Who doesn’t like melody? Whose heart doesn’t beat for Kishore Kumar’s yodeling? Whose ears don’t reverberate with Lata Mangeshkar’s eternal songs? Who doesn’t want to dance with Asha Bhosle’s scintillating numbers? Music is already in every heartbeat and yet in the humdrum and cacophony of hundreds of singers and thousands of albums among us, we still tend to miss the true music in its more intense and sublime melody. We seem to be content with the tip of the iceberg which floats on top of the water but that is only one tenth of the real content. Our fleeting lives just get spent listening to few repeated singers over and over again, be it Kishore Da of sixties or Udit Narayan of nineties or Sonu Nigam of 21st century. We never transcend the popular songs such as, Mere sapno ki rani (Aradhna), Papa kehte hain bada (QSQT), Mehdi laga ke rakhna (DDLJ), and of course, the recent hits from Veer Zaara, Lagaan, Chalte Chalte, Kal Ho Na Ho…..the list is endless. But, you get the point. We have virtually surrounded ourselves with popular film music and that seems to work for us. To some more ambitious folks, this boundary also encompasses few popular ghazals of Jagjit Singh, Pankaj Udhas and in rare cases some Bhajans of Anup Jalota.
To be sure, there is no need to advocate any boundary between popular and classical music. This dichotomy unnecessarily creates boundaries between melodies. Instead, all that is needed is to explore, experiment and expand our boundaries of melodies. If we have been listening mainly to Kishore Kumar, let us now try to immerse ourselves into Mohammad Rafi and see how this new musical wave refreshes us all over again. If we are already listening to Rafi Sahab, let’s get an album in which he has sung songs which are closer to a classical raga. Again, not to be frightened or overwhelmed with the word “classical”, but the idea is to expose ourselves to little different and melodious mood of music. There are actually several albums available in music stores and of course on internet websites which have collection of classical songs of several singers. As I am typing this, I have just now started playing Begum Akhtar’s album with her songs based on some classical ragas. This is the first time in my life that I am listening to her. I may not appreciate it for the first time, but as is often the case, true melody always “grows in” us. Even the Rahman music is often characterized in this fashion. We rarely appreciate Rahman music in our first attempt, but give it some time and something catches our attention and we fall in love with it. Who can forget, O Paalanhaare from Lagaan or some of his other songs? Simple reason that it “grows in” us is that his music has a background basis of some classical raga, either Hindustani or Karnatak style.
Similar is the case with several other songs which are based on classical ragas. We get overwhelmed with music which is shot at us from TV or Radio commercials but if we proactively discover true melody we will be surprised by what we have been missing all these years. A simple definition or criterion to judge true melody is that which is evergreen unlike a passing phase.
Let me refresh your memory with some such true gems of Manna Dey now. When was the last time you listened to poochho naa kaise maine rain bitaayee (Meri Surat Teri Aankhen), I assure you that this song can never become stale in your ears, again the simple reason is that it is based on Raga Ahir Bhairav. Similar is the case with another Manna Dey gem Laaga chunari main daag chhupaaoo kaise (Dil hi toh hai), this song is based on Raga Bhairavi. Both Bhairavi and Ahir Bhairav are morning ragas so as you listen to these two numbers, imagine yourself watching sun rise and you will be amazed by the power of these ragas, they actually take you to the time of dawn! While, we are on the topic of morning ragas, let me throw in another masterpiece from Lata Mangeshkar. This is a song from the film Amar Prem, Raina biti jaye shyam na aaye and is based on another pre-dawn raga called Raga Lalit. Once again, be prepared to be fascinated by the power of music and melody. And who can forget Mohe bhul gaye sanvariya in Lataji’s voice from the film Baiju Bawara. Again, reason for its eternal appeal is that it is based on Raga Bhairav. Another gem from this film in Rafi Sahab’s voice based on Raga Bhairavi is Tu gangaki mauj main jamna ka dhaara. These are just a few gems based on morning ragas.
Now, let’s see some masterpieces from afternoon raga. Khiltey Hain Gul Yaha (Sharmilee)and Panthi hoon main us path kaa (Door ka rahi) both based on Raga Bhimpalasi, sung by Kishore Kumar. And now the evening ragas. Again, while you listen to these songs, imagine watching a sunset somewhere on a small hill. How about Umraav Jaan’s ghazal sung by Ashaji in ankhonki mastike mastane hazaron hai, based on Raga Bhupali. Even if you have never heard of Mehdi Hassan’s ghazals, try these two of his most popular ones, both based on evening ragas. Ranjish hee sahi (Raga Yaman) and Duniya kisike pyaar main (Raga Bhupali). I am convinced that if you develop the taste for Mehdi Sahab’s ghazals, you may never fall back to any other singer who is not classically trained. It would be a quantum leap from a narrow well into a vast and deep ocean of music in which you will be beckoned by such great titans as Bhimsen Joshi, Pt Jasraj and so on. Obviously, this takes little investment of time and patience. But, from my own experience, I guarantee you that it is worth the effort and the returns are priceless and lifelong. It is indeed a nashaa, with traces of meditative spiritual mood.
Now, let’s move little more forward in our time of the day towards night. Two of the more popular ragas of this time of the day are Raga Malkauns and Raga Darbari. To start with, fall in love all over again with Rafi Sahab’s eternal voice in Man tarpat hari darshanko aaj (Baiju Bawara) based on Raga Malkauns. How about these Raga Darbari numbers Hangama hai kyon barpa, a Ghulam Ali ghazal and O Duniyake rakhwale (Baiju Bawara) by Rafi Sahab. Even Mukesh has sung a Raga Darbari song, Dil jalta hai to jalne de (Pahli Nazar). And who can forget mere naina saavan bhaado (Mehbooba) by Kishore Da and Lataji which was based on Raga Shivranjani, another night raga. Again, try imagining yourself in nightly mood to enjoy these songs better. As is the case with serious and true melodies, most of the songs based on ragas either have matching lyrics with the words of that time of the day or a mood matching with that of raga. Morning ragas are usually identified with intense mood of separation and of meditation. Evening ragas evoke lighter mood of love and romance. Night ragas evoke the moods of passion and heroic courage. You can find hundreds of songs and the classical ragas that they are based on at http://www.asavari.org/songs.html. Listening and appreciating music armed with the information of raga would relish both your heart and your mind.
I recently had heated debate with few friends whose argument was that a criterion for good music is simply what appeals to masses. According to them, “classical” singers do not have enough popularity or prestige. Also that, only that music is great which survives the test of “market value”. One can respond to such criticism by just stating few examples from above masterpieces. Granted that some great artists end up in a life of paucity but how can that be a judge of true music? Gangotri, the origin of Ganga, can never be compared with small streams in every village or town. A true explorer will reach the Gangotri sooner or later even though every stream is also a reflection of the same river. Idea is just to expand, explore, experiment and finally to experience yourself to different genres of music and to appreciate the entire iceberg instead of just being content with its tip afloat.
Some say, “don’t sell yourself short”; I think we can apply this to our topic. Let’s not settle for mediocre music, let’s try to explore and expand our musical horizons. And the good news is many different kinds of music are now available on several good websites. www.Raaga.com and www.MusicIndiaOnline.com are two excellent sources. I would even go one step further and say that the way T-Series liberated old film songs from the clutches of HMV with hundreds of cover version pirated tapes; internet is doing the same to rare genres of music. If not for online albums, I would have never experienced the heavenly voice of Mehdi Hassan. Now, I know why he can be called as the “Everest”, the highest point of ghazal singing. So, unlike pirated tapes, we have original music now available to us, all that is needed is little effort from our side and then we will be ready for….
Sangeet Hai Shakti Ishwar Ki, Har Swar Main Base Hain Raam
Raagi Jo Sunaye Raagini, Rogi Ko Mile Aaraam.
References:
1. Alaap, a set of 20 CDs exploring Indian Classical Music produced by Sri Aurobindo Society http://www.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/saspub/sasaudvis.htm#audiocds
2. http://www.AIMArts.org
3. http://www.MusicIndiaOnline.com
4. http://www.Raaga.com
5. http://www.Asavari.org
6. http://www.MusicalNirvana.com
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Did Modern Values Enrich Cultural values?
We are living in a modern society today. At least, we prefer to believe that we are! We shun anything non-modern or so called orthodox. We would like to stay in touch with the contemporary rather than the traditional, be it home furniture or our way of thinking or our way of dressing or the way we perceive spirituality. If we are modern, we practice Yoga or meditation or at least claim to do so but reject any traditional custom or ritual, which does not fit in with our accepted definition of modernity.
In this essay, let us explore what exactly is modernity and how does it affect our way of thinking. Does modernity achieve what it sets out to do? And how do Indian culture and traditions fit into this. Where do Indian traditions stop and modern values begin? The main argument presented here is that the so-called modern values were already imbibed in our culture.
What is Modernity?
Modernity can be defined as connecting to the new and the contemporary, rejecting the old. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: the word modern was first recorded in 1585 in the sense `of present or recent times'. In Latin, modernus is derived from modo, meaning `just now'. The English word modern was not originally concerned with anything that could later be considered old-fashioned. Obviously, modernity often is used to reject old-fashioned ideas and traditions. In the cultural and social contexts, modernity is also interlinked with the values of equality, freedom, feminism and democracy. It is generally assumed that the modernity in 19th and 20th century unleashed the power of scientific and industrial progress, which led to social equality, freedom of downtrodden sections of the society, freedom to women. Democracy is also thought to be a modern concept of governance as against rulers and kings of ancient times. Modernity is also thought of as increasing the role of rationality in the public sphere and reducing the role of religion. Let us take these modern values one by one and explore them more.
Modern Values
Social Equality: One of the popular assumptions is that modernity provided equal status to downtrodden sections of the masses. Before the advent of modernity, people in the weaker sections of the society were controlled and oppressed by the landlords and the religious leaders. With modernity, all the sections of the society have equal rights. However, according to Professor Arvind Sharma, equality before law did exist in ancient India, especially in the sphere of criminal law. The Pali texts clearly allude to it, and the Nibandhas – legal digests of the twelfth century onwards – specifically eliminate unequal punishments. King Ashoka also tried to enforce it. The Nepala-Mahatmya (13.46) of the Skanhapurana also seems to recommend such egalitarianism. Moreover, even today in the 21st century, global spiritual movement Swadhyaya rooted in Indian cultural values has devised many innovative experiments and projects to ensure social equality in thousands of Indian villages. One of the novel Swadhyaya concepts is Amrutalayam, meaning house of immortality. This is similar to a village temple but its priests come from different castes of the village and every evening the entire village gathers here as a social/economical/spiritual family. Just a small example to show how social equality can be achieved by cultural values.
Democracy: Another popular assumption is that modernity gave rise to democracy, ending centuries of autocracy, and therefore governments for the masses, of the masses and by the masses were installed in many parts of the world. This gave tremendous power to the masses in choosing their own rulers and removing the ones they didn't like in the elections. But, contrary to this assumption, India in ancient times did have its own form of democracy and republics. The inscriptions on the walls of the Sundaravarada temple in Uttiramerur near Kanchipuram show how democracy was practiced 1000 years ago. History Professor Steve Muhlberger at Nipissing University has painstakingly shown several evidences of republic forms of government in ancient India. And, according to Hinduism Professor Arvind Sharma at McGill University, republicanism was as prominent a form of government as monarchy in the sixth century B.C. in India.
