From around the time of our 60th Independence anniversary a month or so back, the national mood has been upbeat. And influential academics and commentators are telling us that what informs this mood, what ties us together is our culture. Today we wear culture on our sleeves, as the French do. So it is our culture that binds our immense diversity. Composite culture or the salad bowl culture of ours is now seen by our leading opinion-makers as the bedrock of our national unity. We are a modern nation because of our unique culture. The proposition is simply absurd.

The idea of the nation as a salad bowl comes straight from the writings of American political scientists in the eighties, and our culture theorists have taken it from there, without much thought. By the eighties some American academics and legislators thought that America had become ethnically and religiously too diverse to be homogenised into a single American culture. So the new idea was that of a melting pot where different cultures of immigrants melted into one American culture.

We don’t have an all-embracing Indian identity. This is our great charm. Europeans, who gave birth to the political organisation, called the nation-state marvel at how we exist as a nation with such immense diversity.

But it’s not the Indian civilisation, however romanticised by people like U.R. Ananthamurty and Mark Tully, that holds our diversities together. What holds us together are the ideas and institutions the Raj left us with sixty years ago. The modern Indian state is the creation of Imperial Britain. Our Constitution, built on English liberal ideas, legitimised the state. But more than the state which anywhere guards the national sovereignty, it is our democracy that keeps our diversity together in a form we call nation.

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