Balagangadhara’s interview with Swarajya
Part I, Part II, Part III , Part IV (Appeared on 04/13/2022 through 04/15/2022)
S.N. Balagangadhara, emeritus professor at Ghent University, Belgium, has spent more than 40 years studying the science of cultures, especially Western culture, which was deeply influenced by Christianity, and how this framework was used to understand Indian culture, where it was a colonising power. In the process, our British colonial masters’ understanding of Indian traditions, religion and the ‘caste system’ impacted how we, the colonised, began to see ourselves even after 1947.
His latest book, What Does It Mean To Be ‘Indian’?, written in collaboration with Sarika Rao, examines how the Islamic and British colonialisms interfered with our understanding of the world and experiences, thus leaving us with several unanswered questions on what it really means to be Indian in the twenty-first century.
S.N. Balagangadhara’s books and essays include Cultures Differ Differently, Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem? The Making of Indian Religions (co-authored with Divya Jhingran), and The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, The West, and the Dynamic of Religion. His students have explored his themes in another book, Western Foundations of The Caste System (edited by Martin Farek, Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan, and Prakash Shah).
In a conversation with Dr Balagangadhara, both over email and in a face-to-face discussion over Zoom, Swarajya’s R Jagannathan discussed his book What does it mean to be ‘Indian’?, including the ideas contained in it, and areas for future research. The following is the first part of the Q&A with S.N. Balagangadhara.
Swarajya: Does your book ‘What Does It mean to Be ‘Indian’?’ seek answers to the question “Who were we as a people before Islamic and British colonialism entered the picture?”
S N Balagangadhara: No. What Does It Mean to Be ‘Indian’? does not speak of some pre-colonial, ‘pristine’ Indian culture. What Does It Mean to Be ‘Indian’? is about what it means to be a part of Indian culture in the twenty-first century. The two colonialisms are parts of our past; they cannot be undone or erased. Colonialisms happened and they impacted us. The goal is to understand how they did so and find ways of dealing with them. That is the reason I spend much time on issues like colonialism, culture, and experience.
However, what the impacts of colonialisms were and how we responded to them are dependent on how we were as a culture. How the two colonialisms changed us depended on who we were (as a culture) before they colonised us. What Islam did to us is partially how we were before that event and British colonialism’s impact depended on what we had become before they colonised us. We were never passive victims; our culture defined (partially) what the colonisers were able to do.
There is more research to be done, but thus far we know that colonialism creates colonial consciousness which impedes our access to experiences — not at a generic, abstract level but at an individual level. It is something that you and I, our parents, and our children have.
It is important to reiterate that this book is not peddling cheap identity politics. As I explicitly say:
“I do not plot cultural differences along geographical, or linguistic or religious lines. Thus, belonging to Indian culture is how we use or deal with the resources of socialization in India. This would mean that belonging to this or that religion does not differentiate people as members of a culture: one could belong to Indian culture whether a Jain, Buddhist, or a Hindu in exactly the same way a Christian or a Muslim is Indian. This accords with what we see in India: a Konkani-speaking Muslim in Mumbai is as much an Indian as a Kannada-speaking Christian in Mangalore, and as a Tamil-speaking Brahmin in Bangalore.”
2: You state that colonialism, apart from violence and subjugation, does things to your mind whereby you no longer have access to your own way of experiencing life through your own learnt cultural interpretations. You see everything through the lens provided by the coloniser. My question is: this seems to matter only if the process of colonisation is incomplete, that is we have been outwardly colonised and alienated from our culturally-embedded instincts, but still know that something is amiss about ourselves. But what if we were, say, fully colonised like the pagans of Europe by Christianity? Today’s Christians are all descendants of those early pagan communities, who now fully see their identities as Christian, not pagan. I mean: does colonisation and self-alienation matter only if we are half-colonised, where we still have memories of what we were earlier?
The claim is not that we are not accessing our own way of experience. Rather, we are not accessing our experience. Period. (Read the chapter “India and her Traditions: An Open letter to Jeffrey Kripal”, in my 2012 book, Reconceptualizing Indian Studies,to understand in an abbreviated form what it means to speak of accessing our experience.)
Also, it is not true to say that we “see everything through the lens provided by the coloniser”. The lens that Indians use(d) is different from what the Africans or the Native Americans use(d), even though these people were also colonised. The lens we ‘use’ is ‘made in India’, even if the ‘technology’ is western.
Further, the two processes, Christianisation and colonisation, should not get mixed up. Christianisation is the process of converting populations into Christianity. It is a massive socio-cultural process. The British colonised us but did not Christianise us. In fact, though some missionaries wanted it, the British did not even try to do this. According to some estimates, the Christianisation of Europe itself was only completed by the fifteenth century. In fact, according to me, the Protestant Reformation signaled that the Christianisation of Europe was completed by then.
And we still don’t know why the Roman Empire fell, what happened to the pagans in Rome when Christianity emerged. I develop a partial hypothesis in the second chapter of my first book The Heathen in his Blindness… (1994).
Other than that, here are some further thoughts: I think India was already a mature culture when it was colonised. Perhaps, a passing thought is required to say what I mean by a ‘mature’ culture here. The successful and complete Christianisation of (western) Europe can at least partially be connected to the native cultures that Christianity encountered when it went west of Rome to proselytise. In India, there was very little Semitic religions could offer that would trump what was already present: from the abstract Parabrahma to sophisticated literature, arts, and philosophy; from various types of rituals and traditions to a plurality of routes to ‘spirituality’. Such a culture could tame and absorb some of the tendencies of Semitic religions without being overwhelmed.
