Indian Society: Clash of Perspective-1

Territory of many nations and languages

Sir John Seely 1883

There is not and never was an India, no Indian nation, no people of India. That is, there are several Indian, people and nations in India.

                                                                                                           

John Strachey -1888

There are four competing conceptualization about contemporary India in currency today:-

1.         Cultural Monoism

2.         Cultural Pluralism

3.         Cultural Subalternism

4.         Cultural Fedralism

Cultural Monoism and pluralism crystallized in pre independent India.  Cultural subalterinsm and federalism perspective emerged in independent India.

Cultural Monism  

Conceptualizes India as a single cultural unity. One nation, one culture, one people as articulated by Sangh Parivar and BJP. 

Often involves it as political slogan to emphasize the national unity of India.

Intellectual ancestry of idea- Guru Golwalkar’s statement, “In his country Hindus alone are national and Muslims and other if not actually anti national are at least outside the body of the nation”.  He said/wrote in 1939.  Savarkar saying in 1929, excluded followers of non Indic religions those originated outside India,  from Indian society and he designated the followers of all India religions as Hindus.  This is cultural Monoism, pure and simple.

Historian Radhakumced Mukherji referred to India’s wholeness based on geography and predominantly Hindu culture, economic self sufficiency and the independence her linguistic regions in 1914.  He said before Savarkar and Golwalkar expressed their views.

Sociologist GS Ghurye published, “ The scheduled tribes” in 1943 and argued that the scheduled tribes are but backward Hindus, but they reject this description and insist that their culture and religion are different from those of Hinduism and prefer to call themselves adivasis  i.e early settlers.

Anthropologist NK Bose referred to the process of acculturation that the adivasis were subjected to as the “Hindus mode of absorption”.

Sanskritization   

Notion of Sanskritization floated by MN Srinivas assuming the superiorityty of upper class norms and values which the lower cast willingly adopted.

DP Mukherji said in his first presidential address to all India sociological conference in 1955: “unless sociological training in India is grounded on Sanskrit or any such language in which traditions have been embodied as a symbol, sociological training in India will be a pale immtation of what others are doing”. He said, “all our shastras  are sociological” .  The fact that the shastras are in Sanskrit and it was the prerogative of the Brahmin males to have access to them renders Indian sociology in reality Brahminology. 

Anthropologist ayyapan an Ezhaye bybirth from Kerala used to remark, all the articulation I have referred to are pro Hindu and/or pro upper caste. 

In the British India census there was a religious category designated as animists/ naturalists, the Adivasis, who have not embraced one of the world religions. But, the free India’s first census in 1951, abolished them into Hinduism. They counted around three percent in 1931 and today they would have been more than three million.

The above fact is very significant in the contest of the animosity unleashed against Christian and Muslims by Hindu militants, because these non Indic religions are accused of indulging in proselytiazation by providing material incentives.  But rarely does one come across any criticism of the Indian state invoking the census as a political instrument to absorb Adivasis into Hinduism thereby endangering the constitutionally generated freedom of religion. 

The definition of Hindu in the Hndu code bill which includes all the religions of India origins.  Thus Hindus, jains, Buddhists and Sikhs all are Hindus, exactly the same conceptualization Sawarkar proposed .  Therefore cultural Monoism is widely endorsed in India and one cannot indict the Sangh Pariwar as the sole advocate of this perspective. 

Cultural Pluralism

The competing conceptualization of India against cultural Monoism is cultural pluralism. Indian National congress champions this perspective. 

Cultural Monoists believe that the Indian nation is a victim of centuries of incursions by Muslim conquerors and a western Christian colonizer, who’s cultural remain alien accretions in India.  In contrast the cultural pluralist hold the view that India society is a product of gradual and continuous accretion of cultural elements from ancient, medieval  and modern times, all of which made significant contributions which need to be acknowledged.

Celebration of cultural diversity is the motto of cultural pluralism.

Long presence of multiple socio culture forces have contributed to social formation of India.  More important of these are primal vision of Adivasis of India, pre Aryan Dravidians presence, the Aryan advent, emergence of Hindu protestant religions such as Jainism and Buddhism arrival of non Indic- pre-colonial and pre-conquest religions- “Christianity and Islam” Muslim conquest since eight century, the Bhakti movements, emergence of Sikhism, arrival of Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the Baha’is faith, the anti colonial moment and partition of India.

To nurture and preserve the notion of Cultural Pluralism ideas such as unity in diversity and composite culture have been floated.  Nehru was the Prime mover of this concept.  This idea was invoked to avert partition; this advocacy did not succeed because of Muslim fear of Hindu dominated India. 

In 1940, MA Jinnah observed “The history of 1200 years has failed to achieve unity and has witnessed during the ages.  India always was divided into Hindu India and Muslim India”.

Fusion between Rulers 

      

Political scientist Beni Prasad argued that there occurred a fusion between Hindu and Muslim cultures and societies. He wrote in 1941, As soon as the first wave of conquest, plunder and desecration had spent themselves, there began the operation of forces, inherent in human nature which inter- knit contacts into co-national wholes and transform plurality into community.

Hestorian Tarachand emphasized the effort of kabir, the saint poet to fuse Hinduism and Islam.  Nehru notes in Discovery of India, “Akbar became the great representative of old Indian Ideas of synthesis of differing elements and their fusion into common nationality”. 

Secular Nationalism was/is not as emotionally appealing as religious nationalism, although the idea was advocated by a large number of respected leaders.

Considering the Hindu militant position Madan Mohan Malviya noted in 1950 that Hinduism is no longer exclusively a Hindu country.  Gandhi asserted “the Hindus” the Mohammedans, the Paris and the Christian who have made India their country are fellow countrymen”, yet secular nationalism did not gain ground to counter religious nationalism. 

Secular nationalism only took into account the empirical reality of north India where the two great traditions, Hinduism or Islam, were in tension.  The grand narrative of pluralists completely ignored the internal tension within Hinduism, the tension between Aryan Hinduism and Dravidian Hinduism. 

If Aryan Hinduism saw Rama as a National Hero, Sanskrit as a mother of all languages and the twice born upper casts as its bulwark, Dravidian Hinduism projected Ravana as a hero. Asserted the superiority of Tamil, as an ancient and living language and “Dalit Bahujanas” as its principle constituency.

Dravindian Hinduism also floated “Kimyana” to counter “Ramayana”, the epic of Aryan Hinduism the rupture between the two Hinduism and the elaboration of it may be seen as the beginning of the idea of cultural federation in India. But in case of Dravidian Hinduism the focus shift from religion to language.  The linguist reorganization of the Indian states in 1950 reinforced the idea articulated by Mr D P Mukerji since 1930.  He noted cultural symbiosis to be clearly routed in the specific culture pattern of the Arya Bhumi and the Anarya Pradesh of Bengal, Tamilnadu and Maharastra. These symbolic pattern are the true significance of the term “nationalities in India”.

Left parties attested this view and referred India as a multinational state Marxist Vein AR Desai refers to “Dormant” and “weakened nationalities”.  In India those nationalities moving from the dormant to weakened stage in his social background of Indian Nationalism, not an acceptable India to those nationalities labeled as “dormant” and “weakened”.