Review Of "Ghoul" - An Allegory On The Danger Of Summoning Up Spirits We Cannot Control

[Spoiler alert]

The 3-part Netflix serial "Ghoul" is scary, and I'll tell you why.

Not because it's a supernatural thriller (there are no such things as ghouls, after all), but because it's an allegory for something that is already happening in India, and in a few other places in the world.

The trailer predictably focuses on the superficially scary, and tempts the viewer into uncovering its deeper chills over its three episodes

The premise is simple, and not much of a stretch from what we see today. Set in the near future, this is a dystopian tale of the Indian state that has turned hypernationalist, seeing enemies around every corner, and cracking down hard on every hint of dissent, terming it sedition and treason. In this story, Muslims are the natural suspects, but so are those who merely exhort others to reason and question. India here is a society that has placed itself under siege.

The main character is a young woman, a Muslim, who nevertheless accepts the official narrative about enemies of the state, and goes as far as to turn in her own father for his seditious activities. The father is no terrorist, merely a professor who strays from the officially approved syllabus in order to make his students think for themselves. But in the kind of country he happens to live in, that is a treasonous act. The young woman belongs to a quasi-military law enforcement agency, and she is summoned to join the team at a special interrogation centre, for reasons she uncovers only later. All the prisoners here are Muslims. With the exception of the protagonist, none of the law enforcement officers is Muslim. The lines are drawn quite starkly.

The superficial storyline deals with the interrogation of a new prisoner who turns out to be something other than human. In the torture chamber that is euphemistically called the interrogation room, he turns the tables on his captors, and unleashes a bloody trail of horror. However, that's the predictable part - the shadows, the suspense, the running, the screaming.

But here's the secret to unravelling the allegory. According to the serial, the ghoul (or ghul in the original Arabic) is an evil spirit that is summoned by someone who draws its symbol using their own blood. But after the ghoul appears, it has a will of its own. It is not subservient to the will of the person who summoned it. It often devours them, then assumes their appearance and walks among their kind, striking at them when they least expect it.

It's fairly easy to decode the allegory once we start looking for it, since the best stories usually weave a deeper tale beneath the one they are ostensibly telling. The ghoul haunting the entire serial is the spirit of hypernationalism. The viewer cannot miss the irony in the dialogues. Once summoned, the spirit of hypernationalism takes on a life of its own and cannot be sent back to where it came from. It will exact its price in blood until it is sated.

This, in fact, is not the scariest entity in 'Ghoul':

These are:

The rigged interrogation of an innocent man

The official who knowingly has an innocent man executed, and still maintains that he has done no wrong

What is especially scary about 'Ghoul' is that it is so topical, so close to reality. The demonisation of Muslims in India is complete. They can be lynched with impunity, and their killers walk free even when there is clear video evidence of their crime. Hindu members of the public march in numbers in support of rapists and killers. Ministers and officials greet them with garlands, and pay their respects to them when they die. The families of their Muslim victims are further harassed with trumped-up charges.

The prevailing culture has turned hypernationalist. Those who do not stand up for the national anthem are punished. Those who don't toe the nationalist line are called traitors. Fake news is circulated about opponents, and they are vilified as enemies of the state. Critical journalists are murdered.

What can a demonised minority do when the slightest resistance will be seized upon as an excuse for a harsher crackdown? 'Ghoul' is both a warning and a kind of wish-fulfilment. It is of course a warning to those who think that summoning the spirit of hypernationalism is without risk. The evil spirit will devour those who summon it as well as those it was originally meant to devour. But there is wish-fulfilment here too.

After all, the supernatural being who wreaks bloody havoc among the oppressors is not a rakshasa or asura from Hindu mythology. It is a ghul from Islamic mythology. For a community that is helpless to fight back against injustice, a cultural twist to an otherwise karmic revenge can be the only grim satisfaction.

An Indian Grand Narrative (In Contrast To The Petty One That Passes For It)

The concept of an Indian "Grand Narrative" came up again in a recent social media discussion, and I was amazed at how the Hindu Right wing (or the relatively intellectual sections of it) have both monopolised discussion of the concept and got it so wrong at the same time.

The incipient glimmerings of what the Hindu Right calls the "Indian Grand Narrative" is actually a pretty petty one. I will analyse this in detail in this post and conclude it with my own version (which is arguably far grander!)

[Update February 2022: I have written up a "civilisational narrative" for India, which is available both online and as a downloadable PDF.]

But first, what is a Grand Narrative, and is it important at all?

1. A Grand Narrative - its nature and relevance

A Grand Narrative is a fancy way of saying that a people have a clear view of who they are, their unique history and culture, and of what their place is in the world. Further, they are able to communicate this to other people with pride. Provided this is accomplished in a spirit of mutual respect, such a cultural Grand Narrative is something positive to aspire for.

1.1 An unfortunate (and unfortunately common) example

The example commonly given in this context is the American Grand Narrative, which also goes by the terms "American Exceptionalism" or "America's Manifest Destiny". To my mind, this is a particularly unfortunate example if one is trying to argue for an Indian version.

American Exceptionalism is the notion, held almost unanimously by Americans, that their nation is the greatest of all, that it is based on the noblest of virtues, that whatever America does in the world is to the world's benefit, and further, that while it may make occasional mistakes, those are well-intentioned, and that in the main, America can do no wrong. The sentiment is often succinctly expressed in the phrase heard nowhere else, "I believe in America", as though America were not a nation but an idea. It is taught to children from a very young age in all American schools, public and private, and is therefore unconsciously internalised even by those who consider themselves skeptical in other matters. It is a pervasive and insidious example of indoctrination in a supposedly open and critically introspective society. The works of Noam Chomsky and others explain how this systemic indoctrination works, in chilling detail.

Those fortunate enough to be born elsewhere can see with crystal clarity that this hagiographic imagery of American Exceptionalism is dangerously incorrect. America is no doubt a rich and powerful country, its society has many inherent strengths, it provides a progressive example to older societies in many respects, but as a nation-state in the comity of nation-states, its behaviour has been far from infallible or noble. On the contrary, the moral certainty conferred by its universally accepted Grand Narrative compounds the evil that its deep state cynically practises. Everything that the American establishment does in the world is for its own interests, not the good of the world. And it is not even in the interests of the American people in whose name it is done, but in the interests of the military-industrial complex, of which much has already been written. The fact that a country like Iraq can be subject to a veritable holocaust of over a million deaths, and reduced to utter ruin, on a basis of an American lie, and that no one responsible has paid any kind of price for it, is just the most recent evidence. Nothing else but moral certainty can enable a nation to wreak such suffering on the rest of the world with a perfectly clear conscience.

Therefore, the call for India to adopt a Grand Narrative using the US as an example seems like Kafkaesque humour. Heaven forbid that India become a nation of indoctrinated zombies, supremely convinced in "the idea of India" against all evidence.

1.2 Confusion through conflation

The roots of the Hindu Right's confusion about an Indian Grand Narrative, right off the starting blocks, is its failure to distinguish between four very different entities. This is probably deliberate, since the ideology of the Hindu Right is crucially dependent on a conflation of the four.

Those four entities are:

• The Indic civilisation
• The Indian nation-state
• The Hindu religion
• The Hindi language

Notice that I have deliberately chosen different adjectives (Indic, Indian, and Hindu) to distinguish the first three concepts. The Hindu Right avoids mention of the emotionally neutral term "Indic", slyly preferring to use the more emotive words "Hindu" and "Indian" (interchangeably!) to describe all three ideas. This, as I will argue, is deliberate sleight-of-hand to further a certain majoritarian agenda. Further, the literal meaning of the word "Hindi" as being the language of Hind (India) plays to the same theme.

1.3 A rational critique

In evaluating the suitability of each of these elements towards forging an Indian Grand Narrative, I will rely on rationalism. The most successful societies in history have been led by reason, and a Grand Narrative needs to make its society successful, otherwise it is nothing but a waste of time.

2. The Hindu religion

The easiest to dispatch is the Hindu religion, and I will deal with it first.

As an atheist, I see no merit in any religion or "spiritual" tradition. These have held humankind back from progress in a myriad of ways, with the only thing to be said in their favour is that they may provide comfort to those in distress.

Much is made of the Hindu religion by its adherents, who make many claims:

• its superiority over the collective set of Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which are considered "desert religions" and hence needlessly harsh and puritanical
• the notion that Hinduism subsumes atheism (i.e., that one can be an atheist and still be a "Hindu", simply because some ancient Indian philosophers were atheists)
• that "Hindu philosophy" is a distinct and rationally arguable set of ideas distinct from blind religious beliefs or ritual

I consider all of these arguments facetious.

There is no meaningful difference between different sets of metaphysical truth claims, when all of them are ultimately based on the hubris (in the complete absence of evidence) that human consciousness can somehow outlive the physical body. This, after all, is the concept represented by the "soul", "atman", or whatever term a religious adherent might choose to use. In spite of all the talk of "Near-Death Experiences", with their tunnels and Beings of Light, everything is ultimately explained quite adequately by Dr Susan Blackmore's Dying Brain Hypothesis. There is therefore nothing "superior" about the Hindu religion. I consider it a collection of fairytales like any other.

The desire to claim atheists as Hindu is more a wistful reluctance to let go than a rational argument. Atheists cannot simultaneously be Hindu, otherwise the term "Hindu" ceases to stand for any unique ideas at all.

Finally, any philosophies that could legitimately be considered distinct from metaphysical beliefs, such as the Samkhya philosophy, are more correctly described as "Indic" than as "Hindu". There is nothing particularly Hindu or even theistic about such philosophies, but they are the unique contribution of the Indic civilisation to the set of world philosophies.

For all these reasons, I would keep the Hindu religion entirely out of any "Indian Grand Narrative". It would not just be an embarrassment but (as with anything irrational) would cripple its chances of practical success.

3. The Hindi language

The next item that can be dispatched is the question of language. There are a couple of spurious arguments made in favour of Hindi being India's national language:

1. "Just like the Germans have German as their national language and the Japanese have Japanese as their national language, we should have our own language as our national language, and Hindi is the one spoken by the largest number of Indians."
2. "We are no longer a British colony or slaves of the British, so we should throw off the colonial yoke and stop speaking the language of our colonial oppressors."

As always, these emotive arguments fail the logic test.

3.1 What is a "national" language?

Germany, Japan, and for that matter, all countries with a single language, have it easy. There is no question over what their national language should be. However, India has over 25 major languages. All of them are authentically Indian, and so all of them are in a sense "national" languages. None of them is more equal than the others. Promoting one regional language above all others is unwarranted, and historically unwise.

A linguistic map of India shows that Hindi is nothing but a regional language, although the region that speaks it is larger than any other single region in the country.

There are very few countries in the world that have this extent of linguistic diversity, and even the most advanced countries find it very hard to manage the fractious nature of linguistic identity.

Canada has a hard time containing the secessionist tendencies of its French-speaking province Quebec, as Spain does with its Catalan and Basque regions. Belgium's French and Flemish speakers cordially dislike each other. Multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union broke up in very short order once the iron fist of their erstwhile communist regimes collapsed. There is no multilingual country in the world that has peacefully imposed one language on all of its people. [We have yet to see what will happen to China in the future, if the iron grip of the Communist Party should ever weaken. Will the speakers of the Yue (Cantonese), Min, Wu and Hakka dialects reassert themselves and reject Mandarin?]

Linguistic identity is a powerful and primal instinct, and any government ignores this at its peril. The anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s was handled relatively wisely by the Nehru government. Nehru gave an undertaking that "English would continue as long as the non-Hindi-speaking people of India wanted it". Tamil Nadu bought the rest of the country a breather, as it turned out, because the second emotive argument has also turned out false.

3.2 To whom does the English language belong today?

At one time, English was the language of England. But today, English has become the lingua franca of the world. Anyone who has done business internationally knows that English is the language of business. A corporate meeting room will see business conducted only in English, even if none of the participants is a native speaker of English.

English is therefore an aspirational language for those who wish to raise their standard of living. It opens doors to employment in the formal sectors of the economy, and helps fluent speakers negotiate their way through higher and higher corridors of influence and power.

The English language no longer belongs to England, and thinking of it as an instrument of colonial oppression is outdated.

For both these reasons, the promotion of Hindi as the natural "national" language of India is tenuous and in need of review.

I believe that linguistic integration of the people of India is best achieved through a combination of languages, and that Indians must each learn more than one language. Further, this choice of languages must not be imposed by the state, but be selected by citizens by their own free will.

4. The Indic civilisation

If one looks at the term "civilisation" as a combination of genetics, geography and cultural elements, the Indic civilisation is unique among world civilisations. A telltale sign is that the eminently insightful Samuel Huntington, in his seminal book "The Clash of Civilizations", confesses to being unable to adequately describe the Indic (or as he called it, the Indian) civilisation. This difficulty is not surprising. Both genetics and culture in the South Asian region have undergone cataclysmic change - genetics over the course of a few millennia, and culture over the course of a few centuries. Their lingering effects on present-day society are yet to be fully processed and absorbed, and hence reactionary, denialist movements like the Hindu Right are inevitable as part of this painful adjustment process.

4.1 Genetics

Genetically, the people inhabiting the region identified loosely as "India" (whether it be the Indian nation-state alone, or all the nation-states of South Asia), have arisen as a result of intermixing between three distinct chromosomal groups:

1. South Asian hunter-gatherers
2. Iranian agriculturists
3. Steppe pastoralists

The latest genetic evidence supports the theory that Steppe pastoralists ("Aryans") invaded the land  (the Indus Valley) occupied by a people ("Dravidians") who were themselves descendents of the two earlier groups of people.

As this article explains,

In simple terms, the mixing of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers first created the Indus Valley population.

Then around the 2nd millennium BCE, Steppe pastoralists moved south towards the subcontinent encountering the Indus Valley population in a manner that was likely to have caused some amount of upheaval.

What appears to happen afterwards is that some of the Indus Valley population moves further south, mixing more with South Asian hunter-gatherers to create the Ancestral South Indian population

Meanwhile, in the north, the Steppe pastoralists are mixing with the Indus Valley population to create the Ancestral North Indian grouping.

Most subsequent South Asian populations are then a result of further mixing between Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians.

[As an amusing aside, the Hindu Right vehemently rejects this model even in the face of mounting evidence of its validity, and I will explain the reason for this opposition shortly.]

As I mentioned, the waves of genetic influx and intermixing occurred over the course of millennia, but they remain a source of potential friction to this day. As a hint, this is why the term "Dravidian" is so emotive and controversial.

4.2 Culture

Culturally, after the fairly fundamental influence of the Aryans' invasion in 2000 BCE, with their pantheon of gods and their Vedic-Sanskritic rules and rituals of society, the South Asian region next received influences from two other civilisational groups, and this mainly occurred over the last millennium (more pronounced in the latter six centuries of the last millennium).

In broad civilisational terms, these three cultural influences have been

• Autochthonous developments from within the native Indic civilisation itself (which includes secular cultural traditions like tribal, pastoral, urban, mercantile, as well as religious ones - Hinduism and its various sects, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism)
• The collective set of cultures called Islam that began in force about 6 centuries ago (which includes Arab, Persian, Mongol and Turkic influences)
• The multiple strands of Western influence that began about 2 centuries ago (which includes the Christian religion, rational-humanist thought arising from the Western Enlightenment, commercial exploitation in the form of colonialism, technology from the Industrial revolution, new political and administrative ideas and structures, etc.)

[Alexander the Great's brief foray into the subcontinent around 330 BCE did not bring about as significant a change in Indic culture as the latter two, and so it can be ignored after this brief mention. Indian Ocean trade had its own set of influences on every trading nation (Read "The Ocean of Churn" by Sanjeev Sanyal), but these were gentler and therefore relatively non-controversial. Certainly Indian cuisine was one of the areas most impacted by trade.]

These latter two cultural inputs into the Indic civilisation (Islam and Westernisation), being much more recent than the genetic inputs, have an understandably greater impact on current-day discourse. The tectonic plates representing each of these cultural influences continue to cause tremors in the polity, not just in India but also in other South Asian countries.

An important element of cultural influence has been the outward flow of ideas from the Indic civilisation to geographies beyond South Asia. Countries of East Africa and Southeast Asia to this day exhibit influences of the Indic civilisation, whether these be Sanskritic roots of words in their languages, or variants of Hindu epics in their culture, or temples to Hindu deities, such as Angkor Vat in Cambodia. While these are not controversial within India, they must be taken into account when formulating an Indian Grand Narrative.

4.3 Geography

Having dealt with the cataclysmic influences of genetics and culture, what is left is the relatively stable aspect of geography. Unlike some other countries (such as Poland) that have been unfortunate enough to have their very geographical boundaries rewritten more than once during their history, the geographical outlines of the Indic civilisation have necessarily remained stable since its earliest beginnings. The impact of this is clearly explained in StratFor analyst George Friedman's insightful article "The Geopolitics of India - A Shifting, Self-Contained World".

Indeed, the only geographical event of significance in this region occurred in the last century, when the colony of India ruled by Great Britain was split into India and Pakistan (and later further divided to form Bangladesh). Extrapolating from Friedman's writing, the long-term viability of Pakistan (and Bangladesh) as independent political entities is in doubt, since civilisations tend to extend outwards until they meet hard geographical boundaries like impassable mountains, dense forests, or seas. The Indic civilisation must therefore prevail within Friedman's "island" that is South Asia, regardless of Pakistan's attempts to forge an alternative narrative based on supposed Arab cultural roots.

[An interesting aspect of Friedman's analysis is the relative isolation of the Indic and Sinic civilisations, and by extrapolation, the modern nation-states of India and China ("China and India might as well be on different planets"). This, as we will see, must have a significant impact on the formulation of an Indian Grand Narrative.]

5. The Indian nation-state

And so, after dealing with the Hindu religion, the Hindi language, and the Indic civilisation, we come to the modern Indian nation-state. The attempt by the Hindu Right to craft what they consider an Indian Grand Narrative is an attempt to define the soul of the Indian nation-state, since that is after all the only practical manifestation of any religio-cultural interpretation that they may give to the Indic civilisation.

The relationship between the Indian nation-state and the other three entities that it is sought to be conflated with (i.e., the Hindu religion, the Hindi language, and the Indic civilisation) needs to be understood.

5.1 The Indian nation-state vis-a-vis the Hindu religion

The constitution of the Indian nation-state has dealt with religion in the wisest and most practical way, by consciously separating church and state in the manner inspired by the Western Enlightenment. This wisdom is obvious in retrospect when one looks at neighbouring countries in the region that have adopted a "state religion" (Buddhism in the case of Sri Lanka, Islam in the case of Pakistan). The immediate and practical impact this has had on the lives of religious minorities in these countries has been borne out quite dramatically. Even a nominally secular country like Bangladesh has seen its religious minorities persecuted because of tacit support to the notion of a "state religion". The resulting civil strife impacts every citizen, even those belonging to the majority, who may have initially thought of themselves as winners. There are in fact no winners in this game of one-upmanship, and it is best avoided altogether.

The takeaway from this is that when a nation-state has citizens professing more than one religion, any attempt to elevate one above the others will lead to the creation of second-class citizens and eventual civil strife. India must learn from the mistakes of its neighbours and be grateful for historical circumstances that endowed it with a saner constitution at the start of its journey as an independent nation-state. If India changes its constitution in future to favour the Hindu religion, it will do so at the cost of its own unity and prosperity. This will of course not be obvious at all to the adherents of the Hindu Right, which is why we are constantly admonished to learn from history and from the mistakes of others. It is not "hyphenation" to warn of a "Hindu Pakistan", for example.

5.2 The Indian nation-state vis-a-vis the Hindi language

The wisdom of India's early governments is on evidence again, viz., the creation of states on the basis of language. Language is a fault-line in any society, and India's early leadership showed wisdom in allowing the nation to crack naturally along those fault-lines, instead of trying to weld the nation together with a single "national" language imposed by fiat. Granting linguistic states the autonomy to use and propagate their own languages within their borders has cooled the fissiparous tendencies of a heterogeneous society.

What India has not done so well is in regard to the teaching of English. The English language is a force of nature that is foolish to resist. Rather than attempting to replace English with Indian languages (either a putative rashtrabhasha ("national language") like Hindi, or a person's maatrubhasha (mother-tongue)), policymakers should have emphasised the need to learn more than one language.

The takeaway from this is that autonomy and equal treatment of all languages is the way to keep a nation together. Elevating a single language above all others is a way to create resentment. Further, since humans can learn more than one language, Indian policy should have been even more assertively multi-lingual than it is.

5.3 The Indian nation-state vis-a-vis the Indic civilisation

Similarly, the many civilisational influences on the modern Indian nation-state must be acknowledged and graciously incorporated where suitable, not resentfully denied and expunged. The Indic civilisation is a hybrid one, and the inward flow of cultural influences from other civilisations has enriched and informed it. They are not pollutants to be eradicated, but ideas to be entertained, debated and judiciously adopted without prejudice based on their origin.

It's interesting to observe the markedly different ways in which inward and outward cultural influences are received. A report of schoolchildren in Scotland singing Sanskrit hymns is welcomed and forwarded on social media, while the teaching of English nursery rhymes in Indian schools is criticised. The success of Yoga and "Bollywood dancing" classes in Western countries is welcomed, but the recent popularity of Salsa and ballroom dancing classes in India is frowned upon. A Western woman who wears a sari is praised for her appreciation of Indian culture, but Indian girls who wear jeans are criticised and sometimes physically assaulted. A temple to the Hindu god Vishnu in Angkor Vat, Cambodia, is a matter of great cultural pride, but the Islamic architecture of the Taj Mahal in India is a source of perceived humiliation.

Part of what constitutes the Hindu Right's ideas for a Grand Narrative is the notion that India will take its "rightful place" as a "Vishwaguru" (teacher to the world). It is a peculiar combination of insecurity and hubris that values cultural exports over imports. A realistic assessment of history is that human society progresses through cultural cross-pollination and the exchange, including the conflict, of ideas. No civilisation is inherently superior to any other for all time. Civilisations rise and fall. At different times in history, one or another civilisation becomes relatively dominant. It is a way by which the human race collectively progresses, by passing the baton to one or another representative culture that leads the rest for a time. A so-called Grand Narrative based on an idealised one-way flow of influence from one's own civilisation to all others is not just unrealistic but betrays deep cultural insecurity.

India has been lucky to receive external influences that shaped its society. If only the native Indic cultural influences are to be acknowledged as legitimate, it would be a net loss to society. Countries that remained insular throughout their history struggle to cope in a more connected world. Why would a nation gifted in this regard voluntarily eschew its advantages?

5.3 A simplistic model of what it means to be "Indian" in modern India

The Hindu Right betrays the simplistic thinking of conservative and right-wing movements everywhere, in that it pursues idealistic notions of "purity" in preference to richer and more nuanced cultures. A prime indicator of such simplistic thinking is the desire for a single cultural narrative as opposed to many coexisting ones.

The Grand Narrative sought by the Hindu Right seeks to elevate one set of cultural values above others, and therefore seeks to privilege one set of citizens over others. Although the movement also receives support from outside of this privileged group, those others deny to themselves the fact that they are de facto second-class citizens in this model. For political expediency, they have voluntarily denied aspects of their own identity and willingly subjugated themselves to the identity of the favoured group.

Specifically, what could be called the Hindutva Grand Narrative (which is actually a pretty petty narrative), privileges people who happen to be:

• Upper-caste
• North Indian
• Hindi-speaking
• Hindu
• Male

They are also straight by sexual orientation, cisgendered and able-bodied to boot. People belonging to so-called "lower" castes, South Indians, Northeast Indians, people who speak a language other than Hindi, people who practise a religion other than Hinduism (or even more heterodox denominations like some tribal groups), women, LGBTQI people, etc., willy-nilly become second-class citizens whether they are willing to admit it or not.

Any assertion of hyphenated identities in this model is labelled "Breaking India" (often abbreviated in Right-wing circles to "BI forces"). But why so? One can be proud to be Dravidian and Indian at the same time. One can be proud to be Muslim and Indian at the same time. One identity does not need to be subservient to the other. Identities can coexist, and only right-wingers lack the nuance to understand this.

Trevor Noah explains the legitimacy of hyphenated identities in the context of African migrants in France

Interestingly, Hindu Right-wing sympathisers can readily accept Trevor Noah's argument when it comes to France, but will still refer to a Dalit caste identity, a Dravidian cultural-regional identity, or a Muslim or Christian religious identity as inherently divisive with regard to the "Indian" identity. If one is to be Indian, one cannot be anything else. Or rather, one can only belong to another identity after acknowledging its subservience to the "Indian" one. A Tamil can be a Tamil as long they do not refuse to learn Hindi. If they do, they're anti-national. A Muslim can be Muslim as long as they accept that they are "culturally Hindu". If they do not, they are anti-national.

That's why the Hindu Right's attempt to define a Grand Narrative is a non-starter. It's very petty in its insecure bullying and one-upmanship.

A true Indian Grand Narrative

Here is my simple approach to an Indian Grand Narrative.

1. Leave religion out of it entirely. Religions are fairytales that do nothing to advance the human condition. If it is not possible to explicitly repudiate religious thinking, at least confine religion to the private sphere. The state must be scrupulously secular.

2. Adopt a sensible language policy that does not unfairly promote one regional language (Hindi) over all others, or reject the most useful language in the world (English). Fortunately, human beings have the ability to learn more than one language. So adopt a 3-language formula, and leave it to citizens to decide what those three languages should be. Judging by the popularity of English-medium schools in India (especially in the Hindi-speaking states!), English will almost certainly be one of the three, for an overwhelming majority of Indians. A very large number of Indians will also choose Hindi to be one of the three. For those who do not have Hindi as their mother-tongue, the third language chosen will almost certainly be their mother-tongue. Hindi-speakers may choose some other language (Indian or foreign) as their third language. This is the only democratic way forward.

3. For the Indian nation-state, the most important elements are economics and geopolitics. It will require a separate blog post to elaborate, but the implications of this are that India will need to grow at its fastest and most sustainable rate possible, to achieve the heft it desires. It will also need to be extremely hard-headed in its assessment of what it wants to achieve for itself in geopolitical terms. Secure land borders? An end to rival power centres within the Indian subcontinent? Control of the Indian Ocean? Whatever it is, India has to think rationally and strategically about these, in order to achieve them over the course of the next few decades.

"Veer" Savarkar As Benedict Arnold - How Indian History Should View A Revolutionary-Turned-Collaborator

During the American War of Independence, a man by the name of Benedict Arnold fought on the side of the fledgeling United States. Arnold won some key battles against British forces, and was injured in the foot at the Battle of Quebec. He was promoted to the rank of Major-General in recognition of his many contributions.

Later on, however, as a result of perceived slights at the hands of his superiors, Arnold turned traitor and attempted to hand over his command of West Point to the British. He failed in that attempt, but escaped to British lines and fought against his former compatriots thereafter.

How does the US remember Benedict Arnold today? How does an often comically over-patriotic nation handle the memory of a man who was both patriot and traitor?

There is no statue erected in honour of Benedict Arnold. Arnold is remembered in the US today by the Boot Memorial.

The Boot Memorial in Saratoga National Park, New York

The Boot Memorial honours the injury that Arnold suffered in the cause of American Independence, but does not mention him by name because he turned traitor later.

In India today, the legacy of a man called Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, is being fiercely debated.

VD Savarkar fought for Indian Independence against the British. Unlike Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, he did not choose the path of non-violent, passive resistance and non-cooperation. He believed in violent revolution, so when he was captured by the British in connection with a suspected conspiracy, he received a severe sentence. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison in the infamously harsh Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean.

While in the Andamans, Savarkar wrote numerous mercy petitions to the British, and was finally released after serving just 10 years of his 50 year sentence.

After his return to the Indian mainland as a free man, Savarkar was as good as his word and never again worked against the British. What he did do was work against the Indian National Congress, which suited the British very well indeed.

Gandhi and the Congress aimed to secure Hindu-Muslim unity, and to work towards Indian independence from the British as a undivided political entity. Savarkar, on the other hand, worked to unify the "Hindu nation" against the Muslims, and eventually became the President of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha. In this, he effectively took the same side as Jinnah, who also believed in the "Two-Nation Theory" that Hindus and Muslims were separate "nations" and could not share a single state. The actions of Jinnah and Savarkar thus deepened the divide between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, Jinnah's Muslim League and Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha became unlikely coalition partners in many provincial governments when the Congress resigned from those governments to protest certain actions of the British.

Savarkar's writings acquired a distinctly fascist tone, and he became more interested in the "independence of the Hindu nation" from Muslims and Christians than with the independence of India from British rule. He turned from being a revolutionary into a collaborator. His being a collaborator is clear from  the fact that he got into no more trouble with the British authorities. The trouble he was giving to the Congress played right into the hands of the British.

How must India remember Savarkar today? The Hindu right-wing insists on calling him "Veer" (brave) Savarkar, but there is little that smacks of bravery in the grovelling letters he wrote to the British during his incarceration in the Andamans. India certainly needs to acknowledge his early contributions to the freedom struggle which earned him his prison sentence, but this acknowledgement must be tempered by the knowledge of his subsequent betrayal of that freedom struggle and his actions that favoured the British.

India needs to erect a monument in honour of Savarkar's early contributions, but this monument should not acknowledge him by name on account of his later actions as a collaborator. Only word of mouth should associate him with the monument, just like Benedict Arnold is only unofficially associated with the Boot Memorial.

The Quest For A New Australian Flag (And My Part In It)

I've written before about the symbolism of my painting "Terra Australis Magnus" and its roots in my design of a new Australian flag. This post is about the various players involved in that quest.

There has long been a movement among Australians to remove the Union Jack from the Australian flag. It's widely seen as an anachronism for a country that is independent of Britain.

Having another country's flag in the canton of one's own is unacceptable to many Australians

Have a quick look at the current Australian flag. It has the Union Jack in its "canton", or top-left corner. Directly under the Union Jack is the seven-pointed Commonwealth Star. Six of those points represent the six states of the country. The seventh represents not just the two territories but also all future states and territories. On the right is the Southern Cross (Crucis Australis), a constellation prominently visible in the Southern hemisphere.

I became aware of the movement to replace the Union Jack in the Australian flag sometime after I migrated to Australia, and I immediately and wholeheartedly agreed with it. After all, I had just migrated from another former British colony, and India had lost no time in changing its flag after attaining independence. In fact, all the former colonies of Britain now had their own flags, with the two most prominent exceptions being Australia and New Zealand.

At least India got special treatment as the "jewel in the crown" of the Empire, but there's nothing like having one's own flag

I joined the Facebook group "Change the Aussie Flag", and have seen many alternative designs here, and also contributed some of my own.

The Eureka Flag

There has long been a contender for the position of Australia's national flag. It's called the Eureka Flag, and it looks like this.

The Eureka Flag has had a chequered history

The flag had its roots as part of a miners' revolt, and has been associated with protests ever since. (Supporters of former prime minister Gough Whitlam wore it to protest his dismissal by the Governor-General.)

The Eureka Flag doesn't enjoy wide popularity, but there are some who are fanatically loyal to it. Regardless of its emotive appeal (positive or negative), I find that its aesthetics leave me cold. Blue-and-white is a weak colour combination (sorry, Greece and Israel), and there isn't any contrast between the white stars and their white background, just a thin blue line as a separator.

Southern Horizon

One of the first alternative designs I came across was the one called "Southern Horizon", designed by Brett Moxey.

Southern Horizon won an opinion poll of about 8000 respondents in early 2016, but this was not an official contest for a new national flag, and I believe the race has only lately begun to hot up

What the Southern Horizon design has done is propose a minimalistic set of changes to the current flag, so as not to upset those who are attached to it. It removes the Union Jack from the canton, then moves the Commonwealth Star upwards to take its place. To address the large empty space left behind at the bottom, it introduces the official Australian colours of "green and gold", following vexillological principles of interposing a metal (gold) between two colours (blue and green). By making the green and gold stripes wavy rather than straight, the design also solves the problem of filling different amounts of empty space beneath the Commonwealth Star and the Southern Cross.

Southern Horizon takes the safe route of proposing a compromise design that balances the conflicting requirements of continuity and change.

Golden Wattle

When I first saw Southern Horizon and understood its design imperatives, I felt that a compromise design would only last as long as no alternative, good design emerged, and I believe I was proved right. Of late, a new flag design called the Golden Wattle has gained in popularity, and many former supporters of Southern Horizon have switched loyalties.

The Golden Wattle - Simplicity and elegance pack a powerful punch

The golden wattle is Australia's national flower, and its colours of "green and gold" are Australia's national colours. What could be more natural than to put these colours in the shape of the flower on the national flag? And when the negative space enclosed by the petals also forms the Commonwealth Star, that can only be described as a stroke of genius. The Golden Wattle looks like a winner, and if another opinion poll were to be conducted today, I have no doubt that it would beat the compromise design of the Southern Horizon.

Remember the right-pointing arrow cleverly hidden in the negative space carved out by the letters of the FedEx logo? The Golden Wattle pulls off a similar neat trick

The Fixation with Green and Gold

Golden Wattle managed to pull it off, but many other designs that were fixated on the idea of using "green and gold" were not imaginative enough to produce anything appealing.

This design was virtually predictable given the constraints of retaining the Commonwealth Star and the Southern Cross, and using a green-and-gold colour scheme

Kyron Bracey's design loosens the constraint against using a third colour

Somehow, none of the green-and-gold designs ever appealed to me, except for Golden Wattle. (As we will see later, Golden Wattle "cheated", so to speak, on using the official colours, in the interests of a more appealing look.) Sad to say, the official hex codes (#FFCD00 and #00843D) are not a great colour combination, and the designer who believes they must use these two colours has dealt themselves a bad hand right from the get-go.

The Cool Ones

Many of the designs I saw on the "Change the Aussie Flag" group site were only passable, although some were quite striking.

I'm not sure whose design this was, but I thought it was interesting

Brendan Jones and his Reconciliation Flag

Brendan Lloyd revisits the mandatory green-and-gold with a boomerang theme

I'm not sure who designed this, but Daphne Visbal reported that it was seen on Reddit

The quest for simplicity and elegance

While many of the designs proposed were interesting, they were also a bit complex. I hadn't seen too many designs that were as simple and elegant as Golden Wattle. But there were a few.

For example, these designs by Brian Nedic were immediately appealing to me.

Brian Nedic's stars were unlike anything I had seen until then

The "Change the Aussie Flag" membership is a tough crowd, and Nedic got his share of negative comments, suggesting that his designs looked more like the logo of a white goods company like Electrolux than a national flag.

Nevertheless, these stars made a powerful impression on me. I was star-struck, you could say.

After seeing this new, concave style of star (formed out of the negative space of four circular quadrants), I could not go back and use the traditional five- or seven-pointed star in my designs ever again. They just looked so dated.

The new style also seemed to shine like real stars.

Note the "plus" shape of bright lights in real life

Then I saw another set of designs that appealed to me, and I had no idea what dangers lurked there.

Joseph O'Donoghue's design

Mic Rogan's design

I don't remember which of these came first. Perhaps O'Donoghue refined Rogan's hand drawing. At any rate, the use of an Aboriginal motif seemed to be a no-brainer for an Australian flag. How could we ignore the First Peoples when designing a new Australian flag? It seemed the best way to honour them and their legacy to Australia.

Timeless Red Earth

With these two inputs, I created a design that I called Timeless Red Earth. I had been struck by the cover of the Lonely Planet guide to Australia that I bought in India before migrating here in 1998, and I had to use this shade of red.

Until I saw this cover, I had always associated Australia with the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, never with red sand dunes

A traditional Aboriginal-themed sun and a stylised, futuristic Southern Cross, antisymmetrically balanced against a background of red earth - what could go wrong?

Unfortunately, a lot could go wrong, as it turned out. My well-intentioned attempt to honour the First Peoples of Australia was attacked by some as a form of "cultural appropriation". While I reject that very concept as an example of ultra-leftist manufactured outrage, this is not a hill I choose to die on, so I decided to move on and use a less controversial motif instead. (One can learn from this example how a marginalised community ends up being even more marginalised because their self-styled defenders on the extreme left ensure that no one else is allowed to champion their cause in anything but an "approved" way.)

Someone suggested the Golden Wattle as an alternative motif, and I looked into the flower itself for inspiration.

The Golden Wattle is not a conventional flower but a compound one called an "inflorescence", made up of many smaller flowers called "florets"

I had to design something that looked like an inflorescence, without making it as complex as the real thing.

Great Southern Land / Terra Australis Magnus

After repeatedly submitting modified designs in response to feedback, I finally arrived at a design that combined a seven-sided Golden Wattle (very different from the one used on the Golden Wattle flag) and a stylised Southern Cross inspired by Brian Nedic. I had a choice of colours, and rather than pick one set, I submitted a number of them to the group for feedback.

These are some of the possible variants of Terra Australis Magnus (Great Southern Land). Click to expand

The Schoolkid Test

One of the criticisms that are sometimes levelled at sophisticated flag designs is that they are hard for children to draw. The right thing for me to do would have been to get a schoolkid to try drawing this design. But since there were no school-going kids within call (my son is now in University), I had to be the schoolkid. I took out my stopwatch and measured how long it would take to outline and then to colour one of the variants to Terra Australis Magnus. I chose the one with a red-and-blue background for this experiment.

A little over a minute to draw the flag in outline

A little under two minutes to colour it in

Giving myself a factor-of-three handicap, I suppose a real kid could do it in about 10 minutes.

A Note on Competition

While there may or may not be a monetary prize associated with winning the design contest for a new Australian flag, the prestige is enormous, and I have approached this challenge with relish. I have some strengths, I believe. I am both right-brained and left-brained. I can see what has visual appeal, and I can hack an SVG file, using coordinate geometry to shape, size and colour its elements.

With all respect, I don't believe Southern Horizon is competition anymore. The new front-runner is Golden Wattle. I looked to see who had designed it, and came up with the name Jeremy Matthews.

I also searched the Change the Aussie Flag site for all the elegant designs I could find. I found a very cool one involving a leaping kangaroo. Normally, flag designs involving roos are godawful, as this sample set shows.

Some seem like ripoffs of the Qantas logo, while others are just plain awful

This particular one stood out for its elegance.

A design put together by Ian McLennan, but he said he was just modifying someone else's design

After some more searching, I found the original.

Ian had contributed something important by moving the roo off-centre, but the original design was cooler in its choice of colours. Who created it?

I found that the creator of the Roo design was none other than Jeremy Matthews, the creator of Golden Wattle. The man clearly had flair.

I had seen a few more flag designs that had struck me as being extremely elegant, and I looked at them again.

The current and proposed flags of New South Wales

The current and proposed flags of Western Australia

The current and proposed flags of Queensland

All these proposed flags used the state colours, and featured the flora or fauna of the state. And on top of it all, they were elegant and sophisticated. Who designed these flags?

One name turned up. Jeremy Matthews. Yup, the Jeremy Matthews.

I was heavily intrigued, and did a Google search on Jeremy Matthews.

I confess my heart sank when I read his biography. The guy was a graphic designer.

No wonder his designs were streets ahead of everyone else's! This is what he did for a living. What hope did we amateurs have against him in this flag contest?

Yet, I took heart from a line in "Marketing Warfare" by Al Ries and Jack Trout, "When going up against the market leader, don't attack a weakness that is a weakness; attack the weakness inherent in their strength."

What are the strengths of a professional graphic designer, whose inherent weaknesses can then be exploited?

I could see a few straightaway.

One, a graphic designer lives in the world of corporate brands. They understand brands, and they understand how to communicate a brand's value proposition with one simple logo image. The flip side of the coin is that they are trained to see the presence of more than one image as potentially confusing to a prospect. It's mental clutter. And that was indeed what Matthews had done with Golden Wattle. He used just one symbol to communicate a number of values. However, a national flag may need to communicate many more. One symbol, however clever, simply cannot carry them all.

Two, a professional graphic designer is careful to protect their intellectual property. Sure enough, Matthews had copyrighted his design, all rights reserved. No commercial exploitation of his work was permitted. IP protection is a two-edged sword. The creator maintains control of their IP, but then no one else has any incentive to popularise it. IP restrictions on Golden Wattle had the potential to dampen its viral spread.

Three, the cleverness of the Golden Wattle design in incorporating the Commonwealth Star results in a botanical inaccuracy. The actual golden wattle's "flower" is technically a compound structure called an inflorescence, but the Golden Wattle flag design makes it appear more like a conventional star-shaped flower belonging to the asteraceae family, such as a daisy. There's an opportunity here for an alternative design that is equally elegant but looks more authentic.

