Culture and Identity
Reducing Human Life To Commodities
By Arati Sen and Indrajit Sen
Since the age of Enlightenment, the moral heritage of humanity ~ quest for the ultimate Truth and awareness for individual perfection ~ has acquired distinctly different trajectories in the East and the West. In the name of progress, the intellectual development of Enlightenment in the West shifted its focus from making the perfect man to making the imperfect man comfortable. Tagore was concerned over the consequences of this shift, and this was reflected in his address in Tokyo in 1929: “Satan has had his ample chance of making use of the divine fruit of knowledge for bringing shame upon humanity. Science as the best policy is tempting the primitive in man bringing out his evil passions through the respectable cover that it has supplied him.” The subsequent development of metaphysical thoughts in the West illustrates how Tagore’s observation was prophetic in terms of the decline in certain aspects of Western culture.
The West continuously shifted the centre of its philosophy from God to the rational human mind and then to the unconscious. The perception of the human being changed radically as it envisaged that man ~ born as a ‘polymorphously perverse child’ ~ grows up to become an adult with socially normative behaviour. However, the replacement of the rational mind with the unconscious destabilised the humanist philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and opened the floodgate of desire that reduced all aspects of human life to commodities. This cultural metamorphosis of the West reduced its culture of spirituality to a culture of commodity.
Today, Western culture is marked by incoherence, fragmentation and relativity of truth. The identity of a person, in the Western perception, is multiple and contextual, reflecting one’s affiliation to the socially constructed traits of race, religion, caste, gender, family membership, profession, achievements, social commitments and so on. The ideological underpinnings are often incoherent and contradictory. Thus, when the Marxist leader ~ as in Arundhati Ray’s God of Small Things ~ falls in with his wife’s decision not to accept drinking water from an untouchable, the ideology of social justice that he claims to uphold is severely undermined by his allegiance to the ideology of family membership. However, this perception of contradictory identities is fully compatible with the Western metaphysical thoughts, marked by incoherence and fragmentation.
Knowing a person by these specifications is like knowing a vehicle the person drives by its name and form without knowing its driver. The passenger of the vehicle, according to Indian wisdom, is the real identity of the human being. The Katha-Upanishad has brilliantly explored the relationship of self with one’s mind, intellect and body. Here Yama, the Lord of Death, while imparting the knowledge of one’s identity to young Nachiketa explains, “Know thy self as the rider of a chariot; the chariot is your body that is being drawn by the intellect as driver and controlled by the mind that acts as rein.” (verse 1.3.3).
While body, mind and intellect are ephemeral, every individual Self, being a part of the universal Self, is infinite and immortal. Sri Krishna in his dialogue with Arjun in Bhagavad Gita elaborates on this idea of continuity of the Self and its indestructibility ~ “It is never born, nor does It ever die, nor, having once been, does It again cease to be. Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, It is not slain when the body is slain.” (verse 2.20; Translated by Swami Nikhilananda).
India has been fortunate to have such great personalities as Rammohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda and others whose thoughts had strengthened the link with its heritage. Life, in their reckoning, is eternal. Death is only a pause in its continuity; perfection is inherent in the nature of the human being; and reinventing the same is the process of removing the veil that hides its real Self. Tagore laments the confinement of his real identity within the artificial constructs of name and fame as he reflects in one of his poems in Gitanjali: “He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in his dungeon. I am ever busy building this world all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.”
This real identity of humanity that transcends race, religion, caste and other dimensions of name and fame to find its oneness with all beings forms the foundation of the Indian culture, which sustained it in the face of constant challenges under the influence of science, secular morality and critical reason. While the call for demolishing these manmade barriers of race, religion, caste etc. is becoming increasingly resonant, it is paradoxical that the Western metaphysical discourse on identity is inclined to confine humanity within endless compartments of these artificial constructs.
However, the increasing gap between the ideals of Indian culture and their effective realisation in terms of social practice is appalling. The reformatory zeal to weed out social evils has lost its course within the maze of desire and selfish greed. Although all religions claim to be egalitarian, people continue to be discriminated over caste even after conversion to Islam or Christianity. Atrocities on women has not been checked despite the stringent laws that are in place. About half of India's population is deprived of their fundamental requirements of food, shelter, education and medicine even after more than 65 years of Independence. The privileged section of Indian society is indifferent towards their responsibilities to the under-privileged. This is outrageous. Dwelling on this selfishness, Vivekananda had once remarked: “So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense pays not the least heed to them.”
It is not enough to expose and fight against these injustices. We need to maintain and pass on to succeeding generations the precious values of the culture we inherited and benefited from. By instilling values like love, empathy, tolerance, gratitude and a sense of oneness in all beings, the Indian culture encourages undertaking life’s journey with a spirit of quest. It raises questions concerning the human condition ~ about frailty and durability of pleasures and achievements, regarding one’s relationship with one’s self and with the world one lives in ~ to find one’s own way of organising a life of fulfilment. It cherishes the values of identifying oneself with others by sharing their pain and pleasure and evaluating oneself in terms of their welfare. Such a vision of life envisaged by the traditional Indian culture since the days of the Mahabharata respects the different ways by which human lives and their relationships can be understood and organised.
While it is difficult to achieve the lofty standards of traditional Indian culture, they do set a benchmark of excellence. By reminding us of our limitations, they constantly challenge us to stretch our limits. The impact of the culture of commodity, based on desire and greed, has been evident in the simmering discontent and a drastic change in attitudes of Western societies. When we see a young and bright university student and daughter of millionaire parents looting electronic goods worth thousands of pounds, or children as young as 11 among the London rioters in 2011, we feel that the British Prime Minister was perhaps not off the mark when he said, “This is not about poverty, it is about culture.”
Indian society has also been affected by this culture of commodity and desire. According to TS Eliot, culture begins in the family. Change in attitude and aspirations of Indian women and their families have been well-documented in the two films based on Tagore’s story, Nashtanid ~- Charulata made by Satyajit Ray in 1964 and Charulata 2011 made by Agnidev Chatterjee. In both films, Charulata seeks the emancipation of the Indian woman ~ to come out as an individual in her own worth and to live on her own terms beyond the horizons defined by husband, home and children. Loneliness is the strand that binds the two films.
The writers are freelance contributors
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