The recent events in Jammu and Kashmir and Orissa have once again brought to the fore the stark reality that independent India’s tryst with its own plurality has not always been a happy one. Unlike in the past, we cannot blame outsiders for disrupting Indian unity. The rot is within our society and polity and not outside. There is a serious threat to the two unique features of India’s social heritage - plurality and syncretism that have been built painstakingly over centuries.

All pre-modern societies have been plural. But India’s uniqueness has been that the plurality of its culture has also been accompanied by syncretism. All the features of India's traditional culture - caste, religion and
language, to name a few, have been characterised by the presence of strong interconnections. Indian tradition has been marked not by segregation but by constant dialogue both between and within cultures. Both these features of Indian tradition have faced multiple challenges but survived the various onslaughts till 1947. How did this happen?

As the Indian society began its gradual and tentative transition towards modernity in the 19th century, it faced a real dilemma. Transition to modernity demanded a price. It threatened to wipe out and obliterate Indian tradition that contained both positive and negative features. Caste exclusion, religious bigotry, superstition and gender injustice were the negative features. On the other hand social harmony, mutual dependence, cultural plurality and syncretism constituted the positive and desirable features of the tradition. The aggressive modernisation drive initiated by the alien British rulers promised to remove some of the negative features, but also threatened to destroy the positive ones.

The challenge before the leaders of the Indian national movement was precisely : how to allow the entry of modernity into the body of the Indian society without endangering the positive features of Indian tradition? It is necessary to highlight here that the Indian nationalist leaders strove to forge national unity while retaining the focus on India's diversity. They therefore made great efforts to sustain and nurture India’s plurality and
syncretism, even as they sought to create a strong and unified modern Indian nation.

Maintaining unity with diversity was the national movement's legacy to independent India. This legacy was ratified by the Indian Constitution, which was a product of the creative energies released by the national movement. It is now time to realise that no unity imposed from the top will work. At the same time we can’t afford to take our plurality for granted.
How to combine unity with diversity is a dilemma faced by all the large, multi-cultural national societies of modern world. Europe and the erstwhile USSR constitute two extreme poles of how to cope with this dilemma.

The leading countries of Europe came together to carve out common areas of economic functioning while retaining their specific national cultures and identities. The USSR, on the other hand, tried to maintain strict control though excessive centralisation and collapsed in the process, creating a number of nation states with their own cultural zones.

(Salil Misra teaches history at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi)