Part 1 - In Quest of Abundance
⧭ The first post seems to have piqued a lot of curiosity among the readers about the upcoming posts. What do you plan to write about next?
⧭ Yes, quite an unexpected level of interest actually. Now that you ask me, I’m wondering if we should have a dialogue instead of my writing an essay.
⧭ Nothing can serve a nuanced exploration like a dialogue can. How about we pick up the thread from where you ended the previous one; your intuition about the breakthrough? What are some of your indicators of that?
⧭ First, let me admit that I am known in my circles to be an incurable optimist! So, maybe that’s just playing up. Having said that, I can also give you other reasons. Given that it is a story that is already unfolding in many pockets of the world, what I mean by a breakthrough is that I see the number of people interested in creating and inhabiting new forms of economy, starting to grow exponentially. Like a sudden steep rise in the curve.
⧭ Is this the only reason for you to feel so?
⧭ There is another reason I feel strongly about this, especially for India. I hold very sacred my own connection with the soil I come from. My quest, and that of others from this land, is not a new one devoid of any lineage. My ancestors have lived this quest, created and documented knowledge around it millennia ago. Even as we feel that much of it has been lost, even as I find most of today’s so-called “Brahmin Priests” actually being Vasihyas interested in trading their knowledge of the Vedas for their personal fulfillment and hoarding money seeking social status, even as I see everywhere many more ways that we are holding on to distorted and decaying fragments from our past, calling them ‘Indian’, ‘Hindu’ ‘Brahmin’ and so on, the spirit is still in the air, soil and water of the land in some form. Here’s a story to explain what I mean.
One hot summer day, I went up to a frail old lady selling tender coconuts in Chennai and asked her for one. I quickly looked through my bag and discovered that I hadn’t brought my wallet, and told her so. She gave me one anyways and said “It’s my dharma to give you water on a parched day like this. If you pass by this road another time and remember to pay me for this, great. Otherwise, it’s ok.” I was deeply humbled and moved, and had to, for the nth time, revise my ideas of poverty, scarcity and abundance. What she practised was, to me, business in service. Not what today’s fancy ‘conscious capitalism’ claims to do. And it is this cultural memory of what is dharmic that I still find alive in the unschooled pockets of our country that I am referring to, when I say lineage.
⧭ Our cultural memory! I actually never thought it was worth very much in realms such as Economics.
⧭ Understandable. We have been schooled to believe so. We need to embark on a journey of unlearning all that isn’t part of the larger story of our civilization. To begin with recognize some of the falsehoods that schooling, all of the modern apparatus actually, has forcefully fed us with. A huge one and one that is relevant for our conversation here is that “Ancient India might have had well-developed philosophy, art and literature, but Science, Economics, Politics, etc. were only recent developments from the West.”
⧭ Well, I thought it was true too! I mean, people might have intuitively gone about figuring out how to run their economy and polity. That doesn’t mean there existed well-developed cohesive theories and treatises on these, right?
⧭ That’s what almost all of our people think, including myself until my research into the history of agriculture led me to the facts. The first half of our story of what we could call the ‘Great Cultural Forgetting’ (GCF)’ is our own doing, where we allowed many of our forms (systems, rituals, etc.) to freeze and decay over time. The GCF project was then taken to completion by the recent English education flagged off a couple of centuries ago by McCaulay who said:
“It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.”
We not only gleefully bought into this utter falsehood, but continue to live by it and further propagate it through the billions of school textbooks we print and distribute for our (mis)education year after year. We take it further and make such (mis)education compulsory through acts like RTE (Right to Education). There cannot be a better case of cultural suicide! And the worst part of it all is that all these efforts come to be recognised as the highest forms of service. Building schools, doing charity to support “higher studies”, etc. It is like paying to learn self-hate and masochism and then calling it all “progress”.
⧭ Sounds ridiculous. And the phrase ‘Cultural Suicide’ is especially hard-hitting for me! Can we explore this further?
