:: Antara Dev Sen

What is Progress? Let the Battle of Ideas decide

By Antara Dev Sen

Hallelujah! Some sign of progress in the disturbingly regressive worlds that we lust after. Mr Barack Obama’s victory suggests that America — light of our life, fire of our loins, our sin, our soul — is finally warming to democratic principles like equality. What the abolitionists had started in the 1700s has reached its conclusion in 2008 as a black American is voted President of the United States. Can we call that progress? Yes we can!

Unless you are debating the very concept of progress. I was in such a debate last weekend, where the idea of progress was unfurled, teased, poked, shredded, stitched together, slapped around, embraced, but most of all, examined by several thinkers. It was part of the Battle of Ideas, the annual festival of reflection by the Institute of Ideas in London. It offered scores of debates on current issues, including politics, business, media, culture, science, sport and family. This was a weekend dedicated to thinking and voicing your opinion, to examining the fundamental building blocks of popular belief. A festival that rather grandly wished to "shape intellectual life" by focusing on ideas. Its motto: Free speech allowed. As writer of the column Thinking Allowed (see above), I instantly warmed to them.

It did not disappoint. Not with speakers like the incorrigible Ashis Nandy who presented an excellent anti-colonial critique of progress through delightfully raffish and good humoured attacks on his fellow panellists. I don’t like the way you look, your clothes, your lifestyle, your beliefs, and several other things about you, he said stridently to Claire Fox — founder director of the Institute of Ideas and the brain behind the Battle, who was chairing the session — but I know how to improve you. Because you are now what I was yesterday. I have transcended that phase. I know your future, which is my present. I will liberate you from your miserable condition and make you more like me.

This threat from the "social psychologist" did not dampen Fox. It was the white coloniser’s idea of progress being played out, its absurdities magnified by the bizarre place-swap, with the brown man from a former colony imposing his ideas of progress on an empowered, privileged, born-to-rule Brit. We must remember the victims of progress, Nandy said, 120 million people in different countries died as collateral damage in this battle for progress — this attempt to make everyone follow the same path and create a perfectly dull world. We need more democracy. We should be able to say, I dislike your lifestyle, but you have the right to dislike my lifestyle too.

Oh no, said Fox, we love you the way you are. Stay just the way you are. Don’t aspire for the two cars and the gadgets and the lifestyle we have, don’t add to the carbon footprints, listen to me, we know better!

The game was on. The problem, Nandy believes, lies in the very concept of progress. It makes humans play God. Development in India has displaced 60 million people. But let’s not forget, pointed out Leela Gandhi, postcolonial scholar and professor at the University of Chicago, that the world is indeed a better place today than before. Progress has its uses. All concepts of progress — even all Western concepts of progress — are not colonial. Of course progress is fundamentally good, agreed author and architect Austin Williams, as long as you put people first. It liberates people. But why on earth would you put people first, argued environmentalist Martin Wright, when the earth should be the natural focus of progress? The debate raged on, with questions and rebuttals from an intense audience.

Nandy’s critique of the civilising mission of colonialism — which saw itself as an agent of progress based on its own idea of rationality, and treated the colonised as infantile — is well known. The colonisers justified violence by stressing the need to civilise these irrational, ignorant savages. The seductive charms of infantilisation, Nandy has famously said, still shapes the concept of modernity and influences politics. Here, he distinguished between the age-old idea of improving the human condition and the new idea of progress, which rules that experts know better and can play with the lives of ordinary folk. We have to fight this tyrannical language of progress, he emphasised.

Which, I think, we have been doing for ages. We bravely battle the greatest infantilising progress junkie, the mai-baap state. The violence of Singur, Nandigram and Kalinganagar is fresh in our memory, where we witnessed the state’s glinting greed for industrial development, disregarding human rights and human lives. Old struggles of the victims of "progress" — like the Narmada Dam oustees or the deformed and dying villagers of Jadugoda, the home of our uranium mine — continue. To handle progress better, the state needs to focus on fairness, responsibility and social justice. Especially now, as India strains to become an economic superpower.

But in spite of our several failings, we seem to have our heart in the right place. Earlier, Sanjaya Baru — economist, former spokesperson for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former editor of the Financial Express and now professor at Singapore — had highlighted the unique strength of the Indian economic experiment. India prioritises democracy over economic prosperity, he pointed out to an audience keen to compare the emerging Asian giants, while China focuses on economic prosperity at the cost of democratic rights. India’s rapid transition from a backward to a modern economy within the framework of democracy is unprecedented, he added smugly.

But were all democratic rights being nurtured enough? In a debate on cultural identities, Anmol Vellani, director of India Foundation for the Arts, emphasised the need for inter-cultural dialogue within India. The state’s enthusiasm for one India was smothering our diversity, he lamented as we plunged into a deep discussion on muticulturalism and arts funding. Elsewhere, academic Swapan Chakravorty argued with writers from Europe about whether a city makes its cultural figures or they make the city. The fond belief of enlightened Indians that Kolkata is as good a literary centre as Edinburgh was aired (as I controlled my urge to grab the unconverted by the collar and menacingly whisper, "Say yes!"), aided by the documentary Kolkata: City of Literature commissioned by festival partner British Council.

Meanwhile, Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and writer Susan Jacoby, among others, were evaluating an America on the brink of these historic polls. In an oddly unipolar world, no battle can escape America. Especially not a battle of ideas.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com