Abstract
M.K. Raghavendra, The Hindu Nation. A Reconciliation with Modernity (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2021), ix + 310 pp.
The predicaments of the pluri-ethnic identity of the—for many readers—alarming idea of a ‘Hindu nation’ are discussed in this speculative ‘book of ideas’ (p. 26) by a writer mainly known for prize-winning work on cinema. Staking a claim as a public intellectual, Raghavendra immediately identifies the deadlock scenario in the heated political space of identity battles for the votes and soul of postcolonial India, ‘with liberals unwilling to have any truck with the Hindu nationalists whom they dub “fascists” and Hindu nationalists responding in kind by calling them “anti-national”, each group implacable in its attitudes’ (p. 1). Whatever one’s view, the encouragement to engage in constructive discussions is valuable and draws attention to this book.
The problem itself is not unique. Jamal (2018) has theorised this conflict for Muslim contexts, but fresh debates of these predicaments for India as a unique Hindu-dominated state are welcome. In both cases, the complexity of the discourse reflects the postmodern global re-emergence of ‘religion’ as a law-related entity with ethnic characteristics, crucial in identity formation of a whole nation. While anyway, India has always been beyond tradition and modernity (Menski, 2003), more than before, maybe, we realise in these days of plurality-consciousness and the Anthropocene, which both reflect qualitative characteristics of postmodernity, that modern state law, however strong, cannot abolish religion. State law can tinker with it, but would be better advised to learn to live with religious diversity, clearly a ubiquitous phenomenon, as harmoniously as possible, given the long-established expectation that individual rights to freedom of religion must be respected in modern conditions.
Precisely this raises a critical core question from the start. If, as suggested by reference to Theodor Adorno, ‘Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category’ (p. v, italics in the original), what on earth made Raghavendra think that post-2019 India is modern, rather than postmodern? This mars the entire book, which proceeds to argue for a centralised strong state, when in fact the clear challenge is to navigate and balance India’s sophisticated superlative diversities (Amirante, 2014, 2019), whether in terms of asymmetrical constitutional relations, historically grown pluralities of family law arrangements, a huge diversity of communities, and evidently a whole range of different religions with their implications for identity construction of a massive, deeply plural nation.
What works in tiny Singapore or in centralised France, or maybe in the UK or other supposedly ‘modern’ legal orders, does not match India’s specific characteristics and challenges, which in many ways reflect a shared South Asian predicament. Indeed, it is uncontestable that the role and place of Islam in India is ‘likely to be an issue that will continually excite emotions among Hindus’ (p. 144). Demographically, India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world. And it has two huge, evidently Muslim-dominated neighbouring countries that have behaved all along like estranged cousins (Kadir & Jawad, 2020), feeling still aggrieved about the aftermath of the Great Partition of 1947, which is now, as a new study argues (Menski & Yousuf, 2021), more or less complete. Not just religious difference, as noted by Raghavendra (p. 111), but deeply emotional sibling rivalry connected to ceding of territory along India’s western borders caused major problems. The post-2019 scenario, however, has become a game-changer also in Pakistan, which predictably now announces efforts to focus more on Islamised education, manifestly to ensure that the current dispensation does not get dismissed by some undemocratic powers or by its national community of voters as judges of the government.
If Pakistan exhibits a strategic move towards yet more firmly Islamised identity, India faces the mirror image of this still lingering sibling rivalry over the territory of Kashmir, which tempted both sides to be nasty to each other, while they also needed each other to survive (Kadir, 2019). Having agreed, of course without admitting this officially, that the October 1947 de facto partition of Kashmir is now a de jure fact, the Pakistani leadership now faces a battle for survival vis-à-vis a slowly awakening duped electorate, in which non-Muslims are a tiny minority, while in more extensively plural India, Kashmir is far less central and there are different challenges for identity re-construction of the nation, though still related to Muslims. India now firmly includes yet another Muslim-dominated territory and many more millions of Muslims, some of whom evidently still eye secession (Menski & Yousuf, 2021).
