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Published
in Oxford Literary Review, Vol.16, No. 1 2, 1994
"The
Name has a primacy over form".
(An essential principle of
Bhakti Sensibility as enumerated by Hazariprasad Dwivedi(1)
This
essay is not a historical account or a detailed critique of
anti-communal
movements. What I propose to do here, is to analyse the cultural
substance and political project of the Hindu variety of communalism
and the inadequacy of the left liberal discourse in coming to the
grips with this substance and project.
As
an activist of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (Movement Against
Communalism - SVA), I happened to coin the slogan `Kan Kan Mein Vyape
Hein Ram, mat bhadkao danga lekar unka naam', which can be roughly
rendered thus -Rama permeates every atom of this universe; Don't
instigate riots in his name. This seemingly innocuous slogan
generated hostile reactions from the Hindu communalists as well as
from their leftist and liberal opponents. The slogan was coined in
1989 in the thick of the mobilization for the demolition of the Babri
Masjid. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the then Chief Minister
of U.P., Mulayam Singh Yadav, used it with enthusiasm in his tirade
against that movement. One can infer from these responses that while
the Hindu communalists perceived the slogan as a threat to their
attempt to monopolise Rama as a symbol of their fascistic politics,
the hostility of the left-liberals was rooted in their facile
treatment of communalism as the politics of religious identity. There
was also an apprehension that Muslims would feel alienated from this
slogan - a fear which proved baseless. The enthusiastic appropriation
by Mulayam Singh, whose support base constituted of the lower castes
and Muslims, gave a fair indication as to how distanced the
left-liberal critique of communalism was from the sensibilities of
those who were offering an organised socio-political resistance to
it.
(I)
1992
was one of the most tumultuous years in the annals of
post-independence India. The demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6
December was not only a culmination of a fascistic mobilization but
also a pointer to the success of the `Hindu Nationalism' in creating
an aggressive political constituency for itself along with
considerable legitimacy within contemporary political discourse. The
inadequacy of `Indian nationalist' as well as left-liberal secular
discourse manifested itself in an atmosphere of confusion, even
despondency in politics as well as in the academic sphere; so much so
that in August 1993, the Hindu communalists could, without trying
very hard, force the withdrawal of the Sahmat exhibition at
Ayodhya and Delhi on the culturally loaded plea that one of the
panels presented a version of the Rama legend different from the
Ramacharitmanas and Valmiki's Ramayana and thus was hurtful to
Hindu sentiments. Not only this, the speaker of the lower House of
Parliament recorded the disapproval of the House by consensus.
The notion of Hindu sentiment seems rapidly to have translated itself
into a Hindu Vote Bank, forcing the General Secretary of the CPI (M),
the largest of the parliamentary left parties into distancing itself
from and even criticising the Sahmat exhibition (2) .
With
this background, the results of the Assembly elections held in
November 1993 -shocked those votaries of Hindu nationalism who had
projected the coming vote as a referendum on their politics; and came
as a pleasant surprise to those who were either despondent or were
already bracing themselves for the further appeasement of Hindu
Communalism. The paradox is that a large mass of people whom the
B.J.P. would love to bring into the fold of monolithic Hindu
Nationalism, have chosen to assert their caste identity, on the other
hand, it has consolidated its gains among upper caste Hindus. Its
attempt to divide Indian society on the lines of a communal divide
have been (at least temporarily) rebuffed by something which is
sometimes deliberately and sometimes mistakenly called casteism, but
is actually a challenge to the cultural and political hegemony of the
Brahminical social order (BSO). The agenda of a vertical divide is
being contested by the reality of the horizontal divide.
This
politically and culturally loaded paradox cannot be overestimated by
those seeking to understand and intervene in the cultural semiotics
of Indian society. It is an undisputed fact that from the late 19th
century to the present, Hindu communalism has constantly projected
itself as a response to the `pernicious' caste divide. In other
words, Hindu communalism, or `cultural nationalism' as it names
itself, is self admittedly an attempt to hegemonistically integrate
the political and cultural consciousness of the lower castes into an
ideological construct which is nothing but an euphemism for the
politics of perpetuating the BSO. The attempt is not novel, and Hindu
communalism, a modern phenomenon in a strictly political sense, is
only a continuation of the cultural strategy of the BSO.
(II)
The
inadequacy of left liberal secular discourse is most pronounced in
the crucial realm of the cultural strategy of communalism. This
discourse has failed over the years to evolve a holistic paradigm to
conceptualise the intertwined aspects of the politics of communalism
and that of the caste system. Its failure to contest the cultural
constructs and lingual distortions of communalism is a natural
corollary to this failure.
