You know something is seriously amiss when the pivotal idea of the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech, his vision for India at hundred, is “Viksit Bharat” (India as a developed nation), a tired repetition of a worn out concept called “development” drawn straight from the 1950s. This is not merely the intellectual limitation of a demagogue. It reflects a deeper pathology — an atrophy of the political imagination — that afflicts an entire political class, cutting across ideological and political boundaries.
Two decades ago, the renowned Sanskrit scholar, Sheldon Pollock, wrote a much-cited article, “The Death of Sanskrit”, in 18th century India. Obviously, he did not mean to pronounce the death of a language; Sanskrit continues to exist. His point was about how, on the eve of colonialism, Sanskrit ceased to be the principal carrier of intellectual and cultural ideas of our civilisation. In a later commentary, Sudipta Kaviraj modified it as “The Sudden Death of Sanskrit Knowledge”, an abrupt extinguishing of a conceptual universe.
Something similar has happened to the great tradition of modern Indian political thought that nourished politics of colonial and post-colonial India through the 20th century. While everyone notes and comments on the decline of political morals, we tend to miss out on something that is no less significant — the emaciation of our political vision, the shrinkage in the vocabulary of politics, the withering away of our political understanding, the poverty of political judgement and the recession in the agenda for political action. The river of ideas that........