Aditya Sudarshan
T
he founding of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya is the kind of event so front-loaded with significance and portentousness that few can avoid being swept away by the sense of history-in-the-making. But is there sufficient materiality in this event (for better or for worse) to herald a new Indian republic or a new epoch of national consciousness, as is widely believed? Without attempting a categorical answer, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to an alternate possibility, which falls through the cracks of the left-wing/right-wing, Hinduism/Hindutva, secularism/religious nationalism dichotomies. And it does so because (here I draw on my understanding as a novelist) there is a mysterious rupture in the Indian way of life which overwhelms, and therefore surpasses, the imaginations of such constituencies, including those that happen to be politically dominant at a point of time.
In making this argument, I shall not be doing what these constituencies do- i.e., situating myself within some view of the Hindu tradition and sentimentally chanting verses, and citing passages therefrom. To do so is usually to have already lost that meta-vision of our society, which I am trying to convey a glimpse of. Of course, this meta-vision may be produced at length, and then all manner of texts and utterances can and should be marshalled appropriately. In fact, this has already been done-quite thanklessly, as it turned out- by the late great Nirad Chaudhuri.
I am not citing his work here because that is (already mistreated) historical scholarship, and what I wish to offer is a psychological suggestion, which, though it pulls in the same direction, carries its own authority, and cannot be laboriously rejected. It either ‘takes’ or it doesn’t.
This is the suggestion: that no idea, whether of secularism and liberalism, or of Ram-rajya and Hindu revivalism has risen beyond the level of a smattering in the mainstream of contemporary Indian thought. To be sure, these have been very noisy smatterings, but the noisiness does not alter their character. Rather, it furthers their true purpose, which is essentially negative: the drowning out of some prevailing, external reality, and the focusing of the mind, via the chosen mantra, on petty personal ambitions.
Further, that all those individuals who have gone beyond this nihilism, to a positive espousal of (whatsoever) ideas and a building of a life-pattern on their basis, have been alienated from the mainstream. Consider that Gandhi was thoroughly rejected ideologically and reduced to a token saint. Something similar happened to Tagore.
Nehru has been hollowed-out.
Nirad Chaudhuri too was physically exiled in his lifetime, and although he was an ‘unknown Indian’, relative to the others, this thesis is by no means confined to public figures. Strewn through the length and breadth of Indian society, are any number of thwarted individuals, whose fault is to have taken ideas seriously, so as to try to make them a way of life. Such as these India flatters and frustrates, but finally marginalizes, with implacable efficiency. The ones it really takes to its bosom are those who can ‘play the game’; which is the dreadful one of commandeering ideas for personal gain, and never dropping the act, to the extent of losing one’s own self-awareness of the divide between pretence and reality. This delirium animates the mainstream currents of Indian thought, which therefore become almost perfectly insulated from reality, because its loquacious denizens are not equipped to identify their condition, and the rest have been bludgeoned and bewildered.
Which category does any given individual fall into? One should refrain from judgment. But the overall social tendencies must be seen for what they are. The Hindu Right often complains that Macaulay’s goal of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” 1 was successfully achieved. But that is not so. True, multiple generations of English-educated Indians have occupied key positions of influence in every sector, from government to film, for decades- and yet Westernization in India barely exists beyond modes of dress and speech. Philosophically, it has hardly left a scratch on the Indian psyche. Neither did Nehru’s big-dam ‘temples of modern India’ usher in any scientific paradigm at large. So these Western ideas took no root. Many careers, however, were and are built on the back of them.
In just the same way, Indian liberals who are now bewailing Hindutva, and the Ram Mandir as an emblem of it, are forgetting this Indian quicksand, which drags all ideas down to the base: ‘kitna deti hai?’. By reason of it, the BJP’s Hindutva is not destined to succeed any better than the Congress Party’s liberalism. If anything, it may prove the more resounding failure, because of its energetic fool-hardiness. After the Ayodhya event, the author Amish Tripathi exulted: “We are the only pre-Bronze Age civilisation with a living, continuous culture.” 2 But neither Ram nor temples had any pre-Bronze Age cult in India, except perhaps in present-day fantasy. In the same way, the ‘living, continuous culture’, though it may pertain to Hindu gods, is not the spiritual culture that Amish thinks it is. Nor is it the tolerant and discursive culture that liberals are fond of proclaiming.
