Sometimes there are utter gems which pass unnoticed or uncommented, largely because they seem so obvious that nobody stops to ask what is going on under the hood.
This observation, that Indians are getting more nationalistic, is one such. I would like to venture my own interpretation of this phenomenon.
We must remember that the last time in history that Indians felt their 'Indianness' so deeply was during the Independence movement. During this movement, Indians let themselves be felt and seen in public as firmly determined people; Independence was a goal of epic proportions, and Indians understood they were fighting a battle, a warllke campaign without a single weapon in evidence.
While a comparison with the torture that China went through would be silly, because the two cases are so dissimilar, what happened in India was in many ways unique in world history. Subsequently, dozens of similar events have taken place, on different scales at different levels, but they all took their cue from this extraordinary campaign within south Asia.
At the time of independence, then, there were two entirely different moods prevailing. One was epiphanic, the other sombre and funereal.
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or numinous foundational frame of reference.
There was real reason to be epiphanic in 1947. The whole puzzle had suddenly solved itself, a million struggles in a million dusty streets, the strange interlude of the INA, half-rebel and half-deluded traitor, the war-weariness of the British, the determination of the British working-class to throw off the yokes of their upper-class masters, even if it meant casting away their empire.... It seemed larger than life, every Indian acted and spoke and behaved with a kind of feeling that he or she was individually in the eye of history.
On the other hand, there was incurable sadness. The country had been vivisected; hundreds of thousands were dead, butchered by gangs the leader had been killed in cold blood by the RSS; the leaders were people whose leadership was untested at best.
These feelings didn't last for ever. India soon settled down to years of grinding poverty and dullness, to what can most kindly be described as a bureaucratic socialism, where our progress or lack of it was recounted in murderous prose, which was itself a weapon of mass destruction, printed on toilet paper, with colour covers with the different colours each slightly overlapping the others; where a films division propaganda short inspired the masses before they could see some Hollywood film that the whole world had seen several years before - let's not go on, it's too gruesome to relate the tale.
In these years, we were taught to distrust Indian talent and capability even by our own government. Any initiative that was not inspired by a metastasising bureaucracy was probably either a corrupt practice, punishable with the severest sections of the CrPC, or a foreign attempt at subverting the republic and bringing it to heel once again.
I doubt that either of you who have made these remarks were travellers abroad in the days when we were allowed £5 and $10 - not per day, for the entire trip abroad.Some of our best and brightest students landed up in foreign countries with that sum and nothing more. It was in those days that we learnt to despise ourselves, to understand that we were truly shameful and unworthy of respect, that not only had our industrialisation and urban development failed, but our military also lay in ruins, the same military that saved the skin of the 8th Army and of the 14th Army, was now unable to stand in the path of a vigorous and determined attacker, although it made no bones about tackling an allied force with the same regiments in its order of battle.
Try to imagine, then, what excitement prevailed when the economy, indeed, the country opened up to the outside world. Try, also, the sudden, heady feeling with the release of sufficient foreign currency.
I would invite comment on this response before moving on.
