HINDUSTAN

IS THERE ROOM FOR AN INDIAN ?

SUBJECT : HISTORY II

SUBMITTED TO : MR. AGNI KUMAR HOTA

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
NALSAR UNIVERSITY OF LAW

SUBMITTED BY : MATTHEW KURIAN

ROLL NO. 2014 - 25

Bibliography

Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009.

Jones, Constance, and James D. Ryan. Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Infobase

Publishing, 2006.

Fowler, Jeaneane D. Hinduism: Beliefs, Practices, and Scriptures. Adarsh Books,

2000.

Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Rowman

Altamira, 2002.

Buxton, The Peoples of Asia

Davids, Buddhist India, 56, 62; Smith, Oxford History

Sidhanta, N. K., The Heroic Age of India

Dutt, R. C., tr., The Ramayana and Mahabharata, Everyman Library

Dutt, R. C., The Civilization of India

Macdonell, India's Past

Gombrich, Richard F. How Buddhism began: The conditioned genesis of the early
teachings. Routledge, 2006.

Gombrich, Richard F. How Buddhism began: The conditioned genesis of the early
teachings. Routledge, 2006.

Embree, Ainslie T. "Sources of Indian Tradition, 1: From the Beginning to 1800. 2d

ed. Introduction to Oriental Civilization Series." (1988).

Chatterjee, Partha, ed. Wages of freedom: fifty years of the Indian nation-state. Oxford
University Press, USA, 1998.

Wagoner, Phillip B. "Sultan among Hindu Kings: Dress, titles, and the
Islamicization of Hindu culture at Vijayanagara."

Capper, John. The Three Presidencies of India. Ingram, Cooke & Company, 1853.

Wulff, Donna M. "Hindu Nationalism: An Oxymoron." Brown J. World Aff. 4 (1997)

Lorenzen, David N. "Who Invented Hinduism?." Comparative studies in society and

history 41, no. 04 (1999)

Durant, Will, Ariel Durant, and Alexander Adams. Our oriental heritage. New York,
NY: Simon and Schuster, 1954.

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. "Annihilation of caste with a reply to Mahatma Gandhi."

(1944).

Colonel Brown is long forgotten, the Englishman, and his Government, and his rights,
and his laws have faded away as a ripple dies on water as a wind stirs in the trees
and is gone. But on the bank of the dark pool, a little white temple still stands, and still
the pilgrims come,... for such is India.
JOHN EYTON, The Pool

The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be masterthat's all.
LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

The first and foremost thing that must be recognised is that Hindu Society is a myth.
DR. B. R. AMBEDKAR, THE ANNIHILATION OF CASTE

INTRODUCTION

The earliest known rituals or traditions that may have evolved into, or catalysed the evolution of,
Hinduism as we know it today thrived during the mesolithic, and neolithic era, as observed in the
rock paintings of Bhimbhekta1 and in the worship of several plants and animals as sacred,2 dating
from a period of 30,000 BCE or older to around 6000 years ago. However, the logical, if arbitrary,
origin of several of those elements today identified within the Hindu tradtition, notably the
worship of a Great Male God, likened by some scholars to a proto iva, and that of a Mother
Goddess, one that may prefigure Shakthi, 3 besides the worship of fire (Agni) and wind (Vayu), lies
in the Indus Valley Civilization, geographically in modern-day Pakistan,4

The first Aryans who migrated into the Indian subcontinent from the shores of the Caspian Sea, led
by armoured warriors in chariots, wielding axes and hurling spears, gifted with courage and a skill
in battle that soon gave them mastery over northern India, 5 unfettered by the nationalist zeal that led
the Jewish nation to Canaan, or the missionary fervour that spurred Mohammed's cavalry to victory
at Mecca so many millenia later, did so merely in pursuit of land, pasture for their cattle. Even their
word for war simply meant, a desire for more cows.6
As they passed from armed warfare to settled tillage, their tribes gradually coalescing into petty
states, outnumbered by a subject people they saw as inferior to themselves, the Aryans foresaw that
without restrictions on marriage, they were liable to lose their racial identity, the first caste division
arising, not by status, but by colour, the early word for caste being varna, it was merely the
marriage regulation of an endogamous group.7 The later profusion of hereditary, racial and
occupational divisions the caste system hardly existed in Vedic times, while among the Aryans
themselves, marriage was free and status was not defined by birth.8

However, towards the last millenium BCE, when occupations became more specialized and
hereditary, caste divisions being more rigidly defined, the prevailing conditions of uncertainty and
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009.

Jones, Constance, and James D. Ryan. Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Infobase Publishing, 2006.
Fowler, Jeaneane D. Hinduism: Beliefs, Practices, and Scriptures. Adarsh Books, 2000.
Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Rowman Altamira, 2002.
A treaty concluded by the Aryan Mittani and the Hittites in the 14th century B.C., for instance, invokes the Vedic
gods, Indra, Mitra, and Varuna. Winternitz.
Ibid
Buxton, The Peoples of Asia, 121.
Davids, Buddhist India, 56, 62; Smith, Oxford History, 37.

conflict created a need for warriors and heroes, placing the kshatriya, them to whom it was
iniquitous to die unless upon the field of battle squarely at the top of this hierarchy.9 Even rituals
and ceremonies were performed by kings, with the brahmins marginalised to the role of assistants at
the sacrifice.10

In some manner, the kshatriyas themselves may be held responsible for the reversal of their position
within this social structure with respect to the brahmins that remains prevalent today, yet this
reversal may also be deemed to be the inevitable outcome of the structure, for as the Guptas
established a centralized authority, creating conditions of stability and security, Religion, being but
how men explained that which they could not explain by logic, then largely an aide to agriculture
before the omnipotent elements, grew in social importance and ritual complexity, requiring expert
intermediaries between man and his creator, catapulting the Brahmin into a position of social,
political and economic security and influence; as teachers and scholars, able to recreate the past and
form the future in their own image, moulding each generation into greater reverence for the priests,
and building for their caste a prestige which would, in later centuries, give them the supreme place
in Hindu society.11

From northern India, aided by land grants made by local rulers to Brahmins, 12 the incorporation and
assimiliation of several popular non-Vedic gods and rituals and the process of Sanskritization, the
Vedic-Brahmanic culture spread to southern India and parts of southeast Asia, carrying with it, its
societal divisions and practices, through which people from many strata of society adapted their
religious and social life to Brahminical norms, assimilating the wide variety of local cultures in
India half-shrouded in a tattered cloak of conceptual unity,13 subsuming the cults of Narayana,
Jagannatha and Venkateshwara, finally recognising the Buddha as the ninth avtar of Vishnu, 14 the
indigenous religions eventually finding place under the broad mantle of the Vedic philosophy, a
common allegiance to the authority of the Veda providing the vital link between the multitudes of
gods and religious practices.15 This process is best reflected in the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and
the Mahabharata, containing mythological stories interspersed with moral and political treatises, the
9

Sidhanta, N. K., The Heroic Age of India, 206; Mahabharata, IX, v, 30.

10 Dutt, R. C., tr., The Ramayana and Mahabharata, Everyman Library, 189; Davids, Buddhist India, 60.
11 Dutt, R. C., The Civilization of India; Macdonell, India's Past
12
13
14
15

Supra 9
Gombrich, Richard F. How Buddhism began: The conditioned genesis of the early teachings. Routledge, 2006.
Holt, John. The Buddhist Visnu: religious transformation, politics, and culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Embree, Ainslie T. "Sources of Indian Tradition, 1: From the Beginning to 1800. 2d ed. Introduction to Oriental
Civilization Series." (1988).

Bhagavad Gita forming the magnum opus of this process of assimilation and consolidation,
integrating Brahmanic and Sramanic ideas with theistic devotion.16

The construction of the historical claims of hindutva become possible only within the modern forms
of historiography, one that is constructed around the complex identity of the people-nation-state,
one implicated in the encounter with British Colonialism, part and parcel of the historical imagining
of India as a nation in the 19 th century, the fragile consensus which emphasizes the singularity of a
historically constituted national formation of India, that is Bharat, one demanded by the need to
legitimize the centralized apparatus of the modern nation-state. It is interesting to trace the
genealogy of this history of the nation, one that validates political history as the amoral pursuit of
raison d' tat.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was one of the most important political thinkers and social revolutionaries of
20th century India. A scholar, economist and jurist, he was convinced that the overthrow of the caste
system, implying the overthrow of pre-colonial Brahminism which had nurtured it, was
fundamental within the context of the anti-colonial struggle. 17 For this literature review, I have
chosen to analyse Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's work, The Annihilation of Caste, particularly chapter VI,
dealing with the construction of a Hindu identitiy, and the concept of a Hindu Nation.

16 Supra 10
17 Chatterjee, Partha, ed. Wages of freedom: fifty years of the Indian nation-state. Oxford University Press, USA,
1998.

REVIEW

When they divided Purua how many portions did they make?
What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?
The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rjanya made.
His thighs became the Vaiya, from his feet the dra was produced.

g Ved 10.90. Purus askta

Of all the topics that have fascinated and divided scholars of south Asia, caste is probably the most
contentious. Defined by many specialists as a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy that
distinguishes India from all other societies, caste has achieved much the same significance in social,
political and academic debate as race in the United States, class in Britain and faction in Italy. It has
thus been widely thought of as the paramount fact of life in the subcontinent, and for some, as the
very core or essence of south Asian civilisation.

Ambedkar opens chapter VI of The Annihilation of Caste with a denouncement of the racial, social,
and economic justification for the perpetuation of a caste society, concluding his arguments of the
preceding chapters, and then proceeds to engage with the concept of a conscious, unified Hindu
society, which engagement is to be the focus of this present review, one highlighting the importance
of understanding the word Hindu, its history and its apparent present, one that has today come to
connotate a certain ideology rather than an identity, one that begs of us the question, Who is a
Hindu ?

Arguably, the word is first seen in the first chapter of the Avestan Zendidiad, Hapta Hindu, the
fifteenth of sixteen regions created by Ahura Mazda, a land of 'abnormal heat'. Yet this primitive
India was still confined to the Sind, and it was undoubtedly some subsisting memory of this ancient
nomenclature that evolved into two distinct, though not mutually exclusive, words; Hind, the
geographical extent of India, and Hindu, a resident of the land of Hind, an interpretation that later
came to signify the religious identity attributed to it today, when India came in contact with Arabia,

and thence, the Islamic world, beginning with the Arab invasion of Sind by Muhammed ibn Qasim
in 712 CE., and the administrative arrangemet he constructed with the non-Muslims after his victory
over Dahar, the Brahmanabad settlement, archetypical of the Braminical practice of appropriating
the voices of the Savarnas, placing them as the crucial intermediaries between the invader and the
invaded, enhancing their practices to the position of the mainstream, if not so already, attributing to
them, the legitimacy of authority, one that was earlier challenged by the Kshatriya

It is when we reach the next phase of Islamic contact with India that the identities of the Hindu and
the Muslim come to be sharpened, made distinct and mutually exclusive, the great rift of Indian into
Hindu and Muslim that was extolled by, and became the plague of, James Mill; Mahmud of
Ghazni's rape of Somnath, as dear to the Hindu consciousness as Constantinople would become to
the Christian world four hundred years later, creating in Indian minds, according to Percival Spear,
a tradition of Muslim intolerance, not unlike that of the avarice of the Bania or the courage of the
Rajput, consolidating a wide variety of cultures, traditions, and practices as distinctly opposed to
Islam, themselves thus subsumed into the fold of Hinduism; the possibility of an ultimate Islamic
conquest of India quite possibly lost in the ruins of the Somnath complex, epistemologised in AlBiruni's reference to the Hindus as our religious antagonists.18 Yet here, Al-Biruni himself might
be perplexed bey the ambiguity that he had created, for what did it mean to be a Hindu ?