A new moon has meanwhile arisen on India’s eastern borders, where ostensibly friendly relations with Bangladesh resulted in sorting out messy post-Radcliffe border issues over numerous enclaves (Ranjan, 2018). This prolonged process, started by Congress, with huge BJP outcries at first, since it involved the highly emotional loss of about 10,000 acres of Indian territory, was sealed by Prime Ministers Modi and Sheikh Hasina and finally completed by 2016. Raghavendra does not mention such matters, eliding lingering fears (which are reflected in current highly emotional debates about Indian citizenship) that continuing migration of Muslims and Hindus from Bangladesh to India risks creating a scenario where the whole of Bengal may want to claim the status of a vastly enlarged non-Hindu nation on India’s Eastern borders, implementing frustrated Bengali ambitions from the 1940s.
Such unspoken fears linger behind Raghavendra’s speculative discussions, which contain many valuable points, but overall remain unconvincing. Using an epistemic image I have been using for some years now (Menski, 2020), this book flies a kite that is bound to crash miserably. While many readers will have ideological misgivings about the notion of ‘Hindu nation’, this courageous book needs to be comprehensively scrutinised and studied, because one often learns much from significant mistakes. There are some brilliant, remarkable comments, including a critique of bizarre Hindu nationalist pronouncements (p. 60), the completely welcome tip that Manu is not actually sacrosanct (pp. 106–7) and dismissal of fantasies about helicopters in ancient India (p. 142). Raghavendra rightly insists that ‘Dharma Rajya does not mean a theocratic state’ (p. 164), but also realises that a Uniform Civil Code cannot just be Hindu law (p. 178). And in the Afterword, he even warns Hindutva forces against using Taliban-like actions. But there are also numerous contradictions and important points that this book definitely gets wrong.
Venturing into the conceptual chaos of the modern nation-state (Jamal, 2018: 52), Raghavendra asserts, highly questionably, that ‘Christian and Islamic democracies in the world have been able to conduct themselves fairly vis-à-vis their own minorities and a “Hindu democracy” is also imaginable’ (p. 2). Later he adds to this a Buddhist perspective, as seen in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and elsewhere (p. 120), without disclosing that such strong nationalism has brought disaster for non-majoritarian citizens. Tamils and Rohingyas remain unmentioned. At best, then, the faulty chain of argumentation about the scope for being fair to minorities serves to support Hindu-dominated India’s claim for a space at an imagined global table, oddly linked to craving respect for ‘its whole-hearted embrace of modernity’ as the author’s final point of appeal (p. 256). All of this seems completely redundant, for despite unsympathetic alien criticism (p. 23) a bad global press for Hinduism (p. 135) and significant deficiencies in India’s use of ‘soft power’, including its vast diaspora (pp. 250–6), postcolonial India as a nation is of course a major global player, whether others like and/or accept this or not.
Raghavendra clearly says that he is trying to make a case for nationalism in India (p. 21), using this as an indicator of modernity. Arguing for recognition of Indian nationalism is not reasonably dismissible as retrogressive per se, as every nation-state continuously faces this challenge of defining itself, a process which like kite flying always requires subtle balancing and depends on many internal and external factors. However, having initially admitted that nationalism itself, a politically suspect category to many, needs to be first understood (p. 2), Raghavendra then states point-blank: ‘I will try to argue for “Hinduism” being the ethnic commonality, the term more meaning social practices rather than exclusive religious identity’ (p. 21). He thus asks pointedly whether India can be a ‘modern Hindu nation’, but immediately notes that this question ‘can be engaged with only by exploring various other issues not in themselves connected with nationalism’ (p. 21). The equally ominous next sentence is only clarified in light of the rest of the book. It basically suggests that while Congress-manipulated secularism has been divisive, as it fed on a noxious strategy of ‘minority exceptionalism’ (p. 22, 176), Raghavendra seeks to argue that Hinduism as a cultural identity of India’s diverse citizens ‘provides a viable way to create inclusive national consciousness within India’ (p. 21), because it has the potential to be inclusive (p. 22). That assertion, while not at all denying intolerable evidence of exclusion and discrimination, is a kind of pie-in-the-sky argument, precisely the precariously crashing kite I see here.
It may be too harsh, however, to simply dismiss this line of argument as a total non-starter. As a long-suffering, trained Indologist, I was impressed with the author’s sophisticated way to identify that Hinduism is, at its nebulous roots, not a religion in the accepted sense (p. 118), but ‘arguably an amalgam of Vedic Brahmanism and pre-Vedic belief’ (p. 62). This multicultural bricolage, in my view (Menski, 2003) something which is both pre-modern and postmodern, is further depicted by the author (p. 130):
Hindu cultural narratives and practices have been so varied, and encompassing of all manner of things, that while some of them have elicited the highest admiration, others have caused unease. They are not all ‘Hindu’ in the sense of belonging to the ‘religion’—because Hinduism is not a religion as the Abrahamic religions or even Buddhism are religions. They are, as argued earlier, merely practices and beliefs from a space, not even unified by inner consistency, and should be read as evidence of ongoing conflicts and negotiations between various ethnic groups brought about by racial mixing over millennia.
While this may be called ‘Hindu’, it is quite evidently typically Indian, reflecting the famous ‘Argumentative Indian’ (Sen, 2006), who is forever struggling with himself and others, debating ubiquitous heterodoxies as a natural state of affairs (p. 12) and struggling over toleration of diversity (p. 17), while building up a terrible record in social asymmetry (p. 34), a point endorsed by Raghavendra, who portrays caste as ‘an unmitigated evil’ (p. 112) but refuses to blame ‘Hinduism’ for this. Many points in this book will in quick succession delight and upset various groups of readers.
The volume has a detailed introduction, six chapters, and a brief Afterword. The Introduction (pp. 1–26) links Indian nationalism to print media and thus, typically, to Bengal. Importantly, it correctly highlights ‘the lack of a single religious authority among the Hindus and the consequent absence of an institution equal to the Church’ (pp. 7–8). Raghavendra relies on Wallerstein’s view that India is an invention of the modern world system (p. 9). Its nation-building process obviously continues, now in a democracy with citizens rather than subjects. Arguments for a strong (p. 12) and even an impartial state (p. 24), linked to national security (p. 15), connect nationhood and ethnicity (pp. 17–21) to argue that ‘Hindu nationalism is not religious as much as ethnic’ (p. 18), so that its ‘primary conflict is with … religions with exclusive identities for their adherents’ (p. 18), questioning the loyalty of Muslims and Christians to the Indian state as a Hindu nation. Observing the ‘traditionally weak central state’ (p. 24) identifies further risk factors. But that is where it all goes haywire.
It seems that this argument would only work if one also accepts that the plurality of Hinduism as a historically grown entity with numerous fuzzy boundaries has many sub-identities which all need to be equitably included, which is not the social reality we know. This predicament of wanting to avoid admission of the reality of a Hindu-dominated Indian nationalism with numerous minorities, both ‘Hindu’ and ‘non-Hindu’, makes it impossible, first of all, to assert that any one of these various ‘Hindu’ identities should be the nationally dominant one, while many Hindu nationalists would be particularly nervous, to put it mildly, over trusting the inclusion of various ‘other others’. Raghavendra sees lesser risks from minorities within minorities such as Syrian Christians in Kerala and Bohra Muslims in Gujarat (p. 21). Whether such privileged minorities would be happy to find themselves defined as ‘Hindu’, however, remains seriously questionable.
If the core questions are mutual trust in a polyethnic nation and loyalty to a highly diverse large, modern state, do India’s sophisticated asymmetrical constitutional structures and the personal law system not already take care of such concerns? Developments in post-2019 Kashmir and especially the most recent Assembly elections in Kerala, in which the BJP did not secure a single seat, point in this direction. But would a solution to this rhetoric conundrum then not rather be diversity-conscious adoption of ‘Indian nationalism’, rather than insistence on ‘Hindu nationalism’?
