From Sanskritisation to Hindi-isation and Hindu-isation:
The 13th Lok Saba

Ranjit Sau, Economic and Political Weekly

The Gandhi-Nehru project was flawed at the core; it was an oxymoron par excellence. When caught in an inevitable bind it was converted into a Nehru-Gandhi script. In the 1999 general election campaign the Congress president proclaimed, should her party return to power in Delhi, electric power would be given free to farmers. The audience at Andhra Pradesh hustings, where she spoke, had a rib-rocking laugh to the point of tears. The specter of Indira Gandhi with her crude joke of ‘garibi hatao’ flashed in their mind. Here, again, the same dress, the same voice, the same glycerin tears, the same agenda: a dynasty, all dressed up visibly on the podium – the eerie shadow of Indira Gandhi is stalking the land again, they thought. This is the signature tune of the 13th Lok Sabha: the next reels will show a suspense-thriller with usual Bollywood masala.

It is too early to make a detailed analysis of the general election. However, the immediate causes of the Congress downfall are fairly straightforward: the party has no coherent story to tell the voters, its words ring hollow, its network of local organization is worn out. But that does not solve the other side of the mystery, namely, the success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the polls. What makes BJP an attractive choice? What does BJP have that Congress doesn’t? Why is the Nehru-Gandhi flip a flop? We begin our narration from this end.

Gandhi-Nehru Handloom

We all do two elementary productions, namely, propagation of species and procurement of subsistence, at two sites respectively: family and firm. Families assemble to build a society, and firms come to make the economy. To co-ordinate it all springs up another sector, the polity. A nation thus has three parts: society, economy and polity; they interact and seek an equilibrium.

India has several religions. Its society is said to be in equilibrium when each religious group ceases to have relative internal adjustment and there is no further proselytisation, that is conversion from one faith to another. The equilibrium has thus two facets: intra-religion and inter-religion tranquillity. The economy operates within the infrastructure provided by the society and polity, but it can and does have a bearing upon the latter two as well. The polity is most agile; it responds mostly to the impulse from society and economy. It has some degree of autonomy, of course. The system consisting of these three parts evolves with its own momentum and absorbs external shocks. We shall view India through this lens of general equilibrium.1

In shaping modern India Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru had, as it were a division of labour. Gandhiji mended the society and Panditji looked after the economy, while both of them were steering the polity. The exercise appears, no doubt, a bit hazardous. The scene reminds us of the case of two persons riding on one horse and racing the same three horses at the same time. So it was.

Gandhiji envisaged India as a society of permanently discrete communities, divided along lines of religion and each subdivided by varna, caste or similar other ascriptive marks.2 The glue that is supposed to hold the disparate elements together is his doctrine of faith in all faiths: Iswar Allah tere naam. But clearly the patchwork may not be sturdy enough. For it perpetuates the sharp edges of demarcation and brings frictions and bruises. At the operational level it is even more volatile. Despite his grand scheme of Hindu-Muslim unity the Mahatma rejected inter-dining and inter-marriage. Once he declined to have dinner in the company of his Muslim friends Mohamed Ali and his brother on the tenuous argument that eating is a privately performed sanitary routine of life. He condemned Hindi-Muslim inter-marriage as incest [Bose 1998: 2094]. Clearly Gandhiji was building his castle on quicksands. 3

For harmonious living two communities must not only recognize each other’s religion as legitimate; they must also know and respect each other’s intra-religion ‘caste’ structure. Mere ‘tolerance’ of religions is not enough. For example, a Hindu grocery-store-owner has to be aware of the social prestige of a Muslim scholar-theologian, ulema, in the latter’s own community, and pay him equal respect in full, rather than throw him out as ‘impure’ from the shop’s doorstep. The problem would be compounded when the respective caste ranks of two communities do not map one-to-one and monotonously. I have not found any evidence that would indicate that Gandhiji had time even to address the question, let alone answer it. In a word, the societal vision of Gandhiji was incomplete, underdeterminate, and inconsistent while, his own behavior on related occasions was inscrutable.

Gandhiji said a great deal on simple village life, civilization, charkha, and all that. However, his utterances on economic matters do not add up to a coherent whole. His insistence on cottage and village industries, spinning wheel, handloom, etc, belonged to a different universe, not known to the contemporary world4. Fortunately, Nehru did not pay much heed to it. What Panditji did, obviously, did not take us very far, either. He set up public sector projects everywhere and anointed them ‘temples’ of modern India. The public took him literally. You don’t go to temples for hard work, productivity, competition, innovation, investment, and such other earthly stuff, you go there to meditate. And so they did. By the time they woke up, it was too late.

