Pranam
ADVERSE REMARKS OF THE BRITISH
W Erskine: Cave temples of Ellora: “the execution and finishing of the
figures in general, …are often very defective, in no instance being
possessed of striking excellence. The figures have something of rudeness
and want of finish, the proportions are sometimes lost, the attitudes
forced , and everything indicates the infancy of the ART” (accounts of the
cave temple of Elephanta 1819 p198).
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George Birdwood: Critic of the Indian Art: “… Gupta period image of the
Buddha is a “boiled svet pudding”; in seventy eight years of the study of
Art, he had not come across anything in India that gave, expression to “the
good, the beautiful, and the true” (The Indian empire and the beginning of
modern society p87); “ Ajanta murals are “ no Indian work does entitled to
respectable place among the second or third class even”.
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James Ferguson: Indian architecture was, (History of Indian and eastern
architecture) “a mistake nothing can redeem”. They lacked “those lofty aims
and noble results which constitute the merit and the greatness of the true
architectural art”. (The Indian empire and the beginning of modern society)
{Much maligned monsters: History of reactions to Indian Art by Partha
Mitter}. “The Madurai temple he found particularly barbarous: “the most
vulgar building in all of India”. Sanchi showed, “neither delicacy nor
precision”.
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Edwin Lutyens at Delhi 1869 -1944 as per Partha Mitter book: “Personally I
(Edwin Lutyens) do not believe there is any real Indian architecture or any
great tradition; they are just spurts by various mushroom dynasties with as
much intellect in them as any other art NOUVEU … And then it is ultimately
the building style of CHILDREN”. The Hindus knew little and the Moghuls
little more of any ethic of construction and art in relation to them The
Moguls took Italian Forms and mutilated them “ (p271 ibid).
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DECOLONISATION OF THE HINDU MINDS ( a book) HINDU Hindutva so on
1 In a sense, Hindus, and likewise India, make it all the worse for
themselves by simply being so tolerant. When it comes to tolerating
difference, there is hardly a place like India, as a well-known Indian
Muslim testifies: “I come from an Indian Muslim family, but I experience
India as a very pleasant country, whereas in Pakistan I feel ill at ease.
You would think it should be the reverse. But in spite of its many defects,
India is a rich and open society, while Pakistan is culturally an
impoverished and closed society.”
2 In the long run, this openness is certainly the right policy, but in
the short run, the results of tolerance can be perverse. India is
hospitable even to its critics, and the latter eagerly accept the
invitation. All those NGO activists working in Indian tribal areas can
openly support separatism and still stay in India or return there after
vacation. Foreigners who like to do some “drain inspection” can do it at
leisure in India, focusing on Hindu society: it is fun to be in India, and
there is no need to fear reprisals. It takes courage, and the willingness
to forgo future visas, to write as negatively about China or Pakistan as is
commonly done about India. The result is a complete lack of a sense of
proportion, for example, grave concern about alleged discrimination against
the minorities in India even when the situation of the minorities in
Pakistan is much worse by any standard, violent indignation at the alleged
Hindu plans for a “Hindu state” but acceptance as a matter of course of the
actually existing “Islamic state” in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
3 India, and with-it Hinduism, is paying for its broad-mindedness and
tolerance, while China and Pakistan are being rewarded for their
intolerance. Hindus were trying to incorporate the best things from the
West, but while some were trying to make a clean break with their own
heritage, others tried to preserve and revive their heritage in an adapted
form, partly because they felt encouraged by the appreciation which
cultured Westerners extended to things Hindu.
4 “The Jat Pat Torak Mandal stood for nothing short of the abolition
of caste”. The limits of the Mandal’s view of social reform became visible
in 1936, when it invited Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the most prominent
leader of the Untouchables, to speak at its annual conference. However, its
leadership developed second thoughts when it received the text of
Ambedkar’s proposed speech: he intended to declare that caste could only
disappear if the scriptures on which the institution was based were
discarded and planned to announce that this was to be his last speech as a
Hindu, because Hinduism was incurable unless it ceased to be Hinduism. This
position was contrary to the Mandal’s very raison d’être, which was
precisely to cure Hinduism.
5 “The Mohammedans believe that the world has been in existence for
less than seven or eight thousand years. One should like to know if God was
sitting idle before Creation and will do the same after the day of
judgement. These are all childish things, because God is ever active”
(Dayananda saraswati). Majumdar concludes that jihâd generally meant
offensive warfare, and that Islamic theology never bothered to hide behind
a defensive justification: “Far from being an act of non-aggression, it
could not even count as compensatory retaliation by any stretch of the
imagination. … The theory of jihâd as defensive war must, in the
circumstances, be rejected as a figment of the modern apologist’s
imagination.”
