The Cultural Landscape of Hindutva & Other Essays: Historical Legitimacy of an Idea by Saumya Dey is available for purchase on Amazon.
In the first part, we reviewed the section on ‘Politics and Culture’ from the book. Now, let us look into the section on History.
HISTORICAL NOTES- THE MYTH OF ISLAMIC SYNCRETISM
In the History section, the author deals with the Islamic dynamics leading to the development of Pakistan, simultaneously deconstructing the popular secular narrative of ‘syncretism’ during the Mughal rule. This runs in our standard history books when talking about the Mughal Empire and specially so in Bengal region.
The pre-colonial Muslim ruled imperial system was not ‘syncretic’, by any stretch of imagination, says the author. A syncretism, if meaning that it allowed an unrestricted and consistently legitimate space to the non-Muslims to project their faith and culture, is simply a feel-good story. The Mughal imperial system was of an ‘Islamicate’ character. It had enforced a broad political and cultural hegemony of Islam which granted Hindus limited room for cultural self-assertion. There were concessions made to Hindus by some greatly quoted and celebrated donations to temples; these are but small islands of relief in the sea of gruesome destruction.
In medieval Bengal, despite a shared culture and a common language, a population of converted Muslims expressing its literature in Bengali sought social and religious individuality – its attitude hardly ‘syncretic’. Textual evidence in many works suggested a contempt for the Bengali language as a Hindu tongue. They also had contempt for the Hindu deities. The author details the stress and anxiety of Muslims in Bengal in this regard in his previous book, ‘Becoming Muslims and Hindus.’
The belief in the special moral endowments of the Muslims, when combined with the average Indian Muslims’ search for social and religious individuality, carried the potential of developing into a quest for political sovereignty.
PAKISTAN CREATION
By the end of the colonial rule and in the run up to independence, there was more than an explicit statement of not wishing to co-exist with the ‘ethically inferior’ non-Muslims in a multi-denominational state. The Indian Muslim aristocracy feared that it will not be even remotely ‘special’ in a post-colonial, democratic India; while the Muslims of Eastern Bengal sought to preserve the Islamic ‘individuality’ they had acquired after centuries of effort. The two concerns naturally coalesced to demand an Islamic State, when on 23 March 1940, the AIML passed the ‘Pakistan resolution’ demanding the creation of ‘autonomous and sovereign’ Muslim states in the ‘North-Western and Eastern zones of India.’
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was a pronounced and visible hostile attitude of the Muslims. The Congress, in its eagerness to appease, sought to pre-emptively concede communal representation for Muslims long before the Muslim League existed. Contrary to what people may believe, communal representation was not a brainchild of the British or the Muslim League, but in fact the Congress.
Muslim supremacism and a right to parity with Hindus – were very much inherent in the Pakistan idea. One Muslim author argued, like much literature, propaganda, and pamphlets on similar lines, that it was binding upon Muslims to create an Islamic state since ‘it was a central tenet of Islam.’ The ideological basis of Pakistan, Jinnah’s ‘two-nation theory’, on the other hand, was an attempt at revising the Muslims’ minority status in India.
Muslim elite adopted an exclusivist politics that drew its cultural logic from a hegemonic supremacy they had once enjoyed and the anxiety that its visible erosion caused them, says Dey. It eventually resulted in them creating, with the enthusiastic assistance of a large portion of the Indian Muslim masses, a sovereign political enclosure – the Islamic state of Pakistan.
SELECTIVE READINGS OF AMBEDKAR
There is a curious attempt to merge Islamic causes with ‘Ambedkarism’ these days, a concept of ‘equality of consideration, equality of respect and equality of dignity.’ A rather strong phenomenon of merging the Muslim cause with Dalits and tribals is presently underway in what can be only a Breaking India strategy by inimical forces.
Ambedkar had some rather harsh things to say about Indian Muslims during his time which scholars have glossed over completely. In his work, ‘Partition of India,’ Ambedkar thought that an independent India with a large Muslim population would be an impractical idea. The extra-territorial loyalties of the Indian Muslims, seeing themselves as members of a universal Islamic brotherhood, were a concern for Ambedkar. The Indian army as it existed then, he pointed out, was predominantly Muslim in its composition. Ambedkar thought that a Muslim dominated army would not only be of doubtful loyalty but will be hard to control and discipline for a united India. He also saw a failure of Muslims in their efforts to reform too.