It is true that the Magadha empire rose at the expense of such republics, but when Alexander invaded India in the fourth century B.C., he had to fight against as many republics as kingdoms on his way to Punjab. Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra republics are attested to by Panini, the famous grammarian assigned to the fourth century B.C., if not earlier, and Alexander had to defeat both a Brahmana and a Shudra republic in the course of his conquest. Republicanism, in the form of the operation of guild-laws, common law, regional practices, etc. survived throughout, countenanced by the kings. The Rajatarangini, a historical narrative of Kashmir, informs us of cases in which the king's decisions were blocked and even reversed by the king's council. Rudradaman (c.150 C.E.) had to spend money from his privy purse to carry out repairs at Lake Sudarshana in Saurashtra because his council would not let him use public funds for the purpose. In addition, it is also often believed that modernity ended centuries of theocracy. But, at least within the Indian culture, theocracy was shunned millennia ago when Brahmans and Kshatriyas were assigned separate roles as religious and political leaders. We don't have a single incidence from Indian political history where a religious leader was made the king or vice versa.
Feminism: In the modern society, women are seen more liberated with their earning capacities and their role as career women rather than housewives or homemakers. It is believed that majority of Indian women committed sati in ancient times and widow-remarriage was not allowed. How far is this true? Most of the literature on the subject creates the impression of a general ban on widow-remarriage in Hinduism. According to the 1901 census, however, only 10 percent of the Hindu communities observed it. Professor Veena Oldenburg powerfully challenges even the usual portrayal of women being killed for dowry, which is linked with Indian culture. The British resolve to rationalize and modernize the revenue was particularly hard on women. From being co-partners in pre-colonial landholding arrangement, they found themselves denied all access to economic resources, turning them into dependents. In the event, they faced marital problems, and they were left with no legal entitlements whatsoever.
It is true that Indian society always has been a patriarchic society with males being the head of the family, but so is the case with all the other cultures -- eastern or western. But, it is the Indian culture that has the concept of Devi, goddess, which treats females also as divinely as the male gods, or Devas. Devi exists in various forms and powers. Laxmi is worshipped as the power of wealth. Shakti or Durga is worshipped as the power to be invoked in war. Saraswati is worshipped as the power of knowledge. Even the power of illusion is given a female identity in the form of Maya. Also, it is only South Asian countries that have no problem accepting women as the head of their states in the form of presidents or prime ministers. There are other dozens of social and religious female leaders in India.
Women who were given the sole responsibility to run a home are now being over-loaded to earn money also. In the modern world of judging everything by financial and materialistic rewards, are we reducing our mothers and wives also into moneymaking machines? And is that the only criteria for their freedom?
Science/Technology and Rationality: Modernity has negated the role of philosophical thinking and glorified reason-based thinking. Modernity also launched the era of science and technology with thousands of new inventions and discoveries about the outer world and the human body. This popular notion is already challenged by the scholarly work of Joseph Needham, which highlights the ancient Chinese contribution in science and technology. Similarly, many Arabic/Islamic scientific inventions are now accepted. Within India, we know that many scientific notions in the fields of Astronomy, Medicine, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Maritime and Linguistics were known to Indians thousands of years ago. There is a huge set of evidence about traditional knowledge systems as late as 18th century just before the advent of the British.
It is true that modern science has added tremendous inventions for human society but to claim that tradition or culture was non-scientific will again be misleading.
Environment protection: It is a popular notion that modernity also led to the awareness about environment protection and animal rights. However, it is also true that modernity has reduced the natural resources due to exploitation by human beings. Whereas Indian culture has the reverential concepts to worship natural powers and animals, modernity, while ridiculing such notions, claims to champion the cause of ecology. It is sad that the cultural values to regard the rivers as mothers, land as mother, cow as mother and trees as divine are ridiculed or rejected today in the name of modernity. Didn't these notions already combine eco-friendliness with popular culture?
Freedom: Modernity also is seen to be liberating dozens of nations from centuries of colonial rule. However, it can be argued that we have certainly achieved political freedom from colonial powers but how free are we intellectually and culturally from those powers? Did modernity free us or has it bounded us in new ways?
Conclusion
In this essay, we have seen that the so-called modern values were already present in ancient Indian culture. It is just that, in the medieval period of the last few centuries, they were corrupted under colonial pressures. With the advent of modernity, the same ancient cultural values are being presented to the human society in new western forms. We just need to apply our cultural contexts to them. Modernity devoid of cultural values will always be incomplete progress.
In this essay, let us explore what exactly is modernity and how does it affect our way of thinking. Does modernity achieve what it sets out to do? And how do Indian culture and traditions fit into this. Where do Indian traditions stop and modern values begin? The main argument presented here is that the so-called modern values were already imbibed in our culture.
What is Modernity?
Modernity can be defined as connecting to the new and the contemporary, rejecting the old. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: the word modern was first recorded in 1585 in the sense `of present or recent times'. In Latin, modernus is derived from modo, meaning `just now'. The English word modern was not originally concerned with anything that could later be considered old-fashioned. Obviously, modernity often is used to reject old-fashioned ideas and traditions. In the cultural and social contexts, modernity is also interlinked with the values of equality, freedom, feminism and democracy. It is generally assumed that the modernity in 19th and 20th century unleashed the power of scientific and industrial progress, which led to social equality, freedom of downtrodden sections of the society, freedom to women. Democracy is also thought to be a modern concept of governance as against rulers and kings of ancient times. Modernity is also thought of as increasing the role of rationality in the public sphere and reducing the role of religion. Let us take these modern values one by one and explore them more.
Modern Values
Social Equality: One of the popular assumptions is that modernity provided equal status to downtrodden sections of the masses. Before the advent of modernity, people in the weaker sections of the society were controlled and oppressed by the landlords and the religious leaders. With modernity, all the sections of the society have equal rights. However, according to Professor Arvind Sharma, equality before law did exist in ancient India, especially in the sphere of criminal law. The Pali texts clearly allude to it, and the Nibandhas – legal digests of the twelfth century onwards – specifically eliminate unequal punishments. King Ashoka also tried to enforce it. The Nepala-Mahatmya (13.46) of the Skanhapurana also seems to recommend such egalitarianism. Moreover, even today in the 21st century, global spiritual movement Swadhyaya rooted in Indian cultural values has devised many innovative experiments and projects to ensure social equality in thousands of Indian villages. One of the novel Swadhyaya concepts is Amrutalayam, meaning house of immortality. This is similar to a village temple but its priests come from different castes of the village and every evening the entire village gathers here as a social/economical/spiritual family. Just a small example to show how social equality can be achieved by cultural values.
Democracy: Another popular assumption is that modernity gave rise to democracy, ending centuries of autocracy, and therefore governments for the masses, of the masses and by the masses were installed in many parts of the world. This gave tremendous power to the masses in choosing their own rulers and removing the ones they didn't like in the elections. But, contrary to this assumption, India in ancient times did have its own form of democracy and republics. The inscriptions on the walls of the Sundaravarada temple in Uttiramerur near Kanchipuram show how democracy was practiced 1000 years ago. History Professor Steve Muhlberger at Nipissing University has painstakingly shown several evidences of republic forms of government in ancient India. And, according to Hinduism Professor Arvind Sharma at McGill University, republicanism was as prominent a form of government as monarchy in the sixth century B.C. in India.
It is true that the Magadha empire rose at the expense of such republics, but when Alexander invaded India in the fourth century B.C., he had to fight against as many republics as kingdoms on his way to Punjab. Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra republics are attested to by Panini, the famous grammarian assigned to the fourth century B.C., if not earlier, and Alexander had to defeat both a Brahmana and a Shudra republic in the course of his conquest. Republicanism, in the form of the operation of guild-laws, common law, regional practices, etc. survived throughout, countenanced by the kings. The Rajatarangini, a historical narrative of Kashmir, informs us of cases in which the king's decisions were blocked and even reversed by the king's council. Rudradaman (c.150 C.E.) had to spend money from his privy purse to carry out repairs at Lake Sudarshana in Saurashtra because his council would not let him use public funds for the purpose. In addition, it is also often believed that modernity ended centuries of theocracy. But, at least within the Indian culture, theocracy was shunned millennia ago when Brahmans and Kshatriyas were assigned separate roles as religious and political leaders. We don't have a single incidence from Indian political history where a religious leader was made the king or vice versa.
Feminism: In the modern society, women are seen more liberated with their earning capacities and their role as career women rather than housewives or homemakers. It is believed that majority of Indian women committed sati in ancient times and widow-remarriage was not allowed. How far is this true? Most of the literature on the subject creates the impression of a general ban on widow-remarriage in Hinduism. According to the 1901 census, however, only 10 percent of the Hindu communities observed it. Professor Veena Oldenburg powerfully challenges even the usual portrayal of women being killed for dowry, which is linked with Indian culture. The British resolve to rationalize and modernize the revenue was particularly hard on women. From being co-partners in pre-colonial landholding arrangement, they found themselves denied all access to economic resources, turning them into dependents. In the event, they faced marital problems, and they were left with no legal entitlements whatsoever.
It is true that Indian society always has been a patriarchic society with males being the head of the family, but so is the case with all the other cultures -- eastern or western. But, it is the Indian culture that has the concept of Devi, goddess, which treats females also as divinely as the male gods, or Devas. Devi exists in various forms and powers. Laxmi is worshipped as the power of wealth. Shakti or Durga is worshipped as the power to be invoked in war. Saraswati is worshipped as the power of knowledge. Even the power of illusion is given a female identity in the form of Maya. Also, it is only South Asian countries that have no problem accepting women as the head of their states in the form of presidents or prime ministers. There are other dozens of social and religious female leaders in India.
Women who were given the sole responsibility to run a home are now being over-loaded to earn money also. In the modern world of judging everything by financial and materialistic rewards, are we reducing our mothers and wives also into moneymaking machines? And is that the only criteria for their freedom?
Science/Technology and Rationality: Modernity has negated the role of philosophical thinking and glorified reason-based thinking. Modernity also launched the era of science and technology with thousands of new inventions and discoveries about the outer world and the human body. This popular notion is already challenged by the scholarly work of Joseph Needham, which highlights the ancient Chinese contribution in science and technology. Similarly, many Arabic/Islamic scientific inventions are now accepted. Within India, we know that many scientific notions in the fields of Astronomy, Medicine, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Maritime and Linguistics were known to Indians thousands of years ago. There is a huge set of evidence about traditional knowledge systems as late as 18th century just before the advent of the British.
It is true that modern science has added tremendous inventions for human society but to claim that tradition or culture was non-scientific will again be misleading.
Environment protection: It is a popular notion that modernity also led to the awareness about environment protection and animal rights. However, it is also true that modernity has reduced the natural resources due to exploitation by human beings. Whereas Indian culture has the reverential concepts to worship natural powers and animals, modernity, while ridiculing such notions, claims to champion the cause of ecology. It is sad that the cultural values to regard the rivers as mothers, land as mother, cow as mother and trees as divine are ridiculed or rejected today in the name of modernity. Didn't these notions already combine eco-friendliness with popular culture?
Freedom: Modernity also is seen to be liberating dozens of nations from centuries of colonial rule. However, it can be argued that we have certainly achieved political freedom from colonial powers but how free are we intellectually and culturally from those powers? Did modernity free us or has it bounded us in new ways?
Conclusion
In this essay, we have seen that the so-called modern values were already present in ancient Indian culture. It is just that, in the medieval period of the last few centuries, they were corrupted under colonial pressures. With the advent of modernity, the same ancient cultural values are being presented to the human society in new western forms. We just need to apply our cultural contexts to them. Modernity devoid of cultural values will always be incomplete progress.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Saawariya and the great amalgam of traditions...