The situation in the field outside those holy places was not much different either. By some estimates the Indian economy has remained stagnant for as many as 2280 years; the per capita income is virtually constant over the period between 320 BC and AD 1960 [Lal 1988:34]. Such a case of prolonged economic paralysis is rare in history. The caste system bears part of the responsibility. "The chief features of caste are: (I) Heredity: One cannot chagne one’s caste. (ii) Endogamy: Every member of a caste must marry a member of the same caste and may not marry outside it (iii) Commensal restriction: Regulations are imposed regarding the acceptance of food and drink from members of other castes" [Radhakrishnan 1940:37]. "Two distinct tendencies are implicit in the caste system. The first is an acceptance of the existence of multiple cultures [one for each caste], including moral and religious norms, in any local society. ‘ …Occasionally, a man is heard making slighting remarks about the hereditary occupations of other castes. The other tendency in the caste system is [Sanskritisation] the imitation of the ways of higher castes" [Srinivas 19966: 14; emphasis added]. The first of the two distinct tendencies of the caste system fills the Hindu society with deep ennui and distrust, which partly accounts for the millennia-old economic slumber. The second one, we shall see in a moment has provided a window of opportunity to the BJP. It transpires this that both Gandhiji and Panditji had only a myopic grasp of the Indian ethos. The country promptly headed to the edge of precipice.

Nehru- Gandhi Heirloom

In due course, Nehru’s daughter took over the rein, and the new Gandhi began to fill in the blanks. Her calculation was acute. The society, she saw, is split into three segments: lower-caste Hindu, upper-caste Hindu, and the Muslim and other minorities. Incremental return on any political investment will be higher in the first and third segments than in the second. She put on rudraksha mala, visited temples, mosques, churches, sought benediction of every guru who cared to open the door to her. And in the name of dalits, the weaker sections of society, 5 she proclaimed a 20 point programme.6 The nation was impressed with her skill in balancing acts. The Nehru-Gandhi era dawned in right earnest.

Her son took the Indira strategy to its logical end with disastrous results. An editorial in The Times of India (August 4, 1994) writes that the total electoral rout of the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh came after 1986, an occurrence that could be attributed to tow major events. In February 1986, the Muslim Women’s Bill was introduced in parliament in response to the Supreme Court’s judgement in the Sha Bano case.7 This alienated the upper caste Hindus. In the same month, the district judge at Faizabad opened the locks of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya apparently at the prodding of Congress leadership. As a result the Muslims started to desert the Congress. As if that was not enough, Rajiv Gandhi started the election campaign in 1989 with a speech in Faizabad, the constituency in which the town of Ayodhya is located, promising Ram Rajya and announcing the ‘shilanyas’ for Ram temple. The demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992 brought the curtain down on Congress fortunes in Uttar Pradesh.

In a word, the Gandhi-Nehru period saw an ostrich-like passive policy of supporting the social status quo, while the subsequent Nehru-Gandhi dynasty tried to actively exploit religious differences in order to protect itself. A third variety of policy towards religion will be narrated below – that is the BJP’s innovation. If Indira Gandhi prostrated before a ‘jagatguru’ it was to seek her own political salvation; she was at the receiving end of blessing. By contrast, the BJP would operate on the supply side.

As cited above, one of the two distinct features of the caste system is the ‘the imitation of the ways of higher castes’. Srinivas (1966) has a name for such climbing of caste ladder: sanskritisation. It has been a powerful force in the diffusion of Hinduism in remote past [Weber 1958:9-21]. A tribal chief would invite a brahmin priest who will come to the baptize the royal-highness-to-be into Hinduism and thus legitimize the Kingdom. May be even a kshatriya sib (gotra) going back to such and such sage (rishi) also can be arranged to further fortify the royal claim.

