Throughout my growing years, I remained extremely patriotic, although that has always been without any specific reason. I had never doubted why I should ever be patriotic. And now, though I do not believe one needs a reason to be patriotic about one’s own country, I am glad I have made a small attempt to know more about my country and its peoples. I have come to a conclusion that no matter what, if we do not love our country, history will repeat itself and take us back to the pre-1947 eon. By pre-1947 I mean, the whole of Indian history! The revelation, though, has not been without tumultuous emotions. At one point, I even doubted why I should ever be loyal to my motherland.
The last one year, and particularly the last three months period, has been very enriching for me. At least for this reason, I am happy I left my job and came back to academics. After I had joined my MBA here, I started working part time at the university call center, just to pay my bills. The work is just to sit in front of a computer with head phones on, and talk to our alumni. Since it is an automatic system, I do not have to dial manually; the computer does it for me. My work is only to talk when somebody picks up the phone. Every shift is for four hours.
For most of the time at the call center, I used to read some course related material when not talking. But during the second semester, I started reading a lot of articles on Wikipedia. I do not remember how it all started, but I started reading a lot of articles on various topics, and most importantly on the history of India and Hinduism. One particular thing about the history of India really struck me. The purported distinction between the Aryan and the Dravidian “races” really enthused me. I knew I am from a typical South Indian descent and to my knowledge none in my lineage is a non-Telugu. Though I hadn’t acquired much knowledge about the races, my mind started working much faster, and I started visualizing the differences between “Aryans” and “Dravidians”; how civilizations thrived only in the Indus valley and the Gangetic plain in ancient India, how only a few times have the Dravidians (Andhrakas tribe and et al) been mentioned in the Mahabharata epic, how even the Maurya’s who supposedly held ‘almost’ the whole of the Indian subcontinent together did not come all the way down south, and how the south has almost always remained distinct from the north – linguistically, culturally and politically. As I started reading about the Aryan Invasion theory[1], which still is popular, I could not help but imagine how the “Dravidians” must have been over powered by the more aggressive “Aryans” and how the Aryan “culture” has been imposed upon the “Dravidians”.[2] I even started wondering if the culture that I now follow is that of the “Aryans”, and if so, what about that of my own Dravidians? There have been a plethora of questions in my mind since then.
As I have already mentioned in my previous article, Mahabharata[3], the word “Hindu” did not exist until the arrival of the Persians, and “Hinduism” never existed until the arrival of the British. Probably until the British arrived in India, none in the Indian subcontinent ever gave a damn about who Aryans were and who Dravidians were. I wonder if the words themselves ever existed. Of course, I know it was in the 18th or 19th century researches that the Europeans discovered they belonged to the ‘superior’ Aryan race, and those Aryans only must have migrated to the Indian subcontinent to finally overpower the indigenous dasas or asuras (the Dravidians). In fact, the researchers also discovered that dasas or asuras only meant the Dravidians, and later these words came to mean ‘demons’ (Narakasura, Ravanasura, Mahishasura), because they were not as civilized as the Aryans were. The Britishers also apparently labeled a few communities as being ‘martial races’ owing to their loyalty to the British during the 1857 revolt. The British had since recruited more from those ‘martial races’ into the British army to quell any rebellions within the Indian subcontinent.[4] This, they did based purely on perception (or through deceit) since they never had any well developed genetic or archaeogenetic sciences back then. Their division of Indian peoples into various races worked well to their concept of ‘divide and rule’. And there has ever since been an uneasy divide between the “Aryans” and the “Dravidians”, both groups scorning at each other, giving birth to our own share of ‘racism’.
