Whatever happened to the Left? A Response to Ruth Vanita

Ashoak Upadhyay

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early two decades ago Ruth Vanita raised some important questions that have yet to be answered. In a manner of speaking they seemed fairly obvious: If there is a Hindu Right, shouldn’t there a Hindu left? After all, if Christianity has its faithful on both side of the aisle–think of Liberation theology in Latin America and the gun-loving misogynists, “pro-life” (hunh?) Christian Right in the United States– why shouldn’t Hinduism? That seems a fair question till you realise that they are kitabaya religions, monotheistic faiths focused around the Book whose hermeneutical practice permits, rightly or wrongly a Left and Right. Hinduism doess not have a Book. Yes the Hindu Right claims to stake the Ramayana as the ultimate source of ‘Hinduism’ and the movement it is building around that forms a brand of Hinduism that could be called, as Vinay Lal has it, Temple Hinduism. So a millennia-old faith is being bulldozed into becoming a monotheistic religion and it is time we called this by its real name which is not the Hindu Right, as Vanita would have us believe but Hindutva.

And also let us get the Left right; it is as much in thrall of a monotheistic belief subsystem as the adherents of Hindutva would want to invent one on the ruination of a civilizational palimpsest that still throbs with life. So the Left, like most seculalrists would see the Babri Masjid demolition as an unlawful act rather than a body blow to any sense of religious plurality and self-assuramce that marked, more than anything else, Hinduism as a practicing accommodative faith  

So the starting premise with which Vanita frames her concerns about the absence of a Hindu Left gets the investigation off into a wrong turning. It searches for a Left that is actually worshipping its own monotheistic god of Progress as a historical telos based on secularism, science and socialism. There is no place for religion or faith based belief systems in this ethos of Progress. Particularly a faith like Hinduism with its million gods and goddesses and their messy moralities, myths and legends, its rituals and rites by which millions of Hindus recover and reinforce their relationship with their ancestors, with the non-human world with the world at large, as Nirmal Verma once put it. 

Vanita recognizes this when she rues about the secular-leftists: “But what is significant is the degree to which they were almost programmed to value monotheism over polytheism, uniformity over diversity, without having really thought the question through.”

Actually they had thought it through and come to the conclusion that India’s messy civilizational ethos was fine between the pages of “The Discovery of India”. But in the new age that was dawning, the dawn of correction really, the untidy heterogeneity had to give way to a swanky-chic uniformity, polytheistic faiths to a monotheistic belief in the new religion of Progress, where the dirty Present embodied in a de-centralised village society would be shaped into urban conglomerates of steel and cement. A new religion was born, Secularism, a belief system that sweeps living faiths under the carpet or , as was the case, into the waiting arms of the Hindutva biding time to fulfill its historical mission.

For let us be very clear. Hindutva as we know it is not just about twisting a living faith into a monotheistic religion but standing it in opposition to the Other defined as the enemy of an imagined nation. Linked to the Nation-State, to a politics of power that fulfills a historical mission of a two nation theory in which the Nation-State and nationalism and the nation would be defined in Hindutva terms. This Hindutva is the very antithesis of an Indic culture which “ ‘[…] at no time defined itself in relation to the other, nor acknowledged the other in its unassimilable otherness, nor in consequence occupied itself with the problems of relationship as it arises in in any encounter with the other.’ “ (emphasis in original)

Offering us this gem from the late and under-rated philosopher, J.L. Mehta, Margaret Chatterjee adds  “Otherness, of course, was present in that society itself, caste ‘taking care’ of some of this in respect of purporting to provide the framework of a non-competitive wociety.” (Chatterjee, 2007: 202) 

Hindutva (Vanita’s Hindu Right) stood that age-old dictum Mehta  emphasises as the defining element of Indian culture on its head insisting that the majoritarian identity can only be realized through and in relation to a demonized Other. 

But the Other is not just the ‘minority’ religions and faiths. For Hindutva, the Other also includes Hinduism as a living faith, as it has been practiced for millennia and continues to be. Three hundred Ramayanas are the other; so is polytheism. Godse killed Gandhi because he posited, in his telling, an effete,feminized Hinduism. Gandhi had to be killed because his representation of Hinduism had to be erased. Gandhi’s Hinduism was not Temple Hinduism; he never visited temples. His home-and-hearth Hinduism with its openness to other faiths and belief systems, its non-competitiveness were elements of the Other that had to be subjugated if not wiped out. A myth cannot remain just that; moral ambiguities had to be erased from sacred texts; Ayodhya has to have a material basis never mind that the concrete fact will trample over and eradicate memories and remnants of faiths that lived with accommodative diversity. 

Vanita’s complaint that the Leftist does not care for polytheism, is programmed to believe in monotheism holds just as well for the Hindutva adherent. Hindutva wants India’s living faith to be turned into a religion with its Temple, its hierarchical order. But contemporary Hindutva parts ways with its forebears in the Bengal renaissance that just looked at the possibilities of a monotheistic Hinduism based on Advaita; since Savarkar Hindutva has been fortified into a militaristic muscular State run and controlled ideology. Hindutva turns a living faith not just into a religion but into an ideology of hegemonic power.And as a State power fueled by Hindutva ‘vikas’ may seem to have usurped many of the developmental agendas of the secular dispensation but the fact is that the idea of Progress was built into the narrative of a Hindutva-based Nation-State. Hindutva met Mazzini and discovered capitalism; the results are unfolding before us as farmers struggle to prevent their extinction by oligarchic capitalism, are turned into the Other worthy of water cannons just as are the satyagrahis of Hardwar resisting sand mining projects on the Ganges. 

How could Vanita’s Hindu left have had a chance? It was a no-brainer project anyway. To confront the Hindutva ideological apparatus the Left had to first start with Hinduism itself; with a reckoning of their own identity as Hindus. As Vanita tells us many Marxists remained closet Hindus. Embarrassed or shamed into silence by their submissions to the pressures of the rising discourse of Development-Secularism. A few ventured into the sacred textual fields: veteran CPI leader S.A Dange wrote the introduction to Bani Deshpande, his son-in-law’s book ”The Universe of Vedanta” in 1974; the book was translated into Russian by the Soviet Union Communist party. It was rendered into Hindi and Marathi too but more than the book itself it was Dange’s introduction that drew flak from other party leaders; Dange defended his introduction and the book on the grounds that the Vedas were part of Indian tradition and had to be understood. Fair enough but the party leaders felt betrayed by this venture into “religion,” ‘false consciousness’ by a historical materialist whose task it was to lead the people away from that opium of the past.

Vanita considers the attitude part of the “shame culture” that afflicts Hindus. “Religious behaviour is not widely considered a shameful behaviour. But by the mid-20th century, it had become so within the community of Indian leftists.” Much has been written about this with Ashis Nandy’s various writings setting the tone for an investigation into the attitudes that began to afflict Hindu intellectuals early nineteenth century with the advent of British colonialism and its ethnographic works  that painted Hinduism as an embarrassment; a shameful primitive culture in need of the reformative touch of wetern rationalism. The social reforms of Raja Rammohan Roy and subsequently the efforts of the Bengal renaissance to clean up Hinduism, to find a monotheistic center and invest Hinduism with a stature equal to or greater than other world religions emanated from an anxiety borne of that shame culture. 

But shame is just part of the reason for the secular-left scurrying away from Hinduism. It was the uncritical embrace of western modernity as the answer to India’s ‘backwardness’ that laid the grounds for a rejection of extant pluralistic faiths as practiced for millennia. With the notable exceptions of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the main, who in their own ways critiqued the idea of western nationalism and modernity no other Hindu-born national leader was willing to look around at the civilizational legacy as anything other than a burden—or as a storehouse of ammunition to demonise other faiths. Over the period of the national struggle for Independence and despite Gandhi (and Tagore’s warnings, the intelligentsia along the political spectrum identified India’s backwardness with its extant faiths and practices. If B.R. Ambedkar saw the village as the crucible of caste oppression, Nehru saw it as the site of overall backwardness.

