THE STORY OF INDIA REDISCOVERED : Beginnings (Part - I)

Some years ago, a well dressed gentleman walked into an up-market departmental store in the Belgravia suburb of London. Once he had found what he was looking for he walked up to the counter and stood in line at the cashiers'. When it was his time to pay up he took out his wallet and with the pound-notes out fell a picture of an Indian Hindu deity. The person standing right behind our protagonist, himself an Indian, saw the picture and immediately warmed to the latter.
Our protagonist, the well dressed man was immediately asked if he was a Punjabi. He was not. He was then asked if he was a Gujrati. He was not. He was then told (firmly) that he then must be from UP. Our friend still replied that he was not. The gentleman asking all these questions, by now very hot under the collar, asked quite abrasively (thinking it was some kind of joke) “so what the hell kind of bloody Indian are you?”

This simple event, describes in a microcosm the socio-cultural & linguistic divide that is prevalent in India. The two Indias divided by the Vindhiya Mountains, have existed separately for nearly 2000 years and were only brought together by the much (and not always rightly) maligned British; and this fact somehow, never has been accepted by the historians of the nationalistic school.

The nationalist school of history, fashioned by the Congress in the early 1900s, was founded to give India some sort of cohesive identity. An identity that had eluded it for all of the 10,000 years of its civilisation. If the country had to be united in its desire to rid itself of foreign rule, then it must have some idea of its own identity and heritage. There must be a valid reason to want to get rid of the invader and the simplest reason was that they were foreign and thus oppressive and somehow seeking to obliterate Indian culture and society.
The problem facing the high-priests of this school was that there was no such identity to be found. India as we know it today, has only existed since the 1930s when the British (somewhat arbitrarily) drew the borders of this country out of the areas that it ruled over. Never before has such a landmass been ruled over by one single entity or polity. So who was to decide who was a foreigner and who was Indian? What were the Indian cultures & values that the British were trying to erase and more importantly why would one want to be called an Indian?

Ironically it was the British who gave us the help we needed. When they carved out a large political entity out of their South Asian dominions, they accidentally gave us not only a nation but also our identities. All those who were born inside that area were Indians. Simple. Off course the problems with that were that the borders drawn were completely arbitrary and later on (in 1962) would be the cause of numerous problems. The other big problem was that there was a lot of recorded history to contest this one-nation theory.

In about 2000 BC, the nomads of central Asia came down through the Hindu Kush mountains and settled in the lush Indus plains. These were the Aryans. Tall & fair, with high cheekbones and long noses, they were at a complete contrast to the original inhabitants of the Indus plains. These were short and dark people who worshiped numerous Gods, mostly of the natural world. Dravidians.
The Dravidian culture and society was far more civilised and socialised and sophisticated that the Aryan nomads'.
The displaced Dravidians went back down south to their homeland and built the stunning temple complexes (in Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh & Kerela) that haven't seen an equal in the North yet. Their language also evolved separately and Tamil , today is the world's oldest continually spoken classical language. Far older and certainly far more perfectly (sophisticated) structured than Sanskrit – the (so called) mother of all Indian languages.

Not only the language, but also the sociological structure and even the religion was far removed from that of the Aryan North. While the Aryan's had a simplistic Triumvir of Gods, the South had a complex structure of a multi-layered divine society. The caste system, a plague upon India – even as recently as 2010 – is a Aryan thing.

THE STORY OF INDIA REDISCOVERED: the foreword

India’s 1st “census” of sorts was compiled during the tenure of Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II back in the late 1700s and was more in the nature of a complicated head count than anything else. Historians have long been at loggerheads about the nature of this effort that, to say the least, was unexpected from the person who, symbolically at least, gave away our independence.

While some historians say that the idea wasn’t really his, but belonged to a more farsighted courtier; the nationalist school of history has claimed that it was a more Anglo-French initiative (British in the North & East and French in the West & South) to see what wealth lay to be taken. Although both schools have a great deal of evidence to support their respective claims, they are united on the issue of caste having not been an issue at those times; in other words no one made such a big hue and cry over it.

Now in 2011, 230 odd years down the line, the Govt. of India has agreed to include Caste in the census. That they have pushed Indian society back a good 100 years is not in doubt; neither is that fact that they’re bowing down to parties that have made caste their primary ladder to power; the important question is how do we get out of this almighty rut.