As Ambedkar saw, the Congress’s policy of making concessions to the Muslims had had only ‘increased Muslim aggressiveness.’ This because Muslims interpreted concessions ‘as a sign of defeatism on the part of the Hindus and the absence of the will to resist.’ He nurtured the concern of Muslims accepting a Hindu dominated rule since ‘to the Muslims, a Hindu is a Kaffir’ and, consequently, ‘low-born and without status.’ Ambedkar quotes the infamous remark by Maulana Mohammad Ali about Mahatma Gandhi to underline the degree of contempt that a Muslim might nurture for a non-Muslim– ‘However pure Mr. Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Musalman, even though he be without character.’ No wonder, Dr Ambedkar’s thoughts get a severe editing today.
Islamists reaching out today to ‘Ambedkarism’ allows them to defeat the ‘Brahmanical fascist’ Indian state while posing as social progressives. Several radical ‘Ambedkarites’ are on unfortunately the same page with the Islamists (in the JNU at least), says the author.
EVANGELISTIC BASE OF BRITISH ‘ORIENTALISM, AND THE ARYAN-DRAVIDIAN DICHOTOMY
‘Orientalist’ knowledge was mandatory to fully understand the histories, religions, and customs of the Asian peoples. The imperialists sought this knowledge to control or manipulate them competently. In fact, so eagerly did the colonizers seek ‘Orientalist’ knowledge that Lord Curzon, that imperialist per excellence, termed it a ‘part of the necessary furniture of Empire.’
However, in people like William Jones a certain theological bias never left these ‘Orientalist’ labours. Throughout, he remained prejudiced in favor of his parent creed, Christianity. There was no question in Jones’s mind that Christianity was the only true religion. He was in fact searching for traces of Biblical stories in Indian scriptures.
Lt.-Colonel Boden thought that ‘a more critical knowledge of the Sanskrit language’ will serve as a means of converting ‘the Natives of India to the Christian religion.’ He bequeathed all his property, worth £ 25,000, to the University of Oxford to establish a Boden Professorship of Sanskrit. The first ‘Orientalist’ elected to it was H.H. Wilson, a confirmed evangelist.
Later, Monier Williams succeeded him, whose strong wish was the conversion of India to Christianity. He wrote to his wife in 1864, and gave the following reason for his obsession with the Rig Veda – ‘It is the root of their (Indians’) religion, and to show what that root is, is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years.’
Even the much loved and glorified Max Mueller spoke of understanding Hinduism to help the missionaries contest and destroy it. Muller’s biographer, Nirad C. Chaudhary says that towards the end of his life he tried to persuade the adherents of the Brahmo Samaj to declare themselves Christian.
Similar breaking forces initiated in the efforts of Caldwell, who with philological speculations claimed that Sanskrit and Brahmins were foreign to South India. He contended that ‘Brahmans had brought Sanskrit with them when they moved from the north to the south, along with a strain of Hinduism that emphasized idol worship.’ The original Tamil religion had neither – Sanskrit or idols. By the end of the nineteenth-century, this malicious ‘race theory’ had become a settled fact – that Indian civilization had emerged in the wake of a military clash between invading Sanskrit speaking Aryan and the losing dark-skinned aborigines, who in turn became the shudras and the slaves.
THE CULTURAL UNEASE OF NEHRU- A TURNING POINT WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN
Beginning with the Islamic invasions and the various dynasties and stretching across the Mughal empire, East India Company, Colonials, Orientalists, Evangelists, and Indologists; it has been a persistent story of attack on our civilizational, traditional, social, and cultural values. This, apart from a simple economic plunder. The end of colonial rule should have been a great point of redefining ourselves and starting afresh. Most colonial empires after their disbanding did the same with amazing alacrity. The pride of the growing generations for their respective countries largely remained intact. Unfortunately, this did not happen in India. Nehruvian thinking, the left-leaning academia, and the media derived from the latter grew in cohesion to continue the same distortions and civilizational shaming.
