SAY BHARAT, NAY INDIA

It was holi last year and I had gone home to my parents. As I walked on the roads on which I used to cycle to tuitions, swinging my father’s penang lawyer I had a queer desire to relive those years. There are, in the English language enough words to describe such wistfulness. Such feelings often called nostalgia are not uncommon to experience when you reach a certain stage in life. I was perhaps just following an established stereotype.

The city was dirtier than when I used to live there. The roads had been encroached by sundry vendors, with their shops creeping ever closer to the margin of the road. Suddenly, a bus, very familiar passed by. When it motored ahead of me slowly negotiating the potholed road, which was now much narrower today than in my times, I read on the rear of the bus “ Bhartiya Praudyogiki Sansthan” my alma-meter.

Bharatiya and Bharat. That is the question. Modern strategic minds, corporate captains and many Gen X politicians tend to distinguish between an advancing India and lagging Bharat. A progressive India is contrasted with a backward Bharat.

Bhimbeteka, 40 minutes off Bhopal, traces antiquity to 40,000 year ago. The Pandavas, seem to have sought temporary refuge here as well, during their agyatvasa. The caves paintings speak of a vibrant society. The Harrappan sites too evidence an urban civilization with sewerage and town planning in an age, when the much of the contemporary world at best comprised cattle grazing nomads.

Having come a full circle, India, even today is 70 pct rural. One of the implicit pledges India made, at the moment of her “tryst with destiny” 60 years ago, was of health, nutrition and education for all. Today, India is not only far away from redeeming her pledge, but has failed miserably, even in providing drinking water.

Yet, Bhaskaracharya, the inventor of Zero, the decimal system with the place value, was of Bharat. Nagarjuna, Varahamira and of all, the illustrious Bramhagupta who expounded the then preposterous postulate of a rotating earth and the trees not falling off it, due to a gravitational force pulling everything on it towards its centre, not contemporarily with the West, but 800 years before the West, were indeed in Bharat too.

Whereas the crown jewel of India, Infosys, is still primarily a code writing company, in Bharat, there was mathematics, astronomy, innovative medicine, and even medical surgery. In India of today, we have nothing of even shade. No reader should construe this to be a suggestion to bask in past glory, but just to highlight, that our forefathers were civilized.

Many facets of Kautiliya Arthashastra appear in Kempo of Sholotu or the Magna Carta, 8 centuries later than the Kempo and 14 centuries later than the Arthashastra.

Sahayya sadhyam rajatwan chakram ekam na vartate – quote from Kautiliya Arthshastra, clearly indicates the vibrance of the Republican thought and structure of government 250 BC - in ancient India – Bharat.

In Bharat, you had universities – Nalanda and Takshila - which were internationally acclaimed. That, China was inviting Buddhist monks to teach physics, astronomy and mathematics in China, in the era of the Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty, is no secret. To my mind, the first Indian expat was Gautam Siddhartha who was the head of Astronomy at the Chinese court in the 800 – 900 ADs. Xuanzang ( Hiuen Tsang ) took horse loads of Sanskrits manuscripts from India.

“Bharat Bhagya Vidhata” – the East India Company – later to be replaced by the crown (and I indulge in the act of defiance and perhaps impropriety by deliberately writing it in common case than capital) itself – had a crucial vested interest in depicting an ancient civilization as barbaric and a burden of the white men, an argumentation, that even Theodore Roosevelt would accept, and at later stage use to justify and even extol the virtue of Imperialism. Being legatees to this diligently propagated myth of Indian backwardness, done with the clear purpose of subjugating a nation, we continue to live in the same shadow, constantly trying to justify to ourselves, our coming of age, by seeking solace in simple achievements like the metro or launch Chandrayana.

Taking a leaf from from the Raj, myopic movers and shakers of the day often egg you to believe, the economically and socially backward “Bharat” needs to advance on the trickle of development that it receives from advancing and modernizing “India”. Well that is the myth that I am intending to challenge.

It is India, which is at crossroads, accomplishing the daunting task - trying to re - attain and realize the station that it relinquished 900 years ago – of becoming Bharat.

There is no gainsaying the fact, that the achievements of India in the last 60 years are in no way mean and cannot be trivialized, much less demeaned, food sufficiency and eradication of large scale famine ranking perhaps the highest, nevertheless, the rationale or the lack of it in wishing Bharat to be India is really the question.

Bharat contributed 24 pct to the world GDP even ahead of China and India contributes only 2 pct, so it would betray common sense if we were to demean Bharat and wish it to be India and not the other way round.