Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could the country be ruled by a man who does not understand its national language; only in India, for that matter, is there a national language that half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema's finest “playback singers,” the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.
For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh may cherish the illusion that he represents the “majority community,” an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 81 percent of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, my home state of Kerala, he would be surprised to discover that the majority there is not even male.
Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majority-hood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, a “backward caste,” 85 percent of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.
If caste and language complicate the notion of Indian identity, ethnicity makes it even more difficult. Most of the time, an Indian's name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is: when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins. Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but they share little identity with each other in respect to their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language, or even, these days, their political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would feel he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat, with whom he formally shares the Hindu religion.
What makes India, then, a nation? What is an Indian's identity?
Let me risk the wrath of anti-Congress readers and take an Italian example. No, not that Italian example, but one from 140 years ago. Amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets, the nineteenth-century novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Oddly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought—“We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.”
Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, because he believed India and Indians had existed for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Kerala peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, our nationalist movement did.
Nations have been formed out of varying and different impulses. France and Thailand are the products of a once ruthless unifying monarchy, and Germany and the United States were created by sternly practical and yet visionary modernizing elites. Italy and Bangladesh are the results of mass movements led by messianic figures, Holland and Switzerland the creation of discrete cantons wishing to merge for their mutual protection. But it is only recently that race or ethnicity has again been seen as the basis of nationhood, as has become apparent in the prolonged breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
Most modern nations are the product of a fusion of population groups over the centuries, to the point where one element is indistinguishable from the next. The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan pointed out, for instance, that “an Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. However, [he] is neither the Briton of Julius Caesar's time, nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist's time, nor the Dane of Canute's time, nor the Norman of William the Conqueror's time; [he] is rather the result of all these.” We cannot yet say the same of an Indian, because we are not yet the product of the kind of fusion that Renan's Englishman represents.
So India cannot claim ethnicity as a uniting factor, since what we loosely have in common with each other as a generally recognizable “type” we also have in common with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Maldivians, and Nepalese, with whom we do not share a common political identity. (And further distinctions make matters worse — after all, Indian Bengalis and Punjabis have far more in common ethnically with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis than with Bangaloreans and Poonawallahs.) Nor can we cite religion. Looking again at foreign models of the nation-state, many scholars have pointed out that the adoption of Christianity by both conquerors and the conquered helped the creation of the Western European nations, since it eliminated the distinction between ethnic groups in the society on the basis of their religion. But this is not a useful answer in India, for a Tamil Hindu can share a faith with a Haryanvi Jat and still feel he has little else in common with him. And equally important, over 200 million Indians do not share the faith of the majority, and would be excluded from any religiously defined community (as non-Christian minorities among immigrants in Europe feel excluded today from full acceptance into their new societies).
A third element that has, historically, served to unite nations in other parts of the world is language. In Europe, conquerors and the conquered rapidly came to speak the same language, usually that of the conquered. In India, attempts by Muslim conquerors to import Persian or Turkic languages never took root and, instead, the hybrid camp language called Urdu or Hindustani evolved as the language of both rulers and the ruled in most of North India. But Hindi today has made very limited inroads into the south, east, and northeast, so linguistic unity remains a distant prospect (all the more so given that languages like Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil have a far richer cultural and literary tradition than the Hindi that seeks to supplant them).
No language enjoys majority status in India, though Hindi is coming perilously close. Thanks in part to the popularity of Mumbai's Bollywood cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it cannot truly be considered the language of the majority; its locutions, gender rules, and script are still unfamiliar to most Indians in the south and the northeast. And if the proliferation of Hindi TV channels has made the spoken language more accessible to many non-native speakers, the fact that other languages too have captured their share of the TV audience means that our linguistic diversity is not going to disappear.