⧭ Exploring suicide can be depressing, my friend. But yes, a meaningful place to begin our exploration is to simply acknowledge what has died and mourn it. Mourn it deeply. Mourning is an important part of the process of finding the energy and strength to revive and move on. You have only just embarked on the journey of discovering what has been lost. My guess is we have lost so much more than we can ever know in its entirety. My guess is that there is enough to keep discovering over lifetimes. But, let us learn to mourn in installments without getting stuck there. There’s much work to do.
⧭ And what’s the nature of the work to be done?
⧭ To first understand what it is that we had, where we come from, who our ancestors were, what they created. Let me give you an imagery to work with.
Our cultural memory / history is a like a bed of rich fertile soil. Not just a bed that is a few feet deep. But like a crust of the earth extending a few kilometres, building itself up over thousands of years through nature’s workings. Over the past few centuries, it has been systematically covered with a significant layer of concrete through a combination of brute force and propaganda. The brute force was used to subjugate our people, destroy and plunder our temples and our riches, destroy our village governance systems, severe capital punishment rendered for disobedience and so on. So, we first allowed people from outside to make and pour the concrete over our soil. Then came in propaganda, where our own people were so brainwashed into believing that the soil was dirty, that the concrete was superior to the soil, that they themselves started willingly and enthusiastically making and pouring more and more of it thickening the layer over time.
Most of our approach towards creating the new economy talks about building, at best new forms, but using the same concrete material. Some radical economists and activists are mildly tapping into our cultural memory and are saying ‘Concrete isn’t the way. We need to recreate the lost soil.’ And so saying, attempting to work out the most effective way of creating a new layer of rich soil, so that we can sow seeds, grow seedlings, which can then grow into plants and then eventually maybe, if we survive through the climate change catastrophes, into trees. Given that our parasitic ways of being are actually driving us all towards a massive civilizational crash faster than we can imagine, I believe that we stand a very bleak chance of surviving to see these seeds grow beyond the plant stage. What I’m proposing is a different approach where we actually tap into the rich soil underneath the concrete, for that might give us a better chance of survival. Though this concrete layer appears to be strong and impenetrable, it is actually quite brittle and has already begun to crack. What isn’t True can never be resilient. If we can identify cracks wide enough, and through them prayerfully sow some pipal and banyan seeds into our rich cultural soil beneath, invoking guidance and collaboration from our ancestors, they stand the highest chance we have access to of further widening these cracks, growing trees of life that can take over the whole thing. The concrete will not disappear. But it will be incorporated into the tree, may be providing strength to the new ecosystem in ways we may not be able to imagine now. Like the Cambodian temples! I believe that we now have access to this cultural bed through the cracks. And if we will it, we can create the best chance we have for the breakthrough. Blessings of our ancestors are more powerful than we can ever imagine. They are yearningly waiting for us to invoke their energies.
⧭ That definitely sounds like a potent proposal, if we are ok to set aside its practicality!
⧭ My friend, if you have explored the doomsday stuff enough, you will know that even the best of 'practicality' is nowhere close to being able to save us from our impending crash. I can show you all the proof for that! So, I'm saying let us at least try some “impractical” ways.
⧭ Sure, it does not hurt to explore it at least for the sake of this dialogue. To begin all of this, we first need to be able to realise and acknowledge that there exists such a rich world beneath the concrete in the first place. Most of us do not even know that it does!
⧭ Precisely. Actually a lot has been written about these over the past century. So, to honor all the amazing souls that have given their entire lifetimes working for a saner world and to avoid duplication, I am going to only share a larger narrative that weaves them all together and direct you to explore some of their works for further detailed reading. I must also say that a large part of what has been written is either incomplete or confused.
⧭ What, according to you, is missing in the writing that is incomplete?
⧭ The concrete pavement is modernity and its apparatus and the soil beneath, our rich cultural heritage. When we bundle up all of modern as falsehood and all of ancient knowledge as Truth, it amounts to ignorance of another kind. They are both mixed bags and need to be examined carefully to discard what we do not need, take what we do and build forward.
⧭ And what is the confused part?
⧭ The confused narrative of Indian Renaissance does not question the fundamental precepts of Modern Economics. It tries to superimpose what it understands to be Indic onto the modern framework, which goes against the grain of what our civilization stands for in the most fundamental way; against dharma. This confused narrative tries to juxtapose two narratives that go against each other, believing it to be synthesis.
