The Great Hindu Civilisation Pavan K. Verma. Westland. July 2021. 416 pages
Mayank Bhatt
P
avan K. Varma’s The Great Hindu Civilization – Achievement Neglect Bias and the Way Forward must be read in the context of the rapid degeneration of India from a Constitutional secular democracy to an autocratic state where the only democratic feature is periodic elections; all other Constitutional provisions that made India the largest democracy in the world are being allowed to erode rapidly by the ruling Hindutva establishment.
The advocates of Hindutva, the political ideology of Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claim with fervour that following Narendra Modi’s electoral victories in 2014 and 2019, the Indian nation has been reawakened from a deep slumber, and has entered a phase of true Hindu renaissance.
And that it is time now for the Hinduism to reclaim its rightful place at the top that it has traditionally and legitimately occupied; to obliterate the influences of the ‘Islamic marauders,’ and the British colonial rulers. These ‘aliens’ subjugated the Hindu mind and emasculated the Hindu civilization for a millennium. What drives these bhakts up the wall is that even in the first five to six decades of an independent India, the Nehruvian ideology of secularism continued to dominate academic and public discourse, leading to further marginalization of the Indian civilization’s Hindu ethos.
For these bhakts, there is no distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva – they are the same, or at best two sides of the same coin. Violence is their preferred mode of discourse. The hatred fomented by the bhakts has driven India to the edge of the precipice, periodically culminating in violence against the religious and caste minorities. The state is complicit in these diabolical shenanigans, as it allows the Hindutva forces to slowly but in a determined manner, take control of all the apparatus of statehood that was created to ensure democratic rights to the people.
Having been voted to power with an absolute majority, the Hindutva political ideology has effective control over the executive, but it even controls the government, the judiciary, and the media. And through subterfuge and draconian means, the state is gaining control over non-governmental organizations, the academia, and the think tanks that shape policy by influencing public opinion.
Not surprisingly, India’s corporate sector is rooting for this new ideological turn, having grown tired of secularism that needed a modicum of market-oriented equality for all Indians, minorities included. As Meera Nanda notes in The God Market (Monthly Review Press, 2011):
“What may seem like a paradox, the resurgence of popular Hinduism is happening not against the grain of Indian secularism, but because of it. The Indian brand of secularism has allowed the state to maintain an intimate and nurturing relationship with the majority religion. As the neoliberal state has entered a partnership with the private sector, a cozy triangular relationship has emerged between the state, the corporate sector, and the Hindu establishment.”
The chapter is aptly titled, ‘The State-Temple-Corporate Complex and the Banality of Hindu Nationalism.’
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In recent years, there has been a concomitant rise in academic discourse that propagates the Hindutva ideology although covertly, mostly through sophistry, and seldom through academic rigour. There are foreign and Indian proponents of the glory of India’s pristine past, who ceaselessly advocate for an urgent need to retake the lost intellectual space. David Frawley, Francois Gautier, Koenraad Elst, and Rajiv Malhotra, among others, led the charge in protecting the ‘besieged’ Hindu thought and bringing out all its glorious aspects.
But the background of some of these proponents of Hindu revivalism is less than savoury. For instance, Elst’s Islamophobic writings inspired Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian far-right terrorist, responsible for the 2011 Norway attacks. Breivik acknowledged Elst’s influence in writing his manifesto, which seeks to deport all Muslims from Europe.
Malhotra has been accused of plagiarism. Andrew J. Nicholson, the author of Unifying Hinduism, said that Malhotra had unauthorizedly used extensive parts of Unifying Hinduism in Malhotra’s Indra Net. Malhotra has, of course, denied the allegation in a disingenuous manner, claiming that Nicholson’s book itself is a plagiarism of ideas based on Hindu texts that have been in existence for centuries.
Nicholson claims Malhotra doesn’t know Sanskrit; Wendy Doniger, who has been at the receiving end of Malhotra’s diatribe, slyly concludes her recent review in the New York Review of Books of The Ramayana of Valmiki: The Complete English Translation, thus: “The great scholarship of the seven-volume translation simply cannot be squeezed into a single readable, let alone elegant, volume. The only solution is for everyone to learn Sanskrit (emphasis added).”
