A Survey of Hinduism: Third Edition

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Hindūtva—Hinduism—Hindu Dharma

4 41 CH APTER THIRT Y-T WO Hindūtva—Hinduism—Hindu Dharma Since politics is a main part of Hindu Dharma, Dharmacharyas should in their religious discourses give top priority on the impact of present-day politics on their Dharma and their survival. —“What Hindus Should Do,” http://www.hinduunity.org, November 2, 2002 The whole world watched with fascination and horror the televised demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, by thousands of Hindu political activists and the subsequent large-scale rioting, burning, and looting in dozens of India’s major cities. While for decades the West used to stare at the growth of Communism in India as the greatest threat to democracy, it finally awoke to the reality of a far more serious challenge from the right, that of Hindu extremism , by now well organized and powerful and well within reach of success. The “Militant Revivalism” of Hinduism has been coming for quite long. It was not taken seriously by most Westernized Indians and all but ignored by most foreign observers.1 Traditional Hinduism, consisting of a great number of quite independent and more often than not conflicting religions and philosophies, cannot possibly provide an ideology for Hindu party politics. The nineteenth-century Hindu Renaissance, too, has spawned all kinds of new understandings of Hinduism, from a humanistic, universalistic, tolerant, and generous religiosity to exclusivist, sectarian, and narrow-minded fundamentalisms. The political Hinduism of our age requires a unified, denominational understanding of Hinduism—something that so far has not existed but that is obviously taking shape in our time. Traditional Hinduism had always a political dimension, too, a consequence of its holistic nature, which did not divide life into a religious and a secular sphere. Dharma comprises all aspects of life. In the nineteenth century, under the influence of European nationalism, Hindus turned nationalist, too. 4 4 2 PART I V: HINDUISM ENCOUNT ER ING THE “OT HER” Terms like Holy Mother India were not meaningless rhetoric for Hindus but signified a living reality that every Hindu was called upon to defend, protect , and foster. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the great Bengali novelist, whose Ānandamaṭha depicted the 1770 saṃnyāsi uprising as a national war of liberation from foreign rule, made his patriotic ascetics sing a hymn to Mother India that for some time became the national anthem of the freedom movement and that Hindu activists today want to reintroduce, the “Bande Mātaram,” Mother, I bow to thee, in which India is identified with the Goddess: With many strengths who are mighty and stored, To thee I call, Mother and Lord! Thou who savest, arise and save! . . . Thou art wisdom, thou art law, Thou our heart, our soul, our breath, Thou the love divine, the awe In our hearts that conquers death. Thine the strength that nerves the arm, Thine the beauty, thine the charm. Every image made divine In our temples is but thine. Thou art Durgā, Lady and Queen, With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen, Thou art Lakshmī Lotus-throned, And the Muse a hundred-toned. Pure and Perfect without peer, Mother, lend thine ear.2 Another Bengali, Śrī Aurobindo Ghose, who first fought for India’s political independence in a terrorist band, had according to his own testimony, a vision of Kṛṣṇa through which he was made to understand that his lifework was to be for the restoration of the true dharma, that is, Hinduism. Bāl Gaṅgādhar Tilak and many others undertook their political agitation against the British rāj as duty imposed on them by their religion; their aim was the restoration of Hindu India on the sociopolitical level.3 The most radical advocates of the restoration of Hindu dharma on the sociopolitical level today are the many groups and parties that developed out of the Ārya Samāj, the Aryan Society of Svāmi Dāyānanda Saraswatī briefly described in Chapter 30. R ADICAL HINDU POLITICAL MOV EM ENTS ON A NATIONAL LEV EL In 1909 Pandit Mohan Malaviya, who became later the first vice chancellor of Banares Hindu-University, founded together with other leading ĀryaSam ājists the Hindū Mahāsabhā, which soon developed into a right-wing militant Hindu political party. It has remained one of the national parties HINDŪ T VA—HINDUISM—HINDU DH A R M A 4 43 based on a narrow definition...