6 Vivekananda traces their origins: “What is called the Mohammedan
invasion, conquest or colonization of India means only this, that under the
leadership of Mohammedan Turks who were renegades from Buddhism, those
sections of the Hindu race who continued in the faith of their ancestors
were repeatedly conquered by the other section of that very race who also
were renegades from Buddhism or the Vedic religion and served under the
Turks, having been forcibly converted to Mohammedanism by their superior
strength.” 297 In other words: Muslim are not really Muslims, the Muslim
identity was imposed on them, it is a mere surface layer, and it can be
scratched off.
7 K.S. Lal quotes an inscription, dated AD 1345, in which the Reddi
dynasty of Andhra describes how after the elimination of the Kshatriya
defenders, the duty of defending cows and Brahmins fell on the Shudras,
“born of the feet of Vishnu”; the first independent Reddi king, Vema,
“restored all the agraharas of Brahmanas, which had been taken away by the
wicked Mleccha kings”. Another inscription for the same dynasty proudly
proclaims Vema’s birth from “the victorious fourth varna”, which “sprang
from the feet of Vishnu”, and which ruled “the remainder of the territory
once ruled by the dwijas [before the Muslim conquest]”, and describes how
his first son Anna-Vota gave agraharas to the Brahmins and how his second
son Anna-Vema freed the country of the “crowd of enemies” and used his
wealth to sponsor the “men of learning”. It seems that the Shudras took it
as a proud duty to defend the country against the Muslims and uphold the
Brahminical culture. Surprisingly, inscriptions of Shudra dynasties declare
that belonging to the fourth varna was a matter of pride. An inscription of
Singaya-Nayaka (AD 1368) says: “The three castes, viz. Brahmanas and the
next [Kshatriyas and Vaishyas], were produced from the face, the arms and
the thighs of the Lord; and for their support was born the fourth caste
from His feet. That the latter caste is purer than the former [three] is
self-evident; for this caste was born along with the river Ganga [which
also springs from His feet], the purifier of the three worlds. The members
of this caste are eagerly attentive to their duties, not wicked, pure-
minded, and are devoid of passion and other such blemishes; they ably bear
all the burden of the earth by helping those born in the kingly caste.”
Another inscription relates how his relative Kapaya-Nayaka “rescued the
Andhra country from the ravages of the Mohammedans”. In taking the lead of
the struggle against the Muslim invaders, the Reddi caste gained in
prestige and became the dominant caste in the region. This way, the fight
against the Muslim armies (if not ending in utter defeat) could lead to a
rise in status for a community. Of this, another good example is the large
Jat community, originally a low caste which gained prestige by fighting the
Moghuls and establishing its rule in areas that passed out of the Moghul
Empire’s effective control in the eighteenth century. Another striking
example is Shivaji’s Marathas. All this is a rather different story from
the conventional wisdom. K.S. Lai comments: “If it were true that the
backward classes were so terribly oppressed by the Brahmanas, we would
expect them to take some kind of revenge by making common cause with the
Muslim persecutors of the Brahmanas. But exactly the opposite is the case.
Jats and Meds helped the Brahmin and Kshatriya rulers of Sindh against Arab
invaders. Jats and Khokhars joined the Hindu Shahiya Rajas of Punjab
against Mahmud of Ghazni. Throughout the mediaeval period, the lower castes
fought shoulder to shoulder with the upper castes and against the foreign
invaders and tyrannical rulers.”
11 The downward change of status from captive Kshatriya warriors
doing dirty work to hereditary untouchables, though caused by Muslim
intervention, actually took place within the Hindu cultural framework.
Moreover, the starkest forms of untouchability are found in South India
(unapproachability), where Muslim rule penetrated only briefly and
superficially. Indeed, we are entitled to wonder if the spread of Dravidian
cultural elements (including Bhakti) in the early Christian age does not
have more to do with the introduction of the notion of untouchability. So,
Mayank Jain’s bid to blame Islam for untouchability can only be partly
successful.
14 “The Tantras did not make much discrimination between the Brahmanas
and non-Brahmanas in the spiritual sphere. They admitted the right of all
classes to the Tantrik Gayatri and Sandhya. All were entitled to read the
Tantras and recite the Tantrik mantras. But it must be admitted that the
Tantras recognized castes for all secular purposes.” 532 The egalitarian
claims currently made for religions may well be signs of a desirable
commitment to promote social equality in the present, but as
history-writing they are not to be taken seriously. (K.S. Lal: The Legacy
of Muslim Rule in India.)
15 Aurobindo concludes his speech reaffirming its central message:
“This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and
with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation
declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the
Sanatan Dharma it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism.
This is the message that I have to speak to you.”
