By Ananya Guha
We are a nation of symbols. Symbolism works in every aspect of our nation. But the symbolism is external; internally there are contradictions. What do I mean, you may ask? Well, on the face of it there are secessionist proclivities in many parts of the country. But you probe within there is impassioned talk of being Indian, fighting for the cause of a nation, national identity and being Indian. That is fine. But the outward and the inward manifestations contradict. They contradict in such a manner that the problem becomes overtly political and stereotypically social. Take the example of Azadi in Kashmir. It means, as everyone knows freedom. But does that mean independence? Does that mean merger with another nation? Those who uphold such convictions must also understand that a particular state has perhaps felt manacled over years. And the political situation of it since independence countenances a social and political turmoil. So, perhaps it is freedom from that unrest, freedom from always seeing men in uniforms, freedom from having been told that its people are lackeys of another country, an out an out enemy of ours?
Azadi in the country itself has now become a symbol. Not only in Kashmir. But it is the kind of freedom the people need from poverty, shackles of bonded labour, deprivation of the most needed things, education, heath; in fact survival. Azadi from the onslaught of floods, bad crops, suicide of farmers, within which community there two types – the moneyed farmer , and the crop farmer eking out sustenance and day to day survival. They want freedom, the latter and when they do not have it they commit suicide.
Azadi has shades of connotation in a country with disparities in the social and economic fronts. It is a symbol of desires, freedom from the shackles of bondage and destitution. So if there is a cry for azadi in one part of the country, in another, manifestations may be different. What about Nandigram and Singur some years back? Was that not symbolic of a class of people who wanted to be free and live free on mother earth? Or the tussle for land in Assam?
The nation works through a pattern of symbols, a symbolism representing trauma, freedom of expression and dissent. Students too want it. They feel that they have a right to self determination, not to carve out an independent nation, but to read and act upon the charisma of others, of whom they have read or want to read.
In school we read about a mystique surrounding the country and its ethos, ” Unity In Diversity”. Now with religious fundamentalism and still under-currents of ethnocentricity this ultimate symbol of the country’s constitutional aspirations is turning towards a myth. I am trying to say these as objective realisations of what is happening around us in the past and not as the spokesperson of any group. Group feelings and cliques, manifestations of which are everywhere must be abhorred. But we must place the country above everything and the self. Its historical imagination has captivated people the world over. Its massive Constitution enunciating democracy has attracted international acclaim and critical thought. But overriding all considerations are those of inequality, poverty, lack of education, health care and slums. If we are fighting with one another as our predilections show historically, we are sounding the death knell of a historical edifice built over the years, with painstaking labour and with the emergence of eclectic thought such as Sufi thought. It is exactly this emancipation which forces are out to destroy, as this is a witness to the large underpinnings of a country, and a reproof to insular minds.
The large repository of culture and the climax of the freedom movement shaped its own historical processes, which the British with their acumen for imperialism instinctively realised. But history weaves its own destiny, with its own inner logic of reprobate. The very country they brought under a semblance of geographical and political unity, was the country that rose into uprising, even since the nineteenth century in one form or the other, and gave it final nationalist urges, which resulted in independence from a foreign rule. Paradoxes still remain. The use of English for one and the creative flowering of Indian English, which the past imperialists now use for design, perpetuation of a myth, at least dominate them culturally so that they will be thrown into a pacific abyss, and still continue to laud us and our literature. Such paradoxes, and there are many others entangle the country in sharp and infirm wedges of ethnicity and fundamentalism.
On the one hand is talk of amorphous and distorted nationalism, on the other of ethnic rights. Fundamental approaches to the polity and sociology of the country, differ throwing all this into polemical hub and crisis.
If we are to maintain stoically the grandiose unity of the country, we must come out of our fetters, and our immediate gains, political, social or religious. The symbol of the country must blend both inward and outward without the inherent contradictions, so apparent and obvious.