The
fundamental assumptions of the dominant secular discourse can be
summed up thus -Communalism is the false consciousness of a religious
community with common socio-religious interests, and is channelised
through irrational religiosity into violent intolerance of other
religious communities. Communal consciousness is the politically
motivated distortion of the economic and political competitiveness
among sections of the social elite which try to sidetrack the
political agenda by inventing imaginary problems and offering
imaginary solutions. It is a modern phenomenon which seeks to exploit
malingering medieval attitudes in order to serve vested interests,
and therefore the best strategy to fight it is (in the short run), to
preach the virtues of religious tolerance and composite Indian
culture; and in the long term to rationally re-orient the people's
perception through broad democratic struggles.
It
is only natural that most anti-communal movements and organisations
have chosen to operate as part of a larger political formation or at
last have based themselves upon a political discourse which treats
communalism as a marginal problem of distorted reflections. This
restricts the role of such groups to exposing the mechanisms by which
the energy of the people is channelised towards finding "unreal
solutions to unreal problems". The SVA was probably the first
group which gave sustained consideration to the cultural and
political agenda of communalism. The context of the anti-Sikh
massacre of 1984 lent an urgency to the task of evolving an
intervention rooted in a theoretical interrogation of the
politico-cultural problematic of communalism's hegemonic project. But
the SVA was then, and remains, an exception. The typical left-liberal
or even nationalist secularist seeks to subordinate the mythical to
the historical, the religious to the secular and the spiritual to the
rational in order to restrict the constituency and circumvent the
effectiveness of the communal appeal. There is little attempt to
analyse its cultural substance and its political project. There is
even less of an attempt to address the core of the cultural semiotics
of communalism and its politics of symbols. As the leading Marxist
historian K.N. Panikkar, actively involved in combatting communalism
observes - The secularists
who had earlier dismissed Vivekananda as a revivalist and an
obscurantist have now woken up to recognise the influence of
Vivekananda in popular consciousness. The secular opinion today
abounds with Vivekanand's views on religion which contradict what the
Sangh Parivar attributes to Vivekanada unfortunately, secularists are
about thirty years late and Vivekananda has already passed into
communal mythology. It would be difficult if not impossible, the
retrieve him now 3).This is not a
problem confined to Vivekananda alone. It is a logical outcome of
treating communalism as a politically motivated and yet natural
extension of religiosity. The interesting thing is that Hindu
communalism is actually disdainful of Hindu religiosity. This
apparent paradox becomes comprehensible if one carefully reads the
text of Hindu communal discourse and its political practice (4). It
is not for nothing that Hindu communalism is insistent upon defining
itself as Hindu Nationalism, distinct from and sometimes even opposed
to `Plain Hindu religiosity' (5). For theoretical and practical
purposes it is important to analyse how Hindu communalism perceives
itself, because self-perception is crucial to any ideology -
determining, as it does the social segment which it targets as its
constituency. It also determines the perspective which is imposed on
life experiences, and the nature of the historical narrative which is
sought to be carved out of the amorphous mass of historical memories.
This in turn determines the use which the ideology makes of available
symbols.
Seen in this light
the theoretical construct and the historical narrative of communal
nationalism follows the method of secular nationalism. It creates its
own historical narrative in order to prove the perennial existence of
the putative nation and the inevitability of this nation acquiring
the modern form of a nation state. Like secular nationalism, it
consciously underplays the internal power conflicts of the "imagined
community" by making appeals to the inherent unity-in-diversity
principle. One of the most important slogans of Hindu nationalism is
`panth anek, phir bhi Hindu ek' (`The sects are many, but
Hindus are one'). Communal nationalism is as modern and as
ideological as secular nationalism. In other words, communalism is
not `the politics of', but a politics over religious
identity.
Communalism does
not try to capture a political space for a religious community
already defined in traditional way. On the contrary, it seeks to
offer a new paradigm for the definition of a religio-political
community. The `Hindu' in Hindu Nationalism is as much a `nation in
the making' as the `Indian' in Indian nationalism. Hence the communal
project must conceal or underplay internal conflicts or better still,
seek to integrate hegemonistically all voices of resistance, dissent
and protest. The treatment of communalism (by the secular discourse)
as a politics of pre-existing religious identities has proven the
greatest hurdle in deconstructing the cultural project of Hindu
Nationalism. Even more important has been the failure to understand
the hegemonistic project and the resistance to it.
Culturally
speaking, the evolution of communalism must be located in the
internal power conflicts of Indian society - in particular those of
the Hindu community along with the cultural inferiority complex
suffered by the colonial literati. This literati was anxious to
replace traditional religiosity (of which it was disdainful), with a
`national' religion capable of accommodating the aggressiveness
rooted in the cultural inferiority complex.
