Savarkar,
Hinduness and the Aryan Homeland
Dr Koenraad Elst
1. The
Hindu monologue
Hindus have a problem with
reality. As independent Hindu writer Siva Prasad Ray (Turning of the
Wheel, A. Ghosh, Houston/Calcutta 1985) has observed, Hindu
polemicists, especially Gandhians, are expert at interacting with a
partner without the latter knowing about it. They merely impute feelings
and opinions to the partner without checking what these are in reality.
With that self-deception, it is easy to maintain fictions like the
Gandhian mantra of "Hindu-Muslim unity", or likewise, the RSS
characterization of Indian Muslims as "Mohammedi Hindus".
This tendency extends beyond
the field of Hindu-Muslim conflict and beyond the Gandhian movement,
affecting seemingly hard-nosed Left-secularists and Hindutvawadis as
well. Thus, in the early days of debate on the Aryan invasion theory (AIT),
and even now though to a lesser extent, many Hindu AIT critics claim that
"Western scholarship has discarded the fantasy of an Aryan invasion long
ago",-- a case of pure wishful thinking, for most Western scholars still
stand by the AIT and many haven't even heard yet that it is being
challenged. Or likewise in the demography debate, Hindus who could easily
have made their point about Muslim demographic aggression using the true
figures and trends, nonetheless resort to imaginative false claims
involving third parties, e.g. "the WHO has predicted that Muslims will be
a majority in India by 2010" or so.
This tendency is equally in
evidence in secularist discourse. The secularists may be lacking in the
virtues of Hinduism, but they certainly share in its vices. In their
case, true to type, this tendency to deal with merely imagined attitudes
of the Other is mostly in an adversarial mode: falsely attributing
positions to the Hindus all the better to demolish them. However,
contrary to the ordinary "straw man" technique of debate distortion, the
point here is that most secularists really believe their own
misconstruction of the Hindu position. The main reason for this is that
from their comfortable power position they disdain to take the trouble of
actually acquainting themselves with their opponents' views. They merely
start from a very general summary of "the" Hindutva viewpoint, mostly
already a caricature, and then "deduce" all the supposed Hindutva
positions on specific topics.
A case in point is the
secularist understanding of Veer Savarkar's views of Hinduism and of the
AIT. According to Parsha Venkateshvara Rao jr. (April 6, 2003, "Lord
Parekh, Savarkar and the idea of India", http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems):
"[Lord Bhikhu] Parekh has identified three clusters of people and their
idea of India. In the first, which he has called the 'Hindu' or
'Hindutva' school, he has included Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and
Veer Savarkar. He admits that there are many differences among the
individual thinkers, but he groups them together under a general rubric
because of the dominant idea of each cluster. The 'Hindutva' cluster
emphasises the pre-eminence of Hindu culture as a defining feature of
India. (*) But there are problems with Parekh's thesis because of the
'clusters' he has established. (*) For example, his inclusion of Savarkar
along with Tilak and Sri Aurobindo poses acute problems. The idea of
Hinduness as expounded by Tilak and Sri Aurobindo is philosophical and
spiritual. Secondly, Tilak is one of the distinguished proponents of the
original home of the Aryans being outside India, which is to be found in
his two books, Orion and The Arctic Home of the Vedas. The
Hindutva school, as we know it today, argues that the Aryans were the
natives of the country."
We shall see
that this version of the facts stems from an eagerly cultivated secularist
caricature of Hindutva, not of a genuine acquaintance with Hindutva
doctrine as propounded by Savarkar and his successors. We will first take
up the second point, viz. about the Aryan invasion theory (AIT), and then
consider the general point about the "spiritual" definition of "Hinduness".
2. A Hindu
nation, regardless of its origins
PV Rao jr. (and
possibly Bhikhu Parekh, that depends on how accurately his position was
rendered here) clearly knows neither Savarkar nor the developments in the
Hindutva position regarding the AIT. There is in fact nothing
intrinsically anti-AIT about Hindutva, as will be clear from Shrikant
Talageri's survey (the only one extant, in his book The Rigveda, a
Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 2000) of various Hindu
positions regarding the AIT: some of the wilder Hindutva proponents have
actually elaborated upon the AIT and based far-flung territorial claims on
it, while even some apparent AIT critics with Hindutva leanings turn out
to have interiorized many of the implications of the AIT. In particular,
V.D. Savarkar, the very propagator of the term Hindutva and author
of the influential booklet of that title, has in that very booklet
explicitly accepted the AIT.
