The idea of India revisited

On the day when children are selling tricolour kitsch at traffic signals, advertisements are clothed in patriotic hues, radio stations play songs from films like Haqeeqat, Shaheed and Upkar, and supermarkets offer deep discounts on their unsold inventory, what is the meaning of freedom, and the idea of a nation?

If nations are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson said, then what was India’s collective imagination of itself? Did boycotting British goods also mean shunning all foreign influence? Would absorbing alien influences make India inferior?

Ramachandra Guha has recounted an interesting encounter between Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. In 1921, Gandhi had criticized Ram Mohan Roy and Bal Gangadhar Tilak in an article in Young India, for communicating their reformist ideas in English. Gandhi’s attitude disappointed Tagore who felt Gandhi was stoking narrow nationalism. (Think of Nikhil and Sandip in Ghare-Baire, Tagore’s 1918 novel, which presages the real-life difference of approaches). Gandhi acknowledged Tagore’s view, saying: “I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the Great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”

Gandhi saw nationalism as a virtue because his project was political—to rouse India and liberate it from colonial rule. Tagore saw nationalism as a menace. In Nationalism (1917), he wrote: “The nation with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns…and the literary mock thunder of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that…any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril.”

To be powerful, nationalism has to be built on a singular national narrative. As Congress has embedded itself in India’s narrative so deeply that the party sees the tryst with destiny as its tryst with dynasty, a significant number of Indians—midnight’s grandchildren who are now adults—are looking for alternative views of nationalism. Many first-time voters next year will have grown up in a country without Babri Masjid. They have never seen a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the Union cabinet (unless Maneka Gandhi counts as one), and for them the freedom struggle may seem like a compilation of competing, contested myths.

Some nationalists, rejecting the main narrative, want to hurry history. They don’t like the mosaic of India; they see the heterogeneity as weakness. But India’s different components will pull their weight when they believe in the idea of India, where they see a future for themselves: of unity in diversity, but not an enforced unity.

What is that unifying idea? If there were only one answer, it would be wrong. And that is the challenge of the billboards that erupted soon after Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was named as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s star campaigner for the elections next year. It showed him declaring himself as a Hindu (that’s his private business which shouldn’t concern anyone else) and a nationalist. It mingled two powerful ideas—faith and nationhood.

That game is fraught with risks: to see how it plays out, Modi has only to look at Gujarat’s neighbour: Pakistan. But aren’t Hindus different? If so, look at the legacy of his rule, where a state textbook extolls Hitler, and a shopping mall thinks nothing of charging a refundable entry fee to Muslims, on the day they are likely to shop—Ramzan Id. Nodding at diversity, Modi speaks in Hindi to some audiences and greets in Telugu elsewhere, but can’t get around to wearing a skull cap to please his Muslim constituents.

Tagore saw human differences not as “physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever,” but “fluid with life’s flow…changing their courses and their shapes and volumes.” As do nations and their boundaries. Nations grow large and small over time, as Poland did; some are born anew like Bangladesh, and some disappear, like the German Democratic Republic. Some boundaries are imposed, like those of the former Soviet Union, and some are inherited, like India’s China border.

A free mind can accept complexities and has the courage to ask the unaskable; to think the unthinkable. But Tagore warned: “Political freedom does not give us freedom when our mind is not free. People create huge eddies with their passions and they feel dizzily inebriated with the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom.”

Think of the people in Hyderabad rising and shouting, “Yes we can,” echoing that vacuous, borrowed slogan (ironically foreign) full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Those were free people, caught in nationalistic frenzy, embracing an alternative narrative of strong borders, as if the fence was impenetrable, with entry fee for others.

“You must make your own choice,” wrote Tagore.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi