 The title of my talk today is our culture, composite and unique. Inclusive, however, is not synonymous with composite. In meaning and content and their ambits, they are different. A structure may be inclusive, but not composite. Alternately, it may be composite, but not inclusive. A third variant would be composite and inclusive. Furthermore, the import of the term inclusive and exclusive has to be examined on two counts. Firstly, included or excluded in decision making and secondly, included or excluded as beneficiaries. So what do we mean by composite? The dictionary meaning differentiates between the term as a noun, an adjective or a verb. In classical European architecture, it denotes the mixing of two styles. In Floriculture, it is used for a head of many flowers forming one bloom. For the purpose of today's talk, the term composite is perhaps an MLGAM of all these. We of course know that the term composite is used twice in the constitution. In article 51 AF and in article 351, both in the context of the composite culture of India. Under article 51 AF, it is a constitutional duty of citizens to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture. Under article 351, it is the duty of the Union to promote the spread of Hindi as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India. It mentions in this context Hindustani along with other eight scheduled languages but does not seem to clarify why Hindustani is not mentioned in that schedule or in the list of non-scheduled languages. The theme of today's lecture is thus very much in step with the scheme of things visualized by the constitution. Culture has been defined as a set of customs, traditions and values of a society or community. It is knowledge of practices acquired over time. Cultures are not discrete entities and are invariably informed by their encounters with other cultural influences. For this reason, it is appropriate to conceptualize culture as a process rather than something that is permanent and stable. This process is unavoidably linked to the history of a society and to the historical experience of encounters and interactions. In regard to India, the eminent historian of an earlier age Tarachand had summed it up in a seminal passage almost a century earlier and I quote him. Indian culture is synthetic in character. It comprehends ideas of different orders. It embraces it in its orbit beliefs, customs, rights, institutions, arts, religions and philosophies belonging to strata of society in varying stages of development. It eternally seeks to find a unity for the heterogeneous elements which make up its totality. At worst, its attempts and in a mechanical juxtaposition at best they succeed in evolving an organic system. The complexity of Indian life is ancient because from the dawn of history, India has been the meeting place of conflicting civilizations. Through its northwestern gates, migrating hordes and conquering armies have poured down in unending succession bringing with them, like the flood of the Nile, much destruction but also valuable deposits which enriched the ancient soil out of which grew even more fresh and ever more luxuriant cultures. These foreign impulses have played an important part in India's history. As a matter of fact, the process of its cultural development may be envisaged as the blending of three strands producing the characteristic pattern of their cycle. For the same reason, Jawaharlal Nehru, his depiction of Indian culture as a talent possessed on which the imprint of succeeding generations have unrecognisably merged is a valid reflection of the historical experience of our land. Similar views delinking national identity with religious identity were expressed in 1905 by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya and in 1920 by Lala Lajpat Rai. Ravindranath Tagore described his family background as a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Muhammadan and British. The same idea was expressed by the poet Raghupati Rai Firaq in a couplet. Sir Zameen-e-Hind par aqwa me alam ke Firaq karwa aate gaye Hindustan banta gaye. Thus, ours is a society characterized by pluralism reflective of its diversity and complexity. Graphic evidence of it is found in the empirical data compiled by the Anthropological Society of India in its publication India's Communities that run into 11 volumes. It records 4,635 communities and observes that Indian society is marked by linkages across communities and regions. The linguistic survey and the general data of the decennial census supplement and amplify this diversity in ample measure. It also shows that religious minorities constitute 19.4% of the total population. This coming together of people of different cultural moorings and traditions and at different times in a long history unavoidably had cultural consequences. In this context, as a contemporary historian has put it, the crucial question is whether Indian culture is conceived as a static phenomena tracing its identity to a single unchanging source or to a dynamic phenomena critically and creatively interrogating with all that is new. As a result, no society, least of all a society as diverse as that of India is amenable to a single cultural denominator, either of caste or of religion. And the evolution of Indian national identity of the national identity of India is a result of a long series of inclusion of cultural practices either internally generated or originating from outside. Thus, our national identity has emerged without a united and homogeneous culture and has been born out of interaction between different cultural communities. It is not a given but created over time and with space for self-expression to all its ingredients and through contestations and mutual interrogation. This was carefully reflected in the crafting of the constitution. If this is self-evident, why is it now being shirked or challenged? What are the grounds for it? What are its implications? How is the challenge to be met? Answers to these questions assume criticality in the context of the agenda being unrolled in sections of social and political opinion. It is argued that beneath the diversity is a unity. That this unity emanates from a single mainstream premised on a conflation of land, religion and culture. And that all deviations from it must be subsumed in a hegemonic wave demanding national unity. This was most authoritatively articulated by Madhav Sadashiv Golbhakar whose political and religious philosophy was centred on the