The Missing Revolution
Every nation needs a bouquet of founding myths. The US has several: the pioneer heading out west, the cowboy riding into the sunset, Kirk going where no one has gone before….
Tagore and Gandhi supplied one each to the Indian storehouse. Tagore:
Gandhi (note he’s quoting an Englishman!):
A good myth is put to use by a dedicated cult if not society as a whole. A failed myth is one that’s corrupted or ignored, while a dead myth is one that has no adherents. While both Tagore and Gandhi’s myths under performed in independent India, Gandhi’s myth was a dud while Tagore’s vision was stillborn.
The ‘agrarian question’ has produced many eminent thinkers and political movements, including the Gandhian independence movement. The fate of peasants has been India and China’s major contribution to the global left that was otherwise focused on industrial workers. Every major university in the world has faculty who bring a ‘subaltern’ perspective to their work in the social sciences.
In comparison, we have a non-existent ‘forest question.’ The fate of Adivasis (the aboriginal Indians, ~ 8.5% of India’s population) is assimilated to that of other subaltern groups. Even more importantly, we haven’t grappled with the forest as an entity in its own right, except for conservation efforts around charismatic species such as tigers. While innumerable books, movies etc have been composed about village life - academic tracts, novels, documentaries, blockbusters (a novel/movie like ‘Grapes of Wrath’ has many Indian counterparts)- there’s nothing like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Arguably the best piece of nature writing influenced by Indian traditions is Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard. American Buddhism has done more for an Indic ecological thought than anyone writing from the subcontinent. If what Tagore says is true:
then why aren’t we creating a contemporary tradition that acknowledges our kinship with nature? What to do with the dead myth of the forest origins of Indian civilization?
