Hindu Nationalism, Modernism, and Reverse Orientalism

In 1998 Hindu nationalists proposed that a new goddess temple be built at Pokharan, 50 km from the site of the atomic bomb tests that were conducted in April of that year. According to their program this would be the fifty-third example of Shaktipeeths (seats of strength, literally goddess power) of Hindu preeminence. Another power center is the new temple to Rāma in Ayodhya, being built on the site of the Babri mosque, destroyed by a Hindu mob on December 6, 1992. Some suggested that radioactive sand from the test site should be distributed as prasad, the Hindu sacrament, but cooler heads vetoed that idea. Some Hindu fundamentalists, following the lead of Swami Dyananda, also believe that ancient Indians actually possessed atomic weapons, which they call “Om-made” bombs.

The Indian military helps to fuel this religious enthusiasm by having named its long-range missile after the Vedic god of fire Agni. Muslim Pakistanis countered by appropriating the power of the Hindu goddess by naming their missile Gaurī, another name for the goddess. The followers of Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist party in the state of Maharashtra, proudly proclaim that, after the bomb tests, Hindus were no longer eunuchs and now could stand up to the world as real men. At the 1999 Durgā festival in Calcutta celebrants found new figures in the traditional tableau of the Goddess Durgā and her attendants. They saw life-size figures of brave Indian soldiers who won a victory in the mountains of Kashmir because of Durgā’s divine grace and aggressive action. Hundreds of years ago Hindu kings went into battle only after receiving Durgā’s blessing by sacrificing hundreds of water buffalo to her.

Another chilling experience is to read about the recovery of an original Hindu Empire, extending west into Afghanistan and Central Asia encompassing all Buddhist sites; extending north to recover Tibet, the original land of the Aryans according to Dayananda Saraswati; extending northeast to Cambodia to recover the Hindu Khmer kingdoms of Angkor Wat; to Vietnam, where Hindu temples may be found from the Champa Dynasty; and extending southeast to Java, where a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom once flourished; and Bali where three million Hindus still live. In this connection one is reminded of Zionist maps of Greater Israel, or plans by some Calvinists for a new Confederate States of America where God-fearing Anglo-Celtic top males will rule their households and their nation of fifteen states.

Interestingly enough, both Indian nationalists and Europeans agreed on at least one proposition: Hindu civilization was indeed corrupt and suffering a long decline, but Hindu fundamentalists believed that the solution to that problem was not Christian capitalism; rather, it was the recovery of a glorious Hindu past about which European linguists and archaeologists had confirmed. Indian nationalists did admit that they had to address some problems that had crept in during a long period of decline: caste discrimination, widow remarriage, untouchability, and child marriage.

The Origins of Hindu Nationalism: Rammohan Roy and Raj Narain Basu

The origins of Hindu religious nationalism are quite recent considering the long history of advanced cultures in the Indian Subcontinent. The supreme irony about Hindu fundamentalism is that its first writers were profoundly influenced by European Orientalism and its archeological and linguistic discoveries. The same Orientalism that gave Europeans the excuse to view Asians as effeminate and impotent, thereby lacking the capacities for self-rule, was used by Indian writers to create a view of India as a glorious, unified nation. With this new knowledge from Europe, conveniently altered to claim that the original Aryans came from India, Indians could claim that they not only gave birth to the European languages; but also, after exaggerating the antiquity of their ancestors, they boasted that they were the first civilized peoples with the world’s greatest religion. (Quite apart from their nationalist ideologues, millions of Indians believe that “Hinduism” includes Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, and some declare that “Everyone is a Hindu.”) The idea of India as the cradle of civilization and spirituality is, amazingly enough, found in Voltaire, Herder, Kant, Schegel, Shelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Some scholars argue that the Indian philosophy that we now know as neo-Vedānta found in Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Gandhi, is just as much German idealism as Indian philosophy.

Hindu fundamentalists were flattered by Aldous Huxley’s idea of the Perennial Philosophy and its mystical monism, originally found in the Upaniṣads and only later, according to their views, spread to other cultures. Theosophists such as Annie Besant turned Orientalism on its European creators, claiming that what they perceived as weaknesses—namely, non-dualism, non-violence, renunciation, meditation, and tolerance were precisely what were needed for the salvation of Euro-American societies. In the 1870s there was a concerted effort on the part of English theosophists to merge with the Indian Āyra Samāj (Society of Aryans) as part of Annie Besant’s vision of a World Federation of Aryans. Ironically, in another move of reverse Orientalism, members of Āyra Samāj vetoed this idea because they insisted that Indians were the only true Aryans. Interestingly enough, both Indians and Europeans agreed on at least one proposition: Hindu civilization was indeed corrupt and suffering a long decline, but Hindu fundamentalists believed that the solution to that problem was the recovery of a glorious Hindu past that Europeans had conveniently rediscovered for them.

Even before Āyra Samāj there was the Brahmo Samāj (Society of Brahmā, the Hindu Creator God) founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Rammohan Roy, who, although still preserving the idea of Vedic authority, developed a fully modernist—namely, rationalist and humanist—approach to Indian identity and nationhood. Debendranath Tagore, father of the more famous Rabindranath Tagore, broke with Roy over the issue of Vedic authority, and another nationalist Keshab Chandra Sen proposed that Hinduism ought to be Christianized. The result of these developments within the Bengal Renaissance was a growing view of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity. One of the most dramatic examples of these views came from Raj Narain Basu, who waxed eloquent as follows:

Basu was insistent that the Hindu Motherland could have no place for Muslims because their religion was alien to India. India’s religion should be a cultural Hinduism based on the Upaniṣads, but allowing for the mediation of the one true God by means of the traditional idols. The Brahmo Samāj proposed to reform the elements that had tarnished the image of Hinduism word wide: caste distinctions, widow remarriage, untouchability, and child marriage.