All the proponents of the ‘New’ India have a few common traits –
- They are all advocates of indigenous Aryan theory
- They decry the perceived distortion and denial of
- the Hindu heritage of the subcontinent’s civilization by western academics such as Wendy Doniger, and Marxist historians such as Romila Thapar
- the destruction of Hindu heritage by Islam, whose ‘barbaric marauders’ invaded India repeatedly, ruled over it for over seven centuries, and changed the character of its civilization irreversibly for the worse
- the destruction of Hindu heritage by the English colonial rulers, who ruled India for over 250 years
- and last, but the one that drives the proponents of New India into a bizarre frenzy is the continued denial and distortion of Hindu heritage by independent India’s new rulers – the Congress under the Nehru-Gandhi family
These perceptions are not based on reality; they are merely biases and deep prejudices. Hindutva ideology unites them, but they prefer a neutral nomenclature – New India – to describe their ideas. This New India vociferously talks of reclaiming the Hindu past, which is based more on comic books rather than reality.
While professing Ekam satya vipra bahudha vadanti (The truth is one, the wise call it by different names), which is the essence of the Hindu religion, these proponents of New India adopt a competing vision of other belief systems that propagate an opposite ideal – that of truth being one, and that everyone should call it by one name, and those who call it by other names are non-believers, blasphemers and deserve to be condemned to death.
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A reluctant new entrant in this group is Pavan K. Verma, author of many books. The Great Hindu Civilization – Achievement Neglect Bias and the Way Forward is the latest addition to an already illustrious list of books that this former bureaucrat has written over the last three decades. In the Great Hindu Civilization, Varma has mined many sources to produce what is known to most students and informed lay readers of the Hindu religion. For those unaware, the book is a veritable treasure trove of information and insights.
While there are admirable components in any book, it is the intent that defines the book, and Varma’s intent is, if one may say it, less than admirable. He is here to wage a battle against western academics, Marxist historians, and proponents of Nehruvian syncretism.
The Great Hindu Civilization has sections that reveal the author’s inherent acceptance of India’s diversity and syncretic ethos. His description of nirguna and saguna forms of worship or the exposition on Natya Shashtra show that; as does his treatise on Adi Shankaracharya (Adi Shankaracharya, Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker), a fact-based book devoid of jingoistic verbiage that was published in 2018.
Moreover, while promoting this book, Varma decried the uncontrolled efforts of the Hindutva bhakts to browbeat everyone into submission and accept a unitary version of Hinduism.
And yet, a large part of this book is a weak defence of Hindutva and its adherents who are trying to forcibly bring about a monochromatic transformation of the Indian civilization, bypassing or deliberately ignoring Hinduism’s syncretic essence. Varma admiringly quotes the likes of Elst and Malhotra, criticizes Doniger and Amartya Sen, is dismissive of balanced, verifiable, academic research, favours revanchist opinions from discredited sources that advocate cultural homogeneity.
Varma has some grouse against the urban elite educated in the English medium because he is convinced that they see little value in India’s Hindu heritage. We all know and have known many English-educated urban elites who identify themselves as liberals. I have not met any Hindu or non-Hindu liberals, who believe in the secularism of the Indian variety – Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava – and who justifiably praise Shakespeare but belittle the contributions of Kalidas.
Pertinently, even if one goes along with Varma’s unfounded allegation that liberals are unaware of both Hindu history and mythology, it doesn’t necessarily lead to disrespect for either. Most liberals are proud of the Hindu heritage, and their main difference with the proponents of soft or hard Hindutva is a liberal view of history that includes the Indian Muslims and their contribution to the making of India’s syncretic culture mostly through peaceful evolution. And these liberals are not necessarily Hindus alone.
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Varma is upset with Amartya Sen and Wendy Doniger because according to his assessment they focus on Hinduism’s variety to undermine its philosophical depth, intellectual sweep, and religious cohesion. “To conclude that Hinduism encourages and nurtures a diversity of thought and practice is one thing. To infer that because of this inherent eclecticism it is not a religion at all is quite another,” he asserts.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, in 2015, after her book Hindus – An Alternative History was banned in India, following RSS ideologue Dina Nath Batra’s objections, Doniger responded,
“Any new idea offends people who are committed to the old idea, which is to say, most people. Even in the hands of someone as intellectually challenged as Batra, Article 295a (deliberately hurting religious sentiments) is a weapon of mass cultural destruction…”
She clarified further: “Much of my work, including the book under attack, has been devoted to the representation of aspects of Hinduism that the Victorian Protestant British when they ruled India, scorned as filthy paganism: polytheism, erotic sculptures, spirited mockery of the gods, and rich, earthy mythology. In the wake of the British, in their shadow, many Hindus who worked with the British—I am tempted to call them sepoys—came to share these sentiments. They also took on the British preference for the Sanskrit texts created and perpetuated by a small, upper-caste male elite, regarded as beneath contempt the vast oral and vernacular literatures enriched and animated by the voices of women and lower castes. It is this ‘alternative’ Hinduism that is denied by Batra and by many Hindus in the fundamentalist movement known as ‘Hindutva’.”
