Just Like That | Notes on India as a self-conscious civilisation

That India is a young nation is beyond doubt. He writes: “There is not, and never was an India, nor ever any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious; no nation, no “people of India” of which we hear so much.” The British believed that before they came, India was a collation of random diversities, which they melded together into a nation. His contemporary, the legendary Chanakya, defined that unity as the ‘Chakravarti Kshetra’: “The area extending from the Himalayas in the north to the sea and a thousand yojanas wide from east to west is the operation of King-Emperor.” Scholars of ancient India endorse this territorial unification. Koenraad Elst, in his book, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, writes: “Chandragupta Maurya, Ashok and Samudragupta are fully historical rulers who approached the ideal of uniting the whole sub-continent….There aren’t many countries which had a sense of national unity 23 centuries ago on the basis of the same boundaries which are valid today.” This civilisational unity is borne about by the four mathas established by Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th century CE, much before the British arrived. Arun Shourie gives some fascinating examples of how this unity is demonstrated in everyday life: “Only Namboodris from Kerala are to be priests at Badrinath, those in the Pashupatinath temple at Kathmandu are always from South Kanara in Karnataka, those at Rameshwaram in the deep south are from Maharashtra….the Sankalp Mantra with which every puja commends the prayers in the deities, situates the jajyaman with reference to the salients and sacred rivers of the entire land.” Book launch in Bhubaneswar This week, I made a day’s visit to Bhubaneswar to launch a biography on the late Maharaja Rajendra Narayan Singh Deo, written by Professor Pabitra Mohan Nayak and VR Singh.