We may welcome it, or we may condemn it. We cannot deny it. Hindu upsurge is a fact and in all probability it is there to stay. That is what lends significance to 1990 above all else. India has taken a historic turn. Only the pace of the march towards the goal of a truly Indian intelligentsia may be a matter of speculation and discussion.
This is not to rule out setbacks; on the contrary, it is a foregone conclusion that the resistance from hostile forces will become increasingly desperate as the upsurge gathers momentum; but a long-term reversal and defeat now appears to be out of the question.
Four points need to be borne in mind in assessing the long-term trend. First, the existing order is in irreversible decline. Second, its defenders and supporters cannot put their act together, except perhaps temporarily; for they can neither reassemble under the badly leaking Congress umbrella nor replace it. Third, intensification of the search for identity in India is part of a similar development all over the world, especially in the wake of collapse of Communist ‘universalism’. Finally, identity has to centre round Hinduism; no one can circumvent this reality, however hard one may try.
An unprecedented effort has been mounted to discredit the Hindu upsurge. It is, of course, partly deliberate. But it is also the product of ignorance. So many of us among the dominant elite in the academia and the media have been so used to depending on Western concepts, devised deliberately or otherwise to serve as hegemonic texts for perpetuation of Western dominance, that they are genuinely convinced that a Hindu upsurge must mean Hindu revivalism, fundamentalism, obscurantism, triumph of irrationalism and superstition, return to primitivism and even Fascism.
It might be impolite but necessary to say that not many of these individuals can claim to have cared to trace the original parentage of the slogans they mouth in the Western intellectual and philosophic tradition, and to assess whether they apply to us. Philosophy as a discipline is virtually dead in our universities; sociology has taken its place in the supposedly best among them. But sociology is not culturally neutral. All Western sociologists belong to one Western philosophic tradition or another. Inevitably their assessment of all non-Western peoples and traditions are influenced by their general approach. And of course, most of our sociologists gladly follow their lead.
Indeed, a situation has been reached when it is easier to find Western intellectuals who are fairer and more objective in their assessment of us than our academics and media leading lights. While it may be an accident that I for one have read only Western accounts of how anthropology and sociology were launched by the British government and funded, to begin with, by the colonial office with the explicit objective of legitimizing their dominance in Asia and Africa, and how the ‘primitive’ man was invented, yes invented, by lawyers, among others, I doubt that is in fact the case.
As I see things, an ‘Indian intellectual’ is a contradiction in terms in today’s India. For, only individuals with a wholly imported tool kit are qualified to be called intellectuals. Some of them may even be well versed in Sanskrit and be able to quote appropriate shlokas in support of their contentions. But the contentions are rooted in some Western intellectual tradition. In most cases the tradition is Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. Incidentally, it is fully alive in India whatever may have happened to it in Europe, including Russia. Its proponents are a legion and it will be naive to expect them to close shop. It is also not difficult to list self-professed non-communists and anti-communists whose responses are determined by this Western stream.
To return to the substance of the critique of the Hindu upsurge, it cannot possibly end in revivalism. It is not an accident that Hindus do not bury their dead; they cremate them; they do so primarily because they do not believe in resurrection which, needless to add, is the source of the belief in the possibility of a religious-cultural revival. It is a popular saying among Hindus that the soul sheds the body just as a snake sheds its skin to take on a new one.
Hindus, it is well known, believe in kala dharma which provides for change according to the needs of the time we live in. Discussing the kind of renaissance that would be relevant for India 72 years ago Sri Aurobindo, the great seer-poet (rishi) of our age, wrote: “Now that…the awakening has come, India will certainly keep her essential spirit…but there is likely to be a great change of the body… The reshaping for itself of a new body, of new philosophical, artistic, literary, cultural, political, social forms by the same soul rejuvenescent will, 1 should think, be the type of the Indian renaissance…’”
In this context, it would be in order to quote Sri Aurobindo’s assessment of the beneficial aspects of the Western impact which he regarded as indispensable to an Indian renaissance. He listed three of them. First, “it awakened a free activity of the intellect… This is bringing back to the Indian mind its old unresting thirst for all kinds of knowledge… its passion for exhaustive observation…”
Secondly, “it threw definitely the ferment of modern ideas into the old culture and fixed them before our view in such a way that we are obliged to reckon and deal with them… Finally, it made us turn our look upon all that our past contains with new eyes…”
India’s view of her golden age is that of spiritual anarchy, as the seer-poet has written, which obviously cannot admit of any kind of fundamentalism. It does not mean that there are no backwoodsmen among the advocates of Hindu resurgence. They are there, as the Deorala Sati episode showed in 1989. But they cannot prevail.
It will be disingenuous on my part to deny that the Hindu upsurge has assumed anti-Muslim overtones. But it is equally disingenuous on the part of its opponents to blame the BJP-VHP-RSS combine for it and for the recent riots without any concern for the long-term causes of the Hindu-Muslim conflict, competition for the Muslim vote among ‘secularist’ leaders and parties, especially in the past one year between V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav, the consequent distortions in the country’s political life, the decay of the Nehru order, the defeat of the Congress at the polls in 1989, Muslim leaders’ intransigence on the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue, V.P. Singh’s duplicity in this regard, his decision to implement the Mandal Commission ‘report’, aggravation of caste divisions in Hindu society as a result, the unprecedented reaction to the decision among students in north India in particular, the compulsion for the BJP to respond to this twin-faceted challenge and a number of other related questions.
I have written on many of these issues in this space earlier. It is, therefore, not necessary for me to go over that ground again. But it is necessary to emphasize certain points either because they have not been made at all in the past, or they have been made only in passing.
The central issue in this regard is the fact of the Hindu-Muslim civilizational clash. For me the debate whether Islam spread in India by the sword or by the supposedly exemplary behaviour of Sufis is worse than irrelevant; it is confusing. To me, both means are equally ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate’. I regard it sentimental hog-wash to deny the centrality of power in the conduct of human relations. Educated Hindus of all persuasions have indulged in this escapism in the past 200 years. This, in my view, is one of the biggest factors for their failure to grapple with reality.
Shakespeare, it is widely recognised, is of universal value by virtue of being very English. The same is true of all great civilizations. They are universally significant by virtue of being rooted. Prophet Mohammad, according to the Quran itself, was chosen by God as his messenger to Arabs because till then they had not received a warner. That was also why the Quran was revealed to him in Arabic. The scripture lists over a score of earlier prophets and says that God had sent 1,24,000 messengers to all parts of the world.
By the yardstick of the Quran, Islam was meant for Arabs. For centuries its translation in any other language was prohibited. Even today only the original Arab version can be recited by the faithful.
But Arabia where Mohammad was born, received and delivered the message, was part of the larger Judaeo-Christian world and as such the spread of Islam there by whatever means cannot be said to have meant the crossing of the natural limits. That happened first in the case of Iran.
But in Iran, Islam finally succeeded in submerging Zoroastrianism, though not in eliminating it. The old faith has operated below the surface and is said to account for not only the illuminationist form of Sufism but also for the adoption of twelve Shi’ism as the state religion. Also, the old Persian culture, with its elaborate court manners and theory of divine kings, has proved stubborn. But all that has taken place under the overall auspices of Islam for the simple reason that Islam triumphed.
A similar victory, it needs to be remembered, did not attend Muslim arms in India. The issue is not whether this was good or bad. The issue is the fact of the partial success and the consequent civilisational stalemate. This point has been sought to be confused by insistence on matters of secondary importance, such as the presence of Hindu generals and soldiers in Muslim armies, and vice versa, or the adoption of Persian Muslim culture by Hindus in Muslim courts and employment, or the persistence of Hindu practices among the converts, and of Hindu features in Muslim architecture.
Such evasions, however, can only distort our perspective and therefore our approach to a resolution of the problem. They cannot make the problem go away. And that is precisely what has been happening in India.
The stalemate was not broken by the Moghuls who constituted the most powerful Muslim empire from 1556 to 1707. It could not have been broken because the Indian peasantry was armed and trained to fight. According to Ain-i-Akbari, as many as 4,500,000 armed men were available for service in the military labour market in northern India during Akbar’s reign.
The British disarmed Indians and sought to supersede the Hindu-Muslim civilisational conflict in that they sought to superimpose their own on the whole Indian society. But that made the contest triangular and so it has remained after independence-partition in 1947 because India has continued to be dominated by a Westernized intelligentsia which has served, as it were, as legatees of the Raj.
It is a matter at best of speculation whether India would have prospered economically if Nehru had not opted for a modified Soviet model of development and thereby joined the West-dominated world economic order, and whether that would have prevented a steady deterioration in the quality of our democracy. Similarly, we can only speculate on the possible consequences for our security, both external and internal, vis-à-vis Pakistan if Nehru had not gone in for what he called non-alignment.
It is, however, self-evident that a more successful economic and political order would have not faced a challenge from those who believe in Hindu self-affirmation. Similarly, it is self-evident that the fate of the order has been irrevocably tied up with that of the Congress; that in the absence of an anti-Congress coalition; the BJP could have remained a marginal factor in the country’s politics; that without the BJP’s electoral success in 1989 the RSS-VHP combine could not have made the kind of headway it has on the Janambhoomi issue. So it is a chain of events that we have to keep in view when we discuss the present and explore the prospects for the future.
Sunday Mail, 30 December 1990