Swami Dayananda, Chandranath Basu, and Chattopadhyaya Bankim

The Āyra Samāj was founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in 1875 in Bombay, now renamed Mumbai, after the goddess Mumbadevī, because of the political influence of the nationalist Shiv Sena. (There are also calls to change all English street names to Hindi and warnings against sending good Hindu children to English-speaking schools.) Dayananda’s philosophy is sometimes called neo-Hinduism or Semitized Hinduism, what I would call an Abrahamic Hinduism. Dayananda claimed that the Aryans originated in Tibet, a hypothesis that the Nazis tested by sending Ernst Schaefer and Bruno Beger on two expeditions there in the 1930s. (The Nazis were also captivated by the bizarre idea that the Arctic was the home of Aryans, an idea promoted by Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak.) While in Tibet the Aryans, according to Dayananda, purged themselves of inferior people (identified as the dasyus in the Ṛgveda) and then spread to the rest of the world. In India they established the Hindu Golden Age described in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.

This great age came to an end with the Bhārata War, the beginning of which is dramatically described in the Mahābhārata and the result, according to the text, was over a million deaths. Hindu civilization then descended into a long decline that was exacerbated, according to Dayananda, by the pacificism and nihilism of Buddhism and Jainism, which were seen as failed offshoots of Hinduism and not separate religions from Hinduism. Starting in the eleventh century, a weakened Hinduism was easy prey for the Muslim invaders and then British imperialism. Dayananda saw the Aryans as paragons of virtue and the world’s first monotheists. Even though he uses the Hindu epics as proof of the Golden Age, he argued that only the Vedas and the Upaniṣads have religious authority. (Oddly enough, the members of the Āyra Samāj retained the Vedic fire ritual for their services.) He rejected the authority of the priests to interpret scripture and set himself up, in a way very similar to some preachers in the Abrahamic religions, as the only one that could interpret the Vedas correctly. He saw the Vedas and Upaniṣads as the literal Word of God and as the infallible text of the one true Hindu church, a concept alien to the Indian religious tradition, but one again very similar to the Abrahamic religions. Setting the stage for twentieth-century Hindutva, Dayananda launched systematic attacks on traditional Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and Christians. Incredibly enough, in 1911 the Āyra Samāj requested that their members not be identified as Hindus for the British census.

Dayananda believed that the subjugation of women came with the decline of Hinduism and declared that this was a social ill that needed correction. He also spoke out against the thousand plus subcastes (jāti) that divide Indians according to specific vocations and prevent lateral movement in Indian society. With regard to the four main castes, Dayananda thought that it was a mistake to think of them as hereditary, a position that was an advance over Gandhi, who, while rejecting the oppression of the Dalits, still maintained the hereditary nature of the four main castes. After Dayananda’s death there was a campaign to reconvert Dalits whose families had gone over to Christianity and syncretistic Muslims who, because they so fully participated in Hindu celebrations, ought, according to Āyra Samāj, to return to the fold of the true faith. This campaign of reconversion is still at the forefront of Hindu fundamentalist efforts today, especially among the members of Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

A key figure in the transition from the Brahmo Samāj to the Āyra Samāj was Chandranath Basu, who is the author that coined the term Hindutva (“Hinduness”) and turned Hindu nationalism in a decidedly conservative and reactionary direction. In 1892 he published Hindutva: An Authentic History of the Hindus in which he defended traditional views of Hindu ritual, caste, restriction of women’s education and civil rights, and the maintenance of male authority. Basu was firmly committed to demonstrating the superiority of Hinduism over Christianity, especially after the widespread concern that conversions to Christianity were increasing in the latter half of the century. Basu was insistent that the Hindu Motherland could have no place for Muslims (now 177 million) or Christians (now 24 million) because their religions were alien to India. Religiously motivated violence in the Indian Subcontinent was rare until Muslims came in the twelfth century and the Portuguese and Dutch came in the sixteenth century. It is significant that Hindus did not attack Muslims or Christians until centuries of resentment boiled over and until they started thinking like Muslim and Christian fundamentalists.

In the novels and commentaries of Chattopadhyaya Bankim we see again the profound influence that European philosophy had on the rise of Indian nationalism. Particularly important was the work of Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Auguste Comte. Interestingly enough, Bankim’s early support for women’s equality, presumably under Mill’s influence, disappeared in his later works, which also contain stronger claims to Hindu supremacy and more stringent anti-Muslim comments. He criticized Mill and Comte for their atheism and substituted Kṛṣṇa’s religion of love as the key to human spiritual cultivation and progress. Nineteenth-century Indian nationalists were fully caught up in the idea of evolution and Bankim proposed that Hinduism was the perfect candidate for Comte’s idea of ”positive religion,” the final stage of human perfection. Bankim rejects both the abstract monotheism that he finds in Abrahamic religions and the impersonal monism of his own Brahmo Samāj in favor of the divine incarnation of Kṛṣṇa as a human being.

After the monsoon rains had ceased, Hindu kings, after sacrificing water buffalo to her, called on the Goddess Durgā to aid them in their dry season battles.

The main character in Bankim’s novel Ananda Math is Satya, whose honorific is “Mahātmā” (great soul). His name may have been chosen because satya is Sanskrit for “truth.” Mahatma Gandhi’s trained disciples were called satyrāgrahis (“those who have the force of truth”). The following are illustrative passages from the novel:

Later Bhavan describes his real reason for committing himself to the ascetic life: “We are all ascetics, you see. But our renunciation is only for this practice. When we have mastered all techniques, and attained our goal, we shall return to our homes for our duties as householders. We, too, have wives and children at home.”^[4] In the introduction I have already noted the fact that many of the sādhus, during this great age of great ascetic armies, were not practicing yogis; but I also argued that what were at that time “interfaith” battalions such as Anupgiri’s army are now interpreted as Hindu ascetics who were forced to arm and defend themselves against Muslims.

B. G. Tilak and the Resurrection of the Warrior
King Shivaji

At the turn of the century one of the most important Indian nationalist figure was B. G. Tilak, whose importance and standing in the Congress Party was second only to Gandhi. Tilak was instrumental in inventing a powerful new form of devotionalism centered on the elephant god Ganeṣa. Tilak’s strategy was calculated and very effective: the new Ganeṣa festival (first celebrated in 1893) would compete with the Muslim festival of Muharram, which Hindus had always attended. Hindu nationalists in the state of Maharashtra were successful in creating a new division between Muslims and Hindus that would intensify decade by decade into the new century. The Ganeṣa festival in Mumbai is now so huge that it is common to see pictures and stories of it in the international press.

Tilak also resurrected Shivaji Bhosale, who, by the grace of his patron goddess Bhawānī, was, as we have learned in the previous chapter, the most successful Hindu warrior king against the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal Empire during the seventeenth century. Hindu nationalists admire Shivaji’s courage and excuse the deviousness by which he defeated his Muslim enemies. Tilak instigated celebrations honoring Shivaji, but many of them in the 1890s turned violent. These were the beginnings of the sectarian conflict that was to increase in the next century but was an uncommon occurrence in earlier times. Tilak used the Bhagavad-gītā to justify Shivaji’s campaigns against the Mughals, but also the violence that may be necessary to keep the Muslims of his day in line. Shivaji has become a hero and a model for a militant leader who will bring back the glory of all things Hindu. It is significant, however, in terms of the historical Shivaji that while Muslims repeatedly declared jihad against him, Shivaji’s principal motivations were Maratha nationalism. It was not a broader Hindu nationalism based on the concept of the Indian Subcontinent as one nation and the idea of Hinduism as a universal religion. Tilak also ignored the fact that Shivaji not only had Muslim allies but employed Muslims in his army and administration, demonstrating that his concept of a Maratha nation included non-Hindus as well. Nonetheless, the revival and revision of Shivaji’s reign resulted in a number of Shivaji societies that believed that violence against British rule was a religious duty.

Tilak was also involved in researching and writing about the origins of Hinduism and the Hindu nation. I have already mentioned his odd thesis, defended in a book entitled The Arctic Home of the Vedas, that Aryan culture actually goes all the way back to the last Ice Age. Drawing on astronomical allusions in the Vedas, Tilak takes Vedic history back 8,000 years and argues that the Vedic gods were polar deities worshiped by arctic Aryans. From all of his research he drew the same conclusion that many other nineteenth-century Indian nationalists did, and I offer this illustrative but problematic passage:

The sects of which Tilak speaks—the Sikhs, the Jains, and the Buddhists—are included, but only if they pledge allegiance to Hindutva (conversion itself is not mandatory). Sadly excluded are India’s 24 million Christians and 170 million Muslims.

V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva and M. S. Golwalkar’s Concept of a Hindu Nation

In 1921 the Āyra Samāj reorganized itself as the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, and V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966) was its president from 1937 to 1942. Savarkar’s book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? was published in 1923, and it has become one of the most notable treatises on Hindu nationalism. In 1904, the nineteen-year-old Savarkar founded the Abhinav Bharat (“Young India”), a secret organization that required its members to swear an oath that they would wage “a bloody and relentless war against the foreigner.”^[6] With the help of B. G. Tilak, Savarkar won a “Shivaji” scholarship to study in England. While there he established the Free India Society and recruited Indians to his revolutionary cause. Savarkar and his associates bought weapons and bomb-making materials and shipped them to India. There members of the Abhinav Bharat carried out assassinations and bombings from 1905 on until many of them were arrested.

In 1910 Savarkar was arrested on charges of waging war against the British Crown and arms smuggling. He spent fourteen years in the infamous Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands. It was during this time he wrote Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, which he scratched on the walls of his cell with a nail. Parts of the books were committed to memory as the walls were whitewashed regularly. One of the most significant conceptual aspects of Hindutva is the fact that Savarkar does not define “Hinduness” in terms of religion. In fact, in a poetic flourish that sounds like religious liberalism, he welcomes people of all nations to partake of India’s broad philosophical and theological cuisine: “Are you a monist or monotheist—a pantheist—an atheist—an agnostic? Here is ample room, O soul!”^[7]

