749 Quotes About India

It is time we stopped talking about communal riots” remarked Enayat Habibullah, a retired Major General of the Indian Army. “These are massacres of the Muslims by the Hindus. The aim is to push us back into ghettos.”That, at least, is the result.

Despite Nehru, the common culture has been under assault since Independence. Books have been written seeking to show that the Taj Mahal, one of India’s glories, was really more Hindu than Muslim.Indian history is being rewritten from the new point of view to describe the Muslims who ruled India for 700 years, as aliens and foreigners and Muslim rulers by and large as guilty of the worst intolerances, murders, rapes and plunders.

It would be difficult to sum up the status and conditions of Muslim in India better in two words than "Passive Voices".

From the beginning, Kashmir has been the Indian Prime Minister’s special concern. Yet when Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed from the head of the Kashmir Administration and detained, Mr Nehru only happened to know of the event just as any other Indian citizen did–in the newspapers the next day. That is only one example of the incredible manner in which the Kashmir question has been handled.

On the rare occasions when Romani Gypsies meet south Asians from India or Pakistan, they are astonished to discover that they can understand many of the words these people use in their language, such as Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. There is thus a connection with eastern Europe - Romania and Hungary - but also with far-away India.

The religion of mysticism is the religion of the elect: it becomes popular only when the masses have lost all and can look for nothing of value in this world. The ordinary man turns to heaven for his refuge when he has nothing to look forward to in this world. Healthy materialism is the normal outlook of even religious people when things go well.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others in the post-independence leadership—though, emphatically, not all within this cohort—deeply believed that the combination of liberal democracy, civic nationalism, and socialist economics was essential to successfully building a modern Indian state.

Independence means.. enjoying freedom and empowering others too to let them do so.

History was alive and entangled in the everyday stories of India, and it needed to be coaxed onto the pages of a book. In that sense, history was a woman, substantial, vigorous, complex andalways given the customary short shrift.