They reinvented and reconfigured tradition itself as part of an effort to create a Hindu nation. As Pal confessed, ‘all these old and traditional gods and goddesses who had lost their hold upon the modern educated mind have been reinstalled with a new historic and nationalist interpretations in the thoughts and sentiments of the people’. (Predictably, it did not occur to them to ask, as B. R. Ambedkar, the devastating critic of upper-caste delusions, did: ‘How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation?’)
Many of these insecure Hindus were vulnerable to the inherent teleology in Mazzini’s religion of humanity: the God who loved progress and made man the carrier of the Divine Spirit. Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, one of the nineteenth-century religions of humanity, had actually fought in Italy with Garibaldi and befriended Mazzini in London, before fixing on India as the place for the next great awakening. Various mystical doctrines and occult organizations in the West in the late nineteenth century were informed by European scholarship in Hinduism and Buddhism. Arriving in India, they found many eager and gullible adherents (including the teenaged Jawaharlal Nehru, who was initiated into the Theosophical Society by the Fabian socialist gadfly Annie Besant).
Many of these Hindus were particularly susceptible to a scheme that promised the achievement of modernity through their tradition: a national rebirth that would revivify what was perceived by British liberals and Utilitarians to be stagnant and degenerate. For instance, the idealized image of the woman as nation could be made to seem spiritually superior to the unruly and demanding modern wife (and used to control her). The chauvinism of these Hindus was boosted by the general expectation that a new age of mankind was at hand, and that, as devotees of Bharat Mata, they might be called upon to lead it. At the same time, they couldn’t help but despair at the lack of real ingredients for such a Hindu nation.
Apathetic masses and an infinitesimal, politically insignificant middle class drove them into obsessive daydreams of sacrifice and martyrdom. It was among these upper-caste Hindus, often irreligious if not militantly secular, that the idea of ‘Hindutva’, a form of political Hinduism that organizes and militarizes the Hindus, grew. And from these messianic figures emerged the men who assassinated Gandhi, and whose intellectual progeny now rule India.
Learning from (While Exterminating) the Brutes
The most important of these Indian exceptionalists now seems to be Savarkar, the chief theorizer of Hindutva, whose intellectual spurs were almost all European. He was born in 1883 in the western Indian city of Nasik, into a Brahmin family that not long after his birth fell into financial difficulties. In 1902, Savarkar agreed to marry the daughter of a family friend on the condition that his father-in-law would pay for his education at Fergusson College in Pune. He first read Herbert Spencer in Pune, and was enthralled by his vision of struggle. At the age of twenty-three Savarkar went to England on a scholarship set up by one of the English writer’s devoted Indian students. He spent the next four years in a daze of Mazzini worship.
A true disciple of the Italian nationalist, Savarkar abhorred conventional religion while embracing a secular notion of salvation. But, conforming to a general pattern of escalation, he went much further than his hero in making Hindu nationalism an ideology of hate and violent revenge. In this he had learned the lessons of Wagner’s Germany most effectively: ‘Nothing makes the Self conscious of itself,’ Savarkar wrote, ‘so much as a conflict with [the] non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.’
The pathological hatred of foreigners that overcame Heinrich von Kleist also drove Savarkar. He lamented the ‘suicidal ideas about chivalry to women’ that prevented Hindu warriors of the past from raping Muslim women. (Savarkar’s emotional impairment is confirmed by his virtual silence about his marriage and family life in his autobiographical writings.) In his book on the Indian Mutiny in 1857, he carefully described European women and children being slaughtered by Indians during the risings. ‘A sea of white blood spread all over … body parts floated in it.’ He concluded the description of each atrocity with a gleefully specific reference to the historical injury thereby avenged.
Violence for Savarkar always seems to have been a form of emancipation. He relates in his autobiography how as a twelve-year-old boy he led a gang of schoolmates to vandalize his village mosque ‘to our heart’s content’. In his world view, revenge and retribution were essential to establishing racial and national parity and dignity. But the Hindus needed to have proper enemies against which to measure their manly selves.
To this end, Savarkar built a lurid narrative of Muslims humiliating Hindus; but he also played up Muslims’ ‘fierce unity of faith, that social cohesion and valorous fervour which made them as a body so irresistible’. He gushed enviously about the Prophet and the world dissemination of Islam through a deft use of the ‘sword’. His praise of Muslims, duty-bound to ‘reduce all the world to a sense of obedience to theocracy, an Empire under the direct supervision of God’, stressed all the qualities that he thought overly philosophical and politically fractious Hindus sorely lacked.
The Hindu self, in other words, needed to learn from the Muslim non-self. Indians had to abandon values like ‘humility, self-surrender and forgiveness’ and nurture ‘sturdy habits of hatred, retaliation, vindictiveness’. Indians had been misled by their metaphysical and religious traditions, such as Buddhism, which could not compete with the ‘fire and sword’ of India’s invaders. Moreover, they had to learn from the modern Europeans, who had defanged Islamic civilization, in another twist in the cycle of civilizations. Echoing Herzl’s notion of ‘Darwinian mimicry’, Savarkar hoped for Hindus to adapt themselves to, and then rise in, a world that was ‘red in tooth and claw’.
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