On the 74th anniversary of Gandhi’s martyrdom, let us talk about the ideology that murdered him on 30th January 1948. That of Hindutva or Hindu Supremacist ethnonationalism.1 The core organization that promotes the Hindu Nationalist vision is the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps) set up in 1925, to some extent, as per scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, as a counter to Gandhian vision of an inclusive and non-violent Indian nation.2 While RSS has always denied role in Gandhi’s murder, there is enough evidence to suggest that people affiliated with RSS and sympathetic to its ideology and that of other Hindu organizations, had planned and executed Gandhi’s murder. So, how did this ideology come to be?
It all starts with the British.
You know the deal with us formerly colonized nations. When in doubt, we blame the former colonizer.
Seriously though, that is where this story starts. With British Imperialism. Western imperialism and colonialism changed the world so much that quite a lot of our ways of looking at the world, understanding it, and being in it came to be mediated by an epistemology that took birth in (and borrowed up on) colonial constructions of knowledge. This is true for almost all modern academic disciplines, from science to history to literature and sociology to political science (and economics). This does not just mean that a Western mode of thinking, ostensibly called modern, prevails in academia and popular discourses in the West as well as the Rest. It means that how we look at the world, how we see ourselves in it, and how we device solutions for our problems are mediated by disciplines that have a basis in settler-colonialism and imperialism and the principles that under-gird it. What this leads to is what Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has called ‘White Empiricism:’ where what counts as knowledge and what counts as not, what is in and what is out, what is objective and what is subjective, is determined by criteria developed in the settler-colonial and imperial West (basically a form of knowledge that protects White Supremacy).3
This privileging of the Western epistemological principles and ontological considerations comes at the expense of not just the Rest but the West as well. If you can imagine only one way of being and knowing the world, naturally, you will miss out on other perceptions, other locations, some of which may be beneficial to you.
I am often dismayed by the lack of understanding regarding Western hegemony in knowledge systems in the discussions here, even among people I respect and look up to. This can be seen in how so many of you hope for US to assume leadership in finding a global solution for our contemporary socio-political and ecological disasters when that position itself is problematic.
Why is that?
Because ‘leadership’ involves hegemony and privileging the West and the US.
All I can say is, if you continue to hold that view, you will go on lamenting the climate change, and the population growth in the Rest and how the Rest is mimicking West, without realizing how racist it is. And you will not arrive at a solution for inequality, hunger, and climate change that works for all (including the Rest and the underprivileged in the West). For us to arrive at a solution that works for all of us, you need to come with humility to the table and work with others as equal partners. Otherwise, I am afraid, what you will do is a find a solution that comes at the expense of the Rest.4
Anyways, moving on to the history of Hindutva.
Before I start, let me state that I do not blame all our social ills on British imperialism (the Hindu Nationalists and even some among Indian liberals have a tendency to do that).
Caste, and the related ills, including hierarchy with Brahmin-Kshatriya (Warriors) at the top and Vaishya (Merchants) nearly at the top, has been a feature of South Asia at least since the past two millennia (although it changed in form and effect during colonialism). You don’t need British history to confirm this. You can just look at our mythologies and scriptures to see mention of caste, caste-based hegemony, and hierarchical systems that hurt the little people.5 In addition, archaeogenetic studies have established the presence of caste in India in precolonial times.
Similarly, we had other issues that quite a lot of the feudal/aristocratic precolonial globe faced and continue to face, such as cis-het patriarchy. There was peace but also wars and neither Muslims nor British brought these to us. However, in precolonial South Asia, we also had some limited LGBTQ acceptance, some freedom for women at least of non-Brahminical castes and religions, and there was a hybridity and syncretism in how different religions interacted with each other. We have had violence inflicted by Hindu as well as Muslim rulers. No religion or its people have been peaceful saints in our history.
So, no. British imperialism did not bring all our ills to us.
The British imperialism however changed how we look at our history and culture, and that changed how we look at ourselves.
