2 - Transformations

Summary

Men shall henceforth do consciously, and with better directed and more useful effort, what they have hitherto done unconsciously, slowly, indecisively, and too ineffectively.

—Henri de Saint-Simon, quoted in Felix Markham (ed.), Social Organization, The Science of Man, and Other Writings

Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. Once again we shall be as we were – ordinary people – and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.

—Tayeb Salih, The Season of Migration to the North

We ourselves during our freedom movement said that it was not for the loaves and fishes of office that we were fighting but rather that we might have the political power in our hands with which we could fashion and remould and change the whole structure of society in such a manner that the grinding poverty of the masses may be removed, the living conditions of the people may improve and we could establish a society of equals in this great country of ours.

—Purnima Banerji, Constituent Assembly Debates, 24 November 1949

The end of the British Empire in India came about at the appointed hour: precisely at midnight when the calendar turned from 14 to 15 August in 1947. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ Nehru declared. The certainty of the appointed moment was reflected in his use of the simple future affirmative. If there is one thing a revolution never offers, it is temporal certainties. Revolutionary moments are defined by the ‘unpredictability of emergences’. Revolutionary time is experienced, by both participants and observers, as rapid and chaotic. Nehru's confidence conveyed that this was not the case here. The Indian people were not awakened by the tumult of a revolutionary upheaval, but the disciplined alarm clock of a transfer of power. The certainty, however, was only about the appointed hour of a formal transfer of power. ‘[The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving,’ Nehru continued, ‘[s]o that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today.’