Reconceiving a nation: who controls the past....

India is simultaneously among the oldest and youngest of places. As a civilization, it can claim a past that stretches back thousands of years. But as a modem nationstate, it is not even half-a-century old--a mere infant among the members of the world community--and still very much in search of its own sense of self.

India's present identity depends heavily on its image of its past. Nations, like individuals, are defined by what they think they once were. But the past, it may also be noted, is never what it used to be. The recollection of history, by individuals and by nations, is constantly updated and revised by the everchanging needs of the present. We remember what we want to, forget what we no longer find useful, and, often enough, fabricate what we wish had been.

Over the last several years, India's past has become a contested battleground in an ideological war which has produced very corporeal casualties. Competing and clashing visions of history have played a crucial role in a sometimes deadly dispute about the present and future of the world's second most populous nation.

Since gaining its independence in 1947, India has constitutionally defined itself as a "sovereign, democratic, and secular republic." With a current population of 850 million people comprised of a bewildering variety of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups, modem India has been proud of its status as the largest pluralistic and secular democracy in the world.

But over the last decade a growing and militant faction within the Hindu majority has challenged some of the basic assumptions of India's self-identity. One of these is secularism, a legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964). Critics say secularism has served as a sham for minority appeasement and fostered craven pandering by politicians to "vote banks" of grateful Muslims. Hindus, many complain, have become disadvantaged in their own country.

The conservative Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), riding this wave of Hindu resentment and religious nationalism, has moved in a few short years from the political fringe to its present position as the major opposition party to the ruling Congress party. It has done so, in part, by offering a new interpretation of India's past.

India, insists the BJP, is a "Hindu nation" and always has been. L.K. Advani, one of the principal leaders of the BJP, has suggested that Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs living in India be referred to as "Mohammadi Hindus," "Christian Hindus," and "Sikh Hindus" in order to emphasize the ancient and persisting Hindu character of the Indian nation-state. This proposition has not gone over well with India's 100 million Muslims, who are also now blamed for the supposed anti-Hindu acts of Mughal emperors who ruled north India some four or five hundred years ago.

To reinvent the present, it helps to reinterpret the past. Some Hindu activists have been hard at work doing just that. It was the BJP and its affiliated organizations who were responsible for stirring up the religious fervor that resulted in last December's destruction of a sixteenth-century Muslim mosque in Ayodhya by a crowd of Hindu fanatics. Ayodhya, it is claimed, is the actual nativity site of the Hindu god Rama, born, according to BJP historians, some time during or before the third millennium B.C. In the sixteenth century, or so the story goes, the Islamic ruler Babur destroyed the Hindu temple which had existed at Ayodhya since time immemorial, and erected on its ruins a mosque. It was this structure that was pulled down in six hours, by hand, by thousands of Hindu nationalists on December 6, 1992.

The BJP has historians and archaeologists who provide official validation of its claims. A certain Sudha Malaiya, described in a press release as a "young and bright art historian," told the nation about the remarkable archaeological finds she personally uncovered in the rubble on the day the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed. The evidence--including pillars from the ancient Hindu temple which had, astonishingly, been left wholly intact and a perfectly preserved large buff sandstone slab beating inscriptions in Sanskfit confirmed all the main points of the BJP's version of Ayodhya's past. The miraculous nature of these finds was immediately noted and their authenticity disputed by experts of a more secular bent. Especially critical were those who had worked for years on systematic archaeological excavations which had turned up nothing that remotely suggested that the site held such antiquarian wonders and indisputable proof for religious beliefs. Professor B.B. Lal, the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, had conducted one such excavation in the '70s and found absolutely no evidence of any preexisting Hindu temple at the site.

Historians at the prestigious, left-leaning Jawaharlal Nehru University have also joined the fray, publishing pamphlets and newspaper articles in an attempt to discredit the BJP account of Ayodhya' s past. Hindu extremists, for their part, have broadened their efforts and distributed a list of 3,000 sites across the country where, they say, Muslim emperors usurped sacred Hindu ground. Some of these could well become the Ayodhyas of the future. Others have gone so far as to claim that the Taj Mahal itself was not built by a Mughal emperor to commemorate his wife but was, in fact, a pre-Islamic Hindu monument appropriated later by Muslim aggrandizers.

The battle for India's history is also being fought in elementary and high schools. Textbooks in the states controlled by the BJP have been rewritten so as to glorify the "Hindu past," excoriate the policies of the "Muslim invaders," rename Indian cities and other geographical locales, and reenvision the relationship between the Hindu religion and Indian national identity and citizenship.

India's self-identity pivots on how it understands its past, and that past is currently disputed. How this young nation-state conceives of, or reconceives, its own history will determine whether India will survive as the world's largest secular democracy, or enter the new millennium as the newest, and by far the most populous, of the world's theocracies.