“THE IDEA OF INDIA"
23 January, 2013
The idea of India is a conception often credited
by our English-speaking “secular” elite to Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru or Sunil
Khilnani, not necessarily in that order.
Our
British colonizers too gave themselves credit for it, with an echo by Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh on July 8, 2005 at Oxford University. It is they, he said, who gave us our notions of
the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a
professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories,
our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy, the English language, and
cricket.[1]
Mr
Singh on that occasion did make the token nod to “India's ancient civilization”,
but it is clear he believes we did not have these notions before the British
blessed us with them. Regrettably,
he omitted mentioning the railways that are supposed to have knitted us together
and, for universal school education, he omitted making the conventional
ascription to British missionaries[2].
In point of fact, however, the historical conception of the one-ness of
what in English is called “India” goes back at least 6000 years
to the Rig Veda[3]. It is important to understand this history because the name we give
ourselves or that others give us provides us with a social and political
identity and meaning, so that "India" says something
about how we see ourselves and how others see us.
The citizens of India are called Indians, as
distinguished from the followers of a “religion” called
Hinduism[4]. At the same time, the indigenous peoples
in many parts of the world are called “Indians”. "Indian" was frequently a Western
imperial and pejorative label for dark-coloured indigenes and, at least
till the end of the 14th century (a Vijaynagar inscription c.1393 referring to
the emperor as “Hindurayasuratrana”),
that is, just about 600 years ago in the history of our civilization going
back at least 9,000 years, we had no such thing as "Hinduism". So let us see how we got our name, and
the meanings often connected with it.
The word "India" is
the pronunciation in English of the Greek pronunciation of the Iranian
pronunciation of the Sanskrit word "sindhu", which was our own name in our own
language for the mighty river called Indus
which has always been a major landmark for travellers to our country from
lands to our northwest.
The ancient Iranians - or Persians, as they used to be called - found
difficulty in pronouncing the initial “s” of “sindhu”, so they called it “hindu” – the word occurs for the
first time in the Avesta of the ancient Iranians, and they used it to
describe generally this land and all the people in it. From Iran the word passed to Greece where it became Indus, with variations among the ancient
Arabs, Turks, Mongolians, and Chinese (the last saying “shin-tu”) who
came into contact with us to study, trade or conquer.
This word “Hindu” is not found in any of our ancient texts. It
is nowhere in the Vedas; it is nowhere in our epics, nor in the Bhagavad
Gita, the Upanishads, nor in any of the treatises of Yoga. It does not
appear in any of our indigenous languages, not till the 7th century when it was
brought in by the Islamic invaders.
The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang who visited our country
between 630 and 645 AD reports that while “shin-tu” or its variants could
be heard outside our borders, it was unknown within our country. Even after
Islamic rule was established in our country, the word did not gain popular
currency and was not used, at least till the 14th century, except by the
Islamic rulers to refer to the non-Muslim population as a whole of
this land.
So, it is quite clear that, to begin with, “Hindu”
was a foreign word. It
was not a “religious” description. It was a purely geographical label,
initially describing the land and people in the vicinity of the Sindhu
river but gradually spreading to cover all parts of this country and
its people. It can be said that the word “Hindu” acquired a pan-Indian
connotation from ancient Iranian times - but this was only in the speech of
foreigners, and even with them it did not indicate any distinction of class,
caste or creed. To emphasize, it was merely a
foreign geographical description, and "Hindustan" was the land of the "Hindus". How from being a geocultural description
this was made into a “religious” label is another
story.
Thus, the word we have adopted to describe our country and
ourselves evolved as a word foreign to us. Over the millennia, this word has
acquired a number of meanings that foreigners associated with us, and many of
which we have internalized. Most of
these meanings are not complimentary. In fact, most frequently, in the
post-colonial international eye, India stands for overpopulation,
poverty, dirt and corruption, and the majority of our people are believed to be
lazy other-worldly Hindus. Remember
that it was an Indian who made an international joke of what he cunningly
called "the Hindu rate of growth"[5]
– conveniently forgetting, of course, that in pre-colonial times it was
this same rate of growth that resulted in making us what the historian KM
Ashraf described as "the wealthiest colossus of the
world". How
British colonial rule reduced us from being one of the richest lands to becoming
one of the poorest is also another story.[6]
It is a well-known phenomenon that, in an unequal power relation,
the weaker tries to model itself on what is commonly perceived to be the
stronger, and so one of the legacies of centuries of colonial rule
(compounding the dhimmitude ingrained in us by Islamic rule) is that we still
try to invent ourselves in ways we think will find us Western approval. The West
gave us (among other things) our name, its concept of the nation, its modern
value system, its political system and our political boundaries, its
understanding of religion and of time, its educational system, its view of
female beauty and of masculinity as machismo so, not surprisingly, it is still
to the West we turn for recognition and for affirmation of our
identity.
