Meghnad
Desai explains the fallacies in the idea of Hindu nationalism In a
new essay, the economics professor from the LSE highlights the laws
in this version of history.
Meghnad Desai
The following
propositions are at the core of the Hindu nationalist doctrine:
-
India has always been a single nation since prehistoric times as
Bharatavarsha or Aryabhoomi.
- India got enslaved when Muslim
invaders came from the North-west from the eighth century onwards –
Mohammad Bin Qaseem and then Mahmud Ghazni followed by the Delhi
Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire.
Muslims are foreigners. The
corollary of this xenophobia is to deny that the Aryans came to India
from elsewhere. There is a tension about reconciling the Indus Valley
culture with the story of Aryan
incursions. The Hindu nationalists
deny point-blank that Aryans were foreigners.
- The British
did not create a single Indian entity. It was always there. The
education which Macaulay introduced created the elite
–Macaulay-putras – who behave and think like foreigners.
-
In 1947, 1,200 years of slavery came to an end. (Narendra Modi said
as much during his first speech in the Central Hall of Parliament
after his election.) India was at last free to assert its true
identity as a Hindu nation.
- Congress secularists, however,
went on privileging Muslims whose loyalty is always to be doubted as
their nation is Pakistan.
The stuff of bogus history
These
propositions raise several conceptual and historical issues.
Let’s
examine them.
First, there is the issue of the native versus
the foreigner. The British were clearly foreigners. They came when
they had a job to do and never settled in India or “colonised†it
as they did Rhodesia or
Australia. Muslims emperors, on the other
hand, did not go back and made India their home.
This creates
a problem for the Hindu nationalist. For him, the fact that they have
been here for 1,200 years does not make them natives of India. They
shall forever remain alien. This is a strange doctrine
because
India was the receptacle for many “foreign†tribes throughout its
history – the Shakas, the Huns, the Scythians and many other
“racesâ€, all of whom converted to Hinduism. But, then, 1,200
years are
not enough. What about the Aryans? Did the Aryans also
not come from central Europe or the Arctic, as Tilak argued?
To
say that the Aryans are foreigners would make Hinduism a
foreign religion. The aborigines – tribals – would then be the
only true natives, as some Dalit scholars have argued. That is why
Hindu
nationalists deny foreign origin of the Aryans. The Aryans
have to be primordially native to suit the Hindu nationalist
narrative which imagines a time when somehow instantaneously
Hinduism was established across all of India thanks to the Vedas
and the Brahmins performing sacrifices, etc. Sanskrit has to have
the prime place as lingua franca of Hindu India for that
reason.
This is the stuff of bogus history. The religion which
Hindus practise has only a marginal relationship to the Vedas. The
Vedic gods are no longer worshipped. Vishnu, Shiva and Kali appear
in the Hindu pantheon at least 1,000 years after the Vedas. The
slow spread of Brahmanism (as the religion should be properly
called) from its Punjab heartland to Delhi region and then on to
UP and Bihar has been well charted. The importance of Pali and
Ardhamagadhi in the propagation of Ajivikas, Jainism and Buddhism
from the sixth century BCE onwards is also known.
It took a
thousand-year struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism before the
latter could declare a complete victory. India became a Hindu
nation about the time the Adi Shankaracharya debated and defeated
the Buddhists. If the chronology of Hindu nationalists is taken
seriously, however, it should be soon after India became “slave†to
Muslims.
The Hindu nationalist strategy is to deny any
conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism and claim that Buddha was
an avatar of Vishnu.
This assertion is not found till the seventh
century CE in the Puranas, by which time Buddhism was on its way
out. Hinduism is not enough to define India as a Hindu nation
throughout its history.
Savarkar tried to square this circle
in his essay on Hindutva. He was a modernist and not a devotee of
religion. His idea of nation is derived from the then fashionable
ideas of nationhood espoused by the newly born nations of Europe,
many of them parts of the Habsburg Empire which broke up in 1918 –
Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia.
Nationhood depended on territory
and those born in the territory were members of the nation.
His
Hindutva is not tied to Hinduism. It says that anyone born in
the land of the Indus – Sindhu – is a Hindu and part of
Hindutva. There is a subtext that Hindus are more so than Muslims.
But Muslims can belong to Hindutva if they are loyal to the land
of their birth. Subsequent Hindu nationalists have adopted the
notion of Hindutva but not
Savarkar’s secular
doctrine.
Spurious idea of slavery
As a history of
India, the Hindu nationalist story is as partial as the story that
the Nehruvian vision has created. Of course, they are both north
India–biased stories. They take Delhi and its rulers to be all
of India. Muslim raiders may have come in the eighth century to Sind
and Saurashtra and in the twelfth century established the
Delhi Sultanate. But they never penetrated south of the
Vindhyas.
South India has a very different history about
Muslim immigrants from that of north India. Nor did it “sufferâ€
from Muslim rule till verylate when Aurangzeb went to the south
in the late seventeenth century.
Hindu kingdoms were coexistent
with Muslim ones in the south but thathappened only in the middle
of the second millennium. The whole idea of “1,200 years of
slavery†is spurious. Assam was never conquered by any Muslim
power.
But ultimately there will never be “true objectiveâ€
history. There never is in any nation. Debates and
reinterpretations go on forever.
Patronage to academia can be used
to commission histories to buttress the official line. The
sanctity of dispassionate research can never be guaranteed if the
funding is public. India, however, does not have the tradition of
private philanthropy for research. The government guards all the
doors to higher education, thanks to the statist bias of the Congress
which ruled for the first thirty years uninterruptedly. This bias
has permeated the BJP as well.
It is not the idea of Hindu
nationalism that is worrying. It is that the government will be
the propagator of this particular view.
Meghnad Desai is
emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics
and author of The Rediscovery of India and Development and
Nationhood.
Excerpted with permission from “India as a Hindu
Nation – and Other Ideas of Indiaâ€, Meghnad Desai, from Making
Sense of Modi’s India, HarperCollins India.
http://scroll.in/article/805376/meghnad-desai-explains-the-fallacies-in-the-idea-of-hindu-nationalism
