“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Gospel
of Matthew 5:5, New Testament). God blesses those who are humble,
for they will inherit the whole earth.
In a simplistic though fairly prevalent view, the world
is often seen to be naturally dominated by those species, groups that are more
intelligent and resourceful, powerful, especially ones who are conscious about
their dominant status and are ruthless in perpetuating the same. The directions
and the dynamics of the world affairs are assumed to be decided by the duel
between the extraordinary and the powerful adversaries who, though, share their
vaunted ambitions to dominate these proceedings. The meek, by definition, do
not figure in these power equations. They are too ordinary, small in stature
and low in the scale of their ambitions. Like the grass falling in the path
traversed by the horses carrying the marauding armies or under the jackboots of
their equally intrepid enemies, many among the meek will be trampled, charred
and decimated. But like the grass they will survive being multitudinous, even
grow from the ashes, from the unlikely shelter under the boulder and cover the
slopes and the ridges, plateaus and the valleys, soak the sun and the rain and
continue to thrive long after the gory and destructive competition has stopped.
In that sense, the meek may have a greater chance of escaping complete and
systematic erasure which their more powerful and assertive brethren are likely
to suffer, and therefore have, as a class (individuals may be mauled), a better
prospect of survival and might inherit the earth after all, however scorched it
is rendered by the big players, and grow life out of the waste land.
Karl Marx used the concept of a
so-called “Asiatic mode of production” to
characterise the slow and meandering dynamics of the socio-economic and
political development in the Indian subcontinent till the advent of the British
rule in the middle of the 18th century. His descriptions in his
writings during 1850s call to mind almost an instantiation of the above. The
history of India from ancient times has been replete with instances of major
kingdoms and empires being overrun and visible symbols of their rule having
been razed to ground by invading armies of rival kings in a bid to expand their
own fiefdoms. However, almost as a rule, Marx had observed, these big
overthrows and takeovers have largely left the plebian populace to live their
poor marginalised lives in isolated village communities. The latter were
loosely administered by local authorities who in turn were responsible for
remitting retainership fees (in turn extracting a tax from the villagers for
the communally held and worked land by way of a part of the produce) for the
region of their dominance to, say, the potentates of the provincial Hindu
kingdoms in earlier times or the emperors under India wide Mughal rule later.
For the people at the ground level, the king or the sultan was distant, deity
like, dominant and dangerous but also in some way benevolent to his subjects in
the matters about construction of large public works like irrigation assets.
But his writ at the local level used to be less oppressive and systematic as it
became with the introduction of what is known as the “Permanent Settlement”
introduced in 1792 by Lord Cornwallis, the governor of the Bengal Presidency
under the burgeoning British Raj in the late eighteenth century.
And the village communities
sometimes managed to maintain for even centuries a remarkable identity and a continuity
of local practices – economic activities, cultural mores. They were too
insignificant to have attracted notice or merit the brutal treatment meted out
to the active and real adversaries to the kings and the sultans. However, this
is not meant to make a case in favour of the state of affairs in pre-British
India, nor a philosophical rationalisation of a state of mind that apparently
helped the survival of the masses.
Time and again, it has been demonstrated empirically
(in the stories upon stories of underdevelopment in the Indian subcontinent)
that it is more than likely that what the meek and the docile (and they also
mostly happen to be from the subaltern classes) eventually manage to inherit
are the losses, the shards of shattered grandiose dreams spun and propagated by
powerful rulers (including the ‘potential’ rulers), their ministers, advisers
and other representatives. Not just due to their being weak and not having the
ambition and the initiative to latch on to the bandwagon of progress to move
out of the morass of backwardness but precisely because of their implicit trust
and touching faith in those who take upon themselves the ‘onerous’ task of
driving the chariot. And when the consequences of the historically wrong
choices made by the latter become apparent the meek more often than not lack
the wherewithal and the reserves to withstand any negative fall out over long
periods or get away from them.
Apart from the facile imagery conjured up by the
biblical quote that seems to have an empirical authenticity for many, a lot of
people, especially those that are religiously inclined, implicitly believe in
the core idea by mixing it up with the familiar good and evil conundrum, that
the good eventually prevails (does it always really?). In more modern context
of pacifist activism (or what could be better described as politics of
pacifism) this might have been a good slogan to be used as a strategic tool for
political mobilisation through faith (ultimate triumph of the faith?). One
would suspect that behind this there has been an astute appreciation of the
cultural predisposition of a milieu, making a virtue of one’s weakness and make
a political programme out of it. This is not necessarily a bad idea, after all
the history of evolution is that of the survivors.
It is important, however, to take the proposition
that ‘meek shall inherit the earth’ with more than a pinch of doubt, to ask why
slogans and catch phrases such as these became necessary, who propagated them
and what was the underlying purpose?