CHAPTER 19 POITU VAREIN : INDIA, HINDUTVA AND HISTORY
by Suranya Aiyar
CHAPTER 19: POITU VAREIN
Finally, after nearly a year, I come to the end of
this paper. The Tamil version of goodbye fits well here: “I go now, and will be
back”. For if this work is read, then I am sure that people will have plenty to
say and ask of me. If it is not, then I will be back with another attempt to
force you into a conversation!
Now for the summing up.
For me, the most profound experience working on this
paper was……discovery! One starts writing with a map and destination in mind.
But this time, though I arrived at the place that I had intended all along,
which is a secular India that celebrates her diversity, my understanding of the
country is vastly different to what it was before.
Also my understanding of myself as an Indian. At
journey’s end, I have made the gratifying discovery that in being the mixed
creature that I am: half Sikh and half Tam Bram; a South Indian raised in North
India; English speaking with a taste for Sanskrit kavya; mad about Hindustani
and Carnatic music; believing in everything at once – Hinduism, sufism,
Sikhism, Christianity; married to a Jat Sikh with distant connections to Rajasthani
royalty; I need never have thought of myself as an anomaly in India, that is,
Bharat.
For, in my very hybridity and self-invention, and more
than that, in the fascination and education that everything Indian holds for me,
from the chatter of my village-raised maids to the magnificent temples of
Tanjore, I am and always have been quintessentially Indian. Maybe this is why I feel
so compelled, so helplessly driven to keep fighting for this, the only real and
true India.
What an experiment in humanity. What a lesson in all
things good and beautiful. And what a travesty to let it be destroyed by the uneducated
thugs of Hindutva.
What stands out, towering above everything else and
visible from every direction, like the massive monoliths with which this
history began, is how ancient and deeply rooted are the values of pluralism and
secularism in India. This survey of over 2000 years of history consistently shows India to
have always diverse, with a multiplicity of peoples, cultures, languages and religions. These peoples were melded together in a remarkable early example
of a public ethos of harmonious co-existence, the locus of which was not, as is
sometimes wrongly thought, Hinduism, but the kings who ruled India, and the wider
region that I have called Greater Asia.
By now the reader would have seen in chapter upon
chapter, the openness, tolerance and cosmopolitanism that has marked our rulers
from the time of Ashoka, through the Satvahanas, Pallavas, Gangas, Pandyas, Cholas,
Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas of the first millennium; to the Hoysalas, Yadavas, Vijayanagaris,
Bahmanis, Deccan Sultans, Nayakas and Marathas of the second millennium.
The South Indian kings did not see themselves as
religious crusaders or defenders of any faith. That they went into battle with
the names of their gods on their lips has been deliberately misunderstood by
the Hindu Right. This is how we fight even today. I wonder if it is possible to
be willing to die without consigning your soul to god.
The kings had mixed armies, and their courts reflected
the ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity of the people. The courts were
not just locally diverse, but international hubs for warriors, artists,
thinkers and brilliant men of all races and backgrounds.
They were a magnet for talent and enterprise, as the
great metropolises of the First World are today. There was no petty insularity
and none of the modern Indian propensity to judge a man by his race and
religion.
The courts were open to all gifted men, and actively
sought them out. Poets, philosophers, painters and musicians moved between
different courts, even when the reigning kings had fought each other.
The only ones to escape this cultural and religious
hybridity were the non-fighting and non-courtly Brahmins who remained pinned to
their agraharas and temples in tiny enclaves around the deep South below the
River Kaveri. These Brahmins who did not participate in the wider world were
able to live in a bubble of insularity that was an exception, and not the rule,
to the hybridity of the Deccan.
And these Brahmins were themselves a sub-class of
Brahmins. There is no reason for Tamil Brahmins today to look upon the
constricted cultural and social world of these pujaris, mamis and petites
functionaire of the Madras Presidency as their only heritage.
Orthodoxy and austerity are not the only legacy of the
Brahmin. Look at your own families – in my father’s generation, it was those
who left the old ways who did well. Today your sons and daughters abroad, who
are marrying foreigners and discarding the old rituals and taboos, are the ones
who are flourishing.
