On Tuesday 22 Jan 2008 9:50 am, Gautam John wrote: > On Jan 22, 2008 9:49 AM, Ashok Krish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In fact, it is an absolute miracle that India is still, for most part, a > > single country. > > Butter chicken and cricket, or so says Mark Tully, is the glue that binds > us. > > Precious little to hold a country together, IMHO.
Try reading Ramchandra Guha's take. That apart, there is a lot binding the country together. There is a "British take" that has a tendency to discount the role of the majority Hindu community in India in actually giving a sense of oneness despite the often quoted divisive issues (that are a leaf taken out from what the British described) Hindus, it was said, are divided by caste and other issues. And that story has been swallowed whole without digging deeper to see where there were fissures and where there are bonds. (This is part of the failed sociology of India) There was a case of GIGO here that is likely to be set straight in coming decades. The fissures of Hindu India stand exposed and defined by the Brits and the educated elite, and everyone marvels that there is a a bond at all, and one more Brit (Tully) is quoted to explain why there is a bond. One factor that people continuously discount is that when Hindus were accused of being divisive on caste and communal lines, they (Hindus), for large part relented and accepted that these were true and initiated measures within Indian society to close the fissures. This was the effect of enlightened Hindu leadership that includes Gandhi who insisted on a Hindu need to reconcile, and got a large proportion of Hindus to agree because they had no major ideological issues to stop them from agreeing with Gandhi. Gandhis mistakes are another matter, but on the topic of Indian unity nobody seems to mention that the empowerment of middle and lower caste Hindus and the acceptance of that by the vast proportion of higher caste Hindus including the so called "right wing" is leading to a form of Hindu unity that did not exist before. Nobody really wants to see what is openly apparent. Most often, modern Indian accusations of divisiveness and extremism are an internal Hindu debate with Hindus accusing other Hindus of being that way. (secular vs rightwing) Divisive as that may appear it remains an area of active debate and "work in progress" of healing and uniting India as a society. How come nobody notices and clings on to outdated British views? So let us not imagine that there is nothing holding India together and the unity is just a mystery. That is a myth that is popularly propagated by Indian educated elite based on a British view of India. The problem may really lie in both what the Hindu right wing say and what Ramchandra Guha says. The right wing say that the history of India was distorted. Ram Guha says that Indians stopped writing history after 1947. Indian history ends in 1947. shiv