Exactly like
Nehru, Savarkar could live with the idea that his nation had a fragmented
past but that out of divergent ethnic material a coherent nation could be
made. Whereas Nehru placed the fusion of the different components into a
single nation largely in the immediate future, with the Congressite
programme of "nation-building", Savarkar placed it largely in the past.
To him, the welding of the various components into a Hindu nation was an
old accomplished fact. This fusion had reached down even to the
biological level: "Not even the tribes of the Andamans are without a
sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood." (Notice hisshyness in embracing
the then-prevalent notion of "Aryan blood", incidentally giving the lie to
secularist claims about Savarkar being a racist ideologue, a claim very
explicitly refuted in the booklet Hindutva itself, where Savarkar
accepts racial intermarriage as normal and inevitable.) But more
importantly, the linguistic aryanization of all Indian languages, with
Malayalam or Telugu having up to 70% Sanskrit loans in their vocabularies,
and especially the various levels of Hindu religion adopted by even remote
and isolated communities, had fused the disparate continuum of ethnic
groups into a self-conscious single nation. At least, that was Savarkar's
view.
M.S. Golwalkar,
the second RSS chief, though an accomplished biologist, was much less
familiar than Savarkar (who had studied law in England) with modern ideas
outside the narrow hard-sciences field, and was more rooted in traditional
Sanskritic lore. Therefore, like many old-school pandits, he couldn't deal
with the notion of an Aryan invasion, totally unattested in Vedic
literature. Hence, he tried to save the indigenous origin of the Vedic
Aryans all while accepting B.G. Tilak's seemingly scientific and modern
theory of an Arctic origin by postulating that the pole had shifted and
that in PIE times, the North Pole had been in the lower Ganga basin.
Often held up for ridicule, this passage was without relation to the main
thrust of his (still immature) booklet We, Our Nationhood Defined,
in which it appeared. It was not taken up again in Golwalkar's later
writings, and to my knowledge remained without influence on later RSS
thought, partly because after the Gandhi murder the booklet was never
reprinted and was no longer a part of the RSS workers' education.
Hindutva could
do without an Indigenous Homeland Theory for the same reasons that other
nations can have their patriotic ideologies without having been the hoary
inhabitants of their present countries. Note also that at Benares Hindu
University, founded by Hindu Mahasabha leader Madan Mohan Malaviya, famous
professors like VS Agarwal also taught the AIT even though their textbooks
could for the most part be included in any propaganda campaign for the
greatness of Hindu civilization. There is no necessary contradiction
between nationalism and a history of settlement from abroad. Indeed, many
nations cherish myths of invasion and settlement as founding moments of
their nationhood, vide of course the USA, or vide e.g. Rumania's recent
installation of a massive statue commemorating Emperor Traianus's
incorporation of "Dacia"/Rumania into the Roman empire, thus creating the
Romance-Dacian identity which was to become the Rumanian nation.
3. Why
Hindutva turned against the AIT
Therefore, the
Hindutva movement could function for decades without showing any concern
for the Aryan question, and with some of its spokesmen explicitly
accepting the invasion theory. If the Hindutva movement has come around
to welcoming and highlighting any findings and writings that militate
against the AIT, it is mainly for the following reasons:
(1) the vast and
ever-increasing political use made of the AIT by anti-Hindu militants in
tribal-separatist, Christian missionary, neo-Ambedkarite, Marxist and
Islamist circles. Indeed, all those who show such concern for the
politicization of history are severely lacking in credibility if they
discovered their heartburn for the abused damsel History only when
Hindutva authors started questioning the AIT, and not earlier, when all
the others were already exploiting the AIT no end. The political interest
which Hindutva circles started taking in the Aryan origins debate was a
reaction against a long-standing politicization of that debate by their
declared enemies.
