The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

1. The Invention of India

IN A PASSAGE OF HIS MUCH-MISUNDERSTOOD NOVEL The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie writes of “the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition.” Under the Mughals, he says, artists of different faiths and traditions were brought from many parts of India to work on a painting. One hand would paint the mosaic floors, another the human figures, a third the cloudy skies: “Individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Overartist who, literally, was Indian painting.”

This evocative image could as well be applied to the very idea of India, itself the product of the same hybrid culture. How, after all, can one approach this land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with twenty-three major languages and 22,000 distinct dialects (including some spoken by more people than Danish or Norwegian), inhabited in the first years of the twenty-first century by a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is 40 percent illiterate but which has educated the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while two out of three Indians still scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal emperor to declaim, “If on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this”? How does one gauge a culture that elevated nonviolence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials attempt to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken™ as a threat to the nation, where a former prime minister bitterly criticizes the sale of Pepsi-Cola™ “in a country where villagers don't have clean drinking water,” and yet invents more sophisticated software for U.S. computer manufacturers than any other country in the world? How can one portray an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties, and three hundred ways of cooking the potato?

The short answer is that it can't be done — at least not to everyone's satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayaté”—Truth alone triumphs. The question remains, however, whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers — if the last census hasn't undercounted us again.

For the singular thing about India, as I have written elsewhere, is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. If India were to adopt the well-known U.S. motto, it would have read “E Pluribis Pluribum.” Everything exists in countless variants. There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way.” This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes, and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. The idea of India is that of a land emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy, but containing a world of differences. It is not surprising, then, that the political life of modern India has been rather like traditional Indian music: the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.

When India celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, our then — prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi's sixteenth-century red fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India's national language. Eight other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing forty-eight times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one — the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could the country be ruled by a man who does not understand its national language; only in India, for that matter, is there a national language that half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema's finest “playback singers,” the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.

For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh may cherish the illusion that he represents the “majority community,” an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 81 percent of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, my home state of Kerala, he would be surprised to discover that the majority there is not even male.

Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majority-hood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, a “backward caste,” 85 percent of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.

If caste and language complicate the notion of Indian identity, ethnicity makes it even more difficult. Most of the time, an Indian's name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is: when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins. Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but they share little identity with each other in respect to their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language, or even, these days, their political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would feel he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat, with whom he formally shares the Hindu religion.

What makes India, then, a nation? What is an Indian's identity?

Let me risk the wrath of anti-Congress readers and take an Italian example. No, not that Italian example, but one from 140 years ago. Amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets, the nineteenth-century novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Oddly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought—“We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.”

Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, because he believed India and Indians had existed for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Kerala peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, our nationalist movement did.

Nations have been formed out of varying and different impulses. France and Thailand are the products of a once ruthless unifying monarchy, and Germany and the United States were created by sternly practical and yet visionary modernizing elites. Italy and Bangladesh are the results of mass movements led by messianic figures, Holland and Switzerland the creation of discrete cantons wishing to merge for their mutual protection. But it is only recently that race or ethnicity has again been seen as the basis of nationhood, as has become apparent in the prolonged breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

Most modern nations are the product of a fusion of population groups over the centuries, to the point where one element is indistinguishable from the next. The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan pointed out, for instance, that “an Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. However, [he] is neither the Briton of Julius Caesar's time, nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist's time, nor the Dane of Canute's time, nor the Norman of William the Conqueror's time; [he] is rather the result of all these.” We cannot yet say the same of an Indian, because we are not yet the product of the kind of fusion that Renan's Englishman represents.

So India cannot claim ethnicity as a uniting factor, since what we loosely have in common with each other as a generally recognizable “type” we also have in common with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Maldivians, and Nepalese, with whom we do not share a common political identity. (And further distinctions make matters worse — after all, Indian Bengalis and Punjabis have far more in common ethnically with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis than with Bangaloreans and Poonawallahs.) Nor can we cite religion. Looking again at foreign models of the nation-state, many scholars have pointed out that the adoption of Christianity by both conquerors and the conquered helped the creation of the Western European nations, since it eliminated the distinction between ethnic groups in the society on the basis of their religion. But this is not a useful answer in India, for a Tamil Hindu can share a faith with a Haryanvi Jat and still feel he has little else in common with him. And equally important, over 200 million Indians do not share the faith of the majority, and would be excluded from any religiously defined community (as non-Christian minorities among immigrants in Europe feel excluded today from full acceptance into their new societies).

A third element that has, historically, served to unite nations in other parts of the world is language. In Europe, conquerors and the conquered rapidly came to speak the same language, usually that of the conquered. In India, attempts by Muslim conquerors to import Persian or Turkic languages never took root and, instead, the hybrid camp language called Urdu or Hindustani evolved as the language of both rulers and the ruled in most of North India. But Hindi today has made very limited inroads into the south, east, and northeast, so linguistic unity remains a distant prospect (all the more so given that languages like Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil have a far richer cultural and literary tradition than the Hindi that seeks to supplant them).

No language enjoys majority status in India, though Hindi is coming perilously close. Thanks in part to the popularity of Mumbai's Bollywood cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it cannot truly be considered the language of the majority; its locutions, gender rules, and script are still unfamiliar to most Indians in the south and the northeast. And if the proliferation of Hindi TV channels has made the spoken language more accessible to many non-native speakers, the fact that other languages too have captured their share of the TV audience means that our linguistic diversity is not going to disappear.

But my larger and more serious point is that the French speak French, the Germans speak German, the Americans speak English (though Spanish is making inroads, especially in the Southwest and Southeast of the United States) — but Indians speak Punjabi, or Gujarati, or Malayalam, and it does not make us any less Indian. The idea of India is not based on language. It is no accident that Jawaharlal Nehru's classic volume of Indian nationalism, The Discovery of India, was written in English — and it is fair to say that Nehru discovered India in English. Indeed, when two Indians meet abroad, or two educated urban Indians meet in India, unless they have prior reason to believe they have an Indian language in common, the first language they speak to each other is English. It is in English that they establish each other's linguistic identity, and then they switch comfortably to another language, or a hybrid, depending on the link they have established. Language and religion are, in any case, an inadequate basis for nationhood. Over eighty countries profess Christianity, but they do not seek to merge with each other; the Organization of the Islamic Conference has more than fifty members, who agree on many issues but do not see themselves as a single nation. As for language, Arabic makes meetings of the Arab League more convenient, no doubt, but has hardly been a force for political unity; Spanish has not melted the political frontiers that vivisect Latin America; and England and the United States remain, in the famous phrase, two countries divided by a common language.

A more poetic suggestion made by the French historian Ernest Renan is that historical amnesia is an essential part of nation-building, that nations are those that have forgotten the price they have paid in the past for their unity. This is true of India, though the Babri Masjid tragedy reveals that we Indians are not very good at forgetting. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads and the mud of the future on our feet.

So Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language (since there are at least twenty-three or thirty-five, depending on whether you follow the amended constitution or the ethnolinguists). Nor on religion, since India is a secular pluralist state that is home to every religion known to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism; and Hinduism — a faith without a national organization, no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship — exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage. Not on geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent — the mountains and the sea — was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in pre-partition India is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of an idea.

To repeat the argument: we are all minorities in India. Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land — emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. India's democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. The Indian idea is the opposite of what Freudians call “the narcissism of minor differences”; in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. The whole point of Indianness is its pluralism: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once. To borrow Michael Ignatieff's famous phrase, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Indians are used to multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity.

That idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, conviction, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is about the simple idea that in a democracy you don't really need to agree — except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.

Is such an idea sustainable in a land where 81 percent of the population adhere to one faith — Hinduism? There is no question but that the Indian ethos is infused by a pervasive and eclectic Hindu culture that draws richly from other traditions, notably Islamic ones. Recent news stories have chronicled the rise of an alternative strain in Indian politics, one that appeared to reject this consensus — that of an intolerant and destructive “Hindutva” movement that assaults India's minorities, especially its Muslims, that destroyed a well-known mosque in 1992, and conducted horrific attacks on Muslims in the state of Gujarat ten years later. The sectarian misuse of Hinduism for minority bashing is especially sad since Hinduism provides the basis for a shared sense of common culture within India that has little to do with religion. The inauguration of a public project, the laying of a foundation stone, or the launching of a ship usually starts with the ritual smashing of a coconut, an auspicious practice in Hinduism but one which most Indians of other faiths cheerfully accept in much the same spirit as a teetotaler acknowledges the role of champagne in a Western celebration. Hindu festivals, from Holi (when friends and strangers of all faiths are sprayed with colored water in a Dionysian ritual) to Deepavali (the festival of lights, firecrackers, and social gambling) have already gone beyond their religious origins to unite Indians of all faiths as a shared experience.

Festivals, melas, lilas, all “Hindu” in origin, have become occasions for the mingling of ordinary Indians of all backgrounds; indeed, for generations now, Muslim artisans in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi have made the traditional masks for the annual Ram Lila (the dance-drama depicting the tale of the divine god-king Rama). Hindu myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a common idiom to all Indians, and it was not surprising that when national television broadcast a ninety-four-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. Both Hindus and Muslims throng the tombs and dargahs of Sufi Muslim saints. Hindu devotional songs are magnificently sung by the Muslim Dagar brothers. Hinduism and Islam are intertwined in Indian life. In the Indian context today, it is possible to say that there is no Hinduism without Islam: the saffron and the green both belong on the Indian flag.

A lovely story that illustrates the cultural synthesis of Hinduism and Islam in northern India was recounted by two American scholars. It seems an Indian Muslim girl was asked to participate in a small community drama about the life of Lord Krishna, the Hindu god adored by shepherdesses, who dance for his pleasure (and who exemplify through their passion the quest of the devout soul for the Lord). Her Muslim father forbade her to dance as a shepherdess with the other schoolgirls. In that case, said the drama's director, we will cast you as Krishna. All you have to do is stand there in the usual Krishna pose, a flute at your mouth. Her father consented, and so the Muslim girl played Krishna.

This is India's secularism, far removed from its French equivalent. Western dictionaries define secularism as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism means a profusion of religions, none of which is privileged by the state and all of which are open to participation by everybody. Secularism in India does not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the DMK have found unpopular among their voters; indeed, in Calcutta's annual Durga Puja (the annual festival celebrating the goddess Durga, which is the Bengali Hindu's equivalent of Christmas), the youth wings of the Communist parties compete with each other to put up the most lavish Puja pandals or pavilions to the goddess. Rather, it means, in the Indian tradition, multi-religiousness. In the Calcutta neighborhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the tinkling bells and chanted mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple nearby and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Guru Granth Sahib. (And St. Paul's Cathedral was only minutes away.)

Hindus pride themselves on belonging to a religion of astonishing breadth and range of belief; a religion that acknowledges all ways of worshiping God as equally valid — indeed, the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. This eclectic and nondoctrinaire Hinduism — a faith without apostasy, where there are no heretics to cast out because there has never been any such thing as a Hindu heresy — is not the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, nor the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. To be an Indian Hindu is to be part of an elusive dream all Indians share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors from many sources that we cannot easily identify.

Of course it is true that, though Hinduism as a faith lends itself to eclecticism, this does not exempt all Hindus from the temptations of identity politics. Yet India's democracy helps to acknowledge and accommodate the various identities of its multifaceted population. No one identity can ever triumph in India: both the country's chronic pluralism and the logic of the electoral marketplace make this impossible. In leading a coalition government from 1998 to 2004, the Hindu-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party learned that any party ruling India has to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us.

India's national identity has long been built on the slogan “Unity in diversity.” The “Indian” comes in such varieties that a woman who is fair-skinned, sari-wearing, and Italian-speaking, as Sonia Gandhi is, is not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than one who is “wheatish-complexioned,” wears a salwar kameez and speaks Urdu. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally “foreign” to some of us, equally Indian to us all.

At a time when the Huntington thesis of a “clash of civilizations” has gained currency, it is intriguing to contemplate a civilization predicated upon such diversity, one which provides the framework to absorb these clashes within itself. Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream; we continue to give passports to their ideals. Rushdie's “Overartist” finds his aural counterpart in the Muslim ustads playing Hindu devotional ragas and the Bollywood playback singers chanting Urdu lyrics. The music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilization.

The sight in May 2004 of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 81 percent Hindu — caught the world's imagination. That one simple moment of political change put to rest many of the arguments over Indian identity. India was never truer to itself than when celebrating its own diversity.

Ultimately, of course, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together. Such a will may not be unanimous, for there will always be those who reject the common framework for narrow sectarian ends. But if the overwhelming majority of the people share the political will for unity, if they can look back to both a past and a future, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kohlapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity and freedom. That is the India that has emerged in the last sixty years, and it is well worth celebrating.

2. Hinduism and Hindutva: Creed and Credo

THE QUESTIONS A CANDIDATE FOR PUBLIC OFFICE HAS to answer from the media can cover any subject, and intrusiveness is difficult to resist. Still, I was surprised with the frequency with which, when I was India's candidate for Secretary-General of the United Nations, journalists from Boston to Berlin expressed curiosity about my religious beliefs. I tend to think of faith as something intensely personal, not really a matter I feel any desire to parade before the world. But, in an era where religion has sadly become a source of division and conflict in so many places, I had to concede that the question was a legitimate one — especially after one of my rivals specifically appealed for support on the grounds of his religion.

It's true, in my view, that faith can influence one's conduct in one's career and life. For some, it's merely a question of faith in themselves; for others, including me, that sense of faith emerges from a faith in something larger than ourselves. Faith is, at some level, what gives you the courage to take the risks you must take, and enables you to make peace with yourself when you suffer the inevitable setbacks and calumnies that are the lot of those who try to make a difference in the world.

So I have had no difficulty in saying openly that I am a believing Hindu. But I am also quick to explain what that phrase means to me. We have an extraordinary diversity of religious practices within Hinduism, a faith with no single sacred book but many. Hinduism is, in many ways, predicated on the idea that the eternal wisdom of the ages about divinity cannot be confined to a single sacred book. We have no compulsory injunctions or obligations. We do not even have a Hindu Sunday, let alone a requirement to pray at specific times and frequencies.

What we have is a faith that allows each believer to reach out his or her hands to his or her notion of the Godhead. Hinduism is a faith that uniquely does not have any notion of heresy — you cannot be a Hindu heretic because there is no standard set of dogmas from which deviation would make you a heretic.

So Hinduism is a faith so unusual that it is the world's only major religion that does not claim only its set of beliefs to be true. I find that most congenial. For me, as a believing Hindu, it is wonderful to be able to meet people from other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I have embarked upon a “right path” that they have somehow missed. I was brought up in the belief that all ways of worship are equally valid. My father prayed devoutly every day but never obliged me to join him: in the Hindu way, he wanted me to find my own truth. And that I believe I have. It is a truth that admits of the possibility that there might be other truths. I therefore bring to the world an attitude that is open, accommodating, and tolerant of others’ beliefs. Mine is not a faith for those who seek certitudes, but there is no better belief system for an era of doubt and uncertainty than a religion that cheerfully accommodates both.

The misuse of religion for political purposes is a sad, sometimes tragic, aspect of our contemporary reality. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once said, the problem is never with the faith, but with the faithful. All faiths strive sincerely to animate the divine spark in each of us; but some of their followers, alas, use their faith as a club to beat others with, rather than a platform to raise themselves to the heavens. Since Hinduism believes that there are various ways of reaching the ultimate truth, the fact that adherents of my faith, in a perversion of its tenets, have chosen to destroy somebody else's sacred place, have attacked others because of the absence of foreskin or the mark on a forehead, is profoundly un-Hindu. I do not accept these fanatics’ interpretation of the values and principles of my faith.

But what does it mean to me to be a practicing Hindu? I have never been particularly fond of visiting temples. I do believe in praying everyday, even if it is only for a couple of minutes. I have a little alcove at my home in Manhattan, where I try to reach out to the holy spirit. Yet I believe in the Upanishadic doctrine that the divine is essentially unknowable and unattainable by ordinary mortals; all prayer is an attempt to reach out to that which we cannot touch. Although I have occasionally visited temples, and I appreciate how important they are to my mother and most other devout Hindus, I don't really frequent them because I believe that one does not need any intermediaries between oneself and one's notion of the divine. “Build Ram in your hearts” is what Hinduism has always enjoined. If Ram is in your heart, it would matter very little what bricks or stones Ram can also be found in.

So I take pride in the openness, the diversity, the range, the lofty metaphysical aspirations of the Vedanta. I cherish the diversity, the lack of compulsion, and the richness of the various ways in which Hinduism is practiced eclectically. And I admire the civilizational heritage of tolerance that has made Hindu societies open their arms to people of every other faith, to come and practice their beliefs in peace amid Hindus. It is remarkable, for instance, that the only country on earth where the Jewish people have lived for centuries and never experienced a single episode of anti-Semitism is India. That is the Hinduism in which I gladly take pride. Openness is the essence of my faith. And that's the perspective from which I sought to serve in an office that must belong equally to people of all faiths, beliefs, and creeds around the world.

My avowal of my own Hinduism sits ill with those who assume that every believing Hindu automatically believes in the Hindutva project.^* Yet it is hardly paradoxical to suggest that Hinduism, India's ancient homegrown faith, can help strengthen Indianness in ways that the proponents of Hindutva have not understood. In one sense Hinduism is almost the ideal faith for the twenty-first century: a faith that is eclectic and nondoctrinaire, one that responds ideally to the incertitudes of a postmodern world. Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. But this cannot be the so-called Hindu fundamentalism that has demonstrated such hateful intolerance toward other religious groups. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, the great preacher and philosopher, who more than a century ago, at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the liberal humanism that lies at the heart of his (and my) creed:

I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a country which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all countries of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”… The wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita [says]: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

* The purpose of which is to create a Hindu political identity for India.

Vivekananda went on to denounce that “sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth.” His confident belief that their death knell had sounded was sadly not to be borne out. But his vision — summarized in the Sanskrit credo “Sarva Dharma Sambhava, all religions are equally worthy of respect”—is the kind of Hinduism practiced by the vast majority of India's Hindus, whose instinctive acceptance of other faiths and forms of worship has long been the vital hallmark of Indianness. Vivekananda made no distinction between the actions of Hindus as a people (the grant of asylum, for instance) and their actions as a religious community (tolerance of other faiths): for him, the distinction was irrelevant because Hinduism was as much a civilization as a set of religious beliefs. In a different speech to the same Chicago convention, Swami Vivekananda set out his philosophy in simple terms:

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism…. The Hindus have their faults, but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.

It is sad that this assertion of Vivekananda's is being contradicted in the streets by those who claim to be reviving his faith in his name. What this tells us is we should never assume that, even when religion is used as a mobilizing identity, all those so mobilized act in accordance with the tenets of their religion. Nonetheless it is ironic that even the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji, after whom the bigoted Shiv Sena is named, exemplified the tolerance of Hinduism. In the account of a critic, the Mughal historian Khafi Khan, Shivaji made it a rule that his followers should do no harm to mosques, the Koran, or to women. “Whenever a copy of the sacred Koran came into his hands,” Khafi Khan wrote, Shivaji “treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussulman followers.”

Indians today have to find real answers to the dilemmas of running a plural nation. “A nation,” wrote the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, “is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.” The common enemy of Indians is an internal one, but not the one identified by Mr. Togadia and his ilk. The common enemy lies in the forces of sectarian division that would, if unchecked, tear the country apart — or transform it into something that all self-respecting Hindus would refuse to recognize.

What Hinduism provides is a foundation that promotes a commonality among all religions and their beliefs. In fact, Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. The Muslim reformist scholar Asghar Ali Engineer has written that “rural Islam… (is) almost indistinguishable from Hinduism except in the form of worship…. The degree may vary from one area to another; but cultural integration between the Hindus and Muslims is a fact which no one, except victims of misinformation, can deny.”

I once wrote that to some degree, India's other minorities have found it comfortable to take on elements of Hindu culture as proof of their own integration into the national mainstream. The tennis-playing brothers Anand, Vijay, and Ashok Amritraj all bear Hindu names, but they are Christian, the sons of Robert and Maggie Amritraj, and they played with prominent crosses dangling from their necks, which they were fond of kissing in supplication or gratitude at tense moments on court. But giving their children Hindu names must have seemed, to Robert and Maggie, more nationalist in these postcolonial times, and quite unrelated to which God they were brought up to worship. I would not wish to make too much of this, because Muslim Indians still feel obliged to adopt Arab names in deference to the roots of their faith, but the Amritraj case (repeated in many other Christian families I know) is merely an example of Hinduism serving as a framework for the voluntary cultural assimilation of minority groups, without either compulsion or conversion becoming an issue.

It is possible to a great extent to speak of Hinduism as culture rather than as religion (a distinction the votaries of Hindutva reject or blur). Interestingly, similar Hindu customs have survived in now-Muslim Java and now-Buddhist Thailand. Islamic Indonesians still cherish the Ramayana legend, now shorn (for them) of its religious associations. Javanese Muslims bear Sanskrit names. Hindu culture can easily be embraced by non-Hindus if it is separated from religious faith and treated as a heritage to which all may lay claim.

The economist Amartya Sen made a related point in regretting the neglect by the votaries of Hindutva of the great achievements of Hindu civilization in favor of its more dubious features.

As Sen wrote: “Not for them the sophistication of the Upanishads or Gita, or of Brahmagupta or Sankara, or of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of Rama's idol and Hanuman's image. Their nationalism also ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy — secular as well as religious — achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India — explicitly or implicitly — as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers.”

Sen is right to stress that Hinduism is not simply the Hindutva of Ayodhya or Gujarat; it has left all Indians a religious, philosophical, spiritual, and historical legacy that gives meaning to the civilizational content of secular Indian nationalism. In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country's true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement. This must involve turning away from the strident calls for Hindutva that would privilege a doctrinaire view of Hinduism at the expense of the minorities, because such calls are a denial of the essence of the Hinduism of Vivekananda. I say this not as a godless secularist, but as a proud Hindu who is mortified at what his own faith is being reduced to in the hands of bigots — petty men who know little about the traditions in whose defense they claim to act.

3. The Politics of Identity

I'LL TELL YOU WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS IN INDIA,” the American businessman said. “You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battle-ax, against each other.”

The American businessman doesn't exist; he is a fictional character in my novel Riot, about a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts in the course of the Ram Sila Poojan campaign, the forerunner of the agitation to construct a Ram Janmabhoomi temple on the site occupied for four and a half centuries by the Babri Masjid. As headlines in recent years have too often spoken of a renewed cycle of killings and mob violence over the same issue, I have received dozens of comments on the eerie similarity between art and life.

