The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity

By MK Raghvendra

The Hindu Nation begins with an introduction examining nationhood in India and then traces the political conflict to Nehruvian cultural policy after 1947. In today's world, no religion can claim to be superior to any other. But in pursuing 'modernity' and inculcating the 'scientific' and 'secular' outlook, Nehruvian rationalism created an elite liberal class that was sceptical about the majority religion, but this was not extended to other religions because of a misunderstanding of secularism. In promoting Westernised education, the preservation of local knowledge was neglected and Hinduism lost respect among the educated elite born into it. The elite class became the intermediary with the West, which now dominates the academic study of India. Further, prompted by the sceptical attitude of many liberal Indians, Western academics and intellectuals accord Hinduism less respect compared to other religions and treat it as 'superstition'. Traditional Indians who revere Hinduism but are products of the same lopsided system respond by attributing false value to India's prehistory and its past.

Hinduism is not a religion but a collection of practices associated with the space now called India. Author M.K. Raghavendra examines what being a Hindu means and asks whether its practices are reconcilable with global modernity and compatible with justice and egalitarianism. While examining the obstacles a modern Hindu nation faces, including the fixed ways of a large public, this extensively researched book also suggests measures to make India successful as a global power and Hinduism widely respected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9789390358380

Book preview

THE HINDU NATION

THE HINDU NATION

A Reconciliation with Modernity

M.K. Raghavendra

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7,

Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in India 2021

This edition published in 2021

Copyright © M.K. Raghavendra 2021

M.K. Raghavendra has asserted his right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as the Author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publishers

The book is solely the responsibility of the author and the publisher has had no role in creation of the content and does not have responsibility for anything defamatory or libellous or objectionable.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes

ISBN: PB: 978-93-90358-14-4; eBook: 978-93-90358-38-0

Created by Manipal Digital Systems

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

For

Nirmal Kumar Sengupta,

colleague, friend and philosopher

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

—Theodor Adorno

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Legitimacy of Nationalism

1Hindu Nationalism, Secularism and Intellectual Life

2Who Is a Hindu? Speculating about Hinduism

3The Hindu Subject in the Globalised World

4Imagining the Modern Hindu Nation

5Impediments to the Modern Hindu Nation

6The Modern Hindu Nation in the World

Afterword

Notes and References

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of the ideas in this book were expressed first in my political columns in Firstpost and Deccan Herald and they should be acknowledged. Apart from that, I owe other ideas to discussions with Jaidev Raja, Romit Raj and P.S. Prasad, besides N.K. Sengupta to whom I have dedicated this book. I should also acknowledge Rajendra Acharya who read it and made suggestions. I also owe the book in its final version to my wife, Usha K.R., who edits much of my writing and made helpful suggestions.

Last but not least, I also thank Devapriya Sanyal for putting me in touch with the publisher Bloomsbury.

Introduction

The Legitimacy of Nationalism

Meaning and Origins of Nationalism

The political space in India has heated up, and even split down the middle. This book was prompted by the deadlock in India—with liberals unwilling to have any truck with the Hindu nationalists whom they dub ‘fascists’ and Hindu nationalists responding in kind by calling them ‘anti-national’, each group implacable in its attitudes. The dominant approach of the Anglophone writer is to uphold secular values against Hindu nationalism, but the ‘Hindu nation’ is an idea that would also have enthused a large number of Indians today, although what that entails may be unclear. England is a Christian nation; a Christian state is one that recognizes a form of Christianity as its official religion and often has a state church, which is a Christian denomination that supports the government and is supported by the government. In India, Hinduism has no single denomination and the definition will hence need thought. The idea of ‘Hindu nation’ alarms many others, but in a multiparty democracy, all legitimate viewpoints must engage with one another. Evidently, Hindu nationalism in the shape of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is here for the long haul, as are secular democratic principles, given the populations of the religious minorities in India whose cultural needs have to be addressed. Christian and Islamic democracies in the world have been able to conduct themselves fairly vis-à-vis their own minorities and a ‘Hindu democracy’ is also imaginable, but evidently within certain parameters. But nationalism itself is a politically suspect category to many and it needs to be first understood.

