For decades, the source of India’s popularity has ranged from the exoticization of yoga, to the mysticism of Indian spirituality, going on to the reign of Bollywood, and the mainstreaming of India’s IT-savvy middle class. The world’s obsession with India has historically known no bounds, making it the source of unobstructed attention for centuries. Now, a new Indian ideal stands tall before the world: the spectacle that is the religious right.
The BJP’s Nupur Sharma’s Islamophobic statements on national television, the banning of hijabs in schools or vigilantism against beef-eating Muslims are the blossoming ideals that were sown almost a century ago. And the ideal at its very core, is an issue of land and who gets to belong.
The Indian nationalist organization, RSS, was formed in 1925 centred around the dream of a Hindutva India. Veer Savarkar, who founded the ideological basis of Hindutva, revealed his underlying insecurity of Muslim presence and influence in the region, which he believed was solely the right of Hindus. In his fierce writing on Hindutva, he traced Hindu identity to sacred land.
The strategy of historicizing nature included Indian territory being the father land and the holy land. This criterion was not only exclusionary for Muslims as their Holy Land existed in Arab but it also legitimized Hindu nationalism over any other nationalism. This vision was further reified by his close aide Golwalkar. He believed that Indian soil was not for Muslims because unlike the rich and fertile geography of India, “Islam originated in a dry sandy region.”
Most part of the ideology fetishizes the land but even the appraisal of land is linked to the (Aryan) race that discovered it. With this understanding, every other dynasty – from Ghaznavids to Mughals – is demonized as the foreign invader.
It is this one-dimensional look at history that has materialized into the present-day exclusion and violence against Muslims. In Modi’s India, the Hindutva ideology materialized when Article 370, which granted special status to Kashmir, was revoked in 2019. The 'dream' to return the land to exiled Hindus was once again pursued the same year with the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which essentially fast tracks citizenship to non-Muslims migrants from the neighbouring countries. Both these attempts essentially introduced religious tests to gain Indian citizenship. These tests are the justification of the nightmares of Babri Masjid and Gujarat, which still haunt Indian Muslims.
But there’s a reality which the Hindutva ideology needs to confront – Islam came to India not through Muslim invaders but through Arab traders. The medieval and ancient history of India reveals that Arabs first came to India’s Malabar region in the 7th century for trade of scents and spices. Many of these traders settled in the region and married local Indian women. The first mosque, Cherama Juma Mosque, was built in Kodungallur (present-day Kerala) in 629 AD. It was around the time of Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) life and is one of the first few mosques to be made outside Arabia.
It was roughly around the same time in the 6th century when young Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, sought refuge amongst the geography of Bodh Gaya (present-day Bihar). It was only in six months that being within India’s soil and air provided Siddhartha the real Enlightenment, or the state of Nirvana. What followed next is history. People resigned from their worldly affairs to follow Buddha in his journey towards enlightenment and gave rise to the one the one of the largest religions in the world.
Later on Gandhi followed the same principles of expanding India’s potential through self-actualization and a deep relationship with nature. He borrowed Buddhism’s principle of ahimsa (doing no harm) in his anti-imperialist movement. Like this he developed Satyagraha, a force of truth, to resist British colonialism by gaining mastery over their minds and making them realize their injustice. Satyagraha manifested in the non-cooperation movement between 1919 and 1922, the Khadi movement in the 1920s, the civil disobedience movement between 1930 and 1934 and many hunger strikes.
During these times, mass awareness campaigns reimagined India where people communally went through many ordeals to fully realize their potential of self-reliance in governance, commerce, manufacturing, employment and in all other aspects of life. Even till his last breath Gandhi was practising Satyagraha and observing fasts to persuade the Indian government to release Pakistan’s due share of money and assets decided at the time of partition. He defined Indian civilization not in terms of boundaries but in terms of peaceful coexistence between all the diverse communities. Among occasional quarrels and limitations of differing political ideologies, he dreamt of India as a big happy family where all the children belonged.
This Gandhian memory is intruded by the reality of the BJP’s India. Picking and choosing history is a violent act, which is very evident in the Hindutva ideology. Amidst songs of “iss desh mein rehna hai to jai shariram kehna seekho”, Gandhi’s India seems nothing less than a utopian dream.
But India is a fairly modern concept, and so is Hindutva. Hindustan, as history remembers, is the land next to the Sindhu river where many nomadic groups found home. Hindustan was not a battleground for conquests but a space where Buddha found Nirvana. Hindustan was a melting pot of pluralism where low-caste Hindus escaped their destiny of an untouchable and sought refuge in Islam. It is the same land where the global symbol of non-violence emerged. But where India owned everyone, it is fought over to be owned by just a few. The essence of India is plagued by the BJP’s attempt of restructuring Indian identity for just one purpose: that of electoral power. The BJP’s India is the tragedy of nationalism which thrives on the grave of Hindustan.
The writer is a multimedia journalist at TCM, with an interest in South Asian history and culture.
She tweets _momash