Divya Dwivedi, ridiculed for claiming that 'Hinduism was invented in the Twentieth Century' named some White academics and two Hindu ladies to justify her assertion.
One academic she does not mention is Benjamin Zachariah, perhaps because he is brown and Christian. Obviously, such a person would have a vested interest in claiming that his pagan ancestors in India worshipped trees and rocks and snakes. They had no conception of religion in the Christian sense.
In Chapter 4 of his 'Playing the Nation Game' Ben writes-
What work does the category ‘Hindu’ do for, or in, the ‘national’?
The same work as the category 'Muslim' or 'Christian' or 'Jewish'. Ben takes a different view.
The questions of when what we now know as ‘Hinduism’ came into being, or indeed whether it exists or existed at all, or perhaps whether we are forced to acknowledge its existence because those who believe it does exist are so vocal and aggressive about it, refuse to go unanswered.
These questions raise further questions as to the good faith of those who pose them. Those further questions have now been resolved. Those who raised them were useless cretins who claimed to be fighting 'Fascism'. They failed. They represented a colossal waste of time and were wholly counter-productive politically speaking.
In South Africa, during Gandhi's sojourn there, the legal validity of non-Christian marriage was questioned. This provoked a popular backlash such that the question was quietly dropped. Similarly, the nutters who said 'Hinduism was invented by the Brits. There was no Ram Temple.' provoked a backlash. The BJP emerged as the Hindu party- at least at the National level. Since Hindus are about 80 percent of the population, this has helped that party enormously and given great lustre to the RSS.
This, on the one hand, is a very public debate. On the other hand, there is an increasingly loud academic debate on whether ‘Hinduism’ as we know it is a colonial artefact or invention or whether it has continuities with practices and doctrines in the precolonial past.
The loudness of this debate has convinced educated Hindus that Academia is riddled with anti-national elements- 'urban naxals' and separatists etc. Furthermore, diaspora Hindu communities have turned into a vocal and lucrative support base for Modi. In America, this helped Trump who got to look like he was a Messiah for brown peeps.
Ben himself would be perceived not as a Lefty, which is all he may be, but a typical Indian Christian engaged in defaming the Religion of his ancestors either to curry favor with the Church establishment or so as to reduce his own cognitive dissonance.
It seems we might be working at the very least with several Hinduisms, which is of course not unusual to anything that has remotely been close to claiming the category ‘religion’, or having such claims made on behalf of its imagined collective practitioners. The debate, then, may boil down to a matter of etic categorisation versus emic recognition, in which case it might indeed be relevant to find particular dates for the emergence of particular terms.
We know that kings who had Brahminical coronation or other similar ceremonies were making a claim to a wider type of legitimacy of a 'National' type. The term 'Hindu' may have gained salience after Muslim conquerors became entrenched. But that was many centuries ago. Thus 'emic' recognition is essentially pre-historic while 'etic' recognition followed that 'emic' recognition as is shown by Christian missionaries from the Sixteenth Century onward using the same term for Hindus wherever they were found
There may be some point to quibbling as to what is meant by 'anti-national' or 'urban-naxal'. Such quibbling might be used as evidence in a Court of Law. But it is counter-productive to quibble about when Hinduism came into existence.
Ben says in a footnote 'David Lorenzen rather impatiently writes that quibbling about terminology rather than the thing itself doesn’t get us very far.
The truth is that such quibbling so greatly alienated upper-caste, English speaking, Hindus that they turned to the BJP- which previously they thought of as a bunch of provincial hayseeds.
Contesting things is silly if you end up getting your head kicked in. Pick your fights.
Ben writes-
The trouble is, the terminology is itself contested on political grounds, which makes it important to separate terminological disputes from thing-in-itself disputes while acknowledging the political importance of both
Those who go in for 'political contestation' may, politically speaking, have their heads kicked in. This is what has happened to Ben & Co. They are brain damaged walking wounded. Having denied the bleeding obvious- i.e. the historicity of Hinduism- they are in no position to defend anyone from charges of being anti-national or of being urban naxals.
Ben isn't as stupid as Divya Dwivedi. He is writing at a 'meta' level. He is asking, not when was Hinduism invented but when we might say its present form of political instrumentalization was initiated. He thinks the answer is the Poona Pact- i.e. Gandhi's deal with Ambedkar. This is silly. The Hindu Mahasabha- which played a role in the negotiations- had been formed 16 years earlier. But the Muslim League had been formed in 1906. It was obvious that, in view of Muslim demands, that there would be a Hindu consolidation.
This chapter asks instead when the category ‘Hinduism’ was invested with the meanings it now has: religion, textual sources, finite doctrines, national identity.
Hinduism is not invested with any such meanings now. Atheists born of Hindu parents in India are subject to Hindu inheritance and other law. Meanwhile there are plenty of converts to Hinduism in far away countries who have nothing to do with Indian national identity. Hindus like me accept that 'textual sources' are univocal no matter what ancient language they are written in. Doctrines in Hinduism are 'samskari', sublatable or defeasible in an infinite manner.
Consider the copious Jain literature which we are blessed to have access to through the great Jain savants and Acharyas. We have no difficulty in accepting that Jainism is a completely separate and independent Religion without ceasing to feel, the more we learn about it or the more we associate with Jain people in worthwhile work, that this Religion is part of our common heritage.
More specifically, it is an attempt to study the stages of preparation of the category for national use.
This requires a deep knowledge of vernacular Indian languages and literatures. Ben isn't equipped for any such thing.
The narrative that I present here, run backwards and oversimplified to provide a teleology rather than a genealogy, is that ‘Hinduism’ was completed and properly available for modern political use after Gandhi’s fast and the Poona Pact in 1932.
