Incredible India

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

January 25, 2009

"India," Winston Churchill once remarked gruffly, "is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

What makes India, then, a nation?

It is not an easy question to answer. You see, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation that gave new meaning to an ancient sense of belonging.

Let me give you an example of what this actually means. In 1996, when India celebrated the 49th anniversary of its independence the then Prime Minister, H.D Deve Gowda, stood on the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India's national language. Eight other Prime Ministers had done exactly the same thing 48 times before him. What was unusual was that this time Deve Gowda, a son of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, and so he gave one. But the words had been written out for him in his Kannada script, in which of course they made no sense.

Now I mention this simply because such an episode is inconceivable anywhere else in the world. But it represents the best of the oddities that make India, India. Only in India could we have a country governed by a man who does not understand the national language. Only in India for that matter is there a national language which half the population does not speak. And only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the Prime Minister to address his people.

For you see, we are all minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off the train, let us say a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh, may cherish the illusion he represents the majority community. But he does not. As a Hindu, sure enough, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 82% of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, the state of Kerala, he would be surprised to realize a majority there is not even male.

Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majorityhood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90% of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, or another "backward class", 85% of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.

Or take language. The constitution of India recognizes 18 today. And these are languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures, and cultural assumptions, not just dialects. And if you count dialects you get to 22 thousand. Now each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, because no language enjoys true majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Bollywood cinema, Hindi is understood, though not very well spoken, pretty much across the country. But, it is in no sense the language of the majority, because its gender rules, grammatical conventions, and even its script are unfamiliar to most Indians in the South or in the North East.

Or take ethnicity. Ethnicity further complicates the notion of a majority community. Most of the time, as we all know, an Indian's name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is. Despite some intermarriages among educated and social elites in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Telugu is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. Now the difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. An Andhra Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Yadav, but they share little identity with each other in respect of their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language or even, these days, their political objectives. Now at the same time, a Kerala Hindu would feel she has much more in common with a Kerala Christian or a Kerala Muslim than with, say, a Gujarati Hindu with whom she formally shares the Hindu religion.

Now, why do I harp on these differences? Not to stress division, but only to make the point that Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is a rare animal because it has "worked very well in practice, but it doesn't work too well in theory." It is not based on any of the classical political science theories of nationalism that apply elsewhere, for example to the nation-states of Europe. It is not based on language, for the reasons I have already given you. It is not based on geography, for the natural geography of the subcontinent (framed by the mountains and the seas) was hacked in the partition of 1947. It is not based on ethnicity, because we all accommodate a variety of racial types, and ethnically some Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians (Punjabis and Bengalis, for example, have more in common ethnically with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis respectively, than with Hyderabadis or Bangaloreans). And it is not based on religion, because we are home to every major faith known to humankind. Hinduism, which is after all a faith with no national organization -- no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no Hindu Pope -- exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage.

The idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree -- except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for 61 years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country, to quote Nehru, "held together by strong but invisible threads." "She is a myth and an idea" Nehru wrote, "she is a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive."

Well, how can one approach this pluralist land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with 18 major languages on our rupee notes and 22 thousand distinct dialects, inhabited now, in the ninth year of the 21st century, by over a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country, in whose population 40% are still illiterate, but which has educated the world's second largest pool of trained doctors, scientists, and engineers? A country whose teeming cities overflow with while two out of three Indians scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal emperor to proclaim "If on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this." How does one gauge a nation which elevated non-violence to a moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and officials have attempted to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken as a threat to the nation; where a former Prime Minister bitterly criticized the sale of Pepsi in a country where villagers don't have access to clean drinking water, and which yet invents a greater quantity of sophisticated software for US and European companies than any other country in the world? How can one determine the identity of an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of 4 major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, 85 major political parties, and "300 ways of cooking the potato?"

The short answer is that it can't be done. At least not to everyone's satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. It is often jokingly said, anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true. Our country's national motto emblazoned on the governmental crest is "satyameva jayate" -- truth alone triumphs. The question remains however, whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers.

Now, I realize some of you may see this as a panglossian picture, and I will deal with your skepticism in a moment. But first I must acknowledge that India offers plenty of scope for misunderstanding. Let me share with you a story of international misunderstanding.

It's a story of this American agricultural expert, sent to India before the Green Revolution to advise on Indian farming. He goes and visits an Indian farm in Andhra, and is welcomed by a very gregarious and hospitable Telugu farmer. The farm, thanks to all the land reforms and population pressures, is about the size of the grassy area in front of our church. And the farmer says very proudly "welcome to my farm." And he says "you see this national highway?" and the American looks and sees a dirt road, "my land goes all the way up to there." And he says "you see that irrigation canal?" And the American looks and sees a narrow ditch, and the Indian says "my land goes up to there." He is very proud of the farm he has. And then he asks the American "And what about you?" The American is actually a farmer from the mid-west where the corn fields stretch on for miles on end, and so he sort of clears his throat and says "Well, early in the morning I get into my tractor and drive 4 hours south to the southern boundary of my land. And I drive another 3 hours to the western boundary of my land. And then I have a sandwich and drive 2- and-a-half hours north in my tractor to the northern boundary of my land. And at sundown I travel another 2 hours south to the ranch house." So the Telugu farmer nods very sympathetically, and says "I know, I know, I too used to have a tractor like that."

The point is: what you understand depends on what your assumptions are.

Not all Indians agree with the vision of India I have presented this morning. There are many who would like to see this land become a Hindu rashtra, a land for and of the Hindus. They have made recent gains in elections in the politics of the street. Secularism is established in India's constitution, but they ask why shouldn't India, like so many of its neighbors, assert its own religious identity? Why shouldn't this be a country of the Hindu majority?

