CHAPTER 6
HINDU FUNDAMENTALISM
As James Dunn has shown in Chapter 1 of this volume, the term ‘fundamentalism’ arose in a Western, Protestant evangelical context at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.1 All sorts of methodological considerations – and warnings – are in order if one wishes to transfer the term to a non-Christian, south Asian tradition, such as Hinduism. Nevertheless, in contemporary parlance the term is used to indicate a mentality, or point of view, or attitude, or course of action in contexts that outstrip that of its origins, and I propose to exploit this terminological flexibility in this essay. By ‘fundamentalism’, then, I refer to an approach undergirding a way of life, based on the ideological reading of a source text (or corpus of texts),2 which affirms that only one understanding of that text, whether taken in part or in sum, is viable or true, irrespective of any other factors of interpretation that may be brought to bear, such as reason, tradition, scientific and other empirical discoveries of one sort or other, the so-called wisdom of other faiths and philosophies, and so on.3 It is important to add that such an approach must be implemented in an adversarial manner, so that dissenters are relegated to a position beyond a divide that cannot be bridged except by way of (at least substantially) uncompromising assent on the part of those who have been excluded.
I regard this as a ‘closed’ form of interpretation in so far as this interpretation is not allowed, in theory at least, to undergo any kind of change that deviates substantially from the original understanding of the perceived ‘fundamentals’ of the text(s) concerned. Any change of understanding that may occur is regarded at most as marginal or secondary. The effect to the observer outside this interpretive circle is of an approach that is, overall, unreasonable, unbalanced and ‘closed’. Notwithstanding the origins of the term in question, this definition does not confine its application to religious contexts; it may apply too to non-religious texts such as the constitution of a state or organisation, and so on.
We are now confronted by a different terminological problem: the denotation and connotation of the terms ‘Hinduism/Hindu’.4 As all working in the subject-area know, defining these terms eludes general consensus, but this does not mean that we cannot use them, for despite their having ‘fuzzy edges’ semantically, it is generally agreed that these terms have a wide enough range of uncontested and incontestable uses; besides, their general use gives Hindus a voice amid the forum of other religio(-cultural) voices, such as those of the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, etc. Desuetude of the words ‘Hinduism/Hindu’ would emasculate a great many people in the affirmation of the identity that pertains to the global interchange of news, information, allocation of resources and so on in the political, social, economic, religious, historical (and other) spheres. And there is the salient fact that a great many individuals identify themselves as ‘Hindu’, and insist on the name. Indeed, one of the points I shall be making in this essay is that it is a common project among certain kinds of Hindu fundamentalists themselves, implicitly or explicitly, to recommend their own definition of these contentious naming words.
To a definition of ‘Hindu’ by (some) Hindu fundamentalists, we shall come in due course. I now wish to focus, more clearly, the scope of our inquiry with respect to the kinds of Hindu fundamentalism we shall consider: for want of more precise terms, these may be broadly described as ‘scriptural’ and ‘political’ (though this does not mean that either kind does not include some reference to the content that the other emphasises).
We can start our discussion by noting, with others in this volume, that fundamentalism as such is a ‘modern’ phenomenon. But this statement is not easy to decode. Does this mean that what may count for ‘fundamentalist’ approaches today did not have antecedents in our traditional societies of the past, not least in societies that we may describe as ‘Hindu’? As a ‘modern’ phenomenon, can ‘fundamentalism’ in one form or other have no (pre-modern) historical precedent? What does it mean to ascribe the description ‘modern’ to ‘fundamentalism’ as a concept?
In his essay, Dunn points out that the early twentieth-century publication-project of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles adverted to earlier was undertaken to defend ‘the orthodox beliefs of Protestantism, indeed of Christianity’, viz. the Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Deity of Christ, the creation of the world by God, etc., derived from a literal reading of the Bible, against, inter alia, attack from the Liberal Protestant approach emanating from Germany that subjected the Bible and these putative truths to the ‘scientific’ method of rational, historicist textual criticism.5 Thus, according to the authors of these booklets, at least, the hallmark of modernity6 was a universal reason informed by a scientific–historicist critique that was corrosive of the fundamentals or core beliefs of faith. Fundamentalism becomes a retreat into a notion of faith that provides inerrancy and certainty against an undermining use of reason that is supposed to have universal applicability. This mentality springs from a desire ‘for a firm rock in a sea of otherwise constant change, for [truths] unchanging in the face of so-called “progress” with its seemingly endless confusion and dilution of moral standards’ (Chapter 1). We are in the realm of psychology here, but as Peter Herriot points out in Chapter 2 of this book, fundamentalism (of all kinds, one presumes) generates a distinctive mindset that seeks to avoid insecurity and uncertainty in circumstances of uncontrollable change of one sort or other. However, cast in such broad terms, this description does not represent only a modern mindset: there have always been elements in society the world over that have resisted the pace of change, not least in terms of challenges to the prevailing authorities. And traditional Hindu societies have been no exception. If, however, we specify that this change is wrought by rapidly globalising innovations in technology, and such factors as the irreversible march of rationalist, secularist ways of thinking, capitalist, industrialised economies, and democratic polities, then by definition ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern category.
In a fine article entitled ‘Modernity’,7 Joseph Prabhu challenges the idea that we must understand the concept of ‘modernity’ in terms of the ‘cultural and philosophical hegemony of the West’. This understanding privileges a historicising Eurocentric consciousness of meta-narratives as a key factor of modernity, and demands that non-Western cultures follow suit ‘to earn the badge of “modernity”’. Prabhu points out that many non-western cultures, for one historical reason or other, for example interaction with colonial rule, had forged their own notions of modernity by means of various cross-cultural critiques (as an example, he considers that of Gandhi), so that they could come to terms with their own circumstances. He concludes:
Modernity […] is now made a global category affecting different cultures variously […] The effect of these various critiques on the original model of Western modernity […] is to rob it of both its exemplarity and its normativity.8
In this essay we shall consider how Hindus we dub fundamentalists today created their own versions of modernity; this occurred in a context of colonial rule and Western understandings of Hinduism. However, these constructions have been gradually confronted by a post-modern intellectual climate in which, in contrast to the sometimes facile universalisms and rationalisms of modernism, the emphasis is on the local, the fragmentary, the ambiguous, and the particular. Though ‘fundamentalism’ has been born from the womb of modernity, it finds itself confronted today in many ways by the exigencies of a post-modern environment. This makes its trajectory in various contexts all the more unpredictable, and prone to violence.
