Nidhi Razdan’s ‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’ celebrates the diverse cultural and political terrains that India comprises of. The book is a collection of essays from distinguished voices from various walks of life, upholding aspects of the nation lesser explored, and even lesser heard of.
In Derek O’Brien’s essay, ‘Addressing Nellie’, the politician and television personality revisits the memories of his grandmother and his ancestors who had been through the horrors of the Partition. As a part of the Anglo-Indian community, O’Brien brings forth the voices of those who have rarely been spoken about in the popular discourse of the subcontinent’s traumatic history.
Here’s an excerpt from his essay.
Each year, on 15 August, I find myself thinking of my great grandmother—my father’s paternal grandmother. Nellie Bella Biswas, as she was named when born to a Bengali-Christian family with homes in Jalpaiguri in north Bengal and Maniktala in north Kolkata, formed part of my earliest memories. She died in 1969, when I was just a schoolboy. Even by then she had come to represent an influential figure for me—the familiar matriarch, caring but firm, who taught the three of us, my brothers and me, to speak Bengali.
To my young mind, Nellie Bella Biswas—or Nellie Bella O’Brien as she became on marrying the descendant of an Irish settler in India—symbolized history. She was a walking, talking monument of history. To my innocent eyes, she seemed to stand for Mother India: a venerable and iconic figure who shed a silent tear in August 1947 as one country became two nations, and a composite society was split forever.
Nellie cried in August 1947, she cried every day from 1947 to 1969. She cried for the line in the sand that Partition drew. She cried for Patrick, her firstborn, her beloved son, who stayed on in Lahore . . .
For obvious reasons, the narrative of Partition has been written in terms of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. Christians have had only a small role in this drama. Anglo Indians—the community I belong to and which makes up a minuscule section of India’s Christians—have not even had a walk-on part.
Yet Partition had a dramatic impact on my extended family. My paternal grandfather, Amos, was one of the three brothers. The eldest of them, Patrick, was a civil servant who worked in Lahore and Peshawar, and served as a private secretary to Sir Olaf Caroe and later Sir George Cunningham, governors of the North-West Frontier Province in the tumultuous days leading up to August 1947. Much of the rest of the family, including my father and grandfather, were in Kolkata (or Calcutta, as it was then called).
One day, without quite realizing the implications, these members of the O’Brien family became citizens of separate countries. Patrick, the brother who had stayed on in Pakistan, had a large family. Two of his daughters were married to fighter pilots of what was at the time the Royal Indian Air Force. In 1947, they were either alotted or chose different nations.
Within months India and Pakistan were at war. It was a conflict that tore apart my father’s cousins, daughters of Patrick. One of them was with her father in Pakistan. Her husband was a fighter pilot in the Pakistan Air Force, her sister’s husband a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force.
Night after night she stayed up, wondering if her husband would come home or if her brother-in-law in India was safe, or if these two men so dear to her, comrades and friends in the same air force till only a few weeks earlier, would aim for each other in the eerie anonymity of the skies. Her sister in India went through the same trauma. Patrick comforted his daughter. In another country, Nellie comforted her granddaughter.
Thankfully, neither man died in that war, but a distance emerged. Father and daughter, sister and sister, cousin and cousin, my Indian grandfather and his Pakistani brother—they lost touch with each other.
Tag: nidhi razdan
Through the Past into the Future, An Excerpt from Yashwant Sinha’s Essay in ‘Left, Right, and Centre’
India’s magnificent plurality can not be contained in a homogenous sentence that favours only one side of the scale. Taking up this monumental challenge is Nidhi Razdan’s ‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’ that celebrates every aspect of the country, since its Independence 70 years ago.
In his essay ‘Through the Past into the Future’, Former Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha, talks about the way forward despite all the major roadblocks a country of teeming billions faces every day. In spite of the many governments India has seen since its Independence, and in spite of all that it has achieved, Sinha highlights the pressing concerns that still keep the nation from being the superpower it deserves to be.
Here’s an excerpt from his essay.
It is debatable whether India has achieved all it should have in the seventy years since independence. On the one hand, we have sent the Mangalyaan to explore the planet Mars. Our space agency is capable of launching more than a 100 satellites together. We lead the rest of the world in information technology. Yet, there are hundreds if not thousands of villages which lack the basic amenities of life like an all-weather road, potable drinking water, proper sanitation and health facilities or proper schools. Unemployment continues to be a major problem.
Every government claims to have done its best to solve these problems yet they refuse to go away. Governments are always short on resources; the tax base does not expand despite inspector raj. Only the poor and the innocent are caught and the rich and famous get away. Millions of cases are pending in courts, the jails are full of undertrial prisoners, many of them having spent the maximum jail term which their crime may have merited. There are many ills from which we suffer today. We have miles to go before we rest. But what is the goal that we must set for ourselves for the remaining decades of this century and what are the means by which we can achieve it?
India must strive to reach the top of the league of nations— the top two or three in the world. That is our destiny and we must fulfil it. To arrive there, we must eradicate the bane of poverty, misery and deprivation in our society at the soonest. It is not difficult to achieve this goal.
Our two-pronged strategy should consist of high and sustained economic growth of around 8 per cent per annum for the next twenty years or so and a direct attack on poverty and deprivation. In an uncertain global scenario where globalization is on the retreat and economic nationalism is coming to the fore, we must depend on our own demand, our own resources and our own people to achieve the desired growth rate.
We have massive unmet demand in our economy. Our country is crying out for modern infrastructure. We must build lakhs of kilometres of roads of all kinds, national highways, state highways and rural roads, to connect our country and its people. We need irrigation works especially of the medium and the minor kind to irrigate our still-parched fields. We need all kinds of power, renewable and thermal, to light up our homes, irrigate our fields and run our factories. We need new towns and cities to provide for the population migrating from the rural areas into modern urban centres and to relieve the pressure on farmland and the villages, as well as the existing overcrowded and choking cities. Then, there is the issue of connectivity of these places with modern means of communication like railways and air services, telecom and fast Internet services.
Many more universities are needed and also other centres of excellence. Similarly new research facilities in science and technology are required to meet our growing needs. There is so much to do that the list can go on endlessly. All these activities will contribute to economic growth and generate employment. There will be no dearth of resources. People will always be ready to pay for the services they receive provided they are of quality and are uninterrupted. Resistance comes only when the services supplied are of poor quality and their regular supply is disrupted.
Our Constitution has given primacy to the individual not to the village. I do not know whether that is the reason for the neglect of the village. In the process the individual has also suffered. Is it possible, for a change, to accord primacy to the villages in our country and for the political class to take a vow that the improvement in the quality of the people living in them shall be the first charge on the nation’s resources?
A survey should be conducted in all the villages to find out what is lacking there in terms of basic amenities. We should then prepare time-bound plans to provide them with what they need in a pointed, directed manner much in the way in which the doctors treat cancer patients with radiation. In this way, we shall achieve our goal of improving the life of our fellow citizens within the same resources. Liberation of Indian villages from their wants must be our new battle cry.
Underlying all these activities on the nation building front is the need for political and governance reforms. I have already stated above how politics in this country reached its nadir with criminalization and the use of money power in the elections. Some improvement has taken place but a lot remains to be done. A beginning must be made with the democratization of political parties. Internal democracy within most political parties is becoming increasingly rare. Stricter laws, to be enforced by the Election Commission with the threat of de-recognition, are needed to force political parties to abide by these laws and rules.
The Idea of an Ever-ever Land, An Excerpt from Shashi Tharoor’s Essay in ‘Left, Right, and Centre’
Senior journalist Nidhi Razdan’s ,‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’ captures the country in its essence as a melting pot of cultures and histories
Former bureaucrat and current Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor, in his essay ‘The Idea of an Ever-ever Land’ talks about how any truism can never hold good for a country as plural as India.
Here’s an excerpt from Tharoor’s essay.
Just thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the challenge of defining what the idea of India means. How does one approach this land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with twenty-three major languages and 22,000 distinct ‘dialects’ (including some spoken by more people than Danish or Norwegian), inhabited in the second decade of the twenty-first century by over a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is nearly 30 per cent illiterate but which has educated the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while two out of three Indians scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal emperor to declaim, ‘if on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this . . .’? How does one gauge a culture which elevated non-violence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials once attempted to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken as a threat to the nation, where a former prime minister once bitterly criticized the sale of Pepsi-Cola ‘in a country where villagers don’t have clean drinking water’, and which yet invents more sophisticated software for the planet’s computer manufacturers than any other country in the world? How can one determine the future of an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five major political parties and 300 ways of cooking potato?
The short answer is that it can’t be done, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. It is often jokingly said that ‘anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true’. The country’s national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is ‘Satyameva Jayate’: Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however, whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers, if the last census hasn’t undercounted us again.
But that sort of an answer is no answer at all, and so another answer to those questions has to be sought. And this may lie in a simple insight: the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. Everything exists in countless variants. There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no ‘one way’. This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. At a time when most developing countries opted for authoritarian models of government to promote nation building and to direct development, India chose to be a multiparty democracy. And despite many stresses and strains, including twenty-two months of autocratic rule during the 1975 Emergency, a multiparty democracy—freewheeling, rumbustious, corrupt and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing—India has remained.
One result is that India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, inefficient and seemingly ‘unpurposeful’ as it muddles its way through the second decade of the twenty-first century. Another, though, is that India is not just a country, it is an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible. ‘India,’ wrote the British historian E.P. Thompson, ‘is perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society . . . There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.’
Just as well a Brit said that, and not an Indian! That Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces: ancient Hindu tradition, myth and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique. Many observers have been astonished by India’s survival as a pluralist state. But India could hardly have survived as anything else. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history.