In the wake of the awful Gujarat riots — some might well call them a pogrom — in 2002, which took somewhere between a thousand and two thousand, overwhelmingly Muslim, lives, some callers pointed to the afterword of Riot, published just a few months earlier, in which I alerted readers to the threat by Hindu extremists to commence construction of their temple in defiance of court orders. I seek no credit for prescience. The tragedy in India is that even those who know history seem condemned to repeat it.

It is one of the ironies of India's muddled march into the twenty-first century that it has a technologically inspired vision of the future and yet appears shackled to the dogmas of the past. The temple town of Ayodhya has no computer software labs; it is devoted to religion and old-fashioned industry. In 1992, a howling mob of Hindu extremists tore down the Babri Masjid, a disused sixteenth-century mosque that occupied a prominent spot in a town otherwise overflowing with temples. The mosque had been built in the 1520s by India's first Mughal emperor, Babur; the Hindu zealots vowed to replace it with a temple to Lord Ram, which, they say, had stood on the spot for millennia before the Mughal invader tore it down to make room for his mosque. In other words, they want to avenge history, to undo the shame of half a millennium ago with a reassertion of their glory today.

I remember vividly an American friend at a function in New York on December 6, 1992, telling me he had seen on the news that the Babri Masjid had been destroyed, and my simply refusing to believe it. “You must have heard it wrong,” I asserted confidently. “That sort of thing simply wouldn't happen in India. And if some mob had actually tried to attack it, the police would have stopped them well before they destroyed the mosque. Maybe the TV reported it was damaged?” “It was destroyed,” the American retorted. “I didn't just hear it on TV. I saw it. It was destroyed in full view of the cameras.”

It took a while for my initial disbelief to dissipate. This couldn't have happened, I agonized, in the India I had grown up in. Of course, there had been riots in my youth, but they were spontaneous eruptions, and, for the most part, had been quickly brought under control. But an organized effort to pull down a mosque? The very thought was appalling — something I did not believe Indians, as a collectivity, were capable of contemplating.

And if they were, surely they wouldn't be allowed to complete the task? The destruction of a substantial building takes time, and I couldn't believe the authorities would have let the mob have the hours they needed to fulfill their malign intent. The India in which this could happen was an India that had changed immeasurably from the country in which I had reached adulthood. It was from a profound sense of loss and betrayal that I wrote, and spoke, of my anguish at the time.

Indians in New York were just as exercised as Indians in India. I recall two events in particular. That December I was invited, along with others, to speak at an event at Columbia University at which artists and writers responded to the tragedy. In the time allotted to me I chose to read three extracts from other writers — Tagore's immortal “Let My Country Awake,” from his Gitanjali; a poignant short story by Saadat Hasan Manto about looters at the time of Partition who are helped and encouraged by a kind man who turns out to be the owner of the house being looted; and a brief passage from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, in which he talks about the Indian “Overartist,” using art as a metaphor for the palimpsest that is the Indian identity. To my astonishment the organizers, an anticommunal group, came to me afterward to say that a number of Muslims in the audience had been outraged by my choice of the last passage. Did I not know that Rushdie was anathema to them? Could I dis-avow him and apologize? It was my turn to be outraged. I had not come to lend my voice to a denunciation of Hindu intolerance in order to condone Muslim intolerance.

There was nothing remotely offensive to anybody about the passage I had read; its content, its evocation of Hindu and Muslim artists painting over each other's work, was precisely what I had come to affirm. In choosing this passage by a great Indian Muslim writer I was seeking to uphold the idea of the pluralist, tolerant India that had been attacked along with the Masjid. I refused to apologize, let alone disavow what I had read. But it was a sobering reminder that intolerance comes in many shades.

The second episode at the time was an address I was invited to make to the Indian community at the consulate in New York. A number of Hindutva sympathizers turned up for the question-and-answer session that was to follow, prepared to denounce the “pseudo-secularism” that they expected would underlie my critique.

Instead I spoke as a believing Hindu — and I spoke passionately of my shame that this could have been done by people claiming to be acting in the name of my faith. How dare the goondas of Ayodhya reduce the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the ignorant tub-thumping of their brand of identity politics? Why should any Hindu allow them to diminish Hinduism to the raucous self-glorification of the football hooligan, to take a religion of awe-inspiring tolerance and shrink it into a chauvinist slogan? My speech startled both the secular leftists in the audience and the acolytes of Hindutva. Some of the latter who had come to protest were chastened into silence; only one rose to question me, saying that he agreed with my vision of Hinduism but that such a faith could have only one logical outcome — support for the positions taken by Hindu political leaders. To which my response was simple: I was brought up by a strongly devout father in the Hindu belief that each of us had to find his own Truth. No true Hindu, I averred, would allow a politician to define his dharma for him.

But many Hindus have. India is a land where history, myth, and legend often overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the difference. Some Hindus claim, with more zeal than evidence, that the Babri Masjid stood on the exact spot of Lord Ram's birth, and had been placed there by the Mughal emperor as a reminder to a conquered people of their own subjugation. Historians — most of them Hindus — reply that there is no proof that Lord Ram ever existed in human form, let alone that he was born where the believers claim he was. More to the point, there is no proof that Babur actually demolished a Ram temple to build his mosque. To destroy the mosque and replace it with a temple would not, they say, be righting an old wrong but perpetrating a new one.

Of course, it does not matter what is historically verifiable when it comes to matters of faith. It is enough that millions of Hindus actually believe the masjid had occupied the site of a mandir, and indeed there is evidence of mosques having being built elsewhere in India on the ruins of demolished temples. And yet, when to act on that belief causes deep hurt to innocents who had nothing to do with the original wrong — if there was one — do we not have a greater responsibility to the present than to the past?

One of my more thoughtful challengers from the Hindutva ranks, Mr. Ashok Chowgule of the Mahanagar Vishwa Hindu Parishad of Mumbai, believes in the notion that I previously mentioned, and wrote to me to argue that Babur's motive in constructing the masjid in 1528 was to establish a symbol that would remind the conquered people of India who was the master and who the slave. That may well have been the case — in 1528. But today? The symbol, if such it was, retained the offensive meaning imputed to it by Mr. Chowgule only as long as the reality it sought to symbolize. When Mughal rule disappeared, so too did the potency of that symbol. Western countries have lived for centuries among Roman monuments constructed for exactly the same purpose, which remained, after the fall of the Roman Empire, as monuments, nothing more.

By 1992 the only symbolic importance the Babri Masjid had lay in our minds — in the importance we chose to give it. The attack on it, however, symbolized something else to Muslims in India and around the world; which is why I wrote of my sense of shame and sorrow at what Hindus had done in the name of their faith. When Mr. Chowgule writes that “it is natural that a free people should recover their own symbols,” he appears to exclude non-Hindus from his definition of the free Indian people. I admire Rana Pratap Singh, Chhatrapati Shivaji, and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi just as much as he does, but my admiration for Akbar, for Hyder Ali, and Tipoo Sultan is scarcely less. My sense of India's history embraces all their contributions (as well as those of a few South Indian figures the VHP never seems to mention, such as Krishna Deva Raya of Vijayanagar). I do not see Indian history as Hindu history, and the attainment of India's freedom means, to me, more than just the freedom of us Hindus.

There are some, like me, who are proud of Hinduism; there are others, including much of the VHP, who are proud of being Hindu. There is a world of difference between the two; the first base their pride on principle and belief, the second on identity and chauvinism. My Hindu pride does not depend on putting others down. Theirs, sadly, does.

To most Indian Muslims, the Ram Janmaboomi/Babri Masjid dispute is not about a specific mosque — which had in fact lain disused for half a century before its destruction, most of Ayodhya's Muslim minority having emigrated to Pakistan upon the Partition in 1947—but about their place in Indian society. For decades after independence, successive Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country's civil code and even financing Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India's first five presidents were Muslims, as were innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, and supreme court justices. Until at least the mid-1990s India's Muslim population exceeded Pakistan's. The destruction of the mosque seemed an appalling betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India's pluralist democracy.

The Hindu fanatics who attacked the mosque had little faith in the institutions of Indian democracy. They saw the state as soft, pandering to minorities out of a misplaced and Westernized secularism. To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizable portion of its Muslim population by the Partition, had an obligation to assert its own identity, one that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the term; they are, instead, chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings — and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith — but rather in its role as a source of identity. They seek revenge in the name of Hinduism-as-badge, rather than Hinduism-as-doctrine.

The Hindu zealots of 2002 who chanted insultingly triumphalist slogans helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim side, who may have criminally set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple campaigners; in turn, Hindu mobs torched Muslim homes and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the dispute, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, generating new victims on both sides, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. As I pointed out in the last words of Riot, history is not a web woven with innocent hands.

*

My views have, over the years, earned me more than my fair share of belligerent e-mails and assorted Internet fulminations from the less reflective of the Hindutva brigade. I was excoriated as “anti-Hindu” and described by several as a “well-known leftist,” which no doubt amused those of my friends who knew me in college thirty years ago as perhaps the sole supporter of Rajaji's pro-free-enterprise Swatantra Party in those consensually socialist times.

At least one correspondent, reminding me of the religion that has been mine from birth, succumbed to the temptation to urge me predictably to heed that well-worn slogan: “Garv se kahon ki hum Hindu hain”—Say with pride that we are Hindu.

I am indeed proud that I am a Hindu. But of what is it that I am, and am not, proud? I am not proud of my coreligionists attacking and destroying Muslim homes and shops. I am not proud of Hindus raping Muslim girls, or slitting the wombs of Muslim mothers.

I am not proud of those who assert the base bigotry of their own sense of identity in order to exclude, not embrace, others.

I am proud that Hinduism is a civilization, not a dogma. I am proud that India's pluralism is paradoxically sustained by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus, because Hinduism has taught them to live amid a variety of other identities.

I am proud to claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. As a Hindu I am proud to subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book.

I am proud that I can honor the sanctity of other faiths without feeling I am betraying my own. I am proud that Hinduism understands that faith is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone.

I am proud of those Hindus, like the Shankaracharya of Kanchi, who say that Hindus and Muslims must live like Ram and Lakshman in India. I am not proud of those Hindus, like “Sadhvi” Rithambhara, who say that Muslims are like sour lemons curdling the milk of Hindu India. I am not proud of those who suggest that only a Hindu, and only a certain kind of Hindu, can be an authentic Indian. I am not proud of those Hindus who say that people of other religions live in India only on their sufferance, and not because they belong on our soil.

I am proud of those Hindus who realize that an India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. I am proud of those Hindus who utterly reject Hindu communalism, conscious that the communalism of the majority is especially dangerous because it can present itself as nationalist. I am proud of those Hindus who respect the distinction between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism.

I am proud of those Hindus who recognize that the saffron and the green on the flag hold equal importance. The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their own homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition, and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil.

For Hindus like myself, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. That is the only India that will allow us to call ourselves not Brahmins, not Bengalis, not Hindus, not Hindi-speakers, but simply Indians. How about another slogan for Hindus like me? Garv se kahon ki hum Indian hain.

4. Of Secularism and Conversions

IN ALL THE RECENT DISCUSSION ABOUT HINDUTVA, the bogeyman has been the concept of secularism. Secularism is established in India's constitution, but acolytes of Hindutva ask why India should not, like so many other third world countries, find refuge in the assertion of its own religious identity. It is a reasonable question, which requires a reasonable answer — an Indian answer.

