Others, too, saw India's passionate denunciations of the Bamiyan destruction as tainted, if not undermined, by the fact that they issued from the lips of leaders who had condoned (and in some cases incited) a comparable act of cultural barbarism on their own soil. What have we come to that a land that has been a haven of tolerance for religious minorities throughout its history should have sunk so low in the eyes of the world? India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more important, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and, particularly in the south, to Muslims. Jews came to Kerala centuries before Christ, with the destruction by the Babylonians of their First Temple, and they knew no persecution on Indian soil until the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century to inflict it. In Kerala, where Islam came through traders, travelers, and missionaries rather than by the sword, the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of this community that he issued a decree obliging each fisherman's family to bring up one son as a Muslim to man his all-Muslim navy. The India where the singing of mantras routinely mixes with the cry of the muezzin, and where the chiming of church bells accompanies the gurudwara’s reading from the Guru Granth Sahib, is an India that is entitled to lament and to condemn what happened at Bamiyan. But that India must resist those Indians who pulled down the Babri Masjid.
The central battle in contemporary Indian civilization is between those who, to borrow from Whitman, acknowledge that we are vast, we contain multitudes, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define (in increasingly narrower terms) what is “truly” Indian. The central tenet of tolerance is that the tolerant society accepts that which it does not understand and even that which it does not like, so long as it is not sought to be imposed upon the unwilling. Those who persecute young boys and girls trying to celebrate Valentine's Day have no right to claim they are doing so in the name of a culture that has long been a byword for tolerance. I cringe that an Indian state has self-righteously banned the Miss India contest, even if I believe that such contests enshrine a very limited aspect of Indian womanhood. I am appalled that a government minister intimidates a French television channel into altering its fashion programming because its models’ attire is “contrary to Indian sensibilities,” as if the minister is entitled to define what those sensibilities are, and when the only ones affected are those who voluntarily tune in to that channel. All this is being done in the name of bharatiya sanskriti, a notion of Indian culture whose assertion is both narrow-minded and profoundly antihistorical.
For where, in the Hindutva zealots’ definition of bharatiya sanskriti, do the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho belong? Should their explicitly detailed couplings not be pulled down, as FTV's cable signals have been? What about the Kama Sutra, the tradition of the devadasis, the eros of the Krishna Leela — are they all un-Indian now? I wonder how many saw the irony at the recent Maha Kumbha Mela (the grand Hindu religious festival) of Naga sadhus parading their nakedness in front of women and children without anyone raising an eyebrow, while the police arrested a foreign tourist for similarly stripping and smearing herself with ash in an act she thought had been sanctified by millennial Indian tradition. When the late great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote his final ode to our civilization, In Light of India, he devoted an entire section to Sanskrit erotic poetry, basing himself, among other things, on the Buddhist monk Vidyakara's immortal eleventh-century compilation of 1,728 kavya, many of which are exquisitely profane. Are poets like Ladahachandra or Bha-vakadevi, who a thousand years ago wrote verse after verse describing and praising the female breast, to be expelled from the Swarajist canon of bharatiya sanskriti? Should we tell future Octavio Pazes seeking to appreciate the attainments of our culture that the Mahabhar-ata on Doordarshan is bharatiya sanskriti, but a classical portrayal of the erotic longings of the gopis for Krishna is not?
It may not seem to matter very much what some lumpen elements think of Valentine's Day. But if they are allowed to get away with their lawless acts of intolerance and intimidation, we are allowing them to do violence to something profoundly vital to our survival as a civilization. Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities. To allow the self-appointed arbiters of bharatiya sanskriti to impose their hypocrisy and double standards on the rest of us is to permit them to define Indianness down until it ceases to be Indian. And when that happens we will have completely lost our right, in the eyes of the world, to condemn any future Bamiyans.
The real argument in our country is between those who believe in an India where differences of caste, creed, conviction, class, color, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom shouldn't determine your Indianness, and those who define Indianness along one or more of these divisions. In other words, the really important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers — between those who think all Indians are “us,” whichever God they choose to worship, and those who think that Indians can be divided into “us” and “them.”
I too am proud of my Hinduism; I do not want to cede its verities to fanatics. To discriminate against another, to attack another, to kill another, to destroy another's place of worship on the basis of his faith is not part of Hindu dharma, as it was not part of the preacher and philosopher Vivekananda's. It is time to go back to these fundamentals of Hinduism. It is time to take Hinduism back from the fundamentalists.
5. On the Importance of Being Muslim and Indian
THE TEMPTATION TO SEE IN CRICKET LARGER METAPHORS for national issues has always proved difficult to resist.
One Sunday, while India was losing the 2003 World Cup final to Australia through a heartbreaking combination of ineptitude and ill luck, the New York Times treated its readers to an essay by a travel writer on his experience of being a “cricket heathen” in India. After mildly amusing descriptions of his discovery of the sport and the passions it stirred in the Indian soul, the author, Michael Y. Park, concluded with an anecdote: “Even when I tried to escape civilization deep into the Great Indian (Thar) Desert in the northwest, near the border with Pakistan, cricket dominated conversation. I was on a three-day camel trek, and my camel driver… played only camel polo and had never seen a professional cricket match because he'd never watched television. But… this man who had never been more than twenty miles from the fairy-tale fort of Jaisalmer and who had never heard of nuclear bombs or Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, rattled off statistics about the national team and details of the players’ private lives. He even worked in a few disparaging remarks about the Pakistani team. [He] noted my astonishment. ‘You have to understand,’ [he] said, spitting out a gob of betel nut and saddling up his camel. ‘Indians are crazy about this cricket.’”