Chapter 1 already provides the author’s prefabricated answer. Since Nehruvian secularism in India emerged from the internal power struggles within Congress to privilege what Raghavendra throughout lambasts as ‘minority exceptionalism’, this violates the imagined majoritarian expectation of strong Hindu control. The same argument is applied to personal law exceptionalisms, without any acknowledgement of the important right to follow one’s own customs and the notion of swīkriti as ‘the equity of recognition’ (Sen, 2006: 35) or ‘acceptance’, notably without any affirmation of equality. Chapter 1 argues correctly that Nehruvian secular/modernist education policy created a sceptical/liberal Hindu class distant from its own tradition and discouraged the study of Hinduism (p. 43), while crucially there was another class, ‘incapable of intellectually interrogating it but still deeply reverential’ (p. 144). This dual ignorance manifests in the unproductive verbal duels identified at the start of the book and ‘produces an exaggerated sense of the religious identity in some even as it leads the others to deny their Hindu identities altogether’ (p. 144). Adding the lingering nervousness about loss of control within Hindu-dominated India, a notion that significantly is never named as such in this book, but is shamed both within India and among foreign scholars, we see that the conflicts in India involve not only Hindus and ‘others’, but Hindus themselves disagreeing over the nature of their identity.
India’s powerful affirmative action policies and the resulting predicaments over ‘creamy layer’ problems are also not adequately analysed. In Chapter 4, Raghavendra calls for meritocracy and ‘effective compensatory discrimination’ (p. 175, italics in the original), while indicating the predicaments over how one measures merit, particularly when poor members of upper castes seek inclusion. This low-key rushed coverage confirms, however, that the beneficiaries of most Indian affirmative action programmes are specific classes of Hindus! Since there is also ‘Hindu exceptionalism’ at work, then, how will any Indian government avoid the predicament of handling the many competing claims and internal diversities?
Readers in a hurry may skip Chapter 2, which fails to provide a convincing answer about what is a ‘Hindu nation’ (p. 113) and might move from page 1 straight to Chapter 3, where Raghavendra summarises his earlier conjecture that the ‘Hindu’ identity was created by non-Hindus, specifically Islam, which made Hindus see ‘religion’ (p. 110), thus ‘making the “Hindus” a people’ (p. 143). This English term ‘people’, which in South Asia has been theorised as community (qaum), which can extend into ‘nation’, would definitely require more analysis at this point, especially since manipulation of nuances of qaum led to partition and underpin communalist tendencies.
As is known from ethnic studies worldwide, the self may be defined by reference to ‘the other’, without knowing or reflecting enough about the self. This lack of knowledge about oneself is identified by Raghavendra as the central challenge for the Hindu nation of India. He proposes that while Hinduism in 1947 ‘was still strong enough as the creator of an identity’ (p. 143), postcolonial Nehruvian liberal-secularist policies ‘made a strategic error since “secularism” was much too elitist’ (pp. 143–4), a split that is also observed, indeed, for Nasser’s Egypt and Sukarno’s Indonesia.
While many critical comments of the following chapters could be raised, space constraints suggest a focus here on Raghavendra’s critique of Congress minority exceptionalism related to his misguided modernist glorification of the state. He is simply out of depth, unable to assess the plausibility of law-related analyses when faced with the globally hostile rhetoric he reports about Indian legal developments. Most tellingly, he cites Siobhan Mullaly, a well-respected Irish international human rights author, who argued that after the 1985 Shah Bano case, which granted divorced Muslim wives a right to reasonable maintenance from the ex-husband, the Congress government, then led by Rajiv Gandhi, ‘responded to the heightened communal tensions by passing the 1986 Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, yielding to the claims of cultural conservatives within the Muslim community and attempting to reverse the Shah Bano judgment’ (p. 48).
Using the word ‘attempting’, rather than ‘pretending’, this much-cited author continues by grounding her modernist vision of ‘the kind of trafficking of women that accompanies so many multicultural arrangements. Gender equality was subordinated to religious claims, and the government yielded to a discourse of communalism that defined religious identities solely through religious membership’ (p. 48). Raghavendra readily falls for this imagined modernist chain of arguments, overlooking that Mullaly wrote this in 2004, three years after the Indian Supreme Court, at a strategic moment soon after 9/11, decided in Danial Latifi v. Union of India (AIR 2001 SC 3958 and [2001] 7 SCC 740) that the Shah Bano case had all along been good law. There was no Muslim exceptionalism. Divorced Muslim wives in India were definitely entitled to reasonable post-divorce maintenance (Menski, 2012). This is protective discrimination in favour of divorced Muslim wives, not the imagined abuse of soft state power caving in to traditionalist Muslim claims.