Such supply of caste recognition and upgradation has been greatly activated lately on demand. The kshatriyas, in particular are said to be in special need for this commodity. Historians like KM Panikkar maintain that actually there has been no such caste as kshatriya in the last 2,000 years of history. The Nandas were the last ‘true’ kshatriya, and they disappeared in the fifth century BC. Since then every known royal family has come from a non-kshatriya caste, including the famous Rajput dynasties of medieval India. Panikkar also points out that the "the shudras [of all castes] seem to have produced an unusually large number of royal families even in more recent times. The Palas of Bengal originally belonged undoubtedly to that low caste. The great Maratha Royal House, whatever their function today, could hardly sustain their genealogical pretensions connecting them with Rajput descent. One of the most important functions of genealogist and bardic caste was to legitimize mobility from the ranks of lower castes to the kshatriya by providing suitable genealogical linkage and myth" [Srinivas 1966: 9-10]. Another calamity has befallen this caste. The Islamic conquest and thereafter the British occupation of India had rubbed off some of the glaze of the valiant caste of kshatriya. It feels insecure about its identity [Betille, 1996].

Meanwhile in different regions, there were few castes which, although not regarded as high, became relatively wealthy by reason of their ability to exploit certain special opportunities that came their way during the British rule. Examples of such success are provided by the teli (oilman) castes in eastern India, the distillers in Orissa, the noniyas (salt-makers) in Uttar Pradesh, the Kolis of coastal Gujarat, and kharwas of Saurashtra. When a low caste became wealthy it usually followed this up by sanskritising its life style and ritual, and claiming the status of a higher caste. The priests can provide the required service for consummating the formalities of upgradation. A most eloquent example is the case of Amma Coorgs, a section of the main body of Coorgs, who came under strong brahminical influence in the first half of the 19th century and became vegetarians, teetotallers and donned the sacred thread. In course of time they became a distinct endogamous group, a caste even though they numbered only 666 (yes, 666!) individuals at the 1941 Census. A new caste was born. Thus a caste or section thereof would sanskritise its way of life and then claim to be superior to its structural neighbors or to the parent section [Srinivas 1966: 30, 90-99].

Like the interior of a galaxy where new stars are being formed ceaselessly, the womb of the Hindu society is all the time churning out new castes through sanskritisation; and like the galaxies in the expanding universe the caste-constellations are running away from each other at epic speed. Who says a Hindu Society is static, motionless? Of course, there was no Big bang; it was all a creation of the All Mighty! As we shall be made wiser in a few moments, the BJP will help make it even more dynamic, within the limit of the velocity of light.

Mathematics tells us that between any two numbers there is an infinity of numbers. So, between any two castes a large number of castes can be accommodated at ease. And in India there is a huge demand, we have just seen, for caste upgradation at different levels. The Sangh parivar has long been active in this field as supplier of the required facilities. The historical source of the Sangh parivar is traced to the Arya Samaj founded in 1875 in Punjab by Dayandanda Saraswati, as Sanskrit scholar. Opposed to certain aspects of caste system, idolatry and prevalent rituals, the Arya Samaj was strongly revivalist and proselytizing. Dayananda went about reorganizing Hinduism around a canonization of the Vedas. A crucial instrument to this end was the suddhi movement, a movement for purification of the faith. From the 1880s on the Aray Samaj established a system of educational institutions all over north India: Dayananda Anglo-Vedic (DAV) colleges where English was the medium of instruction. A sanskritised ‘pure’ Hindi was promoted in educational work with a view to making it a common national language. At the turn of the century the first regular Hindi magazines appeared, college curricula in Hindi were drafted and Madan Mohan Malaviya provoked by the inauguration of Aligarh Muslim University in 1898, initiated a protracted campaign for a Hindu university with Hindi as the sole medium of instruction. In 1915 Benaras Hindu University came into existence and it became a central point in the movement for making Hindi a national language.

The Arya Samaj promoted eradication of traditional caste identities defined by birth and suggested a caste system based on virtue and merit which in principle would be open to all. In spite of such radical postures the project remained largely conservative in its implications. The critique was aimed only at the immobility of the caste system, its brahminical orthodoxy and its exclusion of lower caste groups. But neither the hierarchical structure of caste nor the essential virtues and character ascribed to each varna and caste was questioned [Hansen 1999:74].

