Hindu, Hindutva, Hindustan
The term Hindu itself has a very distinct origin. Derived from the Sanskrit Sindhu, the name of the river that we know as Indus, its first recorded mentions are in Persia, not in India, where all the people living in the South and East of the Indus River were termed as ‘Hindus’.
For centuries, Hindu had come to denote an ethno-geographical faction, referring to the cultural inheritors of the civilization that had flourished south of the Indus River, a twin to the Avestan civilization, largely isolated from Classical/Pagan influence from further west. It included, not only the Vedic teachings, but also Buddhist and Jain schools of thought.
How it developed is a tale of its own. Few records remain of religion in Harappa-Mohenjodaro and associated ruins, though most agree that at least a Proto-Shiva figure of Pashupati and a religious figure analogous to a ubiquitous Mother Goddess were worshipped then. The central-Asian invaders, later termed as Aryans, came with their own religion and culture, led by swords of iron and chariots pulled by horses. Their religion, an ancestor to both Vedic and Zoroastrian religions, was subsumed by the much larger Sindhu Culture, forming the Early Vedic religion.
The intervening centuries saw the rise and reabsorption of Buddhism and Jainism, and the resurgence of Pre-Vedic gods as the primary sects among Hinduism formed, the Vaishnavas, the Shaivas and the Shaktas. The upheavals had left the culture as hodge-podge of rituals, beliefs and practices that varied as much as the geography of the country.
And everyone was happy with that. It is the agreeable state of things that continued for centuries, till the day when the Ghurid Invaders set their sights on the throne in Delhi.
Before the Battles of Tarain, the Arabian invaders were happy to loot the riches from the western provinces of the subcontinent and withdraw, leaving the local culture untouched, or as some would say, unspoiled.
But then came the era of Sultanate. The invaders, followers of the barely 500 years old Islam, refused to go back this time, setting up camp in Delhi, ruling over at least the northern portions of India, the most populous parts of the subcontinent. And not only did they bring their armies, they brought along their culture, their language, their scholars, and most importantly, their religion.
Till the time that Islam was granted entry to India, there had been no defined practices, boundaries, rules or taboos that defined religion. Indeed, there was not a single word that referred to the religion itself. ‘Dharma’ was not a simple set of beliefs, but a personal code of conduct. It was righteousness. And in every part of India, the hundreds of religious texts and thousands of interpretations meant that no such codification and unification was desired, or even possible.
With the advent of the Sultanate, for the first time, the cultural and ideological identity of the Hindus, who were till date more of a community than any organised religion, was being threatened. For the rulers enfeoffed the Persian-speaking and penalised the vernaculars. The Islamic religion, born and shaped as a spear to unite Arabia, turned its head towards the millions living to the south of Sindhu. And for the first time, change, a drastic change had come to the subcontinent.
The cultural hegemons, the local priests and kings, to safeguard their interests and position in the social totem pole, had to finally put a word to a concept that was the Indian way of life, Hinduism. Suddenly, the disparate practices in the name of religion became united as a single group, the Hindus. An inherently mutable and capricious set of teachings became a pantheistic behemoth with 330 million deities. The Advaita Brahman of Adi Shankaracharya was no longer influential. The masses needed something tangible to rally around.
Still, the identity of Hinduism as a religion was not yet solid. Though temples were toppled and mosques brought up, non-islamic citizenry heavily taxed, and converts to the Mohammedan camp were steadily increasing, the pantheistic nature decreed that unification would be a long drawn out and slow process, hindered by schadenfreude as Shaivas, Shaktas, Vaishnavas and the thousand and one ethnicities jockeyed for control even as they tried to hold back slowly seeping Islamic influence.
Till 14th century, the writers were writing of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Turaks’ in opposition. Not Muslims, Mohammedans or Islam, but a more ethno-geographical identity of those originating form Turk, the name of the middle east. Till then, while Hindus were the overwhelming majority and Islam was just stabilizing it’s throne, it was more of a cultural rather than religious friction that greeted the invasion of Islamic influence.
But as the Sultanate grew stabler, larger and more influential, and turned its head to a cultural integration of the subcontinent into the wider Muslim world, from Hindu literature rose cultural icons like Ramcharitmanas and the rise of Shiva, Krishna and Ram as country-wide representatives of Hinduism, relegating the 330 million strong pantheon into a assisting role and beginning the first movement to codify Hinduism. The first attempt, to turn a community and its culture into a much more restrictive religion. Hinduism had come to the world.
To an extent, it succeeded. The religious consciousness was born in the vast majority. A resurgence of temple-building followed. And with the weakening of the Sultanate and then the rise of Mughals, Hinduism had the opportunity to breathe and spread. With the religious tolerance of Akbar and Jahangir, the Bhakti Movements spread all over India. A resurgence of the culture of the Hindus was the result, which encompasses a further sidelining of the less popular religious icons and as well, a stricter enforcement of a uniform culture, in a bid to fight against the organised religions like Islam and Christianity that had made its advent. Early Mughals gave the redefined Hinduism the space that it needed to disperse into every corner of the subcontinent and reform the religion in the hearts and minds of people.
By this time, Hinduism, as it had done with Buddhism and Jainism, had made its best attempt to assimilate Islam, adopting its holy figures as venerated ones, its festivities as celebrated ones. But unlike its own offshoots, the inherently alien nature of Abrahamic religion to Hinduism ensured that the core values remained separate, like oil and water. Sufis were but an attempt that turned into a sect neither Hindu nor Muslim.
Aurangzeb was a brief interlude whose actions led to a solidification of cultural friction into religious terms. He helped in condensing into blades the Indian and Persian cultures, whose edges were respectively Hinduism and Islam. And Hinduism got its boost of morale with the resounding success of the Maratha Confederacy, after the fall of Vijayanagara had introduced a period of declining Hindu influence in the Deccan, the portion of the Subcontinent that was the last to feel the advent of Islam.
The British and the Europeans entered into the muddied waters with the missionaries and for long, were frustrated by the lack of inroads they could make into the more influential sections of society. While the lowest rung accepted them, the higher castes enforced cultural insulation well, their methods sharpened with years of practice. But the two pronged attacks of Abrahamic religion catalysed what had been simmering for centuries. And with the final push that was the Divide and Rule policy of the British in the late 19th century, Hinduism shed the last pretenses of its existence as a cultural ideology and fully embraced the saffron robes of religion.
This is not to say that Hinduism and Hindus as a whole had forgotten what it used to stand for a millennium ago. But there was a rise of a vocal presence, that clamoured to organise and codify and weaponise Hinduism, as Christianity was by the West and Islam by Arabia. With the development of Hindi as a language separate from Hindustani and a second resurgence in the popularity of a few religious icons, Hinduism underwent a second transformation. The Vedic gods were near completely sidelined, as seen by the episode of Govardhan Giri. The Upanishads and Vedantic literature, the Smarta traditions, mired with conflicting ideologies and an almost universal acceptance of differences, were pushed to the background as the Puranas, with an almost classical interpretation of god’s, along with Ramayana and Mahabharata, epics both, became primary religious texts.
Hindutva, literally meaning Hinduness, is a term that was coined as a definition of a representation of Indian culture. After 8 centuries of Islamic and British rule, that was interpreted with the new-fangled concepts of Hinduism as the primary axle. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the man credited with popularising the term, defined Hindutva as the culture of the people who see India as their motherland (Mathrubhumi), the land of their ancestors (Pitribhumi) and as the holy land (Punyabhumi).
This was a direct barb at the Islamic and Christian population of the subcontinent, first of whom faced Medina as they prayed and second of whose clergy was still appointed by the Vatican. He argued, their inherently alien nature gave them no place in a Hindu holy land. After centuries of political oppression where Hindus had kept their heads down, Hinduism had finally risen up and hit back.
But Veer Savarkar had a very interesting and unique view of religion itself, as he called Hinduism that had developed till then as a fraction or facet of Hindutva. He included all religions branching off from Hinduism, like Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism as parts of the Hindu culture. After centuries of metamorphosis from a culture to a religion, it was an attempt to forge itself back into a culture in part of Hinduism.
And it failed. Savarkar’s ideology, beautiful in and of itself, became mixed with fascist ideas as Hindu Rashtra, the Hindu Nation and Hindu Sanskriti, the Hindu Culture, became associated with Hindu Jati, the Hindu Race.
And Savarkar was followed by Hedgewar, Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, who adopted a much more exclusive Hinduism which required all minorities not to coexist, but to become subordinate to the Hindu majority. Perhaps a disturbing parallel could be drawn to the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler.
But the chief cause that the first wave of Hindutva had limited success was the fact that the leaders faced a near-unsurmountable opponent in the political field, Mahatma Gandhi.
Hindu Rashtra was handily defeated by Ram Rajya. And though Jinnah did his best, Congress under Gandhiji held an overwhelming popularity. It was their leadership that led to Independence and it solidified their fame and precedence in the Hindi heartland.
Partition and the violence that followed had provided a unique chance for the militant Hindutva, to unite the Hindu ideology with the right wing, perhaps the third transformation that would have led to Hinduism emerging as a religion as organised as the other two world religions. But Nathuram Godse assassinated Gandhi, and for decades RSS and Hindutva’s messengers were seen as the same people who had murdered the Father of the Nation.
For the next three decades, neither RSS, nor the Hindu Mahasabha or even the Bharatiya Jana Sangh could achieve any major political breakthrough. In the Hindi heartland it was branded with the RSS tag and outside, its basis in Brahminical policies were not welcome.
Its rise is inextricably linked with Indira Gandhi, as BJP, the final transformation of Jana Sangh came about as a result of fragmentation of Janata Party. It was Indira Gandhi who helped it achieve its political breakthrough. The days in the second term of Indira Gandhi, marred by issues such as Bangladeshi Immigration and Khalistan Movement, the Rushdie Affair and so on , helped it rediscover its path and the failure of the moderate policies of Vajpayee in the 1984 elections led to a change in the leadership. The focus was now turned towards criticism of Congress policies said to be pandering to the minorities, as well as an identification with Socialist policies initially championed by Gandhi.
An undercurrent of Hindu nationalism, buoyed by the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement and the issue of the Kashmiri Pandits, erupted as the Babri Masjid incident and provided enough political capital for BJP to be vaulted as a pole to balance Congress influence, which has till date failed to regather the votes of the demographic frequently called ‘Upper Caste Hindus’.
This marked a renewal of Hindutva as a guiding political principle of the descendants of Savarkar and Hedgewar, though in a much narrower confine than even Savarkar had imagined. In 1995, a three-judge Supreme Court bench defined Hindutva as a way of life and allowed the BJP to refer to it in their manifesto, clearing the path for the rise of a Hindutva ideology, perhaps redefined in the context of the times, but nonetheless, a definition that has narrowed down further and further. It has given the cover of a cultural movement to a political gimmick that seeks to polarise the population along religious lines rather than having any real motivation to being about a revolution in cultural ideologies.
Today, when a cultural invasion is inevitable, and indeed so much more insidious and unstoppable that no religion, no culture stands unscathed, the world has turned to dogmatic ideologies to protect their culture. In India, where Hinduism is facing the second wave of cultural invasion, the vocal portion that has self-appointed itself as the defender of faith is no longer concerned with religious beliefs and ideals, and is instead fighting on religious icons, of which Ayodhya and Beef are just the most visible facets.
Unless the Hindus, the vast, silent majority, take back their own culture and identity as a community rather than a religion, and restrain the self-proclaimed crusaders of Hinduism, an increasingly disheartened population would just grow farther and farther from what is meant to be a part of the civilization that descends from the South bank of Sindhu, and the residents of all land south of the river would accomplish by their own hand that which a millennium of armed rule could not do, disintegration of Bharata-santati, the people who reside in Bharata-varsha, the people who reside in Hindustan.
