India Today – August 19, 2019

24 INDIA TODAY AUGUST 19, 2019

FROM OUR BRAVE FREEDOM FIGHTERSTOMODERNINDIA’S

ARCHITECTS, PATRIOTISM HAS BEEN ABOUTLOVE—SIMPLE

LOVE—OF INDIA AND OF INDIANS’ ‘TRYSTWITHDESTINY’

IT’S ALL

ABOUT LOVE

L

OVE? SORRY, india today’sedito-

rial gaze will say. Very sorry, but no.

Not love, please. Any word but love. It

is too romantic, too evangelical, lifted

from a godman’s sack of stock words.

After love will come devotion, then

harmony, then peace, and... None of those marzipans, thank you.

This is about India’s Independence Day, its historical magnetism,

its political message. And we are not children.

Fair enough. Love is the kind of word that floats in and out of

assembly meetings in schools, pulpits, satsangs. It belongs to the

‘sacred’ columns of the newspaper-on-Sunday, family maga-

zines. It is weak, pale, anaemic as a description of our bonding

with India that is Bharat and also Hind, on Pandrah Agast.

Magical, that date is, marking our ‘stepping out from bondage,

stepping into freedom’. Something unfurling about that date,

something swirling, freeing, liberating, as with the tricolour that

swings out of its tightened knot at the tug of the lanyard.

As a definition of patriotism, love does not work. It has too

much of the roseate heart in it.

And yet, speaking for myself, I will say, emphatically, that I

believe patriotism is about love.

It is about love of our country that Bankim Chandra Chat-

topadhyay wrote, in a moment of rapture, in terms of our land

being awash with clean and cleansing waters,

bearing fruit aplenty—sujalam, suphalam. It is

for our country, dearly beloved to us, that Rabin-

dranath Tagore incanted jaya he, jaya he, jaya he

and which Iqbal, immortally, hailed as Sare jahan

se achha, in whose lap play a thousand rivers,

as did Dwijendralal Roy in his Dhano dhanya

pushpa bhara, ‘with wealth and seed and blos-

som filled...’. These are celebratory songs, though

not without a hidden pang of anxiety about that

plenitude, that blessing coming under a cloud.

Nothing but love, pure and simple, unalloyed

and unquenchable, informs every word of another

composition, the fifth in that patriotic sequence,

which joins the other great four in the nation’s

repertory of patriotism—Kavi Pradeep’s 1962

outpouring Ae mere watan ke logon... It is soaked

in love that has had a twist, a throb of adversity,

through the fiery ordeal of a reversal in war.

Tipu Sultan, Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja,

Jagannatha Gajapati Narayana Deo II, the ruler

of Paralakhemundi in today’s Odisha, Rani Velu

Nachiyar of Sivaganga and Veerapandiya Kat-

tabomman of Panchalankurichi in Tamil Nadu,

BY GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI