The Question the Thread Threw Up
Yesterday I asked whether Modi made India great again. The thread beneath it, the liveliest we have had in a while since the discussion on Gender, promptly asked a harder question: is Modi good for the Muslims? It is a fair question and it deserves to be held properly, so let me put two commitments on the table before anything else. Every minority and every people has its rights. And hatred is to be avoided at any cost. Nothing below moves either commitment an inch.
With that said, there is a question beneath the question, and it is the one this post is about. Is a self-confident Hindu a bad thing? Because that, stripped of the slogans, is what this era is actually contesting: whether the majority population of India, indigenous to the land, which did not opt for Partition, and which wrote its minorities in as full citizens, may consolidate its dharma, its mythos, its ideology into a confident and unified global identity.
Britain swears in her seventh prime minister of the decade today; India, one tenure deep since 2014, argues instead about what its majority is allowed to become. I know which argument I would rather be having.
Who Appropriated Whom
“Indians have been appropriating/adopting foreign culture for at least the past 4,000 years.” Q
Adopting, certainly. But appropriating runs the arrow backwards. Did India appropriate the zero (inventor: Brahmagupta), or give it like it did the “Arabic” numerals? Nalanda drew students from across Asia for centuries; Buddhism, born on Indian soil, remade China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. One of China’s four great classical novels is Journey to the West, and the west in question is India. Columbus was hunting a route to India when he blundered into the Americas.