It has always been difficult to define a Hindu even for the Constitution or the Law manuals. Does it mean the land (geography), ancestral roots(history), or a shared culture? Even today, a Hindu’s definition is ‘neti- neti’: not a Muslim, not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Parsi. Who exactly is a Hindu and what is this Hinduism practice? However, Hindutva blossomed as a response to attacks on Hinduism at both physical and intellectual levels.
A West, rooted in religion, and seeing religions wherever they went, created whole narratives about ‘Hinduism’ as a religion in India. Later came the religions of Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and so on with even some great imagined conflicts. Hindutva movement initiated with a response against the first colonial-missionary criticisms of idolatry and other deficiencies of a degenerate Hinduism (the social evil of the caste system being one of its consequences). The cultural Hindutva response of Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Ram Mohan Roy, and others in the 19th century consisted of either justifying its many practices or cleansing the superficial corruptions to reveal a ‘purer’ religion at the core. The response typically was within the terms of debate set by the colonial west. Most reformers framed their view as a response to the criticisms of the colonials and the missionaries.
The Minto-Morley reforms in 1909, the Khilafat movement (1919-1924), the Moplah riots (1921) later morphed the Hindutva movement into a religious Hindu protection movement. Hindu Mahasabha gradually formed as a national umbrella organisation encompassing all regional Hindu Sabhas against the perceived injustices to Hindus including the severe appeasement policies which even Gandhi was a part of. Veer Savarkar made his entry here.
Vikram Sampath shows clearly, contrary to the built-up narrative, that neither Savarkar compromised with British authorities and nor was he a Muslim and Christian hater. He was quite critical of the Hindus too for some of its cow-protection activities. His ideas have a construction of a Hindutva ideology set in stone despite few having read it. Savarkar was answering anxieties and confusions of his time, some arguments being simply stepping stones for future amendments. However, the critics will not budge from the supposed anti-Muslim stance of Savarkar’s ideology. The data of practices never did match his theory of Hinduism and Hindutva. Savarkar was a product of his times, and taking his evolving ideas as the final word is doing injustice to him.
In post independent India, a strong Marxist-communist academia; Godse’s bullet which made Hindus villains; the almost anti-Hindu Congress under Nehru; creation of ‘minoritysm’ instead of ‘inclusiveness’; and the distorted ‘secularism’ and ‘liberalism’ which mostly meant appeasement of ‘minorities’ and abusing the ‘majority’ respectively, finally culminated into a strong political Hindutva movements for protection of Hindus. Events like the Shah Bano case, the persisting Uniform Civil Code issue, MF Hussain’s painting of nude Hindu goddesses, Wendy Doniger’s filthy depiction of Hinduism, the persistent refusal to free Hindu temples from government control all played some roles here.
The Rath Yatra and the demolition of the mosque was a major ignition point for a different socio-cultural-political attitude in the country. Some believe that it was, in fact, the culmination of almost one thousand years of physical and intellectual persecution of Hindus. There was a deconstruction of every single aspect of Sanatana Dharma. Indians stopped creating knowledge by reflecting on their own experiences. An extraordinary corpus of Indic literature, beyond the imagination of anyone, rarely taught in our history books, stopped its spontaneous evolution into higher things by the impact of foreign invaders. With a profuse physical and intellectual attack on Indic culture, the Indian intellectual output became that of response rather than production of knowledge. They became primarily defenders of whatever they had produced till the Islamic rulers and the Europeans colonials barged into India.
The extreme elements who pick up stones do some silly things which would never have the support of any sane person. They would never be representative of the entire Hindu community. Picking the weakest link in the opposition to argue is a standard manoeuvre here which obfuscates the larger issues. But these irritating and condemnable responses are molehills compared to the mountains of physical, intellectual, and cultural disruption Hindus have undergone across centuries.
The riots after the demolition of the mosque led to descriptions of Hindutva organisations as paramilitary fascist organisations taking extra-legal measures to make India an authoritarian Hindu state. Today, the debate on the one hand views the Hindutva movement as an integral part of the Hindu community and on the other, it views the fringe element at odds with India’s Hindu majority.
