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Yours Enduringly, India

In a land defined by images, many symbols survive

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Yours Enduringly, India
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History of India

But neither changing times nor unchanging circumstances have affected earlier stereotypes. The magician's been joined in performing wonders by godmen. Unlike the bhaloowallah with his performing bear, the snake charmer's not yet been driven out of business by busybody environmentalists. And, decades after privy purses and royal titles were abolished, at least one maharaja survives - as the mascot of the country's flag carrier. The anachronistic icon and the bedraggled airline suit each other. So much so that an attempt to replace the portly prince of Air-India with the rejected colours of a sunrise transporter led to the banishment of the yuppie CEO who broached the idea. The Maharaja remains, though in a sorry state, visible only in the few places where Air-India flies today, the symbol of an airline that missed the bus.

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There're other persistent icons too of India Exotica. Two mammoth monuments in marble commemorate dead queens. The Victoria Memorial in Calcutta (or is it Kolkata yet for the Marwari hordes that swarm about it morning and evening?) is the Englishman's answer to the Taj Mahal of Agra. But the two buildings represent not only different times but also different states of mind. The ethereal lightness of its architecture, its perfect proportions notwithstanding the somewhat ludicrous onion dome atop it and, most of all, the romantic legend of love on which it stands makes the Taj Mahal the ideal backdrop for picture opportunities and the subject of a million posters. Even the attempt of the utilitarian William Bentinck to dismantle the monument and sell it for its marble did not diminish the romance attached to the Taj Mahal. By contrast, the Victoria Memorial cannot but carry the heaviness of the colonial burden, the solemnity of the Queen-Empress who'd not be amused, the sadness associated with its location in a city which went into protracted rigor mortis shortly after the building was completed. But then, Victoria was no Mumtaz Mahal whose mausoleum would become the lasting icon of romance. The matronly Maharani inspired in Mumbai a monstrous mix of Indo-Saracenic Gothic-Baroque, garnished with grotesque gargoyles. It serves as a railway terminus and has its name changed with unsurprising ease to commemorate another ruler.

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But while maharajas and maharanis have left their marks as the images of India, so has the humble Ambassador. The aged and gas-guzzling Oxford sedan has long been overtaken by sleeker automobiles in other countries and even, lately, in India. Nevertheless, the car remains the official carrier of the Indian ruling classes. Bureaucrats may prefer buying Marutis as their private vehicles and politicians may aspire to Mercs, but off-white Ambassadors are the symbols of Indian officialdom, ferrying the rulers, from joint secretaries to ministers whose transportation is paid for by the public, now hither and now thither to perform their acts of state if not of statesmanship.In the bargain, the ugly hunchbacked Ambassador has become the literal traffic-stopper, the red, yellow and blue flashing lights on its top and or its blaring sirens making it get more mileage than its obsolete engine can possibly deliver. Its power is more symbolic than substantial.

The stretched and yet tenable relationship between substance and symbolism is best demonstrated through a medium that has itself become symbolic of India: its films. The images popularised by Indian cinema through the length and breadth of the country and well beyond its borders too are specifically Indian. Their iconic characteristics, their use of light and colour, their musical quality, their semiotics - all make Indian films and their visual devices, including posters, symbolic of India itself. The manner in which heroes and heroines - larger than life superstars of the silver screen - dress and undress, for instance, has much symbolic meaning.

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There're two items of dress of even the common Indian that too characterise Indianness: the sari and the turban. The five yards or more of magic that even without the aid of strings, zips or buttons defies gravity when draped by a woman is typically Indian. Coutouriers are confounded by its simplicity and darzis passing off as designers can't figure out ways to complicate its unaffected elegance. Attempts to mimic the sari through artful innovations come and go but they never really get off the fashion ramps. Meanwhile, the sari goes on, ever more a typically 'Indian' item of dress in the civilisational sense, with its Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali and Pakistani variants. The iconic element of the sari is enhanced when the bindi is added: for the dot-busters of America it is as infuriating a combination as the half-naked fakir's loin cloth was for Winston Churchill.

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But then, Gandhi survived the imperialist's annoyance and became not only the Father of the Nation but in fact even its iconic representation. His statues, beautiful and ugly, dot India and appear in the most unexpected places abroad: in a park in Amsterdam, on a roundabout in Paramaribo, against a wall in Durban, in an amusement garden in Tokyo. And if Gandhi has become a symbol by which India's substance can be identified, he in turn can be represented by his spectacles, his walking stick, his knee-length dhoti. Indeed, the Mahatma's dhoti as an attribute has only been matched in recognisability by the habit of the Sisters of Charity for whom Mother Teresa devised more than a mere symbol through the blue-bordered sari.

