That ‘glittering aspiration’ called India

Compiled in the thought-provoking This Too Is India, edited by Githa Hariharan, are ‘conversations on diversity and dissent’, including some that engage poignantly with the embattled ‘idea of India’, what makes the idea worth nurturing and how we may put it back at the centre of our public life.

***

In 2017, Nayantara Sahgal published a dystopian satire, When the Moon Shines by Day. Like much of her work, this is a sharp, almost brutal political take on contemporary India.

[…]

Soon after this book was published, Nayantara spoke to me about the making of India — her own experience of the Indian freedom struggle, and the two different ideas of India espoused by Gandhi and the Hindu Mahasabha. Moving to the present, she spoke of how the nation is being unmade — transformed in the name of Hindutva — through violence, exclusion, the suppression of dissent and the growth of an ideology that parades as religion and distorts Hinduism.

18 September 2017

Githa Hariharan (GH): Let’s begin by recalling the idea of India you were witness to in your own family — your parents, and in particular, your uncle Nehru and then Gandhi. You describe this idea as the ‘glittering aspiration called India’ […]

Nayantara Sahgal (NS): What I meant by the ‘glittering aspiration’ was the struggle for freedom led by Mahatma Gandhi, a struggle in which my parents were involved. In fact, my father died of his fourth imprisonment under British rule. It was an amazing period in Indian history—Gandhi brought together people in a way that cut across all the divisions, be it religion, region, class, caste or gender. That is how he created what became the foundation of independent India. Bringing together this rich diversity into a strong political unity that overthrew the British Empire was an extraordinary achievement.

GH: You describe the solidarity then as a rugged idealism. Since we also want to talk about what sort of solidarity we need today, shall we recall how solidarity, a sense of inclusiveness, happened at that time?

NS: There was the star of freedom, and all these people were invited to join the march towards this star. It was a long march of twenty-five or twenty-six years in which people of all classes joined. I have to emphasise that it was the first classless venture that took place in any country. This unique achievement took place because through Gandhi, people like us, who had perhaps never had any communication with rural India, became involved, and people began organising things together. My father and mother spent most of their time in rural areas and my uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, much like Mahatma Gandhi, travelled the length and breadth of India, speaking to village audiences. It was the first time that an English-speaking class joined hands with those speaking regional languages. The confluence was evident in the slogans that were raised during that time — ‘Hindu–Muslim Ek Ho!’ Or ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai!’ Nehru always sought the definition of ‘Bharat Mata’ from the common people instead of defining it himself. Another slogan was ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ Such slogans were radical and emotional at the same time and they united the young and old.

GH: Could you talk about the vision that held all the freedom fighters together, across the board?

NS: It was the call to freedom that was the unifying factor. And Gandhiji had shown that this could be done non-violently. If it had not been a non-violent struggle, it would not have been a popular struggle, in which thousands of people, especially women, participated.

Gandhiji invited women to participate in the freedom struggle and in 1932, about 30,000 women who were part of the struggle were in jail. Women across classes and religions participated in the movement. One of Gandhi’s leading followers, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, was Christian. Many of his comrades in the struggle were Muslim, for example, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad or Badruddin Tyabji. Some were Parsi. India’s freedom struggle was the very epitome of secularism in that it brought people from different classes, different religions, speaking different languages, together.

[…]

Gandhi’s prayer meetings had Muslim, Christian and Hindu prayers. One can hardly forget his famous prayer ‘Ishwar Allah Tero Naam’, which preached the unification of all religions to reach one transcendental God. As a child, I also remember seeing a frail and skinny Gandhiji whose voice didn’t carry very far. But this voice shook an empire. Compare this with the way elections are fought today — in the last election [in 2014], our present prime minister [Narendra Modi] made sure there were life-size images of himself everywhere.

GH: [When I began reading your novel, I thought When the Moon Shines by Day] was going to be a dystopia set in the future. But soon I realised the story was unfolding in the present. The ‘Directorate of Cultural Transformation’ in the novel was especially resonant, living in the times we do. What has happened to the ‘glittering aspiration’ that was India, not just in your novel, but also in today’s reality?

NS: We must realise, that from a country that believed in an inclusive idea of India, we are being reduced to a monoculture which is called Hindu. But what is projected as Hinduism today is a travesty of Hinduism.

Hindutva is a distortion of Hinduism for a true Hindu — not a Hindu just by accident of birth, but a believer like me. My religion matters to me. In the name of Hindutva, Hinduism is being changed, distorted.

[…]

GH: At a time when writers, filmmakers, artists—the cultural community in general—are at risk, it’s important to revisit what you’ve written in the book, as well as what you have done in your own life. Let me take up one specific intervention in recent times. You returned your Sahitya Akademi award in 2015 in protest against the ‘unmaking of India’. Your act implied that art has to be political, that it has to take a stand in public space.

NS: We are all political because we live in a political environment. Just as the human race grows in a natural environment, so we have different kinds of political environments. Growing up, we are shaped and affected by these environments. But writers, especially, have not been able to avoid the political. Writers like Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller and several Latin American writers have written politically, and their works have lasted because they were political. Their work reflects a universal theme within a specific context; they wrote about the human cost of living in a political environment.

[…]

GH: I want to ask you to speak to our young people about the way forward. What should we do, not just as writers, or lawyers, or parliamentarians, but as citizens? Where do you see cause for hope?

NS: We now see protests by different groups of Indian citizens. Women, Dalits, scientists, historians, filmmakers and movie stars—all kinds of people are reacting to this situation. We now have civil servants who are taking part in something called the ‘Karwaan-e-Mohabbat’ from the North-East to Gandhiji’s ashram in Gujarat, making common cause with people who have suffered horribly in the past and the present. These are signs of hope—signs of giving courage to people who have suffered. The class we call writers is an obstinate bunch of people. We will keep raising our voices… [We] are not going to keep quiet and give up.

The above conversation is extracted from:

Title This Too Is India

Author Githa Hariharan

Publisher Context (Westland)

Pages 366

Price Rs 599 (paperback)