On Friday 13 Jul 2007 9:58 am, Charles Haynes wrote: > But national, religious, ethnic or cultural borders are necessarily > fluid in time and space. It's all too easy to pick the time and place > that suits one's agenda. Unfortunately it's also easy for people who > disagree with you to pick equally convincing times and places that > support their views.
In fact I believe the Greeks called the Sindhu river the Indus - and the Al-Hind part was a later derivative None of these factors mitigates or removes the fact that the people of the geographic region that "outsiders" callled India held sacred certain geographic regions and features which became part of their folklore. Pilgrimages or travel to these places were never barred by visas or entry restrictions, and roads and rest areas and towns existed en route. Al these areas found mention in the folklore, ritual and holy books (if you like) of India. I believe that your original question was "was there actually any "inside" there?" The answer to that is, there was an "inside" insofar as the relationship the people had to the places they held sacred. The unity of post 1947 India as a nation was not thought possible by some, but the role of history in uniting the people in India in terms of what is held sacred and part of an Indian identity goes unrecognised by many - usually "outsiders". Not that it matters. Just because someone else does not believe that a Tamilian can find Badrinath or Kashi sacred does not mean that it is not. I believe both Vivekananda and Gandhi recognized this and utilized this eminently utilizable unifying factor. t is still used as a unifying principle in modern India. The Brits chose to believe that there was disunity based on their worldview of the social and military-economic structure of nation states that they sound in India. They were not wholly correct. shiv