⧭ I'm tempted to ask what this confused juxtaposition is. But I guess, before that we need to understand the nature of our cultural soil?
⧭ The confused juxtaposition (believed to be synthesis) is what I hope to be continuously exploring throughout this dialogue. First, let us begin by “Decolonising History”. In his book titled thus, Claude Alvares talks in detail about how rich our cultural soil was. When I say 'rich' here, I literally mean prosperous in economic terms. We were growing phenomenal quantities of food to feed everyone, and producing breathtaking varieties and qualities of crafts, textiles, buildings, sculptures, machinery, crops, etc. We were the world’s most thriving economy, and were exporting our exquisite products to the rest of the world.
⧭ We were rich because we produced abundantly?
⧭ Yes. But we need to understand the word ‘abundance’ in a nuanced manner. If not, there is a serious danger of falling into the trap of modern definitions which are at the very root of our present-day crisis. Abundance, the way I understand and experience it is highly textured, and has many dimensions to it.
The first dimension encompasses three design principles articulated by Vaastu Sastra: bhogadhyam (utility), sukha darsham (aesthetics), ramyam (evoking well-being and delight) that were embodied by the food and other articles we produced. There is a lot of evidence to prove that ancient India produced adequate quantities to meet our demands and to provide for our difficult times (famines and epidemics), and some excess to share across countries and continents. Our products were also known for their excellent quality, finish, aesthetics and their rich diversity. We had 2,00,000 varieties of paddy alone, each with its own unique properties and use which were understood and documented. There has been a similar diversity in every possible field of arts and crafts, in languages, cuisines and so on. Diversity is an unmistakable indicator of creativity and also contributed to resilience. What we produced also nourished us and gave us a sense of well-being. With respect to food, a small amount packed with nourishment feels more abundant than a large amount with empty calories. Or food made and served with love is more filling than with a lack of it.
The second dimension of abundance has to do with our connectedness with fellow-beings and nature. When I live as a member of a caring community, and a life closely connected to a well-endowed natural environment (say a forest and a thriving permaculture farm), I feel a certain sense of security and being taken care of. I feel like I have a perennial access to things (tangible and intangible) that I need for my living. Both these forms of connectedness create a larger field of abundance that I begin to live within. Abundance moves from what I have to what I experience.
And the third dimension transcends all of these external criteria. It is the spiritual connection that was held at the core of all pursuits that is unique to our land. In Sri Aurobindo’s words “Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind.” A growing connection with divinity leaves us wanting less and less things externally. The way real Yogis feel abundant without any possessions. Someone that comes to my mind, who didn’t retreat from the world and was most active, mobile and productive but lived without any possessions, feeling immensely abundant is Peace Pilgrim. For decades, all she is supposed to have possessed are a pair of clothes, a pair of shoes, toothbrush and a comb.
⧭ Wow! I must admit that I never looked at abundance in all these ways! I’m going to need to come back to this to take it all in. But I can already feel a quick rewiring of my brain that just happened.
⧭ I can understand. Connecting to all these dimensions is an inner journey and might take time. It is part of our cultural remembering for, I feel, all these were quite alive until recently. It is still not all gone. In any case, this is just how I understand and experience abundance. But do verify it for yourself. I’d like to share another civilisational view of abundance too, best expressed by Sri Aurobindo’s words to describe ancient India's insatiable creativity and industry.
"There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid, the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing, all the sixty-four accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest and most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure."
⧭ Seeing the power and conviction in those words, I believe there must be some truth to it. What I understand from all this is that 'abundance' to the Indic mind was multidimensional. But to the modern schooled mind, abundance simply means large quantities. Right?
⧭ Yes. This difference is critical because it has three important implications.
If we want to simply produce large quantities without any consideration for anything else, we can easily build a case for ‘efficiency’ to become the supreme lord, for furthering the industrial society and mass-production. We see that this narrative has almost completely colonised our minds globally. What this does is to destroy everything else like quality, diversity leading to weak systems with very little resilience, and also frays the fabric of community and plunders nature, like it is evident everywhere on the planet.
