Religious cries, name changes and the good old days

India is a land that has experienced invasions one after another. It has been one conqueror after another that has come to India in search of natural wealth, treasure and a place to live. This may not be news to any one of you, but I'd like to bring to view India's chronology. You may find this fascinating and surprising.

It began with the settling of the Indus Valley about 3000 B.C.E. This civilization flourished for about a 1000 years after which it was invaded by an Aryan race in approximately 2000 B.C.E. These civilizations moved further east and south towards the Ganges plains where these Indo-Aryan races met with the original inhabitants - the Dravidians and possibly another civilization called the Mundas. The birth of the Vedas, Upanishads and eventually Hinduism and the assimilation of the Dravidian culture into the Aryan culture took place there. It is possible that the cast system was also born during this time to segregate the Aryan race (brahmans) from the Dravidian (sudras) which as you all know took a life of its own later on. But back to the invasions thing. Alexander came to India around 327 B.C.E., then came the Kushans (1 C.E.), the Huns (5 C.E.), the Mughals (712 C.E.) and the Mongols (1221 C.E.). The Persian Zoroastrians, came to India around 10 C.E. fleeing religious persecution in Persia. And just so that they shouldn't miss the party which everyone was invited to, the Portugese, the French and the British came around the late 17th century. The rest of the story you guys all know.

So is it any wonder I ask, that today, when you look around you in India you find people who look so different from you? I have been to a club in San Francisco and hit on an East Asian looking girl only to learn that she spoke Kanada and is from Bangalore! I have seen women with blue eyes, green eyes and some have light brown eyes and not just the ones that wear contacts mind you. I have seen skin colors that are just white, pinkish white, light brown, dark brown and black. I have seen straight hair, curly hair and frizzy hair. Mind you that I have noticed all of these things just amongst my Indian friends, and not across different races! In fact, there are 4,635 anthropologically well defined populations in India, incuding Mongoloids, Australoids and Caucasians, of which 72 are from a primitive population.

So it's easy to see that all of these invasions have, over these great amounts of time, assimilated people and cultures into our own. Even our religions, Hinduism in particular is an example of this nature of our country. The religion has assimilated Gods of every kind so that everyone can identify themselves within it. Much like the Romans who invented equivalent Gods of their own so that the conquered Greek would adapt to it (for example, the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, is the Roman Venus), Hinduism also had an assimilating mechanism that made all the Gods of all the sub-cultures that it came by, a part of the greater Hinduism and thus brought everyone under a unified religion. That's why you find white Gods with blue eyes like Indra, Vishnu and Brahma as well as dark Gods like Krishna, Shiva and Rama (no, they weren't "blue", that's just the PC way of saying they were dark) and you find an explanation for all their existences through a convenient mechanism called 'avataars'.

This has been happening over such a long time, that the definition of who "we" are today is a blurry one now. Many of the invaders didn't come to plunder and loot alone, they settled here and made this their home as well. They have built, contributed their knowledge, art, literature and language to the greater society, bred and included themselves in our gene pool. So when people in India make efforts to get rid of the "outsiders" I wonder who they are talking about. When they make efforts to remove all traces of external influence by changing the names of our cities to 'Mumbai', 'Chennai' and 'Bendakalooru', I wonder what they are talking about. When they say that they would like to break down the Babri Masjid and revert back to the 'original' state, I wonder how far back they want to go in time.

India today is an assimilated mixture of everything that has happened to it over the very long time it has taken. We are a people of multiple influences. And it has served us well. From the art and culture brought in by persians and mughals we have monuments today like the Taj Mahal. Through the religions they brought including Islam, Christianity as well as the indigenous religions like Buddhism and Jainism, the persecution of the untouchables, who converted at the drop of a hat, greatly reduced. Through the fact that we traded with them, we have the railroads that traverse India and also the mastery of the English language which we all know has had such a tremendous positive influence on our society today. Moreover, Bangalore, which was initially a British Cantonment, and India's hotspot for all things IT, completely owes it's birth to the British. And because of the genetic diversity available in one location, India is going to be the epicenter of clinical research for medical companies in the future. We owe all of the good fortune we enjoy today to the past that made us.

And we're never going to enjoy the fruit of our past if we keep bickering over whose land this belongs to and who we should get rid of from our land. The only logical point in time when we can draw the line and agree to as the starting point is the time of the birth of our nation, 1947. What happened before we should just consider it as our glorious past and not try to rectify it. We don't need to relive another Ram Janm Bhoomi/Babri Masjid issue ever again. It doesn't make sense.