I understand the sentiment that attaches to one’s
heritage, but it is possible with a little imagination to carry that heritage,
and to yet be modern and liberal. There is a rich artistic and political legacy
that has been left by the courtly Brahmin that we can take pride in, and draw
from in finding our place in India and the world today.
We have all this, as well as the contribution of Tamil
Brahmins to science, industry, philosophy, the arts and nation-building in
modern India to hold as our legacy and heritage.
Gandhiji’s first trip after returning to India from
South Africa was to Madras. It was the elite Brahmins there who endorsed him,
and introduced him to the rest of the nation as the leader to back in the
struggle against the British. They knew of Gandhi’s work with the Indian
diaspora against colonialism in South Africa from their own businesses and
settlements there. That they were able to identify Gandhi’s brilliance and
importance before he became a “Mahatma” is to the credit of the whole
community.
A historic favour done to India which is now being
undone by the historic mistake of supporting and endorsing Narendra Modi.
The first hard break in this governing tradition came
with British rule – partly as a result of their ignorance of this aspect of Greater
Asian society; and partly as a conscious policy of manipulating sectarian
differences here to their advantage. The ethos of communal harmony was restored
by our Freedom Struggle, and it is suffering its second historical break under
the Modi Regime.
When this is understood, then the Sangh Parivar is revealed
to not be the voice that it claims to be of our ancient civilisation. Rather,
its beliefs and practices violate Indian traditions of cosmopolitanism, secularism
and multiculturalism of thousands of years’ vintage.
Traditionally, there was no idea of cultural
homogeneity or race solidarity in South India. Hinduism, as we know, made a
point of emphasising intra-ethnic separation through caste. We have also seen
in this paper how, from the time of the Mauryas at least, South Indian kings and
chiefs often came from religious, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds that were
different to those of their subjects, and even of their queens. Religion, language
and ethnicity did not define kings or kingship.
The kings were, first and foremost, warriors. Then they were administrators. Then they were aesthetes. It was they who were the builders of temples and other monuments. It was they who cultivated the literature and arts of the times. It was they and their subjects as a body, with all their different religions, languages and ethnicities, who were the creators and custodians of this heritage.
The temples built by kings played a number of secular functions, all of which were more important than their religious one. Afterall, prayer could be done anywhere. Temples were a regal symbol; sometimes they served as commemorative monuments to victories in battle; and, always, they acted as a canvas for the king’s most public celebration of art and culture. His own, together with that of his subjects.
Some part of the espousal of Hindutva by Tamil Brahmins
appears to come from a resentment against the sharp anti-caste politics of the
last century in South India. I have some sympathy for this, for it is not as
though the orthodox Brahmin has been the sole upholder of caste in our society.
Caste and “jat” are the social framework in which all the traditional
communities of India live and have lived, even those who belong to the
so-called lower or excluded castes, and even those who are not Hindu.
Last year, there was a brief outburst against the
revolutionary reformist and anti-caste ideologue, Periyar, as part of a campaign
among Hindutva-minded Tamil Brahmin musicians against the conferment of a
prestigious award to the Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna. They opposed TM Krishna
for going against the orthodoxy in various ways, and most particularly for singing
songs written by Periyar, whom they in turn accused of having viciously
targeted Brahmins as a community.
As I followed the controversy, it struck me that Periyar’s
was an early example of what would today be called structural critique and
identity politics in Europe and America. There is no doubt that the language of
this politics is acutely unfriendly to whichever group it claims has
perpetuated structural inequality and historic wrongs.
Taken at its word, such language is abusive and
intimidating. But the fact is that on the ground, the real life that goes on
outside of the sharp talk of such politics is not as divided or threatening as
it sounds. The long association between Periyar and C. Rajagopalachari, who was
a Brahmin, provides an interesting example of this (634).
