Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  He quoted, he referred to [the ancient lawmakers] Manu and Yagnyavalkya, very great men in our history, who have shaped India’s destiny. We admire them. They are among the heroes of our history. But, is it right for Shri N.C. Chatterjee or anyone to throw Manu and Yagnyavalkya at me and say what they would have done in the present conditions of India?

  N.C. Chatterjee: I am sorry, the Prime Minister was not here; [the law minister] Shri Pataskar threw them on me and I only reciprocated rightly.

  Jawaharlal Nehru: The point is, it is very unfair for Manu or Yagnyavalkya or anybody else to be brought in as a witness as to what should be done in the present conditions of India. The conditions are completely and absolutely different. I admit that there should be, and there are, undoubtedly, certain principles of human life which, normally speaking, do not change and should not change. There are certain bases of human life. But, in adapting them in legislation and other things, you have to consider the conditions as they are and not as they were 1,000 or 2,000 years ago …

  Now, we are often told, reminded, of the high ideals of Indian womanhood, Sita and Savitri. Well, everyone here, I take it, admires those ideals and thinks of Sita and Savitri and other heroines of India with reverence and respect and affection. Sita and Savitri are mentioned as ideals of womanhood for the women. I do not seem to remember men being reminded of Ramachandra and Satyavan, to behave like them. It is only the women who have to behave like Sita and Savitri, the men may behave as they like. No example is put forward before them. I do not know if Indian men are supposed to be perfect, incapable of any further effort or further improvement, but it is bad that this can be so. It cannot remain so, you cannot have it so under modern conditions, either modern democratic conditions or any conditions of modern life. You simply cannot have it. You cannot have a democracy, of course, if you cut off a large chunk of humanity, fifty per cent or thereabouts of the people, and put them in a separate class apart in regard to social privileges and the like. They are bound to rebel, and rightly rebel against that …

  Then again, it is said: ‘it is all very well. We are in favour of it, but it is not good enough unless you create economic conditions for the women’. That is an argument which may be considered valid logically, but, when applied to these things, it simply means: ‘Do not do this and you start the other. You have not done the first, you are doing the second.’ So, the real, basic approach is that nothing need be done. It is quite absurd. You have to make some beginnings somewhere. Of course, I entirely agree that the basic thing is economic condition, equality of economic opportunity. To some extent, I hope, another Bill which is following will do it. Let us go forward still in that line, but to stop a good Act because it does not completely meet the demands of the situation is never to do anything at all.

  The House will remember how it tried at first—that was not in this Parliament, but in the previous Parliament—how the then Government brought forward what they called the Hindu Code Bill, a huge document of hundreds of hundreds of pages. We considered it in various ways, introduced it in the House, referred it to committees. It was so big that we could never get through it. In fact, we never started properly with it, and it was patent that if we went through it, it might take a few years—all committee sittings and all that clause by clause consideration could not be done. Therefore, it was decided to split it up into several compartments and deal with each separately. This is the first part of it. The second I hope will be dealt with and sent to the Select Committee later. This is the only way to deal with human life. You cannot take every aspect, the condition of Indian women, all together, and improve it some way. Apart from the complication, the difficulty involved is that, simply the time element comes in and you rub up so many other groups and things and they object and say it is not practicable at all. Therefore, you have to take [them] one by one. We take this here now, and I hope we shall take something else next.

  I referred to Indian women and I said that I am no admirer of certain tendencies which are visible. They are not visible in Indian women only, they are visible elsewhere too, but I would beg of you again not to fall into the trap of appearing to criticize other countries or other women or other people in other countries about whom we know very little … [S]ome of us may have gone abroad, spent two or three weeks or months abroad, and formed some opinions. Is that the way you would like a foreigner to come to India and form an opinion of Indian society? You would not. When he comes here for two months and writes a book, you object highly because he has picked out some things which he dislikes and runs you down. He does not know the background of it. Now, if I go to Banaras, there are many things that I do not like in Banaras. The streets are not clean and this and that—there are many things. But Banaras evokes in me a thousand pictures of India’s history, of Buddha preaching in Sarnath, and a hundred other things happening, the whole seat of India’s culture and development and this and that. I am filled with India’s past history when I go to Banaras. When some tourist comes from abroad he sees the filth and dirt of the lanes of Banaras. They are both true, but it is something deeper than that. When we go abroad then we too fall into the same trap. We see some filth—social and otherwise—and think that that is the basis of society there. Do you think that the civilization of the West or your civilization or the civilization of any country has been built on these weak foundations, immoral foundations, low foundations? Do you think that any civilizations, any culture, can be built up on that loose basis? Obviously not. They may have been colonial powers—they have been colonial powers; they may have dominated over us—they have done so; they have done injury to us, but the fact is that they have built a great civilization in the last 200 or 300 or 400 years and you must find out the good and take the good from them. After all we have got to build ourselves on our own soil, basically on our own ideas, but keeping the windows of our minds open to the ideas, to the winds, that come from other countries, accepting them, because the moment we close ourselves up, that moment we become static. Whether we close ourselves up by law, by dogma, by religious dogma or any other kind of closure, it is preventing the growth of the spirit of man, and it is bad, for the individual, for the group and for the country. And it has been the greatness, I think, of the basic Hindu approach of life that it was not rigid. Whether in philosophy or anything else, as everybody knows, we have a way of civilization or a way of orthodoxy completely opposed to each other. We accept them: it is a good thing. There is a spirit of tolerance; a man may be an atheist and still not cease to be a Hindu. Maybe it is not religion in the ordinary sense of the word. But in regard to certain social practices, rigidity comes in. Rigidity comes in when you say you must not eat with so and so, you must not touch so and so. That rigidity is a thing which has weakened and brought many disasters on Hindu society. Now, we have to break that rigidity. I am glad we have broken and we are continuing to break the rigidity in regard to untouchability. I hope we shall break the rigidity due to these caste divisions. Now, in that context, it becomes important that you should break this rigid statute law or interpretation of law by judges which has brought about rigidity in regard to human relations in Hindu society. It is because of that that I welcome this, because it breaks that rigidity, as anybody who has read this Bill can see the conditions provided for divorce, etc., are not easy. They are pretty difficult. For any one to say that this is something which will let loose licentiousness all over India is fantastic. There is no basis in fact for that.

