THE HINDU PHENOMENON
By Girilal Jain - Editorial for 3-1-2000
 
Editor's Note 
Chapter 1 - The Civilizational Perspective
Chapter 2 - A Unique Phenomenon
Chapter 3 - Hindu Nationalism: The First Phase
Chapter 4 - Retreat and Rage
Chapter 5 - The Nehruvian Framework
Chapter 6 - Ayodhya: A Historical Watershed
Appendix 1 - Resolving the Ancient Language Problem
Appendix 2 - Islam and the Nation Concept
Appendix 3 - The Old Order Changeth...
Appendix 4 - Combining Bhakti with Power

Editor's Note

Girilal Jain belonged to that minority of Indian
intellectuals who welcomed the movement for the Ram
temple as part of the process of Hindu self-renewal and
self-affirmation. The rise of Hindus, he argued, was a
phenomenon that began 200 years ago with the
consolidation of the British Raj and the disarming of the
local populace. This produced a fundamental shift in the
power balance between Hindus and Muslims which has not
been reversed since, though it led to the partition of
the country in 1947. Every important Hindu leader from
Rammohan Roy to Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru has
made his contribution to the Hindu resurgence. The
Ramjanambhoomi movement was only the latest manifestation
of this phenomenon, its importance being that it had
placed the issued of the civilizational base of Indian
nationalism at the centre of the country's political
agenda. Girilal Jain believed that the political-economic
order that Jawaharlal Nehru had fashioned was as much in
the throes of death as its progenitor, the Marxist-
Leninist- Stalinist order. Two major planks of this
order, secularism and socialism, had lost much of their
old glitter while the third, non-alignment, had become
redundant. By the same token, re-Hinduization of the
country's political domain had begun.

It was not an accident that the battle between aroused
Hindus and the Indian state had been joined on the
question of the Ram temple. For Ram was the exemplar par
excellence for the Hindu public domain. In historic
terms, therefore, the proposed temple was another step
towards that goal. The proper English translation of
Hindu rashtra would be Hindu polity and not Hindu nation.

The concept of nation was, in fact, Girilal Jain argued,
alien to the Hindu temperament and genius. It was
essentially Semitic in character, even if it arose in
western Europe in the eighteenth century when it had
successfully shaken off the Church's stranglehold. For,
like Christianity and Islam, it too emphasized the
exclusion of those who did not belong to the charmed
circle (territorial, linguistic or ethnic) as much as it
emphasized the inclusion of those who fell within the
circle.

By contrast, the essential spirit of Hinduism was
inclusivist, and not exclusivist by definition. Such a
spirit must seek to abolish and not build boundaries.
That is why he held that the Hindus could not sustain an
anti-Muslim feeling except temporarily and, that too,
under provocation.

In that sense, Girilal Jain argued, the Hindu fight was
not with Muslims; the fight was between Hindus anxious to
renew themselves in the spirit of their civilization, and
the state and the intellectual class trapped in the
debris the British managed to bury us under before they
left: "The proponents of the Western ideology are using
Muslims as auxiliaries and it is a pity Muslim leaders
are allowing themselves to be so used".

Girilal Jain had worked out the broad framework of this
project and commenced work on the draft when he fell
fatally ill in June 1993. The book has been completed on
the basis of his draft, notes and recent writings.
Despite all its shortcomings I believe the end result is
a fairly accurate statement of his position `though, of
necessity, it has been stated briefly.

I am grateful to The Times of India, The Sunday Mail, and
The Observer group of publications for permission to use
material published in their columns. I would also like to
thank Mr. Shamlal, Mr. Inder Malhotra, Mr. Dileep
Padgaonkar, Mr. Swapan Dasgupta, Mr. Arun Shourie, Mr.
Jagmohan, Mr. Ram Swarup, Mr. Sita Ram Goel and Mr. Gopal
Krishna, all friends and colleagues of my father, for
their comments and suggestions on the work. I am only too
conscious that the responsibility for the shortcomings is
entirely mine.

