What Does it Mean To Be Indian?
The subcontinent is more than its history. To understand it, look at its stories.
Three things inspired me to write this post. First, I wrote an article for Kamalan on the myths of an ancient Indian city. Next, I read a magnificent post-modern reinterpretation of the Hindu myths, Ka by Roberto Calasso. Third, CNN and Reza Aslan decided to make a video about the Aghori sect of Hinduism, and market it in the most Orientalist way possible.
As a globally-oriented and English-speaking young Indian, I’ve been guilty of Orientalism myself. I’ve seen my homeland as something exotic, something different from the Western norm. I wrote about its history, and I wrote about its traditions. But I saw its myths as mumbo-jumbo, without realizing what its stories said about my heritage and my own past. To understand India, I recently realized, I need to understand its stories.
So this post is not about Hinduism, though many of the stories I tell are Hindu. This post is a story about stories: a story about being Indian.
The first threads of our mythical fabric are woven in the 2nd millennium BCE. The Aryans, pastoral tribes from Central Asia, migrate into North India, and headed East along the river Ganga. They tell stories of wild gods, of Indra, the destroyer of cities, storm-god, drinker of the drug Soma, which they threw into the flames as an offering to the fire-god, Agni. Nothing special, right?
But these herders also watch the stars, the endless universe, as they raid for cattle at night. And possibly alone among all human traditions, they question Creation itself. “To Whom shall we address our sacrifices?”, they ask. “Even the gods will end one day. Who brought forth this Creation, and why? The only one who knows is the Creator Himself. Or maybe even He does not know.”
“.. Maybe even He does not know.”
As they begin to settle in cities along the banks of the great river, they trade questions for answers. And the stories change. The fabric grows.
These new societies are stratified by caste. The wealth of the kings and the Brahmans contrasts with the misery of the rest, and the peace that some find in asceticism. So another story begins: the story of the Buddha, the Enlightened One. A prince is born in modern Nepal, blessed with all the pleasures of life, who leaves it all behind. He discovers a Truth so fundamental that it sweeps across the world: that desire is the cause of all suffering. End desire, and you end suffering, and you are freed from the illusory material world. And so the fabric spreads. And it grows.
“End Desire, and you end Suffering.”
Hundreds of years pass; empires rise and fall. Foreign rulers, from Greeks to Scythians, visit the subcontinent. All of them add their stories to the fabric. The hero-god Vasudeva, believe the Greeks, is actually Hercules. Gopala, god of cowherds, merges with Vasudeva to become Krishna. Krishna becomes an avatar of Vishnu, the great god of the imperial Gupta dynasty that extends its power over most of the subcontinent. As the Guptas conquer the forest tribes of Central India, they add more avatars of Vishnu, such as Varaha, the boar-god. As the stories of Vishnu come South, the South adds its own stories. The land of Kerala, they say, was formed when Vishnu’s avatar flung his ax down the coast, and the sea receded. And so the fabric grows.
Gradually we forget the grand cosmological questions, and tell stories of gods who explain moral and ethical points, a way to understand the complex world we have made. The Ramayana teaches us of Rama, the ideal son, the ideal King, the model of monarchy for centuries to come, and Sita, the ideal wife (Patriarchy is another theme). The Mahabharata teaches us of virtue, of family, of devotion, of the ideal student, the ideal guru (Caste is another theme). And there are always stories of The Other, the Renounced. Shiva, the Destroyer, smoker of cannabis, who cares nothing for all these traditions. Who lives with ghouls, who is covered with ashes, whose turbulent locks hold the crescent moon, and pacifies the River Ganga, which gradually becomes more and more sacred. And so the fabric grows.
The subcontinent trades. The subcontinent teaches Southeast Asia. Temples are built in Cambodia to Vishnu; temples are built to the Buddha in Java. India learns from its invaders, and new stories are born. Even as Muslim conquerors arrive, so too does Sufi Islam. Sheikhs perform miracles, from modern Pakistan through India and Bangladesh, and we pray at their graves, whether we believe in Krishna or Allah. Devotion to God is the ultimate goal. Often, religion does not matter as much as regional or caste identity. And every region and caste of the subcontinent develops its own stories. Thus the fabric grows.
“.. Thus the fabric grows.”
In Uttar Pradesh, once known as Awadh, Muslim poets sing songs to Krishna (by which they meant the Prophet Muhammad). The Mughal emperors of Delhi and Agra commission Persian translations of Sanskrit stories in a bid to understand their own destiny as rulers of the Subcontinent.
A new sort of culture arises: Indo-Persian. Neither Hindu or Muslim, but something unique to the subcontinent. A culture of stories and music and paintings. The culture of Kashmir, of Awadh, of Hyderabad. A culture where all Indians celebrate festivals that have evolved over centuries, from all over the world (such as Muharram, a Shi’a festival that was the greatest annual fest of the Mughal successor state of Hyderabad in South India, or Holi, the Hindu festival of spring, celebrated with joy and abandon in Awadh, in the North). But things change. We begin to worry more about the rituals than their meaning. And then, the West arrives.
“What a load of mumbo-jumbo!”, they say, as many young Indians do today. “The entire corpus of Indian literature is not worth a single bookshelf of British books.” So they re-educate us in English, and they scrub us “clean” of the centuries of coexistence, pluralism and harmony. Instead they tell us that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together, that caste must be remembered and adhered to.
And thus, just as we forgot the cosmological questions of the Vedas, we forgot the stories that gave us direction. We forgot the meaning of the gods. We remembered only what the British saw: the rituals, the temples, the donations, the ceremonies. We no longer thought about what they meant. We abandoned the fabric of stories that made us who we were.
“We remembered only what the British saw.”
So we began to hate. We hated the West, but we wanted to be more like them. We hated other religions, and isn’t hate the easiest emotion for politicians to use? So we let the British Partition our subcontinent. And now we let politicians rename roads, we let them separate us. We let them, like the British, tell us what we can eat, whom we can marry, whom we can live with. We let them rewrite history and even science books! Because we forgot what it meant to be Indian. We forgot the heritage of our subcontinent.
I was searching for answers. I didn’t know who I was or what drew me to the history and mythology of my homeland. I thought about the stories I have heard my entire life, and the stories I head travelling around the country. And then: I remembered.
I remembered to understand the stories -good, bad, casteist, patriarchal — that make up the spiritual and mythical fabric of the subcontinent. To understand OUR past and OUR mistakes. To learn from, to correct, and to teach the world what is best about the subcontinent: not babas and ganja-smoking, but peace, tolerance, and the joy of living. Whether we are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Kashmiri, or whatever the borders on the map tell us that we are.
So let me say this one word to my fellow South Asians: Remember.
“Remember.”
