History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self
eBook - ePub

History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self

Aparna Devare

Share book
  1. 236 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self

Aparna Devare

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Taking the contentious debates surrounding historical evidence and history writing between secularists and Hindu nationalists as a starting point, this book seeks to understand the origins of a growing historical consciousness in contemporary India, especially amongst Hindus. The broad question it poses is: Why has 'history' become such an important site of identity, conflict and self-definition amongst modern Hindus, especially when Hinduism is known to have been notoriously impervious to history? As modern ideas regarding notions of history came to India with colonialism, it turns to the colonial period as the 'moment of encounter' with such ideas.

The book examines three distinct moments in the Hindu self through the lives and writings of lower-caste public figure Jotiba Phule, 'moderate' nationalist M. G. Ranade and Hindu nationalist V. D. Savarkar. Through a close reading of original writings, speeches and biographical material, it is demonstrated that these three individuals were engaged with a modern historical and rationalist approach. However, the same material is also used to argue that Phule and Ranade viewed religion as living, contemporaneous and capable of informing both their personal and political lives. Savarkar, the 'explicitly Hindu' leader, on the contrary, held Hindu practices and traditions in contempt, confining them to historical analysis while denying any role for religion as spirituality or morality in contemporary political life.

While providing some historical context, this volume highlights the philosophical/ political ideas and actions of the three individuals discussed. It integrates aspects of their lives ascentral to understanding their politics.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self by Aparna Devare in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9781136197079
Topic
History
Edition
1
Chapter 1
Introduction: Historicizing the Politics of History
Debates over ‘history’ are increasingly occupying a dominant place in modern Indian public life. History-writing and the search for historical evidence has become a significant terrain on which ideological battles are being fought in contemporary India. For instance, the writing of State-sponsored history textbooks has become an issue of increasing controversy in recent years. Both the Hindu right-wing and the secularists accuse each other of writing and promoting ‘tainted’ histories whenever their respective political parties come to power.1 However, the demolition of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, by Hindu kar sevaks2 on 6 December 1992, on the grounds that it marked the historical site of the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, marked a turning point in bringing ‘history’ center stage in Indian public life. Hindu nationalist groups claimed that Ram’s birthplace, marked by a temple, was replaced by a mosque during the rule of the Mughal Emperor Babur in the 16th century, and that in demanding the demolition of the mosque, they were avenging the ‘wrongs’ of history.
While Hindu nationalists used historical arguments to justify their violent acts, their opponents, the secularist historians, countered them by arguing that they were using spurious historical claims. Responding to the Hindu nationalist version of history, they argued that ‘when beliefs claim the legitimacy of history, then the historian has to attempt a demarcation between the limits of belief and historical evidence’ (Gopal et al. 1989). Hence, their main contention was that they as historians were writing ‘authentic’ history based on evidence, while Hindutva proponents were justifying their actions based on myths and were incapable of rational thinking. Interestingly, however, both were to paraphrase S. P. Udayakumar’s ‘handcuffed to history’ (2001).
However, rather than arguing about ‘bad’ or ‘communalist’ versus ‘good’ or ‘secularist’ versions of history, some critics argued it was ‘history’ itself that needed to be interrogated (Das 1995; Lal 2003; Nandy 1995: 60; Udayakumar 2001). Why, they asked, this obsession with ‘history’ when the local Hindu and Muslim residents of Ayodhya had accommodated each other’s views and sentiments outside the terrain of modern ‘history’ through shared notions of piety and ‘sacred’ spaces? Local residents had generally found grounds for coexistence through shared religious idioms. For instance, the mosque included within its sanctum a small temple dedicated to Sita, known as her rasoi (kitchen).3 The Nawabs of Awadh had patronized Ayodhya as a temple town and Muslims undertook many traditional tasks such as garland making and dress making for the idols.4
The loud battles seeking historical ‘veracity’ for Ram’s birth, these critics argued, were being fought amongst the middle classes (secularist or communalist) in Delhi and elsewhere.5 The secularists’ deep skepticism towards religion precluded them from showing sensitivity to the existence of religious practices and traditions that could lead to accommodation. Hence, as Ashis Nandy points out, the clarion call to opponents of Hindu nationalists, following this incident, was not the need for more or ‘correct’ history but the need to assert counter-myths that often carried religious undertones.6 He stressed the need to recover and reassert aspects of religious traditions that stressed coexistence. The debates pertaining to the Babri Masjid were not merely academic; the event unleashed macabre violence against Muslims resulting in over a thousand deaths by ‘history-avenging’ Hindu nationalists.
Why this growing obsession with history in a society where history-writing and a historical sense have not typically received much attention? Hinduism in particular is notoriously non-historical, as the British emphatically first pointed out two centuries ago. For instance, James Mill, writing in the 19th century, was perplexed to find the complete absence of historical records in India. According to him, Hindu legends were the ‘offspring of a wild and ungoverned imagination, they mark the state of a rude and credulous people 
