[Hinduism, btw, was, and still is, not a (cohesive) religion as was/is the case with Judaism, Christianity or Islam, to take a few prominent examples.
It doesn't have a definite origin. No central holy scripture. No Pope or a singular apex church. Even the tag "Hindu" was coined by incoming outsiders, in order to denote the people inhabiting a specific region - beyond the river Indus or Sindhu. Being not too comfortable with a tag awarded by (despised and berated) outsiders and also the fact that the term "Hindu" figures nowhere in the holy scriptures, some Hindu Nationalists have picked up "Sanatan Dharma". Some radicals also, in turn, picked it up. But, then, this appears to be of even (far) more modern provenance. It became current in opposition to the rise of the Arya Samajis, in Punjab and adjoining regions - a revivalist/reformist current. (Quite often, it is bracketed with its sort of polar opposite Brahmo Samaj - initiated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot, apart from being many other things - a modernist/reformist current.) No scripture, as it seems, uses it. Not to confuse, the term "dharma" is, of course, ancient. So is "sanatan". But, not "Sanatan Dharma". "Dharma" meant the just and righteous way (or the intrinsic nature/property of someone/something). Its antonym "adharma", of which there's no English synonym, brings that out with vivid clarity - wrong/unjust/immoral act/ way. Only much later "Dharma" would come to denote "religion". It was, and still is - though to a significantly lesser extent, a basket of loosely interconnected traditions, which have been incorporated, with modifications and getting modified here and there, in the process of growth. The two commonest threads are the (obnoxious and oppressive) caste system and the two great epics - in myriad versions, the classical and vernacular. Quite contrary to the usual claims of the Indian radicals, there's no uniform Brahmanism either. While Brahmans of the north would, or rather did, desist from consuming any variety of flesh, in the east their counterparts would happily, or rather eagerly, preside over ritual animal sacrifice. Even the gods/goddesses, to be worshipped, vary from region to region. Even for the Brahmans. Just to take two very visible markers. But, of course, they constitute a pan-Indian caste, being at the top of the heap - in the context of religious rituals and certain social customs. In the process of encountering the Abrahamic religions, the basket of Indic traditions, which would come to be called Hinduism, also, partly out of the urge for self-preservation and partly otherwise, started reshaping itself in the image of its, at least somewhat, adversarial interlocutors. This process picked up momentum with the establishment of the British rule. The Britishers tried, pretty seriously, to comprehend the Indian realities, in order to rule. Their scholars, not necessarily willing partners in that project, looked at India and tried to theorise Hinduism in terms of categories and experiences they had been familiar with. Not necessarily, with evil designs. Their explorations made a strong impact on the Indian educated elite - whether in the process of serving them or opposing them. The process of homogenisation of Hinduism gained momentum. Emergence of a common state, market and easier communications between regions helped. Both the "Indian Nationalists" and the "Hindu Nationalists", in their own different ways, pushed the process further forward. That story, particularly as regards the Hindu Nationalists, still continues, in even more conscious and organised ways. Even then, the birthmark could not be completely erased off. At least as yet. While Islamists just blasted off the Bamyan Buddhas, the Hindu Nationalists have to live with the Konark and Khajuraho temples - even glorify these, while shouting and screaming, and doing much worse, against M F Husain for picturing a Hindu goddess in the nude. Husain, in the process, would be hounded out of his beloved land of birth. But, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, a Bengali *Christian* poet, whose best known literary product is 'Meghnad Badh Kabya' (Lyrical Saga of Slaying Meghnad) - retelling (a portion of) the Ramayana, which runs down Lakshmana and Rama and valorises Ravana's son Indrajit, or Meghnad, and Ravana and it still remains a revered, even if no longer too familiar, piece of literary work, as far as the educated Bengalis are concerned. It'd be rather blasphemous to charge it of blasphemy. The heterogeneity or amorphousness of Hindu traditions is, however, often confused with tolerance and liberalism. Of course, the heterogeneity provides far larger elbow room for heterodoxy, than otherwise. While "Hinduism" refers to a religion, "Hindutva", when used in political discourse, is an Indian shorthand for "Hindu nationalism". "Hindu nationalism", very much like "Muslim nationalism", arose during the epic Indian freedom struggle as opposed to "Indian nationalism". While "Indian nationalism", at least notionally, stood/stands for a pluralist, inclusive and composite Indian nationhood, "Hindu" or "Muslim" nationalism stood/stands for an exclusivist "Hindu" or "Muslim" nationhod. Thereby, they also pit the religious community they claim to represent against all the others. "Hindutva" - out and out a political project, in the process, tries to reimagine and recreate "Hinduism" as a monolithic entity. "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan!" is a familiar war cry. Thus, ***while "Hindutva" is, evidently, linked to "Hinduism", these two terms are in no way synonymous***. As "Islam" and "Islamism" are not.] I/II. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/hindutva-hindus-in-india-lok-sabha-elections-5522425/?fbclid=IwAR3AVNW19P0cRLY3y89AWyfa_wqAB5q7WcNyH49G84CrBfBvkum1-FY8sNU In service of politics Hindutva seeks to surmount the diversity of Hinduism Written by Rajshree Chandra | Updated: January 4, 2019 12:20:21 am To say that the terms Hindu and Hindutva include Muslims and Christians is a peculiar invitation to citizenship. (Illustration: CR Sasikumar) I began teaching the Indian Political Thought course last summer with the usual introductory class on Brahmanic tradition. It began with a brief about how Vedism predates what later came to be called Hinduism, how it is the font of Hinduism and how the latter absorbed and synthesised religious ideas, puranic stories, non-theistic and Shramanik traditions. I followed up with a question: What would be some of the defining features of Hinduism, or a Hindu way of life, as the students experienced and practised it? What emerged was both interesting and predictable. For every belief and practice that was cited, there seemed to be a validity of its exact opposite. You could be a Hindu and believe in one omnipotent being or worship many gods; you could be a part of a sect or you could be a devout Hindu and shun the deification of mortal humans; you could be a vegetarian or non-vegetarian; you could believe in animal sacrifice or be its fiercest critic; you could be a practitioner of ahimsa or not be its strict advocate; you could believe in the caste system or call for its annihilation. What emerges from these apparently conflicting propositions is an idea of openness. As Jyotirmaya Sharma says: “Every Hindu decides what is Hinduism. That space ought to remain inviolable.” At times a particular space would be in sync with other ways of being Hindu but it could also be conflictual. But this plurality of gods and practices, norms and habits, cultures and castes, this multiplicity of belief-systems also poses an enormous challenge for projects of nationalism that seek a united, coherent imagination of one nation, one people. >From this challenge was born the ideology of Hindutva, first in the writings of V D Savarkar in 1923. It was taken forward by ideologues of the RSS, and its affiliates. Hindutva, as Savarkar wrote, is “not to be confused with the other conjugate term Hinduism. Hinduism is only a derivate, a fraction, a part of Hindutva.” Hinduism, therefore, is a belief system, a matter of faith, Hindutva, is a political ideology that uses Hinduism to fashion Hindu nationalism. It is, as Ashis Nandy says, “political Hinduism”. Hinduism and Hindutva are thus different, not to be conflated or confused with each other. There are at least three features of Hindutva that distinguish it from Hinduism. First, Hindutva is a homogenising project that seeks to surmount the diversity of Hindu gods, scriptures, practices, rituals. It seeks to re-imagine India in terms of an essentialised similitude of one people, unified by a shared sense of being parts of a singular entity. M S Golwalkar wrote in his Bunch of Thoughts that the view upholding the so-called diversity in Hinduism was simply superficial and partial: “All the various castes, the various ways of worshipping god, the various languages are all expressions of one great homogeneous solid Hindu people — the children of this motherland.” Second, the quest for homogeneity seeks prescription, of practices that can form the basis of this uniformity. Brahmanical conservatism, which today rules our social psyche like never before, is adopted as the adjudicator of what this homogenous culture should comprise of. Its influence is behind what is prescribed as sacred, pure, natural and sanskari or proscribed as profane, impure, unnatural and alien. For instance, consuming beef is an act of untold travesty, a sin that deserves severest of punishments, Durga is deemed sacred, while Mahishasur (the demon god of the Adivasis and Dalits) is regarded profane, gay sex is considered unnatural and allowing women of menstruating age entry into Sabarimala is offensive to the idea of purity and godly celibacy. Social relationships are disciplined, increasingly through the conservative lens of Brahmanical social values. Third, Hindutva conflates the idea of religion with citizenship. It directly or indirectly subscribes to Savarkar’s theory in this respect. For Savarkar, India belonged to the Hindus because for Hindus alone India was both their pitribhu (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holyland). He goes on to say that “some of our Mohammedan or Christian… cannot be recognised as [this land] is not to them a Holyland. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. Their love is divided”. Golwalkar too says: “In this land of ours, Bharat, the national life is of the Hindu People. In short, this is the Hindu nation.” The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat may have said that Golwalkar’s thoughts and prescriptions are not valid for all times to come and that Hindutva is an evolving and inclusive project. But the truth is that it is easier to expunge Golwalkar from rhetoric than it is to erase him from the social psyche and the practice of Hindutva. It is no accident that the rhetoric of inclusion is linked to the underlying unity of being a Hindu — “everyone living in India is a “Hindu”, asserted Bhagwat last year. To say that the terms Hindu and Hindutva include Muslims and Christians is a peculiar invitation to citizenship. It demands a double consciousness based on a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the Hindu, always measuring one’s faith by the type of a world that looks on, at times in contempt and at times with pity but seldom as equals. Such conditional accommodation of other religions and cultures makes for a diversity that is hierarchical rather than plural. It is opposed to the idea of a composite nationhood, which may actually be possible if the majority were left alone to simply being practising Hindus. II. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/religion-vs-religious-nationalism/article25892798.ece?utm_source=email&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Newsletter&fbclid=IwAR2d2UKUoUj7BLu2_72o6pjjaEs2cJOrAwnV5C3ftIif8xn8Fu6HiPieejk Religion vs religious nationalism Varghese K. George JANUARY 03, 2019 00:02 IST UPDATED: JANUARY 02, 2019 22:54 IST *The starting point for anti-Hindutva politics must be the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. Else, it’s doomed* Any rigid secular approach, unrestrained by considerations of electoral politics, could only lead to disapproval of Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s demonstration of his religious faith and his characterisation of the Congress as a “party of Hinduism”. His approach has been widely termed “soft Hindutva”, and as an attempt to compete with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its game. Those who deride Hindutva and those who swear by it both consider Mr. Gandhi a poor imitator of it. Centrist politics by definition is vulnerable to criticism from radical perspectives of different hues — for instance, Marxist M.N. Roy, Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar and Hindutva proponent, and later his assassin, Nathuram Godse, were all critical of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas of Hinduism. What is worth a closer analysis in the current context is the suggestion that the invocation of Hindu symbols for electoral gains is Hindutva, albeit a softer version. A clear trajectory Mainstream Indian nationalism and Hindu nationalism shared a range of symbols and personalities during their formative decades, and distinguishing one from the other can appear a challenging task often. Consolidation of the Hindu society was a preoccupation of several reformists and leaders of the struggle for independence, who were not linked to Hindutva. In a classic essay written in the 1990s, at the peak of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, historian Sumit Sarkar marked the stages of the evolution of Hindu nationalism in two distinct phases: first from the use of the word Hindu as a geographical marker to ‘Hinduism’, an attempt to codify the cultural and religious practices, and then to Hindutva. Swami Vivekananda was the seer of the first shift. “Of the Swami’s address before the Parliament of Religions, it may be said that when he began to speak it was of the religious ideas of the Hindus but when he ended, Hinduism had been created,” wrote Sister Nivedita, the Swami’s closest disciple. Three decades later Veer Savarkar, who invented Hindutva, did not merely seek to unify Hindus, but tried to achieve it by imagining the other as those who do not consider India their sacred land. While secular nationalism’s adversarial image was imperialism, the edge in Savarkar’s Hindutva was against Muslims and Christians. Vivekananda’s Hinduism had no enemy figure. The political rise of Hindutva has been directly proportionate to the success of its proponents’ attempts to equate itself with Hinduism. The Gandhi-Nehru way