By Justice Markandey Katju-
(Justice Markandey Katju is a former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman of Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.)
We are all Indians, but do we know what is India? I am presenting five points for consideration.
(i) India is broadly a country of immigrants, like North America. About 93-94% people living in India are not the original inhabitants of India. Their ancestors came from outside, mainly from the North West.
(ii) Because India is a country of immigrants like North America, there is tremendous diversity in India — so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, customs, etc.
(iii) Despite the tremendous diversity in India, by the interaction and intermingling of these immigrants who came into India, a common culture emerged in India which can broadly be called the Sanskrit-Urdu culture.
(iv) Because of the tremendous diversity in India the only policy which can work and hold our country together and take us forward is secularism and giving equal respect to all communities, otherwise our country cannot survive for long but will be balkanized.
(v) India is passing through a transitional period, from feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society. This is a very painful and agonizing period in history. If we read the history of Europe from the 16th to 19th Centuries we find that this was a terrible period in Europe, in which there were wars, revolutions, turmoil, intellectual ferment, chaos, social churning, etc. It was only after going through this fire that modern society emerged in Europe.
India is presently going through that fire. We are going through a very painful and agonizing period in our history, which I think will last for around another 20 years or so.
I may now briefly elaborate these theses.
(1) India is broadly a country of immigrants, like North America.
The difference between North America and India is that whereas North America is a country of new immigrants, where people came mainly from Europe over the last five hundred years or so, India is a country of old immigrants where people have been coming in for 10 thousand years or more.
Why have people been coming to India? Very few people left India, except on three occasions namely (i) in the 19th century when under British rule Indian poor peasants from eastern UP and Bihar were sent to Fiji, Mauritius, West Indies, British Guina etc. as indentured plantation labourers (ii) Indians from the coastal states like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu went to Africa, Srilanka, etc for business opportunities, and (iii) the diaspora in the last 30-40 years or so of highly qualified engineers, scientists, doctors, etc who migrated to Western countries. Apart from this, nobody left India, everybody came into India. Why?
The reason is obvious. People migrate from uncomfortable areas to comfortable areas, because everybody wants comfort. Before the Industrial Revolution, which started in Western Europe from the 18th century and then spread all over the world there were agricultural societies everywhere. Agriculture requires level land, fertile soil, plenty of water for irrigation, etc. All this was in abundance in the Indian subcontinent, from Rawalpindi to Bangladesh and to the deep South upto Kanyakumari.
Why will anybody migrate from India to, say, Afghanistan or Russia, which is cold, rocky and uncomfortable, covered with snow for four to five months in a year. For agriculture, India was really paradise, hence everybody kept rolling into India, mainly from the North West and to a much lesser extent from the North East.
Who were the original inhabitants of India? At one time it was believed that the Dravidians were the original inhabitants, but now that theory has been disproved. Now, it is believed that even the Dravidians, like the Aryans, came from outside. There are several proofs of that, one of which is that there is a Dravidian language called Brahui which is spoken in Western Pakistan even today by about two million people, which proves that at one time Dravidians lived in this region.
The original inhabitants of India, as it is believed now, were the pre-Dravidians tribals, who are called adivasis or Scheduled Tribes in India e.g. the Bhils, Santhals, Gonds, Todas, etc., that is, the speakers of the Austric, pre-Dravidian languages e.g. Munda, Gondvi, etc. They are hardly seven or eight percent of the Indian population today. They were slaughtered in large numbers by the invading Dravidians and Aryans (just like the native Americans, known as the Red Indians, were slaughtered in large numbers in America by the migrating Europeans), and pushed into the forests by the invaders and immigrants, and treated very badly. Except for these pre-Dravidian tribals, all of us are descendents of immigrants, who came mainly from the North West of India.
(2) Because India is a country of immigrants there is tremendous diversity in India, so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, customs, etc. Somebody is tall, somebody is short, somebody is fair, somebody is dark, somebody is brown, with all kinds of shades in between, someone has got Mongoloid features, someone has got Caucasian features, someone has got Negroid features, there are differences in customs, food habits, dress, traditional festivals, etc.
We may compare India with China. Our population is a little over 1,400 million, which is about the same as that of China, which has about 2.5 times our land area. However, there is broad (though not absolute) homogeneity in China. All Chinese have Mongoloid faces, they have one common written script called Mandarin Chinese (although spoken dialects are different), and 95% Chinese belong to one ethnic group called the Han.
So, there is broad homogeneity in China. In India, on the other hand, there is tremendous diversity, because whichever group of immigrants came into India brought into their own culture, religion, language, customs, etc.
(3) Is India a nation at all, or is it just a group of hundreds of kinds of immigrants? Is there anything common in India? The answer is that the immigrants who came into India over the last 10 thousand years or so, by their interaction and intermingling, created a common culture which can broadly be called the Sanskrit-Urdu culture which is broadly the culture of India.
Now this has to be explained. How are Tamilians part of Sanskrit-Urdu culture, what have the people of Nagaland got to do with Sanskrit and Urdu, etc.
The answer is that we must first understand what is Sanskrit and what is Urdu? The reader may see in this connection my articles.
(4) Since there is so much diversity in India, the only policy which can keep the country together and take us on the path of progress is the policy of ‘suleh-e-kul’ or giving equal respect to all religions and communities, propounded by the great Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) who is the real Father of the Indian Nation.
(5) India is presently passing through a very painful transitional period of our history from semi-feudal to industrial society, which may take 20 years or more, and about which I have written these articles.
(Photo courtesy: Unsplash)
