How the West Looks at India: Debating the Hindu Right

(published in The Pioneer, Delhi, 6 September 2015)

 

How does the West look at India? The Western public is completely, and the professional India-watchers largely, dependent on information filtered by a Delhi bottleneck under firm Nehruvian control. This is not a matter of “sepoy” intellectuals blackening India and Hinduism at the behest of an American conspiracy. It is a two-way influence, with Indians trying to live up to Western fashions and Westerners trying to align with Indian ideological norms.

An important new book exemplifies this American-Indian cooperation against any political mobilization in the name of Hinduism: Pluralism and Democracy in India. Debating the Hindu Right (OUP, New York 2015). It is a collection of twenty essays mostly based on updated versions of contributions to a 2005 conference in Chicago. The editors are religious historian Wendy Doniger and law scholar Martha Nussbaum, both from the top-ranking University of Chicago. Doniger’s name has gained some currency in India ever since her book The Hindus, an Alternative History, was withdrawn by the publisher under Hindu pressure. This way, a biased, flippant and error-ridden book, already exposed in detail in Vishal Agarwal’s counter-book, was given a false aura of martyrdom. The episode also confirmed her enmity for any Hindu self-assertion, as is obvious from the introduction she co-authored with Nussbaum.

About the outspokenly partisan perspective of the book, we can be brief because no attempt is made to hide it. Thus, if we are going to discuss "democracy in India", it should be hard to leave the Emergency and the Sangh Parivar's opposition to it unmentioned; yet these are carefully and completely hushed up. The year Zero of the book's time horizon is explicitly said to be 2002, because of the Gujarat riots. On these, the old progressive party-line is still strictly observed, assuming “Modi’s complicity in the riots” (p.14). Herewith, they consciously overrule the fact that “he has not been convicted in court” (p.1), though not for want of trying. But if riots are deemed so important, surely attention is paid to the far larger killing of the Sikhs in 1984 by Congress secularists; or to the East Bengali massacre of Hindus in 1971 that dwarfed all Indian communal killings since Independence combined? No, this book only notices killings when Hindus are (or can be portrayed as) the perpetrators.

The Ayodhya controversy is mentioned a number of times, but without the decisive information, quite new to the American target audience, that the temple claim has meanwhile proved historically correct. The whole lambasting of the centuries-old pro-temple consensus, challenged by the secularists in 1989 and rebaptized the “Hindu fundamentalist claim”, carried along all of American academe, yet it was wrong.  The paper specifically about “the road from Ayodhya” has 40 footnotes, all referring to partisan anti-Hindutva sources except for one in which BJP stalwart Ram Madhav provides some hard data. And that count is representative for most papers, but then Hindus should admit that they themselves have produced few intellectual works worth quoting.

The editors call Naredra Modi’s accession to power “ominous for India’s very future as a democracy” (p.1). In American academe, the demand of objectivity, on which scholarly authority is based, is suspended in works about Hindu politics.

The subtitle could suggest that a debate with the so-called Hindu Right is being envisaged. That is not the case. The debate is in fact between different sections of the secularist Left (with its American extension), as exemplified by Amartya Sen’s response to Ramachandra Guha’s review of his The Argumentative Indian. The Hindu Right is only an object. The token contribution from Ved Nanda as former head of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (US section of the RSS) has no argumentative thrust, it merely details all the historical and numerical facts about Hinduism in the US.
 

Yet, many of the separate papers in this book are certainly worth reading. Most papers require a review in themselves, but to settle for one example, Mushirul Hasan’s paper on the BJP’s textbook’s reforms provides interesting data on the BJP’s intellectual agenda as seen by the secularists. Once you have accepted that this is not a scholarly account but a veteran’s memoir giving the view of one of the warring camps, it becomes a very worthy read. Incidentally, on p.255, Hasan labels Hindu history-rewriting an “attempt to Talibanise India’s history”, thus holding up an Islamic movement as the level to which Hindus could stoop. Thereby, he implicitly admits that the ideologically streamlined textbooks which he fights in India are a routine fact of life in Pakistan.

A serious drawback of this book is that it narrows its focus to the Sangh Parivar, all while announcing a treatment of the “Hindu Right”. Perhaps this was still passable in 2005, but anyone moderately informed about the ideological scene should know that it is not in 2015. At the mass level, scholars ought to have noticed that the Hindu self-defence network in West Bengal, Hindu Samhati, has been set up by  a dissatisfied ex-Swayamsevak because the RSS was just not living up to its promises. The Sangh’s enemies, such as the editors of this book, portray it as a formidable Hindu force, but insiders know better. It might have number, and today it might even hold office, but its commitment to Hindu victory is wobbly and lackadaisical. More and more, Hindus are locally organizing outside the Sangh. They even continue to do so now that “their” side is in power in Delhi and proving to be no more than time-servers. Mostly they are happy that Modi is at the helm, but for an actual Hindu dimension to politics, more will be needed.

While this trend is still marginal, it is already very visible on the media front, where internet papers have become the arteries of new communities shedding the Sangh baggage and trying to serve the Hindu cause through new analyses: VijayVaani, India Facts, Hindu Human Rights, Swarajya, Bharat-Bharati, the India Inspires Foundation. These people have no power yet, but they do have ideas. More up-to-date and more aware of international trends in political thinking than the gerontocratic Sangh, their thought is far more interesting. It also is more rooted, more Hindu than the Hindutva current, which is stuck in the 1920s’ borrowed nationalist paradigm. If “debate” with the Hindu side is what you want, it is they who are the ones to talk to.

 

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Impressions from the AAR conference

 

This is being written at the end of the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago. For six days, there was a fully blue sky, something unthinkable in cloudy rainy Belgium. The temperature was pleasant due to what the locals call the Indian Summer. Just some highlights on a few memorable events.

 

Being different

The debate about Rajiv Malhotra’s book Being Different was very instructive. At the end, Malhotra ably put his critics in their place, but first they had their say. I was appalled by the bad manners of Brian Pennington against the invited responder, Rajiv Malhotra: he wondered aloud, after a long diatribe which I guess was his privilege, why the AAR and organizer Francis Clooney s.j. had cared to pay any attention to Malhotra at all, let alone invite him. It was typical for these academics: they fight by exclusion, they shamelessly  exploit the fact that they are in and Rajiv is out, eventhough his book will prove more influential (and far more factual) than anything they will ever produce, or than the wrongly famous Orientalism by Edward Said.

Rajiv’s central notion of historicity as distinguishing the monotheist faiths from the dharmic traditions, was misunderstood or not addressed, though Jonathan Edelmann had a point in alleging that the Krishna Bhakti doctrine of Krishna’s historicity, as God’s descent on earth, gets dangerously close to the Christian doctrine about Jesus (but those who lived before Krishna are not consigned to hell, as those predating Jesus or Mohammed are). He and Anant Rambachan were a bit pedantic in their critique because the book was not what they had wanted, e.g. one of them went on about the absence of the notion of pramana (means of knowing) from Rajiv’s book. Well, that was not what the book was about, that’s why it wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t recognize a revolution even when it was presented to them on a platter.

And since we’re discussing what was not mentioned rather than what was, I said during question time that the Indologists in the panel ignored the book’s challenge to their guild, viz. that unlike specialists in any other field, they actively desired and worked for the demise of their subject, Hinduism. They have been flagrantly wrong about central issues, e.g. in the 1990s many of them predicted that if the BJP came to power, it would open gas chambers for the Muslims or throw them into the Indian Ocean. But the BJP did come to power and nothing of the sort happened. This means that they were not just a bit wrong but totally wrong on one of the few things in their field that mattered to lay society. Yet none of them apologized for their gross but false accusation, and all of them kept their posts, which they visibly don’t deserve. Their collective wrongness on the Ayodhya affair is another example: all sources including the Muslim ones said until the 1980s that there had been a Hindu temple on the disputed site, this has again and again been confirmed by archaeologists and finally by the Allahabad High Court, so everybody could know the truth, but the Indologists insisted upon just the opposite scenario. So, it would be fitting for Indologists to acknowledge their mistakes and correct their ways, especially when faced with a book that details their own role in a process of Western-Christian imperialism that is unfolding before our very eyes. 