British brought to our lands and our knowledge systems the prejudices and ideologies they harbored. This included the belief that Asian people were innately suited to what they called ‘despotic rule.’ (Qn: Why, even in these spaces, when you want to talk of authoritarian rule, some of you resort to the suffix stan?) They imagined Asians as supine creatures who have no will or say in their own governance, unlike the liberated West (especially English) where even monarchs had to bend to the laws, and the people were ‘free.’ Muslim rulers who ruled quite a lot of South Asia at the time were considered particularly prone not just to ‘despotism’ but also to religious fanaticism and persecution of non-Muslims. Muslims in general were considered to be religious zealots, barbaric, hypersexual, and hypermasculine, and also somehow decadent. Hindus (all except a few designated ‘martial races’), under which umbrella term the English gathered all the diverse people in the subcontinent that did not fall under the category of Muslims or Christians, were considered effeminate and a people without strength, culture, or integrity, owing to which they were seen to have lost the subcontinent to Muslims.
James Mill’s History of British India, for example, have this to say about Hindus and Muslims.6
“In truth, the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave. The indolence, the security, the pride of the despot, political or domestic, find less to hurt them in the obedience of the Hindu, than in that of almost any other portion of the species. But if less soft, the Mahomedan is more manly, more vigorous. He more nearly resembles our own half-civilized ancestors; who, though more rough, were not more gross; though less supple in behaviour, were still more susceptible of increased civilization, than a people in the state of the Hindus.”
Not all administrator historians of India were quite so dismissive of Hindus or painted Muslims in a favourable light. Still, the British did all they could to portray the rulers before them as having been fanatical Muslims who oppressed Hindus until the ‘manly Englishmen’ came to rescue the people.7 While contemporary Hindus were portrayed as beneath contempt, ancient Hindu civilization was at times lauded, with the fall of it being blamed on Muslims.
These histories were used as textbooks in the higher ed curriculum for colonial Indians. The curriculum was designed, in the words of the Anglicist Thomas Babington Macaulay who is typically considered the architect of western ed in India, to create “a class of people who were Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” to serve as middlemen between the ruling English and the subaltern Indians. But these histories were not all. The reports and other documentation that the East India Company and later the British colonial administration produced, used a-priori judgements to cast the natives as primarily moved by religious sentiment, with special vituperation reserved for poor Muslims, who were nearly always constructed as ‘bigoted’ and ‘fanatical.’8
Post the revolt of 1857 (that the British call ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and Indians call the First War of Independence) the racism against Indians heightened. And it was in this environment that Indians started paying extraordinary attention to history, developing a sense of their identity that was shaped by the colonial constructions.9
For example, 19th century Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose novels and poetry form an important part of the cultural and social rituals of the RSS, had started out advocating reform in Hinduism but after coming across a particularly stringent criticism of Hinduism ended up writing strong narratives against Muslims and the apparent ‘foreign rule’ in India.
Various religious reform and revival movements came into being during this period, led both by Hindus as well as Muslims, nearly all of them in one manner or the other borrowing principles from the British and their understanding of indigenous traditions as regards to what each religion meant. Even those Hindus who wanted an inclusive India that accepted people of all religions as its citizens believed in the British rendering of India’s ‘Mohemmedan past’ and implicitly or explicitly regarded Muslims as the reason for their imagined ‘fall.’
