[As India heads toward
general elections in April and May, its 814,591,184 registered voters are being
influenced by mutated versions of India’s old fantasies. At the heart of the
festive campaigns is a man who admirers and foes alike assert is a mass leader
with dictatorial qualities; his alarmed opponents, headed by the governing
party, the Indian National Congress; and an underrated revolutionary who wants
to destroy all of the above and start afresh.]
By Manu Joseph
As India heads toward
general elections in April and May, its 814,591,184 registered voters are being
influenced by mutated versions of India’s old fantasies. At the heart of the
festive campaigns is a man who admirers and foes alike assert is a mass leader
with dictatorial qualities; his alarmed opponents, headed by the governing
party, the Indian National Congress; and an underrated revolutionary who wants
to destroy all of the above and start afresh.
What the elections are
largely about this time is the rise of the fierce Hindu nationalist Narendra
Modi — whose charm in no small measure derives from the sense
of danger he exudes from having been accused of complicity in the 2002 riots in
Gujarat State that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people,
mostly Muslims — and the political responses to his ascent.
The notion that Mr.
Modi, who belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been the principal
opposition in Parliament for 10 years, is the answer to India’s woes has been
propagated by the business community, which owns Indian journalism, and the
urban middle class, which views the Indian National Congress as corrupt,
inefficient and a reckless benefactor of the poor. The noise on social media,
which is largely in favor of Mr. Modi, contains the low-stakes patriotism of Indian
residents of the United States who do not have to live through the consequences
of their long-distance affair with nationalism. They tend to be liberal
Democrats in the United States, but political conservatives in India.
The man who has done
the greatest damage to Mr. Modi is Arvind Kejriwal, who was the core of a
street movement against the corrupt political class before he converted his
anarchic protests into an Occupy the Delhi Assembly movement and ran for
office. He ended up as Delhi’s chief minister. Mr. Kejriwal has accused Mr.
Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 and still today, of being a danger
to India’s Muslims and a vassal of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
Mr. Modi has not
responded. On Sunday, a day before he was to appear before a live television
audience, he canceled the event. He was to face questions not only from an
interviewer but also from the audience. A person who was aware of the details
and did not want to be identified said that Mr. Modi’s cancellation followed demands
from his party to control the nature of the questions and the broadcast. Mr.
Modi, who wants to be India’s prime minister, is not a man who can survive a
question session he cannot control.
His opponents, headed
by the Congress party, have tried to counter him by forming a tired fellowship
of what they call “secularism,” which in theory is about the co-existence of
various faiths but in practice is short-term pandering to India’s nearly 180
million Muslims.
It was in response to
the perceived rise of Mr. Modi that an unusual meeting was organized by the
Communist Party of India (Marxist). Two men many Indians would never believe
could share a stage did exactly that, at a public seminar on Monday. These were
ordinary men, but they were the subjects of two extraordinary photographs that
became emblems of the 2002 Gujarat riots. One was Qutubuddin Ansari, a Muslim
tailor who was photographed during the riots begging security personnel to save
him. The other was Ashok Mochi, one of the Hindu rioters, who was photographed
brandishing an iron rod as he set homes on fire.
Mr. Mochi, who was
imprisoned for a few days on minor charges, asked Mr. Ansari to forgive him and
said Mr. Modi’s claims of economic progress in Gujarat under his administration
were an exaggeration. “I still live on a footpath,” Mr. Mochi said.
Manu Joseph is author
of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”
BANNED IN BANGALORE
[What is new, and heartening, this time is that the best are suddenly full of passionate intensity. The dormant liberal conscience of India was awakened by the stunning blow to freedom of speech that had been dealt by my publisher in giving in to the demands of the claimants, agreeing to take the book out of circulation and pulp all remaining copies.]
[What is new, and heartening, this time is that the best are suddenly full of passionate intensity. The dormant liberal conscience of India was awakened by the stunning blow to freedom of speech that had been dealt by my publisher in giving in to the demands of the claimants, agreeing to take the book out of circulation and pulp all remaining copies.]
By Wendy Doniger
CHICAGO — LAST month a retired Hindu school teacher named Dinanath Batra,
who had brought a lawsuit against me and Penguin Books, India, succeeded in
getting my book, “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn from publication in India. The
book, the court agreed, was a violation of India’s blasphemy law, which makes
it a crime to offend the sensibilities of a religious person.
Within hours I was
receiving hundreds of emails from colleagues, students, readers, high school
friends and even complete strangers — in the United States, India and beyond —
commiserating with me in my dark hour. But their sympathy, while appreciated,
was also wasted: I was in high spirits.
