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Anti-traditional view Indian Culture: A
Sociological Study
Prescient in many respects, Mukerji’s sociological analysis of India’s cultural past is relevant to the current debates on the quality and scope of our cultural inheritance and on the shaping role of the middle classes in its dissemination. Even after half a century, he comes across very much as our contemporary in his assessment of the fate of culture in post-Independence India as well as its future direction. Written in a forceful, if somewhat meandering style, Indian Culture tackled issues that have become the staple of present controversies among India’s historians and political analysts. His principal aim was to discover ‘the nature of the process’ by which the tradition of "living and thought" grew, matured and underwent significant transformations over the centuries. In this effort, as in much else, we could enlist him as an ally against our own religious and political obscurantism. This is not a theoretical treatise, nor a pseudo-Marxist critique of India’s rural and semi-urban economy generating cultural forms in a cause-and-effect correlation. Primarily a broad-brush account of different facets of Indian culture, it draws upon Weber and Sorrel to determine the substance of cultural forms at various stages of India’s economic and social evolution. Following the established practice of relating high culture to the ruling elites in different centres, Mukerji, however, lays greater stress on the dissenting offshoots emerging from the exclusive preserves of the Brhamanical tradition. The Bhakti poets, the folk arts paralleling "high" art, the populist inversion of established ethical values—are the sites where Mukerji locates the contrapuntal processes in Indian cultural evolution long before the high-profile Subaltern Studies co-opted them to rewrite Indian history in the post-colonial period. Suggesting that the mystic propensities of the Bhakti movement contain seeds of anti-traditionalism, Mukerji explores its pluralistic, syncretic and religion-transcending character challenging the votaries of cultural nationalism of the RSS brand. But more importantly, he underlines the class basis of this movement, which stood up to the hegemony of upper castes without, however, undermining them politically or socially. In his review of the literature, music and other fine arts, Mukerji is at pains to relate the different artistic styles (Dhrupad, fictional realism and other folklorist modes in particular) to specific class formations that extended patronage to and encouraged specific styles. He attributes the "growth of political prose in Bengal, Maharashtra" to the awareness of political nationalism pioneered by middle-class reformers and finds a subtle relationship between the early neglect of music in Bengal and the puritanical hold of land-owning classes. That Tagore broke these barriers in his musical and literary innovations is as much a consequence of the weakening of these classes as of the expansion of opportunities following Asutosh Mukerji’s educational reforms. One is reminded here of Satyajit Ray’s film Jalsaghar. Without grinding any
ideological axes of his own, Mukerji manages to indict today’s
Hindutva zealots by projecting the non-communal roots of Indian culture.
In 1948 that was no mean task. |
Before
the present-day cultural materialists arrived on the scene, the late
Mulk Raj Anand would often define culture as "the poetry of
civilization" grounded in a material base. D. P. Mukerji, the
veteran Lucknow University sociologist of pre-Independence years,
provides ample support for this claim in this timely reprint of an
influential book first published in 1948.