In refusing to make a specific religion a necessary condition for being a Hindu, Savarkar stands apart from nationalists such as Gandhi. Along with millions of other Hindus, Gandhi declared that he was a sanātana Hindu, a universal religion (some equate it to dharma itself) that includes Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Before Gandhi moved to a less hierarchical view of the world religions in the 1930s, he maintained that sanātanadharma “transcends Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality.” ^[8] Perhaps under the influence of the Christian missionary Charlie Andrews, Gandhi developed a horizontal view of outreach and mutual respect for each religion with none of them taking a superior position. The following passages indicate a turn away from the traditional hierarchical view, which is sometimes summed up as “Everyone is a Hindu”: “I’ve advanced from tolerance to equal respect for all religions”; and “I’ve broadened my Hinduism by loving other religions as my own.”^[9]

Savarkar had witnessed far too many tensions among his fellow Hindus about proper rituals and even worried about the dominance of his own brahmin caste in these conflicts. In Hindutva Savarkar writes with despair that after forty centuries in which “Hinduness” has been formed, the result appears to be “countless actions—now conflicting, now commingling, now cooperating. . . . Hindutva is not a word but a history. Not only the spiritual or religious history of our people, but a history in full.”^[10] “Hinduness” is more than religion, it means the “common Fatherland [with] the wealth of a common culture—language, law, customs, folklore, and history”^[11]—that Muslims and Christians do not share. Even if these “foreigners” have learned to speak Indian languages and have participated in Indian festivals, their “love is still divided,” because their “Holylands” are somewhere else. Savarkar assures his readers that he does not condemn Christians and Muslims for who they are and what they believe, but he is “simply telling the facts as they stand.”^[12] Savarkar’s patronizing assurances notwithstanding, many Indian Christians and Muslims, the former coming to India in the fourth century CE and the latter arriving in the eighth century, did in fact feel condemned.

Unlike many Hindu nationalists today, Savarkar does not dispute the theory that the Indo-Aryans came into Northwest India from Central Asia. (Some now believe that their original homeland was south of the Caucasus Mountains.) These original Hindus (remarkably, he admits that they were fair-skinned) intermarried with the indigenous tribes and “colonized” and “civilized” the Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka. Not only is the idea of “colonizing” typical of Reverse Orientalism, but also a rejection of the notion that the British invented the category “Hinduism” and used it for their colonial purposes. Instead, he argues that the Indo-Aryans claimed that identity from the earliest times. As they crossed the Sindhu (Indus) River, they had not only “developed a sense of nationality, but they had already succeeded in giving it ‘a local habitation and a name.’”^[13] Linguistically slipping from an “S” to an “H” in their local Sanskrit dialects, they called themselves and the land “Hindu.” As Chetan Bhatt explains: “The name ‘Hindu’ was in this sense held by the land itself, prior to the arrival of those who became ‘Hindus.’”^[14] Primarily because of the influence of Hindu nationalists, the worship of Mother India has now become widespread and the altars in her temples are huge topological maps of India. For nationalists such as Gandhi, India had been a unified nation for several millennia, because Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs, following the sanātanadharma, had mapped out their nation with their feet as they visited thousands of sacred places on the subcontinent.

Gandhi agreed with Savarkar that Indians were a “manly” race, and that far too many Indians had been deceived by European racial judgments that they were a weak and feminine people. For Gandhi the ultimate act of manliness was fighting (much of his language had a military tone) injustice and oppression with courage, truth, and nonviolence. In sum, Gandhi believed that “nonviolence was the virtue of the manly.”^[15] Savarkar appropriated the views of European thinkers who wrote about Aryan vigor, and the militant Savarkar of course encouraged the virtue of courage. He believed, however, that the Buddha’s focus on love, compassion, and nonviolence was the first major step in the degeneration of the Hindu race. Echoing a Marxist turn of phrase, the Buddhist virtues were “opiates,”^[16] and the weaknesses that followed made India vulnerable to invasion by outside aggressors. India lost the “strength born of national and racial cohesion,” because Buddhists, as Savarkar argued, “tried to kill killing by getting killed—and at last found out that palm leaves at times are too fragile for steel!”^[17] In stark contrast Gandhi believed that the Buddha was the greatest teacher of nonviolence, and that he “taught us to defy appearances and trust in the final triumph of Truth and Love.”^[18] Ironically, even with this incredible animus against Buddhism, India’s Buddhists were still kept within Hindutva’s fold, and Savarkar even launched a Pan Hindu-Buddhist Alliance against the forces of Islam.

Already in the late nineteenth century Ārya Samāj leaders had drawn a distinction between Hindu males, whose virility was expressed primarily in defending the honor of their daughters and wives; and Muslim men, who were described as rapists and filled with lust. (In chapter 4 we shall see that some Burmese Buddhists have made the same charges against their resident Muslims.) The following is typical of the fear spread by these campaigns: “Dear Aryans, why are you sleeping calmly? Muslims will never be your companions. . . . They are making new schemes to increase their population and to make people Muslims. They roam with carts in cities and villages and take away our women, who are put under the veil and made Muslim.”^[19] There are instructive similarities between cases of consensual relations between Muslim men and Hindu women and black males and white women from the pre-civil rights American South. In most instances the black men were accused of rape and executed; and in some cases, the women changed their stories to suit the racial stereotype of the rapacious African.