Colonialism damaged our culture in the sense that it damaged the transmission of Indian culture and the formation of our intellectuals. Even in this process, Indian culture didn’t passively undergo the damage. In turn, it also impacted and changed those that entered it. Indian Islam and Indian Christianity are different from what they are in their native soil. Evangelical Christians and madrassas are trying to change this Christianity and Islam in India into something which they believe is ‘the template’ for these religions.
Finally. At the stage our knowledge is in, we cannot speak of complete or incomplete colonialism because we have no metric using which we can measure either the degrees or the extent of colonialism. Conversion to Christianity did not make Indians either partially or completely colonial: The Church of South India (including the other dioceses that are conglomerated there) is not a colonising institution, even if colonialism established it (in some sense). Madras Christians are not really all that different culturally from Mudaliyars or other similar groups in Tamil Nadu.
3: Can you explain your statement that India was colonised first by a religion (Islam) and later by the British (but not Christianity). The latter is easily understood, since it involved subjugation and direct intervention in our civil and social lives, but how does one explain colonisation by a religion? Or is it that Islam first colonises the minds of its own faithful and then they do the rest?
I have not gone into this question in the book because it requires that one understands my theory of religion and how a religion secularises itself. This is a very long topic. Thus, I can only say in this answer that the claim that Islam colonised us can be made intelligible and is defensible. It is not ‘easy’ to understand it because religion is not an easy phenomenon for us to understand. All you need to know at this stage is that while it is true that people subjugate people, so does a religion. The latter’s colonisation is an entirely different process from conversion into a religion.
Colonising India is the secularising moment of Islam as a religion, but not in its phase of religious conversion. The British colonised us but not their Christianity (i.e., British colonialism was not a process of Christianisation), whereas it was not the Arabs or Persians who colonised us but Islam. The process of Islamification was carried out by a very weakly secularised religion. (Or) Islam secularises itself through Islamification whereas Christianity secularises itself in a de-Christianised form. These two processes, Christianisation and Islamification, are different in kind and these do not qualify as a process of religious conversion into these religions.
Superficially speaking, Islamification looks very much like religious conversion, but it is not. The violent subduing of socio-cultural phenomena and attempts to deform them make this phase (or aspect) of Islam different from religious conversion. Conversion is an individual religious process, whereas Islamification is a secularisation process at a social scale driven by violence. (I cannot explain these distinctions and thoughts here, in this answer, because it requires a very long explanation).
4: My own hunch is that British colonisation was built on top of Islam’s brutal and contemptuous regard for Indian culture. Thus, when the British came, many Indians were willing to see them as saviors from Islam’s brutalities. This made it easy for us to think that the way forward is to think like them. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, for example, wanted to model his Brahmo Samaj more or less like a Hindu version of Christianity…Your comment.
My previous answer hints at a possible explanation of your hunch, viz., “Islam’s brutal and contemptuous regard for Indian culture”. Surely, we must explain this phenomenon: why should Islam, or any religion for that matter, regard a culture (any culture) brutally and contemptuously? Even the most ‘other-worldly’ orientation seeks music, hymns, and ennobling visualisations. That being the case, how to understand your hunch? Since you are not alone in thinking this, as scientists, we must come up with a plausible (and hopefully true) solution to the problem. Currently, I think I am very close to a satisfactory solution, which I have only hinted at in my previous answer.
Many things emerge at the crossover points where religion and tradition meet and impact each other. Movements such as the Arya Samaj or Prarthana Samaj are some such. They modelled themselves on the Protestant Reformation (as Indians understood ‘reformation’, of course) with a goal to ‘reform’ Hinduism. The nature and tenor of the Protestant theologies which they encountered defined their themes and determined their responses. However, I do not think that Raja Ram Mohan Roy (and others) wanted to be like the Protestants because the British fought Islamic rulers. The reasons must be sought elsewhere and not in their possible individual psychologies, because it fails to explain why many other and different psychologies followed these movements. Surely, we cannot explain or understand the ‘popularity’ of Arya Samaj today by appealing to this psychological explanation.
No matter how Indians looked at the British (as saviors or whatever), this attitude does not explain colonialism. In the South, for instance, Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, is praised because he fought the British. Tipu was known as a very cruel king, but he is celebrated as the hero who resisted the British invasion. There is a ‘Tipu Sultan’ day, a festival day, that the Congress party introduced into the state.
5: You say that there is no such thing as Hinduism, but we can accept that there are Hindus of various kinds. In short, we are Hindus in a geographical-cultural sense, but there is no religion called Hinduism, which was the result of colonial understanding and interventions. Is this what you want to say?
Balagangadhara: Science develops because it tries to understand phenomena in the world. Scientific progress happens when old theories are superseded by better theories. That is how we gain knowledge. Just because new scientific theories develop, it doesn’t mean that the phenomenon that they are talking about disappears. For example, the miasma theory of disease which was believed to be true for more than a millennium was superseded by the germ theory of disease. This does not mean that diseases or their causes disappeared. We just developed a better understanding of the phenomenon.
‘India has a native religion, and that religion is called Hinduism’ is one story about India and her culture. This story is 400 years old. I challenge that claim and show through scientific research that it is not correct. But because one hypothesis about India is replaced by another, it does not mean that Indians don’t exist or that Indian culture disappears.
Do Hindus (as cultural groups) exist? Yes, and they are not geographical groups: Hindus exist as a group in many geographies and not only in what we call India. This is not a modern-day phenomenon: Hindus were known to exist in Jambudweepa, Gandhara, Khambhoja, etc., for instance. Are they Hindus because they are a part of Hinduism as a religion? My answer is no. This answer has nothing to do with how the Semitic religions ‘define’ religion. The question is: does Hinduism as a religion exist as a phenomenon in the world? My answer is no. However, whether Hinduism is a phenomenon in the world or not, this ‘fact’ is independent of the question what the word ‘religion’ means in our languages.