concept of India as a Hindu rast founded on the principle of one nation, Hindu, one culture, Sanskrit and one religion, Hinduism. This necessarily implies a negation of cultural and religious pluralism. The imperative here is of nationalism understood solely as cultural nationalism in which integration is understood as a simulation and civic citizenship transmuted into ethnic citizenship. The question of national integration is not a new one in our discourse. The National Integration Council set up after the 1962 conflict has sought to deal with it half-heartedly in its infrequent meetings. Its approach is best depicted in an Urdu couplet. Suljhaya Bedili Se Ye Ulche Hue Savaal. Vaan Jaayin Yaan Ha Jaayin Na Jaayin Ke Jaayin Haan. Many years ago a political scientist addressed the matter with greater clarity and drew attention to errors that emanate from conceptual faults. I would like to cite his words here since they have relevance to contemporary debate. In the semantics of functional politics, the term national integration means and ought to mean cohesion and not fusion, unity and not uniformity, reconciliation and not merger, accommodation and not annihilation, synthesis and not dissolution, solidarity and not regimentation of the several discrete segments of the people constituting the larger political community. Obviously then integration is not a process of conversion of diversities into a uniformity but a congruence of diversities leading to a unity in which both the varieties and the similarities are maintained. End of his quote. We know that there is a difference between promotion of diversity and its recognition. Diversities in our land are ground realities reflective of our society's long historical experience and ought to be traced in all periods. They exist at the core as also on the periphery and have their own unique characteristics and cannot be homogenized. A scholar of ancient Indian history has observed that religious practices in India being many and rooted in cultures of communities constituting the fabric of Indian society, accommodation through recognition of their diversity was the alternative to incessant conflict and compartmentalization. Actual conflicts did take place amongst many established religions for hegemony, but the religious process in India was not homogenization from a hegemonic source but interpretation in diversity and emergence of symbols of universal recognition. End of quote. In a later period, Mughal Emperor Akbar's Sul Hai Kul was a reflection of it in state practice. There is also ample evidence of it in Sufi and Bhakti literature and practices and in languages, prose, poetry and art forms, music and dance. Instances can be found in every nook and corner of our land. The cultural intermingling in Sanskrit and Persian literatures in the Mughal period was the subject of an erudite lecture here in the IAC some months back. So friends, to deny the existing reality of cultural diversity and the resultant presence of a composite culture and to replace it with any form of monoculture in the name of a new strident illiberal nationalism is to conduct a form of regressive regimentation. It would be a denial of the space consciously created in the constitution for the expression of regional, linguistic, religious and cultural pluralism and has been labeled in contemporary parlance elsewhere as Talibanization. To replace composite culture with a form of monoculture, which incidentally is a term in agronomy to denote the practice of producing a single crop, is to negate a constitutional directive and belittle the growth and flourishing of all ingredients of cultural diversity. What are we confronted with is a very powerful and comprehensive impulse, ideologically driven to differentiate the citizen body on partially articulated but fully understood notions aimed at creating the other and otherness defined as an alien identity different from the self. This requires a multi prompt response. In the first place, such an ideological approach is contrary to the constitution and therefore needs to be addressed on political and juridical grounds. More so because it is the citizen's constitutional duty to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood transcending diversity. Secondly, the distinction between indic and non-indic matters in academic and popular writings should be contested since it is not sustainable scientifically and its principal purpose in societal matters is to deny and denigrate. Some in today's audience may know of a grouping called Indic Collective Trust and another promoting Indic scripts. Both ostensibly could be innocuous but both are devoted to pursuits that are focused on furtherance of loaded agendas that are easily discernible. Thirdly, we need to assess the impact of studied subduing or raising of diversity in school curricula, textbooks on history and culture, funding patterns of cultural institutions and academies, projection of soft power abroad through government and cultural agencies. Opinion has to be mobilized for correctives. For this purpose, competent individuals or teams of individuals should be interested with the task of compiling a database of these distortions or misrepresentations and making it available on the net to interested citizens or researchers within the country or abroad. Such a database should also identify matters derogatory to regional, tribal, scheduled caste and minority cultures. So, if advocacy of composite culture is to be more than a sentiment and a slogan, if we have to take seriously our duty to protect, sustain and promote it, then our effort has to be a multi-pronged one involving conceptual clarity and contestation as well as practical to counter challenges to it in all their manifestations. It is to be done because it is the citizens constitutional duty to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood, transcending diversity. Allow me to conclude with an Urdu couplet written over a century earlier but very relevant to the challenges confronting us. It is suggestive of a saner approach. If I need to translate, I don't know. It remains to be seen if Sena Council would prevail to restore to the Indian landscape the richness of a garden in full bloom admired the world over for its uniqueness. An old tradition says that all the fruits and perfumes of paradise are to be found in India because this is where they came with Adam on his expulsion from the heavens. Let us not dissipate this uniqueness. Let us cherish it.