Nationalism and India

India is a heterogeneous society in terms of culture, religion, languages, origin and what not. People of all faith live here. Languages spoken are so diverse from Hindi and its dialects in north, to draividian in south to sino-tibetian in the north east to austro-asian in west. There are deserts as well as places with heaviest rainfall in the world to places where it snows to places where weather is normal.
There has been large scale population movements throughout the world throughout history in search of better places to live in. And in all these cases the migrants bought a holocast on the local population as in the case of America, Austrialia and other places. But not so in India. India kept on absorbing all the migrants and even the invaders and they all became a part of its native culture. In India the immigrants/invaders were not just unable to cast a holocast on native culture and people but they themselves became a part of it, thanks to the secular and non expansionist nature of its religion hinduism which has its roots in the vedic culture.
How did this happen? Unlike other religions where a non-believer is considered to be a sinner, the vedic culture says “Ekam Sat, Vipro Bahuda Vadanthi” which means truth is one and knowledged persons expound it in many ways. So all religions are acceptable to hindus since the vedic culture says that religions are different ways of expressing the same truth. So all religions are acceptable to hinduism since hinduism is based only on truth and not on gods or prophethood. So Indian culture has continued to flourish for the past thousands of years alongside providing a place for people of all faith to live in. If you look at other places on this planet where there were ancient civilizations, the culture of their civilizations has been wiped out completely (say Egyptian, sumerian, balylonian, incas, aztec, etc), except in India.
Coming to the concept of nationalism. It has been wrongly emphasized by people time and again that the concept of one single nation was created in India only after british started ruling this part of the world. Remember, India was the greatest crown in the colonial british empire.
But when we look at history it is clear that India then was divided into about 60 kingdoms whose geographical boundaries kept varying and at the same time there was the concept of Sarvabhauma (Emperor) who used to conduct practises like Ashwamedha and all other kings used to accept him as their ultimate emperor. This emperorship was limited to the subcontinent as the entire sub-continent was a self-contained civilization.
But again this was not the same as the concept of nationalism. Nationalism was born in europe after a series of wars and collapse of the feudal order and sectarian conflicts. Europeans when they started ruling India thought that without the concept of Nationalism India was still an immature civilization compared to them.
And then they ruled India. Then India became free. Still continued to be a multi-ethnic society with an amazing diversity not found in any other part of the world.
But see what’s happening now? Europeans who had called India an immature society earlier because of the lack of the concept of nationalism are today giving a call in europe to rise above nationalism and form a multi-national european union!!! One Europe-One Currency and what not..
The concept of what they call an European Union is what existed in ancient sub-continent of India. We had about 60 kingdoms which had a diversity much more than today’s europe. Each state in India today could be considered like an european country and entire republic of India more powerful than an European Union. Infact the concept of European Union is to protect european countries from the military mights of America, from cut throat competition from India and China.
Thanks to the british rule, India has already successfully emerged as a great union for more than half a century while europe is still preparing itself for the union with more of debates and allegations!!