Jawaharlal Nehru’s 120th birthday
By Willy | November 14, 2009
On this day 120 years ago, in the United Provinces of British India, Jawaharlal Nehru was born. Pandit Nehru, as he came to be known, would grow up to be one of the leading figures in India’s struggle for independence, and independent India’s first prime minister. Among figures in the history of modern India, Nehru ranks second only to Gandhi in significance and prominence.
Cambridge-educated Nehru was the political successor of Gandhi, although the two men were opposites in many ways. While Gandhi advocated a return to ruralism and small-scale economies, Nehru was interested in industrial development and technological advancement. During the independence movement, Nehru faithfully followed Gandhi’s example of non-violence, although unlike Gandhi he did not believe in it as an ideology. Most visibly, Gandhi quit his western habits and lived as a peasant, encouraging his followers to do likewise. Nehru simplified his lifestyle to some extent, but remained a sophisticated urbanite.
Like the other leaders of the Congress party, Nehru spent many years in jail because of his non-violent protests against the British Raj. He devoted much of his time to writing. His most important works were Glimpses of World History (1934); his autobiography, published in the United States under the title Toward Freedom (1936); and The Discovery of India (1946). These books show a level of insight and erudition sadly uncommon in modern world leaders.
Ironic for the leader of one of the most religious countries in the world, throughout his life Nehru remained an atheist or agnostic. In his writings, he indicated a regret that he could not believe like his fellow countrymen and -women. Nehru’s life was marked with grief. His father, mother, and wife Kamala all died within five years of each other in the 1930s. Nehru was left with one daughter, Indira, who would also serve as prime minister of India.
After independence, Nehru steered India on a path of “non-alignment” by agreeing with the ideologies of neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. For seventeen years, Nehru led the world’s largest democracy through Partition, war with Pakistan, war with China, and famine, as well as economic and industrial development. As Gandhi’s successor, Nehru had an almost messianic popularity among the people of India. In world politics, he deeply resented Americans as neo-colonialists, but also distrusted the Soviet Union for their disrespect of human rights. Nehru died while still holding office on May 27, 1964. Both his daughter and her son were also prime ministers of India, and his family continues to influence Indian politics to this day.
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India’s Axial Age
By Willy | October 14, 2009
Occurring in the middle of the first millennium BC, the Axial Age saw a transformation of human thinking and religion from external actions and rituals to internal thoughts and feelings. Religion began to pass from a tightly-controlled priesthood to the common people. Axial Age thinking affected many countries simultaneously. In Greece, Socrates dared to doubt everything. The later Hebrew prophets in Palestine wrote that Yahweh was tired of sacrifices and wanted only devotion. At the same time, Confucius and Lao-Tzu redefined Chinese religion and society.
Like China, India had two major Axial Age thinkers that left their mark on religion and society. One of these was Mahavira, who found enlightenment and release from the problem of suffering by extreme asceticism. His followers began known as the Jains.
India’s other great figure of the Axial Age was Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. Although undoubtedly an historical figure, Gautama’s life is recorded only in accounts that are heavily mythologized. From them we can gather that he was born to a kshatriya (ruling-caste) family in what is now Nepal. Disaffected with his pleasurable princely life, he ran away to seek an answer to the problem of human suffering. Meditating under a pipal tree in Gaya, Gautama became enlightened and concluded that all suffering was caused by desire, and desire could be done away with by following a moderate path of right actions and intentions. With this realization, Gautama became the Buddha, the Enlightened One.
Buddha’s influence on Indian society was tremendous. Although not an atheist, Buddha taught that even trust in god was a form of attachment. Disdaining the caste system, Buddha allowed men and women from all classes to join his sanghas (religious communities). Buddha was himself a meat-eater, being particularly fond of pork, but later Buddhists interpreted his teachings as encouraging vegetarianism and non-violence. A meatless diet spread across India in the centuries after Buddha, becoming an integral part of Hinduism in some areas, particularly the south.
Buddhism became a part of the cultures of Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and southeast Asia, where it survives to this day. In India, Hinduism eventually absorbed Buddhism; today, Buddhism survives as a separate religion only in parts of India near Tibet. Although no longer a major religion in India, Buddhism’s marks are still visible in India, especially in the vegetarian diet.
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Epic India
By Willy | October 7, 2009
Strictly speaking, India does not have a written history before the Middle Ages, save for scattered monumental inscriptions. Ancient Indians, unlike their northern neighbors the Chinese, were never particularly interested in recording their past in a systematic fashion. Instead, bards worked India’s distant past into the Vedas and the great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
The first of many invaders to the Indian subcontinent were the Aryans, light-skinned horsemen who worshipped a pantheon of gods related to the Greeks’ and Persians’. The Aryan’s early conquests and battles figure into the Vedas, collections of hymns that may be humanity’s oldest surviving literary works. The Vedas, composed orally under the influence of soma, a drug whose identity is no longer known, spoke of the physical concerns of this life.
The Sanskrit epics are some of humanity’s longest literary works; the Mahabharata, the longer and more influential of the two, is eight times the length of the combined works of Homer. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero Rama, who rescues his wife Sita from the demon Ravana with the help of a monkey army led by Hanuman. The Mahabharata is the national epic of India. (”Bharat,” from a legendary line of kings, is an alternate name for the modern state of India.) Less a single literary work than a library of tales, the Mahabharata consists of a central narrative intertwined, like the trunks of a banyan, with literally thousands of other stories. The central narrative concerns five brothers, the Pandavas, as they fight to regain their inheritance lost to their wicked cousins, the Kauravas. An epochal battle results from this rivalry. The battle leads to great bloodshed on both sides and the beginning of the last of four ages of Earth’s history, the Kali Yuga.
The Mahabharata remains mostly unknown in the West, because of an inaccessibility of themes, a lack of modern translations, and its imposing length. In India, however, the Mahabharata and Ramayana are still very much alive. Indian television channels broadcast retellings of the epics, and Hindus celebrate Rama’s victory on the Dussehra holiday by blowing up papier-mache statues of Ravana and the other demons.
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