Living in the UK one has become used to the frequent invocation of Kashmir as a self-explanatory symbol of Kashmir’s Muslims denied the right of self-determination. Along with Palestine, it is regularly invoked, but without explanation as to why the two territories are deemed comparable. If the usage of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is anything to go by, it seems they are used as proxies for their sense of oppression, whether justified or not. Makarand Paranjape (Paranjape, 2016; Paranjape, 2022, p. 99) has pointed out that the term ‘azadi’ has the sense of manumission, of being freed from slavery. If so, it would be interesting to inquire further why such rhetoric associating the Muslims of Kashmir with being kept in slavery should be thought appropriate by those using it. (The implication of naming the Pakistani-occupied part as Azad Kashmir then points in the direction of manumission through annexation by Pakistan, while one recent study (Menski and Yousuf, 2021) repeatedly points to the confusing manner in which azadi is used in the rhetoric on Kashmir.) The rhetoric of terrorist organisations matches this sort of talk, and one is never sure where the line between popularly held cliches and terrorist propaganda should be drawn.

In 2018, in the UK, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims adopted a working definition of Islamophobia, a term which the OIC has also been making a big play of, and cited the following as one of the examples of what the definition would cover: “Denying Muslim populations the right to self-determination e.g., by claiming that the existence of an independent Palestine or Kashmir is a terrorist endeavour.” (APPG on British Muslims, 2018, pp. 56-57) This is the only reference to Kashmir in the entire report, which defines Islamophobia as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” (APPG on British Muslims, 2018, pp. 11, 50, 56) The report has been adopted by local authorities in several different parts of the UK giving it a sort of quasi-administrative status within some sectors of government in Britain. One might wonder therefore what the framers of the report would have made of the convictions for terrorist offences in a British court of a group of young Muslim men whose aims included obtaining training and conducting terrorist attacks in Kashmir and potentially in the UK also.^[1] Was that all part of the racism and Islamophobia of the English legal system?

The problems that surface upon closer scrutiny of the APPG’s and similar claims have not prevented making the kind of atrocities TKF depicts unsayable. The film shows clearly that terrorism is a means of imposing territorial rights for Muslims only in Kashmir and therefore becomes a way of eliminating diversity from Kashmir, a point the TKF’s director also makes in interviews again and again. Making the unsayable sayable is one of the remarkable things the film achieves. It is not that others have not made claims in other forms of the kind the film shows. The ‘files’ in the title do exist in some publicly accessible forms. There is any number of books published, and comment pieces and interviews available in print and online, that speak about the atrocities the Hindus of Kashmir had to endure. They have had to endure them during the events of 1990, which are the focus of the film, but also prior to them and afterwards. In one of the many discussions on TKF available online Agnihotri says:

Thousands and thousands of books have been written on Kashmir. It’s not; if somebody says, ‘oh we didn’t know’. No, no, no, no. That’s your problem. You didn’t know because you don’t read. Nobody in schools and colleges are asking you to read. I have got a room full of books on Kashmir and Kashmir genocide. Every Kashmiri pandit has written something, you know, well-published books, if not well-published, some articles, something. They have written for 32 years. They kept this alive. But one film! See I’ll tell you. This is very interesting – to understand the power of cinema. Because cinema is the only art which has all the dimensions. You’ve audio, visual plus you have depth, and it is collective viewing. So, some kinds of vibes are also travelling and transferring, so that there is some kind of a consensus whether this is right or wrong. That’s a science of cinema very simply spoken. (Agnihotri, 2022)

This very pregnant observation invites further reflection. TKF appears to have achieved something that these other forms of expression have not. The film has had an impact in India and internationally that others have not been able to, including other films that have been made on Kashmir. It has made acceptable the public expression of grief, outrage and empathy regarding those atrocities it is most immediately concerned with, while opening the door to the many more which have not yet been able to find expression. It seems worth inquiring into why that might be.

My initial response, to which I still hold as I go further into Venkat Rao’s work, is that the distinction Agnihotri makes becomes even more tangible if one refers back to the former’s work. In particular, I am thinking of his distinction between the ways in which different cultures store and marshal their resources of memory. Venkat Rao proposes that the Western culture is one dominated by lithic, scriptural archival storing and recall of memory, whereas the Indian culture, being performative uses the bodily archive in all its different ways, through voice, speech, gesture, song and so on to establish itself as a mnemoculture, with its own guardians of memory. 

Although it is based on a documentation of the events of 1990s, TKF is not a documentary. Director, Vivek Agnihotri, and producer Pallavi Joshi, who plays the university professor Radhika Menon in the film, carried out upwards of seven hundred interviews which form the basis of the film’s storyline. Those who have said that it provides a false account of what happened in Kashmir have a problem though. The film does not make truth claims and, therefore, it isn’t amenable to accusations of falsehood. Without making factual claims, it tells the story of the events as derived from those expectedly pain-laden interviews. Through its characters, the film aptly conveys that those who most directly underwent the atrocities had to endure them in silence and were unable to transmit them as memories to their younger generations, or to share them with others.

To an extent that I find difficult to estimate, going through the violence of the 1990 attacks must have led to the suppression of expression and transmission because of the trauma they induced. Possibly no register of language exists that allows such grievous infliction of violence to be expressed. In their recent book, What does it mean to be ‘Indian’?, Balagangadhara and Rao (2021, pp. 52-54) make a distinction between undergoing some events or happenings, on the one hand, and transforming them into experiences, on the other. Where undergoing something fails to become transformed into experience, it exists as a trauma, and is relived as pain without becoming merely a memory. It can be transformed into experience only when it is structured by naming what is undergone. That structure is provided by one’s culture, which has the resources we can use for socialisation, and different cultures teach us to structure what we undergo in different ways, through such resources as stories, rituals, lore, legends, poetry and so on.

The film shows the effects of trauma in a variety of ways and especially through the character of Pushkar Nath Pandit, played by Anupam Kher. He witnesses atrocities of an unspeakable kind, and his post-traumatic stress doesn’t leave him until he dies, isolated even from his still-living near ones. Atrocities were committed by those previously known to their victims, neighbours and former students, with whom relationships of trust must have existed. One hears of similar events which took place during the most recent Yezidi genocide as Muslim neighbours turned on their non-Muslim victims. While the theme of the inexpressibility of the trauma permeates TKF, even among those who have gone through them in common, the film also weaves in how their long-suppressed stories surface. In the absence of a language to express the unspeakable, it is as though the film therapeutically provides a scaffolding for the surfacing of suppressed traumas. Is it plausible that the film plays the role of what Balagangadhara and Rao describe as the kind of culturally specific resource, such as a mode of storytelling, that enables the structuring of events by transforming them into experience, and into a mere memory of events? It is striking how those who were close to the experience of terror have become so tearful after watching the film. Are they on their way to coming to terms with what they underwent as a result of the film?

TKF also raises questions about how what it says was not sayable earlier. Despite the existence of multiple other sources documenting the atrocities, which TKF also tells of, it beggars belief that public discussion of the events TKF portrays was not thought acceptable in India, let alone elsewhere. Neither have the public institutions including the legal system, the centres of learning like the universities, nor the media or the film industry discussed them openly. Instead, they suppressed the atrocities and the experiences of those who were exposed to them and created a climate to penalise transgression should public discussion be initiated. And it isn’t merely by the invoking of the Islamophobia tag, which has become so popular today, that such a prohibition was imposed. It seems unbelievable that the genocidal events of 1990 had nowhere in India become the subject of public discussion and outrage, of teaching in universities, of demands for justice accompanied by trials for crimes against humanity, or of cognisance by the huge number of human rights institutions and NGOs in India, let alone something like a truth and reconciliation commission.

The lack of reaction along these lines is even harder to comprehend in light of the fact that we are constantly reminded that not only do Hindus constitute the majority of the country, while Muslims are underrepresented in public institutions, but that India is constantly battling the disease of Hindu ‘majoritarianism’. Had Hindu majoritarianism really been in play all along, why haven’t the public institutions acted by dealing with the perpetrators and the victims of atrocities in some appropriate manner? Either Hindus have not lived up to the expectations of the majority they are supposed to be or there is some basic flaw in the terms of description of the Indian society and in the operation of its institutions. Be that as it may, perhaps we could use the insights Venkat Rao provides to dig further into why some of these modes of response could not have been borne as a consequence of Indian cultural specificities. Among the many pointers Venkat Rao gives is this observation:

The mnemocultural verbal – visual performing traditions precede and survive the lithic turn. Unlike in the context of European cultural history, the Indian (perhaps even Asian and African) mnemocultures subordinate the lithic or orthographic turn to acoustic and performative structures even to this day. No wonder that the orthographic heritage can’t be said to have inaugurated any archive fevers and whipped up passions for centralized archives in mnemocultural contexts. Similarly, the iconic turn, a belated emergence in the Indian context, too does not unleash an urge for the growth of museums and galleries. On the contrary, the passion for the plastic/iconic (sculpture and architecture) multiplied unprecedented range of temples for over a millennium – which, though lithic in manifestation, has little to do with archival passions. (Venkat Rao, 2021b, p. 73)

The western orthographic heritage is unable to generate the archive fevers or whipped up passions in India that the performative can. Our legal imaginaries, being western, are also premised on the lithic archival mode of storing and recall, and that may be why they are unsuited to the Indian cultural context. As Agnihotri informs us, massive documentation along such lines has already occurred. One might have supplemented it with some legal trials or a truth and reconciliation commission, but are these the modes of memorialising that would have achieved the therapeutic and cultural movement that TKF does?

The sense of impending violence is present throughout TKF. Violence seems to have played, and continues to play, a multiple set of roles in inculcating the suppressive attitudes that we see today. As Balagangadhara (1994) has theorised, religion spreads by proselytism or by secularisation. While not all of Islam’s spread has been through violence, in India, a part of it has been. However, Islam’s spread through violence and destruction remains unacknowledged. As with the spread of Christianity, the spread of Islam has been primarily told through a public relations story, which suppresses its spread through violence and compels the projection of the religion’s peaceful advance. This was not always so, however. During the Islamic conquests of India, including in Kashmir, Muslim documentarists recorded with adulation the infliction of violence and humiliation upon the conquered non-Muslims and their culture (Goel, 1982). However, these accounts are hardly acknowledged in public discussion and in the teaching of the universities, which are habituated to the suppression of such evidence or taking them as cues to produce ad hoc explanations for it.

In the same month as the so-called ‘tukde tukde’ protests of February 2016 at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a teach-in was held on the university’s campus (on the protests and teach-in, see Paranjape, 2022). In the book produced out of the teach-in lectures, What the nation really needs to know (Azad et al., 2016), a chapter by Harbans Mukhia (2016), a former professor of medieval history and rector at JNU, has this portrayal of the spread of Islam during periods of Islamic domination:

But knowing that massive conversions did take place, why are references to it so scarce? The only reasonable explanation is that had conversions taken place at the hands of one single agency by force or otherwise, or in one short period of time, there is no way it could have escaped getting into record of one sort or another at the hands of one writer or the other. Conversions took place over very long stretches of time and through a number of agencies and for a number of motivations; hence the absence of a dramatic element lets these off the record.