And when we choose modern industrial production means, we automatically reverse the logic of our economics from being demand-driven to being supply-driven. We no longer use machinery to produce how much we need. We let the machines take over and dictate quantities based on what it needs to produce in order to keep running. We give it a term “economic viability” and then start looking for / inventing ways to sell what has been manufactured. And then it even takes the next step to produce what it can. We call it “efficiency”. This reversal is what Karl Polanyi (also called a moral economist) explains in his seminal work The Great Transformation. From economy being embedded in and serving society, the society got embedded in and started serving the economy. The machines became our masters, and the human spirit got confused about the meaning of life, lost its way and bought into the whole story of it being slave to the machine. The transcendent human spirit bought into a limited story about itself, that it was homo economicus.
⧭ I’m able to connect to another thing you mentioned in your first article. That today’s mass-manufactured products have been sucked dry of their souls! Isn’t that another major damage caused by this “great transformation”?
⧭ Absolutely. And that is the third and the most serious implication of them all. This is what Gandhi talked about. Lewis Mumford has explored this elaborately in his brilliant two-volume series called The Myth of the Machine. He talks about how modern humans’ movement from a soul-centric economy guided by our innate intelligence to a machine-centric economy, we have collectively moved towards a sort of a mania, and eventually to suicide. He crusaded for technologies that served the human race (democratic technics) and against those that served the blind advancement of production (authoritarian technics). Connected to this is another design-flaw in handing over to the machine the decision about ‘how much to produce’. By its very design, it creates economies of war. The very impulse that paved way for the British to colonise India, came from the East India Company wanting to aggressively find foreign markets to sell mass-manufactured cotton textiles beyond what it could consume. And this whole phenomenon has been explained in very simple English by JC Kumarappa in his Economy of Permanance. A supply-driven economy is inherently violent. It needs slaves and colonies for its continuous supplies of raw material, and needs manipulatable markets to buy them all back. We are all stuck in a diseased, cancerous supply-driven economy. Are you beginning to see the fundamental nature of our crisis and the story we are stuck in?
⧭ Yes. But you said India used to export its products even before all this. How was that different?
⧭ India exported her excess production after meeting all her local needs. And she exported certain exquisite stuff like fine Bengal muslin, spices, etc. which were very unique to here. She neither exported staple foods of other countries destabilising their economies, nor imported her own essentials. Neither scarcity nor greed were the impulses for imports or exports. She enjoyed both prosperity and contentment simultaneously, and was willing and able to share of herself with the rest of the world to a healthy extent and in a healthy manner.
⧭ Definitely all of this gives a good idea of the fertile soil beneath the concrete. What next?
⧭ The reason to understand all of this is not to keep basking in past glory or to say that we were flawless or perfect. But to understand that we were way-way-way better than we have been conditioned into believing and celebrate that. And then understand how much we have actually lost and grieve that too. Grieving and celebrating will help us tap into our cultural memory and move forward. But even this is only one half of the story of what we need to do. The other half is about truthfully looking into some of our own flaws and imperfections, feel the shame and pains of them all, own them up, critique and discard what does not belong in our new story going forward so that we can aim for a more glorious future, however distant that might be. Without grieving & celebrating, critiquing & discarding, a part of us will be stuck in the past either by blindly attaching to it or by blindly rejecting it. In order to meaningfully move forward, we need to own up everything in totality: the glory and the pain, the brilliant light and the dark shadow.
Another important reason to understand how soulfully, aesthetically, functionally, respectfully, sustainably prosperous we have been in the past, is to then open completely to the enquiry “What were the systems and processes that enabled such a prosperity, such a way of being?” What was an essentially Indic approach to Economics that is relevant for us today? What were its design principles that we can draw from?”
Part 2 - Reclaiming the Swadeshi from our Economists
⧭ The first post seems to have piqued a lot of curiosity among the readers about the upcoming posts. What do you plan to write about next?
⧭ Yes, quite an unexpected level of interest actually. Now that you ask me, I’m wondering if we should have a dialogue instead of my writing an essay.