Popular
religiosity, which was a recurring object of disdain in the writings
of Dayanand Saraswati, and in a more subliminal fashion in the
writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar, was rooted in a culturally loaded
system of signification created by and manifested in medieval Bhakti
Poetry and its largely autonomous epistemology. This system of
signification is a living reality for the average Indian and is
therefore not a matter of historical enquiry alone for anyone who
wants to intervene. Bhakti sensibility and its complex of
lingual constructs and symbols continue to be a cultural arena of
conflicts. What has not been realized is that communalism like other
fascist tendencies seeks to exploit the power of signs and symbols
because it attaches singular importance to the mastery over the
language of the ruled. Language after all, does much more than simply
reflect reality. It actually constructs reality in the conciousness
of its subject. It transforms the neutral construct of reality into a
morally and culturally loaded conception of truth. Needless to say,
any tradition of language and creative literature becomes over the
centuries a matrix of meanings containing complementary and
contradictory perceptions and perspectives. That is why any project
of restructuring societal relations in an authoritarian mould most
begin with eliminating the multi layered complexity of verbal signs
thus reducing the system of signification applied by society into a
flat rendering of its cultural project, and that too, with the
sanctity of the singular valid articulation of Truth.
This is the gist
of Hindu Nationalism's politics of symbols. Its political project has
required the construction of Rama in a flat rendering,
eliminating the richness and complexity of the traditional Rama
concept, which is still preserved in popular consciousness and
cultural discourse. The left-liberal secular discourse fails to come
to grips with this communal reduction of Rama either because
it shares the colonial literati's disdain for popular religiosity or
because it adopts at best a `tactical' attitude towards it. One came
across a poignant example of the predicament of popular religiosity
in a TV report on the riots in Kanpur in the wake of the demolition
of the Babri Masjid. An illiterate woman narrated a nightmarish
experience, in a story which was a painful manifestation of unsullied
faith. She had given shelter to her frightened neighbours in her own
house, when some rioters approached her and asked her to prove her
Hindu credentials by uttering Jai Shri Ram. She refused. As
she put it later, how could the name of Rama sanctify a
murderous assault ? The woman was simply differentiating (without
articulating it in so many words) between Rama as a name given
to something that permeates the universe and Rama being used
to legitimise the politics of murder. It is this distinction which
Hindu communalism consciously seeks to eliminate and left-liberal
secularism finds of no significance.
(III)
The inability or
unwillingness to distinguish between these two antagonistic
conceptions of Rama is rooted in that culture of knowledge,
which shapes the attitudes of the typical liberal intelligentsia. It
makes him an outsider to his own tradition and cultural environment,
or at best, a guest in that environment -affectionate, yet distant.
This is a predicament which the liberal intelligentsia shares with
its Hindu Nationalist counterpart. Both function in similar fashion
vis-à-vis
popular cultural experience. To them, this experience is only an
arena where they may seek to perform their ideological experiments.
This is how the liberal intelligentsia came to share a paradigmatic
conceptualisation with the several projects of so-called cultural
Nationalism, in spite of choosing opposing intellectual positions.
The thirty years'
delay in claiming Vivekananda, which Panikkar sincerely laments, is
not an aberration or the fault of some individuals. It is a natural
outcome of the cultural situatedness of left-liberal discourse. Hindu
Nationalist discourse projects and reveres Vivekananda as a champion
of political Hindutva. Left-liberal discourse rejects Vivekananda as
revivalist and obscurantist precisely because it agrees with this
projection. This agreement underlies the mode by which religious and
cultural discourses are evaluated. The disagreements are merely
germinated from the chosen political positions : they actually
reinforce each other in the evolution of a discourse of culture.
Hindu communal discourse and the cultural strategies of the BSO
construct Rama as the violent defender of the BSO; the secular
liberal discourse starts with a truculent attack on RamaRama into an artifact frozen
in time, eliminating the richness and complexity of Rama as a
transcendental and yet tragically human figure. Left-liberal
discourse obligingly enters into a serious debate over the
historicity of Rama. Admittedly, there have been attempts to
underline the multiplicity of Rama legends as opposed to Hindu
Nationalism's insistence on treating only one legend as the real one.
But these attempts seek to juxtapose a singular narrative to the
plurality of narratives. The crucial question both for long-term
cultural interrogation and short-term intervention still remains : is
there a Rama beyond narratives ?
because it agrees with this construct. While opposing Hindu
Nationalism politically, left-liberal discourse validates its claims
in the realm of culture and the system of signification. Hindu
Nationalism proposes to transform.
The illiterate
woman of Kanpur had an answer to this question. So did the slogan of
the SVA. Realising the subversive potential of the latter for their
project, the Hindu communalists fiercely attacked it. There was
nothing original in the slogan : which is why it was subversive. It
only articulated in a politico-cultural context the existent memories
and experiences of people's involvement with Rama beyond
narratives. The articulation was also not unprecedented. Gandhi's
Rama was a Rama who was existent in legends as well as
outside them, in history as well as beyond it. Indeed, much before
modern times, there had been agonising conflicts over Rama,
the cultural import of which casts its shadow over our times.
