Geopolitics of India’s Cultural Diversity: Conceptualization and Contestations

Introduction

The major argument of this paper is that one of the major threats to cultural diversity at the local, national as well as global levels emanates from the geopolitics of exclusion. Geopolitics can be critically conceptualized as a ‘way of seeing’ whereby groups and individuals, political elite, and the institutions and intellectuals of statecraft, attempt to spatialize and discipline socio-cultural diversity of their respective societies by implanting maps of meaning, relevance and order onto the highly complex and dynamic universe they inhabit, observe, try to understand, and often desire to dominate. Contingent as well as context-bound, geopolitics can also be considered intimately bound up with the nation-state and its capacity to produce, regulate and survey political space.

The paper makes an attempt to critically examine the ways in which the hegemonic and homogenizing categories of British imperial mapping of the sub-continent came into being, have survived the bloody partition of British India in 1947, and continue to be deployed by the dominant geopolitical discourses in contemporary India to discipline cultural diversity. The paper also reflects on certain commonalities between the boundary producing discourses of Hindutva --a geopolitical project of making India more explicitly Hindu-- and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis of Samuel P. Huntington. Instead of understanding boundary as dividing lines between social power structures (states) the meaning of boundaries is reconceptualised in this paper as part of the construction of difference, inclusions and exclusions through geopolitical discourses at both micro and macro levels. The geopolitical reasoning of rejection and exclusion, expressed largely in ‘cultural-religious’ idioms by both Hindutva and Huntington vis-à-vis Islam and ‘Islamic Civilization’, is being examined in terms of power-political motives. In short, some of the key issues that this paper attempts to answer, especially in reference to increasing ‘global threats to cultural diversity’, are as follows: who are places for, whom do they include and exclude, and how are the related understandings and interpretations maintained in practice? How are places and peoples (natural-human-cultural geographies) for example, being ‘categorized’ within the Geographies of imperial/national knowledge systems?

Constructing ‘India’ in the Geopolitical Imaginations of the Raj

From 1757 to 1857, the English East India Company serially annexed, or else extended its indirect rule over, each of the Indian states. Capitalizing fully its political, commercial and military prowess, the English Company annexed into its direct rule some 2.5 million square kilometres or one million square miles –over sixty per cent of the territory of the sub-continent containing over three-quarters of its people. In the wake of the brutal suppression of a widespread military and civil revolt which had spread through much of northern India in 1857 and 1858, the British, who had started their rule as ‘outsiders’, became ‘insiders’ by vesting in their monarch the sovereignty through the Government of India Act of 2 August 1858.
However, the British knew that their efforts at social engineering were woefully inadequate in legitimizing the British rule in India. Territorial annexation of India had to be supplemented by the annexation of ‘Indian’ in imperial knowledge systems. The mega-diversity of the subcontinent had to be reduced to the status of ‘familiar’ and ‘intelligible’, and established at the same time as ‘inferior’, in the British vision of India. As an integral part of the larger Enlightenment project, which through observation, study, counting and classification attempted to understand the world outside Europe, the British set out to ‘order’ the people who inhabited their new Indian dominion. It was crucial that India came to be known in such a manner that would sustain a system of colonial authority, and through categories that made it ‘look’ fundamentally different. In other words, the categories the British would avoid were those which might announce India’s similarity to Britain and threaten the colonial order. Accordingly, categories such as caste, community and tribe were placed at the heart of the Indian social system. Whereas class, which Victorian Englishmen considered as the most divisive factor in their own society, was conspicuous by its absence in the British accounts of Indian peoples.

Despite its inconsistencies and subordination to the needs of colonial rule, the British ethnographic enterprise had far-reaching consequences. For, these very categories --of case and community, of race and sect— informed the ways in which the British, and in time the Indians themselves, conceived of the basic structure of their society. It was only with the coming of the British rule, from the late 18th century on, that the idea of two opposed and self-contained communities of the ‘Hindus’ and the ‘Muslim’ in India took a definite shape. The two religious communities were defined, demarcated and demonized in terms of certain basic differences. In short, the British, by highlighting the centrality of religious community, along with that of caste, marked out India’s distinctive status as fundamentally different land and peoples.

