Independence Day acts as a reminder to over a billion Indians of our hard-earned sovereignty, countless sacrifices (with or without blood) and varied examples of why India doesn’t suck half as much as a look around your immediate neighborhood would have you believe. For me the day is always filled with question marks.
Think for a moment – what is India? No, I am not asking for poetic references to the saffron in Kashmiri fields, the white shape-shifting salts of Kutchh or the stillness of stone-carved temple tanks. I am talking about identity. Who or what is India, really? Is it a country defined by the physical demarcations on a contended map? Is it the nation of a people that identify themselves with common ethnical, linguistic or cultural backgrounds? Or perhaps it is simply the state that works as a cohesive unit of governing units to manage a permanent population and negotiate with other similar entities on global forums? The answer isn’t half as important as the realization that we don’t seriously ask ourselves this question before bleeding patriotic. No, these three are not the same thing. When you hate the ‘system’, you are sick of the state. When Shashi Tharoor's exemplary rhetoric goes viral, he owes it to his argument for a nation. Ruskin Bond’s dream-scapes of Manila will make you fall in love with the country. These three are concurrent in space and time, to put it mathematically, but are completely discrete.
Other questions plague me with equal doggedness. For a moment, consider, why is it that we celebrate our independence from the British Crown? Is it because they exploited us without consideration for our growth? They leeched, looted and arbitraged everything they could (including people) in the process changing systems, often for the worse; that’s what made it such good riddance, right? But then, are we saying that had they been benevolent rulers, we would have not placed any value on sovereignty? No, that doesn’t sound right for some reason. Autonomy surely is an inherently better state of existence than servitude to a foreign agency, no matter their contribution to our well-being? Why should this be so? Instinct? Really? Would you rather have (hypothetically) no-good 'Indians' running your state rather than have more efficient and well-meaning, say, Hungarians running it (assuming the same process of elections)? At what point does it become acceptable? What is the meaning of this cost-benefit analysis and the break-even point?
To be autonomous you need a self that governs itself. What is this ‘self’ in this case? I am not the first one to point out that we are a nation of strangers. ‘Dunbar’s Number’ is how many people you can reasonably maintain bona fide social relationships with. Most people think this is between 100 to 250 people. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that you don’t really know the people whom you claim to identify yourselves with as a cohesive whole. If anything, the ratio of whom we know and whom we claim to be our brothers and sisters is the worst for a country of 1.3 billion individuals. It is, then, an identity transcending the individuals – “The whole is greater than the sum of its components.”
To me, this is mind-blowing.
We have come from pledging our allegiance to royal bloodlines, the Church, and umpteen other more tangible things to quite simply pledging allegiance to ourselves as a whole. We createdthis entity out of nowhere. This is not synonymous with Democracy, of course, since that concept is more about the state rather than the nation, even if it draws from notions of the latter.
To me, the most interesting aspect of nationhood is something much more fundamental. Let’s pretend you are an Indus Valley civilian from the humble town of Dholavira. It is yet to become the great-walled multi-coloured beauty it will remain until millennia. You have just returned from inscribing records for a local body in a script that will puzzle generations of archaeologists; you are chilling out by a banyan tree, looking at some wagons pass. Your town trades grain with neighbouring cities and that is all the world you know of; Mesopotamia hasn’t found its way to your stockades yet. Do you belong to the Indus Valley Civilization? Yes. Do you know this? Do you have any reason to know this? If you heard the phrase, would it make any sense to you? Most probably not. Any identity whatsoever exists solely because there exists something not like it. The Indus people would call themselves as the Indus people only once they discovered other peoples. At best, the phrase "Indus people" would be synonymous with "everyone". Not surprisingly then, the word ‘Hindu’ is actually a Persian reference for the folk beyond the Sindhu River (Indus River). Before foreign entities came into knowledge, the transcendent identity of a people literally could not exist.
Let's assume this realization does not take anything away from the concept of a nation. The next question then becomes, who needs to believe that it is a nation for it to be a nation? The Anglo-Saxon kings of medieval Europe drove away the Vikings with a concerted effort, inspiring some form of nationalism. Was the conglomeration a nation-state? Alternatively, if a community of people has evolved outside the rest of the world, say, the Sentinelese people of the Andaman islands, do they stop being Indian or does India stop being an entity in their homeland? By the definitions the reader might have internally agreed upon earlier, do these people get to say that their island is a nation inside our nation of India? Is consensus necessary for a nation to be a nation? Is Tibet a country or not? Is the immolation of a Buddhist monk an act of patriotism or rebellion? Do you use history to validate or invalidate claims to identity? Why should you at all? Does terrorism need to be mutually exclusive from nationalism? Is it possible that the average Naxal militant is every bit as justified from First Principles as our dear Mahatma who refused to accept foreign rule? Whose maps should we refer to? Should 'right' or 'wrong' even be a parameter to consider when speaking of nations? This is around the point where things become messy enough for most people that they would shut down the line of inquiry and opt for the comfortable status quo.
Is the status quo ipso facto correct? Of course not. But then are we saying that all patriotism is pragmatic and not really an expression of a deeper truth we have held in our hearts to be sacred? That is a question that troubles me the most. What if we have agreed upon a comfortable story that can just works out for most of those involved?
When I started this blog-post, I knew that I will step on many toes by the very nature of the questions I ask despite not having taken one side or another. There is an almost intuitive sense of love for the nation that comes too easily and inspires too much. I have immense respect for those that dedicate their lives to the nation but to me this has always been respect due to the inherent nature of such dedication. Man my borders, run my state, fix my society and I will bow my metaphorical hat to you. I have an equal amount of respect for those in other countries doing similar things and if someone feels otherwise, they really need to ask themselves why. Is it because the causes of your nation are inherently more important in an absolute sense? Isn't that brazen self-centricism used as a means to judge the acts of fellow men? That is simply selfish and while I usually recommend selfishness, an honest statement can be seldom made with vested interests. A nationalist's love for his nation is like that of a lover who is in a marriage without choice but knows to love unconditionally and is convinced that (s)he could have never selected anyone else given the choice (which isn't a bad thing necessarily, just something we should be very conscious about).
I do not love India any more than I would love my planet or state or city or even my neighbourhood. Some would be concerned for me due to this and to them I ask, "What is India?"
