by Amartya Sen
The second difficulty is conceptually deeper. What is seen as a majority depends critically on what principle of classification is used. The people of India can be classified on the basis of different criteria, of which religion is only one. It is, for example, also possible to categorize Indians according to class, or language, or literature, or political beliefs, to mention just a few. What counts as an ‘Indian majority’ depends therefore on the categories into which the nation is classified. There is no unique way of categorizing people.
For example, the status of being a majority in India can be attributed, among other groups, to
(1) the category of low- or middle-income people (say, the bottom 60 per cent of the population);
(2) the class of non-owners of much capital;
(3) the group of rural Indians;
(4) the people who do not work in the organized industrial sector; and
(5) Indians who are against religious persecution.
Each group thus identified is in fact a majority in its respective system of categorization, and their common characteristics can be taken to be important, depending on the context. In order to attach immense significance to the fact that Hindus constitute a majority group in Indian society in one particular system of classification, the priority of that religion-based categorization over other systems of classification would have to be established first.
It is possible to argue that the way a person is to be categorized must be, ultimately, for him or her to determine, rather than everyone being forced into a unique and pre-selected classification that ignores other principles of grouping. The fact that considerably less than a third of the Hindu population in India vote for the parties that belong to the Hindutva family would suggest that the religious identity of Hindutva is not seen as being of primary political importance by a large majority of Indian Hindus.
There is, in fact, nothing particularly odd in this dissociation. When, for example, people from what was then East Pakistan sought – and achieved – separation and independence as Bangladesh, they were not arguing that their principal religious identity was different from what characterized the people of West Pakistan: the vast majority of people in both East and West Pakistan shared the same religious identity. The Easterners wanted separation for reasons that linked firmly with language and literature (particularly the place of their mother tongue, Bengali) and also with political – including secular – priorities. While the statistics of Hindu majority are indeed correct, the use of the statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu country is based on a conceptual confusion: our religion is not our only identity, nor necessarily the identity to which we attach the greatest importance.*
History and Indian Culture
Is the historical reasoning behind seeing India as a mainly Hindu country less problematic and more convincing than the statistical argument? Certainly, the ancientness of the Hindu tradition cannot be disputed. However, other religions, too, have had a long history in India, which has been, for a very long time indeed, a multi-religious country, making room for many different faiths and beliefs. Aside from the obvious and prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a millennium (Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century), India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. Indeed, Chinese scholars regularly described India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’.†
In fact, Buddhism is arguably as much an inheritor of the earlier Indian traditions of the Vedas and the Upaniṣads as Hinduism is, since both the religious traditions drew on these classics. Scholars in China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and other countries to which Buddhism went were introduced to the Upaniṣads mainly through their studies of Buddhism. Jainism, too, has had a similarly long history and in fact has a large presence in India today.
Also, as was discussed in Essay 1, there has been a very long and substantial tradition of atheism and agnosticism in India, which was already well developed in the first millennium BCE. And to this has to be added the early presence, also discussed in Essay 1, of Christians, Jews and Parsees from the first millennium CE, and the late – but vigorous – emergence of Sikhism in India as a universalist conviction that drew on both the Hindu and Islamic traditions but developed a new religious understanding. The high ground of history is certainly not comfortable for a Hindu sectarian outlook, which is one reason why there has been such a flurry of attempts by political fanatics to rewrite Indian history, which has produced much drama and some farce (to which I shall return later on in this essay).
No less importantly, it would be futile to try to have an understanding of the nature and range of Indian art, literature, music, architecture, cinema, theatre or food without seeing the contributions of constructive efforts that have defied the alleged barriers of religious communities.* Indeed, interactions in everyday living, or in cultural activities, are not segregated along communal lines. For example, Ravi Shankar, the magnificent musician and sitarist, may be contrasted with Ali Akbar Khan, the great sarod player, on the basis of their particular mastery over different forms of Indian music, but never as a ‘Hindu musician’ or a ‘Muslim musician’ respectively (though one does happen to be a Hindu and the other a Muslim). The same applies to other fields of cultural creativity, not excluding Bollywood – that great ingredient of Indian mass culture. India’s cultural life does indeed bear the mark of the past, but the mark is that of its interactive and multi-religious history.
Hindus and Muslims in History
Even though Indian history may, in general, be a difficult battleground for the Hindutva view, much more specialized success has been achieved by the Hindutva movement through agitation and propaganda that build on what is trumpeted as a historical ‘guilt’ of the Muslim conquerors who overran India. Indeed, the main political moves to undermine Indian secularism have tended to focus, not on discussing the broad current of India’s social, cultural or intellectual history, but rather on arbitrarily highlighting specially chosen episodes or anecdotes of Muslim maltreatment of Hindus, evidently aimed at generating the desired anti-Muslim and anti-secular sentiments.
