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Showing posts from August, 2012

Indian? Who? You? Me?

This comes after an off-the-cuff discussion on Facebook about the British being good or bad for us. We've all had a million put together, I know, but this was a little more specific and had a lot to take home. From the many conclusions I reached during the course of the discussion, one, which was strongly contested, was about when we became India indeed. When we study about India in our history books, we are referring to what we became (and what became) years later, as a culmination of those identities. We weren't India yet, until the British proclaimed the Indian Subcontinent as one of their territories overseas. We were Bharata Varsa a long time ago, according to the Puranas. India is the Greek word for "beyond the Indus". But we really never meant what we mean so passionately when we say India now until we were one people under British suffering. Our unity was not in our common culture, but in our common suffering. Before that, we were small littl