| Rivers personify the flow of time; they are synonyms for history. Because of their qualities of sustenance, they are often endowed with almost parental attributes and names. The Thames in England is known familiarly as ‘Father Thames’, the American Mississippi river immortalised in song as ‘Old Man River’, and the mighty Ganges river flowing across northern India revered as ‘Mother Ganges’. |
| In Pandit Nehru’s will, he had stipulated that after his death a part of his ashes were to be immersed in the sacred Ganges, which to him was ‘a symbol of India’s life-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga.’ The equally mighty Indus River, flowing from the north to the south through what is now Pakistan, evoked a similar but not quite as emotional a sentiment. Rather than being given a name, the Indus gave its own to the advanced communities we know today as the Indus Valley Civilisation. |
| One recent author, Aitzaz Ahsan, has asserted that the Indus produced a recognisably separate human type, distinct for example from the Gangetic man. His emphasis on the Indus echoed (perhaps unconsciously) an earlier identification of the Indus, not as the spine of river-fed cities of which MohenjoDaro is the most famous surviving remnant, but as the outer extremity of the cultural and religious reach of a Hindu India, a Hindu as defined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (Hindutva’s revered ideologue) as one ‘who regards this land…from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland (pitrbhumi) as well as his Holyland (punyabhumi).’ |
| By this definition, Hinduism became for the modern Indian not simply one (albeit the major one) out of the many religions practised in the subcontinent but a composite national identity that fused geographical territory, cultural affinity and religious commitment. When applied at the level of statehood, this distinction became sharper, yielding two main types of Indian nationalists - secular nationalists and Hindu nationalists, ‘the former,’ according to an Indian scholar Ashutosh Varshney, ‘combines territory and culture; the latter, religion and territory.’... [EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 8 March 2004, titled: Prediction comes true, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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