These accounts draw on history, but work through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration. It is certainly true that, from the eleventh century, early Muslim invaders did demolish – or mutilate – a remarkable number of temples, at the same time causing general devastation and bloodshed. For example, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, coming from Afghanistan, repeatedly invaded north and west India in the eleventh century, devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and what is now Kathiawar (where the wonderful Somnath temple had been widely renowned for its treasures). Alberuni, the Arab-Iranian traveller and distinguished mathematician, who would later learn Sanskrit and write a great book about India, saw the atrocities and wrote about the nastiness of Mahmud’s barbaric behaviour.12
The ‘slash and burn’ culture of the Muslim invaders, making bloody excursions into India, did, however, gradually give way to immigration into India and to settling in the country, leading to Indianization of Muslim rulers. It would be as silly to deny the barbarities of the invasive history as it would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim presence in India. Recounting the destructions caused by Mahmud of Ghazni and other invaders cannot make us forget the long history of religious tolerance in India, and the fact that the conquering Muslim rulers, despite a fiery and brutal entry, soon developed – with a few prominent exceptions – basically tolerant attitudes.
Muslim rulers in India, such as the Moghals, could hardly be generally characterized as destroyers rather than as builders. Hindutva accounts of Muslim rulers tend to take such a partisan view that they end up being very like the reading of Indian history that Rabindranath Tagore had ridiculed as ‘foreigner’s history’. In an essay written more than a century ago (in
1902), he wrote:
The history of India that we read in schools and memorize to pass examinations is the account of a horrible dream – a nightmare through which India has passed. It tells of unknown people from no one knows where entering India; bloody wars breaking out; father killing son and brother killing brother to snatch at the throne; one set of marauders passing away with another coming in to take its place; Pathan and Mughal, Portuguese, French and English – all helping to add to the nightmarish confusion.13
The history of India does indeed contain many nightmarish elements, but it also includes conversations and discussions, and extensive joint efforts in literature, music, painting, architecture, jurisprudence and a great many other creative activities. And it has included ways and means of allowing people of dissimilar convictions to live peacefully together rather than going constantly for each other’s jugular.
Some Muslim rulers, in particular, were extremely keen on celebrating diversity and on protecting the rights of each religious group to pursue their own beliefs and traditions. Reference has already been made to the great emperor Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, and who was deeply interested in Hindu philosophy and culture along with other religious traditions (such as Christianity and Zoroastrianism). As was discussed in the earlier essays, Akbar tried also to initiate, not with great success, a synthetic religion (the ‘Din-ilahi’), drawing on the different faiths in India. Akbar’s court was filled with Hindu as well as Muslim artists, musicians, painters, scholars and writers, and his pronouncements on tolerance were quite magnificent then and remain rather remarkable, even today. Indeed, Akbar was a major theorist in the direction of toleration, and was a pioneering leader in the world in arranging inter-faith dialogues involving scholars from different religious backgrounds.
Many of the other essays of this volume go into the different ways in which Hindus and Muslims have interacted with each other in cultural, scientific and other creative pursuits. However, since the ancient epics the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata have already figured a certain amount in this book, it would perhaps be interesting to mention that the very successful and extremely popular Bengali translations of these epics owed much to the efforts of the Muslim Pathan kings of Bengal. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s authoritative account of the history of Bengali literature describes the events thus:
The Pathans occupied Bengal early in the thirteenth century…. The Pathan Emperors learned Bengali and lived in close touch with the teeming Hindu population…. The Emperors heard of the far-reaching fame of the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and observed the wonderful influence they exercised in moulding the religious and domestic lives of the Hindus, and they naturally felt the desire to be acquainted with the contents of those poems…. They appointed scholars to translate the works into Bengali which they now spoke and understood. The first Bengali translation of the Mahabharata of which we hear was undertaken at the order of Nasira Saha, the Emperor of Gauda [in Bengal] who ruled for 40 years till 1325 A.D…. The name of the Emperor of Gauda who appointed Krittivasa to translate the Ramayana is not known with certainty. He might be Raja-Kamsanaryana or a Moslem Emperor, but even if he was a Hindu king, there are abundant proofs to show that his court was stamped with Muslim influence.14
Hindutva critics have sometimes focused particularly on the intolerance of Aurangzeb, a later Moghal emperor who ruled from 1658 to 1707. Indeed, some Hindutva sectarians see historical justice in discriminating against Muslims precisely because Aurangzeb is supposed to have done the opposite – discriminating against Hindus – in the late seventeenth century. However, even if Aurangzeb had been the only Muslim ruler in India (he was, of course, one of a great many), the idea of a historical retribution would be exceptionally silly: it is a proposal for matching a historical folly by creating a new folly, penalizing people for ‘sins’ that they did not themselves commit. But also, Aurangzeb clearly was the least tolerant of the long line of Moghal rulers.*
As it happens, Aurangzeb was preceded and followed by other Muslim members of the royalty who took a very different view of religious tolerance, and he himself was surrounded by people who did not share his intolerance. Aurangzeb’s son, also called Akbar, rebelled against his father in 1681, and joined the Hindu Rajput kings to fight his father. As the Rajputs were subdued by Aurangzeb’s army, Aurangzeb’s son continued his battle against his father by joining another Hindu king, Raja Sambhaji, the son of Shivaji who fought the Moghals and who is much revered by contemporary Hindu activists (even the name of the Hindu extremist party ‘Shiv Sena’ commemorates Shivaji, who gets much adoration from militant Hindus of today).†
Aurangzeb’s elder brother, Dara Shikoh, the legitimate heir to the throne of his father, Shah Jahan (the creator of the Taj Mahal), whom Aurangzeb had killed on the way to the Moghal throne, had learned Sanskrit and studied Hindu philosophy extensively. In fact, the heir to the Moghal throne had himself translated into Persian some significant parts of the Upaniṣads, the ancient Hindu scriptures, and compared them – not unfavourably – with the Koran. It is this translation, which Dara did with the assistance of Hindu pundits, that gave many people in West Asia and Europe their first glimpse of Hindu philosophy.‡ To take Aurangzeb as the ‘typical’ Moghal monarch, or as the quintessential Muslim ruler of India, would be an extremely strange historical judgement, aside from the fact that the proposal for matching the intolerance of Aurangzeb by a similar asymmetry today would be remarkably peculiar jurisprudence.
