Star Trek revisited

One of the formative influences in my childhood was science fiction. Because of my later studies in history and religion, people think I am oriented towards the past, but deep down I am far more interested in the future. Last weekend, I enjoyed watching the latest Star Trek movie together with my teenage son, another early convert to futurism.



The late 1960s, when I was in primary school and already a voracious reader, our parish library stocked a good amount of the output of the science fiction boom. On our first TV set at home, we saw several SF serials, like Orion (German), the Thunderbirds, and of course Star Trek. Fiction mirrored reality, for man was landing on the moon, an event for which my mother woke me up to come and watch it live on TV. Pop singers chimed in too, such as David Bowie with his Space Oddity.

Looking back, I wonder how I could be a devout Catholic and an SF fan at the same time. Religion was totally absent from it. And whenever religion popped up, it was either some imaginary Pagan cult vaguely based on Pharaonic Egypt of Aztec Mexico, or East-Asian religion. Japan was a futuristic country in those days, expected to lead the world in the magic year 2000. In the SF landscape, Christianity and Islam were totally out of the picture.

One character supposed to be a little odd, but who looked totally convincing to me, was Mr. Spock, a native of the planet Vulcan. Then already I found it a little weak that so much was made of his lack of emotions, his solid reliance on "logic". The message was that emotions are what makes us human. Well, three cheers for Vulcanic logic. Emotionalism and lack of self-control have caused a lot of misery in this world. In the new movie, the younger Spock, son of a Vulcan father and a human mother, falls in love and loses his temper. The first is fine with me, the second had better stayed under the Vulcan carpet forever.

Another afterthought on the space age of the late 1960s concerns its political and ideological impact. One of the old certainties of human existence and indeed of life on this planet was the contrast between heaven and earth. Heaven was what you looked up to, earth what you stood on. Science started breaking down this neat contrast by showing that the same laws of motion applied on earth as they do in heaven, or that the same chemical elements found on earth also exist in the stars and planets. In 1969, a man completed this process by setting foot on a celestial body, the moon.

Now, doesn't the wave of anti-authoritarianism characteristic of those years make perfect sense against this background? If the utterly fundamental relation between heaven and earth can change, then why not that between teacher and pupil, between rulers and subjects, between parents and children, between man and woman? A lot of SF literature (I hardly recall specific titles, but this one I do: Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a vision of utopia centred around a man from Mars adapting to life on earth) explored the sociological and ethical possibilities opened up by the breakthrough to space. In the present wave of conservative rejection of the "May 68" legacy, I would counsel a more positive appreciation for the sense of omnidimensional new possibilities.

The one phenomenon that makes ever less sense is the renewed popularity that the unimaginative ideology of Marx and Lenin then enjoyed, apparently boosted by its political and military successes in less advanced parts of the globe. It didn't fit the space age at all, as also indicated by its subsequent collapse. Its ruthless concept of power was atavistic, dinosauric. Though perhaps "bold", it was not at all the kind of entreprise "where no man has gone before".



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Lanka, the Aryan invasion at last

The Lankan Army, mostly consisting of ethnic Sinhalese, are taking over the last strongholds of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The self-declared Tamil state of northern Lanka is about to pass into history. On balance, this may not be a bad thing.

Most Tamil nationalists have been spoonfed a particular version of the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT). In general, the AIT claims that the Indo-Aryan (and Kafiri and Proto-Bangani) branches of the Indo-European language family were brought into South Asia from the northwest. The Tamil nationalist variety claims moreover that the speakers of Indo-Aryan languages including Sanskrit subdued and displaced the original population of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization (ISC), and that the latter consisted of speakers of Dravidian, the language family of which Tamil is the best-known member. There is in fact no proof for this "Aryan invasion" nor for the Dravidian character of the ISC (which even pro-AIT scholars now deny), but this lack of proof is amply compensated for by the intensity of the theory's political exploitation.

In Lanka, in the Tamil Tigers' understanding, the Aryan-Dravidian confrontation of about 4,000 years ago is now being re-enacted. The Indo-Aryan-speaking Sinhalese Buddhists have tried, since independence, to impose their language on the whole country, trampling on the distinct identity of the Tamil minority. They managed to get India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's co-operation for the "repatriation" of those Tamils whose parents had been settled in Lanka during British rule. They tried to suppress the Tamil attempt to preserve their identity and freedom by setting up an independent Tamil Eelam. And now they are militarily overrunning and dismantling that de facto Tamil state.

Contrary to international perception, this is not primarily a religious war. The Sinhalese resented the Tamil "overrepresentation" in the civil service and the professions that had developed under colonial rule. Along with the Indian Muslims, the Sikhs and particular Christian groups, the Tamils were "the spoiled children of the British empire". In the British scheme of the racial characteristics of their subject nations, the Buddhists in Lanka and Burma counted as indolent, the Tamils as hard-working. Therefore, they transferred Tamil labour to Lanka and Burma, whence the immigrants were again expelled in the 1960s, as well as to Malaysia, where they eke out a meagre existence as dhimmi-s, and Singapore, where they thrive. Ethnic envy and mistrust is sufficient to explain the genesis of the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict. The key event in its escalatioon was the declaration of Sinhalese as only national language.

