Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism: From the Editor’s Desk

The essays included in this collection critically engage with the vexed question of relating Hinduism to Hindu nationalism. Although both of these terms refer to the designated religious and cultural community of Hindus, they deal with overlapping yet distinct forms of consciousness. One of these is perhaps best defined as a broad-based, pluralistic, inclusive cultural awareness of the self, and the other, more narrowly defined, by a combative and competitive nature and contextually framed. The significant historical overlap between the two arose from the fact that the category of ‘Hindu Nationalism’ took birth almost in conjunction with the formulaic and essentialized religio-cultural label given the name ‘Hinduism’. Surely, a growing social consensus of the word ‘Hindu’, Hindu nationalism, however defined, could not have been an enduring reality just as ideas of nationalism itself would not have taken roots without first conceptually postulating a seamless nation. But this is precisely why, in hindsight, one must heuristically separate early, loosely defined patriotic and somewhat abstract sentiments about India and ‘Indianness’ from its better honed, tendentious and self-conscious articulations. At its birth, a label is more symbolic in nature than substantive, and the application of the ethnic and religious shorthand ‘Hinduism’ for a hitherto hugely diverse cultural world of Hindus did not promptly produce a buoyant Hindu nationalism. Not surprisingly, the first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by intense debates about what constituted the religion of Hindus, its aggregated beliefs and practices, and the commonly accepted sourcebooks. In Raja Rammohun Roy’s (1774–1833) time, this transition from a spontaneous impulse to a closely modulated discourse was still under way. This impulse was as yet fairly uncomplicated, somewhat inchoate and not seriously confronted by pressing questions regarding the social and political constituents of the emerging Indian nation. Though a pioneer in the annals of Indian modernity and indisputably the greatest cosmopolitan figure of his time, Rammohun’s visions of the Indian nation was still essentially a Hindu-led nation, if not also a Hindu nation. At the very basis of his modernist project lay a reformed religious community, acutely aware of its past traditions and eager to embrace a potentially radicalizing future. Pegged as he was on the hopes of a modernist breakthrough, Rammohun was quick to realize that a Hindu-led nation and nationalism could not be a reality without first positing a readily identifiable, homogenized and unified body of people. The concept of Ummah in Islam offered just the kind of building base the Raja contemplated and yet his standing as a Hindu did not allow Rammohun to replicate this in the case of Hindus. Also, in Islam, as Rammohun would have quickly realized, the sources of authority were extra territorial, not indigenous or national. It was one thing to display an eclectic acceptance of Islamic lore but quite another to claim the power to effect changes in the everyday life of Indian Muslims. The Vedanta of Hindus, on the other hand, constituted a national scripture both in terms of its territorial origin, authorship and validation. After Rammohun, this operative reality only reinforced the view among Hindu thinkers that first, national unity could be fostered by the educationally and socially advanced Hindus alone, and second, that Muslims could at best be passive and willing partners in nation formation and not equally its active determinants.

It was a sound strategy on Rammohun’s part to insist on religion being the site for all meaningful change, whether social, religious or political. In this, he may have partly accepted the orientalist characterization of Hindus as an intrinsically ‘religious’ people, but religion was also his chosen language of communication, driven by the contemporary Western discourse that an ethnic group had to be associated with an ethnically determined religious culture. Hence, there had to be a ‘Hinduism’ for Hindus as there was Christianity for Christians. In effect, Rammohun viewed this idea more seriously than one abetting a religious reformation. Unlike Luther, he was a protestant without also creating an alternative body of protesting religious opinion. He consistently denied his religious discourse being in any way adhunik or innovative, apparently upholding the traditional Hindu–Brahmanical view that nothing could be born of nothing, suggesting that all thought and practice had a precedent in time. This belief had the advantage of integrating a sense of antiquity and movement in time, something that eventually bolstered the Hindu nationalist rhetoric about the uniqueness of the Hindu civilization and its uninterrupted continuity. Civilizations of comparable antiquity and achievements had eventually succumbed to historical change, but not the Indic. It struck Rammohun that departures from contemporary religious beliefs and practices would meet with the least resistance if only people could be somehow persuaded to believe that it was not innovation that he was attempting but simply the revival of an authentic tradition, sadly lost to time. This would also explain Rammohun’s uneasiness with social legislation per se. Legislative changes had to be both backed and justified by a judicious use of traditional legal and philosophical texts. In this way, he acknowledged that the agency for change lay entirely in Hindu hands. Ironically, the orthodox Hindu opposition pinned its faith more on the strength and popularity of customary practices than on scriptural sanction. The former, incidentally, was controlled by the nouveaux riche, mostly drawn from the intermediary but upwardly mobile castes, and the latter, by Brahmin ritual experts and law makers. This was perhaps the first instance of the defenders of traditional Hinduism falling in line with notions of defending status quo and fomenting a broad-based Hindu cultural nationalism.

Arguably, the older expression Sanatan Dharma (eternal religion) often used by the traditional Hindu literati but also a section of the English educated intelligentsia to describe the religion of Hindus did not quite match the poignancy or power of the term ‘Hinduism’ first formulated by Rammohun in 1816. Here, one may think of three related reasons. First, the expression Sanatan Dharma prima facie lacked a clear historical and ethnic association with Hindus. It looked culturally neutral and vaguely universalistic. Rammohun appears to have desisted from the use of the term ‘Sanatan’ primarily because that term was more commonly used by his orthodox opponents to denote the immutability of tradition. Rammohun was cautious with reform but his cultural agenda could not have dispensed with change. Second, the term ‘Sanatan’ suggested a static and frozen quality about itself that did not fare well with the new Hindu intelligentsia which had increasingly come to accept the positivist view that history chronicled linear human progress.

In hindsight, it is pertinent to observe that the expression Sanatan Dharma became popular only at a certain historical conjuncture. Its popularity coincided with the cultural backlash that came home to roost in the 1880s and 1890s when a growing pride of race, a sense of reactionary conservatism and xenophobia produced considerable uneasiness over the ‘foreign’ origin of the word ‘Hindu’.

By the mid nineteenth century, Hindus encouraged the increasing convergence of two important ideas: rootedness in a common culture and projections of a new Hindu nationhood. By the late 1860s, the National Mela, an annual, quasi-political gathering of primarily Hindu thinkers and activists began to call itself the Hindu Mela in a subtle transference of meaning and form. But there were also some pre-existing developments that aided this process. Rammohun’s religious monotheism and visions of a consensually framed political community, one has to say, were deeply intertwined. A religious culture founded on a subtle blending of reason and piety and propped up by the idea of a singular divinity was translatable as allegiance to a common nationhood. Polytheism and image worship had been known to traditional Hinduism to breed only violent sectarian differences as against coagulated sentiments of a common belonging that followed from the worship of a single, immutable and absolute deity. One of our contributors (see Anustup Basu) quite fittingly calls this ‘political monotheism’, which I interpret as first, the flattening of traditional pluralistic differences, and second, a move to replace Hindu orthopraxy with emerging notions of centrality and conformity.

The obvious problem with viewing Hindu nationalism as merely an extension of the Hindu renaissance of the 19th century is two-fold. First, in some cases, a radicalization of religious belief did not always match an overt politicization of the Hindu mind. While the novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s (1838–94) invocation of the Mother Goddess as politically besieged contributed to militancy, there were also dissenting voices which were quick to point out that the religion of Hindus, in fact, had no such conception of a territorialized divinity. Also, while there is considerable vicarious nationalism in Bankim’s works of fiction where the ‘oppressive’ and ‘tyrannical’ Muslim becomes the whipping boy for an assertive Hindu nationalism, there is in contemporary Hindu thought also the tendency to completely ignore the Muslim presence or else to culturally subsume the Muslim community under a generic culture which was patently Hindu. The educationist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay (1827–1894) who toured much of upper India in his official capacity found the average Muslims better informed about the Hindu epics than the history of the Caliphate. He also pointedly referred to the Wahabi failure to persuade Indian Muslims to eat beef. In one of his works, Swapnalabdha Bharatbarsher Itihas (Indian history as perceived in my dreams, serialized in 1875), Bhudeb brought forth an imaginary history wherein having forced Ahmad Shah Abdali to return to his homeland, Hindu and Muslim chieftains collectively meet at Delhi’s Jama Masjid to devise ways of ruling the new pan-Indian empire. Quite tellingly, the first full length monograph on Hindutva (Hindutva, Hindur Prakrita Itihas/Hindutva or the authentic history of the Hindus, 1892) by a Bengai literary critic, Chandranath Basu (1844–1910), never touches upon the emerging competing interests between Hindus and Muslims at a time when communal rioting over cow protection or other related issues were already known to have taken place. The flip side to this oversight of curse is the assumption that the emerging Indian nation has to be ipso facto a Hindu nation which would condescend to accommodate non-Hindu minorities, albeit not unconditionally. In 1888, the veteran Brahmo leader, Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899), wrote the following in his Old Hindu’s Hope. For the Establishment of an Indian National Congress, 1888):

