THE LANGUAGE OF BELONGING
IF PATRIOTISM IS A LOVE OF SOMETHING ONE IS WILLING TO DIE FOR, NATIONALISM—PRIDE IN AN ABSTRACT NOTION OF NATION—IS SOMETHING ONE IS WILLING TO KILL FOR
IT IS A SIGN OF THE TIMES that Dr Johnson’s lapidary utterance—“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”—is enjoying a sudden revival. This revival, however, is marked by some tweaks that might spring from ignorance, or malice. Thus, someone was tempted to substitute “liberalism” for Dr Johnson’s “patriotism”. However, there is little room for ambiguity as to the actual words uttered—Boswell was at hand—but there is some ambiguity as to what he might have meant by it. Apparently, there are local political resonances—as well as some suggestion that what prompted the good doctor’s ire might have been the “patriotism” of the American colonists, fighting for freedom from England, who were happy to utter the high rhetoric enshrined in their Declaration of Independence—life, liberty and all that stuff—with no consciousness of any contradiction there with their status as white slaveholders.
However, irrespective of what Dr J might have meant, for our present purposes, his words are insufficient. Patriotism is altogether too mild, and it is nationalism that demands our attention—for it is nationalism that is, pace Johnson, the first refuge of the scoundrel. From Orban in Hungary to Netanyahu in Israel, from Erdogan to Salvini to Trump to our own, homegrown, self-proclaimed “nationalists”—clearly, nationalism is the flavour of the time. And there is little that the “antinational”
“urban naxals” can do—when they are not busy subverting the state and bringing down the established order, that is—except to suck on it. However, I have no intention to dabble in such inflammatory matters, so I will restrict myself to a pedantic lexical exercise, exploring the specificity, and the distinction, between nationalism and patriotism.
Patriotism is by far the older idea—deriving as it does from “patria”, or fatherland. (Sorry, sisters, but “matriotism” doesn’t have the same ring, does it?) However, the crucial thing here is that patriotism is understood typically under the sign of love—love of one’s country, one’s people, etc. And this “country” is certainly not the “nation”. One classic expression of this sentiment is Yeats’s poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”:
...my country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor... This enables us to remark another characteristic of “patriotism”—that it is a love of something that one is willing to
die for—as in Horace’s famous utterance, which Wilfred Owen mocked in his bitter World War One poem—Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Owen’s poem is an unblinking description of a soldier choking to death in a mustard gas attack, and ends with a bitterly ironic reference to Horace: it is sweet and beautiful to die for one’s country.
The morbidity that shadows love in evocations of “patriotism”—“the sands of the desert are sodden red, and what have I done for thee England, my England”—is substituted by rather different emotions when we enter the territory of “nationalism”. Here, instead of the love for particular things that informs patriotism, nationalism is characterised by the emotion of pride—pride in a somewhat abstract notion of the “nation”. And, equally significantly, instead of the “dying” that seems to shadow patriotism, nationalism is something that one is willing, and perhaps required, to kill for. Patriotism is, essentially, defensive, conservative; nationalism is, of its very nature, aggressive and aggrandising.
There is a set of Hindi terms that captures, rather beautifully, the argument that I am trying to make here. Thus, our best term for the “nation” in nationalism is rashtra—and, for me, the hard, syncopated consonants—shtr—tell me all that I need to know about the emotions at play there. The term that carries the sense of country is “desh”—but that final “sh” still sounds too distant—and it is the folk “des” that seems attuned to the necessary intimacy of patriotism. Kishori Amonkar’s “aavo mhaaro des” would be all wrong with a terminal “desh”. And there is a beautiful raga that I call Des—though I have heard it called Desh, too. I wait with dread for what Raga Rashtra will sound like—drums, certainly. Massed voices, chanting slogans. And sundry sounds—bones being broken, flesh pulped with iron rods .... Very post-romantic.
Typically, in this kind of context, people invoke “the idea of India”—which is, variously, affirmed, endangered, eulogised, traduced. However, in light of the lexical distinction that I am trying to explore, I propose that we work through “the feeling of India” instead. I expect that very soon we will encounter the local affinities that give patriotism their characteristic emotional tone. Thus, the “India” I feel patriotic about is inextricably bound to the specificity of my location in the heartland—with its chaotic heterogeneity and its deep cosmopolitan culture, produced by the settling together of diverse peoples over the millennia—qafile
baste gaye, Hindostan banta gaya. There is the crush of humanity that assembles every winter, as if by instinct, on the banks of the river. But there is also the hot summer wind—the loo—against
which one huddles behind reed chiks—which
filter the harsh summer light, and are associated with the snatched romantic moments of deeply conservative societies. There is also the paradoxical privacy of the mango orchard, the amraaee—
and the delicately erotic allure of the world conjured in the music of the poorvi ang—the light showers of saawan, the jhoolas: barsan laagi kaari badariya / bagiyan mein jhoole pare .... Of course, the gardens are only an ever-distant memory now, but this is the “India” that informs my patriotism. But I suspect that the emotional and visual content of the patriotisms of different people—people from different parts of the country—will each be unique. And that is fine.
Nationalism, on the other hand, cannot, by its very nature, accommodate this heterogeneity—and the attempt to fold it into some triumphant singularity—“New India”—must inevitably entail violence. I hear sounds of the Rashtra Raga starting up—it sounds like the stamp of boots, entering the Valley—but meanwhile, the image of the angry Hanuman that has sprouted on a million car windows is future enough for me. The image of Bharat Mata has undergone a fascinating evolution, all the way from the fragile maiden of the Abanindranath Tagore painting to the flag-waving warrior-maiden image of the Hindutva imaginary. I fear that the visual analogue of the “India”, no longer Bharat, that we see bellowing all around us—angry fists, pumping the air—might no longer be containable within any imagination of the “feminine”. Might I suggest, in all humility, that our culture provides us with a possible solution in the figure of the Ardhanarishwara—an androgynous divinity that is, after all, uniquely Indian?
THE ‘INDIA’ I FEEL PATRIOTIC ABOUT IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO ITS CHAOTIC HETEROGENEITY, PRODUCED BY THE SETTLING TOGETHER OF DIVERSE PEOPLES OVER THE MILLENNIA—QAFILE BASTE GAYE, HINDOSTAN BANTA GAYA