Restoring Objectivity: Warring With Words

By Koenraad Elst In the introduction to his book , Decolonizing the Hindu Mind , Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst argues that Western-based reporters and scholars fail to recognize biased and misleading terminology used by their Indian counterparts. The following is an excerpt from his discussion of particularly problematic terms, including: Hindu Revivalism, Hindu Fundamentalism, Communalism, Hindu Nationalism, the Hindu Right, and Macaulayism. To read further, see Part Two of this excerpt, in which he discusses Secularism, Pseudo-secularism, Marxism, and Majoritarianism. To find out about the thought animating a social, cultural, and political movement, one must simply listen and read what its acknowledged spokesmen have to say. The need of the hour is to get acquainted with what Hindu revivalists are really saying and to restore objectivity to the discussion. Objectivity has been under attack on two fronts. One is the "postmodern" form of Marxism (quite powerful in American universities), which denies the very notion of objective knowledge, assumes that knowledge is conditioned by one's social belonging, and insists that "all research in the social sciences has a political agenda." In practice, this means that once an author has been identified as belonging to the wrong interest group, his arguments are ipso facto wrong or vitiated. In a large part of the academic publications, this position is implicit in their way of foregoing any serious evaluation of arguments formulated by Hindu revivalists, as if the identification of the propounder of the argument as a "Hindu fundamentalist" were sufficient to put his arguments beyond the pale of rational discourse. Thus, the Hindu litany of grievances against the inequalities imposed on Hinduism by the Indian state (a major issue) is commonly only mentioned as an object of ridicule, never of proper investigation. The second problem is that many India-watchers who do believe in the principle of objectivity have nonetheless published books and papers on the present topic that suffer serious lapses from the normal scholarly standards. The exacting standards of objectivity are obviously a permanent challenge to scholars in any field, but this field, or at least its present-day state of the art, presents some peculiar problems. In some cases, the bias may be in the mind of the India-watcher, but the overriding problem is that even scholars and journalists who do try to be objective frequently rely on Indian sources that have considerable standing but are nonetheless far from objective. There is, apparently, an assumption of cultural solidarity in which Western India watchers regard their Indian colleagues, "our men in India," as representatives of enlightened modernity who stand above the ongoing conflicts between the native barbarians. This, in spite of the conspicuous fact that many Indian academics use very partisan language when addressing the issue of Hindu revivalism. However, we shall show that the very basics of this research are highly problematic: numerous presumably non-partisan sources are tainted by a partisan involvement that outsiders tend to ignore or misunderstand, and even the terminology that conditions the whole discourse on India's religious conflict is often unclear and sometimes the object of deliberate manipulation. My intention is to avoid these traps and clear away the cobwebs at the only entrance to a real understanding of Hindu revivalism, viz. to let the primary sources speak. What follows is a brief glossary of the typical terminology encountered in the primary and secondary literature on Hindu revivalism. A number of these terms represent false trails, theories, or rhetoric that contribute nothing to our understanding of Hindu revivalism -- this in spite of their tremendous popularity as explanation models in circles with little knowledge of the primary material. Others are very ordinary terms whose meaning suddenly becomes problematic when used in the context of "Hindu revivalism." Hindu Revivalism The focus of this study is most aptly termed Hindu revivalism, a broad trend in 19th-and 20th-century India that seeks to revive Hinduism after a benumbing near-millennium of political, ideological, and psychological subjection to Islamic and Western hegemony. Hindu revivalism is a many-pronged attempt to ensure the survival of Hinduism by integrating the gains of modernity in Hindu civilization (in that sense, it is of course not a revival of anything ancient in unchanged form), as well as by intellectually and politically fighting off the perceived threats posed by Islam, Christianity, and a string of secular ideologies, of which Marxism is the most articulate. The Hindu revivalist movement perceives itself as the cultural chapter of India's decolonization. It tries to free the Indians from the colonial condition at the mental and cultural level, to complete the process of political and economic decolonization. The need for "reviving" Hinduism springs from the fact that the said hostile ideologies (mostly Islam) have managed to eliminate Hinduism physically in certain geographical parts and social segments of India, and also (mostly the Western ideologies) to neutralize the Hindu spirit among many nominal Hindus. Hindu Fundamentalism It should already be clear that the movement under