The standard elite discourse these days is, of course, ‘Hinduism is good and Hindutva bad’. That is a lazy discourse with no clue regarding religions, traditions, Hinduism, and Hindutva. The power structures in academia and media allows this narrative to stay intact in public consciousness. Any counter-narrative quickly becomes ‘Hindutva fundamentalism’. Any hint of defense becomes an unacceptable defense of the unruly elements and activities not conducive to social harmony, like cow protection activities or any random threats by fringe elements.
At a fundamental level, our understanding of the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’ remain feeble and ambiguous, and yet we are in the grip of these constructed entities. The confusion on semantics has been severe which even our Supreme Courts have not been able to address. In an indirect manner, through some related acts, the Constitution does try to define the Hindus, but leaves gaping holes in the interpretations.
The proponents of Hindutva see it as a component of Hinduism which resists or is simply the kinetic component of Hindu Dharma (Gurumurthy) involved in organization and even re-conversion from other faiths. The opponents see Hindutva as a disturbing force extending to even fascism, a fashionable word to beat the opposition into silence. The proponents look at Hindutva to preserve self-respect; and the opponents pontificate, ‘Hinduism is good; Hindutva bad.’
Sanatana Dharma is the overarching synonym of Indic culture which transcends and permeates Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva and is also inclusive of all the other great religious systems of India. Here lies our greatest solution to harmony at all levels- from the individual to the universal. Understanding the genesis of Hinduism, Hindutva, and other related terms, we should realize that our great country is in the trap of false semantics.
Without going into the literature on the theory of religions, briefly, the phenomenon in India are not religions but traditions. There has been a continuous conversion of traditions into religions. Thus, we have Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and so on. Traditions are a) based on rituals; b) have an indifference to differences; c) brings people together by mutual interactions; d) say ‘I am true but you are not false’; e) has many deities, including the feminine, with typical deification of nature; f) and effectively solves the question of pluralism.
Religions, on the other hand, a) looks at rituals as superstitions; b) can maximally talk of tolerance and acceptance under the impact of secularism; c) say ‘I am true and you are false’; d) has a single male God and all the others are false; e) generally divides humans into believers and nonbelievers; f) when it becomes ‘purer’ or more ‘organized’ breeds more intolerance and hate towards the ‘others’.
The destruction of the ancient Greco-Roman world, the religious wars of Europe, the Inquisitions, the Arab world conversion, and the general mayhem in the medieval times Europe and Asia is proof enough of what organized religion can do to civilisations and humanity. A few decades of Hindutva even in its extreme form is no match for what Christianity and Islam did as an organised religion for 2000 years and 1300 years respectively. But the process of hardening of stances and intolerance is exactly the same which scholars, intellectuals, and critiques gloss over or fail to understand.
Without the risk of romanticizing the past, India had always dealt with pluralism far better than Europe anytime in its history. How did this happen? Religions which came from outside India became traditions and Indian culture absorbed them. Without any threat to personal identity or faith, Muslims and Christians sing the highest devotional songs to Hindu deities; Hindus visit Churches and dargahs to pray; and Muslims and Christians visit Hindu temples with reverence. We should be seeking the many examples of syncretism; the loss of proselytising drive in the Indian Christians and Muslims; and the feeble attempts to bring anti conversion laws by Hindus as pointers towards this traditionalising of religions.
Most Hindus have no problem with Jesus Christ, the God of Christianity, Allah, and individuals of any faith. The questioning of their traditional practices by an organised group makes them uncomfortable as many practices do not have a ‘scientific’ explanation (why do you have a bindi? Is the linga a phallus? Why do you revere the cow?). The response is typically a silence and sometimes not knowing what to answer there is an unfortunate and condemnable violence.
We are now insisting to convert a mass of traditions into religions which is breeding intolerance, hate and the violent Hindutva. The problem is in converting traditions into religions and the solution is converting religions into traditions. That has been the Indian solution to pluralism and multiculturalism. But when we look at secularism as a universal solution for all times and all cultures which was in fact applicable to a European Christian world at a specific time of its history, we are in for a disaster.
Hinduism is a construction arising from a huge history; Hindutva is a continuation of the construction. They are two sides of the coin and both exist and dissolve together. A few fringe elements which are fundamentally at odds with the general traditional philosophy of Hinduism can never be a widespread acceptable phenomenon. We need a completely new understanding of religions, cultural differences, and the Indic solutions to a long-standing problem of multiculturalism. The solutions have always been existing within us; we only need to rediscover them, heal ourselves, and then the world.
RANDOM MUSINGS 