What the British ‘construction of communalism’ had willfully glossed over was the fact that the term ‘Hindu’ was traditionally used not in any sense of a homogenous-monolothic religious belief but mainly as a signifier of location and country. The term has Persian-Arabic origin and derives from the river Indus or ‘Sindhu’ (the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization that flourished from around 3,000 BC), and the name of that river is also the source of the word India itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the land around and beyond the Indus, and the Hindus were the native people of that land. Muslims from India were at one stage called ‘Hindvi Muslims’, in Persian as well as Arabic, and there are plenty of references in early British documents to ‘Hindoo Muslims’ and ‘Hindu Christians’ to distinguish them respectively from Muslims and Christians from outside India. Even when the term ‘Hindu’ was used as a marker to distinguish those adhering to a non-Islamic faith, the perception each group had of the other was not in terms of a monolithic religion, but more in terms of distinct and disparate castes and sects along a social continuum. According to some scholars, the coming of Islam led to a new emphasis on the distinction of India, as against the innumerable distinctions within the land.

However, categories necessitate definition and definitions are in turn needed to impose order. This is where the geopolitics of census, which was introduced by the British in 1872, became integral to the British imperial mapping of India, with special reference to construction of mutually exclusive religious communities in terms of their particular demographic and geographical features. This is how the communal consciousness was forcefully injected into otherwise ‘fuzzy’ communities. It is hard to find evidence in support of a sustained communal hatred operating at the popular level prior to colonial rule. The partition of Bengal based on religion in 1905 was the most glaring example of how the British deployed a geopolitical discourse relating to the size of religious communities and their distribution to widen the rift between religious communities, especially between Hindus and Muslims. A new province of East Bengal and Assam was created with predominance of Muslims in East Bengal in 1905.

The new communal consciousness was further perpetuated through the political instrument of separate electorates wherein religious minorities were given separate seats in the legislative bodies according to their proportion of population in the provinces. Even the seats in government medical college Lahore was distributed in the ratio of 40: 40: 20 amongst Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Punjab. Such a policy resulted in further sharpening of communal antagonism in the country, fixed Hindus and Muslims in hostile camps, exacerbated Hindu-Muslim divisions and fostered the spirit of political exclusiveness. Consequently, Muslims were made to ‘see’ the advantage of pressing for special safeguards and concessions in accordance with numerical strength, social status, local influence and social requirement of their community. It is important to bear in mind that communal riots were rare down to the 1880s.

Apparently, a point that the British had so conveniently glossed over was that mapping the land of India has not been simply the domain of the cartographers of empires. In a variety of Hindu traditions, we find that map-making has been the domain of both cosmologist and mythmakers, and the imagined landscape they have created –a landscape shaped by the duplication and repetition of its features-- is far more culturally powerful than that displayed on the Bartholomew’s map of India. One good example of duplication and replication is Gangā, considered as the most sacred river by the Hindus. Gangā as a whole is duplicated throughout India with seven major ‘Gangās’ and numberless other rivers called Gangā. Furthermore, in this landscape networks of pilgrimage places have generated a powerful sense of land and location, not as a nation-state in the modern usage of the term, but as a shared, living landscape, with all its cultural and regional complexity.

Moreover, over the past 1,000 years or so, an extensive Indo-Muslim culture has evolved with its own imagined landscape. There are many places where what we have come to call “Muslim”, Hindu, Sikh or Christian traditions through the retrojective labeling of history have a lived-history and lived-reality of their own in which devotion has not subscribed to the boundaries of what we call the ‘religions’ Various examples of confluence and layering of religious traditions around sacred sites abound on the sub-continent. They are a forceful reminder of the fact that cultures are larger and deeper phenomena than religions and in several respects, social and cultural practices of Hindus and Muslims are inseparable. After all the complex evolution of identities, which threw up over the decades and centuries categories such as Bharatvarsha, Al-Hind, Hindustan, Hindus, Muslims and Hindis, offered a range of terms from which the phrase ‘Hindus and Musalmans of Hindustan’ were chosen in 1857.

