From: sinha@me.utoronto.ca (Pramath Sinha)
Subject: From the NYT - an article by SHASHI THAROOR - A Must Read !
Organization: UofT Mechanical Engineering
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 01:02:26 GMT


Sorry if this was posted earlier. 
The following is reprinted without permission from the New York Times.
All typos are entirely mine !

Pramath
_______________________________________________________________________________


                 THE RANGING STRUGGLE FOR INDIA'S SOUL

            By Shashi Tharoor (author of the Great Indian Novel)

This week, our eight-year-old twin sons are travelling home with us to
India. It is an India they have always identified with, though they
have grown up elsewhere. Ask them what they are, and they'll tell you
they're Indian. Not "Hindu," not "Malyali," not "Nair," not "Calcuttan,"
though they could claim all those labels, too. Just Indian.

Yet they are travelling back to visit an India in which that answer no
longer seems adequate. A mosque has been destroyed, a trust betrayed, and
the flames of communal frenzy blaze again across the land. Men are being
slaughtered because of the mark on a forehead or the absence of a foreskin.
This is not the India my wife and I want our sons to inherit.

Our sense of nationhood lies in a simple insight:  The singular thing about
India is that you can speak of it only in the plural. There is no one 
standard, only countless variants. This pluralism is made inevitable by
India's geography and reaffirmed by its history. There is too much of both
to permit a single, exclusionist nationalism.

We were brought up to take this for granted and to reject the sectarianism
that had partitioned the nation when the British left. I was reared unaware
of the religious loyalties of my schoolmates and friends. Knowledge of such
details came in time, but principally as a vindication; at my college, for
instance, half the presidents of the student body were non-Hindus. In these
things, religion wasn't allowed to matter. Secularism was the defining element
of our national consensus.

To be sure, calling itself secular did not make the land of the guru and the
fakir irreligious. Quite the contrary. Western dictionaries defined "secular-
ism" as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism meant a profusion of 
religions, none of which were privileged. The wail of the muezzin calling the
Muslim faithful to prayer blended with the chant of the mantras at the Hindu
temple and the loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwaras crackling with 
recitations from the Granth Sahib. Religion was part of the texture for life,
even for the ungodly - which is why Calcutta's Communists celebrate the annual
Pujas, or holy week, in veneration of the goddess Durga.

But religion, too, was part of the pervasive pluralism. Like many English-
speaking Indians, I was educated at Christian missionary schools by teachers
of every imaginable faith (and sometimes none at all). We saw movies with 
Muslim stars, listened to ancient Hindu ragas played by Muslim ustads and 
rooted for the national cricket team, captained then (as again now) by a
Muslim. Our national leaders and heroes were Muslim, Parsi, Christian and 
Sikh as well as Hindu. When my Brahmin mother-in-law visited us in Europe,
she was most anxious to light a candle at Lourdes. 

My parents are devout Hindus. Our home always had a prayer room where portraits
of various divinities jostled for wall space with fading photographs of 
departed ancestors. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand
in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed,
and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me join him. In the 
Indian way, I was to find my own truth.

And so the India I want to give my sons imposes no pressure to conform: India
is less a melting pot than a smorgasbord. Though our diversity contains the
potential for discord, we believe instinctively that conflict is best prevented
by respecting our differences. After all, Hinduism is the only major religion
that does not claim to be the only true religion.

So it pains me to read of "Hindu fundamentalism," when Hinduism is a religion
without compulsory fundamentals. That devotees of this faith are desecrating
a place of worship and assaulting Muslims in its name is a source of sorrow and
shame. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken
from each - language, art, food, learning - and outlasted them all.

But today's politics of deprivation has eroded the culture's confidence. Hindu
chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious
democracy. Politicians mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities: 
religion, caste, region. Indians have been more conscious than ever before
of what divides them. It has become more important to be a Muslim, a tribal
or a "backward caste" than to be an Indian.

The central challenge of India is to accommodate the aspirations of its 
different groups. The secular ethos - flexible, eclectic, absorptive -
helped India meet this challenge. I grieve that today this ethos is under
threat. The mobs want revenge against history, but they do not realize that
history is its own revenge.

The raging battle is for India's soul. For my sons, the only possible idea
of India is the one their parents grew up with, that of a nation greater
than the sum of its parts. That is the only India that will allow them
to continue to call themselves Indian.