My generation grew up in an India that rejected the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. That was the basic premise of Indian nationalism. We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for the Muslims, what remained was a state for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India you had to spurn the logic that had divided the country.

This was what that much-abused term, secularism, meant for us. Religion is far too deeply rooted in all our communities to be wholly absent from Indians’ perceptions of themselves. So irreligion was not the issue; every religion flourishes in India. In The Great Indian Novel in 1989, I even argued the case for restoring dharma to its place in Indian public life. One reader, the retired director-general of police of Tripura state, Mr. B. J. K. Tampi, wrote to assert the broad meaning of dharma. “In Hindi,” he writes, “dharma means only faith or religion. But in Sanskrit the word has a preeminently secular meaning of social ethics covering law-abiding conduct.”

Fair enough: in an afterword to my novel I had listed a whole series of meanings that have been ascribed to the term dharma—an untranslatable Sanskrit term that is, nonetheless, cheerfully defined as an unitalicized entry in many an English dictionary. (The Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary defines it as “the righteousness that underlies the law.”) I agree with Mr. Tampi that no one-word translation (“faith,” “religion,” “law”) can convey the full range of meaning implicit in the term. “English has no equivalent for dharma,” writes P. Lal, defining it as a “code of good conduct, pattern of noble living, religious rules and observance.” In his “The Speaking Tree,” Richard Lannoy actually defines dharma in nine different ways in different contexts. These include moral law, spiritual order, sacred law, righteousness, and even the sweeping “the totality of social, ethical and spiritual harmony.” Indeed, dharma in its classic sense embraces the total cosmic responsibility of both God and Man. My late friend Ansar Husain Khan, author of the polemical Rediscovery of India, suggested that dharma is most simply defined as “that by which we live.” Yes — and “that” brings me to my point, and to Mr. Tampi's.

“In fact the four ends of human life,” Mr. Tampi went on, “dharma, artha, kama and moksha, are always mentioned in that order. The purport is that the pursuit of wealth and pleasure should be within the parameters of dharma and moksha (the final emancipation of the soul from rebirth through religious practices).” Mr. Tampi adds, citing Swami Ranganathananda: “The excessive Indian fear of rebirth has led to the neglect of true worldly dharma for the sake of an otherworldly moksha. It has made men unfit both in the worldly (secular) and spiritual spheres.” Now, I have never met the good Mr. Tampi, whose theological learning is all the more impressive in a policeman, but his analysis gladdens my secular heart. The fact is that, despite having done so much to attract the opprobrium of the Hindutva brigade, I do believe that dharma can be the key to bridging the present gap between the religious and the secular in India. The social scientist T. N. Madan has argued that the increasing secularization of modern Indian life is responsible for the rise of fundamentalism, since “it is the marginalization of faith, which is what secularism is, that permits the perversion of religion. There are no fundamentalists or revivalists in traditional society.” The implication is that secularism has deprived Indians of their moral underpinnings — the meaning that faith gives to life — and religious extremism has risen as an almost inevitable antithesis to the secular project. The only way out of this dilemma is for Hindus to return to the tolerant, holistic, just, pluralist dharma articulated so effectively by Swami Vivekananda, which embraces both worldly and spiritual duty.

After all, as Mr. Tampi pointed out, the Hindu's secular pursuit of material happiness is not meant to be divorced from his obedience to the ethical and religious tenets of his faith. So the distinction between “religious” and “secular” is an artificial one: there is no such compartmentalization in Hinduism. The secularism avowed by successive Indian governments, as Professor R. S. Misra of Benares Hindu University has argued, is based on dharma-nirpekshata (“keeping apart from dharma”), whereas an authentically Indian ethic would ensure that secular objectives are infused with dharma.

I should stress that I find this view persuasive but incomplete. Yes, dharma is essential in the pursuit of material well-being, public order, and good governance; but this should not mean turning public policy over to sants—living “saints”—and sadhus, nor excluding any section of Indian society from its rightful place in the Indian sun. If we can bring dharma into our national life, it must be to uphold, rather than be at the expense of, our pluralist Indianness. Hinduism has always acknowledged the existence of opposites (and reconciled them): pain and pleasure, success and failure, creation and destruction, life and death are all manifestations of the duality inherent in human existence. These pairings are not contradictory but complementary; they are aspects of the same overarching reality. So also with the secular and the sacred: a Hindu's life must involve both. To acknowledge this would both absorb and deflect the Hindu resurgence.

Secularists are reproached not so much for their modernism as for their lack of a sense of their place in the grand Indian continuum, their lack of dharma. In my view, to live in dharma is to live in harmony with one's purposes on earth. This emerges from Hindu tradition, but it is not necessarily practiced in a traditional way. If I can be forgiven for quoting my own fictional character Yudhishtir in The Great Indian Novel:

India is eternal. But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied. If there is one thing that is true today, it is that there are no classical verities valid for all time…. For too many generations now we have allowed ourselves to believe India had all the answers, if only it applied them correctly. Now I realize that we don't even know all the questions…. No more certitudes. Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people — those which do not change — and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma.

But secularism as an Indian political idea had, in any case, little to do with Western ideas privileging the temporal over the spiritual. Rather, it arose from the 1920s onward in explicit reaction to the communalist alternative. Secular politics within the nationalist movement rejected the belief that religion was the most important element in shaping political identity. Indian secularism lent itself to an India that had a wealth of religions, none of which should be more entitled by the state.

All the cant about “genuine” and “pseudo” secularism boils down in the end to simply this: Professor Amartya Sen has put it rather well in declaring that political secularism involves merely “a basic symmetry of treatment of different religious communities.” This kind of secularism is actually the opposite of classic Western notions of secularism, because, in effect, it actively helps religions to thrive by ensuring there is no discrimination in favor of or against any particular religion.

In a country like India, our secularism recognizes the diversity of our people and ensures their continued commitment to the nation by guaranteeing that religious affiliation will be neither a handicap nor an advantage. No Indian need feel that his birth into a particular faith automatically disqualifies him from any profession or office. That is how the political culture of our country reflected “secular” assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 81 percent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, of India's first five presidents, two were Muslims; so were many governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, supreme court justices, and chief justices. During the 1971 Bangladesh war with Pakistan, the Indian air force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal Lateef), the army commander was a Parsi (General Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (Lieutenant-General Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal (Major-General Jacob) was Jewish. That is Indian secularism.

Do the critics of secularism want to end an India in which this kind of “secularism” is practiced? And if so, what is their alternative? Hindu chauvinism has tended to portray itself as qualitatively different from Muslim sectarianism. A. G. Noorani has reminded us that as far back as 1958, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had warned against the dangers of Hindu communalism in a speech to the All-India Congress Committee. Nehru's point was that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist: since most of us are Hindus, the distinction between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism could be all too easily blurred.

Obviously, majorities are never seen as “separatist,” since separatism is by definition pursued by a minority. But majority communalism is an extreme form of separatism, because it seeks to separate other Indians, integral parts of our country, from India itself.

This is not to suggest that secular Hindu liberals have got it entirely right. Among the most intriguing correspondence I received as a columnist was a pair of letters from a fellow Keralite, Mr. A. M. Pakkar Koya of Kozhikode, a Muslim with some decidedly perceptive and unconventional opinions.

Mr. Pakkar Koya believes that there is a threat to India from fundamentalism, but he sees it emerging from two kinds of fundamentalism: Hindu and Muslim. The main difference between the two, he argues, is that “the Muslim masses by and large agree with the aims of the fundamentalists and think this is something expected of them. In the name of Islam they are prepared to condone or live under the most retrogressive laws, especially when it comes to women's rights.” The Hindu masses do not have so absolutist a view of their faith — as I too have argued in my own writings.

A more dangerous difference, Mr. Pakkar Koya writes, is that “once they come to power the Muslim fundamentalists will try to eliminate or silence the liberals in Muslim society and those who don't share their views.” Hindu fundamentalists, he believes, are not quite as extremist; so Hindu liberals are in much less danger from them than Muslim liberals are from Muslim fundamentalists. But the problem with that understandable complacency, Mr. Pakkar Koya suggests, is that therefore “the Hindu liberals may not be as keen to prevent a [Hindu] fundamentalist takeover of India as were the secular government and liberals in Algeria to prevent a Muslim fundamentalist electoral victory.”

“The most important difference,” Mr. Pakkar Koya then avers, is that the fundamentalism of the Sangh Parivar “is mostly a reaction to certain aspects of Muslim politics in India and the condoning, in the name of secularism, of such politics by the liberal sections of Hindu society.”

Mr. Pakkar Koya recalls that Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the eminent Canadian scholar of Islamic history, had been convinced that “Islam in India had the best chance of evolving into a liberal creed as it shares a home with the most catholic of all the religions in the world — Hinduism.” But, he argues, this never happened because a “siege mentality and the compulsions of electoral politics have made Indian Islam the most xenophobic and reactionary” variant of the Muslim faith. “As I see it,” Mr. Pakkar Koya concludes, “the tragedy of our country is that Muslims failed to imbibe the best features of Hinduism while Hindus took on the worst features of Islam.”

His second letter made the related point that, on all matters of controversy involving the Muslim community — from the Shah Banu case to the Satanic Verses affair — Hindu liberals, in a misguided desire to be sympathetic to “the Muslim point of view,” ended up backing the most retrograde and uncompromising obscurantism espoused by Muslim community leaders. “So in all these matters the most progressive and liberal Hindus find themselves supporting the most orthodox and extremist in the Muslim community.”

Stirring and provocative words, these, which offer much food for thought. I have never met Mr. Pakkar Koya, but in a letter he observes that one of the strengths of Kerala is that Malayali Muslims study in the same language as other Keralites, whereas in most Indian states ordinary Muslims study in Urdu in religious schools while their Hindu brothers learn Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, or indeed English. I share his evident faith in pluralist coexistence, and I appreciate the importance he attaches to the fact that it is Hindus like myself who decry Hindu chauvinism and the erosion of secular values in India. However, his final point is devastating. By pandering to conservative Islamic elements, he says, Hindu liberals have discredited themselves with both Hindu conservatives and Muslim liberals. “In my opinion,” Mr. Pakkar Koya writes, “this is why Hindu liberals are finding it difficult to influence public opinion in India, and this is a development fraught with more danger than the growth in the electoral appeal of the BJP.”

This is a sobering point. Too many Hindu liberals write of these issues as if we were in denial of our own Hinduism, seeking to find our arguments in rationality and secular discourse, rather than in the tolerance and compassion of our own faith. Those of us who want to preserve Indian pluralism must learn to address Hindu opinion from within the fold of Hinduism, where liberalism has a natural place. In rejecting bigotry and sectarianism on both sides of the religious divide, we must stand up for the timeless verities — goodness, kindness, tolerance, love — at the heart of all religions.

And this can certainly be found in the sacred texts of all of India's contending faiths. I have long argued for mutual understanding, in particular, between Hindus and Muslims. A letter from a Muslim reader, A. M. S. Ahmed, tells me that pluralism has to contend with “the pervasive prejudice and antagonism against Muslims and Islam among the vast majority of the Hindus in India.” He finds this to be based on “uncritical acceptance of two assertions”: that Hindus suffered “centuries of oppression” by Muslim invaders and that “Muslims were solely responsible for the division of India.” Reacting to the first assertion, Mr. Ahmed points out that Muslim rulers in southern states like Hyderabad and Mysore did nothing to force conversion upon their non-Muslim majority subjects, and did not interfere with the cultural or religious practices of the Hindus. As to the second, he recalls the well-known episode of Jawaharlal Nehru's unilateral repudiation of the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946, which Jinnah's Muslim League had accepted — and which would have kept India united, if loosely, in a confederation when the British left.