Later on, a religious dimension was nonetheless inserted into it. After the armed struggle broke out, Sinhalese Buddhists vandalized some Hindu temples, identifying Hinduism with the Tamil enemy. Inside the Tamil separatist movement, however, Hinduism was never the prime motivator and was eventually sidelined completely. All through the 20th century and down till today, Tamil nationalism or "Dravidianism" has been allied with militant anti-Brahminical and generally anti-religious atheism, championed by Periyar Ramaswamy Naicker, the "father of the Tamil race". He summed up his hatred for the "northern, Aryan" Brahmins in his dictum: "If you see a snake and a Brahmin, kill the Brahmin first." Since the 1960s, Dravidianist parties have been taking turns at ruling India's state Tamil Nadu, and their two lasting achievements are the exodus of most Tamil Brahmins (to Mumbai, Bangalore and Silicon Valley) and the "purification" of the Tamil language of Sanskrit loanwords and of the chaste Brahminical style.

Along with vulgarity, corruption is the hallmark of the Dravidianist political culture. On this point, at least, the Tamil Tiger movement, with its extreme military discipline, provided an improvement. But is has kept on sharing the Dravidianist aloofness from, if not hostility to, Hinduism. That is one reason why the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India has never supported the Tamil Tigers. The other is that India has enough problems with various separatisms, and that any success for separatist movements in other countries would only encourage them.

So, the Tamil Tigers are mainly a secular-nationalist movement. At least as far as the nominally Hindu members are concerned. But there is also a Christian presence in the movement, and it has gradually gained in importance. Both LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham and the suicide bomber who killed Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi were Christians. The Sinhalese tend to see the LTTE as a Christian-led and Christian-teleguided movement, which to them explains "Christian" Norway's attempt to broker a peace agreement effectively legitimating Tamil rule in the north. Hence the famous cartoon showing a padre hotly denying any LTTE involvement all while a tiger's tail is showing from underneath his clerical garb. The Tiger martyrs are not cremated after the Hindu custom, but buried after the Christian fashion. Given the Sinhalese Buddhists' prior and long-standing resistance against missionary efforts at converting them, the Christian angle to the Eelam problem exacerbates the religious animosities.

For the Lankan Tamil population, the war for Tamil Eelam has been a disaster. The people for whom the LTTE claims to be fighting, is disappearing. Their percentage of the Lankan population has more than halved due to emigration, war casualties and the war's damaging effect on family formation. Possibly the terms they will get after surrendering will not be as favourable as those they might have gotten after a two-sided armistice negotiated from a position of strength. But in the circumstances, there is simply nothing to be gained anymore from continuing the war. Some international pressure may help in assuring them of a sufficiently fair deal in a reunited Sri Lanka. Or alternatively, the Sinhalese themselves may freely decide not to repeat the mistakes that drove the Tamils to armed separatism.
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A great book about the Great Book

The new book by Shrikant Talageri, claiming to present “the final evidence” on the Indo-European Homeland question, goes a long way indeed in disproving the Aryan Invasion Theory and establishing India as the land of origin of the migrations that spread the Indo-European language family over half of the Eurasian continent, from Bengal to Portugal and from Lanka to Norway.



The kinship between the languages spoken by most Indians and by most Europeans, jointly known as the Indo-European (IE) language family, is usually explained through the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). The AIT holds that in the mid-second millennium BC, a group of immigrants brought the Indo-Aryan branch of IE from Russia through Central Asia into India and then imparted it to the natives. Alternatively, the Out-of-India Theory (OIT) holds that the common homeland of IE was in India, whence some groups emigrated to Central and West Asia and Europe, where their dialects mingled with local languages to become Greek, Slavic, Germanic, etc. Recent attempts to give a convincing formulation to the OIT and buttress it with evidence were still clumsy or fragmentary, but now, the OIT has come of age with Shrikant Talageri’s book: The Rigveda and the Avesta, the Final Evidence (Aditya Prakashan, Delhi).

In earlier books dated 1993 and 2000, Mumbai-based self-taught scholar Talageri (°1958) had already built a case for the following scenario. In the pre-Rigvedic age, a group of IE-speaking tribes populated the central and western Ganga plain and some of these migrated westward to the Saraswati basin in what is now Haryana and Rajasthan, and on to the Indus basin from Panjab to Afghanistan. By the time the earliest Vedic hymns were composed (tentatively dated to beyond 3000 BC), the westernmost tribes, known in Sanskrit sources as the Druhyus, were leaving the subcontinent, filling up Central Asia, thence to migrate to Anatolia, Xinjiang and Europe. The remaining peoples in the northwest, known as the Anavas, were mainly speakers of Iranian; while Indo-Aryan developed in central North India, whence it expanded westward into then-Iranian territory. Of the Indo-Aryan speakers, it is the Paurava tribe and within it the Bharata clan that produced the Rigveda. The friendly and hostile interactions between the Iranians and the Paurava Indo-Aryans form part of the historical background of the Rigveda and the Avesta. Among the conflicts, the main ones were the Battle of the Ten Kings, between the Bharata king Sudas and a confederacy of tribes in whose names we can still recognize Iranian ethnonyms; and the Varshagira Battle, to which both the younger part of the Rigveda and the earliest part of the Avesta refer. At the end of this confrontation, the Iranian centre moved to Afghanistan, those who remained in the subcontinent assimilated into Indo-Aryan.

In the present book, Talageri strengthens his thesis with a lot of new evidence, and refines it considerably. The master key for discerning historical expansions and migrations is the internal chronology of the Rg-Veda. Basing himself on two centuries of Western scholarship, from 19th-century German Veda scholar Oldenburg to present-day AIT champion Prof. Michael Witzel, Talageri compares the contents of the oldest layer, largely coinciding with books 6, 3 and 7; of the middle layer, books 2 and 4; and the youngest layer, comprising books 1, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Covering every verse and every instance of every category considered, and comparing the three periods, he finds a shifting focus in the names of animals, plants, rivers, landscape features, technology, ancestors, ethnic groups, and in personal name types and verse forms.

The result is of such clarity and consistency that most scholars who have been working in this field will feel envy and embarrassment at never having noticed the contours of the scenario before. It is this: the old layer was indubitably composed in the Yamuna/Sarawati region, which was to remain the centre of gravity of Vedic culture; the middle layer’s horizon expands westwards as far as the Indus; while the youngest parts are also familiar with Afghanistan. This is exactly the opposite of what the AIT predicts. In an invasionist scenario, the oldest layer would obviously be based in Afghanistan and be as yet unfamiliar with India’s interior, which would then only be settled in the younger period.

Another spectacular finding is that the early Avesta, involving Zarathustra, coincides in time with the youngest period of the Rigveda. The material and religious culture, along with the vocabulary and the name-types, allow us to link a number of datable extra-Indian connections to the youngest layer of the Rigveda. The remnants of Indo-Aryan vocabulary in the West-Asian Kassite (17th BC) and Mitanni (15th BC) culture, bequeathed by Indo-Aryan-speaking emigrant groups of at least several generations earlier, belong to the youngest period. This implies that the Rigveda must have been completed by ca. 2000 BC.

Another emigrant group is the one whose settlement has been dug up in Sintashta, on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains in Russia. This is where the oldest horse-drawn chariots have been found, dated to ca. 2000 BC. The burials show a number of ritual features which Witzel has connected to the Rigveda in a bid to buttress his thesis that the Sintashta people were proto-Indo-Aryans on the way to India. But of each of these features, including the fabled horse sacrifice, Talageri shows that they are typical of the late period of the Rigveda, unattested in the older periods. So, more likely, the Sintashta people were part of a succession of small westward emigrations (small by India’s demographic standards but highly noticeable in the thinly-populated countries of settlement) around the end of the period of Rigvedic composition. This time seems to coincide with the end of the urban Harappan period, probably due to desiccation, when north-western India became less capable of supporting its dense population.

An Indo-Aryan presence in Russia was noticed by the ancient Greeks (e.g. the Sindoi in the Crimea) and remains visible in dozens of loanwords in the Uralic languages. The latter too have often been presented as testimony of the Indo-Aryans’ stay among the Uralic peoples while on their way to India. But from the unidirectional pattern of borrowing, with not a single Uralic loan in Indo-Aryan, Talageri shows that this is impossible. On the contrary, the pattern fits the opposite scenario: the Indo-Aryan loans in Uralic, like those in Mitanni-Hurrian and in Kassite, were the gift of emigrant groups from the Indo-Aryan heartland, which was India. Here, Talageri has made up for his lack of knowledge of the Uralic languages with a penetrating logical analysis of the relevant findings of other, AIT-bound scholars. Indeed, logic is where this non-specialist outshines all the specialists and manages to use their own data in support of conclusions opposite to the ones they profess.

Talageri argues that spoked-wheel chariots are not simply in evidence “in the Rigveda”, as the Orientalists have known since the 19th century, but are specifically typical of its youngest period. The older parts know of carts, generally with four full wheels, but the chariots with two spoked wheels are a later development. The archaeological record is pretty silent on their first appearance, for none have been dug up from reputedly Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian settlements in the Andronovo culture (Kazakhstan), the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or India. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in the case of largely wooden constructions in a hot and humid climate like India’s. From the late-Rigvedic testimony reasonably dated to the late 3rd millennium BC, it may be deduced that they were first produced on a sizable scale in India, whence groups of specialist craftsmen-warriors and other emigrants took them to western lands.

Talageri’s reconstruction of Vedic and Indo-European history is exclusively based on primary data and on findings by scholars working within the AIT framework. He never relies on the theses of other AIT sceptics. The latter’s findings on astro-chronology, archaeology and linguistics are generally compatible with his scenario extracted from the literary data, but they are independent witnesses, not part of Talageri’s evidence basis. Thus, in the book’s introduction the reader will notice traces of an ego clash between the author and Greek OIT scholar Nicholas Kazanas (whose collected papers on this subject are about to be published by Aditya Prakashan as well). While I hope at the personal level that they make up and become friends again, at the polemical level this quarrel is a fortunate thing. In contrast with the AIT school, a network of mutual support where we see R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar relying on the “evidence” of Michael Witzel’s well-refuted assertion that the post-Vedic literature describes an Aryan invasion, the OIT school consists of isolated individuals who have no other support than from the data themselves.

It will be held against Talageri that he gets too personal in his argumentative jousting with Prof. Witzel, whose rebuttal of his own second book he now rebuts in turn. The objection that he is only paying Witzel back in the latter’s own coin could be a fair excuse in the playground but not on a scholarly forum. The allegations of academic malpractice even carry over to his rebuttal of a linguistic argument by the mild-mannered Prof. H.H. Hock, for which I can find no excuse at all. These breaches of form, along with eccentricities regarding referencing and emphasis, and along with “bank clerk” Talageri’s lack of academic status, are the flaws sure to be exploited against him by those who prefer not to address the formidable challenge posed by his cast-iron argumentation. On the other hand, the quality of Talageri’s work is such that this time, at least some established academics are bound to acknowledge its importance.

The book’s final chapter is a refreshing antidote of sanity against all the hot-headed political abuse that has disfigured the Aryan homeland debate in the last few decades. In Talageri’s opinion, nothing in particular follows from ancient history for contemporary ethnic and caste groups in India. Thus, today’s Yadava “caste”, actually a conglomerate of several cattle-raising castes, is not the physical progeny of the Vedic tribe of the same name. Brahmin clans like Bharadwaj or Bhargava who continue the names of Vedic seers may genuinely comprise the latter among their ancestry but have visibly been mixed with the local population of whichever Indian region where they settled.

Once the OIT gains acceptance, quite possibly some European roots-seekers might start identifying with the Druhyus as their linguistic ancestors and feel honour-bound to adopt the latter’s ancient bias against the Anavas and Pauravas, now turning it against the modern Iranians and Indians. But in fact, languages like Greek and Germanic comprise a very large substrate of pre-IE native vocabulary, and it is from those pre-IE natives that modern Europeans have inherited most of their genetic make-up, rather than from the IE-speaking “Druhyu” immigrants who largely managed to impart their language through a process of elite recruitment. (Why exactly the IE-speakers from the east were accepted as an elite by the European natives, remains to be understood.) The white Europeans are largely the linguistic but only minimally the physical progeny of the brown Aryans.

For most OIT authors, this rejection of the abuse of history for identity politics, which has already done so much harm to India (as in Tamil anti-Brahmin and “anti-Aryan” separatism), will be a matter of course. But they may not applaud Talageri’s related rejection of a very widespread Hindu bias regarding the Rigveda, viz. the belief that its battles are part of a struggle between good and evil, with the Vedic kings representing the good side. In fact, the Vedic king Sudas who won the Battle of the Ten Kings was a Paurava imperialist invading Anava territory, and the ten kings were legitimately defending their own territory against him. Sudas may have been the hero of the Rigveda’s 7th book, “but”, so Talageri warns, “he is not the hero of this book”.

To sum up, the Rigveda is not a God-given text exclusively dealing with cosmic stuff, where all names and data are merely symbolic pointers to some Great Beyond. No, they refer to real people and historical events, and nothing human is alien to this ancientmost collection of hymns. But this only increases the merits of the Rishis, the composers who praised the gods in their hymns. Obviously, without their testimony, Talageri’s reconstruction of early Indian and IE history would have been impossible. We might never have been able to locate the IE homeland. All the Orientalists, including Michael Witzel and the present writer, owe a debt of gratitude to Angiras, Vishvamitra, Vasistha and the other Vedic seers, and to their contemporary scion, Shrikant Talageri.



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In spite of Hinduism

As a long-time India correspondent of the Financial Times and husband of a Hindu Indian wife, Edward Luce is rightfully confident of his grasp of contemporary India’s political and socio-economic situation. His book In Spite of the Gods. The Strange Rise of Modern India (Little, Brown, London 2006) is a wide-ranging and fairly detailed but eminently readable presentation of India’s recent and current developments.



The book contains a few minor mistakes, e.g. “Vaishya” where “Kshatriya” is meant (p.107 and p.124, yet correct on p.70), or the claim that in World War 2, Subhash Chandra Bose’s “INA... never invaded India”. The Indian National Army did briefly occupy parts of Nagaland and Mizoram, while the Andaman and Nicobar islands had been conquered by the Japanese and allotted to INA sovereignty. But let that pass.

Considering the newspaper Luce works for, it is no surprise that he dismisses Nehruvian socialism as a historical mistake for which the Indian population has paid dearly. While applauding liberalization, he also criticizes recent attempts by the Congress-led and Communist-supported United Progressive Alliance government to uphold or revive socialism, e.g. the Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), largely drafted by Aruna Roy and Jean Drèze. No lack of good intentions behind this socialist anti-poverty scheme, but: “Yet there is little, other than its magnitude and its cost, to distinguish it from previous efforts that have failed.” (p.201) He aptly links state tutelage with the ineffectiveness of general utilities in many Indian cities: “If utilities are allowed to charge customers for what they use, there is an incentive to supply them... In the cities, charging the poor for water would ensure that the poor would receive it.” (p.344)


Bias

Hindu readers have often complained about the anti-Hindu bias in all too many India books, including those by authors with Hindu names like Chetan Bhatt, Vijay Prashad or Pankaj Mishra. So, where does Luce stand in this respect?

The book’s title obviously suggests that same bias: India is growing “in spite of the gods”, i.e. in spite of Hinduism, a burdensome heritage. This description maintains, in opposite circumstances, the Nehruvian-era notion of the “Hindu rate of growth”: Hinduism is a hindrance, strong enough in the past to hold India back, sufficiently weakened now for progress to take off in spite of it. As Jawaharlal Nehru himself put it: “Religion as practised in India has ... stifled and almost killed all originality of thought and mind.” (quoted on p.17) But the record shows that Hindus outside India in countries with liberal economies have prospered mightily. The Muslim stereotype of Hindus has always been negative, as in Paki textbooks describing them as “cunning, scheming and deceptive” (p.241, quoted from Stephen Cohen: The Idea of Pakistan, p.243, OUP Delhi 2004), but it has never denied the proverbial Hindu Banias’ entrepreneurial skills and business acumen. The “Hindu rate of growth” was merely an excuse by the Nehruvian socialists for their own failure, yet the correspondent of the anti-socialist Financial Times perpetuates this myth.

On the other hand, it is also with marked disapproval that Luce quotes Winston Churchill: “India is a beastly country with a beastly religion.” (p.4) He also notes with satisfaction that Hinduism has room for religious scepticism, as where he quotes the “sceptical priest” Jabali addressing the epic hero Rama: “Oh Rama, be wise. There exists no other world but this. That is certain.” (p.144) Or the Upanishadic notion, foreign to Abrahamic monotheism, that the gods came later than creation. (p.326) It is not uncommon in the West to despise contemporary Hinduism yet admire its ancient achievements.

In his overview of history, Luce definitely does injustice to Hinduism, often by glaring omission of its merits in contexts where they ought to have been mentioned. Thus, the image of Hindus as passive and losers is strengthened by his jump from the Moghuls straight to the British as the paramount power in India, as if there hadn’t been the Hindu Marathas, Rajputs, Jats and Sikhs to destroy Moghul power before the British took over (p.309). He somehow forgets to give Hinduism due credit for India’s remarkable religious tolerance: “The tendency to accept that there are many paths to God derives from India’s long-running traditions of tolerance between religions.” (p.310) This reminds us of Mani Shankar Aiyar observing how “there is something about India” that inculcates tolerance and then conspicuously (indeed, deliberately) failing to call that mysterious something by its now-common name, viz. Hinduism.

Mr. Luce has lapped up the usual anti-Hindu propaganda in historical matters, but only in moderate doses. Thus, he disagrees with the extreme hate propaganda he heard from neo-Buddhist monks in Aurangabad: “They say the great Indian Buddhist centres of Taxila and Nalanda had been plundered by Brahmins, who feared that Buddha’s egalitarian message would undermine their stranglehold on society. ‘They destroyed Buddhism because it had no caste’, said one militant young novice.” (p.114) He corrects this blatant lie, then inserts a softer variation on the same: “In fact, the great monastery of Nalanda was probably plundered by a Muslim dynasty, but there is plenty of evidence to show that Hindu dynasties in an earlier phase of India’s history took steps to suppress Buddhism too.” (p.115) In that case, pray, how come Nalanda was there at all for Muslim conquerors to destroy, after many centuries of Hindu rule?

The unscholarly “secularist” version of history is faithfully reproduced, e.g. that Christianity was established in Kerala in the 1st century: “Christianity’s Indian pedigree therefore significantly predates its arrival in most of Europe.” (p.154) The thrust of this claim is that Christianity is somehow just as Indian as Hinduism in order to belittle Hinduism’s unique link with India. More serious historians including Western Christians have long ago shown that the Christian refugees arrived there to seek Hindu hospitality only in the 4th century. But even if we were to accept the colonial-age legend that the apostle Thomas arrived there in the 50s of the 1st century, this would not nullify Saint Paul’s far better attested visits to existing Christian communities in Greece, Rome and Spain in the 40s. In Christian history, even the distorted missionary-com-secularist account cannot prevent Europe from preceding India as a home of Christianity.

Edward Luce doesn’t shirk from reproducing the blatant economy with truth which has given secularism such a bad name in India. Thus: “According to India’s census, Christians formed 2.8 per cent of the population in 1951 but only 2.3 per cent in 2001. Yet the Hindu nationalists maintain that India is rife with Christian proselytization.” (p.154) Who do he and his sources think they are fooling? That India is rife with proselytization is a fact observable in pretty much every part of India, with churches of all and sundry sects mushrooming in cities and villages alike. If this does not result in a larger growth than is the case now, it is due to a low birth rate. However, the net growth of the Christian population is higher than Luce and the secularists will admit, and far higher than the negative growth he claims. As can easily be verified from Christian sources, India and many other countries have a large population of so-called crypto-Christians, converts who maintain their old religious identity for official purposes, in India mainly for the sake of safeguarding their right to caste-based reservations. Missionaries and secularists make common cause in deceptively describing the Christian community as a poor and powerless minority, when in fact it is the largest owner of media, schools and prime real estate in India.


Caste

On the unavoidable topic of caste, Luce doesn’t fall for the Christian and neo-Ambedkarite propaganda that nothing has changed. He sees caste eroding (p.14), partly through a convergence of religious practices between higher and lower castes. Thus, he mentions the adoption by lower castes of Brahminical practices like karwa chauth (a wife’s one-day fast for her husband’s longevity), rakhi (a sister’s tying a red thread around her brother’s wrist to implore his protection) and even the thread ceremony, which traditionally marked the distinction between high and low castes. He confirms the general trend of what sociologists call “sanskritization”, in which “the lower castes copy the values and habits of the upper castes” (p.315).

Luce also relativizes the image of a sharp political polarization between low-caste militancy and Hinduism as a religion. Thus, he reports that during his time in prison, Lalu Prasad Yadav, a leader of the “Other Backward Castes”, had a vision of Krishna telling him to become vegetarian and be kind to cows (p.121-122). Even the Ambedkarite Buddhists are not as anti-Hindu as some of their spokesmen pretend: “In the villages Buddha has become just one more god to be placed alongside the popular Hindu deities in the Mahar household (...) When Mahars greet each other, they say ‘Ram Ram’, the traditional Hindu greeting.”( p.112)

Whereas the castes under modern conditions inevitably grow closer and start to resemble each other more and more in lifestyle and material culture, we witness an increasing role of caste in politics. Party leaders “sit up all night thinking of ways to break their opponent’s caste alliances”. (p.137) As a believer in equal opportunity for individuals and in meritocracy, Luce doesn’t mince his words about the “corruption” that caste politics brings with it, giving rights and advantages to people on the basis of their collective (caste) identity rather than their individual talents and achievements. Caste-based parties have no ideology except for enlarging their own constituency’s piece of the pie.

Predictably, Luce repeats the secularist fable that “Islam and its militant sense of equality inspired anti-caste movements in Hinduism” (p.108), by which he refers to the Bhakti movements, which in fact predate the genesis of Islam, let alone its arrival in India. Likewise, he muses about “lower-caste Hindus who converted to Islam (ironically to escape caste)”. (p.250) This propaganda line has been laid to rest for good by the late Prof. K.S. Lal, who has shown that the lowest castes were among the least likely to accept Islam, which had its own social hierarchy, including slavery, and therefore easily integrated the caste inequality of its converts, who retained their caste identity for centuries after their concersion. Islam only adopted the socialist rhetoric of equality for apologetic purposes in the 20th century. It is part of the job of intellectuals to see through such pious anachronisms.


Hindu nationalism

Regarding “the continuing threat of Hindu nationalism” (subtitle of ch.4), Luce correctly rejects the secularist claim that “real Hinduism” wants nothing to do with it, considering the numerous connections (e.g. joint appearances and policy statements) between the Hindu nationalist mass organization RSS and popular gurus including the most modern ones such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (p.180). He leaves no doubt about what he thinks of the movement: “The most coherent threat to India’s liberal democracy is Hindu Nationalism.” (p.353) This after six years of BJP rule which did nothing to erode “India’s liberal democracy”. Not only has the BJP proven that it is in no mind to dismantle democracy, but on Luce’s own admission, it is losing the strength to do so even if it wanted to, for it “may well be true” that “saffron politics [is] on the decline” (p.353). Yet Western loudspeakers of Indian “seularism” refuse to part with their decades-old bogeyman of “the rising threat of Hindu nationalism”. Against the evidence of BJP performance in state and national governments, Luce insists that “its basic aim... is to downgrade the status of India’s religious minorities, through peaceful or violent means.” (p.354)

Predictably, the canard of connections between the RSS and fascism is brought up: “The RSS salute, which is frequently rendered, is unmistakably fascistic: standing to attention, you move your right arm across your chest with the palm of your hand facing down.” (p.155-156) That salute is unmistakably of the military type, but unless Luce wants to tar all armies in the world with the fascist brush, there is nothing particularly fascistic about it. If the RSS had wanted to express fascistic sympathies, it could easily have opted for the Roman salute, then perfectly respectable, but it chose not to.

Likewise: “The uniform they put on is a mix between the khaki outfit that was worn by the British colonial police and sartorial details taken from Mussolini’s Black Shirts, who were icons to the Hindu nationalists when the RSS was founded in 1925.” (p.152) Again, they could have chosen black as the colour of their shirts, but didn’t. The RSS uniform was the one used by security volunteers at Congress meetings, deemed to need protection after the Moplah attacks on Hindus in 1920-22. In those days, Muslims quite sensibly considered Congress as a Hindu movement.
The Moplah massacres were a one-sided Muslim initiative without the slightest provocation from the Hindus, then under the spell of Mahatma’s Gandhi’s non-violence and Hindu-Muslim unity. Likewise, the Muslim invasions including those of 636, 712, 1000, 1192 and 1761 were all unprovoked acts of aggression. Till today, Hindu-Muslim riots are typically started by Muslims. If Hindus restrain themselves, the riot remains small and is not reported in the international media. Only if Hindus mobilize does it become a newsworthy riot, and those are the cases where the victims on the Muslim side can be numerous. This way, a false impression is created of Muslims living in constant persecution by an overbearing Hindu majority. A proper perspective is given by comparing with the situation in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where all Hindu-Muslim violence without exception has Muslims as perpetrators and Hindus as victims, because the fearful Hindu minority wouldn’t dare to act against the Muslims, not even in retaliation. Moreover, for every instance of violent Hindu reaction in India, there are a dozen where the Hindus control their anger. Thus, the Gujarat riots of March 2002 came after half a year of frequent Muslim terrorist attacks, including those on the Parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi, which had not led to any revenge on Muslim communities.

Yet, secularist propaganda is adamant about presenting Muslim violence as merely retaliatory: “Muslim mafia dons from Mumbai organised a series of terrorist bombings in the city in 1993 in revenge for the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya a few months earlier.” (p.255) Those riots had themselves been started by Muslims, which secularists always excuse as “retaliation” for the Ayodhya demolition. Likewise, the killing of dozens in Muslims by the “Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force” was in “apparent retaliation for the anti-Muslim pogroms” in Gujarat. (p.255)

Luce is one of those people who wear fascism-coloured glasses and consequently see fascism everywhere. Thus, he finds it a “strange coincidence” that “February 27 – the date of the Godhra burnings – was also the date of the notorious fire in the German Reichstag in 1933 that gave Hitler the opportunity to seize power.” (p.160) Indians of all stripes have other things on their minds than the anniversary calendar of Nazi-related events, and to them, 27 February is a date like any other. But in case Luce is right about this, the eagerness to celebrate the Reichstag fire by setting fire to a wagon full of Hindu pilgrims must logically have been with the Muslim mob that committed the crime, not with the Hindu victims. Oops!

Luce systematically withholds credit from the BJP where it is due. It was a BJP-led majority that proposed Muslim scientist Abdul Kalam for president, which is remarkable in that it counters the BJP’s anti-Muslim image, but you couldn’t tell from Luce’s account: “India’s parliament also elected a Muslim head of state in 2002.” (p.238) Likewise, and clearly for the same reason of preserving the BJP’s communalist hate image, he refuses to acknowledge the BJP’s repeated initiatives for better relations with Pakistan: “The bilateral peace process was launched in 2003” (p.242), i.e. under BJP rule. Note the impersonal passive voice: it just happened, without anyone actually making it happen, least of all the BJP. In describing the progress made in the Union Territory of Delhi (controlling air pollution, building the metro system etc.), he praises current Congress administrator Sheila Dikshit and conspicuously fails to give credit to the preceding BJP administrations (p.212). The commendable campaign against female foeticide in Gujarat “was launched by Amarjeet Singh, the state’s health secretary” (p.314), but we are not allowed to know that he was a member of a BJP state government.

This type of manipulation is quite systematic in Luce’s book, note e.g. how he allots credit to Nehru where it belongs to others, and how he withholds blame from the godfather of secularism where it is richly due: “Nehru immediately airlifted troops to Kashmir” (p.232), but: “It was New Delhi that requested the UN-mediated ceasefire in 1948.” (p.233) It would be more truthful to reverse these phrases as follows: “New Delhi (i.e. Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel) immediately airlifted troops to Kashmir” while “It was Nehru (against the advice of his cabinet) who requested the UN-mediated ceasefire in 1948”, thus halting the Indian Army’s victorious march and burdening the subcontinent for at least sixty years with the wasteful and often lethal Kashmir problem.


