HVK Archives: Discovering Bharat Dialects of Hindutva
Discovering Bharat Dialects of Hindutva - The Indian Express
O.V. Vijayan
()
17 June 1996
Title : Discovering Bharat Dialectics of Hindutva
Author : O.V. Vijayan
Publication : The Indian Express
Date : June 17, 1996
Aphoney debate is on. The debate on Hindutva. It is like
the Eskimo debating alternative therapies for sun-stroke.
To start with, let us remember that Hinduism is not a
cradle religion, but a name invented by the various
hordes of invaders who had little time for theological
discrimination. It was a term of convenience coined by
the outer barbarians.
All that we can safely assume is that these hospitable
river basins and their lulling climatic environs perhaps
charmed the inhabitants into an unhurried style of
living, with the fringe taking to the masochism of
transcending the body. There was infinite time to
contemplate the verities, there was food available with
marginal effort, and a culture of glorified charity that
subsidised sainthood. It was fair weather all the way.
Long before the contemporary electoral processes
politicised caste and clan, tiny sovereignties co-
existed, surviving along their confused genealogies.
There was no centralising mechanism, and time
and
territory built their wayward collages. There were no
alternatives, but only autonomies. Of course there were
occasions of persecution, but then that was a social
methodology, which all humanity shares. On
comparison,
these river basins with their sun and breeze were still
the better habitat.
Where is these stretches of lassitude do we spot the
Hindu? The Hindu is nowhere to be seen. We have
the
Shaivite or the Vaishnavite, the Shakatya or the
adherents of countless obscure cults, and the sum total
of their confused coexistence has for sometime gone
under
the label of Hinduism. And let us remember that the
nomenclature itself is restrospective.
Excavation is gainful business, tampering with
chronologies even more exciting. What under the
conditions of normalcy would be absorbed into social
rituals, provide the fuel for conflict and violence in
times of turbulence. Perhaps this is what we are
witnessing in the gross belligerence over the saffron
terror.
But once we delink the saffron from its lumpen misuse,
once we sort out the folklore from the spiritual essence,
we confront the magic spectacle of a people in
contemplation, where every tree is a canopy of
enlightenment, where every person sitting cross
legged
beneath it is on his way to renunciation, on his way to a
splendorous and joyful failure. And striking us with its
spectacle is the saffron, not the saffron of conflict and
petty political power but the colour of the cleansing
flame which burns down all that links you to this world
of greed and grab. If we use the word Hinduism, we will
be committing gross distortion. What we see in the
confluence of the meditating India and the labouring
India is the great accommodation of the material into the
spiritual. It is sanyas at work.
India's political frontiers might change, as indeed they
have, the collage that is its physical body might change,
but beneath the surface of conflict, beneath the illusion
of internal sovereignties and localised imperialisms, a
spirit survives. The spirit of Bharat, the life-line of
sanyas.
It is dangerous to use a word like Bharat, because its
partisan misuse has given it a slant it is not guilty of.
India, with its political strife and its territorial
duplicities, its expansionism and its inability to make
all sections of the population comfortable -- this India
is far less real than the consensus of awareness that is
Bharat.
Hindu and Hindutva have been wrenched out of the
peace of
the neighbourhood and made into a code word of battle.
It
is here that the real comedy promises to unfurl itself.
It is time we permitted the Hindu politicians to accept
conversions to Hinduism, in the style of the Mandal
reservations, incentives for Muslims to cross over into
the Hindu faith or the lack of it. Where will you
accommodate the convert? Surely he would like to be
a
Brahmin. He would also like to keep much of the
minority
privileges he was used to until the fateful crossover,
and keep the juicier parts of the personal law with the
add-on of Sati. It will be the end of institutional
Hinduism, it will be Mandal inreverse, at its craziest.
Minor problems like meat-eating can be solved by
relabelling the animals sacrificial carcasses, and
without offense to anyone, by sharing the smell of
cooking curries.
The above suggestion is being made in all seriousness,
as
serious as communal divisions can be. The party that
swears by Hindutva would be unprepared for such
an
onrush, and I can imagine the venerable Advanjiji being
overwhelmed by such a Hindu revival, and fleeing to
safer
territory like Sindh.
Let us put the Vaudeville away and briefly survey the
story of Hindutva. It is besmirched like any other
organised religion, with the stains of human
imperfection.
Occult demographers, the ones that ranged our
mellow
river basins, have tended to locate charges of historical
energy and almost pre-determined roles for every
recognisable ethnic bowl. Thus, in Bharat the die is
cast, and Bharat's pursuit of the zeit-geist makes it
primarily a spiritual country. Which is not the same as
saying that Bharat attempted anything like the debate of
the market place.What does it mean? It means an icing
of
folk wisdom beyond which lie the symbols of space
and
duration. Even as the folk Hindu revels in his grotesque
pantheon, even as the turns superstition into a rich and
civilising choreography, rising over all this are the
experience of the Pranaca, the infinity of birth-cycles,
and a working calender of proto-history. The postulation
of the Brahmin is yet another great leap for the Indo
Gangetic mystic. Consider the Christian calendar and its
scales of history. The white man was about to overrun
us,
and what was he equipped with? The spinning Jenny
and
Crompton's Mule. While it spewed endless generations
of
machines, the hegemony of Empire and its
machine
civilisation, a civilisation of jacks and fulcra, has
groped along amid thses mean instruments. The famed
mind
of Western inventiveness is also backed by nothing
more
than a petty sense of history, like the classic case of
the Christian cleric who pin-pointed Creation at a little
over four thousand years before Christ.
Besides this chronology and its meager rationing of
time
stands Bharat's unbounded mystic. He is the
profound
``failure'' out of whom came words of wisdom that
engendered the limitless theology of Hindutva. This
writer would here like to submit-- the saffron wave and
the Hindu slogan have nothing to do with of gory clan
wars, of the macabre memory of Partition. Neither
Partition nor its irrendentist opposite was is lumpen
politics. And it will remain so. The elaborate exercise
for the creation of a softer saffron is unburdened with
ideology, it is cosmetic.
How did Upanishadic India provide room for this
aborted
fetus? The Indian Right and its matching Left, both
fringe phenomena, have entered the Hindutva
controversy
as its populist and illiterate level. Occupying the mixed
spectrum were a generation of suave Indian politicians
who mimicked the British Fabian archetype, who brought
in
a slippery model of secularism. This secularism was
merely a fashionable opposition to theism and its
inevitable morality. We have ingested the Magna Carta
and
the Westminster model. We have taken on the
people's
histories. We might, in secular ecstasy, defend Henry the
VIII's right to behead more of his queens, his personal
law.
Thus the debate has gathered a tripartite moss of
questions and answers that relate to contemporary
human
dilemmas. Let us remember that when we dismiss
Hindutva
as untouchable, or when we look for populist waves to
power, we are undoing a polity of fabulour dimensions.
We
should carry on the secular routine, we should see that
debased demagogy does not get hold of the levers of
state. But more important, we should discover Bharat's
great asset, we should experience the Pranava, and
relate
to the Brahmin of perennial contemplation.
Hindutva? Yes Because it is almost like Marxism
without
doctrinal rigidity,an ideology of unlimited questioning.
Hindutva? Yes.
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