The Colonial Roots Of Sadhu Lynching

Lynchings are wrong.

All lynchings.

Not only the lynching of sadhus but even the lynching of those considered as cattle thieves is wrong.

The Negative Stereotype Of The Sadhu Goes Back To Colonial India

The British considered sadhus, particularly the wandering monks, as rebels who were instigating the people against the British.

They were seen as having considerable influence on the people. The British wanted to destroy that. So did the evangelicals.

So, the British CID created elaborate dossiers on wandering sadhus.

They also spread stories of sadhus selling marijuana, sadhus as drug addicts, and sadhus abducting children.

Growing up in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, many of us heard stories of sadhus abducting the first-born children "because the magical formulation they do with the skulls of the first-born gave them magical powers".

When going to school, apart from being instructed to never accept anything from strangers, there were two additional instructions, "never tell you were first born" and "never accept holy ash from unknown sadhus”.

It took decades to find out that these instructions had actually been disseminated by the British CID and became part of the rural lore even in post-independent India.

Indian tradition by itself cautions against fake sadhus. Remember Ravana came as one to abduct Sita in the epic, Ramayana.

The Arthashastra also cautions about spies in the garb of sadhus.

The Mahabharata speaks of a cat faking itself as a sadhu in order to get rats. Duryodhana tells the tale actually to ridicule the Pandavas taking up tapas.

So, the notion of fake sadhu is not unknown to Indian society.

But there is a difference. And a paradox.

In the Indian tradition, we did not create a negative stereotype of wandering monks.

Let it be stated clearly: Hindu culture is perhaps the only culture in the world that has for millennia consistently fought against all kind of stereotypes.

But the British government took extraordinary efforts to create that stereotype, putting its bureaucratic network to effective use.

Historian William Pinch makes an insightful observation into this aspect of history (unusual too for his type of scholarship) that shows how the British over-laboured to disseminate this negative stereotype:

Of course, Mahatma Gandhi understood the trick of the British.

Whatever criticism a section of Hindus may have for Gandhi, his grasp of the power of traditional symbols eluded even Veer Savarkar.

He realised how the British were demeaning and destroying the traditional image of a sadhu. He also understood the power of that image. He himself assumed the form of a traditional wandering sadhu, earning himself the derogatory name of "half naked fakir".

But one should realise how much that image of Gandhi also boosted the image of traditional sadhus.

Unfortunately, Jawaharlal Nehru had no understanding of this dimension of Gandhi, and media in post-independent India played heavily on the sadhu stereotype for cheap thrills.

So, the lynching of sadhus in Maharashtra shows how much we have fallen for the colonial stereotypes even in the villages of India.

The result is as simple as it is dark.

The media in India will never generate an outrage for the lynching of sadhus. The same media which generated the ‘lynchistan’ narrative will fall silent on the lynching of two saffron-clad humans — precisely because they were dressed in saffron.

Although, through sustained ground reporting, my colleague Swati Goel Sharma has demolished the lynch-libel on Hindus which the national English media and international media imposed so strongly.

Even so, the lynching in Palghar shows that the need for decolonising the Hindu mind is actually a project of higher urgency than most of us think.