Can freedom exist without the individual?

One of the fears that Rabindranath Tagore had about nationalism was that it could make an individual surrender truth to the cause of the nation. It could even encourage acts renouncing privacy by willingly allowing surveillance by the government. As we celebrate Independence Day, fake news often circulates in the assured voice of patriotism and surveillance networks of dissidents and opposition leaders are laid bare. Tagore’s apprehension may appear more real today than it appeared even a decade ago. But even as many languish in jail without charges, what is also apparent are the large gatherings of individuals who have voluntarily responded to the social media to support causes that do not directly affect them, such as the anti- CAA/NRC and the Farmer’s Movements. Pegasus’s invasion of privacy has raised a storm of protest, leading to an absurd situation, worthy of the best Soviet satire, where we do not know who ordered the illegal investigation and who gathered the information. As our country stands poised between respecting individual freedoms and of undermining these, it is heartening to remember a real life story from over a century ago, that seems unreal in our intolerant times.

A tale for our times

This is the tale of Anantshastri Dogre and his daughter, Ramabai. Born over two centuries ago, Anant was a Chitpavan Brahmin, a Sanskrit scholar who faced opposition from his family and his society because he wanted to educate his wife. He decided to move to a forest and start an ashram for boys, taking this opportunity to educate both his wife and his daughters. Anant was a renowned scholar and became wealthy with many gifts given to a great Brahmin scholar. He was unfortunately even more generous in spending that money on his travels and gifting it away. Reduced to penury he died, succeeded soon by his wife. She was taken on a bier with just four persons; two unwilling villagers, Anant’s son and his youngest daughter Rama who had to carry the pole on her head instead of the shoulder, since she was so small.

Ramabai’s story is even more interesting. Together with her brother, Ramabai reached Calcutta where she was supported by the reformist Brahmo Samaj. Ramabai who had been trained by her father, delivered learned lectures on the puranas in Sanskrit and engaged in public debates. She was feted by reformers as a model of what education could do for women.

Her scholarship, eloquence, brilliance, and advocacy of women’s education fetched her the title of a Pandita from Calcutta University. She entered into a inter-caste marriage which resulted in her boycott by the husband’s family. Her husband died very soon leaving Ramabai alone with a daughter. She went to Maharashtra as a single mother and supported by Brahmin reformers there, began to campaign and write. She wrote her first book which sold well. With its proceeds she went to England where she trained to become a teacher.

But her criticism of Brahminical norms deepened to the extent that she converted to Christianity. She toured the USA, raised funds and returned home to found a school for child widows. Among her other significant achievements was a brilliant critique of Brahminism called the Upper Caste Hindu Woman. It is a pioneering book of Indian feminism. The other feature was that while she remained a Christian, her relationship with the Church was problematic. Reared in the tradition of religious debate in India, she did not uncritically accept the dogmas of the Church.

The dissent tradition

The inter-generational story vividly brings home to the vitality of the dissent tradition. It demonstrates the value and practice of individualisation which is inseparable from the act of dissent. Something more is also involved. Anantshastri’s story reveals a modern commitment to women’s education but it also conforms generally to the established repertoire of permissible dissent in which the socially respected renouncer distances himself from society. His daughter’s story demonstrates a major break.

It is the woman herself and not the patriarch who becomes the agent of her own dissent. Further, the dissent is one that is a radical critique of gender relations in Hindu society. But there is also a paradox that lies at the heart of her revolt. Pandita Ramabai’s individual choices are always exercised in and through a collective. Initially it is through a reformist understanding of orthodox texts, then to Hindu Brahminical reform and finally to Christianity. Yet in all these insertions in different collective beliefs, Ramabai never loses her sense of independence. Her individuality arises from her intimate but critical relationships with collectives.

Ramabai’s story is precious precisely because the delicate relationship of the individual to the collective is constantly threatened. The individual in India is not like the classic liberal self. It is not individuated and atomistic, entering into relationships of contract with other individuals to form a society. Instead the individual locates herself within a collective, even if the collective is chosen rather than inherited.

