However, a few weeks ago, two men entered the building during worship hours while people were chanting and announced themselves as members of Chennai City Corporation. They loudly claimed that the vihara had been “occupying” land that wasn’t their own.  “They barged in and began measuring the walls and the floors and things with measuring bars right during our prayers! ” recalls La. Jayabalan, a congregant, “If this was a Hindu temple, would they have dared to do something like that? Would they have barged in and interrupted a pooja? ” He expresses deep anger and anguish over the way that his faith and practice is being disrespected.

The members assert that the vihara was not “occupied” as the two officials claimed. “The Southern India Buddhist Association first began in the 1800s under Ayothidasar, a Tamil Buddhist revivalist.  It was an initiative of faith run and sustained largely by Dalits in the Perambur area. It is said that one ‘Sakya family’ who are related to K.Armstrong, who is currently serving as Tamil Nadu’s BSP state president, first donated 31204 sq ft. of land in Perambur.” says a Vihara member, G. Meena.

Dr.Ambedkar does mention this vihara in Dr.Ambedkar Speeches and Writings, Vol 17, Part III. The vihara also has long established rules and bylaws for the membership, the second edition of which was published as early as 1954. This is the same copy currently being used.

It remains a vibrant part of the Perambur community but recently has begun seeing attacks.

“If we are occupying this place, shouldn’t the complaint be filed by another disputing local owner, a neighbour, or another community member? Why is the complainant the Commissioner of Police? What does he know about this neighbourhood and its history?  What is his interest in filing this particular complaint? ” asks Sarada Devi, another local member.

After countering the two men from the corporation, the members were able to raise enough voice and show enough strength to prevent them from taking further action. They sent them off with a copy of Dr.Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches Volume 17, Part 3. “Here, take this. This is published by your government. Read what it says. Babasaheb mentions that he visited this Vihara in 1954. In fact, he stayed here from 6th July 1954 to 14th July 1954. And we are much older than that as well!” G.Meena says she told them.

Since the incident with these two men, several cases and legal orders have been filed. Several more government officials have been harassing them. State authorities have sent a letter saying that the vihara could be destroyed at any time.

The problem appears to be that the vihara is largely a Dalit Buddhist initiative. The Vihara serves not just as a centre for practice and meditation but also a political hub and a Dalit organising hub. The second floor hosts an “Anitha Intellectual Center”  – a whole floor that memorializes the passing away of the brilliant young Dalit girl S.Anitha in 2017. Here students study and prepare for exams. The floor above it serves as a monastery and houses Buddhist bhikkhus or monks.

Many Dalit community members hold meetings and events in this space. Crucially, this vihara also performs “conversions” of Dalit community members to Buddhism officially.

Members feel this is the real reason for the harassment and not anything else. People seem uneasy and on edge even as they go about their activities routinely.

K.Armstrong, Tamil Nadu BSP leader states – ” They can demolish our vihara if they want, but let them know that if they do, every single Dalit home in this area will sprout up as its own vihara!”

The author is a contributor to TwoCircles.net from Tamil Nadu.

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

The post ‘Would they do this if it was a temple?’ Anger mounts among Buddhists of Tamil Nadu over attack on Vihara appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: Hindustan Times

Denied citizenship status and classified as illegal immigrants, Rohingya Muslims have been the target of repeated violence with state connivance in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. The continuing persecution has forced the Rohingyas to flee and seek refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. From Bangladesh, an estimated 40,000 Rohingyas have sought shelter in India.

The Union Minister of state for Home, Kiren Rijiju told Parliament last week that the Centre has asked state authorities to identify and deport illegal immigrants, including Rohingyas.
   
“Obviously, we have our concerns about the treatment of refugees,” Guterres’ Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq told during a regular briefing at UN Headquarters in New York. “Once refugees are registered, they are not to be returned back to countries where they fear persecution.”

According to doctrine in the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, no nation shall expel or return a refugee in any manner to territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.

Some of the 4,000 Rohingyas who have been living in the old city of Hyderabad told the Hindustan Times, “If sent back forcibly we’ll be killed.” Maulana Hameed-ul-Haq (50), a cleric at one of the Rohingya settlements in Balapur, says, “It will be better if we are killed in India than in our own country. We will anyway be killed if we are forcibly sent back.” 

“The Indian government was kind enough to acknowledge us as refugees. The Telangana government has been looking after us really well and we feel safe and secure here. Now, suddenly the news about we being sent back has caused a lot of panic among us,” said the Maulana.

The UN spokesperson told the Dawn that UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) office would take up the issue with the Indian government. He reminded India of UN’s position against deporting refugees.
 
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has said deporting and abandoning the Rohingya would be “unconscionable,” according to an ANI report.

The post UN chief concerned over India’s plan to deport Rohingya Muslims appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Yoga is not a culturally homogenous, all-Hindu, Vedic tradition, as is often portrayed by revivalist demagogues and those who have set up a raucous campaign to reclaim its roots. It is, in fact, a liberal, eclectic tradition that absorbed freely from Buddhist, Jain, even Sufist ascetic practices.

Roots of Yoga, a new academic work by renowned yoga scholars Mark Singleton and James Mallinson, is an intensive study of over 100 core texts on the subject. These date from 1000 BCE to the 19 century CE, from early Upanishads and Mahabharata to Jnaneswari and Hawz al-Hayat (The Spring of Life), and include rare texts in several languages, including Tamil, Avadhi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Pali, Tibetan, Arabic and Persian.

The book, five years in the making and launched last week by Abhyas Trust in Delhi, punctures some of the popular myths around yoga. To begin with, there is no evidence that yoga started as a religious tradition.

“Yoga was a sort of floating technology between various religious systems,” said Singleton. “The Dattatreyayogasastra (13CE), for instance, says that yoga can be practised by anyone irrespective of religion or caste, ascetics, Brahmins, Buddhists, Jains, tantrics and even materialists.”

Dattatreyayogasastra has some pithy things to say about religious figureheads in “ochre robes” claiming to be great yogis, while lacking practice, faith and wisdom – “men like that do not practise yoga but attain their ends through words alone, one should shun those who wear religious garb”.

What inspired the book, Singleton said, was the desire to relook at the hegemony of a handful of texts, mostly Patanajil’s Yogasutras (2CE), in the modern recap of yoga history. “There is a vast range of thinking on yoga through different texts and they don’t necessarily repeat the Yogasutras,” said Singleton. He and Mallinson are also part of an ambitious ongoing five-year research project at SOAS, a university in London, on the evolution of one of the branches of yoga – hatha yoga.
 

Another widely-held theory is that yogas are a Vedic practice, traceable back to 1500 to 1000 BCE. This is part of a common revivalist tendency to push the antiquity of knowledge traditions further back in history to give them greater importance. Some wishful thinkers in fact push it as far back as the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1300 BCE), pointing to the Pasupati seal that depicts a seated figure and was discovered at Mohenjo-daro. As the book points out, there are images in Mesoamerica that resemble yogic asanas more than the seal.

The book also traces what is now referred to as yoga, particularly dhyanayoga (meditation), to a much later period – 500 BCE, also the period when Buddhism began its rise to prominence. The Vedas had certain elements of mysticism, posture and breath control critical in yoga, but by no means does that make for evidence of a systematic yogic practice in Vedic era, say the authors.

It was a bunch of renunciant ascetics called Sramanas (strivers) seeking nirvana and moksha (liberation) around 500 BCE whose practices created the earliest template for yoga, though they did not call it that. “These groups, which probably developed independently of the Brahmanical Vedic traditions, but were influenced by them to varying degrees, included Buddhists, Jains and the lesser-known Ajivikas,” says the book. Ajivika was an ascetic sect that challenged the Brahminical grip on Hinduism.
 

Buddhist practices, texts and deities indeed exerted a strong influence in the shaping of yoga, taking its early practice, under other names, to Tibet and Sri Lanka. “The first major text on hatha yoga is Amritasiddhi, an 11th century tantric Buddhist work,” said Mallinson, who has researched extensively on extreme practices in yoga and written a book on the esoteric tantric practice of Khecharividya.

Research now shows that the Buddhist Yogacara school and its texts predate Yogasutra by two centuries. And the use of several asanas and mudras “bear a close similarity to ascetic practices first mentioned in the latter half of the first millennium BCE, shortly after the time of the Buddha”.
“In the second millennium, the new techniques of haṭha yoga began to be incorporated into the vedantic mainstream, and new texts were composed – such as the so-called Yoga Upaniṣads – which assimilated these technologies and presented them as part and parcel of the tradition,” said Singleton. “Previously, authorities like Shankara had rejected yoga as a spiritual path. Increasingly, hatha yoga became accepted as a practice suitable to householders rather than just renunciants.”