In 1938 the Ārya Samāj hired Kanpur attorney Bijendra Swarup to bring a case against a Muslim man who had married Bimla Devi, a high-caste Hindu woman, who then had converted to Islam. Swarup was successful in annulling the marriage and returning Devi to her family and faith, and her family quickly married her to a suitable Hindu groom. As Charu Gupta states: “Gossip and rumors added spice to abduction stories and helped in the growth of a collective Hindu body. These stories combined to produce a mind-set among a section of Hindus of criminalized Muslim masculinity.” ^[20] Significantly enough, many Hindus made heroes out of Hindu men who seduced Muslim women. Gupta explains that Hindus have always celebrated the story of Shivaji, who “waylaid[ed] Roshanara, the daughter of the [Mughal Emperor] Aurganzeb, and eventually married her.”^[21]

Savarkar and other nationalists, such as M. S. Golwalkar, wrote admiringly of Italian Fascists and German Nazis. In 1941 Savarkar declared that he would prefer the “great leader” Hitler to the “useless, impotent, and coward[ly]” members of the Congress Party, and he repeated his support for the Nazis twenty years later in a speech in Puna on January 15, 1961.^[22] He said that the Jews and the Muslims had the same alien status in Germany and India respectively, and they should be condemned for their inability to assimilate as true and rightful citizens. The swastika has long been a religious symbol in Asia, especially for Buddhism and Jainism, but it was never used politically. Significantly, the Pan-Hindu Flag of the Hindu Mahasabha did not have a swatiska on it until it was added in 1941.^[23]

When he writes about India’s indigenous people, Savarkar praises the superior Indo-Aryans for bringing civilization to what, by obvious implication, he thinks are inferior natives. Savarkar and Golwalkar also thought that in addition to the earth of India Aryan blood was the reason why the indigenous peoples thrived with the mingling of Aryan blood. As he states: “The word jati derived from the root jan ‘to produce,’ means a brotherhood, a race determined by a common origin—possessing a common blood. All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers.”^[24] As opposed to the Nazis, Hindu nationalists did not seem to mind the race mingling that happened very soon after the Indo-Aryans moved into the Indian northwest. Savarkar said that the pure Vedic blood that flowed down from the Himalayas as a “noble stream” purified “many a lost soul,” and a well-regulated caste system will “fertilise and enrich all that was barren and poor.”^[25]

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar was the second Supreme Chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsek Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary youth group founded in 1925 and modeled on Mussolini’s Brown Shirts. In addition to calisthenics and weapons training, the daily RSS meetings began with puja to Mother India. The RSS had a primary role in introducing the adulation of Shivaji and replicas of his weapons were worshipped at its meetings. Much like Gandhi’s reformed caste system, which left each caste in its traditional place, the RSS believed in caste equality. At RSS summer camps tasks were assigned regardless of caste. When Gandhi was assassinated by former RSS member N. V. Godse on January 30, 1948, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru banned the RSS. Savarkar and Golwalkar were arrested as co-conspirators, but they both were acquitted of all charges. RSS activities had been previously banned by British authorities and then twice again after Nehru’s proscription: by Indira Gandhi (1975–78) and then after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992.

In 1939 Golwalkar wrote a small book entitled We—Or Our Nationhood Defined, which was widely read in four editions until it was withdrawn from publication. Arguing from the modernist standpoint of Reverse Orientalism, Golwalkar claims that Hinduism is superior to Christianity because it, as opposed to Hinduism, does not “accord with modern knowledge,” and is “dogmatically forced down the throats of one and all.”^[26] He also proposes that while Christianity is a mere “ornament” to a basically secular European culture, religion is “the very soul” of the Hindu nation and culture.^[27] Golwalkar also argues that a nation’s language must also be protected against encroachment by hegemons. He praises the Irish and the Welsh for preserving their native tongues in the face of British linguistic imperialism, and he urges Indians to prevent English from becoming an official national language. Golwalkar does not appear to see the contradiction in his position on this issue. As early as 1937, Tamil nationalists objected to the compulsory teaching of Hindi in their schools. Not only did they succeed in this goal, but they also won again when the central government withdrew a mandate that all Indian drivers’ licenses had to be in Hindi. Tamil nationalists point out the fact that only 36 percent of Indians speak Hindi as their mother tongue. Hindu nationalists are fighting a losing battle if they adhere to Golwalkar’s principle that the elimination of any of the four elements—geographical, cultural, religious, and linguistic—“means the end of the Nation as a Nation.”^[28]

The most disturbing aspect of Golwalkar’s manifesto is his praise for German and Italian Fascism. As he develops his case for Indian “race consciousness,” he asks his readers to “look at Italy, the old Roman Race consciousness of conquering the whole territory round the Mediterranean Sea, so long dormant, has roused itself, and shaped the Racial-National aspirations accordingly.”^[29] Likewise he commends the Germans for bringing back their “ancient Race spirit,” which in ancient times allowed them to “over-run the whole Europe.” Golwalkar defends the right of Nazi Germany to reconquer the lands (in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Russia) where native Germans were separated from their compatriots, just as Hindu nationalists wish to reclaim their “hereditary territory”—all of British India and beyond.

Golwalkar also awards national leaders the “indisputable right of excommunicating” all of those who have “turned traitors and entertained aspirations contravening or differing from those of the National Race as whole.”^[30] For European Fascists the traitors were the Jews, the Slavs, and the Roma, but for Indian nationalists they are Christians, Muslims, and the few Jews who are left (only 4,000 today) after the Portuguese and the Dutch liquidated most of them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Golwalkar’s warning to prospective traitors is clear:

Golwalkar does not flinch from supporting Germany in “her purging the country of the Semitic Races,” commending it as German “race pride at its highest” and offering this project of “racial purity” it as a “good lesson for . . . Hindustan to learn and profit by.”^[32] It goes without saying that Golwalkar firmly rejected the League of Nations and its provisions for the protection of ethnic minorities.

