India is a land of diverse people, varied faith and heterogeneous culture where the Hindu lives peacefully with the Muslim
and the Buddhist dines at the same restaurant with his Christian friend. While the Sikh plays polo with his non-Sikh business rival, the Gurkha subaltern stands at attention with his Tamil counterpart through an army march past. Though war and invasion through decades have mellowed the combatant mindset of the average Indian, none could take away his argumentative psyche. And this had been happening since the legendary days of the Mahabharata where the arguments of Arjuna, the great analyzer with his charioteer Sri.Krishna for and against a devastating war highlights the early argumentative Indian philosophy. (Please read this chapter in the Mahabharata for better understanding of the argumentative Indian) Who is the argumentative IndianIn order to delve deeper into the topic, we must find out first who are the real Indians. Apart from the early residents of this subcontinent, people from faraway places have made India their home. There are a good number of Jews in India who apparently came to India after the fall of Jerusalem and the migration continued through the fifth and sixth centuries from southern Arabia and Persia. The final phase constituted of Baghdadi Jews from Syria and Iraq, settling down in Bombay and Calcutta. So, they or their descendants are very much Indian and their arguments in favor of their faith within the Indian scenario is indeed relevant. Then, take the case of the Parsees who started arriving in India soon after the persecution of Zoroastrianism began in Persia. These Indian Parsees are no less argumentative than their fellow Indians and they have very many reasons for being so. But one thing we must remember that all these migratory communities have managed to retain their identity within India’s multi-
religious continuum, yet getting into the mainstream in some miraculous way.More the dispute, bitter the argumentThe present day Indian is no less argumentative than his predecessors. Take the case of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya within the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, that was destroyed by Hindu activists on December 6, 1992 on the belief that a commander-in-chief of the first Mughal emperor of India, Babar had built it on the same site where a Hindu temple existed in commemoration of the birth of Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu and ruler of Ayodhya. Interestingly enough, the mosque was earlier known as Masjid-I Janmasthan (Mosque of the birthplace) that stood on a hillock called Ramkot (Rama’s fort) and was built around 16th century. Now, if ever there was any dispute linked with building a mosque after destroying a temple that took several centuries to culminate and take a violent shape today is an ample evidence of the argumentative Indian’s cultural, religious and political point of view.