The vedantic appropriation of yoga reached a high point with raja yoga, popularised by Swami Vivekananda towards the end of the 19th century. It combined vedanta, yoga and western “spiritual” techniques. It is the heady mix of yoga, spiritualism and nationalism propagated by him that makes him the favourite philosopher and yogi of the Right-Wing establishment.
 

 

Yoga has, over the last couple of years, been personally pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Yoga Day spectacles on June 21, the drive to ensure it greater place in academia and institutions, and the aggressive stance on issues taken by babas and yogis have ensured that the tradition has now acquired a muscular nationalist profile.

Alongside, the US-based Hindu American Foundation has been protesting what it calls the cultural appropriation of yoga by the West. It accuses the Western countries of tearing the tradition from its Hindu roots. There are an equal number of Christian and Islamist organisations that see yoga as a Hindu practice. Singleton and Mallinson themselves were at the receiving end of blunt comments at the 2017 Jaipur Literature Festival: what are two white guys doing writing on yoga? They are often asked confused questions about yoga’s religious roots and antiquity.

But yoga itself has been robustly open to the idea of taking diverse cultures into its cultures throughout its history. “You often find greater details in some of the Persian texts on yoga than in Sanskrit,” said Mallinson. “In fact, the first illustrated manuscript on yoga, Bahr al-Hyat (Ocean of Life), was commissioned by Prince Salim, later Emperor Jahangir.”
 

Courtesy:Scroll.in.

The post Yoga isn’t an all-Hindu tradition – it has Buddhist, even Sufi, influences appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Photo Credit: Rajib Dhar/Dhaka Tribune
 

The post Secularism in Bangladesh is Just a Facade appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The self-professed guardians of patriotism, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have done it again. At pains to imprint a peculiar version patriotism on Indian Muslims, an RSS outfit, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch has launched a nationwide campaign to get all madrassahs in the country to hoist the Indian tricolor this January 26; India’s Republic Day. India’s largest Muslim seminary, Darul Uloom has shot back a response, “Does the RSS hoist the flag at its headquarters in Nagpur?[1]

But check its history, past and more recent. It has a schizophrenic relationship with both Indian nationalism and the Indian tricolor. Its bhagwa for the supremacist fanatics and the Tricolor for the ‘others’, read Muslims. Not so long back while on its familiar and sinister track of de-bunking composite Indian nationhood, on September 20, 2015, the RSS’ All India Prachar Pramukh, Manmohan Vaidya raised objections over the Tricolour of the Indian flag. According to Vaidya, the usage of different colours to represent different religions in India, was bound to evoke a communal thought. [2]

The first time that the RSS hoisted the Tricolor on its own headquarters was during the term of the first NDA I government in power in New Delhi, in 2002![3] Similar brow-beating tactics that the RSS is using now were used by sadhvi and RSS/VHP leader, Uma Bharati when, on August 15, 1994 she attempted to hoist the national flag at Idgah Maidan Hubli.[4]  Then again, in 2011, again the RSS and its front the BJP once again, its bid to whip up a frenzy against Muslims, announced that they planned to unfurl the Tricolour, the Indian national flag, in Srinagar on January 26, 2011.

As Shamsul Islam, the author, in this article re-published below points out, “It may not be out of context to know that BJP and its RSS mentors, so zealous about hoisting the Tricolour in Srinagar, have least respect for the Tricolour, as we will see from the following documentary evidence from the RSS archives.”

Organiser, the RSS English organ, in its third issue (July 17, 1947), disturbed by the Constituent Assembly's decision to select the Tricolour as the national flag, carried an editorial titled 'National Flag', demanding that the saffron flag be chosen instead. The same demand continued to be raised in editorials on the eve of independence (July 31 editorial titled 'Hindusthan' and August 14 editorial titled 'Whither'), simultaneously rejecting the whole concept of a composite nation. The August 14 issue also carried 'Mystery behind the Bhagwa Dhawaj (saffron flag)', which, while demanding the hoisting of a saffron flag at the ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi, openly denigrated the choice of the tricolour as the national flag in the following words: "The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the tricolour but it will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country." 

Even after Independence when the Tricolour became the National Flag, it was the RSS which refused to accept it as the National Flag.

Golwalkar, second chief of the RSS and the most prominent ideologue of the organisation till date, while addressing a gathering in Nagpur on July 14, 1946, stated that it was the saffron flag which in totality represented their great culture. It was the embodiment of God: "We firmly believe that in the end the whole nation will bow before this saffron flag." 

Even after independence, when the Tricolour became the national flag, it was the RSS which refused to accept it. Golwalkar, while discussing the issue in an essay titled 'Drifting and Drifting' in the book Bunch of Thoughts, a collection of his writings, published by RSS and treated as a bible for its cadres, has the following to say: "Our leaders have set up a new flag for our country. Why did they do so? It is just a case of drifting and imitating. Ours is an ancient and great nation with a glorious past. Then, had we no flag of our own? Had we no national emblem at all these thousands of years? Undoubtedly we had. Then why this utter void, this utter vacuum in our minds?"

Importantly, nowhere in the functioning of RSS is the Tricolour or national flag used even today. The RSS headquarters at Reshambaugh, Nagpur, does not fly it, nor do the RSS shakhas display it in their daily parades. 

For RSS, it seems, the national flag is meant only to whip up frenzy against Muslims. In the 1991 'Ekta Yatra', it was Murli Manohar Joshi, another favourite in the RSS hierarchy, who went to unfurl the Tricolour at Lal Chowk of Srinagar, Kashmir. Uma Bharti carried a Tricolour when it was an Idgah that was being targeted by Hindutva. But when the Hindutva cadres went to demolish the Babri mosque in 1992, they did not carry the tricolour. They carried only saffron flags which were subsequently hoisted there. 

The RSS is faced with a peculiar dilemma. For Hindus it has the saffron flag, and for Muslims, the Tricolour. This selective use of national symbols is bound to boomerang and further expose the Hindutva camp's real designs. But one thing is for sure: 'Muslim Bashing' remains the favourite pastime of the Hindutva gang. And communal polarisation – at all costs – their favourite short-term and long-term obsession. Even on the Republic Day.

 Background (Shamsul Islam)
 
The RSS since its inception in 1925 hated anything, which symbolised the united struggle of the Indian people against British rule. The case of the Indian tricolour is the most pertinent one. It was in December 1929 that the Indian National Congress at its Lahore session adopted ‘Purna Swaraj’ or complete self-rule as the national goal and called upon the people to observe January 26, 1930 as Independence Day by displaying and honouring the Tricolour (the Tricolour was by consensus considered the flag of the national movement by this time).  In response to this Hedgewar as Sarsanghchalak issued a circular to all the RSS shakhas to worship the bhagwa jhanda (saffron flag) as the national flag.

The RSS is faced with a peculiar dilemma. For Hindus it has the saffron flag, and for Muslims, the Tricolour. This selective use of national symbols is bound to boomerang and further expose the Hindutva camp's real designs.
 
Even after Independence when the Tricolour became the National Flag, it was the RSS which refused to accept it as the National Flag. Golwalkar while discussing the issue of the national flag in an essay entitled ‘Drifting and Drifting’ in the book Bunch of Thoughts, an RSS publication and collection of writings of Golwalkar, has the following to say: "Our leaders have set up a new flag for our country. Why did they do so? It is just a case of drifting and imitating….Ours is an ancient and great nation with a glorious past. Then, had we no flag of our own? Had we no national emblem at all these thousands of years? Undoubtedly we had. Then why this utter void, this utter vacuum in our minds?"2
 
The English organ of the RSS, Organizer (dated August 14, 1947) carried a feature titled 'mystery behind the bhagwa dhawaj' (saffron flag) which while demanding hoisting of saffron flag at the ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi, openly denigrated the choice of the Tri-colour as the National Flag in the following words: "The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the Tricolour but it never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country."
 
There is an interesting end note to this. Historical documents also show that the RSS showed anger at the national flag after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.[5] So the duplicitous doublespeak is simple: its Tiranga for the ‘Others’ and bhagwa for itself as far as the RSS is concerned.

The post The RSS Doublespeak: Bhagwa for Itself, Tricolour for the ‘Others’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I entered political life in 1937. I was quite young then but as I had passed my matriculation examination at a relatively early age, I also entered college quite early. Quite active in Pune in those days were the RSS and the Savarkarites (followers of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar) on the one hand and nationalist, socialist and leftist political organisations on the other. On May 1, 1937 we took out a march to observe May Day. The marchers were attacked by the RSS and Savarkarites when, among others, the well-known revolutionary Senapati Bapat and our socialist leader, SM Joshi, were injured. We have had serious differences with these Hindutva organisations ever since.

Our first difference with the RSS was over the issue of nationalism. We believed that every citizen had equal rights in the Indian nation. But the RSS and the Savarkarites came up with their notion of Hindu Rashtra. Mohammad Ali Jinnah too was a victim of a similar world view. He believed that India was made up of two nations, the Muslim nation and the Hindu nation. Savarkar too said the same thing.

