Last month in December I was visited by a psychologist, a friend of many years. An observer of human behavior, particularly mass behavior, he is also an erudite scholar on religion. After spending a week with us, he went on a trip across India. He loves the warmth of the Indian people, the smells, sights and colors and vibrancy in Indian people he says are not to be found anywhere. He spent a month traveling across the cities.
“So, was this time any different?” I asked him when he came back. After a reflection he said, “This time there is a difference. I saw something quite different which I didn’t feel before in any of my previous visits.” Then taking a pause he replied, “I see a nation and a people have come alive. There is a collective hope in people everywhere I visited. There is a palpable excitement, an awareness that something is happening to the people like it has never happened before, something larger than life that comes once in a millennium. It is a mass emotion that is visceral, something that I felt goes to the deepest levels of their being. One person told me that after Ram Temple comes up, the lives of Indian people will no longer be the same. Many people I spoke to, talked of bearing witness to something larger than life, something they feel as deeply transformative. One person told me that this generation of Indians will be remembered as good ancestors who redeemed a historical injustice.”
“It is to do with the temple that is coming up in Ayodhya,” he said. “It has captured the imagination of Indian people like nothing I have seen or heard anywhere in the world. Nothing like this has happened before and nothing like this will happen again. Everywhere I travelled I heard people discussing this, something they believe they are a part of. It is giving collective hope in Indian people that nothing before could give them, least of all Indian independence.”
Collective hope is a term seldom heard in India. It has been lost to us over centuries, to a nation which has lived under colonialism and slavery for centuries. Indian people learnt never to dream and didn’t teach it to their children either. They learnt not to believe in a future that would be theirs and their alone where they will be the masters of their own fate. Where they would make their own collective decisions not controlled by race or religion not their own. The independence movement, though it generated a collective hope in that generation for a brief period, died because the leadership tried to negate the religion of the majority that was the soul of the nation. The partition, the violence that killed millions and the failure of leaders enamored by shortsightedness led to its premature death before it could take roots. The people carried on an identity buried in shame and humiliation again, a defeated people who learnt that dreaming of undoing past injustices would remain a mirage. A failed leadership, a corrupt bureaucracy that was no different from colonial times, retained a collective despair that remained unchanged till day.
In brief there was no national dream that Indians lived by. Everything was ‘Ram bharose’, no pun intended. No dream of future could be built in India. Indians ran to foreign shores, to the very nations whose people had destroyed and ruined us, who mocked us for being beggars and ‘exporters of disease’ because ironically, there you could dream again. The most painful refrain for last seventy years heard from people trying to get a visa was ‘Yahan kya rakha hai?” (What is left here to live by?)
Today, there is a collective hope in our country, however small it may be now but I am sure it will rise and take the shape of a gigantic hope for a better world. A better world to be lived here itself, a world where Indians are no longer ashamed of their past, a world that doesn’t compel our children to runaway to other lands while trying to erase the identity of an Indian. The Ram temple today has become an image of a future of collective and a hope and aspiration nothing of the kind that existed before and tells them they are no longer bound to follow injustices of the past. It is perhaps the first time when the nation has stood as a collective force from all walks of life, from coolies to royals, from faceless villagers to unknown kar sevaks who have given their lives just like the revolutionaries who gave their lives hoping for a better future.
People had done it earlier too for INA, for the Chinese aggression, but the memory remained one of betrayal, of despair and gloom that is now erased and replaced by hope.
The building of the Ram temple will be judged by history not as a religious building but as a passionate struggle for man’s attachment to his religion, to his deity and faith to reclaim his sacred space. It tells us sacred spaces are immortal for man and can never be destroyed but their collective memory holds the identity of an oppressed people that can’t be taken away.
“What sustained the Hindus for so long to carry on the struggle?” I had asked my psychologist friend. “Do you think any other people would be able to do it?”
“No,” he answered. “There is a resilience in the way you have attachment to your sacred spaces, one that has led you to sustain your civilization. It is transformation of the collective grief into resilience, the civilizational angst that holds you together. This is a civilizational strength that Hindus must not let go out of sight. I wonder if any other people would have had as much tenacity to hold on to the memory and perseverance to hold on to a sacred space in human history. It is a power in our civilization that we must affirm now.”
“Borrowing from Swami Vivekananda, I can say that finally a nation, vivisected and looted, colonized and enslaved, however its people have finally found its collective voice. This is a moment that borrowing from Upanishads one can say is beginning of the moment that will lead us from unreal to real, from darkness to light and falsehood to truth. It is perhaps the first collective effort by ordinary Indians never seen before. Millions of kar sevaks, sadhus, school children, women and Indians of every description, have participated in this gigantic effort. History, we know, doesn’t let us repeat but it lets us retrieve what belonged to us if we stand and struggle for it. History also teaches us that a mind open to new possibilities will never go back to being bound by its old boundaries. Let us pray that the collective minds of the Hindus soar high, having reclaimed the sacred space that was always ours and led to regeneration of collective hope for our people.”
“In the end I would make fervent suggestion to our Prime Minister. In Mann ki Baat please link Ram temple with collective hope and history of our people, a valediction of our will to not accept defeat and rise above adversity. I also wish it is taught as a historical lesson through our textbooks.
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist, Speaker and Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’