The Post-Colonial ‘Nation-State’ in India and the Myth of Geopolitical Unity

The British were paid a handsome tribute in the early 1930s by Mahatma Gandhi when he conceded that the “Indian nation was a creation of the empire-builders. Independent India inherited the colonial nation”. The colonial state had been based on bureaucratic institutions and political values, which were not reflected in the historical experience of India. The amorphous structure of Indian civilization had shown the capacity to accommodate a multiplicity of social and linguistic identities, sometimes in a cluster of regional polities, and on other occasions, in a somewhat fragile pan-Indian polity. In the 16th and 17th centuries, when the population around various towns and cities, Lahore or Amritsar for example, would appear to have been as much Muslim as Hindu, a process of peaceful absorption of the new community was under way, accompanied by visible signs of acculturation between Islam and the Hindus. The example of Sufism is most remarkable in this regard and demands as well as deserves critical attention today.

Once the political elite of post-colonial India began constructing its India as a ‘Nation-State’, it too was also compelled to negotiate the geopolitical disjuncture between an acknowledgement of diversity and an insistence upon unity. The Indian state, however, chose to tackle the problem by constructing the ‘consciousness’ of India as a single geopolitical entity, characterized by an organic unity. To a large extent this was a reaction to the colonial thesis that India was diversity and it had no coherent communality except that given by British rule under the integrating system of the imperial crown. The nationalist counter-argument was that despite the diversity, there was an essential unity --and that this unity was not accidental, but some reflection of the unifying tendency in Indian culture and civilization as the ultimate foundation of nationalism.

The founding fathers of India were also forced by various pragmatic considerations to adopt the view that of all the characteristics of a ‘nation’, unity is the most essential: no unity, no nation. Traumatized by the partition of India into two sovereign states, on the one hand, they faced the daunting task of integrating over 500 princely states, which had been outside the circle of British administration. No less compelling in their view was the need to secure their new nation’s frontiers as the successors to those of the British empire in the subcontinent. And they were faced with the task of designing a constitutional-administrative system to make an effective nation from India’s diverse cultural identities. Compulsions such as these drove them to establish a strong central government, a tight ‘federal’ system capable of becoming ‘unitary’ in national ‘emergencies’.

‘Cartographic Anxieties’ of Post-colonial and Post-partition India

In today’s India one finds two principal geopolitical imaginations competing over the ‘core essence’ of India’s national unity and national identity: the ‘secular nationalist’ --combining territory and culture-- and the ‘Hindu nationalist’ --combining religion and territory. It is significant that for both the geopolitical imaginations, defining principle of national identity is territory. The geo-body of India, according to the secular imagination, emphasized for twenty-five hundred years since the times of the Mahabharata, stretches from the Himalayas in the north to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comrin) in the south, and from the Arabian Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east. The Indian sub-continent is not only the birthplace of several religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism), but has also received, accommodated and absorbed ‘outsiders’ (Parsis, Jews, and “Syrian” Christians) over a long period of time. What make Indian civilization unique, therefore, are the virtues of syncretism, pluralism and tolerance reflected in the cultural expression: Sarva Dharma Sambhava (equal respect for all religions).

The most noteworthy example of India’s national identity is Jawaharlal Nehru’s book entitled, The Discovery of India (1946). In Nehru’s construction of India, syncretism, pluralism and tolerance are the signature themes. For Nehru, “some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization.” He ‘discovers’ India’s unity as lying in culture and not religion –hence no notion of a ‘holyland’ in his mental map of the country. For him the heroes of India’s history –Ashoka, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Amir Khusro, Akbar and Gandhi— subscribe to a variety of Indian faiths and it is Aurangzeb, the intolerant Moghul, who “puts the clock back” India’s geography was sacred to Nehru not literally but metaphorically. Moreover, the Nehruvian nation-space was shaped by an economic geography. In this vision, nation as a whole becomes a place of production and places are named and values in accordance with their resource endowment and/or role in economic development. Apparently the Nehruvian nation-space was more inclusive than the nation-space claimed by Hindutva, but it produced and practiced its own exclusions.