The other major difference between us was that we dreamt of the birth of a democratic republic while the RSS claimed that democracy was a western concept that was not appropriate for India. In those days members of the RSS were full of praise for Adolf Hitler. Guruji (Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar) was not only the sarsanghchalak (head) of the RSS; he was its ideological guru as well.

There is amazing similarity between the thoughts of Guruji and the Nazis. One of Guruji’s books, We or Our Nationhood Defined, ran into several editions, its fourth edition having been published in 1947. At one point in the book, Guruji says, "The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-old traditions but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead – in a word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights."

In other words, Guruji wanted to see millions of Indians treated as non-citizens. He wanted all their citizenship rights taken away. Incidentally, these ideas of his were not newly formulated. From the time we were in college (in the mid-1930s), members of the RSS were inclined to follow Hitlerian ideals. In their view, Muslims and Christians in India deserved to be treated the same way that Hitler treated Jews in Germany.

The extent of Guruji’s sympathies for the views of the Nazi Party is evident from the following passage from We or Our Nationhood Defined: "To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by" (We or Our Nationhood Defined, 1947, p. 42).

You might say that this is an old book, of a time when India was in the throes of the struggle for independence. But then there is his second book, Bunch of Thoughts. I cite below an example from this "popular publication" which was brought out in November 1966. In this book, while discussing India’s internal security problem, Guruji identifies three internal dangers. One is Muslims, the second Christians and the third Communists. In Guruji’s view, every Indian Muslim, every Christian and every Communist is a danger to the nation’s security. Such is his ideology.

Our second major difference with Guruji and the RSS has to do with the caste question. They are supporters of the caste system while a socialist like me is its greatest enemy. I consider myself to be the biggest enemy of brahminism and the caste system. I am of the firm view that there can be no economic and social equality in India until the caste system and the inequalities based on it are demolished.

But Guruji says, "Another unique feature of our society was the varna vyavastha (caste system, the former occupation-based classification of society) which is today vilified as jati pratha (a rigid caste system)." He adds, "Society was conceived of in the image of an all-powerful god, of four aspects, who was to be worshipped by different people in their own ways as determined by their different capabilities. The Brahmin was considered great because he was the purveyor of knowledge. The Kshatriya was considered equally great because he destroyed the enemies. The Vaishya was no less important than others because through agriculture and commerce he fulfilled a social need. The Sudra too was important for he served society through his workmanship." Here it is very shrewdly being asserted that through his workmanship the Sudra is fulfilling an important social need. But Chanakya’s Arthashastra, from which Guruji takes his inspiration, clearly states that it is the religious duty of the Sudras to serve the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas. In a clever subterfuge, Guruji replaces service of the upper castes with "service of society".

The fourth issue on which we differ is that of language. We are in favour of promoting the languages of the people. All regional languages, after all, are indigenous. But what does Guruji have to say on this? Guruji says that for now Hindi should be made the common language for all while the ultimate objective should be to make Sanskrit the national language. He says in his Bunch of Thoughts, "For convenience, Hindi should be given primacy as our link language until such time as Sanskrit is adopted as our national language." Thus Hindi is merely for convenience, the ultimate link language is to be Sanskrit.

In other words, Guruji wanted to see millions of Indians treated as non-citizens. He wanted all their citizenship rights taken away. Incidentally, these ideas of his were not newly formulated. From the time we were in college (in the mid-1930s), members of the RSS were inclined to follow Hitlerian ideals. In their view, Muslims and Christians in India deserved to be treated the same way that Hitler treated Jews in Germany.

We have had differences over this right from the start. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Lokmanya Tilak, we too have always been in favour of the regional languages. We do not wish to impose Hindi on anyone. We would like to see Tamil as the prevalent language in Tamil Nadu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, Marathi in Maharashtra and Bengali in West Bengal. If the non-Hindi speaking states wish to adopt English, it should be up to them. We have no differences with them on this. But Sanskrit is the language of a handful of people, the language of a particular caste. Making Sanskrit the national language means the supremacy of a handful of people over others, something we definitely do not want.

Fifth, the national movement for independence had accepted the idea of a federal state. In a confederation, the centre would definitely have certain powers on specific matters but all others would be a subject matter for the states. But following partition, in a bid to strengthen the centre, the Constitution stipulated a concurrent list. As per this list, several subjects were made concurrent, subjects over which both the centre and the states have equal jurisdiction. What was originally meant to be under the domain of different states was included in the concurrent list only to strengthen the centre. Thus the federal state came into existence.

But the RSS and its chief ideologue, Guru Golwalkar, have been consistently opposed to this basic constitutional provision. These people ridicule the very concept of ‘a union of states’ and maintain that this Constitution, which envisages a confederation of states, should be abolished. Guruji says in his Bunch of Thoughts, "The Constitution must be reviewed and the idea of a unitary state should be written into the new Constitution." Guruji wants a unitary or, in other words, a centralised state. He says that this system of states should be done away with. What he wants is one nation, one state, one legislature and one executive. In other words, he wants to abolish state legislatures and state ministries. That means they wish to see the rule of the stick. If they were to capture power, they would doubtless bring into existence a centralised state.

Another issue was the tricolour, the flag chosen by the national movement. Hundreds of Indians sacrificed their lives, thousands bore the brunt of lathis for the honour and glory of our chosen national flag. But surprisingly, the RSS has never accepted the tricolour as the national flag. It always swore by the saffron flag, asserting that the saffron flag has been the flag of Hindu Rashtra since time immemorial.

Just as Guruji rejected the concept of a federal state, similarly, he had no faith in a democratic system. He was of the firm view that democracy is a concept imported from the West and the system of parliamentary democracy did not jell with Indian thought and Indian civilisation. As for socialism, that for him was a totally alien idea. He repeatedly said that all isms, including socialism and democracy, were alien ideas which should be rejected, that Indian society should be founded on Indian culture. Speaking for ourselves, we believe in parliamentary democracy, in socialism, and we aspire to establish socialism consistent with Gandhian principles in India through peaceful means.

While we were engaged in a struggle against the Congress party’s autocratic rule, our leader, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, was of the opinion that we should join hands with all opposition forces to save the nation and dislodge from power the Congress party which was responsible for our humiliation at the hands of the Chinese. I had lengthy discussions with Doctorsaheb on the issue. This debate went on for two years. I kept insisting throughout that we cannot have any alliance with the RSS and the Jan Sangh. Ultimately, Doctorsaheb asked me, "Do you accept my leadership or not?" I replied, "Yes, I do." He said it wasn’t necessary for us to agree on every issue or for him to have to convince me on every issue. Let there be an issue or two on which we disagreed. And since he was only thinking of a political alliance to defeat a major enemy, I should cooperate with him, let his idea be given a "trial". Perhaps he would be proven right, he said, perhaps I would. I remained convinced however that a clash between the RSS and the Lohiaite ideologies was inevitable.

It is a fact that we formed an alliance with these people (RSS and Jan Sangh) when Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed the emergency, increasingly resorted to dictatorial methods, started promoting Sanjay Gandhi and the Maruti scandal surfaced. Lok Nayak Jaiprakashji believed that if the opposition did not unite under the banner of a single party it would be impossible to defeat Mrs Gandhi and dictatorship. Choudhary Charan Singh was also of the view that we should come together and form a united party. While we were in jail, we were all asked to give our opinions on the need to form such a party and contest elections. I recall sending a message that in my view we must contest elections. Millions of people would participate in elections. Elections are a dynamic process. As the electoral tempo builds up, the shackles of emergency are bound to snap and people are bound to exercise their democratic right. Therefore, I stressed, we must participate in elections.

Our second major difference with Guruji and the RSS has to do with the caste question. They are supporters of the caste system while a socialist like me is its greatest enemy. I consider myself to be the biggest enemy of brahminism and the caste system. I am of the firm view that there can be no economic and social equality in India until the caste system and the inequalities based on it are demolished.

Since Lok Nayak Jaiprakash Narain and other leaders were of the view that without coming together under the banner of one party we could not succeed, we (socialists) too gave it our consent. But I would like to stress that the understanding that was arrived at was between political parties – the Jan Sangh, the Socialist Party, the Congress (O), the Bharatiya Loktantrik Dal (BLD) and some dissident Congress factions. We did not come to any arrangement with the RSS, nor did we accept any of its demands. What is more, through a letter by Manubhai Patel that was circulated among all of us in jail we learnt that on July 7, 1976 Choudhary Charan Singh had raised the issue of a possible clash of interests because of dual membership when members of the RSS also became members of the new party. In response, the then acting general secretary of the Jan Sangh, Om Prakash Tyagi had said that the proposed party should feel free to formulate whatever membership criteria it wanted. He even said that since the RSS, having faced many constraints, had been dissolved anyway, the question of RSS membership did not arise.

