{"id":151844,"date":"2020-01-20T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=151844"},"modified":"2020-01-17T08:40:49","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T08:40:49","slug":"growing-gardens-of-diversity-weaving-gardens-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/growing-gardens-of-diversity-weaving-gardens-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Gardens of Diversity Weaving Gardens of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

15 Jan 2020 – <\/em>Diversity is the Hindustan Way.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s civilisation is based on diversity and interconnectedness in nature and culture.<\/p>\n

We grow gardens of diversity. We weave garlands of love.<\/p>\n

Our National Anthem is an ode to the diversity of the land \u00a0from the mountains of \u00a0the Himalaya to the\u00a0Vindhayachal range, from the mighty\u00a0Yamuna\u00a0and\u00a0Ganga\u00a0to the oceans.<\/p>\n

We sing how diversity of cultures and religions came to India from the East and West\u00a0\u201cWeaving Garlands of Love\u201d<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=erar4vTOf-k<\/p>\n

English Translation<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

You rule the minds of all people
\nand control India\u2019s future.
\nYour name brings joy to Punjab, Sind, Gujarat and Maratha;
\nand Dravida and Orissa and Bengal. (regions in India)
\nIt echoes in the Vindhya and Himalayan hills,
\nand mixes with the music of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers.
\nIt is also sung by waves of the sea.
\nWe pray for your blessings
\nand sing your praise.
\nWe look forward to your best wishes.
\nAnd we wish Victory, victory, victory for you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We are of the Earth, in our diversity. The Earth gives us citizenship.<\/p>\n

Our first identity is as Earth Citizens, an Earth Family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam), sharing the planet with other species. We did not impose on ourselves the burden of Anthropocentrism, of separation from and superiority over other species. The Empire was based on the illusion of the superiority of one species, one race, one religion, one gender. It was also an Empire over what were declared to be \u201clesser creatures\u201d, to be exploited and exterminated. The Monoculture of the Mind is the basis of Empire.<\/p>\n

Separation is the basis of Empire.Fragmenting and fracturing interconnected, autopoietic, self organised systems is the basis if Empire. Denial of completeness is rupture of relationships that sustain individuals in community, farmers and their land, humans and the earth. Division is the ground for extractivism. Extractivism is the foundation of Empire.<\/p>\n

There has been a continuous war against our biodiversity in nature and culture diversity by past and present empires. The extractive economy of the 1% is based on the Monoculture of the Mind\u00a0 and it creates monocultures.<\/p>\n

The biodiversity of our forests and farms has been replaced by monocultures of commercial timber and commodity crops. The forest is reduced to a mine for timber and pulp. The biodiversity of our farms has been reduced to monocultures of commodities which are desertifying the soil, impoverishing our farmers, and spreading hunger and malnutrition. Tribals rise. Peasants rise. The 1%\u00a0 then uses the tried and tested policies of Divide and Rule to rupture and tear apart the rich weave of our cultural diversity to defend the Empire.<\/p>\n

The British Empire was established by the East India Company, chartered in 1600, to conquer and colonise India through military force, and take over of our resources, economy and trade. From accounting for 25 % of the global economy, we were reduced to 2 % by the time the British left. Our generous land was ridden by famines and impoverishment of the people. The atrocities and exploitation of the Company Raj (Company Rule ) led to the uprising of 1857, India\u2019s first Independence movement, which ended the rule of the first corporation, the East India Company. We could drive out the East India company because we were united for freedom and justice in our diversity.<\/p>\n

The memorial of martyrs of the 1857 war of independence at Meerut which I visited during our \u201cFreedom Pilgrimage\u201d to commemorate 100 years of the Champaran Satyagraha, shows how Muslims and Hindus gave their lives\u00a0for India\u2019s freedom.<\/p>\n

As, Shashi Tharoor writes in\u00a0the Era of Darkness\u00a0\u00a0\u201cthe sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Moghul monarch \u00a0had alarmed the British who did not take long to conclude that dividing two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of Empire. Lord Elphistone, the Governor of Bombay advised London that\u00a0\u201cDivide et Impera\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0was the old Roman maxim and it should be ours\u201d (pg 120 Tharoor\u00a0)<\/p>\n

