Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Tracing the roots of Indian diplomacy

The philosophy is based on moral codes that are Indian and not exclusively Hindu

When I asked the late Abu Zafar Mohammad Obaidullah Khan, Bangladesh's ambassador to the United States and son of Justice Abdul Jabbar Khan, a former speaker of the Pakistan national Assembly, why he had given his son a Hindu name, he replied Parthasarathy was a Bengali name. "He was Krishna, Arjuna's charioteer in the Mahabharata."

So he was. But the name and the context have a certain resonance this week. On Monday, the high court in Dhaka dismissed a petition that had been hanging fire for 28 years - to drop the "Islam is the state religion" clause from Bangladesh's Constitution and restore the country's original status as a secular republic. Two days later, Shashi Tharoor wondered whether the Mahabharata does provide the rationale for Indian diplomacy, as argued by Deep K Datta-Ray, in his book The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism. Tharoor was speaking (with Suhasini Haider) at a panel discussion, "A Hindu Way of Diplomacy?" organised by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and moderated by Nandan Unnikrishnan.

Let me explain before the saffron ranks explode in triumphant whoops of joy that the book has in mind the parables and moral codes that are enshrined in the Mahabharata rather than any Brahmanical lesson. Tharoor asked if this legacy could be said to apply to parts of the subcontinent that are no longer India. He recalled a cultural exhibition in Pakistan where there were galleries devoted to different influences but not the slightest acknowledgement of any link with India, ancient or modern. Tharoor didn't think Bangladesh would be any different but, obviously, it is for some liberal Bangladeshis despite Monday's high court verdict.

Bangladesh's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which called a countrywide strike to protest the constitution amendment move, and the Hefazat-e-Islam, or Committee to Protect Islam, which celebrated the high court ruling, would undoubtedly agree with Pakistanis who are in a state of denial, as George Verghese's posthumous book puts it. But not all Bangladeshis take such a narrowly sectarian view of the common heritage. By calling Parthasarathy a Bengali name, Obaidullah, who was also one of Bangladesh's most moving poets, asserted that language and culture cannot be circumscribed by the narrow definition of religion.

Deep K Datta-Ray's book, on which Tharoor lavished unstinted praise ("original… imaginative… path-breaking") focuses on this civilisational background. It suggests that the roots of Indian thinking can be traced to the moral codes that are woven into the epics. Very different from the dos and don'ts of the Abrahamic tradition, they shaped the unconscious thinking of men like Mahatma Gandhi and even the Westernised Jawaharlal Nehru. They also provide the rationale of current diplomatic practice. Deep K Datta-Ray's interviews with Indian Foreign Service probationers from modest backgrounds told him this was instinct and not instruction. That makes for a certain continuity of the foreign policy methods and objectives - which, according to Deep K Datta-Ray, are based on satyagraha - of the United Progressive Alliance and the National Democratic Alliance regimes.

The inheritance is Indian and not exclusively Hindu. Indeed, as Haider pointed out, the Hindu identity hadn't emerged at the time of the Mahabharata. What we have, therefore, is a civilisational identity that is common not only to all the communities of India but also to the other countries of South Asia. To an extent, even South-east Asia, the legendary Suvarnabhumi, shares in the legacy of the Mahabharata.

If the heirs to that essentially Indian identity are both Hindu and Muslim, so were its creators. That makes India a unique synthesis that no one group can appropriate. Long before Obaidullah, the Emperor Akbar - as Deep K Datta-Ray reminded the foreign diplomats and Indian academics packed in the ORF hall - locked horns with the Sheriff of Mecca and his overlord, the Ottoman sultan, over the Indianisation of the Mughals' Islam.

Contemporary chroniclers (and modern scholars like Naimur Farooqi) record that the "blasphemous manners" of the unveiled Mughal ladies who went on the Haj in 1578 and the largesse they scattered "scandalised the whole world of Islam". The Ottomans sent back the pilgrims, and Akbar considered avenging the insult through an alliance with the Portuguese against his imperial co-religionist who gloried in the title of "Shadow of God on Earth". Mercifully, the world was spared a clash of arms between the two greatest Islamic powers of the day. But, clearly, the idea of a just war to redeem India's honour was not repugnant to an otherwise peaceable Muslim ruler who had not only read the Mahabharata but had it translated as the Razmnama or Book of War.