Thus, the British colonial knowledge systems had a large part to play in the birth of Hindu Supremacist thought. Indeed, you can see quite a lot of these ideas in the works and anxieties of the contemporary Hindu right. There is a lot of focus on masculinity, defined in terms of power and violence, and there is much fear of being seen as effeminate. There is an envy of Muslims; a feeling of inferiority with respect to the perceived sensuality (and masculinity and unity) of Muslim men, who the Hindu right believes want to attract Hindu women and convert them. Muslims are considered a homogenous mass with no divisions between them and no aspiration beyond propagating their religion. And last but not the least, Muslims are considered to be a threat to Hindus (just like the British portrayed).10
But we cannot blame all of Hindu Nationalism on the British. After all, the dominant stream of anti-colonial and nationalist struggle in India was led by the Indian National Congress (INC) that: a. explicitly rejected what it called ‘communalism,’ and b. after Gandhi’s return to India in 1916, started articulating an inclusive and non-violent future for the country. INC made mistakes because it was dominated by Hindus, some of whom were wary of Muslims whereas others were ignorant of Muslim aspirations and alienation, but its official vision, and the aspiration of its most famous leaders, including Gandhi and India’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, was that of an India that belonged to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Jews and every other religion. Same vision was articulated by another icon of twentieth century India, the father of Indian constitution and its leading architect, B.R Ambedkar; and his anti-caste counterparts of the South such as EV Ramaswamy Naicker (or Periyar).11
TW: Mentions of rape and sexual violence.
The credit for creating a counter to this inclusive vision, in a violent form inspired by European ethnonationalism, goes to VD Savarkar—a man who had come to conceive of Muslims as the hated ‘Other.’ Savarkar condemned precolonial ‘Hindu’ kings (such as Shivaji) for what he considered their leniency towards Muslims, and advocated rape and abduction of Muslim girls and indiscriminate murder of young Muslim men to put Muslims in their place. He has to his credit not just the articulation of the ideology of Hindu Nationalism, or Hindutva, but also works on Indian history that relied almost wholly on British constructions of Muslims (while somewhat eschewing similar constructions of Hindus). His historical works were steeped in violent rhetoric and graphic descriptions of bloody battlefields and rape, with again, not much claim to provenance, and creative inflation of numbers (his numbers of Hindus forcibly converted to Islam by Tipu Sultan, for example, goes from thousands in one book to hundreds of thousands in another, with no explanation for this change).12
Also, if a Hindu Nationalist tells you that there is no caste in the vision of ‘Hindutva’, do not be taken in. Savarkar, a Maharashtrian brahman, was influenced by the caste system and his vision is that of a hierarchical structure with Brahmans at the top, and everyone else paying obeisance to them (see Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalist Movement). It may play out differently when another dominant caste, such as Kshatriya, gains influence (as in the case of the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh), but the place of ‘lower’ and ‘backward’ castes and tribes in the setup is quite clear. At least in practice. As is that of Muslims and Christians.
RSS was set up by another Maharashtrian brahman inspired by Savarkar’s vision. The organization stayed out of the anti-colonial struggle, preferring to collaborate with British at times, while trying to transform society to their own homogeneous vision of Hindus through grassroots work. They set up branches across India where history influenced by Savarkar came to be taught to young children, and Hindu men were trained in martial arts to improve their manliness.13
That they came to hate Gandhi and considered him effeminate was no secret.14 In 1947, during the bloody violence that followed the partition of the subcontinent into a Muslim Pakistan and a Secular India, Gandhi did his best to ensure that Indian Muslims were not retaliated against for violence against Hindus in Pakistan.15 In September 1947, he fasted in Calcutta where observers had feared the worst violence as there had been Hindu-Muslim violence in East India since 1946. This prevented inter-religious violence on the scale that Western India saw. Similarly, when Hindus in Delhi hunted Indian Muslims as payback for what the Hindu refugees had endured, he once again fasted until the different parties laid down their arms. He made India release money owed to Pakistan by the British unconditionally, again against the wishes of Hindu nationalists and conservative and orthodox Hindus, and consistently called for INC and Indian leadership to be inclusive in their management of the country.
Gandhi’s murderers considered him a threat to Hindus and an appeaser of Muslims. They believed that if left to him and his ideology, Hindus would end up being ‘womanly cowards’ who cannot stand up for themselves against the ‘violent’ and ‘fanatical’ Muslims. It was in this belief that the plot to murder him was hatched and executed. There is evidence to suggest that Savarkar and RSS may have had a hand in it though, as mentioned, RSS always denied its part in the murder.
