Class 6 Social Science Chapter 8: Unity in Diversity, or 'Many in the One'

Look out of a train window

Start with a journey. Take a train across India and the land outside the window keeps changing, which you would expect. What may surprise you is how much else changes with it. The dress people wear alters. So does the food sold on the platforms. So do the languages you overhear, some familiar and some not, and even the scripts on the signboards.

And you need not travel at all

Here is the second surprise. You do not have to go anywhere to meet this. Stay in your own region and you will still meet people who came from elsewhere in the country, keeping customs and traditions unlike yours. That is worth noticing, because it means the diversity is not spread out across the map in neat blocks. It is mixed in everywhere.

What visitors notice first

Visitors remark on it before they remark on anything else. Not the size of the country, not its history, but the variety. All this is India's rich diversity, and a newcomer generally sees it before anything else. Something a visitor notices immediately is often something a resident has stopped noticing at all.

Not surprising, really

Put beside the population, the variety makes sense. India has over 1.4 billion inhabitants. That works out at roughly 18 percent of everybody alive on the planet, which is close to one person in five. A group that size, living together in one country, was never going to be uniform.

Counting it

That is an impression. Can it be measured? Late in the 20th century it was. A national body, the Anthropological Survey of India, carried out an enormous survey. It was called the People of India project, and its purpose was to find out, in detail, who lives in this country.

4,635 communities

The scale of the project is the first thing to grasp. It did not sample a handful of districts and generalise. It covered 4,635 communities, and it reached across all the States of the country. When a survey of that size reports a figure, the figure is worth taking seriously.

325 languages, 25 scripts

Two of its counts belong together. The project found 325 languages in use. Those languages were written in 25 scripts. Notice the gap between the two figures: there are thirteen times as many languages as there are scripts to write them in. Many languages must therefore share a script with their neighbours.

A country of migrants

The project also observed something less expected. An enormous number of Indians count as migrants, though not in the sense you might assume. The word is used here to mean people who do not live near where they were born, or who live apart from the community they originally belonged to. On that test, an enormous number of us qualify.

A historian's difficulty

Diversity is a pleasure to travel through. Writing about it is harder. The British historian Vincent Smith put this difficulty plainly more than a hundred years ago. In the face of such bewildering diversity, he asked, how can anyone write a history of India at all? It is a fair question. A history needs a subject that holds together.

The answer he gave

He did not leave the question hanging. The answer, he said, lies in this: India offers unity in diversity. Which is to say that underneath all the visible differences something runs common, and it is that common thing which makes one history possible. The difficulty is real, and so is the way past it.

Many in the One

This chapter takes that phrase as its subject. Unity in diversity, or the Many in the One. Both expressions point at the same idea: that the many forms we can see rest on something single that we cannot see so easily. The task is to work out how to perceive it, and how to describe it.

How to look for unity

You cannot find unity by ignoring the differences, and there is no use pretending the variety is smaller than it is. What the chapter does instead is take a few ordinary dimensions of Indian life and examine each closely. Food. Clothing. Festivals. Stories. In each, it asks the same question: what is the one thing, and what are the many?

Diversity as enrichment

One warning before we start. Finding unity is not a way of tidying the diversity away. The chapter closes on this. Indian culture treasures its diversity as something that makes the whole richer. It never forgets the unity below, which feeds that diversity. Both halves matter, and neither cancels the other.

Scenario:

A class lists what changes on a journey across India. Landscape, dress, food, language and script all go on the board. Meera concludes the country has little in common. Their teacher asks the class to list what does not change on the same journey. The second list fills up too: the currency, the railway, the festivals that appear in several regions at once, and the fact that the journey needs no permission. Meera compares the lists. Both are long. The class decides that noticing diversity first is natural, because difference is visible from a train window and what is shared usually is not.

Analysis:

Two honest lists of similar length. Diversity is what a traveller sees and unity is mostly what a traveller relies on without noticing.

Activity:

Make two lists for a journey you have taken: what changed and what stayed the same. Compare their lengths.

Title:

A survey of your own classroom

What You Notice:

Two results usually turn up. The number of birthplaces is larger than anyone guesses, which is the survey's point about migrants appearing in miniature. And the script count comes out lower than the language count, for the same reason it did nationally: several languages in the room are very likely written in the same script.

