Bhikhu at 90

Abstract

Bhikhu Parekh is a leading philosopher and political theorist of multiculturalism and has combined this with a dedication to public and community service in Britain and India. Here Gurpreet Mahajan, Geoffrey Brahm Levey, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Charles Taylor, Varun Uberoi and Tariq Modood, in a symposium edited by the last two, come together to celebrate Bhikhu Parekh’s 90th birthday.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this symposium to mark Bhikhu Parekh’s 90^th birthday. Bhikhu Parekh is universally acknowledged as one of the leading political theorists of multiculturalism, a theme which he has very much made his own, with Rethinking Multiculturalism: Political Theory and Cultural Diversity (2006 [2000]), being the jewel in the crown. In it, with great originality he brings out how the history of western philosophy has rarely taken the idea of culture and cultural diversity seriously but has been dominated by forms of rationalism and individualism that presuppose all must aspire to live in the same way and that there is only one good politics (Modood, 2001). Bhikhu has shown that those ideas are flawed and harmful, given how much we are shaped by culture. So, a contemporary respect for diversity must be based on intercultural learning, not converting everyone to a single point of view such as Western liberalism.

Readers of this journal may however be less aware that Bhikhu has learnt from and published books on various political philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt and has constantly reflected on the nature of political philosophy and its relationship to political practice; is it possible to escape ideological bias or is one necessarily trapped in the way of thinking of one’s society or class or ethnic group?

This body of work has led him to be a Fellow of the British Academy, of the European Academy, and a past Chair of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK). He is a recipient of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for lifetime contribution to political philosophy – and indeed, one of only four living individuals who has been identified as one of the 17 leading British political theorists of the twentieth century (Kelly, 2010). His work has been translated into 20 languages and he has received the Distinguished Global Thinker Award from the India International Centre.

He has combined this intellectual excellence with public service. He has been a Deputy Chair and Acting Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in the 1980s and has served as a Labour peer in the House of Lords since 2000. He has advised more than one Indian Prime Minister and was awarded the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, the second-highest Indian civilian honour.

His path-breaking thought and engagement with government at the highest level – of speaking truth to power – were brought together in his Chairmanship of the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain. Their report, published in 2000 and known by his name, as The Parekh Report, set out the core guiding principles of British multiculturalism. Sixty-six percent of its recommendations were implemented by the government within 3 years and it is a landmark in forging the idea of a multicultural Britishness, a conception of the country that is fully inclusive of its minorities as well as the majority.

These achievements are all the more remarkable given Bhikhu’s humble origins. His father was a goldsmith in a village in Gujarat, India, of modest means and the son was the first in his family to go to university. He became a lecturer at the University of Baroda at the age of 22 but was soon advised to do a PhD in Britain. He secured a place at the London School of Economics. Here he came to know and learn from the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott.

It would be fair to say that Oakeshott has been one of the intellectual influences on his work together with that of Parekh’s compatriot, Mahatma Gandhi (Uberoi, 2021; and see Gurpreet Mahajan’s contribution below). Gandhi’s penetrating analysis of British imperialism and the evils of the caste system and his vision of multicultural, multifaith learning, cooperation and solidarity has been a lode star that has guided Bhikhu throughout his life.

He has had a very distinctive influence at the Bristol University Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. While that centre works mainly in sociology and political science, Bhikhu Parekh’s work has been an inspiration to many at the centre over its 25 years, including now several cohorts of PhD students and postdocs, who have gone on to themselves contribute to this stream of work. Bhikhu’s role here has been recognised in recent years as a foundation of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (Levey, 2019).

This Symposium

The first two/three papers bring out, as they see it, what is distinctive about Bhikhu’s philosophy of multiculturalism relative to other political theories of multiculturalism. This partly derives from the fact that Bhikhu works with a humanistic canvas, rather than just a focus on politics. Gurpreet Mahajan points out that Bhikhu had said that it is best to understand multiculturalism as a ‘perspective’ on human life rather than a political doctrine or even a philosophical school. Her focus is on Bhikhu’s suggestion that while different cultures represent different systems of meaning and visions of good life, each realizes only a “limited range of human capacities…and grasps only a part of the totality of human existence. Moreover, despite centring cultures in this way, she points out that Bhikhu insists that such cultures are internally plural. She looks to both the source of such views and also their implications. In relation to the former, she points to Bhikhu’s writings on Gandhi and Bhikhu summarising Gandhi’s view of different religions: ‘There was truth in each of them but that did not mean that they were all true, for they also contained some falsehood”. This meant that one had to identify what was false in one’s religion. A good way to do it was, while remaining rooted in one’s own religion, to consider what was better expressed in other religions and learning from them. Mahajan suggests that this was the source of the value that Bhikhu places on pluralism, namely, the possibility of learning from other ways of life. Each represents an aspect of the “totality of human abilities and emotions” (Parekh (2006 [2000]): 336); each is partial and limited, yet, valuable as it embodies aspects of the human experience and potential. When we open ourselves to different cultures, we can explore aspects of the self that may be neglected or even ignored in one’s own. An implication of this perspective is the importance that Bhikhu places on cross-cultural conversations as a feature of his multiculturalism.