Pluralism and inclusiveness have long marked the idea of India. India’s is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians and, of course, Muslims. Jews came to Kerala centuries before Christ, with the destruction of their First Temple by the Babylonians, and they knew no persecution on Indian soil until the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century to inflict it. Christianity arrived on Indian soil with St Thomas the Apostle (Doubting Thomas), who came to the Kerala coast some time before 52 ce and was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. He made many converts, so there are Indians today whose ancestors were Christian well before any Europeans discovered Christianity. In Kerala, where Islam came through traders, travellers 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! This is India, a land whose heritage of diversity means that in the Kolkata neighbourhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer routinely blends with the chant of mantras and the tinkling of bells at the local Shiva temple, accompanied by the Sikh gurdwara’s reading of verses from the Guru Granth Sahib, with St Paul’s cathedral just round the corner.
‘A Bewildering Mosaic of Communities’: ‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’ — An Excerpt
Diverse discourses born from diverse cultures, histories and geographies of India come together in senior journalist, Nidhi Razdan’s book ‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’.
Author and Indian academic, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, discusses the inherent dichotomy in the celebration of this ‘diversity’ in India in his essay ‘India: From Identity to Freedom’.
Here’s an excerpt from Mehta’s essay.
India is a diverse country, a bewildering mosaic of communities of all kinds; its peculiar genius is to fashion a form of coexistence where this diversity can flourish and find its place. It has created cultures of political negotiation that have shown a remarkable ability to incorporate diversity.
This description of India is often exhilarating; and it is our dominant mode of self-presentation. But it’s very attractiveness hides its deep problems. The problem lies with the normative valorization of diversity itself. Diversity is something to be celebrated and cherished for often it is an indication of other values like freedom and creativity. But diversity has become a source of several intellectual confusions. Very schematically these are: Diversity is not itself a freestanding moral value. It makes very little sense to discuss diversity as carrying independent moral weight, even though under some circumstances, loss of diversity can be an indication of other underlying injustices. The invocation of diversity immediately invites the question: Diversity of what? This question cannot be answered without invoking some normative criteria about the permissible range of social practices. The limits to diversity cannot themselves be settled by an invocation of diversity.
The appeal to diversity is usually an aestheticized appeal. It is as if one were surveying the world from nowhere and contemplating this extraordinary mosaic of human cultural forms and practices. Such a contemplation of the world can give enormous enrichment and satisfaction and we feel that something would be lost; perhaps something of humanity would be diminished if this diversity were lost. But the trouble is that this view from nowhere, or if you prefer an alternative formulation, the ‘God’s Eye’ view of the world is a standpoint of theoretical, not practical, reason.
Most of us can conceptually grasp the fact of diversity; we may even try to recognize each other in an intense and important way, but it is very difficult to live that diversity with any degree of seriousness. From this theoretical point of view, cultures and practices form this extraordinary mosaic; from the practical point of view of those living within any of these cultures, these cultures and practices are horizons within which they operate. Even when not oppressive, these horizons might appear to them as constraints. It would be morally obtuse to say to these individuals that they should go on living their cultures, just because they’re not doing so might diminish the forms of diversity in the world. The imperatives of diversity cannot, at least prima facie, trump the free choices of individuals.
There is often a real tension between the demands of integration into wider society—the imperatives of forming thicker relationships with those outside the ambit of your own society on the one hand, and the measures necessary to preserve a vibrant cultural diversity on the other. What the exact trade-off is depends from case to case. But simply invoking diversity by itself will not help morally illuminate the nature of the decision to be made when faced with such a trade-off.
From this perspective, talk of identity and diversity is profoundly misleading because it places value on the diversity of cultures, not the freedoms of individuals within them. If the range of freedom expands, all kinds of diversity will flourish anyway. But this will not necessarily be the diversity of well defined cultures. It will be something that both draws upon culture and subverts it at the same time.
Diversity Talk is compatible with only one specific conception of toleration: segmented and hierarchical toleration. To be fair, India has been remarkably successful at providing a home for all kinds of groups and cultures. But each group could find a place because each group had its fixed place. To put it very schematically, it was a form of toleration compatible with walls between communities. Indeed, one of the major challenges for Indian society is that we have internalized forms of toleration that are suited to segmented societies. It is compatible with the idea that boundaries should not be crossed, populations should not mix, and that to view the world as a competition between groups is fine.
There is no country in the world that talks so much of diversity. Yet no other country produces such a suffocating discourse of identity; where who you are seems to matter at every turn: what job you can get, what government scheme you are eligible for, how much institutional autonomy you can get, what house you can rent. Conceptually, there is no incompatibility between celebrating diversity of the nation and refusing to rent housing to a Muslim just because they are Muslim. Such a conception of toleration does not work where the need is for boundaries to be crossed: people will inhabit the same spaces, compete for the same jobs, intermarry and so forth. Our moral discourse is so centred on diversity and pluralism that it forgets the more basic ideas of freedom and dignity.
Explore diverse opinions from some of the best minds in India with ‘Left, Right and Centre: The Idea of India’.
