By Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit
Indian civilisation has always celebrated development, democracy, diversity, difference, and dissent
Reducing India to a civic nation bound only by the Constitution disregards its history, ancient heritage, culture and civilisation. I would describe India as a “civilisation state”. This is not just a view from one part of the country. There have been writings since time immemorial, where you have this concept, and it is very important to revisit them. It predates the freedom struggle and the arrival of those who eventually made India their homeland. Celebrating history beyond religion is very important. We have to face the challenge of a distorted history: Distorted both because history is “his” story — I think the “her” story also has to come. And the overturning of E H Carr’s dictum: “Facts are sacred, interpretations vary.” Unfortunately, in independent India, and to a certain extent a university I belong to, overturned this dictum: “Interpretations are sacred, facts can vary.” And this is very dangerous. This is a civilisation that preached “ekam sat bahudha vadanti”, that the truth may be one but there are different parts to it. This is the basic essence of the celebration of diversity, dissent, difference, as well as democracy.
Why are we today trying to re-emphasise this point? It’s because we are made to imagine our history with self-loathing and self-hatred. One period is excessively glorified. And I, who come from the south, feel even worse. The longest-ruling dynasty in India was the Chola dynasty, which ruled this country for 2,000 years. Is there any road named after any of the great kings of the Cholas? Not one in Delhi. There is a huge bias, agenda-setting as well as gatekeeping. And it is extremely important that we revisit these ideas and look into the gaps. As most of you know India is not a post-independent idea of a nation. The Rig Veda defined the geographical existence of Bharatavarsha as well as the Sapta Sindhu, a land encompassing seven principal rivers. The Vishnu Purana descried the geographical location of Bharatavarsha. Composed in the 2nd century BC, it says that the land that lies to the north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharat. And there dwell the progeny of Bharat. The word “rashtra” was used in the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda. Rashtra is not only a merely geopolitical concept, it is also a civilisational concept. It is a kind of thought which keeps a patriot in the frame of mind to transcend all the material and immediate interests and protect the motherland from all calamities, aggression and evil. Love for the country is not the same as love for the nation and self-determination, sovereignty or even structuring a composite culture. Rashtra bhakti is a subconscious feeling of being an Indian or a person belonging to this great civilisation. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism is not a proselytising or a structured religion of one book and one God. We are a process. It’s a way of life.
Robert Frykenberg, the American historian, described the Indian National Movement as also being a Hindu revivalist and modernist movement, quoting Bankim Chandra Chatterjee with his Vande Mataram, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, as well as Sri Aurobindo and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who redefined Hinduism in modern terms. So cultural civilisation is only a civilisational perception — a sense of belonging and anchoring in a specific cultural and civilisational milieu.
Most have heard of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and his book, Gita Rahasya. Tilak was the first to say, “Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it”. He infused the spirit of political assertiveness and patriotism, both of which are extremely relevant today, in the people. To inject the spirit of nationalism and awareness among the people, he started the Ganesh festival and Shivaji Mahotsav. These were instrumental in bringing people together, irrespective of caste or creed. And I would say he was the first mass leader before Mahatma Gandhi. Many people think Gandhi is a disciple of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. I would rather say he’s a disciple of Tilak. Both Tilak and Gandhi were greatly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. They saw it as an instrument of karma yoga, rather than just bhakti yoga.
Next, I would like to bring in the ideas of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He said politics should be a service and not a profession. And I think it is this aspect that we have to bring in and young scholars must use these narratives, which are available in the writings of many of the Indian freedom fighters. Unfortunately, we have forgotten all these great nationalists who existed.
I’m going to the more marginalised areas — Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. There was Subramania Bharati, known as Mahakavi Bharati, to Tamil speakers for his outstanding contributions to nationalism and Tamil literature. A passionate freedom fighter, social revolutionary, mystic and visionary who was active during the late period of British rule, he spent much of his all too brief life exiled from British India, in neighbouring Pondicherry, just like Sri Aurobindo. He died suddenly in 1921. He was just 38 years old. He had little opportunity to provide for his legacy, literary or otherwise. In his writings, he talked about the intangible cultural heritage of India and the unity of this culture. The writings destroy all ambiguity. He clearly said that clarity of mind is very important and he thought that all languages and literatures of India have a single origin. Bharati was a genius. He was also ahead of his time. He also spoke about women’s liberation. Many people believe that feminism or women’s rights movements began only with Marx and ended there. The first feminists are Drapaudi and Sita. Who could be a greater feminist than Draupadi, or Sita who is the first single mother. These concepts are not invented by the West.
I’d also like to mention Subramaniya Siva, and two Telugu writers called Duggirala Gopalakrishnayya, who said the nation is not its sand and mud but its people, and Kandukuri Veeresalingam, who was like lshwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a great reformer from the south.
The great writer, Ananda K Coomaraswamy said the highlight of Indian civilisation is the dance of Lord Shiva. The temple of Chidambaram has the Nataraja avatar — the lord of dance — of Lord Shiva, or the thillai form as we call it, as do the South Indian copper images of Shri Nataraja. These images vary amongst themselves in minor details, but all express one fundamental conception — our Lord is the dancer who, like the heat latent in firewood, diffuses his power into the mind and matter and makes them dance in their turn. Cosmic activity is the central motif of the dance. Creation arises from the drum, protection proceeds from the hand of hope, and destruction comes from fire and the foot held afloat gives release. You see this legendary argument about Lord Shiva’s dance as the highlight of the Indian civilisational trait in the Cholas. The Cholas occupied the Indo Pacific regions called the Srivijaya and Suvarnabhumi. They defeated the Chinese and it is the image of Lord Shiva that was their ruling symbol.
So we ask: can India become a norm builder? When you’re a civilisational state, it is expected that we build narratives that can become norms in international relations, in all aspects of life. The way the Cholas conquered, they did not do it by genocide, rape or loot. It was more by culture, trade and commerce. If you look for an alternative paradigm, you have this. When we talk of cultural nationalism, it should help us to define certain very important identifying characteristics that we need to be a norm builder, a shared value system which includes the acceptance of international norms. Yes, we don’t believe in loot, genocide or rape; we believe in trade and commerce and culture. The existence of institutional mechanisms for the resolution of conflicts.
The British did not give us democratic values. If they had, then Myanmar, Pakistan, all countries ruled by the British should have been democracies. India is a democracy because it has a political culture, a culture that can choose from 3,000 crore gods. What more diversity would you require? We are the only country that has sustained a oasis of democracy in the Third World. India’s contribution to multiculturalism and cultural pluralism is extraordinarily important. And it is here that we also have the world-centric paradigm of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam against the state-centric paradigm. And we also believe in a nature-centric paradigm, not an anthropocentric paradigm. We believe that human beings are a part of the cosmos, where every other living and non-living thing has equal space, and a function that has been created for them. We also have the Buddhist philosophy: Lord Gautama, the Buddha, was the first dissenter and we celebrate dissent. Buddhism is a religion of the middle path. And India has always believed in the middle path and non-attachment. Adi Shankaracharya, through Advaita, brought these ideas back into Indian philosophy.
At one point, 2,000 years ago, Tamil was the lingua franca of traders across Southeast Asia. These were not Indian colonies, but proto-states that took on the Hindu apparatus of religion, and concepts of kingship to enhance their position and status. While communities of Indian traders settled in important ports along Southeast Asia, they never crossed the line into becoming colonisers. This is our civilisation, we never colonised anybody. What happened instead, was that local rulers imbibed the Indian traditions. Indian cultural nationalism is on a path that is very different from that of the anthropocentric or the Abrahamic religions. So whenever we talk of Indian civilisation, it is something that celebrates development, democracy, diversity, difference, and dissent.
Originally published: The Indian Express, May 24, 2022. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-idea-of-indian-nationalism-did-not-come-from-the-constitution-it-has-ancient-roots-7932081/
Posted in SIS Blog with the authorization of Dean, SIS.
Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is Vice-Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Edited excerpts from a speech delivered at the seminar, “Revisiting the ideas of India from ‘Swaraj’ to ‘New India’” at the University of Delhi, on May 20, 2022.