Raghavendra also cites Mullaly’s argument that human rights activists did not intervene because they feared that this would ‘further empower the forces of Hindu nationalism’ (p. 49). The latter, though, were quite happy to co-opt such misrepresentations, enabling them indeed to carry on arguing that Congress was guilty of minority exceptionalism. This led more recently to the much-discussed triple talaq judgement in Shayara Bano v. Union of India ([2017] 9 SCC 1), which was followed by the ominously worded Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act of 2019. This exceptionalises and criminalises divorcing Muslim husbands in India, but continues to be silent about the fact that divorced Muslim wives actually have better rights to maintenance than Hindu ex-wives.
I find it hard to believe that the author is unaware of these important legal developments. His strategic silence crashes his argumentative kite of Congress Muslim exceptionalism, hiding that the Hindu nationalist state now chooses to discriminate directly against Muslims. From such devious logic derives, then, the suggestion that ‘it will be natural to have a uniform civil code consistent with secular modernity, although this will have to take all kinds of religious belief into consideration’ (p. 176). This would hardly be a uniform civil code, then, but an act of violence by a strong modern state that simply ignores what its citizens wish to do in their own homes. India’s personal laws are not a legacy of colonialism, they are as old as the Vedic-cum-tribal amalgam that Raghavendra claims to appreciate (p. 62). An imposed uniform code would deprive Hindus, too, of their customs, which remain crucially important in daily life (Kokal, 2020). While the bureaucratic act of registering one’s car is best organised properly, and ideally without bribes, marriage registration is an entirely different matter. Its absence as a compulsory requirement in Indian law is not proof of pre-modern morality, but confirms that the Indian state continues to operate differently from modern Western templates. Tellingly, the sophistication of Indian law with its secular option of the Special Marriage Act of 1954 is overlooked when the author claims that ‘no one is exempt from or may opt out a religious identity’ (p. 177). And, to present the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, which applies to all Indians, wrongly as a personal law misses an opportunity for urgently needed debates about the interactions between India’s personal laws and the increasingly numerous overlapping general laws.
Thus, possibly the most valuable contribution of this study is merely its call for a dialogue to bridge the ideological divide (p. 147). I certainly liked the suggestion to strengthen Indology in India, but semi-informed Hindutva Indology that hides evidence that does not fit into one’s ideological categories would be a poisoned chalice, crashing any kite effort to find an appropriate balance that the roughly one billion judges of twenty-first-century India could live with. If the BJP fails to listen to local voices, it commits the same errors for which it blames Congress, and risks becoming irrelevant in due course, too. Imposing a Hindu identity on a manifestly very diverse Indian electorate and ignoring the basics of India’s people’s Constitution (De, 2018) looks to me like kite hara-kiri, an entirely avoidable predicament.
Congress clearly benefitted from leading India into Independence, but in due course squandered its credit with the nation by ignoring the local people, as Raghavendra’s analysis brings out well. It began to rule rather than to lead, presiding over an increasingly robust and self-righteous state that used violence of various kinds, not fairly negotiated settlements, to achieve its agenda. This was not a weak state, but had several weak leaders, since not everyone putting themselves forward to manage India—a truly gargantuan task—was up to the mark. The people of India as judges seem to have decided earlier that Congress lost its ‘Mandate of Heaven’, as Chinese legal culture calls this, justifying regime change. If the BJP, too, fails to engage with local people in self-righteous moves to impose a centralised Hindu Rashtra, while just blaming Congress, as the thoughtful brief Afterword indicates, this risks anarchy (p. 257), as well as being booted out by a highly diverse electorate that is increasingly aware of the collective power of the ballot. Raghavendra rightly concludes that ‘the milieu needs to be politically quietened and cooled down’ (p. 263), but his recipes for educational reforms, in particular, seem far too idealistic, while advising a strong state, whether Hindu or not, appears completely misguided.