At the same time the individual preserves its ethical autonomy and critical distance even within the collective. The negotiated nature of this relationship has been misunderstood by generations of commentators. The decisive break came with the knowledge of India produced by the colonial scholar administrators of India. By schematising the people of India as belonging to religious communities, they could characterise the colony as both more “primitive” than the “parent” country as well as inculcate a sense of violent competition within Hindus and Muslims about the relative size of their populations. Possibly the greatest impact that colonial knowledge exerted is over the ideology of Hindutva.

Is the nation a monolith?

The immense achievement of Hindutva is that it has popularised an equation of India with Hindu, progressively relegating the minorities to the margins. Accompanying this is a more substantive political vision. Deen Dayal Upadhyaya headed the RSS and refined the Hindutva of Golwalkar for post-independence India. He proclaimed the nation to be a monolith. It was not born from historical changes or the interactions of communities and individuals. Instead it was born as chiti, a single monolithic entity that was both spirit and the body of the territorial nation. Chiti generated other institutions such as culture, society, religion, all of which were seen as interchangeable.

Echoing Golwalkar’s dismissal of democracy, Upadhyaya made a distinction between Nation and State. By the State, Upadhyaya meant an institution that was based on rights; and this weakened the nation. In other words, by dismissing rights, Upadhyaya removed the space for individuals to assert their freedom to dissent and choose their ways of living. Instead the individual had to discipline herself to harmonise with the needs of the nation. Indeed, in Upadhyaya’s vision of India, the people could not be the basis of national sovereignty; instead they had to be subject to Chiti.

Admittedly, the RSS has spawned a vast number of affiliate organisations that often voice different things. It projects an image of toleration and accommodation that counter-balances the violent marginalisation of minorities and dissenters. However organisational differences do not contradict the basic assumptions of Hindutva; in case of serious conflicts, the RSS steps in to arbitrate. The bottom line is commitment to Chiti and this cannot tolerate opposition. Differences are rendered ineffective and exist as simulacra. This may account for the power of the RSS in the short-term, but it also poses insuperable difficulties that can only be tackled by the threat of incarceration or by civic violence. The long-term problem is that the idea of the individual is historically too powerful to be abrogated. This is not simply something that is exemplified in the story of exception persons like Ramabai. The individual-in-community has been generated by a large number of institutions and sites in our history. I will outline a few of these.

Through women's writings

To pick up the thread from Ramabai’s story, the most dramatic emergence of the individual occurred in and through women’s writings. In general, genres such as novels, lyric poetry, autobiographies establish the unique experience of individuals and make it acceptable in public. These opportunities had the greatest effect on women’s writings. Through these, authors could announce their autonomy from the traditional ardhangini [I.e. a limb of the husband] status.

There was an explosion of such writings; one calculation puts the figure at four hundred publications by women between 1856 and 1910. The most significant genre was that of autobiographies. The historian and literary critic Tanika Sarkar has shown how the first autobiography of a woman in India, was written secretly in mid- nineteenth century; it was believed that a woman’s ability to write would result in the death of her husband. Rashsundari-debi was a conventional, upper caste housewife located in the mofussil. The interesting feature of Rashsundari’s story was that she believed she had been commanded to write by her Divine Lord. Even if the practice of writing was individual in the nineteenth century, it had to authorised by a collective belief in Vaisnavism. Equally important however is the fact that Rashsundari pioneered an individual relationship with this repertoire of collective belief.

If we jumpcut to over a century, we can register the freedom of individual choice and expression that autobiographical literature affords to women. The autobiography of Nalini Jameela, a poor, low-caste Ezhava girl who turned to sex-work, was published in 2005. What stands out in this autobiography is firstly, the practice of self-writing permits the emergence of a low-caste sex-worker to validate the uniqueness of her self through her socially hidden experiences. Secondly, Jameela’s life is one in which she finds little anchorage in any collective belonging till she engages in collective Trade Union work. Again, she maintains a critical distance from her Trade Union work and from solidarity with middle class feminist activists, even as she acquires public confidence and a sense of social embeddedness through them.

A split self

It has been observed by the historian Chris Bayly among others, that idea of the individual in modern India has been closely interwoven with neo-Vedanta. To put it simply, neo-Vedanta says that the individual search for unity with the Brahman, the essence that makes and pervades all of creation, is one that unites the individual with all of humanity. Swami Vivekananda saw this as the realisation of the divine in all of humanity. However, neo-Vedanta could also lead to a split self. Krishna Kripalani illustrated this when he declared that, as an individual soul, he was completely free but as a member of the community he was bound by its rules.