The first major
_expression of this conflict was the Ramacharitmanas of
Tulsidas composed in the 16th Century. An ideological text par
excellence, Ramacharitmanas is simultaneously poetry of the
highest order. Tulsidas is effective because he was not a dull
propagandist : there is an agonisingly human aspect of his creativity
and his personality. He is rightfully known as the most unambiguous
defender of the BSO. It is seldom remembered that in his later days,
he had to suffer the iniquities of the very social order that he had
defended in his poetry. His suffering finds moving _expression in
Kavitavali. But the Tulsidas of Ramacharitmanas
effervesced with brilliant polemics against the audacious ideas of
low-born Kabir and his like; and was most unambiguous in his cultural
intentions. What Umberto Eco calls `the intention of the author' and
`the intention of the text' (6), become melded together in the
structure of Ramacharitmanas. Tulsidas is haunted by doubts
and inconvenient questions which he sets out to answer.
The sceptical
atmosphere which troubled Tulsidas was generated by the central
crisis of the BSO. The Nirguna Bhakti which preceded Tulsidas
interrogated the paradigms of the BSO with undaunted logic and
scathing sarcasm. The poetic intention of Tulsidas is to resist this
probing and its attendant subversion of the BSO. The most interesting
thing is that the signifier of the doubts and probing was Rama
himself -a Rama whom Bhakti poets like Kabir and Nanak
refused to attach to any particular narrative. Kabir makes it
abundantly clear that his Rama is beyond all narratives and
outside all legends : `He (Kabir's Rama) was not born to the
king of Ayodhya and did not kill the king of Lanka.' This simple yet
profound statement places Kabir's Rama beyond even the minimum
consensual core of various legends and contesting narratives. This
RamaRama of the
narratives in the consciousness of the woman of Kanpur and millions
of her compatriots -non-Hindus included. In spoken and in literary
Hindi, the _expression Ram-kahani does not denote `the story
of Rama', but `ones own story' and this is not a term used only by
Hindus (7). beyond narratives co-existed with the
The text of
Ramacharitmanas is a conscious attempt at subordinating the
Rama beyond narratives to the Rama of a particular
narrative. In fact, it is an attempt to snatch Rama from those
who dared challenge the cultural hegemony and power structure of the
BSO. Tulsidas makes ParvatiShiva about the
validity of the notion of the `other' Rama; upon which he
launches a vicious polemic against the votaries of such a Rama
: ask
Those who indulge
in this humbug, are ignominious creatures. Influenced by fantastic
illusions, they are incapable of discerning truth from falsehood.
They have no affection for God. In fact, they are hypocrites. They
are ignorant, ignoble and wretched, blind in fact and the mirror of
their mind is vitiated with lowly passions. They are lecherous,
cunning, moreover, deceitful and they have not even dreamt of the
assembly of noble souls. Without at all being bothered about good and
bad, they speak against the Vedas. How dare such people, whose minds
are vitiated and who have lost their right, conceptualise the form of
Rama? They are ignorant of any form of God and can only utter hideous
fabrications. In fact, they are under the spell of evil spirits and
are not aware of what they say. Who can talk to such people, who have
no capacity to listen and who have drunk the potion of the great
illusion (8). This intention of
rejecting the Rama beyond narratives and, more importantly, of
condemning those who drew sustenance from him informs the entire
structure of Ramacharitmanas. At many places, it reappears in
the form of a direct statement like the one quoted above. But
Tulsidas does not completely reject the Rama beyond
narratives. It is significant to note that he seeks only to integrate
the contesting Rama into the hegemonic culture of the BSO; his
position being that "there is no difference between the two."
But he does not hesitate to use choice abuse for the adherents of the
contesting conception. His intention is not to throw the many
constructs of Rama to the winds, but only to desiccate them in
order to destroy any interrogatory and probing potential. This
position was conditioned by the nature and paradigm of the Bhakti
sensibility, which Tulsidas shared with Kabir inspite of all his
fierce opposition to the latter.
I will comment
further on the nature of this sensibility later, but here I would
like to stress that it was precisely because of the shared paradigms
that Rama in the post-Tulsi discourse acquired an
unprecedented richness and complexity of meanings. By incorporating
the Rama beyond the narratives into his Rama, Tulsidas
transformed the hero of a legend or the object of religious devotion
into a deeply tragic figure, transcendental and yet human to the
extent of feeling frightened when his consort is abducted by Ravana.
As Acharya Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, the most creative interpreter of
Bhakti literature observes, "Tulsi's Rama is much
more than either a fictitious character or an object of worship. He
is actually a multiple construction to which one can relate various
emotions" (9).
