04-27-2007, 09:36 AM
Hindu News Headlines for April 26, 2006
The meaning of Indian identity
2006-04-26 Published by asianage.com Gathered by Special Correspondent
Of late there has been a mounting discourse about the meaning and content of Indian identity provoked by the various communal crises afflicting the Republic. Whereas developing industrialisation, communications, urbanisation, and the popularity of cricket and Bollywood films, not to mention televising of regional cultures, have led to a deeper sense of mutual familiarity within this multi-cultural nation, an elegy awaits composing on the "communal problem." Despite the brighter atmosphere surrounding people-to-people contacts between Pakistan and India (which is inevitably linked to Hindu-Muslim relations) no one can as yet claim that the past is totally behind us.
Amalendu Misra in his Identity & Religion: Foundations of anti-Islamism in India (Sage Publications) traces the roots of contemporary Hindu-Muslim tensions to some representative personalities of the last century, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Nehru and Savarkar. By locating the toxin as much in the national mainstream as in the more extremist groups of either community, he finds it endemic to the whole national endeavour, both in definition and in management.
Misra avers that an aggrieved Hindu oral tradition plus British anti-Muslim historiography provided the orientation for all four Hindu ideologues (his term) towards both Islam and the past period of Muslim rule. He does not mention any alternative available viewpoint, such as a possible accommodation that might have been bypassed. He has several breathtaking statements unsupported by citations: for example, where Vivekananda is described as favouring religio-political institutions, the misleading footnote gives references to the religio-political character of past Hindu kingdoms by other historians, and not to Vivekanandaâs alleged visualisation of Indiaâs political future â a task with which he is not usually credited.
Again, despite suggesting that a spurious British intellectual legacy combined with aggrieved oral traditions have spawned heavily Hinduised formulations of a future India, and denigration of pre-British periods of Muslim rule, Misra contradicts himself throughout the text by apparently using similar sources for his own criticisms of his subjectsâ views.
Space allows for only one example from his assessment of Nehruâs attempts at re-interpreting history against popular Hindu stereotypes of Islam. He selects five points on which Nehru relied to provide a less damaging picture of the Islamic period. Muslim dynasties became Indian, they looked on India as their home, they intermarried with Hindus, they refrained from interfering in Hindu affairs, and their patronage of art and architecture led to a happy syncretism of Hindu and Muslim styles. In contradistinction, Misra avers, the invading rulers had no territorial bases elsewhere: they came to India in search of fiefdoms and remained Islamic. Despite a few politically motivated inter-marriages, as conquerors they largely took local women as slaves. They tried to suppress Hindu culture by destroying temples and other monuments, but could not do a complete job as they were contained by the sheer size and expanse of Hindu India. On Indo-Islamic art Misra quotes Richard Lannoy as saying that it bears the impression of "a grim tyrant and foreboding conqueror." He does not quote independent sources for these counter-arguments.
Moreover, he bypasses the common view that British rule helped to firm up separate Hindu and Muslim identities (also Sikh, Christian and Jewish) through various aspects of their governance, sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate. His aetiology is thus too narrow. There was also the census, the first land settlements, the legal system, army recruitment, the Anglophone educational system, improved all-India and later faster communications both within and outside the country. Many factors contributed to an increasing awareness of national-communal solidarities, not only for Hindus but for other communities, at times sowing the seeds of future discord. Thus the Maharashtrian Shanivari Telis were discovered to be Jews, Sikhs became increasingly differentiated from Hindus, Muslims learnt to see themselves as part of a single Indian community, and Hindus also, in the chequered course of their interactions with their white rulers, became aware of a common religious identity and past.
However, Misraâs overall object is to indicate the need for a new conceptual basis for common citizenship, since past formulations, including Nehruvian secularism, have proven unsuccessful. He criticises Hindu inclusivism, whether in Nehru, Gandhi or Vivekananda, as failing to give Islam equal respect. However, as he himself inadvertently indicates, Abrahamic exclusivism has not shown itself to be more respectful to non-Abrahamic faiths. Conceptually the problem, as Basanta Kumar Mallik pointed out, is to do with the incompatibility of absolutes of all traditions. Their mutual intolerance may be expressed in different ways, through social habits, political measures or outright violence, but it is logically impossible for two absolutes to be equal. This applies to the absolute of modernity as well, which is gnawing away at the foundations of the religious outlook.
The enlightenment enterprise, of which secularism and democracy are an integral part, itself faces challenges in the region of its birth from those who do not accept its implicit absolutes of universal human rights. Majoritarian-minoritarian problems are the logical outcome of democratic (rule by the majority) practices in multicultural nations. All Indian political parties use the "communal card" to win elections: indeed, as it has been used up till now, the democratic process can sharpen religious and caste identities.
Ernest Renan is quoted to say "nations are partly built on the knowledge of history and partly on the ignorance of it." Every nation needs some mythological or quasi-historical symbolism for its raison dâetre. But in a heterogeneous society historical interpretation can become a contentious tool of political competition. Misra would like yet another interpretation, but provides no clear guidelines. Recommending a "multiculturalist accommodationist approach" to give equal space to all communities again needs to be spelt out. Acknowledging that current historical tradition has roots too deep to be easily countered, he envisages incremental changes through the media, political parties and educational institutions. However, these very institutions have been and are the main purveyors of past traditions.
Today there are three main competing traditions in India â the Hindu, Muslim and the secularist. The last can be threatening to the former two, with its views say, on female emancipation or property rights, sometimes aligning with one or other for political advantage, thereby creating an unstable triangle. While endorsing Misraâs call for inter-faith dialogue, one would have to extend it to include the non-religious, who are also parties to the identity problematic. Immediately, in the social field, equitableness is a more workable notion than strict equality; ideationally, and this requires a certain scepticism as no ideology or tradition can claim completeness, mutual respect has to rest on a recognition of plural absolutes, which logically implies several non-absolutes, or the relinquishment of total claims to truth. Not only Hindus, but to be effective, all groups need to address the issue together.
Misra could have taken a more comparative approach to communal tensions within India at different periods of its history or with communal tensions in other countries, as for example Ireland and India, for he has taught at Belfast. Moreover, with globalisation, the problematic of community identities is developing dimensions which are a challenge to the entire international community.
The meaning of Indian identity
2006-04-26 Published by asianage.com Gathered by Special Correspondent
Of late there has been a mounting discourse about the meaning and content of Indian identity provoked by the various communal crises afflicting the Republic. Whereas developing industrialisation, communications, urbanisation, and the popularity of cricket and Bollywood films, not to mention televising of regional cultures, have led to a deeper sense of mutual familiarity within this multi-cultural nation, an elegy awaits composing on the "communal problem." Despite the brighter atmosphere surrounding people-to-people contacts between Pakistan and India (which is inevitably linked to Hindu-Muslim relations) no one can as yet claim that the past is totally behind us.
Amalendu Misra in his Identity & Religion: Foundations of anti-Islamism in India (Sage Publications) traces the roots of contemporary Hindu-Muslim tensions to some representative personalities of the last century, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Nehru and Savarkar. By locating the toxin as much in the national mainstream as in the more extremist groups of either community, he finds it endemic to the whole national endeavour, both in definition and in management.
Misra avers that an aggrieved Hindu oral tradition plus British anti-Muslim historiography provided the orientation for all four Hindu ideologues (his term) towards both Islam and the past period of Muslim rule. He does not mention any alternative available viewpoint, such as a possible accommodation that might have been bypassed. He has several breathtaking statements unsupported by citations: for example, where Vivekananda is described as favouring religio-political institutions, the misleading footnote gives references to the religio-political character of past Hindu kingdoms by other historians, and not to Vivekanandaâs alleged visualisation of Indiaâs political future â a task with which he is not usually credited.
Again, despite suggesting that a spurious British intellectual legacy combined with aggrieved oral traditions have spawned heavily Hinduised formulations of a future India, and denigration of pre-British periods of Muslim rule, Misra contradicts himself throughout the text by apparently using similar sources for his own criticisms of his subjectsâ views.
Space allows for only one example from his assessment of Nehruâs attempts at re-interpreting history against popular Hindu stereotypes of Islam. He selects five points on which Nehru relied to provide a less damaging picture of the Islamic period. Muslim dynasties became Indian, they looked on India as their home, they intermarried with Hindus, they refrained from interfering in Hindu affairs, and their patronage of art and architecture led to a happy syncretism of Hindu and Muslim styles. In contradistinction, Misra avers, the invading rulers had no territorial bases elsewhere: they came to India in search of fiefdoms and remained Islamic. Despite a few politically motivated inter-marriages, as conquerors they largely took local women as slaves. They tried to suppress Hindu culture by destroying temples and other monuments, but could not do a complete job as they were contained by the sheer size and expanse of Hindu India. On Indo-Islamic art Misra quotes Richard Lannoy as saying that it bears the impression of "a grim tyrant and foreboding conqueror." He does not quote independent sources for these counter-arguments.
Moreover, he bypasses the common view that British rule helped to firm up separate Hindu and Muslim identities (also Sikh, Christian and Jewish) through various aspects of their governance, sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate. His aetiology is thus too narrow. There was also the census, the first land settlements, the legal system, army recruitment, the Anglophone educational system, improved all-India and later faster communications both within and outside the country. Many factors contributed to an increasing awareness of national-communal solidarities, not only for Hindus but for other communities, at times sowing the seeds of future discord. Thus the Maharashtrian Shanivari Telis were discovered to be Jews, Sikhs became increasingly differentiated from Hindus, Muslims learnt to see themselves as part of a single Indian community, and Hindus also, in the chequered course of their interactions with their white rulers, became aware of a common religious identity and past.
However, Misraâs overall object is to indicate the need for a new conceptual basis for common citizenship, since past formulations, including Nehruvian secularism, have proven unsuccessful. He criticises Hindu inclusivism, whether in Nehru, Gandhi or Vivekananda, as failing to give Islam equal respect. However, as he himself inadvertently indicates, Abrahamic exclusivism has not shown itself to be more respectful to non-Abrahamic faiths. Conceptually the problem, as Basanta Kumar Mallik pointed out, is to do with the incompatibility of absolutes of all traditions. Their mutual intolerance may be expressed in different ways, through social habits, political measures or outright violence, but it is logically impossible for two absolutes to be equal. This applies to the absolute of modernity as well, which is gnawing away at the foundations of the religious outlook.
The enlightenment enterprise, of which secularism and democracy are an integral part, itself faces challenges in the region of its birth from those who do not accept its implicit absolutes of universal human rights. Majoritarian-minoritarian problems are the logical outcome of democratic (rule by the majority) practices in multicultural nations. All Indian political parties use the "communal card" to win elections: indeed, as it has been used up till now, the democratic process can sharpen religious and caste identities.
Ernest Renan is quoted to say "nations are partly built on the knowledge of history and partly on the ignorance of it." Every nation needs some mythological or quasi-historical symbolism for its raison dâetre. But in a heterogeneous society historical interpretation can become a contentious tool of political competition. Misra would like yet another interpretation, but provides no clear guidelines. Recommending a "multiculturalist accommodationist approach" to give equal space to all communities again needs to be spelt out. Acknowledging that current historical tradition has roots too deep to be easily countered, he envisages incremental changes through the media, political parties and educational institutions. However, these very institutions have been and are the main purveyors of past traditions.
Today there are three main competing traditions in India â the Hindu, Muslim and the secularist. The last can be threatening to the former two, with its views say, on female emancipation or property rights, sometimes aligning with one or other for political advantage, thereby creating an unstable triangle. While endorsing Misraâs call for inter-faith dialogue, one would have to extend it to include the non-religious, who are also parties to the identity problematic. Immediately, in the social field, equitableness is a more workable notion than strict equality; ideationally, and this requires a certain scepticism as no ideology or tradition can claim completeness, mutual respect has to rest on a recognition of plural absolutes, which logically implies several non-absolutes, or the relinquishment of total claims to truth. Not only Hindus, but to be effective, all groups need to address the issue together.
Misra could have taken a more comparative approach to communal tensions within India at different periods of its history or with communal tensions in other countries, as for example Ireland and India, for he has taught at Belfast. Moreover, with globalisation, the problematic of community identities is developing dimensions which are a challenge to the entire international community.