⧭ Nothing can serve a nuanced exploration like a dialogue can. How about we pick up the thread from where you ended the previous one; your intuition about the breakthrough? What are some of your indicators of that?
⧭ First, let me admit that I am known in my circles to be an incurable optimist! So, maybe that’s just playing up. Having said that, I can also give you other reasons. Given that it is a story that is already unfolding in many pockets of the world, what I mean by a breakthrough is that I see the number of people interested in creating and inhabiting new forms of economy, starting to grow exponentially. Like a sudden steep rise in the curve.
⧭ Is this the only reason for you to feel so?
⧭ There is another reason I feel strongly about this, especially for India. I hold very sacred my own connection with the soil I come from. My quest, and that of others from this land, is not a new one devoid of any lineage. My ancestors have lived this quest, created and documented knowledge around it millennia ago. Even as we feel that much of it has been lost, even as I find most of today’s so-called “Brahmin Priests” actually being Vasihyas interested in trading their knowledge of the Vedas for their personal fulfillment and hoarding money seeking social status, even as I see everywhere many more ways that we are holding on to distorted and decaying fragments from our past, calling them ‘Indian’, ‘Hindu’ ‘Brahmin’ and so on, the spirit is still in the air, soil and water of the land in some form. Here’s a story to explain what I mean.
One hot summer day, I went up to a frail old lady selling tender coconuts in Chennai and asked her for one. I quickly looked through my bag and discovered that I hadn’t brought my wallet, and told her so. She gave me one anyways and said “It’s my dharma to give you water on a parched day like this. If you pass by this road another time and remember to pay me for this, great. Otherwise, it’s ok.” I was deeply humbled and moved, and had to, for the nth time, revise my ideas of poverty, scarcity and abundance. What she practised was, to me, business in service. Not what today’s fancy ‘conscious capitalism’ claims to do. And it is this cultural memory of what is dharmic that I still find alive in the unschooled pockets of our country that I am referring to, when I say lineage.
⧭ Our cultural memory! I actually never thought it was worth very much in realms such as Economics.
⧭ Understandable. We have been schooled to believe so. We need to embark on a journey of unlearning all that isn’t part of the larger story of our civilization. To begin with recognize some of the falsehoods that schooling, all of the modern apparatus actually, has forcefully fed us with. A huge one and one that is relevant for our conversation here is that “Ancient India might have had well-developed philosophy, art and literature, but Science, Economics, Politics, etc. were only recent developments from the West.”
⧭ Well, I thought it was true too! I mean, people might have intuitively gone about figuring out how to run their economy and polity. That doesn’t mean there existed well-developed cohesive theories and treatises on these, right?
⧭ That’s what almost all of our people think, including myself until my research into the history of agriculture led me to the facts. The first half of our story of what we could call the ‘Great Cultural Forgetting’ (GCF)’ is our own doing, where we allowed many of our forms (systems, rituals, etc.) to freeze and decay over time. The GCF project was then taken to completion by the recent English education flagged off a couple of centuries ago by McCaulay who said:
“It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.”
We not only gleefully bought into this utter falsehood, but continue to live by it and further propagate it through the billions of school textbooks we print and distribute for our (mis)education year after year. We take it further and make such (mis)education compulsory through acts like RTE (Right to Education). There cannot be a better case of cultural suicide! And the worst part of it all is that all these efforts come to be recognised as the highest forms of service. Building schools, doing charity to support “higher studies”, etc. It is like paying to learn self-hate and masochism and then calling it all “progress”.
⧭ Sounds ridiculous. And the phrase ‘Cultural Suicide’ is especially hard-hitting for me! Can we explore this further?
⧭ Exploring suicide can be depressing, my friend. But yes, a meaningful place to begin our exploration is to simply acknowledge what has died and mourn it. Mourn it deeply. Mourning is an important part of the process of finding the energy and strength to revive and move on. You have only just embarked on the journey of discovering what has been lost. My guess is we have lost so much more than we can ever know in its entirety. My guess is that there is enough to keep discovering over lifetimes. But, let us learn to mourn in installments without getting stuck there. There’s much work to do.
⧭ And what’s the nature of the work to be done?
