by Sudhir Kakar
Search for Hinduness
The instrumentalist approach to ethnicidentity, however, makes, an important contribution by pointing out that these identities are not fixed and immutable but more or less variable. The self-consciousness of being a Hindu today is not of the same order as at other times in India’s history. What is today called ‘Hinduism’ has emerged through many encounters between dissenting sects professing diverse beliefs and with other, more self-conscious religions, such as Islam and Christianity.
Today, there is a new Hindu identity under construction in many parts of India, especially the northern and central states. It is a process which is undoubtedly propelled by the fact that this identity is also the basis of political mobilization by the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). Created out of a preexisting though ill-defined and amorphous Hinduism the new identity bears only a faint family resemblance to its progenitors. Indeed, as we saw in the first chapter, some scholars argue that the sharply differentiated cultural identities of Hindus and Muslims which we encounter today, with their heightened self-consciousness, the kind of commitment they command, and the intensity with which these identities are pursued politically, are a creation of the British colonial period. They are not only a product of the colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies which led to the emergence of ‘identity politics’ but are also a consequence of the imposition of alien modes of thought on native Indian categories. The political scientist Don Miller remarks:
By their education, legislation, administration, judicial codes and procedures and even by that apparently simple operation of ‘objective’ classification, the census, the British unwittingly imposed dualistic ‘either-or’ oppositions as the ‘natural’ normative order of thought. In a multitude of ways, Indians learned that one is either this or that; that one cannot be both or neither or indifferent. The significance of identity thus became a new, paramount concern…an orthodoxy of being was gradually replacing a heterodoxy of beings.15
Leaving the issue of pinpointing the time and place of birth of the new Hindu identity in the late 20th century to historians—an identity which its critics have decried as Hindu nationalism, Hindu militancy, or Hindu fundamentalism—we can only observe that this identity selects many of its symbols, myths, and images from traditional stock. The cultural values and forms it endorses have a recognizable ancestry. In its strong links with the past, this Hindu identity is neither wholly new nor completely old. It is constructed, yet also revived; it is a combination of the made and the given. The social and political forces which are self-consciously active in its constructed revival, the sangh parivar, have some truth on their side when they maintain that the elements of this new Hindu identity were always there; it is just that people did not see them before. The question of whether those propagating the new Hindu identity are embarked on its construction or merely on its articulation for others does not have a simple answer. The answer depends upon whether the vantage point is of an outside observer or of the insider directly engaged in the process. In any event, the political countering of this Hindu identity will involve the offer of a different Hindutva with other images, symbols, and myths of the Hindu ethos rather than any abstract concept of secularism, which for most Hindus is empty of all psychological meaning.
The Virtuous Virago
To look more closely at the constructed revival of Hindu identity, I have chosen as my text a speech by Sadhavi Rithambra, one of the star speakers for the sangh parivar, the prefix sadhavi being the female counterpart of sadhu, a man who has renounced the world in search of personal salvation and universal welfare within the Hindu religious worldview. It is reported that Rithambra was a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Khanna, a village in the Punjab, when she had a strong spiritual experience while listening to a discourse by Swami Parmananda, one of the many ‘saints’ in the forefront of Hindu revivalism.16 Rithambra abandoned her studies and home and joined Parmananda’s ashram. Soon she began travelling with her guru to religious meetings in the Hindi heartland and after a while addressed a few herself. Her oratorial talents were noticed by the political leadership of the sangh parivar and, after being given some training in voice modulation, she was well on her way to become the leading firebrand in the Hindu cause.
The speech I have chosen was given at Hyderabad in April 1991, a few weeks after the general election for the national Parliament and many state assemblies were announced. The speech is a standard one which Rithambra has given all over India to the enthusiastic response of hundreds of thousands of people. The political context of the speech is the bid by the BJP, the political arm of the sangh family, to capture power in some north Indian states in the coming elections and to emerge as the single largest party in the national Parliament. In the preceding months, the BJP had determined the country’s political agenda by its mobilization of Hindus on the issue of constructing a temple to the god Rama at Ayodhya, his reputed birthplace. The construction of this temple had become an explosive and divisive issue since the designated site was already occupied by the Babri Masjid, a mosque built by Babar, the Muslim invader from Central Asia who was the founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled over large parts of India for over 400 years. There had been much bloodshed five months earlier as many Hindus, the kar-sevaks, lost their lives in police firing when they attempted to defy legal orders and begin the temple construction, a step which required demolition or at least relocation of the existing mosque. The killings of unarmed Rama bhaktas—devotees of Rama—in Ayodhya led to a spate of riots between Hindus and Muslims in other parts of the country, including Hyderabad, a city with an almost equal proportion of the two communities and where the tension between them over the years had regularly erupted in communal violence.
