India: Museum of Modernities

"Modernity" really begins approximately 50,000 years ago when people started using tools and thinking the way they think now. Essentially, little has changed. But let's take that for granted for a moment and name various gradations in the history of culture, technology, and political thought, "modernities". (Please see the issue of "Dedalus", Winter 2000 if I'm not mistaken, titled "Multiple Modernities".)

Now, let's think about India in 2006. Part of the country is solidly in the "information age" and participating in the global economy at the highest levels. Mr. Singh is no quasi-fascist nut like his predecesor. (Fascism: a failed modernity) Bankers and traders and so on in Mumbai are interacting with their counterparts in Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo and so on, wheeling and dealing, making money and having a grand old time. They are in "Modernity" with a capital M, that unfortunate title for our current moment in the developed post-industrial world. (My personal definition of modernity begins with the assumption of the King of England's debt by the state with the creation of the Bank of England. For purposes of easiness, I date the big m. from 1689. When I mean "Modernity" here I mean "cutting edge contemporanaiety".)

Meanwhile, most man-hole covers in the United States are made of in India. Iron foundaries: how industrial-revolutionish. In the countryside, failed modernities (Maoist rebels and subsistence farmers) are battling it out in a savage, bloody struggle with little or no end or reward in sight. Meanwhile, somewhere in the jungle, India's remaining tribal peoples - those whom the waves of invasions and civilizations passed by - still do their jungle/tribal stone age thing!

India, as you must have learned in high school, was home to the Mohenjo-Daro civilization (though it's ruins are in present-day Pakistan). This was one of the world's first elaborate farming societies. Farming societies create different and more elaborate social hierarchies from hunter-gatherer or herding societies. "Subjugation enters the house through the plow", said the Prophet Muhammad, an observation that was made again a thousand years later by Rousseau. Anyway, the Aryans invaded through the Kyber pass circa 2000 BCE and settled down and established the caste system; an apartheid system that had more relevance to their erstwhile life on the plains than on their new farming life on the Ganges plain. In any case, they adapted it to their surroundings by putting their darker skinned conquerees at the bottom. Also, the horse of the plains warrior gradually became less sacred and was replaced by the cow of the farmer. The last horse sacrifice was performed by a Brahman-general character deep into the era of cow-sacredness and it was regared as a terrifying throwback to a mysterious dark age. (I forget where I read that and wish I could recall it.) None of this is really news or my own insight. It's readily available. Anyway, my point is that this system, though officially outlawed in 1947 is still in place, especially in the countryside. In the gallery of modernities that is contemporary India, the social structuring of steppe-maraudering tribes of horsemen, once a "modernity" in its own right, now is a fossilized modernity occupying a place in the world's largest democracy (the supremely cliched official subtitle of India). And yet, because it is a flourishing parliamentary democracy, that's yet another modernity in it's cap.

Almost every possible way of structuring human society and using technology can be found in India at this moment in 2006. I suppose it's like the rings of a tree or something.