We The People

Indica is a loose term used to define things Indian! When and Indian reads it, invariably they think of our desi car, TATA indica. When a foreigner hears it, ummn, mostly they think of marijuana.
However I used it in the same sense as it was used to define both of these things i.e. simply Indian. Lets talk about what is Indian. And please note that I mean Indian in the classical sense, not Indian as in a guy who hold Indian passport!
I mean a mango even if it grows in Africa is still “magnifera indica” and we all know ganja grown anywhere under any conditions(thinking of floodlights?) will be called indica (of course I am talking of this particular strain!).
Firstly we must accept that we are a mongrel nation. History can only give us a hint of the different contributions we have had from different people. And thanks to their effort of travelling all the way into the sub continental India, today we are what we are.
Some believe that arya concept is fallacy! Its just related to a language group and who ever spoke that “Indo-European language” was arya. I hold a different belief. There is nothing to be proud of or worth hating in it but we have huge inputs from the aryavarta people. This great culture of ours has slowly brewed from the mixing of the locals, and the people coming from outside. And these locals are the people whose role is most often ignored.
For all of those who know of the ancient kingdoms of India, will know of the role Magadha played in shaping our past and continues to shape our present. It was considered non aryanic and at the time of Mahabharata was ruled by non Vedic kings!
I know its very confusing. Still if you want to know what our country looked like before we became this thick curry in which all the spices are mixed, imagine this. At the time of Gautama Buddha, his tribe, the shakya are said to be castles. When you look at the features of Buddha you will see that he was really pale and possibly even had blue eyes! However if you compare the same to Krishna! He was dark skinned and pretty much like a south Indian today. The culture two and a half millennia seems to one that is experimental, there are tribes with different looks cultures and ethics. They are finding ways to cooperate or at least coexist. There is a constant infusion of new varieties and there is a slow infusion of these bloodlines.
Take this slow process and stretch it over a long period of time. Congratulation you have india!
Its my belief but your opposition is welcome.
What we got as a result of this slow infusion is that, today we have an overall homogeneity of culture and beliefs but there exist a high degree of local variation. But that is what our strength is! We can have a lot of similarities or a lot of differences still we can identify each other as unique, one people.
Now let’s talk about the outward stretch of our country. There were few if any military movements of India outside its boundaries. However this quote summarizes our conquests very well.
“India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”
- Hu Shih (Former Ambassador of China to USA)
This has been the Indian way. Though highly mixed up our self, the influence of india outside has been due to ideological rather than ethnological. There were indianised cultures sprouting all over South-east Asia and Indonesian islands. This was the time that we had more than half the world population under indianised umbrella. Stretching from Afghanistan to the tip of Indonesia. But that phase came and went too.
There are still traces of that former glory in the form of Balinese and Cham people. However after the long depression that our culture saw and during which a huge lot of our knowledge was lost we are resurrecting again. There is a new interest in our culture and a new infusion of people has begun. People from all backgrounds and nationalities who are slowly getting colored in this hue of indica.
With education more and more people are realizing what we have been and indeed what we are! There is a resurrection of bhartiyapan in people not only in the subcontinent but also throughout its vast Diaspora!
There are people living in the USA who do Mantra jap every day! There are people in Africa who are studying the scriptures. In India too there is a new curiosity to dig out all that we have lost on in the meanwhile! Who we are, what do our gotras and clans mean! What is the significance of a cast, how did it originate. Who is our ishta devta, what does it signify. What is contained in our books, what is there in it for me? But the one question that all this lead to… ‘who am i?’

And so we come back to where we started. This thing, this term it doesn’t represent a religion or a people or even a culture. It none of them and all of them. There is no worth trying to define it…it’s just who you are.

Indica

India…

A land, a culture, a people, a misnomer. What we call India is more of an idea than a real entity. It has always existed for the world as an exotic land. A land which was less understood and remained for long a fairy land.

Its people, how can one describe them! Though of recent, described as snake charmers and elephant riders, they have had a unique role in shaping the world as we know it today…

The number of languages, cuisines, dressings, customs and even blood we people have is unmatched anywhere else! Get people from the four corners of this country to stand beside each other and you may think that they are from four corners of this world! But still such scenes occur very often here.

It has been the melting pot for ideas and people for a very long time. You can sit beside a road and quietly observe the people passing by. It will amaze you how varied the people can be (and I bet there will be a lot of them too). This world of magic has shrunk and expanded. At its zenith influencing more than half the world’s population and its nadir, its very existence was at stake. However today, again it is thriving.

Today its people are awakening again.

The people who till now were varied in color, customs and religions, today vary in nationality too. A new culture has arisen with this variety. The curry as a new spice added to it!

This blog is a tribute to this sense of Indianness, rather “bharatiyapan”, of being the people… Indica.