Decoding the Idea of India PDF

## Chapter 11 ### Decoding the Idea of India It is often said that Indian history is not very different from that of other parts of the world - the same power struggles, the same tales of warfare, treachery or conquest, the same social injustices and exploitation. The implication behind such state...

## Chapter 11 ### Decoding the Idea of India It is often said that Indian history is not very different from that of other parts of the world - the same power struggles, the same tales of warfare, treachery or conquest, the same social injustices and exploitation. The implication behind such statements is that shared historical experiences lead to common challenges and solutions, suggesting that modern European solutions are required for progress in all countries. The conclusion, explicitly stated or not, is that India's road to progress lies in the modern “idea" of a "secular" nation built on the democratic structures and principles that post-Enlightenment Europe created for itself. This perspective further posits that India's present identity as an independent nation is intricately linked to the legacy of over 300 years of European colonial rule. Is the unity of this country a mere colonial creation, or did something identifiable as “India" exist earlier? Till a few decades ago, the concept of India's cultural unity was so self-evident that only few scholars or statesmen would have thought of questioning it. Let us consider the following observation - “The most essentially fundamental Indian unity rests upon the fact that the diverse peoples of India have developed a peculiar type of culture or civilization utterly different from any other type in the world. That civilization may be summed up by the term Hinduism." This straightforward statement is found in the introduction to Vincent Smith's classic Oxford History of India [1]. Again, we are confronted with some fundamental questions. Was there or not in ancient India a sense of cultural unity throughout this geographical expanse? And was there a political unity - and if so, when, and to what extent? ### Cultural Unity: A Sacred Geography India's geographical unity, at least, is not questionable. The Vishnu Purana, a text at least 1,500 years old defines unambiguously - *उत्तरं यत्समुद्रस्य हिमाद्रेश्चैव दक्षिणम् । वर्ष तद् भारतं नाम भारती यत्र संततिः ।।* *uttaram yatsamudrasya himādreścaiva dakšiņam varsam tad bhāratam nāma bhāratī yatra samtatiḥ* The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bharata. Indologists have long identified a few mechanisms that helped create the unity underlying the rightly celebrated, mind-boggling diversity that strikes any student of India. One of them is the institution of pilgrimage, the most effective way, along with trade, to get people to travel the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Bharata is not an abstract expanse; it is a "sacred geography" given shape to by dense networks of holy places, tirthas that skilfully crisscross the Indian landmass. Among the many lists of such pilgrimage sites, let us mention - * Shakti Peethas, 51 (or 52) in number, covering the whole of India, with some of them in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In this tradition, the very land becomes the body of the Mother Goddess. * Twelve Jyotirlingas, from Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west to Kedarnath in the north, Vaidyanath (Deogarh) in the east, and Rameswaram in the south; * Four Char Dham pilgrimage sites of the Himalayas (Yamunotri, Gangotri, Badrinath & Kedarnath); * Four locations for the Kumbhamela (Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik); * Five sacred confluences (among many more): Vishnuprayag, Nandaprayag, Karnaprayag, Rudraprayag, Devprayag; * 108 Divyadesams or Vaishnavite shrines, most of them in the South; * Five important temples of Shiva in the South, each associated with one of the panchabhutas; * Pilgrimage routes established by India's spiritual figures, from Shankaracharya to Swami Vivekananda, also tended to frame as much of the land as possible, "from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. In the below provided picture of India, can you mark the location of twelve Jyotirlingas, four Char Dham sites, four locations of Kumbhamela and the five sacred confluences of rivers? Is such an interconnected web possible if there was no culturally unified land called India? “India has, for ages past, been a country of pilgrimages. All over the country, you find these ancient places, from Badrinath, Kedarnath and Amarnath, high up in the snowy Himalayas down to Kanyakumari in the south. For, from the very beginning of history, the people of India always thought of themselves as a people belonging to one great country. What has drawn out people from the north to the south, and from the south to the north in these great pilgrimages? What is the common thought that has made them travel from one region to the other? It is the feeling of one country and one culture, and this feeling has bound us together." The author of these remarks is not some Hindu communalist but the very embodiment of Post-Independence secularism- Jawaharlal Nehru himself. **Second mechanism**, closely related to the first, is the creation of a sacred geography in which mountains, rivers, trees and animals are imbued with divinity. Such a web created on the map the concept of punyabhumi - a sacred land present and living in everyone's mind. It was constantly recalled to one's memory through a variety of devices, for instance the many mantras and prayers listing India's sacred rivers in various orders (generally starting with Ganga). One example of such a mantra is, *गङ्गे च यमुने चैव गोदावरि सरस्वति । नर्मदे सिन्धु कावेरि जलेऽस्मिन् संनिधिं कुरु॥