Nehru’s secular nationalist construction of India stands in sharp contrast to religious notion of India as originally the land of Hindus, and it is the only land which the Hindus can call their own. According to V. D. Savarkar, the ideological father of Hindu nationalism, “A Hindu is he who feels attached to the land that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu [from river Indus to the seas] as the land of his forefathers –as his Fatherland; who inherits the blood of the great race whose first and discernible source could be traced from the Himalayan altitudes of the Vedic Saptasindhus and which enabling all that was assimilated has grown into and come to be knows as the Hindu people.” What is said to unite the India’s physical landscape is the ‘sacred geography’ of Hindu holy places (Benaras, Triputi, Rameswaram, Puri, Haridwar, Badrinath, Kedarnath, and now Ayodhya) and the holy rivers (Cauveri, Ganga, Yamuna, and the confluence of the last two in Prayag).

It is important to note that the boundaries of India as suggested by the secular-nationalist are coterminous with the 'sacred geography' of the Hindu nationalist whole hallowed pilgrimage sites mark off essentially the same boundaries of the country, although the Hindu nationalist would go much further into mythic history than two and a half millennia to assert ‘historic rights’ on these sites. Since the territorial principle is drawn from a belief in ancient heritage, encapsulated in the notion of 'sacred geography', and it also figures in both secularist and nationalist imaginations it has acquired some kind of a political hegemony over time. The anxiety surrounding questions of national unity, often expressed in terms of ‘territorial integrity’ too is shared by both the secular-nationalists and the Hindu-nationalists.

The rise of ‘Hindutva’ geopolitics: Re-mapping India

Today, in many parts of India, especially the northern and central states, a new Hindu identity is under construction. The rise of ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hindu nationalism’ in India can in some ways be attributed to the overarching ‘organic’ crisis of the Indian ‘nation-state’, having reached its zenith in the 1990s. The growth of Hindu nationalism in India is intimately related to political instability in recent times that, in turn, has undermined the country’s secular organizational structure. A growing anxiety about the future of India has also resulted from the rise of separatist movements of the 1980s in the ‘border states’ of Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir. Equally contributory to the outgrowth of religious autonomy has been the decay and decline of the country’s major political party for the past forty six years or so, namely the Congress party. The religious teleserials of the 1980s also helped tremendously in preparing the ground for the Hinditva movement, by constructing an abstract but influential televisual space which could be cross-mapped on to the Savarkar’s punyabhumi (holy space) model of nation-space.

The project of ‘Hindutva’ is undoubtedly assisted to considerable extent by the fact that this identity is also the basis of political mobilization by the party in power in New Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP is the only cadre-based party in India in the real sense of the term. Unlike the Communist parties and the Congress, having their front organizations with distinctive identities, BJP is a political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS, National Voluntary Corp), meant to implement its programme. The RSS, also known as Sangh Parivar (family), has emerged since its inception in 1925 as the organization articulating Hindu revivalism, especially among the youth, devoted to the establishment of a ‘vibrant Hindu nation’ with the ethos of the alleged Golden Vedic Age at its core.

A geopolitical discourse signifies much more than the identification of specific geographical influences upon a particular foreign policy situation; to identify and name a place is to trigger a series of narratives, subjects and understandings. For example, to designate an area as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Islamic’ amounts to not only a naming ritual, but also to enframing it terms of its ‘sacred geography’, ‘authentic politics’ and the type of foreign policy that its ‘nature’ demands. Geopolitical discourses are rendered meaningful and ‘legitimate’ largely through practical geopolitical reasoning, which relies more on common-sense narratives and distinctions than on formal geopolitical models. One good example of what has been said above is the section entitled, “Hindutva: The Great National Ideology” on the official website of the BJP. The opening stanzas read in part as follows:

In the long history of the world, the Hindu awakening will go down as one of the most monumental events in the history of world…Never before has Bharat, the ancient word for the motherland of the Hindus, India, has been confronted with such an impulse for change. This movement, Hindutva is changing the very foundations of Bharat and Hindu society the world over…During the era of Islamic invasions, what Will Durant called the bloodiest period in the history of mankind, many Hindus gallantly resisted, knowing fully well that defeat would mean a choice of economic discrimination, via the jaziya tax on non-Muslims, forced conversion, or death…In modern times, Hindu Jagriti (awakening] gained momentum when Muslims played the greatest abuse of Hindu tolerance; the demand for a separate state and the partition of India, a nation that had a common history and culture for countless millennia. Thus the Muslims voted for a separate state and the Hindus were forced to sub-divide their own land.