Roughly 18 out of every 100 people alive today live in India. That is close to one person in five, anywhere on Earth.

The People of India project did not sample a few places. It covered 4,635 communities, across every State in the country.

Vincent Smith, a British historian, raised his question over a century ago, and answered it himself in the same breath.

The survey's four numbers — 4,635 communities · 325 languages · 25 scripts — Three figures from one project, plus a fourth for the country itself: over 1.4 billion people, roughly 18 percent of everyone alive. Learn them as a set and none will go missing.

More languages than scripts — 325 into 25 — There are thirteen times as many languages as scripts, so a single script must serve many languages. That is diversity and unity sitting in the same figure.

Thousands of dishes

Begin with what varies. If you have eaten food from several parts of India you already know how far the cooking differs. The number of distinct dishes and preparations you could taste across the country runs into the thousands, and quite possibly far beyond that. No two regions treat a kitchen alike. So far this is a topic about difference.

The same cereals, everywhere

Now look at what those kitchens start from. Certain food grains turn up in almost every part of the country. Among the cereals are rice, barley and wheat. These are not regional specialities. They are what a very large number of households in very different places reach for first, whatever they go on to make of them.

Millets and pulses

The list continues, and each item carries two names worth knowing. The millets include pearl millet, called bajra, sorghum, called jowar, and finger millet, called ragi. Then come the pulses: the many kinds of dal, and the grams. Cereals, millets and pulses together make a short list for so large a country.

Why they are called staple

All of these go by one name: staple grains. The word staple means basic, and that is exactly the claim being made. They are what most Indians build a meal on. A staple is not what makes a meal interesting; it is what the meal is built on, which is why it changes so much less than the dish does.

The same spices, too

Spices might be expected to differ, since they are what gives a regional dish its character. Some do. But a few are used right across the country: turmeric, cumin, cardamom and ginger. The list could be extended with common vegetables and common oils, and the point would not change.

The same things, endlessly combined

Here is the conclusion the chapter draws, and it is worth stating plainly. The same ingredients, which is the unity, get used in a great number of combinations, which is the diversity. Out of that comes an endless variety of dishes. The variety is not produced by different materials. It is produced by different ways of putting the same materials together.

Every region dresses its own way

Clothing tells the same story from another direction. Every region and community in India has worked out its own styles of clothing and dress. That is real difference, not a surface one. And yet a commonality shows up across those styles. It appears in some traditional Indian dresses, whatever material they happen to be made of.

One obvious example

The clearest case is the sari. It is a plain length of cloth, and it is worn in most parts of India. Notice what that means. A dress found almost everywhere, across regions that differ in language, food and custom, is a piece of unity you can see and touch.

What it is made from

The fabric is where the variety begins. Saris are made mostly of cotton or of silk, and nowadays of synthetic fabrics as well. Among the famous silk saris are Banarasi, Kanjivaram, Paithani, Patan Patola, Muga and Mysore. The kinds of cotton sari are more numerous still.

Hundreds of varieties

Add everything up and a single unstitched piece of cloth runs to hundreds of varieties. Weaving accounts for much of that, and designing for much of the rest, since each admits several methods. Some designs are part of the cloth itself, worked in as it is woven. Others are printed on afterwards, once the weaving is done.

And then the colours

Colour multiplies the count again. There are endless variations in the colours a sari may take, and these are produced from many kinds of pigment. Fabric, weave, design, printing, colour: five stages, each one multiplying what the stage before it produced. That is how you arrive at hundreds of varieties of one garment.

A very old dress

The sari also has a long history behind it. A stone relief from Vaiśhali, which is in Bihar today, shows a woman wearing one. A relief is a carved design that rises out of the flat surface it is cut into, whether that surface is stone, wood, ceramic or something else. This particular one goes back a few centuries BCE.

Chintz, and a ban

Indian cloth travelled, too. Over a very long stretch of time, no cotton anywhere was finer than India's, and cloth made here was carried for sale as far off as Europe. A beautiful printed cotton called chintz sold so well in 17th-century Europe that sales of some European dresses fell sharply. England and France eventually banned the import of chintz, to protect their own products.

