Want some words, phrases out

There are certain words and phrases that I have become allergic to. The list grows each month but here are three of my current bugbears: narrative, paradigm shift and the idea of India. All of them are now used as shorthand for conveying meanings that have become so clichéd and loaded that they often blur their true connotation. Some, such as the concept of a narrative, have been imported from American academic writing and are loosely used here without a proper context. Others, such as the idea of India, are catchwords borrowed from writers who were writing at a different time and in another vein. Divorced from their original sources, when these terms and words are used in our daily conversations by semi-literate and irresponsible speakers, they debase not just the meaning of the word or term, but distort the reality they embody.

Let us take the popular phrase ‘The idea of India’, borrowed from the title of a first-rate book written by the well-respected historian Sunil Khilnani. The book, written to celebrate and assess 50 years of our Independence, was hailed as an important step in understanding the political history of our country and the role of Nehru in particular in fashioning a modern nation. Its wide sweep even included a chapter on Chandigarh but given that it was written in 1997, one could see how central Nehru was to this historical assessment. As we head towards celebrating 75 years of Independence two years hence, the political and cultural scene has changed so radically that any historian who will write a similar book to celebrate this landmark will have to grapple with how the idea of India Khilnani presented so passionately has changed into one that is heading in another direction. I will refrain from asking whether this is a path we should take or not, but even the most devoted admirers of Nehru may have to ask whether Khilnani’s idea of India still grips the common imagination.

This thought struck me as I watched the heated debates over the ‘bhoomi pujan’ ceremony on August 5 in Ayodhya and the brouhaha over the Prime Minister’s participation. There were angry tirades against this betrayal of the idea of India that made us a secular nation. The term was tossed around until I was no longer sure of what it stood for. To get my bearings, I went back to a book that I consider offers the most profound and eclectic view of India/Bharat — Diana Eck’s ‘India: A Sacred Geography’, published in 2012. I had read her ‘Banaras: City of Light’ when it came out in 1982 and was smitten by her scholarship. Many years later, I heard her at the Jaipur LitFest, when she had come with a group of her students from Harvard after attending the Kumbh in Prayag to study the phenomenon of an ‘instant city’. Her talk was mesmerising and opened one’s eyes to how deep and complex the idea of this land is and how stupid it is to reduce it to the nation-state that we now consider India.

Eck shows us how the contours of an idea of India (or Bharat, its ancient name) are best seen in the footsteps of its pilgrims and the location of its pilgrim centres. These tirthas, which span each and every religion that came into or grew out of this subcontinent, have a complex inter-connectedness and are in that sense the locators of the region we consider ours. Interestingly, all the great civilisations that similarly grew and flourished across the world — Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greek, Roman, Inca, even the great Chinese cultural world such as it was once — have vanished. Their cultures and temples are now preserved as dead artefacts in museums but it is only India that still practises the religion it has held on to for millennia. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, we still worship the many manifestations of Shakti in temples that are dedicated to her various avatars. Similarly, the Shaivite and Vaishnavite branches of Hindus have temples that meld the ancient with the contemporary. Our epics are still living and are celebrated in multiple ways and versions of the original stories of the kings and princes they tell us about.

India may have been born a new nation in 1947 but its soul is ancient and goes back to mythical times. To try and impose a modern historical or political interpretation on it is to erect a multi-storeyed structure of steel and concrete on air and water. Both realities co-exist and we constantly collide with the ages they embody in our everyday life. Whether we have seen all its great rivers and mountains or not, whether some of them, such as Saraswati and Meru, even exist now, they are still included in the prayers we recite to this day. Such mnemonic devices as sutras, shlokas and aartis are still sung whether we are familiar with Sanskrit or not.

Sadly to say, all this carries the danger of your being dubbed a bhakt, but if we go back to the original meaning of the word and not its pejorative contemporary usage, it is a term of honour, not an insult to one’s intelligence. This is why I am excising certain words from my vocabulary.