India’s Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change
By Mark Tully,
Rider, £14.99

We should be thankful to Mark Tully for deciding to leave his explorations into faith and spirituality, his own and India’s, as a post-retirement option. But given his belief that much of life is 95 per cent fate and 5 per cent free will, this might have been predestined. Even then, one cannot but feel grateful that Tully kept his religious thoughts to himself most of the two decades he was chief correspondent of the BBC in India. Given his fatalism (he believes that his being in Puri on Kartik Purnima and the beginning of this book on that propitious day were no mere coincidence), who knows, there might have been doubts over the objectivity of the broadcasts, and BBC Radio would not have been what it has been.

Tully talks about his personal growth — the changes in his belief system as he goes through school in Marlborough, university in Cambridge, a failed stint at a theological college and, finally, as assistant representative of the BBC in India, where he rediscovers his own religion. The sparse account of this transition is interwoven with reflections on the drawbacks of world religions (particularly Semitic), and on religious beliefs, accompanied by scholarly observations. His point is to show how profoundly his religious thoughts have been influenced by the Hindu way of life, its pluralism, its humility, its diversity and its sense of balance. Having achieved this feat, he now wants all the faithful, as well as the different faiths, to follow suit in order to strengthen the belief in god and to restore harmony among peoples.

His other significant intention is to rediscover India’s tradition and religious virtue for the people of the country, which is hurtling down the path of change without a thought and without a suspicion that it may fall into the same trap that Western materialistic societies have fallen into. Since Tully subscribes to the belief that “he could only preach what he had personally experienced”, his experiences in England, Scotland and India come in handy.

While preaching (Tully’s propensities can hardly be suspected to be anything else), he dares his readers to call him “counter-cultural” or “an old-fashioned socialist and romantic about India” — all the phrases being presented by him as comments already made by previous listeners. Tully, perhaps in order to prevent these precious descriptions from being repeated, mentions that his thoughts about India have been thrashed out in front of — and found an echo among — scholars, economists, heads of multinational companies as much as of religious bodies. Tully, quite evidently, is not the only one worrying his head about India’s destiny.

But what is he so worried about? One is the loss of faith. He illustrates this with the example of Ireland. The gay, colourful and yet rabidly Catholic country, which once had priests swarming all around, is squirming under the aggressive secular drive of the State. Although the inflexibility of the Church and its prescriptions about sexual practices had a lot to do with its decline, Tully believes the development has robbed the country of its unique character. It is now like any other place in the world undergoing the onslaught of globalization.

This brings us to another of Tully’s worries — progress and its pitfalls, be it in science, technology or economy. Man’s strides in the former gave the world the atom bomb, and the latter has led to an unbridgeable gap between the rich and the poor. Tully warns that there is no ‘certainty’ that progress will benefit all. He quotes John Gray, professor of European thought in the London School of Economics, to strengthen his case, “Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes.”

Tully preaches balance at all times, be it in the pursuit of religion, political success, economic prosperity or sex. Which is fair enough. But did Tully need to hardsell Hinduism this way to promote it as the model to be followed in order to achieve the balance? Tully presents an almost idyllic picture of India where festivals are occasions for reaffirming social harmony (he mourns the lack of festivals in the British calendar), caste brothers share marriage expenses, and religious leaders shake hands and make up. Why gloss over the uglier side? When his friend, Radhakant Nayak, reminds him that casteism lacks a social conscience, Tully can only answer that there have been movements to redress the balance — the Bhakti movement, and the more contemporary Dalit movements. How far has it got India? While Uttar Pradesh has a Dalit chief minister, Dalit doctors in a premier medical institution in the heart of the Indian capital continue to be ghettoized. Would Tully call that ‘balance’?

Tully sees the rise of the Hindu Right as a response to dogmatic secularism practised over the years by India, and blames politics for the development. One wonders if Praveen Togadia and his kind would continue to have such a huge audience to hear their fulminations against the minorities had Indian pluralism been truly at work. Tully’s idealization of Indian social cohesion is almost insufferable. India is definitely undergoing a lopsided growth. But one wonders if the answer to the problem could lie in the reassertion of the fundamental Hindu values. Besides, who is to decide what is ‘fundamental’?

There can be no doubting Tully’s sensitivity to the changing Indian scenario. This comes out best when he goes back to his old-style reporting on the Dalit family in UP or on communal amity in Varanasi. But in trying to bind his own spiritual growth to India’s unforeseen destiny, Tully ties himself in knots. He raises profound questions — like “Is God malign?” “Why should a loving God make it necessary for us to suffer?” — but cannot answer them. He wants the Church to be less dogmatic and learn from the Indian tradition to be “more tolerant of plurality and more willing to question their certainties.” But he does not want it “to forfeit all claims to certainty merely in order to avoid conflict with others, or that it should come to feel it should avoid all moral judgments”. He swears to have learnt humility from India, but does not refrain from crowning himself with glory for taking on John Birt (spelt once as Bird), director general of the BBC.

There are incisive passages in this book. Take Tully’s lambasting of modern management doctrines and their indiscriminate use in all situations. He also senses, as astutely as ever, India’s dilemmas as it tries to follow the path of progress. But if Tully is so sure of India’s “genius for absorption and adaption”, one cannot see why he indulges in the foolhardiness of assuming its self-destruction.