The success of Saawariya lies in its international appeal. The titles in the beginning of the film declare that it is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 novella (short story) White Nights. And yet, after watching the film, I felt the film was also inspired by Raj Kapoor's films. While Raj Kapoor's Anari had the mother-like figure of Ms. Disuja who is the only sympathizer of the protagonist facing all kinds of hardship, Saawariya has "Lilipop" acted by Zohra Sehgal with great elan! Several of the scenes in the film proudly display the "RK" banner in the background and even the hero works as a lead-singer in an "RK" bar! The influence of Devdaas and Muqaddar ka Sikander is apparent when the heart-broken lover seeks shelter at a dancer's residence, although he is rejected there also. The entire role of Ranbir Kapoor is heavily inspired by his own grandfather's similar roles in which the character downplays the sad and harsh realities of life by having a jubilant attitude with a simmering pathos underneath. Ranbir Kapoor is definitely one of the finest actors to have recently emerged in Hindi films. In a moment, he can show us different kinds of rasas of sadness, happiness, comedy, and others, sprinkled with a light dose of dance and song sequence! The other hallmarks of the film is its art direction. Here again, the entire film is shot as a dream sequence with dark and bright colors and huge images in the backdrop. The song picturizations are good, especially the Id Qawwali one. However, the music needed more appeal although Monty Sharma seemed to have worked hard for his debut film. The heroine Sonam Kapoor also pales in comparison with Ranbir's spirited performance. Rani Mukherjee excels in her diegetic role as a narrator and a constant companion of Ranbir throughout the film. She seems to have matured as an actress with Black and now Saawariya.
The DVD cover of this film says, "Hurrah for Bollywood" and I agree! This film is in the emerging series of Hindi films constantly knocking at the international stage starting with Lagaan. The "Bollywood" has finally arrived with a host of recent films with a global appeal. It is to this interesting mix of Western and Indian elements in this typical Bollywood film that one can look forward to in the coming years!
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Jodhaa Akbar: A Review
Jodhaa Akbar: India’s Contribution to World Cinema
For long, Indian films have been criticized, ridiculed, and ignored by the elites both in India and abroad। Indian Cinema has been accused of lacking originality in its themes and contents. Being an admirer of the this media in general and of Indian films in particular, until now I had only names like Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Mehboob Khan, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen to glorify Indian cinema. While Hollywood can boast of several epic films, Indian films in this category could only list names such as Mughal-e-Azam, Mother India, and Sholay. I used to wonder if India could ever produce films makers that can be counted among the great stalwarts of the world cinema. My expectations were fulfilled to a great degree when Ashutosh Gowariker came up with Lagaan. Here was a truly Indian film with Indian characters and music inspired by Indian folk and devotional music. After Lagaan, Gowariker continued with Swades, yet another truly Indian film with an original story inspired by Indian grass root work done by NRIs. I am happy to note that Gowariker has continued his genre of making truly Indian film inspired by Indian history with his latest film Jodhaa Akbar (JA).
For long, Indian films have been criticized, ridiculed, and ignored by the elites both in India and abroad। Indian Cinema has been accused of lacking originality in its themes and contents. Being an admirer of the this media in general and of Indian films in particular, until now I had only names like Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Mehboob Khan, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen to glorify Indian cinema. While Hollywood can boast of several epic films, Indian films in this category could only list names such as Mughal-e-Azam, Mother India, and Sholay. I used to wonder if India could ever produce films makers that can be counted among the great stalwarts of the world cinema. My expectations were fulfilled to a great degree when Ashutosh Gowariker came up with Lagaan. Here was a truly Indian film with Indian characters and music inspired by Indian folk and devotional music. After Lagaan, Gowariker continued with Swades, yet another truly Indian film with an original story inspired by Indian grass root work done by NRIs. I am happy to note that Gowariker has continued his genre of making truly Indian film inspired by Indian history with his latest film Jodhaa Akbar (JA).
While Swades was a dramatized version of true events in recent Indian history and Lagaan was a fictional account of an event that was placed in Indian colonial history by the deft direction of Gowariker, JA is a film that takes its inspiration from the life and times of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor. Again, like Lagaan and Swades, Gowariker has chosen to make use of full potential of this great medium that is largely underused by most contemporary filmmakers. Just to quote from my own review of Swades:
“Having watched it, I am once again full of exhilaration and optimism about Indian films. Pritish Nandy had said about Lagaan: “Phew! What a Movie!” He would say the same about Swades. He had then said “Move over, James Cameron (maker of the film Titanic), Ashutosh Gowariker has arrived! I would say “Move over, Chopras, Johars and others (who have looted public money for their profits and wasted this media), Ashutosh Gowariker has arrived.”
About JA also, I would make a similar comment. To be sure, it is not a documentary or scholarly presentation on the life and times of Akbar. We already have several history books with detailed research about Akbar. Instead, Gowariker has chosen to present a rare chapter of Indian history using the media of this film. We had long heard the name of Jodhaa Bai, a Rajput princess that Akbar had married in his efforts to reach out to the Hindu people of India just as he had abolished the Jaziya Tax that was collected from the Hindus before his reign. Gowariker focuses on the role of Jodhaa Bai in shaping Akbar’s life and rule by way of her Hindu and Rajput background. Just as Sikhism, Urdu, Indian classical music are all products of historic intermixing of the most different traditions of Hinduism and Islam, Gowariker presents Mughal rule by Akbar as a great amalgam of coming together of a Hindu princess and a Muslim King. Even if some historians can dispute the historic accuracy of this film, Akbar’s relationship with Hindus is a theme worth exploring. Like Indian Sufism and India Shiite traditions of Islam, Akbar’s rule is a glorious chapter of Indian Islam that has a unique imprint and impression of Indian culture that may well have derived its inspiration from Jodhaa.
The film starts with an elaborate battle scene with Akbar winning Delhi from the Hindu king Hemu. Akbar’s hesitation to behead Hemu shows his inclination towards Indian non-violence even in his adolescence that takes full shape when he becomes the emperor and asks his caretaker Behram Khan to leave for Mecca. Akbar dislikes the way Khan was conquering Hindu kings and bringing about massive carnage. Akbar changes the Mughal politics from confrontation to conciliation with Hindu kings. In this scenario, Jodhaa’s hand is offered to him by Amer’s king. As a Rajput woman with high self-esteem and pride about her culture and traditions, Jodhaa refuses to marry Akbar until he agrees to her demands. She extracts a promise from him to practice Hinduism after their marriage. She comes to Akbar’s palace in Agra but soon is disappointed by conspiracies and murders widespread in the royal court. Slowly and steadily, she succeeds in bringing about a fundamental transformation in the outlook of the emperor towards his subjects and his personal lifestyle. It is historically known that Akbar had practiced vegetarianism on certain days and had abolished a special tax on Hindus. The film merely connects these historic events to the influence of Jodhaa on Akbar. It was Jodhaa’s suggestion that inspires Akbar to examine the lives of his people to better rule them. Similarly, Jodhaa’s vegetarian Rajasthani delicacies inspire Akbar to be vegetarian on certain days in a month. Even the final battle scene that could have erupted to a huge massacre is reduced to a duel against his bitter enemy in which Akbar puts an end to his long-standing rebel.
The story by Haidar Ali does a great service to the role of Jodhaa who is not known to the audience except for her mention as the wife of Akbar in the history books. The director does not leave any stone unturned to present the power, grandeur, and grace of both Jodhaa and Akbar. The film shows several of their encounters with great subtlety and sensitivity. My favorite scene was when Jodhaa decides to cook herself in the royal kitchen even as the matriarch of the royal palace continues to doubt Jodhaa because of her Hindu background. In addition to a great story line and a great direction, the art direction by Nitin Desai, costume design by Neeta Lulla, and action by Ravi Dewan are other highlights of this epic film. In all, they succeed to portray the royal life of Akbar in all its grandiose and magnanimity. The casting of several characters is top-notch, especially their Urdu diction, including that of Hritik Roshan, shows their hard work. Even the final action scene has several innovative elements, a long scene in which the warriors keep dropping and changing their weapons. However, the music by A. R. Rahman leaves a lot to be desired especially after his superior performance in Lagaan. I was expecting the Sufi dance to be much more passionate and powerful with intense devotion that Rahman had showed in a similar sequence for Shyam Benegal’s film on Subhash Chandra Bose. Here Rahman sounded quite subdued. Similarly, unlike the Lagaan’s immortal Hindu bhajan, Jodhaa’s Krishna bhajan fails to leave an impression. Only high point in music is the title song celebrating Akbar’s rule with his people especially with its spectacular choreography. Coming to the acting department, Hritik has delivered the best performance of his career. I already mentioned about his Urdu, his acting as a Mughal emperor similarly shows his devotion to his work and his coming of age (after “Masala” films like Krish and Dhoom 2). However, Aishwarya Rai only partially succeeded in delivering a powerful performance expected of such an epic role. Ila Arun shines as the Mughal matriarch and so do rest of the characters.
Overall, Akbar’s role in the history of India deserved a bioepic films such as this. I am aware that people in Rajasthan have protested this film challenging the historical accuracy of Jodhaa’s life but they seem to have ignored that the film actually puts Jodhaa on a very high pedestal, a Hindu woman that transforms the Delhi politics and Mughal king in a major way. To me, this film and Akbar’s rule both are powerful celebrations of Indian culture. A culture that indianized several foreign invaders and murderers to adopt Indian ways of non-violence, vegetarianism, and respect for all traditions and religions. Before Muslims, Greeks, left behind by Alexander, were similarly absorbed into the massive “sponge” of Indian culture. After Greeks, Huns, Shaks, and several other invading tribes also were mingled into Indian society. Mongols who were fierce warriors and had established the largest empire in the world could not hold on to their victories in any other part of the world except their Indian descendents the Mughals. The success of Mughals was largely based on Akbar’s upbringing among the Rajputs and his later marriage with Jodhaa.
Again, historians can continue to argue about the historical accuracy of the film but Gowariker has largely succeeded in telling a story of Indian culture in his unique style. This film will be long remembered for its epic portrayal of an Indian king and his queen. Indian cinema should be grateful to acknowledge the contributions by Gowariker for his innovative films that succeed in raising the intellectual and cinematic contents and themes of the films. Kudos!
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
इंडिया = भारत!
Miracle That Is India As India turns 60, we present extracts from Ramachandra Guha's new book on India's history since 1947. It's a history we're still making. RAMACHANDRA GUHA
The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime... and that will be only a start of a general decentralisation and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.
—General Claude Auchinleck, writing in 1948
When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship—as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organised centre of power.
—Aldous Huxley, writing in 1961
The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed. (Indians will soon vote) in the fourth—and surely last—general election.
—The London Times, in 1967
***In May 2004, the Republic of India held its 14th general elections. Four hundred million voters exercised their franchise. The ruling alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was widely expected to win by a comfortable margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the 'Hindutva' agenda. As it happened, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance defied the pollsters and came to power. The outcome was variously interpreted as a victory for secularism, a revolt of the 'aam admi' against the rich, and an affirmation of the continuing hold of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty over the popular imagination. In the larger context of world history, however, what is important is not why the voters voted as they did, but the fact that they voted at all. Ever since the 1952 elections were described as the "biggest gamble in history", obituaries have been written for Indian democracy. It has been said, time and again, that a poor, diverse and divided country cannot sustain the practice of (reasonably) free and fair elections.