Many drapes, one dress

One last multiplication. People keep finding fresh ways to drape a sari, and how it is worn already differs from region to region and between communities. Travellers in past centuries marvelled at its simplicity, its economy, and the many ways it was worn. But in the end it remains a single dress: the sari.

Scenario:

Over a very long stretch of time, no cotton anywhere was finer than India's, and cloth made here was carried for sale as far off as Europe. Among them was a beautiful printed cotton known as chintz. In 17th-century Europe it became extremely fashionable. It was light, it was colourful, it was washable, and it cost less than the heavy fabrics people had been buying. So many buyers turned to it that some European dresses stopped selling nearly as well. Weavers and merchants in Europe were left with cloth they could not sell. In the end, England and France each took the same decision: they banned the import of chintz from India altogether, in order to protect their own products.

Analysis:

Read the ban backwards and it becomes a compliment. Nothing was wrong with chintz; the difficulty was that nothing was wrong with it. European producers could not match it on quality or on price, so their governments removed the competition by law rather than in the market. Two things follow for this chapter. The first is about Indian textiles: to be banned by two countries at once, a product has to be very good indeed. The second is about the sari topic around it. The same industry that made a printed cotton fashionable in Europe was also producing hundreds of varieties of one unstitched cloth at home.

Activity:

Find out what one metre of cotton cloth costs in your nearest market, and what it is used for. Then write three sentences on what would happen locally if that cloth were suddenly banned.

Over a very long stretch, no cotton anywhere was finer than India's, and cloth made here went for sale as far off as Europe.

A stone relief from Vaiśhali, in Bihar today, shows a woman in a sari. It dates back a few centuries BCE.

Women have long put the sari to many uses beyond wearing it, and fresh ways of draping it keep appearing.

The three millets — Pearl is bajra, sorghum is jowar, finger is ragi — Each has an English name and an Indian one, and questions may use either. Learn them in pairs and neither name can catch you out.

Where the variety comes from — Fabric, weave, design, colour, drape — Five stages, and each one multiplies the last. That is how a single unstitched length of cloth ends up in hundreds of varieties and countless ways of wearing.

An immense variety

Festivals in India come in immense variety, and that is the obvious half of the story. What is less obvious is the other half. A few festivals are kept right across the country at almost the same time of year, and yet they go under quite different names in different places. To see how that works, one example is enough.

Makara Sankrānti

The example is Makara Sankrānti. Across much of India it opens the harvest season, and it falls on or around the 14th of January. Fix those two facts in mind, the occasion and the date, because they are what stay the same while everything else shifts.

One date, a dozen names

Now look at what that same festival is called around the country. Shishur Saenkraat in one place; Maghi or Lohri in another; then Uttarayan, Magh Bihu, Khichdi Parv, Makar Sankraat. Poush Songkranti. Makara Sankramana. Makara Vilakku. Pedda Panduga. Pongal. A dozen names and more, for a festival kept at one time of year for one reason.

What the map is really showing

A map of those names looks at first like a map of difference. Read it again and it is the opposite. The names differ; the date does not, and neither does the occasion. If you had only the names you would think these were separate festivals. If you had only the dates you would think they were one. Both readings are true, which is the point.

And not only in January

January is not a special case. October and November carry a great many of the major festivals too, and there too a single occasion often carries several names across different parts of the country. Once you know to look for the pattern, it turns up repeatedly through the year.

Turning to literature

Literature offers another fine illustration of the same thing. Indian literatures are diverse in the extreme. Few bodies of writing anywhere are more abundant, which makes that diversity larger still. Over centuries they have differed in language, in technique and in much else besides.

Shared themes, all the same

And yet, across all that difference, they have shared important themes and concerns. That is a strange thing for unrelated literatures to do. It suggests the differences sit on top of something the writers held in common, which is exactly the claim this chapter keeps testing.

The Pañchatantra

Take the clearest example. Who has not heard of the Pañchatantra? It is a collection of delightful stories in which the leading parts go to animals. The stories are not told for amusement alone. They teach important life skills, which is why they have been thought worth passing to children for a very long time.

How old it is

The original text is in Sanskrit, and it is at least 2,200 years old. That figure is worth pausing on. Stories composed more than two thousand years ago are still being told to children now, which very few collections of anything can claim.