⧭ To first understand what it is that we had, where we come from, who our ancestors were, what they created. Let me give you an imagery to work with.
Our cultural memory / history is a like a bed of rich fertile soil. Not just a bed that is a few feet deep. But like a crust of the earth extending a few kilometres, building itself up over thousands of years through nature’s workings. Over the past few centuries, it has been systematically covered with a significant layer of concrete through a combination of brute force and propaganda. The brute force was used to subjugate our people, destroy and plunder our temples and our riches, destroy our village governance systems, severe capital punishment rendered for disobedience and so on. So, we first allowed people from outside to make and pour the concrete over our soil. Then came in propaganda, where our own people were so brainwashed into believing that the soil was dirty, that the concrete was superior to the soil, that they themselves started willingly and enthusiastically making and pouring more and more of it thickening the layer over time.
Most of our approach towards creating the new economy talks about building, at best new forms, but using the same concrete material. Some radical economists and activists are mildly tapping into our cultural memory and are saying ‘Concrete isn’t the way. We need to recreate the lost soil.’ And so saying, attempting to work out the most effective way of creating a new layer of rich soil, so that we can sow seeds, grow seedlings, which can then grow into plants and then eventually maybe, if we survive through the climate change catastrophes, into trees. Given that our parasitic ways of being are actually driving us all towards a massive civilizational crash faster than we can imagine, I believe that we stand a very bleak chance of surviving to see these seeds grow beyond the plant stage. What I’m proposing is a different approach where we actually tap into the rich soil underneath the concrete, for that might give us a better chance of survival. Though this concrete layer appears to be strong and impenetrable, it is actually quite brittle and has already begun to crack. What isn’t True can never be resilient. If we can identify cracks wide enough, and through them prayerfully sow some pipal and banyan seeds into our rich cultural soil beneath, invoking guidance and collaboration from our ancestors, they stand the highest chance we have access to of further widening these cracks, growing trees of life that can take over the whole thing. The concrete will not disappear. But it will be incorporated into the tree, may be providing strength to the new ecosystem in ways we may not be able to imagine now. Like the Cambodian temples! I believe that we now have access to this cultural bed through the cracks. And if we will it, we can create the best chance we have for the breakthrough. Blessings of our ancestors are more powerful than we can ever imagine. They are yearningly waiting for us to invoke their energies.
⧭ That definitely sounds like a potent proposal, if we are ok to set aside its practicality!
⧭ My friend, if you have explored the doomsday stuff enough, you will know that even the best of 'practicality' is nowhere close to being able to save us from our impending crash. I can show you all the proof for that! So, I'm saying let us at least try some “impractical” ways.
⧭ Sure, it does not hurt to explore it at least for the sake of this dialogue. To begin all of this, we first need to be able to realise and acknowledge that there exists such a rich world beneath the concrete in the first place. Most of us do not even know that it does!
⧭ Precisely. Actually a lot has been written about these over the past century. So, to honor all the amazing souls that have given their entire lifetimes working for a saner world and to avoid duplication, I am going to only share a larger narrative that weaves them all together and direct you to explore some of their works for further detailed reading. I must also say that a large part of what has been written is either incomplete or confused.
⧭ What, according to you, is missing in the writing that is incomplete?
⧭ The concrete pavement is modernity and its apparatus and the soil beneath, our rich cultural heritage. When we bundle up all of modern as falsehood and all of ancient knowledge as Truth, it amounts to ignorance of another kind. They are both mixed bags and need to be examined carefully to discard what we do not need, take what we do and build forward.
⧭ And what is the confused part?
⧭ The confused narrative of Indian Renaissance does not question the fundamental precepts of Modern Economics. It tries to superimpose what it understands to be Indic onto the modern framework, which goes against the grain of what our civilization stands for in the most fundamental way; against dharma. This confused narrative tries to juxtapose two narratives that go against each other, believing it to be synthesis.
⧭ I'm tempted to ask what this confused juxtaposition is. But I guess, before that we need to understand the nature of our cultural soil?
