Hindu Nationalism’s Andersonian moment
The role of a TV series in creating an imagined Hindu community
Some of you might be familiar with the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s influential work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Anderson defines a nation as:
imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign
He explains that nations are essentially modern enterprises seeking legitimacy through reference to the past. He credits capitalism, and particularly the role of the print media with the rise of nationalism. He argues that advancements in printing technology in the eighteenth century allowed for a proliferation of newspapers and books in languages other than Latin. With this — for the first time —German speakers who did not know each other on a personal basis were able to see the world in exactly the same way through the newspapers and books written in their language. The massive reach of the print media allowed this ‘imagined identity’ — again for the first time — to spread to areas larger than villages and cities. This eventually lead to nationalism and the subsequent creation of nation-states on linguistic basis.
In Anderson’s words
Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another through via print and paper. In the process, they became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.
A fascinating insight indeed!
Now, I finished reading Ramachandra Guha’s masterpiece India After Gandhi this week. And I realised that the rise of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s had an Andersonian explanation too. However, because literacy rates in India were still low, it was not a newspaper or a book that did the trick, but a TV series that aired during 1987–1988 called Ramayan.
There are several apocryphal stories about how parents took their infants for vaccination when Ramayan was being telecast because that’s when one would find the streets empty and the crowds in hospitals thin. There are also stories of how people not rich enough to have TVs in their own homes, were firmly glued to the TV screens of their neighbours’ houses for this serial.
But it’s influence went far beyond that. Aired at a time when the Ayodhya movement was gathering steam, the TV series had a far bigger impact — of a kind that print-capitalism had in eighteenth century Europe.
In Guha’s words:
the televised epic was introducing subtle changes in this pluralistic and decentralised religion, long divided into sects each worshipping different deities, lacking a holy book, a unique and singular good, or a single capital of the faith. Now in front of their television sets, for the first time all Hindus across the country and at the same time watched the same thing: the serial in fact introduced a congregational imperative into Hinduism.
Another fascinating insight: notice the uncanny similarity between the impact of print media and Ramayan in eitheenth century Europe and India of the 1980s respectively. Tf one were to accept this theory, may be this TV series was successful in doing what Golwalkar and others long wanted to do: introduce a congregational imperative into Hinduism. Imagine, the Hindutva ideology is that recent!
