The quest of 'understanding India' brings to mind a story, one that some of you might already know and others might feel that you could have heard it before. In its English version, it is called ‘The Blind Men and an Elephant’. An American poet named John Godfrey Saxe composed it in the mid-19th century. The crux of its story goes like this: Six men, bereft of the sense of sight, are asked to describe an elephant presented before them. Depending on the part of the animal’s body that each one is allowed to touch and feel, they come up with wildly different descriptions, each naming the elephant to be something entirely different. The person feeling the tail, thinks it to be a rope. The one feeling the legs, avers that they are tree stumps. The ear is described as a fan, and so on. Then, the six blind men discuss the conclusions they have drawn from their respective experiences, and a fight breaks out over which one of them is correct. Each is content with their respective partial understanding, confident that it is the whole. At the end, no one is able to figure out that thing they had touched and felt was actually an elephant. 
 

It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that this story originated in India, in a Pali language compilation of the Buddha's teachings, called The Udana, from the 3rd or 4th century BCE--a good two thousand years before John Godfrey Saxe introduced it to the English-speaking world as a 'Hindoo Fable'. Indeed, the object of enquiry in the question ‘What is India?’ is not unlike like the elephant in the parable. People have been trying to figure it out for a long, long time, and continue to do so into the present, unabated. If we take the oldest known written account describing 'India' as our historical marker, then the interest in the question goes back at least two thousand five hundred years. And going by the clashes between contending ideas of India even in our own times, it seems that we are none the wiser still. 

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Alas, apt as the parable is in illuminating the complexity of our quest of understanding India, historical realities are always more complex than any morality tale can account for. In the parable, the object of enquiry—the elephant—at least remains stable. It does not take on new names, or change shape, size, and posture as the visually impaired men inspect its different parts. The same cannot be said for the object of our quest. ‘India’ has changed in dramatic ways on all these counts and more over the course of natural and human histories. Unlike the elephant, who the men would have clearly seen had they not they not been visually impaired, or perhaps could have inferred, had they cooperated with their partial conclusions, it is difficult to comprehend India fully, to have full knowledge of it. For ‘India’ is an unruly object of enquiry, with a long history of shifting shape and carrying a long list of aliases. 

 

can india be understood?

Does this mean that India cannot really be understood and, therefore, all attempts to do so are futile? Evidently not; after all, every undergraduate student in Azim Premji University has to compulsorily do the Understanding India courses! But the way we will go about our business is unusual. We will begin by accepting that given the multiple identities of India, the immense diversity of peoples, languages, cultures, and rulers that it has harbored through course of history, one thing is for sure: understanding India can never be an exhaustive endeavor. No one person can claim to have understood everything about India. For there is no one, undisputed ‘India’ out there, to be apprehended fully by our senses and our reasoning. Indeed, as we know from our own lives and lived experiences, there are many Indias.

 

If we recognize this simple but powerful observation--that there are many Indias--and proceed from there, then exploring the question 'what is India?' can be a wondrous and thrilling pursuit. Especially, if we are able to link this pursuit with another basic fact:  that despite all the complexities involved in understanding India in an 'objective' way, India is something with which we are intimately familiar. We understand India in a certain way already. Most, if not all, of us have lived and grown up here; each one of us has experienced India with our own senses, from our own locations in life. We have learnt about it at school; from our friends and families; through our travels; from films and television, news and novels, and, uniquely to our times, from social media. Indeed, we know 'India' from life itself.

 

The experiences and ideas of India that we have gathered in the process are, no doubt, quite similar on some counts and very different in others. In this course, we will use our already existing experiential and acquired knowledge of India as a key resource to for our classes. We will put the many Indias that we bring with ourselves into conversation with each other, with the assigned readings and viewings in the course; we will arrange and analyze them through new concepts drawn from different disciplines of scholarship and research; apply them in group and individual projects; and, at the end of the course, take stock of where we began and how far we have moved in our quest of understanding India. So, to the question 'can India be understood?' the correct answer is: well, it is the journey towards understanding which the fun part here; and the journey definitely produces an understanding.