The reality is that many Indian Hindus feel more assertive about Hindu identity than perhaps previous generations ever did. While the reasons for this are complex, it would be a mistake to think of this as a breakdown in the secular project, and more incorrect to think that the only alternative to Hindu assertiveness is the narrow secular prescription advocated from the ivory-towers of India and the West. This prescription, after all, has been not merely a call to reject militant Hindu nationalism, but really a much deeper injunction to de-Hinduize altogether. Neither the British, in the era of colonialism and then partition, nor the Americans in the era of the Cold War, quite saw it in that way. It seems an amazing fantasy therefore that Hindus should reject something that the world has not. Hindu identity may be a more recent invention than Hindu belief, but it ought not to be dismissed...
There has been a great deal of misunderstanding about what the “myths,” or the stories of the gods, mean in the lives of Hindus. Suffice it to say that until the 1980s, when the Hindu nationalist movement entered the political mainstream, myth was more important to us than history. History was at best a subject one got through in school, and an unimportant one compared to math and science, which were the stuff of global careers in engineering and medicine. As a high school student in Hyderabad at the time, I recall not being especially bothered by what our history textbooks said about our religion; most importantly, they said that our sacred epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, were literature, and the gods, like Krishna and Rama were therefore not real. Our religion did not seem to need any sort of validation from the curriculum, or from school in general. We got our religious stories, and our sensibilities, from our parents and grandparents and from comic books and movies. It didn’t occur to us that our modern curriculum was actually saying the gods didn’t exist. We took history, after all, with a pinch of salt.
Myth, on the other hand, was something we were steeped in, regardless of how and how much we believed in it. We believed that Rama and Krishna were real, that they were avatars of god in human form, and that they lived on this land long ago. But we also assumed that it was all really long, long ago, and that we needn’t bother looking for them in our history lessons. It was an accommodation between belief and the modern mind that had held in India for many generations. My father, for example, taught zoology and read Darwin, and he was deeply devout and religious. My mother acted in movies and later entered politics, and she was deeply devout and religious. I was less religious than them in those days, and certainly less disciplined about rituals and ceremonies, but I could not reject belief completely either. In any case, we were much like the other educated, middle class Indians we knew. We had our gods in our homes and hearts, and from there we seemed to make all our deals with the modern world of science, engineering and careers. It was rarely the other way around. It did not even occur to us to think of our gods using the touchstones of modern conversation, like history, or even philosophy, for that matter. We went on worshipping, singing, watching the old devotional movies, and that was that.
The story of what happened since those days is now well-known. By the end of the 1980s, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had brought Hindu nationalism into the political mainstream. In 1992, the Babri masjid at Ayodhya was demolished by Hindutva activists with the goal of building a temple at what was believed to be the god Rama’s birthplace. Throughout the 1990s, Hindu right-wing parties sought to redefine the nation’s secular, post-independence ethos. Artists such as M.F. Husain were hounded. Attempts were made to rewrite history books in India and, it was said, even in California. In 2002, one of the worst acts of mass violence since partition took place in Gujarat. Hindu mobs massacred around one thousand Muslims, supposedly in vengeance for the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims. These incidents, naturally, led to grave concern about the future of our country, and specifically about the abuse of myth and history by right-wing forces. India, it was said, was on the verge of becoming a “Hindu fascist” nation, if it hadn’t turned into one already.
Since then, many important works on contemporary India have addressed these concerns. Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian countered the Hindu right’s view of India’s glorious Hindu past by celebrating non-religious Indian intellectual traditions and non-Hindu icons of tolerant statesmanship, such as Ashoka and Akbar. Martha Nussbaum’s The Clash Within questioned the post 9/11 climate of Islamophobia in the United States through an earnest exposé of Hindu extremism. Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History challenged the Hinduism of “Dead Male Brahmins” and offered kinetic counter-narratives about women, sex, subalterns, horses, blood and dismemberment in the Hindu tradition. In addition, South Asian writers well-known in the West like Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra wrote frequently about the evils of the Hindu right. From their writings, it seemed that a culture war was underway in India over the future of Hinduism. On one side were the Hindu right, the fundamentalists who couldn’t tell myth from history and sought to impose an intolerant idea of Hinduism upon others. On the other side were people committed to secularism, like the authors of these books, who had come to stand, even if by default, for a liberal vision of Hinduism in opposition to that of the Hindu right. (Two more recent titles might also be mentioned here, Offence: The Hindu Case, by Salil Tripathi, and Uncle Swami, by Vijay Prashad, both of which make a similar case against the Hindu right’s cultural politics.)
There is however one truly strange thing about the supposedly liberal vision of Hinduism that has been offered by writers crusading against the Hindu right. Their worldview seems to have little respect, if not consideration, for how Hindus themselves see their religion in the first place. Consequently, a whole contemporary era of writing about South Asia has come to answer the Hindu right’s distortions of myth and history not by engaging with Hinduism as it is lived and understood by Hindus (which would mean acknowledging at least some grievances felt by them), but by a narrow and selective promotion of its own normative fantasy about what liberal, secular Hindus ought to believe... read more:
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