The Patriots

August 15th is India's Independence Day, and the preparations are already beginning at Visthar for quite the fest. The girls at Bandhavi, in their usual expressions of adorableness, are planning a play to perform. From my spot in the window seat in the library (with the windows open, I can just hear the cows bawling in the distant pasture), I have the perfect vantage to spy on them as they practice. From the polish to their performance, they seem to have already talked through what they wanted to perform -- mostly vignettes, with lots of saluting and "Vande Mataram"-ing (Vande mataram is "hail to the motherland").

I looked out of my idyllic window just in time to see sweet Sunita (Sunita of the chubby cheeks, versus Sunita of the high voice) picking up an air machine gun, taking a stance and sounding out her actions as she "gunned down" Akshaya, Nagaratna, Shruthi, Deepa, Ganga, Sheshikila and others. (ironically, they are practicing in a structure called, "Priety Mane" - house of love) They hopped up a moment later, moving into the next statement of nationality.

It would be impossible to talk about India as a nation without talking about violence. This Independence Day will be only their 62nd; a young nation of an ancient culture. Though borne out of a nonviolence movement against the Raj, India's national history has thus far been punctuated by violence. There is the incalculable violence of the Partition as India and Pakistan West and East were split. Several wars have been fought with Pakistan over land and primacy, and India's border areas remain ragged with hostilities. Then, there are the daily violences brought on by crushing poverty, caste, gender... the list goes on.

By the way, I am not picking on India here; violence seems imbued in the identity of a new state. Look at US history as comparison - in our first 62 years, we tried the Articles of Confederation and had to scratch them because of insurrections (one of the more successful over the taxation of whiskey), fought a rather nasty war with the British, and seriously thought about trying it with the French, too. In the mean time, we quite nearly annihilated an entire indigenous population, enslaved a decent proportion of another, and laid the seeds for civil war.

So, in celebrating our respective Independence(s), how do we celebrate a nation without celebrating violence? How to we honor sacrifice without creating a culture of war? In the US, we are as likely to have a barbecue on the 4th as we are to have a program -- perhaps we are further removed from the realities of our independence-- but still we talk about war.

At my own personal stance, I think we have to realize that being a citizen of a nation is negotiating the border between just national pride and the insidious influence of violent nationalism. How do you celebrate independence justly without turning into a, "'Merica for 'mericans." How do children talk about India's history without machine gunning each other in a field? Does the celebration of institutionalized violence lead to those same trends and themes in political and social thought?