Notes from the heart of the universe

An illustration featured in the calendar created by a high-level team at IIT Kharagpur, who now having anything to do with it

A screenshot from a 2024 calendar came to me last week from a fervent friend, with the following message: India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

No, that wasn't a member of the ruling party speaking. They were written by Pulitzer Prize winners Will and Ariel Durant in their book A Case For India.

The rest of the attached PDF calendar file - apparently created by a high-level team at IIT Kharagpur - bristled with polysyllabic terms like temporal cycles, geo-morphological patterns, hierarchical foundations and pan-universal spirituality. I was handed a brand-new acronym, IKS, standing for Indian Knowledge Systems.
Their point, however, was clear: India is, has always been and will forever be the centre of the universe. Jai Hind.

If you received this calendar, what would your reaction have been? Choose one:

1. I knew it all along
2. Wow. Never knew that. Never knew that we were such bosses.
3. You really expect me to believe that bucket of slosh?

The pages of the calendar are a bewildering carnival ride of spiritual, geological, metaphysical, cosmological, philosophical and religious factoids, with quotations in Sanskrit and Bengali, difficult to understand and for that reason, impossible to challenge. The calendar liberally quotes Swami Vivekananda, who systematically, and with humility, listed India's contributions to human knowledge and understanding. The calendar's ‘scientific' assertions include - The Persians learnt astronomy from India.

The Arabs learnt about zero and mathematics from India.

We also invented plastic surgery, interstellar space travel and nuclear fusion, as proven by the detailed descriptions of obviously nuclear-powered projectiles in India's epics The Ramayana and The Mahabharata.

Indians are the master race. Everyone descended from Indians, including Vikings, Native Americans, Chinese, and Africans. Indians migrated far north, and crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas. The world might call them Mayans, Incas, Totonacs, or Hopis, but they all came from India.

Sanskrit is the mother of all languages and is a watered-down version of Vedic language, which has existed forever and forever. If in the beginning was the Word, then that word was Vedic.

Zoroastrianism and Judaism were apparently born from India's Atharva Veda. Buddhism (purportedly a child of Hinduism) influenced Christianity. The Al-Shaibi Traditions in Atharva (Yathrib) moulded Islam. In brief, all religions came from Hinduism.

Finally, as we are regularly reminded, India is the mother of democracy. We understand freedom, choice, self-expression, rights and civil liberties.

The word hubris comes to mind. It takes a monstrously large ego to describe your corner of the world as the divinely ordained centre of the universe, whence everything came into being. It allows the average Indian to strut, talk louder than everyone else and feel entitled, arrogant and aggressive on the world stage.

There are questions waiting to be asked -

When did India become recognisable as a country? The Indian subcontinent has existed for millennia but the political boundaries we recognise as India were only drawn just around a century ago. The brutal division of this India into its Muslims and its Hindus was a colonial legacy. The Indus Valley civilisation was profoundly tolerant and secular and understood secularism and the connection between faiths.

Which other countries also believe that they are the cat's whiskers? The world is full of countries who have no doubt about their superiority. Americans call their nation the "greatest country in the world". Their President is the self-anointed "Leader of the Free world" (an obsolete Cold War term that once separated capitalists from communists). China, almost as old as India, has its own origin story, no less golden. Do they want world domination? I'll give you one guess.

Mother Russia has no doubt that the world is meant to be theirs and that it will, one day.

So what? India is the world's oldest civilisation, extant since 6000 BCE. Sanskrit is nonpareil as a language, easily a meta-language. India's ancient scientists did invent a stunning range of technologies, from plastic surgery to indoor plumbing. Its savants and philosophers asked questions about the universe that Western minds had never considered.

But so what? That India is long gone and we are nothing like it today. India then was too wise to aspire to the mere political power of ruling everyone else or proposing Hinduism as the best religion in the universe. A Vivekananda quotation in the calendar accidentally captures the one thing ancient India was and modern India is emphatically not.

"I am proud," Vivekananda said, "to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true."

Where is that enlightened India?

The day before yesterday, on December 30, one day before 2023 became 2024, IIT Kharagpur quietly washed its hands of the calendar that seeks to prove that India is the birthplace of practically everything in the world and that religion, science and culture are actually connected.

There goes that.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper