Review of Breaking India

Namaste, 

Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines by Rajiv Malhotra
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The book Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan is about the forces that are fragmenting India. While Islamic radicalism and Maoist insurgencies are two forces that are fragmenting India, Breaking India focuses on the North-South divide, as evidenced by its subtitle Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines.

Breaking India begins with a study of the construction of Aryan and Dravidian identities through the years and how this artificial divide was promulgated and led to setting different groups in opposition to each other. The book focuses on the construction of Dravidian identity, rather than on deconstruction of the AIT - perhaps because others have done that, the authors don't say.

The most eye-opening part of Breaking India is about the roles that academia, evangelical Christian organizations, NGOs, "think tanks," and governments play in undermining India's unity. Shared interests lead to unlikely pairings such as left-wing intellectuals with evangelical Christian interests. There are also unlikely alliances between Maoists and evangelical Christian entities in India's "Red Corridor."

I recommend Breaking India to anyone concerned about India's unity, and encourage readers to go beyond the main text to read the appendices and endnotes. Appendix B highlights references to the Vedas in Tamil religious literature and Tamil familiarity with smriti such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata - a testament to the unity in Indian civilization. Appendix C presents the extreme case of what can happen when separate identities are constructed and put in opposition to each other: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that pitted Hutus and Tutsis against each other. Parallels are drawn with the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka that pitted Tamils and Sinhalese against each other.

Breaking India has a dedicated website, www.breakingindia.com.

Other examples of north/south interactions that I'd like to bring up (although they are not mentioned in the book):

India's Genetic Map

According to this article Genetic map blurs lines from The Telegraph (Kolkata), findings from the Indian Genome Variation (IGV) project indicate that various populations within India have intermingled throughout the centuries.

As noted in the article:

"Dravidian lineages have mixed with Indo-Europeans, Austroasiatics have mingled with Dravidians, and bridge populations in central India are blends of Dravidian, Indo-European and Himalayan groups."

and

"The analysis has also indicated that Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims are genetically similar and share genetic similarities with Dravidian groups. It has also shown that some Dravidian-speaking population groups in south India have Indo-European lineage."

Samir Brahmachari of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) says that the results of the IGV study recall Tagore's words in Bharat-tirtha:

Aryan and non-Aryan, Dravidian and Chinese... Pathan, Mughal/All have merged into one body.…

Might I also suggest that the findings also recall the words of Subramania Bharati?

She has thirty crores of faces, but her heart is one; she speaks eighteen languages, yet her mind is one.

Bottom line: It's time to put aside divisions among Indo-Europeans, Dravidians, and other groups to build a unified India.