Contemporary defenders of Golwalkar assert that Hitler and Mussolini had many admirers in America and Europe, and that in 1938 Golwalkar, along with most of the rest of the world, could not have known the full extent of the coming Final Solution. (There was certainly the opportunity, however, in the fourth edition to make changes in 1947, just as Martin Heidegger could have deleted pro-Nazi passages in post-war editions of Introduction to Metaphysics.) Dutch scholar Koenraad Elst also defends the exclusion of citizenship for non-Hindus because pre-independence Muslim leaders supported a separate Muslim nation, a position that indicated that they no longer wished to be Indians. Furthermore, Elst offers the parallel of Jews and Christians living in Muslim countries as zimmis. As he explains, “Muslims would get the same status in India which Christians and Jews . . . ‘enjoy’ under the zimma (charter of toleration) dispensation in an Islamic state.”^[33] Elst should have known, as I have written above, that Muslim rulers in India applied the Hanafi interpretation of shari’ah, which determined that Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains were “People of the Book” and that they could live under their own laws, and in most cases did not have to pay the zimmi tax (jiyah). By the nineteenth century most of the restrictions on the zimmis in the Ottoman Empire had been removed, and in 1855 Egyptian Jews and Christians were given full citizenship in 1855, and they no longer had to pay the jiyah.

As Golwalkar concludes his little book, he praises both Shivaji and Guru Nanak’s “war-like Sikhs” for their contributions to the Hindu national revival. As we will see in chapter 8, Guru Nanak was a pacifist who would have found the idea that Muslims were not true citizens of India repugnant. While on tour of South Asia Guru Nanak traveled with a Muslim musician and there was never a time when the guru required that he “convert.” Eleanor Nesbitt reports that “a Muslim saint Main Mir laid the foundation stone of the Harmandir Sahib [the Golden Temple].”^[34] Guru Nanak preached that “the temple and the mosque are the same, there is no difference between a Hindu worship and Muslim prayer.”^[35] Golwalkar should have known that militant Sikhs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who wished to establish a religious and national identity separate from the Hindus, criticized santānam Sikhs for preserving the Hindu tradition and they succeeded in removing images of Hindu deities from the walls of the Golden Temple. How is it possible that Golwalkar failed to include Sikh militants as “traitors” to the idea of a “pure” Indian nation?

Hindutva, Gujurat, and India’s Krystallnacht

In early 2002 the prosperous state of Gujurat experienced extensive sectarian violence in which upward of 2,000—mostly Muslims—suffered deaths by burning, hacking, and occasional gun fire. Over the last fifty years, according to Bikhu Parekh,^[36] Gujarat, among all the Indian states, has averaged the highest number of deaths from sectarian violence per capita. There is now solid evidence that as early as November 2001 various Hindu nationalist organizations—the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), its youth group Bagrang Dal, and the Rashtriya Swayamsek Sangh (RSS)—distributed weapons (mainly swords and tridents, the god Śiva’s three-tipped spear) to thousands of people for a campaign to protect Hindus from alleged Muslim terrorists. Parades of armed men took place in many cities with officials from the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) presiding.

In early 2002 there were reports of a severe shortage of LPD gas cylinders, and this hoard of ready-made bombs was later used to destroy hundreds of Muslim homes, shops, and mosques. Much like the marking of Isarelite homes in Egypt before the Exodus, Hindu homes in Gujarat’s Dahod district were flying the Hindu nationalist saffron flag (complete with a swastika) as a list of Muslim homes and shops was published in many newspapers. A VHP leader was touring Gajarat’s Dahod district saying: “These Muslims do not allow the mandir (the Rāma temple at Ayodhya). They should be killed.”^[37]

Earlier in his administration Gujurat’s chief minister Narendra Modi tried to compel all government employees to attend RSS meetings, but even his own BJP assembly members rejected his totalitarian tendencies. Trying to deflect charges that he was responsible for violence against Muslims, Christians, and Dalits (formerly “untouchables”), Modi responded that he was just a passenger in the back seat of a car that ran over a puppy. Modi was too obtuse to realize that the car is an analogue of state agencies for which he is directly responsible. Modi also forgot that all chief ministers sit in the back seats of their Hindustani Ambassadors (modeled on the 1956 Morris Oxford) with full authority over their domains.

On February 26, 2002, the Sabarmati Express departed for Gujurat from the north, and it contained Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, where a temporary temple to Rāma had been set up there after the Babri Mosque was destroyed on December 6, 1992. Many of the pilgrims were armed with trishuls and lathis (metal-tipped batons). Witnesses on the train reported that the militants shouted Hindutva slogans all along the way and threatened the other passengers. The next morning the train arrived at the Godhra station in Dahod district. A press report relates that at the station, “a Muslim girl was molested and an attempt made to pull her into the train. A Muslim tea vendor . . . was insulted and sent out of the coach by the rowdy elements, some of whom climbed onto the roof of the train and made obscene gestures at Muslim women living opposite the railway station.”^[38] Fights broke out and there was stone throwing by both Muslims and Hindus. As the train departed it halted suddenly as an intense fire broke out in one of the coaches. The corpses were essentially incinerated, but the assumption is that most of the ninety-four people burned alive were Hindu pilgrims.