{ Also read Vinay Lal: The Ayodhya Verdict: What It means for Hindus }
It is something much more desperate and beady-eyed, which is calculated to confound all those whom it has not already co-opted. Amish, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and others whose favourite bugbear is ‘Abrahamic’ thinking, are guilty of precisely such thinking, when they impose internally consistent frameworks of meaning on the Indian tradition. But here one might ask: how does one explain the adulation that these or other figures, including national leaders like Modi, can arouse? Does this not imply a mass-resonance with their ideas?
But why do we assume (‘Abrahamically’) that adulation or worship entails any kind of meeting of minds? Words may be spoken for the sake of their meaning, yet heard and adored essentially as mantras, towards (I repeat) the expulsion of the burden of reality, and the massaging of the mind into a delirium wherein naught but one’s private interests actually obtain. The hatred of some enemy-on-the-doorstep (who is ultimately just a representative of reality, the ‘other’, which is not the self), therefore becomes the actual driving force behind such adulation, as in the case of Gandhi and Nehru, and also Modi.
Such fantastical adulation produces crowds, in which persons are atomized and aggregated but never a community in which individuals are united. That is because the condition for community, and true worship, is the adoration of a shared reality, which is the precise opposite of the technique prominent in the Indian mainstream.
What, then of the new Ram Mandir and the new Ram-Rajya under the helm of Modi? Interestingly, the habit of survival, which Amish and others have been praising as non-pareil in the Indian tradition, is itself the antidote to all such hopefulness. Our ancestors, Amish declares, “were the only ones among all pre-Bronze Age pagans who succeeded in protecting that which is most precious: their way of life.” He does not seem to realize what a dubious compliment he is paying a people. For this clinging to pre-Bronze Age mores does not speak to anything but a well-nigh endless capacity for the rejection and subversion of all that reality brings in time.
Therefore, inasmuch as the new Hindutva thinkers try to take a step forward developing the idea of Ram-Rajya in a positive way, studying and teaching the attributes of Ram, evangelising Ram as a model to emulate, they will be doing credit to themselves, they will be taking their worship seriously. But they will soon discover that they are quite out of step with the tradition they thought they knew.
Indeed, this reckoning has drawn near, and is already visible, for those who care to see it. It has arrived by virtue of an inexorable reality, the coronavirus. Even as the country ‘unites’ in fantasy, it is disintegrating in the daylight, with a febrile Centre losing decision-making power, and a weakening union of States now staring at impoverishment, distrust and external dependency.
It is not the Ram Mandir but this reality, because it is so humbling, that may herald something truly new for our ancient land.
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Author Notes 1.From Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education (1835), available at: http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html 2 See Amish Tripathi, Let Ayodhya Mandir be a reminder, at https://theprint.in/opinion/let-ayodhya-ram-mandir-be-a-reminder-indian-ancestors-died-for-it-up-to-us-to-rebuild/474213/ Beacon Note Main image: Courtesy:. https://www.outlookindia.com/photos/topic/Ayodhya-Ram-Janmabhoomi/102348?photo-235532#photo-235532
Aditya Sudarshan is a novelist, the author of A Nice Quiet Holiday, Show Me A Hero, The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi, The Outraged: Times of Ferment and The Outraged: Times of Strife. He won the Hindu Metroplus Playwright Award in 2011 for his play The Green Room. He has been a script-writer for NDTV's political satire show, The Great Indian Tamasha and a columnist and book critic for The Hindu Literary Review, India Today and other publications. He manages the Writing Centre at FLAME University, Pune.
Profound piece calling upon Indians, especially Hindus, to Socratically ‘examine’ our lives.
RS