What on earth does ‘India is the land of the Hindus’ really mean? For liberals like me, plurality, in culture and spirit
For as long as I can remember there has been incessant debate in India about this whole business of whether or not this vast, multicultural, plural nation is, or is not, the land of the Hindus.
This one phrase has been used and abused at will by every single polemicist on every single side to make, sometimes, all sorts of absolutely ridiculous statements that are embarrassing to the enlightened and unique history of India.
What does it mean to be a Hindu? Some would say it means a Hindu is what a Hindu does. And what does a Hindu do? Well, a Hindu lives on the ‘other side’ as it were of the River Indus or, to give its Indian name, Sindhu. This is how, it is said, Hinduism got its name. The Persian (and before them, the Greeks) invaders of India supposedly could not, it is said, manage the ‘s’ and replaced it in pronunciation with an ‘h’. So it became that everyone who lived south of the River Sindhu or Indus came to be called Hindu. North of the river was the mountainous terrain that was the land route to Central Asia through Afghanistan, the route of countless invasions from the Islamic world through the medieval period of Indian history, including by one Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, from Samarkhand, with two bloodlines flowing through him, of Timur, The Lame and Ghenghis Khan, who started the Mughal Empire.
But is that then the identity of the Hindus? Our raison d’être? That we are on one side of the river? This is far from a frivolous question because it goes to the heart of Hinduism’s identity in its homeland. It strikes at the root of a question being asked since independence in 1947 – if Pakistan is the land of the Muslims, created specifically as such, then is India, conversely, clearly the land of the Hindus? The constitution of India says no. It imagines a secular state when everyone finds a place. But increasingly it has become more urgent, as this question is raised again and again in Indian politics, to address the question of the Hindu relation to the state of India and how that relationship has evolved and where it stands today, nearly 70 years after independence.
It is a question that has been furiously debated, often with every side coming to the table with an agenda – and yet, it is important to understand that in the understanding of the common Hindu, and in a deliberative analysis of the query, the answer is not thorny, not irretrievably complex. The answer lies in the practice of Hinduism and is verified by numerous historical authorities.
The question to ask is what really defines the collective memory of a nation? How does it take shape in national consciousness? What are the characteristics that define its boundaries and its identity in the memory? Is it not true that a nation is, in reality, first and perhaps foremost a subconscious construct? You imagine nation before it exists, and so it exists.
In the colonial narrative, there was no ‘India’ before the British brought more parts of the subcontinent under one political rule than had ever been before. This is, more or less, the central theme of James Mill’s three-volume History of British India. Mill, political theorist, historian and father of John Stuart Mill who would later give us On Liberty, argued, in essence, that India was a regressive dark hole until the light of English renaissance via colonial rule fell on it.
‘A duly qualified man can obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India,’ he wrote, thus presumably eradicating the need to visit a country and meet its people before embarking on a grand project to write its history.
Some of Mill’s harshest words were for the Hindu and Hindu culture which he described as a despicable hell hole of oppression and drudgery. ‘…under the glossing exterior of the Hindoo (colonial spelling), lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy… in truth, the Hindoo like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave… dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society.’
‘Cowardly, unfeeling’, the Hindu, said Mill, was also ‘in physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses.’
Perhaps one of the most influential colonial books ever written about India, it was later described by the American historian Thomas Trautmann, who specializes on ancient India, as ‘the single most important source of British Indophobia.’
That India is a colonial construct, and had no locus standi as a civilization, far less as a member of the body polity of nations before colonial rule, is an old argument. In fact, it is a colonial argument. The argument essentially states, correctly, that before the British Raj arrived in India, as far as the geographical boundaries were concerned, there had not been a nation state, as we understand the modern concept, of India. This much is fact.
But was there no sense of a culture, of a definitive land, bound by religion, used here by me in its Latin root word sense — ligare, to bind? Of course there was. There has been for centuries. And therein lies the nuance of this rather facile debate — at least I think so for anyone who spends just a little bit of time thinking about this.
But here comes the nuance. The idea of a unified, plural, composite cultural homeland called Bharat or Bharata has existed for almost 3,000 years which is around when the first foundational text of Vedanta literature, the Rig Veda, was written. Now what is this Bharat and is it any different from India as we know it? Not really. How do we know this? Well, one of the way we know is through collective memory, which is a construct based on historical writings, oral traditions, myths and, as the Harvard professor of religion Diana Eck has shown in her masterly India: A Sacred Geography, India, then known as Bharata has been a philosophical construct complete with broad definitions of borders which almost entirely replicate the cartological (cartology as we all know is the science of map mapping) stretch of pre-1947 India. (None of this much is disputed by anyone.)