In politics, we define ourselves in Western terms. We have modelled
ourselves on the British model of parliamentary democracy. We have a fixed
border, limiting ourselves in time and space. We argue that we are, or we are
not, a nation, a concept that has come to us from the West. And when we go West, as so many of us
hope to do, we try and make it easier for us to be accepted by them by changing
our names – or our “religion” - to theirs. Hari becomes Harry; Akanksha, Angie;
Kishore, Kevin; Sudha, Sue; Ramsadan, Ramsden; Piyush becomes Bobby and a
Catholic. These are actual examples.
Indira Gandhi, when she was harassed by criticism in India, used to go to Europe for approbation, and she was known to have
commented that the European press and people were more appreciative of her worth
and achievements than the Indian press and people. So dominating is our need to reify
ourselves in Western terms that, if I recall correctly, even our
philosopher-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan explained our dharma as
polymorphous monotheism – that is, a monotheism of many shapes – because
Christanity is monotheistic and propagates itself as ipso facto superior to all
our richly symbolic and fascinating ways of constructing Divinity.
We have internalized the eurocentric view of the world and the need for a
foreign affirmation of ourselves and, as long as this need remains, we will
always be inferior to the West.
But are we only a construction of the West? Did we never have any word,
any name, of our own for ourselves?
If
we look at the Constitution of India, we find a very
telling phrase that occurs in it but once. This is "India,
that is Bhārat,...". Clearly, the modern Indian Constitution,
promulgated in English, sees India as the primary name and, hence,
identity, but it does make one mention of a "Bhārat"
as a secondary name. Significantly,
the Constitution in its Hindi translation reverses this to “Bhārat,
that is India…”; significant, because this
endeavour at synonymy in fact glosses over, as we shall see, an essential
attitudinal dichotomy.
Western social science discourse postulates the concept of The Other that
defines identity in terms of opposition (and not complementarity). Thus, the Devil is the Other of God, the
Black Man of the White Man, the woman of the man, communism of capitalism,
atheism of theism, polytheism of monotheism, and so on.
The
Fathers of the Republic of India chose to retain as our primary
identity a label of Otherness. But
who or what is this Bhārat
to which they accorded token recognition?
Bharat
was a legendary sage-emperor of our land, and Bhārat
is
the offspring of Bharat. Therefore, the children of Bharat are Bhārati
and the land of the children of Bharat becomes Bhāratvarsha.
This was the common name our pre-Islamic ancestors shared for our homeland.
It had no fixed political
boundaries but was actually the land in which we shared a common
spiritual-cultural complex, a civilization. This land (now referred to as Akhand
Bhārat)
comprised
broadly eastern Iran,
Afghanistan,
Pakistan, India, Nepal and upto Kailash in Tibet, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, and the
shared spiritual-cultural complex was called the sanatana dharma. There was a
common name for the land and a common name to include the numerous
different ways of worshipping in it, and the evidence is that we shared a single
common name for ourselves as a civilization - as the children of Bharat, the
Bhāratis
or Bhāratvasis.
By
the time of the epic Mahabhārata
about 5000 years ago[7],
the understanding of a shared land and a shared spiritual-cultural complex was
well in place. The Mahabhārata
presents peoples from the entire subcontinent as a
civilizational unity. The Kuru-Panchala kingdom extended
through the Gangetic plain. Gandhari, the mother of the Kauravas, was
from Gandhara which is now Pakistan and part of Afghanistan.
Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, was of the Yadava clan of what is now
Madhya Pradesh in central India. The Pandavas allied with
Krishna who was originally of Mathura south of
Delhi but who shifted to Dwarka on the
Arabian Sea. Krishna's main enemy was
Jarasandha of Magadha or Bihar. In the war of
the Mahabhārata,
kings participated from as far off as Sindh in the west
and Pragjyotish or Assam in the far north-east. In
their pilgrimages and victory marches, the Pandavas travelled from
Afghanistan to
Tibet to
Assam to Kanyakumari, and
even Sri
Lanka is
mentioned.
The Vishnupurana has
uttaram yat
samudrasya himadreshcaiva daksinam
varsam
tad bharatam nama bharati yatra santatih
(Bhārata
is the land north of the seas, south of the Himalayas, and where the people are called
Bhārati.)
