Pehlgaum is a picturesque town located on the banks of the Lidder River in the Vale of Kashmir, some 60 miles from the capital of Srinagar. It is the starting point of the pilgrimage route to Shiva at his temple in Amarnath. It is a popular tourist destination, and many, many Hindus begin their annual Amarnath pilgrimage there.
In April this year, Islamist terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out a murderous attack in Pehlgaum. Armed with automatic rifles, they assaulted a large group of tourists, killing 26 and injuring 20 more. The survivors spoke of how, with mounting horror, they realized that the terrorists were deliberately singling out Hindus and executing them. Not that the terrorists were too discriminating—a Christian and a Muslim also died. Like all other acts of terror, this was tragic, brutal, and entirely unnecessary.
Before the bodies had even cooled, however, media outlets were drumming up anti-Muslim sentiment. Not anti-terrorist or anti-Lashkar-e-Taiba, but anti-Muslim. News anchors, red in the face, thumped desks, brayed for vengeance, and stopped short—just barely—of calling for a pogrom of Indian Muslims. Early in May, the Modi government announced “Operation Sindoor,” a series of airstrikes into Pakistani territory targeting supposed terrorist camps.
The name was telling: Sindoor is the vermillion streak worn by Hindu wives. The government sought, clearly, to evoke Hindu honor violated by Muslim hands. Troops massed along the Line of Control with Pakistan, cross-border shelling intensified, and warplanes carried out bombing sorties. For a long week, India appeared to be preparing to invade Pakistan.
That did not happen, of course. Pehlgaum reopened for tourism. And YouTubers (on either side) made a lot of money with commentary videos.
So passed the 78th year of Indo-Pakistani strife: intense, hateful, and entirely inconclusive.
This did not have to be so.
Now, imagine what could be in its stead. A subcontinent where the princely states—all 565 of them—endure. Not as relics of a bygone age but as proud bastions of local government and cultural stewardship. Where the Rajahs and Maharajahs, far from being sidelined and paupered, stand fast as custodians of their people’s heritage, blending, wisely, tradition with progress. In this India, loyalty to one’s gaon (village) and shaher (city), one’s khan-dan (clan/lineage), remains a sacred trust, holding samaj (society) together in a web of gratitude and obligation.
This is not a fantasy of empire or a yearning for the age of zamindars (landlords) and jagirdars (baronetcies), still less nostalgia for colonial etiquette, but a recognition of the fact that for most of her history, India was a latticework of little sovereignties, of subsidiary nodes of loyalty and patronage more intimate than distant provincial and national capitals.
Let us zoom in. Mysore. Picture the Maharajah lighting a bowl of camphor to greet the dawn: not as a show of piety but because it is his charge. Down the Albert Victor Road drift flower girls and chartered accountants on their way to Hardinge Circle or the City Bus Station. Just over a mile north rise the spires of the Cathedral of St. Philomena. In its eaves stand Brahmin pundits (religious scholars) and Latin clergymen engaged in gentle (and occasionally spirited) debate. All these folk tied by cords of duty to the palace standing in the lees of the Chamundi Hills. The conservative vision of man, society, and God that emerges from this reality is neither libertarian minimalism nor a whitewashed dream of Volkisch purity. It assumes, simply, that to be governed well is to be known—by one’s rulers, one’s priest, one’s neighbors—and that such bonds are a very precious bequest.
March up along the Carnatic coast and you will find Madras. Sunstruck, vibrant, awash with pilgrims and traders, where the Nawab of Arcot receives emissaries from the Mughal Imperium and the Bengali Subah (province). In nearby George Town, Armenian merchants cast their bids at peppercorn auctions; a few gullees (localities) over, in Mylapore, sonorous Vedic hymns emanate from loudspeakers strung up around Kapaleeshwarar Temple, vying for attention with the bells of San Thome Basilica. North again, past the emerald rice paddies and coconut plantations of the Krishna and Godavari catchment areas, we reach the Deccan Plateau. Here the air is dry: Marathi jagirdars hold court in modest durbars hearing petitions about irrigation disputes and cattle thefts. Their goodwives, draped in nine yards of saree, lead the annual worship of Bhavani, patron goddess of Shivaji, lord of the Maratha Confederacy. Yet their charity is not reserved solely for the Tulja Temple, where resides Bhavani. No—they patronize Jesuit schools and Carmelite convents in Berar, Hyderabad, and Poona, too. They understand that piety wears many guises.