But this is not what interests me about Mr. Ahmed's letter. I accept, after all, that prejudice and ignorance are common characteristics of a large number of people of all faiths, and that there may well be Hindus who base their attitude toward their Muslim fellow-citizens on such grounds. As for what happened in 1946, the catalog of blunders and missteps that led to the tragedy of Partition is one from which no side emerges unblemished, though obviously there is a difference between those who espoused communal politics and those who stood for secular pluralism. But putting Mr. Ahmed's “two assertions” aside, what we are left with is a more fundamental point: that Hindus do not understand Islam and Muslims, and do not try hard enough to look beyond their prejudices.

The intriguing point Mr. Ahmed makes is that Islam itself is misunderstood by the majority of Indians. Even I have been guilty of juxtaposing Hinduism's unique tolerance of all faiths against the teaching of the Semitic religions that each of them represents the only true path to God. Mr. Ahmed begs to differ, and he cites extensively from the Holy Quran to make the point that Islam is a tolerant faith. “Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out clear from Error; whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold,” says Sura 2, verse 256. “Invite all to the way of thy Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious; for thy Lord knoweth best, who have strayed from His path, and who receive guidance,” says Sura 16, verse 125. On coexistence, the Quran declares, “O Mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other and not despise each other” (Sura 49, verse 13). And the possibility of different attitudes to religion is explicitly spelled out in Sura 10, verse 47: “To every people was sent an Apostle; when their Apostle come before them, the matter will be judged between them with justice, and they will not be wronged.”

I do not know which translation of the Quran Mr. Ahmed is quoting from, but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of these extracts. The real issue is the way the faithful interpret the tenets of their faith. “The concept of dharma in Hinduism,” Mr. Ahmed adds, referring to my writings on the subject, “is similar to that of deen in Islam, which connotes a way of life governed by the teachings of the Quran, the examples of the Prophet and the ever-present consciousness of accountability for all thoughts and actions, both open and secret, before God on the Day of Judgment.” In other words, Hindus and Muslims have much more in common doctrinally than the fanatics of either faith would have us believe.

“Having lived together for centuries,” Mr. Ahmed laments, “Hindus and Muslims in general have yet to learn and respect each other's way of life.” He recalls that in 1962 Acharya Vinoba Bhave compiled a selection of verses from the Quran under the title “The Essentials of the Quran” and published it on the Prophet Muhammed's birthday. Another Hindu scholar, Professor K. S. Ramakrishna Rao, wrote a “simple yet erudite treatise on the life and message of the Prophet of Islam.” These books were published, appropriately enough, in Varanasi under the auspices of the Akhil Bharat Sarva Sangh in Rajghat. Will an enterprising non-Muslim publisher today take on the challenge of getting Hindu thinkers to explain Islam, with empathy and understanding, to Hindus?

The fact is that there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us. The version propagated by the proponents of Hindutva resembles nothing so much as the arguments for the creation of Pakistan, of which Indian nationalism is the living repudiation. The Hindutva movement is the mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947; its rhetoric echoes the bigotry that India was constructed to reject. Its triumph would mark the end of India, and that, I am convinced, Indians will not let happen.

*

In the late 1990s there was a spate of attacks on Christian churches and missionaries. I was outraged at the anti-Christian thuggery, and equally outraged that it was perpetrated in the name of Hinduism. Killers of children are not Hindus, even if they claim to be acting on behalf of their faith; it is as simple as that. Murder does not have a religion — even when it claims a religious excuse.

It is easy enough to condemn anti-Christian violence because it is violence, and because it represents a threat to law and order as well as to that nebulous entity we think of as India's “image.” But one point that has not been sufficiently made has nothing to do with the violence itself. It is the great danger of admitting a religious justification for the thugs’ actions — of seeing behind it an “understandable” Hindu resistance to Christian zealotry. The then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, even called for a national debate on religious conversions. Reasonable Hindutva sympathizers went around saying, “Look, of course the violence and the killing are inexcusable and should be dealt with. But do you know how much resentment these Christian conversions have provoked? They are going around cheating people into giving up their faith. Naturally some Hindus are angry.”

That sort of line — which we have all heard, often embellished with anecdotal evidence of missionary “trickery”—comes perilously close to condoning the indefensible. Let us assume for a minute, for the purposes of argument, that Christian missionaries are indeed using a variety of inducements (development assistance, health care, education, sanitation, even chicanery) to win converts for their faith. So what? If a citizen of India feels that his faith has not helped him to find peace of mind and material fulfillment, why should he not have the option of trying a different item on the spiritual menu? Surely freedom of belief is his fundamental right, however ill founded his belief might be. And if Hindu zealots suspect that his conversion was fraudulently obtained, why do they not offer counter-inducements rather than violence? Instead of destroying churches, perhaps a Hindu-financed sewage system or paatshala might reopen the blinkered eyes of the credulous. Better still, perhaps Christians and Hindus (and Muslims and Baha'is, for that matter) could all compete in our villages to offer material temptations for religious conversions. The development of our poor country might actually accelerate with this sort of spiritual competition.

Of course, I am being frivolous there, but my point is a serious one. The prime minister's call for a national debate may be unexceptionable, but the premise behind much of the criticism of conversions is troubling. It seems to accord legitimacy to the rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal and its cohorts — who declare openly that conversions are inherently antinational. Implicit in the challenge to conversions is the idea that to be Hindu is somehow more natural, more authentically Indian, than to be anything else, and that to lapse from Hinduism is to dilute one's identification with the motherland.

As a Hindu, I reject that notion utterly. As an Indian, I have always argued that the whole point about India is the rejection of the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. Our nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for the Muslims, what remained was a state for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India you had to spurn the logic that divided the country in 1947.

The danger of the communalism of the majority that Nehru had warned about in 1958 is that it might be seen as nationalist. And, to our detriment, this would cause the line between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism to be blurred. That is what is being done by those who argue against conversions: they are suggesting that an Indian Hindu who becomes Christian is somehow, subtly, turning antinational. This is not only an insult to the millions of patriotic Indians who trace their Christianity to more distant forebears, including the Kerala Christians who converted to the faith of Saint Thomas centuries before most Europeans became Christian. It is an insult, too, to the very idea of India. Indianness has nothing to do with which God you choose to worship, or not. Even if your adherence to a particular faith has been obtained by material inducements or chicanery.

I cheerfully tell Christian audiences that Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. Hinduism, I assert, is a civilization, not a dogma.

If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out toward God? Truth is one, the Hindu believes, but there are many ways of attaining it.

The fact that Hinduism has never claimed a monopoly on spiritual wisdom is what has made it so attractive to seekers from around the world. Its eclecticism is its strength. My late father was a devout Hindu who prayed faithfully twice a day, after his baths. He regularly went on pilgrimages to all the major temples and religious sites in our land. When a fire engulfed the Guruvayoor temple in the 1960s, he led a fund-raising drive in Bombay that saw much of his meager savings diverted to the rebuilding of that shrine. Yet, when a Christian friend presented him an amulet of the Virgin Mary that had personally been blessed by the pope, he accepted it with reverence and carried it around with him for years. That is the Hinduism most Hindus know: a faith that accords respect and reverence to the sanctified beliefs of others.

So the rejection of other forms of worship, other ways of seeking the Truth, is profoundly un-Hindu, as well as being un-Indian. Worse, the idea of Indianness rendered by those who are against religious conversion is one that mirrors that upon which Pakistan was created, of which the nationalism of Gandhi, Nehru, and Azad is the living repudiation. In many Muslim countries it is illegal for a Muslim to convert to any other faith; in some, such apostasy is even condemnable by death. Hindus have rightly sought for years to point out how different their faith is, how India has no room for such practices. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. Yet, ironically, it is the most chauvinist of the Hindutva brigade who want to emulate this Muslim convention.

*

The international outcry at the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas — the magnificent statues carved out of an Afghan mountainside by devout monks 1,400 years ago and described by the intrepid Chinese traveler Hsuen Tsang as among the greatest achievements of human civilization — did not take very long to die down. Within weeks, people around the world concluded that there was not much point to it anymore: the statues were gone, and the Afghan people were starving. Better attend to the living than to mourn the destroyed, many said. And who can blame them?

But one of the saddest features of this outcry, to an Indian, must be the extent to which the world's critics and commentators linked the event to another act of destruction, this time on Indian soil. I refer, of course, to the tearing down of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992. Many foreign analysts drew a direct parallel between the two events. To take but one prominent example, the New York Times editorial observer Tina Rosenberg wrote of the Taliban's action that “such irreversible destruction of cultural and religious property has ample recent precedent.” She cited Ayodhya and its blood-soaked aftermath as her principal example, and added, “Mobs often seek to destroy religious and ethnic sites, both to intimidate the people who hold them sacred and to send the message ‘you do not belong here.’” Shamefully, that is just what an Indian mob did, and we who allowed it to happen will never be able to live it down.

Others, too, saw India's passionate denunciations of the Bamiyan destruction as tainted, if not undermined, by the fact that they issued from the lips of leaders who had condoned (and in some cases incited) a comparable act of cultural barbarism on their own soil. What have we come to that a land that has been a haven of tolerance for religious minorities throughout its history should have sunk so low in the eyes of the world? India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more important, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and, particularly in the south, to Muslims. Jews came to Kerala centuries before Christ, with the destruction by the Babylonians of their First Temple, and they knew no persecution on Indian soil until the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century to inflict it. In Kerala, where Islam came through traders, travelers, and missionaries rather than by the sword, the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of this community that he issued a decree obliging each fisherman's family to bring up one son as a Muslim to man his all-Muslim navy. The India where the singing of mantras routinely mixes with the cry of the muezzin, and where the chiming of church bells accompanies the gurudwara’s reading from the Guru Granth Sahib, is an India that is entitled to lament and to condemn what happened at Bamiyan. But that India must resist those Indians who pulled down the Babri Masjid.

The central battle in contemporary Indian civilization is between those who, to borrow from Whitman, acknowledge that we are vast, we contain multitudes, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define (in increasingly narrower terms) what is “truly” Indian. The central tenet of tolerance is that the tolerant society accepts that which it does not understand and even that which it does not like, so long as it is not sought to be imposed upon the unwilling. Those who persecute young boys and girls trying to celebrate Valentine's Day have no right to claim they are doing so in the name of a culture that has long been a byword for tolerance. I cringe that an Indian state has self-righteously banned the Miss India contest, even if I believe that such contests enshrine a very limited aspect of Indian womanhood. I am appalled that a government minister intimidates a French television channel into altering its fashion programming because its models’ attire is “contrary to Indian sensibilities,” as if the minister is entitled to define what those sensibilities are, and when the only ones affected are those who voluntarily tune in to that channel. All this is being done in the name of bharatiya sanskriti, a notion of Indian culture whose assertion is both narrow-minded and profoundly antihistorical.

