Even if it is realised by some individuals that India is a nation-state by virtue of being a living civilisation, this realisation is seldom reflected in our public discourse. Inevitably this lacuna influences our general approach to the problems we face.
As in the case of Europe and the Arab world, India could have remained a civilisation and not become a nation. For it to be both, it needed the intervening agency of an effective pan-Indian modern state. The British provided us with such an agency. Regardless of whatever else they did, the importance of this contribution cannot be denied.
British Enterprise
The British enterprise in India, it may be recalled, began at a time when the source of armed incursions into the sub-continent had more or less run out of its old restless energy and was itself beginning to be occupied and pacified by Czarist Russia. The British conjured up the nightmare of Russia descending on India and sent expeditionary forces into Afghanistan in a bid to anticipate it. That ended in a fiasco. But India’s frontiers were finally secure. That, in turn, fulfilled an essential precondition for nationhood.
While, however, the frontier had been secured, the consequences of earlier incursions remained to be coped with. All attempts to do so, with the natural boundaries of India as consolidated by the British intact, failed and the country had to be partitioned in 1947. But once this story was over, India as a civilisation-nation-state had come into being.
A civilisation is, by definition, multi-dimensional and multilayered. It is capable of accommodating all manner of diversities and so-called contradictions. This is especially true of Indian civilisation which, from its very beginning, has prospered on diversity. This diversity has, of course, been informed by a principle of unity.
The ancient rishis laid the foundations of our culture so large and wide as to exasperate the modern mind brought up, or trained, in a different cloistered tradition. Yet these foundations have served to give coherence to the structure. Our secular polity flows directly from this civilisation. It is not a mere product of our westernised intelligentsia and of the compulsion to accommodate minorities in a democratic political order.
Educated Indians these days rarely invoke the concept of Kalabrahma or Kaladharma. But it is central to the Indian way of thinking. It accepts explicitly the inevitability of change with the passage of time. The past is not superseded but it is modified according to the demands of the spirit of times determined, in the traditional Indian view, by the cosmic movements of planets. Thus the Vedas are followed by the Upanishads and these by the epics and the Puranas. Nothing is final. So we get masters such as Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Sri Aurobindo and Maharishi Raman in our era who renew old traditions. Sri Aurobindo even wrote mostly in the English language.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is a narrow creed. It is exclusivist, whether it is based on language, race or religious denomination or a combination of them. It involves ethnic subordinations, if not ethnic suppression and “cleansing”. The terrible events in Bosnia- Herzegovina are nothing new in the history of Europe. The holocaust preceded them by half-a-century and that, in turn, by wars between adherents of different denominations belonging to the same Christian faith. And they are accompanied right now by the explosion of a racist anti-foreign sentiment in Germany and France.
Incidentally, Serbs and Croats cannot live together despite the community of language between them at least partly because while the former belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, the latter adhere to the Roman Catholic. The schism took place in 1054 AD, that is long before Serbia was conquered by the Turks and Croatia by the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1941, Croats killed 600,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies at a concentration camp.
Nationalism
Indian nationalism has not faced the danger of such barbarism because it has been informed by a civilisation remarkable for its catholicity and broad-mindedness. That is why it did not acquire an anti-Muslim bias either when the Muslim League unleashed widespread violence as part of its campaign for Pakistan, or when Pakistan was, in fact, created. Massive riots doubtless took place at the time of Partition. But once they were controlled, not only did normalcy return but the leadership committed to a secular state remained firmly in place. Riots have taken place since. But these have invariably been the result of local factors and manipulations various kinds. Indian nationalism as such has not shifted from its commitment to non-discrimination.
The narrow-minded concept nationalism has, however, produced misperceptions and erroneous decisions. The delay in the formation of the Punjabi-speaking state is one such example, though it must be added that the utterances and actions of Akali leaders justly caused apprehensions in the minds of policy-makers in New Delhi.
A Surprise
The talk of national integration and the call to join the mainstream fall in the same category. Implicit in these is the Western-style preference for uniformity and rejection of the truly Indian love for plurality. This proposition must come as a surprise to those who accept Western claims at their face value and do not realise that leaving aside the United States, Western respect for plurality is not only of relatively recent origin but also pretty limited. But history bears testimony to its validity.
The call to join the mainstream is addressed primarily to Muslims who are not only the largest and most self-conscious minority but also have lagged behind others in modernisation. This is understandable in terms of our recent history leading to Partition. But history took a new turn on August 15, 1947, as we emerged as a independent civilisation-nation state.
Muslims as a religious community did not pose any problem before and they do not do so now. And as for the Muslim cultural personality, nourished in very different milieu, it cannot but be influenced by the larger Indian reality. The pace may not be good enough for modernists. But obsession with speed is alien to Indian civilisation which underwrites the Indian nation-state.
Modernisation, as we know from our experience of Punjab, is highly unsettling and destabilising. We have been finding it extremely difficult to cope with its consequences, as should be evident from the spread of violence in the country. Muslim orthodoxy and traditionalism is an element of stability in this period of great flux and strain. The Muslim belief in the finality of God’s revelation in the Koran and Mohammed’s prophecy is at odds with the spirit of Indian civilisation. But Indian civilisation is large enough to accommodate it.
The Times of India, 10 September 1992