“I love my country too much to be a nationalist,” Albert Camus had proclaimed. Lal Kishan Advani’s voluminous autobiography “My Country My Life” argues just the opposite. His prescriptive nationalism is laced with a strange mystification of facts. Some of these can be ascribed to memory lapses or else to an effort to rewrite history through a narrow jingoistic prism. His assertion in one place, for example, that Morarji Desai was sworn in as prime minister in March 1976, instead of the following year, is clearly a clerical error.

However, a more serious error of fact has been challenged by his former cabinet colleague George Fernandes who says that Mr Advani, though he denies it, was in fact present at a key meeting with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when the decision to free three Muslim terrorists was taken to secure the hostages’ safety during the December 1999 Kandahar hijack. In another embarrassment to Mr Advani, former US ambassador Robert Blackwill too has denied Mr Advani’s assertion that the envoy was approached to intervene on India’s behalf in the hijack crisis. Mr Blackwill’s reason was unforgiving. It was still Clinton era when the plane was hijacked, he clarified, and he became envoy only under the Bush presidency!

At another level, serious readers who try to assess a potential prime minister of India from the 986 pages of the book may be startled by an indication that Mr Advani subscribes to the mumbo-jumbo of fortune-tellers. The story of how a pundit predicted, fairly accurately in Mr Advani’s view, that he and his political colleagues would be “exiled” for two years and how the prediction translated into his incarceration in the 1977 emergency only helps slot the author with ordinary politicians who continue to rely on obscurantist ways to divine their fate when earning the goodwill of the people should be the more acceptable option.

Obvious lapses of memory in the narrative not withstanding the interpolation of mythology with history make for a heady brew of easy nationalism. Mr Advani’s book opens with a calendar-art image of a Hindu goddess, one of the pictures that became popular in the 19th century as an idealised notion of Mother India. There’s an interesting article by Sadan Jha in Manushi magazine on the evolution of “Bharat Mata” as an icon that came to be popularised eventually by the Hindu revivalist RSS, of which Mr Advani is a committed member. The image of the dispossessed motherland found form in Kiran Chandra Bandyopadhyay’s 1873 play, Bharat Mata, that influentially entered into early nationalist memory. But very soon the terms of engagement and iconographic vocabulary shifted to the form of the goddess.

It could not be without significance that Mr Advani has highlighted the image of Bharat Mata, a variation of goddess Durga draped in an austere sari as she leans on a majestic lion with a saffron flag in one hand (in the black and white image the colour doesn’t show) and whose feet are reaching out to India’s southern coastal tip and the glow from her golden crown located in the higher reaches of Kashmir or beyond. We have a number of instances where the anthropomorphic form of the nation, Bharat Mata, has been shown along with India’s cartographic form, its map, and this one is as good an example as any.

In the central image in the RSS version, we see a woman/goddess occupying the map of the nation, giving the nation as body a very tangible female form. The smiling face of the goddess standing in front of her lion, looking directly into the gaze of onlookers is an image which takes its meanings from a wide range of cultural signifiers, says Jha. In the subtext, the body of the nation has been defined in a very systematic and anatomical fashion. The cultural signifiers of the visual image have been provided with a set of concrete meanings and contexts. The quotation says: “I am India. The Indian nation is my body. Kanyakumari is my foot and the Himalayas my head. The Ganges flow from my thighs. My left leg is the Coromandal Coast, my right is the Coast of Malabar. I am this entire land. East and West are my arms. How wondrous is my form! When I walk I sense all India moves with me. When I speak, India speaks with me. I am India. I am Truth, I am God, I am Beauty.”

Jha points out a gender issue here between the two subtexts of the frame. He notes the use of masculine gender in the words in bold face that follow: “Jab main chalta hoon to sochata hoon ki pura Bharatvarsh chal raha hai. Jab bolta hoon to sochata hoon ki pura Bharat bol raha hai.” The earlier subtext gave us to believe that that the body of the nation is female; however, the second subtext makes it very clear that the body in consideration is male.

The genealogy of the figure of Bharat Mata has been traced to a satirical piece titled Unabimsa Purana (‘The Nineteenth Purana’), by Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, first published anonymously in 1866. Bharat Mata is identified in this text as Adhi-Bharati, the widow of Arya Swami, the embodiment of all that is essentially ‘Aryan’. The image of the dispossessed motherland also found form in Kiran Chandra Bandyopadhyay’s play, Bharat Mata, first performed in 1873. The play crucially entered into nationalist memory in its early phase. The landmark intervention in the history of this symbol was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Ananda Math (1882) where the woman mutates firmly into Durga, an avatar described in the poem from the novel that became more popular as the controversial Vande Matram song.

While Durga’s calendar-art image is no doubt part of a deliberate appeal to religious nationalism, Mr Advani appears to object to the national emblem adopted by the Indian state on the grounds that it was used by Emperor Ashoka to propagate Buddhism. Its religious history does not go with India’s secular credentials. All this is contained in a discussion in a chapter titled “My first lesson in secularism”. It conveys the impression also of tackling the more serious charge that the RSS in its essential form is really a secret society. Whether Mr Advani has succeeded in disabusing us of this impression is best left to the reader to judge. Mr Advani goes to meet RSS chief Guru Golwalkar, where he asks his “Guruji” for guidance “on a question that had been plaguing” him. “Even though the RSS is not involved inGandhiji’s murder,” he tells the Guruji, “newspapers say that the ban on our organisation would not be lifted for two reasons. Firstly, the RSS is a secret organisation, which does not even have a written Constitution. Secondly, it does not believe in secularism.”

Guru Golwalkar’s reply is significantly evasive. “How can we be described as a secret body just because we do not have a written constitution? Even a country like the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. That does not make its government a secret organisation, does it? In any case, not having a constitution is not a serious issue. The RSS is ready to have a formal constitution, if that is the only problem that the government has with our organisation.” I am not sure if having a constitution alone negates the charge of secrecy in any way.

“So far as the second part of your question is concerned, it is ironic that the government is talking about secularism after having chosen a symbol of a theocratic state – the Ashoka Chakra – as India’s national emblem. According to Hindu tradition, the state always has to be secular. It has never accepted theocracy. It grants total freedom to every individual to follow a mode of worship of his or her choice. It does not permit discrimination on the basis of one’s faith...” But that is precisely what Mr Advani did in 1992 when he led the destruction of a mosque to turn it into a temple. And then, to cap it all, he declared the act an expression of India’s regained nationalist fervour.

—Jawednaqvi@gmail.com