Soft Hinduness versus Hard Hindutva

This is a well intentioned book, and timely at that, when the Hindutva forces, emboldened by what appeared until recently to be a veritable ashwamedha started by Modi-Shah combine in the country, have gone berserk to accomplish their goal of a Hindu Rashtra. It is not merely a change of label; the Hindu Rashtra shall be a Brahmanical fascist regime which has been the ideal of the founding fathers of the Hindutva organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Modi, the seasoned pracharak of the RSS has all in him to become a full blooded duce or fuehrer, which he partly demonstrated as the Chief Minister of Gujarat but much more so clearly during the last four years as the Prime Minister. Ashish Nandy, long before Modi became any of these things and had just donned the robes of a politician, had recorded his impression after interviewing him. He said, “It left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist.” Hinduism, for the Hindutva forces a way of life, is the substratum for their Hindu nationalist politics. It has been their vehicle to reach where they are today and to take them beyond to their long cherished goal of the Hindu Rashtra. The opposition to them has mostly taken the form of proving that what they project as Hinduism is not really so. This book belongs to this genre of opposition.

Shashi Tharoor is one of India’s most articulate and accomplished English writers. Therefore, no one would have any doubt about his book being not interesting. Indeed, I found it extremely lucid and readable, kaleidoscopic in its expanse, seamlessly navigating from the dark alleys of India’s mythical past of uncertain vintage to the episodes as contemporary as the ones still live on television screens and back, interwoven with interesting personalised anecdotes and reflections. The Hinduism that he presents is a Hinduism of a liberal, western educated, cosmopolitan, upper class/caste individual and will not necessarily cohere with that of others, for instance, that of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who saw it so inhuman and unreformable that he had to publicly declare that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die as one and eventually to embrace Buddhism. Admittedly, the book is the author’s exercise in understanding Hinduism for himself, a very subjective undertaking, which others may assess it only on the quality of its narrative and not the content.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section is titled, “My Hinduism” and contains four chapters: My Hinduism, The Hindu Way, Questioning Hindu customs and Great souls of Hinduism. The second section “Political Hinduism” comprises two chapters: Hinduism and the politics of Hinduism, and Beyond holy cows: The uses and abuses of Hindu culture and history. The last section 3 is titled “Taking back Hinduism” and has one chapter of the same name. Through all these chapters Tharoor tries to tell you how Hinduism is liberal, plural, resilient, tolerant and inclusive, in short, antithetical to its intolerant and violent version being flaunted by the Hindutva forces. This, he says, is his second reason for writing his book. In his own words: “The second reason I wrote this book was to show that the intolerant and often violent forms of Hindutva that began to impose themselves on the public consciousness of Indians in the 1980s were against the spirit of Hinduism, that most plural, inclusive, eclectic and expansive of faiths.” This innocuous statement about Hinduism using a comparative clause to stress its superiority over other religions inadvertently describes the essence of Hinduism, which is the notion of hierarchy, inferiority and superiority, which informs what is called the Hindu Social Order.

Does Tharoor achieve this second objective? Much of the virtuousness of Hinduism he points out is happily shared by the Hindutva forces. Tharoor extols liberal, tolerant, accommodative, inclusive nature of Hinduism, which scarcely would be disputed by anyone in the Sangh Pariwar. Some of them may fault some of them, like Savarkar did Hindus’ non-violence (sic), blaming Buddhism for casting effeminate influence over Hindus, and want to militarise them but none would deny these attributes. While questioning Hindu customs like caste — that castes did exist in Hinduism but they were rigidified by the British colonialists or that there were castes but not the caste system — he rather exactly echoes the RSS’s apologetic statement about castes. The RSS externalises the blame on the Islamic rule for causing rigidification of castes, which was further solidified during the colonial rule. While it is true that the British rulers, jolted by the 1857 mutiny, deliberately strategised to measure everything of Indians to establish their firm control (with the dictum that you cannot control what you cannot measure) and strengthened caste consciousness among the populace, it is too much to say that they created caste system as Tharoor, like the Sanghis, says. Also, to dissociate castes from Hinduism is also echoing the RSS argument, with which Ambedkar for instance, would violently disagree.

In his exploratory chapter Tharoor sees Hinduism embracing “an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from patheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system.” But he thinks that “none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas.” Such a fluid definition begs a question as to who is a Hindu? Atheist Savarkar also may have felt the same way and come to define it in terms of pitru bhu and punya bhu (fatherland and holy land). While Tharoor would reject this Savarkar’s political Hinduism, he unconsciously accepts similar contours for his own Hinduism insofar as he identifies himself as cultural and intellectual Hindu. I think Gandhi comes out more candid when he writes in his Young India in October 1921: “I call myself a sanatani Hindu, because (1) I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avatars and rebirth; (2) I believe in the Varnashram dharma in a sense in my opinion strictly Vedic, but not in its present popular and crude sense; (3) I believe in the protection of the cow in its much larger sense than the popular; and (4) I do not disbelieve in idol-worship. Other things notwithstanding, varnashram dharma that informs casteism is indeed a defining feature of Hinduism. All that is said about Hinduism in India surviving evangelical onslaughts of alien faiths is rather due to this life-world of caste, and not due to any virtue of Hinduism.”

Tharoor reads like most upper caste apologetics when he reflects upon his own experience with caste. He wrote that he did not know his own caste until asked about it by someone when he was 11 years old. But he honestly realises, “..My obliviousness to caste is itself a confession of privilege; no Dalit, my Dalit friends tell me, can afford to be oblivious of caste.” [p. 76] He writes further, “Caste blindness,.., is itself an affectation available only to the privileged; the ‘lower’ castes cannot afford to be indifferent to caste.” [p. 78] As he admits candidly that the discrimination against the Dalits still continues, or the untouchability against them is still practiced across the country, it will also be admitted by the Sanghis, who would just blame it to the Congress for its vote bank politics. These are stark facts which have been borne out by survey after surveys, one of which is the latest NCAER survey, referred to by him in the book. They could be denied only by irrational fools. However, he tries to dissociate it from the religion. He writes, “Hindu society may have maintained a distasteful practice, but no one can credibly argue that it is intrinsic to the religion.” [p.79] This is what the RSS also says about the untouchability.

Not to belittle its claim to be a counter to the sectarian Hinduism of the Sanghis, the book does have interesting discussion about how the Hindutva version of Hinduism is not the real Hinduism or the Hinduism practiced by multitude of masses. Many secularists also adopt this method of projecting the so called ‘real’ Hinduism against the RSS’s ‘fake’ Hinduism. They barely realise that such discussion hardly touch the mass frenzy. If at all, it lands up fueling this frenzy with its positive construction of Hinduism. When Tharoor calls his Hinduism as “a veritable smorgasbord of options to the worshipper of divinities to adore and to pray to, of rituals to observe (or not)” [p. 6], the Hindutva brigade also would swear by their own set of options. After all, every construction of Hinduism could be challenged with objectivity. For instance, the projection of tolerant and non-violent Hinduism falls flat in the face of its gods uniquely wielding weapons in the goriest of depictions. The fascist demeanours of the Hindutva forces may rather appear closer to Hinduism than any attempts to paint it otherwise.

These approaches to present sanitised Hinduism actually reduces down to be the ‘soft’ Hindutva which rather being a counter to the hard Hindutva of the RSS, strengthens it. For the fear of antagonising Hindu voters, most political parties, led by Tharoor’s own party, play this game. The real counter to the menace of Hindutva cannot be in the religion but in the negation of it; in the real secularism, the firewall between the religion and politics.

The author is writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Maharashtra.