Bankim Chandra

Does a Pluralistic Nation Like India Really Need ‘Vande Mataram’?

The controversy around Vande Mataram is an opportunity to reflect on the literary aspects of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Anandamath’ as well as his idea of nationalism.

The idea that Vande Mataram ought to be sung by every citizen because it is the national song would have few takers among those with discriminating minds. In any free country, surely citizens are well within their rights to not comply with such demands.

There was a time when after every film show the image of the tricolour would flash on the cinema screen and the national anthem would echo in the theatre. Now, Jana gana mana does not have any religious references, so there was no question of a Hindu-Muslim flare-up over it. Even so, many viewers would get up to leave knowing well that the gates would not open until the seventh and last time the invocation Jaya hey had been uttered.

Eventually, the practice was stopped in the cinemas, among the most effective sites of mass communication. (Courtesy of a Supreme Court order, though somewhat revised, the national anthem has been brought back to cinemas and imposed on viewers all over again.)

Despite being aware of the double ignominy that the tricolour and national anthem were subjected to, if the current dispensation is trying its best to impose the national song on the populace, the reason is quite clear. Parts of the national song are replete with Hindu symbolism that can be used to provoke Muslims and gratify Hindus, albeit not the communities in their entirety.

The Hindu vote bank lures the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which has its base among the majority – and the Congress equally; both parties are locked in a life and death struggle over it. The intellectual community, which understands the motive behind the attempt to make an issue of the national song, has critiqued it extensively, especially on the lines that singing or not singing the national song cannot be a yardstick of patriotism.

But is ‘Vande Mataram’ actually a ‘bad’ song? What kind of a novel is Anandamath? Further, is ultra nationalism the same as nationalism? Sometimes the heat generated by the flare-up of a controversy stretches into a broader and constructive debate. It would have been useful if scholars had taken this opportunity to reflect on the literary aspects of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s work as well as his idea of nationalism.

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I am not a litterateur, nor have I studied political science. But what strikes one sharply about the entire debate is that you have either die hard supporters of Chattopadhyay or die hard detractors who vilify him to the extent of tearing his character to shreds. Literature never features in these debates.

Those who oppose the imposition of the national song start finding faults with the song itself, forgetting that it is a poem first and national song later. It is as if the poem has been sacrificed at the altar of nationalism.

Those who have lauded ‘Vande Mataram’ as well as those who have lambasted it seem to be motivated by social or political factors. In the aftermath of such a debate, one wonders if future generations will ever be able to read it as a poem.

As a composition, I find ‘Vande Mataram’ to be a beautiful poem and Anandamath a light-weight novel; the reader may assume that this opinion is not borne out of intellectual, social or political fervour. Literature is an art and is above worldly affairs. The ways of approaching literature also originate from within it.

Step beyond the barrier that is the religious symbolism of ‘Vande Mataram’ and you will experience its words unfold a gentle and pleasing world of metre, hues and fragrance. Malayajashitalam is not just a cool breeze coming from Malaygiri (Malay mountain), laden with the aroma of sandalwood, nor is shubhra jyotsna pulkit yaminim merely a description of the romance of a moonlit night.

Every simile in the song has an extraordinary capacity to transport one to a world beyond the lyrics and their meaning, provided we express a willingness to undertake that journey.

Here I am reminded of a private conversation with professor Ramchandra Gandhi many years ago. Ramu Gandhi, who was popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, was a consummate art lover and aesthete. He was of the view that the beauty of the rest of the poem aside, the first two words, namely Vande Mataram, are a complete poem in themselves, just like Satyameva Jayate. He was alluding to rhythmic import, which is the soul of poetry. I could appreciate his view.

The simultaneous use of Bangla and Sanskrit in the poem is an accomplishment in itself – something that scholars of Indian languages would be able to grasp and appreciate. The English translation, even as brilliant as the one by Sri Aurobindo, fails to recreate the timbre of the original. The poem is marked by a rare musicality which readily lends itself to widely varying compositions, as exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore and A. R. Rahman.

Tagore composed only the first stanza of the poem, in raag des. It is from this point that the poem began to be sung. Chattopadhyay included the musical score as an appendix in the third edition of Anandamath, choosing it over an earlier composition by one of his friends, in raag malhaar.

It is a fact that the words dashpraharanharini (Durga), kamala kamaladal viharini (Lakshmi) and vani vidyadayini (Saraswati) figure in one stanza of ‘Vande Mataram’. However, religious symbolism in itself isn’t always communal.

Although I am non-religious, I still enjoy listening to Surdas and Meera bhajans or sufi qawwalis in praise of Allah or Prophet Muhammad. I listen to them as music. Moreover, I firmly believe that if one journeys to the farthest horizons of music, it becomes an act of devotion in itself. Therefore, as I see it, religious symbols in art always take a secondary place.

Also read: Interview | ‘Radicalism Is Spurred by Nationalism More Than Religion’: Fatima Bhutto

In such instances, if one’s focus happens to drift from the composition to its religious symbology, then the fault lies not with the work but with one’s perspective. There is a world of difference between Gandhi’s Ram and that of L.K. Advani’s, but in literature, music and art, this difference recedes to a rarefied realm.

Not so long ago some English dailies came up with a story that Chattopadhyay wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a space-filler in Bangadarshan, the literary magazine he founded. One has no way of knowing whether it was so or not, but while reading Anandamath one certainly gets the feeling that ‘Vande Mataram’ may have been just that, namely a space-filler.

The poem reflects a Chattopadhyay who is balanced and rhythmic throughout. In Anandamath both his sense of discrimination and flow of prose come unstuck. By thrusting ‘Vande Mataram’ into the novel, he has roughened the smooth texture of the poem; in fact he is guilty of having reduced the song to a mere slogan.

Because the vision that emerges from his novel comes across as extremely narrow, it has brought ‘Vande Mataram’ and Chattopadhyay himself under a cloud. While the song, when seen in itself, may be cleared of all such charges, Chattopadhyay lovers would find it extremely difficult to rescue Anandamath from the circle of suspicion.

The novel outrightly celebrates Hindu religion, mocks Muslims and glorifies the British. Jai Jagdish Hare and Hare Murare Madhukaitbhare are repeatedly invoked as slogans throughout the novel; ‘Vande Mataram’ is like a prop.