⧭ The confused juxtaposition (believed to be synthesis) is what I hope to be continuously exploring throughout this dialogue. First, let us begin by “Decolonising History”. In his book titled thus, Claude Alvares talks in detail about how rich our cultural soil was. When I say 'rich' here, I literally mean prosperous in economic terms. We were growing phenomenal quantities of food to feed everyone, and producing breathtaking varieties and qualities of crafts, textiles, buildings, sculptures, machinery, crops, etc. We were the world’s most thriving economy, and were exporting our exquisite products to the rest of the world.
⧭ We were rich because we produced abundantly?
⧭ Yes. But we need to understand the word ‘abundance’ in a nuanced manner. If not, there is a serious danger of falling into the trap of modern definitions which are at the very root of our present-day crisis. Abundance, the way I understand and experience it is highly textured, and has many dimensions to it.
The first dimension encompasses three design principles articulated by Vaastu Sastra: bhogadhyam (utility), sukha darsham (aesthetics), ramyam (evoking well-being and delight) that were embodied by the food and other articles we produced. There is a lot of evidence to prove that ancient India produced adequate quantities to meet our demands and to provide for our difficult times (famines and epidemics), and some excess to share across countries and continents. Our products were also known for their excellent quality, finish, aesthetics and their rich diversity. We had 2,00,000 varieties of paddy alone, each with its own unique properties and use which were understood and documented. There has been a similar diversity in every possible field of arts and crafts, in languages, cuisines and so on. Diversity is an unmistakable indicator of creativity and also contributed to resilience. What we produced also nourished us and gave us a sense of well-being. With respect to food, a small amount packed with nourishment feels more abundant than a large amount with empty calories. Or food made and served with love is more filling than with a lack of it.
The second dimension of abundance has to do with our connectedness with fellow-beings and nature. When I live as a member of a caring community, and a life closely connected to a well-endowed natural environment (say a forest and a thriving permaculture farm), I feel a certain sense of security and being taken care of. I feel like I have a perennial access to things (tangible and intangible) that I need for my living. Both these forms of connectedness create a larger field of abundance that I begin to live within. Abundance moves from what I have to what I experience.
And the third dimension transcends all of these external criteria. It is the spiritual connection that was held at the core of all pursuits that is unique to our land. In Sri Aurobindo’s words “Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind.” A growing connection with divinity leaves us wanting less and less things externally. The way real Yogis feel abundant without any possessions. Someone that comes to my mind, who didn’t retreat from the world and was most active, mobile and productive but lived without any possessions, feeling immensely abundant is Peace Pilgrim. For decades, all she is supposed to have possessed are a pair of clothes, a pair of shoes, toothbrush and a comb.
⧭ Wow! I must admit that I never looked at abundance in all these ways! I’m going to need to come back to this to take it all in. But I can already feel a quick rewiring of my brain that just happened.
⧭ I can understand. Connecting to all these dimensions is an inner journey and might take time. It is part of our cultural remembering for, I feel, all these were quite alive until recently. It is still not all gone. In any case, this is just how I understand and experience abundance. But do verify it for yourself. I’d like to share another civilisational view of abundance too, best expressed by Sri Aurobindo’s words to describe ancient India's insatiable creativity and industry.
"There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid, the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing, all the sixty-four accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest and most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure."
⧭ Seeing the power and conviction in those words, I believe there must be some truth to it. What I understand from all this is that 'abundance' to the Indic mind was multidimensional. But to the modern schooled mind, abundance simply means large quantities. Right?
⧭ Yes. This difference is critical because it has three important implications.
If we want to simply produce large quantities without any consideration for anything else, we can easily build a case for ‘efficiency’ to become the supreme lord, for furthering the industrial society and mass-production. We see that this narrative has almost completely colonised our minds globally. What this does is to destroy everything else like quality, diversity leading to weak systems with very little resilience, and also frays the fabric of community and plunders nature, like it is evident everywhere on the planet.