Within the worldview of the Hindu nationalist, “A Hindu means a person who regards his land…from the Indus to the Seas as his Fatherland as well as his Holyland”. In order to qualify as a ‘Hindu’ a person or a group must meet three criteria: territorial (land between the Indus and the Seas), genealogical (‘fatherland’) and religious (‘holyland’). Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists can be part of this definition, for they were born in India and meet all the three criteria. Whereas Christians, Jews, Parsis (already assimilated) and Muslims meet only two. India is not their ‘holyland’. If the Muslims wish to become a part of the Indian nation, they must stop insisting on their distinctiveness and agree to the following essential requirements for complete assimilation: (a) accept unconditionally the centrality of Hinduism to Indian civilization; (b) acknowledge key Hindu figures such as Ram as civilizational heroes, and not simply religious personalities of Hinduism; (c) admit that Muslim rulers (‘invaders’) in various parts of India (between roughly 1000 to 1857) destroyed the pillars of Indian civilization, especially Hindu temples; and (d) withdraw all claims to special privileges, such as the maintenance of religious personal laws and special state grants for their educational institutions. The gendered nature of Hindutva too is extremely important and calls for a closer scrutiny.

More recently, initiatives have been taken to ‘restructure’ and ‘redesign’ the content of education in India by the Sangh Parivar, in order to give a due place to moral code of conduct based on Hindu religious tenets and Hindu scriptural knowledge. This is attempted through a dual strategy of promoting its own network of schools, and at the same time, influencing and changing the content of education in other institutions, especially in BJP ruled states.

There is plenty of evidence to show that this kind of Hindutva being preached by the Sangh Parivar is contrary to many of the liberal, humane, and even critical traditions contained within the broad category we call ‘Hindu’. Yet a visitors to the RSS website is reminded at the very outset that India, that is Bharat (named after the Hindu King Bharat) “has not only been a nation for millennia” but had made phenomenal progress in science, commerce, arts, technology, agriculture, and other spheres, not to mention philosophy and the spiritual domain. We are also told that despite the historical fact that the cultural empire of Bharat extended to the whole of South-east Asia for over two centuries, social unity and dissension have been the cause of Bharat’s political subjugation by alien invaders. And it was against the backdrop of “the 800-year long resistance of the Hindus to the Islamic rule”, that the British made an attempt to subvert the Hindu mind and succeeded in creating a cleavage between the society and its cultural roots and legacy.

According to the RSS ideology, national reconstruction demands the fostering of a national character, uncompromising devotion to the Motherland, military like discipline, self restraint, courage and heroism, and it is to this historic mission that the RSS has devoted itself. According to the RSS, “the State of Jammu & Kashmir, with its oppressive Muslim-majority character, has been a headache for our country.

Globalization and Hindutva are impacting on each other in contradictory as well as complimentary way. One important aspect of this reciprocal involvement is the globalization of Hindutva itself. The globalization of its congregations and constituencies is giving rise to the so-called ‘non-resident Hindutva, especially in the USA and the UK. Today, when the world is witness to more and more such ongoing negotiations (involving both collusion and collisions) between the local and the globalised faces of ethnicity, the net impact is too complex to predict. The entire project of ‘Hindutva’, especially its militant variety, revolves around two apparently complimentary, but deeply contradictory, core ideas. First, the repudiation, denial, and suppression of various forms of diversity, conflict, cleavage and oppression in Indian society. In other words, carving out a monolithic Hindu religious identity out of Indian culture --which has been characterised by syncretism and pluralism-- through assimilation or exclusion of the ‘others’. And second, a glorification of the ‘organic’ cultural unity of the nation in conjunction with a deification of indivisible and unitary state power.

Huntington and Hindutva: Constructing Places and Identities

With the East-West Cold War officially pronounced as over, and the political map of Eurasia radically altered in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mental maps of the intellectuals and institutions of statecraft the world over seem to be in complete disarray. The discourse and practices of globalization, leading simultaneously to integration and fragmentation, have further added a sense of urgency to a search for simplified paradigms or maps for policy making and state action. There appear to be a growing concern, especially after the 11th of September, among the neo-conservative intellectuals of statecraft, especially in the United State of America, that in the wake of increasing deterritorialisation of international politics, sooner the ‘globe’ is reconfigured and ‘fixed’ the better it would be for a “new world order” and all that it entails in terms of containing new threats to world peace and security.

Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis (1996) is aimed at reterritorialisation of the global space by ‘civilizing’ it. According to Huntington, “we need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to: (1) order and generalize about reality; (2) understand causal relationships among phenomena; (3) anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments; (4) distinguish what is important from what is unimportant; and (5) show us what path we should take to achieve our goals (Ibid.: 30). Huntington's Clash of Civilisations thesis constructs a new vision of international politics in the next century. Huntington's key argument is that the history of humanity is, above all, a history of civilisations and that the world of the 21st century will be shaped by "culture and cultural identities, which at the highest possible levels of identification are civilisation identities". Whereas the Japanese, Latin American, and African civilizations appear to be specified geographically, the Confucian, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox civilizations are specified in religious and ethnic terms. The way Huntington evokes a ‘Hindu civilization’, among others, is to call up a foundational identity, a mystical and mythical transcendental presence that is vague yet absolutely fundamental. According to Huntington,

One or more successive civilizations, it is universally recognized, have existed on the Subcontinent since at least 1500 B.C. These are generally referred to as Indian, Indic, or Hindu, with the latter term being preferred for the most recent civilization. In one form or another, Hinduism has been central to the culture of the Subcontinent since the second milennium B.C… It has continued in this role through modern times, even though India itself has a substantial Muslim community as well as several smaller cultural minorities. Like Sinic, the term Hindu also separates the name of the civilization, from the name of its core state, which is desirable when, as in the case of these cases, the culture of the civilization extends beyond that state.”

It is difficult to deny that appeals to ‘culture’ as a justification for particular policies and actions are more common in both national and international politics today than they were, say, a decade or two ago, especially to fundamentalism of all kinds. India is no exception. But at the same time, culture, religion and civilization have divided people at least as much as they have united them. Most of the great wars of history have been fought between states of broadly similar culture, rather than between civilisational blocs: in this very century the European wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, the Sino-Japanese wars and the Iran-Iraq war are good examples.

Cultures are not single, unitary entities. All cultures and religions allow for varying interpretations and, depending on their aims, different states use them in different ways. This goes for economic systems, for political choices and certainly for military alliances. You can justify anything you want in cultural and religious terms. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, interpreters of Judaic texts and scholars of the Koran are each able to find support for whatever stance they prefer, for peace or against it, in their holy texts. According to Huntington, Islam divides the world into two categories: "House of Islam" (the Muslim world) and "House of War" (the rest). But this is antiquated nonsense. Muslim states conduct their foreign policies like any other states, on the basis of national interests; and most of their wars have been with each other, as Saddam would be the first to confirm.

There is another equally strong reason to doubt whether "culture" actually causes events in international politics. The argument presumes the world does indeed consist of distinct cultures, separate entities that have been created separately from each other and which we can discern, or map, in an objective way. This is not true of language, or religion: they may look like discrete blocs now but, through history, there has been a high degree of borrowing and mixing. When it comes to the stuff of international politics - security, political systems, economics - the argument makes even less sense. Despite the separate claims of culture we now live in a world that has a common language and a common set of concepts.

Huntington’s thesis fuels myths about cultural conflict, and reinforces those who seek to consolidate relativist, community-based authority. The voices supporting this view are many - Huntington and communitarian theorists in the west, advocates of ‘Asian values’ in China and south-east Asia, and those who, with varying emphases, call for a return to ‘Islamic’ or ‘Hindu’ values. Huntington's is an argument from the right, an attack on multiculturalism in US society, and on liberal universalism in international relations.

