Dipankar Gupta - Why some of our leaders seek foreign sanction for Hindu intellectual property
When Narendra Modi pumped the crowd up in Hyderabad with an Obamaesque rendition of "Yes, we can," did he even once think of Rajnath Singh and how that would hurt him? His party president barely finished blaming the English language for wrecking Indian culture when Modi broke out in that hated tongue. That he was also imitating a man who has so far refused him a visa did not seem to matter either. Now that Modi has been invited to speak in Britain's House of Commons, what will Rajnath Singh think or say?
Even as we labour against our colonial past, we still look westwards for approval. That this tension afflicts most of us is hard to dispute, but when a clearly Hindu party does just that, even as it claims to fight it, then surely this trait must run deep and wide in us. On the one hand, there is a clear sense of hostility to things western and, on the other, a longing for acknowledgment from foreign quarters. In fact, on a number of testy scientific and historical issues, Hindu activists have sought western scholars, many of them truly obscure, to secure their intellectual claims.
To back the contention that the Ganges is forever pure and immune to pollution because of an "X factor", a certain Julian Crandall Hollick is quoted by Hindu activists across a wide band. The Ganges is also said to be blessed by a certain "bacteriophagus" that eats up disease agents. If you find this hard to believe, track down a Henkins for more details and also find his reference in a number of Hindu websites.
Purshottam Nagesh Oak's sensational claim that the Taj Mahal was once called Tejo Mahalaya, a Shiva temple, also needed white-man's-support. After rummaging through documents, inscriptions and half truths, he eventually found a professor Marvin Miller and a 16th century vagabond, Peter Mundy, to stand by him.
Persuaded by 19th century European Indologists, the great Bankim Chandra Chatterjee proudly asserted that Aryan blood flowed in his veins. Likewise, if ever in doubt about how white and Aryan we Indians are go to Karl Penka or Miguel Serrano, unknown to most of us but commended by many Hindutva partisans.
According to these endorsed scholars, Scandinavia was once hot and tropical and India icy and frigid. Alfred Wegener's account of the continental drift also finds acclaim among sections of the Hindu right for similar reasons. According to this comforting view, Gondwana land moved all the way from Antarctica to the heart of India, proving once again that we Hindus are authentically creatures of the cold. Along the same lines, the Visigoth and the Ostrogoth are really Vishnugotra and Ostragotra, but incorrectly pronounced.
If there is any dispute as to whether the 'Ram Sethu' actually connected India with Sri Lanka as the Ramayana insists, we are advised to consult Joseph Parks and James Rennel. That some British sources refer to the underwater lumps in that region as 'Adam's Bridge' is put forward as corroborating evidence.
Vaishnava News Network claims that Nasa's satellite images show that indeed a bridge once existed whose "unique composition and curvature" prove that it was built by man. Ram, after all, assumed a human form when he came down as the prince of Ayodhya. Believe it or not, it is also claimed that Robert Oppenheimer was humming Sanskrit shlokas at around the time he invented the atom bomb. Even a spurious quotation by Thomas Babington Macaulay is put forward by Hindu activists to argue that India was for the longest time free of beggars and thieves.
If Hindutva protagonists, of different hues, feel the need to refer to western scholars, though some of them are of dubious academic pedigree, there must be some explanation for it. It is not as if this is a characteristic peculiar to saffron activists, but if it is so strong among them then that surely is baffling. When lesser people exhibit such symptoms we can put it down to straightforward colonialism, but why should this be the case with self-conscious Hindu activists too? Unless, of course, the colonial influence is so irresistible that while our heads tell us to fight it, our hearts beat to another tune.
Moreover, it is not just Hindu activists that depend on western sources to bolster, and broker, their contentions. This is true of nearly all political formations in the country that has cultural hurt as its guiding star. Bishop Caldwell's assertion of a distinct Dravidian identity that is at odds with the foreign Brahmanical one provided the first fillip to the DMK movement. Christian missionaries and William Carey, not to forget governor Elphinstone, were in there systematising and collating Marathi literature, culture, script and grammar. Lars OlsenSkresfrud, of the British Baptist Mission, was the first to declare the santhals as a separate nation in the early 1870s. Sikh tradition would not be what it is today without the intervention of the British Indian army.
Brute colonialism is frontally about economic and political control, but a truly successful one rules by stealth. It dominates the intellect and the dominated don't even know it.
