Sunday Posts

The death of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first non-Congress Indian Prime Minister who served a full term (the incumbent, Narendra Modi, is likely to become the second), occasioned a wave of sympathetic reflection, even from those who disagreed politically, about the charm, wisdom and integrity of the old man. Scorned in his lifetime as the 'civilised mask' of the Hindu Nationalists, Vajpayee appeared - in his death - a different breed of a politician, particularly in contrast to his successor,  approachable, consensual and incorruptible. Though he would always have the dubious distinction of being a lifelong Hindu warrior, stretching from the collaboration with the British government in the pre-Independence years to active sponsorship of sectarian politics in the 80s which led to the horrors of religious riots from Bhagalpur to Bombay, Vajpayee came to represent the reasonable case for Hindu Nationalism in India. His death and the outpouring of respect, demand a re-examinat...

I remember this awkward dinner conversation. I was with my colleague in Northern Ireland, and a friend of his joined our table. After we were introduced, he wondered at my name and asked me what religion I belong to. I went for the simpler answer and kept my doubts aside: "I am Hindu", I said. That made him even more confused. "What's a Hindu?" he said, "Is that some kind of Muslim?" When I tell this story to my friends in India, they are usually outraged. What an ignorant person, they would say. Particularly treating Hinduism as a branch of Islam, when Hindus love to believe that everyone was originally a Hindu, upsets them. I have also reflected upon this conversation later. It may indeed be that he did not know. He was particularly ignorant, just as ignorant as the lady, who, standing inside the Irish Bar at Mumbai's ITC Grand Central hotel, asked my colleague - the same person as it happened to be - where Ireland was. But the confusion ab...

My previous post, o n whether Hinduism is the only thing to unite India , to which my answer was negative, was based on the idea that Indian culture is quite distinct from 'Hinduism'. It is this point that needs further elaboration, as the apologists of the Hindu India, both the traditionalists and the new liberal kinds, claim that they are one and the same. I was brought up in a Brahmin family, and read Sanskrit - primarily as my grandmother was a 'Pandit' and a Sanskrit teacher - and read the epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. For a year of my life, after I went through the 'Upanayana', I performed a puja three times a day. Later in life, I read Upanishad and Gita out of intellectual curiousity. And, yet, this still does not cover the core texts of Hinduism - most critically, the various commentaries by later Holy men, which, for many Hindus, represent the revealed religion.  But this is perhaps the key point: That someone may grow up in a Hindu milieu...

The title of this post is in quotes because someone told me this. This was some days ago, over lunch in London, something that I stayed with me since. This is one post I started writing, and then deleted, and then tried again, and again - until this moment when I resolved the question of the headline: Rather than trying the feeble 'reimagination' or 'new idea', using this quote directly was better. Indeed, there is nothing new here. This is the current conversation in India. In fact, suggesting anything else risks being shouted down in India today. However, why this made me reflect is that this was not coming from any zealot, but someone I know and regard highly for intellect. Also, this came out of no online spat or shouting match, but a reasoned conversation about India's future, and came from someone who cares about the country as deeply as anyone could. Finally, and importantly, the person telling me this was liberal and highly educated professional, lest ...

Is it important to have an independent Indian imagination? The question may be too obvious and too jarring at the same time. Too obvious, because the imagination of the Indian Republic was derived from the colonial imagination of India, and the new Republic did not just inherit the colonial laws, polity, ceremonies and buildings, but also its language, geography, ideas and conceptions of itself. But too jarring at the same time, because it is obvious that independence is good and dependence is bad, and the question is attempting to open a debate that is already settled in most people's minds. But independence of imagination is not like independence as a nation state, decoupling the bureaucracies and changing the personnel. It is also different from shifting the power structure, replacing one elite by another. An independent imagination may involve a reinvention of knowledge, questioning what is valuable and how should one look at the world. This is disruptive, but also, in ...

India, after sixty years of committed secularism, has turned a corner. The founding assumptions of India was that in order to survive, it must become a secular country. Indeed, such thinking was shaped by the then recent battles with two-nation theory, which the Indian nationalists lost and the country was divided, and the persistent British argument that India couldn't be a viable country because of its diversity. It was all but natural to make diversity a central theme of the constitution that was drafted - it was avowedly secular and non-sectarian and allowed the Indian states to retain many powers - and the subsequent efforts of the nation's leaders were to commit to an 'idea of India' free of any religious or cultural definition. We are now entering the second stage of the process, when the partition, and all the doubts about viability of India, are distant memories. A new confidence has now replaced the insecurities and doubts that shaped the responses o...

I usually step aside debates with no end, and the question of existence of God is one such thing. However, this is one debate very difficult to run away from, particularly in today's world where God is making a comeback. In every debate he keeps springing up, everyday news and big debates of the day centre on him and he definitely has the full support of almost all governments in the world. So, if I am asked whether I believe in the existence of God, it is very difficult not to have an answer. The answer could be quite straightforward. Most people who know me will know that I am quite a 'practising' Hindu, reading up some of the ancient texts and sprinkling my conversations with references from what I learnt in my childhood. I am not the temple-going kind, neither do I pray much publicly; but then there is a temple I go to if I am feeling restless and downbeat. This inevitably makes me believe in the existence of God, surely. However, like everything else with me, I am afr...