Kripalani’s associate, Rabindranath Tagore, who was also influenced by neo-Vedanta, had a more sophisticated and precise grasp. Tagore is, of course, famous for his song that declared one must follow one’s path even if no one heeded the call. A song that became among Gandhi’s favourites, it is not a celebration of individuation. It calls for individual commitment to a collective cause. Tagore had an original conception of the individual self. He proposed that the individual could only realise herself through her other. The other could be a divine presence in poetry or meditation.

But the principle equally applied to actual social interactions which demanded relating to people and collectives different from oneself. This idea supplied the basis of a Tagore’s commitment to the principle of co-operation. Both self and its other had to reach out to one another, improvise ways to connect and work together. This meant that two could not become identical, they could not simply become parts of a single monolithic whole - even while they formed a collective. Society had to be based on differences and allow the freedom to enter into mutual relationships to everyone’s satisfaction.

A constant presence

If we look beyond Tagore, it may be noted that the value of the individual has been a constant presence in our modernity. The culture of India has not fallen on us like a well-rounded apple but has evolved through interactions between different communities and individuals. The arrival of Islam produced what Purushottom Aggarwal has called vernacular modernity. This is embodied in the use of individual experience and reason in message of Kabir in 16th century India.

Jonardan Ganeri has pointed to remarkable experiments in cross-religious thinking in the 18th century by individuals subscribing to Sufi and Jain faiths among others. Colonial modernity was a time when multiple cultures came together, often in relationships of juxtaposition. The impact of this was far more extensive than in earlier periods, precisely because of the education system and the rise of the middle class. It is not surprising that we see a large range of experiments with ideas and organisations initiated by individuals and groups. These range from Arya Samaj reformism to Gandhian self-discipline and mass activism to ideas of low caste assertion as well as Hindutva. Post-colonial India has deepened this culture by hosting an efflorescence of such endeavours on caste, multi-religious, economic, social lines and so on. Among the most creative powerful products of this process is B.R.Ambedkar who schooled himself in American pragmatism, low caste ideologies, classical Brahminical thought and Buddhism.

Ambedkar had a dual conception of the individual. While conceptualising the Constitution, he seriously addressed the proposal of making villages its foundational unit. But he rejected it because of the grossly unequal social structure of villages. Instead he preferred the individual, clearly because it presupposed equality of opportunity, choice and self-development. At the same time, Ambedkar was committed to the idea of fraternity. This involved a symmetrical relationship of fellowship between individuals. Fraternity presupposed equality and liberty. By itself, the individual could not produce these conditions. Indeed, simple reliance on the individual could feed into the logic of corporate domination over the political process as the instance of the USA demonstrated. Hence two other requirements were needed by the Constitution: caste reservations and socialist measures, especially the nationalisation of land, to ensure economic empowerment for the poor.

It was a difficult task to translate the individual-in-collectivity into the legal framework of the Constitution with its need for clear definitions and demarcations of authority. Ambedkar chose a path by which the individual and the State protection of caste communities and the economically marginal, could remain separate but in a state of balance - with the individual both being protected by a number of rights as well as pointing to a possible future of fraternity.

However Ambedkar was clear sighted about the social and political processes that could undermine the constitution. Among other things, he dwelt on the danger of political bhakti. He felt that devotion to a leader and to a party could undermine deliberation and with it the constitutional morality of respecting the basic premises of the constitution itself. It may be observed that the notion of social and political bhakti was one that arose with the worship of the Great Man as a possible saviour.

Articulated by Keshab Sen, the nineteenth century reformer, it enlisted many supporters including temporarily Tagore himself. Political and social bhakti can be seen as the inversion of the value of the individual. The individual is turned into a charismatic presence and becomes the voice and destiny of the nation. In this form it can join forces with singular ideas of the nation such as Chiti, to seriously threaten the present status of individual freedom. And with it, the future state of fraternity and equality that Ambedkar with so many others, demanded of the country.

The author is an independent academic and former professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at JNU.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this essay are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Deccan Herald or its affiliates.