Written by Amit Chaudhuri | Updated: January 25, 2020 11:34:53 am To be Indian is to be Hindu, the BJP has instructed us, in a way that mutilates both categories. The protests have replied: To be Indian is to be human.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, said Sartre in his brief memoir, Words, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it. Necessary and sufficient: By which I suppose Sartre means that what makes an adventure adventure-like is determined after the fact, when an inchoate event has a narrative and a sort of completeness imposed upon it in retrospect. You cant decide to have an adventure; you cant always know youre in one.

What Sartre said about the adventure, I often felt was true of history: That few people are actually aware of being in history, or in a significant historical moment. The present is frayed, open-ended, distracting, often humdrum: It doesnt have the polish and carefully-put-together air that history does in books, whether theyre scholarly works or novels, or in cinema. Most people Ive met whove lived through great historical change confess to not being aware at the time of the experience of the importance, the historicity, of what they were going through.

The events in India in the last month and a half have made me revise my view. For the first time I can think of, I am aware of living in history. It has all the frayed and unpredictable qualities of the present; yet its sui generis nature has taken us by surprise. We werent schooled to recognise it or led to expect it; but we know it for being history now that it has happened.

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Im referring, of course, to the nationwide protests that began in the midst of the deep gloom of the Citizenship Amendment Bill becoming an act in both houses of Parliament. They first started in Assam for a particular set of reasons; then related to the fraught question of what it means to be Indian in Jamia Millia, Aligarh Muslim, and Jawaharlal Nehru universities; spreading then to streets and squares everywhere, breaking with the terrible normalcy of the BJPs second terms first seven months, replacing the post-CAA despair with incandescence and exuberance. No historical moment, or protest, is like another this much is clear now. Not only India, the world has known nothing like this before. Whats being formulated is the thought that to be Indian is not only to be secular it is to be human. Although the conflagration and revaluation was prompted by religion, its not God thats at issue here.

The words, idea of India, trip readily off the tongue. But what does being an Indian actually mean? At which point did the word begin to be used by the English, and when and how was it wrested away from the coloniser so that it became a keyword, a potent concept, for the natives? To be Indian was to be many things, but I think it also comprised an overhaul of the colonisers ownership of humanism. When a late 19th-century Englishman used the word human, he most often meant Englishman or, at most, European. When late 19th-century Indians, increasingly divorced from power in their own country, used the word Indian for themselves, they were inserting themselves into the history of humanism, which gave them the freedom to perform and be defined by a range of characteristic but seemingly contradictory actions. Whether or not the Indian was a Muslim or high or low-caste Hindu or a Christian or man or woman, they could read, equally, the Gita, the Bible, or Wordsworth, or listen to a qawalli or a bhajan, often in new secular contexts; to be Indian also meant one could oppose the English coloniser politically while being able to study, and be moved by, English poetry. This is how the experience and consciousness of being Indian expressed anew, and in an unprecedented way, what it meant to be human. That to be Indian was not a political identity alone. Besides civilisational pride, it was this modulation of humanism that gave Indians their sense of parity, their absence of a sense of cultural marginality, in relationship to their political rulers.

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In the last half century, its not only liberalism and, in India, secularism that have been called out as fraudulent; humanism, of which the other two are offshoots, is a world-view thats been largely put on the shelf. The reasons for this are unarguable: To do with the powerful whether theyre European, or male, or elite, or all of these using the word human primarily to refer to those who are European, or male, or elite, and leaving the rest of the world outside the words purview. On these grounds, humanism was made illegitimate, both by the Left and the Right, as an idea that was more exclusionary than inclusive. It splintered into a variety of political identities, to do with class, race, gender, and postcolonial difference, which the word human had once enveloped and muffled. No one but a nostalgist would invoke humanism. It had had its day.

Or so it seemed until last month. The protests since mid-December participated in by women, men, and children of all religions and classes, almost entirely peaceful and mostly unaffiliated to any political party represent the first resurrection anywhere in the world of what one thought was an anachronism: The humanist legacy. The resurrection has brought renewed attention to the Constitution, which is a humanistic rather than a nationalistic document. To be Indian is to be Hindu, the BJP has instructed us, in a way that mutilates both categories. The protests have replied: To be Indian is to be human.

Most protests worldwide have had to do, with good reason, with the indispensable assertion of the interests of beleaguered groups and identities: Wed forgotten what it meant to fight for humanity because it had become blurred as an idea, or an ideal. Fighting for an ideal itself belonged, conceptually, to another epoch and value-system. Who remembers now that an ideal can be more pressing and immediate than self-interest? The world would have been unconvinced of this until recently. Yet, the Hindu or the Muslim person on the street rejecting the CAA is not there for sectarian reasons, but to fight for an ideal articulated decades before it was formalised in the Constitution. Humanism, not nationalism, determines the contexts in Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere, of national flags and pictures of Ambedkar and Gandhi and the recitations of the Preamble; yet not even Gandhi or Ambedkar, or any European liberal, could have dreamt that humanism could be so radical an instrument, cutting across religions, classes, castes, and genders.

Who would suspect, unless one discovers Shaheen Bagh or Park Circus, humanisms deep compatibility with religious identity, and the latters kinship with rationality? If theres one thing that interviews, comments, and placards on the street have revealed, its that the ordinary person is not to be respected for their ordinariness alone, nor the burkha-clad woman for her ethnicity and difference, but for speaking with a more profound common sense, clarity and rationality than our politicians. Remember, only a tiny sliver of the rational tradition belongs to Western science; much of it originates in spiritual movements that rebut bogus religiosity, going back to Buddhism and various devotional movements. All these cultural energies have gone into creating the new humanism were seeing taking birth on the street.

Realising, in an absolutely fresh way, that history, unlike the adventure, is not the recounting of a narrative but where we are now, Ive entered it in some of these streets and parks myself.

This article first appeared in the print edition on January 25, 2020 under the title Reclaiming the Republic. The writer is a novelist and essayist.

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Countrywide protests signify a nod to new humanism that seeks to synthesise political ideas and identities - The Indian Express