I have long been troubled by the use of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ (1,2,3) Some usages are neutral when they pertain to facts; others less so when they involve value judgements or stray across cultural boundaries.
A standard dictionary definition of modern is “relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past” and of modernity as “the quality or condition of being modern.” The use of modern in this temporal sense is unproblematic but also not very useful. All people alive at any given date lived in what for them were modern times – we don’t expect people living in, say, 1400 A.D. to have said that they were living in mediaeval times. Nor, 500 years from now, will our own period be referred to as modern by the inhabitants of that day, if, that is, us moderns have not destroyed the world by then. As it is, we have already entered the post-modern era that has challenged almost all the values associated with modernity (4).
The notion of ‘modern’ becomes problematic precisely when there is an attempt to separate it from some earlier period which, by definition, is then classified as pre-modern. Take the periodization of history as ancient, mediaeval, and modern. One can leave aside the exact dates chosen to mark the dividing points, on which there is disagreement, but focus on an interesting phenomenon. The ancient is often recalled nostalgically as the age of wisdom, at times to the extent of being seen as a template to shape the future. On the contrary, the mediaeval is almost always looked at negatively; one can see this carried to an extreme in Europe where the period is referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’ (5).
This stems from the characterisation of ‘modernity’ which assigns certain attributes to the modern period. Among these are rationality, reliance on science, individualism, and secularism. In order to claim that we are making progress, it is tempting to consider the immediately preceding period as largely irrational, unscientific, tribal, and dogmatic. The term ‘mediaeval’ has in fact attained an entirely negative and condemnatory connotation in this sense.
A little reflection should lead one to question this perspective on the past, both ancient and mediaeval. The ancient is so far away that it is often seen through a nostalgic lens while the mediaeval is the victim of arrogance stemming from an unchallenged belief in linear progress. These problems arise because history is written backwards, starting from the present and projected into a darker past, whereas if the direction were to be reversed, as it should be, one would see many more continuities and have to think more intelligently about the nature of the break points.
In distinguishing epochs, some break points are clearly more useful than the triad of ancient, mediaeval, and modern. Consider the advent of bronze, iron, agriculture, coal, etc. All these are generally accepted to have changed the world in some profound ways thus becoming worthy of being identified with an appellation, i.e., the Iron Age, etc. The Marxian stages of production – slave society, feudalism, capitalism – also marked epochs that one could distinguish conceptually from each other.
Consider in this perspective what we think of the modern age, or the period of modernity, with its attributes of rationality, scientific thinking, individualism, and secularity. No one can seriously claim that there weren’t people who were rational, scientifically minded, individualistic, or agnostic in ancient or mediaeval times. It is, however, quite correct to argue that in the age of agriculture literacy was confined to a very tiny minority and that this began to change only with the invention of the printing press around 1436. It was what we can call the age of print that began to transmit these attitudes to ever widening circles till they characterised the majority of populations in Europe. And it was this democratisation of knowledge that triggered many other innovations that are generally associated with modernity.
But note that this was a European phenomenon which brings us to the other problem with the notion of modernity, i.e, that there is no one modernity. While Europe was plunged in the Dark Ages, as is generally claimed, it was the high noon of science in the Arab world. In fact, it was the transmission of this science and scientific thinking that is credited with sparking the European Renaissance. And well before that, there were major advances in mathematics in India, including the invention of the zero, while later the bhakti movement was quite ahead with the advocacy of secular ideas. It is quite justified in this perspective to think of indigenous modernities rather than of one universal modernity (6).
The reason this assumes importance for us in South Asia is that the British colonialists adapted a variant of the ancient-mediaeval-modern triad to demarcate Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods and to further associate the last with modernity quite independent of the religious missionaries and Victorian sexual mores that accompanied it (7). This served a number of purposes: first, to provide a justification for colonialism which would lift Indians from darkness into light; and second, to drive a wedge between the two major communities in India.
There is little doubt that Indian civilization was advanced in many ways at the time of arrival of the British. Its cities were looked upon with awe and its wealth comprised almost a quarter of the entire world’s. But it is also true that lithographic printing didn’t arrive in India till 1827 and it was only towards the end of the 19th century that newspapers and journals began being printed in large enough numbers to make possible the transfer of new ideas beyond the intellectual elites (8).
