I’ve been following the usual commentary, the BP quadrant: Indosauras, Nivedita, Kabir. And I read Kabir’s offhand remark that the Ramayana “didn’t resonate” the way the Iliad or Odyssey did. That casual dismissal is telling.
The Ramayana is not just literature, it is scripture, memory, and civilization encoded in verse. It has shaped the moral and cultural landscape of over a billion people for millennia. To compare it, then downplay it and to do so so glibly reveals less about the text and more about one’s own civilizational estrangement.
Let’s be honest: that kind of language would never be used for the Quran or Islamic texts. And the fact that it is used for Hindu epics by brown intellectuals raised in the shadows of colonial categories says everything about how deeply colonized the Pakistani mind remains. Pakistan is, in truth, an Urdufied Punjab insufficiently imagined, a fragment that lost its civilizational compass in the act of imagining itself apart. The fact that the Ramayan being Pakistani heritage is such a novelty speaks volumes.
Today I sat at Stratford Westfield, eating Dubai Hot Chocolate ice cream, and the man next to me clearly Pakistani asked me, in Urdu, “if I was in the queue?” His wife spoke Punjabi-inflected Urdu. It struck me how London has become the real unifying Punjab. Ten percent of Britain is now Desi. And outside of the subcontinent, the fractures of 1947 heal in ways that remain impossible back home.
We speak of South Asia. But the term is bureaucratic; no one identifies with it. India is real. Bharat is civilizational. Aryavarta stretches from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean — just as France is the Hexagon, Bharat is the Triangle. Partition clipped its wings, but its soul remains intact.
And look at the reality today: Indian Muslims are thriving in the mainstream. The title song of the upcoming film Sarai — written, composed, and directed by three Muslims: Ishaq, Fahim, and Arsalan. The leading lyricist is Javed Akhtar. This is a country that refused bitterness. A country whose largest minority chose Partition, and yet was never cast out, a unique precedent and testament the pluralism of Dharma.
Bharat needs no validation. It doesn’t need the approval of its neighbours or the heirs of partitioned imagination. It only needs to walk — and it is flying. Toward its own authenticity, on its own terms. And the world is watching.