Sreerama Varma Raja P C

Changing Ideas of India

Published on August 15, 2016

In his book 'Following The Equator', the famous author Mark Twain writes “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only”. Quotes like these kindle curiosity among many to really understand what it means by 'India'. Even though indigenous historical texts and maps of India did not survive, many travellers throughout the history of humankind from various parts of the world described India in various ways through books, paintings and maps. Later during the colonial period, many nationalists and freedom fighters invented various ideas about what India as a nation means, as a means to induce martyrdom and patriotism among Indians and to eventually make them take part in the freedom struggle. Britishers on the other hand, utilising the power of rule they had in India, wrote the history of India according to what they thought, imagined and wanted India to be. Even among the Britishers, there were many interpretations of India according to various views of the world of the people who wrote about India. But in all of those definitons of India which were given throughout the history, the common principle was stereotypes. Stereotypes are the over-generalisation of characteristics of a certain individual or a group to the whole of society. Being familiar with these various ideas and streotypes about India will help us realise why knowing about the producers of history prior to learning their version of history is important.

To understand how India was portrayed by early travellers and merchants, it is important to know what a map was then and what it is today. A map, according to J.B. Harley1, is a mediator between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. It serves as a memory bank for spatial data, which can speak across the barriers of ordinary language. Early maps are a part of the history of human communication and thought. Most of them were imagined evocations of space rather than realistic records of geography. For example, the map sketched by the Portuguese of the Coast of Calicut2 has more to talk about than just the terrain. Calicut is a medieval south Indian coastal Kingdom. The map depicts a fort and many buildings which gives an insight into the infrastructure of Calicut, many ships both in water and harboured which shows the prominance of Calicut in sea trade, and an elephant which appears to be bigger than a ship to show that there are elephants in the coastal kingdom. These depictions are also influenced by the experiences of the Portuguese Christian Explorer Vasco da Gama who 'discovered' Calicut in 1498. The whole voyage of Vasco da Gama to India and his experiences were written and published as a book named 'Roteiro'. In the book, temples which were thought to be large Churches, the palace and court of the King, and how the people looked and behaved were described in detail. But nevertheless, the same map of Coast of Calicut and the book Roteiro is again to influence other travellers' imaginations and expectations not only of Calicut but also of the whole Indian subcontinent. So succeeding travellers from Portugal is to assume the whole Indian subcontinent to be looking like the city of Calicut. This stereotyping applies to not only medieval Portuguese travellers, but to all visitors of India of all periods in history who came from outside of the Indian subcontinent. Megasthenes, who visited the Mauryan Empire of northern India 13 centuries before da Gama, had generalised and said that all men married many wives and wives were allowed to be prostitutes. Even Henry Moses, who came to India 4 centuries after da Gama, talks about his disappointment in not seeing any lions or tigers in India during his visit. He had that expectation because of the stereotype popular in Britian that India was full of lions and tigers. Even though India did have lions and tigers, it has been generalised and the concept of India being a land of tigers and lions was spread throughout Europe. These kinds of stereotypes are formed naturally when some information, that too vague and partial information is spread mostly orally through many people, unlike the ones going to be explained in the next few paragraphs, where a stereotype is invented by an individual or a group of individuals for a particular goal.

Nearly five centuries after Vasco da Gama's first visit, during the freedom struggle and post Independence, India and its map were depicted in various ways by several people to achieve political goals. One of them was 'Mother India' or 'Bharat Mata'. According to Sumathy Ramaswamy3, Mother India is the female personification of the Indian nation and its territory. She describes Mother India4 as “Holding the Indian national flag in one hand, she stands on a partially visible terrestrial globe, on which is also perched a figure identifiable to the visually cued India viewer as Bhagat Singh, a young man from Punjab who was hanged by the British colonial state on March 23, 1931. He is handing her his bloodied head, presumably severed by the sword that lies next to him, while blood from his decapitated body flows onto the globe, and onto some roughly marked territories that appear to be parts of India and the adjacent country of Burma. In return, Mother India blesses him for his act of corporeal sacrifice”. What an image depicting India like this wants from its audience is to assume that the land which they live in is their 'Mother land'. Moreover, India being personified as a women, she is pictured somewhat similar to a Hindu goddesses possibly because the majority of the people in India at that time were followers of Hinduism. This shows how even religion was applied to a map, that too a personified one. In the same book, Sumathy Ramaswamy speaks about another Indian map5, which appears to be black and crying, while carrying the dead body of the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi who was assassinated, with the election symbol of the Indian National Congress the open palm displayed on the side. This is a clear example of how the personification of the Indian map was frequent and how the persona of the map changed according to whoever was in power. At the same time, a crying map of India is a metaphor that whole of India is mourning for Indira Gandhi's death, which is indirectly a stereotype.

