HINDU "FUNDAMENTALISM" REVISITED

VINAY LAL

Originally published under the same title in Contention 4, no. 2 (Winter 1995):165-73.

On 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid, a nearly 500-year-old mosque dating to the era of the Mughal Emperor Babur and believed by many people to have been built partly with the debris of a temple that stood on the spot where the mosque was then constructed, was demolished by a large crowd of Hindus who have since been described, in the press and among scholars in India and the West alike, as "fundamentalists." If we are to believe Stanley Wolpert, the destruction of the mosque "may be said to mark the end of India's era of 'secular' statehood." It is emphatically clear to Wolpert that this unquestionably grave threat to Indian secularism and to the principles enshrined in the constitution of the republic constitutes yet another and inevitable episode in the "virulent resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism" (p. 9). It was, argues Wolpert, the "same violent forces of Hindu chauvinism that triggered the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1848," and by the same logic, this "deadly virus of Hindu-Muslim hatred," akin to AIDS, will continue to wreak havoc among the people of the Indian subcontinent (p. 9). In an old weather-beaten country like India, where time far from healing wounds only encrusts them deeper in the psychic consciousness of a people, certain atavistic tendencies, such as the urge to kill in the name of religion, resurface from time to time, leaving behind widows, orphans, and a blaze of hatred.

In its presuppositions about the nature of Indian society, Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim relations, and the timeless pattern of Indian history, Wolpert's argument is as old as the earliest works of Indological scholarship and Orientalist discourse, but it is not enough to marvel at the longevity of a discourse that, over the last two decades, has effectively and decisively been called into question. The honor of Indian civilization, in particular of its traditions of spirituality and modes of cultural accommodation, has been put to the test many times, and 6 December 1992 marks one moment when the forces of pluralism that have sustained Indian civilization surrendered to those who have sought to transform Hinduism into a monolithic faith. It is, nonetheless, far less certain that "resurgent Hindu fundamentalism," which is Wolpert's characterization of the present movement and also the title of his article, aptly captures the nature of the forces and the dynamics of the social processes that led to the destruction of the mosque. We can do little better, by way of critically positioning Wolpert, than interrogating the title of his piece. In the Indian context, as historians and social scientists are well aware, the word that has most commonly been used to describe Hindu-Muslim relations, particularly in their as it were pathological and troubled form, is "communalism." From the first half of the twentieth century, nationalists came to contest the "communalist" interpretation of Indian history. Early Orientalist scholarship had imagined India as a country where the "individual" did not exist; one could speak only of "collectivities," and the predominant organizational form of such "collectivities" appeared to be religion, with caste serving as the principal basis of solidarity within the "Hindu fold." India's special contribution to civilization was deemed to be the marked religious orientation to life displayed by its inhabitants; if the unit of being was the community, and religion the fundamental way of being, then it stood to reason that one had to speak of the communities of "Hindus," "Muslims," "Sikhs," "Jains," and so forth. "Religious communities," in the words of one scholar, came to be seen as "the fundamental social units of the Indian milieu."

Once the position had been taken that the Indian was constituted preeminently by his or her membership in a religious community, it was a short step to the argument that religious differences would invariably serve to keep the communities not merely apart but in perpetual and irreconcilable conflict; and when such conflict comes to the fore, manifesting itself in intimidation and eventually the outbreak of violence, we have a "communal" riot in the making. In the "communalist" interpretation of Indian history, class, ethnicity, political associations, economic interests, and other variables are, when not ignored, assuredly subservient to religious identity, and more precisely to immutable and preordained notions of "Hindu," "Hinduness," "Muslim," "Islam," and other like categories. For example, Sir Hugh McPherson, once a highly placed functionary in the government of India, gave it as his considered opinion, in a paper written in the early 1930s, a time when nationalists had become quite insistent on the demand for independence, that "religious differences" between Muslims and Hindus could "be reinforced by historical tradition, by political rivalries, or by economic contrasts," but he was nonetheless persuaded that "for the great masses of the population it is the religious issue alone that counts."

On the strength of the testimony available from published writings and archival records, a large number of historians have argued that "communalism" was largely the invention or (to put it somewhat more mildly) the consequence of the British policy of "divide and rule," an epistemological imperative of the colonial state. Accordingly, the "communal riot narrative" was to become "perhaps the most important colonialist statement on the nature of politics in [Indian] society." This reading of colonial politics is, of course, keenly contested on the grounds that it constructs an ideal Indian past when Hindus and Muslims lived in comparative if not complete conjugality. There were, no doubt, incidents of Hindu-Muslim animosity in the past, and Muslim rule, as even nationalists have been willing to admit, on occasion provoked the open hostility of some Hindus, which is scarcely to say that the rule of Hindu kings was necessarily any more agreeable to their Hindu subjects. The brunt of the argument on the nationalist side, however, is that "communalism" acquired the status of an episteme -- an institutional apparatus, the active encouragement of the state, and an honored place in the sociology of knowledge -- only with the advent of British rule in India. What the "communalist" interpretation also overlooks is the fact, exemplified in social, religious, and cultural practices running the gamut from North Indian music and architecture to the reverence of certain saints and poets by Hindus and Muslims alike, that a common and syncretistic culture developed over the course of many centuries. Moreover, "communalist" readings posit an India that, being inherently split by "religious" differences, must perforce be the "Other" of a secular West.

While one need not give one's assent to the proposition that Hindu-Muslim relations were always cordial, it scarcely stands to reason that religion should be perceived as furnishing the only motive for action in Indian public life. In considering the destruction of the mosque in late 1992, Wolpert could have reflected on the fact that in 1990, when the agitation to construct the temple first assumed menacing proportions, large parts of India, and particularly urban areas in the northern region, were violently shaken by disturbances that owed their origin to the announcement by the government of a plan to implement a program of affirmative action that would have reserved nearly 50 percent of all seats in colleges, government offices, and other institutions for members of the "backward classes." Wolpert does not explore whether a deep disaffection with India's new development regime, which has led to increasing disparities in the distribution of incomes despite the creation of new wealth, did not equally fuel the anti-reservation riots and the killings around the issue of the mosque at Ayodhya. Such an exploration would certainly establish the complicated inter-relationship of caste, class, religion, and ethnicity, and in turn locate these to developments in the national economy and structural changes in the global economy.

If "Hindu fundamentalism" has such a resonance for Wolpert, it is largely because he accepts the "communalist" interpretation of Indian history and society. Fundamentalism presupposes "communalism"; if "communalism" is always there, "fundamentalism" can never be far behind, giving voice to the volcano of "communalism," lending it the agenda of political organization and ambition which it requires to capture power. All fundamentalists are necessarily communalists; the converse is not true, "communalism" being the blind man's fundamentalism. That is not all that is problematic with embracing the notion of "Hindu fundamentalism." Much as the English, deriving as they did from a culture where religious conflict was endemic, superimposed their view on Indian society, where traditions of belief and worship were and continue to be enormously varied, so Wolpert unreflectively applies to Hinduism a category which has its origins in monotheistic religions. If fundamentalism has an intrinsic relationship to monotheism, how far we can employ the term to describe movements, at least purportedly religious, world-wide?

As the editors of a recent volume, part of what is termed the "Fundamentalism Project," have implicitly conceded, "fundamentalism" is a notoriously expansive, unreliable, and -- I would add -- unanalytical concept. Fundamentalism, at least in Christianity, has always insisted upon one book, one God, one Prophet. What do we find when we turn to the advocates of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement? They scarcely have a notion of the Book by which all Hindus must swear. It is true that for them the Ramayanaof Tulsidas represents the greatest work in Hindu devotional literature, but that is far removed from ascribing to it the status of a work of revelation that is infallible. The Ramayana is only one of many sacred or semi-sacred works, and its recent television serialization, though vastly popular, did not establish its hegemony among the Indian people. Moreover, in a country where there are forty major versions of the Ramayana, significantly irreconcilable with respect to major portions of the story, a North Indian version in Awadhi can make no creditable claim to being authoritative across India. In the long and complex religious history of India, various sects and movements have, at one time or another, elevated a particular text or its variant, and the importance assigned to the Ramayana of Tulsidas constitutes only another episode in a history that is constantly being rewritten and altered. If the Bhagavad Gita, which in the West at least is recognized as the most important Hindu scripture, does not even belong to the category of revelatory texts (shruti) and yet could attain a primordial importance for Indian nationalists from the late-nineteenth century onwards, nothing in the propagation of the Tulsidas Ramayana is altogether out of the ordinary. Nor, for that matter, is it the case that Rama is for so-called Hindu "fundamentalists" the Prophet of Hinduism. The Shiv Sena, a party allied with the "Hindu fundamentalists," is described by its leader as deriving its name, insofar as political matters are concerned, from Shivaji, the great Maratha leader renowned for his military valor; in religious matters, from the God Shiva. Rama is, in the popular imagination at least, a less complex and perhaps more exemplary figure than Krishna, that other great deity of Vaishnavite Hinduism, and the proponents of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement have wisely capitalized on his appeal to the masses. But does that mean that Krishna is being undermined or that he will become less attractive as Hindus allegedly turn to a more "semiticized" form of their religion? The "fundamentalists" have certainly not lent their support to this interpretation; quite to the contrary, judging from their threat that the Krishna temple at Mathura will be the next one to be "liberated," Krishna will continue to hold the exalted place in the Indian imagination and modes of worship that he does today. Of course, this can be interpreted as demonstrable proof, if that were needed, of the intolerance of "fundamentalists," but intolerance does not turn someone into a "fundamentalist." If anything, the attention lavished upon the Krishna temple at Mathura and other contested sites is indicative of the fact that the proponents of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement have a sufficiently expansive notion of Hinduism to make it quite different from "Hindu fundamentalism."

We are, then, far from understanding, much less resolving, what is "Hindu" about "Hindu fundamentalism" apart from the obvious fact that the proponents of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement claim to be Hindus. If by "fundmentalism" Wolpert means no more than the unholy admixture of religion and politics, then Mahatma Gandhi, the victim of "Hindu chauvinism" (p. 9) was surely the most keen proponent of "fundamentalism" in Indian history. It was Gandhi who wrote "without the slightest hesitation" that "those who say that religion had nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." But all this is tangential to Wolpert's argument, for his "Hindu fundamentalists" are the Other of that other sacred cow, "secularism." We can agree that secularism is a creature of modernity; and as Wolpert assumes that Indians continue to inhabit a largely premodern consciousness and mentality, it is axiomatic that "secularism" in India can never have a large following. "India's secular democratic polity, after all," writes Wolpert with supreme confidence, "was but the legacy of Western modernism and liberalism brought into India's political arena almost as an afterthought by the British Raj," and though Nehru and his ilk, "Western-educated liberals, modernists, and secularists," could sustain the temper of "secularism" for some years after independence, it could not root itself in hostile terrain. For "deep down in the subsoil of Hindu-India," as Wolpert puts it dramatically, "far below the surface patina and gloss of the Nehru-Gandhi family and their friends, the ancient Epic heart of Bharat continued to beat and roil and bubble its mantras on high, 'Ram-Ram, Hari! Om!'" (p. 15). In India, the primitive jungle always appears poised to take over the modern metropolis.

Strapped by an impoverished framework which posits "secularism" as opposed to "fundamentalism," the demise of one as the triumph of the other, Wolpert fails to consider the possibility that the two exist in a friendly if not symbiotic relationship to each other. "Fundamentalism," far from being hostile to modernity, is quite receptive to it most of the time. The most ardent defenders of the modern nation-state are often the "fundamentalists," such as the members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization sworn to the defense of Hinduism, as though that old faith could not survive without them. The backbone of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political party which aims to represent the "Hindu" constituency, is the largely urban, educated, middle-class members of the petit bourgeois and bureaucratic classes, precisely that element of the population which is supposed to have liberated India from the throes of religion and mindless mantra-chanting and shown it the unadulterated advantages of modernity. The membership of the BJP is not drawn from illiterate peasants, superstitious tribals, and dispossessed workers -- all those, that is, who represent the non- and premodern segment of the population, almost entirely outside the realm of "secularism." Both secularists and fundamentalists have little room for faith, for their entire endeavor consists in transforming faith into an ideology, call it science or religion; there is no respect here for plurality. As Ashis Nandy has written, in a passage suggestive of why the secularist and the fundamentalist must be seen as the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the "fundamentalist" in India is plagued by the "fear of the sacred and the transcendental, especially the fear of the return of a sacred that is untamed and unpredictable from the point of view of the modern nation-state and modern ideas of public life."

Though one can agree with Wolpert that the "hundreds of millions of ardent followers [who] look to 'God,'" and who appear in his text as an invocatory chant (pp. 14, 15), are not likely to become enamored of "secularism," they can by no stretch of the imagination be characterized as captives to the cause of "fundamentalism." As I have pointed out, Wolpert does not interrogate "fundamentalism," and thus fails to see its severe limitations as an analytical category; and insofar as one can speak of "fundamentalism," it serves little purpose to do so unless one is equally prepared to dissect its intrinsic relationship to both modernity and secularism. In the Indian case, one would also be obliged to consider its intersection with "communalism." It is precisely the lack of this sociological underpinning which makes Wolpert capable of representing India as bedeviled by "resurgent fundamentalism" and an unending series of orgies, which obviates the need to understand why certain cities and states were affected by riots in the aftermath of the destruction of the mosque while others remained unscathed, or what other disputes and grievances might have been camouflaged by purportedly religious violence. If we wish to understand what transpired at Ayodhya, we shall have to move away from "Hindu fundamentalism," "resurgent" or otherwise.

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