Later, when the constitution of the proposed Janata Party was being drawn up, the subcommittee appointed to draft the constitution proposed that members of any organisation whose aims, policies and programmes were in conflict with the aims, policies and programmes of the Janata Party should not be given membership to the new party. Given the self-evident meaning of such a membership criterion, there was no question of anyone opposing it. However, it is significant that the sole opposition to this came from Sunder Singh Bhandari (Jan Sangh). At a meeting convened in December 1976 to thrash out issues, reference was made to a letter written by Atal Bihari Vajpayee on behalf of the Jan Sangh and the RSS, stating that a section of leaders of the proposed party had agreed that the RSS issue could not be raised in connection with membership of the Janata Party. But several leaders told me that no such assurances were given because the RSS was nowhere in the picture at the time when the idea of a merger of opposition political parties was mooted. I want to clarify that I was in prison at the time and even if there was some secret understanding, I had no part in it.

I can categorically assert that the election manifesto of the Janata Party did not in any way reflect the concerns of the RSS. In fact, each point in the manifesto was clearly spelt out. Is it not a fact that the manifesto of the Janata Party spoke of a socialist society based on secular, democratic and Gandhian principles and in which there was no mention of Hindu Rashtra? The manifesto also assured the minorities equal citizenship rights and vowed to safeguard their rights. In contrast, Guruji wanted to deny equal citizenship rights to the minorities and wanted them to be subservient subjects in a Hindu Rashtra. The Janata Party was committed to decentralisation while Guruji was a hardcore proponent of centralisation. He wanted to abolish separate states, abolish state legislatures and ministries while the Janata Party emphasised the need for greater decentralisation. In other words, the Janata Party had no desire to snatch away the autonomy of states. The manifesto spoke of socialism, social justice and equality. Did the manifesto state that it upholds the caste system? Did it maintain that the Sudras’ duty was to devote their life in the service of others? On the contrary, the manifesto not only promised that the backward castes would have full opportunity to progress, it pledged special policies for them: 25-33 per cent reservation for them in government jobs.

Yes, it is true that members of the RSS did not genuinely accept the provisions of the party’s election manifesto. It was my contention and I had once even complained in writing to Kushabhau Thakre that during discussions you people (RSS, Jan Sangh) very readily agree on matters that you at heart totally disagree with. That is why your motives are suspect. I wrote this letter to him a long time ago and I have always had doubts about the RSS. I have had these doubts since Doctorsaheb’s time (Dr Ram Manohar Lohia died in 1967). But despite this, the fact remains that to fight dictatorship we entered into a political alliance with them.

Since it was Lok Nayak Jaiprakashji’s desire that all parties should merge for a united opposition to dictatorship and since the party manifesto did not make any compromises, I consented to our coming together. At the same time, I would like to say that from the beginning I was very clear in my mind that to emerge as a unified and a credible body the Janata Party would have to do two things. One, the RSS would have to change its ideology and accept the ideal of a secular democratic state. Two, the various organisations that are part of the sangh parivar, such as the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and the Vidyarthi Parishad, would have to dissolve themselves and merge with the secular-minded trade union and student wings of the Janata Party. I was very clear about this from the beginning and as the Janata Party had given me the responsibility to manage the affairs of its trade union and student wings, it was my consistent attempt throughout to ensure that the Vidyarthi Parishad and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh ended their separate existence.

But these people started insisting on their autonomy. In fact, these organisations always function on the dictates of Nagpur (RSS headquarters), they believe in the one leader principle. Take, for example, Guruji himself. Guruji maintained that they create a mind-set which is totally disciplined and where people accept whatever they tell them. This organisation operates on a single principle: one leader. They do not believe in democracy, they have no faith in discussions and debate. They have no economic policy. For example, in his Bunch of Thoughts, Guruji expressed unhappiness over the abolition of the zamindari system in India. Guruji was deeply saddened, deeply disturbed by the abolition of the zamindari system. But he felt no compassion for the poor.

I told members of the RSS that you must abandon your ideal of organising Hindus alone and find a place for people of all religions within your organisation, that you must merge your different class-based organisations with those of the Janata Party. They responded by saying that this could not be done so soon, that there were very many difficulties involved but they did want to change, bit by bit. They continued to give such evasive replies.

From their behaviour I concluded that they had no intention of changing. Especially after the assembly elections of June 1977, when they managed to gain power in four states and one union territory, after which they began to think that with this newly acquired clout they had no need to change. Now that they had already captured four states, they would gradually also gain control of other states and finally even the centre. The leaders of other political parties in the Janata Party were older leaders who would not live long; and they would ensure that no younger (non-RSS, non-Jan Sangh) leader emerged at the top.

As is evident from the pages of the Organiser and Panchjanya (RSS mouthpieces in English and Hindi), they have not spared a single Janata Party leader who is not from their parivar. I, of course, was their special favourite, the target of special attention. They probably devoted more column space to abusing me than they did even for Mrs Indira Gandhi.

For a protracted period I persisted in dialogue with these people. I recall an occasion when Balasaheb Deoras (later RSS sarsanghchalak) visited me at my residence in Mumbai. Subsequently, I met him once again after the 1971 polls. I also had discussions with Madhavrao Mule once before the emergency. On the fourth occasion, I met Balasaheb Deoras and Madhavrao Mule together in May 1977. So no one can claim that I made no attempt to talk to them. But I finally reached the conclusion that they have closed minds in which no new idea can germinate.

On the contrary, the RSS specialises in casting young minds in a particular mould from a very young age. The first thing they do is ‘freeze’ the minds of children and of youth, making them impervious. After this they are rendered incapable of responding to other ideas.

Still, I tried. On one occasion I convened a meeting of all trade union leaders. The representatives of all constituents of the Janata Party attended but the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh boycotted the meeting. Not just that, they hurled abuses at me for no apparent reason. Similar efforts were made with the Vidyarthi Parishad and the Yuva Morcha but despite all attempts at a merger, they held aloof. This is only because of the RSS’ desire to function as a "super party".

Their aim is not only to enter into every aspect of people’s life but also to control it. In an article written for The Indian Express around that time, George Fernandes used the example of Dattopant Thengdi to make the same point. Thengdi responded by saying that the RSS intended to have all of society under its sway, it would leave no aspect of a person’s life untouched, it would establish its hegemony in every department of life. Thengdi, of course, was saying nothing new. Similar views have been repeatedly asserted by Guruji in his We or Our Nationhood Defined, as also in Bunch of Thoughts. No totalitarian organisation allows any space for freedom, its tentacles reach everywhere: art, music, economy, culture. This is the essence of any fascist organisation.

The fact is that the RSS wanted to capture the Janata Party and through it to take control of the state apparatus. For this they simultaneously dangled the carrot of the prime minister’s chair before several Janata Party leaders. On the one hand, they went on assuring Morarji Desai to the end that he was their choice for prime minister. Every now and then they would promise Choudhary Charan Singh that they would support his claim to be prime minister. Concurrently, they kept giving similar assurances to Chandra Shekhar, Jagjivan Ram and George Fernandes. Not once did they dare to make me a similar offer. When I once jokingly mentioned this to Vajpayee, he quipped, "Why you, Nanaji (Deshmukh) has never made me such a promise either. They want neither you nor me as prime minister." Anyway, they never made any such suggestion to me, knowing only too well that I would not deny others their due nor would I allow others to deny mine. Perhaps they think, you can’t fool this man so what’s the point of promising him anything – it will only make him (Limaye) even more cautious.

What these people (the RSS) do on the odd occasion is however of little importance. Has the RSS ever said that they have abandoned Guruji’s way of thinking? Only Atalji says that we should all accept the principles of composite nationalism, democracy, socialism, social justice, etc because we cannot move forward without them in today’s world. But Atalji is the only one who says this. I do not trust the other sanghis. These people pleaded for pardon while in prison, Balasaheb Deoras congratulated Indira Gandhi when the Supreme Court ruled in her favour in the Raj Narain case. So I have no faith in the utterances of these people. I am of the firm belief that I could only have trusted these people (erstwhile Jan Sangh leaders in the Janata Party) if they had ousted RSS leaders from the party, expelled them from the working committee, placed restrictions on RSS activities and, in particular, expelled people like Nanaji Deshmukh, Sunder Singh Bhandari and company from the party.

(Translated by Javed Anand.)

(May 1 marks the 31st anniversary of the united Janata Party and also the 86th birth anniversary of senior socialist leader, the late Madhu Limaye. The above piece, penned by Limaye soon after the split in the Janata Party, was published by the Hindi weekly, Ravivar, in 1979. Though dated, many of the issues he raises in the article are relevant even today.)