Yet it has. In those first general elections, voter turnout was less than 46 per cent. Over the years, this has steadily increased; from the late 1960s about three out of five eligible Indians have voted on election day. In assembly elections, the voting percentage has tended to be even higher. When these numbers are disaggregated, they reveal a further deepening. In the first two general elections, less than 40 per cent of eligible women voted; by 1998, the figure was in excess of 60 per cent. Besides, as surveys showed, they increasingly exercised their choice independently, that is, regardless of their husband's or father's views on the matter. Also voting in ever higher numbers were Dalits and tribals, the oppressed and marginalised sections of society. In North India in particular, Dalits turned out in far greater numbers than high castes. As the political analyst Yogendra Yadav points out, "India is perhaps the only large democracy in the world today where the turnout of the lower orders is well above that of the most privileged groups."
The institutions that keep us together are those bequests of the British: the civil service, the army, the railways, and cricket.
And yes, this too: the cricketing nation The Indian love of voting is well illustrated by the case of a cluster of villages on the Andhra/Maharashtra border.Issued voting cards by the administrations of both states, the villagers seized the opportunity to exercise their franchise twice over. It is also illustrated by the peasants in Bihar who go to the polls despite threats by Maoist revolutionaries. Likewise, in parts of the Northeast where the writ of the Indian state runs erratically or not at all, insurgents are unable to stop villagers from voting. As the Chief Election Commissioner wryly put it, "The Election Commission's small contribution to the integrity of the country is to make these areas part of the country for just one day, election day". That elections have been successfully indigenised in India is demonstrated by the depth and breadth of their reach—across and into all sections of Indian society, by the passions they evoke, and by the humour that surrounds them. There is a very rich archive of electoral cartoons, poking fun at promises made by prospective politicians, their desperation to get a party ticket, and much else. At other times, the humour can be gentle rather than mocking. Consider the career of a cloth merchant from Bhopal named Mohan Lal, who contested elections against five different prime ministers. Wearing a wooden crown and a garland gifted by himself, he would walk the streets of his constituency, ringing a bell. He unfailingly lost his deposit, thereby justifying his own, self-inflicted sobriquet of 'Dhartipakad', or he who lies, humbled, on the ground. His idea in contesting elections, said Mohan Lal, was "to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all".
The hardware of democracy gives us reason to cheer. Not so its software. Most of our parties are family firms, most politicians corrupt.
Voice from below: India is the only democracy where the lower orders vote more enthusiastically than privileged groups Considering the size of the electorate, it is overwhelmingly likely that more people have voted in Indian elections than voters in any other democracy. India's success in this regard is especially striking when compared to the record of its great Asian neighbour, China. That country is larger, but far less divided on ethnic or religious lines, and far less poor as well. Yet there has never been a single election held there. In other ways too China is much less free than India. The flow of information is highly restricted—when the search engine Google set up shop in China in February 2006, it had to agree to submit to state censorship. The movement of people is regulated as well—the permission of the state is usually required to change one's place of residence. In India, on the other hand, the press can print more or less what they like, and citizens can say exactly what they feel, live where they wish to and travel to any part of the country.India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on their neighbour's democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or in posters, as the 'World's Fastest Growing Democracy'.If one looks at what one might call the 'hardware' of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote.However, if one examines the 'software' of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms. Most politicians are corrupt, and many come from a criminal background. The percentage of truly independent-minded civil servants has steadily declined over the years, as has the percentage of completely fair-minded judges.Is India a proper democracy or a sham one? When asked this question, I usually turn for recourse to an immortal line of the great Hindi comic actor Johnny Walker. In a film where he plays the hero's sidekick, Walker answers every query with the remark: "Boss, phipty/phipty." When asked what prospect he has of marrying the girl he so deeply loves, or of getting the job he so dearly desires, the sidekick tells the boss that the chances are roughly even, 50 per cent of success, or 50 per cent of failure.Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well, phipty-phipty. It mostly is, when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of movement and expression. It mostly is not, when it comes to the functioning of politicians and political institutions. However, that India is even a 50 per cent democracy flies in the face of tradition, history, and the conventional wisdom. Indeed, by its own experience, it is rewriting that history and that wisdom. Thus, Sunil Khilnani remarked of the 2004 polls that they represented "the largest exercise of democratic election, ever and anywhere, in human history. Clearly, the idea of democracy, brought into being on an Athenian hillside some 2,500 years ago, has travelled far—and today describes a disparate array of political projects and experiences. The peripatetic life of the democratic idea has ensured that the history of Western political ideas can no longer be written coherently from within the terms of the West's own historical experience".The history of independent India has amended and modified theories of democracy based on the experience of the West. However, it has even more frontally challenged ideas of nationalism emanating from the Western experience.Behind every successful nationalist movement in the Western world has been a certain unifying factor, a glue holding the members of the nation together, this provided by a shared language, a shared religious faith, a shared territory, a common enemy—and sometimes all of the above. Thus, the British nation brought together those who huddled together on a cold island, who were mostly Protestant, and who detested France. In the case of France, it was language which powerfully combined with religion. For the Americans, a shared language and mostly shared faith worked in tandem with animosity towards the colonists. As for the smaller East European nations—the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians, etc—their populations have been united by a common language, a mostly common faith, and a shared and very bitter history of domination by German and Russian oppressors.By contrast with these (and other examples), the Indian nation does not privilege a single language or religious faith. Although the majority of its citizens are Hindus, India is not a 'Hindu' nation. Its Constitution does not discriminate between people on the basis of faith; nor, more crucially, did the nationalist movement that lay behind it. Gandhi's political programme was built upon harmony and cooperation between India's two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. Although, in the end, his work and example were unsuccessful in stopping the division of India, the failure made his successors even more determined to construct independent India as a secular republic. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues, if India was anything at all, it was not a 'Hindu Pakistan'.Like Indian democracy, Indian secularism is also a story that combines success with failure.Membership of a minority religion is no bar to advancement in business or the professions. The richest industrialist in India is a Muslim. Some of the most popular film stars are Muslim. Three Presidents and two Chief Justices have been Muslim. At the time of writing, the President of India is a Muslim, the Prime Minister a Sikh, and the leader of the ruling party a Catholic born in Italy. Many of the country's most prominent lawyers and doctors have been Christians and Parsis.On the other hand, there have been periodic episodes of religious rioting, in the worst of which (as in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002) the minorities have suffered grievous losses of life and property. Still, for the most part, the minorities appear to retain faith in the democratic and secular ideal. Very few Indian Muslims have joined terrorist or fundamentalist organisations. Even more than their compatriots, Indian Muslims feel that their opinion and vote matters. One recent survey found that while 69 per cent of all Indians approve and endorse the ideal of democracy, 72 per cent of Muslims did so. And the turnout of Muslims at elections is higher than ever before.Building democracy in a poor society was always going to be hard work. Nurturing secularism in a land recently divided was going to be even harder. The creation of an Islamic state on India's borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to merge faith with state. My own view—speaking as historian rather than citizen—is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.The pluralism of religion was one cornerstone of the foundation of the Indian republic. A second was the pluralism of language. Here again, the intention and the effort well predated Independence. In the 1920s, Gandhi reconstituted the provincial committees of the Congress on linguistic lines. The party had promised to form linguistic provinces as soon as the country was free. The promise was not redeemed immediately after 1947, because the creation of Pakistan had promoted fears of further balkanisation. However, in the face of popular protest, the government yielded to the demand.Linguistic states have been in existence for 50 years now. In that time, they have deepened and consolidated Indian unity. Within each state, a common language has provided the basis of administrative unity and efficiency. It has also led to an efflorescence of cultural creativity, as expressed in film, theatre, fiction and poetry. However, pride in one's language has rarely been in conflict with a broader identification with the nation as a whole. The three major secessionist movements in independent India—in Nagaland in the 1950s, in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s—have affirmed religious and territorial distinctiveness, not a linguistic one. For the rest, it has proved perfectly possible—indeed, desirable—to be Kannadiga and Indian, Malayali and Indian, Andhra and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Oriya and Indian, Maharashtrian and Indian, Gujarati and Indian and, of course, Hindi-speaking and Indian.
Linguistic pluralism has worked. Instead of dividing, as elsewhere in the world, it tamed and domesticated secessionist tendencies.
Denominations on the Indian currency note are given not just in Hindi and in English but in all Indian languages
That unity and pluralism are inseparable in India is graphically expressed in the country's currency notes.On one side is printed a portrait of the 'father of the nation', Mahatma Gandhi; on the other side, a picture of the Houses of Parliament. The note's denomination—5, 10, 50, 100, etc—is printed in words in Hindi and English (the two official languages), but also, in smaller type, in all the other languages of the Union. In this manner, as many as 17 different scripts are represented. With each language, and each script, comes a distinct culture and regional ethos, here nesting more-or-less comfortably with the idea of India as a whole.Some Western observers—usually Americans—believed that this profusion of tongues would be the undoing of India. Based on their own country's experience, where English had been the glue binding the different waves of immigrants, they thought that a single language—be it Hindi or English—had to be spoken by all Indians. Linguistic states they regarded as a grievous error. In 1970, Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post wrote despairingly that this was "a land of Babel with no common voice". From its birth the Indian nation had been "plagued by particularist, separatist tendencies", wrote Nossiter, and "the continuing confusion of tongues...can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state". In fact, exactly the reverse has happened—that is, the sustenance of linguistic pluralism has worked to tame and domesticate secessionist tendencies. A comparison with neighbouring countries might be helpful. Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language. And for more than two decades now, a bloody civil war has raged in Sri Lanka, the disputants divided somewhat by territory and faith but most of all by language. The lesson from these cases might well be: 'One language, two nations'. Had Hindi been imposed on the whole of India, the lesson might well have been: 'One language, 22 nations'.That Indians spoke many languages and followed many faiths made their nation unnatural in the eyes of some Western observers, both lay and academic. In truth, many Indians thought so too. A popular slogan of the original Jana Sangh was 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustani'. The attempt was to make Indian nationalism more natural, by making—or persuading—all Indians to speak the same language and worship the same gods. In time, the bid to impose a uniform language was dropped. But the desire to impose the will of the majority religion persisted. This has led to much conflict, violence, rioting and deaths. Particularly after the Gujarat riots of 2002, which were condoned and to some extent even approved by the Central government, fears were expressed about the survival of a secular and democratic India. Thus, in a lecture delivered in the university town of Aligarh, the writer Arundhati Roy went so far as to characterise the BJP regime as 'fascist'. In fact, she used the term 'fascism' 11 times in a single paragraph while describing the actions of the government in New Delhi.
Arundhati Roy used the word fascist 11 times in a speech on the BJP after Gujarat. That is careless borrowing from European history.
A Bajrang Dal activist in the Gujarat riots
Here again, Indian events and experiences were being analysed in terms carelessly borrowed from European history. To call the BJP 'fascist' is to diminish the severity and seriousness of the murderous crimes committed by the original fascists in Italy and Germany. Many leaders of the BJP are less than appealing, but to see the party as 'fascist' would be both to overestimate its powers and to underestimate the democratic traditions of the Indian people.Notably, the BJP now vigorously promotes linguistic pluralism. No longer are its leaders from the Hindi heartland alone; and it has expanded its influence in the southern states. And it is obliged to pay at least lip service to religious pluralism. One of its general secretaries is a Muslim; even if he is dismissed as a showboy, the ideology he and his party promote goes by the name of 'positive secularism'. The qualifier only underlines the larger concession—that even if some BJP leaders privately wish for a theocratic Hindu state, for public consumption they must endorse the secular ideals of the Indian Constitution.Finally, despite all their best efforts, the BJP was not able to disturb the democratic edifice of the Indian polity. A month after Arundhati Roy delivered her speech, the BJP alliance lost power in a general election that it had called. Its leaders moved out of office and allowed their victors to move in instead. When was the last time a 'fascist' regime permitted such an orderly transfer of power?The holding of the 1977 elections—called by an individual who had proven dictatorial tendencies—and of the 2004 elections—called by a party unreliably committed to democratic procedure—were both testimony to the deep roots that democracy had struck in the soil of India. In this respect, the country was fortunate in the calibre of its founding figures, and in the fact that they lived as long as they did. Few nations have had, living and working at the same time, leaders of such acknowledged intelligence and integrity as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B. R. Ambedkar. Within a few years of Independence, Patel had died, and Ambedkar had left office; but by then the one had successfully overseen the political integration of the country and the other the forging of a democratic Constitution. As Nehru lived on, he was kept company by outstanding leaders in his own party—K. Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, for instance—and in the Opposition, in whose ranks were such men as J.B. Kripalani and C. Rajagopalachari.Of course, there has been a rapid, even alarming, decline in the quality of the men and women who rule India. In a book published in 2003, the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote feelingly of "the corruption, mediocrity, indiscipline, venality and lack of moral imagination of the (Indian) political class". Within the Indian state, he continued, "the lines between legality and illegality, order and disorder, state and criminality, have come to be increasingly porous".That said, the distance—intellectual or moral—between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, or between B. R. Ambedkar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, is not necessarily greater than between—say—Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made, they can be managed by mediocrities. In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.
