by Amartya Sen
The BJP-led NCERT admitted some factual errors and promised to correct them (Madagascar, it was promised, would be returned to the Indian ocean). But there was no assurance on correcting the political slant imposed through selective omissions and chosen emphases to play up the Hindutva view of India. That, of course, belongs to the heart of the attempt to rewrite Indian history. The Hindu, a leading daily, put the gravity of the problem in perspective when it pointed to ‘the havoc that indifferent scholarship combining with a distorted ideology could cause in school education’.18
Indeed, in addition to the plethora of innocuous confusions and silly mistakes, there were also serious omissions and lapses in the government-sponsored Indian history. For example, one of the textbooks that was meant to teach Indian school children about the events surrounding India’s independence failed to mention the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political fanatic who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) – an omission of very considerable moment. More generally, the accounts given in these textbooks of the fight for India’s independence were powerfully prejudiced in the direction of the politics of Hindutva.19
Many Indians felt greatly alarmed at that time that the Hindutva movement would stop at nothing short of alienating India from its own past through their control over schools and textbooks. There was certainly a good case (based both on respect for history and on treasuring the inclusive character of Indian society) for taking the threat seriously, and the need to be alive to these issues remains strong today. There are many outstanding historians in India and they clearly have a protective role to play here; this is best done if the defence of history comes from a genuine commitment to history, not just from political opposition to the Hindutva view. As it happens, many well-established and respected Indian historians did question, with reasoned justification, the accuracy and authenticity of the claims made by Hindutva ideologues.
Despite the understandable panic, it was never easy to see how the Hindutva movement could succeed in making Indians accept a ‘reinvented past’, no matter how much control they might have had over educational policies in New Delhi. The redrawing of India’s history using the Hindutva lens suffers from some deep empirical problems as well as conceptual tensions. The nature of the problem that the BJP faced in trying to change India’s past can be illustrated with a simple example.
Given the priorities of Hindutva, the rewriting of India’s history tends to favour internal and external isolation, in the form of separating out the celebration of Hindu achievements from the non-Hindu parts of its past and also from intellectual and cultural developments outside India. But an ‘isolationist’ programme is particularly difficult to sustain, given the importance of extensive interactions throughout India’s history, both internally within the country and externally with the rest of the world. Thus, the isolationist perspective runs into severe conflict with many well-known aspects of India’s history.
The problem starts with the account of the very beginning of India’s history. The ‘Indus valley civilization’, dating from the third millennium BCE, flourished well before the timing of the earliest Hindu literature, the Vedas, which are typically dated in the middle of the second millennium BCE. The Indus civilization, or the Harappa civilization as it is sometimes called (in honour of its most famous site), covered much of the north-west of the undivided subcontinent (including what are today Punjab, Haryana, Sindh, Baluchistan, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat) – a much larger area than Mesopotamia and Egypt, which flourished at about the same time.20 It had many special achievements, including remarkable town planning, organized storage (of grain in particular), and extraordinary drainage systems (unequalled, if I am any judge, in the subcontinent in the following four thousand years).
There is obvious material here for national or civilizational pride of Indians. But this poses an immediate problem for the Hindutva view of India’s history, since an ancient civilization that is clearly pre-Sanskritic and pre-Hindu deeply weakens the possibility of seeing Indian history in pre-eminently and constitutively Hindu terms.
Furthermore, there is a second challenge associated with India’s ancient past, which relates to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (sometimes called Aryans) from the West, most likely in the second millennium BCE, riding horses (unknown in the Indus valley civilization), and speaking a variant of early Sanskrit (the Vedic Sanskrit, as it is now called). The Hindutva view of history, which traces the origin of Indian civilization to the Vedas has, therefore, the double ‘difficulty’ of (1) having to accept that the foundational basis of Hindu culture came originally from outside India, and (2) being unable to place Hinduism at the beginning of Indian cultural history and its urban heritage.
The Hindutva enthusiasts have also been great champions of so-called ‘Vedic mathematics’ and ‘Vedic sciences’, allegedly developed in splendid isolation in exceedingly ancient India. As it happens, despite the richness of the Vedas in many other respects, there is no sophisticated mathematics in them, nor anything that can be called rigorous science.21 There was, however, much of both in India in the first millennium CE (as was discussed in the first essay of this volume). These contributions were early enough in the history of mathematics and science to demand respectful attention, but the BJP-created proposed history textbooks tried, with little reason and even less evidence, to place the origin of some of these contributions in the much earlier, Vedic period.22
Thus, in the Hindutva theory, much hangs on the genesis of the Vedas. In particular: who composed them (it would be best for Hindutva theory if they were native Indians, settled in India for thousands of years, rather than Indo-Europeans coming from abroad)? Were they composed later than the Indus valley civilization (it would be best if they were not later, in sharp contrast with the accepted knowledge)? How ancient were the alleged Vedic sciences and mathematics (could they not be earlier than Greek and Babylonial contributions, putting Hindu India ahead of them)? There were, therefore, attempts by the Hindutva champions to rewrite Indian history in such a way that these disparate difficulties are simultaneously removed through the simple device of ‘making’ the Sanskrit-speaking composers of the Vedas also the very same people who created the Indus valley civilization!
The Indus valley civilization was accordingly renamed ‘the Indus-Saraswati civilization’, in honour of a non-observable river called the Sarasvatī which is referred to in the Vedas. The intellectual origins of Hindu philosophy as well as of the concocted Vedic science and Vedic mathematics are thus put solidly into the third millennium BCE, if not earlier. Indian school children were then made to read about this highly theoretical ‘Indus-Saraswati civilization’ in their new history textbooks, making Hindu culture – and Hindu science – more ancient, more urban, more indigenous, and comfortably omnipresent throughout India’s civilizational history.
The problem with this account is, of course, its obvious falsity, going against all the available evidence based on archaeology and literature. * To meet that difficulty, ‘new’ archaeological evidence had to be marshalled. This was done – or claimed to be done – in a much-publicized book by Natwar Jha and N. S. Rajaram called The Deciphered Indus Script, published in 2000.23 The authors claim that they have deciphered the as-yet-undeciphered script used in the Indus valley, which they attribute to the mid-fourth millennium BCE – stretching the ‘history’ unilaterally back by a further thousand years or so. They also claim that the tablets found there refer to Rigveda’s Sarasvatī river (in the indirect form of ‘Ila surrounds the blessed land’). Further, they produced a picture of a terracotta seal with a horse on it, which was meant to be further proof of the Vedic – and Aryan – identity of the Indus civilization. The Vedas are full of references to horses, whereas the Indus remains have plenty of bulls but – so it was hitherto thought – no horses.
The alleged discovery and decipherment led to a vigorous debate about the claims, and the upshot was the d
emonstration that there was, in fact, no decipherment whatever, and that the horse seal is the result of a simple fraud based on a computerized distortion of a broken seal of a unicorn bull, which was known earlier. The alleged horse seal was a distinct product of the late twentieth century, the credit for the creation of which has to go to the Hindutva activists. The definitive demonstration of the fraud came from Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, in a joint essay with Steve Farmer.24 The demonstration did not, however, end references in official school textbooks (produced by the NCERT during the BJP-led rule, ending only in May 2004) to ‘terracotta figurines’ of horses in the ‘Indus–Saraswati civilization’.
It is difficult to understand fully why a movement that began with pride in Hindu values, in which the pursuit of truth plays such a big part, should produce activists who would try to have their way not only through falsity but through carefully crafted fraud. Even though Marco Polo was not as impressed with what he saw in thirteenth-century south India as he was with central China, he did put on record, in a statement that is of some interest (even after discounting for the obvious exaggeration in it), his admiration for the commitment to truth that he found among the Indians he met: ‘They would not tell a lie for anything in the world and do not utter a word that is not true.’25 If that was indeed what Polo found, things have clearly moved on radically since then, with political inspiration playing an energetic part.
In a thrilling passage in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad from the first millennium BCE, young Śvetaketu’s father tells Śvetaketu about the manifestation of God in all beings (including Śvetaketu himself): ‘It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Śvetaketu, art it.’ That exchange has been much discussed in post-Upaniṣad Hindu philosophy. It would be rather sad to have to complete Śvetaketu’s education by adding to it a new postscript: ‘And just in case thou art not all that, we will fix it with a bit of cleverness in reconstructing reality!’ In trying to invent Indian history to suit the prejudices of Hindutva, the movement took on a profoundly contrary task. The task is particularly hard to achieve given what is known about India’s long history. The unadorned truth does not favour the Hindutva view, and the adorned falsity does not survive critical scrutiny.
The Miniaturization of India
The size of Indian religious literature and the manifest presence of a profusion of religious practices across the country have to be balanced, as was discussed in the last essay, against the vigour and persistence of sceptical thought throughout Indian history. I have already discussed, in Essay 1, the historical relevance of the sceptical tradition both judged as a part of India’s intellectual world, and also for its relevance to the development of science and mathematics as well as the politics of tolerance and secularism in India.
