Number of words: 676

“The youth, the peasants, the working class, all with one voice must declare that we will not allow facism to raise its head in our country. We will not have dictatorships in our country, we will carry on our people’s government. This is not Bangladesh. This is not Pakistan. This is Bharat. We have our ancient tradition. Thousands of years ago we had small village republics. That sort of history is behind us. There were village panchayats in virtually every village. In the times of the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Pathan, the Mughals, the Peshwas, we had our Panchayats. The British deliberately broke this tradition in order to strengthen their own hold on the country. This ancient tradition was in Bangladesh and Pakistan, but they seem to have given it up. But our leaders sought a reawakening. Gandhiji always said that Swaraj means Ramraj. Swaraj means that every village will have its own rule. Every village, every mohalla and town will manage it so my prayers. What they must not do it just hand over the lot to their representatives to get it all done at a ‘higher level’.”

The above speech by Jayaprakash Narayan begins with an anti fascist call and quickly becomes less straightforward. India becomes the ancient sacred land of Bharat, and the past is mystically invoked: leaping the defilement of the British period, the speaker looks back to the 18th century Maratha bandit kings, glances at the Muslim conquerors, jumps a thousand years to the purely Indian Guptas, and goes back a further 500 years to the Mauryas. Through all this – empires, achievement, chaos, conquest, plunder, the steady loss of Indian territory to the world of Islam – India is said to have kept her soul, to have preserved the democratic ways of a village republics, her people’s government. Democracy hasn’t come to India from an alien source; India has had it all along. To rediscover democracy, India has only to rediscover herself.

But then Narayan turns this rediscovery into something more mysterious. Gandhiji always said that Swaraj means Ramraj. Swaraj means self rule, self government; it was the word used in the British days for Indian independence. Ramraj is something else. It is Rama’s rule, a fantasy of bliss. Rama is the hero of the Ramayan, the sacred Hindu epic. Rama incarnates all the Hindu Aryan virtues; he is at once a man and a God; his rule – after exile and sorrow – is a rule of God on Earth. The narrative of his adventures fills the imagination of the child; and no Hindu can forget that only closeness to figures and events he later learns to be divine, to be legend and not legend.

Ramraj is something that the Hindu always known he has lost: in one way removed, impossible, just a word, in another way only as remote as childhood, just out of reach. From Punjabi Century, the autobiography of India’s most distinguished business administrator, Prakash Tandon, we can get a fuller idea of the Ramraj Gandhi offered in 1919, at the start of his Indian agitation, and of the political effect then, at the time of high emotion even on a professional family.

These visitors spoke about the freedom of India, and this intrigued us; but when they talked in familiar analogies about the Kalyug, we say what they meant. Had it not been prophesized that there were 7 eras in India’s life and history: there had been a Satyug, the era of truth, justice and prosperity; and there was to be a Kalyug an era of falsehood, or demoralisation, of slavery and poverty. Gandhi rechristened India Bharat Mata, a name that evoked nostalgic memories, and associated with Gao Mata, the mother cow. He spoke about the peace of the British as the peace of slavery. Gradually a new picture begin to build in our minds, of India coming out of the Kalyug into a new era of freedom and plenty, Ramrajya.

Excerpted from Pages 143  to 145 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul