The Hindu Dilemma: How Abrahamic Can Faith Become & Still Remain Hindu?

Jyotirmaya Sharma is no friend of Hinduism or Hindutva, and that is one good reason for all Hindus to read his book Hindutva, which is essentially a spruced-up version of a volume authored by him some 13 years ago.

If his original purpose was to ask readers, especially Hindus, to be “sceptical about our own tradition, question self-assumed identities and question the voice and authority of traditionally privileged individuals, icons and texts,” this updated volume goes beyond that goal to explicitly debunk the idea of Hinduism and Hindu identity.

He sees Hindutva politics as its more dominant manifestation. He explicitly rejects the notion that Hinduism in its generic form may be plural and tolerant, while Hindutva may be its more militant version, violent and abusive.

Put simply, Sharma’s regurgitation of his old book is little more than a Hinduphobic western reconstruction of the thesis that Hinduism itself was an Orientalist construct. It has almost no elements of ideas that have emerged from within the people who we now call Hindus. It is not an “us” perspective on Hinduism, but a “them” perspective, an apparent insider who wants to look at Hinduism and Hindu identity from the outside.

It is as legitimate a purpose as any, and it is a useful input for Hindus to have about themselves. The essential thesis is, however, implicitly the same as any western critic of Hinduism: to deny that there was anything Hindu about India before the west arrived with its orientalist scholars such as William Jones and Max Mueller.

It is another way of denying that India was at any time Hindu or dharmic; in Churchill’s words, India was a “mere geographical expression” devoid of any sense of nation. In Sharma’s words, he wants to “delineate the foundational myths of the Hindus… since the very idea of the Hindu as a universal category is a recent one…”.

In a technical sense this would certainly be true, for consciousness about defining oneself as Hindu would have been a relatively recent phenomenon, the result of invasions from the north-west by different peoples with different ideologies that forced us to self-define as the people living beyond the Indus (or Sindhu, from which the word Hindu is derived).

We seldom get to choose our own names; it is given to us. But that does not mean we don’t exist. To presume that we had no sense of commonality before the Orientalist arrived is obviously a falsehood that has become the norm in Left-wing circles. You didn’t need everyone from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to call himself or herself a Hindu in order to deduce a common civilisational connect.

But before we argue this point out, let us get to the book itself. The attempt is to connect present-day Hindutva politics through the ideas and notions developed by three religious reformers and/or philosophers (Dayananda Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, Sri Aurobindo, and Swami Vivekananda) and one explicitly political theorist, Vinayak Damodar “Veer” Savarkar.

Each of them tried to define what or who a Hindu is, and this is what Sharma would like to prove false. He is unlikely to succeed, even given our diversity. It may not be possible to define every Hindu narrowly, but it is certainly possible to define common elements that tied us together: a belief in dharma (which is not religion in the western sense, but more about right action and thought in the right context and a sense of balance and duty); a belief in karma (not a fatalistic view, or about past lives, but something that connects actions and consequences); the belief that one can have many approaches to god and truth, in the expectation that ultimately they will all connect; and, above all, an acute sense of a common geography.

This is how long before we heard of Hinduism, Adi Sankara, born in modern-day Kerala, could travel all over India and establish four Mutts in four different places; this is what enabled a Chola king to bring waters from the Ganga to modern-day Tamil Nadu and claim some form of moral achievement. The sense of what was sacred to all permeated ancient Hindu-ness.

Sharma sees the ideas of Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, et al, as a “terrible and tortured vision” which had these commonalities: an attempt to convert fluid Hinduism into a “rigid, codified, monochromatic entity”: making Hinduism macho and masculine and aggressive, even violent; defining Hinduism’s relationship with other religions as a story of confrontation and misfortune, especially given the assumption that Hinduism was restated as the “mother of all religions’; a “never-ending sense of threat to Hinduism”; the “end of theology”, with spiritual wisdom already finding its ultimate form in the Vedas and Upanishads; and last, the use of “invective, abuse and contempt as legitimate tools of writing, conversation and discourse.”

There is no need to dispute any of these elements in Sharma’s narrative of the Hindu reconstruction as seen in the works of the four ideologues he studies, but this would be at best a half-truth, and similar things can be said about almost every modern religion existing today. What is Islam if not all of these? What is Christianity if not all of these? What is Buddhism outside India (and neo-Buddhism inside Ambedkarite India) if not equally aggressive (as in Sri Lanka and Myanmar)? The creation of the “other” is often a route to unity. The point is simple: whenever any group feels threatened, whether the threats are legitimate or imagined, this is what happens. Just as castes became rigid and impermeable when faced with outside attacks, religions too become so.