The message sought to be conveyed by Mukhia is that conversion to Islam was unremarkable and can therefore be assumed to have been peaceful and voluntary. One response to this claim could be to merely accept that an ambiguity exists and that it is plausible that forcible conversions most probably did not take place. However, this contradicts the accounts we do have of the kind complied by Goel (1982), even if Mukhia does not refer to them or explain their contents. It would also be inconsistent with the chant, “ralive, tsalive, galive!” (convert, leave or die) recited in TKF accompanied by the threat of violence. However, this violence is unsayable in public contexts, which indicates that the public relations version of Islam has been taken on even by intellectuals.

While the spread of Islam by proselytism, peacefully or by violence, is one issue, another is the curious taking on of Islamic religious attitudes by non-Muslims. Previously, in Balagangadhara’s research programme secularisation was expressed in terms of how tropes within a theological tradition of reasoning, in the context of Christianity, get extended into the topoi of a culture (De Roover, 2015). In a recent interview, Balagangadhara (2022) speaks of an extension to his theory of secularisation of religion with respect to Islam by ‘Islamification’, which is a weaker form of secularisation. Among the signs of Islamification is a decline in the intellectual environment in areas of exposure. Agnihotri picks up on this phenomenon when he says:

If you go in Kashmir valley there is zero diversity. There is no art, no literature, no music. In the name of music, you just have azan. No dance – such a culturally rich – no philosophy. See the biggest problem – my grudge against Islam – is that it destroys philosophy. Wherever they go there’s no philosophy. So, there’s no philosophy in Kashmir. There’s no dialogue in Kashmir.

One of the important ways in which TKF picks up the prolific instances of secularisation is to point to the embedding of such attitudes within Indian universities. The reference to JNU is retained in the international print version of the film but was changed to ANU because of the demands of the censors in India, although there appears to be a shared presumption in India too that the university in question is JNU. Regardless of the actual university, the parallels with actual incidents at several Indian universities are striking. The professor, Radhika Menon, who tries to enlist support for azadi among the students, and her attempts to corral the lead candidate Krishna, played by Darshan Kumar, for the student elections, as well as her links with terrorist groups, all jump out from some or other incidents that have reportedly occurred at prominent Indian universities, including at JNU (Agnihotri, 2018; Paranjape, 2022).

The critical element that TKF tries to get across is that the university does not produce or transmit knowledge. The university not only prevents transmission of the Pandits’ genocide, but it goes on to portray the terrorist campaign to have them convert, leave or die as justified. The university becomes a public arena which suppresses understanding of and coming to terms with the trauma of terrorist violence and instead subverts the ability to fight against terrorism. Rather than being continuous with the cultures of memory in India, it fails to respond to the destruction of those cultures except by becoming part of the destructive mechanism. The university enlists the younger generation in this project, cutting them off from their cultures of memory. In this, the role of Krishna becomes a crucial carrier of the conflict thereby induced upon his generation, not least by the very persuasive Professor Menon. Not only has the memory of the genocide, in which his own parents and brother perish, not been passed to him but the university fails in enabling him to come to an understanding of it, except in terms that justify the terror-induced genocide. Krishna is called upon to endorse the violence inflicted upon his family and those like them and to join those terrorists who are still around to unleash it again.

At this point, we might bear in mind Venkat Rao’s observations that the university in India is a colonial implant, imposed with utter disregard for the tissue texture of the host culture, and oblivious of what inquiries it should pursue, a symptom of intellectual destitution. It is an implant made by British colonialism rather than its Islamic counterpart. Whatever the differences between them, in the final analysis, the violence of both Islamic and British colonialism is seen as justifiable. As Marx (1853) put it when justifying British colonialism in India, “whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe … ‘Were not through the rule of Timur souls devoured without measure?’” Colonialism appears to have transmitted a set of attitudes to the colonised about the inherently desirable nature of the coloniser’s rule and prevented the transmission of the experience of violence or its telling except in the terms of the coloniser (the civilisational inferiority of the colonised and so on). In fact, the infliction of violence is not only unexpressed but appears to have embedded this set of attitudes by preventing access to the experience of the colonised (Balagangadhara, 2012), and this seems to hold for both Islamic and British colonialism. British colonialism became the handmaiden for exacerbating the violence of Islam, culminating in the establishment of Pakistan. Rather than ceasing since independence and partition, the levelling of violence from Pakistan was encouraged by the Anglo-American alliance. Kashmir was part of the British design for Pakistan and the latter’s continued call for its secession (effectively annexation to Pakistan) finds a basis in the role of Britain and the United States (Sarila, 2017). In both the latter countries, calls for self-determination of Kashmiri Muslims are reiterated but, as we saw, their linkage to terrorism is deemed Islamophobic.

TKF provides a sense of these manifestations of violence and their consequences whose memory is suppressed, particularly when we combine it with a reading and re-reading of Venkat Rao’s work on a multitude of facets of the Indian cultural difference. TKF manages to convey the sense of the terror unleased on a culture of memory, enables the indifference of others to these events to be acknowledged and repaired, and begins the journey of healing for those who underwent the terror. Maybe that is why it does something that others, among those who use the film as a medium as well as other lithic modes of memorial forms, have not been able to achieve. This comment has merely suggested some lines of inquiring further how TKF does all that, with the conviction that there is some potential in pursuing these directions of thinking. There is something here about the role of film that TKF may exemplify in terms of how to transform film to play the role of guardian of memory.

[1] See the remarks of the judge during sentencing in R-v-Mohammed Chowdhury & Others, Sentencing Remarks of Mr Justice Wilkie, Woolwich Crown Court, Indictment No: T20117593, 9 February 2012. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/mr-j-wilkie-sentencing-remarks-r-v-chowdhury.pdf

References

Agnihotri, V. (2018) Urban naxals. Gurugram: Garuda.

Agnihotri, V. (2022) Q/A session with Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri at Chinmaya Mission Chennai. YouTube. https://youtu.be/lL6ioMH_wHI

APPG on British Muslims (2018) Islamophobia defined: All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims.

Azad, R., Nair, J., Singh, M. and Sinha Roy, M. (2016) What the nation really needs to know: The JNU nationalism lectures. Noida: HarperCollins.

Balagangadhara, S. N. (1994) ‘The heathen in his blindness …’ : Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion. Leiden: Brill.

Balagangadhara, S. N. (2012) Reconceptualizing India studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Balagangadhara, S. N. (2022) ‘What We Lost Under Islamic And British Colonialism: A Conversation With S N Balagangadhara’. Interview with R. Jagannathan, Swarajya, April 15, 2022. 

Balagangadhara, S. N. and Rao, S. (2021) What does it mean to be ‘Indian’? Chennai: Indic Academy.

De Roover, J. (2015) Europe, India, and the limits of secularism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Goel, S. R. (1982) Story of Islamic imperialism in India. New Delhi: Voice of India.

Marx, K. (1853) ‘The British rule in India’, New York Herald Tribune, June 25, 1853.

Menski, W. and Yousuf, M. (2021) Kashmir after 2019: Completing the partition. 1st edn. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Mukhia, H. (2016) ‘Reinstituting the colonial history of medieval India’, in R. Azad, J. Nair, M. Singh, M. Sinha Roy (eds.), What the nation really needs to know. Noida: HarperCollins.

Paranjape, M. (2022) JNU: Nationalism and India’s uncivil war. New Delhi: Rupa.

Paranjape, M. R. (2016) ‘India’s uncivil wars: Tagore Gandhi JNU … and … what’s ‘left’ of the nation’, in R. Azad, J. Nair, M. Singh, M. Sinha Roy (eds.), What the nation really needs to know. Noida: HarperCollins.

Sarila, N. S. (2017) The shadow of the great game: The untold story of India’s partition. London: Constable.

Venkat Rao, D. (2014) Cultures of memory in South Asia: Orality, literacy and the problem of inheritance. New Delhi: Springer India.

Venkat Rao, D. (2018) ‘Accents of memory: Critical humanities and the question of inheritance’,  D. Venkat Rao (ed.): Critical humanities from India: Contexts, issues, futures. London: Routledge, pp. 205-232.

Venkat Rao, D. (2021a) India, Europe and the question of cultural difference: The apeiron of relations. 1st edn. New Delhi: Routledge India.

Venkat Rao, D. (2021b) Performative reflections of Indian traditions: Towards a liveable learning. Singapore: Springer Nature.

Hinduism and the caste system constitute the central components of the discussion on India in the modern-day discourse even if some sections of academia have been assertive that these are colonial constructs. These components have survived as though they are the social scientific discourses on the ills of Hindu society even today. The comparison of ‘Hinduism’ with religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have led to severe ill-informed criticisms of the diverse practices and traditions that are supposed to constitute it. Misunderstanding of the Indian traditions has also led to the generation of stereotypes which are used in bullying and abusing Indian people in the West especially in academic institutions. The incidents which went unrecognised are today labelled as anti-Hindu crimes and the phenomenon is broadly termed Hinduphobia, though it is vague and does not account for the mentioned issues. In this background, Dr. Shah analyses the situation of Hindus in England in the context of the recently published Anti-Hindu Hate in Schools report.

Earlier this month the report, Anti-Hindu Hate in Schools, written by Charlotte Littlewood was published on behalf of the Centre on Social and Political Risk of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). The report makes concerning reading and provides some results of the kind that haven’t been produced in earlier research in England. It points to the large gulf in the incidents of prejudice, discrimination and hate-speech that Hindu parents report their children having experienced in state schools on the one hand and those that schools in England have been recording on the other. A report’s school survey conducted through freedom of information requests showed that of the 24.2% of schools that responded, 71.49% recorded zero incidents of bullying, harassment or similar events connected to the child being Hindu, and 0.41% recorded one incident. The remainder of schools responded but gave no data. Of the Hindu parents surveyed, some 51% reported incidents of anti-Hindu bullying against their children. The gap indicates the ill-preparedness of schools to recognise harms Hindu pupils are exposed to but the report also points to the contribution of schools to sustaining the harms. 

The data concerns recent incidents occurring over the last five years. Littlewood prefers to bring the variety of anti-Hindu slurs, discrimination, prejudice and bullying under the umbrella of anti-Hindu hate. While she finds it helpful in understanding anti-Hindu hate, she stops short of endorsing the Rutgers University definition of Hinduphobia. Either with or without the Hinduphobia definition, we remain in an area of some conceptual vagueness which the report does not allow to become a distraction, although it won’t go away as an issue. The report tries to establish an overlap between types anti-Hindu hate and extremism which again underlines the vague nature of all these concepts. Given that vagueness it remains unclear how schools and authorities ought to respond to them. 

In some ways, the report confirms suspicions that one may have already had, particularly with respect to the targeting of Hindu pupils by Muslims pupils, which measurably comes out as the most significant source of anti-Hindu hate. Anecdotally, incidents of bullying including on religious grounds are known to happen, although their frequency might not have been appreciated prior to this report. Littlewood has already written another report on the Leicester incidents of last autumn, where anti-Hindu hate became visible with an intensity greater than the usually lower-level forms of harassment that are suspected to occur. In fact, this report draws parallels with the findings of the Leicester report confirming that the pattern of learning to abuse Hindus probably starts during the earlier socialisation of Muslims. Predictably, the influence of anti-India propaganda emanating from Pakistan and circulating within Britain’s Muslim communities is also a factor in generating a pattern of abuse directed at Hindu pupils. That was a factor in Leicester where it became a pretext for outright violence against Hindus. While the press and academics, such as Tariq Modood and Gurharpal Singh laid the blame at the door of Hindu nationalism, as did former HJS research fellow Rakib Ehsan, Littlewood’s report on Leicester confirmed that the Hindutva slur became a pretext to commit and cover up violence against Hindus. 

The source of the bullying is also betrayed by the fact that a large number of incidents are reported as based on slurs about cows, idol-worshipping and polytheism. These chime into the Islamic antipathy to idol worship of which Hindus constitute an epitome. The report allocates all those slurs into the basket of extremism. It is not not clear, however, whether we are really speaking of an extreme wing of Muslims or whether these are indeed standard prejudices based on theological commonplaces within Islam. It may not be unjustified to observe that the dominant strain of Islam represented in Britain has been observably taken a strident tone and many other events other than those that took place in Leicester in 2022 point in that direction. In some ways these are chickens coming home to roost because the Anglo-American alliance has long-encouraged the extreme wings to become normalised not merely in Britain, but all over the globe. 

While the comments with respect to Islam in Littlewood’s schools report have been picked up both in the UK and in India, other aspects are also worthy of notice. Much of the focus is on the lack of appropriate teaching of Hinduism, including that such teaching picks out caste, polytheism, and the practice of sati, the ill-preparedness of teachers to tackle Hinduism in the classroom, and that an ‘Abrahamic’ perspective tends to shape the delivery of teaching on Hinduism. Factors such as the underrepresentation of Hinduism in religious education (RE) teaching, the lack of preparedness of schools and teachers, and the negative portrayals of Hinduism have been previously flagged in a report by INSIGHT in 2021. Littlewood’s report links the problems in teaching to the experience of bullying in schools, suggesting cause and effect. Research by the Hindu American Foundation supports the claim that teaching about caste leads to the abuse of Hindu pupils. 

Littlewood understandably stops short of saying just what sort of teaching on Hinduism is appropriate, although there are several quotes in the report by parents suggesting where the teaching goes wrong or could be better done. One specific suggestion is to end mention of caste in primary and secondary schools of caste with support from Sanskrit teacher, Rishi Handa, who argues that caste is so complex that it is not fit for teaching in primary or secondary schools. It is doubtful, however, whether a remedy lies in the report’s recommendation that a centralised syllabus be formulated by experts, away from the currently divergent solutions devised at the level of the local Standing Advisory Councils of Religious Education (SACREs). Although the move could curtail some of the influence of the churches and Muslim representatives, who are far keener to get their doctrines reflected in RE and inflict violence on RE teachers such as the one in the West Yorkshire town of Batley on mere suspicion of blasphemy, it would not solve much deeper problems. RE is only mandatory in state schools because of an 80-year-old compromise with the churches when they ceded power to the state in education. One ought to question its place in the curriculum today, especially because it is used to push the softer doctrines of Semitic religions while disparaging Hinduism, if it is taught at all. 

One of the biggest difficulties in the report is the very idea of Hinduism itself. Indeed, the difficulty would come up in the context of any activity which involves consideration of the framework of teaching Hinduism. There are several points at which parents and the author herself suggest that the Abrahamic lens in teaching Hinduism is the problem and that is what leads to inappropriate, inaccurate, or misconceived ideas of Hinduism. The accompanying suggestion is that if only that can be corrected by experts with the involvement of parents, then it would ameliorate the bullying issues, at least in so far as the teaching of the subject is a proximate source of bullying. However, this is where the core difficulty of the report lies. 

That difficulty is that the very conception of Hinduism is itself Abrahamic or Semitic, and specifically Protestant. It is in the writings of the Protestant missionaries of the 19^th century that we get the crystallization not only of the idea of Hinduism as the dominant religion of India but also of the caste system as its basic social structure. From that point on, the idea has spread as though it were a scientific fact about India and has become a sort of common sense about what India is. In the Protestant writings the antipathy towards Hinduism as a false religion propagated by the Brahmin priesthood was quite express and that continues today in the polemics of contemporary missionaries. The report speaks of one incident where Hindu pupil was told, “Jesus will send your Gods to hell.” Although the report puts this sort of slur under the heading of ‘Far right/Xenophobia’ it is actually pretty standard Christian fare. Over time, as Hinduism and the caste system have become the standard story about India, the Christian polemic has become attenuated at least in public discourse and in the social sciences. However, the basic elements of the Protestant diatribes against Hinduism have remained in secularised form.

It is for these reasons that any discussion of Hinduism is bound to involve elements such as the caste system and the polytheism of the Hindus. This is not a story that has been developed by Indians but by westerners about India. It is no good looking around for experts or parents to solve the problem this creates. The experts almost completely buy into the same story and do not grasp what the problem with their framework is. We get people as far apart politically as Douglas Murray, a former associate director of the HJS, who is convinced about the depravity of the caste system, and Cambridge Professor, Priyamvada Gopal, who thinks that Brahmins are the whites of India, a species of race-oppressor who created the caste system. It is no wonder that the textbooks teachers use in schools contain such references. There have been intermittent battles led by Hindu parents in the United States also on the content of school books. Remember that the British parliament was persuaded to add a clause on caste to the Equality Act on exactly such understandings of the Indian traditions, and that clause remains in place today. A similar move is being made right now in California. These facts underline that the problems with Indian traditions which have passed into the wider western culture find their basis in one or other of the Semitic religions. 

Neither parents nor pandits would be of much help here because the expectation from them would be that they provide a sanitised account of Hinduism but one that is nonetheless based on the assumption of some doctrinal core. Littlewood’s report bemoans the “incorrect commentary on central Hindu principles and beliefs” but a simple discussion would reveal that no such beliefs or principles exist. Were they to be sought, innumerable answers would spring forth leading to even greater confusion. Indeed, one of the slurs the report documents is, “You don’t know about your own religion.” The reason is that the Indian traditions are simply not structured in the way the Semitic religions are. No core beliefs or doctrines exist. Scholarship pioneered by S.N. Balagangadhara theorizes that India (and Asia) does not have native religions. 

This view, to which I subscribe, means that there is a case for bringing ‘Hinduism’ or better, the Indian traditions, outside the box of religion altogether. Why cannot India’s traditions be taught as part of philosophy or better still as part of newly thought-out syllabi on ‘Tradition Studies’. This solution departs from the one advocated in the INSIGHT report where Hinduism teaching would still be tied to the framework of RE. would enable students of various Asian backgrounds be they formally classified as Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain or whatever else to finally reflect on the nature of their traditions, which do not require any set of core beliefs, but which have yet sustained through millennia using mechanisms other than the transmission of core doctrines or beliefs, and which have been receptive to a kind of pluralism that the Semitic religions have simply failed to sustain. 

The claim, “Yoga is Hindu”, creates more problems than it solves as it leads us into the blind alley of identity politics.

We write as sceptics of growing claims that Yoga is Hindu.

This is not to say that Indians did not play a role in developing it. For all we know, the deepest reflections on Yoga took place in India by Indians. Extant texts testify to their reflections. Contemporary gurus and writers speak of an ancient tradition variously, going back thousands of years.

The Yoga-is-Hindu movement

We also want to take seriously those who claim that Yoga is Hindu. At the very least they have some concerns to the effect that Yoga practitioners learn from masters of a Hindu or Indian lineage but at some point, abandon that lineage to claim originality and distort teachings. Rajiv Malhotra is a chief proponent of this argument. They may merely deny the heritage of the practice, divorcing it from its cultural roots, a complaint echoed in the Hindu American Foundation’s campaign to “Take Back Yoga” because, as HAF claims, it is Hindu and a core part of Hinduism.

There is also the challenge of regulating Yoga externally, other than the self-regulating mode the tradition developed. The attempt by British Wheel of Yoga to initiate such a regulatory framework envisages a top-down, state authored and secularised supervision, imposing a normative rule system upon something unanswerable to such a framework. Such moves are contested by Pandit Satish Sharma on grounds that this denies Yoga’s roots in Hinduism, including its Yamas and Niyamas which necessarily ground Yoga practice.

The very same group among Hindus responds with frustration when the academic scholars argue that Modern Yoga is not necessarily Hindu or Indian, but it has drawn heavily from various other practices from the west. This argument, at least, is responsible for triggering the ownership claim most often.

Another stream of thought loosely ties in with and reinforces the claims made by those who want to claim Yoga as Hindu. It is one that emphasises that Yoga derives from specific cultures by pointing out that its practice is tantamount to a form of appropriation. The argument goes that we need to be mindful that the cultures from which Yoga is taken have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and Western supremacy, something that is implied in how we express ourselves while practising Yoga. This argument came to the fore most prominently as a reason for the cancellation of Yoga classes at the University of Ottawa in 2015.

Even if we disagree that Yoga is Hindu or that claiming Yoga as part of Hinduism helps us in any way to address them, let us accept that there is something felt at the intuitive level and understandably causes proponents to have concerns about how they see Yoga being transmitted and practiced today. For instance, distortion of Yoga teachings does take place. It also appears as though after some learning of practices from Yoga masters, the line of transmission is suppressed in accordance with the ‘U-turn theory’ put forward by Rajiv Malhotra. Some would argue in a milder tone that people who practice Yoga must acknowledge that Yoga is rooted in Hinduism and today it is decontextualized and practiced merely as a set of Asanas. Some Hindus claim that Yoga is ours, but it is unclear what these claims really mean.

Let us start our enquiry with the claim, Yoga is Hindu. What does this claim involve? First, it demands that we recognise a human group clearly distinguishable uniquely as Hindu and second, such a group has the ownership of Yoga through inheritance. If and only if both these propositions are established can we treat the claim as legitimate, irrespective of whether one agrees with it or not.

Is there anything that is distinguishable and recognisable as Hindu? A clear answer is no. One can make a claim that all Indians are Hindus, but this would not help us as the existing story is that there are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsi, Jains, Buddhists and any number of groups that are Indian, so one cannot say all Indians are Hindus. One can go further and say all the groups described above are characterised by religions; therefore, that is not what Hindu is, but it is a set of Dharmic Civilizations of South Asia. Even this story does not work as it is unclear what these Dharmic traditions are. Are Indian Christians, Jews, Muslims etc. part of these Dharmic traditions? Many would say no. Then you would run into the problem of denying the inheritance of Yoga practice to all these religious traditions of India like Jews, Christians and Muslims who not only practice Yoga but also are part of these Yoga traditions over a long period of time.

This problem immediately pushes us to think about the claim of inheritance and ownership of Yoga. One can understand the claim of inheritance for members who belong to those traditions. What is incomprehensible is the claim of ownership. If someone makes an argument that Yoga is Hindu, if it is not a claim of ownership then, we are obliged to ask, what is it? As mentioned, one can even understand that members who are part of various Yoga traditions feel it not correct to distort the practices of the given tradition. However, looking at what the group who want to establish Yoga as Hindu say, it is clear that they are not merely bothered about the degeneration of some Yoga tradition or the other. They want to be the authentic custodians and regulators of the traditions. Therefore, there is something peculiar about this claim of ownership by inheritance by Hindus regarding Yoga.  

In pointing out these problems our aim is not to iterate the Biblical enjoinment that the physicians should heal themselves. It is merely to signal the depth of our predicament when speaking of such matters.

Yoga in the mirror of religion

It is no coincidence that the greatest effort in claiming Yoga is Hindu is coming from individuals established in the West, mainly Britain and the United States. These are lands where the discourse of identity politics is well advanced and where groups based on some identifying features such as race, religion and so on claim certain benefits, protections, and representation. This culture of identity politics has, of course, spread far and wide, notably to India where Hindu nationalists make similar claims based on identity.

When, in her letter to the Yoga Journal, Suhag A. Shukla, a co-founder of the HAF refers to “those of us who too are striving to live our lives according to the Hindu principles”, she speaks as though the religion of Hinduism is not only real but that it enables one to function in the world as a Christian does, living out a set of principles that one makes one’s own. In so doing, Shukla merely indexes the extent to which Indians have learnt, erroneously, that the way the West speaks about religion is the way that Indians can also speak about their traditions. The claim that Hinduism merits due acknowledgement for having developed Yoga is not the only way in which Hindu identity politics is being developed. As Prakash Shah has written elsewhere, the interplay of secularised Christian theological claims and contemporary Hindu activism is also played out in ineffectual postures against accusations of caste discrimination, leading to further blind alleys.

When International Yoga Day was celebrated with all the excitement, there were Christians, Muslims and secular groups who raised a simple problem. Muslims and Christians cannot practice Yoga as it interferes in their religious belief. Instead of thinking deeply about these claims, many came up with the formula saying one need not chant Mantra but can remove Omkara from the practice so that the religious part of Yoga is eliminated. Someone suddenly asked this question, if you remove OM and the Mantra, why do Yoga? Let us do some good physical exercise as, today, we have well-developed sciences, especially sports medicine and physiotherapy. Why insist on the Yoga without Mantra and Dhyana? Even though many did not understand the question itself, there is definitely a cognitive value to this question, as well as the suggestion of a knowledge claim, to the effect that Yoga does something more than physical exercise. Even when such questions have an intuitive appeal and the efficacy of the practices can be demonstrated, it is unclear what the people referring to as distortion really mean and why it appears as a distortion of the traditional practice.

Now let us turn back to the previous question: how does Yoga become a problem for Muslims and Christians? It becomes a problem only under certain theological considerations. That is, if they practice anything which is part of false religion. In order to bring Yoga into such theological scrutiny, they have to transform Yoga into something that is a part of Hindu religion.

In some legal contexts, as prevails in the United States, the state cannot push religion because that amounts to impeding its free exercise and violates clauses forbidding the non-establishment of religion. A legal case brought by Christian parents objecting to the teaching of Yoga in state schools in California established that Yoga could be taught only on condition it is done as a secular practice. In such a legal context, the association of Yoga with Hinduism is accepted, but then demanded that it be suppressed so as not to fall foul of non-establishment clauses.

At one level, then, Christians may agree with the proponents of the Yoga-is-Hindu argument to the extent that both see it first and foremost as a Hindu religious practice. They differ in that one wants open acknowledgment and practice of Yoga as Hindu, while the other camp might accept Yoga, if at all, on condition its Hindu religious covering is dropped and it is made secular. At root in this dichotomy is the Protestant Christian teaching that seeks to divide the religious from the secular, and both camps knowingly or unknowingly speak as though they accept its presuppositions, if not its consequences.

To argue that Yoga is a part of the Hindu religion, involves first accepting that Hinduism is a religion. According to their own published views, the proponents of the former position also accept the latter claim. However, as S.N. Balagangadhara has shown, Hinduism is a conceptual and experiential entity in the Western experience of India. Indian culture knows neither of religion nor of Hinduism and, therefore, there cannot be a Hindu religion from which Yoga or whatever else derives. Yet the claims being made about Yoga are distinctly based on Hindu religious identity.

A cognitively challenging and fascinating idea here would be to ask what happens to these theological claims if we can show that Yoga is a tradition which was practiced by people who had no religion. That is, India had traditions and did not have religion at all. Therefore, there is no question of religion of any kind, be it false or true in India. Then, one cannot make the claim that Yoga is a practice of false religion. In fact, such challenges have not been addressed seriously in the theological debates. (Imagine a situation of interfaith dialogue where theology has to confront people who have no religion, or an interfaith dialogue where one party has no faith, or a situation where a Christian wants to give the message of the gospel to people without religion. At least theologically such possibilities have hardly ever been conceptualised. In fact, religions were always compelled to treat Pagans as people with false religion without even examining whether or not they have a religion.)

Yoga as knowledge

Actually, in the West, given the huge commercialisation of the Hatha Yoga tradition (the Yoga tradition being immensely vaster), there is a trend to asserting intellectual property rights over its different aspects. Bikram Choudhary famously moved to copyright his method of Yoga and subsequently pursued studios for violations, attracting criticism from Indian gurus.

The Times of India reported in 2007 that the US Patent and Trademark office had by then issued 150 Yoga-related copyrights, 134 trademarks on Yoga accessories and 2,315 Yoga trademarks. In his book The Science of Yoga(2012), William J Broad noted that US Yoga entrepreneurs had registered “thousands of patents, trademarks and copyrights”. Echoing the language of intellectual property, Aseem Shukla, HAF’s co-founder has responded to this phenomenon, saying “Hinduism has lost control of the brand”.

However, forms of traditional knowledge (TK) are only thinly protected by national and international intellectual property regimes. A sampling of legal writing on intellectual property demonstrates how TK is treated very much as an afterthought. The very idea of TK is weakly conceptualised, and raises questions whether a phenomenon like Yoga is susceptible to protection from claims of intellectual property. Nevertheless, the Government of India began documenting Yoga postures, among other forms of TK, in a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library as a way of preventing piracy.

Part of the problem lies in the uncertainty about the type of knowledge that Yoga is. Responding to the issue of whether Yoga is specifically Hindu, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has replied:

“Yoga is Hindu just the way gravity is Christian. Just because the law of gravity was propounded by Isaac Newton, who lived in a Christian culture, does it make gravity Christian? Yoga is a technology. Anybody who is willing to make use of it can make use of it. It is ridiculous to even think that there could be a religious tinge to Yoga.”

If technology is a way of using science, then behind Yoga is a form of knowledge, but we are currently quite uncertain just what form of knowledge it might be. Efforts such as Broad’s in The Science of Yoga don’t clarify the issue, as its starting point is to examine what scientific research has to say about Yoga. It does not treat Yoga itself as a domain of science or scientific research, but rather works on the implied principle that the two belong in distinct sets.

In fact, for close to two centuries, a large number of western scholars have made an attempt to study and understand Yoga. They have even got initiated into the practice of one tradition or the other. They believed that there is some knowledge in these traditions that might be useful for human beings. In the process of studying these traditions, because of their cultural experience (western), they have built a story that is not really productive to understand these traditions. They thought that there is a Classical and Modern Yoga, they thought Yoga is spiritual, it is some kind of Esoteric knowledge, they thought it is mysticism, cult and so on. They studied the Vedantic view of Yoga and whatnot. Even today, they have been putting a lot of effort into understanding Indian religions and Yoga.

What did Indians do at this point? People who practised Yoga continued to practice and benefited from that knowledge. Others kept on parroting what the Westerners have said. Today the standard story on Yoga is the Christian understanding of Yoga. To illustrate this fact, take the case of today’s Yoga teachers in India. If you ask them to talk about Yoga, they talk about Yama, Niyama and many other things as principles of Yogic Sciences. Once, one of the European doctoral students visited a Yoga centre in Bangalore to conduct interviews with Yoga practitioners. He asked them questions about Yama, Niyama and most of them had no clue on what these concepts are. These are supposed to be the best Yoga practitioners in the best sense of the term. Some of them even responded by saying Yama is the god of death and he has nothing to do with Yoga; Niyama are set of rules that we follow on how to meditate and how to properly do Aasanas. The teacher who taught them Yoga for years, did not find it important to teach them these so-called principles, and rightly so. She herself had very little clue on what these things were. This striking story should tell us something about how Indians and westerners look at these traditions today.

As S. N. Balagangadhara’s work has shown, Indian traditions are primarily ‘performative’ traditions. In these traditions, the primary learning process involves learning by doing and the theoretical learning is subordinated to practical learning. Once one starts understanding these traditions this way, one will realise, Yama, Niyama or any other conception that is being described in the textual traditions is the experience that one would gain by learning through these practices. They are not doctrines, philosophies or principles of any kind. In fact, the claim of these traditions would be that if one undergoes this kind of learning, and becomes a Yogi, one should get all these experiences.

But, when Europeans studied these traditions, they were trying to understand these traditions through their cultural experiences. Therefore, they endlessly searched for Principles, Doctrines, Mysticism and whatnot. But these stories eventually became the authentic source for describing Indian traditions and, as a consequence, today everybody wants to search for what has already been dug out by their European predecessors. In other words, at work is a massive exercise in petitio principii that Balagangadhara describes as inherent to colonial consciousness wherein one begins with the European story as the premise and ends up proving the conclusion that they have already derived about India.

After this rather general sketch, it looks like Hindus are engaging in acts of absurdity. Rather than going down the cul-de-sac of identity politics exemplified in the Yoga-is-Hindu movement they should better spend their time thinking through what exactly they are talking about when they discuss Yoga, what type of knowledge the tradition is offering the world, and indeed what makes it a form of knowledge. If Hindus take the fact that Yoga is human knowledge, then their challenge is to show what kind of knowledge it is and then develop scientific theories about it in the 21st-century language. This would enable them to reinvigorate these traditions, realise their tremendous potential to help human beings, and also help people to nurture these practicing traditions.

However, it appears that the Yoga-is-Hindu school do not take Yoga as knowledge. To illustrate this fact, consider the case of natural sciences as knowledge. If someone wants to talk about Physics and Biology seriously, one would expect them to possess domain expertise. Our high school textbook understanding would not be sufficient for us to really make claims about quantum physics or oncology. Most people who claim that they are defending Yoga do not seem to possess that domain expertise. When we talk of science and technology we seem to recognise that we need to have some qualifications to talk about them, whereas in the case of Yoga it appears that, anybody seems to possess domain expertise. However, from the kind of claims they make, it is evident that they do not seem to believe that Yoga is some kind of knowledge. One can be sympathetic to the concerns of the inheritors of the traditions that they are unhappy with the way scholars talk about Yoga or distort it. But even these people have become prey to the European stories about their own traditions and they respond to the serious challenges posed to these traditions without investing much effort intellectually by claiming that they have the Adhikara or they are insiders without showing what kind of knowledge that these traditions possess.

