Idea Of India

What is the Idea of India

What is the idea of India?

The question may not be simple as it looks There is a deeper issue. While Indians can be said to be those who are citizens of India, different groups of Indians may have widely different perceptions of what is the idea of India or what should be the idea of India. In this sense "the idea of India" is not easy to find out and define. According to my perspective Idea of india can can be visualized as an country who is young as an country but old as a civilization, which has a civilization existed thoudsands of years ago. It has an diversity which may exist in culture, land,religion,language or people.This cultural diversity has been there thousands of years ago even before the british rule or even before there was an America or Britain or france.

Was idea of india is creation of british rule?

The question may have many answers in favour that the idea of india is created by the british and India does not existed before the british came. We agree to this argument because of the education that is being given to us still follows the colonial patterns that existed during the british rule. It was deliberately taught in the British established system of education. John Strachey, writing in `India: Its Administration and Progress' in 1888, said "This is the first and most essential thing to remember about India Ð'- that there is not and never was an India, possessing Ð'... any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious; no Indian nation [1]. We learn instead, in our colonial schools, that the British created India and gave us a link language, as if we were not talking to each other for thousands of years, traveling, telling and retelling stories before the British came.But there has been strong arguments given against this statements.Such as : -

1. If there was no india why would the British, when they landed in Bengal, form the East India Company, unless the conception of the land of India (a term derived from the original Hind) was shared by the natives and the British? They used this name much before they had managed to politically hold control over much of India, and before they educated us that no India existed before their arrival.

2. If there was no India Why would the Portuguese celebrate the discovery of a sea-route to India when Vasco de Gama had landed in Calicut in the south, if India was a creation of the British Empire?

3. If there was no India how did the whole of india would come to know the ancient stories of the Mahabharata or ramayna if the britishers have created the india? because in bhakti movement the various scholars the retold the ancient epics in their own language in different part of india.

Even in the case of the British, when all of India became part of a larger empire centered outside it for the first time, it was clear that it was distinct from Burma, even though they were contiguous land areas ruled by the British. And thus the freedom movements in Burma and India were separate. Burma and India did not become one after their respective independence, nor was there any call by Indian or Burmese nationalists to do so. Thus there was an idea of India that made it be regarded as a separate and whole, even through political change and shifting boundaries of internal kingdoms.

There was india before the british came although divided amoung different territories.The british helped in political reunification of the country under one political entitiy.The britisher Polically united the country and defined them who they are. [2]Even great great leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra bose which were identified as the only Ð''modernists' by the great poet Rabrindranath Tagore amoung India's national leaderswere deeply attached to their country's ancient Heritage.In his book The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru took solace in Ð''the continuity of a cultural tradition through five thousand years of histoy' which made the 180 years of British rule in India seem like Ð''Just one of the unhappy interludes in her long story'.On the opening page of The Indian Struggle, Subhash Chandra Bose emphasized two features critical to an understanding of India : first, its history had to be Ð''reckoned not in decades or in centuries but in thousands of years'; and second, only under British rule India' for the first time in her history had begun to feel the she had been conquered' .

Idea