Will Durant: A true friend of India

2013-11-05T08:56:00.002-08:00

Today (November 5th) is the 128th birth anniversary of Will Durant, the renowned American philosopher and author, popularly known for his books ‘Story of Philosophy’ and ‘Story of Civilization’. He was awarded the Pulitzer in 1968 and the Presidential Medal for Freedom in 1977. A facet of his though, that has long been forgotten, is his vociferous support to the Indian freedom movement.

In the year 1925, a few years after the First World War, the voices of freedom had started gaining momentum in India. But the “magisterial” voices in the American intelligentsia and academia very equally vocal in brazenly ideologizing the colonial rule in India. Katherine Mayo’s ‘Mother India’ insinuated against Indian culture, the character of Indian people and leaders to claim that Indians were not fit for freedom. It was rejected by Gandhi as a “report of a drain inspector”. Along with many Indians, intellectual rebuttals to Mayo’s work also came from two fellow Americans, Jabez T Sunderland, in his work ‘India in Bondage’ and Will Durant’s then famous but now long forgotten book ‘The Case for India’. Incidentally this book had gone out of print for many decades, before a gentleman named T N Shanbhag picked it up and got it republished in 2007 through his Strand Book Stall. I had the fortune of reading it a few days ago.

In this book, written and published first in 1928, Durant takes up the case of the Indian people with “unaccustomed passion”,as he himself admits. A passion manifested out of his genuine love for the cherished value of freedom, as much as his empathy for the Indian people’s quest for freedom from colonial bondage. He minces no words, in calling the colonial administration in India both “a calamity and a crime” that had left the Indian people impoverished. He gives a point by point rebuttal to the British claim to rule India, showing how the British bureaucracy, the army and the traders in India, all owed their existence to the excesses on the common people of India. He questions the many wars that the British fought with Indians as its soldiers and paid for by the Indian people through the taxes, often excessive enough to lead to artificial famines.

But his questioning of British Colonialism was not based just on the lapses or excesses of the Administration but on his genuine belief in the idea of freedom. His critique of British rule was as much a critique of Colonialism itself. And unlike many in his ilk, who believed that it was the ‘White Man’s Burden” to uplift Indian people through Colonialism, he considered India an ancient civilization that had contributed greatly to the world. He famously wrote in his ‘Story of Civilization’ (also quoted in the above book)

“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”

He considered that India’s plunder at the hands of barbaric foreign invaders, a tragedy and a lesson for all civilizations. Talking of India’s fall to Moguls, he wrote “The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”

Will Durant used his pen to give voice to the Indian people which was hard pressed for survival during the Colonial times. He, in many ways articulated what Indians could have spoken for themselves had they been free. He was indeed a true friend of the Indian people.

Book Review: 'Mortality' by Christopher Hitchens

2012-11-16T15:15:00.003-08:00

I had almost six hours of flight time to spend and the flip cover of the book struck me as much as its title. It was about a man who had refused to take refuge in religion even in the most challenging of his times - in his fight against cancer, a fight which he ultimately lost. But what he did not lose was his conviction in his “anti-theism” – the phrase he coined to distinguish himself from atheists who "wish that belief in God were correct".

The book which Christopher Hitchens scribbled as notes through his last eighteen months, talks of his annoyance at being exhorted by religious conservatives both from the Catholic and Protestant side, to embrace belief in God. Many of them saw in his esophageal cancer, a divinely ordained punishment for his blasphemy against God and religion. It did bewilder him, but not as much as the idea of embracing religion itself, for when he wrote “As a terrified, half aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.””

In this book, Hitchens presents a brief yet logical refutation of the basis and the utility of aspects of religion such as faith, revelation and prayer, interspersed in between his own moments of hope, anxiety, despair and pain. Although in this book, his criticism is mostly directed only towards Abrahamic religions, I read that he has written about Eastern religions too, which I would be glad to read sometime. But as I skimmed through some of his other writings, I do get an impression that his arguments lead to ‘concept stretching’. His basic understanding of what religion constitutes, is based on Abrahamic religions, which he directly and indirectly interpolates on other traditions.

Consider this from one of his blog debates. He asserts that no known “religion” has made any allowance for the different deities that have existed through the human story and that religion insists on believing that the “essential problem was solved about two-to-three thousand years ago, by various serial appearances of divine intervention and guidance in … the Middle East.”. I can point two problems in this assertion right away. Firstly, he is either excluding Hinduism from the category of “known religions” (which if he were to be doing consciously, is epistemologically correct) or he has not considered the numerous village and tribal deities that form the 30 million Gods of Hinduism. Secondly, notice that he uses the word ‘religion’ but is essentially talking of Abrahamic religions alone. For starters, none of Eastern traditions like Buddhism or Hinduism or the pagan traditions of Americas or Europe believe in these serial appearances or have anything to do with the middle east, or for that matter anything to do with prophethood or revelations. I do not deny that many of his criticisms do apply to Eastern “religions” as well – at-least the way they are practiced. But ‘concept stretching’ may not be the best way to critique them. Especially when many of these traditions are phenomenologically different from what is understood as “religion” in the Judeo-Christian context.

Now consider this question from his writings which he puts forth to assert the futility of religion : “The great cultural question before us is therefore this: can we manage to preserve what is numinous and transcendent and ecstatic without giving any more room to the superstitious and the supernatural”. If his “anti-theism”, is indeed about “preserving the numinous and transcendent” while questioning “superstitions and supernatural”, a lot of practicing Hindus, like me, would find it supplementary to their spiritual ideas than find it contradictory to them. I would go a step ahead and ask: should that not be the essential goal of spirituality? It would be worth noting that scholars like Kapila, Jabali and Kanada and many others who can be termed as “agnostic” and “atheistic” in today’s sense, were not just revered as Rishis in India but their ideas were celebrated as inseparable part of Hindu spirituality. Patanjali, one of the foremost teachers of Yoga, never mandated 'belief in God' as a requirement for the practice of spirituality in his Yoga Sutras. Belief, for him, as to most Hindus, was just an aid at best. Swami Vivekananda in his message of Vedanta went a step further, to say that ‘mystical things “are generally signs of a weak mind” and that “as soon as they are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food and rest.”

Just a year before Hitchens was diagnosed with his fatal condition, he wrote about the role of objectivity and skepticism and about the “small progress” that has been made in the “basic realization that diseases are not punishments”. Ironically, in his last days he would hear the very rant of the people whose religion had blinded them from achieving even this “small progress”. In that sense, his view on religion was indeed vindicated.

Through the days that he had come to realize were his last, he celebrated through his wit, the fact that cancer, which had already taken away his voice, was not able to take away his convictions. One of his last scribble was “If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

The Moving Goalpost

Will Durant: A true friend of India

Book Review: 'Mortality' by Christopher Hitchens