Varma finds fault with the depiction of Muslim rulers of India by Western academics and Marxist historians. He observes, “Selecting (Akbar) as the emblem of the nature of Islamic rule in India requires caution. More than three centuries after the advent of the Muslim invasion, a dilution of the ferocious iconoclasm that marked the original Turkic invaders could be expected, especially since Akbar’s wife was Hindu. However, there is recorded evidence that despite this, Akbar converted temples to mosques and demolished temples such as at Nagarkot in Himachal Pradesh. Moreover, his religious broadmindedness was staunchly opposed by the powerful orthodox Islamic clergy, the ulama, who declared him a heretic and issued a fatwa for all Muslims to revolt against him. This certainly shows that his tolerance in matters of religious faith was not shared by other members of the ruling Muslim elite, which may have been kept at bay by the emperor, but was far from being emasculated, as the rule of subsequent Mughal emperors brings out.”
To claim, as Varma does, that Akbar was not too different from the earlier Muslim rulers in his iconoclasm, and destruction of temples is to deliberately ignore Akbar’s greatness. In the medieval era, when religion divided the world (as it does even in our times), Akbar’s Din-e-ilahi (religion of god; propounding oneness of god) that he put forth in 1582, tried to unite the people of different religions in his kingdom. As is the case with most visionary ideas, Din-e-ilahi was a grand failure, but the beauty of Din-e-ilahi is that Akbar conceived it as a confluence of different belief systems, claiming that no single system could claim supremacy over divine truth.
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Throughout the history of humankind, religion has proven to be one of the most divisive forces. This was especially true globally during the medieval era. In this scenario, to conceive and propagate a universal religion, as Akbar did, was to be exceptionally far-sighted. To find fault with it merely to suit one’s argument is to be biased, small-minded, and exhibit lack of objectivity. As Amartya Sen notes in The Argumentative Indian, “The most powerful defence of toleration and of the need for the state to be equidistant from different religions came from a Muslim Indian emperor, Akbar… those principles of religious toleration, enunciated in the 1590s, were still early enough at a time when the Inquisition was in full swing in Europe.”
Varma attributes – albeit obliquely – the rise of the Bhakti-Sufi movement to the advent of Islam, and the need for Hindu religion to break the shackles imposed by Brahmins and Sanskrit. He expresses displeasure that Amir Khusrau is regarded by many as “a mystic, a Sufi poet, the spiritual disciple of his contemporary, the great Sufi sant Nizamuddin Auliya…” Varma cautions, “he (Khusrau) was a prominent member of the court of five Sultans who ruled from Delhi, the most important among whom was Allauddin Khilji. In this capacity, he wrote extensively about their conquests and victories and their destruction of the temples of the infidels.”
Now, this is not unusual at all. The ideological and artistic inclinations one nurtures as an individual are usually at variance with one’s official duties, and one performs one’s official duties diligently to earn a livelihood so that one can sustain one’s artistic inclinations.
He emphasizes, “The Sufi faith never rejected Islam, and many of its leading figures were vocal supporters—as in the case of Amir Khusrau—of the religious iconoclasm practised by Muslim rulers.” Here again, Varma is being small-minded. The Sufis were interested in furthering the appeal of Islam through songs and poetry, something that orthodox Islamic practices could only achieve through coercion and force. They never claimed that they were anything but Muslim.
No Muslim Sufi sant but for a few exceptions such as Kabir, Rahim, and Raskhan (the Krishna bhakt) ever tried to cross the boundaries of Islam, just as no Bhakti sant ever claimed that their poetry was anything but a path leading to Hindu deities (mostly Krishna).
And not surprisingly while Varma expects the Sufis to crossover from their religious doctrines, he doesn’t fault the Bhakti sants for staying within their religious boundaries. He doesn’t expect Bhakti sants to be syncretic; they can be Hindu, but Muslim Sufi sants must be syncretic.
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Varma’s opprobrium is justified when discussing the negative influence of India’s colonial rule. One cannot but agree with him that colonial rule has had a lasting impact and among other things, has severely restricted Indian intellectual traditions. But in this context, his criticism of Raja Rammohun Roy for his role in propagating Western values, including social reform measures such as the abolition of sati is severe, lopsided, and unwarranted. Roy’s place in history is assured not merely because of his role in the abolition of sati. He was a towering, multifaceted personality in 18th and 19th century India. His achievement must be seen not in piecemeal terms but holistically.
To paraphrase Soumyendra Nath Mukherjee, honorary visiting professor, University of Sydney, Roy is the first to instil the values of investigation and inquiry, appeal for individualism and freedom from the shackles of systems that had outlived their utility. These were ideas inspired by Western thought, but Roy indigenized them to make them compatible with the prevailing thinking of the Bengali middle class.
Lynn Zastoupil even claims in Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain that he influenced Britain’s policies. “Social and religious reformer, education activist, pioneering journalist and Bengali prose writer, and critical admirer of the West, Rammohun and his interests reflect many currents of modern South Asian history. Less familiar is the fact that his passions intersected with the projects of reformers and humanitarians in Britain. Rational religion, liberty of the press, constitutional reform, free trade, modern education, the condition of women, and suppression of inhumane practices are causes that Rammohun shared with many Britons. These were causes shaping a new order in Britain, and those who most admired him were ushering in an age of reform.”
Varma is unhappy that in post-independence India, cultural and arts institutions have continued to reflect western values, and that nothing of any substantive quality has been produced that may be termed as Indian. “There was unforgivable amnesia in the area of culture and creativity. Bharat’s Natya Shastra, perhaps the world’s first comprehensive compendium of the arts, was largely confined to anonymity. India’s seminal contribution to aesthetics, the theory of rasa—again perhaps a pioneer in the world—was little known even to students of specialized schools of art,” he notes.
This is unfounded angst. Surely, Varma is aware of the theatre renaissance ushered by the likes of Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, and Mohan Rakesh, just to name a few pioneers of the new theatre movement in the formative decades of post-Independence India.
It is in the last section of the book – The Challenge of the Modern Republic – that Varma’s true intentions are revealed. He defends Savarkar, the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, criticizes Jawaharlal Nehru and MK Gandhi. He defends Savarkar quoting Vikram Sampath, who recently had to seek a court order to silence Georgetown University professor Ananya Chakravarti; Rohit Chopra from Santa Clara University; and Rutgers University academic Audrey Truschke, who alleged that Sampath had plagiarized large portions of the Savarkar biography.
Varma contends that Savarkar’s writing on Hindutva must be seen as a product of its time (the 1920s) and he should not be judged harshly for espousing a hardline on nationalism. However, he is not willing to give a similar wide berth to Nehru, who he holds responsible for the alienation of the Hindus from the Indian mainstream. Varma also points an accusatory finger at at MK Gandhi, citing the Khilafat movement and the Mopala rebellion in Kerala, where he faults Gandhi for being too forgiving to the Muslim peasants who rebelled against their Hindu landlords.
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Varma even justifies the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), citing examples of what he considers as the organization’s contributions to nation-building. And yet, after this unconscionable defence of one of the most rabidly fascist forces fuelling the current wave of Hindutva in India, Varma swings to the other direction, holding the current form of Hindutva as it is espoused and practiced by the lumpen elements of the RSS-BJP superstructure, to be responsible for India’s decline as a democracy.
Throughout the book, one gets a feeling that Varma is unsure of what line he should be taking: pluralism that is inherent to Hindu religion, or a hegemonistic and jingoistic view inimical to Hinduism but compatible with Hindutva. This uncertainty undermines the erudition and cohesion that he has shown in his earlier books.
He concludes that Hindu Satya – the truth about Hinduism – should replace Hindutva, but this assertion, well-meaning, no doubt, rings hollow in the face of all that has been articulated thus far in the book. At the end of the day,The Great Hindu Civilization – Achievement Neglect Bias and the Way Forward reads as nothing more than an apologia for India’s current ruling establishment.
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Mayank Bhatt is the Executive Editor of The Beacon. He is a novelist and essayist based in Toronto.
Mayank Bhatt in The Beacon
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