The post What is the RSS: Madhu Limaye on an ‘age-old enemy’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It is indeed an honour for me to have been invited to give this lecture, and I greatly appreciate it. Kalakshetra has been something of a legend from the time it was founded by Rukmini Devi and subsequently for the work that it sustains. The respect for the institution grows both for the attention it gives to what we regard as our heritage and for helping in the construction of an on-going heritage. Since both history and heritage conduct a dialogue between the past and the present, we have much to talk about.

‘Heritage’ means that which is inherited. It is used for many things – from genes to geometrical patterns, from property to culture. It was once assumed that heritage is what has been handed down to us by our ancestors, neatly packaged, which we pass on to our descendants, as is implicit in the term, parampara. We sometimes call it tradition. This is what goes into the making of our cultures and our civilization. Heritage is thought of as static whereas tradition is said to mould our way of life. We prefer to think that these have been passed down from generation to generation, relatively untouched. But the more we seek to understand them, the more we realize that each generation changes the contents, sometimes marginally and sometimes substantially.

More recently it has been argued that tradition is actually the inter-play, of what we believe existed in the past, combined with our aspirations of the present. In exploring this inter-play and the new ideas it generates, our concept of heritage takes shape, or can even be invented to serve the needs of the present. Rituals and ceremonies, thought of as ancient, are often on investigation found to be recently invented. The past therefore can even be invented in order to legitimize our actions. Historians now investigate what we call, the invention of tradition.

The on-going discussion of what constitutes heritage or tradition leads to analyzing concepts such as culture and civilization. There is no easy definition of these and there have been intense arguments about their meaning especially at times when existing norms are questioned. The European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century resulted from striking historical changes and became a time when new questions were asked. Basic concepts needed fresh exploration. In India too, we are experiencing similar change and the constituents of heritage need to be examined afresh.

Heritage can be of two kinds. One is natural heritage that came from the physical creation of the earth. This is the heritage that we are currently busy depleting because we cannot control our greed for the wealth that comes from destroying natural resources. But by linking environment to history, this heritage is now being seen as essential to the other one.

The other heritage is the one that was cultivated and created by human effort. What we refer to as sanskriti and shrishti also involve creating and constructing and interestingly is often either juxtaposed with or contrasted with prakriti, that which is natural. This is what goes into the making of what we call ‘cultural heritage’. It includes objects and ideas that determine our pattern of life. They define our concepts of culture and civilization. This heritage is the subject of my talk. I shall try and explain how the historical assumptions that went into the making of these concepts have changed. Consequently, historians now see heritage not so much as something inherent and inexplicable, but as constructed and changeable.

Let me begin by defining the terms that I am using. Culture was once linked to the achievements of a society listed as in literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, philosophy, and in extending the frontiers of knowledge – of what we would call the life of the mind. In pre-modern times these activities were associated with the elite. So it was viewed as high culture to differentiate it from popular forms. But this was too narrow an assessment. The essentials of these activities come from a wider social range. The definition of culture needed to reflect this range. So culture came to mean both the pattern of life of all segments of a society, and the forms in which they expressed their ideas.

Culture then can refer to something as simple as the pattern of life of hunter-gatherers, pastoral people, farmers or urban dwellers. Out of this simplicity rise the complexities of what people make and do both to render life more meaningful and to understand the world and the cosmos within which they live. But then it was found that cultures change and are both vulnerable and porous. Patterns have changed often enough in history. So we speak of successive cultures registering these changes. The past therefore does not conform to a single culture as some would like to believe but is made up of multiple cultures. The cultures of the elite were dominant, as elite cultures have been everywhere. These were linked to the pattern of life of royalty, the upper castes, and those that controlled power and economic resources. But the cultures of the rest of society sustained the elite culture and therefore were essential.

A number of questions arise. Were they all integrated as we assume when we paint rosy pictures of the past, or were they segregated by caste, language and religion. Are we doing something different now in our attempt to integrate them? The attempt seems restricted to the slogan of ‘unity in diversity’? I call it a slogan because we have never defined as far as cultures go, what constitutes unity or how far we extend the diversity in terms of culture. Are we instead, trying to indirectly justify the segregation through using colonial categories such as majority and minority communities determined by religion? And when we look back at the cultures of the past do we confine ourselves to the easily recognizable dominant cultures alone or do we attempt to search for the ways of life of the rest of society?

There was additionally as there still is, a tension between change and permanence. A seeming continuity when analyzed can point to change. For example, it is said that the four-fold system of caste society with its established hierarchy, has been prevalent in the sub-continent for many centuries. Yet the hierarchy differs quite noticeably in various regions. The dominant caste is not always the same. In the Punjab it was khatri traders, whereas in some other regions it was the brahmana, or it was rulers claiming kshatriya status. And in some areas the varna stratification is absent. Such differences invariably affect the form of the local culture.

The past therefore does not conform to a single culture as some would like to believe but is made up of multiple cultures. The cultures of the elite were dominant, as elite cultures have been everywhere.

The presence of dominant and subordinate groups is characteristic of all societies. Who belongs to them can change over time, as do the cultures that they patronize. A single dominant pattern is neither uniform nor eternal. Until recent times, the upper levels of society were in a better position to leave records and markers of their culture. Reading between the lines has been one way of trying to ferret out the culture of those of lesser status who have not left records. Archaeology provides some information on this. Even the culture of the elite can be better understood if we can follow its interactions with the rest of society, rather than see it isolated.

Cultures, as we know, can also change because of external factors. The effect of ecological change in the past is now being noticed. Deforestation, a changing river course, climate change, all happened in the past. These are now among possible explanations for the decline of the Indus cities. Technological innovations as also adjusting to social and economic changes are often required in such situations.

Contact with new people through trade or in-coming migration, or the political dynamics of conquest, introduces new patterns of living. Conquest is more prominent as a new political pattern. Trade and migration are defining features because they affect larger numbers of people across bigger areas, yet we always give greater prominence to invasions. This is illustrated by what happened at the turn of the Christian era in the Northwest of India with the coming of Greco-Bactrian Hellenistic forms that evolved into the influential Gandhara art.

The art highlighted the aesthetic differences between Buddhist art in this region and in Mathura and Central India as well as further south, as in Amaravati. These differences were sharply debated among art-historians during the last couple of centuries, in defining the Indian aesthetic. Were Indian artistic forms, resulting from contact with Hellenistic forms, superior to those not influenced by the Hellenistic? Nineteenth century art historians did not think to ask the craftsmen still sculpting icons and friezes, to give their reactions to these earlier forms. The art under discussion all came from guilds of artisans. Unlike the art, the languages of the region remained distinct. Both Greek and Prakrit were spoken.

In the same region, a thousand years later came the arrival of Turkish, Afghan and Persian migrants from Central and Western Asia. We dismiss this experience as one of invasions and conquest, and leave it at that. But the flip side of invasions is that they enhance trade connections and attract migrants. The impact of these can sometimes redefine the culture of a region to a greater degree than invasion alone. This time round it was not the style of sculpture that changed, but language intertwined with religious belief.

I am not referring to the introduction of formal Islam but to the more creative side of the infusion – the Sufis and their influence on local languages. New ideas entered the indigenous languages requiring the induction of new words, or else existing words were given a new meaning. With a large popular usage of these ideas, the languages themselves took a new form. A new word for God – rab – entered the Punjabi language. Derived from Arabic it had common currency among all religions using Punjabi. Poets and teachers of the likes of Guru Nanak, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and others, composed their poetry not in Persian or Sanskrit but in this commonly spoken language, creating a new cultural idiom. This would extend to other cultural aspects as language always does.

All languages change. Traces of change are carried in grammar and style with each fresh generation that uses the language, introducing new forms of expression. The grammarian Panini makes a distinction between the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and the more commonly used somewhat later Sanskrit. Changes in the language is one way in which we can date texts that have been composed over long periods of time. For example, the text of the Arthasastra as we have it now took a few centuries to put together. It registers recognizable linguistic differences between the earlier segments and those added later. Where a language is in contact with other languages there is bound to be mutual borrowing. The nature of what is borrowed, is the clue to recovering the relationship between the speakers of the languages. Thus, it has been argued that one of the words for the plough, langala, in Vedic Sanskrit is of Dravidian origin. This raises a host of interesting questions about one aspect of the relationship between the speakers of the two languages, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian.

Migrants come in various ways. One is that of pastoral groups searching for pasture-lands who establish themselves and their annual circuit and interact with the settled farmers in a region. They are carriers of oral traditions as is evident in the folk music and epics of pastoral communities. Migrant communities of traders settle in new places for a variety of reasons. Establishing trade routes brings in settlements of traders that foster new communities and create new cultural patterns. This has happened repeatedly in India, with the coming of peoples from Central and West Asia. They settled, inter-married locally and became a part of the Indian population. These communities so established identified themselves with the local culture and this resulted in new patterns. Caste/jati names, such as Huna and Durrani, among many others point to these origins.

