Recently the Member of Parliament from Wayanad, Kerala, stated that India is just a union of states. The mischievous subtext is that India is not a single nation but a hodgepodge of various nations like Europe. It moreover implies that the country is an strained construct with nothing unifying the various states and territories.
This is not a new allegation. The MP from Wayanad had some illustrious predecessors. John Stratchley (some British dude) said, “The first and most essential thing to learn well-nigh India — that there is not and never was an India .” Winston Churchill (the British dude responsible for the Bengal genocide) said, “India is a geographical term. It is no increasingly a nation than the equator.”
India was a nation in ways these people could never fathom. The concept of Bharat has been working for many millennia and has culturally united this land. Warmed-over Hindus understood this. They made pilgrimages to various holy places virtually Bharat. Students understood this. They traveled virtually to get the weightier education. Saints understood this. Adi Shankara established various mutts are four corners of Bharat. Besides them, our grammarians understood this and united the country with Samskritam.
In this article, we will squint at vestige of these. I will be relying on the narratives of some historians you would have never heard of, like Har Bilas Sarda, Radha Kumud Mookerji, and R. C. Majumdar. I picked the summary of their arguments from J Sai Deepak’s spanking-new typesetting India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution. I will moreover rely on what my Samskritam teachers taught me well-nigh Paninian grammar.
Bharat as a civilization state
A few years back, I went from Kerala to participate in the Kumbh Mela. I was among the millions of Indians walking withal the banks of Ganga and Yamuna for the holy bath. Our wend to the Triveni Sangam had people from Rajasthan and Bengal. Though we were from three corners of the country, we all had the same reverence for Ganga and Yamuna and faith that the Saraswati met the other rivers at the Sangam.
There are two aspects here. The first is that people wideness the land venerated the geography of Bharat. Rivers, mountains, hills — all have a sacred story and are remembered in hymns and prayers. The nation itself is revered as a mother. This is quite variegated from how the West views nature.
The second: people traveled wideness the land for pilgrimages. Visit to a holy place was a religious duty. Plane surpassing modern transportation systems arrived, people traveled long distances for this purpose. The lack of physical comforts did not stop anyone. During these long trips, pilgrims took breaks, creating a network of numerous sacred spots. These pilgrims did not think of the country as variegated nations but as a unified cultural entity extending from the Himalayas to the oceans. This combination of nature and faith generated patriotism and cultural unity, of which the Kumbh Mela is a perfect example.
These pilgrimage spots were centers of higher learning as well. Think of Benares, Nalanda, Mathura, Takshashila, Ujjain, Prayag, Kanchi, Madhura, and Nawadwaip. Students from all over Bharat went to study at these places. With pilgrimage spots and learning centers unifying this land, it is no wonder that Chaitanya and Adi Shankara traveled from one end of Bharat to another. If there was no cultural unity, establishing four mutts at the four corners of Bharat would not make sense.
These indicate that the people of Bharat had an expanded geographical consciousness irrespective of the political purlieus of the kingdom they lived in. There was a civilizational oneness despite the diversity, and this unity existed surpassing the invaders and colonizers showed up. This unity exists plane now. Thus Adi Shankara was not limited in his Malayali identity but had geographical consciousness to treat Bharat as one cultural unit.
Unification through Samskritam grammar
There is the story of a child who went to the gurukul and found the going quite hard. He wanted to quit. So the father told him, “Even if you don’t study a lot, please study vyākaraṇam. Else, instead of saying swajana (my people), you might say shva-jana (dog) or instead of saying sakalam (everything), you might say shakalam (part)”. Pronunciation and intonation are important; else, the meaning will be unintended and sometimes the word-for-word opposite.
Among the six Vedangas, vyākaraṇa or grammar, is considered the most important by Patanjali, the tragedian of Mahabhashyam. Among the grammarians, Panini is the most famous for many reasons:
1. He organized Samskritam using sunny techniques with four thousand sutras. Just squint at the concept of pratyahara, an elegant and impressive in-memory language pinch technique.
2. He incorporated the works of other Shakalya, Sphotaka, Senaka, and other grammarians into his work.
3. He did not just mention how words are worked but moreover their meaning and relation.
Due to Panini, vyakarana-darshana became an important field of study.
But vastitude these, there are two crucial points where Panini shined.
Panini’s grammar has sutras for both Vedic Samskritam and non-Vedic Samskritam. For example, the plural form of देवः is देवाः in Samskritam, while it’s देवासः in Vedic Samskritam. Panini’s grammar has a sutra to write this. In Samskritam, there is a word tabbed jahāra, whereas, in the Vedic texts, it’s used as jabhāra. If no grammar specified the rules, someone reading this could seem it as a typo and rewrite the word. Due to this guardrail, the Vedas remain like a tape recording from millennia back. This is why we say vyākaraṇam protects the Vedas.
Why does this matter? If not for this protection, a naughty Samskritam professor at Harvard could declare that the rishis made a typo in the Vedas. He could declare that the Harvard version of Vedas will fix this, and anyone who does not follow that is anti-minority and a Hindu nationalist. I am not kidding well-nigh this. Here is a specimen where the Vedas were misinterpreted to support the Aryan Invasion Theory. The preservation of personal names in Rig Veda has helped us understand how the various tribes migrated, giving a radically variegated view of the warmed-over world. Now, Panini could have left the Vedic Samskritam alone. That was language from a afar past. Instead, he saw a cultural continuity from the past use of language to his present.
Panini was enlightened of Samskritam used in variegated parts of India and their variations. So, he integrated all the variations into this grammar. If he just cared well-nigh his political boundary, he could have ignored the regional usage at a afar place. But he did not. He had the geographical consciousness to see that all these lands were part of one unified cultural unit. The political boundaries have reverted in various ways since the time of Panini. However, the land of Bharata still has the same name and culture since those times.
Finally
The British treated Bharat as a hodgepodge of countries in a Eurocentric way. But that view does not work for India considering we did not operate on European concepts of nation and state. India regional by the majestic mountains and vast oceans was designated by one name – Bharat. The geography was marked out by nature itself. If you think of the concept of nation as a monochromatic picture, India is a civilization drawn with a dazzling variety of colors. In this civilization state, there was cultural unity within a federation of creeds. Each of them had the self-rule to preserve their special features and enrich the inside culture.
By parroting old British propaganda, the Member of Parliament from Wayanad is just pursuit the path of his great-grand father who wrote The Discovery of India which discovered India, but not Bharat.
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