Why 'Liberals' Tie Themselves Into Knots Over Hinduism And Hindutva

One must empathise with Left-liberals who have to perform a high-wire balancing act just to acknowledge the obvious.

For the Left-liberal, Hinduism did not exist before the British came to rule over us; but caste rigidity, which was as much a colonial legacy as anything else, must be labelled as intrinsically Hindu and ancient.

And even when this backdoor nod to Hinduism’s existence is accepted, it must be contrasted with vile Hindutva, so that only negative linkages remain to the term “Hindu”.

The latest “liberal” to do this kind of balancing act is Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who called out the tendency among some intellectuals to deny Hinduism’s existence before colonial interventions made the term more widely usable to describe an Indic plurality.

But before he acknowledged the obvious, from the very first line of his article, he sought to differentiate Hindutva from Hinduism.

He wrote: “In part as a reaction to the spiritual desecration, homogenisation and centralisation of Hinduism that Hindutva represents, there is a temptation to take recourse to the idea that Hinduism is a colonial invention and no such identity existed before the 19th century.”

Really? Is it the votaries of Hindutva who are desecrating Hinduism or its mindless critics?

The context of Mehta’s observation was a recent statement by actor Kamal Haasan, a covert Hinduphobe, who critiqued the film Ponniyin Selvan-I, based on a popular novel written by the late Kalki Krishnamurthy and serialised in the Tamil magazine Kalki in the sixties.

The novel has had, and continues to have, a cult following among some sections of Tamilians. It is a piece of historical fiction set in the Chola era, where some of the finest Hindu temples were built. Most major Tamil dynasties, whether Cholas or Pandyas or Pallavas, were great temple builders.

But Kamal Haasan would have none of it. There was no Hinduism in the Chola era, he said. There were Shaivites and Vaishnavites, no Hindus.

To debunk this nonsense, Mehta, in an article in The Indian Express, had to resort to the subterfuge of bringing in Hindutva to contrast with Hinduism.

He wrote: “Recently, the actor Kamal Haasan was reported as referring to this idea in his historical critique of Ponniyin Selvan-I, to flag the dangers of homogenisation in modern representations of Hinduism.

"Kamal Haasan’s critique has a local context in Tamil Nadu politics. But increasingly, this idea of Hinduism as a British invention is seen as some kind of intellectual response to the claims of Hindutva.

"Many academics and self-proclaimed secularists spout this idea, as if this was common sense. But this idea is itself philosophically naïve, culturally ignorant and even politically self-defeating.”

Mehta is right to indirectly point out that the mainstream Dravidian political discourse in Tamil Nadu is anti-Hindu, but why does he need to bring in Hindutva, and give it a negative connotation, just to be able to say that denying the existence of Hinduism was “philosophically naïve, culturally ignorant and even politically self-defeating.”

Clearly, liberals fear being cancelled by their own for merely accepting the reality of Hinduism’s pre-colonial existence.

Mehta is bang on when he notes that a category can exist even though it may not have a name attached to it, especially when almost every foreign source assumed that India’s plurality existed “within a field that made it distinctive.”

As one TV debate participant noted, we don’t say the human species did not exist before the term homo sapiens was invented. We don’t say the American continent did not exist before Amerigo Vespucci and Columbus brought it to the notice of Europeans.

The real problem is why Mehta thinks Hindutva is about “spiritual desecration, homogenisation and centralisation of Hinduism?” Is the search for common elements (our collective “Hinduness”) a form of homogenisation and centralisation?

While religion can be vulgarised by (for example) the use of loud Bollywood music during festivals, but is this “spiritual desecration” when Hinduism does not hold spirituality to be something different from basic human desires?

Hinduism embeds both sublime spirituality and earthy physicality. The four purusharthas: Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha, embody this multiplicity of human aspirations. Sensory pleasures were never deemed to be antithetical to more spiritual pursuits.

Where is the attempt at homogeneity, when all that is being attempted under the banner of Hindutva is to find common elements of identity in order to protect the interests of the collective?

Take a different example. When there is no caste called Dalit, why are so many different and unrelated jatis seeking to band themselves together under the term Dalit?

Why do we have a term called feminism, when we know that every woman is different from other women, and groups different from other groups? Is this an attempt at homogeneity?

If Hindutva is homogenisation, then Dalitism – the search for an overarching identity in order to protect common interests and rights - is invalid too.

The real issue is not that Hindus are trying to find common linkages to one another, but why they need to do so.

Unlike religions which had clear founders and a set of defined fundamentals, where commonality is defined by these two factors, Hinduism is a ground-up religion that grew from this soil.

Soft unity was forged through interactions, contestations, debates and by borrowing ideas from one another.

Put simply, the three religions that originated from desert cults and three Indian ones – Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism – started with a unified set of ideas and then developed diversity.

Hinduism started at the other end, with plurality as the norm, and then seeking spiritual and temporal unity. Given its origins and development over five millennia, it is easier to divide Hindus than unite them.

Which is why the predatory and expansionist religions find it easier to recruit new members by exploiting internal fault-lines. To guard against this, Hindus need to find common elements for unifying them and survive these assaults.

This is not the same as homogenisation and centralisation.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta should focus on the truth that he finds relevant, not try to create imaginary threats to plurality through homogenisation and “spiritual desecration”.

He could have merely said that Hinduism-deniers have no clothes, but he chose to clothe his statement by pointing in a different direction to balance the truth with some untruth. He probably fears being "cancelled".

Also Read: Hinduism v/s Hindutva: A False Dichotomy