Diversity in India is neither a choice nor a cultivated virtue but has come as an accumulated result of a very long past, noted literary theorist Aijaz Ahmed said.
"Historical legacies do not allow an imposition of homogeneity. The alternative to preserving this diversity is sheer barbarism," Ahmed said in his keynote address to the fifth edition of 'Samanvay' the Indian Languages Festival that began here today.
In his address titled "The Languages of a Union," Ahmed took note of "how a sense of danger has been building up among artists and eminent thinkers in various walks of life" especially after the killings of writer M M Kalburgi and rationalists Narendra Dhabolkar and Govind Pansare.
"We now live in a strange atmosphere," he said, pointing out that an eminent personality like Girish Karnad has had to live behind the cordons of police security for having made "off-the-cuff" remark about the naming of an airport.
Ahmed also cited instances of historian Romila Thapar having to deliver a lecture in Mumbai under police protection and said music composer A R Rahman too had said that he had felt threatened over the past few months.
"What is most striking now is how widely this sense of danger is shared. Not only have writers and some film personalities expressed their concern in ways and on a scale that is unprecedented but this is also the first time that some eminent scientists expressed their sense of concern and unease as to where the country is headed," he said.
Dwelling on "Insider/Outsider", the theme of the literary festival, Ahmed said,"the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, the permissible and unpermitted is also involved very centrally in the whole range of situations that has brought us to this point."
"M F Husain and S H Raza two of the most famous Indian artists are both Muslims in origin and both have drawn deeply on what they take to be just Indian traditions... Husain was hounded out of the country but Raza is abstract enough not to have earned the ire of powers that be-at least, so far," he said.
Ahmed said he did not intend to speak thus when he was invited to the event but felt "implicated" to do so due to the "explosion more recently of certain issues specifically within the world of literature and social thought in the country."
Talking about his concern about not conceptualising Indian literature and culture in monolithic terms, Ahmed said celebration of the real diversity of languages and literature is possible only if there is willingness to accept that far from being a unitary state with a singular national culture, India is a bundle of innumerable diversities that can coexist.
