India – A Timeless Kaleidoscope

by P.R.Viswanathan

[box]It’s the Mother who does the talking here, about her own children and those who came to her and became her own. She tells you she is a Kaleidoscope, one with colourful little pieces that come together to form beautiful patterns. P.R.Viswanathan mixes prose and poetry to talk about the greatness of his motherland, India, tracing her journey over centuries.[/box]

I am India, Mother India. My children say I will be 63 this month and they are celebrating. Only 63! I must look really young. Actually I am very old, not just old, I am ancient. In fact, I do not remember my age. To be on the safe side, let me put it at between 3000 and 10000 years.

America calls itself “the new world”; in some sense that phrase captures the essence of that country – a restless, dynamic, innovative society of migrants. France is defined in equal measure by its revolution and its devotion to its language, to romantic love and wine. John Bull typifies British stolidity and the Britannia Lion, rightly or wrongly, its nobility and fair play. But what does one say about me? What is India? What do I stand for? What is my quintessence? Every description of me seems inadequate or exaggerated. Everything about me is nebulous, hazy. But can you condemn me for this trait? I am a veritable mosaic.

This mosaic is earth’s most ancient culture

Five thousand and more years old

Hoary with quaint tradition, built tile by tile,

Chip by little chip, colours sprinkled from all over “Aryan” and Dravidian, Arab and Persian,

Jew and Christian, every kind of Mohammedan

And came last, the self-appointed guardian

The white-as-milk, pure-as-snow islander

Sole carrier of humankind’s burden

I am a great receptacle. I have allowed every kind of influence and profited from it. No, I am not passive. I received and absorbed or I fought and fended off and more often was overcome. And even those who overcame me were civilized by me. I have eaten and drunk of the best of them. They say – and rightly too – that I swallow whole, what I find good in others and burp with satisfaction. They came from all over, those who influenced me.

Most came in peace, many in search of peace

Looking for shelter, they found a haven

Some came to trade and some with sword

Some did trade, then unsheathed the sword

Some came and told us we were wrong

And our salvation lay in going along

Accepting their ways and practices

Their gods and rituals, their forms of worship

The mosaic took all, appearing passive

And to each accorded as it thought proper

Sheltered the persecuted, who took her names

Made fortunes and served her all times

Welcomed the trader, who married her daughters

Some of us took up the cross and

Some heard the call of the azaan

The swords, some bravely fought and scattered

Some others yet, did treacherous deeds

Jaychand did Prithviraj in

Mir Jafar became a byword for this sin

Setting up bodies for swords to plunge;

The mosaic spewed blood and soaked herself

Looking the more noble and resplendent

The Parsis came to my shores fleeing Muslim persecution in Iran. My son the Prince of Surat hesitated but briefly. The refugee assured him that his tribe will mingle with us like sugar in milk; they will sweeten the country but ever remain an unobtrusive presence. My son embraced him and the refugees became guests and very soon, my sons and daughters. And they kept their word through a millennium. I kept my word too. For, before entering, the refugee told the Prince, “Your Highness! We have fled from religious persecution. Ours is a religion of peace. We need to preserve it. You must promise that not the shadow of a darvand (non-believer) shall fall on any of our places of worship.” Now it may be that conditions are not to be laid down by refugees or guests or even sons and daughters. But that is me. My son accepted and kept his word. I kept my word – as host and as Mother – through a millennium. You ask what my essence is; here is a bit of it. I don’t just tolerate other faiths and opinions and life-styles. I give them the space to grow and flower. And they become part of me.

My soil is fertile. A thousand crops feed on me and grow and my soil forever unifies. Weeds have sprouted and swarms of locusts have descended on me. Wave upon wave of relentless Muslim invasion swept over me. My temples were desecrated and destroyed, my cities sacked. My children were asked to pay a special tax. They did a lot of harm, these unthinking hordes even after they ascended the throne; they maimed and scarred me. In the end, I always won even if they ruled, for they too and their ways became part of me. They became my sons and daughters. So it is that one of them, the Mughuls, Dara Shikoh became a scholar of the Vedas better than many of my older children. So it is that in the holy town of Kashi in the north, the annual festival at the Viswanath temple always commenced with the shehnai recital by one of my famous sons.

