Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in Nehru's words, “by strong but invisible threads…. She is a myth and an idea,” he wrote (Nehru always feminized India), “a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.”

  It has been over fifty-five years since that midnight moment when the British Empire in India came to an end amid the traumatic carnage of Partition with Pakistan and the sectarian violence that accompanied it. Yet in these last five decades of independence many thoughtful observers have seen a country more conscious than ever of what divides it: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. What makes India, then, a nation?

  Let me turn again to an Italian example. No, not that Italian example. Amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, one Italian nationalist memorably wrote, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Oddly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought — “We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.”

  Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to Nehru, that preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, the nationalist movement did.

  When India celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from British rule nine years ago, its then prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi's sixteenth-century Red Fort 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 forty-eight times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state 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, so he gave one — the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

  Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could a country be ruled by a man who does not understand its “national language”; only in India, for that matter, is there a “national language” that half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution be found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema's finest “playback singers,” the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.

  We are all minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off a train, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh, might cherish the illusion that he represents the “majority community,” to use an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 82 percent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority is not even male. Worse, our archetypal UP Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, polychrome crowds thronging any of India's major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, 85 percent of Indians are not, and so on.

  Or take language. The constitution of India recognizes eighteen today (mirrored in the various scripts on the currency notes), but in fact there are thirty-five Indian languages that are spoken by more than a million people — and these are languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures, and cultural assumptions, not just dialects (if we were to count dialects within these languages, there are more than 22,000). Each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, for none enjoys majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Bombay's Hindi cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it is in no sense the language of the majority; indeed, its locutions, gender rules, and script are unfamiliar to most Indians in the south or northeast.

  Ethnicity further complicates the notion of a majority community. Most of the time, an Indian's name immediately reveals where he is from and what his mother tongue is; when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins. Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in the cities, Indians still largely remain endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but feels little identity with him in respect of appearance, dress, customs, tastes, language, or political objectives. At the same time a Tamil Hindu would feel that he has far more in common with a Tamil Christian or Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat with whom he formally shares a religion.

  Why do I harp on these differences? Only to make the point that Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language (since we have at least eighteen or thirty-five, depending on whether you follow the constitution or the ethnolinguists). It is not based on geography (the “natural” geographical frontiers of India have been hacked by the partition of 1947). It is not based on ethnicity (the “Indian” accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians — Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, have more in common with Pakistanis and Bang-ladeshis, respectively, than they do with Poonawalas or Bangaloreans). And it is not based on religion (we are home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism — a faith without a national organization, with no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship — exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage). Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land — emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.

  This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once. Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream; we have given passports to our ideals. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of “the narcissism of minor differences,” in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. To stand Michael Ignatieff's famous phrase on its head, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

  So the idea of India, to use Amartya Sen's phrase, 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 fifty years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

  Of course, not all agree with this vision of India. There are those who wish it to be
come a Hindu Rashtra, a land of and for the Hindu majority; they have made gains in recent elections and in the politics of the street. Secularism is established in India's constitution, but they ask why India should not, like many other Third World countries, find refuge in the assertion of its own religious identity. Recent news stories have chronicled the rise in Indian politics of an intolerant and destructive “Hindutva” movement that assaults India's minorities, especially its Muslims, that destroyed a well-known mosque and conducted horrific attacks on Muslims in the state of Gujarat, where in the twenty-first century men have been slaughtered because of the mark on a forehead or the absence of a foreskin. The votaries of this movement argue that only Hindus can be true Indians; Muslims and Christians, in particular, are deemed insufficiently Indian because their punyabhoomi, their holy land, lies outside the soil of India.

  It is curious and sad to see the “two-nation theory” advocated by the supporters of Partition in the 1940s coming back to life in secular India six decades later. My generation (and Rushdie's) grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the 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 very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus. To accept the idea of India, you had to spurn the logic that had divided the country.

  Western dictionaries define secularism as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism means a profusion of religions, none of which is privileged by the state, whose institutions are open to participation by everybody. Secularism in India does not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the DMK have found unpopular among their voters; indeed, in Calcutta's annual Durga Puja, the youth wings of the Communist parties compete with each other to put up the most lavish Puja pandals or pavilions to the goddess Durga. Rather, it means, in the Indian tradition, multireligiousness. In the Calcutta neighborhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the tinkling bells and chanted mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple nearby and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Granth Sahib. (And St. Paul's Cathedral was only minutes away.)