This is silly. Ambedkar could only play the 'conversion' card because Hindu Dalits were seen by themselves and others as Hindus just as Christian 'untouchables' were seen as Christian and Muslim untouchables were seen as Mulslim. The question was whether Hindu Dalits they could get a bigger share of power by sticking with the INC.
During the Second Round Table Conference, all 'minorities' including Dalits opposed Gandhi. Would the Hindu Dalits now do a deal of a both religious and political nature?
Ben says- 'This is where the importance of the 1932 moment can be properly contextualised.The Poona Pact is the key moment that suddenly incorporates the ‘backward castes’
No. Only the 'outcastes' were discussed. 'Backward castes' can be dominant.
dalits, as Hindus, and really positions Muslims as not properly indigenous.
This is foolish. Nobody was saying any type of brown person wasn't indigenous. The Freedom Struggle was about getting Whitey to turn over the shiny levers of power.
Ambedkar had, it is true, threatened to convert to Islam but the Muslim leaders had signalled that 'educated' Dalits would not have a leadership role. The leading Barelvi leader insisted that only Ashrafs could lead prayers, etc. In Bengal, the atmosphere was more progressive but Dalits who allied with the Muslim League lived to regret it- if they lived.
This is contradictory as far as the importance of Gandhism to an eventual India is concerned: on the one hand, it is always alleged that Gandhi’s ideas do not properly make their way into the creation of an Indian state; on the other hand, his contribution to defining ‘Hindus' is enshrined in legislation,
on the basis of the Rajah-Moonjee pact. The older Dalit leadership had made a deal with the Hindu Mahasabha. We are thankful for it because Dalit M.Ps tend to be better than average- or less prone to slitting the throats of their Uncles or Cousins. The fact is Dalits have risen only on their own ability and virtue. They had no Sugar Daddy.
even though it is initially British legislation, and it is what finally makes 'Hindus' politically and therefore practically a single entity.
Ben is Christian. Thus he may be unaware that Hindus- like Christians or Sikhs or Muslim- aren't a single entity.
Once this conflation is achieved, the sadhu has without knowing it become one with the Indology professor at Oxford and future President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.
Plenty of Sadhus had degrees and could read Aurobindo and Vivekananda and so forth in English. Radhakrishnan was not a professor of Indology. He was a philosopher who taught Eastern Religion and Ethics.
At this point, the categories Hindu and Muslim are counterposed to each other.
That had happened centuries ago.
The Poona Pact was necessary because Gandhi had managed to unite all the minorities- including the Sikhs- against the INC. By giving reserved seats to Dalits, Congress was also reducing factionalist and intrigue amongst the money-bags and feudal types. At least some legislators would be clean and honest.
Gandhi offered increased representation for Hindu Dalits in return for unified electorates confident that Congress Dalits would sweep the polls. Only in East Bengal, where J.N Mandal sided with the Muslim League, did this strategy backfire.
This is when the boundaries of political Hinduism get fully drawn,
No. This is one of the occasions when those boundaries were reaffirmed.
and backed up by legislative authority in the 1935 Government of India Act, colluding inadvertently (the oxymoron is deliberate) with census operations.
But there had been Censuses since the 1870's! In any case, Communal Riots had confirmed to anyone who might be in doubt, as to whether or not they were 'Hindu'. The side which did not want to slit your throat was the side you were on. Censuses don't matter. Getting killed does.
Thereafter, the ‘Who Is a Hindu?’question is
answered by looking at whom certain Muslims consider it lawful to kill during a riot. J.N Mandal thought it wouldn't be Namasudras. He was wrong. He quit his Cabinet post in Pakistan returned to India. Hundreds of thousands of Namasudras were driven off their land and ended up crossing the border as refugees. 'Tribals' too found that Hindus don't think it meritorious to kill them.
Religious identity has an existential aspect if a particular Religion holds it lawful, under certain circumstances, to kill apostates and infidels and to take possession of their property.
Ben, pretending that India- a very poor country where few have access to effective Judicial remedies- is actually a place where 'definitions' and 'legislative authority' matters.
not one of arguing about definitions, but working with a reality backed by legislative authority; and without incorporating ‘untouchables’ or ‘Harijans’, along with ‘tribals’, the claim that ‘Hindus’ were or are a majority in India cannot be numerically pheld.
Yes it can. You have to subtract OBCs to show Hindus are a minority. But power has passed to OBCs like Modi. That is why he is so keen on getting the 2021 Census to produce reliable OBC figures by restricting 'self selection' of caste to the officially recognized categories. Previously, people were putting down any name they liked for their sub-caste though many such names overlap or are disadvantageous with respect to the purpose of the exercise.
Until then, ‘Hindu’ is a residual category
in the sense of the guys some Muslims consider it lawful to kill and whom, history shows, don't thrive under Muslim rule.
This is not to say that Hinduism is a 'residual category' for actual Hindus. Rather, it is a Tarskian primitive within a univocal soteriological discourse. We are constantly revising our received 'Begriffsgeschichte' in this respect though ruefully recognizing that the exercise is pointless. Still, it is a samskar of a harmless type. Every crackpot is his own Koselleck. But, as far as Indian political life is concerned, the thing is useless. But then, Koselleck is useless when it comes to European politics as well.
that means either non-Muslims, or those without clearly defined faiths (unless they can claim caste status within the upper three varnas)
Varnas don't matter. Jatis do. I myself am engaged in a tireless crusade to get 'Extremely fucking Educationally Backward, not to say Mentally Retarded' status for my own jati. That is why I write like shit.
in which case the question of faith becomes irrelevant.
Faith, shradda, is a purely private matter for Hinduism. Christianity may have had its Inquisitions, Islam its Jihads, but Hinduism aint stuff the likes of Benjamin Zachariah can understand or recognize or instrumentalize for some fell purpose.
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