The Hindu Mahasabha, formed in 1915 with a view to galvanize the Hindu community into a political unit capable of representing ‘Hindu interests’, initially functioned as one of the interest groups inside the Congress Party. With Sarvakar at the helm it became an independent force during the 1920s. There developed a symbiotic relationship between the Mahasabha and the Araya Samaj with double membership and an emerging ideological unity. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) arrived in 1925 to operate on the cultural front. Hedgewar, the founder, envisaged a synthesis of Arya samaj idealism and organizational strength. Throughout the 1930s the RSS maintained close relations with the Hindu Mahasabha for ideology and inspiration. Then under the leadership of Golwalkar, the RSS moved away from politics to concentrate on radical strategy of creating a brahminical RSS culture, a Bharat Mata in miniature, which by its example and high moral stature would gradually transform norms and habits of the larger society. During the 1940s the RSS became the most powerful Hindu nationalist organization in the country. One of the most important branches of the Sagh parivar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), was established in 1964 to provide a bridge between the religious organizations and the RSS. Its objective was to consolidate Hindu society. It represented a continuation of the efforts of the 1920s to produce a Hindu nation through construction of rashtra mandirs and an all encompassing catholic national Hinduism overriding divisions of sect and caste. Several of the leading gurus of VHP have a background in the Arya Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha, Ramakrishna Mission, and other organizations that sponsor a ‘nationalized’ modern Hinduism – ‘adapted to the modern age’- remains one of the very significant activities of VHP, it started as early as 1966 with the First International Conference in Allahabad. A broader activist line was adopted in the early 1970s when the VHP more systematically entered the field of social welfare with schools, medical centers, and hostels all over the country. Another important and widespread activity carried out under the auspices of the VHP is the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram set up 1966 as a combined center of social work and (re-)conversion. It runs a large number of ashrams, schools, colleges, medical facilities, as well as hostels and scholarship programs for tribals. The Sangh parivar has several other members in its family such as the Sevika samity, the Durga Bahini, and the Patit Pawan.

The ancestry of BJP goes back to the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. It is the political front of the Sangh parivar, a vast network – a one-stop shopping mall – that can entertain one from cradle to grave in all spheres, social, political economic. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Clearly, Congress is no match for the BJP in this.

V P Singh once commented in a television interview that the ‘mandal’ (implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations) would enter the ‘kamandal’ (a mall sacred pot of holy water used in rituals by holy men, a symbolic reference to the BJP) and break it. But he was wrong. A cushy job, a little bundle of money from the land, or a few extra rupees from some trade, does not meet one’s appetite, rather it whips it up. Some lucky people, no doubt have seen the faces of affluence; now they want higher social status, caste promotion, culture, in a word, sanskritisation. They will flock to the BJP. Congress has nothng to offer them; it never had.

Epilogue

The Mahatma, all due respect to him, was perhaps too god-like to the point of naivety. He was not simply aware of the failings of the ordinary people like us; he did not realize that it is not enough just to accept as legitimate and tolerate all religions. There is a set of annoying details for our daily existence in society. Where would, say, a Hindu weaver place a Muslim fruit-seller in the social matrix for measuring the corresponding respect due him? There is no answer to such a day-to-day question which is, to be sure, of vital importance for living in a village. So long as the society remains a collection of disparate communities with hard boundary-lines and varying internal hierarchies this problem of translation and evaluation would haunt a common man. It fallows that the society of Gandhiji’s dream was just that, a dream, not viable in theory or practice. On the other had, for the Nehru-Gandhi Congress of today such questions are too theoretical, too abstract and philosophical; it has no time or inclination for such things. For it, efforts are more profitably spent in playing games with social divisions.

The basic model of BJP seems to have the virtue of logical consistency, but its premises are open to serious doubt. To take one example, Sarvakar evidently believes in the Darwinian concept of natural selection: struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. He says: "men, groups and races [are] in the process of consolidation under the stern law of nature, to get forged into that larger existence on the anvil of war through struggle and sacrifice. Those alone who can stand this fierce ordeal will prove their fitness, not only the moral but even the physical fitness that entitles races and types to survive in this world" [Sarvakar 1925;xii, cited in Hansen 1999: 79]. Now caste is based on endogamy and we have seen above that new castes are being born with even as few as 666 members. Endogamy within such tiny groups will be biologically injurious to the groups themselves and the species as a whole. For Darwin 91859:95) writes: "I have collected so large a body of facts, and made so many experiments, showing in accordance with almost universal belief of breeder, that with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigor and fertility to the offspring: and on the other hand, that close interbreeding diminishes vigor and fertility’ (emphasis in the original). If this Darwinian ‘general law of nature’ holds for human beings, then endogamy by caste might have been very harmful to the vigor and fertility of the Hindus, which might be hard to recover by physical exercise and drill in khaki shorts.