It is from this nuanced point of view that we can now attend to our topic. I mentioned earlier that we shall consider two kinds of Hindu fundamentalism: (i) the ‘scriptural’ and (ii) the ‘political’, and that these descriptive terms serve only to emphasise content with respect to each other, not to unduly constrain it.
Let us look at the scriptural first. This kind has a longer pedigree in the Hindu context than the political, and in its current form has become something of a laughing stock. One of its modern representatives has been the ‘historian’ Purushottam Nagesh Oak (1917–2007), born in what was then the state of Indore, who claimed in his writings, inter alia, that both Christianity and Islam derived from ancient forms of Hindu belief, that the Vatican was originally a Vedic institution, that the Taj Mahal began its existence as a temple to Shiva before it was eventually transformed into a Muslim mausoleum, and so on.9 Many of these claims are based on a tendentious reading of historical material and a derisively spurious etymology, e.g. the name ‘Christianity’ comes from the Sanskrit compound kṛṣṇa-nīti, viz. ‘The justice/ethics of (the deity) Krishna’. This stance is ‘fundamentalist’ in terms of my definition in so far as it claims that the ancient Hindu canonical Sanskrit scriptures, the Vedas,10 are a guide for our reading of various historical data (texts, artefacts) in such a way that only one interpretation of these data is acceptable, viz. their Vedic origin, irrespective of a wealth of views and otherwise established evidence to the contrary. So much so that – it is claimed – it is incumbent on the Indian central and relevant state governments to accede to this interpretation and take the requisite ‘revisionist’ action, viz. change of public information and records, of history books, etc. (which demands have been rejected, of course, by the governments concerned). These views of Oak and his revisionist colleagues have been summarily dismissed by more orthodox scholars of Indian culture and history; nevertheless, they continue to have a minority but still significant following among Hindus, not least among Hindus of the far right.
The trajectory of this kind of Vedic fundamentalism, if I may call it that, goes back to the nineteenth century when much of India was under British colonial rule, either that of the East India Company or of the Crown. In his book Resistant Hinduism (1981), Richard Fox Young records a debate between a Scotsman, John Muir (1810–82), a civil servant in the East India Company, and three Hindu apologists.11 In 1839, after he had been in India for over a decade, Muir published, in Sanskrit,12 the first edition of a polemical work, the Mataparīkṣa (abbr. MP), (Test of [Religious] Views), which incorporated elements of a Paleyian rationalism and purported to identify the true religion on the basis of three criteria. These were firstly, the ability of the religion's founder to work miracles that could be attested to by unimpeachable witnesses; secondly, the superior holiness of the religion's scriptures; and thirdly, the religion's universally salvific character. Not surprisingly, these three criteria were applied by Muir to make Christianity the true religion and Hinduism, in particular, false. Behind the scenes it was really a matter of a dominant faith seeking the justification of compliant reason, since Muir's chosen criteria were the reagents of a solution in which the Christian faith was the intended precipitate. But what is interesting for our purposes is the role ostensibly assigned to reason in the work. Muir's explicit starting point is not scriptural authority or faith. Rather, reason is set up as the impartial judge of the inquiry, and it is assumed that the application of the three criteria is rationally demonstrable.13
Note how Muir purports to establish the debate in what we may call a ‘modernist’ context, where the dictates of an impartial and universal reason were supposed to hold sway. The first two editions of the MP drew vigorous rejoinders from native ‘pundits’ (paṇḍitas) or scholars versed in traditional lore, of whom one in particular is of special interest to us. This was Nilakantha Goreh (1825–85), a Citpavana Brahmin from Maharashtra, who had been brought up in Benares, a traditional stronghold of Hindu orthodoxy. His riposte was entitled: Śāstratattvavinirṇaya (abbr. ŚTV: ‘Determination of the Essence of Scripture’), and was written some time in 1844–5. The chief target of Goreh's attack was precisely the relationship between faith and reason implied in the MP.14 The gist of Goreh's defence of the Hindu approach (in effect, really the Vedāntic approach) was this:
Reason [upapatti] but conforms to scripture [śāstra], scripture does not conform to reason. Scripture is self-validating [svataḥ pramāṇakaṃ śāstram], whereas reason acts for the understanding of scripture […] Thus those things set forth in the Vedas, Purāṇas etc. are quite true; reason only serves to make them [better] known.15
Here reason's role is to justify scripture from within the standpoint of faith, not to judge the truth of scriptural beliefs. Scriptural authority dominates. Faith leads reason by the hand, reason following as it may. Goreh repudiates Muir's claim that the mark of the true religion is universality, and conformability to reason. On the contrary, he avers, such attributes are the sign of a false religion. The true religion is not based on truths that can be validated by reason: ‘Only in scripture is God [īśvara] made known, as also the meditations, sacrifices and acts relating to Him.’16 That is the whole point of scripture as a source of knowledge we can rely on (viz. a pramāṇa).17 Consequently, Goreh criticises the ‘superior’ religion advocated in the MP (designedly innocent of the more recondite Christian doctrines) as ‘simple-minded’ (bālādhigocarārthaka) and therefore ‘man-made’ (narair iva kṛta). In fact, on the matter of reason's relation to faith, Goreh stands squarely in the classical Vedāntic tradition, for which the nature and existence of the Supreme Reality, infinite in its being and attributes, cannot be demonstrated by reason.18
For his part, Goreh was a scriptural fundamentalist in that the Hindu scriptures alone (primarily the Vedas) could give us determinate and incontrovertible truth about para-empirical realities such as God; no other alleged source of knowledge, including other (putative) scriptures, could epistemically challenge this truth. It is only the Hindu sacred texts, based on a right reading of the Vedas, that give humans the most worthwhile knowledge possible: the means to and nature of salvation (mokṣa).
Later in the century, another figure went a step further in his claims for the Vedas as a source of knowledge. This was a Brahmin from Kathiawar called Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83)19 who maintained that the Vedas provide the blueprint not only for all religious truth, but also for all scientific discoveries; as a repository of all truth, they yield ‘the totality of knowledge’.20 In the Golden Age of Vedic India, Dayananda affirmed, ‘vehicles were propelled mechanically by the combination of fire, water, wind, etc.’21
[T]he Vedas were […] the repository of scientific truth […] Some texts [of the Vedic corpus] were shown to propound the theory of the relatively new process of telegraphy, and others were said to explain the principles of mechanical locomotion by means of steam and electricity over land, water, and by air.22
This scientific knowledge was lost after the post-Vedic but still ancient cataclysmic war recorded in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, only to be rediscovered in modern times. For Dayananda, the argument for the inerrancy and cognitive comprehensiveness of the Vedas is straightforward:
[I]f there were no single book that has its full logical justification within itself (svataḥ-pramāṇa), then it would be impossible to decide the truth or untruth of all other books, because they disprove one another, and doubt could not be overcome. The Veda, being the wisdom of god, is svataḥ-pramāṇa [self-validating], and therefore the touchstone of all truth.23
In our context, what completes the fundamentalist mindset is something like this: ‘I/My group can divine the mind of God/the text, for which there is but one reading – my/our own. We are right, and all (substantial) dissenters are wrong.’ The Swami did not live in an environment where it was generally known that sacred texts could be subjected to a historical–critical interpretation, as do his followers and sympathisers of present times.24 Nevertheless, even some of the apparently educated among these maintain that the ancient Vedic Aryans were familiar with at least the basics of what most people today think are modern scientific inventions, for example the aeroplane. Thus B. Bissoondoyal could quote in his book in 1979 from the Organiser of 6 October 1952, that ‘Vedic references to aeroplanes described eight kinds of machines in aeroplanes, all of which were electrically controlled’. It was on the basis of such ancient wisdom, he contends, that an inhabitant of Bombay (with some collaborators) constructed an ‘aeroplane’ in 1895 that ‘rose to a height of 1,500 feet and automatically landed safely’. Later, the machine was sold ‘to an English commercial concern’.25 The rest is history – or not, as may be.
This kind of Vedic fundamentalism continues to have its advocates in India today, and exemplifies in salient fashion what I have called ‘scriptural’ fundamentalism in Hinduism. In Dayananda's case, it was a ‘modern’ product in that (albeit rudimentary) modern notions of science were combined with the belief in the superiority of the ancient Hindu scriptures to produce a standpoint that exalted Hindus and Hinduism (in the face of subjection to colonial rule) so as to encourage the self-esteem deemed necessary to seek political self-reliance. This set up a number of sharp divides – between (a certain kind of) Hinduism and Christianity, between Hindus and non-Hindus (Christians, Muslims, etc.), between Hindus of one kind and Hindus of another, and so on – that sought to consolidate an ideology, and became potentially programmatic for various courses of action.
The political goal here, in this kind of fundamentalism, is still inarticulate and somewhat oblique. Though espoused by a number from the far right as compatible with their political beliefs, it is not of itself political in nature, notwithstanding the fact that it may on occasion have political repercussions, as we have intimated. ‘Political’ Hindu fundamentalism, on the other hand, though it also has religious content and implications, has been a political beast almost ab initio, and it is to this more consequential form of Hindu fundamentalism that we now turn. Here I wish to do no more than give an idea of its modern origins and of what I regard as its chief characteristics, without going into the ramifications of its contemporary developments, political or otherwise.
First, however, it is important to bear two facts in mind: (i) that in the global geo-political arena today, India is recognised as an emergent key player, pressed hard as it is on its northern flanks by two historically uncongenial powers, Pakistan and China, both of which like India have nuclear capability; and (ii) that Hinduism is by far the majority tradition of the land.26 So, from the viewpoint of the potential repercussions of political Hindu fundamentalism, the stakes are high.
There is another consideration here. I have argued in a number of places,27 in common with other scholars, that traditionally at the heart of Hinduism lies a strategy for making sense of the world – of the disposition of space and time, of questions of ultimate concern, the reckoning of order (and disorder) etc. – that is essentially a decentralising one, in contrast to counterpart strategies of the so-called Abrahamic faiths. I have called this decentralising strategy ‘polycentrism’. Here is an example of what I mean with regard to a familiar feature of Hinduism, viz. the worship of deity through multiple forms (and images). The example is taken from the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, which has a conception of the supreme deity that we may call ‘binitarian’, in so far as that deity manifests simultaneously through the divine persons of Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa and the Goddess Śrī-Lakṣmī:
Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa manifests in various modes particular to time and place, e.g. as one avatāra or other, or as this or that persona through the image(s) resident in one temple or other, in accordance with his gracious will. The Goddess Śrī-Lakṣmī, the other person of the Godhead, has her own history and panoply of multiple manifestations. Yet the broad gamut of these secondary forms, which invariably have their own liturgies of worship, are expressions of the same Godhead, endorsing and reinforcing each other in a shared framework of divine salvific efficacy. Or, to put it more specifically in the language of polycentrism, the one transcendent invisible Godhead, itself composed of two personal centres in dialectical relationship, manifests concretely through individualized personae [e.g. Kṛṣṇa, Rāma etc. on Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa's side, and Sītā and other figures, on Śrī-Lakṣmī's side] that function as interactive centres of shared grace and power within one and the same domain of Śrī Vaiṣṇava cultic practice.28
The point here is that the broad decentralising strategy exemplified above – a strategy intellectually receptive to the inclusion of fresh centres in the polycentric grids that constitute the whole, and so typical of traditional Hindu understanding of the world – is in direct contrast to the centralising strategy of Hindu fundamentalism, not least the salient kind of political fundamentalism that we shall consider in this essay. Indeed, that is the nature of fundamentalism per se, viz. to exhibit a centralising tendency, especially in the domain of ideas: there is only one cluster of ideas that has authority, only one way of interpreting them, only one axis of certainty – and this generates an exclusivist faith stance that results in a sharp divide between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.
