Hindu Nationalism

Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths

Chetan Bhatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181043
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

The rise of authoritarian Hindu mass movements and political formations in India since the early 1980s raises fundamental questions about the resurgence of chauvinistic ethnic, religious and nationalist movements in the late modern period. This book examines the history and ideologies of Hindu nationalism and Hindutva from the end of the last century to the present, and critically evaluates the social and political philosophies and writings of its main thinkers.Hindu nationalism is based on the claim that it is an indigenous product of the primordial and authentic ethnic and religious traditions of India. The book argues instead that these claims are based on relatively recent ideas, frequently related to western influences during the colonial period. These influences include eighteenth and nineteenth century European Romantic and Enlightenment rationalist ideas preoccupied with archaic primordialism, evolution, organicism, vitalism and race. As well as considering the ideological impact of National Socialism and Fascism on Hindu nationalism in the 1930s, the book also looks at how Aryanism continues to be promoted in unexpected forms in contemporary India. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, the author considers the consequences of Hindu nationalist resurgence in the light of contemporary debates about minorities, secular citizenship, ethics and modernity.

1
Introduction

On 16 May 1998, under the instructions of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) government, Indian atomic scientists exploded three nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert near Pokharan, and followed this with two further explosions three days later. The day of the first tests, Buddha Purnima, is traditionally celebrated as the day of birth, enlightenment and death of the Buddha. This was the second time that India had undertaken nuclear tests (the first was conducted on 18 May 1974 under the orders of Indira Gandhi’s Congress government). The first three devices detonated were said to be a fission device (which India already had the capability of producing), a low-yield weapon that could be used for India’s short-range Prithvi missiles, and a thermonuclear device with a destructive power of several kilotons. This third bomb, and its potential deployment in conjunction with the second stage of India’s proposed development of its intermediate-range Agni missile (Agni II) would provide India with intercontinental ballistic missiles with a destructive intensity and spatial reach that had previously been the preserve of the nuclear superpowers. The tests were followed by a national-popular resurgence in India in celebration of the country’s emergence, under a BJP-led government, as a nuclear superpower that had demonstrated India’s strength and put its chief enemy, Pakistan, ‘in its place’.

If the name of India’s ballistic missile, Agni, the god of fire in the archaic Vedic texts was an older one, its symbolization in 1998 was novel, reflecting the eruption of mass social movements and a political party of government that represented a majoritarian, chauvinistic, anti-minority ideology of ‘Hindu’ supremacism. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the organization at the forefront of the upsurge of militant and violent Hinduism, and having close affinity with the ideological doctrine of Hindutva that also resulted in the formation of the BJP, called for a temple dedicated to Shakti (the goddess of power) to be built at Pokharan, some fifty kilometres from the site of the tests, the fifty-third addition to what it claimed are similar Shaktipeeths (‘seats of strength’) that symbolize Hindu power. The idea was mooted that sand from the explosion site be distributed across India in the ‘tradition’ of a religious offering, though the harmful consequences of ‘radioactive prasad’ resulted in the abandonment of this suggestion. The inevitable claim surfaced, one of many such enabling fictions, that nuclear weapons were traditional to Hinduism (‘Om-made bombs’?), the Vedic god Agni adduced as proof that ‘ancient Hindus’ possessed nuclear bombs. The leader of the violent Bombay-based Hindu nationalist party, the Shiv Sena, declared that after the bomb tests, Hindus were ‘no longer eunuchs’ – reiterating a masculinist theme and an evocative anxiety that has animated Hindu nationalist ideology since its inception.