 who cannot estimate the use of record of past events’ (Mill 1858: 115).
While Indian society did have a sense of the past,7 notions of rationalist and scientific ‘objectivity’ tied to a separation between history and myth/religion, so crucial to modern history-writing, were introduced to India via the British. In fact, the origins of modern history in Europe also date back no later than the 18th century, alongside the onset of the ‘Scientific’ Revolution.
Ironically, in the event discussed above, it were the self-proclaimed ‘Hindu’ groups who were most aggressively promoting history. What accounts for this paradox? How do we account for the growing importance given to history and notions of historicity in a society and religion that had not accorded these notions much significance before then? How can we better understand such a phenomenon? This study is an attempt in this direction. It turns to the colonial ‘moment’ as marking India’s first encounter with modern European notions of history and historicity, and argues that understanding the manner in which these ideas were negotiated at the time is very significant for understanding the discursive space around ‘history’ that exists today.
Modernity can be identified both as a historical moment as well as a conceptual one. Historically, it unfolded in Europe from the 17th century onwards, with the advent of the Age of Progress and Enlightenment. Conceptually, it is characterized by the emergence and reconfiguration of certain concepts and the relationships between them. Key to this discussion is a changed perspective towards religion/faith and myth with the emergence of a modern historical outlook. The modern subject privileges the ‘historical gaze’. In other words, religious practices, beliefs and myths are increasingly subject to a process of historicizing, which renders them ‘dead’ in the present and no longer ‘eternally valid’. Their validity lies only in the realm of belief; one can have ‘faith’ in them but their scientific validity is subject entirely to the scientific criterion of ‘evidence’. Most religious myths and beliefs cannot be empirically ‘proved’. Thus, scientific evidence is seen as a higher order of validity than belief. To be modern is to be scientific and not religious/superstitious/mythical. Since the ‘rational’, the ‘historical’ and the ‘secular’ are ascribed higher order values in the public sphere, as Talal Asad suggests(1993: 205), religion is increasingly viewed as a matter of personal identity, to be kept out of the public sphere:
we have the construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science and morality. (Ibid.: 207)
What were the implications of such ideas in a society such as India’s where traditionally religion (whether Hinduism, Islam or others) was not kept out of the public sphere and delegitimized due to a scientific historical gaze? Colonialism not only first brought these ideas from 18th-century Europe to Indian shores but was also predicated on them; as many scholars have evocatively argued, it was not only economic factors that compelled Europeans to colonize but also a belief that their civilization was superior as they were scientific, rational, historical and secular in their world-view (Chakrabarty 2000; Chatterjee 1986; Nandy 1983). The need to civilize ‘natives’ by inculcating in them notions of science, history and secular thought (more than religious proselytizing, although some of that did take place) was crucial to the colonizers’ justification of their imperial missions. This is, in many ways, what distinguished them from their predecessors who either came in search purely of wealth and/or to actively convert local populations to their faith. In the case of the British, especially after the British State took over (after the East India Company), it was a secular ‘civilizing’ mission.
The colonized Indian elite, who were introduced to these ideas primarily through Western education, negotiated modern ideas, including those of history. Since the Indian colonized elite were the first to ‘encounter’ modern notions of history brought by the British, this book focuses on how the former, especially Hindus, responded to modern ideas about historical thinking and writing. It sees the manner in which three different individuals ‘encountered’ history as being emblematic of three significant (yet not exclusive) responses amongst Hindus. Jotiba Phule,8 M. G. Ranade and V. D. Savarkar all lived through colonial times and were prominent public figures in the Marathi as well as the national public sphere, with each embodying a distinct Indian-Hindu world-view through his contact with colonial ideas.
However, despite their importance on the national scene, they have not received much attention in the literature on this period (although this is less the case with Savarkar). This is partly because most of the scholarship focusing on how Indians negotiated colonial ideas has focused on Bengal, especially the Bengali ‘bhadralok’ (intelligentsia or middle class). But western India, or what was then the Bombay Presidency, was also one of British India’s key territories, with Bombay city as its capital.9 Like Bengal, it was ruled directly by the British and faced a long and deep exposure to colonial rule, commencing in 1818. Not surprisingly then, like Bengal, it too was at the heart of much activity by the colonized, including major social reform, nationalist, caste, and violent revolutionary movements.
In fact, Phule, Ranade and Savarkar can each be seen to represent a major current of activity (lower caste, social reform and Hindu militant movements, respectively) that spanned the gamut of socio-political responses to colonial rule by ‘natives’ in the region. In turn, each of these movements was ‘national’ in its scope, as it drew heavily from trends elsewhere, especially Bengal, and was crucial in constituting varying streams of ‘pan-Indian nationalism’. Many of the ‘nationalists’, such as leaders of the Indian National Congress (henceforth Congress), were social reformers and prominent personalities in the Bombay Presidency.
Broadly speaking, one can identify four major socio-political trends that characterized ‘native’ responses to colonial rule in the Bombay Presidency. The first was characterized by the social reform movements that spanned much of the 19th century, and which used colonial ideas to interrogate Hindu customs, beliefs and practices. M. G. Ranade can be considered one of the most important social reformers in the Presidency at the time. As Rajendra Vohra argues, it is no exaggeration to say that 19th-century Maharashtra belonged to two people: Jotiba Phule and M. G. Ranade.10 Ranade is remembered in popular Indian nationalist history for his work on social reform alongside his crucial role in the formative years of the Congress. Charles Heimsath points out that social reformers in the Bombay Presidency ‘could take pride in the fact that their province had the longest and most extensive record of public interest in social reform and of organized reforming activity of any Indian region’ (1964: 236). These were, however, largely confined to the upper castes and were embodied in debates such as those over the Age of Consent Bill (which became a law in 1891)11 and widow remarriage. The Age of Consent debates brought questions of social reform on the national stage.
The second major trend was the lower-caste anti-Brahmin movements that found their first major voice in Phule, and which culminated in a much broader agitation focusing on the plight of the Untouchables or Dalits under the leadership of Bhimrao Ambedkar over 50 years later. Many of these movements, including those led by Phule and later by Ambedkar, were very skeptical of the manner in which the Congress in particular was defining nationalism. They saw the Congress as a predominantly upper-caste Hindu body that excluded the masses while seeking to represent them.
The third major current was that of militant revolutionary activity, known as ‘extremism’ in popular Indian nationalist literature. Youth from urban centres in the Presidency, such as Pune, Nasik and Kolhapur (which was then part of a separate princely state), resorted to violent tactics, including assassinating key colonial officials and attacking symbols of the colonial administration. Throwing bombs, secretly procuring weapons such as guns and planning clandestine operations to foment dissent against the government were some of the main activities these youth organized. Many of them belonged to Abhinav Bharat, the organization that Savarkar had started for explicitly militant purposes. The young militants drew inspiration from both the Savarkar brothers (Ganesh and V. D.) along with Bengali revolutionaries such as Aurobindo Ghosh. V. D. Savarkar’s reach extended to Bengali revolutionaries as well, particularly with the publication of his book on the 1857 Revolt, entitled The Indian War of Independence, 1857. The Savarkar brothers were active in organizing militant youth, often under the banner of a militant and masculinist Hindu nationalism. However, Savarkar’s strong anti-Muslim tendencies were not too apparent at that time; they became much more pronounced later in his political life, especially when he was freed from prison in the 1920s. By 1912, the militant movement fizzled out since most revolutionaries were caught and subject to long prison terms.12
Fourth, the Bombay Presidency was also the epicentre of the growth of ‘secular’ nationalism, as embodied in the Congress.13 On 28 December 1885 in Bombay, leaders who wanted greater representation for Indians in the colonial government came together to form a national body or the Congress to voice these demands. Known as the ‘moderates’ in popular nationalist literature, many of these individuals were from the Bombay Presidency and were prominent social reformers.14 They differed from ‘extremists’ such as B. G. Tilak who demanded swarajya or complete self-rule from the British. M. G. Ranade, G. K. Gokhale, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Pherozshah Mehta were some ‘moderates’ amongst many others who played a crucial role in the formation and early running of the Congress. Ranade organized and ran the social reform component of the Congress, the National Social Conference, for several years until the ‘extremists’, led by Tilak, successfully managed to push social reform questions out of the Congress in favour of political ones.
How did these three individuals, Phule, Ranade and Savarkar, negotiate modern ideas? In other words, can we better understand the constitution of a modern–historical Indian-Hindu self through an exploration of their views on history and religion? Moreover, what relevance do these investigations have for the present? These themes are the focus of this study. I believe an exhaustive study of Phule, Ranade and Savarkar’s ideas will help us better understand how the modern Indian-Hindu self was imagined with respect to history and religion. While I undertake an in-depth analysis of the more obvious recorded ‘evidence’, including their writings and speeches, I also introduce the use of biography as crucial to a holistic understanding of their thought. I suggest that one cannot fully understand how each of these three individuals negotiated modern ideas of history and its relationship with religion unless one also looks at their lives, which were an integral part of their politics. I read their biographies as lived practice, as texts that are an indispensable part of their ‘written’/public world-views.
Each of these three was heavily influenced by modern ideas of historical thinking/writing. Each looked at religious ideas, customs, practices and mythologies as objects of historical investigation. Phule placed myths within a historical framework and rationalized them; Ranade placed religious texts within specific ages or time-periods with their own distinct characteristics; and Savarkar placed all Hindu religious customs and practices within a ‘dead’ historical past with little relevance for the present, since he strongly believed in linear ideas of progress. For all three, religio...

Table of contents