This is not the only problem they have. They seem to have gone further and taken the European story of Hinduism as a religion seriously and in India coupled it with this deadly poison called nationalism, whereas in the West they have started to play with the sister notion of identity politics. As a consequence, they are not only parroting the European stories in an absurd fashion but are also are ensuring that Indians are going to be deprived of access to their experiential world with the massive growth and grip of what Balagangadhara calls colonial consciousness. What these Hindu groups must do if they really want to make their forefathers (Pitru) happy is to stop quoting shlokas to prove some principle or the other of Hinduism and try to do some serious thinking and scientific research in order to make the vast wealth of knowledge available in Indian traditions accessible to the entire humanity.

“The Heathen in his Blindness”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion.

S.N. Balagangadhara 2^nd ed.

Manohar, New Delhi, 2005 (1994), pp. xii + 503, Rs. 595.00

Reconceptualizing India Studies

S.N. Balagangadhara

Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. ix + 270, Rs. 750.00

Balagangadhara’s primary target is the unpacking of the ‘how’ of knowledge production consequent to the interaction between India and the West over the last few centuries. However, the range and implications of his work are far wider and yet hardly exploited for their potential. Much of The Heathen and Reconceptualizing, as well as his other writing, are devoted to uncovering how the West produces knowledge of the world in general and about India in particular. This has disappointed those who have not understood his work or prematurely expected to find more knowledge about India. My own exposure to its reception indicates that Western scholars, outside of his own research programme at the University of Ghent, in Belgium, and a group of committed researchers in India, have almost unanimously side-stepped his work, even if they pretend to have a passing acquaintance with it. It may well be the case, as Balagangadhara himself indicates in Reconceptualizing, that India is where most of the energy required to extend the programme will be found and, indeed, that it is Asian scholars who will be asking new questions about human beings in the coming century.

Balagangadhara is unapologetic about dissecting how the West experiences the world. His argument is that this task is necessary in order to clear the ground before the contribution of Indian culture can be assessed. It is made necessary because, over the last few hundred years, systems of knowledge worldwide, certainly in academic contexts, have been dominated by questions that Europe has asked of itself and about the rest of the world. This particular way of asking questions means that academia has not asked questions in other ways. The conditions for this way of inquiring about the world are shaped and constrained by the Western culture. Such constrained inquiring has spread worldwide, with intellectuals from other parts of the world having adopted a way of asking questions the West considers appropriate. Whether adopted by Western or non-Western intellectuals, who parasitically formulate problems according to it, that way is tied to Western culture. So, for example, questions asked about India, by both Western and Indian intellectuals, are framed by how the Western culture looks at the world. Only if that process is understood, by first generating theories about Western culture, can the ground be cleared to discover how Indians could ask different questions about the world, thus leading to an understanding of what Indian culture is and what its contribution to the world may be. Balagangadhara’s work explicitly notices and establishes how little we have understood Western culture. Just because Indians speak a Western language does not mean that they understand what Western culture is.

A central part of Balagangadhara’s research programme, reflected in the books under review, is devoted to developing how a comparative science of cultures can be conceived of. For him, a culture is how a particular social group, as it goes about in the world, generates a process of learning as well as a process of learning to learn (meta-learning). While other such processes may be present in a particular culture, what distinguishes and gives shape to a culture are the ways of learning and meta-learning that dominate and crystallise to structure its way of going about in the world. Conversely, these learning processes dovetail into teaching processes so that they can be transmitted to future generations. The structuring of processes of learning and teaching, leading to configurations of learning, occurs and stabilizes over a period of centuries, and cultural differences are tied to these configurations of learning. As The Heathen discusses, for the West, religion lends structure to its way of going about in the world. Religion generates the dominance of theoretical knowledge and it creates a way of going-about predominantly guided by knowing-about. For Indian culture, ritual lends identity to its configuration of learning, this culture imparts practical knowledge, and performative knowledge dominates there.

In Reconceptualizing, Balagangadhara defends the use of ‘culture’ in the sense of a configuration of learning for a comparative science of cultures. In doing so, he dismisses some standard objections to its use as articulated in anthropological theorizing, and he enables us to see how a derivative instance of it proves useful. Elaborating on what it means to be ‘cultural’, he shows how this adjectival use allows us to individuate culture when considering how a person uses the resources of his socialization. Important for comparative studies is Balagangadhara’s question regarding the work that cultural differences do. In other words: what kind of difference is cultural difference and what difference does it make? “Some difference between individuals is a cultural difference if it entails a specific way of using the resources of socialization.” This deceptively simple formulation carries enormous potential because it allows Balagangadhara to isolate what is a cultural as opposed to a psychological or social difference in any set of anthropological accounts. In Reconceptualizing, this provides the opening for Balagangadhara to embark on a series of case studies evaluating how the encounter between Western and Indian cultures tells us something important about both.

Produced nearly two decades earlier, The Heathen is a sustained meditation on the same question but studied through the problem of religion and, specifically, the claim that religion is a cultural universal. The Heathen furnishes a major set of insights, yet to be exploited by the academic world. That should not be that surprising, considering that Balagangadhara has sustained a research programme despite the context of Western dominance, with its in-built proclivities for dismissing certain kinds of questions as being unimportant. Yet Balagangadhara has identified key components of Western culture through his study of religion and has been able to demonstrate their importance in structuring the Western experience of the world. The Heathen is where we find the basis of the argument that there is a discontinuity of epistemology between Western and the pagan settings of Greece, Rome and India. It is the kind of epistemological discontinuity that depends on very different configurations of learning. In The Heathen we find an explanation for why accounts generated about other cultures by the West cannot provide a factual description of those cultures. This is also where we find substantiated why Western culture finds it necessary to think of other cultures as being its variants. This is where we find the basis for the claim that India is a corrupt culture, which is where the variation bites. All themes find further elaboration and deepening in Reconceptualizing.

The key is religion. Religion is an explanatory intelligible account of itself and the cosmos. As such religion fuses a causal and an intentional account. The reason why the universe came about is because God intended it to be so. The reason why religion came about lies in the same source: God’s intention. Judaism, Christianity and Islam share such a claim, which is why they are the only instances of religion we have. They are also the best instance of what a worldview is; it seems that only religions have worldviews. Multiple things follow from Balagangadhara’s identification of the West as a culture constituted by religion. Having religion means that other cultures are also seen as having rival religions, whether or not they have religion at all. It is the fulfilment of a theological claim in Christianity that all cultures have religion. As the West explored, colonized and expanded, religions were found elsewhere. This did not depend on empirical investigation; Westerners found what they already expected to find. The dominant configuration of learning to which religion gave rise led to the suppression of contrary evidence. No society was permitted to be without religion, although different kinds of religion could be admitted. When Westerners accumulated evidence about India, the heathenism their theology spoke of Indians practising was further developed into the different religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. This claim has now been secularized because this is also what the social sciences tell us today about India. Theological claims have become the ‘facts’ of contemporary theories.

In this way religions were ‘constructed’ in India and other parts of the pagan world. But what is the ontological status of such constructions? This is where we can start to unpack the epistemological discontinuities between the West and pagan cultures. If members of one culture consistently claim that another culture has religion, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, does that give rise to the existence of religions in that culture? Prior to contact with the Semitic religions, Indian culture possessed neither explanatory intelligible accounts nor worldviews. The multiplicity and inconsistency of stories of ‘creation’ in Indian culture is testament to that. How does the experience of one culture, the West, which says that another culture, the Indian, which the former experiences as having religion somehow endow Indians with religion? Balagangadhara tackles this basic problem by showing that while the West must experience other cultures as having religion, because that is entailed by how the West structures its experience of them, it does not follow that those cultures are somehow endowed with it. He saves our experience of Asian cultures as having religion by showing why we need to think that, even though it is not so. This is fatal to the claims of those who proclaim the existence of Hinduism. It also undermines the claim of those who might accept that there was nothing like Hinduism prior to colonialism, but still insist that there is something like that now. Those Indians and Westerners who say that Hinduism always existed, perhaps in the form of dharma, have a problem because they need to show how dharma is identical to an entity imagined by the West. These claims about Hinduism are hallucinatory because they require that the imagination of one culture have the effect of constituting religion in another. Many Indians, including those in the diaspora today, talk as though Hinduism exists and is a religion, but they do not know what this means to Westerners.

Constructing religions in Asia is merely a part of what Orientalism is. As Balagangadhara elaborates in Reconceptualizing, Orientalism is the structuring in the experience of one culture, the West, of the Orient, which is the experiential entity. As such, while it may be full of rich and elaborate accounts, it is also an imaginative and structuring exercise on the part of the West. It tells us something about how the Western culture structures its experience. This is how Balagangadhara offers a re-reading of Said’s Orientalism, observing that Said provides an Archimedean point from which to reorient the way the world appears to a former colonial because it makes the familiar unfamiliar. It forces us to reckon with the realization that Orientalist accounts do not provide a factual description of Oriental societies and cultures at all, but a representation of how the West brings together certain phenomena, according to how it structures its experience of the world. Just as the Western accounts brought unrelated items and put them together to constitute something now known as Hinduism, so the West has performed a similar operation with so many other dimensions of knowledge. Differing from Said, however, Balagangadhara argues that the social sciences as currently practiced cannot correct Orientalism by the furnishing of new evidence as they are completely tied to Orientalism, just as Orientalism is supported by the social sciences. It cannot be corrected by adducing factual evidence because the basis of its structuring enterprise lies elsewhere. Decorating Orientalism more elaborately does not disrupt its basic structure. According to the same logic, doing better studies of Hinduism will not disrupt the imaginative entity that it is; they will simply decorate it.

An important dimension of this structuring process takes us back to the religion that Christianity is. It lends identity to the Western culture and acts as its root model of order. The explanatory intelligible account which religion is acts as the model of learning and thus teaches that humans are intentional beings and that beliefs lie behind human practices. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara locates this manoeuvre in Christianity’s early encounter with the Roman pagan milieu in which it found itself, when it had to defend itself against pagan criticism. Christianity, it was said, was novel, and not like the ancestral practices of the pagan traditions, which went back to the ancient past. Christians responded by claiming that their doctrines were ancient, representing a move by religion against tradition which has played a crucial role ever since. In so defending themselves, Christians had completely transformed the pagan question regarding tradition. The pagans argued on the basis of the antiquity of their practices. Christians took a stand on the antiquity of their doctrines on which, they claimed, their practices were based. The reference for religio, which for pagans was traditio, was thereby transformed by Christians. Belief and doctrine dominates, explains and justifies practices, a way of knowing about human beings that expanded and became rooted as Christianity did.

It is important to observe here that religion requires practices to be justified, founded and defended by reference to doctrines. The ancient pagan traditions and the Indian traditions that Christians encountered did not justify or ground practices in that way. Behind their traditions lay ancestral practices. They were part of ordinary human knowledge passed on from generation to generation, naturally changing in the process. This could refer to knowledge of a slice of the world. They did not claim the kind of knowledge that religion did, which was not ordinary human knowledge at all, but the truth revealed by God. Because it presented itself as God’s revelation, religion could also claim to possess an all-encompassing view of the world, rather than partial knowledge of slices of the world. When cultures that have religion speak of human practices they refer to something different from those who do not have religion. Again, there is a discontinuity. Given that descriptions about human practices are framed around the configuration of learning of a religious culture, an asymmetrical relationship between Western and Indian cultures arises. The Heathen goes on to show that when Christians encountered India, they also sought foundations for Indian practices in their doctrines. They sought out the content of Indian beliefs in their scriptures. A study of these lay behind the identification of the different religions, which sprang out of the earlier framework which had merely told of the heathenism and rank idolatry of the Indians. Paying attention to the scriptures allowed the identification of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism as distinct, albeit false religions. Hinduism in particular became identified as the false religion of India. Brahmins got identified as the ‘priests’ of this religion. They kept people in ignorance of the true religion, which the Indians once had. Christian theology had said that all peoples were given the revelation; the Vedas were the Indian version. Brahmins corrupted it by fooling people into following idolatrous practices. These involved worshipping Satan and his minions, the false gods of Hinduism. Not worshipping the true God, but the devil, is what made Hinduism a false religion.

Christians also had another problem with the Brahmins. Hinduism was a corrupt religion and the Brahmins, its false priests. They were also identified as preventing people from converting to Christianity. The caste system, believed to have been instituted by the Brahmins, was part of the problem. That system only served to underline the corruption of Indian society and culture, even though this corruption was not to do with any socio-economic assessment of caste, which was never made. To be sure India has jatis until today. However, as indicated in Reconceptualizing, it remains a mystery what made the caste system into a system and what kept such a system in place. Alongside these mysteries, however, there is also the conviction in the West, and shared by many an Indian since the colonial period, that such a thing as the caste system exists, it is an evil, and it underlies the corrupt social structure of Indian society, such that the immoral practice of caste discrimination is made obligatory. From this framework sprang explanations of the necessity of Buddhism, which was a protest against Hinduism and its caste system. In The Heathen, Balagangadhara shows how this could not have been the case as dialogues attributed to the Buddha concerning the nature of Brahminhood point to how ‘caste’ was presupposed in them as part of the background framework. Still the version of Buddhism as a protest movement is the frame according to which it is widely understood. This applies equally to the various bhakti movements, which tend to be viewed as protest movements against ‘Brahmanism’ of one sort or another. This again underscores how accounts infused with Christian theological assumptions have gained widespread currency in the social sciences and elsewhere.

At various points so far, we have had occasion to notice that much of the Orientalist account of Indian society was and is accepted by Indians. This is often proclaimed as evidence of the continuity between Western and Indian cultures. There is no rupture of understanding and, where the Orientalist or colonial accounts have been wrong, as post-colonial scholars tend to claim, facts need to be supplied to correct them. However, we have also noticed that theological assumptions are part and parcel of Orientalism as well as theorizing in the social sciences. The Christian-Orientalist story about non-Western cultures on its own was never actually convincing on cognitive grounds. For instance, both The Heathen and Reconceptualizing show how Christian accounts of Indian society were often resisted by Indian interlocutors who argued, from within their framework, that it was not necessary for them to accept the Christian story or to convert. That religion suited Westerners just as the Indian traditions suited Indians. At some point, however, the Christian-Orientalist account did become acceptable to Indian intellectuals. They accepted the terms on which Westerners described their societies, including accounts of its backwardness, its corruption, its deficient religions, its caste system, and so on. This phenomenon extends to intellectuals of independent India. How can we explain this? 

To do so, Balagangadhara deploys the concept of ‘colonial consciousness’ in Reconceptualizing. This refers to the effect of colonialism upon the colonized. He shows that colonialism is not just a political and economic enterprise, but also an educational project. Colonialism forces the colonized to accept the Western experience of his culture as his own. It is not convincing on rational or cognitive grounds, so the Western experience is made acceptable to the colonized by force or violence. This is why the colonial project is an educational project and why it succeeds to the extent that it survives formal decolonization. The colonial regime’s attempted substitution of the colonizer’s experience for that of the colonized, using violence, also makes it an immoral project. However, although the colonized accepts the colonizer’s experience as his own, neither his own experience of the world nor that of the colonizer is truly accessible to him. Both the Indian and Western cultures are alien to him. Balagangadhara exhorts Indians to first accept the fact of being colonized in this sense rather than jumping to ‘explain’, in distorted ways, the nature of Indian culture. Indians have to mount a critique of colonial consciousness before they can move to the next level. Simply mimicking the West, as post-colonials might argue for, is also immoral because it accepts, justifies and celebrates what the colonizer said: that the colonized is untrustworthy. Mimicry merely underwrites the inauthenticity of the colonized.

The asymmetrical relationship between the Indian and Western cultures, already noted, is concretized further in Reconceptualizing through a series of case studies from contemporary descriptions of Indian culture. These accounts also speak of dialogues in the context of asymmetry and violence. The kinds of violence spoken of are exemplified in the psychoanalytical accounts given in books by American academics, Courtright on Ganesha and Kripal on Ramakrishna. The violence ascribed to such books is considered psychic in nature because it surfaces in dialogical moves within asymmetrical conditions. On the surface, the accounts provided by the writers portray their subjects as exhibiting some sort of repressed sexuality. It also provokes reactions in terms of threats of or actual violence and criticism, not only on the part of Hindutvavadins. They feel there is something wrong in the accounts provided by the authors but are, at the same time, forced into a position of having to come up with rival theories to account for why the authors are wrong to write in the way they do. That Courtright’s and Kripal’s accounts of their subjects are based on the ad hoc attribution of certain psychological states is easily demonstrated by Balagangadhara. But he goes further to explain why the kind of dialogical moves they engage in silence Hindus even as they are provoked into outrage. He shows that the argumentation involves a number of moves that also prove why the burden on the Hindus is asymmetrical. The authors attribute implicit premises to the Hindus; these attributed premises are transformed into explanatory schemes of which the scholar assumes the truth; the explanations also place the phenomena discussed within a structure; the Hindus are logically compelled to defend the moves by the scholars. In such dialogical manoeuvres lie a number of unproven assumptions of which the protagonist does not have to demonstrate the truth, thus underwriting the skewed nature of the dialogue. Yet the Hindus are forced to take a pre-dialogical position by having to take stand on the explanatory adequacy of the psychoanalytical theories. In such contexts, dialogues may not be antidotes to violence; in asymmetrical situations, they may actually provoke it.

The constraints of a review do not allow the sharing of much more in the contents of both books. Balagangadhara discusses the twin dynamic of Christianity of proselytization and secularization; how the West remains a religious culture; how the secular state may provoke religious conflict in a predominantly pagan milieu like India; how Indians lack normative thinking; and how the criterion of reasonableness in normative political theory is only accessible to those who share a common Western history. The Heathen tells us how a comparative science of cultures would look like by plotting the differences between the Western and an Asian culture, the Indian. Reconceptualizing takes that agenda further through a number of contemporary problems on which further light is shed when they are recast as part of a larger comparative science of cultures. The promise of the first is partly fulfilled in the second, although much more clearly remains to be done. The books under review should constitute a serious challenge, but they are also an inspiration. One hopes that Asian scholars are listening.

The Brahmin has become a hate figure in contemporary times. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey held up a poster in November 2018 that said ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’. More recently, on June 24^th 2020, Priyamvada Gopal, professor at Cambridge University’s Faculty of English, tweeted: ‘I’m from a Brahmin family. That makes me a Brahmin. I will say this too then, since Brahmins are the whites of India. Brahmin lives don’t matter—not as *Brahmin& lives. Abolish Brahmins and the upper castes.’ That tweet was followed by another on the same morning: ‘For those at the back: I’m a Brahmin. My Brahmin life does not matter/ Abolish Brahmin-ness.’ Gopal has continued in a similar vein in subsequent tweets.

Gopal’s tweets came at a time when racial justice is high on the agenda, in the Anglosphere at any rate. Suddenly, an ultra-consciousness appears to have taken hold of British institutions to do everything possible to eliminate racial injustice. No stone can be unturned, from statues of prominent figures to syllabi. Everything must be reviewed. Children and students must be made super-sensitive to race and they must reprimand their elders for racism, which now appears manifest in all they hold dear. A cultural revolution is at play, in the interstices of whose new disciplinarian correctness one must learn to survive. 

What has race to do with Brahmins and with upper castes though? Isn’t racial injustice a problem that the Western world is having to deal with as against those other, non-white people, especially those who are in but not of the West, the historical and current targets of racial prejudices?

Race as a salient difference for the western culture

The West has turned out to be a remarkably race-conscious culture. Race is a salient difference that matters in the Western world. People are thought of as belonging to racial groups and such differences have often conditioned how those people are treated. Such differences have mattered in how people are thought about and how policies and laws have been made for them. In the most neutral manner, it is possible to say that the West is a racist culture. In this culture, racism is a problem, but its putative solutions are also racist in as much as they are premised on an ontology of races.

The races according to which different groups of people came to be and are classified, appear parasitic on this underlying racism. That is not to suggest that such classifications have been stable across time or are unchanging. Far from it. At one time, people of different religions may well have borne a racial classification. Racial markers could suggest what nation one was part of. Skin colour has played an important role and continues to. The word ‘race’ has thus had to bear the burden of notions derived from different axes. This points to the instability of the conception of race. It also tells us how Western culture has maintained the salience of race but changed its mind about its relevant content, with different axial threads either succeeding one another as dominant, or concurrently running alongside one another. Racism is effectively the West’s way of working out what differences there are among people. It varies, but with continuities and overlaps.

The sphere of race studies does not answer to scientific criteria. Although there are many contenders, there is no theory of race or racism as such. It is not as though one has a theory that can be tested against facts or become falsified and thereby abandoned. Many incompatible claims can circulate simultaneously. In this sense, it shares the same problems as the social sciences generally. That is why race-talk almost always appears ideological. 

These features probably account for why one can keep adding to races, ideas of racism, who or what a race is, the criteria for being a race, and the various classifications of race. ‘Coloured people’ isn’t a term one should use, but ‘people of colour’ is fine, although it is also racist. In Britain’s now superseded Race Relations Act 1976, racial grounds meant any of the following: colour, race, nationality or ethnic and national origins. There was an attempt to have its successor, the Equality Act 2010, make caste ‘an aspect of race’. The result has been effectively achieved with the British judiciary accepting the principle that caste discrimination could amount to race discrimination. The reverse is possible, too. So, Isabel Wilkerson says in The New York Times (July 1^st, 2020): ‘In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy for caste.’ Caste has been an American thing all along. Who knew?

One can also racialise people, so racialisation is a thing. Muslims are racialised, it is claimed, and are, therefore, like other races. Racism can also be systemic, structural or institutional. A whole society or country can be racist (though this is different from saying that race is a salient difference in a particular culture). In this way, one can keep adding and changing according to specific commitments and agenda. All the while, this swirl within Western culture seems to make sense, even when it may be parochial, a select discourse among a few people, sometimes within a small academic community, or only within a particular country. For instance, in his book Race Politics in Britain and France, Erik Bleich shows how laws against racism in France address quite differently conceptualised problems from their British counterparts and do so in a different way. 

