While Hinduism is a religion, Hindutva is an identity. Though the origins of Hindutva are diverse, its foremost early expositer and formulater, Vinayak Sarvakar, was an atheist. So while the vast majority of Hindutva adherents are religious Hindus, being a religious Hindu is not a necessary precondition.
Rather, Hindutva may best be thought of as an personal identity with India and Indian culture, and a mass movement attempting to unite the diverse strands of native Indian identity into one. Like many 21st century ideologies, including Islamic and Protestant fundamentalism, Hindutva’s origins date back to the rise of European colonial hegemony in the 19th century.
While Nehru and Jinnah were inspired in their anti-colonial politics by the very traditions of liberty and self-determination pregnant within Western nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Chinese and Japanese nationalism, and Hindutva, all fuse deep-rooted indigenous identities with the modern yearning toward self-determination. Hindutva cannot be understood except in the context of its reaction to the West, and to Islam, but it asserts its deep continuity with the native traditions of the subcontinent.
It is in its attitude toward Islam that contemporary Hindu nationalists are most striking in their dissent from the orthodoxies of the post-colonial Indian secular elites. Though Nehru and his successors all averred a civilisational Hindu identity, they also asserted that in contradiction to Pakistan their project was not confessional, but religiously pluralistic. They argued that Indian nationalism by necessity and choice was a multi-religious project, and that Pakistan’s establishment was predicated on a misunderstanding of the nature of the relationship between Muslims and Hindus, which had been defined by a certain level of amity before the British. Nehruvian socialists and India’s secular English-speaking elite aimed to establish in India a society and culture which rebuked Pakistan’s descent into religious sectarianism.
This project was fundamentally post-colonial, attempting to paper over divisions which had ripened during the British Raj, ultimately fracturing the subcontinent into two states. The early Hindu nationalists had a different vision, one where India’s Hindu identity became central to its self-conception, in the same manner that Pakistan’s Islamic identity was etched into its founding DNA. Rather than Hindu-Muslim unity fractured by the British, the historiography favored by Hindu nationalists argues for two colonialisms, first by Muslims, then by the British. Proponents of Hindutva see in India a wounded civilisation which must be healed, revived, and allowed to take its place vigorously in the congress of nations.
Whatever legitimacy Hindu nationalists had at the founding of India was obliterated by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an activist in the RSS. It took them generations to rehabilitate themselves. This let independent India’s 20th century political and cultural elite have a free hand in shaping Western perceptions. Though the vast majority of Indians were conservative Hindus, Hindu nationalism was long a stillborn political movement hamstrung by its connection to the killing of the beloved Gandhi.
The election and popularity of Modi, and the reorientation of much of Indian popular culture toward Hindutva, means that the 20th century cultural monopoly of the secular Left is now firmly in the rearview mirror. The new reality can be illustrated by the complex dance of Priyanka Chopra, an internationally-renowned Bollywood actress married to a white American pop singer, who nonetheless has good relations with Hindutva cultural elites. Chopra has attempted to depict herself as a progressive, supporting Black Lives Matter. Whatever her personal beliefs, Chopra is clearly attempting to navigate the reality that to be acceptable in the Indian market she cannot be seen as oppositional to the dominant political and cultural ethos, while in the American context she cannot be seen to be reactionary
Yet more broadly the global Left is not positively inclined toward Modi and his Hindutva government, despite the reality that it has not enacted the neoliberal reform they oppose. The Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy, who is fundamentally a global Leftist activist, is deeply opposed to Hindu nationalism. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the former American adult film actress Mia Khalifa tweeting in support of farmers in Punjab only makes sense in light of the fact that they are protesting in opposition to the Modi government. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have been courting allies against their Leftist antagonists, which sometimes results in strange connections to Western white nationalists. Whatever its economics, Hindutva’s plainly anti-Islamic stance falls afoul of the de facto global Left popular front, and wins strange admirers in Europe.
As we proceed in the 21st century India and the world will confront two simultaneous dynamics: modernisation of the nation-state and the rise of indigenous non-Western cultural and political movements, and further international global connections and coalitions. Instead of a homogeneous world dominated by Western “Davos Man,” what we will see is a world with difficult to define texture and protean affinities which might seem ideologically nonsensical.
The rise of Hindu nationalism and its political dominance in India seems here to stay. This will result in a native cultural ascendancy, and will lead to a negative response from the global Left, which has a substantial presence in the English-speaking middle and upper-class of the subcontinent. None of this speaks to the substance of what Hindu nationalism is. It simply speaks to the natural reaction of those with power who no longer have it.
Instead of the great mass of the population being Westernised by the brown-skinned Englishmen, the great mass have thrown up their own leadership class, which has marginalised the Macaulay men. And the responding rage of the secular class has been heard round the world.
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