Geoffrey Brahm Levey similarly identifies intercultural dialogue as a distinctive feature of Bhikhu’s approach. However, Levey argues that it is how Bhikhu combines intercultural dialogue with his equally central concept of ‘operative public values’ that distinguishes his position from Liberal Nationalists, Quebecan Interculturalists and even the Bristol School. Human beings are neither merely ‘natural’ (as the term ‘human nature’ might suggest), nor capable of fully transcending the partiality of their cultures. Yet, as these cultures are not discrete, there can be dialogue across them. While, as noted above, the prime purpose of such intercultural dialogue is to learn from each other, it can also be the basis of political conflict resolution. Yet, in this space, we have no choice but to appeal to the values and institutions that a particular society lives by. Intercultural dialogue becomes a mechanism by which a society’s operative public values, which may disadvantage minorities, may be questioned and reformed. This makes Bhikhu’s position, Levey argues, less statist or politician-led and less prescriptive than other theorists of multiculturalism, and in some ways, less minoritarian, as the goal is to accommodate minorities rather than to seek parity. Minorities must work with the ways of doing things that the majority finds intelligible and, where a policy decision is needed, the operating values and arrangements will prevail till dialogue opens up other mutually acceptable possibilities. It is this open-ended humanistic interculturalism and realm of possibility that Bhikhu offers us rather than a politics that is preordained in either a conservative or multiculturalist format. In this, it is suggested, Bhikhu’s theorising characteristically proceeds more in the spirit of political wisdom and wise counsel than as firm prescriptions.

Varun Uberoi comes at Bhikhu’s political theory of multiculturalism from a different angle but he too puts intercultural dialogue at the centre of it, together with intracultural dialogue. He comes to these from considering what can be found in Bhikhu’s thought to address the kind of social and political polarisation today symbolised by Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. He argues that while Bhikhu may not have explicitly written about polarisation, aspects of his thought help us to identify it as a problem and how to overcome it. Uberoi argues that unity is necessary in any society or polity, and becomes even more urgent in one composed of different groups. A polity is composed of divergent viewpoints and of groups and unity is weakened if some actors are more concerned to aggressively promote their perspective and disparage all others and those who hold other perspectives. The only way unity can be maintained, at least without an unacceptable level of coercion, is through dialogue, trying to understand how one’s co-citizens who hold different views to oneself or one’s group see the same society or how they identify social and political problems and solutions to those problems. A good illustrative site for this is one’s national identity. How people see their country and its history and their sense of what it is to be a member of that country is likely to vary by class and region, not to mention the group characteristics that multiculturalists focus on, language, religion, ethnicity/race, culture, being a majority or a minority and so on. So, a country like Britain should understand itself as a, to expand a Gandhian term, ‘community of individuals and a community of communities’. It is only in this way, by recognising there is a variety of ways of being British and that they are equally valid and in fact each can be enhanced – as can national unity – by thinking what Britain looks like through the other perspectives and using them to educate ourselves about and to deepen our sense of our internally differentiated country. Thus a political leader or party or a government that seeks to promote a singular, a one-sided view of the country is bound to make some people feel outsiders and so divide and polarise the country.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who is not primarily an academic but a current affairs author, broadcaster and journalist, gives us a personal account of how Bhikhu was one of the British minority intellectuals to who she owes her political awakening. She highlights how over nearly five decades Bhikhu, in his own gentle and conversational way, has been a revolutionary as a public intellectual and in his dedication to anti-racist change. She recalls Bhikhu’s important role in the conflict over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, that angered and deeply hurt so many Muslims, many of whom at the same time, like her, were appalled by Ayatollah Khomeni’s ‘death sentence’. Bhikhu sought to get liberals to understand what exactly Muslims were angry about, such cross-cultural understanding, being the first step to liberal self-reflection and the opening up to dialogue. While saying ‘I would not have found my voice or defined my beliefs without him’, she thinks that the call that ‘deep moral differences should be respected’ can protect narrow and oppressive community behaviours, especially to the detriment of women and young people. So, while she believes that Bhikhu embodies the ‘interactive multiculturalism’ of his philosophy, multiculturalism becomes suspect when its proponents are relatively uncritical about some aspects of minority behaviour.

The final paper of the symposium brings us to the current moment with a bump. Charles Taylor’s contribution to this symposium points us to focus on the crises surrounding the recurrent flows, sometimes very large, as in the case of Syrians and others in 2015, of asylum seekers coming into the Western countries. ‘In the European case, the influx has triggered a shift to the right; in the US, the pressure at the southern border has strengthened a rightward turn which has other sources.’ Taylor places these issues, on two different continents, in their historical context. When we do so, he says, we see the significant differences across cases. For example, he argues that the major rightward shift in France, is not directly due to current levels of migrants and refugees but to how many French voters see Islam as a threat. In the US, the rise of the Right and the extreme polarisation is as much to do with that country’s historic white supremacism, and the movement to challenge it and with a religion-secular division amongst its population. Taylor offers some remedial suggestions, though confessing immediately that they fall short of what is needed given the size of the problem. His key suggestion is getting people to see, believers in white superiority as well as their victims, that ‘the continued division deprives them of the mutual enrichment, the enlarging and deepening of their humanity which comes from open exchange between people of widely different backgrounds and cultures’. He connects this to a saying of Congressman John Lewis, a close associate of Martin Luther King, to “lay down the burden of hatred”. Taylor says: ‘To identify this as a burden requires ethical discernment. To build this insight into a democratic society’s self-understanding takes this insight further, beyond the enlightened views of some individuals, into the collective awareness of the community. This would be something new in human history.’ Here, in this vision of a dialogical humanism built into the fabric of a democratic society, we can, in this symposium, close the circle. Its not just that, as we have seen above, such a view is at the centre of Bhikhu’s understanding of multiculturalism, but that a key source for Bhikhu, Gandhi, was also a key source for King and his associates, including Lewis, who even tabled a bill in Congress to mark the importance of Gandi to the civil rights movement in the US. ¹