However, the triumphant Hindutva sacralization of weapons of mass destruction could have had only one consequence. By 28 May, Pakistan, under the government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had retaliated by exploding five fission bombs followed by one further bomb on 30 May in the Chagai Hills, Baluchistan. Pakistan announced its intention to nuclearize its intermediate-range Ghauri ballistic missile, while many of its population jubilantly celebrated the ‘settling of its score’ with ‘Resurgent India’. The ‘score’ was certainly equalized as both countries now possessed a broadly equivalent destructive nuclear capability that had the capacity to kill millions in each other’s major cities. While the development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction in south Asia had an autonomous trajectory, the BJP’s decision to ‘induct’ India’s nuclear weapons so soon after coming to power (March 1998) reflected a different history and ideological practice of ‘Hindu nationalism’, one that has been seen as peripheral to the Indian polity and social formation but has, since the early 1980s, moved to the centre-stage of Indian politics, state and civil society. The names of each country’s missiles, Agni and Ghauri, symbolize, and have the capacity to make real exactly the imagined monumental conflict between a primordial Hinduism and a medieval Islam that the votaries of Hindu nationalism consider to be central to their political sociology.

The aims of this book are to provide a critical assessment of the ideological content to Hindu nationalism, and elaborate intellectual and historical influences that contributed to its development. The focus on ideologies and history is intended to supplement some of the existing and excellent literature published in recent years that has guided many of the directions of this book (Basu 1993, Jaffrelot 1996, Datta 1998, Hansen 1999, Ghosh 1999). The first three chapters are directed towards analysis of the main nineteenth and early twentieth century texts and personalities that were important in the development of Hindu nationalism. The methodological emphasis on idea, text and key personalities that symbolize the contours of Hindu nationalist thinking can inadvertently convey a holistic continuity to Hindu nationalism across a broad historical period. While rejecting the view of an uninterrupted historical development of Hindu nationalist ideology, and indeed highlighting critical epistemological and political discontinuities during the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, one argument of the book is that one can trace a convergence in the substantive ideological content, if not the explicit political concerns, of Hindu nationalists across this period. This is a complicated argument, illustrated in the first two chapters, and its implications are that the generally dominant view of a distinct Hindu nationalism arising as a marginal movement during the 1920s, and of relatively little influence until the 1980s, requires modification.

Hindu nationalism, even in its recent ‘cultural nationalist’ forms, represents a dense cluster of ideologies of primordialism, many of which were developed during processes of vernacular and regional elite formation in colonial India during the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 presents a consideration of the impact of European varieties of ‘primordialist’ thinking from mid- to late-nineteenth century colonial India. The argument is that Hindu primordialist ideas developed in conjunction with evolutionary, ‘physiological’ and metaphysical conceptions of nation. This was not the result of an elementary and unmediated impact European nationalist conceptions, but occurred through dialogic processes of negotiation and debate with such ideas, and through complex intellectual movement to and from colonial India and Europe. A key component of colonial Indian elite configurations of primordial nationalism was Aryanism, which in the Indian context represented the synthesis of a several intellectual strands arising from British and German Orientalism, and from processes of ‘upper’ caste, religious, regional and vernacular elite consolidation in colonial India. The theme of a variant ‘Aryanism’ continues throughout the book and is considered to be a definitive background to Hindu nationalism. Chapter 2 also examines the formation and impact during the later nineteenth century of Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj movement, the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s affective religious nationalism, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s synthesis of archaic primordialism with politicized devotionalism, and other developments in regionalist nationalism, each of which imagined an overintegrated national future for India based on ‘Hindu’ precepts. The extraordinarily wide-ranging impact of neo-Arya Samajist ideologies in the twentieth century is also considered in Chapter 3.

Difficult questions haunt analysis of the relationship between the national movement for liberation from British rule and the projects of a distinctive Hindu nationalism. This is a complicated area to explore, since there were (it will be argued) several Hindu nationalist orientations that had a variety of strong associations with the national movement, both well before and after the emergence of M. K. Gandhi as a national leader. This is explored in Chapter 3 by examining the political trajectories of Lala Lajpat Rai and Lala Munshi Ram (Swami Shraddhanand) in the early decades of the twentieth century. These two political figures are used to symbolize the complexities and tensions between ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ nationalism, and between ‘anti-communal anti-colonialism’ and Hindu majoritarianism during the troubled period of the 1920s. Both individuals were involved to differing degrees with the national movement and both can conceivably be called ‘Hindu nationalists’. The divergence between strategies of non-cooperation with British rule, and strategies of ‘responsive cooperation’ with colonialism is also examined, the aim being to highlight the complex affinities between Hindu majoritarianism and ‘responsivism’. In Chapter 3, it is argued that there was a strong degree of political continuity between ‘Hinduized’ versions of ‘Indian’ nationalism and the specific ideology of Hindutva that emerged in the 1920s. More contentiously, it is also argued that much of the substantial content of 1920s Hindutva was already ideologically established much earlier, including the idea that Indian nationality was primarily to be based on a ‘common’ Hindu civilization, culture, religion and ‘race’. While aware of debates about the complex governmental, political, administrative, taxonomic, ideological and popular characteristics of ‘communalism', the main focus of the book is on ideological Hindu nationalism – that Hindus did or should constitute ‘a nation’, and that Indian nationalism was solely or largely coextensive with, and to be based on, Hindu religious or ideological precepts. In this sense, what is usually referred to as ‘Hindu communalism’ is submerged under a narrative that essentially views the dominant forms of the latter as characteristically preoccupied with broader ideas of Hindu majoritarianism and ‘Hindu nationality’.

The distinctive ideology of Hindutva that animates contemporary Hindu nationalism was expounded at length during the early 1920s by the Indian anticolonial revolutionary, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Chapter 4 critically, and in detail, explores the content of Savarkarism, the Hindu Mahasabha movement that he led after the mid-1930s, and the relationship of his ideology to strands of British evolutionist sociology. Savarkar is celebrated as a revolutionary hero in contemporary India because of his involvement, while in London during the first decade of the twentieth century, with revolutionary terrorist anticolonial societies. If the confluence of revolutionary nationalism with Hindu nationalism is apposite in his case, his activities during the 1930s also sharply demonstrated the difference between Hindu nationalism and the anti-colonial national movement.

In the mid-1920s, a new organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was formed in Maharashtra and was to become the foundational organization for the ‘family’ (sangh parivar) that comprises the main, though not all, Hindu nationalist organizations and tendencies in contemporary India. Chapter 5 explores the origin, ideology and organization of the RSS. Despite the claims of the RSS and its affiliated organizations that they are embedded in the ‘traditional’ ethos of Hinduism, they are products of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist nationalism and are characterized as India’s own versions of authoritarian, xenophobic and majoritarian religious nationalism. It is argued that the RSS and its characteristic ideology of ordered and disciplined society, bodily control, hierarchy, conformity, and unanimist conceptions of collective Hinduism were formed in opposition to the national movement’s strategies of disobedience, disruption, non-cooperation, equality and freedom. There has been significant debate about whether the RSS and its parivar can be considered ‘fascist’. Both Chapters 4 and 5 consider aspects of these debates by examining the RSS’s and Savarkar’s orientation toward Italy and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.

Chapter 6 provides a descriptive narrative of the formation, growth and successes of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh from the early 1950s, and of the BJP from 1980. This chapter also focuses on the BJP’s ‘two’ founding ideologies, ‘integral humanism’ and ‘Gandhian socialism’. The functionalist ideology of ‘integral humanism’, formulated by Jana Sangh activist Deendayal Upadhyaya during the 1960s, is critically evaluated, as is the claim that it emerged from authentic Hindu advaita traditions. The chapter also considers how aspects of both socialism and Gandhian utopianism had a resonance for Hindu nationalist tendencies, especially in the critically important period of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the 1970s. The more recent tensions between the BJP’s policy of ‘calibrated globalization’ and the RSS’s adherence to ‘economic nationalism’ are also explored.

Chapter 7 describes the origins of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in the mid-1960s, and its attempts at the mass mobilisation of Hindu religious communities since the 1980s. The chapter examines the VHP’s novel and experimental use of religious symbols, mythologies and practices in order to dramatically transform and politicize Hindu devotional traditions and direct them to concerns with landscape, territory and xenology. The VHP’s use of semiotic methods relies on the condensation of a vast and disparate cluster of popular and folk religious meanings onto its chosen political symbols. While religious symbols have their own independent histories of change and development, the emphasis of the chapter is on the novel and synthetic use by the VHP of Hindu religious symbolism. Of significance in bothChapters 6 and 7 are the stated Hindutva intentions of the BJP and the VHP, exemplified their respective election manifestos and ‘Hindu agendas’ of 1998. It is argued that these have to be taken seriously as declarations of political intent in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary settings and pose a serious danger to India’s constitutional secular, democratic and federal status once the parliamentary BJP comes to power without facing the burden of constraining coalitions.

2
The Primordial Nation of the Hindus

He: Your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed. There is nothing else for you to do. No good can come of needless slaughter.

Satyananda: The Muslim power has indeed been destroyed, but the dominion of the Hindus has not yet been established. The British still hold Calcutta.

He: Hindu dominion will not be established now. If you remain at your work, men will be killed to no purpose. Therefore come.

Satyananda: My Lord, if Hindu dominion is not going to be established, who will rule? Will the Muslim kings return?

He: No. The English will rule.

Satyananda: Alas, my mother! I have failed to set you free. Once again you fall into the hands of infidels. Forgive your son. Alas, my mother! Why did I not die on the battlefield!

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Anandamath, 1882

Introduction: Primordialist Conceptions of Indian Nationalism

If the nineteenth century is to be conceived as the period in which varieties of primordialist, ethnic, republican and civic nationalism flourished in Europe, there needs to be a suitable register within which to locate incipient and formative nationalisms under the conditions of colonial and imperial domination. The rise of, and tense relations between, nationalisms and patriotisms in colonial India was formidably complex and their trajectory is often underdetermined by post-Independence nationalist readings which seek to evoke a linear path in which the nationalism of the nineteenth century led inexorably to the liberated independent democratic and secular nation state of the twentieth. In colonized India, various ‘indigenous’ primarily elite and ‘upper’ caste ideas of nation, national belonging and national destiny were certainly set in motion in the nineteenth century. However, post-Independence readings of this earlier period tend to confer a telos onto the development of such nationalisms, whether these are conceived as the signal of modernity’s progress towards secular nationhood, as the continuation of precolonial primordial destinies, or as ‘derivative discourses’ arising from the impact of the former in the recovery of the latter.

Nineteenth century colonized India was subject to complex processes of national, regional and, importantly, linguistic, caste, vernacular and religious elite formation. These processes were fuelled by changes in the spatially variegated organization and administration of the colonial economy, urban growth induced by both industrial and mercantile capitalism, a reconfiguration of feudal and caste relations and changes in the military, administrative, legal and educational apparatuses of colonial government (Bayly 1983). These economic and political processes are beyond detailed consideration here. However, the relations between the Indian merchant, industrial, landowner and feudal classes, the political, judicial, administrative, military and civil service elites and the emergent English-educated and especially vernacular intelligentsia neither form a reductive process of nationalist elite formation, nor were these relations pre-given as ‘secular’. Of equal importance are apparently unrelated but concomitant processes of religious reorganization and reformation in the ostensibly ‘traditional’ structures of northern Indian caste Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. These manifested most powerfully in what are often, and problematically, referred to as the ‘reform’ or ‘revival’ movements in northern Indian Hinduism and Islam, and typically located, from the middle of the century, in the towns and cities of the Punjab, Bengal, the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) and what are now the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Describing the intellectual import of these changes for subsequent formations of secular, religious or regional forms of nationalism is complicated by what may be conceived as ‘external’ intellectual influences, primarily those from Europe. The task is not simply to demonstrate how European nationalist ideas impinged upon and subsequently shaped varieties of secular or religious nationalism in the midst of deeper economic and social changes in nineteenth century colonial India. Rather, it is to uncover the extraordinary variety of intellectual currents t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Primordial Nation of the Hindus
• 3 Beyond the Arya Ideal
• 4 From Revolutionary Nationalism to Hindutva
• 5 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's Ordered Society
• 6 The Sangh Parivar in Politics
• 7 The Authoritarian Landscape of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index