Dwivediji uses the term Vibhava Purusha to
define Tulsi's Rama, which implies that the Rama in the
post-Tulsi discourse has been growing into a cultural referent which
can allude to a multiplicity of emotional states and beliefs.
It is this Rama
of the poetic Bhakti discourse, who still works as a Vibhava
Purusha as well as a sign of reality beyond narratives in the
minds of ordinary people. The Hindu communalist discourse consciously
appeals to this signifier of multiple and contradictory emotions but
with a view to turning him into a symbol of an authoritarian
politics. That is why it seeks to restrict Rama to a
particular narrative, violently attacking any reference to other
narratives such as those contained in the Buddhist and the Jain
traditions. It wants to transform Rama into a political symbol
of a `Hindu nation-in-the-making', like a flag or a national emblem.
That is why the RSS propagandists challenged the author of the SVA
slogan to dare coin a similar slogan using the religious symbols of
Islam (read `Political symbols of the Muslim Nation') (10). Sharing the
presuppositions of this method, the left-liberal discourse falls prey
to the error of evolving a discourse of Rama as if he were
really a symbol restricted to one particular kind of perception. By
doing so, it contributes not only to the success of the communal
project, but also to the dangerous game of turning the complex
nuances into flat renderings. Such a discourse confines itself to a
particular aspect and seeks to impose its rendering on a complex
notion. For example, it has been argued that the Rama of the
traditional Hindu religiosity is tender, almost effeminate as opposed
to the warrior-like Rama of Hindu Nationalist discourse. In
fact, Rama, the Vibhava Purusha of popular perception
is "as tender as a flower and at the same time, as strong and
fierce as the Vajra -ultimate weapon of destruction used by
Indra" (this description is rendered by Tulsidas
himself), and perpetuated in incessant readings of various forms of
the legend and the annual performances of Rama Lilas.
Going beyond the
question of this shared method of turning complex into flat, one
still has numerous instances of ordinary people relating in different
ways to the multiple signifier the Vibhava Purusha Rama. It is
not as if the popular sensibility has not noticed the entwined
tragedy of Sita, Shambuka and Rama. Rama
banished Sita because of a baseless campaign of calumny and
killed Shambuka because he dared perform the penance which he,
being a Shudra, was forbidden to do. The point however, is
that in this tale Rama is not the archetypal modern ruler or
villain of contemporary Hindi cinema, but himself a victim of the
paradigms of Maryada, the moral code of sanctity of the BSO.
He is the ultimate tragic hero (11). People have an emotional
involvement with Rama -the criticisms and disapproval
notwithstanding. In the north-Indian cultural regions of Avadh and
Mithila, folk songs abound with references to the banishment of Sita
at the hands of Rama. In one such Avadhi folk song, Sita
refers to Rama thus : "Throughout my life, I don't want
to see the face of that heartless Rama" (12).
In another,
when Mother Earth tore herself open to accept her unfortunate
daughter Sita, Rama rushes to hold her back. But the
body of Sita (probably inspite of herself) cannot bear his
presence and her tender hair turns into prickly grass when he touches
her (13). In a folk song from Mithila, supposedly the land of Sita
herself, she is banished, although she thinks she is being sent on an
excursion by her loving and graceful husband. And when Lakshman,
Rama's younger brother performs the agonising duty of telling
Sita her fate and leaves her alone in the woods, Sita
is seen in an advanced stage of pregnancy crying bitterly and
reflecting on the guilt of being innocent.
Despite all this,
if people continue to worship Rama, their involvement is
obviously much deeper than the `guests of culture' can explore or
appreciate. In recent times, there have been some welcome attempts at
trying to understand the potency of the Rama symbol in popular
imagination. The authors of a tract on Hindu communalism describe
Rama as a figure bathed in tears and rightly conclude that
"The common men and women can identify more with him than other
mythical heroes" (14).
But the point is that unlike any mythical
figure the Rama of the popular conception is beyond narratives
too. In this context, it is necessary to have an idea of the
contribution which the Bhakti sensibility made to the matrix
of popular attitudes and beliefs.
