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IV. Unity and Diversity in India and Indonesia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

J.C. Heesterman
J.C. Heesterman
Affiliation:
University of Leiden
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Extract

When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 10 , Issue 1: India and Indonesia from the 1920 to the 1950s: The Origins of Planning , March 1986 , pp. 83 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1986

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References

Notes

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