For where, in the Hindutva zealots’ definition of bharatiya sanskriti, do the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho belong? Should their explicitly detailed couplings not be pulled down, as FTV's cable signals have been? What about the Kama Sutra, the tradition of the devadasis, the eros of the Krishna Leela — are they all un-Indian now? I wonder how many saw the irony at the recent Maha Kumbha Mela (the grand Hindu religious festival) of Naga sadhus parading their nakedness in front of women and children without anyone raising an eyebrow, while the police arrested a foreign tourist for similarly stripping and smearing herself with ash in an act she thought had been sanctified by millennial Indian tradition. When the late great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote his final ode to our civilization, In Light of India, he devoted an entire section to Sanskrit erotic poetry, basing himself, among other things, on the Buddhist monk Vidyakara's immortal eleventh-century compilation of 1,728 kavya, many of which are exquisitely profane. Are poets like Ladahachandra or Bha-vakadevi, who a thousand years ago wrote verse after verse describing and praising the female breast, to be expelled from the Swarajist canon of bharatiya sanskriti? Should we tell future Octavio Pazes seeking to appreciate the attainments of our culture that the Mahabhar-ata on Doordarshan is bharatiya sanskriti, but a classical portrayal of the erotic longings of the gopis for Krishna is not?

It may not seem to matter very much what some lumpen elements think of Valentine's Day. But if they are allowed to get away with their lawless acts of intolerance and intimidation, we are allowing them to do violence to something profoundly vital to our survival as a civilization. Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities. To allow the self-appointed arbiters of bharatiya sanskriti to impose their hypocrisy and double standards on the rest of us is to permit them to define Indianness down until it ceases to be Indian. And when that happens we will have completely lost our right, in the eyes of the world, to condemn any future Bamiyans.

The real argument in our country is between those who believe in an India where differences of caste, creed, conviction, class, color, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom shouldn't determine your Indianness, and those who define Indianness along one or more of these divisions. In other words, the really important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers — between those who think all Indians are “us,” whichever God they choose to worship, and those who think that Indians can be divided into “us” and “them.”

I too am proud of my Hinduism; I do not want to cede its verities to fanatics. To discriminate against another, to attack another, to kill another, to destroy another's place of worship on the basis of his faith is not part of Hindu dharma, as it was not part of the preacher and philosopher Vivekananda's. It is time to go back to these fundamentals of Hinduism. It is time to take Hinduism back from the fundamentalists.

5. On the Importance of Being Muslim and Indian

THE TEMPTATION TO SEE IN CRICKET LARGER METAPHORS for national issues has always proved difficult to resist.

One Sunday, while India was losing the 2003 World Cup final to Australia through a heartbreaking combination of ineptitude and ill luck, the New York Times treated its readers to an essay by a travel writer on his experience of being a “cricket heathen” in India. After mildly amusing descriptions of his discovery of the sport and the passions it stirred in the Indian soul, the author, Michael Y. Park, concluded with an anecdote: “Even when I tried to escape civilization deep into the Great Indian (Thar) Desert in the northwest, near the border with Pakistan, cricket dominated conversation. I was on a three-day camel trek, and my camel driver… played only camel polo and had never seen a professional cricket match because he'd never watched television. But… this man who had never been more than twenty miles from the fairy-tale fort of Jaisalmer and who had never heard of nuclear bombs or Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, rattled off statistics about the national team and details of the players’ private lives. He even worked in a few disparaging remarks about the Pakistani team. [He] noted my astonishment. ‘You have to understand,’ [he] said, spitting out a gob of betel nut and saddling up his camel. ‘Indians are crazy about this cricket.’”

It's a lovely story to illustrate the extent and reach of the passion for India's real national sport (despite all the General Knowledge quiz books that instruct students that India's national sport is hockey, the marketplace has voted decisively for cricket). But that was not the only reason I quoted it.

In reproducing the tale, I omitted the name of the cricket-chauvinist camel driver. Mr. Park does not make much of this, but it was Amin Khan. This committed fan of the national team, with his “disparaging remarks” about the players from across the border, is a Muslim.

It should hardly be worth mentioning. After all, 13 percent (perhaps 14) of our population follows both the Islamic faith and the fortunes of our national team. But it is a sad commentary on our times that the loyalty of Indian Muslims to India's cricketing success should have been questioned by certain elements in our country. It has long been one of the favorite complaints of the Hindutva brigade that Indian Muslims set off firecrackers whenever the Indian team loses to Pakistan. This is one of those “urban legends” that acquires mythic proportions in the retelling, even though the evidence for the charge is both sparse and anecdotal. Certainly some Muslims may have behaved in this way, but the percentage of the community they represent is minuscule. The camel driver, it is clear, would have been astonished at such conduct: even he, illiterate and poor, knows where his home is, and therefore where his loyalties lie.

But then those who identify the nation with a specific religion would themselves not expect devotees of other faiths to share their feelings. Their unseemly triumphalism after India's victory over Pakistan (a victory achieved by a team including two Muslims and a Sikh, and captained by a Hindu with a Christian wife) was unseemly precisely because it took on sectarian rather than nationalist overtones. And reports came in — perhaps exaggerated — of clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups within India in the aftermath of the defeat of Pakistan. What on earth, I wondered, would prompt petty bigots (on both sides) to reduce a moment of national sporting celebration into a communal conflict?

Cricket in independent India has always been exempt from the contagion of communalism. Despite the religious basis of Partition, Indian cricket teams always featured players of every religious persuasion. Three of the country's most distinguished and successful captains — Ghulam Ahmed, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, and Mohammed Azharuddin — were Muslims, as was our best-ever wicket-keeper, Syed Kirmani. Perhaps more important, so were two of the most popular cricketers ever to play for the country, Abbas Ali Baig and Salim Durrani. Who can forget the excitement stirred by Baig's dream debut in England in 1959, when he was conscripted out of Oxford University by an Indian team in the doldrums (“Don't be vague,” an English commentator declared, “call for Baig!”) and promptly hit a century both in his first tour match and on his Test debut? Or that magical moment when, as Baig walked back to the pavilion in Bombay after a brilliant 50 against Australia, an anonymous sari-clad lovely ran out and spontaneously greeted him with an admiring (and scandalously public) kiss? The episode is part of national lore; it has been immortalized in Salman Rushdie's novel The Moor's Last Sigh. Who cared, then, in those innocent 1960s, that Baig was Muslim and his admirer Hindu? Who in the screaming crowds that welcomed his appearance thought of Salim Durrani's religion when they cheered themselves hoarse over that green-eyed inconsistent genius with the brooding movie-star looks? I will never forget the outrage that swept the country when he was dropped from the national team during an England tour in 1972; signs declaring “No Durrani No Test” proliferated like nukes. I do not believe there have been two more beloved Indian cricketers in the last fifty years than Baig and Durrani — and their religion had nothing to do with it.

Which is as it should be. Apart from the great Muslim players I mentioned, India has been captained by Christians (Vijay Hazare and Chandu Borde), Parsis (Polly Umrigar and Nari Contractor), and a Sikh (Bishen Singh Bedi). Mohammad Kaif may be leading India before the decade is over, just as he captained the national youth team to spectacular success a few years ago. Cricketing ability and sporting leadership have nothing to do with the image of your Maker you raise (or fold) your palms to in worship. When India wins (or loses), all of India wins (or loses).

The degradation of public discourse that has accompanied the rise of religious nativism in our country since the late 1980s must not be allowed to contaminate our national sport.

*

So it was with some trepidation that I declared, on the strength of his early performance in Test cricket, that Irfan Pathan was already well on the way to being my favorite player in what, in 2003–4, seemed an extraordinary Indian team. My enthusiasm might partly have been explained by being the father of twin sons who were then nineteen, and the sight of the nineteen-year-old Pathan bounding down to hurl his thunderbolts filled me with that mixture of pride and awe that I think of as typically paternal (admiration for what is being done, suffused by wonder that this youngster is doing it).

But that was not the whole story. After all, the Indian team was full of stars who deserve greater encomia. And yet — what had Pathan brought to the Indian team? Raw youth? We already had that in wicket-keeper Parthiv Patel, a year younger than Pathan; but Pathan's was a youthfulness raw only in its energy and enthusiasm. His conduct had a maturity that belied his nineteen years, and it was allied to a temperament his elders should value. Pathan was constantly striving, trying new angles, outthinking the batsmen, and he was always seeking to learn, to improve, to educate himself. Pathan had heart, and he also had a head. His English was not yet as ready-for-prime-time as his telegenic looks, but in his interviews he had already spoken of figuring out the difference between bowling in Australian conditions and in those of the subcontinent. Irfan Pathan was old enough to command a place in the team as a matter of right, and young enough to know that he still had a lot to learn.

But since I am not a sportswriter, there was another aspect that thrilled me about Irfan Pathan playing for India. And that lay in the simple fact that his very existence was a testament to the indestructible pluralism of our country. He hails from Gujarat, a state in which many — many with loud voices and great influence — have sought to redefine Indianness on their own terms. Neither his religion nor his ethnicity would have qualified him as Indian enough in their eyes. He is a Muslim, and not just a Muslim but the son of a muezzin, one whose waking hours are spent calling the faithful to prayer. Worse still, he is a Pathan, whose forebears belong to a slice of land that is no longer territorially part of India. To be a Gujarati Muslim Pathan might be thought of as a triple disqualification in this Age of Togadia. Irfan Pathan had not just shrugged off his treble burden, he had broken triumphantly through it.

And he had done so without apology for his identity, or his faith. Interviewed after his 3 for 32 in the last one-day international clinched India the series, Pathan told Dean Jones of his happiness that India had won “after” (not “because of”) his bowling, and attributed this success to his Maker. “God is with me. I knew with God's help I'll bowl well. I had that confidence in God.” So the muezzin's son had invoked Allah's blessings on his team, oblivious to the fact that its opponents were playing under the green banner of an Islamic Republic. What a wonderful reinvention of Indian secularism.

So when Irfan Pathan beamed that dazzling smile after taking yet another wicket for the India he so proudly represents, he filled my heart with more than cricketing pride. He reminded me that he represents a country where it is possible for a nineteen-year-old from a beleaguered minority to ascend to the peak of the nation's sporting pantheon; and even more, that he represents an idea, an immortal Indian idea, that our country is large enough and diverse enough to embrace everyone who chooses to belong to it. This is an idea that no one, however well-connected politically, has the right to deny. The pluralist palimpsest of Indianness can never be diminished by the killers of Gujarati Muslims and the evil men who incited them. Irfan Pathan is their standing, leaping, glorious repudiation.

Or so I argued, and I was surprised by the reactions I received. I discounted the purely cricketing responses — including those from some who churlishly felt that the teenager's contribution to India's cricketing triumphs in Pakistan was not as great as my praise implied — on the grounds that they have somewhat missed the point. In bringing his vigor and his talent to the national cause, Irfan Pathan, a Gujarati Muslim of (to put it territorially) “Pakistani” ethnic origin, had repudiated those who had allowed themselves to forget (or who had consciously denied) an indestructible Indian idea.

A number of readers liked the piece — but of the many who disagreed with it, two, in my view, made strikingly interesting arguments that deserved attention on larger political grounds. One was passed on to me from an Internet discussion group that had reacted to my piece; the other was sent to me directly by an eminent Indian academician. One I disagreed with, the other I accepted.

