The quest for a strong national identity; at what cost, and to whom? Were India and her people better or worse off 40 years ago, than they are today?
She had never felt so ill at ease, uncomfortable in her skin and at the sound of her own voice, or to put it more precisely, accent; to essentially be the same, yet feel and sound so different was awkward, cumbersome and far more difficult to negotiate than being unequivocally different, a foreigner or outsider in a foreign country.
Neither being foreign nor different were new to her. Being the same, and expected to be the same were. She was Indian, by both extraction and citizenship; it was an incontrovertible fact, yet she did not know how to be Indian. She had tried and failed repeatedly over 22 years, from the very first time she attempted to live in what was – is – allegedly her own country, at the age of 24.
Prior to 1998, her experiences of India had been few and fleeting, and the somewhat fluid identity of her country at the time had permitted her to be an outsider just as she was everywhere else.
The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she had been transported all around the globe, ever since she made her entry into the world in New York city, in 1974; neither an NRI nor the adopted citizen of another country, she was but a Jane Doe, equipped with an intrinsic detachment from the need to belong, which is perhaps what allows her be more objective than many of her peers, when searching for an answer to the question, were India and her people better or worse off, 40 years ago, than they are today? From any Indian, however representative or unrepresentative of the country he or she might be, an altogether impartial answer is out of reach.
The question itself begs another; if the past can only be applauded in comparison to the present and not on its own merit, then is it really worthy of the applause?
She was at the impressionable age of six, 40 years ago, and feels that the India she encountered then was as little likeable, for many of the same and apparent reasons, as it is today; overpopulated, underdeveloped and rife with poverty, it remains a country that assaults one’s senses and sensibilities immediately upon arrival, and thereafter is friendly only to those fortunate enough to belong to, or find entry into the upper echelons of society.
Indeed, the prerequisites for both belonging and admission have markedly changed, and therein, she suspects, lies the real reason for the passionate and voluble criticism of the present, by what appears to be a minority of disgruntled stakeholders.
In the years following the partition of India, the governance of the country may not have been as overtly and aggressively divisive in its quest for a strong national identity, as it is today; against all odds, it found both its place in, and unique selling proposition to the world, claiming – even believing – to have triumphed over the ‘divide and rule policy’ of British rule, and successfully effected a secular identity with the moral high-ground that the title confers.
The inequalities were nonetheless glaring and flagrantly overlooked. The poor were very poor and the rich comparatively very rich, the latter, to all appearances, living their lives with a far greater degree of immunity to the misfortunes of the majority – in addition to misconducting themselves with absolute impunity – than they seem to be able to today …
… is this, here-above, what makes the India of the past better than the one of the present ?
The question had been nudging her mind for many days, following an article written by friend and journalist Karan Thapar – whom she reads religiously and admires greatly – in which he concludes that “if the past is another country, I want to go back to it. I don’t like the country India has become today.”
The majority of her peers, belonging to the same milieu as Thapar, which is also her own, immediately concurred, but she was both unable and unwilling to follow suit; somehow it seemed right, even fair, that she, with all her pretensions of ‘anglicised’ grandeur, worldly accoutrements and concomitant sense of entitlement, should not only find herself feeling inappropriate, but also lacking relevance in the India of today.
Yet she couldn’t qualify the feeling, for it was instinctive; she neither had enough knowledge nor experience of her own country to be able to refute Thapar’s conclusion, and demonstrate that in many ways, nothing has really changed, other than the category of short-term beneficiaries of a grossly misconceived quest for a national identity.
The India of our past, according to writer, politician and former international diplomat, Shashi Tharoor, on whose literary masterpiece, ‘The Great Indian Novel’, she allowed herself to lean for validation, fell as much victim to its perceived national identity 40 years ago, as it appears to be falling to the one it has excavated today. Both past and present are stained by, and she quotes, “a betrayal of the challenge of modern democracy.”
In ‘The Great Indian Novel’, in which Tharoor fictionally illustrates the failures of governance during the thirty years following partition, he writes,
“You have to understand that the political and governmental process in our country has always been distant from the vast mass of the people. This has been sanctified by tradition and reinforced by colonialism.
Two hundred years of the British Raj underscored the detachment of ordinary Indians from the processes of their own governance. Perhaps Gangaji’s – aka Mahatma Gandhi’s – greatest achievement was that he made the people at large feel they had a stake in the struggle for freedom. Under him the nationalist movement inspired a brief surge of enthusiasm which overcame the general apathy, but it has all faded away.”
And so, she asked herself once again, how was the India of the past better than the one of the present and for whom? In 2014, for all intents and purposes, the present appeared to once again, after a hiatus of almost 67 years, be giving the majority of the citizens of India the feeling of having a stake in the welfare of their own country and its national identity; was the past not in fact, both reason and catalyst for the present state of affairs then? And in 2021, would it not be fair to deduce that India is simply repeating its mismanagement of a quest for an upstanding national identity?
Whatever the answers may be, the one thing that inarguably remains unchanged, is that India always has, and will continue to justify its misdemeanors on the grounds of fatalism, or to put it more simply, in the words of Alexander Pope, “To err is human; to forgive divine.”