Some proponents of Hindutva might find in Huntington’s rather sweeping generalizations, entitled “Islam’s Bloody Borders”, substantial support for their own anti-Islamic discourse. According to Huntington, “while at the macro or global level of world politics the primary clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the micro or local level it is between Islam and the others…Wherever one looks at the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors…Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of any other civilization…Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards…Even more than Christianity, Islam is an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line between those in the Dar al-Islam and those in the Dar al-harb. As a result, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western Christians, and Orthodox Christians have less difficulty adapting to and living with each other than any one of them has in adapting to and living with Muslims…Militarism, indigestibility, and proximity to non-Muslim groups are continuing features of Islam and could explain Muslim conflict propensity throughout history, if that is the case” (1996: 246-295).

Conclusions

This essay has made a modest attempt to show how once encountered with the mega diversity on the sub-continent, the ‘Geopolitics of Raj’ addressed itself largely to the task of constructing differences between the ‘British’ and the ‘Indians’ on the one hand, among the ‘Indians’ on the other, and the disciplining of those differences through the transformation of ‘fuzzy’ communities into homogenous-monolithic categories. Whereas the major geopolitical concerns of the post-Colonial State (‘Nation-State’!) in India seem to revolve around (a) the uncontested inheritance of certain colonial legacies, especially the British ideology of ‘communal’ difference in India (b) the subtle but at times harsh denial and disciplining of religious, socio-economic and linguistic diversity by invoking the myth of ‘geopolitical unity’ and (c) the growing tendency on the part of the Indian state to deal ‘authoritatively’, both at home and abroad, with mounting cartographic anxieties over preserving the ‘territorial integrity’ of the country; a concern shared by both the so-called secular nationalists and the Hindu nationalists.

Against the backdrop of perennial tension between the disciplinary practices of the geopolitical discourse(s) of ‘unity in diversity’ and the resisting impulses of the geo-cultural ‘diversity of unity’ on the sub-continent, the secular-nationalist and the Hindu-nationalist, neither represent nor exhaust the entire range and variety of geopolitical imaginations to be found across the length and breadth of India. Hindu nationalism has two simultaneous impulses: building a united India as well as “Hinduizing” the polity and the nation. Muslims and other groups are not excluded from the definition of India, but inclusion is conditional upon assimilation, on acceptance of the political and cultural centrality of Hinduism. If assimilation is not acceptable to minorities, Hindu nationalism becomes exclusionary, both in principle and practice. The contest among various such imaginations and representations of ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ for spatial hegemony will continue to rearrange the geo-social map of the sub-continent.

The end of the cold war and the attendant changes in world politics have prompted many geopolitical speculations and imaginations in regard to where the world is heading. From Halford J. Mackinder (Heartland) to Samuel P. Huntington (Clash of Civilizations), what appears to be common to all such geo-political theories is that they give the impression of having discovered, through some kind of a divine vision, universally valid and morally superior insights into peoples and places. To quote Huntington (1996:31), “…we need a map that both portrays reality and simplifies reality in a way that best serves our purposes”. And this is what brings Hindutva and Huntington closer together in some crucial respects. Both, in the wake of growing intellectual and political disenchantment with state-centric reasoning, aim at remapping the political space (at two different, but not entirely unrelated, levels) and to redraw the boundaries between the “familiar” and the “threatening”, between the “friends” and the “foes”. Both the projects are sustained through the production and circulation of a “new” geographical knowledge about places and identities, and both seem to be ably assisted by certain tendencies on the ground.

The proponents of both Hindutva and the Clash of Civilizations, however, seem oblivious of the historical and political circumstances that shape a particular understanding of place. They propagate a geopolitical cartography, which is rooted in threat perceptions (in this case Islam), and legitimizes itself by deliberately ignoring the complex interplay between the physical landscapes(s) and the human landscape(s), at both micro and macro levels. And both suffer from serious contradictions both at the discursive and ground-reality levels. A bad news for both Huntington and Hindutva is that the geopolitical discourse of the Hindu-nationalists, however, neither represents nor exhausts the entire range and variety of geopolitical imaginations to be found across profoundly diverse human-cultural geographies of India or the world at large. Nor are the communities –more real than imagined-- willing to be treated like passive objects of violent conversion into categories of geopolitical control and manipulation. Rather central to the project of resisting the geopolitics of exclusion and marginalization is the long-due task of deconstructing the hegemonic and homogenizing religious categories to which the ‘South Asians’ are becoming increasingly habitual in order to understand themselves and the world around them.