The first, by a chat-room discussant called Saurabh, also objected to my “attempts to build up Pathan as the star of the Indian victory.” He felt I was echoing Imran Khan's statements “downplaying India's team effort” and felt the problem lay in the Pakistanis’ “inability to believe they can be beaten fair and square by India (unless of course it is Muslims who are responsible for their defeat).” Obviously, I did not share this piece of social psychology. But Saurabh then went on to hail Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's comments reacting to what he called “Zaheer Khan's nice putdown of his Pakistani interviewer.” (Zaheer had, I understand, retorted to a question about how he felt as a Muslim playing for India by pointing out that it was his country, he had grown up there, and it had made him who he was.) Thackeray, Saurabh explained, “immediately endorsed him as a ‘true Indian Muslim.’ That runs contrary to Tharoor's script of the Hindu Right as being unprepared to accept an Indian Muslim as Indian.”

Now this took me a bit aback. I had thought Thackeray's comment nauseatingly patronizing, the equivalent of an anti-Semite bestowing the label of “good Jew.” Are we now, in the enlightened first decade of the twenty-first century, to accept the notion that the leader of a Hindu-chauvinist political party is entitled to certify who is, or is not, a “true Indian Muslim”? The notion is as offensive as it is unsustainable. I admire Zaheer's forthright defense of his birthright no less than Thackeray does. But my point is precisely that an Indian Muslim should be free to define his Muslimness as he sees fit (in Irfan's case, with overt expressions of his piety, hardly surprising in a muezzin's son) without in any way diminishing his claim to Indianness. An Indian Muslim is simply that: an Indian and a Muslim. It is not for Mr. Thackeray and his ilk to determine what makes him a “true Indian Muslim.”

The second notable critique came from Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain, vice chancellor of the University of Calicut in Kerala. “As an educated Uttar Pradesh Muslim,” Professor Hasnain wrote, “I felt humiliated that when some player or film actor performs for India, then the majority community feels that Muslims are patriotic Indians.” I was again taken aback, since the last thing I had intended was to humiliate any Indian Muslim by my celebration of Irfan, but the good professor went on to explain: “There are hundreds and thousands of Muslims who are performing for India in various fields and nobody wants to acknowledge their contribution.” In Kerala alone, Professor Hasnain argued, there are over 150 Muslim-funded institutions in the Malabar region providing medical education, and training nurses, paramedics, engineers, and teachers in fields as varied as arts and sciences, hospitality management, and costume and fashion design. These are “high-quality institutions,” he explained, reflecting an estimated total investment of around 1,000 crore Indian rupees, entirely provided by individuals belonging to the Muslim community. And here's the rub: the students who attend these colleges, according to the professor, “are 90 percent non-Muslim boys and girls.” There are, he adds, similar institutions in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. “In my view,” Professor Hasnain concludes, “Irfan is not the standing, leaping, glorious repudiation of the killers of Muslims in Gujarat, but certainly the Muslim institution-builders of South India in general and Kerala in particular are the shining examples.”

I accept the good professor's rebuke, but with one mild expression of self-defense. To celebrate one individual as representing a larger idea is not to deny that there are other examples that affirm the same idea. Irfan and cricket had captured the national imagination at the time; it was not unreasonable for a columnist to seize on them to make his point. No doubt there are worthier examples of Indian Muslims repudiating the assumptions of the murderous chauvinists of Gujarat and elsewhere.

*

This was not the first time, though, that I had unwittingly offended Indian Muslim readers in expatiating on the vexed subject of Indianness. “There is a certain kind of secularism which sometimes scares me even more than the militant fundamentalism of the mosque-bashers,” began an e-mail I received in response to a series of columns on Hinduism and Indianness. “It wears a smiling face and speaks in a tender voice, asking Muslims to participate in Hindu ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion.’ ‘Celebrate Deepavali with us,’ these secularists say, and they perceive no irony in the way Deepavali takes over civil life in India the way Eid or Muharram can never aspire to. They are proud of the fact that rural Islam is almost indistinguishable from Hinduism, but they do not stop to wonder why it is not the other way around.”

I sat up and took notice. I am used to criticism from all sides in our wretched national agonizing about secularism, but rarely in such terms from an Indian Muslim. The author of these words, Shahnaz Habib, went on:

You write about the Amritraj family, “To give their children Hindu names must have seemed more ‘nationalist.’” You have just equated Hindu with nationalist, a religion with the country, the part with the whole. You go on to add that Muslim Indians still “feel obliged to adopt Arab names in deference to the roots of their faith.” I wish I knew how you defined “obliged to.” Is it merely a compulsion of faith as you seem to see it or is it a joyous affirmation of being able to participate not only in a local heritage but also in a culture that goes beyond national boundaries? Or could it be a political act? Could it be the insecurity of living in a country where you walk into a nationalized bank to be faced by a huge oil painting of goddess Lakshmi? Why are there so few Muslim or Christian symbols in our public spaces if cultural assimilation has been so successful?

And there was a particular poignancy to Ms. Habib's concluding paragraph: “I wish for you the knowledge of what it feels like to be a minority. What it feels like to be on the wrong side of an accident of numbers. On one hand, the adventure of having more than one culture to call mine. The magic of constantly challenging my preconceptions. And [on the other,] the pain of wishing that my Hindu friends knew as much about my Muslim festivals and customs as I know about theirs, of wishing that I didn't have to explain my actions in my own country. And worse, feeling guilty for feeling this pain.”

The e-mail gave me much to think about, both because of its own thoughtfulness and because it is always salutary for a writer to be reminded that one must never become too complacent in the belief that one's own good intentions are self-evident. I responded by pointing out that certain cultural symbols are identified with a religious community but used by both — I mentioned the Hindu custom of the smashing of coconuts in my piece; I know Muslim women who wear the bindi for decorative purposes, and Hindu men who wear an achkan. Most Hindus do join in Muslim celebrations when invited, though the iftar parties thrown during Ramadan by sundry politicians suggest both tokenism and opportunism.

In my column I had put the Hindu in “‘Hindu’ names” within quotes because the names of the Amritraj trio are actually no more Hindu than the names Bashir or Jamal are Muslim. Vijay and Anand are merely Sanksrit words connoting victory and bliss respectively, which have been used as names for millennia. Ashok is the name of a Buddhist king. They are indeed names with a hoary pedigree on Indian soil, which is why I suggested their use might have seemed more “nationalist.” I believe my entire published work would demonstrate vividly that I have never identified Indianness with Hinduness, “a part with the whole.”

Having said that, though, I was concerned by Muslims using Arab names as “a joyous affirmation of being able to participate not only in a local heritage but also in a culture that goes beyond national boundaries.” First of all, what is this culture? It is not Islam, because Arab names are pre-Islamic and the same names are used by all Arabs, Christian, Muslim, or Druze. Should an Indian Muslim feel more affinity with Arab culture than with Indian? I hoped not, because then she would be giving ammunition to the worst bigots on the Hindutva side.

Ms. Habib's reply was impressive:

If we go back to the linguistic and geographical roots of “amrit” and “bashir,” there is indeed nothing remotely religious about them. But to do so is to deny the cultural associations that have accrued to them over centuries of use. Most Indian Muslims naming their children are not trying to create a mini-Arabia.

But religion plays an important role in culture (and the cultural-identification process of naming). A name is not its original meaning; it is what it represents. Arab names may represent a geographical affiliation to Christian Arabs; to Indian Muslims, it represents the religion which originated in the Middle East. Piqued by your use of the phrase “obliged to,” I was trying to point out that Indian Muslims have a dual heritage — that of the national culture encompassing the Ramayana and the freedom struggle as well as that of the Muslim civilization.

Fair enough — though I sense much room for further debate on this point. I was struck, nonetheless, by her observation about the paucity of Muslim or Christian symbols in our public spaces — of holidays being granted for Deepavali and not for Muharram in the Delhi publishing house in which she worked. These are, for the most part, unintentional slights. But her raising it is one more reminder that one can never fully put oneself in the shoes of another.

And yet, as I have often written, who in India is not a minority? A Keralite friend recently reminded me of the “southern discomfort” the journalist Madhavan Kutty wrote about in describing his experience of North India. In that case it's not being on the “wrong side of the accident of numbers”; it's being on the other side of the accident of geography and location. But if we were to remain perpetually on our own side, where would be the “magic of constantly challenging” not only our preconceptions, but our expectations of what Indianness can be?

That throwaway line observing that “Muslim Indians still feel obliged to adopt Arab names in deference to the roots of their faith” provoked a flurry of correspondence, many from other Christian readers who themselves do the same as the Amritrajes, a few from Hindus citing examples of friends of other faiths adopting Hindu names, and several from Muslims explaining to me why their names were as they should be.

The clearest explanation in the latter category came from my friend Professor Mohammed Ayoob, the eminent scholar from Orissa who currently teaches in Michigan. Ayoob-sahib pointed out that most Arabic names adopted by Indian Muslims are, in the perception of Muslims, Quranic (and therefore Islamic) rather than “Arabic.” In other words, such names imply no extraterritorial allegiances, only loyalty to the wellsprings of the Holy Book. Some of the most common Muslim names, Professor Ayoob tells me, are names of prophets mentioned in the Quran. For example, Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), Yaqub (Jacob), Yusuf (Joseph), and Ayoob (Job). The same principle applies, naturally, to Muhammad and Ahmed (which is a variation of Muhammad — literally one who sings the praise of God).

There is a second set of Muslim names that have the prefix Abdul (literally servant or slave, the equivalent of Das in Hindu names). Abdul is prefixed to one of the ninety-nine names of God in the Quran that identify his various attributes, which gives us Abdul Rahim, Abdul Rahman, Abdul Karim, Abdul Latif, Abdul Qadir, and so on. “These are equivalent to Bhagwan Das or Ram Das among Hindu names,” says Professor Ayoob. (Or, for that matter, “Jesudas” among Indian Christian names.)

The third set of names came from those of the Prophet's companions or from his family: Ali, Abu Bakr, Omar, Usman, Jaafar, Saad, Hassan, Hussein, Aisha, Fatima, etc. “These were adopted not because they were Arabic,” writes Professor Ayoob, “but because these figures are held in high respect by Muslims all over the world.” Fair enough.

These three sets make up the bulk of Arabic names among Muslim Indians, but there is also a fourth category. Professor Ayoob explains: “Non-Quranic Arabic names have been recently adopted especially as a result of the Gulf oil boom and the sizable number of Indian Muslims who have migrated to West Asia temporarily to find livelihood. They come into contact with Arabs who have non-Islamic Arab names, mistakenly think they are Islamic, and sometimes give such names to their children. Since the returnees from the Gulf are perceived as role models among low-middle-class and working-class Muslims because they have made money, the latter begin to name their children after those of the returnees and the contagion spreads.” However, non-Quranic and non-Islamic Arab names, he stresses, are in a very small minority among Indian Muslims.

Why is this issue important at all? The question of the “foreign origin” of the names used by Indian minorities has become one element of the Hindutva assault on them for being insufficiently Indian. In one passage of his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? Veer Savarkar questions the patriotism of India's minority Muslim and Christian communities because “they do not look upon India as their holy land,” he wrote. “Their holy land is far off in Arabia and Palestine. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin. Their love is divided.” The implication is that the Muslims should seek inspiration in India's culture rather than Arabia's.

Professor Ayoob argues:

Arabic names are assumed by Indian Muslims not because of cultural affinity. Islam came to India (with the exception of Kerala) from the Turko-Persian lands of Central Asia. The cultural influence is, therefore, Persian more than Arab. Persian was the court language and the language of literature and of high culture. A cultured gentleman in north India until the turn of the twentieth century had to know Persian and had to be able to quote Persian couplets (this applied to both Hindu and Muslim old elites). Muslim elite families, therefore, adopted names of Persian origin for reasons of cultural and linguistic affinity. This had little to do with religion. Therefore, names like Parvez, Parveen, Firoz, Firoza, Shireen, Mehnaz, Mehjabeen, Shahnaz, Humayun, once adopted by elite families, also gradually became popular among the lower strata of society, although I would wager that Persian names are more common among the elite than they are among the “subalterns.” Some Arabic names come through Persian because Arabic words, including names, have over time been adopted in Persian.

