Defining India

The question of defining India – culturally, politically, or even in terms of a Nation – is a vexed one. In the course of past couple of years, marking fiftieth year of India’s state of independence, many an author and photographers ventured out and, many a publisher came out with celebratory volumes on India. Sunil Khilnani’s book THE IDEA OF INDIA (which took him at least two years to write and has been issued in India by Penguin Books) provides a valuable framework.

The author confesses that the need to define Indian-ness arose in response to the humiliation inflicted by colonial views about India and its culture. Nationalist Hindus found the strands of unity in religion. Gandhi accepted religion as a unifying factor, but gave it his own ‘eclectic and pluralistic morality from different religious tradition. And then came Jawaharlal Nehru who regarded religion to be the individual’s private concern and found the basis of unity in a shared historical past and cultural mixing, and pointed the way to "a future project of common development."

Khilnani puts these three schools of thought to microscopic scrutiny. He condemns the idea of India being "a complicitous by-product of the opportunities presented by the British Raj and the interests of an aspiring nationalist elite." He evidentially proves the point that a civilizational bond has always existed, and even extended well beyond the territorial boundaries of today’s India.

However, he is also intelligent enough to admit that such a bond did not automatically translate into a political community. There were too many castes, creeds, religious variants, and languages to reckon with. In the latter part of the 19th century (and is continuing) to ‘recreate a past that would lend coherence and legitimacy to these ideas’. I call it an attempt at doctoring the history to suit the political purposes of the day, without caring for the distortions that may sprout from such a project. Arun Shourie, the well-known journalist-writer, has commented upon this phenomena that I call ‘doctoring of history’.

But it will be foolish to presume that such doctoring was being undertaken by only ‘JNU school of historians’. The Chroniclers of the past centuries [Greeks, Chinese, Hindus and Muslims] were all, for want of a better phrase, at it, mostly to stay in the good books of the rulers of the day.

Then came the British historiographers and they resorted to a wholesale demolition of Indians’ pride in themselves, their sense of ‘Indian-ness’ in order to create and then reinforce the myth of Europeans as being the ‘master race’ born to rule the world. We Indians fell for it and set at each others’ throats….a phenomenon which is better known now as ‘communalism’. We became vehement and started admitting to the ‘diversity of races, and religions, and ideals and opinions………’

The denial of this diversity and its inherent contradictions led to the partition of the land in1947. The same is leading today to some of the more unsettling disturbances throughout the land.

The author clearly accepts the Nehruvian approach which provides an open-ended identity, a multi-layered one where you could simultaneously belong to various social, cultural and religious categories and ensure that, above all, there was an eminently modern concept of a civil and political society where the individual was at the centre of the scheme of things and where, importantly, nothing would be imposed purely in the name of majority alone. "Ultimately, the viability….of India’s democracy will rest on its capacity to sustain this internal diversity and demolishing the false dreams of any version of a domestic purity. All of us must realise and appreciate that there are many selves; many, many "I"s which make a "me"; and it is the sum total of such "me"s which define "us" and it is this "us" which gives flesh and blood to the idea of India. Nurturing and sustaining a national identity based on this "us" is and must remain within the reach of our human skills.

My reference to "Nehruvian approach" and its common-sense corollaries must not be taken as an attempt to place the first prime Minister of Free India on a pedestal and worship him as a demi-god. To my mind Nehru was a visionary who trusted his lieutenants with the implementation of his dream and failed to take into account the human fallibility. He presumed that when we get on with the pursuit of national development and betterment of human plight in our land, these many "I"s, "me"s and "us"s will merge into a greater "our"s.

Late Pandit Nehru made many mistakes in his life time. But those were political mistakes. His vision of a united, secular, forward-looking India however, was not a mistake. It was, and still remains, the only feasible and viable future of India.

So much has been thought of, said about and written out about India, by Indian and non-Indian thinkers, that it will be illogical to take any one’s word for it. Best way of defining ‘India of my dreams’ will be to read, understand, and then weigh dispassionately what many more authors and opinion-leaders have to say. [We append herewith a recommended reading list.]

220mm, 349 Pages,SC

UBS, 1996, £ 9.99

200mm, 203 Pages, PB

Minerva, 1997, £ 6.99

225mm, 204 Pages, HB

Vision, 1996, £16.99

240mm, 392 Pages, HB

Viking, 1997, £19.99

200mm, 285 pages, PB

16 Pages of B/W Plates

Penguin, 1994, £ 7.99

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