I recently had the opportunity to revisit Madhya Pradesh, the Indian heartland, and came away with many musings. In Bhopal, I noticed several things. The distances were short, the roads were good, and they did not flood instantly in a downpour, unlike in Delhi NCR. The cost of living was much better, and the people were amiable, again unlike in Delhi NCR. I went around comfortably in an Uber, and the quality of Hindi spoken around me was softer and sweeter than in—where else—Delhi NCR. Plus, Bhopal was lush and green (Madhya Pradesh has the country’s maximum tree cover), with lakes and hills.
The cultural differences began stacking up, big and small. For instance, those outside the Hindi belt who are rightly angered by offensive and highly regrettable Hindi chauvinism scoff that the Hindi belt is ‘uneducated’. However, I noticed that residences in Bhopal had names that you were likely to find in Chennai and other South Indian cities. Whereas Delhi-NCR buildings have overly wannabe names like Richmond, Malibu Towne and Beverley Park; even wedding venues called ‘Notting Hill’, for heaven’s sake, Bhopal’s buildings had more restrained, dignified names like Athenaeum, Coral Cottage and Rainbow Apartments, and, of course, solid Indian names like Suyash and Herambh.
This doesn’t make up for the sad fact that Madhya Pradesh is one of India’s most nirakshar or illiterate states. With a literacy rate of 75.2 percent, Madhya Pradesh is embarrassingly ranked among the lowest. It belongs in a sorry cluster with Andhra Pradesh (72.6 percent), Bihar (74.3 percent), Rajasthan (75.8 percent) and Jharkhand (76.7 percent), which means Madhya Pradesh has one of the bottom-ten lowest literacy rates in India. Uttar Pradesh veers wildly between 67.68 percent and 78.2 percent. Shockingly, there is no authoritative source for 2025, but only what appear to be guesstimates tied to the 2011 Census and state government data.
I made several trips around Bhopal over the Independence Day weekend with my hosts, a young Hindi couple from Lucknow, who had recently moved to Bhopal and urged me to visit. We had initially met in Delhi, and though they were half my age, we discovered a shared love of history, culture and road trips. Like me, they fully appreciated the marvelous fact that we belonged to India, which had so much to discover wherever we went. I went on a weekend road trip with them to Alwar in Rajasthan, and, during the last October Navratra, to Baroda for the garba, which was utterly delightful. And this time, we were bowling along good roads—a vast improvement from what I remembered of the road twenty years ago between musically historic Maihar and Khajuraho. Maihar still preserves the home of Baba Allauddin Khan, where three Hindustani music legends had learnt from him—Pandit Ravi Shankar (sitar), Baba’s daughter Vidushi Annapurna Devi (surbahar), and son Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (sarod). I had gone like an eager pilgrim to a temple of music and communal harmony. I was happy to have seen this historic house. But the roads had been so full of holes and bumps, outrageously deep and big, that I had called it ‘road rafting’ in despair, rubbing ointment afterwards on my battered limbs, and popping paracetamol.
The drive to Sanchi was smooth, and everything was as amazing as I had anticipated. Ashoka had constructed the basic stupa in the 3rd century BCE, but the Hindu dynasties that followed him, such as the Shungas and Satavahanas, commissioned the site’s development and all the Buddhist carvings there, including important Jatakas. Proof in stone of the facts, unlike Lefty fiction, that Hindus had chased Buddhists out. As we drew nearer, the GPS script changed from English to Sinhala. We saw Sinhalese groups in their pilgrim whites, for Sanchi is one of the holy places of Buddhism. Our own behaviour was respectful as we took in the sculptural marvels explained by our excellent Hindu guide, an MA in History. I was excited to see ancient carvings of Jatakas I knew, as well as the two holy epics, such as the Mahakapi Jataka and Vessantara Jataka, which are especially revered in Thailand, and elephant Jatakas, some of which I had retold in this column.
I also saw 23,000-year-old prehistoric cave drawings—yes, twenty-three thousand years old—at the Bhimbetka Caves, and the massive Bhojeshwar Mahadev temple, begun by Raja Bhoj Parmar in the 11th century, which is both incredible and humbling, even in its unfinished state.
Returning to Delhi NCR, I realised anew the actual impact of the invasions on the Hindi heartland. These were the people who composed the scriptures and exalted philosophy, invented the concept of zero, mathematics, chess, astronomy, yoga and Ayurveda, and built architectural wonders. The entire world uses Aryabhatta’s numbers, which replaced cumbersome Roman numerals in the West, and Brahmagupta’s computing, which paved the way for modern banking. Their mathematics triggered so much of contemporary science. The invasions led the Hindi people to a catastrophic decline. From being thought leaders, they were reduced to rustics, something they are still recovering from. Yet, how steadfastly they clung to their ancestral faith through the most discouraging circumstances. It was all they had. Lauding their incredible heroism, and not becoming chauvinistic like some of them, perhaps we non-Hindi people could politely, affectionately, help the Hindi bullies realise that ‘conquering’ the rest of us today won’t rewrite the past, that we must advance positively together, with mutual respect.
Renuka Narayanan | FAITHLINE | Senior Journalist
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)