In recent years we have come to see an India in which political contention has so often erupted in violence. We have seen headlines speaking of riots and killings between Hindus and Muslims, of men being slaughtered because of a mark on the forehead, or the absence of a foreskin. Nuns have been assaulted, a missionary family burned alive, churches destroyed. This is not the India I had hoped my children would identify with or feel proud of.

My generation grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in that clichéd slogan "unity in diversity." We were brought up to take pluralism for granted, and to reject the communalism that had partitioned the nation when the British left. In rejecting the case for Partition, Indian nationalism also rejected the idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. To accept the idea of India you had to spurn the very logic that had divided the country.

And that is what that much abused and perhaps inaccurate term secularism meant for us. In the west, secularism is defined as the absence of, or the prohibition of, religion. But Indian secularism has really meant a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. Secularism in India cannot mean irreligiousness, because religion is far too deeply rooted in all the communities of this country.

So rather than speak of secularism, let us instead speak of pluralism. Let us speak of multi-religiousness, which to me means again going back to the Coimbatore neighborhood where I spent fifteen years as a child and youth. The wail of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer would blend with the chants of the mantras and the tinkle of bells at the Hindu Shakti temple, and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Guru Granth Sahib. And a Catholic church was just around the corner.

Throughout the decades after independence, the political culture of the country has always reflected the so called secular assumptions and attitudes. Though partition had occurred, though what was left was a country with a Hindu majority, 3 of India's Presidents have been Muslims. In fact it is interesting that during the war with Pakistan the Indian air force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim [Air Marshal Lateef], the army commander was a Parsi [General Manekshaw], the general commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh [General Aurora], and the general who was helicoptered in to Dhaka to negotiate the terms of surrender was Jewish [Major-General Jacob]. That is India.

That is the Indian pluralism that makes sense to a lot of Indians. And the irony of all this is that India's secular coexistence was made possible paradoxically because India survived the Aryans, the Mughals, and the British. It has taken from each -- language, customs, art, music, learning -- and grown with all of them. To be Indian is to be part of an elusive dream that we all share. A dream that fills our minds with sounds, flavors, words, from many sources that we cannot easily identify.

It is our post-independence politics of deprivation that has eroded the culture's confidence. Politicians all over India are trying to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities. By seeking votes on the basis of caste, region, religion, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. And as this has happened it has become more important for some to assert their identities according to caste, creed, or culture rather than as an Indian.

That is why the development of Hindu extremism is so dangerous. The suggestion that only a Hindu, and that too, a certain kind of Hindu, can be an authentic Indian is an affront to Indian nationalism. An India that denies itself to some can end up being denied to all.

I have great hope for the survival and success of Indian pluralism. I believe no one identity can triumph in India. Both our country's diversity and the logic of the electoral marketplace make this impossible. And after the awe-inspiring experience of the world's largest exercise in democratic elections in 2004 (400 million voters exercised their franchise), of a Roman Catholic political leader, Sonia Gandhi, making way for a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, to be sworn in by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam, as Prime Minister of India, affirmed, as nothing else could have, the shining example of Indian pluralism.

There is no better way to cope with our pluralism than democracy. Democracy is vital for India's future. What is encouraging is that in India democracy is not an elite preoccupation. In the US, politics is the preserve of the middle and upper-middle classes, as well as the very rich. Whereas in India, it is not the privileged who spend 3 to 4 hours queuing up in the hot sun to vote. Their political participation is lower than the poor, who make the effort to exercise their suffrage, because they know their votes make a difference.

In my view the experiment that began 61 years ago has worked. Though there have been caste conflicts, linguistic clashes, communal riots and terrorist threats to the nation from separatist groups, political democracy has helped to defuse each of these.

In my annual visits home I find India is anything but that unchanging land of cliché. There is an extraordinary amount of change, and I don't just mean the visible prosperity I have seen in Hyderabad, a glittering new city of flyovers and fast-food counters, shopping malls and suburban arcades. There are dramatic changes taking place beneath the billboards that amount to little short of a revolution -- in politics, economics, society, and culture. Now, any of these transformations could have been enough to throw another country into a turbulent revolution. But we have had all four in India and yet we have absorbed them, and made all the changes work, because the Indian revolution is a democratic one, sustained by a larger idea of India, an India which safeguards the common space available to each identity, an India that remains safe for diversity.

That idea of India is a deceptively simple idea, of a land where it doesn't matter what the color of your skin is, the sounds you make when you speak, the kind of food you eat, the God you choose to worship (or not), so long as you want to play by the same rules as everybody else. If the majority of a population share the will for unity, if they wear the dust of a shared history on their foreheads and the mud of an uncertain future on their feet, a nation exists, celebrating diversity, pluralism -- and freedom. That is our India, and it is well worth celebrating.

So that is why India is facing the new millennium with confidence.

Let me end with an ancient story which I came across in Sashi Tharoor's novel Riot. When we speak of pluralism, we are not speaking of something that came to us from the west. We are speaking of a reality entrenched in our traditions.

It is an old Indian story from the Puranas about Truth.

It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow; he told him he could only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So the young warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated and to forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking refuge from a thunderstorm, he found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was an old woman, with warts on her face and matted hair, her skin hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her breath stinking. She greeted him; she seemed to know what he was looking for. They talked all night, and with each word she spoke, the warrior realized he had come to the end of his quest. She was Truth. In the morning, when the storm broke, the warrior prepared to return to claim his bride. "Now that I have found Truth," he said, "what shall I tell them at the palace about you?" The wizened old crone smiled. "Tell them," she said, "tell them that I am young and beautiful."

REFERENCES & RESOURCES:

These reflections owe a great deal to the writings of Ramachandra Guha, Sashi Tharoor, Mira Kamdar, and Fareed Zakaria.

BENEDICTION – Rabindranath Tago

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.