Nationalism as a political ideology became a largely dubious category—especially among the liberal intelligentsia—in the latter part of the 20th century because of fascism and World War II, but the moment has perhaps arrived for a re-examination of its importance to India, because of its resurgence in recent years. There are few nations that do not actively promote nationalist sentiments, although some of them—like the US and the UK—may prefer to use the term ‘patriotism’. Internationalist movements like that of communism have ultimately succeeded only in instituting nationalism as the creed, and wars between revolutionary states—like that between China (PRC) and Vietnam in 1979—underscored the stability of nationalism as a political ideology. If both these countries subscribed to the ‘internationalist’ doctrine of communism, did not the war between them point to the unsuspected strength of nationalism? Benedict Anderson, in writing on nationalism, points out a glossed over aspect of Marx’s pronouncement: ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all, settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.’¹ He is led to wonder at the notion of ‘national bourgeoisie’ still remaining unproblematised for a century, the ‘bourgeoisie’ continuing to be considered a ‘world-class’ in theory², while ‘its own’ would suggest that national affiliations are a primary issue.

Nationalism is a relatively new development since before nations there were empires; ‘nationhood’ developed with people not being merely subjects of rulers but citizens. In going about defining nationalism, it has been found more convenient to categorise it with kinship and religion rather than with liberalism and fascism, that is, not as ideology but as an imagined community in which the members cannot know everyone but nonetheless accommodate, in their minds, an image of their communion. Nationalism is thus not the awakening of nations to consciousness, but the process by which nations are invented where they do not already exist.³ Where nationalism differs from religion is that no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. Nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible for, say, Christians to once dream of a wholly Christian planet. The extent of the imagined nation is consequently limited because even the largest of them has finite, if mutable, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.⁴

But citizenship in a nation cannot simply be seen as a consequence of people first being part of religious communities or subjects in a dynastic realm, and Anderson identifies the key development that made nationhood possible. This is the development of the notion of simultaneous time across spaces through the flowering in Europe of two forms of imagining in the 18th century—the novel and the newspaper. Where ‘messianic time’⁵ of the historian deals with prefiguration and fulfilment—part of a perceived causal chain imagined by a witness in the present—the simultaneity of the newspaper/novel is marked by temporal coincidence and measured by clock and calendar. The novel and the newspaper (made possible only by printing) facilitated, technically, the representing of the imagined community, that is, the nation.

Every novel that one reads includes people who never interact or even see each other, but the reader is never in doubt that they still exist simultaneously within the unfolding narrative. The newspaper, similarly, reports events that are unconnected except for the fact that they are simultaneous, and this simultaneity is connoted by the customary date of the report.⁶ The nation is like a sociological organism moving steadily down history as measured by the calendar and if a person of a country never meets most of his or her fellow citizens, he/she still has a sense of all of them moving along ‘homogeneous empty time’ through their anonymous activity. Needless to add, the modern national language becomes the cultural space in which nationalism develops and this national language is a unity composed of an assemblage of vernaculars. Speakers of the numerous dialects, who might find it impossible to understand one another’s speech, become capable of comprehending one another via print and paper.⁷

Nationalism in India, as Partha Chatterjee argues, did not begin as a political movement but in the spiritual realm, even as Indians submitted to colonialism in the material one. Bengal was the first seat of British power in India and the first printed books were produced in Bengali at the instance of the East India Company and European missionaries at the end of the 18th century. By the first half of the 19th century, English had completely displaced Persian as the official language of the bureaucracy and the most powerful intellectual influence upon the new Bengali elite. By the middle of the 19th century, the bilingual Indian elite set about providing their language with the equipment required to modernise culture and it was towards this end that a network of printing presses, literary societies, newspapers and publishing houses were created, all of them outside the purview of the State and the missionaries.⁸

The bilingual intelligentsia came to think of its own language as belonging to that inner domain of cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out; language, therefore, became a zone over which the nation first had to declare its sovereignty and then had to transform in order to make it adequate for the modern world.⁹

The period of ‘social reform’ of the 19th century was in two phases. In the first phase, the reformers looked to state action to bring about the reform of traditional institutions and practices (like abolishing sati), but in the second phase, where the need for change was still not disputed, there was resistance to allowing the colonial state to intervene in matters located in the space of ‘national culture’; Partha Chatterjee sees the second phase as already a ‘nationalist’ period, although traditional histories would regard it as pre-nationalist.¹⁰ What was sought to be fashioned in this period was a modern culture, nonetheless traditional in its essential aspects and not Western. The print medium played an important role in this phase of Indian nationalism.