Thus one can say that the age of print did not arrive in India till almost the end of the 19th century and even then its revolutionary potential was stunted because of the perverse fallout of colonial rule, i.e., the association of acquiring modernity with the English language. As a result, new knowledge remained confined, even in the age of democracy, to a tiny elite much as it was in the age of agriculture (9).
As a result, continuities across time have lasted much longer in South Asia compared to Europe and the age of print has not resulted in changing the temper of the times in the same way. One can say that South Asians have become modern in looks but their outlooks have changed relatively more slowly. One can find ‘well-educated’ individuals advocating equality in the abstract while living with all kinds of discriminatory practices in everyday life and exporting them overseas as well. Or bowing to reason after ascertaining auspicious dates from a guru. Or setting up ‘modern’ institutions, ostensibly engaged in “cutting-edge” research, but running them like feudal fiefdoms.
In this context, it can be argued that the colonial period was epiphenomenal (10). It jolted and disturbed Indian ways which then gradually reverted back to what they were before the arrival of the British. It did create a new elite that detached itself from the general population and itself began to think of the latter as backward and benighted without doing anything to change the situation. In the evocative description of Arundhati Roy, it seceded vertically from the rest of the country and now exists somewhere up there in the stratosphere where they only interact with people like themselves leaving many incipient and indigenous modernities obscured from view (11). What Ambedkar said of democracy – that it was a thin top-dressing on an Indian soil that was essentially undemocratic – remains applicable to almost every other dimension of South Asian society. The graft did not take except in very superficial ways (12).
Very strong continuities of outlook run through time in South Asia and it is difficult to identify any sharp epochal breaks whether one thinks in terms of the ancient-mediaeval-modern or the Hindu-Muslim-British-Hindu/Muslim-Hindutva periodizations of its history.
Notes
I first started exploring these topics in 2008 in a self-educating discussion with friends which resulted in a set of fifteen exchanges.
My next serious encounter with the subject was in 2020 during the writing of a book on Ghalib whom my co-author and I were inclined to cast as a ‘modern’ poet. We believe the book was greatly improved by critical feedback from Professor Harbans Mukhia who guided us across the pitfalls of such labelling.
Note the difficulties with the notion of modern in the context of poetry. Modernist poetry in English begins with Pound (and includes Eliot who came to symbolize it) with the rejection of the “decadent” style associated with Wordsworth, both sets of poets belonging to the modern period of history. Unlike the brilliance of this revolution in English poetry, the borrowed attempts by Azad and Hali to modernise Urdu poetry in the manner of Wordsworth yielded nothing by comparison.
See https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy.
Professor Harbans Mukhia has written often on the problems of historical periodization in India. For his latest essay, see here.
I first came across a lucid account of indigenous modernities in India in David Shulman’s Tamil: A Biography (2016). For a shorter account, see his review of Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.
On Victorian values, see William Dalrymple, “India: The Place of Sex.”
On the introduction of lithographic printing in India see C.M. Naim’s "Ghalib's Delhi: A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Metaphors.” Note in particular the following observation: “One wonders what could have been the state of general literacy and education in South Asia today if either Akbar or Jahangir had ordered a few printing presses from Europe and had them set up in Agra and Delhi, if only for their own and their nobles’ use.”
The most enlightening essay I have found on the catalytic effect of the downward transfer of knowledge (and therefore of the medium of instruction) and its impact on societal transformation is “How mathematics built the modern world” by Bo and Hannes Malmberg. In this regard, see also my essay “The Language of Instruction and the Narrative of Privilege.”
On the epiphenomenalism of colonial rule, see my essay “South Asia: In Search of Roots.”
On the Indian middle and upper classes, see Arundhati Roy.
Note how the norms of political succession under democracy are reverting to those under monarchy with one or the other contenders to the throne always in prison or in exile. The following remark in Professor Naim’s essay on Ghalib (Note 8) captures this phenomenon: “More importantly, Ghalib witnessed something that had not taken place in Delhi for centuries: peaceful transfers of authority, not just in the Fort involving puppet kings, but also in the British administration that wielded enormous visible power… In 1853, when the incumbent Lt. Governor passed away, Ghalib wrote to his friend, Munshi Nabi Bakhsh Haqir, “The Lt. Governor died in Bareli. Let’s see who is appointed in his place. Just see how [good] the administration of these people is. What tumult [inqilab] wouldn’t have occurred if any similar high ranking person of Hindustan had passed away? But here no one shows even the slightest concern as to what happened and who died.””