A glossary of Indianness

Shashi Tharoor
TOI, 21 April

What does it mean to be an Indian? Our nation is such a conglomeration of languages, cultures, ethnicities that it is tempting to dismiss the question as unanswerable. How can one define a country that has 2,000 castes and sub-castes, 22,000 languages and dialects and 300 different ways of cooking the potato? Sixty years after Independence, however, it will no longer do to duck the question. For amidst our diversities we have all acquired a sense of what we have in common: the assumptions, the habits, the shared reference-points that constitute the cultural and intellectual baggage of every thinking Indian.

Of course, India's complexities make the task a little more difficult than that of the British friend who defined Englishness as "cricket, Shakespeare, the BBC". Any Indian equivalent "cricket, Bollywood, the Mahabharata?" would be far more contentious. Instead of a phrase, therefore, one would need an entire glossary, an A to Z of Indianness. I've decided to embark on one in this space, not every week but from time to time, and readers' suggestions for must-include topics are most welcome. And since each Indian has his or her own view of India, this glossary must be treated as being as singular and idiosyncratic, as wide-ranging and maddeningly provocative as India itself. Let's try the 'A's this week.

Just a couple of decades ago I would have had to begin my glossary with All India Radio 'Akashvani': the voice of the sky, which was also the voice of millions of radio-receivers, transistors and loudspeakers blaring forth from puja pandals and tea shops. Its ubiquitousness reflected the indispensability of radio in a country where most people could not read, and where television was largely absent (can anyone still remember those days?). Despite the often heavy hand of government on its programmes, the anodyne cadences of its newsreaders and the requests for filmi-geet from improbably remote locations, All India Radio mirrored the triumphs and trivialities that engaged the nation.

But its moderation also meant mediocrity. In the first five decades of our Independence, when an Indian wanted real news, he switched on the BBC; for detailed analyses, he turned to the newspapers; for entertainment, he went to the movies.

The rest of the time, he listened to Akashvani. Today, AIR's monopoly has long since given way to a proliferation of cable television channels and the mushrooming of FM stations. So no Akashvani; but even in 2007 one cannot eliminate, as our first entry, the...

Ambassador: Ambassador cars are the classic symbol of India's post-independence industrial development. Outdated even when new, inefficient and clumsy, wasteful of steel and petrol, overpriced and overweight, with a steering-mechanism like an ox-cart's and a frame like a tank's, the Ambassador dominated Indian routes for decades, protected and patronised in the name of self-reliance. Foreigners were constantly amazed that this graceless ugliness enjoyed two-year waiting-lists at all the dealers right up to the 1990s. What they didn't realise is that if they had to drive on Indian roads in Indian traffic-conditions, they'd have preferred Ambassadors too.


Amitabh: the star who refuses to fade away, the 'Angry Young Man' of yesteryear has epitomised the hopes and dreams of a nation for nearly three decades. Bachchan remains a superstar in an overladen firmament, a cinema-hero of unprecedented popularity whose impact on the nation has been out of all proportion to his talent. To appreciate Amitabh Bachchan, you have to confuse action with acting and prefer height to depth, but there's no denying the way in which the now Complacent Middle-Aged Man has hummed and hammed his way into the nation's hearts. When he had a serious ailment, the nation prayed for his recovery; every vendor of garlands and coconuts stood poised for celebration or mourning. When the ruling party wanted to capture a difficult parliamentary seat and dispose of an inconveniently strong opponent, it turned to Amitabh Bachchan. When he realised politics couldn't be enacted like the movies, he quit, went into business, flirted with bankruptcy and reinvented himself as a TV game-show host, before returning to the big screen with a beard to complement his baritone. Through it all, Amitabh has remained the 'Big B', but in a glossary of India, he leads the 'A' list...

Amritsar: is engraved on every Indian heart; the city of the Pool of Nectar drips blood onto the pages of India's history. The tragedy of the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh in 1917 gave a focus and a cause to the incipient struggle for nationhood a nationhood on which the deaths in the Golden Temple in 1984 did more than anything else to cast a shadow.

Ashoka: the great conqueror-turned-pacifist is the one figure of history who has most inspired independent India's schizoid governmental ethos. For decades, his tolerance and humanitarianism, his devotion to peace and justice, infused our declarations of policy; his military might, his imposition of a Pax Indica on his neighbours, informed our practice.

Our national spokesmen inherited his missionary belief that what was good for Magadha was good for the world. And in choosing a national symbol our government preferred his powerful trinity of lions to the spinning-wheel advocated by Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, though, the only institution they saw fit to give his name to was a five-star hotel.

Astrology: has not only survived, it has grown in importance, as more and more important decisions are made by those who believe in it. Marriages are not arranged, flights not planned, elections not called until astrological charts are drawn up and consulted. An Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit-card, and he is subject to many of the same disadvantages in life...