  So far as I am concerned, I do not propose to say anything about women in other countries … About the social fabric of other countries, I am not competent to judge … But I can say with considerable confidence, expressing my own faith, that the womanhood of India is something of which I am proud. I am proud of their beauty, grace, charm, shyness, modesty, intelligence and their spirit of sacrifice and I think if anybody can truly represent the spirit of India, it can be truly represented by the women of India and not by the men. So it is, and I may tell you that even now i
n the modern age, some women of India—not many—go out of India, maybe on some official or unofficial work, in commissions and the like. Every time that a woman has been sent, she has done well, not only done well, but produced a fine impression of the womanhood of India.

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  Chapter Sixteen

  The Hindu Supremacist

  M.S. Golwalkar

  In the early years of Independence, while the country was being united, the refugees of Partition being resettled, the princely states being integrated and the Constitution being forged, Nehru worked shoulder to shoulder with Vallabhbhai Patel, who was home minister as well as deputy prime minister. After Patel’s death in December 1950, Nehru had no equals in both party and government. He towered over the other members of his cabinet, who were in no position really to challenge him or his ideas. However, he had plenty of critics outside government, among them Mahadev Sadashiv Golwalkar.

  Golwalkar was born in February 1906, son of a headmaster. He studied in schools in small towns in central India before joining the Banaras Hindu University, where he did bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology. Later he also qualified as a lawyer from Nagpur. Golwalkar was well read in science and in the Hindu scriptures. He was also a formidable linguist, fluent in—among other tongues—Sanskrit, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and English.

  In 1931 Golwalkar met the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who was a doctor from Nagpur named K.B. Hedgewar. The RSS stood for a militant and muscular brand of Hinduism. It recruited young men who would prepare themselves for a lifetime of service to the ‘Hindu Rashtra’, namely, to the creation of a nation-state run for and by Hindus. Golwalkar’s intelligence and energy attracted Hedgewar, who adopted him as his protégé. He left Banaras and moved to Nagpur, where he took charge of running the RSS’s organization. On his mentor’s death in 1940 he was appointed the sarsanghchalak, or chief organizer of the RSS.

  Golwalkar was influenced by Swami Vivekananda’s call to worship the Motherland. He also admired Bal Gangadhar Tilak, for making culture so central to national identity and self-assertion. However, his love for India and Hindu culture went hand in hand with a demonization of the West and of what he saw as the enemy within. In his suspicion of individualism and his celebration of the organic community, Golwalkar, writes the political theorist Jyotirmaya Sharma, ‘displays a deep distrust of diversity’.

  Golwalkar saw three principal threats to the formation of a Hindu nation—Muslims, Christians and communists. All three were foreign in origin, and the last were godless to boot. Golwalkar saw Muslims, Christians and communists as akin to the demons, or rakshashas, of Indian mythology, with the Hindus as the avenging angels who would slay them and thus restore the goodness and purity of the Motherland. The RSS itself was projected by Golwalkar as the chosen vehicle for this national and civilizational renewal of the Hindus.

  After Gandhi’s murder in January 1948, Golwalkar was arrested and the RSS banned. This was because Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, had once been a member of the RSS and because Golwalkar had himself made very provocative speeches against Muslims and the Congress. He was released from prison and the organization unbanned in July 1949 after they agreed to abjure violence and accept the democratic principles of the Indian Constitution then being framed.

