A nation is primarily the people. And people primarily are a fellowship established through long years of living together. Despite differences of origin- for people may come from multiple origins- languages and other habits, people who were living together develop human fellowship. This fellowship gets written into their psyche and feeling. People’s humour towards each other, their happiness and sadness about each other get written into their inner being. What makes the nation is this inner fellowship often written in invisible ink. It becomes visible only through actions, which in themselves many not manifest outwardly, the history of the inner development.
The inner humour that a people develops towards each other is the essence of the nation. This humour is the charitable amusement that people have of each other. The capacity to enjoy the differing characteristic of each other is what is meant by good humour. This inner humour is built over centuries and is recorded within the individuals of the nation.
Totems of a nation such as a national flag, anthem or even political symbols are of secondary importance compared with the inner habits formed among ordinary people by normal living for a long time. There is, sometimes, the attempt to make people internalise the outer political dialogue and to treat such internalising as the national consciousness. And sometimes there is an attempt to consider a nation’s expressed ideals as the most important aspect of the nation. Such approaches ignore the natural essence of the nation, which is comprised of the inner habits formed among the people over long periods of living together.
However, what is more important to the nation is the basic inner enjoyment of each other, which happens almost unconsciously or semiconsciously in day to day routine behaviour.
This inner character is the best manifestation as to whether there is hope in a particular society that constitutes a nation. If there is hope, then there will be good humour among the people. Good humour is thus a product of hopeful living.
If there is hopelessness within society and if there is demoralization, then this too will be manifested as scornfulness, bitter cynicism and a cruel sense of irony. The inner habits formed in living for a long time in a situation of hopelessness are the opposite of good humour. This loss of humour affects both the members of ruling classes and the ordinary people, though the ways in which each is affected may differ.
To those engaged in ruling, hopelessness can create terrible results. They could become limitlessly avaricious as if to take revenge for the loss of their inner humanity. They can become cruel. They can become careless of the consequences of what they do.
The people, by common practice, learn that nature of their ruling class and form their own inner habits as to how to minimise the ill effects of what their rulers do, due to their bad state of the spirit. They become defensive, evasive and internally fearful. Thus, one may argue that no positive national spirit can emerge out of this despair. It was what Ambedkar pointed out regarding the Indian spirit ruined by hopelessness created by many years of practice of caste. He wrote:
” Men constitute a society because they have things which they possess in common. To have a similar things is totally different from possessing things in common. And the only way by which men can come to possess things in common with one another is by being in communication with one another. This is merely another way of saying that Society continues to exist by communication, indeed in communication. To make it concrete, it is not enough if men act in a way which agrees with the acts of others. Parallel activity, even if similar, is not sufficient to bind men into a society. This is proved by the fact that the festivals observed by the different Castes amongst the Hindus are the same. Yet these parallel performances of similar festivals by the different castes have not bound them into one integral whole. For that purpose what is necessary is for a man to share and participate in a common activity, so that the same emotions are aroused in him that animate the others. Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity, so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure is the real thing that binds men and makes a society of them. The Caste System prevents common activity and by preventing common activity it has prevented the Hindus from becoming a society with a unified life and a consciousness of its own being.”
In contrast to this, Grundtvig, who lived his life during times of great European revolutions, both during his childhood at the end of the 18th century and the 1848 period, saw an emergence of a new spirit of co-operation between the peoples who succeeded in these revolutions and who therefore began a period of greater hopefulness. It is this inner spirit that Grundtvig reflected and tried to influence further. In place of the grim puritan morality of the early Lutheran movement, he preached happy and joyful Christianity. He spoke of the primacy of folk life and of the human. He worked towards enlightened participation of people in all aspects of life.
In Ambedkar’s search for the dynamic early movements in India, what he sought was for a new spirit of animation to break the darkness of the Indian psyche, which was shackled by thousands of years of the practice of caste.