* *gange ca yamune caiva godāvari sarasvati narmade sindhu kāveri jale'smin samnidhim kuru* O Ganges, Yamuna, Godāvari, Sarasvatī, Narmadā, Sindhu and Kāverī, please make your presence felt in this water. **Third** is the spread of the two Indian Itihasas, Mahabharata and Ramayana, across the subcontinent and far beyond. It is remarkable how these two grand tales, replete not only with heroism, but with human frailty and treachery, captured people’s imagination. They not only mention most regions of India (Mahabharata especially), but were warmly adopted by every region, to such a point that it is hard to find a place in India through which the Pandavas or Sri Rama did not pass at some time or the other! The unparalleled cultural integration effected by these two Itihasas were so powerful that it extended to much of South East Asia. This is a fact readily acknowledged by nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam. Mahabharata lists 363 communities (janas) across the map, and many of them, including some that we today call "tribal", returned the compliment by taking pride in owning the Itihasa, translating, adapting or retelling it in endless variations. In Tamil Nadu alone, about a hundred versions have come down to us in folklore forms. **A fourth mechanism** is the various testimonies of foreign travellers. Said-al-Andalusi, a Spanish historian and astronomer, for instance, wrote in 1068 CE- "The Indians, among all nations, through the centuries and since antiquity, were the source of wisdom, justice and moderation. They were a people endowed with virtues of self-control, creators of sublime thoughts, universal fables, rare inventions and remarkable conceptions." Early Greek, Chinese and Arab travellers recognized it as such and referred to India as one country, not several. Islamic invaders too (or their chroniclers, such as Al Beruni) had no doubt in their mind that Al'hind (India) was one country, not many separate ones. When the ancient Greeks referred to this country as "India", the Chinese as "Tianzhu" or the Arabs as "Al'Hind", they had in mind something more than a mere geographical expanse beyond the Hindu Kush or the Himalayas. What their testimonies express is an underlying cultural unity as an identifying factor for "India". "India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences... This has produced something like a United States of a Social Federation, whose common name is Hinduism." [2] Again, is this the utterance of some jingoistic mind? Judge for yourself, since Rabindranath Tagore is its author. The whole process (all the mechanisms) was not one ordered by some central religious or political power; it was organic, decentralized and self-regulated. And note the word "Hinduism", clearly not in the sense of a narrow set of dogmas imposed by a privileged coterie, but as a bewilderingly complex phenomenon of interaction between all layers of Indian society, in which deities, rituals, beliefs and even texts freely travelled back and forth. In a seminal essay entitled, “The History of Bharatavarsha', Tagore, again, gave a beautiful description of India's “talent” in the field - Providence has pulled in diverse people onto the lap of Bharatavarsha. Since antiquity Bharatavarsha has been provided with the opportunity to put into practice the special talent her people were endowed with. Bharatavarsha has forever been engaged in constructing with varied material the foundation of a unifying civilization. And a unified civilization is the highest goal of all human civilizations. She has not driven away anybody as alien, she has not expelled anybody as inferior, she has not scorned anything as odd. Bharatavarsha has adopted all, accepted everybody. And when so much is accepted, it becomes necessary to establish one's own code and fix regulation over the assorted collections. It is not possible to leave them unrestrained like animals fighting each other. They have to be appropriately distributed into separate autonomous divisions while keeping them bound on a fundamental principle of unity. The component might have come from outside but the arrangement and the fundamental idea behind it were Bharatavarsha's own. It needs talent to make outsiders one's own. The ability to enter others' beings and the magic power of making the stranger completely one's own, these are the qualities native to genius. That genius we find in Bharatavarsha. Making the other “one's own"-provided he lends himself to the process is not "composite culture," which, at best, would result in a formless hodgepodge. It is India's way, and one day it will have to be the world's way.