Frank Füredi has explained (in his The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race) how the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1965 was proposed and promoted for accession by Anglo-American countries, which were then fighting a battle to contain the challenge to the white supremacy inherent to European imperialism and to homegrown segregation in the US. That is how they latched onto the defensive philosophy of race relations. From 1965 to 2000, relevant British laws bore the title, Race Relations Acts. 

However, race picks out a difference to which others in the world do not have access. Last year, this author read some of the contemporaneous UN archives of the 1960s held in the library in Geneva. They reveal something remarkable. While some Western countries could describe their problems with confidence, and how they were already addressing them or intended to, something very basic was missing in the response of many non-Western countries. They often stated that they had no problem of racism and did not, therefore, intend to take any measures.

The representatives of some countries expressed the conviction that the Convention dealt with problems of Western countries and not theirs. The League of Arab States sent a letter to the UN’s Division of Human Rights, stating: ‘Racial discrimination issue, in any of its aspects and forms, is basically non-existent in the Arab society as an internal problem.’ The Ethiopian representative sent a similar message. Rather than reading these responses as some sort of disingenuous denial of racism, we can find a deeper lesson in them about how race is not a salient difference in the cognitive world of the non-West. This fleshes out an insight already shared by Ghent University’s SN Balagangadhara that differences among human beings are viewed differently in different cultures. The differences salient to each culture are different. Race is the West’s culturally specific way of expressing one difference among human beings. It tells us about the West and not about other cultures. 

Brahmins, the caste system and race

What has all this to do with Brahmins? From the messages from Twitter’s CEO and Gopal’s tweets, it looks as though a Brahmin, whatever the term has referred to in India, is the last thing someone might want to be. Gopal advocates the abolition of her own class. Dorsey wants it smashed. A Brahmin cuts a detestable figure. But it was not always thus and certainly never has been for everybody. Karl Marx, writing from London for the New-York Daily Tribune, compared Brahmins to the ancient Greeks. No doubt, that was meant as a favourable comparison given the high regard in which ancient Greek culture was held in mid-19th century Europe, even if Marx did not stop there and went on to express a dim view of India’s caste system as inducing a state of vegetative passivity among India’s villagers. Ancient Greek writers themselves held a favourable view of Brahmins, whom they often described as philosophers. 

Yet, with the advent of Semitic religions in India, the Brahmin figure acquired a negative hue. The salient difference of paramount importance to both Muslims and Christians who came to India was religion. They had religion, thought others had to have it too (their doctrines had told them so after all), and saw them as rivals. After Balagangadhara’s The Heathen in His Blindness, we could say that the claim that India’s traditions are religions is a ‘category mistake’, but one made systematically by Muslims and Christians. Asian culture doesn’t have the kind of traditions that answer to religion. 

Brahmins appeared, at least to the Christians, as priests, as though a theological lexicon could account for their role in Indian culture. The Brahmin’s status as hate figure was built as an extension of the post-Reformation anti-clerical polemic in Europe directed against Catholics and Jews. While Catholics marked out Brahmins as the priests of the false Indian religion, they considered caste to be a civic, and not a religious, institution. This changed as British rule consolidated itself and Protestants gained predominance in India. By the mid-19th century, the predominant view was that there was a system of castes (the caste system), that it was a religious institution, and presided over by the priests of a degraded religion, Hinduism. Its ‘oppression’ is not based on economic class but is of a theological nature; the Brahmins’ ritual priest-craft preventing the truth of Christianity from saving Indians from a life of devil worship and an afterlife in hell. The normative force of this account wasn’t restricted to the missionaries; it had spread to the ‘secular’ European intelligentsia too.

This is the time from which the predominant conception of India and its caste system became solidified and entered the social sciences. Adjunct ideas came in to suggest that the caste system was itself a racial construct. Some saw it as a consequence of the intrusion of an Aryan race into India, subjugating the native people, imposing the priestly religion of the intruders, and subordinating them to their laws and institutions. India, therefore, must be composed of different races, one dominant and others subjugated. This is still a standard Indological story of the Indian past, albeit somewhat secularised in its updated forms. Brahmins had not only become the priests of a false religion presiding over a caste system, but that system appeared to be based on race. Anthropologist and colonial Census Commissioner, Herbert H Risley, could argue that ‘caste was the result of interactions between two racial types, a white and a black’. Only a culture where race is a salient difference could have developed a story of that kind. 

Time has passed since the incipient conceptualisations of the 19th century, and the crudity of an account like Risley’s would not be defended by scholars today. But the hold of the constructed story about India and its Brahmins hasn’t declined in power. In fact, it has become deeper and spread wider in the Indian intelligentsia. So much so that progressive Indians are compelled to propel the Brahmin as a hate figure, while any aspect of the Indian traditions deemed Brahminical can be a target of their iconoclasm. Several killings and mass emigration of Brahmins have come about in the post-Independence period, and the further cleansing of India’s Brahmins is an ever-present threat. 

Gone is the fascination and respect the ancient Greeks had for the Brahmin philosopher, as is the time when Marx’s grudging admiration was still within the realm of possibility. The British, having mapped the salient differences of another culture onto their own, with the Brahmin as hate-figure in their cognitive firmament, have extended their law on race discrimination to caste. Concerted efforts are being made to read caste into the UN’s Racial Discrimination Convention, although that is a story for another day. Post-colonialist Indians like Gopal have, in turn, tried to make their own a story of race which isn’t theirs, which only makes racists out of them. 

Gopal’s tweets on whiteness elicited a fierce response from a rightly incensed British public. However, despite complaints regarding their potentially discriminatory and criminal content, her tweets on Brahmins and upper castes have elicited no official response from Cambridge University, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, or the Office for Students. Cambridgeshire Police have decided not to conduct a criminal investigation against Gopal. That is despite the fact that discrimination and criminal offences committed on grounds of caste and religion are now part of the corpus of British law.

Prakash Shah is a Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary University of London. He was awarded a British Academy International Challenges grant during 2018-2019 which supported access to the UN archives at Geneva referred to in this article.

First published in

 
From that wide-angle lens, the farmers protests represent merely one in a longer line of ‘causes’ backed in Britain. Schools in England are now encouraging their pupils to come out in support of the protests. Correspondence from three schools, one in Slough, one in Walsall and the third in Birmingham, provides strong grounds for suspecting that it is part of a systematic campaign being carried out throughout the country by insidious interests. It remains an open question why those who run schools want their pupils to become involved in campaigns in other countries. Since they possess no knowledge of the political and social issues at stake, one can only assume their involvement is ideological.
 
The near-identical language employed by the school letters suggests that farmers across India are badly affected by the enactment of recent legislation, to the point of being deprived of their lands. Contrary evidence suggests that the reforms brought by the legislation, part of the Modi government’s economic agenda, are meant to inject greater market freedoms in the farming sector and a widening of choice for farmers to seek markets for their products or to continue under a minimum price arrangement. It is worth noting that this legislation was backed by political parties and farmers unions now opportunistically feigning opposition to it. The reforms have been brought about after wide consultations and with the prior consent of the farmers representative organisations. Evidence already points to how many farmers in India are benefitting from the higher prices they can command for their products in the open market and it is a source of great relief to many who, for generations, were caught in a vicious cycle involving declining terms of trade, exploitation by unproductive middlemen, inability to access credit, concentration on a few listed products, environmental degradation, reduction in water tables, and suicides. The prospects for the farming sector look brighter than ever.
 
In three states of India, namely, Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Madhya Pradesh there has been some opposition because of fears, among those who have hitherto benefitted from the price maintenance system, that they would no longer be able to force farmers to trade on certain fixed terms when the latter can obtain better terms on the free market. The so-called farmers protests are restricted to those whose dominant position in the fixed market is no longer tenable and comes from within only three states in India. It is worth noting that, even in these states, there is no consensus among farmers, many of whom realise that vested interests are provoking protests by spreading fake news of the effects of the reforms. Protests therefore look like a coordinated attempt to bring down the Modi government not to advance farmers’ interests.
 
The protests in India have affected the main arterial routes to India’s capital city, to the great consternation of its peaceful and tolerant population, whose patience is being tried by the self-centred manner in which a blockade on Delhi has been mounted. No reasonable government should or would allow that. Considering that, the Indian authorities have acted with remarkable forbearance and have continued to engage in discussions despite the most unreasonable demands being made upon them, including the bizarre claim that those held on terrorism related charges be released. One wonders whether the resemblance to tactics and demands adopted in protests earlier this year against the Citizenship Amendment Act, orchestrated by an odd marriage of Maoists and jihadists, is merely coincidental.
 
The provocative letters circulated in and by English schools, urging pupils be allowed to take part in protests, provide none of this detail and give the false impression that the human rights of Indian farmers are being violated. That is contrary to all information already in the public domain, although one will not get that impression glancing at the western press, which follows the opposing narrative, leaving one to wonder on what grounds they choose to depict the version they do.
 
One of the consequences that colonialism left was its depiction of Indian society as divided by rival religions. Among them, the British discovered Sikhism, to rival another discovery, Hinduism. Sikhism was given form by British writers as a revolt against the priestcraft of Hinduism, a model predicated on the Protestant revolt against Catholicism. India has no native religions though. ‘Sikhs’ were followers of just another set of Indian traditions and this is still the reality today. As colonialism consolidated, some attempted to deepen the model the British had gifted, and tried to claim orthodoxy over other traditions. A conception arose that was basically a vulgarised Christianity with its rhetoric of monotheism, catechism, holy book, and baptism, rent away from the traditions of India. While inexistent in the Indian culture, such conceptions nevertheless tend to look for hosts. It is this idea that Sikh ‘fundamentalists’ have since tried to build and impose, often with violent results. Over time, this sense of a ‘religious’ community of Sikhs has given vent to a nationalism to mimic Europe’s nationalisms, as well as birth to terrorism to realise it. The idea of Khalistan expresses this aim. Perhaps it is also relevant that Sikh identity was consolidated by the British Indian army. There is a mutual conspiracy of silence over the fact that Britain’s imperial venture was often supported by Indian soldiers dressed up as Sikhs. It is partly in this past that British admiration of Sikhism rests, even though it was something of their own making. Such admiration has immunised Britons against contemplating the prospect of dangerous and recurring trends.
 
This background is relevant because the protests taking place in Britain seem to be concentrated among Sikhs. This mirrors the pattern elsewhere in the United States and Canada. While the Khalistan sympathies have generally been rejected by Sikhs in India, and the opportunistic protests have a different configuration, in those western countries where multicultural recognition is the norm, fertile ground is found for the further development of Sikh identity politics originally generated by British colonialism in India. This reflects a changing dynamic of how Sikhs abroad relate to their ancestral traditions. These western societies tend to generate a detachment from those ancestral traditions and elevate identification with religion or ethnicity. It is little wonder that those Sikhs who are searching for an identity in these countries will tend to attach themselves to the kind of conceptualisation of a sterile Sikhism provided by the British model, with its focus on a few symbols and slogans. This goes hand in hand with a grasping for a narrative of persecution and a comprehensive distancing from the wider Indian culture.
 
