HVK Archives: Ram Swarup: The wittiest mind
Ram Swarup: The wittiest mind - The Observer
Koenraad Elst
()
February 2, 1999
Title: Ram Swarup: The wittiest mind
Author: Koenraad Elst
Publication: The Observer
Date: February 2, 1999
In the long run, Ram Swarup will probably prove to have been the
most influential Hindu thinker. in the second half of the 20th
century. He has, at any rate, been a crucial influence on most
other Hindu Revivalist authors of the last couple of decades.
Ram Swarup was born in 1920 as the son of a rais/ banker in
Sonipat, Haryana, in the Garg gotra of the merchant Agrawal
caste. He was a good student and earned a degree in Economics
from Delhi University in 1941. He joined the Gandhian movement
and acted as the overground contact ('postbox') for underground
activists including Aruna Asaf Ali during the Quit India
agitation of 1942.
He spent a week in custody when a letter bearing his name was
found in the house of another activist, the later homeopath Ram
Singh Rana.
After his release, and until the end of the war, he worked as a
clerk in the American office in Delhi which had been set up in
the context of the Allied war effort against Japan.
In that period, his wit made him quite popular in progressive
circles in Delhi. He was a declared socialist, a great fan of
Aldous Huxley and a literary imitator of G B Shaw. In 1944, he
started the 'Changers' Club', alluding to Karl Marx's dictum that
philosophers have interpreted the world instead of changing it.
At that time, Ram Swarup was a committed atheist, and in the
Changers' Club manifesto he put it in so many words: 'Butter is
more important than God'.
The Changers' Club published two essays, both by Ram Swarup:
Indictment, a highly critical review of the failed 1942 Quit
India movement, and Mahatma Gandhi and His Assassin, written
immediately after the murder of the Mahatma by the Pune-based
journalist and Hindu Mahasabha activist Nathuram Godse on 30
January 1948. Written from a purely Gandhian perspective, its
main thesis was that a society of small men cannot stand the
presence of such a great man for very long: Martyrdom was only
befitting a man of Gandhiji's greatness. Ram Swarup showed no
interest in Godse's motives, but he did appreciate that after the
disaster of Partition, the urge to exact some punishment
somewhere, though misguided (and in targeting Gandhi,
misdirected), was a sign that Hindu society was not entirely
dead, for suffering a calamity like the Partition and swallowing
it without reaction would be a sure sign of virtual death.
At that time, the Changers' Club was already disintegrating
because its members plunged into real life, eg L C Jain became
the commander of the largest camp for Partition refugees and
organised the rehabilitation of Hindu refugees from the North
West Frontier Province In Faridabad, outside Delhi. In 1948-49
Ram Swarup briefly worked for Gandhi's English disciple Mira Behn
(Miss Madeleine Slade) when she retired to Rishikesh to edit her
correspondence with Gandhiji. The project was not completed, but
he was to remain close to Gandhism for the rest of his life.
Anti-Communism:
Just around the time of Independence, Ram Swarup developed strong
opinions about the ideology which was rapidly gaining ground
among the intelligentsia around him: Communism. His first doubts
developed in connection with purely Indian aspects of Communist
policy. When the CPI defended the Partition scheme with
contrived socio-economic arguments,' he objected that the
Partition would only benefit the haves among the Muslims, not the
have-nots. His doubts deepening, he moved in a direction
opposite to the ideological fashion of the day, and became one of
India's leading anti-Communists.
In 1949, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel set up their own anti-
Communist think-tank in Calcutta, then as now the centre of
Indian. Communism. It was called the Society for the Defence of
Freedom in Asia. Among its first publications was Ram Swarup's
book Russian Imperialism: How to Stop It, written during the
conquest of China by Mao Zedong, when the onward march of
Communism seemed unstoppable. The book drew the attention of top
Congress leaders worried about Jawaharlal Nehru's steering the
country in a pro-Soviet direction.
Still in 1949, home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel decided to
set up a think-tank specifically devoted to monitoring Communism,
the Democratic Research Service, which was formally started in
November 1950. (Related in Minoo Masani: Against the Tide, p 54.)
It was sponsored by the industrialist Birla family, and initially
led by Morarji Desai, who passed the job on to Minoo Masani
(190598). It was as secretary of the DRS that Ram Swarup
prepared a History of the Communist Party of India, which Masani
published in his own name.
A lot of bad blood developed between Masani and Ram Swarup, who
quit the DRS to join Sita Ram Goel in Calcutta. Meanwhile, the
DRS continued to be operative, but beyond publishing the
meritorious periodical Freedom First, it never became very
dynamic. In his memoirs about the anti-Communist struggle,
Against the Tide, Masani did not even mention Ram Swarup or Sita
Ram Goel, much less acknowledge Ram Swarup's hand in the History
of the CPI.
The most authentic and effective Indian centre of fact-finding
and consciousness-raising about the Communist menace was and
remained undoubtedly the Society for the Defence of Freedom in
Asia. Though routinely accused of being lavishly financed by the
CIA, this organisation started with just Rs 30,000, half of which
was brought in by Goel personally, and continued its work with
the help of donations by friends, its budget seldom exceeding Rs
10,000. It published some important studies, which were
acclaimed by leading anti-Communists in the West and Taiwan, and
on one occasion vehemently denounced in the Pravda and the
Izvestia. Until its closing in December 1955, the centre was the
main independent focus of ideological opposition to Communism in
the Third World.