- Meenakshi Jain


Chapter 1 - The Civilizational Perspective

I must say at the outset that I think in terms which are
different from the ones that have dominated the public
discourse in our country for a century and longer. I
think in terms of civilizations, and not territorial
states. It is not that I do not believe in the validity
of the concept of the nation-state as an organizing
principle in the economic and political field. I do. But
I do not regard it as adequate for defining the nature of
our enterprise and therefore the obligation of our state
which must flow from a definition of its nature. Indeed,
I believe that it is our failure to view ourselves as a
civilization and to formulate the tasks for our state
accordingly that lies behind many of the problems we
face.

As I said at the outset, I think in terms of
civilizations and not of nations or territorial states.
This is a relatively new development in my life and, to
be candid, I do not believe it would have crystallized to
the extent it has if the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's (VHP)
campaign on the Ramjanambhoomi temple in Ayodhya had not
acquired the sweep it had by the time of the shilanyas in
1989; if this sweep had not got translated into support
for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the elections
that followed the shilanyas; if the BJP had not, as a
result, become a significant factor in Indian politics,
and, finally, if the popular response to L.K. Advani's
rath yatra had not been as overwhelming as in fact it
turned out to be.

Success, as the saying goes, has many fathers and failure
none. But there is a difference between what we call
opportunism and willingness to recognize a significant
change, especially a change that promises to mark the end
of an epoch and the beginning of a new one. I am
persuaded that we are witnessing a change of that order
in India.

So, as I view the scene, it is no longer particularly
relevant to debate whether Hindu rashtra is desirable or
not, though many of us, mired as we human beings mostly
are in modes of thought which have had their day, will
continue to engage in this exercise. It has been firmly
and finally put on the agenda, though, again many of us
would try hard to avoid this recognition because, more
often than not, wish is the father of thought for most of
us. The pertinent question now is the speed with which
this possibility is likely to be realized.

I for one do not regard speculation regarding the time
frame to be in order. As a Hindu I believe in the
ineluctable power of the time spirit: Mahakala will
deliver on time -- neither earlier nor later. What is
material is that the country is well set on that road,
and while there may be, indeed there shall be, setbacks,
these will be temporary. History zigzags; it never moves
in a straight line. But it moves, and according to a
pattern.

An epochal change, it is hardly necessary for me to point
out, cannot take place unless the existing order has more
or less exhausted its beneficial potentialities, and the
new order has been in the making for quite some time.
Unknown to us and invisible to us, the two processes are
more or less simultaneous. This has been the case in
India, as I hope to be able to show. The subject is
extremely complex and I cannot possibly do anything like
justice to it for a variety of reasons. This would have
been the case even if I was concerned only with the post-
independence period, or the freedom movement. But I am
concerned with a whole millennium. So you can imagine the
difficulties I face in working out and presenting a
theory which is reasonably coherent, intelligible and
acceptable. Before I proceed further, I might add that in
such a framework, there is, at the intellectual level,
not much scope for moral judgement and indignation,
though all that is, of course, valid at the political
level.

Why do I think in terms of a whole millennium which, on
the face of it, is fragmented at so many points? My
reason is simple. The beginning of the millennium
witnessed the beginning of the assault on Hindu India and
as we approach its end, we can clearly see the approach
of the end of that assault. Only on a superficial, so-
called rational, view can it be regarded as an accident
that the millennium which began with the destruction of
hundreds and thousands of our temples should be drawing
towards a close amidst an unprecedented upsurge on the
question of the construction of a Ram temple at a site
millions of ordinary Hindus regard as the avatar's
janambhoomi. For me as an analyst, the condemnation of
the campaign in favour of the temple as Hindu
communalism, obscurantism, relapse into medievalism and
fascism is as besides the point as condemnation of the
destruction of Hindu temples, including the famous
Somnath, by Mahmud Ghaznavi at the beginning of the
eleventh century. As a Hindu, I, of course, welcome the
former and feel saddened by the memory of the latter. But
analysis is a different matter altogether. It has to be
clinical in its rigour. By that yardstick, the first is
an expression of Hindu resurgence and the second of the
second Islamic explosion centred on Central Asia, as the
first was centred on Arabia.

