*** THE IDEA OF INDIA ***

KRISHEN KAK

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.

http://satyameva-jayate.org/