India

by Shashi Tharoor

  The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice and devotion. . . . A heroic past, great men, glory . . ., this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more — these are the essential conditions for being a people. . .. More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a common] program to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed and hoped together.

  This is very similar to Jose Ortega y Gasset’s argument that a nation is not really a nation unless it has both a past that influences it inactively and a valid historical project that is capable of animating dissimilar spirits within the community and of giving unity and transcendence to the efforts of its individual members. Nehru tried to find such a unifying project in the challenges of modernization and economic development; but his task is incomplete. India, with its glorious heritage and its many regrets (most recently, of course, the collective national trauma of Partition), meets the test of history; it must now rise to the challenge of the future.

  Nehru articulated a vision of India as pluralism vindicated by history:

  India . . . was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. . . . Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages . . . [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in . . . and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.

  Nehru went on to argue that the unity of India was apparent from the outside: every Indian, whatever his differences from other Indians, was seen by foreigners as an Indian first, rather than as a Christian or Muslim, even though he might share his religion with those foreigners.

  For Nehru, the “Indian people” have a timeless quality, emerging from history and stretching on the future. The present is merely a point of observation. Octavio Paz, writing about Mexico, asked a somewhat different pair of questions that are implicit in my consideration of India:

  What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are? The answers we give to these questions are often belied by history, perhaps because what is called the “genius of a people” is only a set of reactions to a given stimulus. The answers differ in different situations, and the national character, which was thought to be immutable, changes with them. . . . To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity. . . . But why search history for an answer that only we ourselves can give?

  There is no question but that Indians today have to find answers themselves to the dilemmas of running a plural nation. “A nation,” wrote the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, “is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.” The common enemy of Indians is an internal one; it lies in the forces of sectarian division that would, if unchecked, tear the country apart. There lies the common historical project sought by Ortega y Gasset. We have to return to the pluralism of the national movement. While this involves turning away from the strident calls for Hindutva that would privilege a doctrinaire view of Hinduism at the expense of the minorities, it also requires the rejection of the pseudo-secularism that has made the state hostage to the most obscurantist religious figures among the minorities. India must find its own formula, transcending the thralldom of minority and majority.

  It is not entirely paradoxical to suggest that Hinduism, India’s ancient home-grown faith, can help in ways that the proponents of Hindutva have not understood. In one sense Hinduism is almost the ideal faith for the twenty-first century: a faith without apostasy, where there are no heretics to cast out because there has never been any such thing as a Hindu heresy, a faith that is eclectic and nondoctrinaire, responds ideally to the incertitudes of a postmodern world. Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. But this cannot be the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, or the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, who, a century ago, at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the liberal humanism that lies at the heart of his and my creed:

  I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”. . . [T]he wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita [says]: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

  Vivekananda went on to denounce the fact that “sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth.” His confident belief that their death-knell had sounded was sadly not to be borne out. But his vision — summarized in the Sanskrit credo Sarva Dharma Sambhava: “All religions are equally worthy of respect” — is, in fact, the kind of Hinduism practiced by the vast majority of India’s Hindus, whose instinctive acceptance of other faiths and forms of worship has long been the vital hallmark of Indianness. Vivekananda made no distinction between the actions of Hindus as a people (the granting of asylum, for instance) and their actions as a religious community (tolerance of other faiths): for him, the distinction was irrelevant because Hinduism was as much a civilization as a set of religious beliefs. In a different speech to the same Chicago convention, Vivekananda set out his philosophy in simple terms:

  Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism. . . . The Hindus have their faults, but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.

  It is sad that this assertion of Vivekananda’s is being contradicted on the ground by those who claim to be reviving his fait
h in his name. Of course, it is true that, while Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly. Nor should we assume that, even when religion is used as a mobilizing identity, all those so mobilized act in accordance with the tenets of their religion. Nonetheless it is ironic that even the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji, after whom the Shiv Sena is named, exemplified the tolerance that Hinduism lays claim to. In the account of a contemporary critic, the Mughal historian Khafi Khan, Shivaji “made it a rule that wherever his followers were plundering, they should do no harm to the mosques, the book of God, or the women of any one. Whenever a copy of the sacred Quran came into his hands, he treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussalman followers.”

  But the misuse of Hinduism for sectarian minority-bashing is especially unfortunate, since Hinduism provides the basis for a shared sense of common culture within India that has little to do with religion. Hindu festivals, from Holi (when friends and strangers of all faiths are sprayed with colored water in a Dionysian ritual) to Deepavali (the festival of lights, firecrackers, and social gambling) have already gone beyond their religious origins to unite Indians of all faiths as a shared experience. Festivals, melas, lilas, all “Hindu” in origin, have become occasions for the mingling of ordinary Indians of all backgrounds; indeed, for generations now, Muslim artisans in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi have made the traditional masks for the annual Ram Lila (the dance-drama depicting the tale of the divine god-king, Rama), because Hindu respect for their artisanal skills transcends religious considerations. Religion lies at the heart of Indian culture, but not necessarily as a source of division; such religious myths as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a common idiom, a shared matrix of reference, to all Indians, and it was not surprising that when national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. Hinduism and Islam are intertwined in India; both religions, after all, have shared the same history in the same space, and theirs is a cohabitation of necessity as well as fact. In the Indian context today, it is possible to say that there is no India without Islam, and no Islam without India. The saffron and the green both belong on the Indian flag.