Thus, there cannot be any doubt whatever that any “idea of India” pre-dates by centuries both the British and the Muslims, and can be traced back culturally to the very wellsprings of our civilization[8]. The devious, insidious, widespread and (even today) official propagation of the diametrically opposed macaulayan myth[9] has had horrendous consequences for our rashtra, for Bhāratvarsha.
Macaulayan mythology denies Bhārat through a false Aryan Invasion Theory and a false Aryan-Dravidian “racial” divide[10]; through false distinctions of “religion”[11]; a false history of caste and tribe[12]; a false claim of foreigners as our civilizers, saviours and educators[13]; and a grotesquely false interpretation of secularism[14].
Macaulayan mythology is designed to further the evangelical manifesto of making Indians become Christians “without knowing it”[15], the macaulayan manifesto of forming “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”[16], and the ruinously effective colonial strategy and legacy of destroying Bhārat by dividing-and-ruling it.
What
then is significant about Bhārat
as
the construction of our country?
It is indigenous, evolving from within the psyche
of our own people. India is a response to a foreign
label; Bhārat is our own name for ourselves. It is self-affirmative. What is common is not defined by
political interest or by religious dogma but by spiritual aspiration eventually
personified as Bhārat Mata - our land as Mother. It was created
through two major means - at the classical or scholarly level by the
spread of Sanskrit, and at the popular level by the phenomenon of
pilgrimage. And an indigenous
universal school education – superior to that that the British had in their own
country - played no little part in nurturing it.[17]
The
ordinary people of our land, through centuries of foreign rule, retained a
sense of an overarching civilizational unity embodied in Bhārat
Mata.
All as children of Bharat are of one rashtra; we see ourselves with a common
ancestor; normatively (and, as now proven, genetically), Bhāratis
are one “race”, one people. "India" was always a foreign
construct, with a foreign-focused divisive interpretation. The people
of "India", through oppressive foreign
rule, internalised a psychological inferiority. Consequently, our
macaulayan elite likes to see "India" as
progressive, modernising, Westernised; and we distinguish the "Bhārat"
of the ordinary non-English speaking people as poor, backward, illiterate,
regressive and native. This is an elitist prejudice and
unfortunate, apart from being quite untrue.
I lived almost 6 years in the USA – and let me assure readers that
the West gives us nowhere near any of the importance we want the West to give
us. Yet our macaulayan elite
continues to salivate for the West, to become second-class
Whites.[18] I sometimes teach MBA students in an
upscale b-school; most are quite unfamiliar with the Mahabhārata,
even its principal characters. I
know of an elitist private school in Delhi whose students described a desi collation
of aloo-puri as “shit” and refused to eat it. I know MBA students in a premier b-school
who described as “s-h-i-t” the cultural personification of knowledge as a
goddess and, therefore, to be respected.
I know a Punjabi young woman both of whose parents are fluent in Punjabi
and her mother still covers her head; but the young lady, educated in an elite
missionary college, is fluent neither in Punjabi nor in Hindi nor knows why her
subculture’s festival of “lorhi” is celebrated – but proudly declares she’s
“secular” and knows the reason for Christmas. In Princeton, I saw schoolchildren playing “ball” by kicking
around their book-filled backpacks; in Bhārat,
a book that falls to the ground is picked up and touched to one’s head. A successful desi businessman described
his wife as his chief asset, and when this was explained to MBA students in
terms of a cultural perception of the wife as Lakshmi, many male students
laughed. And, no, these are not isolated examples. There are many more, and
these represent an emerging mindset, a pattern of civilisational change. It is
two different worlds – one in which, for example, food is symbolized as
Annapurna and knowledge as Saraswati, and the
other that dismisses such imagery scatologically.
That
the “idea of India” or, correctly, a comprehension
of bhāratiyata,
still prevails and holds together our civilization and our remaining land is not
because of our macaulayan elite. If
“India” can still be thought
of as “eternal”, it is thanks not to the citizens of India but to the
children of Bharat.
Look
around ourselves. From the vast
geocultural domain in which the dharma flourished, we steadily began to lose it
to violently hostile belief systems, totally antithetical to bhāratiyata,
that entered our land. Even after
Independence, we
continue to lose ground; even today, quite literally.[19] The Republic of India is
riven by division. It is founded on a conception of society that is so
inherently divisive that we now need to position anti-aircraft guns to protect
our prime minister when he celebrates its Independence in our national
capital[20].
Bhāratvarsha bases itself on an entirely different conception that is
inherently unifying.
Two examples should make this clear:
Bhārat
sees all the
indigenous panthas and sampradayas as constituents of the dharma, the
Constitution of India formally constructed and promotes some of them as distinct
and mutually exclusive “religions”;
Bhāratis
see themselves as having contextual and fluid identities within the overarching
dharmic one; the British privileged and fixed one – that of jāti
– and, with their missionaries, made it central to Indian
identity[21]; with the Constitution of India following suit, now casteism, vote-bank
politics and minority appeasement run rampant in India.