Even so, I do not believe that structural critique is
the best way to deal with issues of social justice. Sharp rhetoric and taking
arguments to their extreme is an exercise best reserved for philosophers. In
fact, it was Western academics who invented post-structuralist politics in the
first place.
I believe that on issues of social justice better
results can be obtained on the ground with tact, civility and, again, a little
imagination. As I said in the introductory chapter, we have many other
instruments than disputation and “paying back in kind” to deal with our differences
and grudges. We have humour, forgiveness, looking the other way, agreeing to
disagree, enjoying each others’ food and festivals, being the bigger one in a fight,
looking ahead to the future instead of backwards to the past, and all the other
things that we humans draw on in our relations with each other when we decide
that we would rather be friends than foes.
This is a level of compassion and maturity that
post-modernist university professors can sometimes sorely lack, but we do not
have to behave like them in turn.
It is not as though Tamil Brahmins have always been blindly
conservative. Tamil Brahmins often led reform and modernisation in Indian
society. Like my great grandfather who, in the late 1800s, repudiated the
practice of child widowhood to educate my great aunt instead of placing her
into confinement when her betrothed died in childhood. Being from the educated
classes, Tamil Brahmins were often among the first in Indian society to
recognise the value of modernisation and the injustice of the old ways.
In this context, on identity politics, I can see the unfairness in making people feel that they have to be held accountable for historic wrongs for which they were not individually responsible, and may well themselves condemn. In the end, no society benefits by making any one of its constituents feel under siege. To some extent, the rise of the Alt Right in the West is a backlash against this type of politics.
But Tamil Brahmins have to remember that a blindly pugilistic politics is not the right or ultimately effective response to identity politics. Identity and vote bank politics is written into the fabric of democratic party politics. Is there any democratic country in the world without some version of it?
Tamil Brahmins who are riled up about identity politics and what the Hindu Right calls “vote bank” politics need to take a step back and take stock of the many benefits that have accrued to them individually and as a group from the democratic and liberal social order in India and elsewhere in the world where they have settled.
Moreover, such politics is not always a negative thing for society. It acts as a short-form for expressing solidarity and inclusiveness, both of which are always precariously poised in a diverse and disparate society like ours. In a country with deep inequalities, a Hindu majority that towers in numbers over the other religious communities, and limited resources that cannot possibly remedy everyone’s problems, identity-based interventions can go a long way in making people feel that they have a stake in holding together as a society, no matter what their circumstances and background.
This is something that we all benefit from. It secures the environment of stability and security that we all need in order to organise our lives and endeavour to fulfil our aspirations. It is the best way to address historic discrimination and present inequalities. Let us learn to see it as a way of extending a hand of friendship to the others in our community, and leave it there for the moment. Let the other arguments wait until all our fellow Indians are in a better material and social position.
I notice that in discussion about the caste system, or
about the role of Brahmins in India, there is never any acknowledgement of the
modest means of the vast majority of Tamil Brahmins. This is not to say that
other communities in South India may not be worse off. But the way they are
spoken of sometimes, no one would guess at the rather limited material circumstances
of most Tamil Brahmins, and how hard they have had to work to establish
themselves in whatever field.
While Tamil Brahmins were born into a certain position
of social respect and cultural prestige, that was not the same as a silver
spoon, which most of them did not have. The limits on seats available to them
in educational institutions and public employment in Tamil Nadu did not help.
No doubt, they survived, and many of them thrived. An
example is my own enterprising grandfather who decided as a young man that
Tamil Nadu and the old way of life in the agrahara, even though he was the son
of zamindars, had nothing to offer him.
Many Tam Brams like him left South India to find
better opportunities up north. In the last few decades there has also been a
huge rise in the wealth of many in the community as large numbers of its young have
found lucrative jobs as professionals in information technology, finance, law
and business management in Europe and America.
Despite this, the resentment at having been unfairly
squeezed in an already tight situation is real, and not entirely unreasonable. Moreover,
it is a loss for the whole country that this talent left our shores. But as
educated and civilized people who have done extremely well notwithstanding some
challenges, we Tamil Brahmins do not have the right to be led by our
resentment.