The coming of the British was however, different. They did not settle in India. Their control was through re-organizing the economy of India to enable them to drain its wealth and take it back to Britain. Nevertheless they were curious about the Indian past and applied modern methods to advancing our knowledge of this past. This information contributed to the construction of heritage.

Dominant cultures backed by wealth leave the maximum traces. They have texts, describing their ideas, icons in stone and metal, and their architectural forms indicate their religious and social preferences. Subordinate groups in society leave few such traces. They do not have the wealth to build monumental temples and mosques or to house manuscripts in libraries. Those at the lower end of the social ranking, provide the wherewithal for the wealth, but are not participants in elite culture, as for example they have been excluded from places of worship. Their culture has been different and much of it from the past has to be inferred from how they are viewed by the elite. This information inevitably carries the perspective of the author, not always free of bias. But we should recognize that the living patterns of the wealthy are ultimately dependent on the aesthetics and the expertise of those who make the artifacts and work the resources.

Nineteenth century art historians did not think to ask the craftsmen still sculpting icons and friezes, to give their reactions to these earlier forms. The art under discussion all came from guilds of artisans. Unlike the art, the languages of the region remained distinct. Both Greek and Prakrit were spoken.

Culture that is said to constitute heritage is not static, whether object or idea, although it is often treated as such by us in the present. In claiming an ancestry for cultural items, we are inducting the past into the present and thereby giving it continuity. We should perhaps investigate what has been retained, replaced or discarded in this believed-to-be unchanging continuity.

Claiming ancestry is also a way of acquiring legitimacy from the past. Such a claim can be a stamp of desired status and thus a demonstration of social success, or it can be an attempt to deny questioning an identity – one that may be acceptable to some but questioned by others. By insisting on a particular ancestry for a cultural item we may be denying its other possible ancestry. There could be many reasons for this if it is deliberate. Possibly its other ancestry comes from sources that earlier were quite acceptable but have now become less so. But recognizing the entire ancestry may be crucial to understanding the cultural form. By not recognizing it we are either distorting or inventing a tradition.

To take an example that is much discussed. It is generally agreed that some among the forms of performing arts that we treat as Classical are traced back to the devadasi performances, together with ideas derived from textual sources. Is it enough to know the technicalities of the form or should we not also relate it to the context. In this case it was women choosing or being chosen for a profession that was contrary to the norms of the caste code. They created their own social nucleus distinct from the mainstream. Many other groups of women asserted their autonomy but in a entirely different way when they became Buddhist and Jaina nuns. Did this social code give them the flexibility of experimenting with their professional expertise? How did they relate to the bigger civilizational context through both their performance and their social culture?

The concept of civilization has now become complex. The earlier simplistic definition of its conforming to an elite culture is now giving way to the idea that it encompasses many cultures. This change comes from the new ways in which historical connections of the past are being viewed.

In the seventeenth century, the core of a civilization was a Classical period from the past. ‘Classical’ referred to a style, seen as the high-point in a culture, chosen from a particular historical period. It was the exemplary norm, typifying excellence and against which successors were measured. There was a suggestion of the static in this description and it was not expected to change. All societies with a long history had to have a Classical Age that was viewed as the cultural and intellectual pivot.
The concept of civilization had four components, each of which are now being questioned – territory, language, religion and the classical. Each civilization had a demarcated territory. This was feasible when cartography became common and boundaries of territories could be mapped. Prior to that frontier zones between states were marked by natural features, such as rivers, mountains, forests, deserts etc. These were areas where people came and went so cultures were mixed or overlapped.

The borderland of Northwestern India functioned as a frontier zone for centuries. It hosted peoples from Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, and India. Nodal points of trade and of advancing religions were located there and it also provided spring-boards for invasions in various directions. Buddhist monks travelled with traders and established important monasteries in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and through the Gobi Desert to China. A few centuries later these same routes were taken by Sufi orders coming from Western and Central Asia.

For the east coast of India, the sea was a frontier. This was traversed through close links with Southeast Asia and southern China, as is evident from the impressive monuments still standing. On the other side the long coast of western India had its own history of large settlements of Arab traders that inter-married and founded new communities of Indo-Arab cultures – the Bhoras, Khojas, Navayats, and Mapillas. The Northern frontier zones were land-based, and in communication with cultures across the Eurasian land-mass. The peninsula experienced a different factor, the geographically extensive networks of the Indian Ocean, projecting as it did into the centre-point of the Ocean. These provided a different perspective that we now have to induct into our narrative of Indian civilization.

Where then should we mark the territorial boundary of Indian civilization? We have defined it from the perspective of the Ganges heartland, the perspective from which histories were written until recently. But civilization when seen from the rim, reflects other more distant but significant contacts. Cartographic boundaries enclose and isolate lands, frontier zones extend them and open them up. The concept of civilization has become territorially open-ended.

We apply labels of indigenous or foreign to people of past times. But the boundaries of British India, that defined the concept of Indian civilization according to colonial writers, were meaningless for pre-colonial times. Foreignness in the past was assigned by cultural features – language, custom, ritual – and not by boundary lines. The term mleccha, can mean alien or out-of-caste. There were areas of what were regarded as mleccha culture even within the sub-continent as for example, the communities of forest-dwellers, marginalized in Sanskrit texts and described as raksasas. They were seen as alien. So too were the Yavanas and Turushkas initially. But such aliens and their culture were gradually assimilated.

Looking east the rulers of Cambodia built Angkor Wat with its magnificent sculptured panels depicting the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Khmer style; or the rulers of Java built Borobudur as a gigantic stupa to honour Buddhism. Did they think of themselves as patronizing a foreign culture?

A second component of civilization was that it should have a single language of culture and communication. It was said to be Greek in Europe, Arabic in West Asia, and Sanskrit in India. This meant that the texts written in this language had priority and were treated as the norm encapsulating the entire body of local cultures. To research the past using the texts largely of one language in a multi-lingual area, is historically untenable.

The earliest deciphered records pertaining to Indian cultures are inscriptions in Prakrit and date to the first millennium BC. The earliest surviving written use of Sanskrit, is again in inscriptions, and dates to the start of the first millennium AD. Manuscripts from a slightly later period have survived. Vedic and epic texts composed in Sanskrit were earlier than the inscriptions but were to begin with part of an oral tradition. The major ideologies that opposed Vedic Brahmanism, such as Jainism and Buddhism, initially taught and wrote in various Prakrits and in Pali. From the turn of the Christian era Sanskrit began to replace Prakrit as the language of the elite. But Prakrit continued to be used although with a lowered status, spoken by women and lower castes.
Colonial scholars investigating the Indian past, began with the Sanskrit texts given the highest status by their brahmana informants. It was a while before attention was directed to texts in other languages such those of the Buddhists and Jainas.

A new word for God – rab – entered the Punjabi language. Derived from Arabic it had common currency among all religions using Punjabi. Poets and teachers of the likes of Guru Nanak, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and others, composed their poetry not in Persian or Sanskrit but in this commonly spoken language, creating a new cultural idiom.

This differentiation was also made in defining the single religion of Indian civilization, as Hinduism. This was before it was discovered that Buddhism had once been a major religion, and had been exported to Asia, and had subsequently declined in India. Making religion the third component of civilization and arguing for Hinduism in India and Confucianism in China, tended to eliminate Buddhism in Asia, whereas it can arguably be described as the main religion of the early history of Asia. That other religions, Jainism and Islam for instance, had been important in specific times and regions in India, was not thought relevant.

Since the structure of Hinduism was different from Christianity and Islam, the attempt was to reformulate it so as to make it comprehensible to European scholars and colonial administrators. This created problems of another kind. Hinduism did not grow around the teaching of a single, historical personality with a relatively precise chronology. It was instead a mosaic of sects, independent and some linked, each associated with a particular deity and its rituals. Its extraordinary survival lay in the legitimacy of the segment. It was not monotheistic and did not preclude reverence for other deities. More attention was given to the performance of rituals – orthopraxy, rather than the dogma of theology – orthodoxy. It did not have an overall ecclesiastical authority. The sectarian identity could be and often was linked to particular categories of castes. Inevitably the ranking of sects was not impervious to the hierarchy among castes.

The fourth component of civilization is the existence of what was called a Classical Age. For Greco-Roman civilization it was Athens under the rule of Pericles, and Rome in the time of Augustus, for Islam it was the Caliphate based in Baghdad, and for India it was the Gupta period. But neither cultures nor civilizations can be confined to a single period. That makes them static and stasis is not what governs a golden age. Variant aspects of a culture develop in different periods and they are all inheritors and contributors to an on-going evolution.