Nehru, the founder of modern India and its 1st family, not to mention its 1st PM was not only an atheist but a socialist to boot; that means he neither believed in God, nor the baseless and superfluous distinctions between men. He, doubtless, would have strongly disapproved of the doings of his party, just as he strongly disapproved of Gandhi’s acceptance of “reserved constituencies” for social and religious minorities back in 1935. The problem, then, was that Ambedkar, leader of the dalits, and Jinnah of the (then nascent) Muslim League were far more astute thinkers and negotiators than they were thought to be (by Nehru who was more of an idealist than anything else). Also they were neither impressed nor bowled over by Gandhi’s charm offensives and PR gambits; and since on both occasions Gandhi (who was never a formal member of the Congress Party) carried on these negotiations alone, disaster was bound to ensue.

The past, as they say, is history; and the world has certainly moved on since then. In 2007, for the 1st time in human history, more people around the world will live in cities than in the country side. India, as always, will be an exception to this; but even here the country side has changed. The India that Gandhi said lived in its villages is long gone, yet why does caste still play such a major role in people’s lives today and can the people do something to stop this relentless march to divisive policies.

One answer is to look to the urban middle class. Some say that when the urban, educated middle class makes up 50%-65% of the population, the politicians will have to change their rhetoric to suit these new aspirations, but that is still generation away at best. Even a progressive western education might not be enough to ward off the evils that befell our forefathers. The recent spate of caste-based honor killings in UP, Bihar and Haryana (where such things have become disturbingly common) show that even the most broad-minded of parents can be shockingly conservative (read boorish) when it comes to their daughters’ future.

The answer is to look back to India’s past, for clues to its future. The past must be re-examined in the cold light of reason and enlightenment. We must clearly examine every choice made and reflect on the roads not taken to properly gauge the course ahead.

There was once a concept called India, an idea that lived in its people; that idea must be found, its story unearthed and its message rediscovered.

RIGHT LEFT & CENTRE

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), the oldest in the country will hold elections to determine the Mayor of Calcutta.

Needless to say that it’s a hotly contested election, not least because the party in power gets to demand the rates and bribes that need be paid by illegal builders and the transport unions in order to ply their trades. By the estimate of one Bengali newspaper, approximately Rs.52 Crores was paid as bribes by Auto Rickshaw unions alone to the KMC between 2000 and 2009.

The roads to these elections, though, haven’t been without excitement. The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Indian National Congress (INC), despite some initial foreplay never got around to touching the home-base of the pre-poll alliance that many would’ve liked. In the end it came down to seat-sharing that broke up the dalliance.

The TMC, mindful that the INC at New Delhi  had gotten itself Mayawati’s support and thus didn’t “need” the TMC to prop up the UPA II Govt. decided field candidates in 115 out of the 144 wards in the CMC. Their logic was (and is) that as the more dominant out of the 2 parties in the state, it had a right to those seats. They also might have wanted the INC to see this as a show of strength as the West Bengal State Assembly elections are in 2011. The congress, for its part didn’t play ball as most of its senior members felt that they weren’t being offered a fair shot and that the terms offered were humiliating, especially since the INC had been in politics since 1887 and the TMC since the 1990s.

This of course meant that there were several “sessions” of high-powered “committees”. (Party, Working, Executive, Parliamentary, Joint-Parliamentary etc.)

It all came to naught in the end with neither party budging from its stated position.

This was good news to the dutiful folk at CPI(M) Headquarters at Alimuddin Street. The Left Front has been beleaguered of late with infighting and general dissolutionment not to mention the Maoists. Then there was the issue of them loosing several key seats including 25 to the TMC & allies in the Lok Sabha Bye-elections of 2009. There is also the matter of grooming a suitable successor to Buddhadeb Bhattacharyya and Nirupam Sen, both of whom are getting along in their years.

Whatever may be the case, the Left Front is sitting pretty at the moment as their vote-bank of transport, labor and unskilled office staff unions remains largely intact; something Mamata “didi” Bannerjee is acutely aware off. The problem lies in her decision to fight everyone on all fronts.

As far as the CMC elections go the TMC are in a good position. Even if the pre-poll alliance failed, there’s always a general joint-agreement, with the INC, to fight the Left Front to fall back upon incase the 2 parties decide to patch up after the elections, if for nothing else, just to keep the Communists out.

Whether the powers that be in each camp will allow that to happen is another matter, for politicians much like peacocks, like to strut their stuff incessantly.