161evaluating Marxist and Post-Modernist Responses To Hindu Nationalism During The Eighties and Nineties

South Asia Research
http://sar.sagepub.com Evaluating Marxist and Post-Modernist Responses To Hindu Nationalism During the Eighties and Nineties
Chandra Mallampalli South Asia Research 1999; 19; 161 DOI: 10.1177/026272809901900204 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sar.sagepub.com
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EVALUATING MARXIST AND POST-MODERNIST RESPONSES TO HINDU NATIONALISM DURING THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
Chandra Mallampalli
Over the past two decades, journalists, legal analysts and scholars of India have devoted much attention to the political advances of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the growth of Hindu nationalist sentiments among the nations burgeoning urban middle class. This decade alone has reaped a harvest of more than 70 books addressing the issue of the secular state in India, prompted, no doubt, by the clamour of Hindutva. Extensive print media coverage of events leading to and following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 brought the issues of secularism, national identity, and politicised religion to the forefront of public debate. The BJPs success in forming a coalition government after the general elections of 1998 revived questions about the direction of the partys Hindutva agenda and its viability as a secular party. At some distance now from the tumult of the Babri Masjid demolition, this article offers not another critique of Hindu nationalism, but an evaluation of both Marxist and post-modernist ways of explaining its rise during the 1980s and 90s. The categories Marxist and post-modernist are by no means monolithic, but contain elements that may either converge or conflict with each other. The more traditional Marxist perspective discussed in this article is represented in varying degrees by Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, Nasir Tyabji, Aijaz Ahmad and K Balagopal. This perspective is limited by its economic determinism which downplays the religious dimension of culture, politics and national identity. Writers who are more influenced by post-modern thought, by contrast, replace the rationalism and class dialectic of traditional Marxism with the dialectics of literature, culture (East vs West) and history-writing (Orientalist vs post-Orientalist). Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ashis Nandy create a space for the exploration of culture and religion, but do so with post-colonial distaste for the organs of the very machinery that was supposed to have protected the Babri statecraft thousands of Muslims who were killed in the bloody aftermath of its Masjid and the 1 destruction.
-
The categories Marxist and post-modernist do not preclude instances where self1 designated Marxists address post-modernist kinds of questions. Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, for instance, are self-described Marxists who critique rationalist
South Asia Research, 19, 2, 1999 SAGE PUBLICATIONS New DelhiUhousand Oaks/London
162
Analyses of Hindutva therefore appear stalemateu between critiques which assign, on the one hand, a crucial role to Indias modern state in combating Hindu majoritarian politics, and those which blame, on the other hand, the intrusive forces of modernity (including the state) for producing competitive religious categories in the first place. After summarising key insights from both perspectives, this article recommends a framework which highlights the indigenous factors that contributed to the construction of religious identities. This bottom up account challenges the view that religious categories are derived, in one sense or another, from colonial discourse and are therefore problematic. Greater attentiveness to different religious points of view makes it easier to appreciate historically (a) the common thread of resistance (before and after 1947) to Hindu nationalism by non-Hindu religious adherents, hence (b) the investment of non-Hindus in the protective role of a 2
secular
state .
Does Marxist Equal Secular? In spite of the limitations of their theoretical perspective toward religion, Indian Marxists should be credited for leading the assault on Hindu chauvinism. As key figures of the English press (e.g., Girilal Jain, Swapan Das Gupta, Arun Shourie) and a large section of the Hindi press turned increasingly saffron in their Marxist writers such as Sumit Sarkar, Aijaz Ahmad, N. Ram and others were unwavering in their appeal to Indias secular foundations and in their sustained their critique of BJP politics even opposition to Hindu Fascism. the broad base of that other parties extended to the BJP for the against support nuclear tests conducted in May 1998. So consistent was the Marxist critique that it became easy to regard their analysis as the secular antidote to Hindu chauvinism.
sympathies,3
They
ideologies and institutions. Ashis Nandy and Gyan Prakash, in their rejection of all fixed categories of identity, are more clearly post-modernist in their orientation. Aijaz Ahmads Marxism employs Gramscian tools both in his cultural critique of Hindutva and in his analysis
of Indian nationalism.
2 For
the purposes of this article, secular state refers to the Indian governments constitutional commitment to remain impartial or neutral with respect to any particular religion. In contrast to the strict wall of separation between Church and State found in some Western countries, the Indian constitution has sought to define secular state in terms of the governments equidistance to the countrys many religions.
the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Girilal Jain wrote, The bloated rhetoric 3 Eight days after to and realism constitutionalism and rule of law has to of
secularism, give way commonsense and the Muslim leadership, such as it is, has to recognise the urgent, indeed desperate, need for a change of course on its part. Times of India, 14 December, 1992, p. 7. For a concise history of how, over the past several decades, a Hindutva bias infiltrated the Hindi press, see S. P. Singh, Saffron Hue of the Hindi Press in Communalism Combat, June 1994.
4 The
issues of Frontline magazine published in the months following the Babri demolition contain excellent analyses of Hindutva by Marxist writers.
Masjid
163
Conversely, distinguishing the Marxist angle 5 analysis became more of a challenge.
on
Hindutva from other kinds of
The uncritical and unconscious identification of secularism almost exclusively with Indian Marxist thought was an unfortunate development because it showed that opposition to Hindu bigotry was leaning too heavily on one set of assumptions. Indian Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits also had important things to say about Hindutva. Yet none of these groups, in spite of being seriously affected by Hindutva aggression, have produced in India an intellectual tradition of the calibre and comprehensiveness of Indian Marxists. Consequently, as a response to Hindutva, Marxist thought alone could bear the stamp of both secular commitment and intellectual credibility. Painting the picture in this manner offers at least a preliminary answer to a question posed by Marxist political activist K. Balagopal, namely, Why Did December 6, 1992 Happen? 6 The snowball that demolished the Babri Masjid was resisted primarily by a school of thought that seems unable to grant agency and analytical space to religious identity and to the role of the secular state at the same time. Marxist critiques of the Hindu nationalist movement, in their very emphasis on the economic and class origins of religious consciousness, preclude critiques coming from other religiously defined groups. Granting legitimacy to a Muslim or a Christian perspective on nationhood risks reinforcing the same communal discourse through which the Sangh Parivar has gained pre-eminence. In the interest of ridding political analysis of any seeds of a communal outlook, Marxist writers tend to dismiss the assertion of religious identity as false consciousness, and as an inheritance of the colonial policy of divide and rule. Furthermore, this view results in a tendency either to give religious mobilisations and reform movements a very marginal status in the writing of Indian history, or to locate religious identity 7 formation within the larger narrative of middle-class economic The view of religion as false consciousness is what distinguishes Marxist responses to Hindutva from other forms of resistance that appeal to a secular state.
hegemony
nationalism which do not engage in 5 Examples of critiques of Hindu Romila
a Marxist, baseThapar, Syndicated Moksha, Seminar, Vol. 313, superstructure analysis are September 1985, pp. 14-22, and Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Berkeley, 1994. See also conttibutions of Susan Bayly, Ainslee Embree, Peter van der Veer and Robert Frykenberg in Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds, Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, Chicago, 1994; Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York, 1996; David Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu, Delhi, 1996; and John McGuire, Peter Reeves and Howard Brasted, eds, Politics of Violence: From Ayodhya to Behrampada, New Delhi, 1996. 6 K. Balagopal, Why Did December 6, 1992 Happen?, Economic and Political Weekly (hereafter EPW), Vol. 28, No. 17, 24 April 1993, p. 790.
7 K. P. Karunakaran discusses the misapplication of Marxist ideology to Indian conditions in

his
Religion and Political Awakening in India, New Delhi,
1965.
164
False consciousness does not deny the religious component of social diversity, but refers only to any attempt to make religious difference a means for political mobilisations. According to Bipan Chandra, when politicians claim to be representing the interests of religious communities, they are using religion to mask non-religious social needs, aspirations and conflicts which were the products 9 of the interplay of forces released by the impact of colonialism on Indian Inherent in this outlook is a distinction between real political solidarities of class, language and anti-imperialism, and unreal religious ones. Also implied is a particular theory of representation which holds that the primary function of Politicians and political involvement is to serve non-political, material land-holding elites appeal to religious group interests only to position themselves more effectively for material advantage. Hindu and Muslim interests are falsely conceived because they lack any correspondence to the objective, material factors which shape the patterns of social, change and underlie all social conflict. According to Chandra, there are in fact no distinctively Hindu or Muslim interests. Those who have been most vocal in defending the interests of any particular religious community were fighting primarily for socio-economic interests, and much less frequently for the distinctive religious practices of that Chandra develops this outlook with detailed references to the practices of zamindars and jagirdars under colonial rule, as well as to the actual policies and Chandras s practices advocated by the Muslim League and the Hindu much than other more of is more versions of forthright polished style expression similar arguments. His rigorous and detailed application of his theoretical perspective to a very broad spectrum of historical material is both impressive and helpful for informing the debate on the causes of communalism. But his contention that nationalism is somehow more objectively grounded than communalism is contested by more current conceptual tools in the academic market. On anti-colonial nationalism, he writes:
society.
interests,0
community2
Mahasabha. ~ ~
8
9
Hanna Pitkin contrasts this with Anstotles view that participation in political culture valuable in its own right. See The Concept of Representation, New York, 1969, pp. 5-7.
10
Bipan Chandra, p. 160. Ibid.,
Communalism in Modem India, New Delhi, 1984, p. 23.

