The product called ‘India’: codes, processes, labels

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Notes

1. Nandy 1995, 63. For a discussion of the Hindu concept of time see Embree 1992, 20–30. For secular concept of time see Raghuramaraju 2000, 20–39.

2. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita's Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (originally published in 1913) sharpen a kind of defensive arguments against the deprecatory colonial critique of Hindu beliefs and customs. Goswami's scholarly habitation on the Puranic literature brings to my mind the intense and ‘involving’ pronouncements of Haraprasad Shastri and V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar where the Puranas are sought to be seen as a repository of knowledge meant for historicist reconstruction and redoing; indeed R. C. Hazra's Studies in the Puranic Records on Hindu Rites and Customs in 1940 bore the stamp of meticulous research and authentic argumentation that commanded respect and made historians take critical notice of incisive comparative exegesis which revolved around the contents and composition of the Puranas, the Smritis and other contemporary texts (Dikshitar 1932 and Shastri 1928). For interesting discussion on Puranic Hinduism see Vijay Nath 2001.

3. This dialectic has assumed enormous importance in the production of contemporary India especially with the emergence of the ‘Ayodhya’ controversy. See Pandey 1994; Tapan Basu etal 1993; Srivastava 1991. For an excellent collection of writings related to this controversy see Noorani 2003.

4. For substantial discussions on related areas see Thapar 1989; also, Habib 1999.

5. The Hindu historians, being victims of inveterate subject positions, have always found the ‘Muslims’ as congenitally evil, narrow-minded and bigoted. See, for instance, Savarkar 1971; Mazumdar 1953–69 and especially his Struggle for Freedom; Jayswal 1924; Shahid Amin, however, brilliantly reverses such perceptions. See Amin 2002.

6. For more detailed analysis see Rai 2000, 40.

7. McGregor notes further that ‘by contrast to Hariscandra's use of the words Hindustan and Hindu, in the formal title of his speech he refers to India by the word Bharatvars, a term favoured in Bengali and Sanskritic origin. This non-communal inclination of Hariscandra's thought does not of course preclude his seeing Hinduism or Hindu identity as a prime determinant of the character of modern Indian life’ (100). Also, see Dalmia 1997 and Chandra 1984.

8. It is quite interesting to see that in the earlier period the Hindus and the Muslims were not monolithic communities but had sectarian orientation. There is no reference to Hindu dharma in early texts and this term is of relatively recent origin. See Thapar 1990; also Pandey 1993.

9. But the idea of India has been quite problematic in the sense that Asoka inscriptions datable to around 250 BC, especially Rock Edict XIII, Manusmriti, Samudragupta's Allahabad inscription and Alberuni's Kitab al-Hind (c. 1035) present a picture of Jambudipa whose civilisation had its own imperviousness, fostering a belief that prefers perceiving one's civilisational entity as self-contained and insular. One may note that Abu Raihan al Biruni was able to offer a geographical outline of the country of al-Hind: ‘limited in the south by the above mentioned Indian ocean, and on all three other sides by the lofty mountains, the waters of which flow down to it’ Al-Biruni underscored the assumption that Bharata-Varsha comprises the entire inhabitable world, while in actual fact, the parts named and ascribed to it are located in al-Hind alone. To al-Biruni, the Hindus as inhabitants of this country, had an identifiable single higher culture, with Sanskrit as its language, which he made it his business to study and interpret, critically and without bias. He saw this as a firm cultural unity, reflected in an arrogant insularity on the part of the Hindus, which he regretted characteristically on account of the obstruction it raised to the study of their culture by an outsider. See Athar Ali 1996. The concept of Bharatvarsha is developed with more singular rigidity in the later writings of Gowalkar 1939 and Savarkar 1989.