Parts of Kashmir and the Northeast may be in trouble; Maoists hold a bit of central India. But India remains 80 per cent united.
Kashmir: a question of territory
If India is roughly 50 per cent democratic, it is approximately 80 per cent united. Some parts of Kashmir and the Northeast are under the control of insurgents seeking political independence. Some forested districts in central India are in the grip of Maoist revolutionaries.However, these areas, large enough in themselves, constitute considerably less than a quarter of the total land mass claimed by the Indian nation.Among the institutions that keep the country together are those bequests of the British—the civil service, the army, the railways, the English language and the game of cricket. Working with—or in subordination to—a democratic and federal Constitution, these institutions have ensured that in over four-fifths of India, the elected government enjoys a legitimacy of power and authority. Throughout this territory, the citizens of India are free to live, study, take employment and invest in businesses.The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is, after all, one country.Apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity. Pre-eminent here is the Hindi film. This is the great popular passion of the Indian people, watched and followed by Indians of all ages, genders, castes, classes, religions and linguistic groups.Each of the formally recognised states of the Union, be it Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala, says the lyricist Javed Akhtar, "has its different culture, tradition and style. In Gujarat, you have one kind of culture, then you go to Punjab, you have another, and the same applies in Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala". Then, Akhtar adds: "There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema."This is a stunning insight, which asks to be developed further. As a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that (in a cultural sense) is most creative in the other states. Thus its actors, musicians, technicians and directors come from all parts of India. Thus also it draws ecumenically from cultural forms prevalent in different regions. For example, a single song may feature both the Punjabi folk dance called the bhangra and its Tamil classical counterpart, Bharatanatyam.Having borrowed elements from here and there—and everywhere—the Hindi film then sends the synthesised product out for appreciation to the other states of the Union. The most widely revered Indians are film stars. Yet cinema does not merely provide Indians with a common pantheon of heroes; it also gives them a common language and universe of discourse. Lines from film songs and snatches from film dialogue are ubiquitously used in conversations in schools, colleges, homes and offices—and on the street. Because it is one more state of the Union, Hindi cinema also speaks its own language, this, however, understood by all the others.
Javed Akhtar calls Hindi cinema 'one more state in this country'. It has done more for the acceptance of Hindi than any official fiat.
Bollywood: an idiom for all of India
The last sentence is meant literally as well as metaphorically. Hindi cinema provides a stock of social situations and moral conundrums which widely resonate with the citizenry as a whole. But, over time, it has also made the Hindi language more comprehensible to those who previously never spoke or understood it. When imposed by fiat by the central government, Hindi was resisted by the people of the south and the east. When conveyed seductively by the medium of cinema and television, Hindi has been accepted by them. In Bangalore and Hyderabad, Hindi has become the preferred medium of communication between those who speak mutually incomprehensible tongues.Finally, one might instance the banning of Hindi films, DVDs and videos by insurgents in the Northeast: this, in its own way, is a considerable tribute to the part played by the Hindi film in uniting India.One might think of independent India as being Europe's past as well as its future. It is Europe's past, in that it has reproduced, albeit more fiercely and intensely, the conflicts of a modernising, industrialising and urbanising society. But it is also its future, in that it anticipated, by some 50 years, the European attempt to create a multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, political and economic community.It is tempting to compare India with the United States, a country justly celebrated as "the planet's first multi-ethnic democracy". Born nearly two centuries later, the Republic of India is today comfortably the world's largest multi-ethnic democracy. However, the means by which it has regulated (and moderated) relations between its constituent ethnicities have been somewhat different. For, as Samuel Huntington has recently argued, the American nation has been held together by a "creedal culture" whose "central elements" have included "the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music". Indeed, "America was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth centuries".The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants. For much of the country's history, the new groups that came in merged themselves with the dominant culture. "Throughout American history," writes Huntington, "people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America's Anglo-Protestant culture and political values." Of late, however, newer groups of immigrants have tended to maintain their distinct identities. The largest of these are the Hispanics, who live in enclaves where they cook their own food, listen to their own kind of music, follow their own faith and—most importantly—speak their own language. Huntington worries that if these communities are not quickly brought into line, they will "transform America as a whole into a bilingual, bicultural society". The older American model of assimilation was called 'the melting pot'. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank a single, uniform—or uniformly tasting—drink. Now it appears that the society, and nation, are coming to resemble a 'salad bowl', with each group starkly standing out, different and distinctive in how it looks and behaves.Huntington himself is less than enthusiastic with the idea of the salad bowl. For him, America has long been, and must always be, a "society with a single pervasive national culture". He observes that Americans identify most strongly with that culture when the nation is under threat. War leads not merely to national consolidation, but also to cultural unity. The original American creed was forged as a consequence of the wars against the Native Americans, the English colonists and the southern states. The events of 9/11 once more brought patriotism and national solidarity to the fore. Concerned that these energies shall dissipate, Huntington urges a more thoroughgoing return to the creed that, in his view, was responsible for "the unity and strength of my country".Samuel Huntington's line of argument is, of course, quite familiar to students of Indian history. It has been made here by political ideologues such as M.S. Golwalkar, and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP.They have believed that India has "got to have a dominant culture", and that this culture is 'Hindu'. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.And it has stayed that way. It has sustained a diversity of religions and languages, precisely the diversities the likes of Huntington deem inimical to national survival and national solidarity. It has resisted the pressures to go in the other direction, to follow Israel and Pakistan by favouring citizens who follow a certain faith or speak a particular language.The most eloquent tribute to the idea of India that I have come across rests in some unpublished letters of the biologist J.B.S. Haldane. In his native Britain, Haldane was a figure of considerable fame and some notoriety. In 1956, already past 60, he decided to leave his post in University College, London, and take up residence in Calcutta. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute, became an Indian citizen, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. He also travelled energetically around the country, engaging with its scientists but also with the citizenry at large.Five years after Haldane had moved to India, an American science writer described him in print as a 'citizen of the world'. Haldane replied:
"No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this.... On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India."
On another occasion, Haldane described India as "the closest approximation to the Free World". An American friend protested, saying his impression was that "India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor, unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive". To this, Haldane responded:
"Perhaps one is freer to be a scoundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould, when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The 'disgusting subservience' of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I don't think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue."
As a modern nation, India is simply sui generis. It stands on its own, different and distinct from the alternative political models on offer—be these Anglo-Saxon liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic Communism, or Islamic theocracy. Back in 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh crisis, when India found itself simultaneously at odds with Communist China, Islamic Pakistan, and America, an Indian diplomat captured his country's uniqueness in this way:
"India is regarded warily in the West because she is against the concept of Imperialism and because she 'invented' the 'Third World'.India is looked on with suspicion in the 'Third World' because of her (subversive) sentiments for democracy, human rights, etc; the Muslim world is wrathful because of our secularism.The Communist countries regard India as insolent—and potentially dangerous—because we have rejected Communism as the prime condition for Progress.We are, of course, on the side of God. But is God on our side?"
The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got:
The hoary old man of lucent kenPointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edificeBecause of which there is colour in life; HeWould not like it to perish and fall.'
Ghalib and his interlocutor were speaking then of India, the civilisation. Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and—lest I forget—so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.
(This essay is adapted from Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Picador India, 2007.)
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The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime... and that will be only a start of a general decentralisation and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.
—General Claude Auchinleck, writing in 1948
When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship—as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organised centre of power.
—Aldous Huxley, writing in 1961
The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed. (Indians will soon vote) in the fourth—and surely last—general election.
—The London Times, in 1967
***In May 2004, the Republic of India held its 14th general elections. Four hundred million voters exercised their franchise. The ruling alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was widely expected to win by a comfortable margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the 'Hindutva' agenda. As it happened, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance defied the pollsters and came to power. The outcome was variously interpreted as a victory for secularism, a revolt of the 'aam admi' against the rich, and an affirmation of the continuing hold of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty over the popular imagination. In the larger context of world history, however, what is important is not why the voters voted as they did, but the fact that they voted at all. Ever since the 1952 elections were described as the "biggest gamble in history", obituaries have been written for Indian democracy. It has been said, time and again, that a poor, diverse and divided country cannot sustain the practice of (reasonably) free and fair elections.
Yet it has. In those first general elections, voter turnout was less than 46 per cent. Over the years, this has steadily increased; from the late 1960s about three out of five eligible Indians have voted on election day. In assembly elections, the voting percentage has tended to be even higher. When these numbers are disaggregated, they reveal a further deepening. In the first two general elections, less than 40 per cent of eligible women voted; by 1998, the figure was in excess of 60 per cent. Besides, as surveys showed, they increasingly exercised their choice independently, that is, regardless of their husband's or father's views on the matter. Also voting in ever higher numbers were Dalits and tribals, the oppressed and marginalised sections of society. In North India in particular, Dalits turned out in far greater numbers than high castes. As the political analyst Yogendra Yadav points out, "India is perhaps the only large democracy in the world today where the turnout of the lower orders is well above that of the most privileged groups."
The institutions that keep us together are those bequests of the British: the civil service, the army, the railways, and cricket.
And yes, this too: the cricketing nation The Indian love of voting is well illustrated by the case of a cluster of villages on the Andhra/Maharashtra border.Issued voting cards by the administrations of both states, the villagers seized the opportunity to exercise their franchise twice over. It is also illustrated by the peasants in Bihar who go to the polls despite threats by Maoist revolutionaries. Likewise, in parts of the Northeast where the writ of the Indian state runs erratically or not at all, insurgents are unable to stop villagers from voting. As the Chief Election Commissioner wryly put it, "The Election Commission's small contribution to the integrity of the country is to make these areas part of the country for just one day, election day". That elections have been successfully indigenised in India is demonstrated by the depth and breadth of their reach—across and into all sections of Indian society, by the passions they evoke, and by the humour that surrounds them. There is a very rich archive of electoral cartoons, poking fun at promises made by prospective politicians, their desperation to get a party ticket, and much else. At other times, the humour can be gentle rather than mocking. Consider the career of a cloth merchant from Bhopal named Mohan Lal, who contested elections against five different prime ministers. Wearing a wooden crown and a garland gifted by himself, he would walk the streets of his constituency, ringing a bell. He unfailingly lost his deposit, thereby justifying his own, self-inflicted sobriquet of 'Dhartipakad', or he who lies, humbled, on the ground. His idea in contesting elections, said Mohan Lal, was "to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all".
The hardware of democracy gives us reason to cheer. Not so its software. Most of our parties are family firms, most politicians corrupt.
