The Self Loathing Leftists and Liberals of India

The Self Loathing Leftists and Liberals of India

Modern India’s modern myths

The first of these myths is that India itself is a myth. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are myths that were written by men who lived in a place without geography or history. Sanskrit came from this same nebulous arena as did the Vedas and the mathematicians who invented the zero.

The idea of India did not exist until the British created it is the contention of India’s self-loathing ‘liberals’. In the words of a historian of recent celebrity, India is an ‘unnatural nation as well as an unlikely democracy’. He does not bother to explain what he means by ‘unnatural nation’ since the nation state itself did not exist till not very long ago. Long, long before that there was a country called Bharat whose borders were clearly defined and whose certainty continues to be perfectly understood by ordinary Indians across India.

When a pilgrim from Tamil Nadu or Karnataka sets off to attend the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, he does not think that he is travelling to a foreign country. When a family from Bengal travels to Banaras or Mathura to drop off some inconvenient widow in one of the ashrams, there they do not think they are travelling abroad either. The only people who have a problem defining India are liberal, English-speaking ‘secular intellectuals’ who usually don’t speak even a single Indian language. They understand no more about the idea of India than those intellectual refugees from the West who make India their home and become ‘experts’ on all things Indian. They belong to the same club because they all make a living out of writing books, histories and articles about this India that is so unnatural a nation, so accidental a country.