Dynasties are more often chronological labels, rather than the handlers of cultural idioms. Of the many rulers in a dynasty only some chose to patronize particular cultural forms. Thus when a new form of devotional worship, bhakti, that virtually radicalized Hinduism emerged from the seventh century onwards, not every ruler of the dynasties in the area uniformly patronized it, but some did. Similarly Firuz Tughlaq ruling in Delhi in the fourteenth century, was the first major Indian conservator of objects from the past. He moved the Ashokan pillars from out-of-the-way places where they lay in a neglected state, to secure locations. He recognized them as heritage even though no one could tell him what was written on them. But he was the only Tughlaq to do so. The Mughals however were remarkably creative in inter-weaving cultures. Akbar was curious about ancient Sanskrit texts and had some translated into Persian. This doubtless facilitated his discussions with religious scholars. He would have received a rather different picture of the tradition of belief and practice of the majority of the Indian people, if his discussions had included the yogi, the sant, the pir and the fakir.

Indian cultural items were not a source of heritage for the British. They were a source of information on the colony and fed their curiosity about its culture. Nineteenth century Europe held the view that the world consisted of the civilized, the barbaric, and the savage peoples. The civilized was the society predictably of the European colonizers. The Others constituted the primitive. This incorporated both the barbaric and the savage depending on the area colonized.

So deeply rooted was the distinction between the civilized and the primitive that it was even included in the British Indian court of law as a valid legal differentiation. The transgression of laws by the natives was explained as due to their being primitive and not civilized.

The concept underwent a radical change in the next century. Instead of a single Classical age it was argued that any age with the required characteristics could be a Classical age. This emerged largely from the efforts of archaeologists and historians to periodize the past. In India the dual division of history into Hindu and Muslim periods was discontinued as it was an inaccurate explanation of historical change. The changes in material culture noticed by archaeologists also called for a systematic explanation.

Civilization now meant a society that lived in cities and communicated through a writing system. Control by a state system and a stratification of society was assumed. The city manufactured articles that could be traded. It was dependent for food from the surrounding agricultural settlements. There was no single period of urbanization and city cultures arose in different regions at various times. This culture, both material and intellectual, was believed to be the cradle of sophisticated aesthetics and the life of the mind accompanied by a distinct improvement in material conditions. This allowed more people to think beyond the mundane.

The new definition opened up many hidden aspects of cultural expression and brought them together in diverse ways. There was a move away from seeing just a narrow vertical space of a dynasty, or a text or a monument that called for attention. The horizontal lateral view provided an entry into far more than had been earlier seen as contributing to either culture or civilization. What was evident was already known but now the search began for the less evident or for the hidden within what was thought to be the evident. The making of a cultural item began to be viewed as the consortium of many ideas and artifacts. Civilization was no longer a static entity but had developed a kinetic form.

What this allowed for was the idea that everything does not have to be traced back to the earliest beginning or to a single point. Some facets of culture may have evolved later and this process reflects on what went into its making. This in turn introduced the idea that items of heritage are selected by a society. Who does the selecting and what goes into the making of heritage is another question. This is reflected and some would say sadly so, in some of the current formulators of culture – state patronage, Bollywood and the visual media. But citizens can and do demand alternatives even if they remain at the margin. The Khond tribe in Orissa did insist on preserving their sacred site of Niyamgiri and not have it eroded by the mining corporates. The pluralities of Indian culture require that we give such questions more thought than we have done so far.

Cultural innovation can give a new meaning to heritage. Earlier forms presented in contemporary ways have often been the trajectory of cultural items. This not only links the present with the past but can convey additional meaning. The contemporary presentation can open up new ways of understanding the item. This is most commonly seen when the aesthetics of elite groups have to be extended to include those of other segments of society. What is incorporated however different in origin, can create new forms. The juxtaposition of these with existing ones tells its own story. One thinks of Chandralekha inter-facing Bharata-natyam with Kalari. Dialogues between the presumed authors of existing forms and the new authors making the transposition, become meaningful.

An example from literature comes to mind. In the early eighteenth century when the Mughal court wanted to host a performance of the story of Shakuntala, the drama of Kalidasa was adapted to the occasion. The language was changed from Sanskrit to Braj Bhasha, currently used in the royal court and outside. Shakuntala herself was a feisty, forthright woman rather than the more shy, demure woman of the Kalidasa version. The episodes of the ring and the curse were deleted. Unlike the Kalidasa version that has largely remained within the upper caste-upper class cultural norms until recently, the Braj version had a wider audience. Such extensions express a changing aesthetic. Maybe one day we too shall see Shakuntala performed in a contemporary adaptation.

Much is made of the centrality of memory as a component of heritage. But memory is amazingly short and few cultures take pains to remember the past. When they do, the earlier memory is reshaped to accommodate the aspirations of the present. Slivers of remembrance can hardly go beyond a couple of generations after which they are grist to oral narratives. Buddhist rock cut monasteries went into oblivion with the decline of Buddhism. Even when texts are memorized as were the Vedic compositions, their previous contexts are forgotten. When scripts change texts can no longer be read. The edicts of the emperor Ashoka that we quote as a valuable heritage were unread and ignored for a millennium and a half until their script was deciphered in the early nineteenth century. That is a long cultural hiatus for the message of non-violence and tolerance that they carried. And when the edicts were initially read none knew who he was. Only the Buddhist texts tell us about him. But these Pali Buddhist texts ceased to be read in India when Buddhism declined.

The colonial definitions that we have internalized have often been divisive in slicing apart common cultures, separated by religion and caste. Within these divisions, the cultures of the elites were given priority. This often disallows dialogue between cultures such as those that exist at lower social levels. Now that we are searching for a national heritage it is again elite cultures that surface more readily, whilst much remains hidden. Heritage can give prominence to or submerge aspects of its own history. Earlier forms may continue or new ones be described as the old. My argument is that we need to explore in greater depth what we refer to as our traditions and to recover from these explorations, the diverse strands of our cultural inheritance that might currently be submerged. If heritage is not a fixed item and can be added to and subtracted from then we have the opportunity to construct it and perhaps argue over the construction.

Looking east the rulers of Cambodia built Angkor Wat with its magnificent sculptured panels depicting the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Khmer style; or the rulers of Java built Borobudur as a gigantic stupa to honour Buddhism. Did they think of themselves as patronizing a foreign culture?

The definition of national heritage is invariably contested since there are many competing for inclusion, especially in societies that host multiple cultures. Sometimes the contestation leads to the deliberate destruction of heritage, possibly for political reasons, as for instance with the Babri Masjid. Contestation can also but not invariably be linked to competition among dominant groups, as with the destruction of sacred places by rulers of various religious persuasions. Sometimes the opposite happens and an item of heritage over time absorbs much more than it started with and takes on incarnate forms. This quieter and gentler history of heritage is more often linked to those of lesser status with smaller ambitions and aspirations. Knowing the link between cultural forms and the societies from which they come helps in assessing these connections.

An interesting case of both absorption and contestation is the current confrontation over the narrative of the rama-katha. There are a few hundred versions of the story familiar to the Indian sub-continent and Southeast Asia and some go back many centuries. Each version is special to its authorship and its audience. This plurality has always been viewed as the strength of this particular cultural idiom. Amoeba-like, it has fissioned off, each segment growing and absorbing diverse ideas and incarnated in new forms, including dramatic presentations and exquisite poetry. The range is quite remarkable. Then comes the contestation when the story becomes a pawn in modern politics. The Valmiki version is declared to be the sole acceptable version, encapsulating a religious and social identity, to the exclusion of other versions. Where such political moves are successful, the definition of this cultural idiom will inevitably change and shrink. National heritage will then include only the items that survive. The Valmiki Ramayana is undoubtedly of the highest quality, but can we exclude the other versions? Some of these give us extended insights into the meaning of the story as well as the communities that associate with that version of the story.
We are perhaps somewhat ambivalent about constructing our heritage. We should search for and discuss insights that will give meaning to this construction. To give priority to certain patterns of culture, be they of the elite, or of any particular religion or language or region, leaves the search incomplete. We have to accommodate many more aspects of our diverse cultures if we are to justify the richness of this diversity. Such an accommodation requires sensitivity, both to the constant adjustments made by cultural forms, and to a changing history.

[I would like to thank Rajani and Shirish Patel and Kumkum Roy for their helpful comments on an earlier draft]
(Romila Thapar is Professor Emeritus in Ancient History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)
 

The post Culture and what it tells us about our Past appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 

The all-out assault on secularism is not merely against tolerance; it is against democracy itself and the very basis of a pluralist India. As before, a two- nation theory will only lead to Partition, or as Yugoslavia and the USSR have shown, to Balkanisation

Independent India was born in the fires of communalism, through the genocidal carnage of the Partition. In the desperate contest between the secularists led by the Congress under the Mahatma and Nehru, and the communalists abetted by the British and led on the one side by the Muslim League and on the other by the Hindu Mahasabha–RSS, the latter won. The periodic and increasingly menacing communal violence that has occurred since then is symptomatic of the unfinished secular agenda.

Those who fondly imagined that the bloodletting that followed the Babri Masjid demolition, particularly in Bombay and Surat, would be checked by the moderate and statesman–like Vajpayee leading an NDA coalition that included secular parties, were in for a rude shock, especially after the genocide in Gujarat by the RSS–appointed Narendra Modi’s government in February–March 2002. The BJP’s current moves to vacate the Supreme Court stay on religious ceremonies near the Babri Masjid site, and the proposed bill to ban cow slaughter, starkly highlight that secularism is under assault as never before.

A major reason this assault has progressed so far has been because of the assiduously spread myths and falsehoods about what secularism, democracy, the Indian nation and culture are. The core and co-ordinating body behind this Hindutva attack, the RSS, has its own Western roots. The Italian researcher Marzia Casolari has exposed the RSS links, after it was set up in 1925 with the Italian fascist party led by Mussolini. RSS sarsanghchalak MS ‘Guru’ Golwalkar’s admiration for Hitler is well known. Many of the core concepts of Hindutva are Indianised versions of Italian and German fascism. Swadeshi versions some might say.

For example, the sangh brigade has argued that since India is very largely Hindu, it is a Hindu Rashtra or nation. This is similar to Hitler’s concept of the German ‘herrenvolk’ or pure Aryan community. The sanghis argue that the Aryans, contrary to all historical evidence, were indigenous people and the forebears of a Hindu race. All minorities, esp. the Muslims and Christians (but the Sikhs and Jains are not so stridently included as they are considered part of the Hindu family), are considered illegitimate converts by force and fraud by Muslim and British rulers.

The attack on the Babri Masjid (a misnomer as Babar never visited Ayodhya) was part of the sangh purification (sudhikaran) of history, and righting of mythical historical wrongs by the Muslims. Babar and ‘Babar ke aulad’ demolished Ramajanmabhoomi, and so the sangh brigade had to repay the Muslims in the same medieval coin. And today, Vajpayee talks of historical proof that the Rama temple existed there, despite the evidence given by renowned archaeologists like D. Mandal, and eminent historians like RS Sharma, Romila Thapar et al. Despite the fact that in Ayodhya there already exist several Rama temples, for the sangh brigade desperate to remain in the seat of power, Lord Rama also has an accommodation problem.

Many of us forget that India was the birthplace of Gautama Buddha, and that the very influential emperor Asoka was his disciple. The Asoka chakra is at the centre of the Indian national flag. What happened to all the Buddhists in the land of the Buddha? They were forcibly converted to Hinduism by the Brahmins and their followers. Buddhist shrines and monasteries were despoiled and turned into Hindu sites. Thus the Bodh Gaya temple today in Bihar is managed by both Buddhists and Hindus. The sacred Boddhisatva tree nearby, where Buddha attained enlightenment, was chopped down by a Hindu fanatic centuries ago.

No one, including the Buddhists, talk of this now. So forcible conversion and the demolition and co-optation of religious shrines are nothing new, and the Brahmin–led Hindus because they were the most powerful, were the biggest offenders. This was pre–eminently not a matter of religion, but of political power, as indeed Hindutva is.

At the core of this history of hate is the communal project that argues, as the fascists did, that the Hindus are a homogeneous community, with little difference, and no pluralism. Thus the term ‘majority community’. This community is seen as having objective contradictions and differences with the minorities, the ‘other.’ But aren’t Hindus divided by class, caste, gender, region, language, etc.? Aren’t the Tamils and Kannadigas feuding over the Cauvery river waters mostly Hindus? Is SM Krishna who tried to side-track Supreme Court orders on this issue less of a Hindu than Ms. Jayalalitha?

Are those for and against affirmative action including the Mandal Commission recommendations less Hindu than the others? There are also Hindus on both sides of the bitter dispute on the Women’s Reservation Bill. Such examples can be multiplied. Clearly Hindus never were and never can be homogenous. Similarly, Muslims and other minorities are also not homogenous. For example, Muslims who claim to have descended from upper castes or more lofty ancestors like the Sayyids, Ashrafs, Khans do not normally marry the comparatively lower caste Ansaris and Qureshis. In Kerala, the Syrian Orthodox Christians do not normally marry the Latin Christians or frequent the same church. Thus there is no homogenous ‘majority’ community or its counterpart ‘minority’ communities.

The assault on secularism is also based on a crucial misrepresentation of democracy. The sangh argument is that democracy means majority rule, and since Hindus are a majority, Indian democracy must be Hindu, and what for them is the same thing, Hindutva rule. But this is another distortion. Democracy is not simply majority rule. Liberal democratic theory holds that all majorities are temporary. Take elections. Yesterday a party/coalition e.g., the BJP–Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, was in power. Today another party/coalition, e.g. the Congress–NCP is in power. The leadership/membership of both is predominantly Hindu.

If one makes the trivial statistical point that in either case Hindus are in the ‘majority,’ the concomitant confession will have to be that Hindus are different: they vote and act differently. That further proves they are not a homogenous community. Further, in the ‘first past the post’ electoral system, Narendra Modi’s sweeping electoral victory in Gujarat, like Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s famous Lok Sabha victory in 1971, was based on a minority vote, less than 50 per cent. Very few Indian political formations have got more than 50 per cent votes, and they have never consecutively repeated the performance. Moreover, democracies must guarantee minority rights.

That leads us to the next anti-secular canard of minority appeasement. For example, the sanghis argue, that Article 30 of the Fundamental Rights, which allows minorities to run their own educational institutions, has resulted in the proliferation of madrassas that are spreading Muslim fanaticism if not terrorism. This they say is minorityism, against democratic majoritarianism (that we have already refuted). In the first place, there are enough criminal laws in place in the IPC and CrPC to counter this, apart from the extraordinary anti–terrorist laws like NSA, Armed Forces Special Powers Act and POTA. No minority institution is above the law. But the question that arises is what about the ‘majority’ RSS–controlled Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, Vanvasi Kalyan Kendras and the like? Don’t these spread Hindu fanaticism? And don’t these fuel genocidal terrorism as in Gujarat and elsewhere? Behind the rhetorical façade it appears that ‘majority’ fanaticism is seen as patriotism, but ‘minority’ conservatism as ‘jehadi terrorism.’

Similar is the argument that subsidies to the Haj pilgrimage are minority appeasement. If subsidies for the restoration/rebuilding of Hindu shrines and pilgrimages and the Kumbh Mela are acceptable, then why not this? But there is a more profound objection. If secularism is about the separation of religion and politics, why is the state subsidising religion? We must distinguish between the state being partisan between religions, funding religions per se, and subsidising a few religious activities. In such a stratified and largely poor society, where religion not only for the pious, but even for the atheistic, is an integral part of culture, limited state subsidies cannot be simply decried as anti–secular, as favouring either Hindu or Muslim. In any case, quite contrary to the Hindutva argument, Hindus have got more subsidies than the minorities.

Today, the latest furore is over cow slaughter instigated by the Congress CM of MP, Digvijay Singh. Facing an election later in the year, the two term CM sought to beat the BJP at its own game like other Congress leaders before him, and raised the issue of cow slaughter, accusing the BJP of being insincere in this objective. The local youth Congress even printed posters accusing Vajpayee of being a ‘beef eater.’ In the first place, eating habits have nothing to do with nationalism or democracy. Secondly, many lower caste Hindus as well as Hindus in eastern, north–eastern and southern India, apart from the minorities, eat beef. Thirdly, Article 48 of the Directive Principles, which unlike Fundamental Rights are not judicially enforceable, does not focus exclusively on the prohibition of cow slaughter. It concerns the scientific organisation of animal husbandry and enjoins on the state to preserve and improve on all existing indigenous breeds, and prohibits the slaughter not only of cows, but of all "draught and milch cattle." In other words, under this Directive Principle, all draught and milch cattle including cows, buffaloes, yaks, mithuns, should not be slaughtered.

So why this Brahminical insistence only on cows? The comprehensive prohibition in Article 48 is just not enforceable. Hindus, especially lower caste and poor, widely eat buffalo meat, and where they can get it, beef, as in Kerala, West Bengal and the north east. In any case there are other Directive Principles such as Article 41 which includes the right to work, Article 39 for an equitable distribution of wealth, etc. that no one talks of today. Is cow slaughter more important than all this?

It is clear that the current assault on secularism is motivated, aimed at establishing a pseudo–theocratic, authoritarian polity in which the BJP can secure its rule forever. Where progressively the sansad (Parliament) will be substituted by a dharma sansad of self–appointed ‘sants’ acceptable to the sangh brigade and the political opposition be booked under POTA.

The all–out assault on secularism is not merely against tolerance; it is against democracy itself and the very basis of a pluralist India. As before, a two–nation theory will only lead to Partition, or as Yugoslavia and the USSR have shown, to Balkanisation. 

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2003 Year 9  No. 84, Cover Story 5

The post Secularism Under Siege appeared first on SabrangIndia.