That "I" Word...

The world is living in multiple centuries. I do not mean that Africa is forty years behind South Asia which is fifteen years behind Southeast Asia which is ten years behind Europe materially. Nor do I mean that different people use different calendars - for Christians, it is 2009 AD, while for Muslims, it is 1420 AH. Hindus have multiple calendars, depending on too many things to consider for the sake of our sanity. What I mean is, that in many ways, many parts of the world are living in the Age of the French Revolution. Populism, autocracy, nationalism, religion, and a sense of Romanticism, of purpose, and of destiny mark this developmental stage in the history of nations. Two regions that seem particularly inflicted with this fever are the Middle East and South Asia (my rather circumscribed understanding of the planet includes only Asia, Europe, and North Africa, with North America being the alien presence - hence, apologies if you feel your region has been left out of my equation). Whether it be an inferiority complex stemming from colonial subjugation or from an incomplete nationalist project, that dreaded "I" word, identity, is still a matter of public discourse and politics.

[DIVERSION 1: Essentialising is usually used in a pejorative sense, at least in the West. Although the dictionary definition of the word merely states that it is the expression of core properties of a subject, critics have argued that it reduces the subject to those core properties alone (although Indian Marxists don't think this applies to their more 'nuanced' categorisations of the Right). Well, yes, if the actor is an imbecile who cannot recognise individual characteristics which may go against the collective image. To reject an essentialising statement is, however, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science is based on educated generalisation - statistics depends on it. And yet scientists and their research survive. Similarly, there is no denying that Europe has a Christian identity, even if it is secular by law today. The Middle East, barring Israel, has a strong Islamic flavour, no matter what the differences between Shia and Sunni are. Africans are usually dark-skinned. This in no way negates the African-ness of white settlers who have been in Africa for two or three centuries, but they are in the minority. Essentialising does not mean that, because the average height of the Dutch is 179 cms, a Dutch midget would be in danger of having his/her citizenship revoked. It is time that scholars quit their immature hostility to the idea of essentials.]

There can be no denying that India has a strong Hindu component to its identity. In every history ever written, be it by Muslims or by Christian missionaries, no one claims that Islam, Christianity, or Judaism are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. No scholar has ever claimed that Moses parted the Saraswati, or that Jesus gave a sermon under a banyan tree or that Muhammad received the angel Gabriel in the Udaygiri caves. Despite this essentialising of Indians, no one in their right mind would deny that there are Muslims or Christians in India, nor would any sane person claim that APJ Abdul Kalam, Mansoor Ali Khan, Zakir Hussain, Irfan Khan, Irfan Pathan, or for that matter, Leander Paes, Diana Hayden, or Amartya Sen are not Indian. Oddly enough, today, claiming a Hindu identity is not only seen as backward but also immediately marks one as part of the Saffron Brigade. As former Managing Director of Procter & Gamble Gurcharan Das revealed in his latest book, "The Difficulty of Being Good," his desire to read the Mahabharata prompted one of his friends, a favoured civil servant of Indira Gandhi's, to ask him if he had gone saffron. Das wondered why no eyebrows were raised when he had read Western epics like the Iliad or the Divine Comedy. In part, this is due to a highly successful public relations campaign mounted by the Communists and the Congress. Another ingredient to this mix is a latent Macaulayism that exists till date among Indian elites - the language of elitism is unabashedly English to this day in India. Of course, it would be asinine to legislate against this and only a Party desperately grabbing at straws (like the BJP in Haryana promising to ban Western pop music in defence of Indian culture) would try to do so. Only a free market of ideas and commerce should dictate the rise and fall of languages and culture. Thus, although there is nothing inherently lamentable about the domination of the English language in India, particularly among the intelligentsia, the Indian fetish for all things foreign creates an implicit bias in thinking - Chaucer is more familiar to this class than Kalidasa and Shakespeare, rather than Vishakhadatta, Shudraka, or Bhasa provides the framework for future literary endeavours, and not because of literary merit. Das quotes V S Sukthankarand I feel the need to as well: “The Mahabharata is the content of our collective unconscious .... We must therefore grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present. We are it."

