01-24-2008, 04:23 AM
WHAT'S SO MYSTERIOUS?
I belong to an interesting and active mailing list in which the following comment was made:
it is an absolute miracle that India is still, for most part, a single country. When the Brits left, they had absolutely no hope for India. The differences of language, caste, clan, region etc, they believed, would eventually break India into a thousand pieces.
The statement had some support, with one person quoting Mark Tully as saying that "Butter chicken and cricket" hold India together.
But let me rebut that with some thoughts.
The idea that India would not hold together was a "British take" that discounts the role of the majority Hindu community in India in actually giving a sense of oneness despite the often quoted divisive issues (that are a leaf taken out from what the British
described)
Hindus, it was said, are divided by caste and other issues. And that story has been swallowed whole without digging deeper to see where there were fissures and where there are bonds. This is part of the failed sociology of India. There was a case of GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out - in terms of how a computer responds to any input) here that is likely to be set straight in coming decades.
The fissures of Hindu India were exposed and defined by the Brits and the educated elite, and everyone now marvels that there is a bond at all, and one more Brit (Mark Tully) is quoted to explain why there is a bond.
One factor that people continuously ignore and discount is that when Hindus were accused of being divisive on caste and communal lines, they (Hindus), for large part relented and accepted that these were true and initiated measures within Indian society to close the fissures. This was the effect of enlightened
Hindu leadership who insisted on a Hindu need to reconcile, and got a large proportion of Hindus to agree because they had no major ideological issues to stop them from agreeing withthe idea.
Nobody seems to mention that the empowerment of middle and lower caste Hindus and the acceptance of that by the vast proportion of higher caste Hindus including the so called "right wing" is leading to a form of Hindu unity that did not exist before. Nobody really wants to see what is openly apparent.
Most often, modern Indian accusations of divisiveness and extremism are an internal Hindu debate with Hindus accusing other Hindus of being that way. (secular vs rightwing) Divisive as that may appear, it remains an area of active debate and "work in progress" of healing and uniting India as a society. How come nobody notices and clings on to outdated British views?
Let us not imagine that there is nothing holding India together and the unity is just a mystery. That is a myth that is popularly propagated by Indian educated elite based on a British view of India. There is a lot binding India together. It seems a mystery only if you discount that Hindus exist in India. The problem may
really lie in both what the so called "Hindu right wing" say and what Ramchandra Guha says.
The "right wing" say that the history of India was distorted.
Ram Guha says that Indians stopped writing history after 1947. Indian history ends in 1947.
It was pointed out by someone as a curious fact that Europe has fewer languages and a single religion (Christianity), but yet consists of 30 odd countries.
I see this statement as a summary of some really deep and complex historic, social and cultural dynamics.
Most of Europe being Christian is the result of both Christianity (and Islam) being practised as "Only me and nobody else" religions.
On a another note I am not at all sure that the Christianity I learned in school in India is the same adversarial Roman Christianity that overran Europe. But it did overrun and and occupy Europe - effectively removing all pagan religions that predated Christianity.
When Islam plundered through vast areas of Europe, Christianity bounced back and virtually eliminated Islam from Europe, just as Islam had eliminated all other faiths in most of the lands that it overran.
But Christianity in Europe split into various factions that fought and fought and fought and fought until Europe became tired and eventually came up with
the treaty of Westphalia. That helped create "secularism" which means absence of religion, but in practice it means separation of Church from state, with the government (state) being secular.
But even a "common religion" (of many factions) did not stop internecine European conflict. Europe battered itself out of world domination and handed
the baton to the US.
India, with less commonality of religion and more linguistic variety is seen as fissionable and "ready to break" based on a Euro-centric view of what lack of common religion or common language should normally do to a land area based on the European
experience.
Valid as this argument may sound, this makes no effort whatsoever to check if there could possibly be other shared traits that have not been picked up by
an essentially Euro-centric view of society, religion and nations.
The fact is that such a commonality was repeatedly recognised and picked up and utilized by Shankaracharya, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo among others. But these names mean little or nothing from the viewpoint of the Macaulay inspired school education that Indian children get. Horror of horrors! Mentioning names like Shankaracharya and Vivekananda in school books might cause great discomfort (it is probably felt) to our Muslim and Christian brothers. It may break the secular fabric of the country to suggest that Hindus may have something to do with Indian unity.
Hence Indians go through life imagining that there is nothing unifying in India. The blinkered forces of needless and misguided "secularism" blunder on, being unable to pinpoint what holds India together.
I belong to an interesting and active mailing list in which the following comment was made:
it is an absolute miracle that India is still, for most part, a single country. When the Brits left, they had absolutely no hope for India. The differences of language, caste, clan, region etc, they believed, would eventually break India into a thousand pieces.
The statement had some support, with one person quoting Mark Tully as saying that "Butter chicken and cricket" hold India together.
But let me rebut that with some thoughts.
The idea that India would not hold together was a "British take" that discounts the role of the majority Hindu community in India in actually giving a sense of oneness despite the often quoted divisive issues (that are a leaf taken out from what the British
described)
Hindus, it was said, are divided by caste and other issues. And that story has been swallowed whole without digging deeper to see where there were fissures and where there are bonds. This is part of the failed sociology of India. There was a case of GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out - in terms of how a computer responds to any input) here that is likely to be set straight in coming decades.
The fissures of Hindu India were exposed and defined by the Brits and the educated elite, and everyone now marvels that there is a bond at all, and one more Brit (Mark Tully) is quoted to explain why there is a bond.
One factor that people continuously ignore and discount is that when Hindus were accused of being divisive on caste and communal lines, they (Hindus), for large part relented and accepted that these were true and initiated measures within Indian society to close the fissures. This was the effect of enlightened
Hindu leadership who insisted on a Hindu need to reconcile, and got a large proportion of Hindus to agree because they had no major ideological issues to stop them from agreeing withthe idea.
Nobody seems to mention that the empowerment of middle and lower caste Hindus and the acceptance of that by the vast proportion of higher caste Hindus including the so called "right wing" is leading to a form of Hindu unity that did not exist before. Nobody really wants to see what is openly apparent.
Most often, modern Indian accusations of divisiveness and extremism are an internal Hindu debate with Hindus accusing other Hindus of being that way. (secular vs rightwing) Divisive as that may appear, it remains an area of active debate and "work in progress" of healing and uniting India as a society. How come nobody notices and clings on to outdated British views?
Let us not imagine that there is nothing holding India together and the unity is just a mystery. That is a myth that is popularly propagated by Indian educated elite based on a British view of India. There is a lot binding India together. It seems a mystery only if you discount that Hindus exist in India. The problem may
really lie in both what the so called "Hindu right wing" say and what Ramchandra Guha says.
The "right wing" say that the history of India was distorted.
Ram Guha says that Indians stopped writing history after 1947. Indian history ends in 1947.
It was pointed out by someone as a curious fact that Europe has fewer languages and a single religion (Christianity), but yet consists of 30 odd countries.
I see this statement as a summary of some really deep and complex historic, social and cultural dynamics.
Most of Europe being Christian is the result of both Christianity (and Islam) being practised as "Only me and nobody else" religions.
On a another note I am not at all sure that the Christianity I learned in school in India is the same adversarial Roman Christianity that overran Europe. But it did overrun and and occupy Europe - effectively removing all pagan religions that predated Christianity.
When Islam plundered through vast areas of Europe, Christianity bounced back and virtually eliminated Islam from Europe, just as Islam had eliminated all other faiths in most of the lands that it overran.
But Christianity in Europe split into various factions that fought and fought and fought and fought until Europe became tired and eventually came up with
the treaty of Westphalia. That helped create "secularism" which means absence of religion, but in practice it means separation of Church from state, with the government (state) being secular.
But even a "common religion" (of many factions) did not stop internecine European conflict. Europe battered itself out of world domination and handed
the baton to the US.
India, with less commonality of religion and more linguistic variety is seen as fissionable and "ready to break" based on a Euro-centric view of what lack of common religion or common language should normally do to a land area based on the European
experience.
Valid as this argument may sound, this makes no effort whatsoever to check if there could possibly be other shared traits that have not been picked up by
an essentially Euro-centric view of society, religion and nations.
The fact is that such a commonality was repeatedly recognised and picked up and utilized by Shankaracharya, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo among others. But these names mean little or nothing from the viewpoint of the Macaulay inspired school education that Indian children get. Horror of horrors! Mentioning names like Shankaracharya and Vivekananda in school books might cause great discomfort (it is probably felt) to our Muslim and Christian brothers. It may break the secular fabric of the country to suggest that Hindus may have something to do with Indian unity.
Hence Indians go through life imagining that there is nothing unifying in India. The blinkered forces of needless and misguided "secularism" blunder on, being unable to pinpoint what holds India together.