Reclaiming the Hindu Gods

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>http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040130/asp/opinion/story_2834652.asp

>RECLAIMING THE HINDU GODS

>- Another view of nationalism is emerging from the Hindu diaspora

>SWAPAN DASGUPTA

>

>Among the many attributes of leadership, the one that stands out is the

>ability to swim against the tide. Mahatma Gandhi was an incorrigible

>individualist, bound by his quirky sense of ethics and morality. This

>fierce

>sense of personal conviction prompted him to go against conventional

>wisdom.

>It is by far too early for history to pronounce its verdict on Atal Bihari

>Vajpayee. As a political leader, he has both led from the front and buried

>personal misgivings in favour of a larger sense of corporate discipline.

>Using ambivalence to full effect, he has suggested possibilities and, at

>the

>same time, left room for retreat. Nurtured in the traditions of Hindu

>nationalism, he has both moved with the current and risen well above it.

>Earlier this month, the prime minister emerged as a brave voice of sanity

>and restraint over an issue that touched the core of his corporate belief.

>In the wake of the fierce controversy generated by James W. Laines slim

>monograph, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, Vajpayee made it clear to

>an audience in Mumbai that he was personally against the banning of books.

>In the best traditions of Hindu pluralism and Anglo-Saxon liberalism, he

>made the necessary distinction between contesting an idea and suppressing

>it

>by official diktat.

>Tragically, few, either in the saffron parivar or in the liberal

>fraternity

>took the cue. At a time when the Left Front government in West Bengal is

>invoking memories of its totalitarian inheritance by peremptorily banning

>the autobiography of the Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasreen, the

>left-inclined liberal intelligentsia is unwilling to be shown up by a

>regime

>it has, with irascible regularity, dubbed fascist.

>It is, of course, a different matter that this so-called fascist regime

>has

>not outlawed a book in its six years of government. It even took the brave

>step of issuing Rushdie a visa, thereby enabling him to reclaim his India.

>Thats an exemplary record, which cannot be matched by the Nehruvians. The

>ban imposed on Laines work by the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party

>government in Maharashtra matches the earlier acts of cussedness and

>stupidity of earlier Congress governments in the Centre and the states.

>From

>Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses to Charles Bettelheims India Independent

>and Stanley Wolperts Nine Hours to Rama, India has a chequered history of

>liberal proscription.

>The problem, in my view, is likely to intensify in the coming years.

>Hitherto, governments have usually taken a narrow, law-and-order view in

>defining the boundary between legitimate and unacceptable dissent. It has

>normally taken some intemperate outburst by a preacher of the Tipu Sultan

>mosque in Calcutta or an act of mindless desecration by a self-styled

>Maratha leader in Pune for the political class to come down harshly on a

>piece of intellectual heresy. Preserving communal peace happens to be the

>most familiar fig-leaf for confronting awkward views.

>In time, even this is unlikely to work. Hidden from the secularist and

>media

>gaze, there is another type of intellectual ferment that is in evidence.

>Beginning sometime last year, American Hindus have mounted a spirited

>attack

>on the bastions of Indology in the North American universities. The

>movement

>was triggered by the reprint of Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of

>Beginnings by Paul Courtright of Emory University in Georgia. It was

>claimed

>by American Hindus, quite rightly too, that the projection of the Hindu

>god

>as a personification of incestuous licentiousness was deeply offensive.

>Following a round of angry emails, petitions and protest meetings-which,

>incidentally, was not replicated within India, the publisher withdrew the

>circulation of the book.

>What is significant is that, for the first time, there is an organized

>Hindu

>protest against wilful misrepresentation of Indias culture and heritage.

>Earlier, such monstrous academic follies went by-and-large unnoticed and,

>at

>best, were accompanied by private protest. It is only now, for example,

>that

>a deeply offensive work by an American Indologist on Ramakrishna

>Paramhansa

>published many years ago has triggered a sense of outrage in the diaspora.

>The Courtright controversy has become the catalyst for a wider,

>intellectually rigorous critique of Indology as taught and researched in

>the

>West. Using intellectual tools that are reminiscent of Edward Said and

>Gayatri Spivak, concerned diaspora intellectuals such as Rajiv Malhotra of

>the Infinity Foundation and Shrinivas Tilak have questioned the skewed

>power

>relationships that underpin the somewhat disparaging view of India and

>Hindus in American academic circles.

>Taking back Hindu studies will require Hindus to revisit site by site the

>history of Hinduism that was constructed under colonial and western eyes,

>wrote Tilak in an article that has been widely circulated among

>internet-based Hindu groups. This in turn would require developing a

>theory

>and approach to engage with, understand and then act upon the received

>history of Hinduism. Rewriting history of Hinduism, reclaiming Hindu

>studies

> giving testimony to distortion of Indias past will have to be the basic

>strategies of decolonising Hindu studies.

>On his part, Malhotra has raised even more fundamental questions. At a

>time

>when the United States of America perceives India as a strategic partner,

>both economically and politically, does it behove the American academic

>establishment to patronize those who perceive Hindu to be a four-letter

>word?

>Western institutions, Malhotra wrote earlier this month, must introspect

>whether they should remain the blood supply of the intellectual vampire of

>Indian separatism, or whether they must drive a stake through its heart

>before it is too late. Will the Western institutions that are now

>sheltering

>and promoting these separatist ideologies like to go down in history as

>catalysts of taliban-like movements?

>The stirrings in the diaspora anticipate a trend that has been slow to

>manifest itself within India. As the Indian middle classes grow in

>prosperity and self-confidence, there is a growing impatience with the

>contrived scepticism of everything they value as cultural and national

>symbols. It wasnt strictly necessary for Laine to question Shivajis

>parentage. He did it as a snide aside because that also corresponds to the

>disavowal of the Shivaji legacy by the dominant intellectual classes in

>India. It corresponds to the belief of the historian, Romila Thapar, that

>the demonology around Mahmud of Ghazni is yet another example of Hindu

>false

>consciousness.

>Today, for the first time since Indira Gandhi conceded academia to the

>left

>in the late Sixties, there is an emerging counter-view of Indian

>nationalism

> Although replete with many loose ends, it is a view that broadly

>corresponds to the major shifts in Indian politics over the past decade or

>so. Yet, the alternative view has not secured any significant

>institutional

>toehold. Hindu writers, to put it bluntly, arent taken seriously in

>liberal-dominated academe.

>As the challenge intensifies, it is more than likely that some of the

>points

>of friction will spill over into the streets, not least because those who

>are under threat are likely to get more and more outrageous. Such

>provocations have to be resisted. Those who attacked the Bhandarkar

>Oriental

>Institute in Pune and assaulted a senior scholar did their own cause a

>major

>disservice.

>

>The battle to reassess Indian heritage in keeping with the achievements of

>Indians involves a long haul. It will not be won by bans on offensive

>texts

>or McCarthy-ite purges of the infuriatingly perverse. It has to be fought

>with civility, argument, rigour and a sense of strategy. Vajpayee was

>right

>to warn against a gung-ho retaliation.

>

 

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