Continued from https://indiarubbermancom.home.blog/the-unsettling-world-gandhian-view/?frame-nonce=ca8a1bbde2
11 August 2019
Just as India now uses ‘Yadum Ure…’by Kanniyan Ponkundranaarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaniyan_Pungundranar and Vasudaiva Kutumbakam as Universal Acclamations to espouse her moral ascendency in the comity of nations, she also uses the now much hated Allama Iqbal’s ‘Sare Jehan Se Accha…’ to buttress her notions of being special. Many Indians erroneously think that it is they as representative inheritors of their ancestry who can take justifiable pride in how Dharma has descended amongst our times and places as an unbroken cultural and religious heritage, as a defined dogmatic dominion, an India of Vedas and what is now widely known as ‘Hinduism’. Just as there is subtle but significant difference between the Tamil hoary declaration which espoused a sense of belonging every where, juxtaposed to accepting the world in an embrace of the familial, there is also a distinction between the Tamil ‘Aram’ ( Obligations borne by human birth) and Sanskrit ‘Dharma’(Rights and Obligations of Humans in Society). I am quite sure that Pali, Prakrit, Paisaccha, Naga, Rakshasa, Yaksha languages had similar distinctions, which make this culture as it exists today a amalgamation, an amorphous coalescing of cultures and thoughts, where the distinctiveness of source codes and customs has blunted over the eons and divisions have been erased by way of concessions and circumstances to each other. In more familiar context, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Din E Elahi, Arya/Brahmo Samaj, Unitarian Church evolved out of context to Dharma, even as Jewish, Islamic and Christian faiths found enclaves ashore in India through trade and exchange of ideas much before they became regal instruments.
Liberal views! I wonder if Indians after the entry of the word ‘maleecha’ म्लेच्छ were actually liberal! It is ironic that a word that was used in its root to signify a language one could not distinguish or discern, came to be used as a label for ‘outcast race/barbarian/non Aryan/foreigner). Post Colonial era, I think we (today’s Indians) were black mailed into accepting Partition the way we did, that India became a home for all, while Pakistan chose to be exclusive. We received a dividend of Bangladesh, but at that time we lost the opportunity to see it as an affirmation of an inclusive idea. India saw that as a rare moment of military triumphalism, without meandering into the moral question of how this was a Dharmic war, like Kurukshetra was for Pandavas, that we won because the Truth was with us, the Right Cause was with us, cementing the wisdom of our modern Founding Fathers led by Gandhi who forced us to accept India as a Secular Democracy and not a Religious State. In our recent history we see things selectively, not recognising Generalship of Hemu, Shahaji Bhosale, Raja Mansingh amongst others who served Mughals and Sultans, nor do we see Hakim Khan Suri, Kale Khan, Siddhi Hilal amongst others who served Ranas and Marathas. In a rare coincidence, in the victory over Pakistan in 1971, the Generalship of India displayed a rare mix of religious denominations, even though the Ghost of Sam Bahadur will not forgive us if we tried to past religious tags on his Army! There were Sikhs, Christians and Parsees in very senior and visible positions at that time, which was arguably simply a coincidence.
There are people well intentioned like Tarak Fateh, Martha Wright, David Frawley who reinforce stuff that would appear that Indian Government in the name of Secularism denied its ‘Hindu character’ or belittled it’s Vedic origins. Far from it, I can claim that unlike how the West pursued the hieroglyphics of Egypt we never tried to decipher the Indus Script, nor as we enthusiastic about Rakhigarhi, Keezhadi or Arikamedu amongst other sites which prove the extent and existence of pre Vedic civilisations in our sub continental landmass. The near non academic approach to a major work like Tony Joseph’s Early Indians which is cautiously suggesting that India was a magnet for immigrating cultures and settlers, suggests that we have shifted focus from what was an unique Indic world view, to one which embraces a Continental European concept of Nation State, one which was in effect hardly two centuries old and which laid the foundations for so much bloodshed and disruption in cultural ties and linguistic affiliations across regions. India’s closest example to Rome was Magadha, though she had a history predating Rome of standing armies and organised kingdoms, always surrounding Kingship, coexisting with confederations that had some form of democracy, states without Kingship called Ganarajyas as well. If as cine-goer you relished Bahubaali 1 & 2, the mistake would be to take Mahismati to exemplify even Magadha! Indian Statehood was imperial in its conquering concept of Chakravartikshetram- the sphere of influence of the imperial overlord. The ruler and the state were interchangeable definitions, even as far back as the Ramayana, with the example of Janaka/Janakapuri.
