The beginning of the journey of Imagining India......

India is a nation of stories, from these stories comes our nation's history. Our freedom struggle is another very interesting story. It was full of drama, excitement, trauma, loss, separation, extreme passion, devotion, determination, unity in diversity, unexpected achievements and a few unforgivable failures. Different writers have depicted the story of our freedom struggle in different ways, creating a different kind of picture in our minds every time. Different ideologies construct different images of the events in our minds.  At the center of every story there is an authority from which all meanings and forces emerge.

We Indians always look out for a hero and a villain in every story that we read. We want to believe that if there is a good person there has to be a bad person and good must triumph over the evil in the end. We look at varied people’s ideas and start accepting things in the way the writers want us to see, in the manner they have put it across. Sometimes the image that is created in our minds about a person through the writings is not completely true. For example, most of us believe that Jinnah was a villain, solely responsible for the partition of India. But have we ever thought about how Jinnah was as a person? What provoked him to take this huge decision of wanting a new land of Pakistan?

We always get an insight into the author’s mind regarding a particular subject. Not always do we get the real truth, the way things had actually happened.  So what exactly happened in the freedom struggle and the post- independence era, we don’t really know. Some writers chose to write the freedom struggle in the form of: Britisher’s came, ruled, flourished and went away. While a few others chose to present things pointillistically, picking bits and pieces of stories from here and there to create a complete picture. Very few chose to present the struggle that people were putting up against the Britishers though not on a very large scale, for example, the peasants rebellion in Kheda. Therefore, whatever we know about our Independence War is incomplete. There were a lot many factors which contributed to our freedom which we are not really aware of.

India is rich in culture and heritage, a unique blend of very diverse traditions living together under the same roof named India. But is this country what it seems to be? Is this one country or is it a combination of various small countries which we term as states? After independence we were presented with this very rosy picture of India being united. But was this really so? Was there truly unity in diversity as we are being told?

Nations do not have specific origins hence it is an idea. India has always been seen as an “Eternal” nation, the one which strongly sticks to its culture and heritage, refusing to budge, refusing to accept the changes happening around, refusing to evolve. But is it really so? Most of the youth that we see today are trying to emulate the Western culture, thinking their ways are forward and ours are not. It is all a question of perception. We see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe.  So when we want to believe that everything is hunky-dory, we will.

When we want to believe that everyone in the country was happy after independence we will, not ready to face the truth lying in front of us. But the truth is that after independence, we were fighting a war amongst ourselves, a fight of knowing what position our religion, our caste and most importantly we have in the newly formed country now. The Dalits were insecure about their position thanks to their experience of the past. Many of them felt that the Britishers rule was better for them. Many Muslims refused to join Pakistan , they were scared about what their plight would be in India now. Hindus were insecure thinking whether the nation entirely belonged to them or no. Basically post-independence a national identity was forced upon people, a sense of Indianness thrust upon. Whether they truly accepted this or not was a question which remains unanswered.

To speak the truth, a single India is an artificial construction. There are two layers in each Indian’s heart, one, the “Pan-Indian” view and the other which part of the country they actually hail from. Both these layers take turns in overshadowing each other as per the situation in front of the people. India is very unique in the sense that the people here have this constant war of assimilation and resilience- we belong, but we don’t belong. For example, a thought that goes on in a person's mind could be I am an Indian but I belong to Maharashtra.

Also, India is a very unnatural nation. Usually nations are formed under the subject of many commonalities. For example the idea of Europe came from common language, religion, territory.  But India has none of these factors in common. India is not a nation, it is a nation state. Here each state in itself is a small nation, having its own governance but sheltered under the blanket of a bigger nation India. Each nation-state has its own unique characteristics, its own language, its own culture, its own tradition yet it “belongs” to a bigger nation of India.
Although Hindi is considered to be the national language of India, it is not so. This decision was simply imposed upon the people back then. Even now a large chunk of the population is not well- versed with the language. Ironically after declaring Hindi as the national language, the very first post- Independence speech given by our honourable first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was in English! Wonder how many people must have understood what he was trying to say through his speech.

Even though we live under the illusion that “India is One” , there is “Unity in Diversity” , everyday we hear of incidents which break this myth. We have created categories in our minds, form biased opinions about communities. Caste is a concept which is still largely prevalent here much to the astonishment of foreigners. We are proud of our culture but somewhere it is turning out to be a bondage, which is preventing us from evolving and throwing away certain concepts which are not relevant today.

We speak of equality among men and women, but even today if you go to your parents and say you want to get married to a lower caste girl, the very first question that will pop in front of you is,”What will the society say?” When men themselves do not get entire freedom, women cannot even dream of being free. Even today when we see a person from the East we assume that he must be from China or Nepal. Isn’t this a form of discrimination? We fail to understand that this society, religions all are our creations and we must learn to transform them as and when the need arises. Inspite of all this we can say that the “concept of India” is a very successful democratic idea – a new nation having an ancient civilization.