My Notion of a Nation

In a world of pan pizzas and Mac burgers do I really have any country left for me? The pithy Americanism ‘go global, think local’ is commonly used to justify the erosion of geographical boundaries. Else why should a paneer pizza or for that matter a Mac- Aloo tikki burger sell more than the authentic originals? Why are fully fried steaks a big hit with the urban Indian palate? For individuals, the microcosm of their immediate environment is of far greater significance and consequence than a macrocosmic ‘weltanschauung’. Woodrow Wilson with his misplaced and lofty notions of a utopian world thought of the concept of a League of Nations which history proved was a timeless blunder. That did not deter the combined will of wily politicians to create an effete Union Nations built on the debris of Wilson’s dreams. I began with the analogy of fast food as I strongly believe that the specificity of any culture is truly defined by its gastronomical uniqueness apart from its other sundry racial characteristics like behavioral patterns and language.

Jingoism has reduced us to revel as Indians only when Sachin Tendulkar scores his thirty-sixth test century or Amitabh Bachchan’s wax replica finds a place at Madam Tussad’s. We tend to overlook the fact that cricket sponsorship thrives only because the largest number of people who watch cricket on television are Indians and by sheer numbers the spending capacity of the average Indians on tooth paste or an economy car is the highest in the cricket viewing world and most of the tickets sold at the Wax Museum in London are bought by gaping Asian tourists with a distinct colonial hangover and these same people worship Bachchan as a demi-god. Even the maudlin excess of Swades and the concept of ‘desi’ among non residents everywhere work basically on the premise of nostalgia of a land they have left. In reality, they pine for the intimacy of their native place of origin, more specifically the immediate neighbourhood, they have abandoned, family and friends they have forsaken for better prospects in an alien environment and the sentimental excesses attached to local rituals and ceremonies, home made food and their mothers’ recipes. When they do visit their countries, they soon feel suffocated after a while and inevitably visit their revered motherland with confirmed return tickets.

Except the top brass political leadership who thrive on the concept of a nation for survival, how many people in the world today seriously think and are proud of being a citizen of whichever country they belong to by virtue of their birth or passports? Before lynching me for espousing such a thought put a hand to your heart and ask yourself in a moment of introspection whether you really belong to any one country anymore? This is not meant to be a diatribe against the splendid notion of nationhood and a clarion call for anarchy to reign supreme, for I too believe than an ordered universe is essential for civilization to progress. I have not lost faith in the spirit of nobility, the ability to rise and react to circumstance that surround or afflict your immediate environment. I am not advocating a philistine, lotus eating morbid philosophy of inaction, apathy and non-committal posturing. Here I use the first person singular not for personal aggrandizement or to espouse a quasi neo Nazi philosophy to accelerate any personal agenda but merely to reinforce a point of faith.

If individuals do not function collectively, the world order would collapse. Nihilism cannot make humanity function even at the basic level of the simple piety of everyday, humdrum survival. Mouths need to be fed, babies need to be nourished, young minds need to be ignited and the body politic needs to work for economic, scientific, technological, intellectual and cultural progress of the community. The community I reiterate is distinct from the narrow confines of a nation. The concept of a “Nation State’ has outlived its utility since its emergence in the nineteenth century Europe where the political climate of the day necessitated a racial divide based on language and ethnic groups. That need no longer exists especially in a multilingual, multicultural country like India where even the dialect and food habits of a distinct racial group differ every hundred kilometers.

Plurality of cultures and their co-existence is the reality of the day. From the now extinct World Trade Centre to the confines of any multinational organization in the remote corners of the third world, the Chinese executives rub shoulders with their local counterparts, Sikhs and Bangladeshi cab drivers taxi around the busy streets of New York with Australian or Swahili passengers. They are jubilant when by sheer accident their fellow brethren hop into their vehicles and they can lapse into merry banter in their native tongue. The emotional connect is always within a narrow parameter. However, the dichotomy of peaceful co-existence and parochialism don’t are not necessarily at loggerheads. A Filipino worker at a sweatshop in Chicago raises a toast with his Cuban comrade or a Bihari migrant to Mumbai may visit a beer bar with a local Marathi but at home they will practice their region specific rituals of worship, cooking and social mores like they did in their villages. A devout Muslim will say his Nawaz five times a day in Belgium; a traditional Hindu Brahmin will recite his Gayatri daily. Today’s individual is well versed with the practice of a dual life. So while they might display a wide variety of cosmopolitan attitudes while conducting business or interacting with co workers, inside their inner sanctum sanctotum, they will faithfully abide by age old tradition or practices. That does not discount the fact many Muslims eat pork chops and Brahmins relish beef steaks. In that duality, the post structural universe survives.

One certainly needs to experiment with a variety of food to broaden one’s mindset. Petty parochialism should not make you survive only on dosas, machcher jhol or tandoori chicken all through your life. That dulls your senses and makes you remain a frog in the well forever. I revert to the analogy of food yet again to rubbish the current trend of blending cuisines in the name of experimenting with exotica and propounding the thesis of the new Nation State of a Global Village. All you gastronomes will agree, the succulence of a particular combination works, others don’t. You can cook mutton with bitter gourd for all I care and spill mayonnaise over it, but make sure to go to Iceland and dare to sell it to Eskimos. Don’t blame me if they chase you with their harpoons. On a more serious note, you surely understand the essence of this bizarre recipe. The chicken tikka kebab might have become the national food of Britain, but then consider the fact that many residents of England are not English anymore. The cliché of United States being a melting pot of cultures became passé half a century back. There is no sacrosanct nation left anymore except maybe The Vatican which is essentially a theocratic state.