In other words, he concludes, these are “cultural” names, not religious ones. I do agree that the adoption of such Islamic/Quranic and Persian names is tied to the preservation of Muslim identity in India, but I do not think this should be a target of criticism. After all, one finds names like Kallicharan and Ramadhin among West Indian cricketers. This does not make them any less West Indian.

I should like to thank this eminent scholar and friend for his valuable contribution to the debate on this issue. More important, I agree that no Indian should feel obliged to take on elements of Hindu culture as “proof” of his or her own integration into the national mainstream. Equally, Hinduism can serve as a framework for the voluntary cultural assimilation of minority groups, if they want it. Yusuf Khan is no less Muslim because he chose the name Dilip Kumar to put on the marquee, and Shah Rukh Khan is no less Indian because he retained his Muslim name. In a country of such great cultural diversity, our names are, after all, one more tangible sign of the pluralism that is India's greatest strength.

Now if only Irfan Pathan, whose cricketing prowess fell away within a couple of years of his ascent to stardom, will recover his mojo for India….

6. Making Bollywood's India a Reality

TO ME, INDIAN FILMS, WITH ALL THEIR LIMITATIONS and outright idiocies, represent part of the hope for India's future. In a country that is still (whatever the official figures say) almost 40 percent illiterate, films represent the prime vehicle for the transmission of popular culture and values. Bollywood and its regional offshoots produce more than eight hundred films a year in nineteen languages and employ 2.5 million people, and their movies are watched over and over again by the Indian masses, especially those with few other affordable forms of entertainment.

In India, popular cinema emerges from, and has consistently reflected, the diversity of the pluralist community that makes this cinema. The stories they tell are often silly, the plots formulaic, the characterizations superficial, the action predictable, but they are made and watched by members of every community in India. Muslim actors play Hindu heroes, South Indian heroines are chased around trees by North Indian rogues. Representatives of some communities may be stereotyped (think of the number of alcoholic Christians portrayed on screen) but good and bad are always shown as being found in every community.

To take just one recent popular film: a Marathi-speaking “playback singer” records an Urdu poet's lyrics to the tune of a Tamil Muslim's music; her voice is then lip-synched by a Telugu actress, swaying to the choreography of a Goan Christian dance director, as she is romanced by a Punjabi superstar; the resulting film, produced by a Gujarati and directed by a Bengali, is then promoted by a Jewish public relations executive and watched by Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, cuisine, costume and consonant, from all over the country. Bollywood embodies the very idea of India's diversity in the very way in which it is organized.

But that alone is not enough. India's diversity is under assault: the twentieth-century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture's confidence, and the politics of bigotry, which once partitioned the country, have again arisen. Hindu chauvinism and other forms of communalism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves along these lines. Indians have been made more conscious than ever before of what divides us. When caste and religion elevate sectarianism to the level of public policy, it becomes more important to be a Muslim, a Bodo, or a Yadav than to be an Indian.

In this situation, films can — and do — play a vital role in keeping alive an idea of India that enshrines its diversity. Film is a more potent weapon than that used by the advocates of hatred. To take one example: in the film Zanjeer, a megahit of 1971, the character actor Pran played Badshah Khan, a red-bearded Pathan Muslim who exemplified the values of strength, fearlessness, loyalty, and courage. This was just a year after the bloody birth of Bangladesh in a war in which most of the subcontinent's Pathans were on the other side. But far from demonizing the Pran figure, the filmmakers chose not to portray a strong Muslim character but to make him the most sympathetic presence in the film after the hero (Amitabh Bachhan himself).

Bombs and riots cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history. But what can destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people. The central challenge of India as it enters the twenty-first century is not purely economic or simply political: it is the challenge of accommodating the aspirations of different groups in the national dream. The ethos of diversity — of an inclusionist, flexible, agglomerative India — helped the nation meet this challenge. The battle for India's soul will be between two visions of diversity, the secularist Indianism of the nationalist movement and the particularist fanaticism of the bigoted mob. The film world has a vested interest in the struggle because it too depends on the survival of the world from which it has emerged.

It is only through the Indian ethos of diversity, only by ensuring that all Indians find the same opportunity to fulfill their hopes and aspirations, that the nation can realize its potential. And even the trashiest film hit can embody loftier ideals: one megahit of the 1970s, Amar Akbar Anthony, was an action adventure film about three brothers separated in infancy who are brought up by different families — one a Christian, one a Hindu, and one a Muslim. As adults, one is a smuggler, one a street fighter, and one a policeman. How they rediscover each other and turn the tables on the villains is why the audience flocked to the film in their millions; but in the process they also received the clear message that Christians, Hindus, and Muslims are metaphorically brothers, too, seemingly different but united in their common endeavors for justice.

The Indian film industry is by far the largest in the world — making more films annually than Japan, and five times as many as Hollywood. Much of this is escapist entertainment, but it all reflects the understanding that the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India that denies itself to some Indians could end up being denied to all Indians; and so Indian films communicate the diversity that is the basis of the Indian heritage, by offering all of us a common world to which to escape, by allowing us to dream with our eyes open.

And what is the responsibility of the filmmaker in a developing society like India's? Even the most commercial filmmaker contributes toward, and helps articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity of the society. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism, which has in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what we are proud of, this is the world we imagine when we want to entertain ourselves, even that this is what we want to be. In this process, culture and development, and films and national identity are fundamentally linked and interdependent. We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That goal is increasingly being realized; it is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for diversity.

That is the popular Indian culture from which so many of us have emerged. Let us hope Bollywood always remains true to it, and that the self-appointed guardians of bharatiya sanskriti don't try to change it into something more “authentic” and less true.

7. Epic Interpretations

THE QUESTION OF EXCLUSIONIST INTERPRETATIONS of Indian authenticity keeps coming up. Some years ago, I found myself responding to a literary critic who wrote extensively about my clothing and (presumed) Hollywood haircut, essentially to make the point that I wasn't authentic enough an Indian writer for her taste (the episode is recounted in my Bookless in Baghdad). The notion of Indianness as something sanctified by a prescribed list of acceptable attributes is not just highly contestable, it is positively un-Indian.

Apropos of the way in which some authors have retold the works of others, I once remarked that a Ramayana from Ravana's perspective would bring the lumpen Hindu zealots of the Bajrang Dal onto the streets in protest. (Ravana, the demon-king of Lanka who kidnapped the virtuous Sita, Lord Rama's queen, is the traditional villain of the epic narrative.) To this suggestion, an erudite Indian ambassador, Shyamala Cowsik, then serving in Cyprus, wrote me to say that what I imagined had already been done, apparently before the Bajrang Dal was even a gleam in its founders’ eyes. In the late 1960s, she informed me, the Ramayana was indeed retold from Ravana's point of view in a play called Lankeswaran by noted Tamil playwright and actor Manohar. I am informed that Manohar played the hero Ravana himself, and Lankeswaran was staged literally hundreds of times in Tamil Nadu, to great applause, so much so that he was from then on known only as “Lankeswaran Manohar.”

This is almost the equivalent of retelling the Bible from the point of view of Satan, but it is profoundly authentic to the Indian cultural heritage. Ambassador Cowsik went on to add: “Ravana, as you know, was the son of the Rishi Visravas and a great scholar, a much greater one than Rama, besides being a tremendous Shiva bhakta. In Lankeswaran, Sita was Ravana's daughter. Due to some curse that I do not now remember, having seen the play when I was just a little girl, she had to be put into a box and buried in a field in Janaka's kingdom, where of course she was found when the king was indulging in a spot of ceremonial plowing. Ravana actually carries his infant daughter, Sita, in that little box, underwater, all the way from Lanka to Mithila, and leaves her underground in the field where she is eventually found. The whole subsequent Rama-Ravana battle was interpreted by Manohar as an attempt by Ravana to get his beloved daughter back.” Interestingly, Ravana was portrayed in Lankeswaran as a tragic hero, rather like the protagonists in Greek drama, which is more interesting than simply rewriting the Ramayana from the point of view of the traditional villainous Ravana.

Ambassador Cowsik's second point concerned the idea of the Ramayana as seen from Sita's perspective, which, I had warily suggested in my column, “might tremble on the brink of sacrilege to some.” When she was ambassador to the Philippines from 1992–95, she told me, she was “astounded to find that in this ultra-Catholic corner of Southeast Asia, there was a local Tagalog [the main Filipino language] version of the Ramayana, the Radiya Mangandari. This version had traveled northward up from Indonesia, where of course it is very familiar, through the Muslim south of the Philippines to the main island of Luzon. In the process, it acquired various undertones and overtones, besides the very interesting concept of Rama's alter ego. Now this alter ego was stoppered up in a bottle, something like the djinn in the Arabic fairy tales. Deprived of his alter ego, Rama degenerates from a noble philosopher king to a rapacious, common or garden variety of conqueror. He stays so till the end of the play, which I sat through for three-and-a-half hours while the playwright translated it for me line by line into English, when he finally regains his alter ego and becomes once more the noble Rama. However, Sita remained unchanged throughout the play, and was a strong, self-reliant, highly principled, and fairly aggressive woman who does not indulge in any of the traditional husband-worship. The group that had staged the play wanted to take it to India and perform it at various small places besides the metros. I had to warn them that public reaction in the smaller towns (these days possibly also in the metros) might not be entirely favorable to such an interpretation of Rama's character, and so the idea was dropped.”

As a footnote to this episode, Ambassador Cowsik added that she got hold of a detailed account of the Radiya Mangandari in English and sent it to Vinod C. Khanna, who was then our ambassador to Indonesia. He used it for a book on various versions of the Ramayana that he was writing, which has since been published. (What an outstanding example, if I might be permitted the digression, this pair is of the remarkable intellectual quality of our senior officialdom. Whatever unkind thoughts many of us may nurture about the Indian bureaucracy, ours is, clearly, a mandarinate of merit.)

I recount these stories at length because they remind us of how far we have traveled from the questing spirit of Indian epic tradition to the uncritical worship of today. When the Indo-British writer Aubrey Menen wrote a rationalist version of the Ramayana in 1956, Rama Retold, the book was promptly banned in India, and — deprived of its natural audience in our country — it has faded away without enriching our collective consciousness of the possibilities of the great epic. The Sahmat exhibition a few years ago of various depictions of Rama and Sita in art from around our country was attacked by intolerant Hindu fanatics outraged that some of the versions shown did not conform to their orthodoxy.

The Hindu tradition has always been a heterodox one: we have always believed there are versions of divinity for every taste, and uncountable ways of reaching out to the Unknowable. What a shame that the Hindu banner is now so visibly and volubly being waved by those who have shrunk the grandeur of the Hindu spiritual and philosophical heritage to the intolerant bigotry of their slogans. Our epics were constantly retold and reinvented for centuries; the Hindu imagination was not fettered by fear of experiment. Today, sadly, that is no longer the case. Writing about Lankeswaran, Ambassador Cowsik remarks that Manohar “faced absolutely no protest those days. Of course, I cannot say what would happen if this were to be tried out in North India these days.” I am sure she would not recommend it.