Indology

Debate: Don’t Accuse Critics of Indology of Being Handmaidens of Hindutva

In their quest for ideological purity, activists on the Left can sometimes resemble the Far Right, which has little tolerance for differing opinions.

In a recent opinion piece in The Wire, Raju Rajagopal and Sunita Viswanath from a U.S-based advocacy group called “Hindus For Human Rights”, criticised me for an article I had published in The Hindu where I had joined issue with the scholarship and teaching style of Audrey Truschke, an associate professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

In seeking to respond to what I had written, the two authors made a series of sensational, tabloid-style allegations that I was part of a nefarious and “well-coordinated” campaign engineered by the “Sangh Parivar” to attack and silence Truschke.

A few days after the article came out, The Wire edited it, “with the consent of the authors, to remove any erroneous implication that the writer Vikram Zutshi is associated with Sangh Parivar groups or campaigns.” A note to this effect was added as well. But I believe the article as it now stands still incorrectly characterises my position.

For example, the authors claim that my article “regrettably echoes the talking points emerging from a well-coordinated project of the Hindu Right in the United States, targeting intellectuals and historians in service of their masters in India” – when in fact I cautioned against the very same forces in my original piece!

In their ham-fisted attempt to misrepresent my position, the authors deliberately ignored a paragraph in my article in which I point out that “the main problem with Truschke’s work lies not in its elisions and omissions but the implications it has for the entire body of Western scholarship on India. A number of renowned academics writing about pre-modern India have come under attack by nativists and political actors for not toeing the Hindutva line. Irresponsible and non-reflexive scholarship only reinforces right-wing prejudices about Western Indology.” (emphasis added)

Interestingly, the above paragraph also raised the hackles of some right-wing activists who took offence at my reference to “nativists” who see all western scholarship on India as inherently compromised.

In the South Asian context, any criticism of academics whose works are lauded for adopting a ‘secular approach’ to history is often characterised – without evidence – as being motivated by “Hindutva” ideology. Surely, one has the right to debate an intellectual position without being smeared with ad hominems?

In “Cry Hindutva: How Rhetoric Trumps Intellect in South Asian Studies”, written as a response to Eli Franco’s review of their 2014 book, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, Joydeep Bagchee and Vishwa Adluri offer a window into how Hindu nationalism is weaponised to silence differing opinions. They write,

“Crying Hindutva to discipline non-conforming scholars is hardly new. What is more disturbing is that questioning Indologists’ criteria, arguments, and application of methods now suffices to be accused of directly or indirectly espousing Hindutva causes. No evidence for such a serious accusation is required…One need not approve of Hindutva to see problems with Indology. Neither should a critique of Indology automatically strengthen Hindutva.”

Adluri and Bagchee could very well have been talking about Rajagopal and Viswanath, who seek to tar all critics with the same brush.

In their frightening quest for ideological purity, activists on the Left can sometimes resemble the Far Right, which has little tolerance for differing opinions. In this, they are not very different from the ideologues they constantly rail against. Here, one can see clearly the divide between people of genuine faith, and those – on the Left and Right of the spectrum – for whom religion is little more than a political football used to score goals against the other side.

In an article I wrote some years ago, I spoke about the need for a progressive Hindu organisation that would represent practicing Hindus who sought a more inclusive and tolerant vision of India, one that would treat all faiths as equal. In the same piece, I mentioned Sadhana – an organisation founded by Rajagopal and Viswanath – as a step in the right direction. A genuine spirit of tolerance and inclusivity, by definition must include differences of opinion, and the willingness to hear out all sides of a story. Or it risks becoming a mirror image of that which it fights against.

Vikram Zutshi is a cultural critic, author and filmmaker.

Questioning the Free Lunch: On the Recent Protests at the Jaipur Literature Festival in London

Sponsors like Vedanta give money to festivals in order to buy the power of controlling the narrative, not out of the goodness of their hearts.

From the protest against Vedanta held at the Jaipur Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, London. Credit: Facebook.

The recent protests at the Jaipur Literature Festival, or JLF, organised at the Southbank Centre in London should have been a moment to reflect on a few things – primarily what the literary festivals, which have popped up all over the place, mean and what they are worth. Unfortunately it turned into a point-scoring competition between those who support the protestors and those who support the festival. Of the many arguments that were made, one was that sponsors don’t affect the content of the festival. John Elliott asserted in these pages that “Sponsors rarely have much influence – at JLF a company chairman might get a spot in one of the discussions, but little more”.

Maybe, just maybe, John forgot the old axiom that there is no free lunch. Nobody gives money away for nothing and anybody who believes that Vedanta, with its reputation for exploitation and trampling over the rights of the marginalised, gave money to the JLF organisers out of the goodness of their heart, understands neither business nor politics. The question to be asked is what was Vedanta buying? Or rather, what is it that a literary festival has to sell, and is it a legitimate sale?

What is it that literary festivals are selling?