In trying to embrace modern statehood, Indians had two distinct visions, one was that of the RSS centred at Nagpur that made Indianness conditional to Hindutva and the other was one discussed and deliberated across many Congress Sessions across then British India that made Indianness unconditional! From the personal space to the political space, was the bottoms up approach of the RSS, while the Congress before it became degenerate, kept the personal and political spaces distinct.
A simple understanding of Sanskrit as a heritage language or Tamil for that matter, reveals the presence of Tamil and Sanskrit words in many languages and dialects across the globe, there are echoes of Indic thought in the works of ancient Greek, European, Chinese and even Arabic scholarship, and these reveal the unstated fact that Indian culture was an open society. Once the best minds and bodies worked in Indian universities like Taxila, Nalanda, etc and from time to time, Indian cultural miasma produced genius like Vyasa, Adi Sankara, Chanakya who edited libraries of didactic text and refashioned them to make these more relatable to their times and by extension to ours!
What the White Conservatism seeks to to destroy this alternate model of empowered collaboration and consensual collective, and create only a delineated architecture where the status of the elite will never be disturbed, where scholarship and genius will no doubt be selectively co-opted without disturbing the status quo. When Hitler proclaimed the 1000 year Reich he was simply espousing an undercurrent of White Supremacy, of White Conservatism in an unpalatable way. Through the Cold War era, White Conservatism has perfected itself, now operating through a series of institutions, NGOs and think tanks, in persuading the popular mandate to adopting its core stratagems without quite understanding their key import. If immigration is selectively challenged for Latinos,Africans and Asians as was demonstrated in the recent deportation of an ethnic Iraqi Christian from America by ICE, who was born to his parents in a refugee camp in Greece and who died within months of his deportation! (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/08/politics/deported-iraqi-national-dies/index.html)
The Too Big To Fail, the selective outrages about gun violence when Pakistanis or Arabs are involved, the way the War on Terror was conjured, the manner in which Jihad was given birth to by the CIA in Afghanistan, all points to a clear strategic view of preserving the supreme hold of White Conservatism on global polity. The current dominant mood in India has to be viewed as the succumbing of indigenous plural view to this dominance!
So how India is able to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds is something she can look to China’s Communist elite for inspiration, for China is now under notice from the White Conservatives in a joust for supremacy of dogma. There was much in Chinese totalitarianism and commercialism for White Conservatism to admire. The only challenge was whether American Technological Supremacy is essential to preservation of their project or whether going forward, the WC can shift ship to an Asian Culture that is quite similarly aligned to its core values. I foresee the WC trying to thwart the Chinese ascension for as long as possible. What WC does not see is how human ingenuity and inventive energies thrive in a particular ecosystem of plurality. The amalgamation of Germanic tribes under the Bismarck plan of Grand Reunification created the mighty German engineering and scientific prowess within a 100 years, that made the Germans leaders in many technologies until their intellectuals were co-opted by Soviets and Americans to start of the Cold War. Now when WC has played its hand, for how long will the rest of the world keep supplying it with intellectual human resources needed to maintain the edge of the current bastion of WC-America? India’s concern will be to create an ecosystem that will make references to her intellectual heritage not one of empty echoes! That will be her challenge as she discards Gandhian values for more orderly and robust Hindutva!
Concluded.
indiarubberman.com 