is
According Chandra, minorities during the depression years of the 1930s did not fight for issues other than those relating to the middle class at large. In discussions of the minorities problem, the religious, cultural or social rights of the minorities seldom came up for discussion ...The "protection" and "safeguards" demanded for religious minorities at the Center and in the provinces were invariably defined in terms of shares in public services, higher education providing training for such services and the professions and political and administrative power. Ibid., p. 50.
to
11 Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, pp. 12
18-23.
., pp. 79-89, 104-27. Ibid 13
165
Nationalism in the colonial situation and as the consciousness of the new identity of the Indian people or nation was the valid or legitimate consciousness of the objective reality, that is, of the developing identity in real life of the common interests of the Indian people for modern social, economic, political and cultural development and, in particular, against the common enemy, foreign imperialism, and the need to unite against it in
struggle.
14
This view of nationalism is difficult to reconcile with the language of imagined Li communities (Benedict Anderson) or invented traditions (Eric Hobsbawm). Furthermore, it portrays the Hindu particularity of nationalism as merely epiphenomenal to the objective struggle of the Indian people against imperial rule. From such an angle, the Hinduism of B. C. Pal, Vivekananda, Tilak, or Gandhi becomes merely a false idiom that overlays what are assumed to be the secular and true essences of Indian nationalism. Chandra arranges the divisions of caste, language, region and religion among Indians into a hierarchy of legitimacy in which religious divisions rank lowest as the false products of imperial divide and rule. The Indian Marxist suspicion or omission of religious identities from the writing of history set the pace for other writers who would come to regard religious difference as epiphenomenal or not genuinely Indian.16 From this perspective, a religious history, as distinct from a class history, reinforces a colonialist ideology and risks encouraging the separatist attitudes that religious discourses often breed. This framework, however, came to be critiqued as a sell-out to Western naturalism and its preferences for rational or scientific explanations for social conflict over irrational religious ones. It was only a matter of time before Indian intellectuals would sense the need for a more rigorous and sympathetic examination of religion and culture in the writing of Indian history.
primary criticism of Marxist ideology is that it failed to account for the formation of nationalist as opposed to class identities. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1983; also, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, Cambndge, 1983.
the most articulate statement of this is Gyanendra Pandeys The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New York, 1992. Pandey argues that communal identities were crafted by the colonial state, and later adopted by Indian nationalists. 17 K. P. Karunakaran describes the Indian Marxist academy during the years following Independence as having uncritically sold itself to Western naturalism in the terms alluded to here. Palme Dutts book [India Today, Bombay, 1949] began a phase of scholarly writings on modern India which failed to understand the significance of the interrelation between religion and politics in the country. Their authors repeated the complaint of Palme Dutt that many Indian leaders were cut off from any scientific social and political theory, by which they
., Ibid 14 p.21. 15 16 Perhaps
Andersons
166
Mushirul Hasan observes that the preference for class over religious or cultural histories omits the important roles of Muslims in the national independence movement. This includes their intellectual awakening during the late nineteenth reactions to issues relating to education, social reforms and century and their 18 political processes. Hasan attributes this omission, in part, to a psychological hangover of Indias Partition and the fear of unearthing the voices of Muslim He also points to the intellectual milieu of the post-Partition decades that downplayed anything other than economic history:
separatism9
[T]here
the historiographical trends allow much space for a discourse outside the Marxian intellectual framework. Seminal work on economic and agrarian relations was produced, with Economic Nationalism, Peasant Movements and Agrarian Unrest providing the staple diet to a generation tutored in Marxism-Leninism.2
were
obvious constraints
imposed by
not
which, until the mid-1980s, did
While boasting of its own rational and empirical underpinnings, a Marxistdominated intellectual climate dismissed social, religious and cultural history as outdated or reactionary. Emphasis on economic and class histories has the effect of either reading religion out of the pulse of Indian political history or attributing religions political saliency to British policy. With regard to nationalist movements in India, such a perspective validates the anti-imperialist sentiments of nationalism, but not the particular colour that religion gives to such sentiments. In the case of India, the nationalist vision has always been linked to the recovery, reform and celebration of Hindu civilisation by an imagined Hindu majority. The We the People of Indian nationalist rhetoric was predominantly a Hindu people, however inclusive and tolerant this newly constructed majority 21 might claim to be. As much as one may prefer a nationalism framed in terms of
the liberal and socialist doctrines of Europe. But the truth is that these authors were off from the superstructure of ideas and institutions which modern India had inherited from an earlier period. Karunakaran, Religion and Political Awakening in India, p. 4.
meant cut
Introduction to Mushirul Hasan, ed., Islam and Indian Nationalism, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 3-6. 19 Hasan points out how such inhibitions infiltrated the ranks of Muslim scholars themselves, such as those at the prestigious Alrgarh Muslim University. Ibid., pp. 2-5.
20
18 See
Ibid
21 Ghia Nodia insightfully links so-called irrational nationalism to democracy:
Democracy
has always emerged in distinct communities; there is no record anywhere of free, unconnected and calculating individuals coming together spontaneously to form a democratic social contract ex nihilo. Whether we like it or not, nationalism is the historical force that has provided the political units for democratic government. "Nation" is another name for "We
167
non-sectarian human interests, this has not been the dominant narrative of Indian nationalism, either before or after the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Rather than recognising the role of Hinduism in the imagining of India, the traditional Marxist view of the national independence movement, from the days of Palme Dutt onwards, imagined Hinduism out of mainstream political life, either as a strategy to defeat communal elements, or as a way of prescribing the right way to be anti-colonial. Sumit Sarkars history of the national independence movement thoroughly examines issues of class struggle and economic exploitation under the Raj, but pays
little attention to the cultural and religious aspects of nationalist imagination. Sarkar devotes much attention to labour and peasant protests and to the Swadeshi Movement after the turn of the century. Nationalism, according to Sarkar, articulated not merely an elitist aspiration for power, but a far more broad-based resentment of the economically exploitative practices of the Raj. A mere six pages describe Hindu revivalist movements, with other references to Hindu revival being classified as a communal development as distinct from the more economicallyfocused nationalist movement.22 In his more recent contributions to the discussions of Hindutva, however, Sarkar seems to have put on a new set of glasses, and to deal more rigorously with the construction of Hinduism and Hindu unity in colonial He draws more attention to the significant overlap in personnel, assumptions, and symbols between mainstream Indian nationalism and Hindutva, while also pointing out the differences. In contrast to his earlier treatment of nationalism primarily as a protest of imperial economic policies, his more recent work addresses the precise location, ethos, and strategies of the groups directly involved in the transitions from &dquo;Hindu&dquo; toward &dquo;Hinduism,,,?4 This line of enquiry explores the various strategies for Hindu unity adopted by Brahmins, such as the new interpretations of adhikaribheda, as responses to the assertion of lower castes and While paying more attention to the Hindu side of nationalism, Sarkar retains an essentially Marxist analytical framework, which he regards as more socially transformative than those theoretical perspectives which make sweeping critiques of
Bengal. 23
women.25
the People". Ghia Nodia, Nationalism and Democracy in L. Diamond and M. Plattner, eds, Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Democracy, Baltimore, 1994, p. 7.
22
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947, New Delhi, 1983, pp. 70-81, 234-46. Sarkar pays significantly more attention to the cultural and religious aspects of nationalism in The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, New Delhi, 1973. 23 Sumit Sarkar, Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva in Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu, pp. 270-93.
24
Ibid., p. 279.
25 He describes
adhikari-bheda as a Brahminical strategy of the seventeenth and eighteenth situating and retaining within proper limits the differences of rituals, beliefs and philosophies. Ibid., p. 278.
centuries aimed at
168
modernity.26 The Marxist framework,
even while protesting the adverse economic effects of imperial rule in India, presents certain effects of modernisation such as the break-up of the traditional hierarchies within Indian society as a historical necessity. When Marxist thinkers such as Sumit Sarkar or Aijaz Ahmad do examine the religious dimension of nationalism, however, it is unclear whether they subordinate religious identity formation to economic factors or recognise the former as legitimate sites of analysis in their own right. This conflict of priorities between religion and economics becomes particularly striking in connection to the social construction of Hinduism. Romila Thapars critique of syndicated Hinduism was widely quoted by the different sides of the discussion of Hinduised politics of the 1980s and 90s. 27 Thapars insights are unique in that they strike at the very heart of Hindu majoritarian claims and identity formation. Moreover, they do so without groping for a socio-economic text behind those claims. Her argument, that there was no earlier syndicated Hinduism, and is none now, not only counters the very efforts of the Sangh Parivar to manufacture one, but also challenges the whole narrative of Hindu victimisation as well as the celebrative impulses of the nineteenth-century Hindu renaissance and nationalism. Frequently quoted as she was in earlier discussions of the BJPs rise, traditional Marxists subordinate her commentary on syndicated Hinduism to the material/economic narrative of middle-class ideology. Aijaz Ahmad recognises Thapars contribution, but adds that both the homogenisation of Hindu identity and the discussion of what is true Hinduism address what is secondary to the real socio-economic factors that guide the
-
movement:
The power of this falsely homogenised Hinduism perhaps lies elsewhere in the articulation of the growing integration of the Indian market and communicational grids with the invention of a belief system that can be widely shared, easily packaged, reduced to a linear explanatory narrative, ready to serve more or less as a secularised ideology through TV
26
Responding to Ashis Nandys reference in his The Intimate Enemy (New Delhi, 1983) to the innocence which confronted modern Western colonialism, Sarkar points to the centuries of caste, gender and class oppression in India before the advent of colonialism. Arguments like these, Sarkar concludes, threaten to leave us today with no language adequate for analysing many of the most basic issues of contemporary Indian society and history. Sarkar, Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva, p. 293.
27
Romila Thapar, Imagined Religious Communities, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1989, p. 223. Thapar refutes the notion that any single, monolithic or syndicated
Hinduism reaches back into the pre-modern period. No common sense of identity, she argues, could have bound the vast array of cults, beliefs and sectarian divisions that were further segmented by caste and language. The idea of a single Hinduism, she argues, is a modern construction rooted in Orientalist scholarship and serving the political climate of nineteenth-century India.
169
serialisation and mass spectacle, to give to the nation a symbolic unity, on the terrain of hysterical religiosity, which compensates for the lack of a progressive national project in the material domain.
Ahmad the need for a pan-Indian identity which would respond to the powerful work in this century that have changed the face of the subcontinent: processes universal suffrage, centralising government, networks of regional and national education systems, print media and television; and, apart from China, the worlds s for The national identity, he argues, largest home market labour and commodities.29 need not be articulated in terms of a common culture or religion, but may be understood as a grand project of restructuring relations of gender, class and caste which intersects with the restructuring of market and state relation. In the absence of such a progressive nationalist vision, he sees Hindutva as filling a void. Ahmad is acutely aware of the Hindu Rights capacity to lay claim to the whole of Hindu tradition including heroic visionaries such as Vivekananda and Gandhi. 31 He attributes the success of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to the organisations ability to draw upon a number of legacies which have been an and nationalist articulations enduring feature of diverse reform movements 32 the of modern India. Yet the history throughout implications of the RSS Hinduism still remain a issue to Ahmad. of peripheral interpretation Ahmads way of explaining the BJPs rise is shared by other Marxist analysts who regard the Hinduised politics of the 1980s and 90s as the result of a failed, Nehruvian agenda for national development. According to Nasir Tyabji, secularism is an intrinsic part of the process of giving shape to a modern identity for the people of a multi-language and multi-ethnic society, the necessity for which is 1 continuously generated by the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation. During the first two decades after Independence, the state was to transform the Indian people from the traditional hierarchies and beliefs of feudal society to a more scientific temper advanced by higher education, industrial growth and agrarian
sees
at
being
28
Vol. 21, Nos 7-8, 29 Ibid., p. 31.

