Beyond its religious dimension, the past decade has witnessed the intensification of a very particular kind of nationalism. This has moulded public discourse through defining those whose beliefs, behaviours and utterances are “genuinely” Indian and others who are characterised as “outsiders” and “anti-nationals”. This latest version of nationalism has played a significant part in shaping electoral strategies at national and sub-national levels. The key driving force behind this nationalist ideology relates to strict definitions of the idea of home.
Nationalism is, of course, always about defining a home for a particular population. However, the current nationalism of home-ness is different from the one that fired the anti-colonial imagination. Though it frequently relapsed into sons- (and sometimes, daughters)-of-the-soil rhetoric, an important strand within anti-colonial nationalism related to being-at-home-in-world. Anti-colonial Indian nationalism was strongly informed by transnational thought and was, hence, a critique of colonial thinking that suggested that a colonised people could not think beyond their immediate life-worlds.
In their different ways, BR Ambedkar, the poet Mahadevi Verma, Captain Lakshmi Sahgal and Jawaharlal Nehru — to name just a few within this strand of nationalism —sought to define India as a dwelling place where local ideas became entangled with transnational ones. In their thinking, Indian-ness should both draw upon what was local but also exceeded its potential parochialism. The lives and thoughts of Lakshmi Sahgal and Mahadevi Verma, for example, foregrounded that being an “Indian woman” could not simply be equated to something called “Indian tradition”.
Though none of the above thinkers themselves ever put it this way, the significance of their thought also lies in telling us something about the importance of never being completely at home. The latter leads to parochial nationalism and bigotry through imagining very strict demarcations between those who belong to our home and those who don’t. This way of thinking about dwelling lies at the heart of contemporary nationalist ideologies that seek to re-define the idea of home primarily as a vantage point of defining “outsiders”. Across gated communities, schools, Residents Welfare Associations, cultural bodies, universities, the fields of the arts and bureaucracies, a new idea of India-as-home informs emerging norms of being Indian. It is this that is linked to two recent instances of defining India: One where it was claimed that there is just one kind of Hinduism (Sanatan Dharma) that is “genuinely” Indian and the other where Muslim school children were told to “go to Pakistan”.
There is, however, an evocative Indian history of not-being-at-home that, not so long ago, sought to both imagine the richness of all that was local but also question its possible small-mindedness. It is particularly significant that this was articulated by thinkers steeped in Indian religious and literary histories. Nehru is easy to criticise for being “alienated” from Indian lifeways but it is difficult to dismiss the philosopher Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) and the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan (1907-2003).
A historian, linguist, academic, collector of Buddhist manuscripts, Congress worker, Buddhist and sometime Communist, Sankrityayan was a relentless traveller. His best-known book, Ghummakkad Shashtra (1948), outlined a philosophy of travelling — or not being at home — as a philosophy of being in the world.
Sankrityayan called this “ghummakkad-dharma”. Those who commit to it, he was to say, “must pay no heed to their [parents’] protests, the wife’s tears or the husband’s lament”. Respect for one’s “janma-bhoomi” (birth place), he was adamant, must not force us to become “rooted beings”. For that only leads to an inability to fully explore and express our humanity. There is nothing more human, Sankrityayan writes, than the capacity “to help strangers and to consider it one’s duty to offer assistance to those whose language we do not understand”.
For Sankrityayan, not-being-at-home is a philosophy of dwelling in the world. And there is no one way of defining home, for this reduces the idea of human relations to exclusivist categories. Perhaps, most significantly, Sankrityayan’s ideas on home and belonging draw from local traditions (Buddhism, for example) while expanding their meanings through incorporating contexts of 20th century life. His Indian-ness powerfully reimagines parochial ideas of home and belonging that certain other forms of national identity promote.
Currently prevalent ideas of the nation as home are strongly linked to exclusivist ones that speak of “our ancestors”: Those who, apparently, built that home. In this line of thinking, there is little scope for multiple lineages of the nation. Is there something, then, un-Indian about suggesting that homes have multiple histories and, hence, complex parentage? Not if you follow Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s musings in his multi-volume autobiography, translated into English as The Afternoon of Time.
Some years after his family had moved out of Allahabad (now Prayagraj), Bachchan returns to the city and is taken to a ramshackle building that, he is informed, is his “ancestral house”. The poet is unsure but recollects a story he had heard about a greatly cherished hukkah that, the owners claimed, had been gifted to their ancestors by the Emperor Akbar. Some years after the initial gift was made, the hukkah’s mouth-piece decayed and had to be replaced. Then, later still, another part fell apart. The original had been made of gold but the family now made do with a cheaper substitute. Bit by bit, Bachchan says, all original parts came to be replaced and though the hukkah certainly looked like the original implement, nothing remained of the materials that made up the putative gift. And still, Bachchan reports, the current owners of the implement felt a deep attachment to it, never tiring of presenting it as that same hukkah that the Emperor had given. Though he could no longer recognise his “ancestral home”, Bachchan continues, his attachment to it was no less for it. As in the case of Akbar’s hukkah, humans have the capacity to think of home, ancestry and attachment in multiple ways.
In following Sankrityayan and Bachchan, we might learn that there is nothing un-Indian about imagining national life in ways other than currently fashionable and that the latter is no more than an invention of the dominant politics of our times. Identities, the philosopher and the poet might have said, are dynamic and always in the making and the only home worth building is the one that allows for dynamism and change.
The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London
