Season of Protests – Hindutva

Freedom. A new freedom movement is going on in India. 62 years after gaining independence from the British, people in India rise against the Hindutva establishment. Hindutva runs on the premise that the grand civilization called India lost its lustre when Muslims invaded and ruled over the Hindus. And their chivalrous work is to  reclaim its heritage and its glory. And with the partition of India, and the formation of Pakistan as an Islamic state, the proponents of Hindutva have been working to undermine the secular foundations of India and build a Hindu raj over the iron grip of Hindutva. But what is Hindutva and how empirical are the claims that Muslim rulers destroyed Hindu culture? How exact are the imagination of two distinct identities called Hindu and Muslim in India?

Kabir, (Arabic: “Great”) (1440 – 1518 AD), iconoclastic Indian poet-saint revered by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. His early life began as a Muslim,  but he was later strongly influenced by a Hindu ascetic, Ramananda.

 

Today, in India’s age of identity conflicts, with 2 distinct and polarized vision of what India as a nation means, Romila Thapir’s book “The Past as Present” is a highly relevant and very informative read. For Romila Thapar, the issue of identity is as old as herself. She was 16 when India gained its independence from British rule, and her speech at the celebratory event at her school were reflections on two themes: What kind of society did Indians want to build with their freedom and what was the identity that tied Indians as a people? The British historian had left a neat periodization of India’s past into Hindu civilization, the Muslim civilization and the British period. This periodization is so ingrained in the Indian mindset, where school curriculum confirms this view of the past, loaded with its oversimplification and factual errors.

Historically speaking,  there isn’t one homogenous civilization before the arrival of the Muslim rulers  that can be called Hindu. In fact, the origin of the word lies in the name of a river called Sindhu, the Indo-Aryan name for the Indus River. When the Achaemenid Empire of Iran conquered the Indus region in the mid-first millennium BC, the area began to be referred to as “Hindush”, with Indo-Aryan ‘s’ changing to ‘h’ in Old Persian. Subsequently, Arabs began to refer to the region beyond river Indus as al-Hind and the people came to be known as Hindu. Thus Hindu was the term for a geographically based identity, until after 14 th century, when gradually the name began to be applied to all people in the region who were not Muslim. Thus it began to denote a religious identity, even though the religion of the geographical region is very diverse in its beliefs, the dieties worshipped, and the social norms followed. Caste and tribal identities are what the people really associate with, and  they form endogamous groups based on those identities. This is true even today, in spite of all the passions surrounding the Hindu identity.

Romila Thapar writes: “The known history of the Hindu religion begins with Vedic Brahminism from the late second millennium BC and winds its way through a variety of sects, belief systems and ritual practices to the present. It is therefore not possible to date it precisely. Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, were all founded at a particular point in time, by a historical person. This makes them different from Hinduism.” The semitic religions as well as Indian religions like Buddhism and Jainism began with a structure at a basic point in time, and evolved in relation to that structure. Even though these religions also diversify into sects, there remains a particular reference point- the historical founder and the teachings generally embodied in a sacred text regarded as a canon. The discourses within these faiths are related to the tenets and doctrines set out at its founding.

Thus, Hinduism, as we understand the term today, is very different from the other world religions. In ancient historical sources, there is no reference to a religion called Hinduism. Instead, we find early historians like the Greek Megasthenes of 400 BC, the Chinese travelers, and Arab historian and traveler Al-Biruni (1017 AD) writing about the Brahmanas and Shramanas, as the two religious groups prevalent in India. Brahmanas were the highest of the 4 castes in a caste system that has origins in the vedas, and they positioned themselves as mediators between humans and the divine, and performed sacrificial rituals for the other upper castes (the shudras, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, were not bound to such religious duties). Shramanas on the other hand were the monks, or Buddhist and Jain adherents. These groups were considered heretical sects by brahmans, and they were outside the power of the brahman. Monkhood was open to all. Thus, even though Buddhist and Jain teachings could not unsettle caste hierarchies, these faiths gave equal access to the divine and salvation. In many ways, this choice of becoming a monk or a mendicant has been a way of dissent in a society held tightly under caste norms. Gandhi’s own choice to live a ascetic life had a hint of this age old phenomenon in India.

What we see in the evolution of the many sects of Hinduism in India is the exchange and amalgamation of belief systems within a framework of castes. It is the caste system itself that seems to have an age old existence in India. Early Vedic brahmanical religion was aniconic, and based on elaborate and intricately planned sacrificial rituals rather than the worship of dieties, which emerges later. It was Buddhism that introduced iconism, probably borrowed from the Greeks of the time, and gradually, it was then adapted by others, and it became a predominant feature of Puranic Hindu faith, that centered itself around “Bhakthi” or devotion to the diety. Romila Thapar writes that the Bhakthi sects were in some ways inheritors of the shramanic tradition, and to some degree, replaced it in places where it was declining. Similarly, local hero stones, memorializing the valiance of local war heroes, soon were also incorporated into the Puranic framework by giving them the status of avatars or reincarnations of Puranic gods. When religious sects gained secular power and status, they would move up the caste hierarchy by interpolating their beliefs into the predominant beliefs. So the evolution of the Hindu religions was not a linear process, but one of many adaptations depending on the social and economic changes surrounding castes and sub castes.

