26th January is celebrated as 'Republic Day of India'. It is one of those very few days where the consciousness of being an Indian dawns on many of us. The notion of being called an Indian is a perplexing one indeed !!! It ain’t as simple as it seems.. My endeavour to decipher the essential Indian identity hasn’t produced any satisfactory results till now.
Indianness has to be understood through the historical context of nation building. India is seen as a ‘melting pot’ of diverse cultures and traditions. Multitudes of people, from Aryans to Mughals, visited India and decided to make it their permanent home. The nation saw origin of many religions; from Hinduism to Jainism to Buddhism to Sikhism... And therefore, after the official birth of India as a nation in August 1947, it became important to feed the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ to the citizens..
Thus, a grand narrative of ‘unity in diversity’ was fed to us since our childhood.. I find the whole narrative as a hollow one. It is built on the false premises. Because the narrative forces us to ignore the ground reality of the country where the regional identity has always superseded the national identity. There has been a persistent demand for secession from either a particular state or the nation as a whole. This means that the idea of seeing an essential unity in this diversity is definitely not viable today. No one can impose the feeling of being an Indian from outside through coercion. It should come from within. And if it is not coming we all are to be blamed for it..
In my opinion, the country should be made a federal republic like USA where each state enjoys maximum independence. That would bring an end to the insecurity faced by ethnic minorities who aren’t able to relate to the idea of Indianness. Only then, an essential Indian identity would come to the fore...And that identity would not mingle with the ethnic/regional identity...
This beautiful poem ' WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR' by nobel laurate 'RABINDRANATH TAGORE' is an inspiration and hope for those who still envision the notion of a united INDIA !!!
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
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