Author: Francois Gautier
Publication: www.india.com
Date: November 6, 2000
I HAVE had the privilege
to live for more than 30 years in India.
To my knowledge, only
two foreign journalists have stayed so long in this country: Mark Tully,
who as you know was for long the South Asia BBC correspondent and myself.
It has long been my opinion
that India is very difficult country to grasp for a foreign correspondent,
as it is so different from the West, full of contradictions, paradoxes,
baffling parameters, etc. Going from Delhi to Madras, for instance,
is like flying from Paris to Athens, because there is absolutely no comparison
between the two, as if you have passed from one continent to another.
Thus, for a Westerner, say from Europe, where all the countries share more
or less the same religion (Christianity), more or less the same ethnic
origins (Caucasian), more or less the same food habits (meat) and more
or less the same dress code (ties and dresses), India can be a very enigmatic
country.
Disinformation about
India by the intellectual media
Yet, not only do we
find that Western correspondents are generally posted only for three, maximum
five years in India - too short a time to really start getting the ABC
of the subcontinent; but also, that most of them have - before even reaching
India - very strong and biased ideas, prejudices, misconceptions, on the
country they are supposed to report about in an impartial and fair manner.
Forget the fact that
by the time they leave India, these foreign correspondents have even been
more reinforced in their prejudices: the Hindu "fundamentalists", the "persecuted"
minorities of India, the "Human Rights" abuses performed in Kashmir by
the Indian Army, plus the usual folkloric the stories about India: the
"dashing" maharajas (who are absolutely irrelevant to modern India), the
"atrocities" on Indian women (no country in the world as India has given
such an important place to its women), or the "horrible" sati and bride
burning (an old British trick to show Hindus in a bad light).
I was lucky. First
I came to India when I was very young (19), with hardly any prejudices,
because I had never really thought about India; I was also immensely fortunate
to have spent my first eight formative years in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
of Pondichery, where I met the Mother, a formidable Presence and read at
length Sri Aurobindo, India's modern Avatar, Revolutionary, (the first
Congress leader to have advocated India's Independence, if necessary by
force), immense Poet, Philosopher and Yogi (yet totally ignored by today's
Indian youth); I was also extremely lucky that when I started journalism
in the early 80s, I did freelancing assignments in rural areas, particularly
in the South: Kerala's extraordinary Kalaripayat, the ancestor of all great
Asian martial arts; the beautiful Ayyappa pilgrimage, also in the jungles
of Kerala; the Ayanar sculptures in the villages of Tamil Nadu.
And this led to my most
important discovery, which endured to this day (and I believe Mark Tully
came to the same conclusions - read his books): namely that the genius
of India was (and still is) in its villages - and not in the cities --
where an arrogant intelligentsia and a more and more westernized youth,
have less and less idea about their roots and culture.
Even so, it took me ten
years to feel that I was beginning to understand India and to discard the
ideas I had somehow picked-up along the way: that the Congress was the
best party to lead India out of communalism; that secularism was the best
option for the country, given its incredible ethnic and religious diversity;
or that the RSS, the VHP and other Hindu groups were "violent" and dangerous.
On a more positive note, it also took me ten years to understand what a
wonderful culture and civilization Hindu India had been -- and still is
in some way: how Hinduism never tried to use the might of its armies, as
Islam and Christianity did, to convert other nations; how Hindus always
recognized the divinity of other religions and never shied from also worshipping
in Buddhist temples, Christian churches, or Muslim mosques; how India,
since time immemorial, has been the land of refuge for all persecuted minorities
of the world: the Jews, the Parsis, the Syrian Christians, or today's Tibetans.
Only Marxists find fundamentalism
in Hindus
It took me ten years
to see, that far from being the fundamentalists described by the British
and today's Indian Marxists, Hindus have been at the receiving end of persecution
for 1,600 years: first wave upon wave of Muslim invasions, which tried,
in the most ruthless and horrifying manner, to wipe-off Hinduism from the
face of the earth; then the more insidious European colonisation - but
no less harmful - witness the Portuguese who crucified countless Brahmins
in Goa, or the British under whose "enlightened" rule 30-million Indians
died of famine. And it is not finished: today's Hindus are still
killed in Kashmir, in Bangladesh (see Taslima Nasreen's book Lajja), Pakistan
or Afghanistan.
It also took me a long
time to understand that Indians are sometimes their worst enemies: Indian
journalists have often taken-up like parrots the slogans coined by the
British to divide India and belittle its civilisation; Nehru blindly adopted
most of the set-up left behind by the English, without bothering to borrow
from India's ancient genius and, as a result, India's constitutional, judicial
or educational system is totally non-Indian and only produces western clones.
