Question

The cause of variations and diversities in India

Answer 1

For many years in India — until last week, in fact — the above incantation, spoken or delivered in print, constituted the entirety of a divorce proceeding, provided you were a Muslim.

The “triple talaq” method of divorce was just outlawed by the Indian supreme court after a challenge by a number of unhappy divorcees supported by, among others, the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement. Triple-talaq divorce was, in theory, available to women, too, though a woman who initiated such a divorce would in effect have forfeited any economic claims related to the marriage and probably have lost custody of her children. As you might imagine, triple-talaq is considerably more popular with Muslim men than with Muslim women.

The ordinary secular mode of divorce in India is, like any other Indian legal proceeding, rather more cumbrous. And there isn’t much of it: In the United Kingdom, about 500 of every 1,000 marriages end in divorce; in India, the corresponding figure is 13 in every 1,000, though the rate has been increasing, and sketchy rural record-keeping brings the accuracy of figures into question.

The British colonial rulers like to justify their presence on the Subcontinent with an aphorism: “India isn’t a political expression; India is a geographic expression.” (Metternich had said the same thing about Italy.) Prior to colonization, there had been no central Indian state, and, indeed, no notion of one. But what there had been was something called “Hindustan,” which is the common local vernacular name for India. (India has a very fine newspaper that still bears the name “Hindustan Times.”)

Here, geography, politics, and religion all come together in a very messy knot: “Hindustan” is where the Hindus live, and the Hindus are the people east of the Indus River, in the ancient estimate of the Persian-speaking raiders and conquerors who put the words on the ancient maps. Hinduism is a religion. What does Hinduism teach? How much time to you have? And it depends on who you ask: It changes from place to place and time to time, but so long as you are east of the Indus, in Hindustan . . . A very devout Hindu scholar once vehemently denied to me that Hinduism is a religion at all, but a group of religions linked by common languages and seeping through porous cultural borders from village to village and kingdom to kingdom, i.e. not a religious expression but a geographic one.

The less compromising Indian nationalists will, even while making the appropriately Gandhian noises about maintaining solidarity with their Muslim brothers, insist that Hinduism and Indian civilization are synonyms. The longtime ruling political party in Bombay is named for Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the heroic king who did battle with the invading Mughal empire — think of him as an Indian Charles Martel victorious at Hinduism’s answer to Tours. (It is thanks to the dominance of this essentially fascist political party that we are now obliged to call Bombay by its Marathi name, Mumbai.) It is common to hear those in the south of the country insist that theirs is the real, pure India, untouched by Muslim occupation. These are live questions: A major political figure in India has recently been indicted for his role in a violent Hindu–Muslim dispute originating in — this is not a typo — 1528.

How deeply the ethic of India — a secular republic that is home to many different religious traditions — ought to be identical with Hinduism — the faith and cultural tradition of the overwhelming majority of the people of that secular republic — is a matter of endless dispute. A Hindu-nationalist politician who insisted that India is Hindu was chastised by a liberal: “No,” the critic said, “India is secular. India has freedom of religion.” Came the answer: “Yes. India is secular. India has freedom of  religion. And that is because India is 80 percent Hindu, not 80 percent Muslim.” The example of Pakistan, part of India until independence and partition, must be sobering. India has its problems, to be sure, but Pakistan is a basket case.

A major political figure in India has recently been indicted for his role in a violent Hindu–Muslim dispute originating in — this is not a typo — 1528.

Answer 2

cause due to increase in pollution, high temperatures, high living standards