(IV)
In dominant modern
readings (be they of the Hindu cultural variety, the Hindu
Nationalist type, left-liberal in orientation or even of the
subaltern school), Bhakti is construed as a unilinear
continuum since the days of the Gupta empire and before. In such
discourses, medieval Bhakti poetic sensibility is nothing but
an emotional restatement of scriptural religiousity. This method
ignores the autonomous existence of the poetic BhaktiSaguna Bhakti as a valid extension of the genuine
Indian tradition and Nirguna Bhakti as an aberration under the
evil influence of the Muslim `other'); and on the other, is reflected
in the later `normalisation' -
conception. Thus a kind of normative canonicity is created, which on
the one hand, manifests itself in the Hindu cultural discourse (which
treats..so that the
diverse tendencies of Bhakti are recouped, too, as so many moments of
a Hindu spirituality, which is distributed between the High tradition
and the low, between the philosophical (e.g. vedantic) and the
narrative (e.g. the Puranic genealogies) and the populist lyrical
(e.g. Bhakti), but remain essentially the same (15).The methodical
similarity of discourses ostensibly rooted in contesting viewpoints
becomes most apparent in the case of Bhakti. What is ignored
in the process are the most striking characteristics of the poetic
Bhakti conception and its uneasy relationship with scriptural
religiosity. It is this unease which defines the paradigm of the
poetic Bhakti conception and which Kabir and Tulsi share
inspite of their contesting cultural agenda, and their different,
even antagonistic audiences. The poetic Bhakti conception thus
signifies an arena of unresolved conflicts, a sensibility that is
constantly struggling to evolve into a full-fledged world-view. But
in modern discourse, it is reduced to a finished product, which has
already resolved the conflicts in favour of the dominant classes and
their hegemonistic cultures. What is also ignored in this simplistic
reductionism, is the most peculiar feature of the Bhakti
conception of transforming or even inverting the content and emphasis
of a signifier, which however remains constant. Both Kabir and Tulsi
refer to ninefold Bhakti, but the point is that they propose a
notion of this ninefold Bhakti radically different from texts
like Bhagvata (16).After this
reduction of Bhakti into an emotional restatement of given
philosophical constructs and social attitudes, it is natural that it
should be referred to as "an ideology of subordination par
excellence", (17) or held responsible for "a streak of
morbid self- debasement in Indian religion" (18). Yet another
interesting result of this treatment of Bhakti not as an
autonomous sensibility but as a restatement of this or that
scriptural religion is to relate Kabir's conception of God with
"God's position as the judge, which is perhaps the most central
element in the non-suphic Islam". This position comes along with
the astonishing statement, "In Kabir's verses the emphasis on
love as the cornerstone of man-god relationship is very weak"
(19).
This is not the place to enter into a debate over the
centrality of the just or loving God in Kabir. Suffice it to say that
to Kabir the very leitmotif of his poetry was love, pure and simple
(20). These instances of an inadequate coming to grips (on the
academic plain) with the poetic Bhakti conception are closely
related to the left liberal inadequacy of understanding and resisting
the cultural mechanisms of Hindu nationalism for the simple reason
that Bhakti, far from being the space of already resolved
conflicts continues to be a system of signification in which
contesting viewpoints seek to validate themselves in the
consciousness of the people. More importantly, in this system of
signification, the difference between a religious and a secular text
is minimised, even eliminated -a differentiation on which secular
scholars tend to base their arguments for demystifying the Rama
legend. (21)
Hazariprasad
Dwivedi's phrase, "Name has a primacy over form", sums up
one of the essential features of the poetic Bhakti conception.
Unlike the practitioners of other religions, Hindus continue to utter
the name of chosen gods or goddesses when they greet each other (`Ram
Ram', `Jai Shri Ram', `Jai Shankar', `Jai Shri Krishna' and also,
`Radhe Radhe'). The rationale for this is simple. You cannot
conceptualise God's form and yet, there can be any number of forms.
But the name signifies the essence of all forms. So the moment you
utter the name of a god, you enter into an emotional communion with
him. Therefore, the name has primacy over form. And the Hindu
nationalist discourse seeks to exploit this practice by making only
one form (of its own construction) the valid one - just as it
operates in a democratic polity with the intention of ultimately
destroying it.
(V)
In 1908, one of
the early Hindu nationalists Lala Lalchand wrote,
The idea is to
love everything owned by the community. It may be religion, it may be
a tract of the country or it may be a phase of civilization. But
these are mere outward clothes of inner feelings. This then, is the
fire I wish to rekindle (22).
This fire, for Lal
Chand was the idea of "communal patriotism" as opposed to
merely "geographical patriotism". Lal Chand was not as
sophisticated as the later ideologues of Hindu Nationalism who used
the more comprehensive and respectable adjective `cultural' in place
of `communal'. But the continuity is clear. Religion does not define
community; it is a fetish owned by it. That too, as one of mere
outward clothes of inner feelings, these being the political notion
of patriotism. The leitmotif of the later praxis of Hindu communalism
or the so-called cultural Nationalism has been to contest "Indian
propaganda" (Lal Chand's phrase), in the political realm and the
idea of Hindu religion in the religious realm -both by the political
category of Hindutva or Hindudom. The high priest of Hindu
Nationalism, V.D. Savarkar, wrote a seminal treatise Hindutva,
which was published in 1923 with the avowed intention of replacing
"the less satisfactory and sectarian term Hinduism" with
"Hindutva, which embraces all the departments of thought and
activity of the whole being of our Hindu race". Savarkar
insisted that
Hindutva is not
identical with what is vaguely meant by the term Hinduism. By an
`ism', is generally meant a theory or a code more or less based on a
spiritual dogma or a system. But when we attempt to define the
essential significance of Hindutva, we do not primarily and certainly
not mainly concern ourselves with any particular theoretic dogma or
creed. Had not linguistic usage stood in our way, then Hinduness
would have been certainly a better word than its near parallel
Hinduism (23).