6: So, similarly, we can say that castes (or jatis) exist, but not a caste system. That there may be Brahmins, but Brahminism is a concoction.
Absolutely. Jatis are social groups in Indian society. Social groups exist in all societies and in India these social groups are called ‘jatis’. Similar social groups that exist in societies are called differently in different parts of the world. It is as sensible to speak of ‘the caste system’ in India as it is to say that there is ‘the social group system’ in societies. Further, yes, Brahminism is an invention of western Indology. Indology which is fond of ‘-isms’ has created quite a few: Brahminism, Vedism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on.
7: Religion is difficult to define, but traditions, rituals and practices are clearer to acknowledge. Tradition needs no justification, unless it offends basic human good sense in this day and age. But is there a danger in reducing all of Indian knowledge, metaphysics, philosophy, spiritualism, even science, to just tradition and not call it a religion? After all, isn’t Hinduism partly a religion even as defined by the West?
I will start with the simplest point first. As far the West is concerned, Hinduism is not ‘partly’ a religion: according to them, Hinduism is fully a religion. Period. The West is not denying that Hinduism is a religion. In fact, they have always claimed that it is. So, when Indians jump up and down and claim that they too have religion and that it is called ‘Hinduism’, Western commonsense and academia are in complete agreement. They don’t understand why Indians are proclaiming this very old consensus as though it is a revolutionary new discovery.
Now, the second part of the answer. You say that “there is a danger of reducing” everything to “just tradition”. And that, surely, Hinduism is “at least partly a religion”. This issue is worth focusing on.
The first thing to notice is that there is an anxiety involved in trying to identify Hinduism as a ‘religion’. The anxiety is not about understanding religion. The concern is also not to understand what ‘Hinduism’ is. The anxiety is in gaining agreement with the opinion that ‘Hinduism’ is a ‘religion’— at least ‘partly’. People don’t know why, but they are convinced that it is bad if someone says Hinduism is not a religion. Why? Where did this conviction come from that all human cultures must have religion, whether in primitive or in an advanced form, whether as a ‘natural religion’ or as ‘sophisticated spirituality’? One might tweak the definitions in any which way, but one wants to make sure that the result is that ‘all human cultures have religion’. This is something we must pause and look at.
The idea that ‘religion is a cultural universal’ is a belief in Christianity and Islam. With the process of secularisation, this belief has spread into commonsense and social science. This belief has become so ‘obvious’ that we have an entire cottage industry studying the ‘evolutionary biological explanation for religion’. Therefore, I say that many social scientific insights are simply universalisations of the experiences of one culture, namely that of the West.
The idea that ‘religion is universal’ is not only an obvious unquestioned ‘fact’ but to question it is also considered offensive. My first book (1994) looks at European culture, and the phenomenon of religion, and I develop a theory of religion. I show that what we do not have is a definitional problem. It is about developing a scientific theory of a phenomenon X and seeing whether other phenomena like H or P are also the same or not. The book also explains why the West thinks that religion is a cultural universal.
The other thing to notice is that by identifying one phenomenon, we do not ‘reduce’ any other thing. Just because I say that the water you see in a desert is a ‘mirage’ and ‘not photosynthesis’, it does not mean that all kinds of other things ‘get reduced’ to mirage. Why would they? Likewise, just because I say that we have ‘tradition’ and ‘not religion’, everything cannot ‘get reduced’ to tradition. Philosophy, linguistics, grammar, psychology, science, medicine, etc. are other things and they don’t get reduced to religion or tradition.
Religion is difficult to define as a word only when there is no theory of religion. The word is defined satisfactorily in a scientific theory of religion. Recognising some practices as ‘traditions’ (or as belonging to a tradition) does not make defining ‘tradition’ any less difficult. For that too, we need a good theory.
8: Would you call Buddhism or Jainism or Sikhism also traditions? Or do they pass muster as religions since they do have founders and a set of holy texts like Abrahamic religions? Is it the lack of a founder or “fundamentals” that provides a line separating a religion from just a tradition?
I do not say that any phenomenon that has a founder and a set of holy texts is a religion. I do not say this because it is a bad argument: when we say that ‘Hinduism’ does not have holy books, a founder, etc., the only thing we can say is that ‘Hinduism’ is different from the Semitic religions in this respect. We cannot say that, therefore, it is not a religion. I have a hypothesis on what religion is (as a phenomenon in the world) and that is explained in my first book, The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion’. In one sentence, which is difficult to understand in such a brief form, “religion is an ‘explanatory intelligible account’ of the Cosmos and itself”. (This sentence can be read as a definition of religion, but it does not speak about churches, holy books, founders, dogmas, beliefs, etc.)
‘Buddhism’ was a discovery (actually, an invention) of the British. Sikhism is an emergence from the interaction of Indian traditions with Islam. Neither exists in the world as religions. These are Indian traditions.
I have written on the difference between religion and tradition in my writings. One must understand these two phenomena separately to understand their relationship with each other.
9: You seem to want to give our colonisers the benefit of the doubt in terms of intentions. You broadly suggest that they defined us based on their own experiences with the way European Christian history evolved. So, it was natural for them to analyse us in the way they understood reality. But is this the whole story? Didn’t coloniality need them to actively promote internal antagonisms and widen the fault-lines inside India, so that they could rule us with very few people? Didn’t Pakistan, and the widening of the jati divide, serve their interests?