Obviously literary festivals have something to sell – if they did not, then there would not be one in every city worth its name – and many that are not worth anything. The obvious answer is proximity to authors. This would be nice to believe, except that authors are rarely celebrities – those that are, are rarely good authors. In fact if you look at the programme of various literary festivals you will find many names – maybe even a majority in some – are not writers. They are actors and activists, politicians and journalists. The presence of a person like Anupam Kher at a literary festival boggles the mind. Fine, he is a great character actor and often a great comic, but he is far more capable of discussing hamming than Hamlet. Then there is Suhel Seth, whose only contribution to literature was to write a book nobody was likely to read, but which resulted in one of the finest reviews written of any book published in India – Mihir Sharma’s brilliant The Age of Seth.

So, if literary festivals are so top heavy with political actors or those that hover around them, it becomes obvious that what they do have to sell is something political, and that thing is called a “narrative”. At the end of everything, humans are storytellers and listeners of stories. It is how we make sense of the world. There are good people and bad people, or sometimes good people in bad situations, or maybe something even more complicated, but to understand them, we need to understand their stories. And it is here that literary festivals are such an opportunity for the peddlers of propaganda, and hustlers and hucksters of all stripes.

An author is a peddler of lies, especially an author of fiction. We know that and expect it, but we listen to those lies in the hope of sussing out some truth hidden behind them. An interaction with authors – say at a literary festival – seems to offer a shortcut. We can go straight to the source, and ask, “What do you really think? What is the story behind the novel?” Often this is disappointing. Public speaking requires a different set of skills than writing. It is rare for a person to combine both. But where the writer may hesitate, the huckster will not. This is the opportunity that sponsors buy. They have the chance to insert their people into the conversation, to tell a prepared little tale of how they are good people and tie it off with a ribbon – and those people, those protestors who are loud, rude and aggressive (maybe because they have lost things dear to them – land, a house, the life of a relative), well they are outside the podium, and their voices will not be represented.

Controlling the narrative

The power of controlling the narrative is nothing new. All ruling powers in their time have tried to control what is being discussed in public. Whether it was Mahmud of Ghazni, and the writers he captured when he conquered cities – the most famous one being Al Beruni, the father of Indology – or the Iowa Writers Programme funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, or the ironically titled Pravda (Truth) newspaper of the Soviet Union, even the most ruthless, maybe especially the most ruthless, rulers have seen the use of writers. In China, of course, the brutal suppression of inconvenient stories – what is sometimes referred to as the truth – continues, as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre is never to be discussed. China has recently bought Corbis, the agency that owns many of the pictures from the massacre, including the famous one of the unarmed man standing in front of tanks.

If countries are willing to go to such lengths to control the stories that are being told about them, isn’t it obvious that others – whether government actors or private companies – will go to lengths to do the same? This is what pays for the lunch – for the flights too, and the accommodation and everything else – the self-interest of rich and powerful people to control the stories that are being told.

What do we do with our free lunch?

Does this mean that all authors are either willing or unwitting accomplices to a great sham? Maybe some of them are, or maybe they have not thought through the “free lunch”, but here is the delightful thing about words. You can invite an author to a podium, but you cannot control what she or he says. In maybe the most evocative such gesture, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami accepted the Jerusalem Prize in 2009. He had been urged to reject the prize and boycott the ceremony, but he chose not to. Instead he gave a marvellous speech in which he stated, “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg.” It remains one of the finest speeches about the responsibility of an author to speak up for the individual in the face of a mindless system.

Murakami’s gesture and his speech highlight one of the basic truths about literature: that it is a conversation and not merely a one-way track. Even while powerful actors may try to control the message, in fact what good writing allows is for us to discuss complex ideas with each other. It is hard to control that or stop it. Truthful speech is its own rebellion. This is the burden that authors bear. Life itself is unfair and the opportunities we receive are not equal, many of them made possible by the bloody handed power of states and empires, or even our own ancestors, what matters though, is how we use those opportunities, and if we are presented with a stage, if we speak the truth, or influenced by fear or hope of favour, we turn our words into lies.

How Hindutva Historiography is Rooted in the Colonial View of Indian History

Members of the Sangh Parivar have been perpetuating the colonial view of Indian history.

Members of the Sangh Parivar have been perpetuating the colonial view of Indian history

At the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Chennai. Credit: nagarjun/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

During the years of imperialist rule, western scholars, especially the British, created several stereotypes about India. They portrayed Indian society as static and changeless over centuries, the Indian people as otherworldly and unfit to rule, and India as having no history and lacking historical consciousness. During the freedom struggle, Indian historians, inspired by the nationalist fervour, did not question these clichés and instead indulged in the uncritical glorification of ancient India and produced several counter stereotypes. In the post independence period, however, both the colonial and the ultra nationalist views of the Indian past came under rigorous scrutiny by historians like D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar and others.

Over the last six decades, the work of mainstream historians has demonstrated that Indian society was not static, otherworldly or without a history. Through research, Indian historians have questioned and rendered irrelevant the communal periodisation by Utilitarian James Mill, who divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. Under their influence, there has been a shift in focus in the historical research on early India. Political history, chronicling the details of kings and queens, has come to occupy a secondary place in research priorities, with the erstwhile uncritical glorification of ancient India giving way to analyses of aspects of the lives of the people. The post-independence period has thus seen the growth of an impressive corpus of literature dealing with social structure, caste, gender and socially marginalised groups, as well as agrarian economy, arts and crafts, trade, urbanisation and technology.