The tone for the happy embrace of western modernity and the idea of Progress through technology and science was evident in the letters between Gandhi and Nehru on the eve of Independence. In that correspondence Nehru would spell out his idea of India that marked the most decisive departure from Gandhi’s vision of Swaraj and the start of a modernising project that would also inform perspectives on Hinduism and religion in general as markers of backwardness. The progressives, liberals and orthodox left joined in the chorus. Their differences with the Nehruvian vision were not so radical as to overturn the foundational precepts that underlined the idea of progress as a secular, faith-free telos. 

Vanita points to the irony that “[…] the social agenda of the secular left and the Hindu one-time left was in large part the same, despite the use of very different theories, language and terminology.” But when did the secular and the Hindu ever meet with a common social agenda? For her Gandhi was a Hindu left. Debatable as that label is and surely Gandhi would have refused it, Nehru’s decisively programmatic letters to Gandhi make clear that the secular left would have no truck with Hinduism of any sort. 

Social distancing. The secular dispensation  wouldn’t touch Religion for any intellectual inquiry (barring few exceptions of course that would prove embarrassing to Communists such as Dange’s work). As Vanita reminds us “[…] anyone who theorizes positively about Hinduism is almost invariably labelled ‘communalist’ by the Indian left” Abetted by a historical-materialist belief that dissuaded the secularist from examination and inquiry into its hermeneutics of praxis, into its potential for interfaith dialogue as our forebears had delved into for 500 years of Indo-Islamic culture, the secular left the room for the Hindutva, to poison the hearts and minds of those who had for centuries engaged in it as living faith, willing and able to live beside other faiths with accommodative reciprocity.

Social distancing. The secular-left dispensation disdained from pedagogies that would delve into the complexities of Hinduism’s sacred texts. The number of universities offering Hindu Studies or Religion /Divinity Studies in general is so thin on the ground as to not figure at all as subjects worthy of study by students. Secularism and the race towards modernity—industry as Temples—snuffed out the need for any moral education baed on the Humanities and faiths as storehouses of the recovery of rhe Self buffeted by the encroaching storms of modernity. Then Hindutva stepped in.

The irony was tragic and we pay the price. Muscular secularism left the field for muscular Hindutva forces to ‘modernize’ Hinduism, to define it, contrary to what Mehta quoted above had felt about Indian culture in relation to the Other faith, Islam, to replicate its kitabya singularity all the better to fight it.  An exact replica only technologically better! Industries as Temples or better still, Temples as Industries.  

Having abandoned Hinduism as a living faith practiced by the subalterns for millennia, the secular-left could do no more than just confront the Hindutva juggernaut that grew slowly but surely by appealing to the notions of electoral democracy. Simply policing the RSS and other arms of the Hindutva, as Nehru and secular politics did could not prevent their poison filling our consciousness unchallenged. The politico-juridical opposition did not work as we have seen. Nor did the secular appeal to forget faiths and keep the faith in rationality and scientism. 

The binaries of the Hindu Right and Hindu left are misplaced constructs because they do not help in seeking out the interstitial greys that unite, not demarcate the secular and the Hindu Right: the faith in modernity, the Nation-state, a development discourse that wreaks havoc on non-human life, a belief in consumerism, uniformity over variety and a contempt for faiths that are polytheistic, non-competitive. M.K.Gandhi, his grandsaon Ramachandra Gandhi the philosopher, Ashis Nandy and let us add Raimondo Panikkar, Jarava Lal Mehta, A.K. Saran are not Hindu left members but Hindus with an eye on the faith as it is practiced. For them Hinduism is an open ended book with infinite chapters. And perhaps Vanita’s advice offered two decades ago ought to be taken up by more than “leftist” Hindus or professional scholars nestling in the groves of academe: to acknowledge their Hindu identity and speak up in defense of the Hindu heritage…not as it is exists in the sacred texts but in the hearts and minfs of a million subalterns.

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Notes
--Chatterjee, Margaret: Gandhi’s Diagnostic Approach Rethought Promilla & Company Publisshers. 2007 New Delhi 
--The cover image courtesy: https://www.religionworld.in/street-gods-south-india-ayyanar/