<b>What unites India</b>
By U R Ananthamurthy - Posted on August 16th, 2007
EXCERPTS:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>My grand father, deeply religious and orthodox, would never have used a sentence like âI am an Indianâ in his whole life. </b>Yet India was still an idea, a concept derived mostly from her rivers. When he drew water from our well and poured it over his head he recited a mantra which prayed that the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswathi, Narmada and Kaveri be present in the well water of our home and sanctify him. As he sat for his prayers he positioned himself in the universe beginning with Bharata varsha and then Bharatha khanda and then Jamboo dweepa which further got focussed into the actual place he sat in and the ever recurring time according to the lunar almanac. Thus seated he got all the Gods to dwell in several parts of his body who enabled him to propitiate Gayatri- a prayer to enhance the psychic ( Dhee =mental?) energy of the whole of mankind.
Only when I went to my village school, India became a geographical place for me and not just a puranic akash kind of space. I was told by my teachers this India was not free, and was made poor by her alien rulers. I was ten years old when Gandhiji gave the âQuit Indiaâ call to the British and we sang patriotic songs. Yet India..
...
For people like me the great shift in the idea of India was from the Puranic to the political and historical, and it was primarily Mahatma Gandhi who brought it about. But I must add , however, that Gandhi did not abandon the Puranic but revised it. âIswara Alla there Namâ a line in his Ram Bhajan goes against the exclusivist fundamentalist belief of both Hinduism and Islam, but it opposes fundamentalism without abandoning the true religious piety. This was both politics and religion for uniting India. The search for a strong Nation, of the kind one finds in the history of Europe can only divide India- for a strong nation needs one religion one language and one race. That is what Savarkar wanted, and nuclearised India of today wants. But our contemporary political experience tells us that if we over centralize in the interest of the unity of India we are sure to balkanize.
India canât be a nation like European nations; we are a civilization. I am never tired of retelling a story that I heard from A.K.Ramanujan, a great poet and translator. Once he was collecting oral Ramayanas in the villages of Karnataka. He heard a dialogue between Rama and Seetha. Rama was exiled to the forest and Seetha insisted that she should accompany him as she was his wife. As usual Rama tried to reason with her that life in a forest would be hard for the delicate Seetha. Both Seetha and Rama in this story were non-literate and they were making up the argument. <b>At one point when Rama came up with a strong argument Seetha replied: âIn every Ramayana I know Seetha accompanies Rama to the forest. How can you then say no to me?â This is a fascinating example for the intertextuality that unites India. </b>One of my friends always insists that among innumerable languages of India there are two that are understood all over the country. They are the Ramayana and the Mahabharathaânone of us have read these two epics for the first time.A communalized India will only kill the creativity of our religious innovative spirit.
Both the globalized rootless modernity and the ferocious fundamentalist communalism will only weaken the Puranic sense of unity that is there among the common people of India.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By U R Ananthamurthy - Posted on August 16th, 2007
EXCERPTS:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>My grand father, deeply religious and orthodox, would never have used a sentence like âI am an Indianâ in his whole life. </b>Yet India was still an idea, a concept derived mostly from her rivers. When he drew water from our well and poured it over his head he recited a mantra which prayed that the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswathi, Narmada and Kaveri be present in the well water of our home and sanctify him. As he sat for his prayers he positioned himself in the universe beginning with Bharata varsha and then Bharatha khanda and then Jamboo dweepa which further got focussed into the actual place he sat in and the ever recurring time according to the lunar almanac. Thus seated he got all the Gods to dwell in several parts of his body who enabled him to propitiate Gayatri- a prayer to enhance the psychic ( Dhee =mental?) energy of the whole of mankind.
Only when I went to my village school, India became a geographical place for me and not just a puranic akash kind of space. I was told by my teachers this India was not free, and was made poor by her alien rulers. I was ten years old when Gandhiji gave the âQuit Indiaâ call to the British and we sang patriotic songs. Yet India..
...
For people like me the great shift in the idea of India was from the Puranic to the political and historical, and it was primarily Mahatma Gandhi who brought it about. But I must add , however, that Gandhi did not abandon the Puranic but revised it. âIswara Alla there Namâ a line in his Ram Bhajan goes against the exclusivist fundamentalist belief of both Hinduism and Islam, but it opposes fundamentalism without abandoning the true religious piety. This was both politics and religion for uniting India. The search for a strong Nation, of the kind one finds in the history of Europe can only divide India- for a strong nation needs one religion one language and one race. That is what Savarkar wanted, and nuclearised India of today wants. But our contemporary political experience tells us that if we over centralize in the interest of the unity of India we are sure to balkanize.
India canât be a nation like European nations; we are a civilization. I am never tired of retelling a story that I heard from A.K.Ramanujan, a great poet and translator. Once he was collecting oral Ramayanas in the villages of Karnataka. He heard a dialogue between Rama and Seetha. Rama was exiled to the forest and Seetha insisted that she should accompany him as she was his wife. As usual Rama tried to reason with her that life in a forest would be hard for the delicate Seetha. Both Seetha and Rama in this story were non-literate and they were making up the argument. <b>At one point when Rama came up with a strong argument Seetha replied: âIn every Ramayana I know Seetha accompanies Rama to the forest. How can you then say no to me?â This is a fascinating example for the intertextuality that unites India. </b>One of my friends always insists that among innumerable languages of India there are two that are understood all over the country. They are the Ramayana and the Mahabharathaânone of us have read these two epics for the first time.A communalized India will only kill the creativity of our religious innovative spirit.
Both the globalized rootless modernity and the ferocious fundamentalist communalism will only weaken the Puranic sense of unity that is there among the common people of India.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->