By Rana Nayar
I
do not know whether I’m an insider or an outsider in India. Much will depend on
what historians may have to say about my origins or my beginnings, which in any
case, shall remain shrouded in endlessly inconclusive controversies. Some
people will insist on treating me as a descendant of the Hindus, tracing my
links with Indus Valley Civilization (emphasizing the homology between ‘Indus’
and ‘Hindus’), while others may look upon me as a leftover of the Aryan race
that came from the West and overran the Nagas and/or Dravidians (read the
original inhabitants of this land), seeking to establish my hegemony over this
land, its peoples, its languages and its native cultures, too. I do not know
whether I’m a naturalized citizen of this land or an aggressor, an invader
and/or a colonizer. Historians would probably never let me have the
satisfaction of knowing this, one way or the other. What I do know is that I
have lived on this land for close to three, four thousand years; that I’m among
one of its oldest, if not the oldest, inhabitants; and that I have participated
in its social, political, religious and cultural life for as long as I can
remember.
Of
course, I know that despite having lived in this land for close to four
thousand years, and despite having made all the contribution towards shaping, and
not controlling, its cultural forces; and despite all my protestations about
being truly, genuinely non-violent, secular and democratic in my convictions, today,
I’m extremely apologetic about being a Hindu or made to feel so. Do I have a
right to ask, why, for God’s sake, am I being pushed into such defensive
postures, today? You perhaps don’t know that I was very much part of the crowd
of non-decrepit soldiers who were led into the First War of Independence by
Mangal Pandey, and the moment I witnessed the birth of the Congress Party out
of the womb of history, I had simply stood by and cheered loudly. I was there when
the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre happened, or when the non-cooperation movement
was started by Gandhi. I was there when Lala Lajpat Rai was mercilessly beaten
to death or Bhagat Singh was hanged with his companions following a farcical
trial. I was among the crowds in 1942 when they booed and jeered at Englishmen,
saying, “Quit India”, before plunging headlong into the unprecedented communal
conflagration of 1947. Yes, I was killed among those who died during the Partition
and was born, yet again, with the birth of a new nation.
And
let me assure you, since 1947 I have never participated in any of those loony
linguistic movements that you witnessed in the late 1950s for the
reorganization of Indian states on the basis of language or regional
aspirations. To be honest, I wasn’t the one who raised the bogey of ‘official
language,’ or the one who shed the blood of those who didn’t want ‘Hindi’ to be
installed as an the sovereign, national, and/or official language. Now as I
look back, I feel, it’d have been much better had Tamil been made the official
language, as it‘d have probably brought the never ending colonial march of
English to a sudden, necessary halt. It worries me to think now that we have
missed out on a real opportunity to decolonize ourselves by making one of our
own languages as the national/official language. Do you really think that I was
the one who torched the government buildings or damaged the public property
when the communal fires engulfed our sanity? Certainly not! Why to hide from
you, friends, at that point of time, I was only too busy managing the petty
affairs of my inconsequential life, running from pillar to post, clutching on
to a bottle of milk or a can of kerosene, or waiting endlessly in the long
queues either outside an employment bureau, a post-office, a bank, or a polling
booth or just about too busy keeping the wolves at bay.
Believe
me, when I say that I never participated even once in all those crazy,
misdirected Rath Yatras (on Toyota convertibles) that some power hungry,
political opportunists organized from time to time in the name of Hindutva. Do
you know that I was not at all opposed to the political churning or
mobilization that Mandalization caused in this country, nor did I ever support
those who pulled down the Babri Masjid or engineered the Godhra Riots or burnt
the train carrying Muslims across to Pakistan? Instead, I have been a strong
votary of the affirmative action, as I sincerely believe that weak must always
be protected by the strong, whatever the cost; and also whatever is pushed down
by history must ultimately come up the hard way, and that it is not at all
possible without social engineering of some kind. You do not know me enough to
know that when this bandwagon of Hindutva was rolling out in the Indian
streets, I was among those who were silently crying over the death of a shared
dream, and grieving over the possibility of communalization of Indian politics.
Much before that, I had already shed enough tears, or even spent many sleepless
nights worrying over the criminalization of politics in our country, when it
hit in the late 1970s.
Each
time, a Kashmiri Muslim is killed either by the militants or the State, each
time an innocent Sikh is burnt alive in a politically sponsored carnage, each
time a Christian missionary is slain by some lunatic Hindu, and each time a
Parsi is forced to migrate owing to the bullying tactics of Shiv Sainiks, I go
through, no, not just the spasms, but genuine convulsions of conscience, and
agonize endlessly over how the dream of secularism is fast turning into a
nightmare, how the specter of communalism is forever hanging over our heads, threatening
to unleash forces we can’t contain; how the ever growing decline of governance
and moral imperatives of our politicians is pushing us deeper into a chaos and
anarchy from which we may never be able to recover. And yet, you continue to
doubt my secular credentials, suspect my political convictions or affiliations,
interrogate my religious beliefs, and much before I realize what you are doing,
you quietly dump all this guilt and pain of those whom I do not even know or
recognize at my rickety door, leaving me with no choice but to cower in shame
or run for a cover. And yet, you condemn me each time a fringe group of
lunatics, who know no religion except the religion of violence or hatred and who
know no language except the language of terror and crime, inflict all kinds of
horrible wounds on your skin. You perhaps do not even know how the wounds in
your skin have cut permanent holes in my body, and how your pain keeps searing
my conscience, even my soul, in the silent hours of night.
When
I’m alone with myself, I often wonder when did I ever give legitimacy to
Manuvaad or the abominable caste-system. Did I ever want its continuation or
perpetuation in our society? Did I ever want to live down the guilt of asking
some people to serve me or my class interest perpetually? Did I ever want that
Manu should codify Hindu laws in a certain way? Wasn’t Manu, after all, doing
this codification for a society that was essentially moving from the tribal to
the feudal, agrarian stage? And pray, when did Manu ever claim that his
codification was sacrosanct and should not ever be subjected to a process of
re-examination or revisionism? If some of my ancestors just didn’t get into the
exercise of revisionism and Manuvaad or Brahmanism colluded to create
conditions for the continuation of caste-system, why must I be made to bear the
cross, especially, when I’m genuinely modern, moderately secular and materially
egalitarian, and also when I celebrate the cultural synthesis of Bhakti movement? Am I supposed to feel
guilty if a certain class of people (read Brahmins) chose to hegemonize others,
as all classes, often driven by the egregious self-interest, almost always tend
to do, in the best or the worst of times?
I
also wonder why most of the people who condemn me for being a Hindu often
forget that if the ancient Hinduism legitimized Manuvaad, it also gave Ved Vyas and Valmiki, both outcastes (one, the
son of a fisherwoman, and the other, a reformed dacoit), the responsibility of
disseminating two of their most significant narrative texts among its
adherents. Why do they forget that the principle behind the caste-system was
one of mutual interdependence of different sections (read castes) of society
and of their integration and oneness at socio-religious level? And further, if
the priestly class of Brahmins had not turned self-serving (as all ruling
classes invariably do), probably caste-system would not have become an
unchanging, ossified fact of Indian social and religious life? If I’m to be
held accountable for crimes the priestly class committed through history, then
I should also be held accountable for all the acts of omission and commission
the ruling class of today is committing with much the same impunity. Don’t you
think so? After all, logic is the same, isn’t it? So how many of us are
actually prepared to bear the burden of other’s sins, pray? How many of us
would want to do penance on behalf A. Rajas or Kalmadis of our times? Please
don’t tell me now that my logic is fallacious, or my argument, untenable or
specious.