The Golden Wattle flag resembles a daisy rather than a real golden wattle!

Four, there was also a weakness inherent in the very use of the official Australian colours of green and gold. Truth be told, the official shades of yellow (#FFCD00) and green (#00843D) as specified in the standard do not result in great-looking designs, as any graphic designer would surely know. Sure enough, the shades of yellow and green on the Golden Wattle flag are not these but some other shades chosen for their superior aesthetic appeal.

I can sympathise with Jeremy Matthews for the dilemma he must have faced, and I can understand his eventual choice

Golden Wattle is hence not fully authentic in terms of colour, and another design that uses the right colours in a better combination might therefore stand a competitive chance.

I believe the Terra Australis Magnus design is probably competitive for these reasons.

First, it uses more than one symbol that is of importance to Australians - the Golden Wattle and the Southern Cross. There is also a choice of meaningful background colours, such as those of red earth and blue gum.

Golden Wattle, Southern Cross, Red Earth, Blue Gum - This flag carries a lot more imagery than a single icon can. After all, a national flag is not a corporate logo where one has to stay "on message" with one value proposition, so a background of graphic design may not necessarily be an advantage

Second, I come from the world of Open Source software, having been a Linux user since 1996. It was the most natural thing for me to seek to evolve my design through community feedback (the bazaar model) rather than lock myself in my studio like a solitary creative genius (the cathedral model). Similarly, I had no desire to keep my design proprietary. What evolves through community input belongs to the community, and so I made my SVG source files available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike licence. There is no restriction even on commercial activity. If someone wants to sell T-shirts with my flag design on it, more power to them. I'm hoping the sense of community ownership will fuel the design's continuous improvement and garner more support as time goes on. This is, after all, a community-contributed design, and more than one person can point to some element of it or another and say, "I contributed that!"

Third, the representation of the golden wattle is truer to nature (the "inflorescence") (although it has been likened by some to a mediaeval torture instrument,  a football, a magic mushroom, and car valves).

The compound structure using florets is more representative of reality, without being too complex

Fourth and finally, in the variants where a green-and-gold theme is used, I took care to stick to the official colours. With the offsetting effect of other colours, these shades don't look quite as bad as they do on their own. To the dyed-in-the-wool green-and-gold loyalists, this should put Terra Australis Magnus above Golden Wattle.

The navy blue area offsets the less-than-appealing look of the official colours

The Kangaroo Revisited

Although in general I'm not a fan of animals on flags, it's undeniable that the presence of a kangaroo will cause a flag to be instantly recognisable around the world as the Australian flag. It's just that most designs involving roos have been terrible.

But then Ian McLellan began to produce a few interesting ones that didn't look bad at all.

Not many like the coat-of-arms style, because it still seems a bit redolent of a monarchy, but this didn't look too bad

This was beginning to look like a possible flag...

This last design inspired me to create the following tricolour:

Something for everyone

I had read a few days earlier on the site that vertical tricolours symbolised a revolt against a European monarchy. That's appropriate in the Australian context, since the quest to remove the Union Jack from the flag is a revolt of sorts against the British monarchy.

The roo-on-ochre theme makes the flag instantly recognisable as the flag of Australia.

The golden wattle, rendered in green-and-gold, should satisfy those who believe the Australian flag must carry the "national colours". I'm a bit meh on this, but whatever.

I personally like the heraldic colours of red, white and blue, and I'm fond of the Southern Cross (especially in Brian Nedic's futuristic style), so that makes up the third stripe.

Update 27/09/2020:

Here are some more designs that I've created later. These involve a simpler golden wattle and stars that look sharper (thanks to cubic rather than quadratic curves).

Update 20/10/2024:

I got a few ideas to tweak the earlier Roo-SC design - i.e., make alpha crucis slightly bigger than the other 3 main stars, change the shape of the bezier curve to start and end at the corner points, make the kangaroo grey.

Tweaked this design even further - used the colours of red earth and light sky blue, removed the white separator, used the opposing colours of white and black for the Southern Cross and the Roo.

Update 23/10/2024:

This diagram explains the evolution of some of these designs.

Keep the colours of the current Australian flag, and just change the design.

Some purists want the new flag to be purely green-and-gold. Here's what such a design could look like.

Introducing black and white could enable a different green-and-gold design.

Back to red earth as the background, with white stars and a black roo.

And this then brings back the idea of the Aboriginal Sun instead of the Southern Cross. (To those who think this is "cultural appropriation", it might interest you to know that a white Australian named Geoffrey Bardon introduced the dot-based painting style to native Australians in 1971, so if I'm guilty of cultural appropriation, I need to beg Bardon's pardon.)

And of course, the third option automatically suggests itself - remove the roo and use the Aboriginal Sun and Southern Cross.

Coat of arms with the roo and emu posing with the Aboriginal Sun.

A slightly redder earth.

Change the central part to make it a vertical tricolour.

A friend (Nidhi Arora) suggested using the original dark blue as the background for this design. The roo's colour then changes to match one of the circles in the Aboriginal Sun.

Update 27/04/2025:

8-pointed star version 1

8-pointed star version 2

8-pointed star version 3

8-pointed star version 4

Update 31/12/2025:

Aboriginal Sun against Red Earth and Southern Cross against Blue Sky

Update 03/01/2026:

Aboriginal Sun against Red Earth and Southern Cross against Blue Gum

Aboriginal Southern Cross against leaf-shaped background

Southern Cross against Blue Sky and Roo against (darker) Red Earth

Southern Cross against Blue Gum and Roo against (lighter) Red Earth

Update 06/01/2026:

Southern Cross against Blue Gum, Roo against (lighter) Red Earth, Aurora Australis dividing the area into two

Update 07/01/2026:

The same flag, but with the elements made more prominent so as to stand out well

The above flag with descriptions added

If you liked this post, you may want to read this one too: "The Making Of "Terra Australis Magnus" - The Why And The How"