VIEWPOINT

ROMIT BAGCHI

When the nation was undergoing a churn over the resurgent Bharat-India controversy, I could hardly remain immune to it.  Like others, I also began to reflect on what ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ signify. What ‘India’ signifies is clear – a Union of States, a geographical marker, an administrative entity. But what does ‘Bharat’ or ‘Bharatavarsha’ signify? Can we define it as easily as we define ‘India’?

As I was contemplating on the subject, a treatise written by Rabindranath Tagore on Bharatavarsha found in the anthology of his Bengali essays came to my mind which I had read when I was a school student. I must admit that I could not make much out of it at that time as the thoughts suffusing the text were too lofty, too sublime, too exalted for my adolescent brain to comprehend. So I reread it and then it filled me with a sense of awe. Bharatavarsha appeared to me as a mystifying, timeless, unfathomable phenomenon embodying the quintessence of the eternal quest of the human race for the Supreme Reality, a land of the final pilgrimage of humanity: Bharat Tirtha.  

Now, let us see what Tagore wrote about Bharatavarsha. “The Real Bharat does not come into sight when we look at the country through the misty shrouds made of the gory, ever-changing scenes similar to what constitutes a nightmare… in the historical accounts handed to us by foreigners, we just get to read about the dust and the storm, the turbulence and the turmoil. While reading that history it seems that Bharat did not exist then and only a whirlwind of the Mughals and the Pathans wandered from north to south and from west to east. But when the foreigners came to our shores, Bharatavarsha was still here or else who gave birth to the likes of Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya and Tukaram amidst all these intrusions and incursions? Not only were there Delhi and Agra, but Kashi and Nabadwip were there too. We learn since our childhood to disparage her and as a result we get disparaged ourselves. An English boy is aware of his country’s history, of his ancestors having won many wars, conquered many lands and accumulated fabulous wealth through trade and commerce and he too wants to be an heir to his nation’s legacy.  We, on the other hand, learn that our ancestors did none of these things.  And as we are ignorant of what our ancestors did, we naturally become inclined to ape others.”

But what is the soul of Bharatavarsha that keeps enlivening the physical body of the land through millennia of time? Tagore wrote: “The history of real Bharatavarsha is replete with the answer to this question. Bharatavarsha denotes a driving force to establish unity amidst diversity, to make various paths move towards one goal, to experience the One-in-Many as the innermost reality of existence, to pursue with invincible conviction that supreme principle of inner unity which runs through the apparent differences and to realise and achieve this truth without annihilating the distinctions that appear in the external world. This ability to perceive this indivisible Oneness amidst baffling diversity is the fulcrum on which the real Bharatavarsha is founded…But our ties with this Bharatavarsha lie outside text books. If these ties get lost our soul loses its anchorage. We are no weeds or parasite plants. Over millennia of time, it is our roots, hundreds and thousands of them, that have kept the soul of Bharatavarsha throbbing.”

Yet, this Bharatavarsha won her freedom amidst cataclysmic events: mutual carnage, arson, forced conversions, mass migration, mass abductions and savage assaults perpetrated on women with about 75,000 of them being raped, disfigured or dismembered. Over 15 million people were uprooted while about two million were left dead.  Nisid Hajari in ‘Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition’ writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

So naturally, the National Leaders of fragmented Bharatavarsha were shaken and scared. They longed to move forward, leaving behind the blood-spattered legacy of the terrible partition. Desperate to keep communal peace in the territory they got to govern, they chose to bottle up the communal genie and tried compromises. Vande Mataram, the mahamantra, the marching song, the rallying cry of the freedom struggle, was stripped of its stanzas as the national song after the national leaders accepted the validity of the objections raised by a section of Muslims to certain parts of the song having religious connotations. Similarly, when it came to the newborn country’s nomenclature, Bharat, which held a cherished place in the collective consciousness of the majority of the people, was significantly kept out of the Article 1 (1) of original draft of the Constitution introduced by the chairman of the drafting committee BR Ambedkar in November 1948 which said: “India shall be a Union of States.” It triggered fierce opposition from a number of the Constituent Assembly members who insisted on the inclusion of Bharat or Bharatavarsha. But Ambedkar resisted any amendment. Many scholars opined that the name Bharat was thought to have Hindu connotation. Finally, a compromise was struck and Bharat was added to Article 1(1): “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.”

However, the debate did not stop. Some members passionately demanded it be rephrased with Bharat to be put ahead of India.  I will not get into the details of the debate.  I will just quote one of them whose speech battling for Bharat struck me as the most interesting. He is Kamalapati Tripathi. He said: “When a country is in bondage, it loses its soul. During its slavery for one thousand years, our country, too, lost everything. We lost our culture, we lost our history, we lost our self- respect, we lost our soul and indeed we lost our form and name.” However, despite the opposition, the sequence was maintained with India kept ahead of Bharat.

Yet, when all is said and done, we must bear in mind the fact that it was a volatile, perilous time with a dark shadow of uncertainty looming large over the unity and the stability of the nascent country.  The cynics both at home and abroad doubted the survival of the fledgling nation. Nehru said in 1947, “First things must come first and the first thing is the security and stability of India.” The national leaders were aware of the colossal challenges staring them in the face in the nation-building process. It was not that they were not proud of Bharat’s heritage; yet it was not the time to revel in adventurism but of exercising cautious restraint, of keeping their heads above their hearts and of realistically accommodating divergent views to strengthen the security and stability of newborn India.