The first sentence in the question captures a prevalent misunderstanding. It says that I speak of the ‘intentions’ of the colonisers. That is not the case. I am not interested in the intentions or the motivations of individual or even groups of Europeans. The reason I do not do that is because: (1) it is not correct to say intentions guide actions. Take the incessant excuse that people give of intended actions and their unintended consequences. I have different ideas about that, but I won’t go into that now. I tackle this issue a bit deeper in chapter 4 of the book Cultures Differ Differently (2022) or in the book ‘The Heathen…’. (2) It is very difficult to find out the reasons for an action by a person. Most of the time, individuals themselves don’t know what their reasons are, or why they act the way they do. (3) One of the problems in tightly linking intentions to action is the fact that one and the same action (even a trivial action like opening a door) can be the result of many kinds of intentions (maybe the room is too cold or too warm, maybe I thought someone is standing at the door, maybe I think spies are listening in to my conversation, maybe there is too much cigarette smoke in the room…)
Like with any person or group, multiple motivations and intentions in a mixed form are present at any given time. To try to crawl into the heads of earlier generations, especially centuries later, to find that which is inscrutable to themselves is to set myself to fail. Or worse, that is to present ignorance as knowledge which I call ‘bullshit’.
What I do is to make intelligible the consistency and thus the pattern of what the Europeans said about us and how they behaved. My hypothesis is independent of individual psychological differences (because we speak of hundreds of thousands of different people); it does not change with the passage of time (because we speak of a time span of centuries); it does not depend on national borders or geography (after all, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English belong to different countries); it does not depend on their political inclinations (Liberal or Conservative) or religious proclivities (whether Anglican, Protestant, Catholic). That is, I put the constraints and demands of science on the hypotheses that I formulate. If I do not do this, I am simply one more person expressing one more opinion.
Discussing motivations, intentions and opinions is an endless process. Look at the number of books produced on colonialism. They have not helped us gain much of an understanding of the phenomenon of colonialism or its effects.
A scientific hypothesis must make sense of a canonised Catholic priest like (Francis) Xavier and the low-life thugs who made up the mercenaries of the East India Company, as well as bureaucrats like Warren Hastings and Orientalists like William Jones. I find that my hypothesis does it. Whether they abhorred the Savages and wanted to convert them, or whether they were rapine looters who wanted to make money or power-hungry imperialists, their cultural background and their shared Christian framework provided them with certain ideas about human beings, the natural world, and the social world. They used these ideas to make sense of what they went through and encountered in their lives.
This is what all human beings do. We use our repertoire to make sense of and deal with what we encounter. When Europeans landed on the coasts of Malabar and met Indians, their framework (their culture) provided them with ideas (resources) to make sense of what they saw. One example is the idea that ‘all cultures have religion’. This notion is never questioned, but different possible explanations are given to justify it. ‘False religion’, ‘primitive religion’, ‘magical thinking’, ‘a different kind of religion’, etc., are just the different forms that a justification takes depending on the fashions of the time. But the notion that is never questioned is whether ‘all cultures have religion’.
I also don’t use words like coloniality and decoloniality in my book. That is another reason for confusion. These words are obfuscating jargon from post-colonialism and post-modernism. These are the worst intellectual products of the twentieth century. In intellectual circles, post-colonials are described as Jammergemeinschaft (in German): a community of whiners who do not contribute to knowledge. Post-modernism goes further and is openly inimical to knowledge. Unfortunately, both have become very widespread and influential. Thus, it is wise not to speak of ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’.
To give a short answer: no, I am not giving our colonisers any benefit of doubt, nor am I being soft or apologetic about them. The only focus of my work is to develop scientific knowledge about human beings, culture, and society. A true science of the social.
Of course, colonialism used many strategies to subjugate a people. This includes the ‘divide and rule’ policy, ‘exacerbating existing fault lines’ and so on. To speak of something (Pakistan, the jati divide, etc.) as furthering their ‘interests’, we first need to be able to say what those interests are: are we talking about interests (in the plural?) of the British people (of which period?), of the British Anglican Church, of the British Empire, of the East India Company, of the White Race…? Was this plurality of ‘interests’ ever in conflict with one another? If they were, whose or which ‘interests’ did the conflict serve? Which became victorious and why?
You know, ‘interests’ is such a silly all-encompassing word that we can even say that everything the British did was in their ‘interest’. I would suggest that you think of an Indian linguistic equivalent for this word ‘interest’. You will then see how silly it is to speak of ‘interests’. ‘National security interests’, ‘national interests’, etc., are weasel words with no boundaries.
Finally, let me formulate a question. True, the British came “with very few people”. We were servile: there too I agree. No question that we behaved like menial servants. But did the British ever “rule” us? Do we know what either the word means or what it indicates in the real world? This is a teasing question based on the results of my ongoing research. I hope to publish them soon.
10: Regarding itihasa and history, you clearly warn us not to take itihasa, which is about stories that may or may not have some history attached to them, as history. Itihasa is about our way of passing on cultural information as stories and may not be history. But why do you suggest that the absence of history writing in India and using itihasa as history are both colonialisms. After all, don’t we try to understand or deduce history from holy texts like the Rg Veda or even epics like the Mahabharata? How is this colonialism?
I have written articles on the subject where this question is tackled. (I suggest using my academia.edu website page, which contains most of my writings.) However, I do not say that we can learn nothing about our past by studying the Vedas or Puranas. But I do say that historiography (the graphein of historia) is not our way of talking about the past. Itihasa does this job without being history. Using itihasa to understand our past is not an expression of a colonial attitude. Using itihasa as history is.
11: You make a very bold — even controversial — claim about truth and knowledge. That “knowledge trumps truth” in our culture. We have a goddess for knowledge, but not truth. For the Abrahamics, truth is revealed by their one and only ‘true God;, and hence they are more obsessed by truth than us. But our national motto says, “Satyamev Jayate” and Gandhi said his whole life was about experiments with truth. How do you explain this contradiction between what we really revere (knowledge) and what we have adopted as national mottos?