Nehru, suffering from a major cultural disconnect with India, as evidenced from his books and letters, perhaps started all this. The Indian experience and conceptualization the Sacred and the Divine made little sense to Nehru. Nehru linked religion to exploitation and the preservation of vested interests, reflecting strongly a Marxist influence. At another place he writes that religion is ‘closely associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs which are about uncritical credulousness, a reliance on the supernatural,’ a Judeo-Christian description of religion rather than Dharma. Despite a superficial familiarity with the Dharmic textual corpus, Nehru confidently made a negative assessment of the philosophy of the Upanishads, calling it ‘individualistic’ and damaging the Indian society. The author shows how Nehru could still indulge in appeasement politics. He was quite keen for the President Rajendra Prasad not to attend the Somnath temple reconstruction functions; but was more than eager to facilitate the Haj tours.
It was surprising that Nehru could make over-generalizations, like ‘Indian literature is very backward’, in the contemporary times of Tagore and Subramaniam Bharati. Nirad Chaudhari again assesses Nehru not so kindly in his book, ‘Thy Hand, Great Anarch’. Chaudhuri had had the opportunity of observing Nehru while serving as private secretary to Sarat Bose, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose. Chaudhary writes that Nehru had no direct access to the Indian mind and had a strong antipathy to traditional Hindu ideas and habits. Nehru was both ignorant of Hindu traditions and hostile to them as well according to Chaudhary again.
Unfortunately, the history departments of our major universities with a left-of-center political bias made a symbiotic relationship with a Nehruvian dominant political ruling to thoroughly disconnect with Dharma. This simply continued the civilization breaking attitudes of the pre-Independence days. And an opportunity went away. The agenda has been to shield the pre-colonial Muslim dynasties from all infamy and promote the empirically untenable narrative of an assimilative and ‘syncretic’ Indian Islam. Our politicians wanted the votes.
Liberals of the Nehruvian cast still dominate Indian media and academia. Hence, they scoff at Dharma but celebrate the ‘Islamicate’, relishing the kababs of Old Delhi to a delight in a dastangoi performance.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The dichotomy of the ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ is a very western idea having no bearing on Indic thought and Dharma. The Left borrowed freely its language from the west and created severe distortions in reading our past. The Right of the western world takes a distinctly aggressive posturing while countering the Left, a language which our traditionalists could perhaps never be comfortable with. Reading a few works of contemporaries like Roger Scruton, Jonah Goldberg (he loves Winston Churchill- a massive put-off), or Ben Shapiro makes it clear that their language is imperfect to take on the left-liberal discourses in India.
Many of the conventional issues in the west raised by the Left, only to be disagreed by the Right confuses us. As Hari Vadlamani says in his article, ‘Indic Liberal’, “using the western framework to define ourselves, we are a unique form of ‘Religious Left’ aspiring to become a ‘Liberal Right’. While Left is normally non-religious, (as a push back to the conservatism of the Abrahamic faiths), it need not be so with us. On the economic front, the necessity to provide equal opportunity to the poor warrants an understanding of the need for welfare measures, hence ‘Religious Left’ captures a socially & economically Liberal view.”
Hari continues, “On the other hand, most of us by nature believe in free markets and limited government. Hence the term ’Liberal Right’ captures our aspiration both socially and economically. Socially, an Indic Liberal respects his or her past without needlessly glorifying it, promotes an outlook that respects tradition without being bound by it, keeps his or her religious practises in the personal domain or within the community, cultivates spiritual enquiry and seeks to build an inclusive and non-discriminatory society.” Our standard Left-secular-liberal-discourses went without resistance far too long. We have now an army of intellectuals talking back to them in a language soaked in Indic values and Dharma. Dr Saumya Dey, who writes with thorough research and extensive references, is one such important person to fight these Breaking India forces. The political tide is no longer favourable; but these forces have a deep infiltration in the academia and the media. They are going to scream and become more aggressive; but with patience, we can weed them out to create a more conducive and an all-inclusive Indic thought. An Indic consciousness based on Sanatana Dharma values where no religion and no caste will claim a persecution; and where a genuine pride in our past civilization and core values will pervade.
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