Violent Gods

Congrats for writing “Violent Gods”, a book on Hindu Nationalism. A study of this ugly phenomenon is overdue. I confess I have not read the book but your article in ZNet suggests that the approach is rather  academic, drawing, as you say, from Anthropology, Postcolonial studies etc. Native Indian discourse on the subject would hardly attempt a multi-disciplinary perspective. For example, Arundati Roy’s take on Hindu Nationalism in her latest book “Listening to Grasshoppers” is more direct and amply within the grasp of the common man. But like you, I too hope that your book will generate “discussion, debate, contemplation about India’s future, etc”. But I have my doubts – India has no robust tradition for public debate, notwithstanding what Amartya Sen says in his book “Argumentative Indian”. May I add some thoughts of my own?

There is sadly not much an intellectual base in India; there is a vacuum in the realm of ideas. Some decades ago, VS Naipaul wrote:
"The poverty of the Indian land also extends to the Indian mind. The simplicity of India disappoints and in the end fatigues. India lies all on the surface. The holy cow is absurd, the caste marks and the turbans belong to a people who, incapable of contemplating man as man, know no other way to define themselves. Where here is no play of the intellect, there is no surprise.

"Here was a nation exchanging banalities with itself: it was the impression Indians frequently gave when they attempted analysis. The concrete eludes them. India is profoundly dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers. Here’s a country held together by no intellectual current, no social graces…”

No wonder, India has failed to make a mark on the international scene. Indians don’t invent or create, they just borrow, mimic & plagiarise. In a desperate bid to acquire the trappings of power, the Hindutva brigade is ready to bully the weak at home and grovel before the powerful for technology. They are in a hurry for big power status (a nuclear submarine, an aircraft carrier – all with foreign know-how) while the people remain poor, illiterate and hungry. How lop-sided can you get? The nationalists seem to be driven by emotion and ritual and not at home with logical structures and rational analysis.

I’d like to suggest that the failure to advance springs from
- a historical inferiority and spirit of defeatism,
- the grip of caste and rigid socio-religious practices,
- unending poverty, failure to provide basic needs to the people,
- internal unrest and state repression, 
- decaying institutions, aversion to rationality, flawed democracy,

The Hindus have been under Muslim domination for several centuries before the British arrived - from about 1000 CE. Hindu elites are no doubt acutely conscious and demoralised over the failure to resist and fight back the invaders.
There were no Hindu adventurers, explorers or conquerors. For centuries, the peasant masses toiled in dire poverty and squalor, put up with caste-based discrimination and sought comfort in religious rituals. As rulers, the British 1) treated the Indians shabbily, 2) taxed and plundered and 3) let famines starve the natives by the millions.
Nevertheless, the Indians hold the British in respect and are grateful to them for unifying the country as a nation and introducing basic infrastructure, establishing the education system and state institutions.
The Mughals did introduce cultural refinements and build splendid monuments but as historian William Dalrymple puts it, it is the long Muslim dominance that has served as a "mortal wound in the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that still bruises the country's self-confidence. the Hindus tended to withdraw in the face of defeat."
The memory of the long subjugation has left a smouldering resentment and vindictiveness against the Muslim minority (15% of the population) but an attitude of subservience to the West on which it still depends for ideas, technology and security.

UK’s Lord (Professor) Parekh said:
 "Unlike most western middle classes that have been contributed in social and cultural revolutions, the Indian middle class remains intellectually superficial with limited interest in ideas, and cultural dilettante.  Few have a strong social conscience, they are politically apathetic to the plight of their underprivileged countrymen.  They love vulgar displays of wealth in a country in which 80% of the people live on Rs 20 or less a day.
"Indian institutions - universities, Parliament - are in decline; the streets are dirty, the traffic chaotic, the crowds undisciplined the infrastructure decrepit. The democracy is flawed.”

Instead of spending their energy constructively (improving infrastructure, helping the rural poor, upgrading their institutions), the Hindu fundamentalists have turned against the minorities.
In his book “ My Frozen Turbulence” (1991), high official Jagmohan wrote:
”An essential pre-requisite and component of a renaissance would be a re-awakened and rejuvenated Hinduism that has shed its flabbiness, cleared its clogged arteries and recouped its vigour and buoyancy. This new Hinduism would create a new Hindu who is just, compassionate, creative and contemplative; a Hindu with a clean conscience, one who believes in the fundamental unity of man and is committed to the purification of his own soul and of those around him; a Hindu prepared to provide motivational underpinning to all State institutions, making them honest, and service-oriented.”

MS Chatterji, Best wishes for the success of your book.

Eddie