OW CAN ONE approach the India of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with seventeen major languages and 22,000 district "dialects" (some spoken by more people than Danish or Norwegian), inhabited by nearly 940 million individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is 51% illiterate but which has educated the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while four out of five Indians scratch a living from the soil?

What is the due to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mogul emperor to claim, "If on Earth there he paradise or bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this..."? How does one gauge a culture which elevated non-violence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials attempt to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken as a threat to the nation, where a former Prime Minister bitterly criticizes the sale of Pepsi-Cola "in a country where villagers don't have clean drinking water, and which invents more sophisticated software For US computer manufacturers than and other country in the world? How can one portray the present, let alone the future, of an ageless civilization that is the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties and 300 ways of cooking the potato?

The short answer is that it can't be done - at least not to everyone's satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately' contradicted by another truism about India. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is "Satyameva Jayate": Truth Always Triumphs. The question remains, however: whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least 940 million answers.

UT THAT SORT of answer is no answer at all. Another answer may lie in a single insight: the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are many Indias. 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 flourish and contend.

India is not just a country, it is an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible. The British historian E. P. Thompson wrote, "There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind."

That Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces:

ancient Hindu tradition, myth and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique. Many observers have been astonished by India's survival as a pluralist society. But India could hardly have survived as anything else. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of India.

One of the few generalizations that can safely he made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted here. Not even its name: for the word "India" comes from the river Indus. which flows in Pakistan. That anomaly is easily explained, for what is today Pakistan was part of India until it was partitioned in 1947. Yet each explanation breeds another anomaly. Pakistan was created as a homeland for India's Muslims, but from 1971 till very recently there were more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.

With diversity emerging from its geography and inscribed in its history, India was made for pluralism. It is not surprising, then, that the political life of modern India has been rather like traditional Indian music: the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.

E ARE ALL minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off a train, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh, might cherish the illusion that he represents the "majority community", to use an expression much favoured by the less industrious of our journalists. But be does not. As a Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 82% of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority is not even male. Worse. our archetypal UP

Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, polychrome crowds thronging any of India's major railway stations to realize bow much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90% of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, 85% of Indians are not - and so on.

Or take language. The Constitution of India recognizes seventeen today, but, in fact, there are thirty-five Indian languages which are each spoken by more than a million people - and these are Languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures and cultural assumptions, not just dialects. Each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, for none enjoys majority status in India.

Thanks in part to the popularity of Bombay's Hindi cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it is in no sense the language of the majority.

Ethnicity further complicates the

notion of a majority community. Most of the time, our Indian names immediately reveal where we are from and what our mother tongue is; when we introduce ourselves we are advertising our origins. Despite some inter-marriage at the elite levels in the cities, Indians still remain largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. Karnataka Brahmins share their Hindu faith with Burr Quorums, but feel little identity with them in respect of appearance, dress, customs, tastes, language or political objectives. At the same time Tamil Hindus would feel that they have far more in common with Tamil Christians or Muslims than with, say, Punjabis with whom they formally share a religion.

Affinities between Indians span one set of identities and cross into another I am simultaneously Keralite (my state of origin), Malayali (my linguistic affiliation), Hindu (my religious faith), Nair (my caste), Calcuttan (by marriage), Stephanian (because of my education at Delhi's St. Stephen's College) and so on, and in my interactions with other Indians, each or several of these identities may play a part. Each, while affiliating me to a group with the same label, sets me apart from others; but even within each group, few would share the other identities I also claim, and so I find myself again in a minority within each minority.

T IS IN SUCH a context that we must understand that much-abused term, "secularism". Western dictionaries define "secularism" as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism means a profusion of religions, none of which is privileged by the state. Secularism in India does not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist panics like the Communists or the DMK found unpopular amongst their voters; rather, it means multi-religiousness. In the Calcutta neighbourhood where I lived during my high-school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the chant of the mantras at the Hindu temple and the voices of the Sikh faithful at the gurudwara reciting verses from their sacred book.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of India reflected these "secular" assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 82% Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, two of India's first five Presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable Governors, Cabinet Ministers, Chief Ministers of states, Ambassadors, Generals, and Supreme Court Justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim; the Army Commander was a Parsi, the General Officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh, and the General flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish.

Indian nationalism is not based on language. It is not based on geography. It is not based on ethnicity. And it is not based on religion. India is an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land.

This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things - and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. Where Freudians speak of the narcissism of minor differences, in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. To stand Michael Ignatieff on his head, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don't really need to agree - except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for fifty years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

And so the Indian identity that I believe in celebrates diversity: if America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a "thali", a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

Indians are comfortable with multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India which safeguards the common space available to each identity, an India that remains safe for diversity.

If the overwhelming majority of a people share the political will for unity, if they wear the dust of a shared history on their foreheads and the mud of an uncertain future on their feet, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kohlapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity and freedom. That is the India that has emerged in the last fifty years, and it is well worth celebrating. °