The cultural technologies of Divide and Rule are part of the violence that Empires use to maintain their rule in times of dissent and resistance. Partitions, compulsory registration on the basis of religion and race, and using the Census to construct artificial, fragmented, negative identities are at the core of the arsenal to hold on to power.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s movements against imperialism continued after 1857, and were strongest in Bengal. In 1905 the\u00a0British<\/strong>\u00a0viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, divided Bengal on the basis of religion to\u00a0strangle the intensifying nationalist movement\u00a0,and implement the Empire\u2019s Divide and Rule policies, The nationalist movement protested against the partition of Bengal through\u00a0Swadeshi\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>(self making and autonomous) and boycott of the import of British goods. This is how Swadeshi was born as the nationalist movement against economic imperialism and its divisive policies.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s very tragic partition into Pakistan and India built on the earlier division of Bengal and a result of the divide and rule policy of the Empire.<\/p>\n

Around the same time as the partition of Bengal, the Empire was\u00a0dividing South Africa on the basis of race.<\/p>\n

After the Boer war, when Transvaal became part of the Empire, the Government passed an\u00a0Asiatic Ordinance on Aug 22, 1906<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

As Gandhi writes in his book\u00a0\u2018Satyagraha in South Africa\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cI saw nothing in it but hatred of Indians. It seemed to me that if the ordinance was accepted, it would spell absolute ruin for the Indians of South Africa\u2026better die than submit to such a law\u201d<\/p>\n

The ordinance required that every man, woman or child of eight years or upwards, entitled to reside in the Transvaal, must register his or her name with the Registrar of Asiatics and take out a certificate of registration. Indians who failed to apply for registration, forfeited their right to residence and could be sent to prison or deported. Indians were required to produce the certificate of registration for police officers whenever and wherever required. Failure to show the certificate could send you to prison.Police officers could enter private houses in order to inspect certificates.<\/p>\n

Hindus and Muslims in South Africa joined hands to fight the laws for compulsory registration which were called the\u00a0Black Act<\/strong>. They refused to register. After 8 years of non cooperation, the Empire had to withdraw the restrictions.<\/p>\n

The South African Satyagraha against the race based compulsory registration of Indians was Gandhi\u2019s first Satyagraha.<\/p>\n

Gandhi\u2019s ideas of freedom through Swaraj and Satyagraha were shaped by the struggles in South Africa.<\/p>\n

But the urge of the Empire to Divide and Rule continued . It was institutionalised as the Apartheid regime in 1948 The Africaans word,\u00a0apartheid<\/em><\/strong>, meaning\u00a0\u201cSeparateness\u201d \u00a0or the state of being apart It was first articulated in\u00a01929. Mandela and others who fought against Apartheid were imprisoned for decades.\u00a0Thousands died. The apartheid system was abolished in 1994.<\/p>\n

The world celebrated the end of apartheid as the beginning of a new age of our consciousness as one humanity, with no place for race based and religion based separation and division.<\/p>\n

However, the empires tools of apartheid and separation keep coming back in new forms. And anti apartheid struggles which celebrate diversity also emerge in each age and every place where diversity is threatened.<\/p>\n

The spirit of human freedom, in and through diversity, cannot be extinguished inspite of repeated, brutal attempts to destroy freedom and diversity.<\/p>\n

Divide and rule policies of the British Empire included the attempts to change the census from one based an occupation and place , which creates positive and real identities, to one based on artificial constructions of fixed and mutually exclusive caste and religious identities, and then dividing people on the basis of these constructions, violently removing the shared identity of culture, community, place.<\/p>\n

