One of the most pernicious things that has happened to intellectual life is the idea of colonialism over-determining everything to do with India. (Source: AP photo/Representational)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. Recently, the actor Kamal Haasan was reported as referring to this idea in his historical critique of Ponniyin Selvan 1, 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.
One of the most pernicious things that has happened to intellectual life is the idea of colonialism over-determining everything to do with India. In part, this is because few historians of modern India or social scientists understand pre-modern sources, or are connected to deeper cultural idioms. In part, because over-determination by colonialism made life politically easy. It also made it easier to hold on to a post-colonial resentment which has become a substitute for genuine anti-colonialism. But there was also a kind of opportunism in this. I was at a conference once where a prominent figure from “the Left” was very happy saying Hinduism is a colonial invention. But in the same breath they said caste and Hinduism go together, and caste is centuries old. A scholar from the “Right” was very happy to say that caste was a colonial invention but Hinduism was eternal. The “colonial invention” thesis is also now used as and when politically convenient.
Colonialism, of course, transforms the way we talk about Hinduism through its legal codification, enumeration, and translation. But the “colonial invention” thesis borders on nonsense. It is true that the word “Hindu” as a mode of self-identification is used much more rarely before the 18th century, though its use is much more widespread than has been previously acknowledged, both in philosophical and poetry texts. Just to take a random example, this consciousness is very much pronounced in Eknath, and it has both political and religious connotations. Second, there is a deeper philosophical issue of whether a category can exist without some term being used for it. Third, it is striking the degree to which almost all foreign observers for centuries, from Greeks to Muslims, both recognised the deep contestation and plurality within India, and yet had an uncanny sense that this plurality was operating within a field that made it distinctive.
The term “Hindu”, as applied by most foreign observers, was always shot through with an ambiguity that still marks discussions of Hindu identity. But most of them did not succumb to the lazy argument, it’s just all diverse with no interconnection. Irfan Habib had given a gloss on one such attempt in the Dabistan-i-Mazahib, where Hindus come to be defined as “those who have been arguing with each other within the same framework of argument over the centuries,” a gesture that both acknowledges diversity and contestation but also common stakes in the argument. Fourth, there is often a ridiculous ignorance of how ontology and experience works in Hinduism.
The idea being propounded, for example, that there were “only Vaishnavas and Shaivas, no Hindus” is again curiously off base. It is a strange fetishisation of iconography, or social divisions, completely ignoring the wider cosmology that co-produces all these gods, as if you can imagine a Hindu cosmological world where Shiva and Vishnu exist without each other. Even the claim that there were only “sects” is off, since sects are parasitic upon a whole. When Shaivas and Vaishnavas are arguing over whether Supreme Consciousness is best expressed in Shiva or Vishnu, there is a contest over hierarchy but that presupposes a common frame of ontological experience.
Or think, in other contexts, where my well-meaning Left Bengali friends would try and draw a sharp line between Shaivas and Shaktas, only to run into a figure like Abhinavagupta. In fact, these rigid distinctions don’t even apply to modern self-conscious sects: The rigid lines between Brahmoism and Vaishnavism also quickly crumble under scrutiny.
If the Hindutva project is to homogenise and centralise Hinduism, the answer to that cannot be the historically ill-founded and philosophically inept strategy of denying the historical existence of Hinduism altogether. Or worse, to imagine that pre-modern Hinduism is simply an endless proliferation of sects, walled up, with few interconnections and not dependent on a shared cosmology, social system, or even intellectual concerns. It is to reduce Hinduism to simply an aesthetic heteroglossia, and not take seriously any of its imaginative constructions, intellectual endeavours or practices. If Hindutva uses identity to erase diversity, it is also important to avoid the opposite fallacy: To use diversity to deny the fact that the diverse parts may also be parasitic on referencing a larger whole, and common canons of contestation.
The colonial construction thesis simply comes in the way of a deeper understanding of pre-colonial India. The more one reads pre-colonial texts, the more one is struck by the fact that the danger with Hinduism is not that it had no identity, but that its identity is too strong and self-satisfied, especially in relation to those it considers outsiders. One way of marking this is to see how little it engages with intellectual frames of reference that come from outside the sub-continent. It has come in the way of acknowledging the more complicated histories of conflict and compromise. Second, it has produced an academic culture that in large parts is deeply ignorant of how Hinduism works; it has made the academic study of Hinduism a prisoner of false binaries. But it is also self-defeating. It is naïve to think that a proper answer to Hindutva will be a deeper psychological cut that gives credence to its worst fears, to deny it any historical standing whatsoever.
Saying Hinduism is a colonial construct does not delegitimise Hindutva; it reinforces its central claim about the blasé ways in which Hinduism is sometimes conceptualised. The debate over Hinduism requires greater theological imagination, philosophical subtlety and historical nuance.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express