For while it is clear that by the sixteenth century, Hindus had begun referring to themselves as
Hindus, as is evidenced by Ekanath's (1548-1600) verse :
Hindu kaha ta mariya, Mussalmaan bhi nhin
(If I call myself a Hindu, I will be beaten up; But Muslim I decidedly am not)

Hindus are using this word to refer to themselves, but whether in a geographical, cultural, or
religious perspective, is disputable, for several rulers of Vijaynagara had taken the title, HindurayaSuratrana, 'Sultan of the Hindu Kings', politically enforcing the idea of the ruler of Vijaynagara as a
Sultan, a suzerain over Hindu kings, or differentiating its bearer from other, ordinary, Indian rulers,
signalling their willingness to participate in the political discourse of an Islamic Civilization.19
18 Sachau (1914, 1:7)
19 Wagoner, Phillip B. "Sultan among Hindu Kings: Dress, titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu culture at
Vijayanagara." The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 04 (1996): 851-880.

Thus, we may propose that at least until the 14 th century, the use of the word Hindu did not include
an idea of Hindu self-consciousness.
Indeed, we can conclude that, although Hindu and Muslim groups never forged a totally
homogeneous society, there was a level of interchange in the realm of culture that is scarcely
imaginable if one assumes them to comprise two antagonistic religious communities. At least from
the fifteenth century, especially in poetry, music, dance, architecture, and painting, Hindu and
Muslim artists contributed to the creation of a rich, vibrant Indian culture. Likewise, Hindus and
Muslims throughout India have participated for centuries in each other's festivals and rituals. In
many villages, they have lived side by side for longer than human memory.

This gossamer faade of Hindu-Muslim hegemony was changed by the advent of European colonial
ambitions into the subcontinent, their propensity to arrange structures as neat, mutually exclusive
categories unable to comprehend the multitude of overlapping systems they were faced with, and
their attempts to mould it into a form comprehensible to them obiliterating it entirely. This is best
exemplified in the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal (1905), the emerging nationalist forces
channeled along the ideologies of territory and of religion, neo-Hinduism evolving a distictly ethnic
streak, Hindutva, symbolised by the formation of the RSS in 1925,20 sparking off debate, and indeed
conflict, over what constitutes Indian culture.21

20 Andersen and Damle (1987)

21 Philip H. Ashby (1974)

CONCLUSION

Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken into fragments, by narrow domestic walls...
RABINDRANATH TAGORE

So wrote India's poet-laureate, envisaging a glorious future when India should come into her own,
break free of the shackles that bound her in slavery, and emerge in radiant glory into a world of
opportunity...
It has now been seven-and-sixty years since the Indian State came into existence, and we have now
come to fulfill the pledge of our tryst with destiny. Yet we are no closer to resolving these questions,
what constitutes a Hindu, and what, an Indian ? Where is it that these terms merge and overlap in
continuity, and where do they emerge mutually exclusive ? What idea do they convey about the
identity of an individual so categorized ? And how do they engage with the Constitutional guarantee
of the Freedom of Religion, quintessesential to the construct of a sovereign, socialist, secular,
democratic republic ? For we are an Indian State, but are we an Indian Nation ? And is an Indian
Nation necessarily a Hindu Rashtra ?

A collective pan-Indian Hindu consciousness thus cannot have existed until others claimed not to be
, and could not be incorporated, within the fold of Hinduism, while a historical uncertainty in the
origins of the word Hindu, ethnic, geographical, and religious, each chosen by the individual to suit
his immediate need. For this very reason, it is imperative that the Indian State claim for itself, a
position of neutrality towards religion, and treat individuals, as citizens, for what they are worth,
rather than what they believe in.