It is not that India had not undertaken enumerations of the population before the British. But these enumerations, like Ain-i Akbari, took relationships and diversity into account. The\u00a0Empire used the census to construct essentialised, polarised, artificial religious identities. As a Government resolution stated;\u00a0\u201cthe basis of the classification should be religion\u201d\u00a0(Gottschalk, Religion, Science and Empire,\u00a0Pg 203). The mutually exclusive antagonistic categories of Hindu (referred to as\u00a0\u201cGentoo\u201d) and Muslim (referred to as\u00a0\u201cmussalman\u201d)\u00a0are constructs of Empire. People had multiple identities, and religion was not the most dominant at the social level.\u00a0Identities of occupation were dominant. They would put\u00a0\u2018mali\u2019\u00a0(gardner), not muslim.\u00a0People often saw themselves as Hindu Muslim, because Hindu merely referred to a geographical indicator \u2013 the people of the land beyond the Indus. Hindus and Muslims prayed at the same shrines.\u00a0\u201cThe Satya Narain of the Hindu is the Satya Pir of the Bengali Musalman\u201d. Bengali muslims used the same language, dressed the same way (pg 204 Gottschalk). And diversity is India\u2019s being. A diversity so rich that no box, no standardised category, no monoculture, can contain it. Every attempt at forcing it into a box has involved violence, and failure.<\/p>\n

Government officials argued that census operations directly aggravated communalism \u00a0(Religion , Science and Empire , Peter Gottschalk , Oxford University Press ,,2013 , pg \u00a0195)<\/p>\n

The consequences of this reduction of diverse, multiple, shared, positive identities, into negatively constructed, reductionist, religious identities are at the root of much violence in our times. It is part of the Divide and Rule strategy of today\u2019s Empire.<\/p>\n

Oneness<\/em> is based on the consciousness that we are interconnected, we are interbeings, ecologically and culturally. When we do pranayama we say So Hum <\/em>\u2013 you are<\/em>, therefore I am<\/em>. There is no \u201cother\u201d.<\/p>\n

Instead of identity flowing positively from who we are, the work we do , the place we live in and spaces we occupy, the relationships we nurture and which nurture us, Empire destroys our work, uproots us from our homes making us all refugees, tears apart our relationships and actual identities, and fills the vacuum by negative, fragmented, cultural identities constructed and externally imposed by Empire. The externally defined and imposed identities of Empire are negative, defined not by who we are but\u00a0 who we are not.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Empire of the 1% destroys identity and meaning that flow from work and place, dividing societies and manufacturing enemies, to Divide and Rule everything, everywhere.As Samuel Huntington wrote \u00a0\u201cI cannot know who I am till I know who I hate\u201d. The Empire is defined by who our enemy is.\u00a0We witness this today with the threat of a war against Iran, and the\u00a0 continued wars in Iraq and Syria. We see it with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica becoming the machinery of the manufacture and unaccountable dissemination of hate to hijack democracy in a digital world. The currency and commodity of the Empire is hate.<\/p>\n

In these times of limitless greed and manufactured division and hate, we resist<\/strong> by living and thinking through, and with, our diversities as one humanity on one planet.<\/p>\n

We grow gardens of Diversity. We weave garlands of love.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>TRANSCEND Member<\/a> Prof. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers\u2019 rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993. She is executive director of the Navdanya Trust.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 navdanyainternational.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 Jan 2020 – Diversity is the Hindustan Way. In these times of limitless greed and manufactured division and hate, we resist by living and thinking through, and with, our diversities as one humanity on one planet. We grow gardens of Diversity. We weave garlands of love. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":37325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[229,842,952,1121,232,120,519,354,849,401,248,932,1055,931,759,929,1200,1621,1122,1455,985,380,1120],"class_list":["post-151844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-activism","tag-agri-food","tag-agriculture","tag-biodiversity","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-ecology","tag-economics","tag-ecosystem","tag-environment","tag-farming","tag-genetic-engineering","tag-genetic-manipulation","tag-gmo","tag-india","tag-monsanto","tag-natures-rights","tag-navdanya-international","tag-organic-food","tag-seeds","tag-social-justice","tag-solutions","tag-vandana-shiva"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}