The political context of the speech, the theme of temple versus mosque, the abundance of imagery and allusions in its text to the narratives of the epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the person of the speaker herself are all replete with symbolic resonances, evocations, and associations. They virtually reek with a surfeit of meaning that burrows deep into the psychic recesses of the audience, going well beyond the words used as its carriers. Listening to her speak, the earlier question is once again raised: Is she an elite manipulator of Hindu cultural symbols (instrumental theory) or is she an articulator of what many Hindus feel but cannot express (primordialist viewpoint)? The answer is again not in terms of either/or but of the simultaneity of both processes. Rithambra appeals to a group identity while creating it. She both mirrors her listeners’ sentiments and gives them birth. My impression is that the images, metaphors, and mythological allusions of her speech have a resonance for the audience because they also have a resonance for her. This does not imply that the speech is a spontaneous pouring out of her heart. Like an actor she has honed this particular speech through successive deliveries and knows what ‘works’. It is not raw feeling but carefully crafted emotion; an epic poem rather than a scream or a shout. Rithambra’s power lies less in her persuasiveness on an intellectual, cognitive plane than on the poetic (Greek poiesis—a making, shaping) that permeates her speech. It is this poetic which gives a first form to what are for her audience only vaguely or partially ordered feelings and perceptions, makes a shared sense out of already shared circumstances.17
As a renouncer of worldly life, a sanyasin, Rithambra conjures up the image of selflessness. Associatively, she is not a politician stirred by narrow electoral considerations or identified with partisan interest groups but someone who is moved by the plight of the whole country, even concerned with the welfare of all mankind. As an ascetic who has renounced all sexual activity, she evokes the image of the virgin goddess, powerful because virgin, a power which is of another, ‘purer’ world. There is also a subtle sexual challenge to the men in her audience to prove their virility (vis-à-vis the Muslim) in order to deserve her.
The key passages in the text of her speech are delivered as rhyming verses, in the tradition of bardic narration of stories from t
he Hindu epics. Perhaps people tend to believe verse more than prose, especially in Hindu India where the transmission of sacred knowledge has traditionally been oral and through the medium of rhymed verse. In any event, implicit in her speech is the claim to be less tainted with the corruption of language, a corruption which is widely laid at the door of the politician and which has led people to lose faith in what they hear from public platforms. It Rithambra is a politician, hers is the politics of magic that summons forces from the deep, engaging through coded ideas and ideals the deeper fears and wishes of her Hindu audiences whom she and the sangh parivar are determined to make ‘more’ Hindu. As I listened to her I was once again reminded of Milan Kundera’s statement that ‘political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.’
Hail Mother Sita! Hail brave Hanuman! Hail Mother India! Hail the birthplace of Rama! Hail Lord Vishwanath [Shiva] of Kashi [Benares]! Hail Lord Krishna! Hail the eternal religion [dharma]! Hail the religion of the Vedas! Hail Lord Mahavira! Hail Lord Buddha! Hail Banda Bairagi! Hail Guru Gobind Singh! Hail the great sage Dayananda! Hail the great sage Valmiki! Hail the martyred kar-sevaks! Hail Mother India!
In ringing tones Rithambra invokes the various gods and revered figures from Indian history, ancient and modern. The gods and heroes are not randomly chosen. In their careful selection, they are markers of the boundary of the Hindu community she and the sangh parivar would wish to constitute today and believe existed in the past. Such a commemoration is necessarily selective since it must silence contrary interpretations of the past and seek to conserve only certain of its aspects. The gods and heroes are offered up as ego ideals, to be shared by members of the community in order to bring about and maintain group cohesion. Identity implies definition rather than blurring, solidity rather than flux or fluidity, and therefore the question of boundaries of a group become paramount. Rithambra begins the construction of Hindu identity by demarcating this boundary.
In the context of the preceding year’s agitation around the construction of the Rama temple, the god Rama occupies the highest watchtower on the border between Hindu and non-Hindu. Rithambra starts by praising Rama’s wife, the goddess Sita, and his greatest devotee, the monkey god Hanuman, who are then linked to contemporary concerns as she hails Rama’s birthplace where the sangh parivar wishes to construct the controversial temple and around which issue it has sought a mobilization of the Hindus.
The 5000-year-old religion, however, with a traditional lack of central authority structures such as a church and with a diffused essence, has over the centuries thrown up a variety of sects with diverse beliefs. It is Rithambra’s purpose to include all the Hinduisms spawned by Hinduism. The presiding deity of the Shaivite sects, Shiva, is hailed, as is Krishna, the most popular god of the Vaishnavas.
The overarching Hindu community is then sought to be further enlarged by including the followers of other religions whose birthplace is India. These are the Jains, the Buddhists, and the Sikhs, and Rithambra devoutly hails Mahavira, Buddha, and the militant last guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh who, together with Banda Bairagi, has the added distinction of a lifetime of armed struggle against the Mughals. Nineteenth-century reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj are welcomed by including its founder Dayananda Saraswati in the Hindu pantheon. The Harijans or ‘scheduled castes’, the former ‘untouchables’ of Hindu society, are expressly acknowledged as a part of the Hindu society by hailing Valmiki, the legendary author of the Ramayana who has been recently elevated to the position of the patron saint of the Harijans.