This geographical construct has been defined, to use the words of a favourite tutor of the historian Simon Schama, using ‘the archive of the feet’, emphasized for several millennia — in hymns, prayers, myths, legends, countless journeys undertaken by pilgrims. This idea of an imagined landscape also comes from Schama who details this in his seminal work Landscape and Memory. In his explanation for instance of how there are similarities in approach between the geography, in the mind and on the ground, you will find similarities between the philosophical and geographical idea of India as traversed and established by the Hindu tirtha or pilgrimage map, and the Christian notion of big trees being contemporaries of Christ. The Scottish American naturalist John Muir, noted Schama, ‘counted the rings on one martyr to the axe and discovered that – this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra winds when Christ walked the earth’. In 1920, the historian Radhakumud Mookerji spoke about this imagination of India or Bharata when he spoke about the river hymns of the in the Vedas. ‘As the mind of the devotee calls up in succession the images of these different rivers defining the limits of his country, it naturally traverses the entire area of his native land and grasps the image of the whole as a visible unit and form.’ The river hymns of the Rig Veda, said Mookerji, was the ‘first national conception of Indian unity such as it was’.
In her book, Eck writes, ‘Bharata is not merely a convenient designation for a conglomerate of cultures, such as Europe has been for so much of its history or such as Indonesia has become in modern times. Nor was Bharata ever the name of a political entity like a nation-state, at least until 1947, when it became the proper name of independent India. And yet it is arresting to consider a sense of unity construed in and through the diverse imagine landscape… a sense of connectedness that seems to have flourished for many centuries without the need for overarching political expression or embodiment.’
There is a favourite argument that says that nothing called India existed because there was no definitive map. But as Eck explains, this is fundamentally flawed as a tool to look at India because mythology and geography have a very close linkage in the country. The epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, for instance, and the Puranas, are often describing not just incidents but detailed locations that actually exist in the landscape. ‘Not only was the geography of the land expounded most prominently in Hindu mythological texts, but conversely, Hindu mythology in these texts was constantly grounded in the topography of the land of India,’ says Eck.
‘There is arguably no other major culture that has sustained over so many centuries, and across such diverse regions, a fundamentally locative or place-oriented world view.’ It is the char dham or the four pilgrimage spot spread across four corners of the imagined landscape which patterned India’s Hindu landscape and created through countless treks by thousands of pilgrims who archived through their feet the first indigenous idea of the Indian nationhood. It is these itineraries of pilgrims that laid root the dream of a homeland.
This is not surprising to any practicing (or even non-practicing, since even atheism is valid theological and philosophical position in the faith) Hindu. We have always known it. And this is not even just confined to the Hindus, as Eck points out, it is in their sacred geography that Muslims built scores of shrines dedicated to saints, to an extent incompatible to the Arabic idea of rigid, monotheistic Islam, as have the Christians and the Sikhs and so many other faiths like Zoroastrianism, which found shelter in India when persecuted in Persia, Jainism, Buddhism, since it is the birthplace of the Buddha, and Sikhism. The Hindu imagination of a sacred geography that defined the founding blocks of a plural nationhood allowed the newer faiths to add their own bricks to this palimpsest, as the first prime Jawaharlal Nehru called it, and assimilate over time.
Swami Vivekananda himself made this distinction, ‘In Europe, political ideas form the national unity. In Asia, religious ideals form the national unity. There must be the recognition of one religion throughout the length and breadth of this land. What do I mean by one religion? Not in the sense of one religion as held among the Christians, or the Mohammedans, or the Buddhists. We know that our religion has certain common grounds, common to all sects, however varying their conclusions may be, however different their claims may be,’ he said.
‘So there are certain common grounds, and within their limitation this religion of ours admits of a marvellous variation, an infinite liberty to think, and live our own lives.’
This is the Hindu plural imagination that sustained its civilization for 3,000 to 4,000 years, during which the Vedic texts were composed, before the arrival of the Islamic age (800 years) and British rule (less than 200 years). As R. C. Majumdar explained in the introduction to the influential 11 volume The History and Culture of the Indian People, it is pre-Islamic India that laid the philosophical bedrock for the syncretic, secular, composite culture that India has been able to build, therefore to credit this foremost Hindu imagination of a tolerant scared geography is neither incorrect, nor is any manner, shape or form discriminatory.
