Skip to main content

Inextricably interlinked



I wrote last month in a blog post that some of our (Indian) staple foods originated in alien lands.  Yesterday’s Hindu newspaper informed me that even idli, the quintessential South Indian food, probably had its origin in the Arab lands.

The Right Wing ideologues in India like Mohan Bhagwat are still harping on the same old worn-out string of Hindu Rashtra though the more practical people like our beloved Prime Minister and his right hand man, Amit Shah, are choosing to keep mum on the issue at least for the time being. 

Why should India be a Hindu Rashtra when the whole world is becoming a global village, countries are opening up their borders and people are moving across the borders with increasing frequency?  There are millions of Indians living in other countries, practising their religion without interference from the indigenous people of those countries.  Why should India turn parochial when the world (leaving aside a few theocratic countries which are struggling to discover their identities in the secular, scientific world ) has become cosmopolitan?

More importantly, how much of what we think are purely Indian are indeed so?  Most of our foods seem to have come from elsewhere.  Right from the days of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, people visited India for various purposes and some of them settled down in India too.  Cultures intermingled.  India, like most other countries, witnessed much miscegenation. 

There is so much diversity in India today that the country’s culture cannot be brought under one label.  In the North-East alone one would find an amazing range of varieties.  Take Meghalaya, a tiny state, for instance.  The Khasis, Jaintias and Garos are the major tribes in the state.  The former two tribes belong to Mont-Khmers ethnically and their language belongs to the Austroasiatic family, while the Garos belong to an entirely different race and their language belongs to the Bodo-Garo branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family.  If we take the other North-Eastern states, we will be astounded by the linguistic, cultural and ethnic varieties in that one small part of India alone. 

Can the advocates of Hindu Rahstra simply wish away the non-Hindu elements, and very dominant ones at that, in Kashmir, Goa, Puducherry, Kerala, and many other places?  It should be remembered that even the Hinduism practised in Kerala may have little in common with that practised, say, in Gujarat. 

Indians, like people in any country, have multiple identities determined by language, culture, religion, race, and so on.  Today’s Indians also don’t mind mixing these identities when it comes to marriage and other such accepted relationships.  Many Indians of the envisaged Hindu Rashtra relish McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken more than masala dosa and bhel puri. Indians are far more broad-minded than their contemporary political leaders.

Why do people like Mohan Bhagwat wish to take India in a direction that is diametrically opposed to the one in which the world is moving?  Why can’t Indians be left to choose for themselves their religious faiths or lack of such faith?  Why should India take an obscurantist trajectory when those countries which followed such trajectories have already ended up with the dreadful problem of religious fundamentalism and terrorism? 

One hopes that the BJP will start using the immense power it enjoys for the welfare of the nation, to take the nation on the path of modernity and rational outlooks, instead of turning back and moving toward medievalist practices and beliefs.

The least that people like Bhagwat can do is to educate themselves a little more and realise that the world is too interconnected a place now for raising racially separatist demands.  I’m sure he is aware of what some of our forefathers wrote some 2500 years ago: “Vasudhaiva kutumbakam.”  

Comments

  1. Absolutely agree with you. It is only few people but the noisier ones who imagine themselves to be the representative of everyone who are power hungry. And in their obsession to retain power, have no idea of the benefits to economy or what the ground situation is like. If we research some more, Sanskrit may also turn out to be a foreign language.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The noisier ones won't go too far. Indians are not foolish any more.

      Sanskrit belongs to the Indo- Germanic family brought by immigrants. Even that is not really Indian!

      Delete
  2. Have you read 'End of India' by Khushwant Singh? I think you can write a sequel to it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I haven't read it. But I know the history it contains. I know that India is going to face a similar situation soon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Life of a Transgender

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Trapped in Pandora’s Shadows

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha