The need to guard plurality

These lines from chapter 12 of the Bhagwad Gita contain precious words and sentiments I hold dear to my heart. Lord Krishna taught them to Arjuna, and I learned them from my Dadi, Kamla Bhatnagar. Every morning, after her prayers, she would feed the birds with the food that was served as a holy offering to the gods. When I was a child, she taught me that the avian menagerie collecting on the rooftop of our Delhi home would take the food to the greater beings that we associated with divinity. Dadi also made me appreciate the work that the birds did — how, despite their small frames and without access to a roof over their heads, having to fly far and wide for food and water, at the mercy of larger birds and humans, they still seemed extraordinarily comfortable going about living the life they needed to. Birds, I was told by Dadi, exemplified life driven by karma (action) and equipoise, defined in the Gita as life worthy of being appreciated by our creator.

It was my good fortune to have had Dadi, my maternal grandparents, my Bua and Phupaji, and my parents as constant reminders of the teachings of the Gita. The tutelage I got from them on Hinduism was the age-old wisdom of an ancient way of being, of a belief system that had lived so long, it was not shackled by the confines of books, temples, mosques, churches, or synagogues. What I appreciated about this way of life, of this grand philosophy and religion, was its ability to breathe, live, love, accept, embrace, welcome and celebrate all within its fold and to keep respectfully celebrating all it encountered along its journey that others might have othered or harmed, ignored or marginalised. My elders demonstrated this for me through the diktat that the prime minister very wisely used as India’s calling card for its G20 Presidency of “Vasudhaiva Katumbakam”, One Earth, One Family, One Future.

The India of the 1970s into the early 1990s taught me to value a deeply ingrained philosophy of progressive inclusivity that viewed the world as one universal family transcending the borders of language and ideology. We were the children of parents born in India as the subcontinent saw its earth stained by the ghastly blood of the vexing tragedy of the Partition. Modern School, Vasant Vihar in New Delhi where I spent most of my schooling years, was a fertile playground for study in the Hindustani way of celebrating plurality of thought, action, and deed. I learned songs in several Indian languages, hymns celebrating the nation, its religions, regions, seasons, festivals, and syncretic makeup. I was one of a dozen students recording these for All India Radio to use as morning assembly sing-alongs, something I am still very proud of. This lesson in linguistics has blessed me with a skill in learning language and deciphering words in foreign ones.

But that was then. My arrival in New York City (NYC) in 1993 gave me a glimpse to a world very different and rather insular. As big as life was in NYC, America was living a life small in thought and deed. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the US was a tale of two nations: a nation that was urban and one with the world, and another that was suburban and rural and at odds with those it othered within its borders and beyond.

In Manhattan, I found kindred spirits who were global citizens as defined broadly in the Gita, who welcomed every wave of immigration, no matter what part of the planet they came from. In doing so, they added layers of cultural sophistry to the tapestry that was its living and thriving fabric. Yet, just 200 miles away at our farm, nestled in the bucolic valley between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondack Mountains of New York, there were people who, although full of charming quaint demeanor, were frightened by the diverse faces of people different from those Northern European regions close by.

Town and country living had me enjoying the best of both rural and urban lifestyles. It was to our farm that I escaped to be one with our animals and pets and to enjoy the flowers, bushes, trees, and pastures we had shepherded and cared for. But the expansive, naturally rugged protean topography of the rural landscape seemed choked by the mindset of people stymied by small-minded beliefs. For life-enriching and life-affirming oxygen, it was to our apartment in Manhattan that I went running. Lost in the tight streets of Gotham and the taller-than-tall concrete-and-glass cityscape of New York City, I found people with soaring ideals and an inclusive manner who welcomed oneness with others around them no matter their race, religion, gender or sexual preference.

Back home after 30 years in New York, I find India dancing to a new tune. Not confining as small town and rural America, but also far from that pollyannaish nation I came of age in. There’s new pep in India’s step, there is bravado in its speech, and its language is increasingly Hindi. The dominant religion that has always been Hindu now parades itself with proud careless abandon like a peacock dancing in the rain. It is a new India, and it is also 75 years richer than that moment when Partition tore its people and their lives apart across a religious divide.

I feel removed from the world of the rural dwellers of America, a people who are tearing apart the foundations of the oldest democracy of the world. But I am also a stranger in the land of my birth, learning to live in a new world in an ancient land. America as we knew it once doesn’t exist, and the India that I came of age in doesn’t exist either. What keeps me hopeful is the deep-rooted shared history of India’s many peoples, religions, languages and regions.

As we celebrate the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, a happening that soaring majorities of people from across India have welcomed and feted, I want to believe that the old Hindu way of “Vasudhaiva Katumbakam”, One Earth, One Family, One Future, keeps leading us to greater consciousness. I hope we maintain a deeply inclusive welcome given to one and all, and that we protect from harm every being we share the planet with, and especially those in our communities locally and nationally.

Lord Rama, the embodiment of virtue and chivalry, has been known to please, delight, charm and offer unconditional love to all who come in his presence. It is my hope that this moment of honouring the great Lord Rama is a renaissance, a renewal, a refreshing new wave of Mother India, Ma Bharati, showing the world through her fine and peerless example the infectious and inspiring beauty of a religion, ideology, and people who become one with the other, and in doing so, become one with self and one with the divine. Raam Raam, Bharat, good morning New India!