A Reading of Dr. Shashi Tharoor's The Battle of Belonging

My initiation to Dr. Tharoor’s literary work was with ‘Pax Indica’ and while I have come quite a long way from those days, I still enjoy what he writes. It was his ‘Why I am a Hindu’ that shaped my critique of an essential part of my identity which I guess was again negated with Kancha Ilaiah’s ‘Why I am not a Hindu’ but I guess this is a tussle which every thinking human will always have in their life.

Coming to the most recent addition to Dr. Tharoor’s endeavor to provide direction to the idea of India, I think ‘The Battle of Belonging’ is a worthwhile contribution. It’s not that I agree to all he has written but we exist in a state of evolving discourse and as such not making any contribution to that discourse would be more demeaning than producing something which is evidently intended to keep up the spirit of an old diminishing elite.

There are certain arguments in the book though, that cannot be denied – the most important one being the transformation to the idea of India. I believe I don’t have substantial knowledge to judge if this transformation is for the good or for the bad but again, I do buy Dr. Tharoor’s argument that we must strive towards what he describes as civic nationalism. My dilemma, though, arises from the fact that I do believe in the civilizational idea of Indian nationalism.

The conception of the Nation-states, from the frame of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, depends on commonalities and with reference to the Indian sub-continent, we do share the heritage of the ‘Hindu’ civilization. Here, when I say ‘Hindu’, I don’t refer to the limited western understanding of the term which compartmentalizes Hinduism as one religion or for that matter ‘a religion’ and in this I again agree with Dr. Tharoor’s argument that ‘We are all Minorities’.

Although I do think that this book is every chapter makes a critique of the present dispensation while crying that the act of critiquing is being stifled - that, I see as a very hypocritical position. I did enjoy the particular personal account from the life of the author about being born in England and the frustration of not being given (on account of not needing it) an entry permit to the UK.

I am not a fan of postmodernist thought, given its deficiency of not being able to provide a solution to an existing problem and only critiquing it. Dr. Tharoor's book, for me, only critiques but doesn't provide an alternative. The Nehruvian idea of India is a thesis from a bygone era and Hindutva is the challenge - unless there is an alternative to this Hindutva, I have my reservations on the reinstatement of the Gandhi- Nehru legacy. The validity of both the 'Hind Swaraj' and the idea of India pushed by Nehru in his 'Discovery of India' is debatable in the current scheme of things.   

The ideas of civic nationalism, though, do intrigue me and I am very inclined to the idea, although, from my limited experience of growing up in an ethnocentric society in the North-East of India and also being on the receiving end of it, I do believe that people’s primordial needs will triumph over ideas such as value-based civic nationalism and it is here that I see the need for Hindutva. I am also a firm believer in Hegelian thought and so, as I see it, we exist in a dialectic, and to achieve a limited stasis, two equally strong extremist ideologies have to oppose each other. I only hope that the number of extremists does not exceed the number of moderates.