I am really not a good Indian. I have never been a pucca Hindu either. I had abandoned these categories as I had abandoned the memories of the Great War and I was equally happy with the Aeneid, the Mahabharata, or the Hezar-o-yek Shab. In the backdrop of the Shah Bano case, the temple controversies in Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, and the Mandal Commission, however, I was made keenly aware of not only of my Hindu identity but my brahmin identity. Congress and its allies seemed to say, "Look, we don't care what you are. You qualify as a Hindu brahmin by birth and on that basis we are going to deny you many things other have easy and even free access to." Thus began my exploration of the tenets of Hinduism, my investigation into the caste system, Hindu law, and philosophy. What it meant to be a Hindu (in modern India), practically, was made abundantly clear to me by the sychophantic and obsequious Congress regime. A nation-state fraught with as many difficulties as India cannot afford so many divisions and categories of people. There are already too many visible differences in language without compounding them with religious and caste considerations. By advocating sectionalisation, the Congress is pushing the country to the brink of disintegration. Today, as Das found out, it has become a mindset - read the Divine Comedy and you are secular; read the Mudrarakshasa and you are clearly a saffron fascist, never mind that the Divine Comedy (or the Iliad for that matter) also involved divine creatures and locations. Gurcharan Das, and probably millions of others, myself included, probably do not want to choose between religions. We celebrate Eid as easily as Ganesh Chaturthi. We enjoy Abu Muslih bin Abdallah Shirazi as much as Nakkirar, and we are as interested in the Sharia as we are in shruti, smriti, and aachaar. Yet unless one is willing to exorcise one's Hindu self, one is forced into a saffron strait-jacket.

National interest is another strange thing - the ridiculously facile political scene in India has made the choices highly reductive. One the one hand, you have an ineffectual foreign policy (wedded stubbornly to a pro-Arab sentiment in the hopes that it will protect oil supplies and put pressure on Pakistan) and a system and level of taxation even highway robbers would be hesitant to apply (59% of the tax revenue is from indirect taxes such as excise, customs, cess, sales tax, VAT, entry tax, etc.), and a focus on rural money sinks (giving massive subsidies - no tax, free electricity and water, etc. - and loans and writing them off just before elections, with no outlay for education, irrigation, pollution control, or land reform). On the other hand, again, if you are a saffron-tinged fascist, you can opt for a cogent foreign policy based on realpolitik and logical defence outlays, lower and lesser taxes to encourage business, huge private-public partnerships in sorely needed infrastructural projects, and more privatisation of Public Sector Units. The latter set of policies, which most people with any faith in market capitalism would choose, were those of the BJP Government 1998-2004. The common wisdom would have one believe that voting for defence (only an alpha fool would argue it is not required given 26/11, the Naxal terror, and almost daily Chinese incursions into Indian territory), infrastructure, and an incetive-based economy makes you a Hindu fundamentalist. In effect, according to the (pseudo)secular Front, every choice one makes can and must be boiled down to religion.

Personally, I am rather lukewarm on nationalism. It does not seem necessary to repeat the European experience (though, strictly

speaking, if modified from its European form, it ceases to be nationalism unless we allow for more valencies) and I am yet to find any state that deserves my undying devotion. I am a 'nationalist' of many states - India, Israel, Italy, France, Russia, Denmark, Egypt, Iran - because I find something wonderful about each of them. They are better than some states, worse than others. Being an Indian (or any other nationality) is like being on a team. Michael Ballack loved Bayern Munich and played to the best of his ability for them. Today, however, he belongs to Chelsea and he will play hard for them. That, though, is irrelavant. Civilisational glory, whatever that means, is not something we participate in. Not one nationalist (alive) contributed to the building of Persepolis or the writing of the Ainkurunooru. It is highly unlikely that anyone remembers compiling the Pirkei Avot or designing the Pyramids. Admittedly, some civilisations have much to boast of but what of it? Would it not be a better use of time to read up on these achievements than boast of them as signs of one's personal superiority? More critically, are the Pyramids really any less or more of a wonder than Angkor Wat? National glory is a simpler beast to tackle - it is more tangible, for one. It is the collective public relations boost a state experiences if many of its citizens win international laurels. Even in this, unless one is part of the football team that won the Championship or the person who won the Nobel Prize, one is only deluding oneself, aggrandising oneself, and living vicarious through others to forget any shortcomings in the immediate proximity.

The political climate, however, forces me to be an Indian nationalist and a Hindu brahmin. I have to be Hindu because I like the ancient Indian philosophy and the epics, and I have to be an Indian nationalist because Hindus vote for the BJP which is a nationalist party. I am unwilling to relinquish either identity, even if I don't invest in them as much as some might. Perception may be dictated by others, but identity is an individual choice and naturally, the two are intertwined. It is in manipulating this link that there seems to be an effort to subvert an apathetic (to insular and parochial arguments) individual through guilt and horror of association with brutes and beasts (inevitably, all Right-wing movements share a lineage with German National Socialism - Godwin's Law is true! Ironically, Leftist movements have nothing in common with Josef Stalin or Mao Tse-tung). Although I believe in collective identity, I also believe that it is only a part of me, and not necessarily the most important part. Is it any wonder then, that more and more people seem drawn towards "tough love" against minorities? That the smallest demand (not so small nowadays after years of being pandered to) results in a violent backlash? It is, after all, on their behalf, for the sake of their vote banks, that the Third Front and Congress so abasedly engage in this propaganda war. If anything is wrong with India's public religious sphere, it is solely the Hand and the Elephant that are to blame. Goebbels is supposed to have said that if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it becomes the truth. In India, the results bear him out.