Into almost every Indian language

The stories did not stay in Sanskrit. They have been adapted into almost every Indian language. Notice the word adapted rather than translated. An adaptation reshapes a story for its new language and audience. It does not carry the story across word for word. So each version ends up a little different from the one it came from.

And well beyond India

Then they kept going. The stories travelled to Southeast Asia, to the Arab world, and to Europe. They did not merely arrive in those places either; they inspired new collections of stories along the way. A collection that sets other collections going has done more than travel. It has taken root.

Two hundred, in fifty languages

How far did this reach? The estimate runs to roughly 200 versions of the Pañchatantra, spread over upwards of 50 languages. Set that beside the single Sanskrit original and the shape of the thing is clear. One collection of stories has become many, which is the chapter's phrase turned into arithmetic.

Why festivals and stories belong together

These two subjects look unrelated, and they make exactly the same point. In each, something single lies underneath: one harvest festival, one collection of tales. In each, the many forms above it are real and not to be dismissed: a dozen festival names, two hundred adaptations. Neither the one nor the many can be left out of a true account.

Scenario:

A class notices that several harvest festivals fall within a few days of each other in January. Arjun says the dates must have been coordinated between regions. Their teacher asks the class what else happens in the middle of January. The answer is that a harvest comes in, and the Sun's apparent path begins to shift. The class works out that nobody needed to coordinate anything. Regions far apart arrived at the same date because they were all answering the same event in the year. Makara Sankrānti falls on or around 14 January, and the class sees that a shared cause explains a shared date better than agreement does.

Analysis:

The dates agree because the year does. A harvest and the Sun's turning are the same everywhere, so separate regions reached the same week independently.

Activity:

Find three harvest festivals from different states and their dates. Write what event in the year they are all marking.

Title:

One festival, many names

What You Notice:

The colours spread right across the map, while the middle of it holds a single date and a single reason. That is the whole chapter in one sheet of paper: the many on the outside, the one at the centre, and neither of them cancelling the other.

The Pañchatantra travelled well beyond India, reaching Southeast Asia, the Arab world and Europe, and inspiring new story collections on the way.

October and November bring a cluster of major Indian festivals, many of them known by different names in different parts of the country.

The animals in the Pañchatantra are not decoration. They are the main characters, and the stories teach through them.

One festival, many names — Lohri, Bihu, Uttarayan, Pongal — one date — Four names from four corners of the country, all falling on or around 14 January. Learn any four and the pattern is clear: the date holds, the name changes.

The Pañchatantra's two numbers — 200 adaptations, 50 languages — Two figures worth keeping together, plus the age of the original: at least 2,200 years. One collection became many, which is the whole point of quoting them.

What an epic is

First the word. An epic is a long poem. What it recounts is the doings of heroes, together with other great figures out of the past. That is a type of composition, not a single book, and many cultures have produced one. India produced two, and they are the striking case this chapter has been building towards.

The two of them

They are the Mahābhārata, and the Rāmāyaṇa. Both were composed in Sanskrit. Their size is worth stating before anything else. Taken together, their original versions might fill some 7,000 pages. Very little else that this chapter has discussed is on that scale.

What the Mahābhārata tells

In the Mahābhārata, the Pāṇḍavas set out to recover their kingdom. The people they must fight for it are their own cousins, the Kauravas, which makes the quarrel a family one. Kṛiṣhṇa helps them. The detail to hold on to is that the enemy here is not a stranger.

What the Rāmāyaṇa tells

In the Rāmāyaṇa the shape is different. Rāma defeats the demon Rāvaṇa, who had carried off his wife Sītā. He does not do it alone either: his brother Lakṣhmaṇa helps him, and so does Hanuman. Here the adversary comes from outside the family altogether.

One aim behind both

Different as the two stories are, the heroes of both are fighting for the same thing. They fight to re-establish dharma. That single sentence is what makes these two epics a pair rather than two unrelated poems, and it is worth remembering when you are asked what they have in common.

Stories inside stories

Neither epic is only its main plot. Both contain many shorter stories, and those shorter ones focus on values. They keep asking the same pair of questions, over and over: what is right, and what is wrong? An epic built that way teaches while it entertains, which is part of why it lasts.

Retold for two thousand years

Now to what happened to them. Across upwards of two thousand years, both poems have been carried over into regional literatures, as translation and as adaptation, inside India and outside it. Add to that the countless folk versions, which are the retellings kept alive by ordinary people rather than by any written text.

