India's tormented soul

The struggle to regain India's independence was not over on 15 August 1947. It only added one more chapter to the story of the sage that is still being written.

Today as I look at India's past, my heritage, back into those thousands of years past, the vision is blurred by cobwebs. Beginning with who we are, where our history began, what is our national soul, the sociological character and the religious impulse of my people, nothing is there where there is no confusion. Cobwebs that now I have no power to remove, but to fall on my feet and mourn the circumstances that have made all this come. But every day passes with trying to make a better path for light on the faculties of analysis through this labyrynth.

I was reading an account of the development of Buddhism and its relationship to what is 'Hinduism'. These lines sum it all up:

'When invoking the national tradition of religious pluralism, Nehru credited Buddhism: “Even since the distant past, it has been India’s proud privilege to live in harmony with each other. That has been the basis of India’s culture. Long ago, the Buddha taught us this lesson. From the days of Ashoka, 2300 years ago, this aspect of our thought has been repeatedly declared and practised.”The omission of Hindu tradition here is obviously unfair: the Buddha, rather than bringing religious pluralism, was himself a beneficiary of a well-established pluralism, which allowed him to preach his doctrine for fifty years and die in old age of natural causes

The Lion Pillar of the Maurya emperor Ashoka was made into India’s official state emblem and is depicted on Indian currency notes and coins. The 24-spoked Dharma Chakra in India’s national flag was understood to be a symbol introduced by Ashoka (it also figures on his pillars, between the two lions), known for his patronage of Buddhism and claimed to be a convert to Buddhism.Nehru, on top of presenting the Chakra as a truly representative and truly Indian symbol (as would befit the national flag), explicitly associated it with Ashoka and with the ideology-based policies he stood for:

“That Wheel is a symbol of India’s culture. It is a symbol of many things that India had stood for through the ages. (…) we have associated with this flag not only this emblem, but in a sense, the name of Ashoka, one of the most magnificent names not only in India’s history, but in the history of the whole world.”

Unknown to Nehru, the Chakra was a pre-Ashokan and pre-Buddhist symbol of “uniting the many”, viz. the different autonomous parts of India under one suzerain or “wheel-turner” (chakravarti; the term implied in the Buddhist term dharmachakrapravartana, “setting in motion the wheel of the Dharma”). So, in spite of Nehru, the centre-space of India’s flag ended up being taken by a truly national rather than a sectarian symbol. Nehru’s intended imposition of a specific historical model and the concomitant ideological message on a national symbol does amount, at least in principle, to the declaration of a state ideology. Like Ashoka, who used his throne to preach Dharma, Nehru was guilty of “varna-sankara”, here not in the sense of intermarriage between varnas but in the sense of mixing up the distinct social functions: as rulers, they had no business setting themselves up as preachers, since these are distinct roles best exercised by separate groups of people. '

When O Sun of Truth, will you bring Summer to the soul of India? When will Truth untained by polemic be the property of us the children of India?