Look at Portugal to find India's heroes

Earlier this month, I went on a tour of Portugal, a country I have always wanted to visit because of a man I had first heard about 35 years ago — Henry the Navigator. He was the man who started Portugal exploring down the Atlantic, along the West African coast between 1425 and 1450.

Portugal exceeded all expectations by a factor of 1,000. It is a truly wonderful country that is not on the Indian tourists’ radar screen at all.

But this article is not about tourism. It is about how countries treat their histories and their heroes. The two countries of interest to Indians are Portugal and England. The contrast is stark.

The Portuguese ruled a part of India — albeit a tiny one — for far longer than the English, 450 years against 190. Goa was under Portuguese rule from 1510 to 1962.

The man who made this possible — Vasco de Gama — is all but forgotten in Portugal. Indeed so are the others like Bartolomew Dias and Pedro Cabral, who charted the seas in the face of the most daunting odds. While survival was possible, death was probable.

To be sure, Vasco de Gama’s remains — relocated from Cochin to Lisbon — are interred in a magnificent Church about half a kilometre from the spot from which he sailed for India. But today the place, Belem, is better known for its pastries than Vasco de Gama. 

This forgetfulness is amazing, considering the fact that but for him — and Ferdinand Magellen — Portugal may never have become the wealthy maritime and colonial power it did. But then, 500 years is a long time and Portugal has been through a lot of travail since then — political, military and economic. 

A sharp contrast

England — as I now prefer to call the UK because the English are junglis — provides a sharp contrast. The starkest difference is in the way the two countries treat their heroes and their churches.

In Portugal, they do not use their places of worship to glorify their wars and war heroes. In England they do just that, never mind how insignificant the battle or how tiny the contribution of the “hero” was.

In Portugal you do not see battle standards in churches. In England they are the first things you see. Portugal does not glorify war. England does.

So even if they have stopped teaching their shameful colonial histories in schools, English churches constantly remind the faithful — not many left now — that despite its several and extraordinary artistic, political, philosophical and scientific attainment, England was, and remains, a yob at heart. Their football fans stand noisy and uncouth testimony to this.

Nor, in Portugal, which from 1500 to about 1650 was the only maritime power — with colonies, including Brazil and Angola — do you do see statues of their heroes scattered all over. In England, that’s routine.

Perhaps this striking difference is because whereas Portugal did the colonising in the name of God, England did it for commerce. God followed later and in an absent-minded sort of way and left us something absurd as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

Indian dilemma

I would not have written about all this except for the fact that we in India are currently undergoing a major convulsion about not only how to treat our heroes but also, far more viciously, about who they are. 

Depending on which god is being worshipped — the man-made Constitution or the mythical divinities of the Indo-Gangetic plain — we are taking sides in an increasingly strident and unbecoming manner. Over the last four years the debates and diatribes have become increasingly abusive and pointless.

The Congress and its country cousins claim to worship the Constitution. The BJP, which had started off not opting for god, now opts for nothing else.

In 2019, Indians will decide whose heroes they prefer, of the gods or of the Constitution. Mr Modi is positioning himself as hero of both and runs the risk of not convincing either side.

My solution to the problem is this: Forget what happened before 1947 because it doesn’t matter any longer and focus on what happened after 1947. Then choose six men and women as national heroes. In fact, since Gandhiji is already there as a permanent member, we have to choose five only.

My choice: Nehru, Patel, Homi Bhabha, H R Khanna and R K Laxman. I leave it you to work out why. If you succeed you will finally understand not just what heroism is and what heroes are made of but also India’s political, scientific, constitutional and social history.