In Britain, Khalistan sympathisers have been organising among Sikhs again in a hark-back to the Britain of the 1980s, which was a period of great tension between Britain and India, with a number of murders being carried out on British soil. For a while, the Khalistan project receded but has been revived recently. The de-proscription by the Cameron government in 2016 of the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF), involved in the attack on two Air India flights in 1985 (the more lethal of which took the lives of 329 people including 27 British citizens), has not helped matters. Since then, Sikh gurudwaras have come under the control of Khalistani elements represented by the Sikh Federation. It is not unusual to see Facebook profiles displaying pictures of Khalistani terrorists. There is a heightened sense of intimidation within the Sikh community which regularly spills over into the wider society. The Indian consular missions in the U.K. have come under attack on several occasions by thugs that have included Khalistanis. This places Britain in breach of the international law on the inviolability of diplomatic premises and personnel.
 
 
 
Joining the same sort of Britons who feel their own virtue is confirmed by backing ‘worthy’ causes, but who seem unable to distinguish between the language used to attract support and the unsavoury inclinations of the actors behind them, some British parliamentarians have chosen to speak in sympathy for these elements. One Coventry MP, after tweeting her support for the inappropriately named US-based Sikhs for Justice, apologised after being informed it is proscribed under India’s anti-terrorism laws. Her apology doesn’t extend to a recognition that her tweet placed her in potential breach of British anti-terrorism laws.
 
Academic colleagues have come under great pressure to conform to the Sikh Federation’s agenda, which extends to having Sikhs counted in the next census, not merely as a religion, but also as an ethnic group. Scotland has accepted the demand after threat of judicial review. The claim, which seems connected with the revived campaign for Khalistan, has not met with success in England and Wales despite three rounds of judicial review mounted by the Sikh Federation against the decision of the Office for National Statistics. One wonders where the funds to support such identity politics, that includes pursuing expensive litigation, are sourced. In one case, a female Sikh academic colleague has been bullied by an MP sympathetic to the Federation because of her criticism of its demands, such that special measures had to be introduced to protect her. Remarkably, although many cannot have been unaware of the pressures brought to bear against our female colleague, no fellow Sikh academics supported her against her intimidators. Commendably, however, her own university has taken measures to shield her.
 
An immediate and pressing problem is the way in which schools are now coming under the sway of insidious elements on the false pretext of fighting for human rights in India. The radicalisation of schoolchildren, their grooming to adopt the discourse and agenda of these elements, and their being used as shields by them, should be a cause of national concern.
 
Schools have statutory duties to inform the local authorities and the police that children are being placed under pressure to circulate letters within schools covering political issues of which they could have no comprehension. However, schools are also issuing such letters to all parents, thus spreading the material and giving it their imprimatur, which other children would find difficult to reject and which creates negative prejudices of India the minds of pupils. There are evident concerns about how parents or anybody else responsible for the children, who couldn’t possibly have drafted such letters themselves, are pushing the children to adopt their dubious agenda of untruths. Concerns arise under the children’s legislation, the law on terrorism, as well as charity law. At least one Sikh school from which letters have emerged is part of a larger network of voluntary aided faith schools, once again raising the problem of how faith schools can become vehicles for spreading divisive and false material. It may be that the schools in question should come under investigation, as have some schools that were caught promoting Islamic extremism. Here is another Trojan horse in the making.
 
The U.K. government must be presumed to be in possession of the relevant intelligence in order to take appropriate action against these insidious elements. Indo-British tensions were allowed to fester during the 1980s, and criminal elements allowed to create fear, because of the British government’s foot-dragging. Matters have once again slipped out of the British government’s control and the sooner this genie is put back into the bottle, the earlier we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Events take a turn for the worse when, in one of the protests zones, plans are made to block off another arterial road in emulation of moves elsewhere in the capital. The local residents object and tensions build up. Imams and the police try to persuade the Muslim protestors to withdraw but are attacked instead. Residents take matters into their own hands and violence erupts between the different groups. From some high-rise blocks, shots are fired at residents and the police. Some policemen and residents die as a result. In a manner reminiscent of attacks against American forces in Iraq, it is as though the events have been carefully choreographed by external agents over the weeks leading up to the city’s worst riots in living memory. Residents are physically and mentally scarred and fearful of the future. The impression conveyed in the international media is one of police brutality against students and peaceful, mostly female Muslim protestors. The British authorities are condemned by celebrity academics worldwide and the UN’s Secretary General.

Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, a book by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra tells of just such a story of violent protests and riots. But they do not take place in London. They occur in India. The story is not an imaginary dystopic vision of a future Britain but relates the chain of events that occurred from mid-December 2019 to end-February 2020 in Delhi, India’s capital city. The protests were ostensibly about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA). That legislation was designed to fast track the citizenship of those religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan already in India. It benefits just over 30,000 persons who, having completed a 5-year residence period in India, would be able to submit their application for citizenship upon the legislation coming into effect, rather waiting to meet the usually applicable 10-year requirement.

The intent of the legislation is benevolent and mirrors legislation in countries around the world in as much as it makes concessions to specific refugee groups or targets of past persecution. The legislation doesn’t treat Muslims from the three countries as presumptively persecuted but neither does it bar them from qualifying for citizenship in the usual way. In all of the three countries, where Islam is the official religion, the non-Muslim populations essentially have second class status or worse, their numbers have declined considerably over the past decades, and those that remain are exposed to a series of human rights violations that only occasionally hit the headlines, as did the Asia Bibi case. Daily acts of humiliation against non-Muslims in each country are well documented, even if considered unpalatable for polite discussion in politically correct circles. No Raoul Wallenberg has emerged to organise their exodus although some such initiative is now desperately required to rescue the remaining population who will otherwise disappear by forced conversions or by other means.

Criticism of the CAA is a clever manipulation to misrepresent its effect. Links were made to two other programmes in India – the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register for Citizens (NRC) – which are of limited application so far. These are long-standing aspects of policy supported by successive governments and not some evil design of the Modi government. Nevertheless, the suggestion that there was a plan to deprive India’s Muslims of citizenship was circulated with some success, often rebounding via international coverage of the issue. Although the authors do not address it, there may well be backstory to why the NPR and NRC programmes got falsely linked to the CAA. Ample anecdotal evidence suggests of mass influxes of irregular migrants especially from Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is widely suspected that many of these migrants have become part of Delhi’s demographic landscape given decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. The rolling out of the two programmes would have impacted these influxes and the criminal networks that sustain them.

As in our imaginary story, the manipulation to make the violent protests and rioting appear justifiable occurred not only within India but externally too in the international media and in the way prominent figures in academia and the UN Secretary General have made pronouncements criticising the Indian government for the CAA. Such narratives were given added adhesion by other measures of the central government which became prominent topics of sloganeering in Delhi. One was the ending of any ambiguity about the status of Jammu and Kashmir, thereby cutting off prospects of a Muslim-led secession of the province. The other was the Supreme Court judgement in favour of rebuilding the once-destroyed temple at Ayodhya.

The book’s three authors were part of an original five women investigation team who, in turn, are part of a much wider Group of Intellectuals and Academics (GIA). Arora is a practising lawyer while the other four are academics at Delhi University. The team had gone on an on-site investigation, talking to more than 20 people and visiting public institutions, including schools, destroyed in the affected areas. They document some of the cases of injury and loss of life by speaking to affected local residents. These accounts, together with pictures, are provided in a separate chapter which is drawn from a fact-finding report already published by the team of five.

Delhi Riots focuses in on the different stages of escalation with separate chapters for each development – from the universities, to the protest sites across Delhi, and then (after the February 2020 Delhi elections) to the events of late February that saw the worst clashes in specified areas of the city. The book’s authors relate how the manipulation regarding the CAA and other programmes became a pretext and cover for mass mobilisation of student actors and especially Muslims, instigating them to acts of incivility that, in the worst instances, led to the loss of life of fellow citizens and the policemen who had tried to bring the violence under some control. The forbearance of the police is remarkable as are their attempts to diffuse the threat of violence by enlisting the help of locally respected imams and mullahs. Such attempts at diffusion may be put down to field-level practical knowledge that police acquire over years. Only that, this time, in light of the different nature of the threat, such know how seemed obsolete.

This points to the far more eerie dimension characterising the violence as well as the events leading up to it. The suggestion is made in various parts of the book that the way in which the events unfolded during those months provides grounds for thinking that unprecedented coordination made the violence quite unlike the periodic and rather more spontaneous communal incidents. The authors further suggest that the coordination must have come from the strategic involvement of far-left organisations, termed ‘Urban Naxals’ in Indian public discourse after Vivek Agnihotri’s book of the same title. The Naxals, a Maoist group, are the largest terrorist network active in India. As Sankrant Sanu’s foreword to Delhi Riots 2020 points out, they have the dubious distinction of being the most murderous of terror groups. The term Urban Naxals isn’t arbitrary; the Maoists’ own playbook describes them as the civilian counterparts who work within Indian institutions, including academia. They are meant to support the rural cadres by providing propaganda, securing supplies and so on.

The other strategic involvement, they suggest, must have come from the jihadist network from within and outside India. It is these two main agents who appear to have coordinated by blocking off of transport routes in and out of Delhi; making material preparations for violent attacks in the affected areas; unprecedentedly placing women in the frontline of protests; securing the presence of non-locals at the protests, a finding which comes up frequently in the book; and killing security personnel brutally as though a signal was being sent to the state authorities. These suspicions in turn lead to concerns about security vulnerability, and the authors make relevant recommendations about these and others of their findings. In fact, even before the book’s release date, another Muslim riot hit India, this time in the IT capital Bengaluru. Suggestions have been made that its pattern mirrors Delhi in some respects.

Delhi Riots 2020 may have become yet another book on India’s periodic riots and its security vulnerability. Yet it has now catapulted to unanticipated fame. Bloomsbury India withdrew the book at the instigation of Bloomsbury’s UK headquarters after pressure was brought on the publisher. On the eve of the book’s launch in Delhi, the authors were told by Bloomsbury India that, while the publisher sympathised with them, they were compelled to withdraw the book. Bloomsbury’s behaviour has been put down to the persistence of British colonial attitudes. This reviewer has written to Bloomsbury UK for an explanation but hasn’t received one. The book’s subtitle may have come true, with the story it tells remaining untold. The readership reacted, however, and another publisher, Garuda Prakashan, took the book on, with over 15,000 pre-orders being received on the first day.

While this book provides a disturbing account of events in Delhi, it is of much wider significance. The authors show that conventional policing cannot deal with the recruitment of a substantial section of the population to the service of civil unrest damaging to lives and property. Their account also suggests that foreign intervention in India using criminal terrorist networks is at an advanced stage stooping to using what was meant as humanitarian legislation for refugee populations as a pretext for organised unrest and violence. If not met with a rapid and appropriate response, the perpetrators will get emboldened, and the tipping point into mass violence and civil war may not be far off. Organised criminal networks will be drawing lessons from the Delhi conflagration but so must the Indian authorities. The international community, whose members have either remained indifferent to India’s plight or colluded in spreading fake news, must also decide what they favour: flirtation with terrorism or mutual cooperation to beat it.

Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar & Prerna Malhotra is published by Garuda Prakashan, 2020, ISBN 9781942426295, xvi + 174 pp, $9.95.

Prakash Shah is a Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary, University of London.