  Both Hindus and Muslims throng the tombs and dargahs of Sufi Muslim saints. Hindu devotional songs are magnificently sung by the Muslim Dagar brothers. Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. The Muslim reformist scholar Asghar Ah Engineer has written that “rural Islam . . . [is] almost indistinguishable from Hinduism except in the form of worship. . . . The degree may vary from one area to another; but cultural integration between the Hindus and Muslims is a fact which no one, except victims of misinformation, can deny.” The American scholars Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph recounted a story that they had heard from an Indian Muslim friend:

  As a child in India, she was once asked to participate in a small community drama about the life of Lord Krishna. Krishna is the blue “Hindu” god adored by shepherdesses, who dance for his pleasure. They exemplify through their human passion the quest of the devout soul for the lord. Not exactly a Muslim monotheist’s theme. She was invited to dance as a shepherdess with other schoolgirls. Her father forbade it: Muslims don’t dance. In that case, said the drama’s director, we will cast you as Krishna. All you have to do is stand there in the usual Krishna pose, a flute at your mouth. Her father consented. She played Krishna.

  To some degree, India’s other minorities have found it comfortable to take on elements of Hindu culture as proof of their own integration into the national mainstream. The tennis-playing brothers Anand, Vijay, and Ashok Amritraj all bear Hindu names, but they are Christian, the sons of Robert and Maggie Amritraj, and they played with prominent crosses dangling from their necks, which they were fond of kissing in supplication or gratitude at tense moments on court. But giving their children Hindu names must have seemed to Robert and Maggie more nationalist in these postcolonial times, and quite unrelated to which God they were brought up to worship. I would not wish to make too much of this, because Muslim Indians still feel obliged to adopt Arab names in deference to the roots of their faith, but the Amritraj case (repeated in many other Christian families I know) is merely an example of Hinduism serving as a framework for the voluntary cultural assimilation of minority groups, without either compulsion or conversion becoming an issue.

  It is possible to a great extent to speak of Hinduism as culture rather than as religion (a distinction the votaries of Hindutva reject or blur). The inauguration of a public project, the laying of a foundation stone, or the launching of a ship usually starts with the ritual smashing of a coconut, an auspicious practice in Hinduism, but one that most Indians of other faiths cheerfully accept in much the same spirit as a teetotaler acknowledges the role of champagne in a Western celebration. Interestingly, similar Hindu customs have survived in now-Muslim Java and now-Buddhist Thailand; Islamic Indonesians still cherish the Ramayana legend, now shorn (for them) of its religious associations. For the people of Java, heirs to a syncretic tradition of Islam superimposed on ancient Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, culture is uniquely able to transcend religion. I visited the Shiva temple on Indonesia’s Hindu island of Bali once with the daughter of a Jakarta Qazi, a Muslim divine, and was astonished to see her praying before the idol, the Shivalingam. When I asked her about it, she was wide-eyed in her innocence: the Hindu gods were also a part of her cultural heritage, and she saw no incompatibility between her obeisance and the purist faith rigorously preached by her father. Such a scene is still impossible to imagine in India, but it hints at intriguing potentialities for mutual interchange — when each community feels secure enough in itself to acknowledge its debt to the others.

  Lapsed Hindus have continued to recognize the value of Hindu cultural symbols even when they are no longer fully rooted in faith. India’s most famous agnostic, Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who openly despised temples and was never known to have worshiped at any Hindu shrine in his long life, asked in his will to be cremated, like other Hindus, and to have his ashes scattered from the air over the country, to mingie with the Indian earth, except for a portion of them, which would be immersed in the sacred river Ganga at Allahabad. This last would not have been a surprising request from a devout man, but Nehru’s reasons, spelled out in his will, had little to do with religion:

  The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast, roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, . . . I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

  In this reading, the most sacred river of Hinduism becomes a force for cultural unity, a torrent that unites history wit
h hope. There is nothing in Nehru’s use of the Ganga as symbol that could alienate an Indian Muslim or Christian. By narrowly appropriating such powerful national metaphors for a dogmatic version of their faith, the advocates of Hindutva are denying themselves and their co-religionists the all-embracing potential of a culture that truly can incorporate Indian non-Hindus into a common civilizational space.

  The economist Amartya Sen made a related point in regretting

  the neglect by the Hindu leaders of the more major achievements of Indian civilization, even the distinctly Hindu contributions, in favor of its more dubious features. Not for them the sophistication of the Upanishads or the Gita, or of Brahmagupta or Sankara, or of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of Rama’s idol and Hanuman’s image. Their nationalism also ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy—secular as well as religious — achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India — explicitly or implicitly — as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers.

  Sen is right to stress that Hinduism is not simply the Hinduism of Ayodhya; it has a religious, philosophical, spiritual, and historical track record that gives meaning to the reflexive language of secularism. At a more mundane level, Hinduism’s own accommodations to other faiths have involved interesting compromises, not the least of which is the flourishing success of Christian missionary schools across the country, overwhelmingly to educate the Hindu middle class without any serious attempt to achieve their formal conversion to the faith of the Bible. A brief digression from my own childhood experience may help illuminate one of the many striking aspects of this oddly secular interpenetration.