A redundant celebration — Alone in eternal India

This was true of the East India Company and the British Empire. And what was the East India Company about? Spices. The trail of cardamom and cloves. You can get sick with eating, until for sheer survival, you accept the bland menu your doctor prescribes. Imagine a million people going to war, building a nation or an empire, only to be scared back into the harmless individual privacy of stomach ulcers.

It is this futility that the Hindu mind perceived. Once this is understood, the empire and its profligacy fail to move us to heroic action. As a matter of fact, there is nothing like heroic action, it is an illusion. In the experience of our century people look forward to a fearsome climax, an apocalypse. The Hindu mind had seen this, and sat back in profound inaction. The successful races, pursued by ecological nemesis, still prefer to call us a failed model. They are still spice-gathering.

Let us take another gorgeous example, Adolf Hitler. His hatred of the Jews, says the parallel historian, was built upon a personal quarrel with a clumsy and indigent Jew who sold him castaway coats at extortionist prices. Hitler was a mere ex-corporal, and would have been content to stay that way. Had we run into this foolish Jew, we might have told him, “Brother Abraham, why do you want to start a world war? Isn’t it a lot cheaper to give him a better-fitting old coat at a reasonable price?”

The Hindu sense of freedom, the ultimate experience, is open to people who desire it. It calls for and gets a martial ring round its penance. The Indian state has to be seen in this context. Both the sage and the soldier occasionally step into each other’s domain. And the day-to-day conduct of the state is managed by low-profile thievery. The state’s history is trimmed by a little lying. We do not want to throw more light than is necessary on questions of accession, self-determination, spying and freedom, and so on. These are inferior pursuits.

Yet the Hindu mind becomes responsible to much that is good in the human twilight, and owns up its mistakes. One of the most significant pronouncements to come in this fifty years of freedom was made by Prime Minister Gujral when he said that India and Pakistan should make every conflict an opportunity to cement friendship, brotherhood, peace. It was more resounding than the tryst with destiny. True, Gujral had to recant, and go back to textbook sovereignty. But it was clear that the Hindu mind was taking a look at the chronic conflict.

Muslim theologians say that Islam was there even before the Prophet, because Islam meant faith in the true God. Similarly, I should like to think that Hinduism extends into a deeper past than the five thousand years of decay given to it by secular historians. If it were to observe anniversaries, there would be no end. But more than this physical non-manageability, it is a question of another view of doing and accepting. It is the secret bliss that comes from a proud sense of failure.

So it cannot die, this system of existential questioning and receiving answers. This perennial dialogue became the language in which Hindu civilisation communed with other civilisations as they walked with it and fell by the wayside. The archaeologists and the cryptographer dug and excavated, and came to the grand verdict that this was moving back along its five thousand years of unspent time to perish once and for all. We have cyber-highways but we resist a cyber-civilisation. Our boys have stormed the silicon valley, and one of our tenacious old men nearly colonised the state of Oregon. But none of this altered the basic truth of the decaying wrap and the refulgent core within it. It needed enormous sensitivity to understand this strange contradiction.

That is one of the reasons why even the national movement under Gandhi invited a sceptical and harsh evaluation. Gandhi was seen, though people were polite not to say it in public, as a freak who thrived on British tolerance. The Left opinion particularly projected Subhas Chandra Bose as the real leader who was tricked out of leadership. They saw the real combatants of the freedom struggle in the violent and emotive terrorism of Bhagat Singh and Surya Sen. This is secular immaturity. Because India was above both dependence and independence. The struggle and its reward glided over the Hindu mind like a passing mist. Gandhi, seen through this mist, belonged rightly to some populist morality play.

That in no way hurts Gandhi. It is true that Independence was one of his relatively minor concerns, what he was after was the freedom of the enslaved spirit. He will not miss this half-centenary vaudeville. And it is so with the general populace as well. They are detached and tolerant spectators.

But as practical citizens it is our task not to mistake the historical spectacle for its small and banal starting point, and maintain live links with the radiant core of Indianness. It is clear that we have lost the war of exteriors. What resides at the core is our secret. What happens around us is the nemesis of a destructive civilisational aberration, namely the western. Look out and what do we see? A loud-mouthed cretin comes to the silos where nuclear warheads are kept in semi-slumber. The cretin calls out to them, “I have come to wake you. Do you know who I am?”

The warheads waddle out of their sleep. They say, “Our master.”

“What else?”

“You are the Big Mac.”

Indian Independence was never a part of this play. Eternal India was never dependent, and so there is no question of her gaining Independence. The celebration is redundant.

Vijayan’s latest novel is Thalamurakal’ (Generations)