  In 1952 the Bengali politician Syama Prasad Mookerjee formed the Jana Sangh as a ‘Hindu-first’ political alternative to the Congress. Although it claimed to be a purely cultural organization, the RSS worked closely with the Jana Sangh, deputed workers to it and directed its ideology. (This link continues with the Jana Sangh’s successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party.) In its early years, the RSS was strong in Maharashtra, the home territory of both Hedgewar and Golwalkar. However, in the run-up to and aftermath of Partition, it greatly expanded its reach and influence in northern India. The communal riots had deeply polarized community and public opinion, as had Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir. A campaign to target the enemy within and the enemy without attracted considerable support in an atmosphere of tension and suffering. In the 1950s and 1960s, as tempers cooled in northern India, Golwalkar and the RSS worked to make their presence felt in the southern parts of the country as well.

  In the 1930s the RSS had professed admiration for the policies of the National Socialists in Germany. There are certainly some parallels between Golwalkar’s ideas and those of the Nazis—the mystical love of the Motherland, for example, and the hatred of the alien or the culturally impure (the Jews there, the Muslims here). Although references to the Nazis naturally disappeared in later years, Golwalkar’s speeches of the 1950s and 1960s still affirmed a blut-und-boden (blood and soil) kind of nationalism, in which the Hindus were the only true lovers of the nation. The philosophy of the RSS also promised the Hindus that, were they devoted and determined enough, they would enjoy a glory in the future that had apparently been theirs in the past.

  There were important Hindu right-wing thinkers before Golwalkar, such as V.D. Savarkar and Madan Mohan Malaviya. These may have been more subtle or sophisticated, but scarcely as effective or influential. Through his three decades as the head of the RSS, Golwalkar exercised a deep influence on the society and politics of modern India. A lifelong brahmachari, or celibate, he acquired, in the fashion of a typical Hindu guru, a cult of younger male acolytes. These went on to become chief ministers of large Indian states. Others acquired even more power, directing the affairs of the Central government in New Delhi. Thus, Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India between 1998 and 2004, and Lal Krishna Advani, home minister and deputy prime minister during the same period, were both, in a personal as well as ideological sense, disciples of the long-time head of the RSS. M.S. Golwalkar died in 1973.

  The Hindu Nation and Its Enemies

  Golwalkar worked chiefly in the oral mode, giving talks to groups of RSS workers in different parts of the country. His speeches were compiled in a book published in 1966 and entitled Bunch of Thoughts. The excerpts below define the elements of a putative Hindu nation and identify the threats to its coming into being.1

  The first requisite for a nation is a contiguous piece of land delimited as far as possible by natural boundaries, to serve as the substratum on which the nation has to live, grow and prosper. Then the second requisite is, the people living in that particular territory should have developed love and adoration for it as their motherland, as the place of their sustenance, their security and prosperity. In short, they should feel that they are the children of that soil.

  Then, that people should not be just a mass of men, just a juxtaposition of heterogeneous individuals. They should have evolved a definite way of life moulded by community of life-ideals, of culture, of feelings, sentiments, faith and traditions. If people thus become united into a coherent and well-ordered society having common traditions and aspirations, a common memory of the happy and unhappy experiences of their past life, common feelings of friendship and hostility, and all their interests inter-twined into one identical whole—then such people living as children of that particular territory may be termed a ‘nation’.

  If we apply this definition acknowledged by all the learned men in the world to our own country, we find that this great country of ours extending in the north from the Himalayas—with all its branches spreading north, south, east and west, and with the territories included in those great branches—right up to the Southern ocean inclusive of all the islands, is one great natural unit. As the child of this soil, our well-evolved society has been living here for thousands of years. This society has been known, especially in modern times, as the Hindu Society. This also is a historical fact. For, it is the forefathers of the Hindu People who have set up standards and traditions of love and devotion for the motherland. They also prescribed various duties and rites with a view to keep aglow in the people’s mind for all time to come, a living and complete picture of our motherland and devotion to it as a Divine Entity. And again it is they who shed their blood in defence of the san
ctity and integrity of the motherland. That all this has been done only by the Hindu People is a fact to which our history of thousands of years bears eloquent testimony. It means that only the Hindu has been living here as the child of this soil …

  When we say, ‘this is the Hindu Nation’, there are some who immediately come up with the question, ‘What about the Muslims and the Christians dwelling in this land? Are they not also born and bred here? How could they become aliens just because they have changed their faith?’ But the crucial point is whether THEY remember that they are the children of this soil. What is the use of merely OUR remembering? That feeling, that memory, should be cherished by THEM … But the question before us now is, what is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam or Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to its salt? Are they grateful towards this land which has brought them up? Do they feel that they are the children of this land and its tradition and that to serve it is their great good fortune? Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation.

  Nor does it end there. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They look to some foreign lands as their holy places. They call themselves ‘Sheikhs’ and ‘Syeds’. Sheikhs and Syeds are certain clans in Arabia. How then did these people come to feel that they are their descendants? That is because they have cut off all their ancestral national moorings of this land and mentally merged themselves with the aggressors. They still think that they have come here only to conquer and to establish their kingdoms. So we see that it is not merely a case of change of faith, but a change even in national identity. What else is it, if not treason, to join the camp of the enemy leaving their mother-nation in the lurch? …