Reclaiming Hinduness: A Political History Of India’s Civilisational Identity

Being Hindu: A Political History from Aditya Chola to Narendra Modi. Saumya Dey. BluOne Ink. Pages 224. Rs 414.

A tectonic shift has happened to Indian politics with the massive rise of Hindutva post-2014. Any incumbent observer could feel the change in the Overton Window manifested through prime-time TV debates, news headlines, issues discussed and social media conversations. 

To both connoisseurs and critics alike, it is evident now that Hindutva has arrived in India to stay in the long term.

Typically, the left-liberals portray Hindutva as an extremist ideology, often bracketed along with Nazism. However, Hindutva has demonstrated in the last decade that it is a non-exclusivist and constructive ideology that focuses on a civilisational revival with the empowerment of the marginalised people. 

Prioritising the welfare programmes to uplift the poor across all strata is a testament to this focus. The periodic allegations of exclusionism against Hindutva such as robbing citizenship from its Muslim citizens through the Citizenship Amendment Act or discriminating against Kashmiris for making its status equal to others, did not turn out to have an iota of merit when we examine back the merit of those allegations raised years ago. 

On the other hand, liberals relegated themselves from a balanced centrist mindset to polarising fringe elements. We observe different expressions of this phenomenon over and over again. There was a time when liberals used to take offence to a person for asking someone about his caste. This is not the case anymore with the same liberals parroting the need for asking everyone her/his caste. 

From alleging an ideological connection between Nazism and Hindutva, they are actively desecrating Hindu symbols like Om. From the position of the supremacy of the rule of law, liberals are now endorsing street violence and mob action.

Why have the liberals become so desperate and polarising? The liberals essentially believe in a Western perspective of India. They conceive India as a nation born in 1947 with the only acceptable destiny of becoming another land where the Western ideas spoken in a Western language, are considered sacred. 

A Portuguese once told me that the elite in Angola speak Portuguese in a better diction than him. Well, his words would have sounded like heavenly music to those (presumably) liberal elite of Angola. Once we understand this liberal perspective, we can understand why the liberal views anything from the pagan antiquity of Bharat as a problem. They view Hindutva as an avenue to claim the civilisational space of Bharat, lost through colonisation. As harbingers of the Western civilisation in India, they fight Hindutva, but this fight quintessentially represents “the clash of civilisations”.

To the liberal, going back to the Hindu past is like being lost in a dark haunted mansion with which they are quite uncomfortable, having considered the pre-modern Hindus as primitive and themselves as progressive. 

This liberal worldview faces the challenge of data that tells them that the pagan antiquity of Bharat was the richest land of the globe with far fewer crimes than anywhere else in the world. This Hindu land was scientifically the most advanced one with unmatched social harmony. An ignorant liberal may dismiss all these as myths but a sharper one knows that foreign travellers like Megasthenes and Faxian acknowledged all these.

The Hindu texts do not mention (forget about justifying) any incidence of genocide and obliteration of cultural identity for any people. 

The sharp liberal is not comfortable with this part. The likes of Amartya Sen and William Dalrymple attempt to disconnect the Hindu heritage of antiquity from the Hindu political identity today through their works. This part of manufacturing a Hindu-less ancient India is well-accomplished by the leftist historians who link the Hindu kings to a regional identity. Chola becomes a Tamil king and Shivaji becomes a Maratha lord and so on and so forth. This is why all hell broke loose among the liberals when Sengol, the symbol of Chola royalty, was restored as a symbol of Hindu civilisational polity in the newly designed parliament in New Delhi last year. 

The resistance to this manufacturing of Hindu-less India comes from Saumya Dey who has been trained in the most demonstrably leftist institution in India, the History Department of Jawaharlal Nehru University. After all, Kumaril Bhatta had to train himself in a Buddhist school to defeat the Buddhists in due course in time. 

Although academic, Saumya Dey's Being Hindu: A Political History from Aditya Chola to Narendra Modi is still a very readable book. He has demonstrated the underlying Hinduness of the kings belonging to the pagan antiquity of Bharat for more than a millennium. He started the book with the investiture ceremony of Charlamagne in 800 CE by the papal authority and then, took the same framework to assert the fact that the tradition of Hindu kingship was no different. If medieval Europe could claim to be Christian, medieval India could equally claim to be Hindu. If Industrial Europe could claim itself to be Christian, the post-independent India too should be able to call Herself Hindu. This distinction is significant, as the medieval era was a period of turmoil for Europe, unlike the uninvaded parts of medieval India, which experienced continued prosperity and sustainable peace.  

The book not only portrays that Cholas, Vijayanagara, and Marathas are part of the same Hindu tradition but also tells a story in which these phenomena could be compared to different bubbles rooted in the Hindu psyche for self-rule (Swaraj). This desire manifested in jati-driven organisations, called Communitas, in the British period before the emergence of the Hindu Mahasabha.

Dr Dey establishes with persuasive skills that these movements owe their existence to a previous phenomenon. He began the journey from Aditya Chola — a king who awakened the dormant Cholas to imperial ambitions — but of course, it is an imposition based on the scope of the project, not based on lack of data before Aditya Chola. The journey stops right at Narendra Modi, a phenomenon in his own right, as he becomes the rare prime minister to secure a third consecutive term — not only defying the tide of anti-establishment sentiment but also standing against the powerful global liberal establishment, in a region where countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have experienced significant turmoil recently.

The conclusion is terrific. The typical Marxist idea of ruling out pre-modern political institutions as an expression of popular sentiment is shallow and agenda-driven. This is where my expectation is partially unmet with the book. History is a larger scheme of things in the social sciences.

The left history is based on the liberal dogma: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” This history often portrays the previous generations as shallow and the present people as more intelligent than all of them. Here is a thought experiment for the potential liberal reading this article: How would you like it if your grandchildren considered you stupid? 

In a way, this history disconnects people from their roots to produce rootless lost persons who are easy to be controlled by the global hegemons. History cannot be an instrument of rootlessness but of knowing who we are. This is why history is so critical to education in general. History is not about facts and figures but about connections to be discovered through time. Prof Dey should have explored it a bit further.

Even then, this book is an extremely valuable attempt to academically challenge the Nehruvian consensus on our history. If Indians cannot claim their history — intellectually and argument-wise — there is no hope for claiming Swaraj.