Author: Saradindu Mukherji
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 3, 2007
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/214168.html
Introduction: Tharoor, please note: long before
the Constitution, a Hindu India gave shelter to outsiders
This is with regard to Shashi Tharoor's piece,
'Indian identity is forged in diversity', first published in the Guardian,
and excerpted by The Indian Express in the column 'Printline' (IE, August
16). By blowing up the trivial, if not the non-existent, and smothering the
obvious, it causes dismay. Having gone through pages and pages of what was
earlier called the Manchester Guardian, and then the Guardian, in the British
Newspaper Library, Colindale, and also having gone through the private papers
of Sir Charles Prestwich Scott (1846-1932), its legendary editor (1871-1929),
I may make a few observations about the changing values of the British press
and the unchanging attitude of the Indian intelligentsia.
If Tharoor was genuinely interested in celebrating
the vibrancy of India's pluralism, he perhaps should not have missed out,
in all fairness, the only exclusivist, intolerant and violent strand which
has posed the biggest threat to this country over the millennia. A quick look
at the recent history of Kerala and parts of southern India, with whose history
and politics he should have a greater familiarity, might show that it is not
the hydra-headed "sectarian Hindu chauvinists" but others who have
been playing havoc. Many incidents of sectarianism - right from the forced
conversions carried out by the 'nationalist' Tipu Sultan and the pogroms against
the Hindus of Kerala by the 'progressive' Moplahs, right down to the latest
blasts in Hyderabad - have been the handiwork of groups whose comrades are
reasonably active in places as distant as New York and Bali, Glasgow and New
Delhi. The potential secretary-general of the UN, either because he is oblivious
of the facts or is reticent about setting them down, may be seen on the wrong
side of the civilisational clash.
While Tharoor can indulge in suppressio veri
and suggestio falsi in bashing the non-existent while covering up the real
source of danger in the contemporary world, he might remember that Scott's
paper was very much against this kind of subjective and blatant propagandist
writing. The piece should have been published in the Daily Mail and the Morning
Post, both of which are rabidly conservative and unsympathetic to Indian sensibilities.
Tharoor, a potential minister in the Government
of India, has every right to be a Nehruvian. But as for the origins of "modern
Indian nationalism", one may have to go back to the days of Surendranath
Banerjee and Dadabhai Naoroji, Bankim Chatterjee, Swami Dayanand and Swami
Vivekananda. One feels even Jawaharlal Nehru himself never visualised himself
as the "prime exponent of modern Indian nationalism".
Long before India's Constitution was conceived,
long before India was pulverised by invaders, an overwhelmingly Hindu India
had given shelter to Zoroastrians, the Jews and the likes of St Thomas - and
that without being subjected to sermons from outside India.
The writer teaches history at Hansraj College,
University of Delhi