“How can the two nations amalgamate? But if they (the Muslims) practiced the same faith as that of the Hindus and adopt common manners an customs, this amalgamation may well take place”

In possibly the first extant monograph in any language on the concept of ‘Hindutva’ to which I have briefly alluded above, there is virtually no mention of Muslims as antagonists or to the Hindu–Muslim problem. Prima facie, there is a startling overlap here between Chandranath and Savarkar who, in 1923, argued that ‘Hindutva’ was not a word but a history. And yet, there is a palpable difference between Savarkar’s brushing aside of the religious content of Hinduism or the exclusionary ‘othering’ of Muslims and Christians and Basu’s reluctance to take up the question of locating non-Hindus within the Indic civilization. On the contrary, he cites Muslim food habits in support of the Hindu discourse on the subject, notwithstanding the fact that in his time, the Hindu Raja or Tahirpur attempted to persuade the Congress to adopt a resolution against the slaughter of cattle for food. Also, his quarrel is not so much with Christianity (since he cites the Gospel in his support) but the larger world of Western political and cultural imperialism. My own research has revealed that the concept of Hindutva had entered the vocabulary of Hindus by the 1880s1, and contrary to my own perceptions, some twenty years back, Chandranath Basu’s magnum opus may well be only the tip of the iceberg.

Of the seven essays that make up this collective, two (Sophie Jung Kim and Barbara Harris) address global Hinduism and the Hindu diaspora, which have been especially growing and active in recent times. This clearly has a pre-history in the advent of two significant neo-Hindu movements which deftly combined qualities of aggression, ecumenism, eclecticism and universalizing postures. These were, respectively, the Vedantic and the Vaishava movements, the best representatives of which today are the Ramakrishna Mission and the ISCKON. Given their pre-histories, it is not fortuitous that the United States of America has been the battle ground where they have had to fight not only non-Hindu forces but internally dissenting Hindu religious activists equally. Jung discusses how the World Hindu Conference, originally convened in New Delhi in 2014, later spilled over to Chicago. By 2016, the Hindu population in the US was about 1% of the total population, but even this does not seem to sometimes match the fervor, intensity or passion that goes into the celebration of Hindu ways of life in various forms abroad. Of late, however, there has steadily developed yet another aspect to this cultural restatement that is firmer and more combative in its projection of Hindu historical culture. Chaman Lal’s Hinduism Invades America (1940) foretells some of these currently emerging trends. The Infinity Foundation, a fairly well-funded (primarily, one presumes, by NRIs) and well-populated forum representing what it considers to be the ‘authentic’ Hindu world view, angrily casts aside the ‘slander’ that the West has allegedly inflicted on the hapless community of Hindus. This forum finds Rammohun Roy a stooge of the British and questions the wisdom behind Governor General Bentinck’s abolition of sati. Arguably, its links with the Hindutva lobby in India are beyond question.

Harris’s article is clearly a takeoff from her recently published work on Vivekananda (Guru to the World, The Life and Legacy of Swami Vivekanada) and will serve as a useful summary for those who are yet to read through her weighty and highly informative book. My only reservation here was that to call the Swami a global guru looks a little far-fetched considering how, for a long time, his followers were confined to the Anglo-American world. I have often wondered why no study based on Vivekananda’s experiences in Europe could match Burke’s classic work on his life and work in the USA. It is hard to escape the conclusion that there would have to be a significant difference in the available source material and, by implication, the Swami’s popularity in the two areas. The near-global presence of the Ramakrishna Mission today results from the unfolding of a persisting evangelizing history.

