India
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Hindu Code Bill
The legislation, passed in 1956, that amalgamated, revised, and supplanted a wide variety of “traditional” practices in Hindu family law (see Personal Law, below). Among other things, the Hindu Code Bill outlawed polygamy (which had been legal for Hindus in some parts of the country), permitted women to inherit property, and defined the legal status of the Hindu Undivided Joint Family.
Jainism
A reformist faith nearly contemporaneous with Buddhism, founded by Mahavira (540 - 468 B.C.), with several million adherents scattered all over India, particularly in the north and west. Unlike Buddhism, Jainism did not seek or win followers abroad. Its principal tenets include nonviolence, penance, self-control, moderation, and charity. Though Mahatma Gandhi was not a Jain, his beliefs echoed Jainism in many ways.
Jharkhand
A region of northern India straddling eighteen southern districts in the state of Bihar, inhabited principally by “tribals” — Indian aborigines — who have long demanded a separate Jharkhand state of their own within the Indian Union. The support of members of Parliament elected from the Jharkhand region on the ticket of an autonomist party, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), proved crucial to the survival of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s minority Congress government (1991-96).
liberalization
The opening up of India’s protected, overregulated economy to greater competition, global investment, and foreign trade.
Mahabharata
One of two great epic poems of Hindu civilization, the other being the Ramayana. The Mahabhara is the world’s longest epic poem — some five times the length of the Bible — and contains the famous declaration, “What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.” Few other works in world literature could make such an extravagant claim, but in doing so, the two-thousand-year-old Indian epic poem is not defending a closed structure: rather, the Mahabharata has had so many accretions over the years in constant retellings that there is practically no subject it does not cover. The dramatic central narrative, if the tale of the dynastic rivalry between the Pandava and Kaurava clans may be called that, has been so thoroughly the object of adaptation, interpolation, and reinterpretation that the Mahabharata as we now have it overflows with myths and legends of all sorts, didactic tales exalting the Brahmins, fables and stories that teach moral and existential lessons, bardic poetry extolling historical dynasties, and meandering digressions on everything from law to lechery and from politics to philosophy. Whenever a particular social or political message was sought to be imparted to Indians at large — at least over the thosuand years the epic took to arrive at its settled shape in around A.D. 500 — it was simply inserted into a retelling of the Mahabharata. Which is why I used the epic as the framework for my own satirical retelling of twentieth-century Indian history, The Great Indian Novel.
melas
Fairs.
Nairs
A caste native to Kerala, occupying an intermediate social position below the Brahmins (who are known as Namboodiris in Kerala) and above the “backwards.” Nairs traditionally were warriors, landlords, farmers, and professionals.
Onam
A Kerala harvest festival.
Partition
The division of British India in 1947 into the sovereign independent states of India and Pakistan. Partition was the demand of the Muslim League party, which wanted a separate homeland for India’s Muslims, and was resisted by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party, which had fought for a secular, pluralist, undivided India. Partition was accompanied by rioting, massacres, and refugee flows, with some 13 million people displaced as non-Muslims crossed into India and Muslims migrated to Pakistan. (The two halves of the new country of Pakistan were separated by some 1,500 miles of Indian territory: twenty-four years after Partition, the eastern wing seceded to become the republic of Bangladesh.)
Personal Law
The Indian term for “family law,” i.e., law governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, and worship; in India, minority communities are permitted by legislation to follow their own “Personal Law,” administered by their own priests and religious leaders.
Ram Janmabhoomi
“Birthplace of Ram,” the name given by Hindus to the site of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, which many believe to have been built on the grounds of an earlier temple commemorating the birth of the Hindu god-king Ram. The “Ram Janmabhoomi agitation” was a movement led by the votaries of Hindutva to replace the mosque with a temple to Ram on the site; it culminated in the destruction of the disused mosque by a mob in December 1992.
Ramayana
One of two great epic poems of Hindu civilization, the other being the Mahabharata, which it probably precedes in composition. The epic tells of the adventures of the god-king Ram (or Rama) of Ayodhya, his love for his wife Sita, his banishment to the forest following the machinations of a jealous stepmother, the kidnapping of his wife by the Lankan demon-king Ravana, and his great war, aided by a monkey army, to destroy Ravana and recover Sita. Ram is worshiped as an incarnation of God by Hindus; Mahatma Gandhi’s dying words were “He Ram” Hail Ram. The story of the Ramayana remains a vital part of the folk traditions of a number of no-longer-Hindu Asian countries, including Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Raj
Literally “kingdom” or “reign,” as in “British Raj,” but also used to mean “state system,” as in “India’s permit-license-quota Raj.”
reservations
Quotas, i.e., reserved seats (in colleges, in the bureaucracy, in Parliament, etc.) for specific disadvantaged groups, such as the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (see below) and “Other Backward Classes.”
