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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

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