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The Real Hindutva
vs 'Hindutva'
as Cultural Regression
by
Valson Thampu
The Hindutva idea of Indian culture is an arbitrary and a-historical
construct. The uniqueness of Indian culture is its composite and pluralistic
nature. In no other part of the world has religious and cultural plurality
co-existed and cross-fertilized each other so creatively. While Christians
fought their denominational wars in the western hemisphere, Indian
Christianity remained free from confessional conflicts and sectarian
tensions. Shi'as and Sunnis in India do not kill each other as their
counterparts do in our neighborhood. Sikhism and Sufi mysticism witness the
synergy of Hinduism and Islam. These, and not the communal outbursts of
Hindutva, are the authentic signs of the vitality and creativity of Indian
culture.
Advani's personal stamp on Hindutva is the shift he engineered in its
strategy from cultural nationalism to religious jingoism. The political
windfall that Hindutva enjoys today, as he has every right to claim, is on
account of Ram Janmabhoomi movement that frenzied Hindu religious
sentiments. In its genesis and genius, Hindutva was a project of cultural
nationalism. It had nothing to do with religion. Its early ideologues and
propagandists were, like Veer Savarkar, agnostics or atheists. Neither Ram
nor rituals nor temples mattered to them. Their role models were Hitler and
Mussolini. It was not the vision of the Vedas, or the spirit of Indian
culture that inspired them - they drew their inspiration from the ethos of
European nationalism.
The irony inherent in cultural nationalism is that it signals and
accelerates cultural regression. Re-hashing a culture along an ideological
bias implies utter disrespect towards it. The Hindutva idea of Indian
culture is an arbitrary and a-historical construct. The uniqueness of Indian
culture is its composite and pluralistic nature. In no other part of the
world has religious and cultural plurality co-existed and cross-fertilized
each other so creatively. While Christians fought their denominational wars
in the western hemisphere, Indian Christianity remained free from
confessional conflicts and sectarian tensions. Shi'as and Sunnis in India do
not kill each other as their counterparts do in our neighborhood. Sikhism
and Sufi mysticism witness the synergy of Hinduism and Islam. These, and not
the communal outbursts of Hindutva, are the authentic signs of the vitality
and creativity of Indian culture.
How integral this harmonious co-existence of plurality is to the spirit of
India, as Octavio Paz points out, is evident even from the way we serve and
eat our meals. In the west, the different courses that comprise a meal
follow one another. In our case, all items are served on the same plate
before we begin to eat, as though plurality is the very food of our
humanity. Togetherness is the essential character of our way of life. It is
this spirit of togetherness that welcomes and blends diverse elements that
seem disparate outside of that framework. This mytho-spiritual
character of the Indian ethos has never failed to mystify western observers.
"Is India a mystery or a muddle?" was the question that stalked E.
M. Foster right through and beyond his tryst with India. India is neither;
she is, instead, a spiritual-cultural unity-in-diversity that can host the
different and the
contrary. It was because Gandhiji was authentically Indian that he could
blend Indian spirituality with western rationality and bamboozle the west.
Swami Vivekananda, who embodied the spirit of India, advocated a synthesis
of the east and the west: a possibility that did not presented itself to
western thinkers then. The same spirit runs though Vivekananda's concept of
the integrated Indian identity synthesizing Vedantic soul with Islamic body.
This is, by and large, true of the Asiatic cultural and spiritual ethos.
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