Now
whether or not I was a natural inhabitant of this land, I did make this land my
home and you certainly can’t grudge me that or, will you? And then I slowly
began to give birth to an entire civilization, mythological, Indus and then
Vedic. Do you think it was a mean achievement on my part to seek to build
secure edifices of civilization at a time when the rest of the world was still steeped
in the dark ages, and was struggling hopelessly to preserve the Mayan or
Mesopotamian civilizations, Abyssinian or Egyptian civilizations? Do I need to
say that all those civilizations have quietly slipped into oblivion and
disappeared into the haze of time, but my ancient wisdom, like the ageless
Ganges, continues to flow, not merely through the veins of my own children, but
those of rest of the humanity, too? Over the centuries, I did create a diverse
wealth of art, literature, philosophy and/or culture, whose worth and
estimation is today easily recognized, the world over. I may have believed in
the fatalism of the Karmic theory, but I also gave the spirited message of
activism through the philosophy of Karma
Yoga in Sri Bhagwatgita. If I
talked of the three stages in the life of a householder, to be achieved by
following the three-fold path of arth,
kama and moksha, I also gave the over-enveloping concept of dharma as an enabling principle. If I
taught you the difference between the Purusha
and Prakrati and the process of their
interanimation, I also helped you understand that there is nothing outside the Braham, the eternal, transcendental, and
perhaps the only all-subsuming reality. Perhaps, that’s why, I could throw the
doors of my house open to people who came to visit this land first, and then
decided to make it their own.
Do
you think, if I hadn’t the catholicity of spirit that my religion (read Hinduism, not Hindutva) ingrained in me, right from the very beginning, I’d have
been able to accommodate all the Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Muslims,
who came calling? You know pretty well how some of them came looking for
refuge, and others, simply with a specific aim of reducing me into a refugee in
my own land. But I made no discrimination; as I not only threw open my doors to
one and all, but also allowed each one of them the freedom to pitch their own
tents, of whatever size and wherever they wished, simply following the dictum
that this universe constitutes a single brotherhood. Do you think, it would
have happened so easily, if I, too, had followed the policy of discrimination
on the basis of caste, colour, creed, race or religion? I know, what you are
thinking of, now. You’re possibly thinking that I was too weak religiously and
too easily divided and fragmented politically to have taken care of my
social/cultural space or what I sometimes call my home, if not my territory.
Just remember, only the Muslims forced their way into my home (and yet I
embraced their thought and philosophy of Sufism, even Islam) with open arms;
others came as peacefully as they could, and apparently there was no question
of my raising objections either to their presence here or their desire to make
this land their home. Even when I didn’t possess the political sagacity of
Ashoka or Akbar, the openness of my heart and the generosity of my spirit were
never found wanting.
The
only difference between you and me is that I’m looking at the vast panorama of
history spread over four thousand years or more, and you have your eyes focused
exclusively on the contemporary reality. In the recent times, you have found
one too many reasons to put me on the dock; starting with, of course, the
emergence of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha in the early
1930s and its dubious role in the freedom struggle, to the assassination of the
Mahatma in which again, you claim, RSS had some shady role to play; from the machinations
of Vajpayee and Advani in the 1980s, who created an entirely new political
outfit called the Bharatiya Janata Party out of its erstwhile avatar Jan Sangh,
to the militantly aggressive postures of rabid Ashok Singhal and Vinay Katyar of
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, you have found enough reasons to pick holes in my
defenses, and now you constantly keep nagging me about my Hindutva affiliations. If you were to stop at this, I wouldn’t
really mind, but you don’t, and actually go much further than that. You accuse
me of being anti-Muslim, and of harbouring hatred against all Muslims,
sometimes going so far as to claim that I’d like to see all the Muslims
transported to their sacred land of Pakistan. I don’t deny that it troubles me
when Pakistan refuses to respect our territorial integrity and strikes
aggressive postures, or surreptitiously pushes ISI-trained terrorists or
militants into our soil for senseless murder and mayhem. It troubles me when the
centuries-old communal ties snap all of a sudden, and communal hatred begins to
stalk the land. In my moments of moral weakness, sometimes, I do begin to doubt
the nationalist spirit of my Muslim neighbours or start blaming them for their
extra-territorial loyalties, but even in my weakest moments, not even once do I
wish them away.
My
occasional sense of insecurity or moral lapse is only a passing fancy;
certainly not the defining moment of our centuries-old mutual co-existence, in
which we continue to share our myths and fables, our folklores and festivals,
our languages and cultures, all differences notwithstanding. Besides, who told
you that I’m a die-hard Hindutva fan, just because I happen to be a Hindu? My
sense of politics, if seen historically, has been extremely weak. Had it not
been so, I would not have been pushed around so much by the invaders or the aggressors.
It’s because of my poor sense of political judgment that I sometimes ended up
colluding with my own enemies, thus working against my own best political
interests. Whatever my failures or lapses, the fact is that I have paid much
too heavy a price for it, as well. Having said so, let me go on to explain the
basic differences between Hindutva
and Hinduism, as you often use them
interchangeably, thus not only confusing the issues, but also damning me for no
fault of mine. Hinduism teaches me openness of heart and magnanimity of spirit,
which also goes hand in hand with my total or partial lack of political wisdom.
My problem is that I’m too easily swayed by the political slogans and quickly
succumb to the hate-mongering of our special breed of fire-spewing politicians.
Hindutva, with which I have never had
any affiliation, and which I have always suspected as much as you have, if not
more, is only a subversive way of twisting, distorting and manipulating the
actual teachings of Hinduism for political ends. In other words, Hinduism is a way of life that teaches
catholicity, whereas Hindutva is a
way of controlling or manipulating Hindu votes, by whipping up narrow,
parochial jingoism or fanaticism among them.
You
would perhaps complain that in such moments of existential crisis, why don’t I
invoke the teachings of Patanjali, who had once warned me against losing my viveka ever, and always keeping my body, mind and soul together? My problem is that in this long march
over so many centuries, I have moved so far away from his teachings and many
more things besides, that I don’t hear Patanjali’s words any longer. Though I
have heard Krishna tell me repeatedly that I must do all I can to become a sthithapragyana, I’m too much into the
world to achieve that and continue to wallow in the dance of the three gunas -- sattva, rajas and tamas -- thus nullifying all possibility
of attaining inner poise and equilibrium. But that only makes me human, doesn’t
it?
Do
you think, it is right on your part to make me feel less about myself, just
because I’m only too human, like you and everyone else? Don’t forget that I
always showed immense tolerance for the difference, great patience for dissent
and always supreme respect for an alternative viewpoint. Had it not been so, do
you think, Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism could have possibly emerged out of our
soil? Each time, as a Hindu, I saw the prospect of my own decadence and decay;
I re-incarnated myself as a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Guru Nanak. I never had any
problems with re-inventing myself, or any issues with initiating a dialogue
with myself or my neighbours. I never tried to create monoliths out of my
beliefs, as I always gave myself, even others, the freedom to follow any one of
the “thirty three crore Gods” I had created for possibly as many followers.
I
always had immense faith in the philosophy of cultural pluralism, never
deviated from it and shall perhaps never do. And yet, you call me a staunch
Hindu, a violent oppressor or aggressor, a power-hungry Hegemon, perpetually
trying to swallow the minorities, their right to life and survival, a perpetual
threat to their social and cultural space. For God’s sake, don’t extend the
logic of US imperialism to understand my position (in their case, the Big
Brother is not only watching but also breathing down everyone’s neck all the
time, and in our case, he’s happily living with the younger ones), or judge me
in the light of the theories you may have borrowed from the West, or impose
them on me, unthinkingly.
Please
don’t treat me as a colonizer, just because the British told you that I was
one. And finally, don’t let them divide us now that we think we are free, for
we have, are and will continue to live with each other, peacefully, joyously and
harmoniously. And the next time, you are tempted to blame me just because I’m a
Hindu, or catch me by the collars because I let you share my home, do think
again!
I
only hope, you do or else, I’ll continue to be apologetic for no other reason, but
for being what I’m, yes, just another Hindu.