Scheduled Castes and Tribes
A bureaucratic name for India’s outcastes, so called because the specific castes suffering from the stigma of untouchability and aboriginal tribes are listed in “Schedules” attached to the Indian Constitution.
secularism
In Indian usage, not irreligiousness, but rather the doctrine that no religious community shall be favored by the state, and that religion will play no part in public policy or personal advancement. In practice, secularism in India has often meant multireligiousness.
Sikhism
A syncretic faith, founded in the Punjab in the fifteenth century by Guru Nanak (1469-1538), which attempted to combine elements of Hinduism and Islam, notably the universalism of the former and the monotheism and egalitarianism of the latter. As a result of Muslim persecution the Sikhs converted themselves into a martial faith under Guru Gobind Singh (1675-1708); all Sikh men use the name “Singh,” or “lion,” and though Sikhs represent only 2 percent of the Indian population. they make up 25 percent of the Indian armed forces. Sikhs wear five outward symbols, the “five K’s”: kesh, or long hair; kangha, or comb; kara, or steel bangle; kachba, or short drawers; and kirpan, or sword. Male Sikhs are generally recognized by their uncut facial hair and tightly wound turbans. An overwhelming majority of Sikhs are ethnic Punjabis, though as enterprising migrants they may also be found scattered throughout the country. Partition hit the Sikh community particularly hard, since millions had to abandon ancestral homes, livelihoods, and shrines in what became the new Muslim state of Pakistan.
Untouchability
The stigma placed on the lowest of India’s castes and those outside the caste structure, who literally could not be touched by a highborn Hindu for fear that contact would be polluting. Untouchability was outlawed by free India’s Constitution — whose principal draftsman was an Untouchable, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. It is still practiced in many parts of rural India, though caste discrimination is a punishable offense and prosecutions occasionally occur.
Upanishads
Literally “esoteric doctrines,” a series of some 150 treatises in prose and verse going back to the sixth century b.c., which contain some of the most sophisticated and profound philosophical inquiries of the ancient world — on such topics as the nature of the godhead, the origins
of the universe, the knowability of the soul, and the connections between mind and matter.
Vedas
Literally, “divine knowledge,” the Vedas are the basic (but not the only) holy books of Hinduism, consisting principally of Sanskrit hymns written between 1500 and 1000 b.c. There are four principal Vedas: the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, and the comparatively recent Atharva Veda
Vedanta
Literally, “the end [or object] of the Vedas.” The orthodox school of Hindu philosophy.
Acknowledgments
Many of the ideas in this book have engaged me for some time, and over the years I have expressed views in print on several of the subjects touched upon in the preceding pages. Parts of the text of the present book, in somewhat different form, have therefore appeared in the following publications: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Times of India, Indian Express, Business India, Mid-Day, the Straits Times, the Far Eastern Economic Review, CEO/International Strategies, Bostonia, and Civilization, whose cooperation is gratefully acknowledged.
A special word of appreciation to Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, for encouraging me in my literary moonlighting. Nothing in this book, of course, engages the United Nations in anyway or represents anything but my purely personal views — as the notice on the copyright page makes clear.
I would like also to thank David Davidar for talking me into writing this book and for guiding me generously to its completion; Jeannette Seaver, Dick Seaver, and David Martyn for their enthusiasm, editorial skill, and forbearance; my literary agents Mary Evans and Deborah Rogers for their many efforts; and David Curzon, for a passage from Ananda Coomaraswamy. I am especially grateful to “c.p.” for reading the manuscript with diligence and insight, and for believing in the book; to Rosemary Colaco and Vikas Sharma, for their help; and to my family, for bearing with my neglect of them as I wrote.
Thanks, too, to the many others who contributed, in big and little ways, to making this work possible. Above all, there is India itself— “The sole country under the sun,” Mark Twain wrote a century ago “that is endowed with imperishable interest. . . , the one land all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.” I am, of course, solely responsible for what I have made in these pages of the glimpses afforded to me of my beloved and impossible homeland.
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