Sanatan Dharma: An Ideology or the Entire Hindu Community?

On July 1, 1941, the then-president of the Hindu Mahasabha, V.D. Savarkar, met a delegation of an organisation dedicated to sanatan dharma.

His dialogue with the delegation of the Shri Bharat Dharma Mahamandal was in a politically fraught context – namely, the Hindu Mahasabha’s bid to taste power at the provincial level by joining coalition governments with the Muslim League or its former allies in Muslim-majority provinces, including Bengal.

Because of his much-touted engagement with caste reforms, those sanatanists were worried if Savarkar would, following the precedent that had been set by Congress in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, push for a law throwing open temples to Untouchables.

Having assuaged their concern, Savarkar’s account of that meeting began with the telling admission that the “Hindu Mahasabha and all sanatan organisations have 95% points in common”.

Savarkar went to the extent of promising that the Hindu Mahasabha would not allow any legislative intervention one way or the other in the domain of temples.

“So far as the 5% differences of views are concerned, I guarantee that the Hindu Mahasabha shall never force any legislations regarding the entry of Untouchables in the ancient temples or compel by law any sacred ancient and moral usage or custom prevailing in those temples,” he said.

Thus, even as he compromised with the orthodoxy, the most influential ideologue of Hindutva made it clear that he identified sanatan dharma with caste segregation. Unlike the BJP’s position on the current controversy over the same term, Savarkar hardly conflated sanatan dharma with the entire Hindu community.

This is further clear from the appeal he claimed to have made in the same meeting to that conservative section to let the reformists strive for equality among Hindus through methods other than legislation:

“In general the Mahasabha will not back up any legislation to thrust the reforming views on our sanatani brothers so far as personal law is concerned, but the sanatanis on the contrary should recognise that in public life all Hindus must be looked upon on the basis of equality and should leave the reformists free to bring about their religious reforms, etc. by means of persuation [sic] and mental change.”

It’s debatable though whether Savarkar, a barrister, could have believed that the reformist section had the option of bringing about equality within the Hindu community without recourse to legislation.

Whether it was about allowing temple entry for Dalits or legalising inter-caste marriage for Hindus across the board, history testifies that those social reforms could be carried out only through legislation superseding the restrictions imposed by custom and scriptures.

Even so, in the 1941 authorised collection of his pronouncements titled Whirlwind Propaganda, Savarkar boasted about the impact he had made on sanatanists with his non-coercive approach to caste reform: “This attitude has greatly been appreciated by the sanatanist leaders and it is receiving their cordial & Sincere Consideration approbation in several leading quarters [sic].”

Given his professed sympathy for non-sanatanist Hindus on the question of caste reform, there was another reason why Savarkar ought to have been aware of the indispensability of legislation: the sanatan dharma debate that another icon of the Hindu right, Madan Mohan Malaviya, had a decade earlier with the most famous campaigner against untouchability, Mahatma Gandhi.

Also Read: What Is Sanatana Dharma?

The 1933 debate, in the aftermath of the historic Poona Pact, followed Gandhi’s belated espousal of the legislative path for throwing open temples to Dalits.

Though the Gandhi-backed legislative proposal still left discretion in the hands of caste Hindus, it was provocation enough for Malaviya to organise a protest in the form of a ‘Sanatan Dharma Mahasabha’ in Varanasi on January 23, 1933.

Emboldened by the support he had received at that gathering from other sanatanists, Malaviya wrote to Gandhi on February 8, 1933, making no bones of his disagreement with the Mahatma’s interpretation of scriptures: “There is plenty of authority for the view that certain persons are Untouchables under certain conditions and that certain other persons are Untouchables by reason of their birth and occupation.”

Since the tallest leader of the Dalits, B.R. Ambedkar, had by then given up on reforming the Hindu community on caste, he declined Gandhi’s request for supporting temple entry legislation. His letter to Gandhi on February 14, 1933 began with a disclaimer that “the controversy regarding the question of temple entry is confined to the sanatanists and Mahatma Gandhi”.

Thanks to such resistance that sanatanists put up during the colonial period, the reformist camp succeeded in getting temple entry laws enacted with a rights-based approach – as opposed to the previous policy of benevolence without any entitlement – only around the time of independence. The rhetoric of equality that had gripped the nation then, especially due to the contemporaneous proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, pushed the sanatanists to the margins.

The extent to which their clout had dropped during that short-lived phase was evident from an unusual tactic that the sanatanists were forced to adopt in Poona for their voice to be heard on the Bombay temple entry Bill.

Right on the eve of the enactment of that Bill, on September 10, 1947, a deputation of sanatani Hindus met the head of the Bombay government, premier B.G. Kher. They had wanted to present a petition to the legislative assembly “but could not find a single member who was willing to do it”.

This was revealed by Kher the next day in the House while forwarding the sanatani petition in a democratic gesture along with a disclaimer, as reported then by the Times of India, that “he entirely differed from the views contained in the petition”.

The same news report on Kher’s speech went on to say: “Replying to the sanatanists who did not wish government to interfere with religion, he said that he had no doubt at all in his mind that it was ungodly to keep so large a section of people as the Harijans out of society and to treat them in the way they had been treated for centuries.”

Unfazed by their failure to block the Bill in the Assembly, the sanatanists turned their attention to the Bombay legislative council. On October 18, 1947, members of the Varnashrama Swarajya Sangha barged into the council hall and demanded that the Bill be rejected. Such was their desperation that they likened the legislative attack on caste restriction to the Partition violence against Hindus in Pakistan.

As the Times of India reported, “The leader of the Sanatanis, Pandit Anna Shastri Upadhyay, with his palms joined together, said that the government in India was treating orthodox Hindus in the same manner as Hindus were being treated in Pakistan.”

The conception of sanatan dharma as an ideology that resisted any change in the Hindu social structure was not just in political discourse, but also part of judicial language.

Take the 1954 Allahabad high court judgment on the sanatani opposition to letting Dalits enter the holiest of holy temples, Kashi Vishwanath. The dispute was over whether Dalits had been allowed to enter the Kashi Vishwanath temple through its main entrance, singhadwar, when they had finally dared to exercise their right under the 1947 temple entry law of the United Provinces on February 17, 1954.

While the sanatanists claimed that the Dalits had not been “stopped from entering through the main gate”, the state asserted that they had been “refused entrance … through the singhadwar”. Weighing the conflicting versions that had been given under oath, the high court found that “the Harijans could not, uninterrupted, have access … through the main gate … because the sanatanists … were at the scene to obstruct their entry.”

Manoj Mitta is the author of the recently published Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India.