Indian literature, like Indian society, is based on a common-sense principle: what I say is important, but it is less important than what you hear. You must nurture text within the womb of context.
Words are empty if they are not the stones of a bridge that closes a gap. This bridge connects with the other, and becomes part of a multicultural architecture that makes diversity stronger than homogeneity.
Modern India is the European Union of the East. It became Europe long before Europe became Europe. The Forties were a violent, horrifying and seminal period for both India and Europe. They reached that war-drenched decade from opposite ends of the political spectrum, through different trajectories: conflicts, rooted in the past, altered the future.
Europe's four-century-long appetite for colonization had given it an unprecedented domination over the world, and untold riches. Colonialism rode to battle on a horse called Civilization, preaching that it had come to wrest natives from despair and deliver them into modernity. But the culture of oppression that sustained colonization in conquered territories bred, among the conquerors, the politics of competition, conflict, greed and, often, the urge to despotism. The past finally exhausted itself in the stench and brutality of the Second World War.
In 1947, India became the first colony to defeat a European master, but paid a heavy domestic price. India did not join the world war, but succumbed to a virtual civil war between Hindus and Sikhs on one side, and Muslims on the other. Without the help of organized armies or dictators, two million Indians killed one another in the partition riots as two countries emerged from one land. Estimates vary, but over six million devastated people became refugees in an exchange of populations.
It was a legacy that could have institutionalized hatreds. Instead, the Indian Constitution offered a federation constructed on the cardinal principles that have established the European Union: a free, democratic polity; equality for every citizen, whether Hindu or Muslim; freedom of internal travel (a facility that the Chinese citizen does not possess); the right to economic migration; a single currency whose value was unaffected by disparities in regional development; and a robust federalism that permitted provinces to keep their regional languages as their means of administration and social intercourse, while two national languages, Hindi and English, maintained communication across the nation. Europe achieved in the Sixties what India fashioned in 1950.
The spirit of new India rose above the history of Hindu-Muslim conflict to give life to a vision. But the tensions generated by that conflict have been a central fact of our modern history, and inevitably nurtured a literature that attempted to understand the nuances of a human story beyond the dimensions of historical facts. My own books, whether analysis [India: The Siege Within, Kashmir: Behind the Vale, The Shade of Swords], biography [Nehru: The Making of India], reportage [Riot After Riot, Byline], or fiction [Blood Brothers] have sought to examine an emotional landscape that has often been bleak, but nevertheless found the strength for optimism through humanism.
My view of the tensions and undercurrents prevalent through the Muslim world has not always been understood as I might have wished. When Samuel Huntington quoted a sentence from an essay I had written, in his famous monograph, The Clash of Civilizations, he gave it a completely different interpretation: I was discussing colonization, and not civilization, when I said that the region between Morocco and Indonesia was becoming an arc of battle. In too large a section of this region, colonization has been replaced by neo-colonization, spawning powerful local elites that have denied democracy and liberalism to their own people.
Every former colony has become independent, but how many are free? Millions in Africa and Asia, of all races and religious persuasions, have become victims of domestic oligarchies and autocracies protected by the muscle of instruments of state. The people are denied the elementary rights of a fearless voice and a genuine vote.
As a Muslim and as an Indian I am proud of the fact that Indian Muslims are the only Muslims in the world who have enjoyed six decades of continuous democratic freedoms. Some Muslim-majority nations have enjoyed democracy in spells; others have been denied it completely under one excuse or the other.
Freedom is the essence of literature. Freedom includes the right to be wrong in debate, but it does not extend to superiority or abuse. The harmony of Indians depends on respect for each other's space and sentiment. When this is breached, there is a spurt of havoc that serves as a reminder that the ideal is not yet within reach.
Secularism in India is not the absence of faith, but space for all faiths.
When Mahatma Gandhi began to mould an idea of India into a freedom movement, he said that politics without religion was immoral. Gandhi, an alchemist who destroyed the age of colonization with a toothless smile, was not a fundamentalist. For him, religion was the basis of morality. Religion shapes an Indian's identity perhaps more than any other factor. Indians do not treat religion as "anti-modern". It would be inconceivable for an Indian Prime Minister who was a Sikh, as is the case today, to appear in public without the turban demanded by his faith; to suggest that a symbol of faith should not be permitted in a state institution would be laughed off.
Islam and Hinduism have co-existed in India for almost as long as Islam and Christianity have co-existed in the Middle East, Africa and significant sections of south and east Europe. There is no major Hindu writer in the Indian tradition who believes that the literary merit of his work would improve dramatically by taunting the Prophet of Muslims, or an important Muslim writer who discovered aesthetic virtue in insulting Hanuman, the monkey god.
Literature is for the reader, and you cannot reach the reader by hurling abuse at what he holds sacred. Even Marxism, which made religion politically incorrect between Europe and the shores of the Pacific, had to compromise in India. The Communists, who have held power for over three decades in Bengal, started to win elections only after they bowed to the Goddess Durga, or her other avatar, the Goddess Kali, during the annual celebrations through which she is worshipped.
Language is used as a seed in quality Indian literature, not as a landmine. Indians would quickly see through some of the phrases that have come to control the discourse about Islam in America and Europe. Let us examine just one instance, widely in currency after President George Bush introduced it into the political dictionary sometime before the fifth anniversary of 9/11: 'Islamic fascism' or 'Islamofascism'. Islam is 1400 years old. How old is fascism? It appeared on the political map of Europe only with Mussolini in 1920. So whatever else fascism might be, it cannot be Islamic. On the other hand, there are many Muslim rulers who are fascists or at least despots. But why blame Islam for the sins of Muslims? Do we blame Christianity for Hitler, or the Vatican for Mussolini?
Literature cannot be subservient to laws. I am reminded of that famous aphorism: No court can save a society that needs a court to be saved. Literature cannot be saved by laws; it is better served by sensibility. India believes in an inclusive sensibility.
India, I suggested, was the Europe of the East. When will Europe become the India of the West?