History-rewriting

Some criticisms of Hindu nationalism are more justifiable, if true, e.g. where he alleges that VHP office-bearer Giriraj Kishore failed to condemn the killing of “cow-killing” Chamars during caste riots. (p.167) Nonetheless, he might have added that the Hindu nationalists’ record regarding caste is on the whole fairly good (the internal functioning of the RSS branches is caste-blind, the first party president of a ruling party from the Scheduled Castes was the BJP’s Bangaru Laxman), and that the current cancer of casteist lobbying which he rightly deplores, was not their doing.

Luce is right to lambast the BJP government’s conduct of textbook reform ca. 2002, which was a horror show of incompetence. But that doesn’t justify his largely incorrect account of the textbook controversy (p.148 ff.), faithfully borrowed from the Marxist lobbyists whose iron grip on the education sector had briefly seemed threatened by the textbook overhaul. On one of its flashpoints, the Aryan Invasion debate, Luce is clearly out of his depth and merely parrots the account given in the Communist fortnightly Frontline.

About N. Jha’s and N.S. Rajaram’s eager “discovery” of a horse depiction on a Harappan seal, purportedly proving that the horse-centred Aryan culture was present in the Harappan cities, Luce writes: “in 2000 the discovery had been exposed as a simple case of fraud. Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, showed how the two men had manipulated computer-generated images of the seal to conjure up a horse.” (p.149) It is true Witzel claimed that much, but he never “showed” it. The fact of the matter is that the original broken seal was reproduced in print by Jha and Rajaram, with the horse only showing up in what they introduced as an “artist’s reconstruction” (a pretty clumsy one, too) of what the original seal must have looked like. If they had had fraud in mind, they would have gone about it differently, but now they simply offered a naïve reconstruction of an irretrievable seal extrapolating the fragments of what was more likely the depiction of a bull into the shape of a horse. They had been carried away by their enthusiasm, just as Witzel’s own writings contain a number of unwarranted conclusions betraying his own eagerness to jump at those rather than let the data point to other conclusions less fitting in his preconceived hypotheses, e.g. his mistaken “discovery” of Aryan invasion references in the Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra. When I first drew attention to that mistake of his, I didn’t accuse him of “fraud”, and never have done so since. As Napoleon reportedly said: “Never ascribe to malice what can just as well be explained by incompetence.” Or by eager self-deception.

I can understand that Luce is not a specialist and cannot verify every claim he quotes in primary sources. With this particular claim, however, he ought to have been extra careful, as it contains a grim allegation against people’s integrity. But since the people concerned had been dismissed as “Hindu nationalists” beforehand, I suppose different norms apply as compared with the decorum observed vis-à-vis real human beings.

About the thousandfold destruction of Hindu temples by Muslims, Luce of course tries to minimize the phenomenon, and to the extent that he cannot deny it, he shifts the blame to the Hindus: “And it was a tradition for new Hindu dynasties to do precisely the same thing.” (p.308) That is simply a lie. This allegation is a massive extrapolation from a claim by Richard Eaton that a handful (not more) of idols were carried away as trophies by Hindu armies conquering fellow Hindu states. But that is a totally different phenomenon, for it left the cult to the deity entirely intact. The stolen idol was installed in the conqueror’s own temple, reconsecrated and then put up for worship. The defeated original worshippers were left free to install a new idol to the same deity and to resume their worship. By contrast, Muslim iconoclasm, which didn’t steal idols but destroyed them, did not focus on the material object of the idol. In destroying the idol, they meant to destroy the tradition of worshipping the deity represented by it. Their point was not to destroy a piece of sculpture, but to destroy a religion. This refusal to distinguish between the stealing of a sculpture and the attempt to finish off a religion is typical of the wilful superficiality and studied silliness that constitutes so much of Indian secularist discourse.

Moreover, even a non-specialist like Luce should have been able to see that blaming Muslim iconoclasm on Hindu precedent leaves the fact of Muslim iconoclasm outside India unexplained. This is another instance of secularists’ wilful silliness: they expect Indians to be ignorant of the outside world and thus to limit Muslim history to Indian Muslim history. When Mohammed broke the 360 idols in the Kaaba, it is unlikely that he was following a Hindu precedent, isn’t it? By contrast, the Muslim iconoclasts in India, whenever they cared to explain their conduct in their court chronicles, invariably invoked the Islamic tradition of iconoclasm started by the Prophet himself, and never ever a purported Hindu precedent.

To sum up, Edward Luce is a typical Western press correspondent in Delhi. He doesn’t hate India or Hinduism, but has innocently lapped up all the prejudices of the so-called secularists. On the Delhi cocktail circuit, trendy Indians gain prestige by showing off their Western friends and at the same time feed them their own view of things. The reading the correspondents do is mostly from the English-medium secularist press, which again corroborates these prejudices. And since exploring alternative viewpoints is both labour-intensive and unrewarding, indeed risky for their reputation in case they were to acknowledge any merit in the Hindu critique of the reigning secularist paradigm, they happily limit themselves to reproducing what their select group of native informers tells them.


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