Akhbar El Adab, p.3, (15/6/2008)

India and ancient cultures

By: Gamal el Gheitani

When I was invited to deliver a lecture in Maulana Azad Center for Indian Culture, I never hesitated and accepted at once. The center is in downtown. It reminds me and those who belong to my generation of very nice memories. It lies in a small ally facing Radio Cinema. On the corner, there used to be a small café in which Naguib Mahfouz used to hold his seminars in 1964 before he moved to Riche café. The cinema had air conditioners and it was something new to Egyptians. Some people used to go to the cinema just to enjoy the cold air not to watch the movies. We used to sit in that ally and lovers used to pass by in their way to the Indian tea house in which they used to sit and exchange some conversations while paying little money.

India used to have a strong presence in the Egyptian literature after the emergence of NAM. Egyptians used to read the Indian literature. Tagore was the most famous Indian poet. As for the Indian movies, they were popular on the grassroots level. The movie of Sangam had become a part of the popular Egyptian memories. I don’t know why the gap between Egypt and India has become so wide since the sixties. Currently, we don’t have a clear picture of the Indian literature. And the Indian men of letters we introduce in Akhbar El Adab magazine are those whose works are published in English in England.  I hope that the national translation project would translate books like the Mahabharata and the holy books that contributed to forming the Indian character.

I chose a topic that I have become very interested in, in recent years. It is "the continuity of the Egyptian Culture". I believe in having a distinguished cultural identity within the framework of cultural diversity. Therefore, I call for establishing close ties between the cultures that formed the human thought such as the Persian, Indian, Chinese, South East Asian culture. This move will face the calls for the destructive conflict of cultures. It will also help in facing the call for the supremacy of one and only culture over the whole world. The Egyptian experience is unique in that it contains continuity within the framework of change. The Indian culture is as ancient as the Egyptian culture. But the Indian spiritual content has not changed a lot. In Egypt, the ancient Egyptian civilization came to an end; the language spoken here seized to exist and so was the religion. But the ingenuity of the Egyptian culture is that it mixed between the original traditions and the foreign trends coming to it from abroad. I addressed this topic in a book entitled: "A drop going down" I hope that it will be published by the beginning of the coming year. In this book, I concentrated on the aspect of continuity in the daily activities, language, architecture and religion whether it is Islam, Christianity or Judaism. This topic is also raised by Egyptologists in Europe.

In fact the audience during the lecture distinguished including former Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher. He is a friend of mine and a prominent thinker. There was also Dr. Gihad Oda, professor of political science and the Ambassador of India in Cairo. In addition, there was a large number of professors from the AUC and Egyptian universities. I was keen to explain the aspects of the complex features of our cultural structure. I concentrated on the interaction between all human cultures especially ancient ones that should maintain their identity even with the change of ages. They should resist globalization that aim at turning them into just fossils and monuments and make the heirs of great civilizations feel happy with the money they get from showing those monuments while they don’t know anything about their great civilizations.

*****