My answer is colonial consciousness. We learn a way of talking and we use it. This way of talking is unconnected to our experience. We have adopted many things in the formation of the Indian nation-state which are strange. The entire Indian Constitution is an expression of that strangeness.
A couple of other things. In Christianity, God is the truth; He does not merely reveal something called ‘the truth’. This truth is an ontological notion (i.e., it is about what there is or exists in the world), whereas the ‘truth’ as we use the word in India is semantic in nature. It is a linguistic property of sentences, mostly. I do not say that the true sentences that we talk and write are unimportant to us; I say that this truth-telling is subordinated to knowledge.
Gandhi titles his book without knowing what he was talking about. (We must understand his educational and experiential backgrounds, both of which were colonial and Christian, to understand his obsession with ‘the’ truth.) How does one experiment with truth, or how many kinds of experiments can we do with it? What does such a formulation or such an activity mean? What kind of experiments can we indulge in? For instance, is lying an ‘experiment with truth’ or is it the opposite of truth-telling? Silly slogans should not replace serious thinking. About ‘Satyameva Jayate’: what does the ‘victory’ of truth mean? Against what? Lies? Why should truth-telling and lying be each other’s enemies? Have we not been taught by our mothers, grandparents, and friends to know how and when to lie? Are we ‘experimenting’ with ‘truth’ in such cases?
If we were members of Semitic religions, we could make sense of the victory of ‘the truth’, viz, of God. If ‘satya’ were to mean ‘the good’, we can understand the victory of ‘the good’ against evil. What would this mean if truth is a linguistic property of sentences? Of course, ‘Satyamev Jayate’ is a native Indian motto. Here and there, Indian writings hint at the existence of an ontological notion of truth but they became popular only during the British colonialism and under the influence of Protestant Christianity. (“Ekam Sat…” is about Sat but not about satya, whereas “bahudavadanti” is about truth-telling.) Thus, the point is that we cannot explain or understand what the victory of satya is without appealing to Semitic religions today. Do we really need to have a national motto incomprehensible to most of us Indians?
12: You define “culture” as combining two things, language, and actions. These exist not only as resources for enabling socialisation, but contain knowledge on how to use and experience these resources. You also say that in Western culture, religion plays an important role and in Indian culture it is rituals and practices. Can you expand on this idea with examples?
I have put this across as a possible hypothesis of a phenomenon in chapter 3 of the book ‘What does it mean to be Indian?’ I have said more in ‘The Heathen…’, and in ‘Reconceptualizing India Studies’, and in many other articles. I suggest reading them to know more.
13: I wonder why you say that Islam and Christianity have adapted to the Indian configurations of learning despite differing belief systems. But you also state that madrassas and evangelical groups resist this adaptation to Indian cultural configurations. Can you explain this conflict, and why it is so important to understand in the Indian context?
All things are influenced by the environment of which they are a part. Religion is no exception. The way Semitic religions evolved in a religious environment like Europe or in the Middle East is different from how the Semitic religions evolved in a non-religious environment like India. Europe or America today are ‘secular’ worlds; a ‘secular’ world in a religious culture is a secularised religious environment.
Both religions and traditions face different challenges in different environments. Take, for example, the kind of problems faced by NRI Hindus: they are suddenly confronted with new questions and novel situations. So, they adapt to survive in that environment. Or take the Jews: European and Middle Eastern Jews who were victims of relentless persecution evolved differently compared to the Jews who lived peacefully in a non-religious environment like India.
Thus, Islam and Christianity also changed in India. Today, there is also the growing impact of evangelical Christianity or Wahabism on them. It is a very complex issue with multiple threads, but I think that the increasing hostility and friction between communities in India has to do with the changing nature of these religions. But because we don’t have many intellectuals in India, we don’t have the resources to understand what is happening there. It is one of the biggest tragedies of India: not only do we not have many intellectuals, but we also do not appear to care about producing more of them.
Your main concern is about the modern-day interaction between Indian culture and these two groups of militant evangelising Christians and the equally militant madrassas. Note that they are taking place against an India whose culture is losing its vibrancy. To understand this complex pattern of interaction and make a prognosis requires research of a kind that is totally non-existent in India. A moralising talk about the persecution of minority groups in India is the language of the current crop of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University and Asoka University people. It gives them ‘fame’ but produces no knowledge.
14: It seems likely that colonisation is not always a well-thought-out conspiracy by the coloniser. It is the product of the colonial powers using their own historical lenses to define or describe the colonised, but, at the same time, it also involves a long-term process whereby the colonised people develop a “colonial consciousness”. Why and how did India’s intellectuals start believing that their rulers understood them better than they themselves did? What could have been the triggers for this process?
Colonialism is not a conspiracy: no massive social phenomenon is a conspiracy, well thought-out or otherwise.
I speak about these two questions very briefly in my book, because much of the work on these issues belongs to ongoing research. I am one of the few who have identified and raised this as a question. There is a lot more work to be done before we can answer these questions. In my book, I say:
“So, we can ask: what made Indians think that the British experience of India describes India the way it is? This issue becomes even more acute because of another claim that I have been developing: one of the characteristic aspects of Indian culture has been its continuous emphasis on reflecting on experience. Thus, Indian intellectuals must have been able to see that what the British were saying about them did not match their own experience. Yet, instead of disagreeing, they acquiesced. What made the Indian intellectuals blind to the nature of their own experience? If we assume that events that occurred in the world are responsible for this, what happened in the past that made the intellectuals of India lose their grip on an essential element of their culture? How could Indian culture have failed in accessing its own experience, when its internal focus was precisely on reflecting on experience?” (p. 84)
The indicative hypothesis is that Indian culture was losing its vibrancy and the nature of her intellectuals must have changed their shape and form during this time. For now, what I say in the book is all I can say. When I die, I can leave behind what I have worked on for 40 years. After all, I am one man (and an old one at that) and the questions are many. There are no easy fruits to pluck, we must plant the trees and tend to them with the hope that our posterity can pluck the fruits.