Look at the price that is being paid for taking
revenge on history through Hindutva. Here I mean the special history of the
last century of the Tamil Brahmins, and not the false Hindutva-history of India.
Our culture is daily getting
degraded under the reign of the Hindu Right. Take the thumping
beats of H-pop. This is techno music for young Hindutva recruits. It is breathy and pumping. It creates the
sort of effect that over-sexed teenagers go for like bees to honey. No one
would guess that the music was supposed to be “religious” were it not for the
token reference to Ram or Shiva in the refrain.
The sexualised make-over of Hindutva runs deeper than
a publicity stunt to attract the youth. After weeks of being told to go f---
Pakistanis in the trolling by Hindutva activists that I mentioned in the
opening chapter, it dawned on me that there was a deep underlying sexually-related
feeling of inadequacy among these people. I don’t bring this up just for
laughs. There is an inner vulnerability among the constituents of the Hindu
Right that has been cleverly and rather ruthlessly exploited by their leaders.
One way in which they do
this is by flooding social media with revised images of Hindu gods and deities.
The monkey god Hanuman has become a scowling lion. This has been made into a
car sticker.
The new Ganesha has abandoned his usual pose, which was seated, with the broken-off tusk in his hand, poised to start writing to Vyasa’s dictation. Oh no, the new Ganesha prefers the gym to the writing-desk. He has lost his pot belly, broken out in muscles, and appears to be wearing Viking boots.
Neo-Hindu imagery of Hindutva. A scowling lion-like Hanuman.
The conversion of monkey to
lion and the dropping of Ganesha’s pot-belly are revealing of how de-racinated
and embarrassed of our traditions the Hindutva brigade truly is, even as it
accuses everyone else of these things.
This has to be the reason for the tacky depictions of gods with flying hair, six-pack abs and sharply cut features in the neo-Hindu imagery of the Hindu Right. There is no attempt to disguise the fact that these re-vamped images of Hindu deities are meant to evoke Western super-heroes and anime characters. Why would you do that unless you believed that the old gods were not good enough?
The replacement of the eloquent serenity in the
carvings and drawings of our gods with the aggression of the new Hindutva
imagery is not simply an aesthetic infraction of a 1400-year-old tradition. It is
a repudiation of the moral message contained in that tradition.
Hindutva wants the young to be angry and physically
aggressive. This is the implementation of one of the many wrong and distorted
ideas of the founding fathers of Hindutva, which is that Hindus were weak and
unmanly, and hence gave in to thousands of years of “ghulami” (slavery) to
others.
I do not know which Hindus those founders of Hindutva
had in mind. The pages of this paper are filled with the histories of valorous
Indian rajas who were Hindu. The martial prowess of our warrior clans is
world-renowned. Many of them are Hindu. But for some reason Hindutva ideologues
have always been obsessed with this idea of manning-up Hindus. This is why under
the British Raj they pathetically imitated English Boy Scouts in their khaki
shorts and pulled-up socks.
But the pot-bellied uncle who held Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh meetings in the form of hasya yoga exercises in the park downstairs, has now been replaced with a new and frightening sort of young man. In North India, it is clear that the matts, deras and other religious hubs are being used to recruit young, aggressive and jobless men as the foot-soldiers of Hindutva.
During the Kawaria Yatra season
they zoom around on their motorbikes in orange bandanas, breaking traffic rules
in a show of power, and intimidating the public. They hold up traffic in tempos
loaded with enormous speakers blasting aggressive H-pop.
If you drive through
Uttarakhand at any time of the year, you will see road-side “langars” and
parades blasting H-pop with menacing young men hanging around, many of whom
look drunk.
These are serious and dangerous developments that are bad for our society. It is time to wake up and realise that there have to be limits to the desire to show TM Krishna his place or to avenge yourself for your children being kept out of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras by reservations!
continued after photos below
There is a deep lack of confidence in confronting
modernity among the adherents of Hindutva with their hitherto limited and
closed-off lives. I cannot imagine what it must be like to come from a milieu
that has had no break from the conventions of a thousand or more years, and
moreover, which were developed in the context of a strict ascetic lifestyle,
out of sync with natural human instincts and needs. But it has left millions of
young aspirational Indians spiritually at sea in contending with modernity.