Anustup Basu’s engaging paper advances and enhances two arguments of substance. Hindu–Muslim conflicts, as he argues, are not axiomatic but undoubtedly have a certain historical context to them. The qualification that can be justly inserted here is first, that such conflicts may not be as endemic to colonial modernity alone as commonly believed. While his thesis was widely condemned at the time, Bayly’s seminal essay on how a sense of uneasy peace prevailed between the two communities even in the pre-colonial period is worth highlighting. In an early 17th century Vaishnava hagiographic work, there is a starling reference to how Muslims of the Nadia–Krishnanagar area in Bengal found even the sight of Hindus to be ritually polluting. Hitherto, one had been accustomed to hearing only the other side. The other conclusion that I derived from his paper was about the liberating and transformative qualities of modernity (albeit working in very complex ways) when compared to what was merely the ‘modern’.

Arpita Mitra’s paper is the first to take up the study of the scholar–administrator, Romesh Chnder Dutt in a long time, her forerunners here being the works of Sudhir Chandra and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Mitra persuasively brings out the conflation between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism, an argument that I have earlier referred to. More tellingly, however, she disputes the heuristic divide that is sometimes created between economic nationalism and cultural nationalism, especially in a figure like Dutt. Personally, I see much meaning in Dutt’s decision to translate the Rig VedaSamhita in the teeth of social opposition. There was clearly a certain political ideology at work here within a broadly cultural and scholarly enterprise.

Paleri’s work borders on the confluence of cultural anthropology and history, basing its findings as it does on both texts in circulation and investigative field work. Paleri persuasively narrates how the idea of seva (social service) was instrumentally used by the Hindu right for political recruitment in a crisis-ridden situation. However, in his otherwise very thoroughly researched paper, the author neglects to address two key questions. First, he overlooks the pre-history of the concept of seva itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially at the behest of Vivekananda and his several brother monks of the Ramakrishna Mission. Here, one may recall the connections that Swami Akhandananda established with certain leaders of the RSS. While this ideology of seva clearly differs from its contemporary forms, a more nuanced comparison between the two models might have been quite engaging for the reader. Second, it was also my feeling that Paleri’s categorically identifying of Hindu nationalism with Hindutva is problematic. As I understand it, one of these is a broad-based phenomenon, more cultural than political, and the other, a particularly tendentious reading of Hindu history and culture. One feature that clearly distinguished the Hindu nationalist from a supporter of Hindutva was his firm identification with the religion of Hindus. As my own research reveals, in the time before Savarkar, those figures which chose to articulate the concept of Hindutva were deeply anchored in Hindu religion and philosophy. Chandranath Basu’s work is a combined study of the Hindu world view and the domestic economy of Hindus. This definition also disabuses us of the notion that Swami Vivekanada was a forerunner of Hindutva ideology. The Swami’s life and work, as I understand these, lie deeply rooted in the spiritual content of Hinduism.

Among the several interesting points that Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav makes in her paper is the one that disputes any symbiotic association between Hinduism and Hindu nationalism. As would appear from a perusal of the paper, the term Hinduism here is often a naively undifferentiated term. In the Punjab, which is the area of Bhargav’s study, the expression ‘Hindu spokesperson’ would apply to both the reformist Aryas and their ideological opponents, the Sanatanists and in Bengal, to Brahmos, as well as liberal Hindus. At most times, this combination sits uneasily since in their political and cultural perceptions, the aforesaid camps differed quite sharply. I am willing to hazard the guess that Bengal failed to produce figures which were able to effectively combine political militancy and social conservatism, as was the case with Tilak and Mandlik in Maharashtra. The conservatives tended to somewhat overlook the sweeping political transition occurring in colonial India, and in treating the British occupation of India as just another change in the ruling class, they were clearly in the wrong. A related argument also made by this camp was that from the Hindu perspective, it was the samaj (the community) that came before the rashtra (the body politic) and the internal cohesion and consolidation was far more important than responding to external changes in political power. During 1890–91, the state of near-revolt that Kolkata and some other cities in British Indiareached was over changes to laws related to marriage and conjugality, not the denial of Indian political aspirations.

