http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mohan-bhagwat-rss-workshop-at-delhi-university-yes-bring-on-bharatiyata-4590003/
Quote from the above article followed by my comment:
“Indigenisation
would require confronting the self as much as confronting the other. The
insidious claim in the call to indigenisation is this: What counts as Indian?
Who gets to set these terms? What about western ideas? What about Islam? Will
we recognise, as Aurobindo did, “However much we may deplore some of the characteristics
of that intervening period which were dominated by the western standpoint or
move away from that standpoint back to our own characteristic way of seeing
existence, we cannot get rid of a certain element of inevitable change it has
produced upon us, any more than a man can go back in life to what he was some
years ago?” Will we recognise as Aurobindo did, that Islam nourished India and
was nourished by it? Or will the choice of indigenous be determined by
Golwalkar who said non-Hindu peoples must “stay in the country wholly
subordinated to the Hindu nation”? A genuine indigenisation would require
embracing all of India; not parts of it. So, bring on the indigenisation that
embraces all, the Western and the Islamic, the Aghoris and the Tantriks, the Marxists
and the Liberals, as Indian.”
The quote from Sri Aurobindo is from his
book The Renaissance of India (CWSA,
Vol. 20, p 51). The context of it is whether India can or should go back to its
culture as it was before the Mahomedan and British conquest. Sri Aurobindo says
that we cannot go back to our great past, but we “can go forward to a large
repossession of ourselves in which we shall make a better, more living, more
real, more self-possessed use of the intervening experience”. This can hardly
mean that Islam has “nourished India”! It could as well mean that the problems
of building a nation have multiplied instead of diminishing with the coming of
Islam into India. If Islam had really “nourished India”, then there would have
been no problems at all in unifying the Indian nation.
