A "multinational" nation

For the past fifty years, we have grown up with the belief that Pakistan is a monolithic, theocratic state with one religion, one language, and one mind. India is the opposite--with many religions, many languages, many communities and many minds. In the 1990s, with the ascent of the BJP, a second conception of India became popular with, perhaps, a quarter of our voters. Instead of the plural India of the first conception, it views the nation as singular and essentialist, which will be energised by Hindu nationalism. In its view, India has been victim of a thousand years of foreign invasions, and is now threatened by multinationals and particularly American culture. It wishes to restore it subliminally to a pure, pre-invasions, and eternal Hindu past and advance rapidly toward superpower status in the future.

The first concept of India, by contrast, is more relaxed, liberal and self-confident. It celebrates the opening up of India in the 1990s to foreign trade, investment, and most importantly to ideas. It thinks of India as a mixture of different peoples and cultures that settled here. In this view, India never had an authentic past; it was always a moving feast and the moments of mixture were in fact the most creative. Historic migrations and wanderings of many peoples and tribes over thousands of years created this India. The subcontinent, in this view, is a deep net into which various races and peoples of Asia drifted over time and were caught. The tall Himalayas in the north and the sea in the west, east, and south isolated the net from the rest of the world and brought into being a unique society.

Our caste system may have had its origins in this net, for it made it possible for such a vast variety of people to live together in a single social system over thousands of years. Hence, diversity is India's most vital metaphor--it is a "multinational" nation. It is what plural Europe would like to be--a united economic and political entity in which different nationalities and minorities continue to flourish. In recent years a new generation of historians has enriched this plural conception of India. Their innovative studies have illuminated our regional identities, showing how our national identity is superimposed from above and created usually by the grab for power, with little to do with how ordinary people saw themselves. Moreover, our recent politics are further reinforcing our regional identities. This liberal view, however, does not deny a shared sense of India. It merely warns us to be careful in positing a unifying conception of India based on nationalism. That our minds have finally got de-colonised gives this liberal view of India a quiet reassurance and self-confidence.

The year 1981 was the symbolic watershed in this respect, when "Midnight's Children" appeared. The moment Salman Rushdie began to "chutnify" the language of Shakespeare, he opened the minds of the Indian sub-continent. Ever since, contemporary Indian history, "has acquired the air of a fancy dress party…full of chatter, music, sex, tomfoolery, free drinks, and rock and roll, an occasion to which everyone is invited provided they can join in the fun", says Amit Chaudhuri.

India and Pakistan's future will be determined far more by the relentless push of the global economy and communications, supported avidly by our rapidly growing middle classes. The future preoccupations of both peoples will be with rising living standards, social mobility, and the peaceful pursuit of consumer goods. As a result, obsessions with religious identity and fundamentalist attitudes will slowly fade. Gurcharan Das TWO CONCEPTS OF INDIA TOI 29/07/2001