No matter what happens to economy at large, there are always some people who will somehow get a lot of money. Almost all of them will seek caste promotion, and mathematically there is not a problem in accommodating their demand even if it is almost infinite. Between any two points on a line there is an infinity of points; in a multi-dimensional sphere the scope is even wider. The Sangh parivar will continue to have a busy schedule of performing sanskritisation. The BJP is here to stay for a while, at least.

The preamble to the Hindu Declaration of Human Rights (drafted in Sanskrit and not yet available in its official English version) goes as follows: "A Hindu is like any other human being, only more so, wherefore all human beings possess the following rights as they are all the children of the Earth and descended from Manu and possess rationality and morality in common" (pioneer, June 17, 1995, cited in Hansen 1999). But as far as we know, in a democracy no one is allowed to be ‘only more so’, it violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations, December 10, 1948. Such a discrimination is not grounded in the Hindu ethos of the Vedic era, either.

Yet the BJP is likely to have a tremendous appeal to the Hindu masses, all eager for sanskritisation. Not too long ago you heard a chorus of lambs: Indira is India. Expect soon a kirtan of hanumans: India is Hindia.

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Notes

  1. By contrast there are models of partial equilibrium. Among several brands of this category that are making rounds in India nowadays let us briefly mention three for clarity. One may be called the ‘imagining’ school, in which the starting point is ‘imagination’ of a novelist, poet, or bard. A community’s identity, aspirations and evolution are all in someone’s imagination, and they unfold through diffusion via communication media such as folklore, books or stage performance. A second one may be called the ‘dalit’ school which puts the political action of traditionally oppressed groups such as the scheduled castes (14.6 percent of total population) at the heart of the current dynamics of India. Third, there is the ‘middle’ school where it is the middle class of India that hold the key to almost everything. It is our cardinal axiom that the mode of production by and large shapes the consciousness, rather than the other way around.
  2. Almost all religious communities have ‘castes’ in one form or another [Dumont 1966:201-12]. The Hindu caste system is most rigid in that it is anchored on the doctrines of ‘Karma’ and rebirth. Caste system in other communities are mostly non-hereditary, and fairly permissive. Let us emphasize here that the Hindu caste system does not have the approval of the Vedas; it originated in the later-day Upanishads coinciding with the rise of private property.
  3. In ancient times foreign tribes had been absorbed into the Hindu society. "Hindu leaders accepted primitive societies and foreign settlers such as the Greeks and the Scythians into the Hindu fold and recognized their priestly families as brahmins and their fighting men as kshatriyas" [Radhakrishrna 1940:357]. Great invaders such as the Saks (Scythians) the Yavanas (Greeks) and the Pahalavas (Parthians), and the Kushans were accepted as Hindus without hesitation. Much later a reaction against the ‘savages from the central Asian steppes’ set in, especially after the tribes of Huns were taken over into Hinduism, and an unusually strong disinclination to intermarriage grew. At the moment, however, we are not talking about something like an invasion by the Huns.
  4. Sen (1968:110) has concluded: "The Ambar Charka program is inflationary and is also likely to affect capital accumulation adversely. Far from creating any flow of surplus, it produces a flow of output value less than even its recurring costs. For the Ambar Charka to have no inflationary results and no recurring adverse effect on the national capital stock the workers would have to be paid Re 0-1-8 (less than two pence ) per 8 hour day, which is quite absurd. As a technological possibility, the Ambar Charka seems to offer very little. "These results were initially published in a note in the Economic Weekly, October 19, 1957.
  5. Sen (1980:447) is amused at the ambiguity of language: The phrase ‘weaker section of the Indian population’ "has not been descriptively very illuminating. As it happens, people drawn from this ‘weaker section of the Indian population’ do the heavy work in India, varying from breaking stones and bending iron to carrying heavy loads on their heads."
  6. For a few months there was confusion about the exact number of points in the prime ministers program. Initially it was declared to be 21 point program, then the bureaucracy in the prime minister's office discovered to their horror that the last paragraph in the script of her radio address to the nation proclaiming the momentous program consisted only ‘Jai Hind’, which was not really a plan or a development project for the uplift of the weaker section. So the number was duly revised down to a round number 20.
  7. In April 1985, the Supreme Court of India in a judgement had allowed a Muslim divorcee, Shah Bano, maintenance for life from the former husband. The Rajiv Gandhi government enacted a law in May 1986 that in effect, overturned the Supreme Court verdict.