Our culture has always placed a huge premium on knowledge. Jnana and Saraswati are not easily acquired. You ask for examples of the resources of socialisation: our intuitive relationship to Saraswati, vidya and jnana are excellent examples. In any case, a very brief answer can be given. Indians succumbed to the descriptions of the colonisers because Indians were unable to counter them with their native descriptions. The crises in Indian society that preceded Islamic colonialism had weakened the Indian intellectual traditions. The Muslims damaged this weakened culture so that when the British came, our resources were almost exhausted due to a millennium of lack of use and quite some abuse.
15: Regarding Islamic colonisation, you say that it enabled the penetration of Islamic themes using Indian terms and concepts. This happened because Indian culture was already losing its vibrancy when Islam came to India… Can you speculate on why we were already losing vibrancy at that time, so that we became easy fodder for Islamic themes to enter our consciousness? How did Islam prevent us from accessing our own experiences?
I am still trying to understand this phenomenon fully. This requires research which is still ongoing. It would not be correct to speculate about such serious matters now. As it is, disciplines which claim to study India are full of speculations, conjectures, and pernicious nonsense. I would be very irresponsible (and unethical, to be honest) to add to that.
However, the following can be safely said. There must have been a huge crisis (maybe, there were many crises) in our culture because of which certain kinds of enquiries died. Certain ‘developments’ in Indian culture about 1,000 years ago were probably responses to crises that we could not adequately meet. That is, not everything that emerged in our culture, even centuries before the Islamic colonialism, indexes our strength; some of these developments could well be expressions of weaknesses. This is a call to seriously study the Indian past, not the way JNU and Delhi University scholars have done until now, but in a scientific manner.
16: You make a statement that there is intellectual poverty in already Islamised regions on the Indian sub-continent, in places like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. Why do you say this?
I say this because it is visible, isn’t it? These regions have not produced any great intellectuals in the last centuries and the environment in these regions is hostile to intellectual development. While people of Pakistan and Bangladesh do flourish and grow when they go to study in other countries, there are no noticeable native intellectuals in these regions.
In fact, India is heading in the same direction: we don’t have intellectuals and we are not creating them. Irrespective of whether the decline will take the form of economic poverty or not, if things don’t change, the intellectual poverty in India will reach the same level as Pakistan or Bangladesh. For instance, if things in education (both secondary and higher) do not drastically change in the next 15 years, the educational landscape in India will soon resemble that of Black Africa in the 1930s. We simply do have less and less competent teachers in our educational landscape.
Take the example of the reaction of most Indian intellectuals to the movie The Kashmir Files and the massive response of ordinary people. If the first aspect demonstrates anything, it lays bare the absolute barrenness of Indian intellectual landscape. I have not read a single reflection or review that even minimally tries to understand what people are responding to when they respond to the movie. Like everything else, this too is another occasion for moralising lectures about communalism, posturing against the imputed hatred the movie apparently propagates combined with expressions of pseudo-horror about an allegedly partial portrayal.
Very few things can move the entire population like this movie did and I am still thinking about it. And perhaps will also write on the movie. Tragedies or violence are not new, especially when they are in the news every day. So, it cannot be that the overwhelming response of people had only to do with the horrors faced by the Pandits in Kashmir or the treachery of our ruling classes (politicians, intellectuals, and media). Shortly after the movie came out, I saw it in Belgium, I remember telling my daughter that this movie would enter the national consciousness of India.
I have a feeling that one of the reasons why this movie has had the kind of impact it has is because it addresses our deeply held intuitions about our culture regarding knowledge, Saraswati, learning and the destructions wrought on it. One of the horrors we experience is to the rape of “Kashimra Puravasini” there and to her becoming a total alien in her hometown. (One of the first shlokas we learn as very young children goes thus: Namaste Sharade Devi, Kashimrapuravasini…)
17: Religion expands in two ways: through conversions, and then later by expanding the same ideas through a secularisation of theology. Christianity expands by de-Christianising its format… And this secularisation is brought about by violence. Religion, whether it remains religion of gets secularised, is about “othering” someone or something… Is this what you are trying to say?
I don’t speak of ‘othering’. It is a jargon which doesn’t explain anything. To treat someone as ‘the other’ might be bad if they are the same as you and you don’t treat them that way. For example, if one is a Christian, and Christianity says, “we are all children of God”, to treat some people as the ‘other’ might be wrong. But if someone is different from you, your refusal to see and acknowledge that difference is wrong, isn’t it?
In fact, I say that when the West looks at other cultures, it does not see them as ‘the other’. It sees and thus transforms them into a pale erring variant of itself. The other becomes another.
I do not say that Judaism and Christianity also secularise themselves through violence. The emphasis on secularising violence seems truer of Islam. The Semitic religions see ‘Hinduism’ as another religion: false, to boot, but a religion, nevertheless. They see each other as the ‘other’, i.e., as deficient, or defective religions (or heresies).
18: You broadly seem to suggest that colonialism seems to have made us strangers to our own access to culture, and also that we simply have not made enough efforts to understand Western culture. Thus, we don’t know how we must respond to colonial ideas when they come back to bite us without our knowledge of it. We say and speak words that display our colonial consciousness. If Western efforts to understand us through their lenses did not bring us much good, why is the reverse process, of our understanding Western culture, going to do us much good? Should we not focus on understanding ourselves first?
