[Discussion] Why Hinduism is as much a political invention as an ancient tradi tion: The God of new things

[Paksoy, Hb]

Why Hinduism is as much a political invention as an ancient tradition: The
God of new things

By Pankaj Mishra, 12/1/2002

EARLIER THIS year, I was in Rishikesh, the first town that the river Ganges
meets as it leaves its Himalayan home and embarks upon its long journey
through the North Indian plains. The town's place in Indian mythology is not
as secure as that of Allahabad or Benares, even holier cities further down
on the Ganges. People seeking greater solitude and wisdom usually leave
Rishikesh and head deep into the Himalayas. With its saffron-robed sadhus
and ashrams, its yoga and meditation centers, and its Internet cafes,
Rishikesh caters to a very modern kind of spiritual tourist. The Beatles
came, most famously, in the '60s to learn transcendental meditation from
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their quick disillusionment seems not to have
deterred the stylishly disaffected members of the Western middle class that
can still be found wandering the town's alleys in tie-dyed outfits, trying
to raise their kundalini in between checking their Hotmail accounts. 

 

I was in Rishikesh last winter to see my aunt, who had just retired to one
of the riverside ashrams. She has known a hard life; widowed when she was in
her 30s, she worked in small, badly paid teaching jobs to support her three
children. In my memory, I can still see her standing at exposed country bus
stops in the middle of white-hot summer days. She had come to know comfort,
even luxury, of sorts in later life. Her children travel all over the world
as members of India's new globalized corporate elite; there are bright
grandchildren to engage her at home. But she was happiest in Rishikesh, she
told me, living as frugally as she had for much of her life, and devoting
her attention to the end of things.

True detachment, however, seemed as difficult to achieve for her as for the
spiritual seekers with e-mail. I had only to mention the political situation
- India was then threatening to attack Pakistan - for her to say, angrily,
''These Muslims need to be taught a lesson. We Hindus have been too soft for
too long.''

In the last decade, such anti-Muslim sentiments have become commonplace
among the middle-class, upper-caste Hindus in both India and abroad who form
the most loyal constituency of the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that
governs India. They were amplified most recently in Gujarat last winter,
during the BJP-assisted massacre of almost 2,000 Muslims; they go with a
middle-class pride in the international prominence of Indian beauty queens,
software professionals, and Bollywood films. Perhaps I wouldn't have found
anything odd about my aunt's anti-Muslim passions had I not later gone up to
her monastic cell and noticed the large garlanded poster of a well-known
Sufi saint of western India.

Did she know that she revered someone born a Muslim? I'm not sure. The folk
religion to which the Sufi saint belongs, and which millions of Indians
still practice, does not acknowledge such modern political categories as
''Hindu`' and ''Muslim.'' I think the contradiction - between the narrow
nationalist prejudices my aunt had inherited from her class and caste and
the affinities she generously formed in her inner world of devotion and
prayer - would only be clear to an outsider. This contradiction is not
easily understood. But it reflects the extraordinary makeover undergone by
Hinduism since the 19th century, when India first confronted the West and
its universalist ideologies of nationalism and progress.

Indeed, there was no such thing as ''Hinduism'' before the British invented
the catch-all category in the early 19th century and made India seem the
home of a ''world religion'' that was as organized and theologically
coherent as Christianity and Islam. The word ''Hindu'' itself was first used
by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the river Indus
(''Sindhu'' in Sanskrit). It later became a convenient shorthand for those
who weren't Muslims or Christians.

Certainly, most Hindus themselves felt little need for such
self-descriptions, except when faced with blunt questions about religion on
official forms. Long after their encounter with monotheistic Islam and
Christianity, they continued to define themselves through their overlapping
allegiances to family, caste, linguistic group, region, and devotional sect.
Religion to them was more a matter of unselfconscious practice than of rigid
belief; at any given time, both snakes and the ultimate reality of the
universe were worshipped in the same region, sometimes by the same people.
Religion very rarely demanded, as it did with many Muslims or Christians,
adherence to a set of theological ideas prescribed by a single prophet,
book, or ecclesiastical authority.

It is partly for this reason that Indian theology accommodates atheism and
agnosticism. Rituals and deities have always varied greatly, defined often
by caste and geography. And they are also flexible: New deities, such as an
AIDS goddess who is believed to both cause and cure the disease, continue to
enrich the pantheon even today.

And so a history of Hinduism, no matter how narrowly conceived, has to
describe several very parochial-seeming Indian religions, almost none of
which contained the evangelical zeal to save the world. 

The first of these - the Vedic religion - began with the nomads and
pastoralists from Central Asia who settled North India in the second
millennium BC. It was primarily created by the priestly class of Brahmans
who conducted fire sacrifices with the help of the Vedas, the earliest known
Indian scriptures, in order to stave off drought and hunger. But the
Brahmans wished to enhance their own glory and power rather than propose a
new all-inclusive faith. They presented themselves as the most superior
among the four caste groups, which were based first on racial and ethnic
distinctions between the settlers and the indigenous populations of north
India and, eventually, on a division of labor.

A new religion was also far from the minds of the Buddhists, the Jains, and
many other philosophical and cultural movements that emerged in the sixth
and fifth century BC and sought to challenge the social hierarchy and the
power of the Brahmans. Later, those dissatisfied with the sacrificial
rituals of the Vedic religion grew attracted to the egalitarian cults of
Shiva and Vishnu that became popular in India around the beginning of the
first century AD. But the Brahmans managed to preserve their status at the
top of an ossifying caste system. They zealously guarded their knowledge of
Sanskrit and esoteric texts, as well as their expertise in such matters as
the correct pronunciation of mantras. Their specialized knowledge, and their
presence across India, gave them a hold over ruling elites even as the
majority of the population followed its own heterodox cults and sects.

Today, the Hindu nationalists present Muslim rulers of India as the flag
bearers of an intolerant monotheism. But during the long Muslim presence in
India, which began as early as the 10th century AD, there was an even
greater religious plurality in India. Sufism mingled with local faiths; the
currently popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna and the network of
ashrams and sects expanded rapidly. In medieval India, there was more
sectarian violence between the worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu than there
was between Hindus and Muslims.

The British who arrived in India in larger numbers in the 18th century were
both appalled and fascinated by the excess of gods, sects, and cults they
encountered there. It was not unlike the pagan chaos a Christian from the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire might have encountered in the West
just before Constantine's conversion. As it turned out, the British in
India, like the powerful Christians in Rome, sought and imposed uniformity.

There were intellectually curious men among them: for example, a judge named
William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, whose amateur scholars
began in the late 18th century to decipher the language and culture of the
strange, bewildering country they found themselves in. It would be too
simple to say that this great intellectual effort, to which we owe much of
our present knowledge of India, was merely part of a colonialist or
imperialist enterprise. What's more interesting than the by now familiar
accusations of Orientalism is how the assumptions of the earliest British
scholars mingled with the prejudices of local elites to create an entirely
new kind of knowledge about India.

These scholars organized their impressions of Indian religion according to
what they were familiar with at home: the monotheistic nature of
Christianity and its exclusive claims to truth. When confronted by diverse
Indian religions, they tended to see similarities among them. They assumed
that different religious practices could only exist within a single
overarching tradition. 

They also had a strong literary bias. They thought that since Christianity
had canonical texts, Indian tradition must have the same. Their local
intermediaries tended to be Brahmans, who alone knew the languages needed to
study such ancient texts as the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. Together, the
British scholars and their Brahman interpreters came up with a canon of
sorts, mostly Brahmanical literature and ideology, which they began to
identify with a single Hindu religion.

The Brahmanical literature would later create much of the appeal of Indian
culture for its foreign connoisseurs, such as the German Romantics,
Schopenhauer, Emerson, and Thoreau. It also provided the British the
standards with which to judge the state of contemporary religion in India.
Since few Indians at the time seemed capable of the sublime sentiments found
in the Bhagavad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, Hinduism began to seem a degenerate
religion, full of evils like widow-burning and untouchability, and in
desperate need of social engineering from above. The idea appealed both to
British colonialists and their Brahman allies, who had long felt threatened
by the non-Brahmanical forms of religion that most Indians followed. It was
equally convenient to blame the intrusion of Islam into India for Hinduism's
fallen state, and to argue that British rule would save India from Muslim
tyranny and prepare the path to a higher civilization.

These ideas about the Muslim tyrants, Hindu slaves, and British
philanthropists were originally set out in such influential books as James
Mill's ''History of British India'' (1817), books that today tell us more
about the proselytizing vigor of some Enlightened Scots than about Indian
history. Nevertheless, they had a profound impact on a new generation of
upper-caste Indians who had been educated in Western-style institutions.
These Indians wished to do for India what a few enterprising Britons had
done for a tiny island, and they found a source of nationalist pride in the
newly-minted unitary ''Hinduism.''

Only a tiny minority of upper-caste Indians had known much about the
Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas until the 18th century, when they were translated
by British scholars and then presented as sacred texts from the lost golden
age of Hinduism. But in the 19th century, movements dedicated to recovering
that glory grew rapidly.

Consider the case of Ram Mohun Roy, who is often called the ''father of
modern India.'' In 1828, Roy - a Unitarian - founded the Brahmo Samaj, a
reformist society whose aim was to turn Hinduism into a rational,
monotheistic religion. (The group had a strong influence on the poet
Rabindranath Tagore and filmmaker Satyajit Ray, among other leading
intellectuals and artists.) In 1875, the social reformer Dayananda founded
another such society, the Arya Samaj, in Western India. He exhorted Indians
to return to the Vedas, which he said contained all of modern science; he
also echoed British missionary denunciations of such ''Hindu'' superstitions
as idol-worship and the caste system. Even the more secular and universalist
visions of Gandhi and Nehru - the former a devout Hindu, the latter an
agnostic - accepted the notion of a decayed ''Hinduism'' in need of reform.

But it was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) who in his lifetime was witness to,
and also most responsible for, the modernization of Hinduism. Vivekananda
was the middle-class disciple of the illiterate mystic Ramakrishna, who
lived until his death in 1886 at a temple near Calcutta and preached the
essential unity of all religions. (The British writer Christopher Isherwood
wrote a reverential biography of him.) But Vivekananda moved very far away
from his guru's inward-looking spirituality in his attempt to make Hinduism
intellectually respectable to both Westerners and Westernized Indians.
During his lecture tours of England and America, where he acquired a mass
following, Vivekananda presented India as the most ancient and privileged
fount of spirituality. At the same time, he exhorted Hindus to embrace
Western science and materialism in order to shed their burden of
backwardness and join together in a manly nation.

Vivekananda borrowed from both British-constructed Hinduism and European
nationalist realpolitik. In doing so he articulated the confused and
aggressive desires of a Westernized Indian bourgeoisie that was then trying
to find its identity. But his ambition of regenerating India with the help
of Western techniques - science, technology, nationalism - did not separate
him entirely from the folk religious traditions he had grown up in. He
remained a mystic. Looked at today, his contradictory rhetoric seems to
prefigure the oddly split personality of the modern Hindu, where devotion to
a Muslim saint can coexist with an anti-Muslim nationalism.

Vivekananda's importance doesn't end there. The marriage of Indian
religiosity and Western materialism that he tried to arrange makes him the
perfect patron saint of the BJP, a political party of mostly upper-caste,
middle-class Hindus that strives to boost India's capabilities in the fields
of nuclear weapons and information technology while also revering the cow as
holy. 

A hundred years after his death, the BJP has come closest to realizing his
project of fully Westernizing Hinduism and turning it into a full-fledged
nationalist ideology: one that has pretensions to being all-inclusive but
demonizes Muslims, one that places itself above caste divisions while aiming
to block, or at least delay, the long-overdue political empowerment of
lower-caste Indians.

Vivekananda's modern-day disciples are helped considerably by the fact that
the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer small and insignificant. Affluent,
upper-caste Indians in India and abroad largely bankrolled the BJP's rise to
power, and now they long for closer military and economic ties with the West
- a process that has only been accelerated by globalization. As a global
class, they are no less ambitious than those in the Roman empire who
embraced Christianity and made it an effective tool of this-worldly power.
Hinduism in their hands has never looked more like the Christianity and
Islam of popes and mullahs, and less like the multiplicity of
unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for most Indians.

The growing prominence of this group suggests that Vivekananda may yet
emerge as more influential in the long run than Gandhi, Nehru, or Tagore -
the three great Indian leaders whose legacy of liberal humanism middle-class
India already is frittering away as it heads for times as intellectually and
spiritually oppressive as those the West suffered after its own elites chose
a severe monotheism as their official ideology.

Pankaj Mishra is a writer based in New Delhi and Simla. He is the author of
"The Romantics," a novel, and a forthcoming book about the Buddha.


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This story ran on page D2 of the Boston Globe on 12/1/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.