The fundamentalism of which we speak began to coalesce as a major political force in independent India around an organisation called the Vishwa (sometimes ‘Vishva’) Hindu Parishad (abbr. VHP, variously translatable as ‘The Pan-Hindu Association’, ‘The World Hindu Council’, etc.) and its affiliates, in the 1980s. The VHP itself was founded in 1964 (and officially registered as a society in 1966). As its name indicates, its aim was to consolidate and marshal Hindu political power in terms of an assertive sense of Hindu identity that derived from the concept of ‘Hindutva’, which may loosely be translated as ‘Hinduness’ (to which we shall return). But the building blocks, conceptually and politically, for the Hindutva movement were fashioned much earlier, indeed from the time the Indian nationalist movement against British rule began to take shape in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in Bengal. Nor must we forget that:
Hindu nationalism in most of its modern forms (including hindutva) is inconceivable without reference to contemporaneous Western contributions about ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ […] [which] led to a dominant view of vedic Aryanism as the original fount for the beliefs gathered under Hinduism. Similarly, vedic Aryans were seen as the progenitor peoples for those who became known as Hindus […] [so that] in colonial India an archaic civilizational vedic Aryanism became virtually ‘common sense’ for many Indian intellectual elites in their varied projects of patriotism towards empire, anticolonial nationalism, or communalism.29
The arrival of the Vedic Aryans in (northwest) India was assigned by these western scholars to some time in the second millennium BCE.
The politically-charged atmosphere of the period was given broader popular impetus by Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838–94), the doyen of Bengali literature at the time, especially in his last three novels, and particularly in the first of these, viz. Ānandamaṭh (abbr. AM, which was soon widely translated into other Indian regional languages);30 a particular twist in this religio-political novel was the inclusion of a certain kind of Muslim, together with the British, as the chief social and cultural ‘Other’ for Hindus.31
There can be little doubt that, more or less through a process of ‘mission creep’, the vanguard of the ‘Indian’ nationalist movement against British rule gave the impression that they were a Hindu faction. Admittedly, this perception was aided and abetted to some extent by Muslim leaders themselves, not least from the Muslim League (India's main political mouthpiece representing Muslims in the run-up to independence), who dragged their feet when it came to co-operating with their Hindu counterparts in the struggle for a free India under the rubric of a single national identity. In general, the political and social ‘speak’ of the leaders of the nationalist vanguard (most of whom were Hindus) was not sufficiently attentive to Muslim sentiment.32 Consequently, it was easier for the separatists among the Muslim leaders to make their case for a separate homeland for Muslims in the subcontinent, where a huge Hindu majority could not ride roughshod over Muslim demands and sentiments; thus Pakistan (in both its original eastern and western sectors) was born.
It was in this general atmosphere of a growing divide between factions of Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent, a divide exacerbated from time to time by bitter riots between the two communities, that several right-wing Hindu voices rose to prominence. The Hindu Mahasabha, a militant Hindu organisation, was launched in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. Though it has not played a major role on the Indian political stage, the Hindu Mahasabha is important for our purposes because it was one of the first parties to formulate an ideology that sought to unite Hindus politically, culturally and religiously in the face of specifically Muslim (but also Christian) identity in the Indian context in contrast to the Indian National Congress party's avowed non-communal secularist agenda, and also because it was out of this developing programme that a number of more significant active, militant Hindu voices subsequently emerged.
In keeping with the implications of its name, an important feature of the Hindu Mahasabha's manifesto (as indeed of other voices at the time) was the repudiation of the age-old caste practices pertaining to untouchability; on the face of it this was a major step, in the context of a militant nationalist agenda, towards the political unification of Hindus, all the more so when one considers the strong Brahmin influence that constituted the party's original ideology. How effectively this repudiation of caste divisiveness was implemented at grassroots level is not strictly to our point. We wish to emphasise here a ‘collectivist’ way of thinking with respect to Hindu identity that was to reappear again and again in subsequent Hindu political fundamentalist approaches (and which was reinforced in other political contexts of mass mobilisation in the first decades of the nineteenth century, e.g. Gandhi's regular summons to public demonstrations for one cause or other, though these latter were not confined to Hindus only). To some extent the Hindu fundamentalist programme of ‘collectivisation’ of Hindus goes against the vastly more narrow ‘them’-versus-‘us’ mentality of most Western and Abrahamic fundamentalist groupings.
It is in the context of this ideological matrix that we may locate one of the Mahasabha's later guiding lights, the militant Hindu nationalist, Vinayak Damodar (‘Veer’) Savarkar (1883–1966). Savarkar became President of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, but already in 1923, while imprisoned in Ratnagiri jail for what amounted to an act of political extremism in British eyes, he wrote a groundbreaking tract for the ideology of subsequent Hindu political fundamentalism, entitled Essentials of Hindutva, which was republished in 1928 as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?
In explicating what he meant by Hindutva or ‘Hinduness’, Savarkar did not focus on Hindu commitment in its religious dimensions as a potentially uniting factor of Hindu identity. In fact, not surprisingly, he found Hinduism's proverbial religious diversity divisive for his purposes, as he did the plethora of caste groupings and their discriminations.33 These religious and caste distinctions were to be collapsed into a sense of identity that focused on racial–cultural, geo-political, and moral factors, based on a particular reading of Indian history.