Some writers claim that the slogans were raised by armed Hindu sannyasis (ascetics) against tyrannical rulers, who coincidentally happened to be Muslims. This is a false claim. In the novel the sannyasis who call themselves the santaan sena (children of Mother India) fight the Muslim and the British. In the end they side with the latter.

Some refer to Anandamath as a historical novel because it is set against the backdrop of the rule of Bengal’s first nawab, Mir Jafar. The movie Anandamath, which was based on Chattopadhyay novel and directed by Hemant Gupta in 1952, portrays the rebellion as India’s first battle of independence, fought long before 1857. However, historian Jadunath Sarkar, armed with facts, has refuted these claims about Anandamath and Devi Chaudhurani.

Chattopadhyay himself never described Anandamath as a historical novel. At the same time he was drawn to the idea of historicity. In his preface to the novel’s third edition he informed the reader: “This time the true history of the sannyasi rebellion has been given in extracts from English works in the appendix”.

Further, he clarified that: “the battles described in the novel had not taken place in Birbhum but in north Bengal. And, in the novel, the name of Major Wood has been used in place of Captain Edwards. This difference I do not consider serious because [a] novel is a novel, not history.” However, in later editions he corrected some “differences” as they were “unnecessary to retain”.

It is possible that Chattopadhyay may have initially wanted to write against the British; after all the basis of his novel was the sannyasi rebellion that took place during the time of Warren Hastings’ governor-generalship, in the 18th Century. Being a government servant he was, perhaps, caught in a dilemma, wavering between making the santaan sena fight the British and Muslims, unequivocally going over to the British side towards the novel’s conclusion. By doing so, he linked the inevitability of British rule to the conception of a Hindu-rashtra in the future.

In his preface to the first edition (1882) of the novel, Bankim wrote: “Most of the time a revolution in society is an exercise solely in inflicting pain on oneself. Rebels are suicidal. The English have saved Bengal from anarchy. All these facts have been explained in this work.” Not only this, the preface ends with the statement that the very objective of the santaan rebellion was to establish British rule.

As borne out in the excerpts below, from the fifth edition of Ananadamath’s translation by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta (The Abbey of Bliss, 1906), anyone reading the novel will be quick to notice the feeling of hatred towards Muslims and praise for the British.

“…but our Mussalman King – how does he protect us? Our religion is gone; so is our caste; our honour and the sacredness of our family even! Our lives even are now to be sacrificed. Unless we drive these tipsy long-beards away, a Hindu can no longer hope to save his religion.”

…

“Quite so, we do not want sovereignty; we only want to kill these Mussalmans, root and branch, because they have become the enemies of God.”

…

“Then they began to send emissaries to the villages. These went to the villages and wherever they found 20 or 25 Hindus, fell on Mussalman villages and set fire to their houses. While the Mussalmans busied themselves in saving their lives, the Children [the santaan sena] plundered their possessions and distributed them among their followers. When the rustics were gratified with a share of the booty, they were taken to the temple of Vishnu and initiated there as Children with the touch of the idol’s feet. People felt that the Children’s mission was a lucrative business….and where they found a Mussalman habitation they burnt it down to ashes.”

…

“Someone cried out, ‘Kill, kill, the shaven knolls! … Another would say, ‘Brother, would the day come when we shall we able to break the mosque to raise the temple of Radha-Madhava in its place?’”

…

“Some ran to the villages and others to the towns and then caught hold of passersby or householders and said, ‘Say Hail Mother [Vande Mataram] or you die’…. Everybody said, ‘The Moslems have been defeated and the country has come back to the Hindus; cry Hari, Hari’. The villagers would chase any Mussalman that they would meet – some would combine and go to the Mussalman quarters to set fire to their houses and pillage them. Many Moslems shaved off their beards, smeared their bodies with earth and sung Harinam. When challenged they would say in their own patois that they were Hindus.”

Obviously, there is more to the novel than a struggle between a tyrannical ruler and persecuted subjects. There is concern for the Hindu religion, disdain for Muslims and a surfeit of exaltation of the British. When a British officer is captured in battle, Bhavanand tells him:

“Captain Saheb! We shall not kill you; the English are not our enemies. But why did you come in as friends of the Mussalmans? Come, I shall save your life, and for the present you are our prisoner. We wish all joy to Englishmen [‘May the Englishmen be victorious’ would be closer to the text of the original], we are your friends.”

At the end of the novel, overcome with anguish that a Hindu reign could not be established in spite of the destruction of Muslim power, the leader of the rebel sannyasis, Satyanand, poses a question to the chikitsak (who appears as Satyanand’s mentor). “Sire,” he said,

“who is then to become the sovereign if it is not the Hindus. Is it the Mussalman that will return to power?”

The mahapurush replies:

“There is no hope of a revival of the True Faith if the English be not our rulers….The English are great in objective sciences and they are apt teachers. Therefore, the English shall be made our sovereign. Imbued with a knowledge of objective sciences by English education our people will be able to comprehend subjective truths….The rebellion was raised only that the English might be initiated into sovereignty.”

It is true that the hues specific to a language are often lost in translation. Except, with regard to Anandamath, there is an element of dissonance in the original novel itself. While the language is smooth, the narrative progresses in a monotonous and discordant fashion. The situations are not fleshed out well, nor is the ambience of battle built up satisfactorily. What emerges clearly is more the author’s intention to pour the narrative into the gaps between the incessant dialogues of weakly sketched characters, and slogans.

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Novels that are serialised in magazines often suffer this fate; otherwise works based on an insular perspective can be excellent too. Such examples abound in literature. For instance, Ezra Pound, an avowed supporter of fascism, is considered a great poet. About Nietzsche, Vijaydevnarayan Sahi once wrote, “From the point of view of social reality Thus Spake Zarathustra ought to be burnt, but from the literary point of view, it is among the great works.”

As with ‘Vande Mataram’, I read Anandamath with an open mind, but it came across as an unimpressive work not only from an ideological viewpoint but also as a work of art. True, the novel as a form was not well developed in our parts at the time the work was written, but signs of greatness manifest themselves one way or another. Unfortunately, these signs are not to be found in the most famous of Chattopadhyay’s works.

The same cannot be said about ‘Vande Mataram’ which was written separately and should be read as such. There is no sense in imposing it as the national song either. If intoned in accordance with regulation or as a prescribed primer, a poem loses its essence and is reduced to a mere slogan.

