![]() This week, I made a day’s visit to Bhubaneswar to launch a biography on the late Maharaja Rajendra Narayan Singh Deo, written by Professor Pabitra Mohan Nayak and VR Singh. Arun Shourie gives some fascinating examples of how this unity is demonstrated in everyday life: “Only Namboodris from Kerala are to be priests at Badrinath, those in the Pashupatinath temple at Kathmandu are always from South Kanara in Karnataka, those at Rameshwaram in the deep south are from Maharashtra….the Sankalp Mantra with which every puja commends the prayers in the deities, situates the jajyaman (the person organizing the puja) with reference to the salients and sacred rivers of the entire land.” That has not diluted but only enriched its essential and syncretic cultural unity. Over the centuries, it has interacted with and assimilated other cultures and influences. The truth is that India as a self-conscious civilisation has existed since the dawn of time. The great philosopher-sage was himself born in Kerala, and died at Kedarnath. These four mathas define the civilisational map of India. ![]() One was in Sringeri in the south, the second at Puri on the east coast, the third at Dwarka on the west coast, and the fourth at Joshimath in the Himalayas in the north. This civilisational unity is borne about by the four mathas established by Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th century CE, much before the British arrived. Koenraad Elst, in his book, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, writes: “Chandragupta Maurya, Ashok and Samudragupta are fully historical rulers who approached the ideal of uniting the whole sub-continent….There aren’t many countries which had a sense of national unity 23 centuries ago on the basis of the same boundaries which (disregarding the Partition) are valid today.” His contemporary, the legendary Chanakya, defined that unity as the ‘ Chakravarti Kshetra’: “The area extending from the Himalayas in the north to the sea and a thousand yojanas wide from east to west is the operation of King-Emperor.” Scholars of ancient India endorse this territorial unification. Political unity - even if not in the modern sense of a nation-State - was achieved as far back as the fourth century BCE, in the reign of Chandragupta Maurya. Other historians, such as Sunil Khilnani, in his very readable book The Idea of India, discounts colonial hubris but still believes that “the moments of actual unification of India’s past were achieved under the yoke of British rule.” But this too is factually incorrect. But the mention of mountains, rivers and places-some of which can be identified-suggests that the composers were familiar with various areas of the sub-continent, and perceived them as part of a larger cultural whole (emphasis mine)’. Bharatvarsha is said to consist of nine divisions ( khandas), separated from one another by seas. Cosmography blends with geography in the Puranas. She writes: "One of several explanations of the name Bharatvarsha connects it with the Bharata people, descendants of the legendary king Bharata, son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala. She is a professional historian of impeccable credentials and -incidentally - the daughter of Dr Manmohan Singh, former prime minister of India. Dr Upinder Singh, in her magnum opus, A History of Ancient India and Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, testifies to this. The apparent cacophony of languages, dress, customs, rituals, food and regional identities, can appear bewilderingly different.īut, below the surface, there is a civilisational unity, and objective historians have little doubt about it. ![]() As rulers, they were entitled to such an illusion, and to some extent, cannot be blamed for being overwhelmed by the surface diversities that India presents to any foreigner. The British believed that before they came, India was a collation of random diversities, which they melded together into a nation. ![]()
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