Sharma is right to flag the point that the Hindutva approach is making Hinduism more rigid – and possibly more Abrahamic in its approach. He notes that the redefinition of Hinduism/Hindutva came from a sneaking admiration for what is perceived as the strength of Islam – whether in the writings of Vivekananda (who talked of developing a Vedantic mind in a Islamic body), or the more explicit words of Savarkar, who wrote, “The Muhammedans, when they came, found a source of irresistible strength in the principle of theocratic unity…while Hindus….(had) fallen prey to the most decentralising and disabling institutions and superstitions…”.

The question Sharma fails to ask is this: when your opponent or challenger uses more lethal weapons, can you win using bows and arrows, claiming this is how we have always fought? Indian hockey was artistic, but astroturf and speed have changed the game. Can we ever hope to beat Australia by following our own styles?

We should, however, thank Sharma for highlighting the essential dilemma facing Hindu society: the liberal approach of seeking truth through different paths is fine for individuals, but sticking to old ways to doing things leaves you vulnerable to attacks from physically stronger rivals. But can you still remain what you were if you adopt the tactics of Abrahamism?

The answer is probably not, for in fighting an enemy effectively you become more like him. Sikhism – which faced the brunt of the Islamic challenge in the north-west of India – began as a Hindu reform movement but morphed into a militant Abrahamic idea given the nature of forces it was combatting. You can notice the change between Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, when Sikhism started with questioning and ended up with “one book, one people” – Sharma’s “monochromatism”.

Put another way, if you decide to fight, you change; if you don’t fight, you could be digested or annihilated. Which is the right choice for Hindus to make? Sharma has no answer to this question, and does not even try to understand why Dayanand Saraswati, Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Savarkar wrote the way they did. They were essentially seeking the answer to the dilemma I have stated above, and this is a dilemma we are yet to evolve.

Sharma also tries to posit Gandhi, Ambedkar, Lohia and Tagore as representing rival approaches to the above four, but this is a mythical separation. For they too were engaged with the same dilemma.

Gandhi, an apostle of non-violence, may have come to different tentative conclusions, but he was grappling with the same dilemma of how to make Hindus strong. Wasn’t it Gandhi who said that the average Hindu was a coward, and the average Muslim a bully? What else was this but a restatement of what Vivekananda or Savarkar may have said in different words?

Gandhi also sought strength, but differently. He let loose violence on himself (his fasts, his advice to independent India to disband its army), which is like an open invitation to enemies to defeat you. Gandhi failed to ask himself what happens when your opponent refuses to accept the spiritual basis of your defiance? Did Gandhi’s internal violence to himself prevent Jinnah from getting his way? Would Hitler have offered peace if, the Poles or the British, had dropped their arms and accepted death in the hope of changing Hitler’s heart?

For that matter, did Ambedkar not construct an artificial people by embracing neo-Buddhism for Dalits, when Dalits were as diverse as caste Hindus? How is this construct any different from what a Vivekananda may have proposed to Hindus?

The fact is all Hindus saw weaknesses in themselves, and tried to build a strength they saw in the adversary, whether it was Islam or Hinduism itself (as in the case of Ambedkar). Ambedkar critiques Hinduism in the same harsh way as a Dayananda Saraswati or Savarkar critiqued Islam and Christianity. Ambedkar posited Hindiusm as the “other” just as Sharma’s four did with the Abrahamic religions.

In a sense, Sharma raises a key question without realising it or explicitly mentioning it: how Hindu can you remain when you face an existential threat and decide to fight it? Can you hold your own against aggressive Abrahamic faiths – whether evangelising Christianity or jihadi Islam - by being passive and submissive?

The Jews changed after the holocaust, and became a different (aggressive and combative) people in Israel. The Sikhs too became that when they decided to stand their ground against Islam.

Modern-day Hindus too will have to find their own answers – and in this they face the same dilemmas that Dayananda Saraswati, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda and Veer Savarkar tried to resolve in their own way.

They tried to retain the essentials of what it meant to be Hindu without opting for the passivity and submissiveness that allowed rivals to walk all over them over a millenium of Islamic depredations and British colonialism.

The dilemma is not resolved yet, and is a work in progress. Today, the fight is against new enemies, against American Orientalism (to use Rajiv Malhotra’s term), neo-colonialism, post-Orientalist Hinduphobia, aggressive evangelisation, and jihadi terrorism – not to speak of the strenuous efforts of Jyotirmaya Sharma to tell Hinduism to just lie down and die.