In 10 days, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. Six decades ago, at midnight on August 15, 1947, independent India was born as Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed “a tryst with destiny — a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”. With those words he launched India on a remarkable experiment in governance — remarkable because it was happening at all. “India,” Winston Churchill once barked, “is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. It is often jokingly said that “anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true”. Our country’s national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayate”: Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however: whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers — if the last census hasn’t undercounted us again.

A singular pluralism

The singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. In the U.S., the national motto is “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one; if India were to borrow it, it would read “E Pluribus Pluribum”! Everything exists in countless variants. There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way”.

This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. At a time when most developing countries opted for authoritarian models of government to promote nation-building and to direct development, India chose to be a multi-party democracy. And despite many stresses and strains, including 22 months of autocratic rule during a “state of Emergency” declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, a multi-party democracy — freewheeling, rumbustious, corrupt and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing — India has remained.

One result is that India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, divided and seemingly unpurposeful as it muddles its way through the first decade of the 21st century. Another, though, is that India is not just a country, it is an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible. “India”, wrote the British historian E.P. Thompson, “is perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society... There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.”

Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language (since we have at least 23 or 35, depending on whether you follow the amended Constitution or the ethnolinguists). It is not based on geography (the “natural” geography of the subcontinent — framed by the mountains and the sea — has been hacked by the partition of 1947). It is not based on ethnicity (the “Indian” accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians — Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, have more in common with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, respectively, than they do with Poonawalas or Bangaloreans). And it is not based on religion (we are home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism — a faith without a national organisation, no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship — exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage). Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land — emerging from an ancient civilisation, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.

The idea of India

This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Mu

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