In the back­drop of the views on In­dia by two Ital­ian travel writ­ers, au­thor-com­men­ta­tor Ajay­pal Singh Brar de­cries the at­tempts to foist ma­jori­tar­i­an­ism-based unity cul­ture by the RSS and ad­vo­cates that the mi­nori­ties have no choice but to fight back, tooth and nail.

ONCE UPON A TIME, TWO ITAL­IAN WRIT­ERS go on va­ca­tion to­gether in In­dia, and each writes a book about his trav­els. One sees in In­dia only what is dif­fer­ent and the other only what is the same.

The one writer, Al­berto Moravia, ti­tles his book An Idea of In­dia (Un’idea del­l’In­dia) and tries to ex­plain how dif­fer­ent In­dia is, but he is frus­trated that he can grasp it only in the most ab­stract, meta­phys­i­cal terms and through a se­ries of tau­tolo­gies.

The ex­pe­ri­ence teaches him why Eu­ro­peans are Eu­ro­peans and In­di­ans are In­di­ans, but that is so hard to cap­ture in words. The dif­fer­ence of re­li­gion, he thinks, will help him put his fin­ger on it. In­dia is the land of re­li­gion par ex­cel­lence, he ex­plains. Not only are its re­li­gions dif­fer­ent than ours but also in In­dia re­li­gion en­velops all of life. The re­li­gious idea com­pletely per­me­ates the ex­pe­ri­ence.

It is time the fas­cist forces in this land re­alise that the land and its peo­ple can­not be turned into a mono­lithic so­ci­ety ad­her­ing to their nar­row ver­sion of Hin­dutva but the recog­ni­tion of an open net­work of sin­gu­lar­i­ties that links to­gether on the ba­sis of the com­mon they share and the com­mon they pro­duce can make har­mo­nious co-ex­is­tence pos­si­ble, work­able and en­joy­able.

In­di­ans go about their daily lives liv­ing their re­li­gions in count­less strange and in­com­pre­hen­si­ble rit­u­als. But this no­tion of a liv­ing re­li­gious idea, he finds, does not re­ally cap­ture the dif­fer­ence ei­ther. The dif­fer­ence of In­dia is much more than that. In fact, this ex­treme dif­fi­culty of ex­press­ing it proves to him that the dif­fer­ence of In­dia is in­ef­fa­ble. “My fel­low Ital­ians, I can­not de­scribe In­dia to you. You must go there and ex­pe­ri­ence its enigma your­self. All I can say is, In­dia is In­dia,” he con­cludes.

Pier Paolo Pa­solini ti­tles his book ‘The Scent of In­dia’ (L’odore del­l’In­dia) and tries to ex­plain how sim­i­lar In­dia is. He walks the crowded streets at night in Bom­bay, and the air is filled with odours that re­mind him of home: the rot­ting veg­eta­bles left­over from the day’s mar­ket, the hot oil of a ven­dor cook­ing food on the city’s side­walks, and the faint smell of sewage.

The writer comes upon a fam­ily con­duct­ing an elab­o­rate rit­ual on the river­bank, mak­ing of­fer­ings of fruit, rice, and flow­ers. This is not new to him ei­ther. The peas­ants back home in Friuli have sim­i­lar cus­toms, an­cient pa­gan rit­u­als that have sur­vived for ages. And then, of course, there are the boys. The writer talks play­fully in bro­ken Eng­lish with groups of boys who con­gre­gate on street cor­ners.

Even­tu­ally, in Cochin (Kochi) he be­friends Ravi, a poor, laugh­ing or­phan who is con­tin­u­ally tor­mented and robbed by older boys. Be­fore leav­ing the town the writer con­vinces a Catholic priest with the promise of send­ing money from Italy to take the boy in and pro­tect him, just as he would have done back home. All of these boys, the writer finds, are just like the boys in every poor neigh­bour­hood of Rome or Naples. “My fel­low Ital­ians, In­di­ans are just the same as us,” he con­cludes. In his eyes, in fact, all the dif­fer­ences of In­dia melt away and all that re­mains is an­other Italy.

It makes you won­der if the travel com­pan­ions even saw the same coun­try. In fact, al­though po­lar op­po­sites, their two re­sponses fit to­gether per­fectly as a fa­ble of the two faces of Eu­ro­cen­trism: “They are ut­terly dif­fer­ent from us” and “They are just the same as us.” The truth, you might say, lies some­where be­tween the two-they are some­what like us and also a lit­tle dif­fer­ent-but re­ally that com­pro­mise only clouds the prob­lem.

Nei­ther of the two Ital­ian writ­ers can es­cape the need to use Eu­ro­pean iden­tity as a uni­ver­sal stan­dard, the mea­sure of all same­ness and dif­fer­ence. In­dia, how­ever, is not merely dif­fer­ent from Eu­rope. In­dia (and every lo­cal re­al­ity within In­dia) is sin­gu­lar—not dif­fer­ent from any uni­ver­sal stan­dard but dif­fer­ent in it­self.

If the first Ital­ian writer Al­berto Moravia could free him­self of Eu­rope as a stan­dard, he could grasp this sin­gu­lar­ity. This sin­gu­lar­ity does not mean, how­ever, that the world is merely a col­lec­tion of in­com­mu­ni­ca­ble lo­cal­i­ties. Once we rec­og­nize sin­gu­lar­ity, the com­mon be­gins to emerge. Sin­gu­lar­i­ties do com­mu­ni­cate, and they are able to do so be­cause of the com­mon they share. We share bod­ies with two eyes, ten fin­gers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share cap­i­tal­ist regimes of pro­duc­tion and ex­ploita­tion; we share com­mon dreams of a bet­ter fu­ture. Our com­mu­ni­ca­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and co­op­er­a­tion, fur­ther­more, not only are based on the com­mon that ex­ists but also, in turn, pro­duce the com­mon. We make and re­make the com­mon we share every day.

To­day’s world is a para­dox! While, the re­cently con­cluded elec­tions in Canada has shown us how a na­tion with vast swathes of im­mi­grants from di­verse na­tion­al­i­ties could grasp this dy­namic re­la­tion­ship of the com­mon, our own home-grown or­ga­ni­za­tions such as RSS -Rashtriya Swayam­se­wak Sangh and its off­shoots ad­vo­cate the turn­ing of the en­tire land into one mono­lithic sin­gu­lar­ity in the name of Hin­dutva, thus de­stroy­ing the gar­den full of myr­iad cul­tures, na­tion­al­i­ties and  re­li­gious  ide­olo­gies that has been cel­e­brated as the Idea of In­dia or per­haps as the sec­ond Ital­ian au­thor Pier Paolo Pa­solini puts it, the Scent of In­dia.

It is time the fas­cist forces in this land re­alise that the land and its peo­ple can­not be turned into a mono­lithic so­ci­ety ad­her­ing to their nar­row ver­sion of Hin­dutva but the recog­ni­tion of an open net­work of sin­gu­lar­i­ties that links to­gether on the ba­sis of the com­mon they share and the com­mon they pro­duce can make har­mo­nious co-ex­is­tence pos­si­ble, work­able and en­joy­able.

It is not easy for those who stand for the Idea of In­dia, which is di­verse and vi­brant to chal­lenge the brute bull­dozer of Hin­dutva forces, yet de­spite the at­tempts to crush un­der its mo­men­tum and weight the dy­namism of di­ver­sity, chal­lenge they must. What will hap­pen if the Idea of In­dia dies?