Hindu nationalists claimed that Muslims set the fire, but every single investigation, except one done by the state BJP government, concluded that the fire was an accident caused by a stove on the coach. A Gujarat police report stated that Muslims threw fire bombs at the train, but there was no evidence of burning from the outside of the coaches. Such an alleged attack would have been general, not specific to one coach. Nevertheless, in February 2013, thirty-one Muslims were convicted in a Gujarati court for setting the fire and eleven of them are due to be executed. Indian capital cases are automatically appealed and it will be a long time before the legal process is over.

After the train fire at Godhra, the Hindutva plan was executed all over Gujarat; and Chief Minister Modi, according to one of his own cabinet members, told his police force to allow the pogrom against Muslims to run its course. It was reported that Modi silenced the head of the state police force when he objected to the order, and another official who demurred was found dead. Hindu-instigated violence was state-wide comprising twenty-one cities and sixty-eight provinces, and even extended into rural areas where there had never been any sectarian conflict. The pogrom continued for several months and the official death count was 822 (mostly Muslims), although unofficial sources put the final toll at over 2,000 killed. About 250 mosques were destroyed (statues of Rāma’s faithful servant Hanuman were placed in many of the ruins) along with hundreds of Muslim homes. Damage to Muslim businesses was estimated at $152 million. Hindus took over many of the Muslim shops and a state-wide boycott of Muslim businesses still continues.

The Hindutva attacks were investigated by the International Initiative for Justice and their 2003 report described one that was particularly brutal: “In Vadodara City, fourteen people were killed in what has come to be known as the ‘Best Bakery incident,’ where the family and employees were hacked and burnt to death and in some cases literally baked to death in the bakery ovens.”^[39] About 400 of the victims were burned alive, a quid pro quo, Bikhu Parekh suggests,^[40] of “fire for fire” in retaliation for the train incident. The violence against women was especially heinous:

Women’s breasts were mutilated and in some instances the Hindu symbol “Om” was carved into the victims’ bodies. Ironically, women from Hindutva auxiliaries, who had been taught that their place was in the home, “were brandishing swords [and] throwing stones at riot police,” who, after long delays, came to protect Muslims. In an article entitled “Saffron Sisterhood” Lalitha Panicker quotes an RSS woman Chandravati, who joined Hindu militants at the Babri Mosque in 1991: “We have come here to shed blood . . . The meaning of the [Rāma] temple building is that Mullahs should be hanged.”^[42]

A report of the Indian Human Rights Commission condemned the Modi administration for “promoting the attitudes of racial superiority, racial hatred, and the legacy of Nazism.”^[43] In a chapter entitled “Genocide in Gujarat” Martha Nussbaum, a careful scholar not known for rhetorical excess, examines, drawing on books such as Fascism in India, the background of Narendra Modi and his nationalist credentials. She reminds her readers that Modi believed that the Muslims of Godhra had “criminal tendencies” and he strongly implied that the state-wide pogrom was a justified “reaction” to the burning of the rail coaches. Nussbaum also refers to the report of the Indian Commission on Human Rights that found that there was “premeditation in the killing of non-Hindus [and] complicity by Gujarati State government officials.” K. N. Panikkar concurs: “It was state sponsored, state supported, and if eyewitnesses are to be believed, state directed. . . . What happened in Gujarat was not a ‘communal’ riot but an organized massacre of Muslims with the state’s active complicity and connivance.”^[44]

In 2004 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (CIRF) investigated the Gujarat violence and concluded that Narendra Modi was guilty of failing to stop the Hindutva attacks. The U.S. State Department did its own research and decided to ban Modi from traveling to the United States. In addition to citing the failure to prevent the violence, the State Department document condemned the Modi administration for refusing to change textbooks, which extolled the achievements of Nazi Germany and called Hitler a “charismatic” personality. In 2013 the CIRF reaffirmed its recommendation that Modi not be granted a U.S. visa. The Commission did acknowledge that some arrests had been made and that one of Modi’s administrators had been sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. The Commission also noted that “in early February 2012, the Gujarat High Court strongly chastised the Gujarat government and Chief Minister Modi for inaction and negligence during the violence. The court has also ordered the government to pay compensation for the over 500 houses and businesses that were destroyed during the violence.”^[45]

A previous BJP Gujarat government persecuted Dalits and Christians, and it was reluctant to lash out at Muslims, primarily because of their entrenched business interests. With its two-third parliamentary majority, the BJP was able to press forward with its anti-Christian campaign. Asia News reported that “from March 1998 onwards, Christians and their institutions were attacked with frightening regularity. A huge church that was under construction was pulled down in Ahmadabad by a mob. Several other churches throughout other parts of South Gujarat were attacked or burnt in December 1998 and January 1999.”^[46] In December of the same year, Gujurati Christians, for the first time, marched in Ahmadabad to protest against this persecution, but it still continued. In March of 2003 the Gujarat Parliament passed the Freedom of Religion Act, which requires government permission for one to change his or her religion. At a Hindutva celebration in 2006, Modi called Christian missionaries “arrogant, charlatans, and hypocrites.”^[47] Gujurat is now one of seven Indian states that have passed anti-conversion laws.

Large numbers in the Indian community abroad support the BJP, and Indian Americans protested when they learned that Modi was denied entry to the U.S. They and others around the world are the source of huge sums of money that are used to support Hindu nationalist activities in India. The Vishva Hindu Parishad of America alone raises millions of dollars a year for these projects. Corporate America gives large contributions to the Indian Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), not realizing that it is a front for Hindu nationalist organizations. Between 1997 and 2001 the IDRF raised $10 million, and it reported to the IRS that 82 percent of their funds go to Hindu nationalist organizations.