However, scepticism about religion need not always take the combative form of resisting religious pronouncements. It can also find expression as deep-seated doubts about the social relevance and political significance of differences in the religious beliefs of different persons. Despite the veritable flood of religious practices in India, there is also a resilient undercurrent of conviction across the country that religious beliefs, while personally significant, are socially unimportant and should be politically inconsequential. Ignoring the importance – and reach – of this underlying conviction has the effect of systematically overestimating the role of religion in Indian society.*
This claim might seem peculiarly implausible for a country in which allegedly religious conflicts have been extremely prominent in the recent past, and in which they seem to influence a good part of contemporary politics as well. We have to distinguish, however, between (1) evident societal tensions that we may see between pugnacious spokesmen of communities identified by different religious ancestries (often led by sectarian activists), and (2) actual religious tensions in which the contents of religious beliefs are themselves material. Indeed, even when the enthusiasts for religious politics in India have been successful in playing up religious differences, they have worked mainly through generating societal frictions in which the demographic correlates of religion have been used to separate out the communities for selective roguery (as happened, to a great extent, in Gujarat in 2002). In this, the finery of religious beliefs has typically played little or no part.* It is important to appreciate the distinction between religious strifes, on the one hand, and political discords based on utilizing communal demography, on the other.26
It is possible that even the process of exploiting the classificatory divisiveness of religious demography, including the violence associated with it, is running into substantial resistance in contemporary India. The use of militant ‘Hindutva’ may have worked well in the state elections in December 2002 in strife-torn Gujarat, with whipped-up hysteria (much as the frenzy of pre-partition riots had ‘communalized’ Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the 1940s). But as the delirium quietened, the excitement of Hindutva activism delivered very little to sectarian politics in the four state elections held a few months later, in February 2003. After four successive defeats, including losing control of the state of Himachal Pradesh, a versatile – and revamped – BJP changed its tactics and went on to win handsomely at the polls in three out of four state elections in November 2003, mainly by prominently shifting the focus of its campaign to developmental issues (in particular ‘roads, electricity and water’), with religious demography taking, by and large, a back seat.
However, the issue of divisiveness had not gone away, and surfaced again, in a big way, in the Indian general elections in May 2004. There is considerable evidence that the sectarian as well as economic divisiveness of the BJP did cost it considerable support across the country. Much has been written about the fact that the BJP’s slogan ‘India shining!’ (which tried to take credit for the elevated growth rate and other economic buoyancy in India) backfired, since large groups of people, especially many among the poor, particularly the rural poor, had not received much of a share of the prosperity that the urban rich had enjoyed. But in addition to that economic infraction, it was possible for Congress and other parties outside the BJP-led alliance to make good electoral use of the anxiety and revulsion generated by the BJP through its cultivation of sectarianism and the targeting of minorities, which made the BJP look like a very divisive force in India.
Any set of election results, especially in a country as large as India, would tend to carry the impact of many different types of influences, and there cannot be any single-factor explanation of the different electoral outcomes. But looking through the nature of the electoral reverses of the BJP and its allies in the recent elections, including the total – or near-total – demise of the ‘secular’ parties in alliance with the BJP, it is difficult to miss a general sense of grievance about the neglect of secular concerns by parties which were not formally signed up for the Hindutva agenda. Not only were the voters keen on bringing down the BJP itself a notch or two, but it looks as if the ‘secular’ support that the BJP allies delivered to the BJP-led alliance was particularly imperilled by the Hindutva movement’s aggressive – and sometimes violent – undermining of a secular India and the complete failure of the BJP’s allies to resist the extremism of Hindutva.
In particular, the violence in Gujarat, especially aimed at Muslims, left a lasting mark on the BJP’s image, and received much attention across the country. The concession by the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the leader of the defeated BJP, that the Gujarat killings had been a major influence in the BJP’s defeat, seemed to be saying what was obvious to many.* But – not surprisingly – the less moderate part of the Hindutva leadership has reacted to this concession with unconcealed venom, making Vajpayee swallow most of his words of concession.
It is important to understand the hold of the sceptical tradition in India, despite the manifest presence of religions all across the country. In responding to the exploitation of religious demography in the politics of Hindutva, the defenders of secular politics
often take for granted that the Indian population would want religious politics in one form or another. This has led to the political temptation to use ‘soft Hindutva’ as a compromise response by secularists to the politics of ‘hard Hindutva’. But that tactical approach, which certainly has not given the anti-BJP parties any dividend so far, is foundationally mistaken. It profoundly ignores the strength of scepticism in India, which extends to religions as well, particularly in the form of doubting the relevance of religious beliefs in political affairs. Indeed, the tolerance of heterodoxy, and acceptance of variations of religious beliefs and customs, is deep rooted in India.
Rabindranath Tagore thought that the ‘idea of India’ itself militates ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’.27 Through their attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India – proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present – and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism. In the confrontation between a large and a small India, the broader understanding can certainly win. But the battle for the broad idea of India cannot be won unless those fighting for the larger conception know what they are fighting for. The reach of Indian traditions, including heterodoxy and the celebration of plurality and scepticism, requires a comprehensive recognition. Cognizance of India’s past is important for an adequate understanding of the capacious idea of India.