Connecting the dots… the question of Indic identity

~Avatans Kumar (@avatans)

Life is all about connecting the dots, making sense out of the webs of complexities.  This making sense is an eternal journey of the human race, a journey that makes a Adi Shankara leave the comfort of his Kerala house at a tender age of 8.  From Gautam the Buddha to Swami Vivekananda, there are numerous similar examples in the Indic Tradition as ‘Self’-exploration is the ultimate goal of human existence. But what happens when dots don’t connect and the path one has been made to follow turns out to be a hoax, not a ‘satvik’ one? 

Connecting the dots may not be child’s play, especially when it comes to navigating Indic/Hindu identity. Identity is usually how individuals or groups in question chose to define themselves. However, in case of Indic/Hindu identity, others defining them takes precedence. This phenomenon, what Arvind Sharma calls “outsider to outsider” view in the academic world, has reached to a level where a Hindu scholar’s views have not only been marginalized but they have also been rendered useless.  A Wendy Doniger or Sheldon Pollock have more validity in the academic circles than the Hindu thinkers such as a Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, or Ramana Maharshi, themselves.

In the last 200 years or so, the foreigners and the Marxists have dominated the study of India, its culture, traditions, texts, religions, etc. The emergence of Indology as a field of study of India can be traced back to neo-Protestant theology and their debates over scriptures as well as its anti-clerical prejudices. These prejudices over time, but consciously, were applied to the study of Indian texts where one can easily trace the antecedent of anti-Brahmanism. 

These foreign Indologists believed, according to Vishwa Adluri, that “Indians lacked access to the “true” meaning of their texts… for Indians never developed scientific critical thinking”. The University College Chapel, Oxford monument of Sir William Jones is a prime example of this attitude.  The monument shows Sir Jones comfortably sitting on a chair and writing something on a desk. The monument also shows three Indians squatting in front of him. The inscription underneath reads: “He formed a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan Laws”.

Post-independence Marxists, on the other hand, consciously hid and denied any reference to India’s past achievements. They also picked up from where the colonialists and missionaries left in demonizing almost each and every facets of Indian society.

This question of identity gets further complicated due to some of the markers used for this process. These markers have, over time, changed our own perception of ourselves. Religion is one such marker that is fundamentally flawed and inadequate when applied to describing Indic faiths. The predominant Abrahamic notion of religion is utterly incapable of describing and nuancing the Indic ‘religions’. Similarly Dharma, the modern Indic equivalent used for ‘religion’, comes nowhere to describing a ‘religion’. 

Even in terms of history writing, the indigenous Itihasa has been replaced by the “study” of the past. SN Balagangadhara (Balu), a professor of Comparative Science of Cultures at the Ghent University in Belgium, calls the modern Indian history writing “an old knee-jerk reaction to the Protestant critique of Indian culture and tradition”.

It was the 2014 Maulana Azad Memorial Lecture (November 11) organized by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), an autonomous body under the aegis of the Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India. Balu, while delivering the Lecture, was recounting his 40-year journey of academic research.  Very soon in his research he discovered that there were many problems in his understanding of European as well as Indian history.  Most of the knowledge about India that makes it to Indian textbooks is a description of India by foreign traders, travellers, and the Christian Missionaries, he noted.  He further said that the description of India these textbooks gave based on those accounts “was not the India I lived in.”

What Balu described in his ICHR address is the kind of disconnect we have all experienced in our lives and can easily relate to it. These are the kinds of dots that don’t connect and make sense at all.  As Indians, we are constantly reminded of how horrible our society has been, how badly we have treated our women and even burnt them alive on pyre as ‘Sati’, how we have the world worst discriminatory ‘caste’ system, how we not only worship ‘idols’ but how we also worship thousands of ‘gods and goddesses’, how we cannot take care of our places of worships, so on and so forth.  The list is endless.

It won’t be an exaggeration to state that even in the remotest corners of the world people know at least about one thing about it India is its tyrannical ‘Brahmanical caste’ system. Notwithstanding the many prevalent exploitative discriminatory systems around the world such as class, feudalism, communism, racism, the worst kind of contempt is saved for the ‘caste’ system. 

Despite the preponderance of academic literature, both in India and in the West, on the topic of the ‘caste’ system, there is no consensus among the academicians about “how the caste system came into being and what sustains it”, write authors of the Prakash Shah (ed.) book “Western Foundations of the Caste System”. The authors meticulously investigate this issue and come to the conclusion that foundation of the Indian ‘caste’ system is predicated on the Western, Christian theological notions and historical experiences. 

Podcast: Prakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Case of ‘Sati’ can also be explained on similar lines. There has been one ‘Sati’ incident in India in the last 3-4 generations. Yet this issue keeps getting harped on demonize Hindus and Indians. In her groundbreaking book Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries and the changingcolonial discourse emphatically shows that the bogey of ‘Sati’ was a cooked up one at best. The Evangelicals and the various Christian missionaries a used a few random incidents to further their own agenda of and justify their own presence as well as justification for colonial rule in India. 

A similar modern parallel can be found in the narratives of ‘intolerance’ and ‘lynchistan’. Such narratives based on isolated events have been built, albeit unsuccessfully, to derail the Narendra Modi government’s reelection campaign as well as the Hindu renaissance sweeping the Indian sub-continent.  In his review of Meenakshi Jain’s book on Sati, Abhinav Agarwal writes:

“The fabrication of evidence, the wanton exaggeration of data, the shameless duplicity of foreign players, rabid evangelical motivations, and cold-blooded manipulation of public policy – all ingredients witnesses in the eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and again over two hundred years later.”

It is now time for Hindus to overcome the disconnects and connect the dots to make their civilization a ‘vishwa guru’