Rethinking Hindu Identity

Dwijendra Narayan Jha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781845534592
• eBook ISBN: 9781317490333
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Recent years have seen the emergence of a virulent version of Hindu nationalism and fundamentalism in India under the banner of Hindutva. This xenophobic movement has obfuscated and mystified the notion of Hindu identity and reinforced its stereotypes. Its arguments range from the patently unscientific - humankind was created in India, as was the first civilisation - to historical whitewash: Hinduism has continued in one, unchanged form for 5000 years; Hinduism has always been a tolerant faith. 'Rethinking Hindu Identity' offers a corrective based on a deep and detailed reading of Indian history. Written in a riveting style, this study provides a fresh history of Hinduism - its practices, its beliefs, its differences and inconsistencies, and its own myths about itself. Along the way, the book systematically demolishes the arguments of Hindu fundamentalism and nationalism, revealing how the real history of Hinduism is much more complex.

1 Deconstructing Hindu Identity

I

The quest for India's national identity through the route of Hindu religious nationalism began in the nineteenth century and has continued ever since. In recent years, however, it has received an unprecedented boost from those communal forces which brought a virulent version of Hindu cultural chauvinism to the centre stage of contemporary politics and produced a warped perception of India's past. This is evident from the indigenist propaganda writings which support the myth of Aryan autochthony, demonize Muslims and Christians, and propagate the idea that India and Hinduism are eternal. In an effort to prove the indigenous origin of Indian culture and civilization it has been argued, albeit vacuously, that the people who composed the Vedas called themselves Aryans and were the original inhabitants of India (Prinja 1996: 10; Guha 2005: 399). They are further described as the authors of the Harappan civilization, which the xenophobes and communalists insist on rechristening after the Vedic Saraswatī. Such views have received strong support from archaeologists whose writings abound in paralogisms (Gupta 1996; Lal 1998: 439–48);¹ and from their followers, whose works are dotted with fakes and frauds, a notable instance being the attempt to convert a Harappan "unicorn bull" into a Vedic horse so as to push the clock back on the date of the Vedas and thereby identify the Vedic people with the authors of the Harappan civilization.² This obsession with pushing back the chronology of Indian cultural traits and with denying the elements of change³ has taken the form of a frenzied hunt for antiquity. We see a stubborn determination to "prove" that the Indian ("Hindu" is no different in the communal lexicon!) civilization is older than all others and was therefore free from any possible contamination in its early formative phase.

In this historiographical format India, i.e., Bhārata, is timeless. The first man was born here. Its people were the authors of the first human civilization, the Vedic, which is the same as the "Indus-Saraswatī." The authors of this civilization had reached the highest peak of achievement in all arts and sciences, and they were conscious of belonging to the Indian nation, which has existed eternally. This obsession with the antiquity of the Indian identity, civilization and nationalism has justifiably prompted several scholars, in recent years, to study and analyse the development of the idea of India (Mukherjee 2001; Habib 1999: 18-29; idem 2005; Ray 2004; Goswami 2004). Most of them have rightly argued that India as a country evolved over a long period, that the formation of its identity had much to do with the perceptions of the people who migrated into the subcontinent at different times, and that Indian nationalism developed mostly as a response to Western imperialism. But not all of them have succeeded in rising above the tendency to trace Indian national identity back to ancient times. For instance, a respected historian of ancient India tells us that "the inhabitants of the subcontinent were considered by the Purāṇic authors as forming a nation" and "could be called by a common name—Bhāratī" (Mukherjee 2001: 6; Ray 2004: 49, 55, nn. 33, 34). Assertions like this are very close to the Hindu jingoism which attributes all major modern cultural, scientific and political developments, including the idea of nationalism, to the ancient Indians. Although their detailed refutation may amount to a rechauffe of what has already been written on the historical development of the idea of India, I propose to argue against the fantastic antiquity assigned to Bhārata and Hinduism, as well as against the historically invalid stereotypes about the latter, and thus to show the lack of substance behind the ideas which have been the staple diet of the monster of Hindu cultural nationalism in recent years.

II

The geographical horizon of the early Aryans, as we know, was limited to the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent, referred to as Saptasindhava (ṚV, VIII, 24, 27)4 and the word Bhārata in the sense of a country is absent from the entire Vedic literature, though the Bharata tribe is mentioned at several places in different contexts. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī (IV.2.113) of Pāṇini (500 BCE) we find a reference to Prācya Bharata in the sense of a territory (janapada) which lay between Udīcya (north) and Prācya (east). It must have been a small region occupied by the Bharatas and cannot be equated with the Akhaṇḍabhārata or Bhārata of the Hindutva camp. The earliest reference to Bhāratavarṣa (Prākrit Bharadhavasa) is found in the inscription of Khāravela (first century BCE) who lists it among the territories he invaded (Sircar 1965: no. 91, line 10), but it did not include Magadha, which is mentioned separately in the record. The word may refer here in a general way to northern India, but its precise territorial connotation is vague. A much larger geographical region is visualized by the use of the word in the Mahābhārata (composed over the period c. 200 BCE to 300 CE), which provides a good deal of geographical information about the subcontinent, although a large part of the Deccan and the far south does not find any place in it. Among the five divisions of Bhāratavarṣa named, Madhyadeśa finds frequent mention in ancient Indian texts; in the Amarakośa (also known as the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana), a work of the fourth-fifth centuries, it is used synonymously with Bhārata and Āryāvarta (II.6,8); the latter, according to its eleventh-century commentator Kṣīrasvāmin, being the same as Manu's holy land situated between the Himalayas and the Vindhya range (II.22).⁵ But in Bāṇa's Kādambarī (seventh century), at one place (1968: 290; Agrawal 1958: 188) Bhāratavarṣa is said to have been ruled by Tārāpīḍa, who "set his seal on the four oceans" (dattacatuḥsamudramudraḥ); and at another, Ujjainī is indicated as being outside Bhāratavarṣa (Kādambarī 1968: 311; Agrawal 1958: 205), which leaves its location far from clear. Similarly, in the Nītivākyāmṛta of Somadeva (tenth century), the word bhāratīyāḥ cannot be taken to mean anything more than the inhabitants of Bhārata, which itself remains undefined (prakīrṇaka 78).

Bhāratavarṣa figures prominently in the Purāṇas, but they describe its shape variously. In some passages it is likened to a half-moon, in others it is said to resemble a triangle; in yet others it appears as a rhomboid or an unequal quadrilateral or a drawn bow (Ali 1966: 109). The Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa compares the shape of the country with that of a tortoise floating on water and facing east (ibid.). Most of the Purāṇas describe Bhāratavarṣa as being divided into nine dvīpas or khaṇḍas, which, being separated by seas, were mutually inaccessible. The Purāṇic conception of Bhāratavarṣa has much correspondence with the ideas of ancient Indian astronomers like Varāhamihira _ec (sixth century ) and Bhāskarācārya (eleventh century). However, judging from their identifications of the rivers, mountains, regions and places mentioned in the Purāṇas, as well as from their rare references to areas south of the Vindhyas, their idea of Bhāratavarṣa does not seem to have included southern India. Although a few inscriptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries indicate that Kuntala (Karnataka) was situated in the land of Bhārata (Alam 2005: 43), which is described in a fourteenth-century record as extending from the Himalayas to the southern sea (EI XIV [1917–18], no. 3, lines 5-6), by and large the available textual and epigraphic references to it do not indicate that the term stood for India as we know it today.

An ambiguous notion of Bhārata is also found in the Abhidhānacintāmaṇi (IV.12; 1964: 235) of the Jain scholar Hemacandra (twelfth century), who describes it as the land of karma (karmabhūmi), as opposed to that of phala (phalabhūmi). Although he does not clarify what is meant by the two, his definition of Āryāvarta (which may correspond with Bhārata) is the same as that found in Manu (IV.14). In fact, Āryāvarta figures more frequently than Bhārata in the geohistorical discourses found in early Indian texts. It was only from the 1860s that the name Bhāratavarṣa, in the sense of the whole subcontinent, found its way into the popular vocabulary. Its visual evocation came perhaps not earlier than 1905 in a painting by Abanindranath Tagore, who conceived of the image as one of Bangamātā but later, "almost as an act of generosity towards the larger cause of Indian nationalism, decided to title it 'Bhāratmātā'" (Bose 1997: 53–54).⁶ Thus it was only from the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century that the notion of Bhārata was "forged by the self-conscious appropriation and transposition of discourse at once British-colonial, historical, geographical and ethnological, as well as received Puranic chronotopes" (Goswami 2004: chapters 5–6).

In many texts Bhārata is said to have been a part of Jambūdvīpa, which itself had an uncertain geographical connotation. The Vedic texts do not mention it; nor does Pāṇini, though he refers (IV.3.165) to the jambū (the rose apple tree). The early Buddhist canonical works provide the earliest reference to the continent called Jambūdvīpa (Jambūdīpa), its name being derived from the jambū tree which grew there, having a height of one hundred yojanas,⁷ a trunk fifteen yojanas in girth and outspreading branches fifty yojanas in length, whose shade extended to one hundred yojanas (Malalasekera 1983: 941–42). It was one of the four mahādīpas (mahādvīpas) ruled by a Cakkavattī. We are told that Buddhas and Cakkavattīs were born only in Jambūdīpa, whose people were more courageous, mindful and religious than the inhabitants of Uttarakuru (Malalasekera 1983: 942). Going by the descriptions of Jambūdīpa and Uttarakuru in the early Buddhist literature, they both appear to be mythical regions. However, juxtaposed with Sihaladīpa (Siṃhaladvīpa = Sri Lanka), Jambūdīpa stands for India (Mahāvaṃsa, V.13; Cūlavaṃsa, XXXVII.216, 246; Malalasekera 1983: 942). Aśoka thus uses the word to mean the whole of his empire, which covered nearly the entire Indian subcontinent excluding the far southern part of its peninsula (Sircar 1965: no. 2, line 2).

Ambiguity about the territorial connotation of Jambūdvīpa continued during subsequent centuries in both epigraphic and literary sources. In a sixth-century inscription of Toramāṇa, for instance, Jambūdvīpa occurs without reference to any precise geographical region (Sircar 1965: no. 56, line 9). Similarly, the identification of Jambūdvīpa remains uncertain in the Purāṇic cosmological schema, where it appears more as a mythical region than as a geographical entity. The world, according to the Purāṇas, "consists of seven concentric dvīpas or islands, each of which is encircled by a sea, the central island called Jambūdvīpa" (Sircar 1960: 8–9). This is similar to the cosmological imaginings of the Jains who, however, placed Jambūdvīpa at the centre of the central land (madhyaloka) of the three-tiered structure of the universe (Jaina Purāṇa Kośa 1993: 256, 259).⁸ According to another Purāṇic conception, which is similar to the Buddhist cosmological ideas, the earth is divided into four mahādvīpas, Jambūdvīpa being larger than the others (ibid: 9 n. 1). In both these conceptions of the world, Bhāratavarṣa is at some places said to be a part of Jambūdvīpa but at others the two are treated as identical (Sircar 1960: 6, 8).

Since these differently imagined geographical conceptions of Bhārata and Jambūdvīpa are factitious and of questionable value, to insist that their inhabitants formed a nation in ancient times is sophistry. It legitimates the Hindutva perception of Indian national identity as located in remote antiquity, accords centrality to the supposed primordiality of Hinduism and thus spawns Hindu cultural nationalism.⁹ All this draws sustenance from, among other things, a systematic abuse of archaeology by a number of scholars, notably B. B. Lal. The Pañcatantra stories, he tells us, are narrated on the pots found in the digs at Lothal (Lal 1997: 175), and the people in Kalibangan cooked their food on clay tandurs which anticipated their use in modern times (Lal 2002: 95). The Harappans, his sciolism goes on, practised the modern "Hindu way of greeting" (namaskāramudrā); their women, like many married ones of our own times, applied vermillion (sindūr) in the partings of their hair and wore small and large bangles, identical to those in use nowadays, up to their upper arms. They are said to have practised fire worship (which is attested to by the Vedic texts and not by Harappan archaeology!) and to have worshipped liṅga and yoni, the later Śaivism being pushed back to Harappan times. An attempt is thus made to bolster an archaic and ill-founded view—supported and recently revived by several scholars¹⁰—that the Harappan religion, which, according to the Hindu cultural nationalists was in fact "Vedic-Hindu" was "the linear progenitor" of modern Hinduism (Gupta 1996: 147).

III

Those, including some supposed scholars, with an idée fixe about the incredible antiquity of the Indian nation and Hinduism have created several stereotypes about Hinduism over the years, especially recently, and these have percolated down to textbooks. A few sample statements from two books randomly picked from amongst a large number adequately illustrate the point: "Hinduism [is] a very old religion…sanatana dharma i.e. the Eternal Spiritual Tradition of India" (Lal et al. 2002: 133). "The Vedas are...recognised…as the most ancient literature in the world. The term 'sanatana' is often used to highlight this quality" (Prinja 1996: 7).¹¹ "…freedom of thought and form of worship is unique to Hinduism" (Prinja 1996: 13). "In Hindu history no example of coercion or conversion can be found" (54). "...there is no conflict [in Hinduism] between science and religion" (153).

The above quotations contain several clichés which lend support to militant Hindu cultural nationalism. One of these—the imagined "oldness"—of what has come to be known as Hinduism—has been a parrot-cry of Hindu rightist groups and needs to be examined in the light of historical evidence. It is not necessary to go into the etymological peregrinations of the word "Hindu," derived from "Sindhu," on which much has bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Essay 1 Deconstructing Hindu Identity
• Essay 2 Tolerant Hinduism: Evidence and Stereotype
• Essay 3 Holy Cow: Elusive Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index