Their theories, of course, seemed so true that everybody believed them, and I too scorned at the aggressive and outgoing attitudes of the Aryans. At one point in time, I sympathized with the Tamil/Dravidian movement of the late 1960s as well. I thought the Aryans should not have imposed their free will on us, Dravidians. I also hated our obsession about gori chamdi, just because Dravidians are not naturally gora. This lead me to wonder, who does India actually belong to? The indigenous Dravidians, or the invading Aryans? Why should I ever show allegiance to a country that has been united by the British only two thousand years after Chandragupta Maurya had last done it? My patriotism slowly crumbled, thanks to my newly acquired “knowledge” and to a few fringe groups that have proclaimed their language or race superiority all the time (and also to a pathetically directed movie called ‘Gulaal’). I also thought about every Indian (including me) joking about ‘Gujjus’, ‘Bongs’, ‘Madrasis’, ‘Sardars’, ‘Gultis’, ‘Chinkis’ and what not. Do not even try to tell me those were jokes made in good humor. I do not know how many such pure souls are out there, but I am sure every such joke adds to the scorn-factor against the subjects. I even thought maybe it is better the country is torn down into 28 different countries, and Pakistan and China are anyway ever willing to help us on that front.
In this mayhem, I started reading about the latest revelations in the research on racial groups of India based on latest genetic and archaeogenetic discoveries[5]. These researches apparently show that almost all the linguistic and ‘racial’ groups in the Indian subcontinent seemed to belong to the same genetic pool, barring a few groups such as Balochis, Pakhtuns/Pathans, Sindhis, etc., most of whom now live in Pakistan. The recent discoveries have apparently cast a serious doubt to the claim that Dravidians and non-Dravidians are any different racially. While that gave a respite to my already struggling conscience, I started to think more deeply into the ‘Indian’ way of living. Whereas people from different states look different on the outside, and whereas people from specific states are known to be capable of doing a few specific things, we are innately very much ‘Indian’. By that I mean, our familial systems, our traditions, our mind set (read our greed specifically), our callousness (or lack thereof), our peevishness, and our passion (or fashion) for cricket and movies, bring us all together. Who cares if we became homogenous only after millennia of inter mingling and sharing? Who cares if better technologies come up to prove the Britishers’ theories right? We have still (violently) coexisted for at least two thousand years. We still fight with each other, scorn at each other and help ‘our own’ people (read linguistic-nepotism). So what if not many of the ‘Madraasi’ kids could aspire to become the prime minister of India, since the prerequisite is to know Hindi? Come on, we are still INDIAN, aren’t we?
If you think, my article is disturbing, if you think we all ought to be as one nation, YOU give me one good reason for us all to be together. YOU give me one good reason to settle our differences. After all, almost all of our languages and literatures have existed for over two thousand years.
I will tell you why we should be together in our differences and first love our country before anything else. For a thousand years and an equal number of times, it has been proved that foreign invaders took advantage of our diversity and plundered us ruthlessly. We have forsaken our cultural similarities that we have accumulated over a longer period of time, only to become more diverse and get introduced to newer and murkier theories and ideologies. Isn’t it greed that made us welcome western traders, befriend them, and use them against our own people? I believe that is all what got us into a mess for over two thousand years. And then the nascent Pakistan had also started dreaming about ‘re’capturing India post partition. It seems the war cry of the Pakistanis during the partition was ‘hak se liye Pakistan, cheen ke lenge Hindustan’, because they thought India rightfully belonged to them as they were the remnants of the Persian rulers of India. I just can not imagine how such small armies starting with the Persians, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danish, the French and the British conquered the whole of the Indian subcontinent! I guess that was diversity in unity! And the most important point is, we lost everything fighting with each other during this time, let alone achieving anything. Post colonial era has seen an entirely different world, but it is not that hard to imagine that being together has been and will be beneficial to us as a nation.
Now if that’s not good enough a reason, YOU give me a good reason why we should not fight, and why I should not fight for a separate country for Kothagudem. YOU tell me!
Opponents of Aryan Invasion Theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Aryans
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_people
[3] http://illindala2.blogspot.com/2009/06/mahabharata.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_groups_of_India
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_and_archaeogenetics_of_South_Asia
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