Images of future

As said above, India is passing through the advanced phase of development on the pattern of “the developed countries” of today. Yet, there is a small intellectual – Indological and textual – tradition in India that aims at exploring alternatives to modernity. This begins with dissatisfaction with the present form of modernity. A number of scholars have contributed to this in literature and social thought but not in political action. There is very limited work on this in development sociology or economics. Writings of Anand K. Coomaraswamy, Louis Dumont, A.K.Saran, G.S.Ghurye and several others have presented an understanding of new possibilities keeping in view the religious and spiritual texts of ancient India. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, B.R.Ambedkar, M.K.Gandhi and many reformists followed a mixed model. They wanted to combine the perceivedly spiritual and introspective development of the East, and the materialist development of the West. Nevertheless, all of them had different images of “the ideal form of this combination”. The most articulate of all of them were Ambedkar and Gandhi. Ambedkar adopted the rationalist modernity of the West and found a freshly interpreted Buddhism (Navayan) to serve his purpose of social reconstruction. Ambedkar was a post-Marxist thinker who stressed the unique importance of caste in transformation of an inegalitarian society. He is blamed for politicizing Buddhism and making it socially relevant (Rathore, 2011x). Gandhi was developing a new universalistic paradigm: he did not distinguish between the West and the East and attempted to evolve a universal, moral and humanistic framework of society. The most noticeable thing in this effort, however, is that the traditionalists were not sure whether what they had imagined could ever become true. Gandhi too is not an exception. This lecture focuses on the concept of development, the nature of disillusionment with it, and the future possibilities. It suggests that the best we can take from the tradition is the twin idea of cooperation and holism but in a present day plural society this has to be enforced through a strong sate. I argue that it is better to make humanism the first principle of transformation rather than to actualize traditions or modernity without evoking metaphors and names of thought leaders of particularistic traditions.