Reclaiming Authentic Self

-- Pritam Mukherjee

Pavan K. Varma, Becoming Indian. New Delhi: Allen Tate.2010. Rs. 499

Pavan K. Varma's Becoming Indian (2010) is a salvage enterprise. It encompasses the anxieties and aspirations of an upper-middle class 'Indian' bureaucrat who has embarked upon a personal journey of rediscovery of an authentic Indian self in and through the dynamics of culture and identity. This is, in a very positive sense, a personal book. From the very beginning when the author tries to locate himself and his family in the politico-cultural map of India till the very end when he probes deep into the psychic patterns of Indians of the globalized world order the author maintains a very personal and intimate tone. Confessional note creates an atmosphere of intense self exploration that will soon engage in its web all of us.[Many critics will find it very difficult to accept though – since they believe in a scientific distance from the topic under discussion. Any attempt to break this inhuman objectification will be treated as aberrations] By 'all' here I mean to suggest the normative readers of this book for whom this book is primarily written. The search for an authentic Indianness is always going to be a complicated one. The author has certain broader ideas about that self which we have permanently lost due to colonialism. The point is to rescue it now from the increasingly homogenizing forces of the global capital. Is it possible to reclaim it in its absolute pure form? That is merely an illusion which even Varma won't encourage us to harbour. Both culture and identity of a milieu, community or a nation always go through a process of continuities and changes. But ours is a different story where we had little or no choice but to accept cultural subjugation for no less than two hundred years whose damaging legacy still continues to haunt our present day reality. But are we going to meekly accept the progress of the western Juggernaut without ever questioning it? Varma questions the very basis of such unqualified faith and engages in a debate with the present state of our modernity [which he feels an unfinished project]. There is surely a doomed bravado about such an attempt.Varma's book will engage its Indian readers in a meaningful dialogue with the past, present and future of their identity and culture.