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Like the sari, the turban too has many forms and indeed, unlike the sari, it has a spread beyond the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the picture of the turbaned male, particularly if he is also generously bearded or at least moustachioed, is yet another Indian stereotyped image. The eternally jovial and ultra-energetic bhangra dancers from Punjab may share little with the perpetually troubled Tamilian with his blue house and his inexplicable blue mood but when it comes to representation, the Sikh turban is more symbolically apt for all Indians - as has been repeatedly demonstrated by generations of sportspersons marching in the Olympics - than, let's say, the voluminous head-dress of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. For some decades it did seem that the Gandhi topi would, as part of "the livery of freedom", become the iconic headgear of all male Indians but the Congress cap got to so symbolise low-level politicking and high-level corruption that its habitual wearers are few, like the discarded Sitaram Kesri.The peasants of Mahrashtra, from whom Mahatma Gandhi had taken the topi, continue to wear it but then, when have peasants contributed semiotically outside the arcane areas of academic Subalternism?

There has, of course, been one substantial element of agricultural and even pre-agricultural India that's found ritual veneration in life and art: the holy cow and her bovine but nevertheless less amiable counterpart, the humped bull. The cow and the bull are no longer rural; their sacred status enables them to roam unhindered in city streets too and even the almighty ministerial Ambassador has to give way to the hallowed quadruped. And the sanctity of the species is not new: Harappan seals depicting the Indian humped bull speak eloquently of their importance.

The animal kingdom has many members who're 'Indian' eco-genetically and representationally. The national bird, the peacock, may be found elsewhere but the importance it has received in India as both a living creature and a totemic symbol - with an illustrious dynasty, the Mauryas, deriving its name from the fowl - is unparalleled. Snakes abound in India and in the rest of the world but the hooded cobra is uniquely Indian. Where else can the reptile be worshipped, its portrait painted on houses and carved in temples and the venomous creature offered milk which could have been of better use to children? As the song goes, "It happens 'wonly' in India!"

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There's one animal whose identity, both real and symbolic, is not only Indian but even specific to a particular province. Nevertheless, the Royal Bengal Tiger has been used as an icon not only for Calcutta's favourite hero, the "Give me blood; I give you freedom" Subhas Chandra Bose whose myth refuses to die but also for the faraway Tipu who was a sure martyr. And yet, when it comes to contemporary use of the animal as a metaphor, "tigerisation" is more appropriate for others than for India. Instead of burning bright in the darkness of the globalised night, India trundles along in the economic jungle like a mammoth, blundering elephant. That, incidentally, is yet another creature that has for long symbolised India, even if six blind men of Indostan failed in figuring out its real shape.

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If the many real aspects of the elephant - its trunk and tail, its ears and tusks, its legs and hide - mystified the Indian seekers of truth, the symbolism associated with the multiple deities that Indians venerate was easily deciphered. These include the elephant-headed Ganesh, the many-armed Durga, the blue-skinned Krishna, the serpent-bedecked Shiva, even the new vhp-created muscular, bow-wielding warrior Sri Ram who's being substituted for the traditional, kinder, more accessible duo of Sita-Ram invoked by, among others, Goswami Tulsidas and Mahatma Gandhi. When Vasco da Gama on arrival in India kneeled before an image of the Mother Goddess thinking it a representation of the Madonna, it might have been seen in the West in those terrible times of the Inquisition as involuntary apostasy but in India, such is the wide interpretation of religious symbols that his act would have been taken to be perfectly normal. Religion is represented largely through symbols in India and in turn India too has been represented by religious symbolism: the profusion of deities on the awe-inspiring gopurams of Madurai; the blood-letting rock where the Doubting Apostle, Saint Thomas, is believed to have died; the fabulous calligraphy of verses of the Holy Quran on India's many monuments; the symbols of the Eternal Being that adorn the flags that flutter over gurudwaras; and, perhaps most widely recognised around the world, the different representations of the Buddha, the Enlightened One who taught that compassion is the basis of spirituality.

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But it's ironic that despite the plethora of Buddhist artefacts and art in India, the memory of the Buddha himself and the order he founded should've been lost for centuries in the land where he lived and preached. Not only was the substance of his doctrine contested and subverted by ritualistic Brahminism but even the site and symbols of Enlightenment were attacked: Sasanka Narendragupta, a Hindu king, destroyed the Mahabodhi temple and even cut down the Bodhi tree where Siddartha had attained the Supreme Wisdom and whose very leaves symbolise Enlightenment.

But attacks by the believers in one religion on the followers of another faith and on their symbols and sites - and there have been many of these through history and make their barbaric reappearance even in this secular age - can't really destroy the power of such symbols. Witness the fact that the emblem of India itself today is the Lion Capitol of the Righteous Emperor Ashoka, who adopted the Dhamma taught by the Buddha. Witness also that centuries after the Sarnath sculpture was carved, statues of B.R. Ambedkar, yet another follower of the Dhammachakra Pravarttanya sermon preached by the Buddha, have proliferated all over India. Some of those statues are good, many are bad, most are outright ugly but they all have certain common iconic elements. Babasaheb Ambedkar is always depicted with his right forefinger extended, the finger with which he re-started the Wheel of Righteousness, which had stopped turning. He's also shown holding a copy of the Constitution of India, the dhammashastra of this secular age, symbolic of we, the people, and our republic.

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