With the arrival of the Muslim rulers, gradually, the population that was not Muslim soon began to be referred to as Hindu. But was Muslim rule characterized by a brutal attack on Hindu religion and culture as claimed by the British historians and the Hindu nationalists? There is a lot of attention given to the temples that were demolished as part of conquests, but what is tactfully avoided is the mention of other facts surrounding those events. Temples were more than centers of religious worship. They were also centers of power and finance, which is why, even Hindu rulers are known for temple demolition, a fact carefully avoided from Hindutva narratives. Another fact that is suppressed is that the Muslim rulers, even Aurangazeb, a name that is invoked as the epitome of Muslim hatred of the Hindu,  are also known for the numerous endowments made to temples. Hence, temple demolition was more political in nature than a result of religious animosity.

Initially, the muslim invaders faced intense opposition from Rajput states, but by the time Akbar was in power, the Rajput princes had been accommodated within the Mughal rule and made part of the courts, given governorships, and command of Mughal armies. Ties were also strengthened with marriages. Art and architecture flourished with the amalgamation of Indian and Mughal influences. Rajput status was frequently claimed by groups that attained secular power, and this explains the presence of Muslim Rajputs in North western and eastern Pakistan. The custom of purdah or seclusion of women is common to both Rajput and Mughal culture. The Hindu Bhakti movement was also infused with Sufi teachings that arrived with Muslim rule.

Once British took over India, both Islam and Hindu faith came under the scrutiny of the orientalist and some soul searching became inevitable. As result, there arose a number of groups such as the Brahma Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, the Divine Life Society, the Swaminarayan movement etc. The debates and dialogue between upper caste Hindus who formed the middle class, and Christian missionaries gave rise to the idea of Hinduism as a common religion of the Hindu people. What this religion and culture looked like inevitably was also drawn from the beliefs and practices of the upper caste Hindus. Soon, it also became a means of political mobilization. The founding fathers of Hindutva, Savarkar and Golwalkar claimed a continuous and unbroken Aryan identity at the centre of this new Hinduism, and also claimed supremacy of their rights over the land, even though there is no historical basis for such an indigenous Aryan identity. Today, the greatest support for Hindutva comes from the Hindu diaspora, who experience a sense of cultural insecurity as a minority community, and therefore, search for a religious identity that will strengthen them in terms of numbers and also enable them to pass down to their children a structured religion at par with Christianity.

It is these Hindutva proponents that I encountered at the CAA and NPR teach-in organized by the South Asian Institute at University of Texas, Austin. The panelists were also Hindus, academics from various departments in humanities . Their objective, logical and in depth lectures laid out historical and legal facts that portrayed the CAA and NPR exercise as merely a war on the poor. But this was unappealing to the group of impassioned RSS members (assumed) in the audience who had come with the sole intention of disrupting the event. Their disruptions were kept at bay till the very end, but the nature of their questions revealed that the entire exercise had been futile. Their minds had been stamped and baked with anti-secular, anti-Muslim  narratives. Many random comments were made to discount the answers the speakers gave to their questions. When the speaker said that the anti-CAA protests had generally been peaceful, one man butted in with the statement that the protestors are shouting “Hinduon se azadi” (freedom from the Hindus). The event concluded amidst the mayhem, and as I left, I saw the man standing near the exit door. I went up to him and told him abruptly that the slogan being shouted at anti-CAA protests was not “Hinduon se azadi”, but “Hindutva se azadi”. He quickly took out his phone saying he had evidence, and I told him I did not wish to see his WhatsApp videos. I told him that as a Muslim protesting CAA, all I was saying was “Hindutva se azadi” (freedom from hindutva”), not “Hinduon se azadi”. I grew up with Hindu friends, and I want Muslims to continue to live with Hindu friends, I told him. I left quickly to avoid the crowd that was forming near him. I heard them shout about Islamic terrorism from behind me and my friend, and a Sikh man who had also confronted them about something they had said. There are no Muslim victims. Muslims are ever the rioters in their eye. But I have resolved not to conflate a Hindu for a fanatical fundamentalist that I saw in each one of them because I had also seen there that day, respectable Hindus who had spoken for justice, and had stood strong and defiant against their ignorant taunts, standing firmly on knowledge and truth, their regard for secularism and the constitution of India.