Most Hindu revivalists do accept the term Hindu nationalist. After the Ayodhya-related excitement, with its media exaggerations, died down, the more responsible Western media decided to use this term when discussing the RSS and BJP. It should be kept in mind that in India, nationalism doesn't have the negative connotations that it has in Western intellectual circles. On the contrary, the term is hallowed by its association with the freedom movement. For the people concerned, it simply means "love of one's country," and in all other respects its meaning can vary. Another term that Hindu nationalists themselves often use, and which is now effectively a synonym of "Hindu nationalism," is Hindutva, "Hindu-ness." It is distinct from "Hinduism," in that it designates the "Hindu nation" rather than "Hindu religion." The "Hindu nation" is conceived as including Indians belonging to semi-Hindu religions like Sikhism and Buddhism (whose sacred sites associated with the founders lie in India), but whether it also includes Indian Muslims and Christians is a point of disagreement within the movement.
The Hindu Right
In Leftist writings, it is not uncommon to see Hindu revivalism, particularly its political section, described as "the Hindu Right." Though there is nothing pejorative in the term right in itself (on the contrary, for ages this was the "right" side, while the left side was associated with abnormality and evil), ever since the French Revolution it has become associated with the reactionary defenders of social injustice, the moribund forces of the past. In practice, the very word "rightist" carries an inherent leftist bias. The parties journalistically described as "rightist" (British Tories, German Christian-Democrats, American Republicans, etc.) very rarely call themselves that; only "extreme-rightist" parties do that. Most parties to which the metonymic term rightist is applied identify themselves by means of descriptive terms, like conservative.
The term Hindu Right only applies if an extreme Leftist viewpoint is assumed, as is effectively the case for numerous Indian Hindutva critics: only from that angle is Hindu nationalism consistently found to one's right. To the extent that Hindu revivalism rejects the Marxist reduction of history to economic factors -- a refusal that Marxism construes as a camouflage for support to the status-quo in economic power equations -- Hindu revivalism is, of course, non-Marxist and, if you want, non-Left.
But the decisive objection against the term Hindu Right is that the people concerned will not accept it. In fact, the BJS explicitly described itself as "centrist," e.g.: "As a centrist party, the Jana Sangh has been subjected to attacks both from the extreme right as well as the extreme left." One workable measure of objectivity and neutrality in news reading and scholarship is whether people and groups are classified with terms in which they recognize themselves. When we apply this simple yardstick of objectivity to the available literature on Hindu revivalism, we find most of it wanting.
Macaulayism
Macaulayism is named after the British administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay, who in 1835 initiated an education policy designed to create a class of people Indian in skin color but British in every other respect. "Macaulayites" are those Indians who have interiorized the colonial ideology of the "White Man's Burden" (as Rudyard Kipling called it in a famous poem): the Europeans had to come and liberate the natives, "half devil and half child," from their native culture, which consisted only of ignorance, superstition, and the concomitant social evils; and after this liberation from themselves, these Indians became a kind of honorary Whites.
Macaulay's policy was implemented and became a resounding success. The pre-Macaulayan vernacular system of education was destroyed -- even though British surveys had found it more effective and more democratic than Britain's then-existing education system. A Hindu revivalist diagnosis is given by Ram Swarup:
Above all, there appeared a class of Hindu-hating Hindus who knew all the bad things about Hinduism. Earlier invaders ruled through the sword. The British ruled through Indology. The British took over our education and taught us to look at ourselves through their eyes. They created a class Indian in blood and color, but anti-Hindu in its intellectual and emotional orientation. This is the biggest problem rising India faces -- the problem of self-alienated Hindus.
It is this class of Hindu-born "Macaulayites" which has inherited the mantle of the colonial ruling class. Its most conspicuous representative was the first Prime Minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru, then sometimes nicknamed "India's last Viceroy," and recently evaluated as "the English gentleman who came to ruin India." Reviewer Joseph Shattan describes Jawaharlal's father, Motilal Nehru, as "in Macaulay's famous phrase, 'Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect' . . . There being no vacancies at Eton, in 1905 he packed 15-year-old Jawaharlal off to Harrow, determined that the boy grow up a proper English gentleman. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams; and years later, at Cambridge, Jawaharlal wrote his father asking permission to transfer to Oxford: 'Cambridge is becoming too full of Indians.'"
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