Seeing Hindu fanaticism as sui generis

David Ludden organised a seminar of scholars just after the fascist Hindutva mob had destroyed the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, and every scholar reacted to it.

All the 12 contributors have interpreted the making of India Hindu by not only going to the past history of modern-colonial India but also by relating post-independence developments, especially of the 1980s and 1990s.

The very fact that a second edition had to be printed within a decade of its publication shows not only the value of scholarly contribution made by the edited volume, but also the social concern of the Indian literati class about the subversion of the democratic, secular Constitution by Hindutva fanaticism.

The editor himself has introduced this second edition by stating that "this edition reprints the original volume exactly as it appeared in 1996, but its context has changed dramatically since then.

We had composed it to help explain how Hindutva rose to prominence but now the book can also help to explain how Hindutva operates inside India's political mainstream".

Unfortunately, except a new preface of 18 pages by Ludden, the other 12 scholarly contributions, by historians, political scientists, and scholars of religion, do not answer new questions that have emerged during the 1990s and the early 21st century.

The volume is divided into three parts """Mobilising Hindutva," "Genealogies of Hindu and Muslim," and "Community and Conflict." Sumit Sarkar, in his contribution on Indian nationalism and the politics of Hindutva, correctly states that "the crucial ideological and organisational initiatives in the formation of both Hinduism and, later, Hindutva, however, have come primarily from a new middle class produced by colonial education."

Sarkar then shifts in a very discursive manner about the issue of "caste" among the Hindus and suggests, which is believed at a very commonsense level, that V P Singh's Mandal politics brought high-caste Hindutuva to the Mandir-Masjid politics of the Sangh Parivar.

Why is it that the BJP has not been able to maintain a hold on upper-caste Hindus in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar? Why is it that Hindutva consistently targets Muslim and Christian minorities and is able to mobilise a section of dalits and tribal population against "the others"?

If a scholar of the eminence of Sarkar is not able to rise above the immediate context, the others are caught in the "immediacy" of the Hindutva phenomenon.

Amrita Basu highlights "the contradictory images that the BJP has projected since 1989 at the national, state, and local levels".

Basu, while describing the complex and seemingly contradictory strategies in understanding "The puzzle of Hindu nationalism," comes to the conclusion: "... the BJP's support rests in part upon the rage it expresses at the injustices of the present political order.

Furthermore, the BJP has both encouraged and redirected hostilities that emerge from a class, caste, and gender-stratified social context".

The real weakness of the edited volume of Making India Hindu, in spite of rich individual contributions by scholars, arises from a basic methodological flaw because the rise of Hindutva has been seen as sui generis and Indian reality has been projected as co-terminus with the country's defined territorial boundaries.

Of late, religion, with the exception of Western Europe, has emerged as a powerful global phenomenon and it has been raised to the level of the Clash of Civilisations.

Why has religion-based identity assumed global significance? Why has Islam suddenly emerged as a villain in the corridors of decision makers in America and many European countries?

Is the growth of masculine and militant Hindutva a purely Indian phenomenon or can it also be interpreted in the light of global religious revivalism as recently witnessed by the Americans during President George W Bush's election in 2004?

Philip Jenkins, in a seminal work on "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity," observes: "From the 1970s on, you get the growth of not just more conservative religion, but religion with a political bent."

The real scientific social theory is "comparative" and powerful social explanations about the emergence of any significant social and cultural force emerge only by keeping in mind comparative experiences of human beings in spite of the fact that territorial designations may give the impression of insulation or isolation of societies.

In his preface, Ludden correctly mentions that "international trends have continued to inflect Hindu majoritarianism. Indian politics is increasingly sensitive to India's experience of globalisation".

Unfortunately, this relationship between globalisation and the emergence of Hindu or Islamic or Christian fundamentalism in the garb of "religious revivalism" is not the explanatory approach of the contributors to this volume on Hindutva.

Lauric Goodstein in a New York Times article on January 15, 2005, observes: "Almost anywhere you look around the world ... religion is now a rising force. Former communist countries are crowded with mosque builders, Christian missionaries and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs of every possible persuasion ..."

This growth of fundamentalism (including Hindutva) and "evangelists" has led many scholars to ask: Is this the failure of the secular, nationalist agenda? Is it a crisis of the global project of "modernity" and Enlightenment, which has brought back vicious beliefs in religiosity?

Is religion providing "hope" to the hopeless and oppressed millions who are completely alienated from their present social institutions? Is the Sangh Parivar expanding its project of "re-Hinduisation" of the tribal Vanvasi population?

The message of this edited volume is intellectually limited because Hindutva has been explained solely as an "indigenous" phenomenon and no effort has been made to link the growth of religion-based politics in other societies like Arab countries and the United States.

The book is dated because efforts have not been made to link Hindutva with any grand theoretical narrative.

Making India Hindu

David Ludden (ed)
Oxford University Press (2nd edition)
Price: Rs 550;
Pages: 350