And when we choose modern industrial production means, we automatically reverse the logic of our economics from being demand-driven to being supply-driven. We no longer use machinery to produce how much we need. We let the machines take over and dictate quantities based on what it needs to produce in order to keep running. We give it a term “economic viability” and then start looking for / inventing ways to sell what has been manufactured. And then it even takes the next step to produce what it can. We call it “efficiency”. This reversal is what Karl Polanyi (also called a moral economist) explains in his seminal work The Great Transformation. From economy being embedded in and serving society, the society got embedded in and started serving the economy. The machines became our masters, and the human spirit got confused about the meaning of life, lost its way and bought into the whole story of it being slave to the machine. The transcendent human spirit bought into a limited story about itself, that it was homo economicus.
⧭ I’m able to connect to another thing you mentioned in your first article. That today’s mass-manufactured products have been sucked dry of their souls! Isn’t that another major damage caused by this “great transformation”?
⧭ Absolutely. And that is the third and the most serious implication of them all. This is what Gandhi talked about. Lewis Mumford has explored this elaborately in his brilliant two-volume series called The Myth of the Machine. He talks about how modern humans’ movement from a soul-centric economy guided by our innate intelligence to a machine-centric economy, we have collectively moved towards a sort of a mania, and eventually to suicide. He crusaded for technologies that served the human race (democratic technics) and against those that served the blind advancement of production (authoritarian technics). Connected to this is another design-flaw in handing over to the machine the decision about ‘how much to produce’. By its very design, it creates economies of war. The very impulse that paved way for the British to colonise India, came from the East India Company wanting to aggressively find foreign markets to sell mass-manufactured cotton textiles beyond what it could consume. And this whole phenomenon has been explained in very simple English by JC Kumarappa in his Economy of Permanance. A supply-driven economy is inherently violent. It needs slaves and colonies for its continuous supplies of raw material, and needs manipulatable markets to buy them all back. We are all stuck in a diseased, cancerous supply-driven economy. Are you beginning to see the fundamental nature of our crisis and the story we are stuck in?
⧭ Yes. But you said India used to export its products even before all this. How was that different?
⧭ India exported her excess production after meeting all her local needs. And she exported certain exquisite stuff like fine Bengal muslin, spices, etc. which were very unique to here. She neither exported staple foods of other countries destabilising their economies, nor imported her own essentials. Neither scarcity nor greed were the impulses for imports or exports. She enjoyed both prosperity and contentment simultaneously, and was willing and able to share of herself with the rest of the world to a healthy extent and in a healthy manner.
⧭ Definitely all of this gives a good idea of the fertile soil beneath the concrete. What next?
⧭ The reason to understand all of this is not to keep basking in past glory or to say that we were flawless or perfect. But to understand that we were way-way-way better than we have been conditioned into believing and celebrate that. And then understand how much we have actually lost and grieve that too. Grieving and celebrating will help us tap into our cultural memory and move forward. But even this is only one half of the story of what we need to do. The other half is about truthfully looking into some of our own flaws and imperfections, feel the shame and pains of them all, own them up, critique and discard what does not belong in our new story going forward so that we can aim for a more glorious future, however distant that might be. Without grieving & celebrating, critiquing & discarding, a part of us will be stuck in the past either by blindly attaching to it or by blindly rejecting it. In order to meaningfully move forward, we need to own up everything in totality: the glory and the pain, the brilliant light and the dark shadow.
Another important reason to understand how soulfully, aesthetically, functionally, respectfully, sustainably prosperous we have been in the past, is to then open completely to the enquiry “What were the systems and processes that enabled such a prosperity, such a way of being?” What was an essentially Indic approach to Economics that is relevant for us today? What were its design principles that we can draw from?”
Part 2 - Reclaiming the Swadeshi from our Economists
1 comment:
What westerners call barter, was a karmic exchange of one's duty, towards the larger society that everybody was a part of, each only contributing towards, at first, the global pool of utilitarian knowledge and skills, and then reaping the benefits of the world brotherhood charkha of nature.
A study of the political interjections that were needed to destabilize the mamoth called Indie..
Show that much that developed, developed with an inclusive understanding of the producer, of the produced, and the goodwill of the producer to have produced what he did, for the benefit of everybody else, and how was he to be compensated.
This question always had multiple correct answers, always.
Pls share yor email address, for some q and a format discussions and explorations.
I can be reached at:-
niftynikhil@gmail.com.
Nikhil Thakur.
+919892612728
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