The developments in post-independence Indian historiography owed much to the use of new tools of analysis, as well as the interaction between history and other social sciences. In short, in the decades following partition, mainstream Indian historians have made significant departures from colonial historiography as well as from nationalist-chauvinist historiography. Their works have been trashed by the Hindu right wing as being produced by “Macaulay’s children”. However, while mainstream historians have broken the stereotypes created by the imperialist historians, the premises of the Hindutva brand of ‘history’ are not only derived from colonial Indology but also serve to perpetuate it.

Tracing the trajectory of the Hindutva view

One of the foundational premises of the Hindutva view of the past is derived from Mill’s division of Indian history in his History of British India (1823) on the basis of the religion of the ruling dynasties – a division that sought to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. This periodisation received much support from H.M. Elliot and John Dowson’s eight-volume History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (1867-1877) that put together the faulty and biased translations of Persian chronicles and overstated the dark side of Muslim rule, with the clear intent of inflaming passions between the two communities, which was important for British imperial policy, especially after 1857. Through the works of subsequent writers, especially Vincent Smith, Mill’s chronological scheme became widely accepted and remained firmly entrenched in Indian historical writings throughout the colonial period, continuing to influence historical studies in Indian universities in our own time.

While mainstream historians have tried to either distance themselves or break away from this periodisation, the Hindutva scholars, if there are any, have clung to it. Since this periodisation lends support to the view that the Muslims are the ‘other’ and that they are foreigners because their punyabhumi is not India, it is the basis of the communalisation of Indian politics and the demonisation of Muslims.

The othering of Muslims as foreigners has led the champions of Hindutva to assert that the Hindus are indigenous people and so are their supposed ancestors, the Aryans. Since they are considered the original inhabitants of India, they have to be the progenitors of the oldest civilisation, the Harappan civilisation. Since some of the important centres, such as Mohenjodaro and Harappa, are in Pakistan, the civilisation has to have its roots in India, and has have been named after the river Saraswati. Thus, without going into the merits and demerits of the argument, one can immediately see the link between the communal periodisation, the depiction of Muslims as foreigners and the naming of the Harappan civilisation after the river Saraswati.

Linked with all this is the Hindutva propaganda of Aryan greatness and the so-called Aryan foundation of Indian civilisation. But even this idea, like that of the Muslims as the ‘other’, is rooted in colonial Indology. It was Max Muller who first spoke of the Aryan foundation of Indian culture. This was shared by two theosophists, the American Col. Olcott and the Russian Madame Blavatsky. They, however, differed on the issue of the original home of the Aryans.

Muller postulated the migration of the Aryans from the north-west into India while Olcott and Blavatsky asserted that the Aryans were indigenous to India. In their view the Aryan culture was the cradle of civilisation, and had spread from India to the West and other parts of the world. Like them, Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj in 1875, also considered the Aryans as indigenous to India, and the Vedas as the repository of all knowledge and wisdom. Incidentally, the Arya Samaj merged with the Theosophical Society, which also was founded in 1875. Although this merger did not last long, the two parties never seem to have differed on the Aryan question.

The Sangh Parivar has adhered to the view of the Theosophists and Dayananda, and in doing so has gone to ridiculous lengths, for instance when MS Golwalkar reconciled his own view of Aryan indigenism with Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s theory of Aryan migration. Tilak had asserted (1903) that the Aryan homeland was in the North Pole and Golwalkar (1947), who did not have the courage to disregard his view, made the laughable assertion that the North Pole was not stationary and that, quite long ago, it was in what is present day Bihar and Orissa. No one else has pursued this matter of “continental drift”.

The idea of the greatness of the Aryans led to an uncritical admiration of the entire “Hindu” period, which was seen as a phase of affluence, social harmony and happiness. Here again we find that some ideas about ancient India are borrowed from Vincent Smith, who, despite his generally anti-India attitude, described the Gupta period as the golden age of Indian history. During the freedom struggle era, Indian historians jumped at this idea, inspiring the nationalists who, living in a state of dystopia as it were, were looking for a utopia in the past.

In the post-independence period serious historians have eschewed the notion of a golden age in the past but Hindutva scholars have continued to hold on to this obsolete and effete idea. For example, RC Majumdar, in the Classical Age (1962) tells us that life was never happier than in the Gupta period. It is this kind of hype over the so-called Hindu period that is at the root of the wild and crazy assertions about the fantastic achievements of ‘Hindu’ India and the portrayal of the ‘Muslim’ period as a dark age by communalist historians.

Thus, the members of the Sangh Parivar have been perpetuating the colonial view of Indian history. But they never tire of describing as “Macaulay’s children” those historians who have jettisoned the clichés created by the imperialist historians. They need to be reminded of their own pedigree. They are the children of Mill, Olcott, and Elliot and Dowson. What a distinguished multiple paternity indeed!

DN Jha is an Indian historian specialising in ancient and medieval India. He was formerly professor and chair at Delhi University’s Department of History.