From an anthropological perspective, I believe one root lies in
understanding whether the individual is the unit of society or whether the
group, but this too becomes another story. [22]
The
“idea of India” is, therefore, an
insubstantial linguistic expression. Cognitively and experientially, it is
bhāratiyata,
emerging from the dharma, that still holds us together.
Our
name is important, but even more important is that, whatever name we use, we
need always to remember that the backbone and strength of our land, our
civilization, our rashtra, is bhāratiyata.
India
divides; Bhārat
unites.
Notes:
1.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/
2. A totally false ascription; see
Dharampal, “The Beautiful Tree”, Mapusa: The Other India Press,
1996.
3. For the date, see NS Rajaram & David
Frawley, “Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization”, New Delhi: Voice of India,
2001.
4.
It is most emphatically
iterated that Hinduism is not a “religion”. It is “dharma”, and there is no
equivalent in English to “dharma”. What English commonly understands as
“religion” (typically, “recognition
of, obedience to, and worship of a higher, unseen power”) is an abrahamic construction with no conceptual
equivalent (because of the requirement of “obedience”) in any of our own
languages. The dharma does not require a belief in or worship of, much less
obedience to, any higher, unseen power by whatever name called, and an atheist
is a dharmi too. The words closest to “religion” that we have are “pantha” and
“sampradaya”. However, because of
our macaulayan system of education, we tend to accept as appropriate the
abrahamic construction. (Our
macaulayan system of education can be summed up in its subliminal projection of
“West is best”; an enduring legacy of TB Macaulay’s notorious Minute on
Indian Education in which he stated
“a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native
literature of India…..all the historical information which has been collected
from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what
may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in
England…..false history, false astronomy, false medicine…a false
religion…..absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology”
- http://www.columbia.edu/itc/
5.
Prof. Raj Krishna of the Delhi School of Economics. Prime Minister Singh too was once on its
faculty. It is not without
relevance that Mr Singh again parroted a myth when he claimed the Amarnath yatra
“was
run by Muslims in Kashmir and it is over 180
year old pilgrimage”. In fact,
documentation of the yatra pre-dates any Muslim involvement in it and goes back
centuries to ancient texts (http://www.expressindia.com/
6.
Ashraf, quoted in Akhtar Riazuddin,
"History of Handicrafts: Pakistan-India" (Islamabad: National Hijra Council,
1988). “It has been estimated that
the total amount of treasure that the British looted from India had
already reached Pds 1,000,000,000 (Pds 1 Billion) by 1901. Taking into consideration interest rates
and inflation this would be worth close to $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 Trillion) in
real-terms today” (Dr Leo Rebello, “My India”, pps, http://www.healthwisdom.org/).
7.
For the date, see Rajaram & Frawley,
op. cit.
8.
David Frawley, “The Rig Veda and the History of India”, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan,
2001.
9.
The
British did not accept any notion of the historical unity of the Indian
subcontinent; the Muslims do, but credit it to Islam. See Sankrant Sanu, “Why India Is A
Nation”, http://sankrant.sulekha.com/
blog/post/2003/10/why-india-
10.
See, for example, David Frawley, “The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India”,
New Delhi: Voice
of India, 2005.
11. See Koenraad Elst, “Who
is a Hindu?”, New
Delhi: Voice of India, 2002.
12.
“All
ancient Indian sources make a sharp distinction between the two terms;
varna
is much referred to, but jāti very little, and when it does appear in
literature it does not always imply the comparatively rigid and exclusive social
groups of later times. If caste is defined as a system of groups within the
class, which are normally endogamous, commensal and craft-exclusive,
we
have no real evidence of its existence until comparatively late
times”
- AL Basham, quoted by Arvind Sharma, “What Was
Manu Up To?”, http://arvindsharma.wordpress.
13.
See, for example, the works of the late Dharampal. See also P Priyadarshi, “Zero Is Not The
Only Story”, New
Delhi: India First Foundation, 2007.
14.
See, for example, the works of the late Sita Ram Goel.
15.
