Colonial offspring INDIA's violently reactionary Hindu communalist BJP party, and the movement of which it is a part, present themselves as the defenders of Hindutva - "Hinduness" — thereby claiming to represent a venerable tradition stretching back thousands of years.
In reality, the tradition and Hindutva they talk about is an artificial creation of the colonialist rulers and, subsequently, though for different reasons, a section of the Indian nationalist and proto-nationalist middle class, since the late 18th century. KUNAL CHATTOPADHYAY — Calcutta, December 1992
OR the majority of European F observers, the aim was to understand India from the point of view of the West European experience and neatly place the "Orient" as Europe's Other. In other words, West European capitalism and its theorists would decide what constituted the history of India, what was significant in it and what was irrelevant.
There were two trends among these Western scholars. The first trend was called Orientalist at the time but I will use the term Indologist.
The founders of this first trend included Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of British India, and, among scholars, William Jones and H. T. Colebrook. They erected a mythic structure of an ancient golden age of Indian history. They believed it their task to hand over the heritage of that golden age to the benighted descendants of its creators, who had forgotten all about it and lived in a degenerate age.
How far this ideological operation was successful is revealed by a comment from one of the greatest early 20th century historians of India: "In the nineteenth century we recovered our long lost ancient literature, Vedic and Buddhistic, as well as the buried architectural monuments of Hindu days.
The Vedas and their commentaries had almost totally disappeared from the plains of Aryavarta where none could interpret them; none had even a complete manuscript of their texts. The English printed these ancient scriptures of the Indo-Aryans and brought them to our doors". (Jadunath Sarkar, India Through the Ages, 1928, reprint, Calcutta, Orient Longman, 1979, p. 84).
This frank confession is enough to show that the Vedic texts had, in reality, influenced Indian life in the intervening centuries in a very limited and very attenuated manner. The culture and civilization of the vast continent-sized land, was the result of many influences, many peoples, many religions.
In that case, why invoke this alleged "real tradition"? To start with, there was a general assumption that any cultural or political greatness had to conform to the "classical" (that is, Graeco-Roman) pattern. So, following the received Western historiographical sequence, we have the Indian antiquity, the Indian Dark Ages, and even the "Bengal Renaissance" (under British tutelage).
Moreover, the second stream left its own mark. This was represented above all by the Utilitarian philosopher James Mill. Mill, an employee of the East India Company, wrote a three volume History of India with the aim of establishing that Indian society was in a hideous state. Mill, Mountstuart, Elphinestone and others proceeded to draw up a bill of indictment.
Mill doomed Indian civilization as crude from its inception and plunged into the lowest depths of immorality and crime. Western colonization was therefore an act of humanity, bringing regeneration to an utterly stagnant society. The eternal barbarism of India justified conquest and a Christian ideological offensive.
So compelling was Mill's argument that even his opponents had to concede considerable ground. The later generation of Indologists argued that while Mill's picture was true of later days, there had been a period of Indian greatness. This was the task above all a scholar influenced by German romanticism, Friedrich Max Müller. He collated and printed the Vedas and declared them to be the only natural basis of Indian history.
A creation of the "Aryan" race, it was their "bible" and reflected the past of Europe no less than India, since the Vedic cul-
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ture was part of one of the great races of the Old World, the IndoEuropeans.
To reconstruct the Veda was to trace the origin of all religion, law and philosophy. Müller insisted that "so minutely has almost every private and public act of Indian life been regulated by old place of the foreign English. Two other points should be briefly made. In colonial discourse, Indians were assumed to be religious only when they passively and unquestioningly obeyed the scriptures. Syncretism was therefore not seen as a positive coming together of different forces, but as a degeneration. Thus the great devotional movements of the Middle Ages, among Hindus and Muslims aloke, that had reduced the differences between them, were ruled out. The Christian missionaries dubbed these movements as lewd, obscene, representing an indecent and lower class culture. They were disturbed, among other things, by the fact that the Vaishnav movement allowed women far greater control over their sexuality as well as giving them freedom to learn, teach, and in general compete with men on a more equal footing. By adding the epics to the more philosophical and ritual writings, a basis was provided for drawing in broad masses into the fold of the new Hindutva.
Certainly, modern communal and fascist ideology cannot be wholly explained by this, but this shows why bourgeois democratic ideology in India is hamstrung in combatting the communalists.
Three aspects of the colonialist construction of Hindutva are worth noting:
• First, true Hindutva is based on Aryan descent and the ancient scriptures.
• Second, regional differences, syncretism etc, are all degeneration, not true faith. The essence of Hindutva, its inner Hindutva, is something capable of uniting all Hindus.
• Third, this "all Hindus" is defined in relation to the Other — the Muslims.
It is easy, even without tracing the intervening century of communalist, protofascist and fascist ideology, to see how these three elements were used by the RSS-BJP combine. Their battle cry was not Hindus in danger but Hindutva in danger. Rama, the incarnation of Vishnu the preserver worshipped as god throughout north India by Hindus was a convenient rallying point. How can there be any historical dispute over the birthplace of god? So what if a 400-year old mosque stood on the assumed spot. It was a 400-year old symbol of Hindu disgrace, of Muslim oppression, which had to be extirpated root and branch. And through this campaign, carried on zealously for six years, a militant Hindutva has indeed been created and pressed into the service of fascism.
One reactionary force, imperialism, has thus spawned the ideology of another.* traditional precepts that it is impossible to find the right point of view for judging Indian religion, morals and literature without a knowledge of the literary remains of the Vedic age". (Quoted in Nirad C. Choudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary; the life of the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Müller, P.C., p. 135).
According to Müller, the historical mission of the Aryan race, was to bind the world together with bonds of religion and civilization. Others, like W. M. Hunter filled in gaps in Müller's theory, claiming that the dilution of Ayran blood through mixing with non-Aryan elements was the cause of the degeneration of the Indians. The result was the create of an effete, slothul race, typified by the Bengali Brahmin. This was why, in India, the semitic Arabs and Turanic races overwhelmed the Hindus.
From the "Bengal Renaissance" to the development of Indian nationalism, Indian Hindus swallowed much of this myth and produced a counter-model based on it. Reformers based their arguments not on modern bases but on the scriptures.
Thus, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, pioneering reformer, often hailed as the father of modern India, based his opposition to widow burning on scriptural grounds. Even Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, the most systematically modern and progressive of the 19th century Bengali reformers, found that he could win his case for widowremarriage not by fighting on grounds of human rights but by reference to the scriptures.
So, in this way, even before the birth of political nationalism, Hindutva, or Hindu identity, was created by imposing the hegemony of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Dharmashastras. One crucial textual element in this were the two epics — the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
In the next generation, Indian nationalists like R. C. Dutt took up this orientalist discourse. Of course, they wanted to fight the British. But they took a problematic route. By invoking the Aryan myth, they made Muslims as much the enemy (in some ways even more the enemy) as the British. To counteract the assumed weakness of the "unmanly" effete Bengalis they created the myth of the pure Aryan ("martial") races like the Rajputs and Narathas.
But in doing so, Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhay and others depicted these "races" as heroic fighters against Muslim invaders. Moreover, the theory of martial races allowed a covert identification with the colonizers against the "Muslim usurpers and marauders" just as the theory of common Aryan descent had done.
If one can describe the work of Indian nationalists as misguided but honest, it is not so with the British. Thus H. M. Elliott, the foremost British historian of the Indian Middle Ages, followed James Mill in using the characterizations Hindu Age and Muslim Age and declared that his aim was to show Hindus how throughout history, Muslims had tortured and killed Hindus, destroyed their temples and so on, so that the verbose Bengali baboos who were just beginning to form a proto-nationalist consciousness would recognize the benefits of British colonialism. (H. M. Elliott, The History of India as Told by its own Historians, 1849).
The effect of this onslaught was to portray the Middle Ages of India (in any case a questionable periodization) as a period of conquest, "foreign rule" and to portray Muslims, even the Mughals who had ruled for several centuries, as foreigners.
This, along with parallel efforts among Muslims, created a deep breach, whereas, as late as 1857, during the first Indian war of independence, peasants and talugdars of Asadh, regardless of religion had risen under a slogan that recognized the suzerainty of the Mughal emperor, viewing him as an authentic indigenous ruler in
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