Bismillah Khan until his recent death. A Muslim singing to God in a Hindu temple in that bastion of Hinduism, the religion followed by the oldest of my sons and daughters! Without unity how can a thousand flowers bloom? In the southern extremity thousands of my Hindu children trek up the Sabarimala Hills seeking the blessings of Lord Ayyappa. They stop at a Muslim shrine before ascending the hill. On the way they listen to songs in praise of the Lord sung by another child of mine – Jesudas, a bearded Christian with a soulful voice. The Vailankanni Church, now is that Christian or Hindu? No one asks. Everyone seems headed there. That’s me. You ask what my essence is; here is one more bit. Others change me. I seep into them. They become mine, they become me.

That was me in the seventeenth century – a land of peace, a land of diverse cultures and of plenty. The mosaic was a beautiful sight to behold.

At first it appeared the mosaic had two tiles

One the smaller was a dark and lovely shade of green

With huge patches of saffron: the other, vastly bigger

Appeared all sacred saffron but behold!

There were small and secure oases of green all over

And behold yet, there were specks of red and white

And orange, blue and grey and yellow

And shades of every imaginable hue

Each itself, yet lost in vast placid saffron

But the mosaic was also an object of envy for some.

Came the noble white carriers of earth’s burden

They stole and pillaged, maimed and killed and saw with fear

The vanquished possessed of superior ways

Their unity etched in multi-coloured stone

This did not suit their purpose, did not warrant them

So they set their hearts to destroy the oneness

They drew lines all across – white, smudgy and ugly

Caste and religion came in handy

They played these for all they were worth

The colours deepened, lines sharpened, differences strengthened

The green turned shades deeper

And the saffron shades brighter

And poignant irony!

They claimed, nothing

But the white lines held the pieces together.

There was something sinister and insidious about the approach of the British. They did not seek merely to subjugate; they sought to kill our spirit. They taught us to look on ourselves with contempt. Was there a single division amongst us that they spared?

The noble carriers did not rest;

To further carry rift and division

They made up many a self-serving myth

“Aryan” the most enduring of them all

Disproved and yet not discarded

They taught a few of us in their tongue to make us their lackeys in spirit forever.

“These lowly natives need some learning

But not in their juvenile native tongues

A score though they may be in number

Of significant literature there is none

Trivial stuff; makes up no more than a shelf

Let us do our bit with the King’s own tongue

Create a small army of clerks and scriveners

That looks like them but thinks like us

It will help us oppress them with them”

So baa baa black sheep gave lots of wool

For us to keep in Indian summer, our cool

So Jack and Jill went up the hill

And Indians came tumbling after

Sikhs were an integral part of Hindu society; the great Guru, Govind Singhji asked every Hindu family to spare one of their sons to become a Singh (Lion) in the service of the people – to safeguard the religion. Yet what did the cunning British do?

The turbaned Sikhs he made a separate martial race

“Forget you sprang as saffron’s sword arm”, he said

When the East took hurt and revolted

In freedom’s first war in 1857

The wily whites sent turbans out to quell them

Dispatched martyrs all, from the mouths of canons

And peace prevailed. The Queen ruled.

And the sun set in the east.

Bengal had posed a grave danger to the British early on. The first war of independence of 1857 started here with Hindus and Muslims standing shoulder to shoulder.

This part of the mosaic looked beautiful

Steeped in poetry; suffused with learning

Rich with writing, resonant with music

And strident leadership to cap it all

“No, they said, “we cannot suffer Bengal”

Then the shame of it all

Curse-one who smeared that bloody line

And cleaved the noble state in two

The Hindu West and the Muslim East

Again and again it happened. Different times, different places, same strategy. Play one against the other. Now it was Punjab in 1919.