Gujarat is Gandhi’s home state, and it is where most of the exquisitely beautiful temples of the Jain religion are found. Gandhi claimed that growing up among the strictly non-violent Jains was one of the principal influences on his later worldview. In 1917 Gandhi established an ashram on the Sabarmati River, and he and his disciples called it home until the British confiscated it in 1933. It was from here that Gandhi organized and carried out one of the most successful campaigns of his political career. Gandhi and seventy-eight well-trained satyāgrahis marched 241 miles to the salt works at Dandi and, although beaten mercilessly by Indian police, still managed to make their own salt in defiance of the British salt monopoly. It is, therefore, sadly ironic that BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani, who was the BJP’s prime minister candidate in the 2009 election, represents the Sabarmati area in the Indian Parliament. He also calls Golwalkar “Guruji,” whom he believes has been unfairly criticized and grossly misunderstood. Advani recently reassured Indians that Golwalkar was a true secularist, and that “Guruji was of the view that theocracy is totally alien to the concept of Hindu polity.”^[48] Advani has resigned as head of the BJP and now Nahendra Modi is being touted as the prime ministerial candidate in federal elections late this year. The fact that Modi has been condemned for his role in the pogrom against Gujarati Muslims does not appear to deter his supporters. As I finished editing this chapter, Modi and his BJP won a decisive victory in April-May 2014 elections.

Notes

Quoted R. P. Sharma, “Indian Nationalism: A Layman’s View” in Ethnicity, Culture, and Nationalism in North-East India (New Delhi: Indus Publishing Co., 1996), 92.

2.
Bande Matārām, trans. Sri Aurobindo at http://intyoga.online.fr/bande.htm, accesed on May 21, 2014.

3.
Chandra Chatterji Bakim, Anandamath, trans. and adapted by B. K. Roy (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2006), 41–42.

4.
Ibid., 53.

5.
A Google text of “Bal Gangadhar Tilak, His Writings, and Speeches” http://archive.org/stream/balgangadhartil00ghosgoog/balgangadhartil00ghosgoog_djvu.txt, accessed on April 18, 2014.

6.
Quoted in Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 80.

7.
V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2nd ed., 2003), 114.

8.
Gandhi, All Men are Brothers (Ahmebabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1960), 77.

9.
Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 93: 64; vol. 35: 462.

10.
Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, 3.

11.
Ibid., 113.

12.
Ibid.

13.
Ibid., 5.

14.
Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 87.

15.
Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 25: 138.

16.
Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, 24.

17.
Ibid., 23.

18.
Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 40: 160; speech at a Buddha Jayanti meeting in Bombay on May 18, 1924 in The Collected Works, vol. 24: 86.

19.
Quoted in Charu Gupta, “Anxious Hindu Masculinities in Colonial North India: Shuddhi a nd Sangathan Movements,” CrossCurrents 61, no. 4 (December, 2011): 450.

20.
Ibid., 451.

21.
Ibid., 452.

22.
See Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 104, 107.

23.
See Ibid., 107.

24.
Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, 84–85.

25.
Ibid., 86.

26.
M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan, 4th ed., 1984), 29.

27.
Ibid., 28.

28.
Ibid., 40.

29.
Ibid., 39.

30.
Ibid., 40.

31.
Ibid., 55–56.

32.
Ibid., 43.

33.
Koenraad Elst, “Was Guru Golwalkar a Nazi?” at koenraddelst.bharatvani.org/fascism/golwalkar.html, accessed on August 27, 2013.

34.
Eleanor Nesbitt, Sikhism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.

35.
Dasam Granth, 51.

36.
Bikhu Parekh, “Making Sense of Gujarat” in The Gujarat Carnage,, ed., Asgharali Engineer, The Gujarat Carnage (New Delhi: Longmans Orient, 2003), 169.

37.
Quoted in Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat Report by the International Initiative for Justice. www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/ iijg/2003/ annexures.pdf, 2, accessed on April 18, 2014.

38.
K. S. Subramanian, “Truth Behind the Fire in Sabarmati Express,” Mainstream Weekly (April 9, 2011), posted at http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/04/truth-behind-fire-in-sabarmati-express.html, accessed on November 18, 2013.

39.
Ibid., 5.

40.
Parekh, “Making Sense of Gujarat,”170.

41.
Threatened Existence, 5.

42.
Lalitha Panicker, “Saffron Sisterhood: An Illusory Promise of Power” in The Gujarat Carnage, 105.

43.
Quoted in Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 50.

44.
K. N. Panikkar, “The Agony of Gujarat” in The Gujarat Carnage, 93, 98.

45.
“Visa Ban on Modi Should Continue, Says U.S. Religious Freedom Panel,” The Hindu (May 2, 2013), at www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/visa-ban-on-modi-should-continue-says-us-religious-freedom-panel/article4673392.ece, accessed on April 24, 2014.

46.
Nirmala Carvalho, “Ayodhya No Justification for Evil Actions of Hindu Fundamentalists,” Asian News (September 30, 2010), accessed at http://www.asianews.it/view4print.php?l=en&art=19596 on November 18, 2013.

47.
Ibid.

48.
“Advani Says He Learnt Meaning of Secularism from Golwalkar,” The Times of India (August 17, 2008).