16 Hinduism is the religion for the modern age because it is
essentially a science, an applied science: “This is the one religion that
can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries
of science and the speculations of philosophy. … It is the one religion
which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to
realize it with every part of our being.” In a way, this vision of a
scientific religion is thoroughly unsecular: “It is the one religion which
does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion.” 12 European
post-Christians, convinced of the benefits of the scientific worldview, had
to separate religion from public life because the religion they knew
(Christianity and to a lesser degree Judaism) was a revealed religion and
intrinsically unscientific. Science being universal, the very idea of
exclusive prophetic revelations supposedly sent down by God was necessarily
in contradiction with it. Instead of religion, the Enlightenment
philosophers wanted scientific insights to penetrate every aspect of life
and society in the manner of religion’s omnipresence until then. It is
Aurobindo’s point that Hinduism basically has the scientific spirit, so
that unlike the revealed religions, it is perfectly compatible with the
Enlightenment, and need not be removed from public life. “We Hindus are a
nation. … We Hindus are not just a religious community like the Mohammedans
and the Christians but a nation unto ourselves. The term ‘Hindu’ is the
name of our nationality.”
17 It so happens that the word jâti, “caste”, is the exact etymological
counterpart of Latin gens/gentis, “clan”, (from Proto-Indo-European gnti-)
and is also related to Latin natio ((<gnatio); without attaching too much
importance to this etymological coincidence, is it not a strong hint that
the castes are far better candidates for the status of “nation”? At the
same time, the Hindus are also divided in many language communities,
usually the unit of nation-building in Europe’s nationalist nineteenth
century. Should we not rather speak of Bengali nationalism (as the
Communists sometimes do), of Keralite nationalism, etc.? Linguistic
identities and caste identities are no doubt real. In fact I will grant
them more reality than Benedict Anderson is willing to concede to the
“nation”, which he labels as an “imagined community”. Speaking the same
language (even in non-standard but mutually intelligible form) is a very
real form of community,—try getting lost in a foreign country where you
have no language in common with anyone. 27 That is why monolingual
nation-states have on average been the most successful; most separatist
movements in Europe emanate from linguistic minorities. Similarly, religion
constitutes real community, because the same rituals, the same broad
assumptions about life, the same code of behaviour already constitute a lot
of common ground between people, they create a real basis of mutual trust.
Caste identity is real, linguistic identity is real, and religious identity
is also real; but the point is that one collective identity does not
exclude another.
22 Hinduism not a religion In Hindutva thought, attempts are made to
put Hinduism in a different category from the “religions” of Christianity
and Islam. Scholars might agree, for instance, that unlike Christianity and
Islam, Hinduism is not a belief system, at least not to the same
definitional extent. It is also what Sri Aurobindo said: “Other religions
are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanathana
Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as
lived.”
25 No Hindu Constitution On the Hindu nationalist assumption that there
is a Hindu nation, it is undeniable that there is no state which is the
political embodiment of this Hindu nation. One can verify this from the
text of the Constitution: there is nothing recognizably Hindu about its
conception and terminology. India’s Constitution was but an adaptation of
the British Government of India Act 1935, finalized in 1947-50 by a ruling
class of anglicized Indians, mostly British-trained lawyers. Ministers of
the Hindu princely states who might have made a specifically Hindu
contribution (and who, unlike the Congress leaders, were experienced in the
art of government), were most unwelcome in Nehru’s first Cabinet. As Abhas
Chatterjee observes, “even the Preamble of the Indian Constitution does not
contain any Hindu idea. It enumerates no principles based on Hindu ethos
and ideals. The Preamble talks of justice, equality, fraternity and liberty
as its goals. They may be good ideas in themselves, but what is the
inspiration behind them? All of them are Western notions borrowed directly
from the French Revolution. The national ideas of India, that is, of the
Hindu nation, are —as Swami Vivekananda repeatedly reminded us—dharma and
spirituality, renunciation and service, tolerance and harmony. … But the
present Indian Constitution has not incorporated a single idea out of
these.” 41 Of course, Western Constitutions also don’t mention the Ten
Commandments. Moreover, it is a common boast in Sangh Parivar pamphlets
that India has always been a pioneer of democracy and freedom, so these
values need not be considered foreign impositions. Chatterjee further
alleges that the Constitution refuses to acknowledge the central place of
Hinduism in Indian culture: “In Article 51 A, Hindu culture has not been
accepted as India’s national culture. Instead, it has been clearly stated
that India’s culture is a hotch-potch ‘composite’ culture. This means that
we have to regard Islamic culture also as our own culture and to view with
reverence even such enemies of the nation as Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan.” 42
Most Hindu revivalists reject the very notion of “composite culture”, a
central doctrine of Nehruvian secularism. 43 Aurobindo rejected the concept
of composite culture: “a bastard culture is no sound, truth-loving culture.
An entire return upon ourselves is our only way of salvation.” 44 To this
school, Indian culture is Hindu culture, other cultures present in India
are either considered as honoured guests (Mazdeism, Judaism, Syrian
Christianity) or as unwelcome intruders (Islam, missionary Christianity).
But then, Hindu culture itself is a composite. 45 The difference is that
the strands which have come to make up Hinduism have really blended, or
have at least managed to coexist in peace, unlike Christianity and Islam.
KR IRS 181221
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