Naturally,
Savarkar used to describe the leaders of the anti-colonial national
movement as pseudo-nationalists because in his discourse, nationalism
was based upon the idea of cultural and racial purity of Hindu
Nation, which itself was not a referent to a `community of believers'
but that to a racial stock. The suffix `ism', after all, implies a
degree of notionally voluntary involvement with a set of ideas while
the suffix `ness' precludes precisely that. That is why, "had
not linguistic usage stood in our way, Hinduness would have been a
better term". Moreover, it is not sufficient for anyone to
identify oneself as believing in Hindu religion. One must subscribe
to the notion of religious beliefs being only the outer clothing of
the inner feeling of belonging to a political community. In practice,
one must submit to the cultural hegemony of the self-appointed
political interpreters of Hindu religiosity or one must suffer
humiliation or even capital punishment : like the `plainly religious
Hindu' M.K. Gandhi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) is
absolutely right in calling itself a cultural organisation because it
attributes to itself a cultural project distinct from political where
`political' signifies the everyday political ups and downs and
`cultural' signifies an agenda of creating a controlled space of
politics. Politics is sought to be Hinduised by militarising Hindus.
The knee-jerk response of the left liberal and nationalist secular
forces to the artificially generated controversy on the Sahmat
exhibition indicated the success of the `Hinduise politics' project
theoretically articulated by Savarkar and implemented by RSS.
Culture in RSS
discourse is not a vibrant reality of common experiences, creative
interventions and the conflicts of power. It is an attempt at
concealing conflicts and oppressions by a rhetoric of hatred and
destruction. Cultural nationalism of the Hindutva variety is actually
an unabashed attempt at emulating Nazi racism. One may cite the
example of Golwalkar, who praised Hitler for his treatment of Jews
and for his racial pride and advocated a similar treatment for
minorities in India. That was in 1938 (24). This crudeness gave way
to logical sophistry in his later works. But the thrust of the
argument and even its structure remained the same. His Bunch of
Thoughts (1966) is considered the Gita of the RSS. In this book,
Golwalkar describes anti-colonial nationalism as reactionary.
The theories of
territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis
for our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and
inspiring content of our real Hindu Nationhood and made many of the
`freedom movements' virtually Anti-British movements. Anti-Britishism
was equated with patriotism and nationalism. This reactionary view
has had disastrous effects upon the entire course of the freedom
struggle, its leaders and the common people (25).
The texts of this
cultural nationalism abound in laudatory references to death and
destruction. Savarkar goes to the extent of prescribing rape as an
appropriate weapon of political pre-emption and retribution. The
cultural project is to be realized in an ingenious way. The RSS is a
non-political and therefore, politically unaccountable organisation.
It handles the controls of its political front the BJP without itself
contesting elections and it works for the propagation of its notion
of culture through a well-knit organisation, which works under
varying nomenclatures, creating the illusion of its ideology being
the spontaneous _expression of Hinduness.
It is in order to
perpetuate this hegemonic project and conceal its real intentions
that communalism manipulates cultural symbols and attempts to create
a dual trajectory. The religious is loaded with political
significance and the political in turn, is invested with sacredness.
Furthermore, it manipulates the semiotic flexibility of religion,
sometimes referring to the moral aspect of it, so as to set out its
claim to be the sole defender of morality; and sometimes treats
religion as nothing but a racial denominator, upon which basis it
claims to be the sole champion of a racially defined nation. At the
right historical juncture, religious things turn into political
symbols, be they a mode of worship or a sacred image or a text. After
such transformation, it is pointless to attack the irrationality of
religion and the futility of medieval symbolism. Placed in such a
context, religious symbols and mythical figures are transformed into
names that contestants for power attribute to a complex strategical
situation. For reasons already stated Rama has proved to the
most potent and the most-contested-for among these names. It is
positively dangerous to shut ones eyes to contests of power and their
symbolical content. Any academic or activist willing to intervene in
the contemporary culture of politics and the politics of culture
would be immensely benefitted by rekindling the memories of Gandhi's
insistence on planting one's feet firmly on one's own ground and at
the same time keeping all the windows open!
Footnotes
NB : I am grateful
to Deepak Chowdhary for helping me with the manuscript.
(1) Hazariprasad
Granthawali (Collected works in Hindi) (Vol.5), p. 427, Rajkamal
Prakashan, New Delhi, 1981.