From gods and heroes of the past, a link is established to the collective heroism of the kar-sevaks, men and women who in their bid to build the temple died in the police firing at Ayodhya. The immortal gods and the mortal heroes from past and present are all the children of Mother India, the subject of the final invocation, making the boundaries of the Hindu community coterminous with that of Indian nationalism.
1 have come to the Hindus of Bhagyanagar [Hyderabad] with a message. The saints who met in Allahabad directed Hindu society to either bend the government to its will or to remove it. The government has been removed. On fourth April, more than two and a half million Hindus displayed their power at the lawns of Delhi’s Boat Club. We went to the Parliament but it lay empty. The saints said, fill the Parliament with the devotees of Rama. This is the next task of Hindu society.
As far as the construction of the Rama temple is concerned, some people say Hindus should not fight over a structure of brick and stone. They should not quarrel over a small piece of land. I want to ask these people, ‘if someone burns the national flag will you say “Oh, it doesn’t matter. It is only two metres of cloth which is not a great national loss.’” The question is not of two metres of cloth but of an insult to the nation. Rama’s birthplace is not a quarrel about a small piece of land. It is a question of national integrity. The Hindu is not fighting for a temple of brick and stone. He is fighting for the preservation of a civilization, for his Indianness, for national consciousness, for the recognition of his true nature. We shall build the temple!
It is not the building of the temple but the building of India’s national consciousness. You, the wielders of state power, you do not know that the Rama temple is not a mere building. It is not a construction of brick and stone. It is not only the birthplace of Rama. The Rama temple is our honour. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity. We shall raise its flag. We shall build the temple!
Hindi is a relatively passionate language. Its brilliant, loud colours are impossible to reproduce in the muted palette of English. As the Rama temple takes shape in Rithambra’s cascading flow of language, as she builds it, phrase by phrase, in the mind of her listeners, it evokes acute feelings of a shared social loss. The Rama temple, then, is a response to the mourning of Hindu society: a mourning for lost honour, lost self-esteem, lost civilization, lost Hinduness. It is the maternal and social counterpart of the individual experience of mourning. In a more encompassing formulation, the Rama birthplace temple is like other monuments which, as Peter Homans perceptively observes:
engage the immediate conscious experience of an aggregate of egos by representing and mediating to them the lost cultural experiences of the past; the experiences of individuals, groups, their ideas and ideals, which coalesce into what can be called a collective memory. In this the monument is a symbol of union because it brings together the particular psychological circumstances of many individuals’ life courses and the universals of their otherwise lost historical past within the context of their current or contemporary social processes and structures.18
The temple is the body in which Hindu identity is sought to be embodied.
Some people became afraid of Rama’s devotees. They brought up Mandai.a They thought the Hindu will get divided. He will be fragmented by the reservations issue. His attention will be diverted from the temple. But your thought was wrong. Your thought was despicable. We shall build the temple!
I have come to tell our Hindu youth, do not take the candy of reservations and divide yourself into castes. If Hindus get divided, the sun of Hindu unity will set. How will the sage Valmiki look after Sita? How will Rama eat Shabri’s berries [ber]?b Those who wish that our bonds with the backward castes and the Harijans are cut will bite dust. We shall build the temple!
Listen, Rama is the representation of mass consciousness. He is the god of the poor and the oppressed. He is the life of fishermen, cobblers, and washermen.c If anyone is not a devotee of such a god, he does not have Hindu blood in his veins. We shall build the temple!
Marking its boundary, making it aware of a collective cultural loss, giving it a body, is not enough to protect and maintain the emerging Hindu identity. For identity is not an achievement but a process constantly threatened with rupture by forces from within and without.
Constant vigil is needed to guard it fr
om that evil inside the group which seeks to divide what has been recently united, to disrupt and fragment what has been freshly integrated. Rithambra addresses the feeling of threat and singles out the political forces representing this threat which must be defeated at the coming battle of the ballot box.
My Hindu brothers! Stop shouting that slogan, ‘Give one more push and break the Babri mosque! The mosque is broken, the mosque is broken!!’ What mosque are you talking about? We are going to build our temple there, not break anyone’s mosque. Our civilization has never been one of destruction. Intellectuals and scholars of the world, wherever you find ruins, wherever you come upon broken monuments, you will find the signature of Islam. Wherever you find creation, you discover the signature of the Hindu. We have never believed in breaking but in constructing. We have always been ruled by the maxim, ‘The world is one family [Vasudhe kuttumbkam]. We are not pulling down a monument, we are building one.
Scholars, turn the pages of history and tell us whether the Hindu, riding a horse and swinging a bloody sword, has ever trampled on anyone’s human dignity? We cannot respect those who have trod upon humanity. Our civilization has given us great insights. We see god in a stone, we see god in trees and plants. We see god in a dog and run behind him with a cup of butter. Hindus, have you forgotten that the saint Namdev had only one piece of bread to eat which was snatched by a dog. Namdev ran after the dog with a cup of butter crying, ‘Lord, don’t eat dry bread. Take some butter too!!’ Can the Hindu who sees god even in a dog ever harbour resentment towards a Muslim?