(2) the
publications since the early 1980s by non-political scholars, particularly
archaeologists both Indian and Western, of findings which failed to
support (or which actually threw doubt upon) the invasion theory. One
important Indian contributor at this stage was K.D. Sethna, formerly the
secretary of Sri Aurobindo, the sage accepted as a good spiritual Hindu by
PV Rao jr. Aurobindo has been an AIT skeptic but only made a feeble
attempt to argue against it, and actually made it more difficult to muster
textual
arguments against it by
reducing (though less radically than the Arya Samaj had done) the Vedas to
a vast metaphor, a purely spiritual text free of mundane historical data.
Sethna, by contrast, drew attention to material information in the Vedas
contradicting the predominant theory, e.g. the unfamiliarity of the oldest
Vedic authors with cotton, a tissue familiar to the mature-Harappans as
well as the (supposedly early-Vedic) post-Harappans. Such findings and
insights also set some non-Hindutva authors rethinking the common
assumptions, e.g. the Marxist Bhagwan Singh; but somehow only the Hindutva
input is being noticed.
A final point
here concerns BG Tilak, sometimes depicted as a Hindu nationalist
Hindutvawadi avant la lettre but better described as a Hindu
traditionalist (e.g. pro child marriage, pro caste), this in contrast with
the Hindu reformists of the Arya Samaj, and of the Hindu nationalist
movement since then. PV Rao jr. calls him "one of the distinguished
proponents of the original home of the Aryans being outside India". He is
clearly unaware of the facts of the matter.
Tilak's
arguments in favour of an Aryan homeland outside India are anything but
"distinguished"; they are highly contrived and sometimes downright
ridiculous. For a full treatment, I refer to Talageri's The Rigveda, a
Historical Analysis. Even without going into the details, the idea of
locating in the Arctic a people destined to colonize the European and
Indian subcontinents is a priori very unlikely given that region's
inability to support a sizable population. Tilak was under the spell of
European superiority, a presupposition to which he adapted his knowledge
of Vedic history; and he even accepted the then-common European view of
the Aryans as a band of spectacularly unstoppable conquerors from the
North.
The only part of Tilak's
argumentation that seems to stand up to scrutiny, and that has been
confirmed by more recent researchers, is the part which contradicts
the AIT at least in its most common version: his astronomy-based
chronology dating the Rig-Veda to the 4th millennium BC. This
may be reconciled with an invasionist scenario but it would be a very
different one from the now-dominant version: either you believe along with
Tilak that the invasion took place ca. 1500 BC but that the Vedas describe
an Arctic setting, against all the textual evidence; or you accept that
the Vedas testify to an Indian setting so that the Vedic Aryans lived in
India before and during the Harappan period, regardless of whether they
immigrated at an earlier date.
4.
Savarkar's definition of Hinduness
Now to the
second point, PV Rao jr.'s objection to the inclusion of Savarkar among
the votaries of Hindu spirituality: "But there are problems with Parekh's
thesis (*) For example, his inclusion of Savarkar along with Tilak and Sri
Aurobindo poses acute problems. The idea of Hinduness as expounded by
Tilak and Sri Aurobindo is philosophical and spiritual. (*) Secondly,
Tilak's politics was never sectarian, even during his 'nationalist' phase,
which ended with the split of Congress in Surat in 1907. And it was Tilak
and Mohammed Ali Jinnah who crafted the Congress-Muslim League Pact in
Lucknow in 1916. It is in contrast to the narrow-based, exclusivist
national politics of Savarkar and the Hindutva brigade. And the major
difference between Savarkar and the other two is that Savarkar rejected
Hinduism as a religion. His Hindutva is a desiccated nationalism, devoid
of spiritual, religious and cultural values. (*) Savarkar and the Hindutva
brigade have nothing to say about the idea of India because they reject
Hindu spirituality and religiosity. As a matter of fact, Savarkar
represents a perverted secularism, an evil spawned by the French
Revolution of 1789. (*) It is not difficult to see that Savarkar's
Hindutva is an alien concept."
First of all my
compliments to Rao for his critical view of the French Revolution, which
most Indian social science authors idealize after the Western-Leftist
fashion. It is certainly true that a desiccated secular-nationalism was
one of the planks in the French Revolutionary platform. But does this
also apply to Savarkar's Hindutva? Most Indian secularists would be
uncomfortable with the classification of Hindutva as secular and
non-religious, given their own habit of denouncing it for "mixing religion
with politics".
Part of the
problem is the difference between Christianity, against which genuine
secularism was a reaction, and Hinduism. Most Indian secularists
including Rao have no clear understanding of Hinduism and project onto it
the notions of religion which they picked up from Western textbooks whose
authors had Christianity in mind when discussing religion. "Hinduism" is
not coterminous with a community of believers in a specific belief system,
as most scholars of the subject would agree. Therefore, Savarkar very
sensibly avoided the trap of trying to catch Hinduism in a doctrinal
definition, and offered the pragmatic alternative of defining the Hindu as
one to whom "India is both Fatherland and Holyland", i.e. any Indian who
accepts any native Indian religion (hence one with its holy places inside
India) as his own.
Far from being an
idiosyncratic innovation, Savarkar's definition is in fact coterminous
with the original understanding of the term "Hindu" by those who
introduced it into India, viz. the Muslim invaders: "any Indian who is not
a Parsi, Jew, Christian or Muslim". Moreover, this concept has been
retained as the definition of "legal Hindu" (i.e. Indian citizen to whom
the "Hindu law" concerning marriage and inheritance applies) in the Hindu
Code of 1955 and approximately also in Art. 25 of the Constitution, which
applies the term "Hindu" for its purposes to Sikhs, Jainas and Buddhists.
So, Savarkar's definition is very sensible both historically and legally.
5. Hinduism
and nationhood
At the same time, his
definition does not seem to be lacking in respect for Hindu philosophy and
spirituality. His criterion for including someone in the "Hindu" category
is not biological (racial) nor purely territorial (native to India) but at
least partly religious, viz. an attachment to at least one Indian
religious tradition. It may be true that Savarkar personally was an
atheist and that he refused religious rituals for his departed soul, but
that doesn't put him outside the tradition of Hindu spirituality, which
has room for many different philosophies. Nor was his secular outlook
necessarily "desiccated", for India has generated a variety of atheistic
or agnostic yet intensely spiritual traditions, best known among them
Jainism and Buddhism. If anyone in this debate can be diagnosed as
"desiccated" in their Weltanschauung, it is more likely the secularists of
Rao's own variety.
Meanwhile, it
can be argued that Savarkar's position was not too different from Tilak's
nor even from that of the most spiritual of the three Hindu leaders
mentioned, Sri Aurobindo. If Hindutva ideologues from Savarkar on down
have "mixed religion with politics", that is certainly one element they
have in common with Tilak and Aurobindo. A negative instance is the one
applauded by Rao, viz. Tilak's role in legitimizing Muslim separatism
through his 1916 Lucknow Pact with Jinnah. I suppose one shouldn't hold
it against a political leader that he sometimes feels compelled to make a
compromise, but with hindsight we must admit that the Lucknow Pact was a
tremendous boost to communalism, setting the stage for the communal
conflagration which was to follow in the early 1920s, and ultimately for
the Partition. A more widely acknowledged instance of Tilak's policy of
mixing religion with politics was his incorporation of the Ganesh
Chaturthi festival into his nationalistic propaganda.
But the
strongest instance of "mixing religion with politics" and of identifying
India with Hinduness was most certainly Sri Aurobindo's famous Uttarpara
speech: "Other religions are preponderantly religions of faith and
profession, but the Sanatana Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has
not so much to be believed as lived. This is the Dharma that for the
salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula
from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. (*) When
therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that
shall rise. (*) It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists.
To magnify the religion means to magnify the country. (*) When the
Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines (*) The Sanatana
Dharma, that is nationalism."
In the
desiccated and unsympathetic discourse of Indian secularism, anyone
repeating Aurobindo's words as his own would be denounced as a "communal
fascist". Yet, that fusion of Hindu spirituality and nationalist politics
was the central message of the man whom Rao recognizes as a genuine Hindu
sage. And sure enough, Aurobindo's Uttarpara speech is frequently invoked
by the hated "Hindutva brigade". If Hindu nationalism is to exclude
Savarkar from the spiritual aura of Hinduism, then Tilak and Aurobindo
should be excluded as well. But if, more realistically, it is to include
them, then it should also include Savarkar.
Dr. Koenraad ELST
