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| Deconstructing democracy |
| BS Weekend Team / New Delhi Aug 15, 2009, 00:00 IST |
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Amartya Sen on the “confusion of ink clouds”.
In Aldous Huxley’s novel, Point Counter Point, the lead character, Sidney Quarles, goes frequently to London from his country home in Essex, ostensibly to work at the British Museum on democracy in ancient India. ‘It’s about local government in Maurya times,’ he explains to his wife Rachel, referring to the Indian imperial dynasty that ruled the country in the fourth and the third centuries BC. Rachel does not, however, have much difficulty in figuring out that this is an elaborate ploy by Sidney to cheat on her, since his real reason for going to London, she surmises, is to spend time with a new mistress.
Aldous Huxley tells us how Rachel Quarles assesses what is going on.
‘(Sidney’s) visits to London had become frequent and prolonged. After the second visit Mrs Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the women had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table — not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements. Behind the ink-cloud of the Ancient Indians (Sidney) hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved.’
It turns out in Huxley’s novel Rachel Quarles was right. Sidney was squirting ink for exactly the reason she suspected.
The confusion of ‘ink-clouds’ has an important bearing on the subject of this book. Are we misleading ourselves — perhaps not in quite the same way in which Sidney Quarles wanted to mislead Rachel — in assuming that the experience of democracy is not confined to the West and can be found elsewhere, for example, in ancient India? The belief that democracy has not flourished anywhere in the world other than in the West is widely held and expressed. And it is also used to explain contemporary events; for example, the blame for the immense difficulties and problems faced in post-intervention Iraq is sometimes put not so much on the peculiar nature of the under-informed and badly reasoned military intervention of 2003, but attributed instead to some imagined difficulty that sees democracy and public reasoning as being unsuitable for the cultures and traditions of non-Western countries like Iraq.
...As it happens, even ‘the ink-cloud of the Ancient Indians’, as Rachel called them, is not entirely imaginary, since there were, in fact, several experiments in local democracy in ancient India (more on those presently). Indeed, in understanding the roots of democracy in the world, we have to take an interest in the history of people’s participation and public reasoning in different parts of the world. We have to look beyond thinking of democracy only in terms of European and American evolution. We would fail to understand the pervasive demands for participatory living, on which Aristotle spoke with far-reaching insight, if we take democracy to be a kind of a specialised cultural product of the West.
...As Alexis de Tocqueville, the great historian of American democracy, noted in the early nineteenth century, while the ‘great democratic revolution’ occuring then in Europe and America was ‘a new thing’, it was also an expression of ‘the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history’.
THE IDEA OF JUSTICE
Author: Amartya Sen
Publisher: Penguin
pages: xxviii+467
Price: Rs 699
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