My grand father, deeply religious and orthodox, would never have used a sentence like “I am an Indian” in his whole life. Yet India was still an idea, a concept derived mostly from her rivers. When he drew water from our well and poured it over his head he recited a mantra which prayed that the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswathi, Narmada and Kaveri be present in the well water of our home and sanctify him. As he sat for his prayers he positioned himself in the universe beginning with Bharata varsha and then Bharatha khanda and then Jamboo dweepa which further got focussed into the actual place he sat in and the ever recurring time according to the lunar almanac. Thus seated he  got all the Gods to dwell in several parts of his body who enabled him to propitiate Gayatri- a prayer to enhance the psychic ( Dhee =mental?) energy of the whole of mankind.

Only when I went to my village school, India became a geographical place for me and not just a puranic akash kind of space.  I was told by my teachers this India was not free, and was made poor by her alien rulers.  I was ten years old when Gandhiji gave the ‘Quit India’ call to the British and we sang patriotic songs. Yet India was a mythological place too for in our hilly villages Seetha had lived and she favoured the flower Seethal, an orchid that Laxman picked for her from the forest trees. The river in which the Pandavas bathed during their exile into Dandakaranya was the river Thunga in which we bathed. Here goes a story.

Draupadi desired a pond to swim and her fond husband Bheemasena built a dam of rocks in the river Thunga to create a pond for her. Not far from there lived the great sage Doorvasa who was known for his temper. Not enough water would flow into the island in which he lived because of the pond Bhimasena built for Draupadi. He was sure to get angry and curse and therefore Krishna warned Bheema and made him make three breaches in the rocky dam and propitiate Lord Shiva in expiation. Bheemasena hurriedly installed  a Lingam on the bank of the river for the purpose.

We boys bathed in the swift flow of water in the breaches and worshipped the Lingam and told ourselves  the story  many times to delight ourselves in the sun as we  dried ourselves and also the clothes we had washed.

A couple of years ago I revisited this lovely small temple on the bank of Thunga and watched the old priest worship the Lingam. As he came out he recognized me and gave finishing touches to the story I knew as a boy.

Just a year ago, he had at last done what his father and fore-fathers desired which was to correct a mistake that Bheema had committed in his hurry. While installing the Lingam, he had forgotten to install the neutral and the female stones- one over the other-  as foundation for the Lingam. (I may not be recounting the exact ritualistic necessities of installation that he described to me).It was left to our priest in Kaliyuga to correct a blunder impetuously committed in the era of Dwapara. It cost him money for all the rituals and he collected some and spent some himself. Yet his wicked neighbors spread rumors that he squandered some money for his own pleasure. There will always be such people in all ages whether Dwapara or Kali- don’t you think so? The priest asked me.  

(Just then a group of village youth who recognized me came there  and complained that the Government is planning a few small dams for production of electricity and I must help them to fight against such dams for they would ruin agricultural land and the forest. Had not Bheemasena done the same? I wondered.)

As I listened to the stories of the priest I thought that the fundamentalist Hindutva ideologues should know that a mistake that Bheemasena (a contemporary of God Krishna) made could be corrected by our humble priest of today. We are the greatest ‘revisionists’ in the world- for the followers of other great historical Semitic religions this revisionism is not easy.

A common phrase is heard all over Karnataka now in our language mixing English and Kannada: ‘make adjustment’. The Kannada word is used for the verb ‘make’. I think this is one of the ways in which we have survived as a country all through millenniums-- making revisions and making adjustments.

For people like me the great shift in the idea of India was from the Puranic to the political and historical,  and it was primarily Mahatma Gandhi who brought it about. But I must add , however, that Gandhi did not abandon the Puranic but revised it. ‘Iswara Alla there Nam’ a line in his Ram Bhajan goes against the exclusivist fundamentalist belief of both Hinduism and Islam, but it opposes fundamentalism without abandoning the true religious piety. This was both politics and religion for uniting India. The search for a strong Nation, of the kind one finds in the history of Europe can only divide India- for a strong nation needs one religion one language and one race. That is what Savarkar wanted, and nuclearised India of today wants. But our contemporary political experience tells us that if we over centralize in the interest of the unity of India we are sure to balkanize.

India can’t be a nation like European nations; we are a civilization. I am never tired of retelling a story that I heard from A.K.Ramanujan, a great poet and translator. Once he was collecting oral Ramayanas in the villages of Karnataka. He heard a dialogue between Rama and Seetha. Rama was exiled to the forest and Seetha insisted that she should accompany him as she was his wife. As usual Rama tried to reason with her that life in a forest would be hard for the delicate Seetha. Both Seetha and Rama in this story were non-literate and they were making up the argument. At one point when Rama came up with a strong argument Seetha replied: ‘In every Ramayana I know Seetha accompanies Rama to the forest. How can you then say no to me?’ This is a fascinating example for the intertextuality that unites India. One of my friends always insists that among innumerable languages of India there are two that are understood all over the country. They are the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha—none of us have read these two epics for the first time.A communalized India will only kill the creativity of our religious innovative spirit.

Both the globalized rootless modernity and the ferocious fundamentalist communalism will only weaken the Puranic sense of unity that is there among the common people of India.