To what extent did Hinduism and particularly its modern, polemical avatar Hindutva originate in India, and how much of its aura—to speak the language of a spiritual Gen-Z—was conceived in unexpected and unlikely places? Likewise, how much of the celebratory Hindu identity has indeed been shaped in the 21st century, which has seen its most emphatic articulation? Is it conceivable that a significant dimension of this aggressive identity today actually originated outside our time and place? More pointedly, might one say that a significant part of it is actually an external construction by protagonists far removed from today’s vocal and violent champions? As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh steps into its second century, these questions make for a difficult but unavoidable reckoning.
The understanding of Hindutva as a significantly colonial and Victorian project with a sanitary morality rooted in prudish Protestantism is now fairly well-entrenched. Somak Biswas’ provocative book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940, offers a new twist to this tale by reinforcing the foreignness of the forces behind ideas of Hindutva as well as Hinduism. The book shows how crucial white Westerners were in crafting the idea of India and Hinduism, and in the nationalist conjunction of the two. An argument that offers a particularly harsh reality check is that the romantic engagement of white Westerners with India was rooted primarily in “upper-caste Hindu imaginaries”.
For Biswas, this engagement came to exist and prosper through influential networks around three key figures: Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Gandhi. His claim that all three shared pride in “Aryan civilisational greatness” is provocative. But it is equally important, as he notes, that this greatness found forceful global championship in the thoughts and works of notable Western followers, most significantly C.F. Andrews and Sister Nivedita who upheld “belief in Aryan superiority, borne by contemporary ‘scientific’ claims about the distinctiveness of this ‘racial stock’.”
If today’s Hindutva is indeed at least partially a construction of colonial India, these white Western disciples of the gurus were important links in that constructive machinery. As such, contemporary Hindutva’s investment in some of these figures (most significantly, Swami Vivekananda) cannot be dismissed as entirely opportunistic, particularly because we identify through these figures a lineage of liberal Hindu identity that has otherwise been established as distinguished and beneficial for Indian society.
This story was originally published in frontline.thehindu.com. Read the full story here.