  The irony is that India's secular coexistence was paradoxically made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus. It is odd to read today of “Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian among them — the word for “Indian” is Hindu. Originally Hindu simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word Hindu did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

  “Hinduism” is thus the name others applied to the indigenous religion of India (Sanatan Dharma). It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas. Hinduism is a civilization, not a creed that can be reduced to commandments.

  The sectarian misuse of Hinduism for minority-bashing is especially sad since Hinduism provides the basis for a shared sense of common culture within India that has little to do with religion. The inauguration of a public project, the laying of a foundation stone, or the launching of a ship usually start 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. 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, fire-crackers, 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). Hindu myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a common idiom 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, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. Both Hindus and Muslims throng the tombs and dargahs of Sufi Muslim saints. Hindu devotional songs are magnificently sung by the Muslim Dagar brothers; the Hindu Shankar Shambhu invokes Muslim pirs as he chants the qawwali. Hinduism and Islam are intertwined in Indian life. In the Indian context today, it is possible to say that there is no Hinduism without Islam: the saffron and the green both belong on the Indian flag.

  A lovely story that illustrates the cultural synthesis of Hinduism and Islam in India was recounted by two American scholars, Lloyd and Susan Rudolph. It seems an Indian Muslim girl was asked to participate in a small community drama about the life of Lord Krishna, the Hindu god adored by shepherdesses, who dance for his pleasure (and who exemplify through their passion the quest of the devout soul for the Lord). Her Muslim father forbade her to dance as a shepherdess with the other schoolgirls. 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; and so the Muslim girl played Krishna.

  This is India's “secularism.” Indeed, Hindus pride themselves on belonging to a religion of astonishing breadth and range of belief; a religion that acknowledges all ways of worshiping God as equally valid — indeed, the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. This eclectic and nondoctrinaire Hinduism — a faith without apostasy, where there are no heretics to cast out because there has never been any such thing as a Hindu heresy — is not the Hinduism professed by those who destroyed a mosque, nor the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken from each — language, art, food, learning — and grown with all of them. To be an Indian is to be part of an elusive dream all Indians share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors, from many sources that we cannot easily identify.

  This is why the development of what has been called “Hindu fundamentalism” and the resultant change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous. The suggestion that only a Hindu, and only a certain kind of Hindu, can be an authentic Indian is an affront to the very premise of Indian nationalism. The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

  Of course it is true that, while Hinduism as a faith might privilege tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly. Ironically, Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. As religion, caste, and region have come to dominate public discourse, to some it has becom
e more important to be a Muslim, a Bodo, or a Yadav than to be an Indian. But this is not merely dangerous; it is an assault on the essential underpinnings of Indianness.

  Yet India's democracy helps to acknowledge and accommodate the various identities of its multifaceted population. No one identity can ever triumph in India: both the country's chronic pluralism and the logic of the electoral marketplace make this impossible. In leading a coalition government, the Hindu-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party has learned that any party ruling India has to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us.

  So the Indian identity celebrates diversity: if America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Indians are used to multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity. That is the tradition to which Rushdie's “Overartist” belonged.

  At a time when the Huntington thesis of a “clash of civilizations” has gained currency, it is intriguing to contemplate a civilization predicated upon such diversity, one which provides the framework to absorb these clashes within itself. For Indians across the world, wary of the endless multiplication of sovereignties, hesitant before the clamor for division and self-assertion echoing in a hundred NRI forums, this may be something to think about. In today's globalized world, Indians in Michigan cannot escape identification with what is happening to Indians in Mumbai. So the idea of India is an idea familiar to Americans but few others — of a land where it doesn't matter what the color of your skin is, the kind of food you eat, the sounds you make when you speak, the God you choose to worship (or not), so long as you want to play by the same rules as everybody else, and dream the same dreams. If the overwhelming majority of a people share the political 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, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kohlapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity and freedom — and that is the India to which Rushdie's “Overartist” would belong.