I have devoted my
entire academic career, going back to the 1960s, to the interpretation of
Hinduism and Indian society, and I have long been inured to the vilification of
my books by a narrow band of narrow-minded Hindus.
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Their voices had
drowned out those of the broader, more liberal parts of Indian society; it
reminded me of William Butler Yeats’s line: “The best lack all conviction,
while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
What is new, and
heartening, this time is that the best are suddenly full of passionate
intensity. The dormant liberal conscience of India was awakened by the stunning
blow to freedom of speech that had been dealt by my publisher in giving in to
the demands of the claimants, agreeing to take the book out of circulation and
pulp all remaining copies.
I think the ugliness
of the word “pulp” is what struck a nerve, conjuring up memories of “Fahrenheit
451” and Germany in the 1930s. The outrage had been pent up for many years, as
other books, films, paintings and sculptures were forced out of circulation by
a mounting wave of censorship.
My case was simply the
last straw, in part because of its timing, just when many in India had begun to
view with horror the likelihood that the elections in May will put into power Narendra Modi, a
member of the ultra-right wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
If Mr. Batra’s
intention was to keep people from reading the book, it certainly backfired: In
India, not a single copy was destroyed (the publisher had only a few copies in
stock, and those in bookstores quickly sold out), and e-books circulate freely.
You cannot ban a book in the age of the Internet. Its sales rank on Amazon has
been in single-digit heaven. “Banned in Boston” is a selling label.
Attention has now
shifted, rightly, to the broader problems posed by the Indian blasphemy law. My
case has helped highlight the extent to which Hindu fundamentalists
(Hindutva-vadis, those who champion “Hindutva,” or “Hindu-ness”) now dominate
the political discourse in India.
Two objections to the
book cited in the lawsuit reveal something about the Hindutva mentality. First,
the suit objects “that the aforesaid book is written with Christian Missionary
Zeal.” This caused great hilarity among my friends and family, since I grew up
in a Jewish family in Great Neck, N.Y.
But when I foolishly
decided to set the matter straight — “Hey,” I wrote to an accuser, “I’m Jewish”
— I was hit with a barrage of poisonous anti-Semitism. One correspondent wrote:
“Hi. I recently came across your book on hindus. Where you try to humiliate us.
I don’t know much about jews. Based on your work, I think jews are evil. So
Hitler was probably correct in killing all jews in Germany. Bye.”
It’s hard to have a
religious dialogue with someone who begins the conversation like that. I was
doing better in my role as a Christian missionary.
But there is a bitter
irony in this mischaracterization of my religion, since Christian missionaries
are actually a part of the problem.
The Victorian
Protestant British scorned Hinduism’s polytheism, erotic sculptures, spirited
mockery of its own gods and earthy mythology as filthy paganism. They also
preferred the texts created and perpetuated by a small, upper-caste male elite,
and regarded as beneath contempt the vast oral and vernacular literatures
enriched and animated by the voices of women and lower castes. It is this
latter, “alternative” Hinduism that my book celebrates throughout Indian
history.
Many of the Hindu
elite who worked closely with the British caught the prejudices of their
masters. In the 19th century, those Hindus lifted up other aspects of Hinduism
— its philosophy, its tradition of meditation — that were more palatable to
European tastes and made them into a new, sanitized brand of Hinduism, often
referred to as Sanatana Dharma, “the Eternal Law.”
That’s the Hinduism
that Hindutva-vadis are defending, while they deny the one that the Christian
missionaries hated and that I love and write about — the pluralistic,
open-ended, endlessly imaginative, often satirical Hinduism. The Hindutva-vadis
are the ones who are attacking Hinduism; I am defending it against them.
The Victorian factor
also accounts for the Hindutva antipathy to sex. (Here it is not irrelevant
that India recently passed a law criminalizing homosexuality.) The lawsuit
objects that my “focus in approaching Hindu Scriptures has been sexual in
orientation.” In my defense, I can tell you there is a lot of sex in Hinduism,
and therefore a lot of puritanism in Hindutva; where there are lions, there are
jackals. The poems and songs that imagine the god as lover, like the exquisite
statues of goddesses, are a vital part of the religion of those Hindus who did
not cave under the pressure of colonial scorn.
But I must apologize
for what may amount to false advertising on my behalf by Mr. Batra, who
pronounced my book “filthy and dirty.” Readers who bought a copy in hope of
finding such passages will be, I fear, disappointed. “The Hindus” isn’t about
sex at all. It’s about religion, which is much hotter than sex.
Wendy
Doniger is a professor of the history of religions at the
University of Chicago and the author of “The Hindus: An Alternative
History.”