30 31
Aijaz Ahmad, Culture, Community, Nation: July-August 1993, p. 32.
On the Ruins of Ayodhya, Social Scientist,
Ibid.
For a good description of the RSSs appropriation or saffronisation of Gandhi, see A.G. Noorani, The RSS and the Mahatma, Frontline, 28 November, 1997, pp. 93-96. 32 Ahmad, Culture, Community, Nation, p. 25. 33 Nasir Tyabji, Rediscovery of India: The Political Economy of Secularism, paper presented at Seminar on Ethnicity and Nation-Building, 21-23 March, 1994, Madras the U.S. Educational Foundation in India and the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras), pp. 1-2.
(organised by
170
reform. These steps sought to disseminate a secular outlook at the societal level and institute secular norms through state policy. It was the Congress partys failure to effectively implement this vision and produce tangible results that led to the erosion of its base of electoral support and its gradual compromise of secular principles. It was especially during the reign of Indira Gandhi that the Congress party withdrew from its pre-Independence promises and began to play the communal card. In the initial phases, this was done by trying to consolidate a base of support among upper-caste Hindus in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan by supporting anti-Muslim policies (e.g., authoritarian measures against artisans, who were largely Muslim). The increasingly anti-Muslim tone of party rhetoric expressed itself in a rereading of Indian history so as to portray the sixteenth-century battles against the Mughals as precursqrs to the independence movement. This was the first time, geared according to Tyabji, that a political action by the Congress was towards a rereading of Indian history and, therefore, of Indian nationhood.,3 Indira Gandhis post-Emergency government would take things a step further by courting the nations top Acharyas and by taking a hardline position against Sikh separatists. In so doing, she sought to generate fears of the enemy within. The policies of Indiras administration as well as that of Rajiv Gandhi coincided with the more active role of the RSS in propagating a Hindu view of history among the 35 urbanised, and affluent elite sections of the rural population. K. Balagopals outline of the evolution of Hindutva describes the shift from the Nehruvian vision to a more market-driven economy. The breakdown of a strong public sector aimed at promoting industrial development and a fairer distribution of resources and the move toward privatisation resulted, according to Balagopal, not in a conscious collective attempt to fabricate a new consensus, but in political anarchy and economic individualism,.16 The burgeoning middle class, in turn, required a legitimising ideology to secure its position of economic advantage. Hindutva provided this ideology by its emphasis on Hindu cultural preservation and the othering of non-Hindus. Balagopals analysis of Hindutva rests on an analysis of the flow of capital that seems far removed from the actual events leading to 6 December, 1992:
express7
was evident from 1980 onwards that a core element of this consensus would be the transference of a privileged role in accumulation from the bureaucracy to private hands, but given the context of a dependent and underdeveloped capital, that is not a simple matter of going over to the market. It includes not only the industrial policy reorientation and tax
It
34 p. Ibid., 9. 10. . p Ibid., 35 36

35
34
K.
Balagopal, Why Did
December 6, 1992
Happen?, p. 791.
171
restructuring that Manmohan Singh [Indias finance minister] talks smoothly about, but also the accommodation of, for instance, the arrack
lords of Andhra Pradesh with whom it is the gun and the bomb and not any 37 marginalist principle that determines who invests where and why.
This perspective no doubt derives from a keen awareness of the economic changes that accompanied the onward march of Hindutva forces. Yet, the relationship between this dense economic narrative and the mob of saffron-clad yogis who helped Ram demolish the Babri Masjid carrying picks and shovels and chanting Jai Shri 38 This too easily escapes both the eye and the natural intuitions of most Indians. is not to deny the relevance or role of economic factors in the growth of Hindu nationalism; it only serves to show how far away from anything like religion Marxist analysis is inclined to go to explain a conflict involving religious sites, symbols and actors. In contrast to the above analyses of Hindutva are writers who pay more attention to religious identity formation, but only in the context of their extensive critiques of modernity. These post-modernist approaches also regard fixed religious categories as a type of false consciousness, but not because they prefer to focus on a more objectively defined class base from which religion derives. Instead, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy and others critique modern religious categories for having distorted the fuzzy, syncretistic, reciprocal and overlapping character of identities that existed before the advent of the modern state. This critique of the religious category is part of a debate being waged with Marxists as to whether the very existence of the modern states bureaucratic rationality is to be implicated in the development of communal conflict and ideology.
-
How Best to Be Anti-Imperial As Indian intellectuals debated the question of why the Indian intelligentsia was so ineffective in preventing the bulldozing by the forces of Hindutva, two contrasting perspectives came into focus. The more traditional Marxists link Hindutvas rise to the influence of deconstructive, post-modern philosophy, now pervasive among Indias scholars of subaltern studies. The post-modern critique of Enlightenment rationalism undermines Marxism itself - a reservoir of that rational
17
Ibid.
Dipesh Chakrabarty writes: The problem is not the so-called alienation of the secular intellectual in India from its "religious" elements. The Hindu Right often makes this criticism of the peoples on the left and Sarkar is quite right to reject it. The problem is rather that we do not have analytical categories in academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday "connections" we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as "non rational". Dipesh Chakrabarty, Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies, EPW, Vol. 30, No. 14, 8 April 1995, p. 753.
38
172
tradition and the chief guardian of the secular principles of class struggle, democracy and socialism in India. The move away from Enlightenment rationalism coincided with the rise of Fascism in Europe and seems to have had similar effects in India, according to Sarkar, in promoting the uncritical cult of the &dquo;popular&dquo; or &dquo;subaltern&dquo; reflected in Hindutvas radical Dipesh Chakrabarty, a contributor to the Subaltern Studies volumes, cogently responds to the above arguments by claiming that Marxists have bought into a hyper-rationalism that prevents them from properly appreciating the role religion played during the most vibrant and creative stages of Indian nationalism (e.g., in nineteenth-century Bengal). Chakrabarty argues that under colonial rule, reason became the enemy of Indian religion and unjustly coerced natives into its own agenda for modernisation. Under the influence of the same rationalism, he says, Sarkar and others have taken an instrumentalist view of religion, which regards religious enthusiasm as serving only political ends. Such Marxists have no category for understanding instances when Indians clearly celebrated their religion the vital role religion has always for its own sake; neither can 40 played in the imagination of India. According to Partha Chatterjee, Indian nationalism successfully evaded the universal history of the nation (as described by Benedict Anderson) by identifying and preserving its cultural difference from the West.4~ It was in the inner, private domain of home the domain of culture and religion that Bengalis were able without and to their nationhood, creatively imagine accepting the modular actively forms of nations developed in Europe and the Americas. The national awakening in Bengal, however, would eventually compromise with the world by accommodating
indigenism.19
they understand
Sumit Sarkar, The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar, EPW, Vol. 28, No. 5, 30 January 1993, pp. 163-67. Stanley Payne, in his study of Fascism, discusses how the revision of Marxist doctrine near the turn of the century provided new non-rational approaches which emphasised the significance of myth, symbols, emotive appeals and, especially, violence. Payne cites the pioneering work of the French engineer Georges Sorel, who, in addition to a rejection of parliamentary democracy in favour of direct action (i.e., violence), advocated a more central role for human emotion, vitalism, idealism and myth. See Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, Madison, 1995, pp. 27-28. 40 Chakrabarty, Radical Histories, pp. 751-59, especially pp. 753-56. 41 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories, Princeton, 1993, pp. 4-6. In her study of nationalist politics in Bengal, Joya Chatterji
39
describes a turning inward of Indian nationalism. She argues that the Hindu bhadrolok were much more strident advocates for the Partition of Bengal than has been recognised in earlier scholarship. In the years following the Communal Award of 1932, the bhadrolok, Chatterji argues, reoriented themselves away from the mainstream nationalism that sought independence from British rule, adopting instead a rhetoric that portrayed Muslims as the chief threat to their interests. The bhadrolok went so far as to credit British rule for liberating Hindus from Muslim tyranny and for allowing the Bengalee Hindu genius to flourish. See Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947, Cambridge, 1994, p. 26.
173
imported political culture. In so doing, the nationalist movement was pulled by the competing impulses of asserting a private sphere marked by cultural difference from the West, while appropriating and later instituting the characteristically Western forms of disciplinary power.42 While Chatterjee pays careful attention to the cultural dimension of Indian nationalism, it remains unclear just how helpful his home/world dichotomy can be in understanding the Hindu nationalism of post-Independence India. Anti-colonial nationalism, after all, differentiates itself from the West, while Hindutva typically targets the Muslim Other. 43 Also, in Chatterjees scheme, the world of statecraft, law, public policy and the economy is a tainted realm of compromise with the West. They are not a domain in which Indian creativity or imagination can operate, because they have been imposed on India through colonial rule. Hence, as long as the state is treated as an alien domain of compromise and not a domain genuinely owned and shaped by Indians, it cannot impose limits on Hindu majoritarian politics without reifying itself as colonial and the Hindutva forces as national. This pessimistic attitude towards the state apparatus is a dilemma created not only by Chatterjees analysis, but also by other post-modernist critiques of modern forms of
itself
to an
governance.
Chakrabartys critique of Marxist hyper-rationalism is part of a larger project which seeks to eliminate the otherness of Indian communal problems by treating them as a pathology to be found wherever governments have been in the business of Although British rule did not create classifying, counting and mapping it or caste in India, fundamentally changed the way groups would designate religion themselves in public by placing people either in one category or another (negating the multiple identities which operated in the pre-colonial period). Such to the and classified groups being categorisations gave new, political meaning continue to breed jealousies and conflicts. But rather than designating these conflicts between Indians with such exotic labels as caste-ism or communalism,
people.44
42 43
Ibid., p. 75.
Since the original draft of this article was written, the forces of Hindutva seem to have shifted their campaign of violence from Muslims to Christians. It is doubtful, however, whether this shift is to be seen as a Saffron realignment against the West. During the latter half of 1998, the Hindu Dharma Jagran Manch (HJM), an affiliate of the VHP, along with the Bajrang Dal, carried on an aggressive campaign against Christian tribals in the Dangs district of Gujarat, involving numerous church burnings, physical assaults of pastors and inflammatory propaganda. In response to these incidents, Prime Minister Vajpayee rejected pleas to ban militant Hindu organisations and called, instead, for a national debate on conversions. The attacks on Christians culminated in the burning to death of the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa during the third week of January 1999. See The Hindu, 11January and 29 January, 1999.
44
This project is spelled out most forcefully by Modernity, in Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu, pp.
Richard G. Fox, Communalism and 235-49.
174
the conflicts should be regarded as no different from the racism to be found in other parts of the modern world.45 This treatment of the modern state as the source of the very illnesses it purports to cure rests on an argument that equates correlation with causation. It assumes that since the states enumeration, classification and formulation of policies coincides with new forms of group conflict, the state is the mastermind behind such conflict. Missing in this analysis is any assignment of agency, choice or creativity to Indians themselves in constructing their identities in relation to the state and to various others or any consideration of the protective, emancipatory and empowering possibilities that may come by way of policies effectively formulated around identities. The Indian people, instead, are viewed as iron filings, pulled indiscriminately towards the allurements of a state that tells them who they are. Furthermore, Chakrabartys analysis does not resolve the problem of trying, on the one hand, to recover the important role of religion in Indian life from colonial hyper-rationalism, and attempting on the other, to de-orientalise contemporary problems in India by streamlining them with those found in the West. Ironically, the Saidian project of undoing the colonial construction of difference is met with the realisation that India is in fact different! Ashis Nandy treats modern religious formations with suspicion because they represent the breakdown of traditional, social and cultural ties crossing 4 boundaries, as these are conventionally defined within the modern sector.4 He argues that the secular state is the enemy, not the guardian of religious tolerance, because it prefers to treat religions as monolithic constructs in contrast to their essentially fluid and boundless expression in pre-modem society. Nandy makes his case by drawing a distinction between religion as faith and religion as ideology. Religion as faith refers to the non-monolithic, syncretistic and tolerant religious landscape of pre-modern India in which religious groups shared a common cultural ethos and understood religion as a way of life This landscape is marked by pliability, catholicity, and a much more fluid definition of the Self with respect to the Other. It is definitively pre-modern or anti-modern in its outlook. 48
religious
45
Chakrabarty, Modernity
Politics of Violence, 208-9.
46
and
Ethnicity,
in McGuire, Reeves and Brasted, eds, The
Ashis Nandy, The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance, in Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Commumties, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 69-93.
., Ibid 47 p. 70. 48
Peter
van
der Veer argues that Ashis Nandy has falsely projected the idea of a tolerant folk of the pre-modern past. The emphasis on a tolerant Indian civilisation, he argues, is often used to challenge the notion that Hindus and Muslims represent incompatible civilisations and beliefs which necessitated Partition and which account for the ongoing communal violence in India. Syncretism, he argues however, did not necessarily create harmony and tolerance, but in some cases implied a decline of tolerance,
pluralism
onto the rural
175
Religion as ideology, by contrast, is a sub-national identifier of populations contesting for or protecting non-religious, usually political or socio-economic, interests . 49 It portrays each religion as an inflexible, bounded self that is pitted against other selves. Such a view of religion, Nandy argues, mirrors the outlook of evangelical Anglican Christianity and generates numerous polarities: Centre vs civil vs primordial, and great traditions vs periphery, true faith vs its distortions, 50
local cultures or little traditions. Votaries of Hindutva are ashamed of traditional Hinduism because it strikes them as too diverse, feminised, irrational, unversed in the intricacies of the modern world, and too pantheistic, pagan, gullible and anarchic to run a proper state. 51 Their ideology targets the uprooted, de-cultured, urbanised, middle-class Indian. It responds to their quest for identity by locating them within a coherent Hinduism at war with non-Hindu religions. The new politicised Hindu identity seeks to for the uprootedness and deculturation among urbanised, middle-class compensate .52 Indians. The modern state prefers to deal with ideology over faith not only because of the formers manageability (because it is more circumscribed), but because the state gains legitimacy by posing as the arbiter of religious difference. Religion as ideology emerges from a process that seeks to separate religion from the public sphere in a manner similar to processes of secularisation in Western society. In line with Nandy, Dipankar Gupta distinguishes secularisation as a historic process from secularism as ideology. Equating the two, Gupta argues, leads to what he calls the tendency of the secular state to identify fixed,. permanent minoritisation minorities so that it can heroically sell itself as the guarantor of their interests. This reification of fixed, religious boundaries works against the natural flux of
-
See van der Veer, Syncretism, Multiculturalism and even among rural populations. Tolerance in Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, eds, Syncretism/Anti-syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, London, 1994, p. 204. In his Religious Nationalism, Berkeley, 1994, van der Veer makes a case for the pre-colonial antecedents for communal conflict. He describes pre-modern modes of religious communication such as expanding saintly networks, ritual observances and pilgrimage whose meaning carried over and assumed new potency during colonial times.
49
Nandy,
The Politics of Secularism and the
Recovery of Tolerance,
p. 70.
and Fear of the
Ibid., 50 71.
51 Ashis Nandy,
53
Creating a Nationality:
The
Ramjanmabhumi Movement
Self, New Delhi, 1995, p. 63. 52 Ibid., p. 22.

