The edited version published in the Hans India (Readers Pulse dated 06.03.2022) https://epaper.thehansindia.com/Home/ArticleView?eid=1&edate=06/03/2022&pgid=68253
Ramu Sarma has written a bold piece in THI dated 5th March 2022 where he analysed the pathetic response of the opposition towards the Ukrainian student crisis. It is now the unfortunate polarisation around the single point of Modi and the BJP that hatred for them translates into hatred for the country. This is a time, as the editorial rightly points out, that the opposition should get its act together and offer solutions instead of resorting to criticisms using the social media platforms. On the same page, as a double-whammy, the main editorial highlighted the depressing degeneration of the country in the seventy-five years of independence where ‘region, caste, and religion’ have become the most important reasons for major discord. Where have our politicians, intellectuals, academia, and thinkers gone wrong? Why is everyone in the country unhappy for their social identity and go around with feelings of persecution and discrimination?
In the garb of rejecting the colonial narratives, the post-colonial academia, heavily infiltrated with a hegemonic Marxist ideology, completely misunderstood Indian traditions. In a deep symbiotic relationship with political leaders, they managed to distort every single framework of Indian society even more disastrous than the colonials themselves. An evil caste ridden Hindu society forever having a communal problem with the Muslims became the backbone of all scholarly output on India. Band aid solutions like whitewashing documented histories became the methods of achieving secularism. An excellent opportunity to understand India in a better framework never materialised from our social sciences which remained trapped in ideology. The social sciences continued to look at India and the world the way the west looked at India and the world. These universities nurtured many influential intellectuals who became our bureaucrats, politicians, and the media. The colonial view of India never disappeared.
Are there solutions? Yes, there are, if we radically reject the old theories and give place to intellectuals like Balagangadhara Rao and many others who are struggling to give an alternative viewpoint of our country and culture which stood strong for thousands of years against all attacks. Similar civilizations have simply melted away in the face of such onslaughts. Caste and sub-caste grew in the western contexts; varna and jati grew in Indian contexts. Is there a possibility that there is an inappropriate application of a western framework to understand our social systems? Every single social understanding has undergone radical alterations with new knowledge, but the supposed core idea of ‘Brahminism’- an exploitative divinely sanctioned system, permanently etched into Indian society from the days of early 17th century European travellers and missionaries to present day Indologists. One of the most complicated, dubious, and confusing discourse on social structuring in India has been to correlate the varnas and the jatis. There never has been a one-to-one correlation. There is a selective but constant quotation of the scriptures since the colonials landed in India (a distorted translation of the Manusmriti or a single verse in the Purusasukta). There are other equally important and valid scriptures that note a reversal of hierarchy and equal authority for all varnas, yet those remain ignored in the narratives. Is our understanding of varna and jati faulty at some level?
As Dr Balagangadhara strongly proposes, ‘Hinduism’ is a huge conglomeration of many traditions, rituals, local practices, and philosophies with a core characteristic of an indifference to differences. This transcends the concepts of both ‘tolerances and acceptances.’ Hinduism as a ‘religion’ became an experience of the West which saw religions wherever it went. They saw the multitude of traditions in the great tree of Sanatana Dharma and constructed religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism (sometimes even fighting each other). Do religions even exist as defined in the Abrahamic mode? The biggest problem of the world (colonial, post-colonial, modern, post-modern, and so on), cutting across all ideologies, is the continuous understanding of traditions as religions. For reasons we cannot grasp now, Christianity and Islam took the character of traditions like other traditions in India; they lost the fixation on distinguishing between the true and the false and the resulting proselytizing drive. This was the Indian solution to multiculturalism and pluralism. Instead of exploring our own solutions, we imported secularism for our ‘communal’ harmony, a solution for European Christendom at a specific point of its history.
An enlightened monarchy with decentralisation and individual autonomy was the key of Indian culture. A centralised Parliamentary democracy was never our route. The regional parties today are no surprise looking at the character of India but what is uncharacteristic is that they seem to have forgotten a core civilizational essence which defined and united Bharatvarsha in the past. Yes, there are solutions; only it needs strong work in the next few decades.
RANDOM MUSINGS 