Skip to main content

The Tolstoy of Hindi

Image from Time

Weekend is the time to catch up with all the reading that was missed during the week. It is during that catching up I came across Yuval Noah Harari’s article in the Time [Jan 30 – Feb 6, 2023]. Titled ‘The Dangerous Quest for Identity,’ the article argues why undue stress on one’s identity as a member of a narrow group can hamstring our understanding of ourselves.

If you choose to emphasise those parts in you that connect you to a group and ignore the other parts, you will obviously see only a small part of yourself. For example, if you define yourself as a proud Hindu Indian and believe that your culture is the best, you are obviously ignoring a lot of things in your personality that came from other places and cultures and religions. There are, probably, more factors which came from other sources than your religion and nationality that make up your personality. You ignore all of them the moment you choose to see yourself primarily as a Hindu Indian.

If you are reading this post, obviously you know English and that is not a contribution of Hindu India. The writers who have influenced you, the artists you admire, the music you go to bed with… the medicine that runs in your blood right now... so much of the technology without which your life would be miserable… there’s lot that came from somewhere out there, from beyond the Arabian Ocean. To know you fully is to know those things that came from other sources too.

Let me adapt a parable used by Harari. Suppose someone asks a Hindi chauvinist, “Who is the Tolstoy of Hindi?” Well, there may be certain writers in Hindi who can be named in answer to that question, no doubt. But the best answer would be “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of Hindi.” What that means is: Tolstoy is not just Russian. He belongs to the whole world. He is an integral part of humankind. He belongs as much in Hindi literature as in Russian. If you are able to say that, your thinking has gone beyond the narrow confines of languages. You belong to the universe just as much as Tolstoy does. You become greater than if you were to define yourself as a Hindu Indian. You become a universal citizen, a citizen of the cosmos. When I say “I am a human” I belong to a society of nearly 8 billion people. Why would I want to trim down that to a much smaller figure and limit myself?

After all, Tolstoy does belong to the world. He was influenced by Victor Hugo, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jesus and Buddha – none of whom were Russian. We are all similarly influenced by many things which are not Indian. It is possible to ignore those influences by declaring our pet ideas and ideologies as the only right ones. But, in the words of Harari, “As long as I adhere to that narrow story, I’ll never know the truth about myself.”

Narrow identities are political gimmicks that can win votes. Harari agrees on the vote-winning potential of such identities. But those leaders who make use of such strategies as identity politics have no right to claim to be Vishwa Gurus. You cannot be the guru of those whom you shut out from your horizons. If you refuse to accept the relevance of other traditions and ideas, how can you be their guru? 


Comments

  1. The dangers of being ethnocentric.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    Excellent article - and ponderment upon it!!! As a universalist, I am applauding loudly... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Replies
    1. I found Harari irresistible. So reproduced him this way.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...