'Dharmanomics' Illuminates Indic Sustainable Economic Thinking

Dharmanomics. Sriram Balasubramanian. Bloomsbury India. Pages 298. Rs 599.

The quest for sustainable living is the challenge for modern times across the world.

Developing an appropriate economic framework is a part of this quest but not divorced from the other intrinsic issues associated with this quest.

One must credit the liberals of the Western world with the credit due to them for highlighting this issue, as opposed to the Western conservatives, who often even fail to acknowledge the pressing issue of sustainability for the future of mankind.

Even then, the liberal view is a very shallow one. This shallow view is embodied in their approach, which demands only some token changes in their lifestyle, accompanied with far greater entitlement of moralising others, without thinking about any comprehensive solution that requires fundamentally acknowledging the incompleteness of their understanding about human nature.

Cowspiracy, a documentary produced by two environmentalists, Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, posits this problem with the liberal worldview. The liberals may effectively want people to pursue almost the same lifestyle that they are now pursuing but acknowledge the ecological sustainability issues as a way to assert their own moral superiority rather than a problem-solving issue.

As a rebellion against this understanding, the documentary articulated much bigger changes to be made and also succeeded to an extent in mainstreaming the idea of less intake of meat in Western culture.

For a bigger change, one should look at India, the biggest economy in the world (as acknowledged by the leading authority, Angus Maddison) until colonisation by Islamic colonisers, but with an economic thinking bypassing the Western economic thought that has led to a massive rise in ecological footprint and the consequent crisis.

The time is ripe to understand Indic thinking, appreciate it sufficiently, and replicate it for the world for a sustainable future. Of course, no thinking can be replicated in another culture like a simple cut-paste operation but requires sufficient intellectual churnings as its initiation. The Indian academia should take the lead in effectively decolonising itself and initiating this churn. 

At this crossroad, Sriram Balasubramanian’s Dharmanomics is a necessary and pertinent contribution for the present times, written lucidly with academically sound arguments.

The author has considered this book as the middle part of his promised trilogy on Indian economic thinking and presented the book as evidence of the success of this thinking.

The book does not shy away from defining dharma and dharmanomics as rigorously as possible from primary sources, highlighting the crucial role of dharmic culture in producing economic success.

Balasubramanian, in different chapters of his book, narrates the economic institutions developed under the Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation, Cholas, Pallavas, the Vijayanagar Empire, and Cambodia (known as Kambuja Desa). These institutions were decentralised, having their checks and balances, and commendably survived very many centuries without a strong state but based on their own strength.

The chapter on Sreni Dharma decodes the power of their strength rooted in their excellent balance between promotion of individual pursuits and catering to the best ethical practices for the collective. Moreover, many of the modern institutions bank on the very same ideas practiced in the Indian guilds as Sreni Dharma. This may be analogous to the European practice of selection through competitive examination, which originates from China but is now regarded as a European custom worldwide. 

The operational contours of dharmanomics were way bigger than the geographical boundary of present-day India, pervading very many parts of the Asian continent. Asia comes from the Semitic root "asu," meaning "rising" or "light." This may simply not be a physical description but a worldview in a world where the great economic superpower called India exuded its soft power all over, coming to be regarded as the constant light for the world.

Balasubramanian has argued for a five-millennia-old continuity of this notion of dharmanomics in a wide geographical region. This is an underappreciated statement in the current academic climate that needs to be emphasised more and more. An exuberance of infinite growth for the entire humanity defeats both scientific understanding about the nature of things and also available human experience, which is more of a cyclical phenomenon than being a linear story. 

What the book crucially misses to expound upon begins here. The “linear story” part about growth is not a standalone phenomenon but a consequence of the very foundations of the Western culture itself. This manifests in their obsession with expanding their frontier everywhere.

This linear story is a direct consequence of an underlying linear theory. The first person to point it out is Lynn White, Jr, in his article 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis' published in the prestigious outlet of Science in 1967.

Many works since — most importantly that of the Ghent school of Balu — demarcate this aspect of Western thinking too well. As a modest mention, the current reviewer has also highlighted this facet of Western thinking in the work The Majoritarian Myth, published last year.

Balasubramanian has demonstrated that without such a linear theory, a sustainable economic system evolved from India, but he stopped short of comparing the two systems otherwise. For example, how was the Chola economic empire fundamentally different from the British Empire, economic system-wise? How was the Indian Sreni Dharma different from corporate ethics, and so on and so forth?

The book is almost exclusively about finding similarities between the two economic systems but hardly about finding the crucial differences. Without recognising the differences, any exposition of the similarity of the Indic civilisation with the Western one looks like an effort, if not an apologia, to be considered good enough to the Western standards. While I am sure that the author did not have any such motive, the audience of the book could still nourish such notions. 

Of course, it would be sufficiently uncharitable of me if I blamed the individual author, Sriram Balasubramanian, for any incompleteness in the work. The blame for this incompleteness should collectively go to the Indian academic world, who are often happy to only publish their work in journals run by Western academia without a bigger goal as a collective entity.

Unless this collective entity has a mission to do things proactively to nourish Indic thinking, any imitation of the Western framework shall neither deliver any laurel to Indian academia nor make it to be taken seriously. The authorities that run the academic world should create institutional effort beyond the ornamental coining of words.

Before closing down the review, I should mention commendable efforts by Sandeep Singh for his book Temple Economics on the related topic, which is full of terrific ideas but often expressed in a non-academic language. Indian academics should be bold enough to express them in the right parlance and with proper empirical verification.