According to Savarkar, the Hindus were in essence one people, descended from the glorious, energetic and valorous ancient ‘Aryans’, with common cultural, ethnic and moral bonds, and destined to flourish within the bounds of what we may call a ‘greater India’.34 Thus there was a Golden Age to which Hindus could hark back for inspiration as a ‘nation’, for the Aryans of old soon ‘developed a sense of nationality’.35 In time, the whole land ‘from the Himalayas to the [southern] Seas [around “Ceylon”]’ was brought ‘under one sovereign sway’,36 and ‘Aryans and Anaryans knitting themselves into a people were born as a nation’.37 Thus there is no talk here of a Volk, of a people of one pure race; the language is more assimilative than that. But throughout there is a racial bias towards the original inhabitants of the subcontinent – post-Aryan – uniting to form the Hindu people/nation of which Savarkar speaks.38
The geographical boundaries of Savarkar's vision are not clearly defined, but they would certainly include territory from the countries we now know as Pakistan and Bangladesh,39 a claim that Savarkar's more extreme, contemporary followers emphasise in terms of the designation, ‘Akhil Bhārat’.40 In fact, a large part of Savarkar's tract purports to be a historical analysis of how the Hindus from earliest times, after one reverse or another, again and again repulsed foreign attacks on their integrity as a people and as a civilisation within the bounds of the subcontinent. On each occasion a leader, more or less regional, cropped up to rescue the Hindus concerned from dissipation and to preserve the body politic. Towards the end of his analysis, Savarkar gives the following rather extended description of what Hindutva is and of what it means to be a Hindu:
A Hindu […] to sum up the conclusions arrived at, is he who looks upon the land that extends from […] the Indus to the Seas as […] his Fatherland, who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhus [seven rivers] and which on its onward march, assimilating much that was incorporated and ennobling much that was assimilated, has come to be known as the Hindu people, who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit and represented by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals; and who above all, addresses this land […] as his Holyland […] as the land of his prophets and seers, of his godmen and gurus, the land of piety and pilgrimage. These are the essentials of Hindutva – a common nation [Rashtra], a common race [Jati] and a common civilization [Sanskriti].41
Note that this statement is meant to be assimilative as well as exclusivist. Savarkar includes the so-called dharmic religions of Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and so on within his definition of Hinduness (a claim that many from these faiths would reject today); and he excludes from his definition's purview such ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ traditions as Islam and Christianity, both of which have a long history in India and which comprise, in Savarkar's terms, part of the ‘non-self’ that stands in opposition to the Hindus' ‘self’.42 He does not speak of first-class and second-class citizens of the Indian polity; his concern is to circumscribe what it means to be a Hindu. It was left to others who followed to contemplate this further step in a more politicised framework.
Savarkar's ideas about Hindutva were extremely important for the development of the general strategy of the Hindu political fundamentalism that prevails today. Almost all branches of this fundamentalism regard his criteria of Hinduness, duly reworked, as central constituents of their ideology, not least the VHP (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad), in whose shadow a number of the more active branches of this brand of fundamentalism operate today (often under the rubric of the ‘Sangh Parivar’ or ‘the Joint Family’, members of which include the RSS and the Bajrang Dal or youth wing of this nexus43). To obtain an insight into this perspective at large, let us now inquire briefly into the ideological groundwork of the VHP. Though the VHP counts for an organisation, with a publication that has acted as its mouthpiece (viz. the Hindu Visva, published in several languages, including English), here we shall treat it not so much as an organisation in its own right with a set of historical personalities, but as the representative of an ideological template which members of the Sangh Parivar could reconfigure to suit their own objectives. In short, our concern is mainly with the basic Hindutva ideology of this so-called family network.
The VHP rose to power in its function as a marker for the Hindu far right in the context of the running political problem that is the Kashmir issue (with its historical ambiguities), India's poor showing in the Sino-Indian conflicts, Muslim assertiveness and its fallout in connection with the petro-dollars of the Middle Eastern economies, and perceptions that the ruling Congress party of the time was cynically selling out Hindu interests to gain the Muslim vote, not to mention the gradual exacerbation of the political divides that characterised the background narrative of our earlier discussion. In this light, the criteria for Hindu collectivisation and mobilisation that shaped the founding ideology of the VHP can be reconfigured under the following three headings: the principles of Dharma or right order; the meaning of Samāj or the ideal Society; and veneration for Bhārat Mātā or the Motherland that is India.44
Firstly, the term dharma denotes an ancient Hindu concept bearing on the principles of right order and right living, with both descriptive and prescriptive connotations, and hence represents the ethical–cultural dimension of VHP ideology. Thus dharma tells one what is the case (e.g. it is the dharma or characteristic of fire to burn) as well as what one should do. In our context this means that dharma has an ideal or transcendent dimension that is the unchanging root of right order and right action to which all (not only Hindus) must defer (so Hindus can speak of sanātana or ‘eternal’ dharma), but when implemented empirically it is susceptible to contextual change and adaptation:
Dharma is regarded as an eternal, universal, unchangeable principle. It is also regarded as a norm for social, as well as individual behaviour, and in this aspect it is not eternal, unchangeable or universal, but prescribes rules according to the situation.45
In consequence, VHP ideologues take recourse to the notion of gatimān dharma or ‘developing dharma’, dharma-on-the-go. Such conceptual flexibility is important, for it allows Hindutva strategy to adapt to circumstances, e.g. by allowing a greater role to women as circumstances are perceived to change (even though this ideology remains basically androcentric and gender-specific46). Though key characters of the great Sanskrit Hindu epic, the Rāmāyaṇa in particular47 – such as Vishnu's avatar, the brave Rāma, who is protective of his kingdom and of his subjects; Sītā, his spirited but devoted wife and the model of what it is to be a married woman; the simian figure, Hanumān, ever energetic and solicitous of Rāma's and his loved ones' needs, etc. – are given ideal status as exemplars of dharma, each in their own way, there is no engagement in Hindutva ideology with the doctrinal niceties or sectarian battles of Hinduism. There is a marked difference in this respect between the Hindu militant approach of which we speak and Abrahamic fundamentalisms.
The exemplary characters of Rāma, etc. (or indeed of any other figure that might be selected from Hindu religious history) are brought into play largely as motivating counters for moral or political action to create an atmosphere and achieve specific objectives of the VHP caucus. In this sense, the character of Sangh Parivar ideology is more secular-ethical than religious (see Savarkar). Nevertheless, there was greater scope, at least in the earlier decades of the VHP's existence, for Hindu sādhus or holy men – the so-called dharmācāryas or ‘Teachers of dharma’ – to pronounce collectively on the implementation of Hindu dharma on one issue or other that cropped up for consideration by Hindutva leaders, than seems to be the case at present.48 However, the image of the Hindu holy man or woman – of which the saffron robe is a salient marker – continues to play an important part in Sangh politics. A well-known example is Uma Bhar(a)ti (1959–), a senior activist of the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, the most populous and influential political party of the Sangh Parivar. Her familiar saffron-clad figure was prominent in the agitation that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid (Mosque) in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 under the instigation of militant Hindu nationalists. ‘Definitely I take moral responsibility for whatever happened that day’, she is reported as saying in The Hindu national newspaper (24 November 2009, New Delhi edition). According to Hindutva ideologues, this event was Hindutva dharma in action. It is not accidental that the mosque was located on the site that these ideologues claim was also the birthplace of the avatar, Rāma. In the political context, fundamentalisms of all stripes not infrequently lead to violence.
Secondly, not only do the militant nationalists want a Hindu rashtra or nation state, they want it to be dominated by a Hindu Samāj or society.49 The concept of Samāj too has mystical and empirical connotations. In this vision, the demeaning, proliferating discriminations of caste and untouchability – which according to many ideologues were unwarranted accretions anyway – would be a thing of the past, but at least the four-fold order of varṇa (Brahmins or purveyors of wisdom and learning; Kshatriyas or rulers and protectors of polity; Vaishyas or entrepreneurs and business folk; and Shudras or functionaries of one sort or other) would remain in its ‘originally intended’ sense, that is as based not on birth but on the character and qualities of individuals.50 As in the case of Savarkar, this Samāj would include all the ‘dharmic’ faiths (Buddhism, Sikhism etc.) under an extended notion of ‘Hindu’. Indeed, in theory at least, even Indian Christians and Muslims seem to be eligible, provided they venerate India as their ‘holyland’ (see Savarkar), that is provided they conform as much as possible to Hindu dharma, to (Hindutva perceptions of) Hindu ethical and religious culture, as illustrated, for example in the nationally popular and extensive 1980s TV serials of the two ancient Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana, where respect was shown for Hindu deities and festivals, and for ‘family values’ such as modesty in women and deference to elders, and for the sacredness of the cow, and where patriotism and loyalty towards ‘Bhārat’ was the order of the day. De facto, contend the Hindu militants, such conformity will never be possible for most Muslims and Christians, who have supervening allegiances to one foreign ideal or other (e.g. Rome, pan-Islamism, alien cultural values of dress, etc.), and so, provided they remain law-abiding, these can stay as Indians-on-sufferance in the ideal Hindu state. In effect, this will be a state of Hindudom, which in fact is a reincarnation of ‘Bhārat’ (see earlier) or Bhārat Mātā. This leads us to the third and last criterion.
Thirdly, this is the establishment of Bhārat Mātā or Mother India, which we have noted earlier also has both an ideal and an empirical dimension.51 Empirically, Mother India must continually strive to realise its ideal form as the only land where a person can be fully ‘Hindu’ in consonance with his or her individual dharma in an ideal Samāj. As we have indicated above, this hardly translates into a democratic polity in the full sense, where all citizens, even from the smaller minorities, are equally ‘children of the Mother’, and are accorded equal status in terms of their religious and other aspirations in the context of an egalitarian distribution of civil rights.
Because Bhārat Mātā is viewed in its ideal form by Hindutva ideologues as some kind of organic entity, just as a real mother would be, the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan is treated as a dismemberment of sorts, requiring eventual reconstitution, even though, as noted earlier, the full territory of ‘Akhil Bhārat’ or ‘Undivided India’ is not clearly defined. Nevertheless, Mother India awaits the day when it will take its rightful stand as a world leader and teacher among the assembly of nations. To achieve this end, India must be economically and militarily powerful in the world today. Gandhi's agenda of non-violence (ahiṃsā) is turned on its head. In Hindutva thinking, violence becomes a ready recourse rather than a desperate one for self- (and other-) preservation.
It is with these nuances in mind that we must understand the following definition of what it is to be a Hindu according to VHP ideology, in terms of the three criteria mentioned earlier (noting that this definition is interpreted to serve different ends by the various affiliates of the Sangh Parivar):
The term ‘Hindu’ according to the Parishad, is not to be interpreted in its narrow restricted sense, geographical or religious, but in the most comprehensive connotation to embrace all people who believe in, follow or at least respect the eternal values of life – ethical and spiritual – that have sprung up in Bharat, irrespective of the faiths which they follow […] and irrespective of their Castes, Creeds, Colours or the places of their birth.52
We may conclude by reiterating that Hindu fundamentalism, whether of the scriptural or political variety, breaks the mould in several ways of the original Christian fundamentalism of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. In its scriptural form it is not as literalist as the latter, and on occasion it incorporates other texts than the Veda itself, though these additions are deemed to be eminently Vedic in character. Further, these scriptures are often regarded as providing the template for scientific as well as religious truth. In its political mode, Hindu fundamentalism is ethnically orientated, de facto tends towards xenophobia in one way or another, and has ethical-cultural rather than religiously narrow concerns; in this sense it may be described as ‘secular’, but it is ‘secular’ neither in the Nehruvian sense which demands a separation of religion from politics, nor in the Gandhian sense, for which all faiths must be viewed equally in the eyes of the Constitution.
Like all fundamentalisms, both kinds of Hindu fundamentalism are ‘fundamentalist’ in so far as they lack ‘Integrative Complexity’, that is, in so far as their proponents seem incapable of integrating into their own positions, by way of empathetic (and not necessarily ‘sympathetic’) understanding, the complexities of life situations that seriously challenge their own views and invite them to arrive at more nuanced and accommodating conclusions.53 Fundamentalisms per se are inherently confrontational, exclusivist, and opposed to integrating the effects of changing circumstances into their systems. Consequently, the fundamentalist stance is ‘monochromatic’ and relatively lacking in cognitive and psychological depth. This uncompromising linearity of thinking is at odds with the flexibility of mind required to successfully negotiate, on both an intellectual and a practical level, the sinuous complexities of life that confront us today. As we know all too well, the consequences can be far-reaching, disruptive and even deadly.
Notes
1. ‘[T]he actual origin of the term “Fundamentalism” can be dated with some precision. [T]he origin lies in the publication of a series of 12 small matching books […] entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth […] published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles from 1910 to 1915 […] the authors including well-known conservative Protestant scholars of the day’ (Dunn, Chapter 1).
2. ‘Text’ here need not refer only to the written word; it may refer also to oral narrative and material artefacts such as paintings and items of statuary. In this sense, one could speak of a fundamentalist reading of a statue or painting.
3. Reference to ‘a way of life’ in my definition excludes such trivial instances of source-texts as maps and instruction-manuals, though these may be included, I suppose, in contexts of parody, sarcasm, or humour. Note too that it is not necessary for the fundamentalist on this understanding to insist that others follow his or her way of life, or to take recourse to violence as a form of self-preservation or enforcement.
4. W. Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1660–1776 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003) and J. E. Llewellyn (ed.), Defining Hinduism: A Reader (Equinox, London, 2005), for example are two kinds of work that address this issue.
5. Ironically, though the Roman Catholic Church was waging its own war against the modernist critique, the Los Angeles project queried: ‘Is Romanism Christianity?’, and described Rome as ‘The Antagonist of the Nation’ (see Dunn, Chapter 1).
6. ‘Modern’ can be understood in more than one sense: first, in the general sense of ‘contemporary’, ‘up-to-date’, and second, more particularly, in a periodising sense that distinguishes the time when reason, with special reference to western thought, no longer saw itself as subject or attentive to religious authority and objectives. The term is used here in the second sense; in this context we may speak of ‘modernism’ as an ideology that claims to champion the chief characteristics of ‘modernity’.
7. J. Prabhu, ‘Modernity’, M. Kirloskar-Steinbach et al., 2012, pp. 221, 225.
8. Ibid.
9. Thus, on the metamorphosis of the Taj Mahal from a twelfth-century Shiva temple to a Hindu palace to a Muslim tomb, see P. N. Oak, Taj Mahal – The True Story: The Tale of a Temple Vandalized (4th edn) (Houston: A. Ghosh, 1969), pp. 104, 161, and Chapter 22.
10. Dated by modern scholarship to some period in the second millennium BCE Scriptural Hindu fundamentalists assume a much earlier date.
11. R. F. Young, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: University of Vienna Indological Institute, 1981), Chapter 4.
12. Traditionally, for the Hindu elite, who made the running in these matters, Sanskrit was the ‘accomplished’ (saskta – from which the Anglicised form ‘Sanskrit’ derives) medium for articulating all that was religiously or culturally worth preserving. Even today, Sanskrit is deferred to as a cultural icon by perhaps the majority of Hindus (with the exception of the ‘dalits’ or ‘oppressed’ Hindus of the former so-called untouchable castes).
13. It is noteworthy that this consideration for reason led Muir later in life to adopt a less confrontational Christian stance.
14. Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 105, 108. ‘[T]hree of six chapters of the ŚTV discussed the relation between faith (śraddhā) and reason (tarka or upapatti)’.
15. For the Sanskrit, see Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 107–8, note 103. I have modified Young's translation.
16. For the Sanskrit, see Young, Resistant Hinduism, pp. 107–8, note 103. My translation.
17. Here Goreh takes a leaf out of the (non-dualist) Vedāntin, Śakara's (ca. eighth century CE) book. In commenting on the epistemic scope of reason vis-à-vis that of scripture, Śakara says, ‘The cognitive authority (prāmāya) of scripture (śruti) applies not to the objects of perception and of the other [sources of knowledge], but to objects not known from such sources […] For the cognitive authority of scripture concerns objects whose scope lies beyond [empirical experience] […] Even if a hundred scriptural utterances were to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, they would have no cognitive authority. If they were to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, we would have to assume that they intended some other meaning, otherwise scripture would cease to be a source of knowledge. For scripture is neither opposed to other sources of knowledge nor inconsistent with itself’ (See his commentary on the Bhagavadgītā 18.66). In other words, the epistemic scope of scripture is separate from that of other sources of knowledge such as perception, inference, etc.
18. This section on Muir, the MP and Goreh is taken, with some emendations, from J. Lipner, ‘A Modern Indian Christian Response’, H.G. Coward (ed.), Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
19. In due course ‘Swami’, viz. ‘Master/Teacher’, preceded his name.
20. See J. T. F. Joordens, Dayananda Sarasvat?, His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 103.
21. This is also a diffusionist claim: ‘From [India] wisdom and science spread over the earth, first to East Asia, then to Greece and Rome, and thence to England’, Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvat?, p. 110.
22. For the identification of the source-texts of Vedic knowledge according to Dayananda, see Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvat?, pp. 57–8, 272.
23. Ibid., p. 103.
24. Dayananda founded a politically-charged socio-religious reform movement called the Arya Samaj, which soon developed nationalist aspirations and acquired a considerable following especially in the northern half of the country. The Arya Samaj, through its political profile, lies at the historical roots of much current militant nationalist sentiment in India today.
25. B. Bissoondoyal, Hindu Scriptures (Maritius: G. Gangaram, 1979), p. 16, note 20.
26. The last two decennial censuses show a falling trajectory hovering around the 80 per cent mark for the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population.
27. J. A. Lipner, ‘A Modern Indian Christian Response’, H. G. Coward (ed.), Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 1996, 2004, 2006.
28. Lipner, 2006, p. 100.
29. The term ‘communalism’ in the Indian context emphasises sectarian affiliation in a conflictual situation. C. Bhatt, ‘Nationalism’, in K. A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 5 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 750a–1a.
30. I have introduced, translated into English, and annotated the first two of these novels under the titles Ānandamah or The Sacred Brotherhood (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Debī Chaudhurāī or The Wife Who Came Home (Oxford University Press, 2009), respectively, and I am now working on the third, Sītārām.
31. Unlike many Hindu culturalists and politicians who followed him, Bankim was nuanced in his selection of the adversarial Muslim; this was not the deśī Muslim or ‘son of the soil’ who had been converted to Islam (and resided mainly in the eastern sector of Bengal), but the jaban or ‘outsider’ Muslim whose forbears had ‘invaded’ India from such places as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Persia in centuries past and who had then settled in India to rule but with scant appreciation for Hindu culture. I have discussed this distinction with reference to Bankim in my AM 2005, pp. 63–70.
32. This can be illustrated by a ‘test case’, viz. the choice of a National Song for independent India (in contrast to a national anthem). This became the first couple of verses of a hymn that appeared in Bankim's Ānandamah, entitled Vande Mātaram, ‘I revere the Mother’. That ‘Mother’ here refers to the ‘Motherland’ that was India is clear, but in the context of the hymn there can be little doubt that ‘Mother’ also refers to the (Hindu) Mother Goddess who is identified with the ‘Motherland’. It was the general Muslim consensus at the time that the larger context of the hymn was idolatrous and even anti-Muslim in sentiment, and that therefore this hymn was an unsuitable provenance for the National Song of a new state that sought to be religiously egalitarian. The relevant functionaries at the time, however – largely Hindu – went ahead with this choice for the National Song without subjecting their decision to the proprieties of an official debate (even Gandhi seemed blind to the controversial nature of the hymn), and Vande Mātaram remains a bone of contention with the Muslims of India to this day. I have discussed this matter both in the introduction to my edition of AM, and in Lipner 2008.
33. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003), p. 4. ‘[W]hen we attempt to investigate into the essential significance of Hindutva we do not primarily […] concern ourselves with any particular theocratic or religious dogma or creed’; a few sentences later he describes the term ‘Hinduism’ as ‘essentially sectarian’.
34. Ibid., p. 29. The ancient Aryans had presumably entered the subcontinent from the northwest, for ‘The day on which the patriarchs of our race had crossed that stream [the Indus] they ceased to belong to the people they had definitely left behind and laid the foundation of a new nation – [they] were reborn into a new people that […] were destined by assimilation and by expansion to grow into a race and a new polity that could only be most fittingly and feelingly described as Sindhu or Hindu.’
35. Ibid., p. 5.
36. Ibid., p. 11.
37. Ibid., p. 12.
38. Ibid., p. 84. ‘An American may become a citizen of India. He would certainly be entitled […] to be treated as […] a fellow citizen of ours. But as long as in addition to our country, he has not adopted our culture and our history, inherited our blood and has come to look upon our land not only as the land of his love but even of his worship, he cannot get himself incorporated into the Hindu fold […] The Hindus […] are not only a nation but also a race.’
39. Ibid., pp. 32, 82. ‘[I]t is indisputably true that […] the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland: the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu – from the Indus to the Seas.’
40. This expression is not easy to translate. Bhārat (Hindi) is the official name for the political entity that is India today; however, it derives from the ancient Sanskrit name (bhārata) for the land that was fit for the implementation of Vedic norms and practices. Thus modern Hindu political fundamentalists tend to use this name for India with a mystical twist, recalling this special earlier sense. So one contemporary Hindu politician of the right could say, when commenting on the notorious incident of December 2012 when a young woman was raped on a Delhi bus, that such an incident could happen only in ‘India’, never in ‘Bhārat’. It is in this idealistic sense that we must understand the meaning of ‘Akhil Bhārat’, viz. ‘Undivided Bhārat/India’ in a Hindu fundamentalist context.
41. Ibid., pp. 115–6.
42. Ibid., pp. 42–4.
43. The Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ‘was formed by [K.B.] Hedgewar [1889–1940] after he had read [Savarkar's] Hindutva and had been further stimulated by a visit to Savarkar […] [Hedgewar] was deeply influenced by the latter's conception of the nation.’ C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999). The RSS was founded in September 1925. ‘The RSS is the foundation for almost all the hindutva movements and networks that currently exist in India and the Indian diaspora’ Bhatt, ‘Nationalism’, p. 756b. Perhaps this claim is overstated; in any case, as we shall note, our aim here is not to assess rival claims to precedence, but to inquire into the common basis of Hindutva ideology, using the VHP as a point of entry.
44. In the discussion that follows I have profited in particular from E. Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism: The Challenge of the Viśva Hindū Pariṣad’ (Paris: Doctoral Dissertation, Uppsala University, 1993).
45. Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism’, p. 102.
46. In so far as it is claimed that women and men tend by nature to be cut out to play specific roles in society (here the descriptive function of dharma comes to the fore).
47. In its received form this large text (ca. 25,000 verses) is generally assigned, in its various strands, to the period ca. sixth century BCE to ca. fifth century CE. See J. Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998), pp. 377–97.
48. Jaffrelot The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, pp. 196–204, 350–1, gives an account of the position of these holy men in early VHP strategy.
49. I do not wish to make much of the view that Hindu political fundamentalism is in essence a ‘middle class’ or ‘urban’ phenomenon. In the Indian context such descriptors lack precision; in any case, through its strategy of large-scale mobilisation by way of participation in mass politicised ‘pilgrimages’ (jātrās) across regions, rallies, media events etc. these categories are transcended.
50. An idea first developed in the modern period by Dayananda Sarasvati, and one way in which the influence of the original Brahmin inspiration of the Hindutva movement endures.
51. On the concept of ‘Mother India’ as a forerunner of this notion of Bhārat Mātā, see Lipner, 2005, pp. 98–102, 122–4.
52. Hellman, ‘Political Hinduism’, pp. 170–1.
53. For more on the notion of ‘Integrative Complexity’ which defines a line of research, developed in the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge University, that seeks to study and prevent religious radicalisation, see S. Savage, ‘Head and Heart in preventing religious radicalization’, in F. Watts and G. Dumbreck (eds), Head and Heart: Perspectives from Religion and Psychology (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2013).
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