Hindutva is not Hindu modernity; it is populism
Apologists for Islamism, extreme nationalism or Hindutva alike often gratuitously speak the language of modernity. Worse, they would have us believe that a newer expression of these ideologies is somehow enough to meet the criteria of modernity. The fact that there is, at least, a tacit admission of the need to be modern is good. The discreet aim, however, behind passing off renewed traditions as modernity, is to create a basis for their acceptance and legitimacy.
I write in response to Abhinav Prakash Singh’s piece, Why Hindutva is Hindu modernity, published in this newspaper. Starting with England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, and ending roughly a century later with the French Revolution, modernity is first and foremost a rejection of old ideas. Its foundations lay as much in radically new social ideas as in the progress of science. Christianity’s core ideas were shaken by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Voltaire’s unflinching idea of liberty, including hedonism, shocked the establishment of the day. John Stuart Mill’s democracy as a “government by discussion” and the Hobbesian world where the State has all monopoly over violence — these constitute the bedrock of modernity.
The essential features of modernity are liberalism, free will, freedom of thought, secularism, equality, anti-clericalism, and, above all, the application of reason. These ideas then laid the foundations of modern institutions, such as democracy and capitalism. Having given a sense of what we might call modernity, let us examine Hindutva.
Modernity came about as a challenge to the tyranny of traditions, while Hindutva is thoroughly informed by traditions emanating from Hinduism. Yet, the two are not the same. VD Savarkar, an atheist thinker who coined the term Hindutva, brilliantly begins his Essentials of Hindutva with a sharp distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva, drawing an analogy not from any ancient Hindu text, but from Romeo and Juliet, asking what’s in a name. A lot, he goes on to explain. “Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva”.
Our quibbles begin here. To project Hindutva as “Hindu” modernity conflates the two terms, an error Savarkar himself avoided. Hindutva is an all-encompassing idea of “our Hindu race”, Savarkar wrote, making race and culture sacred.
On the contrary, an important feature of modernity is its “desacralising” impact. It rejects anything sacred. Neither the clergy, nor the Church is sacred anymore; neither race nor the human body, making it possible to sell and buy human labour at a market price.
The social contract within the ambit of modernity is mediated by citizenship, which is the highest legal status of an individual. Hindutva by contrast, as propounded by Savarkar and being practised
today, is a non-liberal social order presaged on race, culture, and faith, arching high over secular citizenship, an integral aspect of modernity.
Hindutva prescribes limits to who a Hindu could be; modernity prescribes no specifications on who a member of modern society could be. A Hindu is one who inherits that “blood of the great race” whose “first source” can be traced from the “Vedic Saptasindhus”, Savarkar writes, adding: “That is why Christians and Mohammedan communities, who, were but very recently Hindus …cannot be recognised as Hindus; as since their adoption of the new cult, they had ceased to own their Hindu civilisation (sanskriti ) as a whole.” This exclusion wouldn’t have bothered us, had it not become a basis for one’s place in the nation, superseding citizenship.
The modern idea of a nation is territorial, but nationhood in Hindutva is racecentric, having been informed heavily by
20th-century European nationalism.
The current non-liberal social order brought forth by Hindutva is, therefore, not a distortion of Hindutva, but its truest expression. Hindutva, whatever it was intended to be, has been reduced to Rightwing populism and a mode of politics. Hinduism has no central text and no boundaries. Hindutva, therefore, seeks to give Hinduism a frame, drawing the boundaries of who is in and who’s out. Why else would someone claiming to be Hindu draw vicarious pleasure from making a Muslim forcibly utter the words “Jai Shri Ram”? That’s because Hindutva demands conformity. This then defines one’s place in society, a clear antithesis of modernity. It is not one’s intention to argue that Islamism or Hindutva are unchangeable in their essentials. However, modernity will always stand on its own feet.