Whatever RSS intended at the time did not come to pass. RSS was banned until July 1949 and had to promise to reduce its violent rhetoric and toe the national line to have the ban lifted. The Indian constitution, which we adopted on 26th January 1950, enshrined the right against discrimination based on religion (and caste, gender, geography, and ethnicity). India, under Prime Minister Nehru, remained mostly secular. At least, in its vision.
But things were not going to remain so for long.
And that story I will share in another post. For now, let me say that our first PM’s daughter played the Sulla to Modi’s Julius Caesar, and in the 1970s, Indian democracy as well as India’s premier national political party, were broken. When it was patched back up, it was ripe for further breakups. And that lead to where we find ourselves today.
Thank you for reading this far. This is sort of a series on India, and you can find the first post here. Thank you to G2geek for suggesting it.
Have a good day and week ahead.
Edits:
- I have removed reference to Italian fascism in the case of Savarkar because he was more inspired by Italian and German nationalism. The RSS leaders were inspired by Nazism.
- I have also edited the bit about caste to make it more accurate.
- In the final section, I have edited the details of Gandhi’s fasts and the duration for which RSS was banned. RSS was banned until July 1949 (which makes the ban duration one and a half years and not two).16
References
I know this list is long but I do not expect you to read all of it or even most of it. I am just adding this out of habit, and because people who really are interested may check these out. However, I will ask you to read Amitav Ghosh’s and Dr Prescod-Weinstein’s works if you have not already read them. Also, please read that first link.
- https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/a-yawning-chasm-politics-and-play-gandhi-versus-hindutva/cid/1849592.
- Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed., Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
- Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books, 2021.
- Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2021.
- See Mahabharata or Ramayana for example. Decent sources though not critical editions are available at https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/maha/index.htm.
- Mill, James. The History of British India. 3 vols. Cambridge Library Collection - South Asian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. You could also find a 19th century edition at Internet Archives.
- Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
- Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077305.001.0001.
- Lal, Vinay. The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001. (Lal thoughts on the importance of History may give you pause. 😊) See also: Sarkar, Tanika. "How the Sangh Parivar Writes and Teaches History." In Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot, Majoritarian State, 151–173 and "Imagining a Hindu Nation: Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra's Later Writings." Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 39 (1994): 2553–2561.
- https://scroll.in/article/955971/this-book-shows-how-a-meerut-godwoman-is-trying-to-save-hindu-women-from-sensuous-muslim-men.
- See Jaffrelot. Ambedkar’s works can be found at https://velivada.com/dr-b-r-ambedkar-books-2/ or http://www.ambedkar.org/. Periyar’s at https://thesatyashodhak.com/english/.
- Savarkar, V. D. Hindu Rashtra Darshan: A Collection of the Presidential Speeches Delivered from the Hindu Mahasabha Platform. Bombay: Laxman Ganesh Khare, 1919. See also his Hindu-Pad-Padshahi: Or a Critical Review of the Hindu Empire of Maharashtra. Madras: B. G. Paul & Co., 1925 and Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. Translated by S. T. Godbole. Bombay: Bal Savarkar, 1971.
- See Jaffrelot and Sarkar above.
- https://thewire.in/books/the-rss-and-gandhi-2. Aside: Winston Churchill was another person with disdain towards Gandhi. He was also dismissive of Indians, and his vision led to death of millions of Indians in Bengal Famine: www.theguardian.com/.... This is in addition to the Indians who died serving in WWII, which amounts to around 80000, and the ones who served, numbering in the millions. www.npr.org/… When I say that your Western way of looking at the world will kill people in the Rest, I do not say it lightly.
- https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/a-yawning-chasm-politics-and-play-gandhi-versus-hindutva/cid/1849592. Also, Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. London: Picador, 2008.
- When Sardar Patel took on the forces of hate and banned RSS.