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RSS & BJP lay emphasis on Indian culture, and that’s what prompted me to write this. But let me be fair. They aren’t the only ones. Every religion, country and community has such organisations that have culture as an important pillar. I think that preserving, protecting, and spreading our culture is not something that one should strive towards. Let me lay down my reasoning in the following paragraphs.
Let’s start with what cultures are. This is my definition: when a large set of people share some values, beliefs and practices, we call it their culture. I think we could put things like food, dress, celebrations, myths, religion etc. under the above buckets.
Now, let’s examine how cultures come to be. Cultures aren’t created deliberately, that is, cultures aren’t created by a person or a committee of people who sit down and draft what the culture of a people should be. Rather, cultures take their present form over long periods of time with contributions of a large number of people. National and regional cultures may have histories spanning centuries or millennia and may involve contributions of millions of people. Cultures keep changing. They are like rivers that keep moving forward and as they move forward, they keep carrying sediments from everywhere they pass. In the case of cultures, time is the riverbank and values, beliefs and practices of a time are the sediments that are carried on the river of culture.
Just like a river remains the same river whether it’s fresh and clear in the mountains, or slow and sediment rich near the ocean, a culture remains the same culture even if new values, beliefs and practices become a part of it. And just like it’s impossible to return the river waters to the composition that they had at a prior point in the river’s course, the same way, it’s impossible to return a culture to a previous state. We could in theory try to filter the river, but you can imagine what kind of humongous task it would be. Even if someone is ready for the hardship of this task, one has to naturally ask, is the task even worth it? I say, no, it’s not. Why? Because we should evolve forwards, not backwards. One cannot take the values, beliefs and practices of one particular time and say okay, this was our culture and anything after that point is not. Freezing a culture in time is like freezing progress. Cultures need not be preserved. Else, cultures become constrictive to their people. Therefore, I think that the people who just want to preserve a specific state of their culture may be well intentioned but are misguided. Instead of trying to preserve culture, I think our focus should be elsewhere. What’s that elsewhere? That’s a very important question that we will come to.
Okay, let’s say that we are convinced that culture isn’t something that we can create, preserve or control. Then what should we do? Should we simply forget our values, beliefs and practices and do whatever we want? No, that’s not even possible because we can’t give up these things even over a lifetime no matter how hard we try. ‘Whether we should preserve our culture or should we move with the times’ seems like a valid question, but I say that it’s not. This is something that we need not worry about. Rather we all should strive towards good. That’s the answer to the question that I had raised above.
Let’s take an analogy to understand this better, of habits. I think we all will agree that we shouldn’t stick to our habits just because those habits have been a part of our lives for a long time. Rather we should stick with the good habits and change the bad habits. Or replace good habits with better habits. ‘What is good?’ is a big question that is tough to answer, but even in the absence of an answer to that, I think we can agree on the principle that we should adopt better habits. Applying the same logic to culture, we should stick with good values, beliefs and practices, or the ones that work in the present day and age, and we should feel free to change and update the rest. What do we mean by ‘work’? We mean that the values, beliefs and practices shouldn’t have become obsolete and/or proven wrong. That’s how we can progress. Otherwise culture becomes dogma. The spirit is gone and just the shell remains. If we are trying to preserve values, beliefs and practices which don’t stand the test of present times, then we are doing something wrong. I think that goes against the spirit of humanity and progress.
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