Indian Nationalism and Its Origins

Given that nationalism is linked to the print medium—a by-product of the modernity introduced by the British—it may be anticipated that Indian nationalism had its origins among the intellectual elite in the space first colonized by the British, in Bengal. Nationalist thought was born in India out of the encounter of a patriotic consciousness with the framework of knowledge imposed upon it by colonialism¹¹ and the modernity it engendered. Partha Chatterjee elaborates on how nationalism features in the writing of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), one of the first intellectuals and writers to expound on the notion. Bankim Chandra was steeped in Western texts, notably in 19th-century sociology and political economy. The most important question to engage him was why India had remained a subject nation despite its Greek and Muslim invaders noting the bravery of the Hindus; even as late as the 19th century, the British were defeated by the Marathas and the Sikhs. Bankim explained that a majority of Indians had never fought for their liberty. There had been wars galore between various kingdoms, but the bulk of the Hindu society had never gone to war.¹²

One could point to the lack of a single religious authority among the Hindus and the consequent absence of an institution equal to the Church, which might have organised society—to harness it to martial ends in times of war—but the fact remained that Hindu society did not participate in military engagements between kingdoms. To Bankim, India was apparently synonymous with Hindu¹³ because Muslim conquerors were treated on par with the British, although unlike the latter, they integrated. But one might also propose that with such integration, the Muslims also acquired ‘Hindu attitudes’. This might explain the differences between the military-minded first Mughal Emperor Babar (1483–1530) and the last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887), better known as a poet, playwright, dancer and patron of arts, pensioned off by the British to Calcutta after his kingdom was annexed by them bloodlessly.

Based on his study of Samkhya thought—which accepted the Revelation (through the Vedas) but rejected God—Bankim concluded that although both the European and Indian systems sought knowledge, the goal of the knowledge was different. Europeans sought power through knowledge, while Indians sought salvation. Power is directed outwards, while salvation is directed inwards. Power was to be had in this world and, since salvation belonged only to the next, its attainment, unlike that of power, could not be known with any degree of certainty. The desire to acquire power through knowledge, Bankim argued, could only be developed through the cultivation of national–cultural values, which presupposed self-awareness on the part of a people of their own history, of which Indians/ Bengalis were judged ignorant. To understand their own history—which was clouded in myth and legend—Indians had to sift the truth from the elaborate myths inherited by them, just as bare history had been created from the embellished accounts of Herodotus and Livy. One of Bankim’s last efforts was to write a biography of Krishna by brushing out later-day additions from whatever had been handed down about him through the Mahabharata; Bankim seriously attempted to make of Krishna what Jesus Christ was to Christianity—a moral guide for contemporary times.¹⁴

Nationalism and the Modern Nation

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was engaged in trying to define a nation where none existed, but independent India exists as a nation today. In an essay/paper provocatively titled ‘Does India Exist?’ and written in 1986, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that India (like Brazil or Pakistan or Britain or China) is an invention of the modern world system. We detect a homogeneous cultural entity in ‘India’, but if it had so happened that Mughal territories had been colonised by the British and the Southern part simultaneously by the French, it might have led to two different nations, say ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Dravidia’, and scholars from around the world would have written tomes arguing that the two were ‘different cultures, peoples, civilisations, nations, or whatever’.¹⁵ Here is how he views the ‘creation’ of India’s past by history:

My … proposition is that India’s pre-modern history is an invention of modern India. I am not saying it didn’t really happen. I presume, given all the inbuilt control mechanisms of world historiography, there are few (or no) statements found in the textbooks, which do not have some evidentiary basis. But the grouping of these statements in an interpretative narrative is not a self-producing phenomenon. ‘Facts’ do not add up to ‘history’. The historian invents history, in the same way that an artist invents his painting. The artist uses the colours on his palette and his vision of the world to present his ‘message’. So does the historian. He has a large leeway, as does the artist. The leeway is not total. It is socially constrained…. The historian’s narrative of past events ‘interprets’ these events in terms of long-term continuities and medium-term ‘conjunctural’ (or cyclical) shifting patterns.¹⁶

Wallerstein argues that since what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries (colonisation) affected how an earlier past would be viewed, what happened in the distant past is a function of what happened much more recently, that is, the present determines the past and not vice versa.¹⁷ This may sound like a critique of how national history is ‘fabricated’, but what Wallerstein does is to argue for the need to transform a population into a nation. This would strengthen the State, so it can effectively accumulate capital towards the good of this population:

One of the ways in which states try to reinforce their authority … is to transform their population into a ‘nation’. Nations are to be sure myths in the sense that they are all social creations, and the states have a central role in their construction. The process of creating a nation involves establishing (to a large degree inventing) a history, a long chronology, and a presumed set of defining characteristics (even if large segments of the group included do not, in fact, share those characteristics).¹⁸

We have hitherto tried to regard nationalism as a sentiment required of a people who are already together—to give them self-respect—but Wallerstein approaches it from a different angle when he explores the issue of sovereignty with regard to the independent state within the capitalist world economy. The French Revolution reoriented the concept of sovereignty from the monarch and legislature to the people, and one of the central consequences of the people becoming ‘sovereign’ is that they are not ‘subjects’ but ‘citizens’. Issues concerning sovereignty are central to the modern state, both internationally (between states) and internally. The following are instances of economic acts dependent on the sovereignty of states: (a) They create the rules concerning property rights within; (b) They set rules concerning employment and the compensation of employees; (c) They decide which costs an enterprise must internalise; (d) They decide what kinds of economic processes may be monopolised, and to what degree; (e) They tax; and (f) When enterprises based within their boundaries may be affected, they use their power externally to affect the decisions of other states.¹⁹

The state functions more effectively when it is stronger and a key way in which the strength of a state can be measured is through the effectiveness of its tax collection and its control of leakages in public spending. The weaker the state, the less the capital that can be accumulated through economically productive activities because its weakness hampers it in performing its economic activities. The weakness of the state enables private accumulation of wealth through non-productive means like bribery and larceny. The ‘nation state’ is what all states²⁰ aspire to become and nationalism is one status-group identity like religion or race and, as Wallerstein describes it, is the ‘minimal cement of state structures’.²¹ The national identity is the most important of status-group identities because it has such a great bearing on sovereign states. Wealthy nations promote it strongly, and the pursuit of nationalist themes by statespersons points to a desire to strengthen the state rather than assert that the state is already strong.²²

National Rivalries and the External Enemy

From what has just been said, it should be evident that nationalism has had functions that have little to do with identifying an external enemy, although that is what the term immediately suggests to the public; this is although wars were fought for thousands of years before the advent of nationalism. If one looks at when nationalism became identified with war and aggression, the answer appears to be that it was when common ethnicity became the basis of nationhood, as it had not been before:

Nationalism demands that rulers and the ruled hail from the same ethnic background. The gradual adoption of this principle of legitimate statehood has transformed the shape of the political world over the past 200 years and has provided the ideological motivation for an increasing number of wars fought in the modern era. Before the age of nationalism set in at the end of the 18th century, individuals did not pay much attention to their own ethnic background or that of their rulers. They identified primarily with a local community—a village or town, a clan or a mosque. In much of Europe and East Asia, their overlords ruled in the name of a divine dynasty, rather than ‘the people’, and many were of different ethnic stock than their subjects.²³

Nationalism, as Anderson saw it, first found itself emerging in the West. With increasing political participation by the public, the exchange of public goods and services against taxation, there was the natural consequence of military support by the population at large. Political loyalties were now shared as was identity, different classes—from the elites to the masses—seeing themselves as mutually dependent. It, therefore, meant that elites and masses should identify with each other, that the rulers and ruled should be from the same people. This new compact