RETHINKING OUR CONSTITUTION FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

This geological epoch, when man is the main destroyer of nature, sets new limits on human rights. So we must celebrate the Constitution by envisioning it afresh

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

CHANGE provides an element of charisma, a sense of theatre for the routines of everyday life. But, of late, the concept of change itself has become problematic, subject to paradoxes and ironies.

This week, we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Constitution. How should we look at it? One tries to locate the debate within the wider debates of the national movement. So let's consider the Constitution as a locus of radical change.

The national movement had a civilizational perspective of change. Consider the early debates on tradition and the museum. The debates, fed by geologist and art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy, claimed that the West had no sense of tradition, even less of memory. It argued against the establishment of museums, claiming it would create a tyranny of memory, while oral memory created traditions that were dynamic. Coomaraswamy argued that the Swadeshi movement should fight for guerrilla war against the museum as 'false memory,' a taxidermy of life.

The movement went further—Coomaraswamy coined the term 'post-industrial'. Today, people associate the term with Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Bell borrowed and narrowed the term. But Coomaraswamy had used the label for coexistence of nature, craft and industry—a mix we desperately need today.

On the other hand, biologists like Patrick Geddes felt the Constitution should not only have a sense of cosmos, livelihood and a rigor about time and energy. He said it was a tragedy that the national movement had not embodied ideas of cosmic time and entropy in the Constitution. As a result, it had no link between waste and justice. As the scientist C V Seshadri put it, we had no sense of the link between waste and the people of a wasted society.