This is an existential crisis to which the easiest
response is a doubling down on your traditional identity. This offers a
reassuring certainty in an age of deep uncertainty about the things that we
come from.
But it does not have to be this way. The sense of uncertainty about our past evaporates once we acquire a deeper understanding of it by going beyond its rituals and mores. Once we go beneath surface conventions to their underlying values then we can see, straight and true, the connection of our present with our past. This is what I have tried to demonstrate in this paper.
One of the things that was thrown at me during my run-in
with Hindutva trolls last January, was the question of how I could say that I
was a Hindu when my father was an atheist and my mother a Sikh.
I had never thought of it like that before. It seemed
like an odd question for an Indian, especially a Hindu, to ask. One simply
absorbs all the traditions and religious influences around, and they appeal to
you or not.
Maybe if I had been told that it was wrong to be a
Hindu, I might not have grown up to think of myself as one. But no one ever said
that to me. This is not how secularists speak. If the question was asked genuinely,
then my answer is that you have a grave misconception about what Indian
secularists believe in. Secularists do not make an enemy of any religion. They
just believe that religion is a personal matter, and should not be imposed on
anyone.
Most Indian secularists are spiritual and religious.
They simply reject ritualism and all the trappings of religion - not its core
message. As an atheist, my father is in a minority even among secularists. He
says that he does not believe in god and genuinely seems to believe that. Personally,
I have never been able to understand atheism – not from a moral point of view,
but as an epistemology! I am not able to adopt the perspective of those who say
that they do not believe in god. How, then, do they find meaning in life?
In the case of my father, I find his atheism all the
more puzzling because he is such a deeply humane man. He is not in the least
cynical or nihilistic as atheists can be. I have often wondered how someone who
is so full of kindness and generosity, and with such a love of life, can be an
atheist. Over the years I came to the conclusion that his is actually an
inverted version of my own attitude – while I see god everywhere, he does not
see him anywhere, and somehow, it comes to the same thing!
Both my grandmothers were devout. My paternal grandmother, Bhagyam, moved into the Sivananda Ashram in Rishikesh before I was born. When she would visit, she would talk to me about meditation and spirituality, and conduct prayers.
I would wake up to find her in her morning meditation. Then
when she joined the family, she would give me a report on how it had gone. Once,
she told me that she had been naughty as flashes of the show Laurel and Hardy
had kept coming into her mind. Another time she told me that she kept thinking
of cheese, which she oughtn’t even to be eating!
She would tell me stories from Hindu mythology in a
philosophical spirit, as lessons for life and morality. If you had asked her
whether Ram was a mythological or historical figure, she would have shrugged
and told you a moral story about him.
At the end of her life, as she was in our home dying from
cancer, her mind almost entirely gone, she would repeat god’s name over and
over, lying on her bed in the foetal position: “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama,
Rama…..”.
My father would come home from work in the evening and
lie on the bed beside her, curling himself around her, holding her hand in his.
Years later, my mother brought my maternal grandmother,
Teji, to our home when she was in her final illness. Towards the end, dementia had
taken her mind away almost completely, except for snatches of some kirtans. I
remember entering her room and watching her gibbering helplessly through the
day, but emerging almost miraculously from time to time into a few seconds of
lucidity to sing a line along with the kirtan playing on the recorder.
So this is how my grandmothers died. In the same way, calling
out to god. Only the name of the god was different. Looking back, I believe
that god was ever present in my home in those days in the devotion of my
parents to theirs.
This is what I come from. This is the life of a secular Indian.
I think that I should end by
saying that I did not write this paper because I hate India or Hinduism. I was
brought up to be religious or not as I pleased. But I always only ever thought
of myself as Hindu.
