This thing called Love of Country

What a strange place this 21st century India is! More than ever perhaps, does it need the clear, unswerving love of the people who call themselves its citizens; more than ever is the country offered a loud, vulgar, spurious version. It is as if we cannot focus even for a few seconds on the hideous images laid bare in the distorting mirrors of reality, but would rather seek to drown ourselves in ancient justifications. History’s facts are juggled with to allow us to wear the righteous garb of prevarication…this, that and the other was done to us in the past; how can we be blamed for our present flaws? From Alexander to Nehru and Gandhi, everyone we can think of, who can be held remotely responsible for our present plight, is.

Going to the movies is something of a ceremony in our house, because we do it so rarely. Somehow we are always taken by surprise by the signal (‘show respect’) that the national anthem is going to be played, stumble to our feet, stand stiffly at attention, and as I watch the flag on the screen flutter, the skin at the back of my neck prickles, and quite helplessly, I begin to sing with the recorded version. I love that song. My eyes well up as the full meaning of the words explodes in my head, the naming of each state that makes up this country, the Vindhyas, Himachal, the Yamuna, the Ganga. Jaya hai, Jaya hai, I sing as loudly as I dare, and am subjected to strange looks. How magnificent it would be if everyone would sing the refrain lustily, in time or otherwise, in tune or out. Where do we get to sing our anthem together anymore?

Cut to the Rajnigandha ad. which plays on our television screens. “Indians are not for sale, gentlemen…” as the suited-booted executive struts to the conference table where there are some white people seated and scribbles an enormous figure on the contract, adding, “I’m buying you out.” The first time I saw this ad, I fell off my seat laughing. With repetition, I just began to feel an enormous impatience at the hypocrisy implicit in those words.

A few weeks ago, the Times of India carried an item about a BJP MP or politician who was enraged to find that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were not included as recorded history in the Std. XI history textbook. Unfortunately this report was not followed up. But this is where a fundamental divide opens up in our country between modernism and pre-modernism which is essentially everything that went before.

Why do we study history? To understand. Understand what? Well, who we are, where we came from, why we are what we are, and by ‘we,’ I mean the whole human race. This knowledge is vital for children to know and understand, not just as another boring subject to do an exam in, but as the essence of knowledge. Here is where a teacher or the people who set a syllabus can do a magnificent job of marking the highs and the lows of human history. The ascent of man and woman from the bestial to the heights we have reached with all the pauses and hiccoughs, the deviations along the way. The vastness of human migrations across the earth, the slow discoveries about ourselves, and the world around. Inventions in science, discoveries of the power of nature. The taming of animals to work with us. The growth of agriculture, the growth of the machine. The scope of our minds. No it is no small thing we have accomplished. Then the downside, for nothing must be kept from our children. All knowledge must be passed on. The rise and fall of civilizations, our inability to live in peace with fellow humans. The hunger for power, land at any cost. The waste of the earth’s resources. The pollution of air, water, the destruction of the tribal way of living.

Anniversaries of events serve a definite purpose as they bring to the forefront of consciousness just how far we are from the ideal. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are names that still sear our conscience. How did the human race ever allow something like that to happen? Justifications continue, quarreling with different versions of history, but the fact remains that America used the most terrible weapon on earth against an enemy that was all but defeated. And not just once, but twice.

While clearing out a cupboard filled with old files, I came across a bulging overflowing, tattered file full of newspaper cuttings on India’s immediate history, that is over the last three hundred years: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement, the agonizing images of Partition, highly critical pieces on the setting up of the East India company, Churchill and the great Bengal famine, Gandhi and Jinnah laughing together, Gandhi and Ambedkar standing warily at some distance from each other, the birth pangs of Pakistan---the paraphernalia that we still carry as heavy burdens to this moment.

All these articles were written in 1997, which was the fiftieth anniversary of our Independence, as well as the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Quit India Movement.

Settling down on the floor, I leaf through the yellowing pages, and realize that with hindsight, so many events, alliances, feuds seem to acquire a distinct clarity but that makes me suspicious. Are they not just a bit too clear? Who are these writers? Historians, journalists well-known in their respective fields, accustomed to writing slanted essays, academics who may have political axes to grind? Historic facts pithily fitted into a capsule for instant consumption.

How beautifully the desiderata of the past can be arranged to suit modern day readers who may lack the patience to read history as it must be read. None of the clash and clamour of clashing events and egos, without the painful necessity of discovering inconvenient truths, the past as it really happened. But that can become so dull. Can historians give the young a focus on the slow, sometimes accidental establishing of empire, the defeats and compromises that were forced on us by the politics of the time? Look at the times we live in. Are we not hemmed in by things that happen seemingly without reason, are we not constantly beset by a sense that so much is going on under the surface, that we are marginalized by forces greater than we can imagine or cope with?

To take one small instance of something that surfaced in the last few weeks : a prominent member of a supposedly outlawed gang of killers, smugglers, no-gooders is caught in New Delhi sitting alongside an ex-Intelligence cop. He claims that he is helping the government, the cop denies that he was there, at all. In another similar incident a cop is found to have links with a much-wanted criminal who lives under the protection of a hitherto enemy-country turned friend . Do not these bits of trivia open up a can of worms? And not just worms but all kinds of creatures, things that exist in the dark muck and slime of our body politic?

Then an odd fact of history surfaces in one’s brain. In the Mauryan empire, read Chandragupta the founder, and Ashoka known as the Great, intelligence-gathering was a huge network that permeated the whole of society. All kinds of people were paid to bring in intelligence, vital or non. Servants, dhobis, courtesans, pan-wallas, actors, postmen, tax-gatherers, soothsayers…. the list is endless. And the person who set off that way of life was Chanakya. The wily Brahmin who had the ear of Chandragupta codified the art and craft of government, and set off a system which has existed three thousand years, perhaps more. So we should not be surprised when in the information age, we hear of odd deals and friendships happening within society. Newspapers are fond of the word ‘nexus’ these days. But in the urgencies of political life, the man or woman who does not get the facts straight, or is the first to know, is dead.

It occurs to me that by examining the present, one can very well study the past. Everything belongs to history. If we want to know why we are what we are, psychology, science, anthropology, sociology, geography, environment, economics ---everything can be used to excavate the past. Uncover inconvenient truths. But we have to be brave enough to look these truths in the face.
Squarely.