In Assam, Bengal, and the wide, rolling lands of the Indo-Gangetic doab (two-river plain), the same subtle tapestry unfolds. Tea planters in Bengal and Assam, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian, patronize local melas (fairs) honoring the local gods even as they send their children to Salesian and Dominican tutors in Darjeeling. Southward, in the Bengal delta, the baul (peripatetic bards) sing songs to Krishna and Jesus, Radha and the Blessed Virgin. Calcutta remains the jewel of the Subcontinent: Trams rattle down the Upper Circular Road, hauling passengers the length and breadth of the city. Parsi and Greek merchants man their stores along the dingy, crowded lanes of New Market, Chowringhee, and the Esplanade; bright-eyed students debate beneath the cool portico of Presidency College; lovers walk arm-in-arm down the colonnade of the Victoria Memorial.
Westward, beyond the rugged hills and badlands of Bihar and Chattisgarh, lies the heart of the ancient realm of Aryavarta. Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Allahabad, Benares—capitals of realms present and past—live still. Indeed, the very soil of the corridor between the Ganges and the Yumna seems to remember the countless dynasties that have come and gone. Each contributes to the great striated humus of civilization that has called this land home. It is perhaps here more than anywhere that a true Indian conservatism could take hold, one rooted in place, tempered by a thousand thousand dialects and devotions, suspicious of all grand abstractions save that which emerges: India, mother and daughter both, and the glory of the subcontinent.
We cannot in our recollection of else-when forget that other curious lot: the living embodiment of a love that spans continents, reuniting brethren long-sundered, sprung from the mingling of the Bengali and the Briton, the Konkani and the Lusitanian, the Tamil and the Irish—the Anglo-Indian. Neither wholly Indian nor wholly foreign, they are India’s hinge. In the counting houses of Bombay, the tearooms of Calcutta, the cantonments of Meerut and Mysore and Oudh, and the signals cabins of Madras, they keep the arteries of the realm open.
It is they who ensure that the writ of law does not choke on the dust of custom, nor justice and freedom die in the fires of zeal, that the dispensaries, ordnance manufactories, and irrigation pumps run. They are the persnickety troubleshooters, engineers, and planners. In them are the best of the West and the East distilled. They love their clubs, their kedgeree, their Simla summer soirees, and their Bombay duck as much as any old India hand; unlike them, though, they love also the bright tropical sun. Nowhere else are they so much at home, for like India, they are, in the truest sense, mingled. No one else better embodies India’s genial contradictions or accepts anomaly as the grain of life.
What better sigil, then, for this never-when realm than the old Star of India? Not the bland tricolor nor the crescent and star, but a rayed, five-pointed star of argent, studded with diamonds and encircled by a sunburst with 52 rays of gold, and in the center of the sunburst a ribbon of azure with the motto: Heaven’s Light, Our Guide. No vaunting claim to remake man, no demand for conquest or creedal uniformity—only the humble plea that the Lord God might limn peasant and prince alike, under heaven’s light.
In this vision, the Indian subcontinent is not a furnace of endless grievance, but a many-pillared hall of stone, centered in a common hearth of loving tradition.
To an outsider, it may seem like madness that no Indians of goodwill—or Bangladeshis or Pakistanis, for that matter—are advocating for this alternative. Indeed, the vision outlined here underscores the Preamble to the Indian Constitution. It is the hope of “Unity in Diversity” given living form. The reasons are many and not lightly told. Perhaps we can take them up at some later time.