On Inventing the Past
History is an active field of intellectual engagement for the Hindutva movement, and parts of that movement have been very involved in the rewriting of history. Even though it is not surprising, given the nature of the Hindutva creed, that Indian history must play some part in the arguments presented by the movement, it is still worth enquiring precisely why these issues are taken to be so central, as a result of which Indian history has become such a battleground. What is its specific relevance in contemporary Indian politics, and why is Hindutva politics so keen on redescribing the past? I would argue that the answer lies in two specific features of contemporary Hindu politics.
The first is the need for the Hindutva movement to keep together its diverse components and to generate fresh loyalty from potential recruits. The Hindutva movement reaps considerable strategic benefit from the variety of styles and modes of operation that the diversity of organizations within the Parivar allows. As a modern political party in a multi-party functioning democracy, the BJP itself is committed to parliamentary rule, and does, by and large, listen to the views of others. But it can, at the same time, draw on support – sometimes violent support – from other members of the Hindutva family who can stray from the BJP’s cultivated urbanity and provide a harsher force. The ‘two nation’ theory, which – it must be emphasized – is not a part of the BJP doctrine, is championed quite crudely by several sections of the Parivar.
The solidarity of the diverse members of the Sangh Parivar is greatly helped by taking a united view of India’s history as essentially a ‘Hindu civilization’ (it is convenient for them that even a cultural theorist like Samuel Huntington has described India in exactly those terms, as was discussed earlier). The rewriting of India’s history in line with the message of Hindutva is extremely important for the cohesion of different elements in the Sangh Parivar. They can differ on political means and tactics – varying from soft-spoken advocacy to hardheaded violence – but still agree on a grand Hindu vision of India.
The second reason for focusing on India’s past is the large support for the Hindutva movement that comes from the Indian diaspora abroad, particularly in North America and Europe, for whom it is quite important to be able to retain their general Indian nationalist attachment while embracing any other loyalty they may be persuaded to have (such as Hindutva).* The two can be harnessed together by a narrowly Hinduized view of Indian history, which fosters the congruence of a Hindu identity with a more general Indian i
dentity.
The rewriting of India’s history serves the dual purpose of playing a role in providing a common basis for the diverse membership of the Sangh Parivar, and of helping to get fresh recruits to Hindu political activism, especially from the diaspora. It has thus become a major priority in the politics of Hindutva in contemporary India. Following the electoral victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging ‘appropriate’ rewritings of Indian history. Even though this adventure of inventing a past is no longer ‘official’ (because of the defeat of the BJP-led coalition in the general elections in the spring of 2004), that highly charged episode is worth recollecting both because of what it tells us about the abuse of temporal power and also because of the light it throws on the intellectual underpinning of the Hindutva movement.15
The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The ‘reorganization’ of NCERT was accompanied by an ‘overhaul’ of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement.16
The speed of the attempted textbook revision had to be so fast that the newly reconstituted NCERT evidently had some difficulty in finding historians to do this task who would be both reasonably distinguished and adequately compliant. In the early school textbooks that emanated from the NCERT, there was not only the predictable sectarian bias in the direction of the politics of ‘Hindutva’, but also numerous factual mistakes of a fairly straightforward kind. School children were to be taught, in one of the textbooks, that Madagascar was ‘an island in the Arabian sea’ and that Lancashire had been ‘a fast-growing industrial town’. The newly devised history of India in the new textbooks prepared by the Government of India received sharp criticism in the media and in public discussions that followed. The reviews in the major newspapers were almost uniformly disparaging. ‘Bloomers Galore in the NCERT Texts’, was the news headline in the Hindusthan Times.17
