The Tom Friedman version of globalization is finished. And the real battle for the idea of national identity has started — in India. The world should watch carefully. The future of globalization depends on it.

Seeing the world upside down. (British Museum)

For about two or three decades, most of my adult life that is, I grew up surrounded by the dizzying idea that one could belong everywhere.

When I started to study economics, one of the first lessons was that for most of human history the idea that people would progressively do better, earn more money, lead a better life with each generation, never mind in their own lifetime, was an astounding thought. No one expected this to happen, and it certainly did not happen, for most people. Expanding riches were meant only for the upper-classes, the aristocracy, in most cases.

Like economic mobility, mass physical mobility too is a relatively new concept. This idea that everyone, or seemingly everyone, would be able to go wherever they want, to whichever corner of the world they seek, would not be easily understood even by my parents’ generation who expected at best to travel to a few places, a few times.

With great transportation comes great theory, and so it came to pass that for many years it seemed that everyone was talking about being a ‘global citizen’, a life spent on air-crafts and airports, gazing presumably over a flat, or at the very least flattening, world.

If we all wore blue jeans, and ate at McDonald’s, surely, we would all be the same? And the never-ending flow of cash would sustain our common buoyancy forever — didn’t the bankers tell us that the idea was to better liquefy every asset and ‘democratize capital’?

By the time Lehmann Brothers came down, we knew the cost of such mindless liquidation, and today, through political movements around the world we are waking up to all those who don’t necessarily live from airport to airport, who don’t think the world has become flat.

Culture cannot be so easily transposed as shedding old clothes for new jeans after all. Places have meaning, they have time and stories stitched in them, geography is, in fact, history.

This is what the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer meant when he wrote that from the classical Greeks to British imperialists there was only one civilization known: the Indian civilization. There is no such thing as the South Asian civilisation.

Why, then, would some people, including some academics, today fight so hard to erase the word India and replace it with South Asia? And why would assorted groups including some Sikh and Dalit groups take the side of the deletion of ‘India’? Some of this comes from old fissures.

Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs, was one of two main regions (the other was Bengal) to be hacked into two parts during the partition of India in 1947 into the countries of India and Pakistan. Many Sikh holy and historical places were left behind in Pakistan including the historical city of Lahore, the capital of the Sikh empire created by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the 18th century. Since then, there has been a fringe but aggressive demand among some Sikhs for Khalistan or an independent nation of Sikhs which takes its name from the Sikh order of Khalsa. In the early 1980s, Punjab saw a period of terrorism with groups of militant Khalsa attacking Indian government institutions leading to a siege of the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, and the assassination of the then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi for sending in the army to flush out guerrillas from the shrine. Some of academic arguments of this sentiment have filtered through to current debates even though the revolt is long gone in Punjab.

The Dalit question is an old colonial argument that talks about the intermingling of races in India (though the genetics of this are consistently being proved highly doubtful and questionable) between the ‘local’ Dravidians and the ‘outsider’, migrating ‘Aryans’. This theory connects to the caste system in India with the Brahmins on the top of the ladder and the Dalits at the bottom and pitches the Brahmins as ‘Aryan outsiders’, ‘invaders’ against an ‘indigenous Dravidian’ (including Dalit) lower caste population. This line of thought sees any notion of Indian nationhood as ‘Brahmanical’ and seeks to stamp it out.

Perhaps some of the issue also lies in the epistemological problem from how some academics see the origins of nationhood.

Most of the Western understanding of nationhood comes from the Westphalian model of a nation, named after the treaty of Westphalia which brought an end to The Thirty Years War in Europe. This memory of countless lives lost and massive destruction hangs over the idea of the European Union even today. This peace was achieved by accepting that nationhood had to be based upon similarity and uniformity — of language, ethnicity and religion.

But that is not the only model for nation states to follow — though it is easy to see why that might be appealing to many scholars in the West because of the peace it once brought the region.

There are other states, though, that follow a different model, states which base their identity on a common civilization beyond contemporary borders (after all, the division of South Asia is as recent 1947 while Indian civilization traces its roots to nearly 5,000 years or more). As the writings of Zhang Weiwei, Diana Eck and Martin Jacques has shown, there is a distinct model of a civilization state. Both India and China build their national identity on their long civilization and culture which has always been unique and distinct, and identified as such, long before modern state borders came into being. That’s why there is a South China Sea and, as Glazer pointed out, an Indian Ocean.

These civilisations gave birth to unique classical texts, art forms, languages and philosophies which have always been associated with their geographical and political identity.

To erase India from the Indian civilization is frequent flyers bullying people who have never had an opportunity to travel beyond their hometown. It is a snobbery where air miles is the new Ivy League, a totem to browbeat the less fortunate. It is the attempt to censor the local for the supposedly global. It is the murder of the organic in pursuit of steroid-pumped volumes and economies of scale.

And yet as the best kind of Ivy League student, Mahatma Gandhi, who was taught law at the Inner Temple, knew, it is usually the most culturally rooted who can summon the greatest generosity about the world. A true global citizen is the one with the most assured understanding of her own roots, quite like Gandhi showed through his own life that it is those with the deepest faith in the divine who can be truly secular.

I have the greatest empathy for the idea that multiple histories ought to be treasured and that there are many perspectives to historical events. I believe in the shared cultural treasures between modern-day South Asian nations but none of this ought to be used as justifications to wipe out the name India, the marker of perhaps the only unbroken civilization remaining in the world, from Indian history and civilization.

That would be a destruction infinitesimally greater to the collective memory of an ancient people than the blasting of the Bamiyan Buddhas (whose loss many of us rue even today and always will).

Eating McDonald’s unites us only if — as is true in India — many of the burgers are vegetarian.

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