It appears that scientific scepticism, emphasis on dialogue over hostility, openness to new ideas, assimilation of diverse cultural strands- no matter where they originated- a 'liberal' (don't miss the quotes) mind, is now emblematic of a Nehruvian conspiracy to drown out alternative theses that represented the 'real' India. These alternatives, I am asked to believe, involve much more धर्म and परंपरा, and diverge sharply from the fake consensus that was really in the nature of leftist propaganda. We have been duped and our minds are contaminated. An epic 'cleansing' or 'purification', शुद्धिकरण, of our minds, and nothing less, is imperative. And imminent.
I have two issues with the argument:
- India has a liberal tradition that predates Western Colonisation by centuries, perhaps millenia. Remember that Vedanta allows or even encourages multiple interpretations. From Nyaya, Vaisheshik, Mimamsa (of two variants) to Lokayat or Charvak, they coexist and none has claim on immutable truth. We don't need the West. We can show them a thing or two about the liberal temperament. Like Khajuraho and Konark.
- An epidemic called globalisation has infected the planet probably from back to the earliest years of the Silk or Spice Routes. People and ideas have been travelling back and forth across continents and oceans. As this mighty churn turns, everyone is touched by its centrifugal and centripetal forces. In recent years, the Human Genome project has been revealing how everyone is now of mixed ethnicity: we are not Asian or Caucasian, not Native American or Nubian or Pacific Islander but a little bit of everything. Ideas have been cohabiting and people have been procreating without inhibition about provenance. We began as a timorous homo sapien tribe in the Rift Valley. A million years on, having branched away to inhabit and adapt to every terrain and climate, we have spent the last few thousand mixing it all up. To speak now of a pure race is an unattainable goal. Then again, we may be closer now than ever before to recreating the original, undifferentiated stock that came out of Africa. Entropy was replaced by enthalpy and we are children of the confluence.
We can work up a froth about a pristine, uncontaminated state but our planet's civilisational history conspires against it. We can no more bring back this ethnic or religious or cultural purity than we can put humpty dumpty together again.
The food we eat is not our own. Chillies, potatoes and tomatoes came from the Americas. Our customs aren't our own. The demure घूंघट is a modified hijab. Our language isn't our own either. My mother tongue, Marathi, is shot through with Arabic and Persian, Portuguese and English. Would you strip away these variegated, many splendoured colours? And what do you think you'd be left with, at the end?
Let me break this to you gently. Your utopia of the unsullied state is only ever going to exist in your febrile dreams. Deal with it.