Voice from below: India is the only democracy where the lower orders vote more enthusiastically than privileged groups Considering the size of the electorate, it is overwhelmingly likely that more people have voted in Indian elections than voters in any other democracy. India's success in this regard is especially striking when compared to the record of its great Asian neighbour, China. That country is larger, but far less divided on ethnic or religious lines, and far less poor as well. Yet there has never been a single election held there. In other ways too China is much less free than India. The flow of information is highly restricted—when the search engine Google set up shop in China in February 2006, it had to agree to submit to state censorship. The movement of people is regulated as well—the permission of the state is usually required to change one's place of residence. In India, on the other hand, the press can print more or less what they like, and citizens can say exactly what they feel, live where they wish to and travel to any part of the country.India/China comparisons have long been a staple of scholarly analysis. Now, in a world that becomes more connected by the day, they have become ubiquitous in popular discourse as well. In this comparison China might win on economic grounds but will lose on political ones. Indians like to harp on their neighbour's democracy deficit, sometimes directly and at other times by euphemistic allusion. When asked to put on a special show at the World Economic Forum of 2006, the Indian delegation never failed to describe their land, whether in speech or in print or in posters, as the 'World's Fastest Growing Democracy'.If one looks at what one might call the 'hardware' of democracy, then the self-congratulation is certainly merited. Indians enjoy freedom of expression and of movement, and they have the vote.However, if one examines the 'software' of democracy, then the picture is less cheering. Most political parties have become family firms. Most politicians are corrupt, and many come from a criminal background. The percentage of truly independent-minded civil servants has steadily declined over the years, as has the percentage of completely fair-minded judges.Is India a proper democracy or a sham one? When asked this question, I usually turn for recourse to an immortal line of the great Hindi comic actor Johnny Walker. In a film where he plays the hero's sidekick, Walker answers every query with the remark: "Boss, phipty/phipty." When asked what prospect he has of marrying the girl he so deeply loves, or of getting the job he so dearly desires, the sidekick tells the boss that the chances are roughly even, 50 per cent of success, or 50 per cent of failure.Is India a democracy, then? The answer is well, phipty-phipty. It mostly is, when it comes to holding elections and permitting freedom of movement and expression. It mostly is not, when it comes to the functioning of politicians and political institutions. However, that India is even a 50 per cent democracy flies in the face of tradition, history, and the conventional wisdom. Indeed, by its own experience, it is rewriting that history and that wisdom. Thus, Sunil Khilnani remarked of the 2004 polls that they represented "the largest exercise of democratic election, ever and anywhere, in human history. Clearly, the idea of democracy, brought into being on an Athenian hillside some 2,500 years ago, has travelled far—and today describes a disparate array of political projects and experiences. The peripatetic life of the democratic idea has ensured that the history of Western political ideas can no longer be written coherently from within the terms of the West's own historical experience".The history of independent India has amended and modified theories of democracy based on the experience of the West. However, it has even more frontally challenged ideas of nationalism emanating from the Western experience.Behind every successful nationalist movement in the Western world has been a certain unifying factor, a glue holding the members of the nation together, this provided by a shared language, a shared religious faith, a shared territory, a common enemy—and sometimes all of the above. Thus, the British nation brought together those who huddled together on a cold island, who were mostly Protestant, and who detested France. In the case of France, it was language which powerfully combined with religion. For the Americans, a shared language and mostly shared faith worked in tandem with animosity towards the colonists. As for the smaller East European nations—the Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians, etc—their populations have been united by a common language, a mostly common faith, and a shared and very bitter history of domination by German and Russian oppressors.By contrast with these (and other examples), the Indian nation does not privilege a single language or religious faith. Although the majority of its citizens are Hindus, India is not a 'Hindu' nation. Its Constitution does not discriminate between people on the basis of faith; nor, more crucially, did the nationalist movement that lay behind it. Gandhi's political programme was built upon harmony and cooperation between India's two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. Although, in the end, his work and example were unsuccessful in stopping the division of India, the failure made his successors even more determined to construct independent India as a secular republic. For Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues, if India was anything at all, it was not a 'Hindu Pakistan'.Like Indian democracy, Indian secularism is also a story that combines success with failure.Membership of a minority religion is no bar to advancement in business or the professions. The richest industrialist in India is a Muslim. Some of the most popular film stars are Muslim. Three Presidents and two Chief Justices have been Muslim. At the time of writing, the President of India is a Muslim, the Prime Minister a Sikh, and the leader of the ruling party a Catholic born in Italy. Many of the country's most prominent lawyers and doctors have been Christians and Parsis.On the other hand, there have been periodic episodes of religious rioting, in the worst of which (as in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002) the minorities have suffered grievous losses of life and property. Still, for the most part, the minorities appear to retain faith in the democratic and secular ideal. Very few Indian Muslims have joined terrorist or fundamentalist organisations. Even more than their compatriots, Indian Muslims feel that their opinion and vote matters. One recent survey found that while 69 per cent of all Indians approve and endorse the ideal of democracy, 72 per cent of Muslims did so. And the turnout of Muslims at elections is higher than ever before.Building democracy in a poor society was always going to be hard work. Nurturing secularism in a land recently divided was going to be even harder. The creation of an Islamic state on India's borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to merge faith with state. My own view—speaking as historian rather than citizen—is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.The pluralism of religion was one cornerstone of the foundation of the Indian republic. A second was the pluralism of language. Here again, the intention and the effort well predated Independence. In the 1920s, Gandhi reconstituted the provincial committees of the Congress on linguistic lines. The party had promised to form linguistic provinces as soon as the country was free. The promise was not redeemed immediately after 1947, because the creation of Pakistan had promoted fears of further balkanisation. However, in the face of popular protest, the government yielded to the demand.Linguistic states have been in existence for 50 years now. In that time, they have deepened and consolidated Indian unity. Within each state, a common language has provided the basis of administrative unity and efficiency. It has also led to an efflorescence of cultural creativity, as expressed in film, theatre, fiction and poetry. However, pride in one's language has rarely been in conflict with a broader identification with the nation as a whole. The three major secessionist movements in independent India—in Nagaland in the 1950s, in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s—have affirmed religious and territorial distinctiveness, not a linguistic one. For the rest, it has proved perfectly possible—indeed, desirable—to be Kannadiga and Indian, Malayali and Indian, Andhra and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Oriya and Indian, Maharashtrian and Indian, Gujarati and Indian and, of course, Hindi-speaking and Indian.
Linguistic pluralism has worked. Instead of dividing, as elsewhere in the world, it tamed and domesticated secessionist tendencies.
Denominations on the Indian currency note are given not just in Hindi and in English but in all Indian languages
That unity and pluralism are inseparable in India is graphically expressed in the country's currency notes.On one side is printed a portrait of the 'father of the nation', Mahatma Gandhi; on the other side, a picture of the Houses of Parliament. The note's denomination—5, 10, 50, 100, etc—is printed in words in Hindi and English (the two official languages), but also, in smaller type, in all the other languages of the Union. In this manner, as many as 17 different scripts are represented. With each language, and each script, comes a distinct culture and regional ethos, here nesting more-or-less comfortably with the idea of India as a whole.Some Western observers—usually Americans—believed that this profusion of tongues would be the undoing of India. Based on their own country's experience, where English had been the glue binding the different waves of immigrants, they thought that a single language—be it Hindi or English—had to be spoken by all Indians. Linguistic states they regarded as a grievous error. In 1970, Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post wrote despairingly that this was "a land of Babel with no common voice". From its birth the Indian nation had been "plagued by particularist, separatist tendencies", wrote Nossiter, and "the continuing confusion of tongues...can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state". In fact, exactly the reverse has happened—that is, the sustenance of linguistic pluralism has worked to tame and domesticate secessionist tendencies. A comparison with neighbouring countries might be helpful. Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language. And for more than two decades now, a bloody civil war has raged in Sri Lanka, the disputants divided somewhat by territory and faith but most of all by language. The lesson from these cases might well be: 'One language, two nations'. Had Hindi been imposed on the whole of India, the lesson might well have been: 'One language, 22 nations'.That Indians spoke many languages and followed many faiths made their nation unnatural in the eyes of some Western observers, both lay and academic. In truth, many Indians thought so too. A popular slogan of the original Jana Sangh was 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustani'. The attempt was to make Indian nationalism more natural, by making—or persuading—all Indians to speak the same language and worship the same gods. In time, the bid to impose a uniform language was dropped. But the desire to impose the will of the majority religion persisted. This has led to much conflict, violence, rioting and deaths. Particularly after the Gujarat riots of 2002, which were condoned and to some extent even approved by the Central government, fears were expressed about the survival of a secular and democratic India. Thus, in a lecture delivered in the university town of Aligarh, the writer Arundhati Roy went so far as to characterise the BJP regime as 'fascist'. In fact, she used the term 'fascism' 11 times in a single paragraph while describing the actions of the government in New Delhi.
Arundhati Roy used the word fascist 11 times in a speech on the BJP after Gujarat. That is careless borrowing from European history.
A Bajrang Dal activist in the Gujarat riots
Here again, Indian events and experiences were being analysed in terms carelessly borrowed from European history. To call the BJP 'fascist' is to diminish the severity and seriousness of the murderous crimes committed by the original fascists in Italy and Germany. Many leaders of the BJP are less than appealing, but to see the party as 'fascist' would be both to overestimate its powers and to underestimate the democratic traditions of the Indian people.Notably, the BJP now vigorously promotes linguistic pluralism. No longer are its leaders from the Hindi heartland alone; and it has expanded its influence in the southern states. And it is obliged to pay at least lip service to religious pluralism. One of its general secretaries is a Muslim; even if he is dismissed as a showboy, the ideology he and his party promote goes by the name of 'positive secularism'. The qualifier only underlines the larger concession—that even if some BJP leaders privately wish for a theocratic Hindu state, for public consumption they must endorse the secular ideals of the Indian Constitution.Finally, despite all their best efforts, the BJP was not able to disturb the democratic edifice of the Indian polity. A month after Arundhati Roy delivered her speech, the BJP alliance lost power in a general election that it had called. Its leaders moved out of office and allowed their victors to move in instead. When was the last time a 'fascist' regime permitted such an orderly transfer of power?The holding of the 1977 elections—called by an individual who had proven dictatorial tendencies—and of the 2004 elections—called by a party unreliably committed to democratic procedure—were both testimony to the deep roots that democracy had struck in the soil of India. In this respect, the country was fortunate in the calibre of its founding figures, and in the fact that they lived as long as they did. Few nations have had, living and working at the same time, leaders of such acknowledged intelligence and integrity as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B. R. Ambedkar. Within a few years of Independence, Patel had died, and Ambedkar had left office; but by then the one had successfully overseen the political integration of the country and the other the forging of a democratic Constitution. As Nehru lived on, he was kept company by outstanding leaders in his own party—K. Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, for instance—and in the Opposition, in whose ranks were such men as J.B. Kripalani and C. Rajagopalachari.Of course, there has been a rapid, even alarming, decline in the quality of the men and women who rule India. In a book published in 2003, the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote feelingly of "the corruption, mediocrity, indiscipline, venality and lack of moral imagination of the (Indian) political class". Within the Indian state, he continued, "the lines between legality and illegality, order and disorder, state and criminality, have come to be increasingly porous".That said, the distance—intellectual or moral—between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, or between B. R. Ambedkar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, is not necessarily greater than between—say—Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made, they can be managed by mediocrities. In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.
Parts of Kashmir and the Northeast may be in trouble; Maoists hold a bit of central India. But India remains 80 per cent united.