 

Hindu-bashing

I no longer get worked up about the endless Hindu-bashing by young as well as by established scholars. There was plenty of that in all Hindu-related forums, though in different doses: the more the study topic was sociological (as the modern Orientalists want) and the less it is textual (the focus of the old Orientalists), the more Hinduism and especially the Brahmin caste were put in a bad light. Thus, there was what a Hindu listener, citing Paul Krugman, called “zombie lies”: they have been disproven any number of times, yet there they are again. In particular, he meant the presentation claiming that relations between the Jains and the Sultanate rulers were quite friendly, and that the occasional destruction of idols had nothing to do with religion. We don’t need to repeat our arguments against these long-lasting Marxist lies.  

In young scholars joining in the long-standing criminalization of Hinduism, optimist Hindus might see an opportunist stance to make a career, for the least show of sympathy to the wrong parties will be ruthlessly punished with exclusion from the institutions. But it is more likely that these doctorandi have lapped up what they have been taught, and really mean it with their Hindu-bashing, which they consider only natural. To them, Hinduism really is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste; anything that may happen in India, past or present, is the result of a conspiracy by the wily Brahmins. In established scholars, of course, Hindu-bashing is the habit of a lifetime and is very hard to dislodge.

 

Pagan international

My own paper, in a session co-organized by the Paganism and the Indigenous Religions groups, was about the crucial role of Hindu nationalism in the creation of a Pagan international. The Hindu diaspora is well-placed to organize first bilateral meetings between Hindus and local “Pagan” or indigenous people, and then a global platform such as the triannual Gathering of the Elders, organized in India. This has taken shape in the “Gatherings of the Elders”  

Near the end of the question-and-answer round, a conformistic Indologist objected to my relativizing the meaning of the Hindu nationalist participation in this forum. He alleged that the Hindu nationalists mistreated the “indigenous” people, “the Dravidians and the Adivasis” and that the latter were being “converted” by Hindu nationalists. In reality, the charity for tribals is one of the oldest and most successful fronts of the Hindu nationalists, countering the Christian missionaries with their own weapons: social welfare and schools. As testified precisely at this forum, the tribals are quite happy with this concern, and while a rare narrow-minded local officer may insist on imparting certain Hindu practices to the tribals, the over-all policy of the Hindu nationalist workers among the tribals is to fully respect the local traditions and integrate the tribal cultures wholesale into the wide bosom of Hindu society. “Conversion” is a Christian concept which does not apply to the relation between urban Hindus and forest-dwellers.

I pointed out that the Indologist used the term Adivasi, “Aboriginal”, a missionary neologism creating the false impression of native familiarity with the division of the population into aboriginals and invaders – which most non-tribals are not (and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter). Indians use descriptive terms like Vanavasi, “forest-dweller”, or Girijan, “hill people”, not the ideologically loaded and false term Adivasi. To repeat myself: the term Adivasi is the most successful one-word disinformation campaign in history.

 

 

Identity

Over-all, the striking thing about most papers and about the whole conference was the emphasis on the sociological angle and the concern for “identity”. Americans even more than other contemporaries are just obsessed with it. This conference was full of papers on this or that religion as a  tool for (black, Hispanic, gay, Asian-American, women’s, the handicapped’s) “identity formation”. But identity has little place in a conference on religion, which transcends identities.

A Hindu I met at the conference observed this American obsession (which, through sociology, is being imposed on all other nations) and commented: “Identity is simply there. It is what you start from when you proceed to something else.” So you forget about it and concentrate on something higher. As a Hindu master I interviewed long ago told me: “He who is enlightened, knows he is the same as everybody else.”

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