Vol. 30, No. 35, 2
Dipankar Gupta, Secularisation and Minoritisation: September 1995, pp. 2203-7.
Limits of Heroic
Thought, EPW,
176
socio-cultural processes, and
yields
more
transient
expressions
of
religious
identity. 54
Nandy describes Gandhi as an advocate of religion as faith and as someone who broke down the public-private, religion-politics dichotomies encouraged so strongly by modernisation. Gandhis religious eclecticism along with his claim that his religion was his politics and his politics his religion constitute, in Nandys mind, a healthy recovery of the tolerance that characterised the subcontinents premodem religious landscape. While Nandy legitimately points to Gandhi as a critic of Western influences, his equation of Gandhian tolerance with the religion of the premodern masses is simply false. Gandhian tolerance proceeded from the Max Mueller tradition of Orientalism which was, in its own right, a distinct discourse of an abstraction and universalisation of religion with significant modernity for implications the tone of Indian nationalism (to be discussed in a later What is important to observe, at this point, is a shift in the treatment of religion from Bipan Chandras belief in a so-called objective reality and crude dismissal of religion as false consciousness to Ashis Nandys efforts to recover a more tolerant kind of spirituality from the intrusions of modernity and the secular state.56 In light of this shift, Hindutvas rhetoric of so-called cultural nationalism can be said to have stimulated creative thinking among scholars. As Indian Marxists recited their variations on the theme of false consciousness, the BJP grew in size from two parliamentary seats in 1984, to its status as the leading opposition party in 1993 with 119 seats, to the point of almost forming a government after the 1996 s general elections, and finally to forming a coalition government in 1998. Hindutvas the vacuum in an in Indian cultural intelligentsia guided longevity politics exposed by a highly reductionistic approach to religious movements and ideologies. The startling advances of a political movement which based its campaign on the disputed birthplace of a Hindu god triggered new reflection on the cultural interpretation of Indian nationhood and its relationship to religions. The new
-
section).55
This reification of religions in the modern world is nothing that post-modernists discovered. Wilfred Cantwell Smith discussed it in The Meaning and End of Religion, New
54
York, 1963.
55
Peter
van
der Veer discusses this
in
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Discourse of
Modernity in Marty and Appleby, eds, Accounting for Fundamentalisms, pp. 656-57. 56 Again, on the issue of the syncretistic character of pre-modern India, van der Veer, referring to a work by Richard Handler, observes that syncretism, like notions of boundedness, functions as a metaphor within discourse about religion. He writes: Boundedness, continuity and homogeneity are not objective aspects of social life, but metaphors used in nationalist discourse to create the "entitivity" of the nation. Syncretism is a term within that discourse which acknowledges the permeability and fluidity of social life, but is used to evaluate it. That evaluation depends on the context in which it is made. Syncretism can be seen, negatively, as a corruption of the absolute Truth. It can be seen, positively, as a sign of tolerance. In all these cases it has to be discursively identified. van der Veer in Stewart and Shaw, eds, Syncretism/Anti-syncretism, p.209.
177
post-modern sensitivities of Nandy, Chatterjee, Chakrabarty and others maintain the anti-imperialist edge of Marxist scholars who painted the colonial state as the chief architect of communal hostility. Nandys diagnosis of the globally dominant language of the nation state highlights the role of Western influence and of state power in the subcontinents fall from its pre-colonial religious amalgam. 57 But how exactly the forces of modernity, including imperial state structures, changed the nature of religious identity leaves much more room for debate than Nandy and other critics of modern nation-states permit. 58 More attention must be paid to the nature of pre-modern identities in the subcontinent and how exactly they were altered by a variety of factors that can be called modern. Sudipta Kaviraj points out that the coevality of the colonial and the modern in Indian history should not lead us to treat the two as equivalent. If communalism, after all, was only a consequence of British rule, communal politics would have faded after independence.59 With much more historical insight than Nandy, Kaviraj analyses the before and after of both caste and religious identity in light of the
overall impact of modernising forces such as Western rationalist education and the enumeration of identities by the colonial state. Of particular relevance is the transition from a segmented, localised, self-determining society where a wide variety of transactions occurred in non-state realms to the modern context in which society subjected itself to a centralised, bureaucratic state whose sovereignty was much more far-reaching than anything previously encountered. As a result of this
change
57 Iseek to provide
concern
a political preface to the recovery of a well-known domain of public in South Asia, ethnic and, especially, religious tolerance, from the hegemonic language of secularism popularised by the westernised intellectuals and middle classes exposed to the globally dominant language of the nation-state in this part of the world. Nandy, The Recovery of Tolerance, p. 69. Nandy contrasts the secularism that stresses the states role in accommodating religious diversity with the secularism that rejects religion as nonscientific. Most non-modern Indians (i.e., Indians who would have brought Max Weber to tears), pushed around by the political and cultural forces unleashed by colonialism still operating in Indian society, have unwittingly opted for the accommodative and pluralist meaning, while Indias westernized intellectuals have consciously opted for the abolition of from the public sphere. Ibid., p. 74. religion 58 C. A. Bayly offers detailed accounts of instances of communal conflict in pre-modern north India which were not the product of punst beliefs or bounded traditions, but occurred in the context of shared participation in syncretistic practices. Bayly writes. If religious revitalisation did not necessanly give nse to religious or communal conflict, it is also the case that the widespread Hindu-Muslim symbiosis of the pre-colonial and early colonial penods did not totally exclude the possibility of riot and disturbance along communal lines. Bayly, The Pre-History of Communalism?, Modem Asim Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1985, pp. 179-80, 186-93.
59
Sudipta Kaviraj, Religion, Politics and Modernity, Change in Contemporary India, New Delhi, 1995, p. 304.
in
Upendra Baxi, ed.,
Crisis and
178
[S]ocial groups in India are thus pressed to deal with, and bring under their advantageous control, this leviathan, this large, strange, unfamiliar,
faintly threatening animal. At the same time they try to do this by deploying their available repertoire of social actions and identifications.
The Government of Indias effectiveness in mediating conflicts and addressing the needs of its diverse constituency depends largely on the degree to which it continues to be perceived as large, strange, unfamiliar, and faintly threatening. The parallel question to address is whether the evolving faces of religion are seen as strange and threatening or are accepted, in some capacity, as legitimate centres of meaning,
identity and organisation in a pluralistic polity Nandys critique of the globally dominant language of nation states suggests a desire to turn the clock back to an imagined period when religion was innocuous, ambivalent with respect to boundaries and removed from political spaces. While his analysis generates an interesting debate on the precise relationship of religion to politics in pre-colonial India, it betrays a degree of escapism from the realities of modern statehood and the assertion of religious identity in this context.62 His approach resonates with those who employ Saidian frameworks in their reaction against Orientalist essentialisations of non-Western societies. 63 The Saidian critique treats the enumeration of religious identities as part of the Orientalist construction of India as an external object knowable through representations. 64 Although colonial knowledge enumerates many religions, it still reinforces the perception of India as a religious people in need of the political ordering of secularised Europe. In contrast to the Marxist preoccupation with objective classes and their histories, Gyan Prakash rejects all categorical representations in order to protest the ideologies he feels they inevitably serve. His protest of capitalism and nation-states requires that he write history in a way that does not implicitly endorse them:
p. 311., Ibid., 60
62
61 Sacred centers are the foci of religious identity.

earth that express most clearly a relation between van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, p. 11.
They are the places on the surface of the cosmology and private expenence. Peter
van der Veer adds that this picture of a syncretistic, tolerant landscape is advanced by those who want to claim that India is essentially Hindu. See his Syncretism, Multiculturalism and Tolerance, p. 203. 63 For a trenchant, Marxist critique of Saidian frameworks, see Sumit Sarkar, Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History, Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 16, Nos 1-2, 1994, pp. 205-24.
64
Indian
Gyan Prakash, Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Historiography, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2, April, 1990, p. 387.
179
How is it possible to write [class histories] but also contest, at the same time, the homogenisation of the contemporary world by capitalism? How can the historians of India resist the totalising claims of the contemporary nation-state if their writings represent India in terms of the nation-states s
career?6s
Scholarship, according to this fashionable perspective, is a moral enterprise, which must reject the categories of thought derived from the grand narratives that have created the worlds problems.66 Opponents of this post-structuralistapproach, however, view it as the pursuit of victory through denial (i.e., denying the very categories of people who require liberation) which actually makes any kind of politics of resistance impossible. 67 Opponents also point out how poststructuralism silences the voices it hopes to liberate from Orientalist distortion, denying them agency in constructing their identities and defining the shape of their politics. Aijaz Ahmads scathing critique of Edward Saids Orientalism illustrates the resistance of some Marxists to ahistoric methods of indicting Western imperialism
and its textual derivations.6s Ahmads response to Orientalism ranges from his attack on Saids gaping oversight of the colonial domination of Latin America and India, to his misuse of Foucault (with whom Ahmad also disagrees), to his inclusion of Karl Marx in the genealogy of Western historicism which constitutes its 69 One of Ahmads criticisms of Said, particularly epistemology of dominance. relevant to India, is his oversight of how the intelligentsia of colonised countries received, accepted, modified, challenged, overthrew, or reproduced Western textualities. Saids omission of this vital discourse, Ahmad argues, engages in the very silencing that his book sets out to condemn:
65
Ibid., p. 398. See Nira Wickramasinghe, History Outside of the Nation, EPW, Vol. 30, No. 26, 1 July 1995. Also, Gordon S. Woods review of Appleby, Hunt and Jacobs Telling the Truth About History in The New Republic, 7 November 1994, pp. 46-49.
66
67
69
See David Washbrook and Rosalind OHanlon, After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1992, pp. 141-67. 68 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, and Literatures, London, 1992, pp. 159-221.
Because Marx is such a key ingredient in the anti-imperialism of Indian intellectuals, Ahmad is relentless in repudiating Saids location of Marx in the same poisonous Western historicist tradition. As Ahmad explains, All previous "critiques of imperialism" are thus effortlessly conjoined with "the actual practice of imperialism", thanks to the historicist contamination. So much for the intellectual capacities of national liberation struggles, which have often used at least the Marxist critiques of imperialism, not to speak of Gramscis own historicism, which Said often likes to invoke! Ahmad, In Theory, p. 175.
180
what is remarkable is that with the exception of Saids own voice, the voices we encounter in the book are precisely those of the very Western canonicity which, Said complains, has always silenced the Orient. Who is silencing whom, who is refusing to permit a historicised encounter between the voice of the so-called Orientalist and the many voices that Orientalism is said so utterly to suppress, is a question that is very hard 70 to determine as we read this book.
...
only
Ahmad not only calls attention to the active voices of colonial subjects, but also effectively defends the enterprise of empirical history from inflated, post-modernist
theory.
In rejecting Saids inflated indictment of Western historicism, Ahmad creates for appreciating what Indians have done with Western constructions and how in What remains to be seen is whether they, turn, have constructed the this recovery of indigenous voices may include those who define their identities along religious lines. The following section seeks to provide such a framework for recognising religious voices in modern Indian history.
room
European. 71
Can the Religious Speak? Both traditional Marxists and those who have taken the post-modern turn destabilise religious categories, but from two contrasting sets of emphases. The former regard religious movements as a cloak for real, objectively defined class interests, while the latter see them as a sell-out to modernity and its production of bounded, enumerable categories. The one sees communal identities as false and antimodern, the other as impositions of the modern. One says we can all get along if
unmask the public or political claims of religion, while the other says we can do if religions would blend together as they did in times of old. What is the way out of this impasse? A small glimmer of light breaks through in the debate over categorical representations. Ahmad, Washbrook and OHanlon and others attack the Saidian view of Orientalist representation because it actually silences indigenous voices and precludes any politics of resistance. Yet, the categories, histories and voices that
we
so
70 71
Ibid., p. 173. The voices, perspectives and agency of native intelligentsia are especially crucial in the case of India, since without recognising them, one can never appreciate a figure such as Gandhi. To look at Gandhi from the springboard of Orientalism, Judith Brown observes,
is to see the ingenuity and discrimination with which a colonial subject could handle imperial assumptions about India and reconstruct them sometimes inverting them and use them as foundations for a critique of imperialism and a movement of opposition to imperial rule. Brown, After Orientalism: Gandhi and the Future of India, Inaugural Address given at the
-
24th Annual Conference 1995.
on
South Asia,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 23 October
181
Marxists
from sweeping post-modernist claims are not those of religious should groups. Why they not be? If Marxists such as Ahmad can criticise Said for suppressing indigenous agency and insight, can they not therefore allow Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other groups to tell the stories of their own handling of Orientalist knowledge and their own itineraries through social reform, modernisation, imperial rule and nationalism? 72 Without permitting followers of these traditions to speak for themselves, both sides of this debate, however progressive or radical their claims may be, are engaged in a neo-colonial project of telling people who they are or who they are not. The telling of these stories helps to identify the role that religious adherents themselves played in constructing their identities and interpreting their sacred texts in the face of modernisation and the making of the Indian nation. In addition to (or in contrast to) Ashis Nandys account of how religions lost their syncretistic, fluid and unbounded selves, and mutated into purely instrumentalist constructs (religion as ideology), emic voices (who are less likely to identify themselves as falsely conscious religionists) would unfold the transformation of their traditions and how they came to identify their solidarities and differences in a modern, pluralistic polity. Rather than viewing distinct religious communities as products of a top down, imperial historic process, religious adherents would speak of their relation to various Others and their investment in the representative structures of Indian These accounts would describe historically but from the inside out the evolution of Muslim, Christian, Sikh, or Buddhist identities, their hybridisation with Dalit, local caste or linguistic identities, and their ongoing encounter with the discourse of Hindu majority. In so doing, religions are
rescue
democracy. 73
72
For a good example of this kind of scholarship, see Mushirul Hasan, Muslim Intellectuals, Institutions and the Post-Colonial Predicament, India International Centre Quarterly, Spring 1995, pp. 100-22. Here Hasan argues that the distinctive qualities of
identity and solidarity defended by nineteenth-century Islamic reformers did not preclude solidarities of class, language and profession shared with non-Muslims. See also David Gilmartins discussion of how Muslims in nineteenth-century Punjab developed their identities both within and outside of the spaces created for them by the colonial state, in his Democracy, Nationalism and the Public: Speculation on Colonial Muslim Politics, South
Muslim
Asia, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1991, pp. 123-40.

73
According to a study by Dick Kooiman on communalism in Indian princely states, minorities actively sought separate electorates even when they were not introduced by the British. Kooiman makes his case by describing factors contributing to the emergence of communalism in Baroda and Travancore, two Indian princely states where separate electorates were not introduced, in spite of being actively sought out by Christians, Muslims and Ezhavas (a low caste group). Kooimans analysis is not entirely different from the Marxist angle on communalism in the sense that he describes religious group identity in instrumentalist terms. He differs from the Marxists in emphasising native agency and initiative in pursuing group interests through constitutional reform and separate electorates. Kooiman, Communalism and Indian Princely States: A Comparison with British India, EPW, Vol. 30, No. 34, 26 August 1995, pp. 2123-31.
182
into Indian history, while sustaining a critique of the distinctly saffron colour of nationalism. This call to bring religion back in, however, does not come without qualifications. Mushirul Hasan is careful to stipulate the terms in which Islam, for instance, is represented, especially in the making of Indian nationhood. Hasan wants scholars to correct the simple, Orientalist portrayals of Muslims by both British and nationalist writers as a monolithic group with an unusual inclination towards religious orthodoxy:
woven
It is time to underline, along with the dominant orthodox paradigms, the heterodox trends which contest the definition of Muslim identity in purely religious terms, and to refute the popular notion that Islamic values and symbols provide a key to the understanding of the Muslim world
view . , 74
view .
the kind of Islam to which Hasan wants academic audiences to pay more attention is the progressive, reformist and modernising variety represented by such figures as Syed Ahmad Khan.75 By calling upon scholars to take the multiple faces of Islam seriously, Hasan wants to show that Muslim identity is very much entwined with other identities on the Indian landscape and may be quite consistent with the ideals of liberal democracy:
Clearly,
If we
change the stereotypical images of Islam and its followers, perpetrated by scholars like Samuel Huntington in recent years,
are
concerned
to
we must come to terms with the histories of the Muslim communities in the subcontinent ... and if the West has a stake in liberal and secular ideas, it must try to unmask the liberal face of Islam, pay heed to the liberal voices which are often stifled in their own countries by the Islamicist or the hindutva forces, and explore the complex but subtle interplay of modernist ideas with traditionalist thought in Muslim
societies.76
Granting legitimacy in history-writing to the religious component of Indias diversity need not sound the alarms of separatism or raise fears of a repressive
74 Hasan, Muslim Intellectuals, p.
100.
75 Hasans academic project may be balanced by Usha Sanyals study of Ahmad Riza Khan
Barelwi and his movement, the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jamaat. Here, Sanyal explores the debates amongst the north Indian ulama which revolved around devotional and doctrinal topics more than politics. See Sanyals Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870-1920, New Delhi, 1996.
76
Mushirul Hasan, May 1998, p. 1078.
Aligarhs
"Notre eminent
contemporain", EPW,
Vol. 33, No. 19, 9
183
orthodoxy. 77
On the contrary, religious histories such as those advocated by Hasan reveal the plurality of opinions and viewpoints that operate within any given historic tradition. Another example of allowing the religious to speak comes out of Dalit studies. In his book Why I Am Not a Hindu, Kancha Ilaiah tells the story of his own experience as a Dalitbahujan, with a particular emphasis on the differences 78 In addition to recounting the between Dalitbahujan identity and Hindu identity. he of and discrimination that and his fellow caste members long history oppression Ilaiah how every dimension of his suffered under describes Hindus, (Kurumaas) caste culture can be differentiated from Hindu culture. These domains of difference include family relationships, the roles of women, deities, dietary habits, sexual mores, occupations and education. Based on these differences, there are no grounds, according to Ilaiah, for regarding Dalitbahujans as part of the Hindu fold. Attacking the Hindutva-inspired co-option of his caste into the Brahminical social structure, Ilaiah writes:
The question is what do we, the lower Sudras and Ati-Sudras (whom I also call Dalitbahujans), have to do with Hinduism or with Hindutva itself? I, indeed not only I, but all of us, the Dalitbahujans of India, have never heard the word Hindu not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days.... But today we are suddenly being told that we have a common religious and cultural relationship with the Baapanoollu [Brahmins] and the Koomatoollu [Baniyas]. This is not merely surprising; it is
-
hocking. 79
Interestingly, Ilaiah employs not the tools of modern, secular historiography to present his history, but an experiential approach that relies on story-telling. The reasons he gives for why he is not a Hindu tap into a tradition of non-Hindu confessionalism that can be grounded in the thought of such figures as Phule, Ambedkar, or Naicker. the goal of such confessionalism is to show that Dalits are
77
Sangari argues that the reification of religious categories is likely to yield multiple patriarchies. She makes her case by way of an extremely thorough analysis of religious communities, gender justice and personal laws. See her Politics of Diversity, in
Kumkum
The term Dalitbahujan encompasses all groups classified either as Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Castes. It combines the term Dalit, which encompasses only the so-called untouchables, with the term Bahujan a term popularised by Kanshi Ram and meaning literally majority. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, Calcutta, 1996, p.
VIII.
EPW, Vol. 30, No. 51, 23 December 1995, pp. 3287-310.

78
79
Ibid., p.
radicals
x1.
80 Gail Omvedt describes how the rejection of Hinduism became a defining feature of caste
as
distinct from the caste reformers;
see
Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic
184 the soil but are indeed, even more so than the upper castes nevertheless not Hindu. The recognition of religious identity outside of Hinduism but thoroughly inside of India is itself a vital form of resistance to the claims of Hindutva. Yet, neither Marxist nor post-modernist perspectives lend intellectual credence to resistance based on alternative religious identities. In discrediting so-called falsely conceived religious essences, each engages in a different kind of essentialising. While Marxist opposition to Hindutva (e.g., Ahmad, Sarkar, Balagopal) appeals to the essential, non-religious economic interests of Indians, post-modern antidotes (e.g., Nandy, Prakash) explode all identities by positing and invoking the essentially fluid and unbounded religiosity of pre-modern India. Omitted in either case is any grappling with the disparate symbols, narratives and confessions of religious traditions, the internal logic of religious reform and revival, the concepts of kinship, of ultimacy and the ongoing role Indians played in interpreting all of the 1 the All of these facets, which may be termed religious, affect the construction of distinct identities and yield distinct standpoints from which to weigh the costs of public or national Such grappling with the religious aspect of identity formation is particularly absent in Marxist analysis. Do class realities, after all, adequately explain why Indian Muslims and Christians might be bothered by the Vishwa Hindu Parishads reconversion drives or the ritualised reclaiming of mosques and churches? Do they explain why Ambedkar and Naicker denounced Hinduism? Or why some resisted the reverence for Gandhi, the selection of Bande Mataram as the national anthem, or proclamation of Hinduism as the Mother or essence of all religions? Accounting for the indigenous bases for religious identity also serves the critical function of underscoring the investment of religious adherents in a non-partisan, secular state, especially its protective role in the face of the totalising claims of Hindutva nationalism. The fact of a genuinely Indian religious diversity, not its
people of
langua above.e
participation.
Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 12-16. 81 Anthropological and literary studies deal more effectively with these issues. To some extent, the issue of priorities is disciplinary as well as ideological. Insights from anthropology, sociology and other cultural analysis contained in works by Frednck Barth, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, Sandna Freitag, Anand Yang, Gyanendra Pandey, Veena Das and others address the interrelationships between sacred symbols, group formation and
ideology.
82
For discussion
on
the
meaning
of
public
in
colonial India,
see
contributions to South
Asia, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1991.
185
falsity, is why 81 the state must not identify itself exclusively with any single cultural personality. In an effort to give religion a greater voice in the writing of Indian history,
what are we to make of the voices of Hinduism and their relation to the nation? To understand Hinduism and Hindutva strictly as derived discourses of middle-class formation sheds little light on their emergence as interpretative events and on precisely why these events instil fear in non-Hindus. Kavirajs account of the BJPs violation of iconic grammar in its poster images of Rama is a good illustration of the interpretative dimension of Hindutva. BJP propaganda transformed the serene, compassionate and exemplary Rama into a vengeful, warlike Rama subservient to the BJPs political interests:
From the traditional
point of view this wrathful Rama is wholly ungrammatical, a complete misunderstanding of the complex narrative and its iconic representation. If he returns violence with irritation and violence he loses his great calm and sense of measured propriety. Instead of acting like an ancient god, he acts like a modem
politician.
While it is easy to see how this image of a wrathful Rama who now aims his arrows at the enemies of the Hindu Nation is unsettling for Muslims or Christians, it is less apparent but equally vital to see how the softer variety of Hindu nationalism also sent a signal to non-Hindus that their status in an independent India may be a very precarious one. Like the ungrammatical representations of Rama which serve BJP politics, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apologetic of Hinduism departed from localised, exclusive forms of Hindu orthodoxy and adopted a language of religious inclusivism or tolerance. This new hermeneutic of unity in diversity by the Hindu elite served the social and political climate of Indian
adopted nationalism.8-
83
R. E. Frykenberg, Hindu Fundamentalism and the Structural Stability of India , in Martin and R. Scott Appleby, eds, Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Politics, Economies and Militance, Chicago, 1993, p. 233.
Marty
84
Kaviraj, Religion, Politics and Modernity, pp. 309-10. Ainslee Embree, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modem India, Berkeley, 1990, p. 21. The idea that Indian thought is inherently universalistic in its attitude towards the worlds religions stems from a modern construction of Hinduism that emerged from When inclusivists such as extensive European contact and Orientalist influence. Ramaknshna Paramahamsa and his disciple Vivekananda, and later Gandhi, extolled the allembracing arms of Vedanta which could incorporate all religions, they were preaching something quite distinct from earlier interpretations of Vedanta that were much more exclusive of non-Vedic, mleccha religions. See William Halbfass, Vedic Orthodoxy and the Plurality of Religious Tradition in Halbfass, ed., Tradition and Reflection: Explorations of Indian Thought, Albany, 1991, p. 51.
85
186
The construction of modern Hinduism and Hindu identity is unique among religious categories because of the way Hinduism came to identify pluralism itself as its essential characteristic. By underwriting pluralism in this manner, Hindu elites (who were often leaders of the Indian National Congress party) could claim to speak for a more collective, national culture. Gandhis philosophy of religious tolerance, expressed in the vocabulary of Modern Hinduism, sought to provide the much-needed packaging for progressive, integrative Indian self-rule. In his affirmation of all religions as different paths to the same summit, Gandhis Hinduism sought to provide a middle ground between an officially Hindu rashtra and 86 a Western, anti-religious secularism that would alienate Hindu sensitivities. Inasmuch as modern Hindus such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan and Gandhi presented Hindu tolerance as a non-sectarian ideal, they did so in a competitive religious climate where a tolerant and rational Hinduism was pitted against the dogmatism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Islam. 87 Gandhis tolerance certainly appealed to those who feared Partition and other forms of religious separatism, but it militated against groups who adhered to exclusivist religious orientations and pleaded that they discard their hard shell of religious distinction in 88 Gandhis imagined India had a theological order to blend with the national spirit. basis which did not deny religious claims, but asserted, as Ainslee Embree notes, a profoundly dogmatic one that all religions are true. This balance between accommodation and particularity easily tipped in favour of the latter on issues such as conversion or electoral representation. These issues 90 Though it frequently defined or contested the boundaries of the Hindu fold. provided a philosophical rationale for an integrated, multi-religious polity, modern Hinduism also fed the revivalist and nationalist impulses of a constituency that
-
tolerance as an essential feature of Indian Peter van der Veer points out, finds its origins in the Orientalist history of ideas. See van der Veer, The Vishwa Hindu Panshad and the Discourse of Modernity, in Marty and Appleby, eds, Accounting, for Fundamentalisms, pp. 656-57. See also David Kopf, Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, Berkeley, 1969, chapter 2.
86
Although
Gandhi and others
presented
as
civilisation, the idea of tolerance,
Radhakrishnans interpretation of Hinduism as outlined in his The Hindu View of Life, London, 1927, beyond its apologetic dimension, served a political purpose of bolstering the self-esteem of the so-called Hindu majority by suggesting the rationalism and superiority of their religion. See Sarvepalli Gopal, Radhakrishnan: A Biography, Oxford, 1989, pp. 74-76. , 88
in
87
"Warring creeds" is a blasphemous expression.

-
And it
fitly
describes the state of
things godly
as I believe her to be of Religion or religions. If she is truly a India, the mother mother, the motherhood is on trial. Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to
Christianity and vice versa? Why should he not be satisfied man? M. K. Gandhi, Hanjan, 30 January 1937. 89
90
if the Hindu is
good
or
Embree, Utopias in Conflict, p. 44.

See Sunder Raj, The Confusion Called Conversion, New Delhi, 1987.
187
called itself both Hindu and an electoral The result was and still is an as unresolved contradiction between Hinduism a philosophy of accommodation and Hindus who chauvinistically claim ownership of that philosophy and of the nation itself. The accommodative claims of Hinduism had the effect of endlessly expanding the parameters of the Hindu fold so as even to include strata that wanted to escape caste oppression through religious conversion.92 Seen from this angle, Hindu tolerance was not a liberal concept, but an interpretative manoeuvre by which Hindus could claim an absolute majority. When Hindus were orthodox, segmented and exclusive, they could at best be part of the nation; when they became tolerant and universalist, they became the nation. Such vacillation between secularist, sectarian and majoritarian discourses is what makes Hinduism the thinnest and unhappiest of all religious categories. Far more than a spiritual ideal for national integration, Hindu inclusiveness provided the script for the politically potent syndicated Hinduism. The ethos of a tolerant Hinduism, embodied in the career and philosophy of Gandhi, has contributed to the sense among some Marxists that Hinduism was merely the cultural idiom through which Congress leaders voiced their essential commitments to progressive, secular values. Such inattention to religious content allows Sumit Sarkar to state with unchecked confidence that an ocean separates the Ram of Mahatma Gandhi, conceived as both Iswara and Allah, from the Ram in whose name the Babri Masjid has been destroyed93 Dalit critiques of Gandhi reduce the size of this ocean considerably, especially in connection with Gandhis reaction to Ambedkars proposal of 1932 to introduce a Communal Award for Depressed Classes. Gandhi not only announced an intention to fast unto death to prevent the Award, but he also sensed in the Award the injection of a poison that is calculated to destroy Hinduism and do no good whatever
majority.9~
91
92
According to Annie Besant, The civilisation and culture of India must be mainly based on Hinduism in the future as in the past ... Hinduism is peculiarly fitted to shape and colour the national future, for it is non-aggressive as regards to other religions: it makes no converts, it assails no beliefs, it is as tolerant as the earth itself. Annie Besant, Hinduism and Nationality, New India, Madras, 9 January 1915, p.7.
It was Mahatma Gandhi who broke the stalemate within the Congress, by welding the moderates concern for orderly change. It was Mahatma Gandhi who smoothened out the rough edges in the Hindu nationalist discourse, to impart to it an aura of benevolence. The Mahatma never made the slightest concession to the ideal of a nation-state. He never could challenge the exclusivist character of Hindu nationalism, because he himself deeply believed Sukumar Muralidharan, in certain categories of social separation and stratification. Patriotism Without People: Milestones in the Evolution of the Hindu Nationalist Ideology, Social Scientist, Vol. 21, No. 7, July-August 1993, p. 20.
93
Sarkar, The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar, p. 166.
188
Depressed Classes.94 Gandhis fast along with his campaigns against untouchability invoked a picture of Hindu society trying to erase its social ills without dismantling its basic structure and cohesiveness. This picture led Dalits to identify in Gandhi a highly orthodox Hindu commitment to varnashrama dharma behind his outward profession of tolerance and reform.95 Through Dalit eyes, Gandhis fast patronised a particular interpretation of Hindu society which coopted them into the whole while denying them real power and mobility. Robert Frykenberg illustrates the importance of interpretative power in his discussion of Gandhis renaming untouchables as Harijans:
to
the
labelling untouchables Harijans our- Children of less [Vishnu] transparent attempt of co-option into Hinduism. means of a simple redefinition, this enormous and potentially By if not troublesome, dangerous, twenty-five percent of Indias population could then be claimed for the permanent majority community in India. which would not have been possible had Gandhis action This is 9 not been taken.
was a no
His sudden action
something
the
dynamics of middle-class economic interests that give shape and energy to religious nationalism, but the political potential of naming others. Hindutva exploits the highly emotive quality of names and myths, the huge investment among Indian nationalists in the interpretation of Hindu religion, and Gandhis unrestrained injection of religious discourse into political space. To ignore or marginalise this narrative in favour of a stale, mechanical commentary on capitalist production and falsely conceived class contlict is not only poor history,
Here, it is
not
but
form of denial.
Only some of Indias Marxists have gone to this extreme. But even when powerful minds such as Partha Chatterjee or Dipesh Chakrabarty help us ask the vital question of how to grasp and appreciate Indias rich cultural heritage without turning saffron, they do so with post-modern distaste for rationality and the powers of statecraft. Chakrabarty illustrates this either-or thinking in his critique of Enlightenment rationalism:
94
95
Quote taken from Muralidharan, Patriotism Without a People, p. 32.
For Dalit critiques of Gandhi on the issue of caste, see Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, New Delhi, 1989; Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, New Delhi, 1992; D. R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, Bangalore, 1993; and Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution. In his account of the Gandhi-Ambedkar exchanges, Nagaraj argues that Ambedkar made Gandhi more attentive to socio-economic solutions for Dalit problems, while Gandhi convinced Ambedkar of the relevance of religion.
96
Robert Frykenberg, Religion, Nationalism and Hindu Fundamentalism: The Indian Unity, Ethnic Studies Report. Vol 11, No 2, July 1993, p. 140
Challenge to
189 If it is true that Enlightenment rationalism requires as its vehicle the modern state and its accompanying institutions the instruments of terms and if this in Foucaults entails a certain kind of governability, violence the violence colonising anyway (however justifiable might be from a retrospective point of view), then one cannot both uncritically welcome this violence and yet maintain a critique of European imperialism in India except on some kind of essentialistic and indigenist ground (e.g., only Indians have a right to colonise themselves in the interests of
-
modernity).
97
line of thinking raises important questions about how Indias entry into statehood should affect the way scholars address problems related to religious diversity and their remedies. Leaders of the national independence movement its judicial, executive and legislative retained the structures of the imperial state features - and did not choose to return to what Kaviraj describes as the traditional equilibrium of a distant, limited, non-interfering state and a largely segmented, selfNational leadership not only appropriated the instruments determining of governability, but considered it crucial that these would be entirely in the hands of Indians. The question that remains to be answered is whether those who recognise Hindutva as a threat to religious diversity are accepting the constitutional framework of Indias modern state as a legitimate context for intellectual investment or are subtly discarding it in their protest of imperialism. As a corollary to Chakrabartys question above, we must also ask, like Sumit Sarkar, whether it is possible to oppose the ideology and actions of the Sangh Parivar while engaging in an unqualified critique of modern statecraft and its aim of devising and implementing rational public policy. If the moral dimension of scholarship is interpreted as the rejection of imperialist categories and agencies, and if this lends itself to a denigration of statecraft, where does this analysis leave Muslims in the bloody aftermath of 6 December, 1992? How can history judge the Rao government or the local police for not enforcing court orders to protect the Babri Masjid if post-modernists are correct in believing that even thinking in such terms constitutes an endorsement of imperialism? The active participation of politicians and local police in communal contlict, as well as the significant disruption of the state apparatus caused by the Emergency ( 1975-77) may certainly have contributed to the movement of intellectuals down the anti-state tail. 99 However,
Chakrabartys
society. 98
97
98
Chakrabarty, Radical Histories and the Question ot Enlightenment Rationalism, p. 756. Kaviraj, Religion, Politics and Modernity, p 310. 99 That Indian intellectuals have such a bleak picture of the state is certainly not surprising, when we see the extent to which politicians and police authorities play leading roles in communal violence. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence for this involvement should lead to
190
in the face of Hindutva, throwing out the nascent Indian state with the postmodernist bathwater leaves religious minorities vulnerable to hostility. In this respect, post-modernist critiques of categorisation and protective policies, while of history, may actually amount to a conservative neglect of protesting the course affected Marxist emphasis on socio-economic factors buttresses the distributive aspect of government; yet, the secularism it so faithfully upholds is inspired by an unrealistic hope that religious symbols and discourses would cease to play a role in shaping identities and their claims on government. This article has argued that the defence of an impartial, secular state need not endorse a secularising ideology which either denies the religious component of identity or tries to uproot it entirely from public Advocacy for a secular state has proceeded in India from an economy consisting of multiple religious identities and their very legitimate fear that any one symbol or ideology would monopolise the national culture. Resisting the Marxist impulse to unmask Hindutva in search of a class or of private capital, this article argues for a reappraisal of the role of Hinduism in imagining India before and after Independence and the anxieties these interpretative shades of saffron have created for non-Hindus. By granting agency and voice to Indians in the construction of their religious identities, it is possible to arrive at a rationale for secular government based not on the falsity of religious difference, but on its very real bearing on identity formation and political life in India.
groups.
spaces. 0
demystification of the sharp distinction between a secular state and a religious society. van Syncretism, Multiculturalism and Tolerance, p. 202. 100 Laura D. Jenkins, research scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Consultation, May 1996. 101 This is consistent with the understanding of secularism that came out of the debates of the Constituent Assembly (1947-49). See Robert D. Baird, Religion and Modern India. New
a
der Veer,
Delhi,1981, p. 396.

161evaluating Marxist and Post-Modernist Responses To Hindu Nationalism During The Eighties and Nineties

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161evaluating Marxist and Post-Modernist Responses To Hindu Nationalism During The Eighties and Nineties

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South Asia Research

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Conversely, distinguishing the Marxist angle 5 analysis became more of a challenge.

Hindutva from other kinds of

nationalism which do not engage in 5 Examples of critiques of Hindu Romila

7 K. P. Karunakaran discusses the misapplication of Marxist ideology to Indian conditions in

Religion and Political Awakening in India, New Delhi,

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Bipan Chandra, p. 160. Ibid.,

Communalism in Modem India, New Delhi, 1984, p. 23.

11 Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, pp. 12

., pp. 79-89, 104-27. Ibid 13

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., Ibid 14 p.21. 15 16 Perhaps

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which, until the mid-1980s, did

21 Ghia Nodia insightfully links so-called irrational nationalism to democracy:

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modernity.26 The Marxist framework,

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Vol. 21, Nos 7-8, 29 Ibid., p. 31.

Aijaz Ahmad, Culture, Community, Nation: July-August 1993, p. 32.

On the Ruins of Ayodhya, Social Scientist,

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34 p. Ibid., 9. 10. . p Ibid., 35 36

Balagopal, Why Did

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Richard G. Fox, Communalism and 235-49.

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in McGuire, Reeves and Brasted, eds, The

onto the rural

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The Politics of Secularism and the

Self, New Delhi, 1995, p. 63. 52 Ibid., p. 22.

Dipankar Gupta, Secularisation and Minoritisation: September 1995, pp. 2203-7.

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socio-cultural processes, and

der Veer discusses this

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Discourse of

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Upendra Baxi, ed.,

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61 Sacred centers are the foci of religious identity.

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24th Annual Conference 1995.

University of Wisconsin, Madison, 23 October

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Asia, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1991, pp. 123-40.

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74 Hasan, Muslim Intellectuals, p.

Mushirul Hasan, May 1998, p. 1078.

Vol. 33, No. 19, 9

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EPW, Vol. 30, No. 51, 23 December 1995, pp. 3287-310.

distinct from the caste reformers;

Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic

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