For Gandhi, Hinduism was the essence of his existence, but even the avowedly secular Jawaharlal Nehru was not dismissive of faith and tradition. The Discovery of India draws from sacred texts and beliefs; “though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom… yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely,” he wrote in his will, asking for some of his ashes to be immersed in the Ganga. The vertical rise and the horizontal spread of Hindutva challenge its opponents to devise new political idioms. A puritan view is that Hindutva can be challenged only with an unyielding secular paradigm, devoid of Hindu symbols. Those leaders and parties that are directly involved in electoral politics are more conflicted on these questions than those who have the convenience of a quarantined approach. In the early 2000s, when critics began to use the neologism saffronisation to describe the A.B. Vajpayee government’s policies that advanced Hindutva, within the Congress there was a debate on the wisdom of it. A.K. Antony and Digvijay Singh vehemently opposed the expression, arguing that it amounted to legitimising the Hindutva agenda given the cultural association of the colour saffron with sacrifice and renunciation. The Congress discontinued use of the word. Other parties too have used Hindu symbolism and terminology. Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad, whose mastery of electoral politics broke the Hindutva momentum in Bihar, connects his community to Lord Krishna. “Haathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai (this is not merely an elephant, but is Lord Ganesh; and Brahma Vishnu Mahesh)” was the Bahujan Samaj Party’s 2005 slogan referencing its election symbol, the elephant. Groups associated with the Communists Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala recently organised events around Ramayana month. “The Sangh has created a particulate image of Ram, that a majority of the faithful do not relate to,” said V. Sivadasan, CPI(M) State committee member, who was closely associated with the programme. “Given this context, it is the duty of the secularists to come in support of the believers who understand Ram different from the way the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) tries to make him. All secular people have this responsibility to help protect the plurality of faith that exists among religious people.” Whether or not these attempts add up to a robust and credible challenge to Hindutva is an open question. However, the notion of ‘soft Hindutva’ is detrimental to anti-Hindutva polemics and mobilisation. For one, it ignores the tactical components of electoral politics, which the moralist might dismiss as opportunism, for good reasons. What is more critical is that the notion of expressive faith as ‘soft Hindutva’ is an inadvertent endorsement of the Hindutva claim that it is equivalent to Hinduism. The proponents of Hindutva also acknowledge the existence of ‘hard’ and ‘fringe’ elements within its fold. Categories of soft and hard, being relative terms, trick moderates and offer an alibi to opportunists to side with the softer versions — Vajpayee against L.K. Advani, Mr. Advani against Narendra Modi, and who knows, perhaps Mr. Modi against Yogi Adityanath in the future? Any equivalence between Hinduism and Hindutva, conversely, is taken to mean that any criticism of Hindutva is an attack on Hinduism. That one could be accused of being anti-Hinduism for questioning the logic of building a temple on the site of a destroyed mosque at Ayodhya draws from the logical premise of likening Hinduism to Hindutva. To take another example, the Hindu American Foundation claimed recently that even the questioning of ‘Brahminical patriarchy’ is a an act of Hindu-phobia. To Hindutva’s advantage? And most consequentially, any polemical negation of the wall between Hinduism and Hindutva makes the transition from the first to the second easier. It could even encourage believers to consider Hindutva their natural political abode, if they sense hostility in the anti-Hindutva camp. If non-Hindutva platforms expect temple-goers to explain their conduct, that is not an enticing recruitment pitch. The fact is that there are numerous people who visit temples and even believe in vastu, astrology, tantra, etc. while still being secular in a political and public context. The only politics that benefits from associating Hinduism to Hindutva is Hindutva. The practice of Hinduism, even when it is exhibitionist and for political ends, is not Hindutva — soft or hard. Hindutva stands out for its conceptual clarity, leaving little scope for a spectrum within it. A manifesto for any durable anti-Hindutva politics is still a long way away, but its singular starting point is an assertion of the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. Anything else is doomed. [email protected] -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