The influential British politician and evangelist William Wilberforce, quoted by
Dharampal, op. cit. Conversions to
Islam are more problematic than conversions to Christianity, but the lower rate
is compensated for by the demographic aggression of illegally immigrating
Bangladeshi Muslims who are then enabled by a “secular” State to get Indian
identities that allow them to vote in and influence Indian elections (see, for
example, Samudragupta Kashyap, “Bangla infiltrators now kingmakers in Assam: HC
judge”, The Indian Express, July 30, 2008). “Former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad,
in his neighbouring Assam Lok Sabha constituency, invited Bangladeshis to make
his constituency a Muslim majority” (DN Mishra, “Neighbour or invader?”, The
Pioneer, Feb 23, 2003). Even President APJ Abdul
Kalam prevented the deportation of Muslim aliens (A Mishra, "Kalam responds
to SOS; stalls quit India notices", The Pioneer, Feb 25,
2005). There is no record of any President intervening to return Hindu
citizens to Kashmir, and the “secular” State makes little more than token
attempts to repel what the Supreme Court bluntly called this “external
aggression” (Navin Upadhyay,
“Govt failed to protect Assam from external aggression: SC”, The Pioneer, July
15, 2005).
16. Macaulay’s Minute on Indian
Education, op. cit. Note how in
English our dharmic lore is invariably referred to as “mythology” whereas
comparable lore in Christanity and Islam – such as the parthenogenetic birth of
Jesus or Mohammad’s excursion on an eagle-winged horse – is
not.
17. For Sanskrit, see
Karanth, op. cit.; on education, see Dharampal, op. cit.; on pilgrimage, see SM
Bharadwaj, “Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography”,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Both Sanskrit and pilgrimage as unifiers
pre-date by millennia not just the railways the British introduced but all other
foreign factors to which macaulayans ascribe our civilizational unity.
18.
Symptomatic is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s gratuitous declaration on Sept
25, 2008 in Washington, DC to US President George Bush that “In
the last four and half years that I have been Prime Minister, I have been the
recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to
me and to the people of India…The people of India deeply
love you” (http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/
19. Witness the roaring
declaration on July 22, 2008 in Parliament by a Kashmir MP that “hum jaan de denge
lekin zamin nahi denge”
(we will give our lives but not our land) – Omar Abdullah, quoted by Ashok
Pandit, “Dark side of freedom”, The Pioneer, Aug 15, 2008. And, “…..the
Constitution itself contains the seed for a de facto and de jure separation of
even those parts of Kashmir that are physically still within India. Read Art 370
and you will know why even the already broken crown rests so uneasily on our
head. By this provision J&K is exempt from many laws that are applicable to
the rest of the country, many other constitutional provisions themselves are
declared redundant in that State and worse, the operation of even the ‘residual’
laws are subject to the approval of the J & K Assembly! That is, a State
Government can overrule the writ of the Union!
Indeed, this Article is a dangerous knife in the nation’s stomach, an
independence within an independence and a huge mockery of a free, united
India” (TR Jawahar, “Freedoms
Galore”,
http://newstodaynet.com/col.
21. It is therefore that Justice C
Dharmadhikari can write, “The real component or unit of the Hindus is caste
only. The term Hindu is concord of
all castes. In Hinduism, caste is
real, religion is myth, so it is not even a community” (in Muzaffar Hussain,
“Insight into Minoritism”, New
Delhi: India First Foundation, 2004:6). On contextual identities and the role of
missionaries in singling out one of them, see Dirks, op.cit.
22. “The unit of this
democracy is citizen or voter and not the institution or community” - Justice
Dharmadhikari, op. cit., p7. In an
insightful essay, Kalyan Viswanathan shows why “Hindus,
even though they are a majority in India, do not behave like a
majority. They
behave more like a large collection of small minorities. While from a
spiritual/religious point of view this is not a problem, and India has always
valued a certain inherent diversity and a co-existence of different paths, sects
and sampradayas, this is a very serious problem from a political standpoint……In
any modern democracy (where numbers matter), assembling a coherent identity
translates to influence and power…..So unless Hindus learn to forge together a
larger overarching identity, and start behaving like a more coherent and
homogenous group, they are in for trouble…..Hindus will inevitably come out
losers in their own country where they are supposedly a majority” (K
Viswanathan, “Hindu Identity: why and why not”, http://www.
Originally posted at :
Eternal
India
(India First Foundation), Nov
2008:127-138
http://www.*========================================================*
2 March, 2012
Ladies, Gentlemen and significant others,
"WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and
integrity of the Nation;
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION."
...this is how the new Constitution of India begins. This living document is to show us the path that we must take to ensure that we live in peace and live-up to the dreams of innumerable those who sacrificed so that we could exercise this option today.
(Folks, I am trying to put together some of what has come to my mind while i have been trying to know and understand this country, this nation, in the books, newspapers that i have read and in the villages and the cities that i have lived in. It may take time and it may come bit by bit, but i assure you, it will come) :)
