The Hindu : What went wrong?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 09, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

What went wrong? — II

By Gail Omvedt

The coming of a new industrial society and the rise of science and technology should have made possible a life of prosperity for all... But this did not happen.

AMBEDKAR'S ARGUMENT against Gandhi was simple. In 1936, he had written, "You must destroy the sacredness and divinity with which caste has become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the Shastras and the Vedas... You must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took... You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion — the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste." (Ambedkar, 1979: 69).

Pre-British India had seen a flourishing of religions and philosophies. From the first millennium BC, though Brahmans taking the authority of the Vedas had worked to establish a society functioning according to the laws of varna, other darshanas — Buddhism, Jainism, Lokayata — had challenged this with more equalitarian and rationalistic ideals. The coming of Islam meant another momentous civilisational encounter, one seen in newly flourishing artistic, architectural and music traditions. Bhakti sants also challenged caste and Brahman domination, posing new ideals of a society of equality.

Ravidas had written:

"The regal realm with the sorrowless name

they call it Queen City, a place with no pain,

no taxes or cares, none owns property there,

no wrongdoing, worry, terror, or torture.

Oh my brother, I've come to take it as my own,

my distant home, where everything is right.

They do this or that, they walk where they wish,

they stroll through fabled palaces unchallenged.

Oh, says Ravidas, a tanner now set free,

those who walk beside me are my friends."

This expressed both "class" and "caste" utopias — no taxes or property, and the right of even the lowest toilers to walk freely everywhere, so important for those classified as Untouchables and relegated to live and work away from the main areas of a city. Within the context of a Brahman-dominated medieval order, this was a dream. The coming of a new industrial society and the rise of science and technology should have made possible a life of prosperity for allsuch bold dreams could have shaped a new national society in India. But this did not happen. Industrialism, science and rationality came to India as an appendage to colonial rule. By the end of the 19th century, the early openness of the British became closed, and racist ideologies began to pervade their rule. The discovery of a relationship between Sanskrit and

European languages led to the formation of the "Aryan theory" — which expressed on the one hand a racial kinship between Europeans and high-caste Indians, and on the other hand defined the Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis as descendents of more primitive, dark-skinned indigenous peoples. The Indian elite accepted this racist interpretation readily enough: they were Aryans, the noble ones, possessors of ancient religious scriptures and high philosophical knowledge. Theirs was a spiritual heritage; the low castes could be seen as subordinate parts of this, incorporated within a hierarchy of "Hinduism" which possessed a unique social system that could incorporate inferior elements without destroying them. Varnashrama dharma was thus given a new justification. All the elite "reform" organisations of the 19th century — the Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj — proclaimed this acceptance of Vedic-Brahman hegemony within Hinduism in their very names.

A Hindu, according to Savarkar, was one who accepted India as his "holy land" and "fatherland". This was linked also to European notions of the nation-state, as a solidary society based on a people with a common religion and culture. The word "Hindu", which had once had a simple territorial meaning, was redefined in terms of religious nationality. It was seen as incorporating all the diverse traditions, including Buddhism, Jainism, Veerasaivism, Sikhism, and other movements which had opposed Vedic-Brahman hegemony and the varna-jati system.

Thus, the reality of India as a plurality of cultures and philosophies was replaced by one divided into two major communities — "Hindus" and "Muslims". The more liberal of the nationalists saw the need to create a "secular" state uniting both communities. But the idea of "two communities" very easily gave birth to that of "two nations". The way of envisioning the major social-religious division of India itself laid the groundwork for Partition.

Gandhi accepted these ideas. He also saw "Aryans" as his ancestors. As against what he saw as the evils of industrialism, he wanted to go back to an idealised, harmonious village society in which tradition ruled. This he called "Ram Rajya" — appealing to an ideal of a divine king and his

subordinate family members, who had enforced varna dharma at the cost of the life of the Shudra ascetic Shambuk. As against Ambedkar at the Round Table conference, he proclaimed that he himself was the leader of Untouchables because they were part of "Hindu" society. They should not leave "their" religion but should instead reform it. Gandhi was ready to conciliate Muslims whose separate religious-cultural identity was undeniable; but he could never admit that the Untouchables had a separate religious and cultural identity. Thus his major fast was a fast against Ambedkar himself, undertaken against the award of separate electorates to Untouchables.

In contrast to Gandhi's romantic, anti-industrialism, Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar, Iyothee Thass and other great social radicals of the Dalit-Bahujan masses stood for science, education, industrialisation, seeking to give a concrete base to the ideals expressed by Ravidas and other sants of the medieval period. They refused to admit that the essence of Indian/Hindu identity lay in the spiritual realm; rather it had to be realised with a concrete achievement of equality. Phule had expressed this as "Bali Rajya" — the realm of the mythical peasant king Bali, considered a rakshasa in orthodox Brahmanic tradition. Ambedkar, though he urged a revival of Buddhism to provide a moral foundation for the new society, saw it consistently in terms of the great French revolutionary values of "liberty, equality and fraternity".

Where Gandhi had idealised traditional society, Ambedkar was a modernist who called villages "cesspools" and laid the basis for planning in fields of irrigation and energy policy. The confrontation between Ambedkar and Gandhi was a defining event of 20th century Indian history. It was a confrontation between conservative romanticism and a rationalistic, equalitarian modernism.

Gandhi, who spent so much of his life trying to achieve Hindu-Muslim amity, would have been appalled at the slaughter in Gujarat. Yet, in many ways, his own ideals paved the way for the growth of Hindutva and the transformation of Ram-Rajya into the regime of terror that has made Gujarat a name of shame today.

(Concluded)

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