(2) See the
article by Harikishan Singh Surjeet, the weekly People's
Democracy, the official organ of the CPI(M) : 29 August 1993.
(3) Culture and
Communalism, Social Scientist, Vol.21, No.3-4, p.27, March-April
1993, New Delhi.
(4) See for
instance, Neeladri Bhattacharya, `Myth, History and the Politics of
Ram Janambhumi' in Anatomy of a Confrontation edited by
Sarvapalli Gopal, Viking, New Delhi, 1991, pp.122-40.
(5) This was the
crux of the argument in the statement of Nathuram Godse, the Hindu
Nationalist assassin of the Mahatma. He expressed both his belief in
the idea of Hindudom and his disgust for the "irrational and
superstitious plain" religiosity of Gandhiji. This statement is
now available in published form. See, May It please your Honour,
Surya Prakashan, Delhi, 1987.
(6) Umberto Eco,
Interpretation and overinterpretation, Cambridge University
Press, 1992, p.25.
(7) The
autobiographical note by Nazir Banarasi in his collection of poem,
Rashtra ki Amanat Rashtra Ke Hawale is entitled `Apni Ram
Kahani Apni Zubani'. (The story of oneself in our's own words),
Banaras, 1992.
(8)
Ramcharitmanas, stanza following the Doha no. 114 in
the first Canto Balkand. The translation here is rendered by
the present writer.
(9) Hazariprasad
Dwivedi, op. cit., vol.4, pp. 523-527.
(10) See Shailesh
Matiani's article The Communalism of anti-communalism, in
Panchajanya, (Hindi), Special no. 26th January 1992,
Pancha-Janya is the official organ of RSS.
(11) For slightly
expanded treatment of this theme, see my Sita and Shavbuk : A
Common Destiny in Mainstream (Weekly), New Delhi, May 18,
1991.
(12) Guru jee
Ramanirmohia Ke munhva jiyat nahin dekhbai ho.
(13) Kaati hein
dharti samaye lagi sita
Lapaki dhare
Rama kes
Yas satavanti
se rani setal dei
Kus Kei
Santharia hoi jayen.
I am grateful to
my students Mr. Vagish Jha and Mr. Kamalanand Vibhuti for making
these songs available to me.
(14) Khaki
Shorts Saffron Flags, Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar,
Tanika Sarkar, Sambuddha Sen, Orient Longman Limited, New Delhi,
1993; p. 82.
(15) Aijaz Ahmed,
In Theory, OUP, Bombay, 1993, p.261.
(16) I draft with
this theme in some detail in my paper `Bhakti - an Interface
of poetry and philosophy', presented at the National Academy of
Letters : Seminar on Dnyaneshwari (17th-18th August 1990) New
Delhi. Also see my Kavya aur Shastra Ka Mukhamukham (Hindi in
Samas, Vol.1, no.1, New Delhi, 1992, ed. by Ashok Vajpayee).
(17) Ranjit Guja,
`Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography' in Subaltern
Studies, vol.6, ed. by Ranjit Guha, OUP, Delhi, 1989, p.259.
(18) Richard
Lannoy, This Speaking Tree, OUP, New York, p.206.
(19) Irfan Habib,
Social Scientist, Vol.21, No.3-4, March-April 1993, New Delhi,
p.85.
(20) Pyanjari
Prem prakasya antari bhaya ujas mukh kasturi mahmahi bani phooti
baas. (`Love manifested within me and illuminated my heart and
hence, my speech turned as fragrant as musk').
(21) See for
instance, Romila Thapar, `Historical Perspective on the Story of
Rama' in S. Gopal's An Anatony of Confrontation (op.cit), pp.
and Subira Jaiswal, Historical Evolution of the Ram Legend,
Social Scientist (op.cit), pp.89-97).
(22) Quoted by
K.W. Jones in his `Arya Dharma : Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century
Punjab', Manohar, N.Delhi, 1976, p.287.
(23) Hindutva :
who is a Hindu?, Bharatiya Sahitya Sadan, New Delhi, 1989, p.4.
(24) Golwalkar's
book We : Our Nationhood Defined, first published in 1938 has
recently been a matter of interesting controversy. The RSS has sought
to disown this book in its typically deceitful way. In this book,
Golwalkar categorically demanded of the non-Hindu people of
`Hindusthan' that they must "either adopt the Hindu culture and
language" must learn to respect and revere Hindu culture and
religion, must entertain no ideas, but those of the glorification of
the Hindu race and culture..". In case they do not follow these
dictates, Golwalkar further says, they "may stay in the country
wholly subordinated to Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens'
rights" quoted by Desraj Goyal in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
Radhakrishna Prakashan, New Delhi, 1979, p.157.
(25) M.S.
Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Vikram Prakashan, Bangalore,
1966, p. 142-143.
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