Hindutva Conflates Its Ideas Of Religion And Culture: Revived Contestations Over History — From The Gyanvapi Mosque Case To The Renewed Demonisation Of Aurangzeb
By
Shashi Tharoor
June 27,
2023
The revived
contestations over history — from the Gyanvapi mosque case to the renewed
demonisation of Aurangzeb — confirm that Hindutva conflates its ideas of
religion and culture with those of nation and state. Nationalism and statehood
are by definition indivisible, whereas religion and culture take on multiple
manifestations. Culture of course contributes to national identity; yet,
culture alone cannot mould the nationalism of a country, leave alone that of a
plural land such as India. Indeed, an India confident in its own diversity
could celebrate multiple expressions of its culture.
‘In
the Hindutva-centred view, history is made of religion-based binaries’ | Photo
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
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A
‘Ground Zero’
Hindutva
sees culture differently. As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s longest-serving
chief M.S. Golwalkar wrote, culture “is but a product of our all-comprehensive
religion, a part of its body and not distinguishable from it”. For the
Hindutvavadis, India’s national culture is Hindu religious culture, and
cultural nationalism cloaks plural India in a mantle of Hindu identity. Since
Hindutva’s conception of nationalism is rooted in the primacy of culture over
politics, the Hindutva effort is to create an idea of the Indian nation in
which the Hindu religious identity coincides with the cultural. In this
process, Indian history, following the Muslim conquests of north India, has
become “ground zero” in the battle of narratives between the Hindutvavadis and
the pluralists.
When, with
the publication of my book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, I
spoke critically of 200 years of foreign rule, the voices of Hindutva, led by
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, condemned 1,200 years of foreign rule. To
them, the Muslim rulers of India, whether the Delhi Sultans, the Deccani
Sultans or the Mughals (or the hundreds of other Muslims who occupied thrones
of greater or lesser importance for several hundred years across the country)
were all foreigners. I responded that while the founder of a Muslim dynasty may
well have come to India from abroad, he and his descendants stayed and
assimilated in this country, married Hindu women, and immersed themselves in
the fortunes of this land; each Mughal Emperor after Babar had less and less
connection of blood or allegiance to a foreign country. If they looted or
exploited India and Indians, they spent the proceeds of their loot in India,
and did not send it off to enrich a foreign land as the British did. The
Mughals received travellers from the Fergana Valley politely, enquired about
the well-being of the people there and perhaps even gave some money for the
upkeep of the graves of their Chingizid ancestors, but they stopped seeing
their original homeland as home. By the third generation, let alone the fifth
or sixth, they were as “Indian” as any Hindu.
The
Intellectual Terrain
This
challenge of authenticity, however, cuts across a wide intellectual terrain. It
emerges from those Hindus who share V.S. Naipaul’s view of theirs as a “wounded
civilisation”, a pristine Hindu land that was subjected to repeated defeats and
conquests over the centuries at the hands of rapacious Muslim invaders and was
enfeebled and subjugated in the process. To them, Independence is not merely
freedom from British rule but an opportunity to restore the glory of Hindu
culture and religion, wounded by Muslim conquerors. Historians such as Audrey
Truschke, author of a sympathetic biography of Aurangzeb, have argued that this
account of Muslims despoiling the Hindu homeland is neither a continuous
historical memory nor based on accurate records of the past. But one cannot
underestimate the emotional content of the Hindutva view: it is for them a
matter of faith that India is a Hindu nation, which Muslim rulers attacked,
looted and sought to destroy, and documented historical facts that refute this
view are at best an inconvenience, at worst an irrelevance. Indeed, Professor
Truschke has remarked on the widespread belief in India that Aurangzeb was a
Muslim fanatic who destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of
Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. None of these
propositions, she demonstrates in her work, was true, least of all the claim
(made by many of those who fought successfully to remove his name from a
prominent road in Delhi) that his ultimate aim was to eradicate Hindus and
Hinduism.
Historical
evidence suggests that Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of Hindu temples, as
is claimed, and that the ones he did destroy were largely for political
reasons; that he did little to promote conversions, as evidenced by the
relatively modest number of Hindus who adopted Islam during Aurangzeb’s rule;
that he gave patronage to Hindu and Jain temples and liberally donated land to
Brahmins; and that millions of Hindus thrived unmolested in his empire. Like
many rulers of his time, whether Muslim or Hindu, Aurangzeb attacked Hindus and
Muslims alike. But such nuanced accounts of Aurangzeb enjoy little traction
amongst those who prefer their history in unambiguous shades of black and
white. Aurangzeb is controversial not because of what he did in the historical
past but rather because he serves a useful purpose in the present as an emblem
of Muslim oppression.
In the
Hindutva-centred view, history is made of religion-based binaries, in which all
Muslim rulers are evil and all Hindus are valiant resisters, embodiments of
incipient Hindu nationalism. The Hindutvavadis seem unaware of the Muslim
generals who fought on the side of Hindu rajas and vice-versa. Indeed, few who
extol Maharana Pratap as the “victor” in the Battle of Haldighati against
Akbar’s Mughal army realise that Akbar’s forces were in fact commanded by a
Hindu, Raja Man Singh of Amber, and that Rana Pratap’s resistance was led
principally by a Muslim, Hakim Khan Sur. Similarly, liberal and tolerant rulers
such as Ashoka, Akbar, Jai Singh and Wajid Ali Shah do not figure in Hindutva’s
list of national heroes. Indeed, where many nationalist historians extolled
Akbar as the liberal, tolerant counterpart to the Islamist Aurangzeb,
Hindutvavadis have begun to attack him too, principally because he was Muslim,
and like most medieval monarchs, killed princes who stood in his way, many of
whom happened to be Hindu.
The
Recent Past Is Not Spared Too
Communal
history colours even the more recent past. Among those Indians who revolted
against the British, Bahadur Shah, Zeenat Mahal, Maulavi Ahmadullah and General
Bakht Khan, all Muslims, are conspicuous by their absence from Hindutva
histories. And syncretic traditions such as the Bhakti movement, and
universalist religious reformers such as Rammohan Roy and Keshub Chandra Sen,
do not receive much attention from the Hindutva orthodoxy. What does is the
uncritical veneration of “Hindu heroes” such as Maharana Pratap and of course
Chhatrapati Shivaji, the intrepid Maratha warrior whose battles against the
Mughals have now replaced accounts of Mughal kings in Maharashtra’s textbooks.
As the recent National Council of Educational Research and Training controversy
has again reminded us, the educational system is the chosen battlefield for the
Hindutva warriors, and curriculum revision their preferred weapon.
History has
often been contested terrain in India, but its revival in the context of 21st
century politics is a sobering sign that the past continues to have a hold over
the Hindutva movement in the present. While the Mughals will be demonised as a
way of delegitimising Indian Muslims (who are stigmatised as “Aurangzeb ke
aulad”, the sons of Aurangzeb), the appropriation of Sardar Patel, Madan Mohan
Malaviya and other nationalists by Hindutva confirm that the heroes of the
freedom struggle will be hijacked to the ruling party’s attempts to appropriate
a halo of nationalism that none of its forebears has done anything to earn.
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Shashi Tharoor is third-term Lok Sabha Member of
Parliament (Congress) from Thiruvananthapuram, is the Sahitya Akademi
Award-winning author of ‘An Era of Darkness’ and of ‘The Battle of Belonging’.
His most recent book is ‘Ambedkar: A Life’
Source: The Main Chapter Of How Hindutva
Sees The Past
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