Today, the ways and means that we possess to understand ourselves, the intellectual frameworks, the concepts, the interconnections between them, the social scientific theories are all entirely built by Europeans. I have shown in my work that they are based much more on their experience of the world than on how the world is. There are any number of examples: the idea that ‘all cultures have religion’; the idea of a ‘unique self (soul) which all human beings have’; the notion that ‘the caste system characterises Indian society,’ etc.
So, if we must understand ourselves, we must study the Europeans in very concrete ways. Of course, we will study and understand them as Indians. That is precisely the point. To recognise, first and foremost, that there are cultural differences between us. We must study these to understand the theories we have about human beings. To understand what we say about ourselves when we claim that we too have a religion or pontificate that one must be true to oneself, and that the caste system must be eradicated, we must study the West.
We must understand the intellectual frameworks and their implications to understand our laws and to learn how to make laws which don’t make a travesty of everything good and just. To understand ourselves, we must understand western culture. Whether we like it or not, colonialism happened, and colonial consciousness exists. The question is how we can get out of it and regain access to our experience. My research programme, “Comparative Science of Cultures”, formulates one way of doing it. We cannot return to a pristine past of pre-colonialism. The question facing us today is ‘what does it mean to be Indian in the 21st century?’
To know more about the methodology of this approach, which the question raises, the second and third chapter in ‘Reconceptualizing India Studies’ might help. They explicate my answers and their justifications.
19: In a country where “freedom of religion” is written into the constitution, how do we defend Indian/Hindu rights if you do not even define it as a religion? How can law makers even begin to understand the difference between religion and tradition, or the need to protect “majority” rights that are not religious in nature?
This is one of the big problems in India. We have no investments in research and development in social sciences. (The UGC does massively fund ideological propaganda by calling it ‘funding social research’.) There are also no institutions (political, legal, educational, or even charitable) which are interested in stimulating novel social scientific research.
If Hinduism is not a religion and current legal frameworks are primarily structured by Semitic religions, how can non-religious traditions hope to have the protections of law? This is not just a question for ‘Hindus’, but one that is also of crucial importance to other traditions like the native American or African. What would the frameworks or even minimal formulation of law look like which is not Semitic in nature but one which makes space for traditions too?
To get an idea of enormity of the question: despite decades of experience and knowledge, even a group of gifted intellectuals will have to do four to five years of full-time research to begin answering this question. There have been barely any attempts by Hindus to try and understand themselves, their social and institutional world, and their implications. Even to this day, people think that it is a definitional problem or a semantic discussion. (‘According to us religion is…’ or ‘Abrahamic definition of religion is…’). Our Supreme Court routinely cites the US juridical definitions to decide about cases involving religious disputes in India.
So, to answer the question about how lawyers can understand and argue about the difference between religion and tradition, first, social scientists must develop at least the beginnings of an alternative legal framework, legal definitions, etc. Second, it is a collaborative research project with people who specialise in the comparative science of cultures, religion and constitutional law and Indian law. Third, out of such a long-term collaborative project, some tangible results like providing a skeletal legal framework for traditions which can be integrated into existing legal structures could emerge. Such a project does not exist.
Further, to understand our ‘laws’, we must look at who the ‘lawmakers’ are. Could it be seriously suggested that our current crop of MPs and MLAs even understand what they are legislating? Laws are written (the way the Indian Constitution got written) by third-rate bureaucrats in capital cities: neither they nor the ‘legislators’ know what they are doing.
20: The need to defend Hindu rights (we don’t even get to run our own temples) have led to a political platform broadly called Hindutva, but social justice warriors want to pit Hinduism against Hindutva and there was even a global conference called to “dismantle Hindutva”. What should our reasoned stand on these issues be, if Hinduism is not even a religion?
Those defending Hindutva and those attacking it are both using the same intellectual framework. I have spoken of it in different places, including in “What does it mean to be ‘Indian’?” (Page 25). If Hinduism does not exist and India has no religion, what does it mean to speak of (Hindu) religious fundamentalism? How then do we understand the phenomenon of Hindutva? (See also my preface in Cultures Differ Differently.) None of the so-called India-scholars is raising these questions.
The conference you speak of was a marginal event, organised by academically fringe groups. But it gained wide-spread recognition because of the attention given to it by the people who got attacked by it. It surprises me that the so-called right-wing, in so far as it can be considered a coherent entity, has not realised that it now embodies and implements the PR strategy of these fringe ‘scholars’: bait ‘Hindutva’ if you want to gain academic approval and social recognition.
There are two problems in the way the question is asked: (1) One is that there is a “need to defend Hindu rights” which led to the political platform of Hindutva. Yet the ruling party, which is considered Hindutva, has gone much further than the Congress in the appeasement of minorities and instituting welfare schemes. (2) The suggestion is that “social justice warriors want to pit Hinduism against Hindutva”. But the Hindutva, whether in the form of civil organisations or as a political party, has completely bought into social justice ideology. (When people claim that the victory of the BJP in the recent elections is the result of a “pro-poor” policy of the government, or that BJP wants to win the elections to promote ‘socially just’ policies, one is enthusiastically espousing social justice slogans. Such people are also the real social justice warriors in India.)
The growth of social justice ideology and its conflation with political correctness is relatively new in the West. But the poisonous combination of identity politics, social justice and political correctness has existed in India for decades. The reservation system which has ballooned out-of-control, the atrocities act, etc., are expressions of social justice ideology promoted and encouraged also by the current ruling party. Hindutva is doing more to promote ‘social justice’ warriors than Congress and its allies ever did. And yet, academic fringe groups sell the idea (which the Right strengthens) that there is ‘caste atrocity’ and ‘minority insecurity’ in India under the BJP, while the current ruling party is the best defender and protector of the so-called ‘Dalits’ and ‘minority religious groups’.
