The Hindu : The crisis within Hinduism

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Saturday, Mar 23, 2002

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The crisis within Hinduism

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

There is something seriously amiss with a Hinduism that seeks to protect and disseminate itself... by committing the very wrongs that it claims were done to it in the past.

TO SPEAK of a crisis in Hinduism at a time of the continuing and militant ascendancy of Hindutva would strike many as odd. But we ought to consider seriously the proposition that the creed and practices the VHP signifies, represent not just the actions of fringe groups but are sustained, legitimised and given momentum by a wider crisis within Hinduism. This crisis can be described in several dimensions. While many people were rightly aghast at the public calamities that were visited upon citizens of this nation, in Godhra and elsewhere in Gujarat, articulate voices of the Hindu sants and yogis, gurus and sadhus, in opposition to the VHP were scarce. There were occasional ritual denunciations of violence, but these were quickly lost in the hideous politics of recrimination that followed. There were half-hearted attempts to broker peace by reaching a deal on Ayodhya, but the terms of any deal that leaders such as the Sankaracharya had on offer rested on whitewashing out the constitutional usurpations that were carried out in the name of Hinduism, in Ayodhya less than a decade ago. Communal violence has a long history, but the ease with which its condemnation is made to go along with the thought that "the other community had it coming" is striking. The Hindu leaders cannot now be reliably considered exemplars of a large and delicate tolerance in the way in which many of the Hindu reformers at the turn of the century could.

But the depth of the crisis within Hinduism is signified by the fact that even many well meaning Hindus, who would have no truck with the VHP, have internalised a narrative of victimhood. On this narrative, Hindus have been for centuries at the receiving end of onslaughts from others, Christians and Muslims. Hindutva, for many who have internalised this narrative, represents a coming to grips with history, an assertion of the will that will finally put Hindus in charge of their own destiny, invulnerable to takeover or corrosion by outside forces. To be fair, this is a narrative to which there are analogues in most religions, insofar as they have political leanings. Versions of Islam tout the same sentiments vis-a-vis the West, and even the Christian Right in as Christian a nation as the United States thinks of itself as threatened by the United Nations, or worse, the Jews! These narratives represent a wider failure of these religions to give a meaning or teleology to everyday life under the complex conditions of modernity, and their inability to accept the facts of difference.

In the Indian context, this narrative not only sustains groups such as the VHP and the RSS, it makes even those otherwise ambivalent about those groups hesitant in their denunciations. In fact, the crisis of Hinduism is signified by the fact that so much of contemporary Hindu identity is vested in this narrative. I do not mean to deny that we often witness genuine acts of faith, or a religiosity that runs deep, or even that Hinduism provides an astonishing grammar with which to comprehend life and creation. But increasingly, being a Hindu is coming to be identified with participation in the creation of a communal identity that can now fully, and often furiously, discharge its role in history. It is an identity constituted by a sense of injury, a sense of always having been on the losing side, a sense of innocent victim hood. Much of the understanding of history that sustains this sense of injury is simplistic if not often false. But of greater import is the fact that Hindu identity, in so many ways, is coming to rest upon a sense of resentment. It can no longer define itself by its achievements, the vitality of its thought and the creativity of its aspirations.

It is not an accident that it is precisely at the moment of greater militancy that we see Hinduism at its intellectually and spiritually most moribund. Hinduism, however one may choose to define it, was nothing if not creative in its ability to constantly transcend its own limitations, through a diversity of forms. Like all great traditions, it not only placed limits, sometimes oppressive ones, on individuals, but also gave them the means to escape them. A vital culture is one where individuals are energised by the thought of bettering themselves, not by a tissue of resentment and a pathetic sense of victimhood. At the turn of this century for instance, Hinduism responded to the challenge of modernity in different ways. It produced the eviscerated ideologues of Hinduism such as Veer Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar who would confine its best aspirations to a pinched up sense of territorial identity. But it also produced Tagore and Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Gandhi. No matter how much condescension of posterity we may impose on the latter group, it would be difficult to argue that their identities were constituted negatively: as if the only way of being a Hindu was beating up someone else, or protecting yourself. They produced, for all its flaws, a version of Hinduism, which at least tried to face the moral and political challenges of their time, without rancour, without weakness and with what in retrospect seems an astonishing self-confidence.

The shrillness of contemporary Hinduism, its even greater moral vacillation in the face of violence, is not, with all due apologies to V. S. Naipaul, an act of self-assertion. The insistent rhetoric that many well meaning Hindus are buying that Hinduism is in danger, betrays above all a lack of self-confidence, a recognition that somewhere Hinduism has lost its vitality to the point that it can be sustained only by the fervour of a will directed against others. It is never fair to indict a whole people, but there is something seriously amiss with a Hinduism that seeks to protect and disseminate itself, not by internal reform, or an inner strength of conviction, but by committing the very wrongs that it claims were done to it in the past. All religions may be undergoing a version of this crisis. But a religion that requires the ghosts of exaggerated or imagined injuries to sustain itself is conspiring to create a darkness where we will not be able to recognise each other as citizens, as human beings. Instead, we will be defined by our resentments rather than achievements, by our wilfulness rather than the moral quality of the objectives to which our will is directed. No wonder Hinduism in its public face seems nothing more than a creed endlessly rehearsing its own truisms. The trouble with defining oneself through historical wrongs is that the past will imprison us by its very perpetuation, like a disease with chronic malignity. I used to think the whole point of Hinduism is that we suffer from too much history and should aim to transcend it. How far have we come from its ideals?

(The writer is Professor of Philosophy and of Law and Governance, JNU.)

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