Hindutva and
ethnicity
By Gail Omvedt
In 1996, during a six-month
employment in Bhubaneshwar, fascinated by the beauty and antiquity of
the area, I travelled with friends to Konarak and to Puri. Here, I was
interested in seeing the temple of Lord Jagannath, considered to be
the symbol of Orissa. At the temple, however, while my friends were
allowed to enter, and confront the solicitude and greed of the Pandas,
I was not. The warning sign, "non-Hindus not allowed" clearly
meant me. In the Puri temple at least, a white skin was the sign of
a non-Hindu.
A couple of years after that,
I attended a conference in Madurai, and decided to go see the great
Meenakshi temple with a friend, a Chinese woman who had also read a
paper at the conference. Though I was not particularly interested, she
wanted to go into the inner sanctum, not taking the "only Hindus
allowed" warning very seriously and hardly imagining that a temple
of a god could be exclusionist. But she was also turned away. Clearly,
yellowish skin and folded eyelids also indicated a "non-Hindu"
to them.
Does this mean Hinduism is
racist? This is a somewhat loaded term, but it is clear that "Hinduism"
as it is seen today by the Hindutva forces has been consistently given
an ethnic interpretation. The basis is one of taking it as a religion
of a people who have inhabited a territory. In spite of significant
differences among them in colour and racial features, there is in fact
a sense in which South Asians - people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh,
Nepal, Sri Lanka - share enough common features to gain an identity.
It is an identity that is known in the U.S. today as "brown"
- and after 9/11 "brown" has been seen as an object of racism
and chauvinism by many Americans, including American officials. Brown
Muslims are the main target, but "brown" is an identifying
mark, so that while beards
and turbans are the most dangerous, any "brown" person is
considered suspicious. With the George W. Bush Government taking the
lead, thousands of Americans have been subjected to tyranny, and thousands
of foreigners have been humiliated.
This is rightly condemned
as racist. The Dalit position during the
World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in August-September
2001, which argued that the birth-linked characteristics of caste are
also similar to racism, is also correct. Both racism in the U.S., which
includes discrimination against all "brown" people, and casteism
in India, which stigmatises those considered of "low" birth,
are social forms of cruel discrimination in which groups of people are
seen as somehow biologically inferior and socially dangerous.
But what do we call it when
a religion is identified in ethnic terms?
That is what took place during the 19th century when the founders of
Hindutva formulated their ideology. The modernisation of traditional
varna Hinduism at that time was expressed by the attempt to bring all
Dalits and OBCs into one ethnically-defined, territorially-linked community.
As the main ideologue, it was Sarvarkar who most clearly formulated
the themes. According to him, "a Hindu is someone who views India
as his holy land and fatherland". What this means is that a Hindu
is not simply a person who has a particularly belief, but
also a person whose ancestry is in a particular territory. In other
words, it is an ethnic definition. It sought to create solidarity by
overriding differences among those classified as "Hindus"
-
differences of language, region within India, and caste and status.
This attempt to create solidarity
was an early way of dealing with
objections of Dalits and OBCs that the discrimination against them on
the grounds of their birth amounted to something like racism: it proclaimed
that they had a racial, that is ethnic, origin in common with that of
the upper castes. But, while denying an ethnic difference along caste
lines, the Hindutva position simply formulated a different ethnicity
as the basis of a religious community. It included and excluded people
from the religious community on grounds of birth. That is, it excluded
not only people from India who accepted religions whose "holy land"
was elsewhere (the clear references were to Mecca and Jerusalem!); it
also excluded people whose ethnic origin was from outside India, that
is, whose "fatherland" (why not motherland?) was elsewhere.
It continued in a different form the old idea that one can only be born
a Hindu one cannot convert to it. Strikingly, the only other major religion
of the world today which takes such a position is Judaism.
The antagonism to conversion
rests on an ideological foundation which takes ethnicity, that is a
presumed community of blood and heritage, as central. It suggests that
the choice of a religion cannot be on the basis of aspiration, of a
questioning and a spiritual search that transcends all barriers and
resists all limitations to the human mind. It insists that this choice
has to be bound by ancestry, by blood, by family and habit. What justifies
this is the idea that somehow a religious faith is bound to a "people"
so much that the heritage of blood and family cannot be transcended,
and that those who don't share that heritage can never truly be a part
of that religious faith. This in turn denies individual human creativity
and freedom. The argument for "no conversion" seems to assume
that humans are less than human, that they are tied down to instinct
and heritage.
This is a strange idea, in
many ways, to come in a land from which the first great missionary religion
of the world, Buddhism,
originated. It is perhaps not so strange, however, when we recall
that many of the debates between Buddhists and their more orthodox opponents
were on the issue of whether a person's worth was determined by action
or by birth. In any case, the ethnic definition of religion is in many
ways very pre-modern. To Ambedkar, agonising in his early days over
what this "Hinduism" was that excluded him not only from temples
but also from households, streets, water tanks, and the whole basis
of public life, this ethnic definition of religion was unacceptable.
In one of his early essays, "The Philosophy of Hinduism",
he classified world religions into those of "modern" and "antique"
societies. In cultural terms, he argued, the main difference was that
the religions of antique societies identified god with a particular
community and so had a community-centred collectivist ethics, while
those of modern societies were universalistic, seeing god as the father/creator
of all humans and centring their ethics on the individual rather than
on the community. Ambedkar here was using the term "modern"
in a different sense from the sociologists of today, to identify societies
which proclaimed a universalistic morality based on a universalistic
religion, societies which date back thousands of years.
This in turn led him into
an attack on Hinduism as denying the
equality and freedom necessary for a truly modern society. However,
even apart from the issues raised by this attack, his distinction between
community-based religions and universalistic religions is important.
The denial of the right of
conversion amounts to the ethnicisation of religion. And, it was this
denial that Ambedkar fundamentally
challenged when he proclaimed in 1936 that "I have been born a
Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu". Claiming the right to convert
was a challenge to the ethnic definition of religious identity. And
this
remains the issue at stake in regard to conversion laws: are the
religions of India to be defined in terms of one community, or
universalistically?
February 28,2003