It might be interesting to note that the notion of ‘social justice’ is of Christian (Roman Catholic) origin, best formulated by their Pope in the twentieth century. Without a Christian framework within which to understand and endorse it, the entire ‘social justice’ idea dissolves into incoherence. Leo Shields, commissioned as a Lieutenant in the US army and dies fighting in France in 1945, received a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 1941 for his dissertation on “The History and Meaning of the Term Social Justice”. There, he summarises it as follows:
“The … message of social justice is written in sharp relief against…(the) background of individualist thought in all its forms — romantic, rationalistic, humanitarian, totalitarian. It is the key to the reintegration of social life that must be inspired by Christian faith and charity and supported by grace. But it is a key which even this pagan society can turn if it is shown how. The realization of the idea of social justice is the unity of social peace.”
(I have written on this issue: see the article “Caste-based reservation and ‘social justice’ in India”. It is published in the book Western Foundations of the Caste System, 2017, and is also available on my academia.edu page.)
The current ruling party bends over backwards to appease ‘oppressed’ groups because it has bought into the image sold by others that it is a ‘religious fundamentalist party’ or that it is a ‘majoritarian party’ and that it would be against ‘social justice’ to do otherwise, etc. I do not think that the BJP (and the Sangh Parivar) are religious fundamentalists. This way of characterising and demonising them is the favorite pastime of the intellectually weak. But the BJP buys into its hook, line and sinker and is constantly busy ‘defending’ itself from these pseudo-attacks.
21: Islam has 200 million adherents in India, and Christianity is expanding fast through conversions in many states. There are non-Hindu majorities in seven states/Union Territories, and even states like Kerala may soon have fewer than 50 per cent who call themselves Hindu (it is 54 per cent now, but in 20 years, it could fall below 50 per cent). How do we apply your theories and postulates to defend the ideas that are truly Indian, especially when radical Islam and Evangelical Christianity are seeking to differentiate and dissociate from Indian cultural ethos, aided by global social justice warriors?
I have spoken about how religion spreads in two ways: secularisation and proselytisation. Secularisation is more dangerous of the two. Strangely, Indians are more worried about proselytisation than they are about secularisation, which spreads Christian ideas in a de-Christianised form. Indian culture was not threatened by these religions, and it was able to deal with their proselytising drive. It did so without persecuting them or banning them. A vibrant Indian culture can handle religion in such a way that religion itself changes to adapt itself into the non-religious environment it finds itself in.
But the impact of colonialism, the enduring colonial consciousness and secularisation of religious ideas have consistently reduced the vibrancy of our culture. Post-Independence has seen an acceleration of this loss-of-vibrancy. The process of secularisation transforms ‘the other’, in our case the Indian traditions, into pale and erring variants of religion. We Indians swallow this silly idea hook, line, and sinker. One of the reasons why Indian culture is losing its vibrancy is because we are busy transforming it into something it is not. We are unable to transmit the culture we received from our ancestors to posterity because we have taken over the language and framework of the West (from Indology and other social sciences).
It is not a question of practical problems like how to argue in a court of law, but a question of how you look at yourself, your life, and your experiences. What is breathtaking is the combination of ignorance and complacency of Indians. We don’t understand English, but we are certain that we are experts there. We very easily pick up words and sentences and use them without any reflection or self-reflection and even write on our ‘experiments with truth’. We don’t ask if those words make sense of our experience. This did not create huge problems to the generation that grew up in the 1950s because they were schooled in regional languages and used English in addition to it. But that is no longer the case; it has progressively become worse with every generation. Thus, we have today’s generation which only learns English (that too badly) and as a result cannot speak, think, or write coherently in any language. Not in English and not in any regional language.
Regional languages have provided protection against colonial consciousness. I often tell my Indian students to think in their native languages, as though they are speaking to their grandmothers. The result is striking: the amount of nonsense that comes out of their mouths gets reduced drastically. It is much harder to speak in slogans, jargon and produce verbiage if you must explain it in Kannada or Marathi to your grandmother. Then you are forced to interrogate what you are saying. You are forced to think. (You cannot explain to your grandmother what ‘coloniality’ or ‘decoloniality’ is even if someone has coined a regional language word to translate these words.) But unfortunately, regional languages are on the decline. The millennials were already severely handicapped and now their children will be even more stunted: incoherent, confused, and unhappy personalities who speak broken English with pseudo-American accents.
We can improve this sorry situation by promoting regional languages in India. One way to do it would be to combine the strengths of the twentieth century with the strengths of our culture (its orality) by creating and promoting audio books of some of the great literature written in Indian regional languages.
Because the millennial and post-millennial generations cannot read or write in regional languages, they have a very limited access to language and culture. The scope of their language is limited to conversations with friends and TV series. Without access to the richness of ideas through language, they have no way of evolving. So, they lose access to one of the most important resources of a culture: its literature, art, and ideas. And without these resources, they cannot aspire to become anything more than two-dimensional uncultured boors. Therefore, by making the literature in regional languages available as audio books, we can partially restore their access to regional languages and thus to Indian culture and ideas.
What I hope will happen in India is that a generation will come which can look at the ravages wrought by colonialism and the post-independence institutions and start dismantling the useless and dangerous structures and start building anew. They will have to be intellectuals and builders, formed and shaped by the consequences of the current generation’s failures. Perhaps the grandchildren of the millennials. They will need intellectual tools and frameworks. It is for that posterity that I write.