In addition to using maps to induce patriotism and martyrdom among Indians, many nationalist politicians and thinkers made their attempts to 'invent' a concept of India as a nation according to their imagination to unite its people to form an independent nation. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in 1923 wrote a book called 'The Essentials of Hindutva'6, which talks about India as a Hindu nation. In his book, he defines India as the 'motherland' of Hindus. But he defines a Hindu as “a citizen either in himself or through his forefathers of 'Hindusthan' and claims the land as his motherland”. He goes on further saying that “the Hindus are not merely the citizens of the Indian state because they are united not only by the bonds of the love they bear to a common motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood”. Savarkar, through his concept of Hindus as more of a race than followers of Hinduism, was trying to ignite a sense of unity among the readers at that time to convince them to fight against the British rule. To make his goal clearer, he says that even though a Hindu need not be a person belonging to Hindu religion, the identity of a Hindu is his hate towards 'foreigners'. Foreigners here mean people who do not identify themselves as 'Hindus' or people who do not follow Indian culture or its religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. On the other hand, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his book 'The Discovery of India' talks about his view of India as a secular state. He says that “It is fascinating to find how the Bengalis, the Marathas, the Gujratis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajputs, and the great central block comprising the Hindustani-speaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics for hundreds of years, have still more or less the same virtues and failings of which old tradition or record tells us, and yet have been throughout these ages distinctively Indian, with the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities.” His take on uniting India is by saying that even though India is diverse, the moral and mental qualities of every Indian are the same. He also indirectly criticises Savarkar's idea of a Hindu nation by arguing that “Some Hindus talk of going back to the Vedas; some Moslems dream of an Islamic theocracy. Idle fancies, for there is no going back to the past; there is no turning back even if this was thought desirable. There is only one-way traffic in Time. India must therefore lessen her religiosity and turn to science.” Even though he was more secular but still appreciated religious values, and wanted Indians to think of their future than quarrel about the past, his interpretation of a common heritage of 'distinctive Indianness' is historically inaccurate and is a cyclic argument. Not only that the cultural practises in ancient and medieval India were very varied from kingdom to kingdom, the way he describes an Indian as “a person who has distinctively Indian moral and mental qualities” is an argument which points to itself.

Along being been imagined and written about vaguely by the ancient and medieval travellers, and being defined as a nation with various characteristics by various nationalists, India during colonial period have been framed and seen through different views of the world such as Orientalism, Marxism and Utilitarianism. According to Romila Thapar7, “Orientalist scholars studied the languages and the texts with selected Indian scholars, but made little attempt to understand the world-view of those who were teaching them. The readings therefore are something of a disjuncture from the traditional ways of looking at the Indian past”. They depicted India as a Sanskritic civilisation and ignored the chronicles written in Persian by poets and chroniclers of the Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rulers. Moreover, a dichotomy in values was maintained, where Indian values are 'spiritual' and European values are 'materialistic'. Not only that, by showing the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, William Jones, a British philologist, had argued that there was a single origin of language, suggesting that they had all descended from an ancestral language. Indo European was projected as such a language, a hypothetical language reconstructed from known languages that were related to each other within a structure of linguistic rules. This was often incorrectly extended to equating all those who spoke Indo-European languages with membership of an 'Aryan race'. Here, more than 'Indian civilisation' being stereotyped as Sanskritic, they invented an 'Aryan race' which later inspired Nazism and the advent of Adolf Hitler. On the other hand, Utilitarian interpretation of the history of India was a critique of Indian culture. In her book, Romila Thapar talks about how scholars such as James Mill and Thomas Macaulay wrote volumes upon volumes of books on the history of India without ever setting foot in the subcontinent. But still James Mill periodised Indian history into Hindu civilisation, Muslim civilisation and the British period. This is so embedded in the minds of those who studied Indian history that it prevails even today. Romila Thapar argues that this is at the root of the ideologies of current religious nationalism and that it still plays a role in the politics of south Asia. This has also resulted in a distorting of Indian history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion. Moreover, James Mill described that Indian civilisation lacked qualities such as rational thought and individualism, which the Europeans admired. This is a direct evidence of stereotyping of India. These depictions of India from an Oriental and Utilitarian view made economists like Karl Marx treat Asia as 'The other of Europe'. The lack of a capitalist system in Asia, were thought to be because of the pre-modern history of Indian society and religion. Romila Thapar says “The analyses of Karl Marx, in what he called the Asiatic Mode of Production, envisaged despotism and stagnancy as key characteristics which nullified movements towards change parallel to that of Europe. In the absence of private property there were no intermediary groups between king and peasant, nor classes or class conflict of a kind that would lead to dialectical change. This was further nullified by the absence of commercial centres and cities specialising in production for a market which, if they had existed, might have encouraged economic change”. Here, Karl Marx uses the stereotypes made by Oriental and Utilitarian scholars to give his own explanation of the economy of not only the Indian subcontinent, but whole of Asia.

From all these ideas of India which appears to be either imagined or invented, it is becoming clearer that the unification of India as one nation or civilisation historically came from stereotypes rather than actual political movements. Which forces us to accept the fact that India was never a unified nation prior independence. The Indian subcontinent accommodated many kingdoms and princely states and had very different culture from state to state. That means people India did not have the identity of an Indian but were rather identified according to the language they spoke. So the idea of an 'Indian', like any other racial or ethnic identity, is a very vague and a trivial one, with an exception of being used for official purposes. But India being a very diverse country and not having a unified identity or governance in the past does not mean that the nation has to be dispersed. India as a republic state now has a lot of both potential to develop in terms of polity, economy, culture and education as well as drawbacks such as poverty, corruption, environmental degradation and communalism. Therefore, working towards extracting the potential of the country through investing in better education, better infrastructure and bringing up the market is more crucial for India's development rather than debating, deciding and discriminating on who were the 'indigenous Indians' and who were not.

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