Also read: ‘We Live in Times When National Integration Has Been Replaced By Ugly Nationalism’

The controversy centred on the national song affords a pretext for a discussion on nationalism. For instance, how does one approach the emphatic view in certain quarters that declaring ‘Vande Mataram’ the national song, was not proper. I would say, the song with all its religious symbolism was not communal at its inception but became so six years later when Chatopadhyay decided to insert it into the controversial novel which was communal in tone.

It is a fact that in the course of the freedom movement, revolutionaries drew inspiration from the song. But later, during communal riots, this very song was also used as a war cry against the Muslims. It was not the Muslim League alone that protested against it; even Gandhi was apprehensive that the song would be used to humiliate Muslims. Eventually, owing to the controversy surrounding ‘Vande Mataram’, it was not declared the national anthem.

As a consequence of the same debate, however, a truncated version of the poem, sans the controversial part, was declared the national song – is there any poet alive who would endorse this move – following which there is a constant attempt to place it even above the national anthem in the name of patriotism.

Making a show of patriotism is a consequence of the idea of nationalism which did not exist in our country earlier. The nationalism with which we have draped ourselves is a concept borrowed from the West, or Europe, where it was born during the 19th Century.

It is a well-known fact that nationalism was what destroyed Europe, pushing it into two World Wars. It was a similar idea of nationalism that led to the formation of Pakistan. However, Europe managed to steady itself and now the 28 countries (Britain included) that are part of the European Union boast one currency and travel on the strength of one passport sans visa requirements. These nations are ethnically diverse yet there is no attempt to homogenise the different cultures, languages and arts. Rather, the focus is on preserving each of them.

Also read: Asserting Your Nationalism Day In, Day Out Is Unnecessary: Hamid Ansari

In our country, however, the ritualistic aspects of nationalism are increasingly being seen as synonymous with nationalism. There is a huge difference between the two. Certainly, a citizen must have faith in his or her nation, but faith cannot be measured only in terms of national symbols.

We tend to forget that at one point ultra-nationalism takes the shape of fascism. It is not without reason that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has the same faith in this ideology as Hitler or Mussolini did. It is in the context of this ideology that the debate around singing or not singing ‘Vande Mataram’ keeps surfacing time and again.

‘Vande Mataram’ is not the only issue; there are many others which can lend themselves to similar controversies. The question is – does a pluralistic nation like India really need such symbols? No symbol of a nation can ever be more important than its people. It is the people themselves who create those symbols in the first place. So how can there be just one religious, or even non-religious, symbol for a country as pluralistic as India?

On this issue, a study of the ideas of Tagore, our national poet, and master novelist Premchand can provide extremely useful pointers. Tagore held the ideal of humanity to be much above those of patriotism; Premchand likened nationalism to a disease (leprosy).

Normally it would make little sense for a country to have a national anthem as well as a national song. This situation is peculiar to our country. Thankfully, the list of nationalistic symbols has not extended to other art forms. The mind boggles to think of a scenario in which a process of having a national story, play, painting, film, dance form and sport were to be initiated.

In fact, the flag should suffice as the symbol of a nation. The sooner there is an end to the practice of the Central and state governments creating more and more official symbols, the better it would be for India and Indians. We can do without the empty ritualism.

Like the contentious debate around ‘Vande Mataram’, the issue of Hindi as the national language is raked up every now and then in the context of the ideology of ultra-nationalism. As Hindi Diwas (September 14) approaches, one can expect the usual slogans accompanied by the usual debate on the national language. But there will be no talk about the many languages and dialects that we are knowingly or unknowingly losing by the day.

Hindi is a gentle language pleasing to the ears. Being the most widely spoken, it can easily become a contact language. The irony is that although Hindi has been given the status of an official language, it has not even succeeded in becoming the language of governance. An administration’s efforts can neither supplant nor constrict the popular mind-set.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learnt from the ‘Vande Mataram’ controversy is that in a free country such matters should be left open, not corralled. It will help safeguard not only our unity but many other aspects of our life which happen to be genuine markers of our national identity. The sooner the ultra-nationalistic prodigals return from their Western perch to the East, the better.

Translated from the Hindi original by Naushin Rehman and Chitra Padmanabhan. Read the original here.

Om Thanvi is a senior journalist who retired as editor in chief of Jansatta in 2016.

The Unique Identity of Bengal Violence

Violence is endemic in all states across India. But in Bengal, all acts of violence are essentially political in nature.

Political violence has always been an integral part of Bengal’s history. The forms of such violence – over time – have mutated and transformed themselves. In the series Bengal: Genealogies of Violence, The Wire attempts to capture some of the milestones that mark the narratives of political bloodshed spanning more than eight decades. Read the other articles here.

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The discourse on political violence as advanced by thinkers, administrators and politicians is indeed baffling. Even as the critics of violence are worried over the continuance and diversification of violence, they are unable to explain why people, states and nations have become so increasingly violent.

Walter Benjamin, who perished while fleeing the Nazis on the border of France and Spain in 1940, reportedly observed that the war of 1939 actually had its origins in earlier times, dating back to 1933. The people, however, were still not aware that all episodes of violence tend to have their genesis in the past. Benjamin cautioned that while we tend to recognise mythical violence without any ambivalence, the real danger lies in the violence generated by the executive. He used the term ‘pernicious’ to describe the violence sponsored by the executive and the administration.

Bengal context

We need to analyse the different faces of violence in Bengal in this larger context of violence. And we need to clarify what we mean when we characterise Bengal as a land ridden with violence. Let’s not forget that all states have their respective genealogies of violence, and their mythic forms exist alongside executive and administrative violence which routinely visit people. But it is violence in its mythic form, such as a war, which captures popular imagination; which makes us aware of its cataclysmic nature.

It is true that Bengal has had its fair share of such divine or pure violence. It is difficult to believe that Shah Shuja, the 17th century Bengal governor, son of Emperor Shah Jahan, had described Bengal as a fertile land of peace-loving, opium-consuming, idle villagers. The villagers, according to the governor, were loath to working hard because they could grow abundant crops with minimum amount of ploughing.

Yet, within a century, Shah Shuja’s portrayal of Bengal as a peaceful state was shattered as famines, deaths, and violence savaged the state in 1770. W.W. Hunter, a colonial officer, immortalised Bengal’s plight in The Annals of Rural Bengal, which he wrote in 1865.

Hunter quoted verses from John Shore, an officer of the East India Company who served as Bengal’s governor general between 1793 and 1797:

Still fresh in memory’s eye the scene I view,

The shrivelled limbs, sunk eyes, and lifeless hue;

Still hear the mother’s shrieks and infant moans,

Cries of despair and agonising moans,

In wild confusion dead and dying lie;

Hark to the jackal’s yell and vulture’s cry,

The dog’s fell howl, as midst the glare of the day

They riot unmolested on their prey!

Dire scenes of horror, which no one can trace,

Nor rolling years from memory’s page efface.

Around the same time, the novelist Bankim Chandra, in his novel Anadamath, wrote about the violence that was triggered by the famine. Understanding how people tend to remember or recall such episodes of violence is important in understanding the history of violence and the multiple layers within that narrative.

During the famine that took place between 1870 and 1880, litterateurs and administrators recalled the earlier famine that ravaged the land a century ago in 1770. But the linkages among famine, violence, and memory did not end here.

Also read: The Forgotten Massacre of Dalit Refugees in West Bengal’s Marichjhapi

Seventy years on, Bengal found itself in the throes of yet another cataclysmic famine – which since has come to be known as the 1943 Bengal Famine. Three years later, unprecedented communal violence erupted across Kolkata. Significantly, intellectuals and administrators in 1943 barely recognised the palpable violence that was gestating underneath the famine-stricken land – the violence that in no small measure contributed to the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946. The killings, unfortunately, were projected as sudden upheavals — divine retribution, as it were.

Such projections befuddle the idea of ‘violence’ in normal times, or, to put differently, the idea of ‘normal violence’. Normal violence is administrative violence, delivered within the framework of law. We tend to overlook or underplay the everyday violence in our life. It is only when confronted with unprecedented scales of violence – a strike of divine retribution – that we wake up to the presence of violence.

Thus the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which an estimated 3 million people died did not appear as a violent episode, while the Great Calcutta Killings in 1946, were identified as markers of violence.

Social history of violence in post-Partition Bengal

Bengal was indeed once the peaceful land prince Shuja had believed it to be. But colonisation jolted the foundations of the state. During the long years of colonial rule, Bengal remained a violent land dotted with numerous bloody revolts alongside struggles for land rights, famines, police torture and burning of women on husbands’ pyres.

Kolkata, then known as Calcutta, became as violent a city as Mumbai was known to be in the latter half of the 20th century. Beginning in the 19th century, as a flourishing site of slave trade and transportation of coolies abroad, followed by gang warfare, opium trade, and murders along banks of rivers, urban violence in the course of time overwhelmed rural violence. Street violence and urban warfare, an integral part of post-Partition Bengal’s history between1950 and 1970, were consequences of such economic and social processes. The street fighters came from the ranks of lower classes and dispossessed refugees. And the police were trained by their colonial masters to tackle the restless streets, which were as much a site of gang warfare and communal violence as they were of protests. Street violence was remarkable not so much because of the number of casualties. But because of its pure nature, uncontaminated by conflicts of caste, language or religion.

View of a rally in Calcutta in support of the peasant uprising of Naxalbari, 1967.

Analysts and Bengal watchers often wonder at the lack or even absence of caste-based violence in Bengal. It is not that caste discrimination did not or does not exist in Bengal or that it does not generate violence against people from lower castes. What needs to be understood is that in Bengal, all forms of social violence seem to have been subsumed in political violence.

The Naxalite decade (1967-1977), as it is popularly known, while claiming thousands of lives, epitomised Bengal’s changing face of violence. The movement subsumed all other forms of violence generated by caste, gender and religion.

Following the ascendancy of the Left Front government in 1977, the form of violence once again mutated and transformed itself into everyday routine violence.

The changing face of violence

One can therefore argue that, like the face of protest and rebellion changes over time, so too does the face of violence. The violence one encountered in Bengal during the colonial regime changed its form in the post-Independence period. Violence in this period manifested in street warfare and strengthening of mafia economy, with extortions and informal taxes increasing. Another contributing factor to this changed form of violence was a particular kind of development model that started taking shape in this period – the model that saw various rent-seeking groups resort to extreme violence in extracting income from land development and construction industry.

Let’s consider some aspects of street violence Bengal witnessed during this period. The infamous murders of Vinod Mehta – a police officer – and Idris Ali – a gangster – in Kolkata during the 1980s and the 1990s are just some of such incidents. Yet, the scale of violence in this state has been much less compared that of, for instance, Uttar Pradesh, whether it was violence directed by police to eliminate gangsters or the kind of violence that one saw in Bihar’s Bhagalpur blinding case where the state police blinded 31 undertrial convicts by pouring acid into their eyes. Known as the ‘Bhagalpur blindings’, the case made history in criminal jurisprudence by becoming the first in which the Supreme Court ordered compensation for violation of basic human rights.

Also read: Memories of 1946 Great Calcutta Killings Can Help Us Understand Violence in Today’s Bengal

During the Left Front regime, the cataclysmic violence lessened and political violence became ‘normal’. Or to put it differently, what we can describe as violence became banal. We can recall here the words of the political theorist Hannah Arendt about the ‘banality of evil’ – in this case the banality of violence.

Political killings continued unabated during the Left Front’s 34 year rule. The scale of violence may have reduced now, but the police and para-military personnel are still standing guard over the people in conflict and tension prone regions like Jangalmahal.

In general, we can argue that social violence still remains low in Bengal. The explanation for its seeming absence is that every incidence of violence in the state appears to be an act of political violence or ‘pure’ violence. The metamorphosis of social violence into political violence is an intriguing phenomenon, one that calls for a separate discussion. Bengal is a state whose levers of power can transform the social into the political. Political violence catches the eye, and in Bengal, encounters with violence is direct — physical. One has to fight the enemy physically, one must risk one’s own life and try to kill the enemy.

There is only one exception where, unfortunately, social violence has not become political. And that is gender violence.

Finally, I argue that no state experiences the same kind of violence throughout its history. No land escapes the problematic linkage between social and political violence. Therefore, to suggest that Bengal is a state more violent than others points towards a lack of rigour in understanding the nature of violence in general. This laxity allows us to condemn violence without being specific, and to not acknowledge that violence can become the organising principle of politics in a society, where social violence can continue unrecognised. Bengal illustrates this point better than any other state in India.

Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair in Forced Migration studies, Calcutta Research Group. He can be contacted at ranabir@mcrg.ac.in.

In Bengal, Hindutva Confronts Two Icons – Tagore and Fish

Trying to separate the Bengali from fish will boomerang badly on the Hindutva advocates.

Trying to separate the Bengali from fish will boomerang badly on Hindutva advocates.

It doesn’t pay to be anti-fish in Bengal. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (left), WorldFish/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In Satyajit Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath – set in Benaras – Machli Baba is a fake sadhu aligned with the criminal smuggler of antiquities Maganlal Meghraj. In that film, Feluda makes a caustic remark that excessive overt religious devotion is a trait of the corrupt. And Machli Baba, after his pravachan on the ghat of Benaras, gives out a fish scale to all the devotees.

That machli or fish is integral to the Bengalis is common knowledge. My late maternal grandfather whose Mukherjee family is distantly related to S.P. Mukherjee – the founder of Jan Sangh – though he was a Kanyakubja Brahmin whose ancestral origins went to Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, used to devour fish and meat every day. He didn’t relate religion to food. He held his holy thread before every meal, uttered something and then proceeded to eat his non-vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner with vigour. He was a foodie from the quarks of his bones.

Grandfather looked upon total vegetarianism as irrational; a self-inflicted injury to deny crucial nourishment that could make a person very ill and arrest higher mental development. He used to insist to me, from my boyhood days, to drink up the gravy of the Hilsa dish as well, because it would be good for my brain. Seafood and fish oil rich in omega-3 have played a role from the pre-historic times in the development of the human brain – this is a scientific fact. So since fish is a permanent part of the Bengali menu, certain diseases – related to memory and the brain – are much less in Bengalis.

But now fish, our much loved fish, is under attack in Bengal. BJP’s Hindutva food politics have reached Bengal via social media propaganda.

For the last six months, Bengali speaking trolls have surfaced in large numbers on Facebook and Twitter. They are swarming everywhere like locusts. One doesn’t need the detective skills or the mogoj ashtro (mental weapon) of Ray’s Feluda to figure out which ideology they are supporting.

This is Bengal’s disgrace, Michael Madhusudan Datta. He gave up his Hindu religion and converted to Christianity in order to marry foreign women. He wrote Meghnad Badh Kavya to support the Christian missionaries. In his poem, Lord Ram has been insulted by being called ‘Chandal’ (untouchable low-caste), despicable, etc. All the writings of M.M. Datta have to be banned. We will not tolerate Lord Ram being insulted.

Reports were already coming from rural Bengal that cow protection is turned into an issue and caste politics is being encouraged. A well-funded grassroots campaign is going on in rural Bengal to polarise the people in the name of religion and caste. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has spoken about this; she wants to stop or at least resist this campaign.

These trolls have spread all over social media with their propaganda. Memes demanding that the writings of poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta should be banned because he had converted to Christianity, married a foreigner and ‘insulted Rama’, were followed by memes which declared Tagore as ‘characterless,’ ‘anti-Hindu’ and a ‘pimp of the seculars and the British’.

(L) Bankim: The litterareur who truly deserved the Nobel prize. He was not afraid to speak the truth. (R) Tagore (seen with Helen Keller reading his lips): The characterless, licentious, anti Hindu agent of foreigners and secularists who got the Nobel.

(L) Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: The litterateur who truly deserved the Nobel prize. He was not afraid to speak the truth.
(R) Rabindranath Tagore (seen with Helen Keller reading his lips): The characterless, licentious, anti Hindu agent of foreigners and secularists who got the Nobel.

On the other hand, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – who in reality wrote ‘Bande Mataram’ while thinking of Bengal – is being eulogised as a ‘true Hindu’ who ‘should have received the Nobel Prize’, but was denied it because “he spoke the truth”. The fact that Bankim had died before the Nobel Prizes began is a small matter that is conveniently ignored. All this is being done to ‘awake Hindu Bengalis’, asking them to know their ‘true history’.

An organisation calling itself the ‘All India Fish Protection Committee’ has emerged on social media, threatening Bengalis who eat fish. Religion is invoked by mentioning Matsya, one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. To most Bengalis, all this is very comical. Some have responded that the silvery Hilsa in the memes is perfect to be converted into a nice, smoked fish.

All India Society for the saving of fish: The ‘matsa’ (fish) is God’s avatar. Consumption of fish equals the consumption of God. Our fish saving society is keeping a watch everywhere. Anyone caught eating fish will be beaten up mercilessly.

But beyond all this humour, something serious – and worrying – is brewing. For many Bengalis, this goes beyond resisting a political party; now it is a matter of preserving the liberal culture of Bengal from the assault of the conservative Hindustani cow belt culture. On Saturday, the state BJP president Dilip Ghosh – an MLA from Kharagpur – at a seminar at the Jadavpur University declared that he would lead a Ram Navami rally on April 5 with tridents and swords. Ram Navami celebration is a recent import into the state and the worship of Ram is not popular in Bengal, like it is in North India. Many are seeing this publicly announced rally – with swords and tridents – as a ploy to impose Hindustani cow belt culture on the liberal fabric of Bengal. Many Bengalis are offended and appalled at this attempt at socio-cultural engineering. A Hindu identity is being hammered into the minds to polarise people.

The BJP’s vote share in Bengal had fallen from its peak of 17% in the 2014 Lok Sabha election to 10% in the 2016 assembly elections. A renewed effort is now being made by BJP to increase the vote share. Banerjee has recently appealed to the Left Front to fight under the TMC leadership against the Hindutva ideology that is being spread systemically through these well-funded campaigns.

The Hindutva campaign is likely to boomerang. It doesn’t pay to be anti-fish in Bengal. The carrot and stick politics of BJP where the carrot is the mythical ‘development’ and the stick is ‘hate against anti-Hindus, ‘seculars’, Muslims, targeted intellectuals, anti-nationals and political opposition’ might stumble badly like Machli Baba of Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath, if the party is foolish enough to deny the Bengali her/his fish.

A vegetarian Hindu Rashtra with anti-Romeo vigilantism and a regressive ultra-conservative mindset is not the idea of Bengal or indeed of India. They are repulsed by this idea and want to resist it by safeguarding liberal culture.

Bengal is one of the large bastions which has resisted Hindutva ideology and stopped its surge in Bengal after 2014. If Bengal falls, India will fall, is the common feeling amongst the liberals and the progressives in Kolkata. The soul of Bengalis is related to ponds, rivers, ocean and fish. If something fishy happens there, there is no chance of BJP advancing beyond its support base for a long time to come.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life. He is one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

Remembering Partition and Saadat Hasan Manto

104 years after his birth, Manto continues to teach us about valuing the human above any ethical or political standpoint, through his stark Partition stories.

Saadat Hasan Manto. Credit: Twitter

Many Indians know Toba Tek Singh from their school textbooks – the poignant story set a few years after Partition that traces the transfer of Bishan Singh and his fellow asylum inmates from Lahore to newly created India.

2016 marks 104 years since Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth, and 61 years since he penned Toba Tek Singh. The year has already seen renewed explorations of his work, including dramatised readings and Nandita Das’ new film on the writer, yet to be released.

Ao, plays by Saadat Hasan Manto, published by Educational Publishing House, 2005. Credit: Educational Publishing House

Ao, plays by Saadat Hasan Manto. Educational Publishing House.

Toba Tek Singh is the culmination of Manto’s long literary preoccupation with partition, an event he lived through. Manto was born on May 11, 1912, in Paproudi village in Ludhiana district, Punjab, in a family of barristers. He began his career by reading Russian and French authors, and translating them into Urdu. As a student at Aligarh Muslim University, he became involved with the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, started in England by a group of young Indian writers, with the objective of charting out a new direction for Indian literature by urging writers to confront the realities of Indian life. With that began Manto’s flowering – he went on to write, most famously, his partition stories, but also radio plays, essays and film scripts.

Manto’s stories are about partition – yet there is no mention of ‘Hindu,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ in them. This is what makes them so striking, and relevant, even to this day.

On the whole, there is an utter lack of contextual detail or description of personality or identity in the stories. There is only confusion and bewilderment, action and raw detail.

In the story The Return, for instance, we are given no details about the protagonist Sirajuddin’s identity. Instead, we are immediately thrown into the confusion and terror of a refugee camp. As the events unfold, we continue to process them in a raw, immediate way. We are told that Sirajuddin asks a group of eight armed young men to look for his missing daughter Sakina; we are told that they have succeeded in finding her and are kind to her. Then the story abruptly ends. We realise, along with the unnamed doctor who had no previous importance in the story, that the armed men have actually raped Sakina and abandoned her by a railway track. This we realise through the single, simple yet devastating act of Sakina undoing and lowering her salwar, which acquires as much weight as her father’s search for her.

Manto the narrator never judges his characters; he simply describes their actions. The juxtaposition of one story and one character against another startles not because of clear binaries set up, such as that of Hindu/ Muslim, but rather because the characters react with equal vulnerability and aggression, shifting between the roles of perpetrator and victim. In stories like The Return, and also The Assignment, The Last Salute and Bitter Harvest, friends and neighbours turn into enemies, and victims into killers.

As we follow their actions, we lose all sense of identity and belonging, all motivation to define and blame. We are left only with the violence of partition.

Manto describes a completely new social and psychological space in which violence and “madness” is the norm. This is the space that belongs neither to India or Pakistan, but has been borne of the rupture of partition, and is, simply, human.

Toba Tek Singh, by Saadat Hasan Manto, published by Penguin. Credit: Penguin Books

Toba Tek Singh, by Saadat Hasan Manto. Penguin Books

Manto’s lack of investment in any political or ethical standpoint initially may disturb. It translates into a tone that could be read as cold and detached. But it is his detachment, his refusal to linger over any one tragic detail over the other, which allows us to be thrown into the confusion and terror of partition. For that is perhaps what the experience of Partition was like: raw and immediate, with little sense of the depth of time and space, with little sense of the meaning of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim,’ ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’.

And while it serves to make Partition real, Manto’s detachment also means his stories become abstract, and universal. What lingers after we finish reading them is the violence, and at the same time, and above all, a deep sense of the human and the individual.

A new historiography

In Remembering Parition, Gyanendra Pandey argues that the historiography of modern India has been such that history has been homogenised and violence, including the violence of partition, has become an aberration and an absence.

As a counter to this mainstream nationalist history, Pandey argues for the need to pay attention to the “fragment”. He says that “histories of partition are generally written as accounts of the political and economic origins and causes of partition rather than histories of struggle, violence, sacrifice, loss, and the forging of new identities, loyalties, and ambitions… And in the end, they project ‘India’ as staying firmly and naturally on its secular, democratic, nonviolent, tolerant path. Even literary explorations of Partition, he says, represent it as a ‘natural disaster in which human actions play little part.” Here, Pandey gives the example of the earlier nationalist writer Bankim Chandra’s sentimental mourning of the violence of Partition and simultaneous exaltation in Mother India, Gandhi and a vision of hope and secular, democratic progress.

In what ways can a work of fiction successfully perform an ‘alternative historiography’ of the ‘fragment’? What would such a work be like, and in what ways could fiction specifically achieve this, as a unique mode of historiography?

And then, how could such a text avoid being just a response to mainstream nationalist discourse and be a work of literary and artistic merit in itself? That is, how can it avoid becoming just an alternative discourse of counter-nationalism, serving to simply record traumatic events?

Manto’s text is, one could say, an example of an alternative, ‘fragmentary’ representation of partition.

But at the same time, that it resists any definite political position, and its detached, abstract quality in exploring the losses of partition, without attempting to give causes and reasons – could be called problematic.

Who is the Mata in Bharat Mata?

Is Mata associated with particular cultures and religions or is Mata a secular conception, making it possible for people of diverse religions, who call themselves Indian, to pay obeisance to the nation as motherland?

Is Mata associated with particular cultures and religions or is Mata a secular conception, making it possible for people of diverse religions, who call themselves Indian, to pay obeisance to the nation as motherland?

An early depiction of Bharat Mata. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A dinner conversation with a Muslim couple, who are good friends, turned to the current debate of whether all citizens of India ought to proclaim ‘Bharat Mata ki jai‘. They were upset about the pressure on Muslims to say ‘Victory to Bharat Mata’. We spoke about the contribution of scholars of Deoband and several other Muslims to the Indian freedom struggle. Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani (1879 – 1957) always wore khadi, as Barbara Metcalf has demonstrated in her finely drawn portrait of the Muslim nationalist leader. Patriotism should come spontaneously, it cannot be forced, stated our friend, “When we were children we would cry when we heard patriotic songs.” We both recalled Lata Mangeshkar’s powerful rendition of the song, “Ai mere watan ke logon zara ankh mein bhar lo pani/ Jo shahid hue hein unki zara yad karo qurbani (oh people of my nation, fill your eyes with tears/remember the martyrs, their sacrifice).” The song was said to have moved Jawaharlal Nehru to tears.

The question is what is the meaning of Mata (mother)? Is Mata associated with particular cultures and religions or is Mata a secular conception, making it possible for people of diverse religions, who call themselves Indian, to pay obeisance to the nation as motherland?

The idea of Bharat Mata is largely of twentieth century vintage, born out of Bengali and Marathi vernacular nationalism. She was famously painted by Abanindranath Tagore in a lyrical wash image. Sri Aurobindo eulogised Bharat Mata in an early phase of his life but went on to develop an eclectic philosophical spirituality that criticised the distinction between the religious and the secular.

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s well known novel Ananda Math celebrated the motherland as a goddess. But it was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founding ideologue of Hindutva, who propounded the idea of rendering “whole hearted love to our common Mother” and recognising her not only as “Pitarbhu but even as a Punyabhu,” i.e. as fatherland and holy land. A Muslim or Christian who does so will be welcomed into the Hindu-fold and recognised as Hindu, Savarkar argues in Essentials of Hindutva (1923). Thus it is possible for Muslims and Christians to make a choice, he held, “a choice of love”. Till such time as Bohras, Khojas, Memons and other Muslim and Christian communities do not make this choice they cannot be recognised as Hindus, Savarkar wrote. Savarkar celebrated the Sindhu and sanskriti and sages and seers who have founded or revealed the “schools of religion, the Thought of the Saptasindhus,” which have the indelible stamp of Hindu culture and sanskriti. “The essentials of Hindutva then are a common Rashtar, a common Jati and a common Sanskriti. The first two are connoted by Pitarbhu (Fatherland) and the last by Punyabhu (Holyland).”

As Janaki Bakhle puts it, Essentials of Hindutva was written as a sentimental love letter to the country and how it could reimagine itself. It sought to fill a vacuum in political leadership by “a nationalist credo that was both secular and Indian, necessarily invoking ritual and mythology as fundamental features of the Indian modern”.

Supporters of Savarkar have likewise argued that he was secular. But as GP Deshpande, the well known scholar (including that of Savarkar’s Marathi writing) asserts it is punyabhu, the idea of imbuing land with sacredness that makes Hindutva non-secular, deriving as it does from the concept of punya, which is connected to ideas of karma and rebirth embedded in Hindu metaphysics. Other proponents of Indian nationalism such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi notably did not use the idea of Bharat Mata.

The term Mata derives from Hindu lifeworlds. Several pagan cultures, many of which belong to areas around the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, have worshipped the ‘Mother Goddess’. As any scholar of Indian religions will tell you, the much larger and popular understanding of Mata is the divine feminine. She appears as the source of maladies and can cause affliction, but is also the healer as in the case of Sitala Mata. In Rajasthan massive crowds flock to the temple of this goddess who sits tall upon a hill. A festival, Sitala Ashtami, is named after her, when the hearth remains unlit and only food cooked the previous night, called Basoda, is eaten. In my husband’s family even tea could not be made on the gas (the electric kettle was the great saving grace!) but such had been the power of this goddess who caused all the poxes – small and chicken – that greatly troubled mothers of ailing children.

If I think of the regions where I have done field work, both Hindu castes and also some communities of Muslims would recognise the idea of the goddess in Mata. She has an amazingly diverse presence as Parvati, Durga or the collective goddess.

I can never forget my encounter with young Jamila, who was a medium for the goddess in a village in the Beawar subdivision of Ajmer district in the 1990s. After her death (indeed, murder by her husband and mother-in-law) her highly successful practice was taken over by her young brother who became the vehicle of bhava or the trance as the goddess now possessed him. Ironically he was among the persons targeted for conversion when the Viswa Hindu Parishad began its paravartan campaign in Beawar in the 1980s.

The contrast to these religious subjectivities is the ideology of Hindutva defined by Europeanist ideas such as the modern state, the modernist conception of religion and nation and the modern idea of nationality. The utopia it seeks is a strong and militarised political entity where a version of Political Hinduism becomes hegemonic over the other Indic religions and, indeed, over Hindu philosophical and spiritual traditions. To ask of Muslims or Christians to proclaim ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ is violative the concept of monotheism concepts that is at the theological core of their religions. ‘Jai Hind’ rather than ‘Jai Bharat Mata’ is what some might proclaim – a few will even proclaim Victory to Bharat Mata – but choice is the essence of the matter and there must be no compulsion or pressure to constantly wear one’s patriotism on one’s sleeve and demonstrate it continually in one’s speech!

The author is a historian and political anthropologist whose most recent book is Israel as the gift of the Arabs: Letters from Tel Aviv

The History and Future of a Demolition Without End

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was an act long in the making and the processes it involved are still very much with us.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was an act long in the making and the processes it involved are still very much with us

Hindutva activists, mobilised by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. Credit: Vimeo

The destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was not merely an instance of state-sponsored lawlessness. Neither was it a momentary lapse in the enforcement of rule of law. While it is seen by many as just an episode or a trigger that unleashed forces of Hindu religious nationalism, it was, in fact, the culmination of a process that began in the 19^th century. European modernity, orientalism, ideas of reform, restatements of society and religion were the ingredients that went into the making of an Indian nationalism in that century. It was just that: one idea of India rather than many ideas of India.

Out of a dazzling constellation of sects, doctrines, philosophical arguments, rites, rituals, practices, social realities, identities and differences, a unique entity called Hinduism was confected. Its central purpose was to be compatible and commensurate with the idea of sovereignty and the state.

In order to exist and to be legitimate, this version of Hinduism depended on certain affirmations. The first was its own centrality as religion and its salience as the core of national identity. In being so, it had to be modern, scientific and rational. Affirmation of caste was the second element. It resurrected the ideal of the cerebral brahmin as the repository of culture and tradition. But it also celebrated the ideal of the kshatriya as the embodiment of force, violence and masculinity in the service of maintaining order, stability, and justice. The kshatriya was no longer just the dispenser of punishment, waging just war: he held independent charge of the instruments of violence and retributive justice. Early Indologists and orientalists contributed to this effort. Texts and scriptures were often quoted out of context in the belief that texts scientifically and empirically reflected the social and historical reality in India.

The mild Hindu, the Muslim zealot

A third element in constructing the Hindu self-image appears at first to be a contradiction of the previous two elements, but was, indeed, a legitimising device for the new Hinduism that was taking shape. This was the myth of the mild, peaceful, soft, otherworldly, non-materialistic, tolerant, and all-embracing Hindu.

In constructing this shared myth, two processes were at play. A subtle internalisation of the caricature of Muslim identity was the first of these elements. From the 18^th century onwards, the caricature of Muslims portrayed them as religious zealots, with the Qur’an in one hand and sword in the other, exhibiting a fierce theocratic unity and religious fervour, but, more importantly, as a people ready to die for their religion and nation. Nineteenth century restatements of Hinduism were bewitched and mesmerised by their own caricature of the Muslim. This view has had an unusual longevity; hence in its 20^th century formulation, it could still impel V.D. Savarkar to exult that this religious unity and fervour made the Muslims ‘irresistible’. While part of this caricature was absorbed for the sake of fabricating the ‘new’ Hinduism, the Muslim also had to be distanced. Temple destruction was one such element that went into the process of demonising the Muslims. Despite this, another view of the Muslims as sensuous, lascivious, indolent – Bankim’s bearded, opium-eating degenerates – existed side by side and was used when convenient, often in conjunction with the first (as in the modern Hindutva myth of ‘love jihad’ and its earlier variants)

The shared myth of the mild, soft, peaceful, reasonable and tolerant Hindu also helps in escaping any serious discussion of the excesses of caste. While many nationalist thinkers expressed pious sentiments regarding the plight of the Dalits, they did little to alter the primacy of the upper castes or the social structures that supported caste oppression. Symbolic gestures were offered periodically but every single one of these were geared towards bringing about a preconceived, elite-driven Hindu unity for the sake of the nation. Not only did the shared myth help in muting any serious discussion of caste, but it also attempted to whitewash violent and invective-ridden antagonisms between Hindu religious sects.

Casting aside the shackles of citizenship

Indian nationalism and the modern Indian state were crafted out of these affirmations. In a deft and effortless move, the word ‘Indian’ replaced the word ’Hindu’. After 1947, while Indians were formally citizens governed by a constitution, there was an unspoken understanding among many (within both the Congress and the sangh parivar) that ‘we’ were governed by a pre-political and pre-social unity that transcended the Constitution and the rule of law. The conflict with democracy and its institutions dates back to 1947 and is not something that is a recent development. This is how the conflict unfolded.

Democracy and its institutions sought to convert the shared myths of the Hindus into reality. It was no longer a question of self-image or self-identity. The concept of citizenship meant the Hindu had to be mild, soft, reasonable and tolerant and submit to the rule of law. The cerebral brahmin had to admit to other versions of tradition and culture. The kshatriya could no longer possess the instruments of violence, punishment and retributive justice. The Constitution spoke of equality before law, unmindful of caste, class, gender or religion. This inaugurated a slow but steady distrust in the institutions of democracy while retaining a ritualistic faith in elections as a means of conferring legitimacy on the central tenets of the shared myth. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was the unshackling of this impulse and an attempt to reappropriate the instruments of violence.

The Mandal movement went a long way towards disturbing this pre-political and pre-social consensus. The Dalits, more than any other section of Indian society, have a greater stake in the promises and hopes the Indian Constitution offers. It offers, above all, radical equality, if only on paper. The various ‘Backward Class’ and Dalit movements – and their growing resurgence – also give a lie to the myth of Hindu unity and a chimerical Hindu vote bank.

The elections of 2014 and the emergence of a BJP majority in Parliament has only consolidated the process that started in the 19^th century. While there is much to cheer from the election results in Bihar, three major trends have emerged from 2014.

The good days roll

There is, firstly, a move to ensure that the ‘nation’ takes over the state. The ’nation’ is often defined in terms of numbers, but also tradition and culture. The simple formula is that whoever wins a majority in parliament represents the ’nation’ – the mandate, in other words, is the ’nation’. This ’nation’ is arbitrary, wilful, intolerant and aggressive. It is above principles and legal niceties.

The second trend is of greater significance. It lies in the realisation that not only Hindutva but the 19^th century version of Hinduism can only exist with the help of the state. For the mild, soft, tolerant, reasonable and peaceful Hindu to survive, the state has to ensure that differences be eliminated in the name of unity, that plurality be eliminated in the name of the survival of a scientific and rational Hinduism. The enemies of this state-supported Hinduism could be the folk and the tribal traditions, the Dalits, the Muslims and all forms of free expression.

Given the contestations within the democratic framework, where elections can be lost on grounds of mis-governance and non-governance, a neutral space for the ’new’ Hinduism to survive had to be found. This space had to be modern, technologically savvy, and scientific. But it also had to divorce governance from its details, reducible to technocratic and managerial solutions. The exhortation is to look at the larger picture, one that invariably excludes the poor, and involves atrocities on Dalits, women and minorities. It is a space that systematically represses alternative views, dissent and ideology, branding them dirty and manufactured. Politics itself had to be neutralised: it has to be reduced to throwing up a majority in the service of order and stability. The public space is to be sanitised from all enemies of stability and order, even if they are Indian citizens: they have choices now of either going to Pakistan or being branded terrorists or anti-national.

This neutral space is the zone of progress and ‘vikas’, or development. It envelops the traditional upper castes, and also upper classes and corporates. But its formal logic and appeal also includes farmers, Dalits, women and minorities. It is today’s version of the 19^th century ideal of making Hindu men more manly. Married to the rhetoric of nationalism, progress and development is all about the physical and economic muscle of the ’nation’. Here, GDP figures replace principles and basic freedoms. The ideal of India as an economic superpower, encashing its quiet, supine, uncomplaining, orderly and disciplined demographic dividend is the 21st century culmination of the myth of the mild, soft, reasonable, peaceful, otherworldly and non-materialistic Hindu. In the 19^th century, this myth was created to serve the demands of sovereignty and the state. It fares no better in our century.

Jyotirmaya Sharma is professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, India, and is currently Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He is the author of Cosmic Love and Human Apathy: Swami Vivekananda and the Restatement of Religion (2013), Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (2003/2011) and Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India (2007).