Kashmir: a question of territory
If India is roughly 50 per cent democratic, it is approximately 80 per cent united. Some parts of Kashmir and the Northeast are under the control of insurgents seeking political independence. Some forested districts in central India are in the grip of Maoist revolutionaries.However, these areas, large enough in themselves, constitute considerably less than a quarter of the total land mass claimed by the Indian nation.Among the institutions that keep the country together are those bequests of the British—the civil service, the army, the railways, the English language and the game of cricket. Working with—or in subordination to—a democratic and federal Constitution, these institutions have ensured that in over four-fifths of India, the elected government enjoys a legitimacy of power and authority. Throughout this territory, the citizens of India are free to live, study, take employment and invest in businesses.The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is, after all, one country.Apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity. Pre-eminent here is the Hindi film. This is the great popular passion of the Indian people, watched and followed by Indians of all ages, genders, castes, classes, religions and linguistic groups.Each of the formally recognised states of the Union, be it Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala, says the lyricist Javed Akhtar, "has its different culture, tradition and style. In Gujarat, you have one kind of culture, then you go to Punjab, you have another, and the same applies in Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala". Then, Akhtar adds: "There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema."This is a stunning insight, which asks to be developed further. As a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that (in a cultural sense) is most creative in the other states. Thus its actors, musicians, technicians and directors come from all parts of India. Thus also it draws ecumenically from cultural forms prevalent in different regions. For example, a single song may feature both the Punjabi folk dance called the bhangra and its Tamil classical counterpart, Bharatanatyam.Having borrowed elements from here and there—and everywhere—the Hindi film then sends the synthesised product out for appreciation to the other states of the Union. The most widely revered Indians are film stars. Yet cinema does not merely provide Indians with a common pantheon of heroes; it also gives them a common language and universe of discourse. Lines from film songs and snatches from film dialogue are ubiquitously used in conversations in schools, colleges, homes and offices—and on the street. Because it is one more state of the Union, Hindi cinema also speaks its own language, this, however, understood by all the others.
Javed Akhtar calls Hindi cinema 'one more state in this country'. It has done more for the acceptance of Hindi than any official fiat.
Bollywood: an idiom for all of India
The last sentence is meant literally as well as metaphorically. Hindi cinema provides a stock of social situations and moral conundrums which widely resonate with the citizenry as a whole. But, over time, it has also made the Hindi language more comprehensible to those who previously never spoke or understood it. When imposed by fiat by the central government, Hindi was resisted by the people of the south and the east. When conveyed seductively by the medium of cinema and television, Hindi has been accepted by them. In Bangalore and Hyderabad, Hindi has become the preferred medium of communication between those who speak mutually incomprehensible tongues.Finally, one might instance the banning of Hindi films, DVDs and videos by insurgents in the Northeast: this, in its own way, is a considerable tribute to the part played by the Hindi film in uniting India.One might think of independent India as being Europe's past as well as its future. It is Europe's past, in that it has reproduced, albeit more fiercely and intensely, the conflicts of a modernising, industrialising and urbanising society. But it is also its future, in that it anticipated, by some 50 years, the European attempt to create a multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, political and economic community.It is tempting to compare India with the United States, a country justly celebrated as "the planet's first multi-ethnic democracy". Born nearly two centuries later, the Republic of India is today comfortably the world's largest multi-ethnic democracy. However, the means by which it has regulated (and moderated) relations between its constituent ethnicities have been somewhat different. For, as Samuel Huntington has recently argued, the American nation has been held together by a "creedal culture" whose "central elements" have included "the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music". Indeed, "America was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth centuries".The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants. For much of the country's history, the new groups that came in merged themselves with the dominant culture. "Throughout American history," writes Huntington, "people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America's Anglo-Protestant culture and political values." Of late, however, newer groups of immigrants have tended to maintain their distinct identities. The largest of these are the Hispanics, who live in enclaves where they cook their own food, listen to their own kind of music, follow their own faith and—most importantly—speak their own language. Huntington worries that if these communities are not quickly brought into line, they will "transform America as a whole into a bilingual, bicultural society". The older American model of assimilation was called 'the melting pot'. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank a single, uniform—or uniformly tasting—drink. Now it appears that the society, and nation, are coming to resemble a 'salad bowl', with each group starkly standing out, different and distinctive in how it looks and behaves.Huntington himself is less than enthusiastic with the idea of the salad bowl. For him, America has long been, and must always be, a "society with a single pervasive national culture". He observes that Americans identify most strongly with that culture when the nation is under threat. War leads not merely to national consolidation, but also to cultural unity. The original American creed was forged as a consequence of the wars against the Native Americans, the English colonists and the southern states. The events of 9/11 once more brought patriotism and national solidarity to the fore. Concerned that these energies shall dissipate, Huntington urges a more thoroughgoing return to the creed that, in his view, was responsible for "the unity and strength of my country".Samuel Huntington's line of argument is, of course, quite familiar to students of Indian history. It has been made here by political ideologues such as M.S. Golwalkar, and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP.They have believed that India has "got to have a dominant culture", and that this culture is 'Hindu'. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.And it has stayed that way. It has sustained a diversity of religions and languages, precisely the diversities the likes of Huntington deem inimical to national survival and national solidarity. It has resisted the pressures to go in the other direction, to follow Israel and Pakistan by favouring citizens who follow a certain faith or speak a particular language.The most eloquent tribute to the idea of India that I have come across rests in some unpublished letters of the biologist J.B.S. Haldane. In his native Britain, Haldane was a figure of considerable fame and some notoriety. In 1956, already past 60, he decided to leave his post in University College, London, and take up residence in Calcutta. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute, became an Indian citizen, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. He also travelled energetically around the country, engaging with its scientists but also with the citizenry at large.Five years after Haldane had moved to India, an American science writer described him in print as a 'citizen of the world'. Haldane replied:
"No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this.... On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India."
On another occasion, Haldane described India as "the closest approximation to the Free World". An American friend protested, saying his impression was that "India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor, unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive". To this, Haldane responded:
"Perhaps one is freer to be a scoundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould, when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The 'disgusting subservience' of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I don't think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue."
As a modern nation, India is simply sui generis. It stands on its own, different and distinct from the alternative political models on offer—be these Anglo-Saxon liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic Communism, or Islamic theocracy. Back in 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh crisis, when India found itself simultaneously at odds with Communist China, Islamic Pakistan, and America, an Indian diplomat captured his country's uniqueness in this way:
"India is regarded warily in the West because she is against the concept of Imperialism and because she 'invented' the 'Third World'.India is looked on with suspicion in the 'Third World' because of her (subversive) sentiments for democracy, human rights, etc; the Muslim world is wrathful because of our secularism.The Communist countries regard India as insolent—and potentially dangerous—because we have rejected Communism as the prime condition for Progress.We are, of course, on the side of God. But is God on our side?"
The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got:
The hoary old man of lucent kenPointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edificeBecause of which there is colour in life; HeWould not like it to perish and fall.'
Ghalib and his interlocutor were speaking then of India, the civilisation. Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and—lest I forget—so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.
(This essay is adapted from Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Picador India, 2007.)
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
Diwali, the Biggest Indian Festival
Diwali the festival of lights – apart from being the most widely celebrated is perhaps one of the prettiest Indian festivals. It is a festival of joy, splendor, and brightness. Diwali is celebrated in various parts of the world, including South Asia, South-East Asia, North America, Europe, Australia, Caribbean countries, Middle-East, and Africa. With more Indians now migrating to various parts of the world, the number of countries where Diwali is celebrated is also increasing. While in most countries it is celebrated mainly by Indian diaspora, in others it has become part of the general local culture, especially in the South-East Asia. In addition to South Asian countries, Singapore and New York City has included Diwali in the list of public holidays.
The uniqueness of this festival is its harmony of five varied philosophies, each day for a special thought or ideal. Diwali is a time when every Indian house and shop is illuminated with oil lamps and every heart is filled with joy. Delighted children set off fireworks in the spirit of festival. The word Diwali comes from the word Deepaawali, i.e., series of lamps. It falls on the last day of the last month of the lunar Indian calendar.
The five-day celebration of Diwali begins with Dhanteras, the day to worship Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. Indian culture has not considered wealth to be corruptive; on the contrary Vedic sages have sung praises of various types of wealth in the Shrisuktam hymn of Rig Veda. According to Indian culture a wealthy person is considered to be God's beloved child, he is rewarded for the good karmas done in past life. This is indicated in the verses of Bhagavad Gita "Shuchinaam Shrimataam Gehe" (6:41). In Shrisuktam, Vedic people asked for wealth that would never turn away from their houses: “Tam maa aavah jatvedo...purushanaham". In another verse of Shrisuktam, it is asked: “God grant me wealth, which is beyond destruction and with which I can acquire gold, cattle, horses and sincere friends.” According to Indian perspective, wealth in itself may not be corruptive, but a wealthy person's attitude leads to corruption. The financial power can lead a person higher towards divinity or lower towards evil. When somebody uses wealth as a means for material gains alone, one may be paving the path to self-destruction. On the other hand, wealth is to be revered as the divine mother and to be regarded as a blessing from God.
Money used destructively is called Alaxmi or impure wealth that which is used for selfish reasons is money or Vitta. Money that is used for the benefit of others is referred to as Laxmi or wealth and ultimately wealth used in cultural work attains the status of Mahalaxmi or divine wealth. Those who invest wealth for divine work enjoy the wealth for several generations. Since wealth has such tremendous strength it should remain in the hands of good people who would use it appropriately. Indian culture has sung praises of the Rajashri. This can be compared with the Greek thinker Plato’s term "philosopher king".
The second day is celebrated as Kali Chaturdashi, the day to worship Kali, the goddess of power. Physical strength used to harm others is called Ashakti or impious strength that which is used for selfish reasons is strength, Shakti. The strength to protect others is referred as Kali, and if it’s used for spiritual purposes, it is called Mahakali. In the Mahabharata, Vyasa has given examples of human life by skillfully portraying three diverse characters of Duryodhana, Karna and Arjun. Duryodhana the eldest of Kauravas, who used his strength only for selfish motives, Karna who had vowed to use his skills in the service of the Kauravas and Arjun who dedicated himself to Lord Krishna. These three can be considered as the examples of ashakti, kali and mahakali respectively.
Another name by which this day is remembered is "Narak Chaturdashi". The story goes that Narakasur the ill-famed king of Pragjyotishpur was creating havoc in the society by the excessive use of his powers. He was responsible for the imprisonment of 16000 young women. Lord Krishna had decided to destroy this evil dictator. Satyabhama, wife of lord Krishna, took up the challenge of rescuing the innocent women and Lord Krishna fully supported Satyabhama in her mission. This day is celebrated as freedom from the tyranny of the evil king. People free from atrocities of the evil ruler joyously celebrated the event by lighting lamps to illuminate the night sky. Adorned in new clothes they set out on the streets to express their happiness.
The third day is the main day of Diwali festival. It is the festival of light. Thousands of lamps are lit in every home to mark the return of Rama, Laxmana and Sita to Ayodhya from their exile. Lamp is also the symbol of knowledge. Lighting the lamp of knowledge means to understand and reflect upon the significant purpose of each of the five days of festivities and to bring those thoughts into daily lives. The day of Diwali is to remember the mantra - Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya, lead us from darkness to light. It is very important day for business community as it is the end of the fiscal year. Old accounts are settled, new books are opened. Account books are worshiped in an elaborate ceremony. It is time to take account of one's life also, to reflect upon life and remove anger, hatred, jealousy and callousness from life and have renewed hope from the New Year.
