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. 

Last week, the famous Shri Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha, remained closed for devotees when the sevayats (servitors) refused to open the gates of the temple after a tussle with the police.

The past months had seen tensions escalating between the temple’s sevayats and the Odisha government following a Supreme Court order that imposes new ‘reforms’ on the temple.

The order came in response to a petition that raised concerns about harassment by the sevayats, inadequate hygiene, encroachments, commercialised rituals, and general “deficiencies in the management of the Shrine”.

Now the devotees are witness to yet another episode in a long series of legal disputes surrounding the Sri Jagannath Temple. Ever since the government passed legislation to take control of the temple in the early 1950s, conflicts have arisen again and again between the temple administration, the sevayats, the Gajapati or ruler of Puri, and the devotees.

Naturally, this case is part of a larger story. For decades now, state bureaucracies have intervened in the ‘management’ of Hindu temples, from controlling the finances to supervising the rituals. Along the way, politicians and judges have frequently condemned the mismanagement, which they claim is rampant in temples, and used these claims to justify the ongoing expansion of government control.

There is an irony here. It is precisely those temples that saw decades of government intrusion that are also the ones that have become hotbeds of conflict and mismanagement. To find remedies for the shortcomings in temples like the Jagannath Temple, the Supreme Court issued an order in June 2018, in which it directed the Union government and the Odisha government to create committees that should study “the management schemes” of major pilgrimage centres.

These included the Tirupati temple, the Vaishno Devi temple, and the privately owned temple of Dharmasthala in Karnataka. After first creating the space for a massive government take-over, the court now advised the government to look to other sites for lessons about proper management of temples, as though the problems can be solved by compiling a list of ‘best practices’.

The point is not that no well-managed ‘public’ temples (controlled by the government) exist or that all privately managed temples are beacons of harmony. Something more important is at stake. India’s larger temples are highly complex organisations. The tasks to be performed every day are numerous. Temple premises have to be cleaned, different kinds of water need to be drawn from specific wells, puja (ritual) is to be performed multiple times. These activities require a variety of flowers and other ingredients that need to be cultivated or acquired.

In addition, cooked food along with different kinds of prasad (food offering) needs to be prepared for rituals. The large numbers of visitors to the temple and their movements have to be monitored and handled. In some temples, food needs to be served to thousands of people and there are many other big and small tasks surrounding major festivals.

So, the work of the many people involved in the functioning of the temple needs to be well-coordinated and conflicts need to be proactively resolved or kept at bay.

Now, consider the following: the Indian temple is the most ancient type of organisation sustaining with this level of complexity. It goes back thousands of years. As a form of organisation, the temple survived in extremely hostile environments over millennia. They had to withstand Islamic invaders and rulers, who saw temples as sites of false religion and devil worship. British colonial governments viewed the temples in much the same way, but also exploited them as sources of revenue. The latest assault, of course, was the government take-over after Independence.

The temples also adapted to the fast-paced societal, technological, and demographic developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hundreds of thousands of temples are thriving in today’s India and their numbers keep growing. Therefore, the Indian temple must be a highly resilient and adaptable organisation, at least as complex as a mid-sized company, to flourish under such challenging situations.

In post-Independence India, multiple state governments passed legislation that transformed ‘public’ Hindu temples into branches of state bureaucracy, which happen to deal in rituals and deities rather than, say, liquor licences or land records. In the case of the Puri temple and many others, this occurred with enthusiastic endorsement from the Supreme Court. Yet, for decades now, people have kept rediscovering that such temples have become sites of mismanagement, harassment, and commercialised rituals.

What else can be expected when pujaris are transformed by law into lower-level government servants? Predictably, they will also want their share of the revenue pie that India’s ‘public’ temples have become. The same is the case for politicians and bureaucrats sitting on the temple boards. Sadly, temples have begun to function as a means to pursue private interests.

This is precisely the kind of harm that government control of temples is unleashing. It is leading to the breakdown of the patterns of collaboration among the various groups of people involved in the temples, the very thing which allowed them to flourish for so many centuries. In this way, post-Independence India has perhaps become the most hostile environment ever faced by its temples. Leaving these institutions in the hands of state bureaucracies is a recipe for further decline.

Adding to government control of temples is the judicial intervention with regards to many traditions and rituals followed in temples. Why should people have to face these obstacles while they live in a country that claims to recognise the constitutional right to religious freedom? Should we not put an end to the unthinking political and judicial intervention that leads to disruptions in the functioning of temples and their traditions?

One of the tragedies of our times is our ignorance about the current state of affairs plaguing Hindu temples. It is time for social scientists to start figuring out how temples have worked in India, what kind of organisations they are, and what has gone wrong in the past seven decades.

We need to examine the legal grounds of the system of government control and build effective means for challenging this state of affairs in the courts. That is why a research project has been launched under the guidance of professor S N Balagangadhara, which aims to develop systematic analysis of these issues. This project will examine the legal and conceptual foundations of the state’s interference in temples, its historical origins in British colonial rule, the effects on the temples and their traditional practices, and the relation to the international legal tenets and jurisprudence about religious freedom.

To tackle the legal issues involved, it will re-examine state-level legislation about ‘Hindu religious and charitable endowments’ and the judgements of the Supreme Court and the high courts in cases related to temple management and temple entry, all from a jurisprudential point of view.

Finally, the enquiry will also focus on the Constitution of India and its articles concerning freedom of religion.

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.

This controversy shows that the secular state and its principles give enormous opportunities to create new problems.

The Hijab controversy began as a dispute between a few Muslim students and college management regarding permission to wear hijab inside the campus, which was denied on the grounds that it was against the uniform rule. Muslim girls insisted that they have their freedom to wear hijab because it is part of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Immediately, Hindu students reacted by wearing Saffron shawls on campus to assert their identity. These protests had a cascading effect and resulted in a series of protests and heated debates.  

The controversy got muddled up when different political parties entered these debates. Now the matter is under trial in the high court of Karnataka. What transpired in this debate involves multiple issues ranging from rights and law to an array of moral positions. Irrespective of which side one belongs to, the debate around the dress code on college campuses do not help anyone but  shows a bankruptcy in handling issues like this especially in educational institutions. These conversations show how shallow the nature of our reflection on serious issues like the peaceful coexistence of communities is today in India and how we are converting places of learning into places of hatred.  

To get some glimpse of what was debated in this controversy, a cursory look at the debate will be sufficient. Some have stated that wearing hijab is a fundamental right guaranteed by the constitution. Many felt that the public places like educational institutions must show neutrality towards any religion and therefore they cannot use those religious symbols in colleges. Some even argued that uniforms in campuses bring about a sense of equality and therefore allowing hijab would violate of such principles. For some the prayers, Saraswathi puja etc. on campus is evidence of schools being neither neutral spaces nor all religions being treated equally. Therefore, allowing hijab should not be a problem but, rather, a means of treating all religions equally. For some this conflict is about denial of the right to education to Muslim women as well as discrimination against minorities and is therefore a clear case of communal bigotry. If one carefully examines this debate, it appears that the principles of equality and religious neutrality in public places are at loggerheads with the principle of religious freedom, while both are important pillars of liberal secular democracy. 

During this debate, many thinkers were worried about the fate of the students and what they will learn and carry along with them in such an environment. Today, students are provoked to show off their identities. On the contrary, these campuses are expected to nurture an attitude of valuing diversity and peaceful coexistence. But these controversies are doing the opposite of what is expected of the campuses. It is puzzling how the issue has become such a point of conflict which was not present earlier. What enabled our ancestors to deal with enormous diversity in dress, food, practices etc. for centuries? They always lived with people from different backgrounds, traditions, and religions in India without any of these conflicts. Even when such conflicts came, they had their ways of dealing with them successfully. 

During our student days, campuses were known for their diversity. Most Muslim girls did not wear hijab, even if they did, they did not bring it into to classrooms and rarely some wore it in the class. Even when someone wore a hijab or burqa none of us identified it with any serious problem. In the same manner some of the boys used to wear dhoti and shawl on certain occasions, while a few used to have shikha on their head. Almost all of us shared this school upbringing. Campuses were filled with a lot of humour regarding attire and although students used to make fun of each other it hardly led to any kind of tension. There was freedom to wear what they wanted to. There was ease among the students to change these dresses to suit the occasion. The hijab or burqa was not very different from any other person wearing a turban, saree or shawl or dhoti. There was no problem in these people attending Saraswathi puja or attending a Muharram procession which used to pass through school campuses. In all these cases, the idea of the hijab or burqa as a religious symbol was neither known to us nor to even many Muslim students. Just as there were many other jaati groups, Muslims were also seen as yet another group. Even though we learnt about religions in secondary school, that did not make any difference to our lives. Just as different groups exist and have different ways of going about this world, Muslims became one of those different groups and it was the same for most Muslim students, with whom we continue to share same affectionate friendship. 

The idea that some dress is a symbol of some religion was almost non-existing amongst student communities. There was an “indifference” to different ways of being in this world. The question of tolerance or respect was never raised, but all of us thought that different people have different ways of being in this world, and each has their ways of being in this world. Neither Muslim students and their parents saw us as ‘Kafirs’ nor did we see them as enemies. Muslims existed like any other community/jaati and many of the Muslims still exist in the same manner (except for some intellectuals and activists). Though there could be local conflicts, they were never major problems till the 1990s.  

This should not be mistaken for a preachy story of peace or harmony in the service of national integration. It is about what we experienced as part of Indian traditions, and how we were brought up. We did not see the dress as an expression of religious identity. The way Kodava, Gujarati or a Bengali woman draping saree in her own way, Muslims wore some dress. It was part of our milieu to deal with the differences with an attitude of indifference. The hijab or burqa was seen in the same manner. But this did not mean that we tolerated somebody wearing a particular dress because of the principle of toleration which assumes that one has a problem with something and yet tolerates it because of a principle. It was not even a question of mutual respect or disrespect. As Indians we had and even now continue to have a kind of indifference to differences, and this has been a hallmark of our co-existence. The tendency of Indian culture has been to accept and live with differences.

But today things seem to have taken a different shape, maybe because of various political reasons, the differences are highlighted as symbols of identities. Earlier even most Muslims in India did not think that hijab was the symbol of their religious identity either. But now they have been made conscious of such an identity and this controversy only adds to this kind of awareness. Similarly, many of the groups who do not have any such symbols have begun to engage in such symbolism and affirming different symbols of identities. As a result of affirming these new identities there has been growing intolerance in India amongst the educated population. Today we are witnessing that the feature of indifference which had made co-existence possible in a very healthy manner, is fast vanishing. The politics around identities which are linked with the language of rights, constitution, freedom etc. seems to be provoking a deeper conflict rather than solving the issue at the local level. So, where is the problem arising from? 

The problem seems to emanate from the structures and ideas that evolved during colonial rule of India and the same continued with the secular state. The secular state with its structure emerged in certain historical situations in Europe, and it is fundamentally a product of dynamics within Christianity and its secularisation in Europe. These theological ideas and institutions in its secularised form were then sold as the only option to save this world and all of us bought it as panacea to the problems of humanity. If we look at the debate around the hijab controversy, it is very clear that the entire controversy has emerged because of the possibilities that law allows us to think. The legal system in our part of the world, instead of solving problems of the society, creates more opportunities to create new problems. 

If one looks at the history of educational institutions in Karnataka, Muslims, Hindus and Christians studied in all private institutions where management had people from all these groups. In all these colleges different people studied and followed the rules of these institutions without much problem. At times when there were some minor disputes, they resolved it by talking to each other. We had not witnessed any such controversy of this kind earlier.

If one looks at why there is a conflict now, which did not appear earlier, one will start finding the answers. Many intellectuals who claim themselves to be secular, along with some of the Muslim organisations have been training students to assert their rights. Though such attempts were never successful earlier, recent attempts by some scholars backed by different political outfits have been successful in fuelling such controversy now. This has been main goal of certain Muslim groups since the colonial period, that is bring all the Muslims under Sharia and Islamic way by dissociating with the local practices. For these attempts Hindu groups reacted by picking up the language of rights and law and used the saffron as their identity marker. Saffron, the colour of Rishis, is associated with knowledge and the kind of change that they brought in the world. Such a colour is reduced to a religious symbol. All the parties in these debates are employing the language of modern politics. Saffron today is pitted against Hijab and Muslims. They invoke ideas like liberal democracy, secular state, law, rights, religious freedom and so on. Instead of thinking about how this language itself generates the problem, as it has been well formulated in the works of S N Balagangadhara, people are using these languages to solve some problems. They are unable to recognise that these problems themselves are products of entry of secular state in a non-religious culture. Once we start building our conversations within the language of modern politics to talk about ourselves be it Muslims or Hindus, then we will have initiated a process of creating new problems and look for solutions that are already provided by these structures like law. 

Finally, by looking at this controversy one is tempted to think what are we up to? Today, we are in the process of making our future generation learn religious symbols, create conflicts and start deciding relationships based on religious identities. This allows different Muslim fanatic organisations to push the large Muslim population to follow a particular kind of Islam that they propose. This will result in Hindu and other groups asserting their identities. Muslim population will be pushed towards aggressive Islamisation. The attitude of indifference that was carefully crafted and transmitted by our ancestors will simply disappear and we are forcing our future generation to ‘tolerate’ differences. such conflict over hijab has already happened in the courts of many of the western countries but have their solutions satisfied either side? The answer is clear no. But, in our part of the world, we have a legacy and a history of coexistence, a practical knowledge that has been transmitted to us. Our schools and colleges must be centres of learning for such values rather than transforming the living with the difference into a pain. 

This controversy shows that the secular state and its principles give enormous opportunities to create new problems. There are groups which are keen in exploiting these possibilities in the name of identity politics or in the name of asserting rights and that has become a new formula that guides present-day politics. In fact, it has become counter-productive to resolve conflicts by dissolving the indifference to difference that Indians have and then preach about peaceful coexistence. One must look at these kinds of issues with more intellectual rigour while attempting to assess what kind of conflict resolution our ancestors undertook in our past. The liberal, secular claim would deny such possibilities of explorations as shown in the works of Jakob De Roover. Therefore, we must envisage a way of living which emerges from within our culture. At this stage what we must teach our students is not the new ways of generating conflicts using the constitutional principles but a way of peaceful and happy living wherein dresses are not seen as religious symbols, but it is a kind of difference that exists in the world. We must learn from our ancestors, to teach indifference to differences. Otherwise, our campuses will be battle grounds of identity politics and this is exactly what we must not allow to happen.

The article was first published in: https://www.news9live.com/state/karnataka/hijab-row-pushing-children-to-learn-religious-symbols-decide-relationships-on-religious-identities-152907

Opposing proselytisation = Casteist   

The Hindutva movement is widely and correctly described as being anti-proselytisation. In arguments that criticise the movement for being casteist, Hindutva’s anti-proselytisation stance is used as proof of its casteist nature.

A few questions follow from the equation of being anti-proselytisation with being casteist. How does opposition to conversion = casteism? One of the answers readily available in academic and popular discourse is that conversion out of Hinduism is a means to free oneself from the shackles of the caste system. This was also what various Christian denominations in India have promised their lower caste converts for centuries. The same rationale of conversion as an escape from caste was behind the mass conversions of Dalits into Buddhism led by Dr B R Ambedkar, and the same argument is given for conversions to Islam as a protest against caste and its violent inequality. Given this link between conversion and emancipation from caste, to oppose, discourage, or disallow conversion out of Hinduism, particularly of/by lower castes, is to oppose their efforts to break free from caste oppression.

However, this premise of the communalism = casteism argument, namely, the link between conversion out of Hinduism and freedom from caste, is itself highly problematic. To begin with, there is the very long and complex discussion, right from the earliest European studies of India, about what caste is and whether it is a religious practice of the Hindus. While Orientalist discourse on India developed such that the dominant story today is that caste is a Hindu institution and has basis in Hindu scriptures, there is as yet no consensus at all on any number of important questions such as the link between Hinduism and caste, the rules and structure of the caste system, and wherefrom this “system” draws its legitimacy and authority such as to fundamentally shape the lives of India’s millions. To add to this, there is a growing body of work which argues that what we know about the “caste system in India” is result of the European experience of India, and exists in that experience only. That the caste system as it is spoken of today, is not Hindu, and does not exist in India.

Lack of clarity on caste notwithstanding, even if one is willing to accept the idea that conversion is an escape from caste, another problem arises. Caste is widely acknowledged to have become a part of Indian Islam and Indian Christianity and is seen to have been so for many centuries. As such, conversion to these religions will not and cannot be an escape from caste. Proponents for extension of reservation benefits to Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims make precisely this argument – that lower caste converts to these religions continue to face caste discrimination within their own communities and face the same oppression and lack of access to opportunity as their Hindu counterparts. The idea that conversion out of Hinduism is an escape from caste, in fact, contradicts academic and popular knowledge about caste in both Indian Islam and Indian Christianity. If we then take away the premise that conversion = freedom from caste, Hindutva’s anti-proselytisation stance no longer relates to caste and caste discrimination in any way and cannot be seen as evidence of the movement’s casteist nature. As such, the movement’s opposition to proselytization could be criticised for going against freedom of choice and freedom of religion (and even this criticism is not without complex problems), but it cannot be used to characterise Hindutva as casteist.  

The confusions and contradictions underlying the use of Hindutva’s anti-proselytisation stance as evidence for its casteism leads us to a larger, more fundamental problem, namely, that there is a pervasive confusion about caste and the caste system in academic and popular discourse. 

Confusion about caste

Caste and the caste system in India have been discussed for centuries. Early travellers, merchants, missionaries, Orientalists, colonial officials, Hindu reformists, gurus, Indian and foreign intellectuals, academics across the world, journalists, and activists have all had something to say about the “social structure” of India. To provide any meaningful overview of these discussions, much less to put forward a critique, is beyond the purview of this article and my own abilities. Nonetheless, without going into the complex history of how caste has been spoken of and written about, when we examine the conclusions of the received story about caste as they are used in discourse on the Hindutva movement, inconsistencies and gaps become visible, and it becomes evident that there are cracks in the wall. For those who would like to dive deeper into these cracks and discover the underlying structural problems, there is seminal work being done on the received story of caste and the caste system, it can be accessed here. In this article, however, I hope to illustrate simply that the cracks are there. In itself that is enough here because it alerts us to the question: If there is a fundamental confusion about caste and the caste system, how much can “Hindutva is casteist” tell us? In order then, to zoom in on one of the conclusions of the received story on caste and how it is used in discourse on Hindutva as casteist, I’d like to use an example from Ornit Shani’s Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat.

In her book, Shani situates the communal violence of the 1980s in Gujarat within a historical context spanning almost a century. Telling the history of Ahmedabad, and in lesser detail, also Gujarat, Shani touches several times on the social and economic status of an important Gujarati community, the Patels. She links the rise of the Patels to several developments: Maratha rule in Gujarat which appointed Patels as revenue collectors; land reforms enacted by the British Raj which benefitted the Patels greatly by suddenly turning them from tenants to landowners; large scale migration into Ahmedabad during the city’s industrialisation; the advent of textile mills; and finally, India’s independence and subsequent land reforms by the Indian government which further cemented land ownership of higher castes and of the Patels. Shani identifies each of these developments as an important event which changed the socio-economic position of different castes in Gujarat and particularly in Ahmedabad. As a result of these socio-economic shifts, Shani writes, “The Patel caste, shudras by Hindu law, emerged as an economic and political force, and was able to attain the savarna.” (Italics in original). In her book, Shani uses savarna as “a generic term for upper-caste Hindus (also referred to as twice-born or Caste Hindus)”.  Shani goes on to discuss the ultimate development that lead to the particular caste and communal tensions of 1980s Ahmedabad: Caste-based reservations. About the impact of caste-based reservations in Ahmedabad, Shani states;

With the growing class fissures among and between castes it gradually became apparent that the widely perceived harmony between the ‘cosmological’ Hindu order and everyday reality was breaking down. If, for example, the relatively low-status upper castes in the walled city had previously been able to justify their self-representation as middle-class, this was no longer negotiable in the context of the mid-1980s.

It is interesting to note however, that though caste-based reservations were the ultimate in a long series of developments, the Patels, shudras, as Shani points out, had already been able to “attain the savarna” decades before caste-based reservations, especially for shudras or OBC communities, were enacted. With this in mind, let us consider Shani’s reference to a “‘cosmological’ Hindu order” and her claim that post-independence events led to a breaking down of the harmony between this “order” and everyday reality.

Leading up to post-independence events, particularly reservation, were many other developments, such as change in the ruling power (Maratha rule in Gujarat), reforms by the ruling power (land reforms by the British Raj), and economic developments (the rise and fall of the textile mills in Ahmedabad). Surely, change in ruling powers, reforms, and economic development would have been a fairly recurrent feature not only of Gujarat, but also of the many other regions and polities of the Indian subcontinent. This is a reasonable assumption considering that the Indian subcontinent has a documented history going back several centuries which speaks of the rise and fall of dynasties and of the region’s importance in the global economy as a centre for trade and manufacturing. We are then bound to raise certain questions.

There have been several political and economic upheavals through the history of the Indian subcontinent. The administrative and economic changes that enabled a shudra or lower caste community such as the Patels to “attain the savarna” through economic and political success were surely not the first instances of such change. Such changes would have taken place innumerable times in the history of the subcontinent and, as indicated by the rise of the Patels, communities must have held alterable positions along the purported “hierarchy” of the caste system, and would have risen or fallen along this “hierarchy” depending on whether or not they thrived as a result of the political and economic changes taking place around them.

When communities could rise or fall in caste hierarchy by virtue of economic or political success or lack thereof, how then could any cosmological Hindu order have had a sustained, “widely perceived harmony” with everyday reality? Surely, it must have been clear all along to people in the subcontinent that there is a good amount of disharmony between the supposed “‘cosmological’ Hindu order” and everyday reality. In what contexts, then was this cosmological Hindu order remembered and considered relevant, if at all? What relation, if any, did it have to how people actually lived and interacted with each other?

Unfortunately, the possibility and impulse to raise such questions are often foreclosed by an idea pervasive in academic and popular discourse; that caste is at once remarkably rigid and remarkably flexible, allowing it to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances (2 decades of economic liberalisation and urbanisation in India is said to have eroded almost completely some of the foundational, characteristic elements of caste). What this idea indicates, in fact, is a concealed lack of clarity about caste and the caste system. Because we do not possess any significant depth of understanding about what caste and the caste system is, it becomes possible and imperative to, on the one hand, “update” its salient features and characteristics continuously, and on the other hand, go about discussing what is considered unquestionable, namely, the impact of caste: hereditary oppression and inequality. It is this lack of clarity about caste and the caste system that allows Shani and other scholars to write about developments such as Patels “attaining the savarna” through economic and political success while simultaneously referring to the enduring, and supposed arbitrary caste system based on birth, which Hindutva purportedly seeks to uphold.   

Conclusion

Focused only on arguments used to criticise Hindutva as a casteist phenomenon, one could conclude that such criticisms of the movement build a weak case for the indictment they hand down. The natural next step would be to say we need to build a stronger case by doing better, more in-depth research, by gathering more and better evidence. However, as this article has tried to point out, on one level, criticisms of the Hindutva movement as being casteist betray a blindness towards the larger reality of what is happening in India today. They feign ignorance of the social and political impact of caste-based politics in the country. But on another, more fundamental level, this discourse illustrates that while we indict the Hindutva movement of being casteist, within academia and popular discourse itself, there is no clarity whatsoever about what caste and the caste system are. When we do not know what caste and the caste system are, branding the Hindutva movement “casteist” cannot and does not further our understanding of the movement in any way. Instead by giving the impression that we have arrived at a correct diagnosis of what Hindutva is in India today, such discourse forecloses possibilities of asking better questions and ultimately of developing actual insights on the movement. Thus, the task at hand is not to find more and better ways of and reasons for saying that Hindutva is casteist, but rather, to examine how much this description actually tells us about the movement. If on examination we find it to be a dead-end, doors are open for us to head out and discover new and promising directions for the urgent, important work of understanding what the Hindutva movement is and its impact on the India of today and the future.

Acknowledgments

My sincere gratitude to Dr Prakash Shah, who has guided me through the many drafts of this article, kindly giving me so much of his time and the benefit of his expertise over the long period I took to develop this into something coherent. A big thank you also to Dr Sufiya Pathan whose sharp insights on earlier drafts of this article enabled me to tell the grain from the chaff.

The article was first published in Pragyata.com.

The labeling of the Hindutva movement as casteist leaves a lot to be desired.

Introduction

The Hindutva movement is at an unprecedented position in India today. Led by the charismatic Narendra Modi, the movement’s political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the 2014 and 2019 general elections with an absolute majority and is currently in its second term at the helm of the central government. In the patchwork-coalition politics of India, this absolute majority was a feat unseen in decades. Since 2014 the movement’s growing support base has rallied behind Modi’s government as it aggressively executes a series of controversial promises (think revocation of Kashmir’s special status, the Ram mandir (temple) in Ayodhya, and the Citizenship Amendment Act) in the face of protests and sometimes, uproar and strife across the country. In what commentators have dubbed “a struggle for the soul of India” the Hindutva movement seems to be enjoying a significant edge. This fact is not lost on its critics, and alarm bells have been ringing the world over. Articles, op-eds, reports, and academic work have poured out in criticism of the movement for decades now.

Judging by the growing heft of the Hindutva movement, these denunciations, expressions of concern, and annual reports on India’s lack of religious and journalistic freedom have not achieved much in countering the movement. Simply put, the liberal response to the rise of Hindutva doesn’t seem to be working. Perhaps for good reason. Apart from raising alarm bells, the steady rise of the Hindutva movement in India also raises some pressing questions for the movement’s critics. While the party’s sweeping electoral victories in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha (the Indian parliament’s lower house) elections show definitively that the BJP has successfully built a national following, these victories also underscore one of the most pressing and confounding anomalies facing experts and commentators on the Hindutva movement, namely, its popularity amongst Dalit and Other Backward Class (OBC) voters.

An anomaly to be addressed, a diagnosis to be re-examined 

The BJP is the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, which has played a pivotal role in the Hindu nationalist or Hindutva movement in India. The movement itself is described as, among other things, a Brahmanical, upper-caste phenomenon that seeks to consolidate Hindus into one community while still maintaining prevalent caste discrimination between different groups.

In the face of this description of the Hindutva movement and its political arm, the BJP, being upper caste and casteist, the fact that the movement has become significantly popular amongst Dalit and OBC communities is a striking anomaly. The 2014 and 2019 general election results in Uttar Pradesh offer proof. Uttar Pradesh (UP) is heralded as the state where the political power of Dalits and OBCs came into its own. It is home to regional caste-based parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP), both of whom have achieved repeated electoral success, with SP leader Mayawati being celebrated as the face Dalit political power and being projected as a possible Prime Ministerial candidate. Even so, in the 2014 and 2019 elections voters in UP, including Dalits and backward castes, swung sharply towards the BJP and away from the BSP and SP, both of which exist with the explicitly stated objective of working for the rights and upliftment of lower castes. This electoral success of the BJP, replicated across the country in both general elections, brought to fore in very concrete terms what a majority of academics and intellectuals across the world have been pointing out and expressing concern over; Hindutva has successfully won over Dalit and OBC communities. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, this raises a pressing anomaly: How can a movement criticised for being Brahmanical and casteist become the choice of those it seeks to oppress?   

Several explanations of Hindutva’s popularity amongst Dalit and OBC communities have been put across by academics, intellectuals, and commentators the world over. Most of these refer to outside factors, such as a crisis in Dalit politics, and the effect of globalisation and India’s economic liberalisation on Dalits. However, there are also one or two explanations which locate reasons for Hindutva’s popularity amongst Dalit and OBC communities within the movement itself. Interestingly, across all explanations, descriptions of Hindutva as a casteist phenomenon remain unshaken. I will argue that this is part of the reason why criticisms of the Hindutva movement have failed to make a dent; Because most descriptions of the movement are hardly insightful to begin with.

“Co-opting” Dalits and OBCs and the “true intentions” argument

Almost every discussion of Dalits, OBCs and Hindutva describe the movement as having “co-opted” these communities. Such discussions accuse the Hindutva movement of only paying lip-service to Dalit and OBC interests while in reality it is opposed to their true upliftment out of the inequality and humiliation of the caste system. The problem with this description is that it implies access to the true intentions of the Hindutva movement, and that too within a wider political and social environment where all political parties and ideological organisations say the same thing: that they condemn caste discrimination, seek to improve the lives of Dalits and OBCs, and are working for their upliftment and access to opportunity.

Common ways in which intellectuals and academics have “accessed” the “true intentions” of Hindutva are by referring to the movement’s history and by noting that almost all its leaders and important officials have been and are upper-caste. For instance in his Hindu Nationalism: A Reader Christophe Jaffrelot, refers to speeches by several people considered important to the development of the Hindutva movement in general and the Sangh Parivar in particular. Without going into the content of these speeches and what they might contrarily indicate, one can identify a basic problem with the “true intentions” argument. In India today, activists, experts, and commentators have assigned “casteist” as a tag to almost everyone and every organisation, including upper-caste intellectuals condemning caste discrimination (eg., here and here) and upper-caste leaders of anti-caste movements and organisations. When seen within this larger context, the “true intentions” argument for describing the movement as casteist only tells us that the Hindutva movement is casteist in a particular way, as are, for instance, Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party.          

With the exception of Dalits and to a lesser extent OBCs, if all those who have publicly taken a stance against caste discrimination are actually/always suspect of being casteist (which is what one would expect if one takes the received story about India and the caste system seriously), then describing the Hindutva movement as casteist by claiming access to its “true intentions” does not tell us anything about the movement except that it is par for the course in a society and culture deeply permeated by the discriminatory caste system.

In itself, this is not nearly enough to prompt a re-evaluation of descriptions of Hindutva as casteist. However, taking the “true intentions” argument seriously will compel us to conclude that at least when it comes to being casteist, far from being on an extreme end of the discriminatory spectrum, Hindutva lies alongside a majority of its staunchest ideological rivals and critics, many of whom are seen as the last hope of a secular, egalitarian India, as the last embankment against the onslaught of the very Hindutva movement, they share space with as actual/potential casteists.

Opposing caste-based reservation = Casteist  

A link commonly made in academic and popular discourse on caste is that opposition to caste-based reservation is in itself a casteist stance. One of the bases for criticisms of the BJP and Sangh Parivar is that their opposition to caste-based reservations exposes their casteism.

Without going into the explicitly stated stance of the Sangh Parivar and its many organisations on caste-based reservations, let us accept that the Sangh and the BJP have been against caste-based reservations in the past. Over the last three decades, however, things have changed. As Christophe Jaffrelot has pointed out, the political wing of the Hindutva movement has accepted the inevitability of reservations for SCs and OBCs. Given the caste-based politics of India, the BJP has actively supported caste-based reservation, at least since the 1990s. As Jaffrelot quotes, in its 1999 election manifesto the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition led by the BJP, promised that “If required, the Constitution will be amended to maintain the system of reservation [. . .] We are committed to extending the SC/ST reservation for another 10 years. Reservation-percentages above 50 per cent, as followed by certain states, shall be sanctified through necessary legislation measures.” The BJP’s acceptance of the inevitability of reservations and the resultant break from its ideological moorings (given the Sangh Parivar is against reservation), is by no means an exception.

In the caste-based politics of India, all parties and organisations operate on the basis of political expediency rather than fidelity to ideological standpoints. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, the Mayawati led BSP has often built electoral alliances with Brahmins despite its roots as a Dalit party. These Dalit-Brahmin alliances were completely contingent on the party’s “social engineering” plan, which dictated which castes it sought to woo and changed from election to election. In 2002 when the BSP ran an anti-upper-caste campaign its election slogans included the following:  Tilak, Tarazu aur Talwar, Inko maaro jutey chaar (roughly translated, it means: Brahmins, Vaishyas, and Kshatriyas, beat them with shoes). In contrast, in 2007 when the party ran a sarvajan or all-community campaign, one of its slogans was: Tilak, Tarazu aur Talwar, Inko pujo barambaar (roughly translated it means: Brahmins, Vaishyas, and Kshatriyas, to them pay your respects). In the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Mayawati again attempted to cobble together an alliance of Dalits and Brahmins. Thus, as any observer of Indian politics will know and as both the BJP’s and BSP’s political opportunism shows, ideological volte-faces are an everyday feature of Indian politics. Pretty much like its political wing has bowed to the reality of caste-based politics, sometime before 2010 the Sangh Parivar too created the Anusuchit Jati-Jamati Arakshan Bachao Parishad, which roughly translates as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Reservation Protection Assembly. There is little information available about this organisation, however, and it has not been possible to find its website online.

While the BJP repeatedly emphasises its active support for caste-based reservations, these proclamations are received by most of its critics with suspicion. The underlying assumption is that though Hindutva is wooing Dalits and OBCs, promising and pushing for reservations, is all this in good faith?

The problem with this question is, how can we tell? The Congress Party enacted several policies and decisions with the explicitly stated objective of improving the lives of Indian Muslims. Was the Congress’ pro-Muslim agenda in good faith? Ambedkarite and OBC politicians have promised time and again to work for the upliftment of all SC or OBC communities. Are these promises made in good faith? Commentators have argued that the Congress Party used the Muslim vote bank but did nothing to improve the lives of India’s Muslims. Mayawati rose to prominence as a Dalit leader but, after coming to power in Uttar Pradesh, she has been widely criticised for having focused only on the welfare of Jatavs, a sub-caste of Dalits to which Mayawati herself belongs. As a result, the BSP has become a Jatav party rather than a Dalit one. Similarly, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP), ostensibly an OBC party, brought political and economic gains almost exclusively to Yadavs during its tenures in the Uttar Pradesh government, and today the SP remains a Yadav party, unable to gain the trust of other OBC communities in that state. Thus, whether or not political parties speak or act in good faith, and why, can be a larger question about Indian politics, but to be meaningful it must go deeper than simply raising suspicions of insincerity.

The BJP may never be able to convince critics of its good faith regarding caste-based reservations, but the party has made strong statements to convince the Indian electorate about its stance on Dalit and OBC interests. After coming to power in 2014, the BJP government restarted an endeavour by its predecessor (a Congress-led government), and in 2015 it moved a bill in parliament proposing amendments to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989 (commonly referred to as the SC/ST Act). The SC/ST Act makes a range of offences coming under the rubric of caste atrocities punishable. One of the many notable changes the BJP’s amendment sought to bring to the SC/ST Act was to disallow the possibility of anticipatory bail for any person accused of committing a caste atrocity. This effectively made complaints filed by SC/ST persons sufficient grounds to immediately arrest a non-SC/ST person, who would then have little to no ability to secure bail.

The ensuing Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act 2015 was passed by Parliament, in the upper house within minutes and without debate. However, it was soon challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that the Act violated Constitutional guarantees to personal liberty and equality before law. In March 2018 the Supreme Court ruled that anticipatory bail could not be barred to those accused under the SC/ST Act. It expressed concern over misuse and abuse of the stringent provisions of the law. The BJP government responded by urging the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling. When the Supreme Court refused to do so the central cabinet led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved an amendment bill that would bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling on the amendments of 2015. Within a week the bill was passed by parliament, nullifying the apex court’s ruling earlier that year and delivering the changes promised by the BJP. In 2019 the Supreme Court recalled its March 2018 ruling.

The BJP government’s rapid, deft, and determined manoeuvring in response to the controversy over the amended SC/ST Act clearly indicated that the BJP, the political wing of Hindutva, an allegedly upper-caste movement, is as determined as almost every other political party in India to extend reservations, protection under a special category of criminal offences, social welfare benefits, and political visibility to Dalits and backward castes and that it will make exceptional efforts to do so.

Returning to the link discussed at the beginning of this section between being against caste-based reservation and being casteist, the question arises: if being anti-caste-based-reservation is casteist, and even if we accept descriptions of the Sangh Parivar as being casteist for this reason, does the BJP’s active wooing of Dalits and Backward Castes by offering them benefits and reservations transform the party into a non-casteist organisation? If yes, it is no longer possible to describe the BJP as casteist, at least for this caste-based reservation-related reason. If not, then this contradicts the link between being opposed to caste-based reservation and being casteist, since supporting caste-based reservation does not seem to have any impact on the description of the BJP as being casteist.

Manipulation of Dalit and OBC culture as a strategy to successfully co-opt these communities

One explanation for Hindutva and the BJP’s popularity amongst Dalit and OBC communities is that the movement has successfully made itself attractive to these communities by manipulating their culture and icons. One of the many who make this claim is Badri Narayan, an academic and expert on the movement who writes frequently in the public domain about Hindutva and Dalits. In his book Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation Narayan discusses the manipulation of Dalit culture;

… ambivalence in the collective memory provides a fertile ground for the reconstruction and recreation of the collective memory of different castes for the politics of power. It is interesting that the emancipatory Dalit memories that are being reinvented and reinterpreted by BSP and other Ambedkarite political groups and the creation of saffron Dalit memories by the BJP are being done through the same strategies and devices … But the difference between the strategies of these two kinds of political forces lies in the result, as mentioned earlier. In the process of political mobilisation, one produces racial communal politics which empowers a powerful section of the society, while the other tries to provide opportunity to the powerless Dalits in the power and welfare politics. ((Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 36.)) (emphasis added)

Without going into Narayan’s comfort with manipulation of Dalit culture right away, an obvious question arises from his general argument: why is manipulation by the Hindutva movement successful as against the many other manipulations of Dalit and OBC culture? Here “manipulation of culture” explanations run thin. References to the shifts in India’s economy post liberalisation and the creation of a new aspirational Dalit middle-class, or the attraction of an explicitly “Hindu” agenda for Dalits who continue to see themselves as Hindu and not Buddhist, oppressed, or working class, as Ambedkarite and Left politics would have them see themselves, offer some context but hardly scratch beyond the surface. Largely, the question as to why Hindutva’s cultural manipulations are more successful than others remains unanswered.

Regardless of the reasons for this success, Narayan’s work effectively shows that manipulation of Dalit and OBC culture is what political parties and ideological organisations do in order to woo these communities. Discussing the focus and content of election campaigns, Narayan notes that before caste was an important part of the electoral discourse, there was a meta-language “promising the fulfilment of basic needs” ((Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva, 154.)), which was used to address all “small communities”.((Narayan, 154.)) With the advent of caste-based politics, Narayan writes, Dalits and backward caste communities find themselves at the centre of attention from political parties across the spectrum. This has given several communities the power to negotiate for more benefits, affirmative action, and political visibility. However, Narayan also notes that political discourse, especially when aimed at Dalit and backward caste communities, remains limited to appeals to caste pride, while addresses to middle-class audiences (whom Narayan identifies as mostly upper caste) are focused on development-oriented issues such as infrastructure and healthcare. Thus, manipulation of local heroes, stories, songs, and culture take precedence in winning elections, particularly in rural or semi-urban areas, while issues of infrastructure, education, healthcare, or agriculture, take a backseat.

Narayan’s work is unique in that it makes explicit what remains implicit in most other works. As he shows in his book, the cultural manipulation undertaken by the BJP and other Hindutva organisations is by no means unique to them. It is, in fact, common practice in the vote-bank politics of India. As such, while the “cultural manipulation” explanation of Hindutva’s popularity amongst Dalits and backward castes claims to tell us something about the movement, it actually tells a larger story about the broader social and political scenario in India today. The kind of token politics evidenced in this ubiquitous strategy of cultural manipulation is further compounded by the responses it generates in intellectuals and academics. What Narayan takes exception to is not the cultural manipulation of Dalits or OBCs, but rather one cultural manipulation, namely, manipulation by Hindutva organisations such as the BJP and RSS. At one point he also expresses regret that Left organisations are missing opportunities to use Dalit and backward caste culture to mobilize these communities towards their own particular brand of politics and ideology. In his book, Narayan asserts that the particular manipulations of Hindutva organisations lead to racial communal politics, while manipulations by organisations and parties from other political standpoints result in the empowerment of Dalits in welfare politics. Because it remains largely implicit, this assumption regarding the differing end results of manipulation of Dalit and backward caste culture is never justified in the discourse on the Hindutva movement. Such is its assumed credibility that even where it does become as explicit as Narayan makes it, the assumption is still not put to any test for its verity. While Narayan and other scholars might well be correct in questioning the impact of Hindutva strategies and actions on Dalit and OBC communities, the assumption that the culturally manipulative strategies and actions of Ambedkarite and other political groups have brought power to Dalits and OBCs in welfare politics, on the one hand, remains highly debatable and, on the other, presumes that welfare politics and any such “power” in it leads to an actual and sustainable improvement in the lives of lower caste communities as a whole. Both, this assumption and presumption, remain unexamined and are perhaps some of the most important questions facing India today.

Meanwhile, choosing one manipulation over another, intellectuals and scholars such as Narayan remain limited to hinting at the impact of this kind of cultural manipulation on Dalit and backward caste communities. They seem unable, or maybe are unwilling, to examine the larger social and cultural ramifications of such politics, even as their own work offers some very clear hints.

The article was first published in Pragyata.com.

“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.

Detailed exploration of his works could lead us to radical reappraisal of the Indian image constructed by the Europeans and even by the contemporary scholarship of India. He authored many important texts like Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly (1962), Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (1971), Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971), The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), Bhàratiya Chitta Mànas and Kàla (1993), Understanding Gandhi, Rediscovering India, Despoliation and Defaming of India: The Early 19th century British Crusade, The British Origin of Cow-Slaughter in India: with some British Documents on the Anti-Kine-Killing Movement 1880-1894, The Madras Panchayat System, Vol II: A General Assessment and so on, among other seminal works.

I want to briefly sketch an initial introduction to his work, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition which is more relevant today than when it was written. When we observe the social movements and protests that occurred in the past decade, we can clearly see a lot of confusion over the issues raised and the foundations of the claims of certain movements. Thanks to social media it has become clear that general public has lost interest in such movements.

Even the over-exposure to media has not brought people together to fight for many causes that we think are important. The mockery of the situation is best expressed by a Kannada intellectual who says that people have lost interest in the so-called people’s movements. The question is why it is the case and how could people like Gandhi, not only draw attention of large masses but also could sustain such movements for very long time. This is exactly where Dharampal becomes very relevant today.

Let us remember how we talked about our freedom struggle. Normally we invoke people like Gandhiji, Nehru, Bose and the revolutionaries. Though there is a lot of discussion about these legendary figures and their role in resisting colonial regime, we seem uninterested to find out from what cultural resources Gandhi derived ideas of civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Dharampal’s work on this very issue shows the roots of Gandhian resistance. In his book, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition, Dharampal tries to examine the sources of Gandhian resistance. Some claim that Gandhi derived his ideas on civil disobedience from Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin and other western intellectuals.

Others opine that it was Gandhi’s own invention, and he may have got this from Indian Itihasas from characters like Prahalada. Contrary to these claims, Dharampal recognises the Gandhi’s view through Hind Swaraj, wherein he says, “in India the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us”. Dharampal gets into various historical material to examine this claim.

To his surprise, he discovers that in 1680, there were records of peaceful protest against the rulers in Madras Pattinam. It is recorded that people protested in a novel way by using trumpets and other instruments. Further, Dharampal gives another account of a similar protest which spread like wildfire from Bengal to Banaras, Patna, Mursheedabad, Sarun and other places. This movement during 1810-11 were against certain tax levied on house and shops. In these passive resistances, people closed shops, stopped all kinds of transactions and production till the rule was withdrawn by the rulers.

Dharampal says, doing ‘dharana’ to attract the attention of the rulers was a common thing. Dharampal argues that Gandhi had an insight into this nature of Indian society and devised strategies of resistance through those ideas that could actually hold Indians together. Dharampal says that Gandhi had the ability to understand as how Indians act and react to various issues. He was able to find out the inner core of Indians and his call for independence movement was more successful. Not that Gandhi discounted the role of the revolutionaries in the independence movement, but that was not his way.

Dharampal further observes from the British records that the Moghul Sultans were wary of such civil disobedience movements by the Indians, and they were very guarded and extremely careful while levying taxes on house, businesses, or temples. There seems to be a fear amongst the Islamic rulers about these kinds of protests by Indians. There is another significant passive resistance in 1830, which Dharampal makes a note of wherein around 11000 farmers all over Canara region of Karnataka protested.

The list of the nature of resistance shown by Indians are plenty in 19th century. What do these records tell us? There are many things to learn today from these records that British documented. Primarily, these documents point us towards how Gandhi was drawing his resources from Indian traditions to develop a resistance to colonialism which was never heard hitherto. It also tells us that it is not possible to mobilise Indian people until and unless one shows them certain serious moral grounds which Indian society has been considering very crucial for centuries. It is also clear that the ordinary people from Indian culture, though labelled subservient and backward had an unbelievable mode of resistance against their rulers irrespective of whether they are Indians or invaders or colonial masters.

Given this attitude of Indians, one could see why a large majority of India disapproves of these resistance movements based on ideologies or identity politics. It is also the same ground on which entire India was hurt by witnessing the Republic day violence. Here we understand what insights Gandhi had about India. This is the reason why, for Gandhi, civil disobedience was not just a resistance but a “Satyagraha”, a way of being in this world. Today that Gandhian understanding can be seen in the response of Indians. This is also exactly the reason for which even in 21st century, Indians who are allegedly labelled as illiterate, backward villagers disapprove of these movements. It also tells us how one should think about building movements in India and why most of the ideological and identity-based movements do not succeed in India.

It is high time that our universities and other institutions of higher learning should open their eyes widely to not just appreciate the agile intellect of the phenomenon called Dharampal but also to challenge the contemporary image of India. This could be a mark of respect to such a giant scholar on his birth centenary.

Rashtrotthana Sahitya, Bengaluru has initiated publications of these texts by Dharampal under the title “Dharampal Classic Series”. Soon we will have the Kannada translation of most of his works under Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati, Government of Karnataka. These publications would open new vistas for a better understanding of India and her traditions.

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