A hundred in one State

How many is countless? A few years ago a scholar carried out a survey in Tamil Nadu alone. He arrived at roughly a hundred tellings of the Mahābhārata still alive in folklore. One State, one epic, a hundred versions. Then try to imagine the figure for the whole of India.

Communities with their own versions

Many communities hold tellings of the two poems that belong to them. They have also preserved legends tying their own history to these epics. Tribal communities up and down the country do this most of all, the Bhils and the Gonds and the Mundas among them.

Across the northeast and the Himalayas

The reach is remarkable. Most tribes of India's northeastern and Himalayan regions, Kashmir included, have had their own version of one epic or the other, and in some cases of both. These are places at the very edges of the map, and the epics are there too.

Passed on by voice

These tribal adaptations are transmitted orally. Alongside them travel legends about how the heroes came to that community's own region. The heroes named are generally the five Pāṇḍavas, or some of them, and their wife Draupadī. Sometimes their cousin and adversary Duryodhana appears as well.

A stone in the Nilgiris

One example makes this concrete. In a forest of the Nilgiris, in Tamil Nadu, stands a carved stone showing the five Pāṇḍava brothers. It is known as Pañcha Pāṇḍavar. The shrine that holds it is maintained by Irula tribals, and it commemorates the brothers' passing through that area.

An anthropologist's verdict

K.S. Singh, the anthropologist who directed the People of India project, studied this pattern. On the Mahābhārata he observed that folklore leaves hardly a place in the country unvisited by epic heroes such as the Pāṇḍavas. The same, he said, may be said of the Rāmāyaṇa.

A thick mesh

Put all of it together and here is the conclusion. Across the centuries these two poems wove a thick mesh of cultural exchange over the whole of India, and over much of Asia besides. Few texts anywhere have done as much. Two poems, and a web of connection over a whole Subcontinent.

The chapter's last word

The epics are one more example of unity in diversity, and the same could be shown from India's classical arts and architecture. What the chapter ends on is a balance. Indian culture treats its diversity as something that enriches the whole, and it never forgets the unity underneath, which is what feeds that diversity.

Scenario:

Deep in a forest of the Nilgiris, in Tamil Nadu, stands a carved stone. The carving shows five brothers, and the stone is known as Pañcha Pāṇḍavar. It sits inside a small shrine. That shrine is kept up by Irula tribals, a community of the region. They keep it to mark one thing in particular. The five Pāṇḍava brothers passed through that very area. Nothing here is written down in the way a book is. What explains it is a story carried by voice. Heroes from a Sanskrit epic came through this forest, and a community has kept the memory ever since.

Analysis:

Three things make this small shrine worth a case study. First, distance: the Pāṇḍavas belong to an epic composed in Sanskrit far to the north, and here they are honoured in a southern forest. Second, ownership. The Irula are not merely repeating somebody else's story; they have tied it to their own region and their own history, which is exactly what your chapter says tribal communities do. Third, method. Nothing here depends on a written text. The adaptation and its legends are transmitted orally, and the stone is the visible end of an invisible chain. K.S. Singh's observation fits this shrine precisely: folklore leaves hardly a place in the country unvisited by the epic heroes.

Activity:

Ask at home or at school whether any place nearby, a hill, a pond, a rock or a grove, has a story attached to a figure from either epic. Write down what the story claims and who told it to you.

The original versions of the two epics, put together, might fill some 7,000 pages.

A carved stone in a Nilgiri forest shows the five Pāṇḍava brothers. Its shrine is kept up by Irula tribals, to mark the brothers' passing through.

A scholar counting folk versions of the Mahābhārata in Tamil Nadu alone reached about a hundred of them.

Who fights whom — Pāṇḍavas against Kauravas; Rāma against Rāvaṇa — In one epic the quarrel is inside a family, with cousins on both sides. In the other the enemy is outside it. Both fights aim at re-establishing dharma.

The three helpers — Kṛiṣhṇa for the Pāṇḍavas; Lakṣhmaṇa and Hanuman for Rāma — No hero in either epic succeeds alone. Naming the helper beside the hero keeps the two stories apart when you are asked to summarise them.