Decades went by; the rebellious turbans were on boil

This time ‘round, they got them mowed, in Amritsar

That was the heinous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

Using the loyal fearless Gorkhas, led by Dreadful Dyer

But all the while there was a coming together happening – Hindus and Muslims, Parsees and Christians, North, East, South and West rose together. They rallied behind a new star that appeared on the firmament, one of my noblest sons, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

By now a little master strode like a colossus

He it was who told us of the mosaic, its patterns

There is no Muslim, Hindu, Christian! Oh Indian!

We all are one, he said, children of Mother India

He spoke inspiring words, did many a great deed

To prove that over and over

The British could not countenance this. And so they instigated another of my sons – a lean cadaverous lawyer – once an ardent nationalist and ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity – now smarting and chafing at the periphery of the freedom struggle. Used to making fine rousing speeches for home rule in typical British style, he was distinctly uncomfortable with the inclusive politics of the little master. Gandhiji said loudly and repeatedly that I (Mother India) live, my spirit resides, in my 700,000 villages, not in the salons of the rich and the famous in my metropolises. So, the lean and mean one started echoing the sentiments of the famous poet, Mohammed Iqbal.

It started way back in nineteen thirty

When a great poet did, in a weak moment, speak

Green and saffron do not jell, he cried in beautiful verse

Aeons of co-existence and culture mingling notwithstanding

Yes, the same poet had earlier written “Sare Jahan Se Accha, Hindustan Hamara”. For fifteen years, the forces of Adharma worked on me. They first laid the foundation stone of discord and incompatibility, then placed brick upon brick of illogic till finally they did the dance of death on me and cut me in two. I wept and I bled at the sight of this new nation born in sin. And they called it the land of the pure – Pakistan. But still I won. What were my victories?

At the height of the British Raj, they arraigned my little master again and again. One time, it was on a charge of sedition and when the prisoner entered the court, Justice Broomfield rose in his chair in greeting. And then, finally, my oppressors left my shores as friends. What were my weapons? One was non-violence and the other I got from my oppressors – the English language. Are these not victories?

One of my sons, a genial Pathan giant, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, whose Muslim homeland wanted to be in India but was ceded to Pakistan, wept at the death of undivided India. Sad as it makes me to think of it even today, was that not a victory?

My epic tele-serials Ramyana and Mahabharatha were watched avidly in Pakistan. Is that not a victory?

But were my troubles over? No, they never will be. I have fought wars with Pakistan and I won. In 1971, not one of my Arab brothers supported me though I had always stood by them. In fact, the whole world barring the Soviet Union was united against me. I still won. I liberated the eastern half of Pakistan. In later years, Punjab revolted and I won. The North-East boiled over and I cooled it. Kashmir in my northern extremity is like a wound in my head but it will heal. I will win. I continue to suffer and I continue to win. That’s me. I am always challenged and I have to keep proving myself – forever.

One of my sons, a migrant in the West Indies, called me the land of a million mutinies. He is absolutely right but what he failed to note is the significance of the fact that I still survive. So should I not also be called the land of a million victories?

For fifteen years now, I have been growing rapidly and the world thinks I am going to be the economic powerhouse of this century. My own children are at times not that bullish though they talk and act now with greater confidence.

You ask me what my essence is? You want me to describe myself in one word? I am a kaleidoscope, I have been one always. There are innumerable disparate pieces within me. New, often jagged ones from without add to the melee.

They are jostling one another all the time. But look closely and you will see the pieces forming luminous patterns all the time. They are highly irregular, these patterns. You will be hard put to describing them but the wonder of it is, the pieces all hang together and that is a beautiful sight to behold.

I can go on and on but must stop somewhere.

I have come a long way but I realize I have a long way to go.

I am not young, I am not old. I am ageless, timeless. I was always around.

Pic : chefranden – http://www.flickr.com/photos/chefranden/

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