Bhargava also draws attention to the perceptible difference in cultural strategy between the reformist Brahmos and Aryas, with the latter rejecting any ideological base in the essentially speculative nature of Upanishadic texts. Here, Lajpat Rai was clearly following Swami Dayanand’s prioritization of the apparently more positive and action-oriented Vedic Samhitas as opposed to the metaphysically oriented Upansihads. My only rejoinder to this argument is that his was tactically or otherwise somewhat short-sighted. After all, that even Vedanta, founded on the Upanishads, could work as a platform for activism and transformative change had already been demonstrated by Swami Vivekananda.

The essay on Satyajit Ray and his film by Chandak Sengoopta animated me the most, partly because of its delicate handling of a complex subject. In this paper, Sengoopta generically addresses some of Ray’s films which attend to the deeply intertwined issues of reason and rank superstition, but his focus is clearly on the 1960 film Devi based on a story by one of Bengal’s prominent novelists and short story writer, Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay (not to be confused with Tagore’s biographer by the same name). Most film commentators and critics, especially those based in the West, projected the film as epitomizing an epic battle between reason and faith, liberal openness and hardened prejudice, and even Ray himself, in what I consider to be one of his rarely incandescent and impatient moods, asserted that he had, in fact, targeted religious dogmatism and not religion itself. This is just as well since contrary to perceptions in some quarters, Brahmoism was far from the secular counter narrative to Hindu religiosity. However, Ray also went on to remark that those critics who read his handling of the story as typical of Brahmo scorn against ‘irrational’ Hinduism had to be ‘stupid’ and ill groomed in cinematic art. This appeared to me to be slightly uncharitable. Perhaps Ray overlooks the fact that the story writer was a Hindu himself and that in 19th century Bengal, allowing for some exceptions, an internal critique of traditional Hinduism was no less sharp compared to that produced by Brahmo detractors. That Brahmos too had their share of ‘dogmatisms’ is amply borne out in Tagore’s Gora but more importantly, the line between dogmatism and faith, as it appears to me, is at times elusively and intangibly narrow. After all, in the context of the story itself, a belief in Dayamoyee’s supernatural powers was not confined to her father in law, the man who prima facie appears to be responsible for pushing the young bride over the edge. It was a belief shared equally by vast multitudes of local people seeking relief from death and disease, a belief considerably enforced, as some would be apt to recall, by a gravely sick child’s miraculously coming back to life and good health. Dayamaoyee’s failure to revive the second child, to whom she was deeply attached, is not something that a commonplace Hindu would utterly fail to comprehend, for on this understanding, there was both individual karma and inscrutable divine play (Lila) at work. Arguably, therefore, Dayamoyee’s failure to demonstrate her gifts a second time would not really have shaken common belief in the miraculous. My reservations also extend to Prabhatkumar’s own narrative and of Ray’s adopting these in the film. Prabhatkumar shows brilliant sociological insight in connecting a zemindar (rural landlord) with the cult of Kali worship. Colonial ethnography reveals how the metaphysical worship of Sakti (literally power) is often translated into the pursuit of material empowerment and this typically reflects the Hindu gentry’s anxiety to overpower a recalcitrant local peasantry and revenue payers. On the other hand, I believe Mukhopadhyay is mistaken in projecting Dayamoyee as an ‘incarnation’ of the Goddess Kali. As far as I know, avatars are typically associated with the male deity, Vishnu, and with Vaishnavism, not Sakta theology. My conjecture also is that no figure widely acknowledged as an avatar in Brahminical Hinduism was feminine by construction. What occurs here is clearly a case of spirit possession, a phenomenon commonly known in rural Bengali culture. It therefore appears slightly simplistic to argue, as some Western reviewers and critics have done, that this was unquestionably a case of religious fervor turning into misplaced worship. Personally, I am inclined to doubt if worship at all rests on a well-defined rationale, and perhaps Ray’s handling of ‘dogma’ and ‘superstition’ in some of the characters visible in the story/film as well as his own responses to his critics could have been more understanding and compassionate.

I would be greatly remiss if I failed to thank all my contributors for their willingness to support this volume and for their eloquent skills of comprehension and articulation which they have brought to bear in their respective papers.