In
a recent op-ed in a national daily, Dr Rakesh Sinha, a Delhi University professor, sought to clear the mist around
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of cultural nationalism, and rescue it
from the attacks of the critics, whom he caricaturises as pseudo-secularists.
But in doing so, the writer, first of all, misread what a renowned political
scientist has said about modern nations.
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| Image courtsey: apsc-arts.deviantart.com |
Late Benedict Anderson, a Cornell
University professor had stated in his 1983 book that modern nations are best
understood as imagined communities (also the title of the book) because, to
quote him, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of
their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion.” Dr Sinha asserts that the RSS’ idea of
Hindu rashtra “disqualifies Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation as an
‘imagined community’”. It is difficult to understand why it should be. The
probable explanation is that an imagined community seeks participation from its
citizens in creating a common culture, while the state in the Hindu rashtra is
busy ensuring that Muslims, Christians or communists as well as the Dalits and
adivasis are falling in line with the Hindutva ideal of cultural “unity”. Dr
Sinha is well within his rights to bring forth the magnanimity of Sri Golwalkar
with regard to cow protection and Muslim baiting but hero worship must not
blind him to what the second sarsanghchalak had said in his Bunch of
Thoughts. Similarly, even though Anderson is no apologist for nation or
nationalism, for the sake of intellectual honesty, a gross misreading of him
must be avoided.
By “imagined” Anderson does not mean
“unreal”, “false” or “artificial”, it merely notices that in modern times people all over the world have creatively visualized and shaped, i.e., imagine, their collective and distinct existence as a
nation. He says, “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their
falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” In India, Hindus,
Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, animists, atheists all must come
together to imagine how we would like to live. However, Dr Sinha would like us to
believe that the final word about Indian nationalism had been spoken; we only
now have to impose it without any further attempt at dialogue.
Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century
scholar in whom RSS ideologues might discover a kindred spirit, made a valid
point when he said there are two things that constitute the nation: “One is in
the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich
heritage of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live
together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has
been handed down.” While Hindutva organizations and ideologues go hammer and
tongs about the former, they exhibit a glorious disregard of the need to engage
with others in a dialogue to collectively shape a common future.
And the above are not the only failures
of the Hindutva movement.
The insistence on the so-called
“cultural nationalism” and the talk of “civilizational trajectories” proffer an
extremely narrow view of Indian history. Scholars call it an essentialist view;
we might even refer to it as the fossilized image of India’s past. Modern India
has moved far ahead from the “golden period” first popularised by the European
Indologists of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The upper-caste Hindu
intellectuals took advantage of the scholarly discoveries of the Indologists
and fashioned the language of modern Indian nationalism. This new language was
in essence patently brahmanical—eulogizing, at different times and in different
regions, cow, Ganesha, Krishna, Gita, mother goddess, temple, so on and so
forth. But it excluded the contrapuntal contribution of many other Indians who
at that moment were just beginning their exciting journey in articulating their
points of view. Universal education, political mobilization, participation of women,
has now made it possible for a truly representative majority of Indians to
engage in a fruitful conversation about the meaning and essence of Indian
nationalism. If ever there was “golden period” in Indian history, it is now;
but, by harping on Hindu Rashtra, Dr Sinha—and the movement he represents—is
missing a golden opportunity to create a genuine Indian nationalism and a
genuine Indian nation.
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