consideration cannot be called "Hindu fundamentalism." The reason is not that, as Hindu revivalists commonly argue, "a Hindu cannot be a fundamentalist because the concept of fundamentalism is specific to the Biblical-Koranic tradition." The role of "scripture" is, indeed, not exactly the same in Hinduism as in the "religions of the Book," among other reasons, because there is a plurality of Hindu scriptures. Rather, the key point is that that segment of Hindu opinion that we are considering in the present study does not belong to this scripturalist tendency, even though it may embellish its manifestoes with an occasional (and often creatively reinterpreted) Vedic quotation. Most certainly, it is "not fundamentalist in the sense of being scripturalist." Fundamentalist movements invariably oppose the lukewarm and compromising tendencies within their own religion; such is not the case at all in Hindu revivalism, which focuses on confronting non-Hindu doctrines or social forces and uniting all Hindus. Fundamentalism, in the true sense of the word, is not in evidence in the Hindu revivalist movement. Communalism One of the most frequently used terms in India-watching is communalism, a term unknown to most Westerners. Its roots lie in the British colonial policy of taking "communities" as the relevant units in recruitment or in the allotment of seats in representative assemblies. Originally, the term had no pejorative connotation. Today, communalism is one of those labels allotted exclusively to people who reject it; it is a term of abuse. This distortion of an otherwise well-defined and useful term started in the 1920s, when Congress leaders took to using it for (i.e., against) Hindu organizations, even though the latter opposed communal electorates and recruitment quota that the Congress had endorsed. Even when Congress became a party to the Partition of India on a communal basis (Pakistan for Muslims, India for non-Muslims), which these Hindu organizations kept on opposing, Congress kept on denouncing the latter as "Hindu communalists." To justify this shift in meaning, a symmetry was assumed between minority organizations that favored the communal principle and Hindu organizations that opposed it, in the sense that both defended the perceived interests of their own community. The definition of the term was changed. The effective meaning of communalism in post-Partition India is explicated by the Marxist historian Bipan Chandra as "the belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common social, political and economic interests." This definition is generally accepted and used, e.g., by Saral Jhingran: "By communalism is meant the assertion that the secular interests of a group of persons are coextensive with its religious identity." This definition, is, unfortunately, quite wrong. It does not satisfy the defining criterion of a definition, viz. that its semantic domain be coterminous with the phenomenon it seeks to define. When Bipan Chandra and Saral Jhingran talk about "communalism," they certainly include issues like the agitation against cow-slaughter, the Hindu and Muslim agitations concerning the temple or mosque in Ayodhya, and the Satanic Verses affair. These examples involve not "common economic, political, social and cultural interests," but purely religious concerns -- that the birthplace of Rama or the fair name of the Prophet is being violated. Such controversies are not covered by Bipan Chandra's definition of "communalism." The fact that nowadays the label "communalist" is systematically applied to people who never describe themselves as such, and most of whom go out of their way to deny that they are "communalists," should caution scholars to handle it with utmost care. It may be legitimate to sit down and collect evidence for the thesis that "the Hindu nationalists are communalists," but it is not legitimate, at least not from the viewpoint of scholarly or journalistic duty, to routinely replace their chosen self-description with the externally imposed label "communalist." Hindu Nationalism 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.'" Hindu commentator S.R. Goel, in Hindu and Hinduism, Manipulation of Meanings , observes: "One has to read Nehru's writings and speeches, and evaluate his policies from a Hindu point of view, to realize that, so far as Hindus and Hinduism are concerned, he was a combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, White Man's Burden and communism -- that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions or interventions." This class of mostly Hindu-born Macaulayites has shaped the institutions of post-1947 India, including its de facto state ideology, secularism. Read Part Two on secularism, Marxism, and majoritarianism here. Dr. Koenraad Elst was born in Leuven, Belgium, on August 7, 1959, into a Flemish (Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family. During a stay at the Benares Hindu University, he discovered India's communal problem and wrote his first book about the budding Ayodhya conflict. He has frequently returned to India to study various aspects of its ethno-religio-political configuration and interviewed Hindu and other leaders and thinkers. This article is an excerpt from his book , Decolonizing the Hindu Mind , and is reprinted with permission. The pictures are added.

Restoring Objectivity: Warring with Words