 "Dayananda, Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Savarkar: Hindutva's Big Four")
HINDUTVA EXPLORING THE IDEA OF HINDU NATIONALISM
Author: Jyotirmaya Sharma
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 299
Jyotirmaya Sharma presents a comprehensive study of the thoughts and beliefs of four of the foremost philosophers and activists of modern-day Hindutva — Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The book is an interesting read at a time when the legacy of several iconic Indians of the 20th century, all of whom contributed immensely to reform Hinduism, is either being questioned or reinterpreted, while the virtues of these Hindutva icons are being extolled without a close examination.
Of late, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, pruned of his contribution to Hindu-Muslim unity and the uplift of Hindu women and Dalits, has come to represent swachhata or cleanliness; B R Ambedkar is a god only of the Dalits; Rabindranath Tagore is merely a Bengali poet whose modernism evokes little resonance outside his motherland; Ram Manohar Lohia is somebody whose sole contribution was fighting the Nehru dynasty; and Jawaharlal Nehru is remembered more as part of a westernised elite who robbed both Vallabhbhai Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose of their “rightful” place in the history of independent India.
Sharma’s probe into the prehistory of Hindutva and an examination of the writings of some of its pre-eminent thinkers brings out several less-known facts that, if more widely known, are likely to leave not just Christians and Muslims deeply offended but will also worry women, Dalits, Kabirpanthis, Shaivites, Buddhists and anybody who isn't a fan of orthodox and aggressive Brahminical Hinduism.
In Hindutva, a reprint of his 2003 book with a new introduction, Sharma does not make a distinction between “tolerant” Hinduism and “jihadi” Hindutva. He argues that Hindutva, or political Hinduism, is only the dominant expression of Hinduism in our times, and that the “Hindu identity” as we understand it today was mostly reinterpreted in the last 150-odd years by such thinkers and activists as Dayananda, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Savarkar.
Sharma looks closely at each of their contributions to the cause of Hindutva, including their orthodox views on the place of women, Dalits and tribes in Hindu society and their visceral hatred towards Christians and Muslims. He also goes on to question some of the foundational myths of the Hindus: how “the very idea of the ‘Hindu’ as a universal category is a recent one”, or that Hinduism is “a way of life”. “Whose way of life?” the author asks.
Sharma also argues for a more exhaustive study of ancient texts, particularly the Puranas that have until now been rejected for their “scant” historical value. Sharma, a journalist turned teacher, says the Puranas were an attempt by the Brahminical orthodoxy to absorb heterodox elements and coalesce these with the dominant tradition, but were rejected by Dayananda, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Savarkar in favour of the Vedas and Upanishads. The four also glorified Hinduism and caricatured the “other”, whether it was Christianity, Islam, the tribal traditions of India or, to a lesser extent in the case of Vivekananda, even Buddhism.
Dayananda, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Savarkar denounced the Buddha and Buddhism for weakening the fighting impulses of Hinduism, leading to its enslavement ,first at the hands of Muslim rulers and then the British, the author claims. They shared a vision of transforming Hinduism into a “rigid, codified, monochromatic entity...The Hindu nation had to be founded on racial and doctrinal unity. Hindus had to be bound together with the help of one book, one ‘church’ and one ‘gospel’,” says Sharma.
But this differed from Dayananda, who excluded everyone who disagreed with his interpretation of the Vedas, while Savarkar believed Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists were part of Hinduism. Aurobindo, Sharma says, started with a liberal view of the Muslims but by the end of his life was convinced that “nothing ought to be done to conciliate the Muslim”. Aurobindo was firm that if Muslims were to be placated, it would amount to abandonment of the greatness of India’s past and her spirituality. Vivekananda interpreted Hinduism for the West as a tolerant, universal faith and was most engrossed in his version of “Practical Vedanta”. It is likely Vivekananda’s fans might feel that their hero has been unfairly dealt with by Sharma. Vivekananda, it must be said, understood Islam as well as Christianity with more empathy than the other three. Sharma, however, cites enough examples from Vivekananda’s speeches as evidence that the religious leader found himself caught between an admiration for the egalitarianism that Islam preached and his opposition to the role it played in India’s history.
The author, however, isn’t very hopeful that the philosophies of Gandhi, Tagore, Lohia and Ambedkar, none of whom believed in any of these characteristics of a rigid, ossified Hinduism, could act as the antidote to Hindutva when it threatens to turn into hyper-nationalism. Sharma ends with a question often asked: why take on only Hindu identity and Hindutva? Why not Islam and Christianity? “One can only say that my concern in these pages is with the darkness on my side,” says Sharma.
This exhaustively researched but readable book comes at a time when we have ceased to examine ourselves, and blame the “other” for most of what is apparently wrong around us.