The day following New Year is celebrated as Balipratipada. People who are blinded by kanak - wealth and kaanta – lust become demons. Lord Vishnu had destroyed Bali and this day is a reminder to have proper outlook towards wealth and beauty. The final day of Diwali festival is Bhai Dooj. This day symbolizes the respect for all women. The day gives every man the noble outlook to consider every woman as his mother or sister.
Although Diwali is considered as a Hindu festival, the origin of this word actually comes from the Jain tradition. Although in the two major versions of the Hindu Ramayana, the return of its heroes Rama, Laxmana and Sita is celebrated with grant festivities, there is no mention of the word related to lighting the lamps. The word was first mentioned to celebrate the nirvana of the 24th Jain Tirthankara Mahavira Swami which had occurred on this day. And the day following Diwali marks the beginning of the Jain calendar Vira Nirvana Samvat, in the year 527 BCE. In the Sikh tradition, it is celebrated to mark the return of the Sikh Guru Hargobind Sahib to the city of Amritsar who is believed to be freed by the Mughal emperor Jahangir on this day in 1619. With different kinds of communities of different religions and different regions celebrating Diwali in different ways, it can rightly be called as the “national” festival of India and Indian diaspora around the world.
Indian New Year
According to Vikram Samvat, Indian New Year starts from the Shukla Pratipadaa of Kaartik month. This day is also called as Bali Pratipadaa. Bali was the son of Virochan. Ironically, Virochan was atheist son of the legendary devotee Prahlaad whose devotion was instrumental in killing his father Hiranyakashyapu by the Narasingha incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Bali was influenced by his father and systematically removed the importance of spirituality and scriptures from the society. He also disturbed the Varna system in the society by making people change their traditional jobs. He reduced the importance of Brahmins in the society. Kshatriyas slowly turned into autocratic officers and leaders. Business leaders became greedy capitalists. Overall, all the sections of the society turned towards evil and ignored social welfare. To reform the society, Aditi and Kashyap asked for a boon about a son. Aditi and Kashyap become parents of Vaaman, the dwarf incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Eventually, Vaaman asks for three steps from Bali and sends Bali away down south. Thus, society is rescued from the malevolence of Bali and importance of spirituality and scriptures is restored in the society.
Another legend associated with this day is about the celebration of Govardhan. It is believed that Lord Krishna had asked people of Vrindavan not to worship Lord Indra. Indra responds by heavy rains for several days. Krishna protects the people by lifting Mount Govardhan and giving shelter under it. This tale has now been connected with ecological importance of mountains.
Bhaiya Dooj
The Shukla Dwitiya of Kaartik month is called Yama Dwitiya and is celebrated as Bhaiya Dooj as a mark for love of brothers and sisters. It is believed that Yamuna had invited her brother Yama for dinner and Yama in turn responds by granting her two boons. Yamuna asks that Yama should visit her every year on this day for dinner and secondly, to grant happiness to brothers who would visit their sisters on this day. Sisters traditionally worship Yama on this day for the longevity of their brothers. There are several examples of brother and sisters in Indian culture. For example, in the Mahabharata, Draupadi is also known as Krishnaa due to her great love for her brother Krishna.
Significance of moon on this day is also important. The phase of the moon on Dwitiya or dooj, the second day of Shukla fortnight marks the increment in the moon which denotes development and growth. In Ramayana, Ravana once asks Sita to compare himself with Rama. Sita calls him the moon of full-moon night whereas Rama is compared with the moon of Dwitiya. Moon of the full-moon night quickly starts decreasing and loses itself completely while the moon of Dwitiya is set to increase itself culminating on the full-moon night. Lord Shiva also is usually depicted with the moon of Dwitiya on his head. Perhaps this is why moon of this day is considered benevolent in Indian culture and even in Islam. Moon has special relationship with the sisters and this is reflected in Indian children calling Moon lovingly as chandaa maamaa (moon as maternal uncle).
Overall, this day associates brother with the moon of Dooj symbolizing the importance of efforts and sacrifice.
The uniqueness of this festival is its harmony of five varied philosophies, each day for a special thought or ideal. Diwali is a time when every Indian house and shop is illuminated with oil lamps and every heart is filled with joy. Delighted children set off fireworks in the spirit of festival. The word Diwali comes from the word Deepaawali, i.e., series of lamps. It falls on the last day of the last month of the lunar Indian calendar.
The five-day celebration of Diwali begins with Dhanteras, the day to worship Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. Indian culture has not considered wealth to be corruptive; on the contrary Vedic sages have sung praises of various types of wealth in the Shrisuktam hymn of Rig Veda. According to Indian culture a wealthy person is considered to be God's beloved child, he is rewarded for the good karmas done in past life. This is indicated in the verses of Bhagavad Gita "Shuchinaam Shrimataam Gehe" (6:41). In Shrisuktam, Vedic people asked for wealth that would never turn away from their houses: “Tam maa aavah jatvedo...purushanaham". In another verse of Shrisuktam, it is asked: “God grant me wealth, which is beyond destruction and with which I can acquire gold, cattle, horses and sincere friends.” According to Indian perspective, wealth in itself may not be corruptive, but a wealthy person's attitude leads to corruption. The financial power can lead a person higher towards divinity or lower towards evil. When somebody uses wealth as a means for material gains alone, one may be paving the path to self-destruction. On the other hand, wealth is to be revered as the divine mother and to be regarded as a blessing from God.
Money used destructively is called Alaxmi or impure wealth that which is used for selfish reasons is money or Vitta. Money that is used for the benefit of others is referred to as Laxmi or wealth and ultimately wealth used in cultural work attains the status of Mahalaxmi or divine wealth. Those who invest wealth for divine work enjoy the wealth for several generations. Since wealth has such tremendous strength it should remain in the hands of good people who would use it appropriately. Indian culture has sung praises of the Rajashri. This can be compared with the Greek thinker Plato’s term "philosopher king".
The second day is celebrated as Kali Chaturdashi, the day to worship Kali, the goddess of power. Physical strength used to harm others is called Ashakti or impious strength that which is used for selfish reasons is strength, Shakti. The strength to protect others is referred as Kali, and if it’s used for spiritual purposes, it is called Mahakali. In the Mahabharata, Vyasa has given examples of human life by skillfully portraying three diverse characters of Duryodhana, Karna and Arjun. Duryodhana the eldest of Kauravas, who used his strength only for selfish motives, Karna who had vowed to use his skills in the service of the Kauravas and Arjun who dedicated himself to Lord Krishna. These three can be considered as the examples of ashakti, kali and mahakali respectively.
Another name by which this day is remembered is "Narak Chaturdashi". The story goes that Narakasur the ill-famed king of Pragjyotishpur was creating havoc in the society by the excessive use of his powers. He was responsible for the imprisonment of 16000 young women. Lord Krishna had decided to destroy this evil dictator. Satyabhama, wife of lord Krishna, took up the challenge of rescuing the innocent women and Lord Krishna fully supported Satyabhama in her mission. This day is celebrated as freedom from the tyranny of the evil king. People free from atrocities of the evil ruler joyously celebrated the event by lighting lamps to illuminate the night sky. Adorned in new clothes they set out on the streets to express their happiness.
The third day is the main day of Diwali festival. It is the festival of light. Thousands of lamps are lit in every home to mark the return of Rama, Laxmana and Sita to Ayodhya from their exile. Lamp is also the symbol of knowledge. Lighting the lamp of knowledge means to understand and reflect upon the significant purpose of each of the five days of festivities and to bring those thoughts into daily lives. The day of Diwali is to remember the mantra - Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya, lead us from darkness to light. It is very important day for business community as it is the end of the fiscal year. Old accounts are settled, new books are opened. Account books are worshiped in an elaborate ceremony. It is time to take account of one's life also, to reflect upon life and remove anger, hatred, jealousy and callousness from life and have renewed hope from the New Year.
The day following New Year is celebrated as Balipratipada. People who are blinded by kanak - wealth and kaanta – lust become demons. Lord Vishnu had destroyed Bali and this day is a reminder to have proper outlook towards wealth and beauty. The final day of Diwali festival is Bhai Dooj. This day symbolizes the respect for all women. The day gives every man the noble outlook to consider every woman as his mother or sister.
Although Diwali is considered as a Hindu festival, the origin of this word actually comes from the Jain tradition. Although in the two major versions of the Hindu Ramayana, the return of its heroes Rama, Laxmana and Sita is celebrated with grant festivities, there is no mention of the word related to lighting the lamps. The word was first mentioned to celebrate the nirvana of the 24th Jain Tirthankara Mahavira Swami which had occurred on this day. And the day following Diwali marks the beginning of the Jain calendar Vira Nirvana Samvat, in the year 527 BCE. In the Sikh tradition, it is celebrated to mark the return of the Sikh Guru Hargobind Sahib to the city of Amritsar who is believed to be freed by the Mughal emperor Jahangir on this day in 1619. With different kinds of communities of different religions and different regions celebrating Diwali in different ways, it can rightly be called as the “national” festival of India and Indian diaspora around the world.
Indian New Year
According to Vikram Samvat, Indian New Year starts from the Shukla Pratipadaa of Kaartik month. This day is also called as Bali Pratipadaa. Bali was the son of Virochan. Ironically, Virochan was atheist son of the legendary devotee Prahlaad whose devotion was instrumental in killing his father Hiranyakashyapu by the Narasingha incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Bali was influenced by his father and systematically removed the importance of spirituality and scriptures from the society. He also disturbed the Varna system in the society by making people change their traditional jobs. He reduced the importance of Brahmins in the society. Kshatriyas slowly turned into autocratic officers and leaders. Business leaders became greedy capitalists. Overall, all the sections of the society turned towards evil and ignored social welfare. To reform the society, Aditi and Kashyap asked for a boon about a son. Aditi and Kashyap become parents of Vaaman, the dwarf incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Eventually, Vaaman asks for three steps from Bali and sends Bali away down south. Thus, society is rescued from the malevolence of Bali and importance of spirituality and scriptures is restored in the society.
Another legend associated with this day is about the celebration of Govardhan. It is believed that Lord Krishna had asked people of Vrindavan not to worship Lord Indra. Indra responds by heavy rains for several days. Krishna protects the people by lifting Mount Govardhan and giving shelter under it. This tale has now been connected with ecological importance of mountains.
Bhaiya Dooj
The Shukla Dwitiya of Kaartik month is called Yama Dwitiya and is celebrated as Bhaiya Dooj as a mark for love of brothers and sisters. It is believed that Yamuna had invited her brother Yama for dinner and Yama in turn responds by granting her two boons. Yamuna asks that Yama should visit her every year on this day for dinner and secondly, to grant happiness to brothers who would visit their sisters on this day. Sisters traditionally worship Yama on this day for the longevity of their brothers. There are several examples of brother and sisters in Indian culture. For example, in the Mahabharata, Draupadi is also known as Krishnaa due to her great love for her brother Krishna.
Significance of moon on this day is also important. The phase of the moon on Dwitiya or dooj, the second day of Shukla fortnight marks the increment in the moon which denotes development and growth. In Ramayana, Ravana once asks Sita to compare himself with Rama. Sita calls him the moon of full-moon night whereas Rama is compared with the moon of Dwitiya. Moon of the full-moon night quickly starts decreasing and loses itself completely while the moon of Dwitiya is set to increase itself culminating on the full-moon night. Lord Shiva also is usually depicted with the moon of Dwitiya on his head. Perhaps this is why moon of this day is considered benevolent in Indian culture and even in Islam. Moon has special relationship with the sisters and this is reflected in Indian children calling Moon lovingly as chandaa maamaa (moon as maternal uncle).
Overall, this day associates brother with the moon of Dooj symbolizing the importance of efforts and sacrifice.
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