Conclusions 181
films and videos, arts and performances, campaign strategies, collective
memories, stories about the past, politicians' and intellectuals' discourses,
and any such arena where the self and the Other are represented.^29
In spite of all these communalists, fundamentalists, and status-quoist
forces, there does exist a composite culture influenced by Hindu, Islamic,
and other traditions. There is considerable influence of Islam in Indian
poetry; fine arts such as music, dance, and painting; ways of speech, modes
of dressing; foods; architecture; and so forth. The very word Hindu has
been given by Muslims. There are Hindus and Muslims living together in
virtually every town and village of India and taking part in each other's
daily lives. Indian Muslims have much more in common with Indian Hin-
dus than with Muslims from anywhere else. Likewise, all Indians have
much more in common with each other than do the peoples of other mul-
tinational states. This needs to be pointed out vigorously.
Building up on the emerging Indian (maybe someday, South Asian)
civil society through all these tasks and strategies, Hindus, Muslims, and
everyone else have to constantly negotiate and renegotiate their values
and interests. The "functioning anarchy" called India must be kept diverse,
plural, and multivocal lest it should aspire to superpower status. As Gal-
tung points out, the crystallization of the violent strains in the "hegemo-
nial systems, sewn together seamlessly with an impeccable logic" and the
ascending sense of sacred time and place will lead only to decline and
fall.^30 The Indian experiment could be instructive for the world, as India
is, to borrow the words of Selig Harrison, the whole world put in close
quarters.
NOTES
- Nicholas B. Dirks, "History as a Sign of the Modern," Public Culture 2, no. 2
(spring 1990), pp. 25, 29.
- Ibid.
- These are the phrases of Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy, respectively.
See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and
Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
- Gyan Pandey, "Nationalism, Communalism, and the Struggle over His-
tory," in Communalism in India: Challenge and Response, ed. Mehdi Arslan and Janaki
Rajan (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994), pp. 50-52.
- Ibid., p. 53.
- Ibid., p. 55.
- Ibid., p. 57.
- Gyanendra Pandey, "The New Hindu History," South Asia 17, Special Issue
(1994), p. 112.
- Addressing Americans, or maybe Westerners in general, Juergensmeyer
comes up with "lists of what in religious nationalism we cannot live with, and what
we can," and "aspects of religious nationalism that we cannot live with easily, but