Ram Swarup's main books on Communism:
Let US Fight the Communist Menace (1949);
Russian Imperialism: How to Stop It (1950);
Communism and Peasantry: Implications Of Collectivist Agriculture
for Asian Countries (1950, but only published in 1954);
Gandhism and Communism (1954);
Foundations of Maoism (1956).
Arun Shourie on Ram Swarup's struggle against Communism: "Ram
Swarup... is a scholar of the first rank. In the 1950s when our
intellectuals were singing paeans to Marxism, and to Mao in
particular, he wrote critiques of communism and of the actual -
that is, dismal performance of communist governments. He showed
that the 'sacrifices' which the people were being compelled to
make had nothing to do with building a new society in which at
some future date they would be heirs to milk and honey". (see A
Shourie: Indian Controversies, p 293.)
Ram Swarup as a Hindu Revivalist:
Initially, Ram Swarup saw Gandhism as the alternative to
Communism, and he has never really rejected Gandhism. He
continued to explore the relevance of Gandhism to real-life
problems, eg. in his booklet Gandhian Economics (1977). Gandhian
inspiration is also palpable in his The Hindu View of Education
(1971), the text of a speech given before the convention of the
RSS student organisation ABVP. But gradually, he moved from the
Gandhian version of Hinduism to a more comprehensive
understanding of the ancient Hindu tradition.
His first booklet on Hindu religion was written just after Dr
Bhimrao Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism in 1956: Buddhism vis-a-
vis Hinduism (1958, revised 1984). it took a moderate view of the
much-debated relation of Buddhism to its mother tradition,
affirming that the Buddha was a Hindu Gust as Jesus was a Jew),
but conceding that Buddhism had a typical atmosphere setting it
apart from the Hindu mainstream.
By the late 1970s, his focus had decisively turned to religious
issues. Apart from a large number of articles published in
Organiser, in Hinduism Today (Honolulu), and in some mainstream
dailies (in the 1980s The Telegraph, the Times of India and The
Indian Express, in recent years mostly The Observer of Business
and Politics and the Birla family's paper The Hindustan Times),
Ram Swarup's contribution to the religious debate consists of the
following books:
The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods (1980), on the rationale of
polytheism; Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam (1982,
revised 1992);
Christianity, an Imperialist Ideology (1983, with Major T R
Vedantham and Sita Ram Goel);
Understanding Islam through Hadis (1983 in the US by Arvind
Ghosh, Houston; Indian reprint by Voice of India. 1984). In 1990,
the Hindi translation was banned; Foreword to a republication of
D S Margoliouth's Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (1985, original
in 1905);
Foreword to a republication of William Muir's The Life of Mahomet
(1992, original in 1894);
Woman in Islam (1994);
Hindu Dharma, Isaiat aur Islam (1985, Hindi: 'Hindu Dharma,
Christianity and Islam');
Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1993, a republication of
the above-mentioned forewords to books on Mohammed by Muir and
Margoliouth plus an enlarged version of Hinduism vis-a-vis
Christianity and Islam); Syed Shahabuddin, who had managed to get
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses banned (September 1988), made
an attempt to get Hindu View of Christianity and Islam banned as
well, but a prompt reaction by Arun Shourie in his weekly column
and a petition of intellectuals led by Prof K S Lal contributed
to the defeat of this attempt. (See K Elst: 'Banning Hindu
Revaluation', The Observer of Business and politics, 1 December
1993, and S R Goel, ed.: Freedom of Expression, 19981.
Ramakrishna Mission. Search for a New Identity (1986), a
critique of the Mission's attempt to redefine itself as 'non-
Hindu', Cultural Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces
(1987);
Foreword to Anirvan: Inner Yoga (1988, reprint 1995);
Hindu-Sikh Relationship (1985);
Foreword to the republication of Sardar Gurbachan Singh Talib,
ed.: Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab, 1947
(1991; also separately published as Whither Sikhism? (1991);
Hindu-Buddhist Rejoinder to Pope John-Paul II on Eastern
Religions and Yoga (1995), a rejoinder to a papal statement
opposing yogic spirituality.
Departing:
Ram Swarup was a quiet and reflective type of person. He never
married, never went into business, hardly ever had a job, never
stood for an election, never joined an organisation or party.
When I first met him in 1990, he lived In a rooftop room in the
house of the late industrialist Hari Prasad Lohia, a sponsor of a
variety of Hindu sages (including even Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh).
He had been living with the Lohia family in their Calcutta or
Delhi property since 1955; in 1996 he moved to his late brother's
house. At any rate, his biography is not very eventful apart
from his daily yoga practice and his pioneering intellectual
work.
He had been in rather good health when unexpectedly, he was found
dead on his bed after his afternoon nap on 26 December 1998. The
family doctor gave brain hemorrhage as the cause of death. He
left no children but many Hindus felt orphaned when the flames
consumed Ram Swarup's earthly remains.
(The author is a well-known Belgian Indologist)
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