Paradoxically the alternative reality of a Global Village is also hogwash. Despite having usurped Mother Teresa as Indian was she truly only an Indian? Only after being de- Indianized did Amartya Sen develop the objectivity of seeing through the façade of the argumentative Indian. Salman Rushdie or a Vikram Seth could observe social mores and phenomenon with such clarity of vision and write about it so eloquently only after migrating from India. But have they become Americans or Britishers? Is Arundhati Roy anymore a mere Indian despite choosing to live in India? By becoming truly ‘nowhere people’ have they developed an insight that is uniquely individual and at the same time universal. They have become nation states as individuals.

That brings me to the crux of my proposition. In the recent past in my capacity as a talk show host I decided to interview the average Indian on their concept of a nation. I had the rare privilege of speaking to eminent thinkers, writers, artists and several common people on the roads from a wide variety of social strata. I was pleasantly surprised by their myriad responses to the concept of India as a nation. While the intellectuals spoke about diverse and distinctly different notions of their ides of India, most of the people from the lowest rung society when questioned what their ‘desh’ (read native land) was, mentioned the names of the villages or at best districts to which they belonged. The nonagenarian yet ever alert and acerbic Khuswant Singh said India meant different sounds for him, the legendary danseuse Sonal Man Singh defined Indians by their body language, the venerated anthropologist Dipankar Gupta referred to the collective subconscious of the narrow racial coteries that defines the essence of the polyvalence of the core Indian dilemma. There was no consensus either among the intellectual elite or the common person on the streets about the notion of nationhood. Is there any nationhood left in India anymore? The simplistic age old answer to this would be that India operates with the supreme irony of unity in diversity. India was never a nation before independence from British rule. Even secondary level school students are aware that the success of imperial rule in India was due to the divide and rule policy. India was a loose conglomeration of states, several of which refused to bow down to the pressures of its colonial rulers. The Nizam territory had to be annexed using guile and what many term deceit. Goa, Pondicherry and finally Sikkim also joined the Union much after independence. Kashmir was given special status even when the constitution was being formulated. All this is text book knowledge that needs no reaffirmation. Even debate about the division of India to appease minority sentiment and douse ambitions of the then political hierarchy has become stale to the point of becoming putrid at present. So exactly when was there one India since recorded history?

When there is no concept of nationhood left in the imperialist first world anymore despite lesser diversity in terms of linguistic and cultural divides, why do we have to force such an effete and anachronistic notion down our gullet? We have spent sufficient thought and proposed our thesis about the larger agenda. Let us now be circumspect and move to a more introspective plane.

Let us for a moment forget the larger national picture and concentrate on regional divides. In the last twenty five years divisive forces have been constantly raising their heads with disastrous consequences. Forget the demand for separate nationhood for Khalistan, Kashmir, Nagaland, Bodoland and the Assam insurgency, even in the otherwise apparently pacifist state of West Bengal with a stable single party rule for the last thirty three years(a record of sorts) the demand for Gorkhaland and Kamtapuri pose constant threats. Now the Maoist movement has turned West Bengal into a virtual terror state The government had to yield to separatist demands and create the truncated states of Uttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh to appease popular sentiment in those regions only because they did not choose to go out of the union and remained content with narrower regional divides within the sovereign nation. The movement for Telengana has set Andhra Pradesh on fire. As mentioned earlier, every hundred kilometers, the dialect changes, so do social mores and attitudes. The concept of the undivided joint family, intrinsic to the Hindu way of life for centuries too is a thing of the past. Within nuclear families the compatibility between partners are breaking down. This is a world wide phenomenon. So what state or nation is eventually left for us even when we cannot survive within the minimum basic unit of two? The binary equation too is eroding. There are no easy answers for these posers. Ultimately we are reduced to the statehood of being just one individual.

Within that individual too there are schizophrenic divides. What I was when I begun writing is no longer the same be as my basic metabolic process has changed me within even this short span. Am I myself a nation unto myself? That is the scariest thought. If I cannot become a nation unto myself how will the social order survive? That is where we need to address the issue today. Unless I become constant despite the divisive forces of doubt that assail me and tear me asunder to become several, how will I be a part of a larger social fabric? This occurrence could go well beyond laissez faire. There is the imperative need to unite. I have to retain my own essential sanity and function as a cohesive whole for me to connect to and maintain a sane world order. For that first and foremost I need to become a nation unto myself. The league of nations can be built brick by brick only is each of us consider ourselves to be individual nations. For that I need to look inwards and realize my positioning the larger scheme of things. If I let myself go, how will I ever be able to reach out to a second individual?

For that we need to redefine our place in the universe and start from the concept of individual nationhood. We spoke of some eminent Indians and referred to them by defining them in a way that is always termed in the pejorative context as being ‘nowhere people’. I think we need to re-evaluate the notion of nothingness and call it the zero state. That state needs to be seen as what the ancient Greeks defined as a state of ‘ataraxia’ which in common parlance would mean a state of peace that passeth understanding; the closest Sanskrit term for it would be ‘shantih’ – the state of perfect poise. By becoming the great dove unified in vision we can again rise from being individuals to become a collective whole. By realizing and becoming one within ourselves can we step forward from being to becoming. Like the mythical ‘Great Swan’ Paramhansa can we separate milk from water with our magical beaks and understand the need to create a cohesive union in the larger world order. We can look beyond the narrow confines of our personal states and reach out to one another. Through simple acts of goodness and actuating our aspirations not for ourselves alone can we rebuild the matrix from the singular state. The rest is bound to follow.

I begin by becoming my own nation and worshipping the sovereignty and limitless potential of my own humble self.