I had stayed in touch out of
sentiment with the pujari who had conducted my wedding – I had insisted on a
proper Tamil ceremony. When the Covid lockdown was imposed, my first thought
was for the dancers and musicians that I work with. How would they manage with
all public gatherings banned? My next thought was for the pujaris who do homams
in people’s houses. How would they survive the ban on social gatherings?
I called my wedding pujari in
Tamil Nadu to ask how he was doing. It became clear that pujaris like him were
not receiving anything from the temples. A really gross injustice when you
think of how much treasure those temples have.
I sent across what little I could, and commissioned some “online” pujas for my family’s health to help this pujari and his group of priests tide over the lockdown.
Last year in May, I was to
turn fifty and decided to fulfil the dream of a lifetime to have a yagya at
home with hundreds of priests as I used to read about in Amar Chitra Kathas in
my childhood! I asked the pujari who gently suggested that instead of hundreds,
I should have a Maha Rudra Yagya with fifty two priests.
The yagya was sublime. I
kept alternating between a state of inner bliss and catching my breath at
the loveliness of the spectacle. The fire, the beautifully be-robed gods and
goddesses, the flowers, the patterns with powdered rice, haldi and kumkum, the
uplifting hum of the chanting.....no one could have resisted this religion had it
been open to everyone.
When all the priests had
arrived and the chanting was in full swing, I looked around noting the rich timbre
of their voices and a certain practiced mobility that they all seemed to have about
the jaw. All the hallmarks of the orator.
It put me in mind of my
father and uncles who are forever holding forth on something or other. This is
where we Tam Brams get the gift of the gab from, I thought. Centuries of Vedic
chanting.
My father and uncles will never have thought of it as such, but to my eye, their fierce intellectualism and sharp wit, their refusal to suffer fools gladly, was all Tam Bram. It always made me smile that they could not see that.
As for India, I love India. Maybe India is the greatest love of my life. I used to think that the greatest loves of my life were my children, but when at one point around this time last year when police action was being threatened against me by random members of the Hindutva public for my stand on the temple inauguration at Ayodhya, I did not hesitate a moment in the cause of what I saw to be the fight for India, no matter what the consequences for my family.
I am sometimes told that I
am brave, but I don’t know if this is just the Dutch courage that comes from
being angry. Or maybe the truth is that all courage is Dutch……We were on a
driving tour of Rajasthan on the 4th of June last year, when the
results of the General Election began to come in. By lunch time we had reached
our hotel, and it was clear that Modi would not be making it to “400-paar”. What
is more, he was getting a drubbing in Uttar Pradesh, the heart of Hindutva
politics. He was losing in Ayodhya! Then he began to lose in all the places
that Ram had stopped in the Ramayana!
It was delicious. But not as
delicious as that moment when I caught myself looking across the table at my
son, and not saying goodbye to him in my mind for the first time in months…..My
daughter I never had any worries about. She has an almost super-human
resilience. Don’t know where she gets it from…When I told her that I might be
going to jail, she told me to stop being a show-off!
Actually, one is scared all
the time but just keeps going, pulled along willy nilly by this relentless inner
compulsion ….
As I came to the end of
writing this paper, and the moment of its publication drew near, I could not
understand why my sleep was getting disturbed. Then early one morning I woke up
with a gasp from a dream of being frogmarched to jail by a Russian Stasi-like guard
when a hand came from behind and brushed me on the back with a white powder. I
woke up with the word “Novichak!” ricocheting about my head.
This is the degree of stress
at the thought of going public again on the subjects that I had raised last
January. And just the other day we were a democracy, free to say whatever we
liked….
It is not that I myself in
the waking state assess the situation in the country to be that bad…not yet. It
was headed there, and then, with Narendra Modi being cut to size in the General
Election, seems to have changed course somewhat. But I get discomposed by the
fear in people’s eyes when they whisper to me that I am doing a “great job”.
I will not leave my children
to such a cowed and silenced country. I am going to fight, and you morons from
the Hindu Right can bring it on. But, Tam Brams, let us be clear. I am not
fighting you. I am fighting for you. Stop the madness, and come over to my
side.
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