Religious-civilizational explosions are like floods and
earthquakes. Only in retrospect do their adherents and
proponents look for and offer justification for them.
When they take place, they are their own justification,
or condemnation for victims. This was clearly true of the
first Islamic wave in the seventh and eighth centuries,
which saw the beginning of the attack on the frontiers of
our civilization in Afghanistan, Eastern Iran,
Baluchistan, and Sind, and this was equally true of the
second Turkic Islamic wave which overtook us precisely
because our defences on the border had finally gave way
after three to four centuries of bitter fight.

In parenthesis, I might mention that Arab Islam was as
much a victim of this Turkic Islamic explosion as Hindu
India. Indeed, for all practical purposes, the Turks took
over the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad by the middle of
the tenth century, that is long before Mahmud Ghaznavi
began his raids into India proper. The sack of Baghdad in
1258 was only the culmination of a process that had been
on for well over three centuries; in fact, close to four.

It will be outside the scope of this discussion for me to
go into the state of India at that time and the nature of
the Indian response. Even so, it is necessary to make a
couple of points in passing because a distorted
perspective has come to dominate our thinking in this
regard. India, of course, could not mobilize against
Mahmud Ghaznavi and subsequent invaders the kind of
vigorous response Chandragupta Maurya had after the raid
by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., but
this was primarily because the centre of political power
had moved from North India, which had to bear the brunt
of Muslim invasions, to the Deccan and the south. It is
really a shame that so few Hindus are alive to the
achievements of the Rashtrakuta, SatvAhan, Chola and
Vijaynagar empires. This applies as much to those who
rejoice in the Rajput resistance, followed by the Maratha
and Sikh resistance, as to those who take pride in the
glory of the Mughal empire.

It would also be in order to emphasize that the Hindu
resistance to Muslim invasions, conquests and rule was
truly heroic, both in fact and in spirit. The first
aspect is by now well recognized and need not therefore
detain us.1 The latter aspect has, however, not received
much attention at the hands of historians and, therefore,
needs to be specially emphasized.

The Bhakti movement was doubtless part of the Hindu
response to Muslim rule. But it is a travesty of the
truth to suggest, as is done by any number of Hindu
intellectuals, that it represented an attempt to produce
a synthesis between Hinduism and Islam. If anything, it
was an attempt, even if unconscious, to disarm Islam with
the help of a popular movement which clearly demonstrated
that equality before God was as much part of Hinduism as
it was of Islam. The Bhakti movement was a form of
resistance and not an attempt at synthesis or compromise.
Many Hindu intellectuals are just not able to comprehend
the fact that there is no human aspiration or experience
which lies outside the range of Hinduism; it provides for
even demon-Gods. In contrast, all religions are in the
nature of sects, though they cannot be so defined because
of their insistence on their separateness and, indeed,
hostility to Hinduism.

The point I wish particularly to underscore is, however,
different; which is that when Hindus fought and lost,
they did not throw up prophets of woe and doom; they did
not bemoan that their Gods had let them down because they
had been disloyal to them. Hindus are perhaps unique in
this respect. That is perhaps why the well-known British
historian Elliot wondered why Hindus had not left any
account which could enable us to gauge the traumatic
impact Muslim conquests and rule had on them.
(Incidentally, one such account entitled Kanhadade
Prabandha by the Jain Muni Padmanabha written in the
fifteenth century regarding the fight for the Jalore fort
is available, and the muni-poet praises Muslim valour as
he praises Hindu valour. An English translation of this
unique document, with an introduction and annotation by
V.S. Bhatnagar, has recently been published.)2

A large number of Hindus, of course, cooperated with
Muslim rulers and millions even got converted to Islam.
It is important to know, even in retrospect, how Islam
spread. But, for one thing, the distinction that is often
made between conversion by force (sword), temptation
(favours by the court) and persuasion (influence of pious
Sufis) is rather arbitrary because all three factors
operated in conjunction with one another; and, for
another, the more critical point for us is that by the
time the Mughal empire went into decline in the early
eighteenth century, a kind of stalemate had been reached,
with neither the Hindus nor the Muslims able to dominate
India as a whole. It was in this context that the British
came to rule over India.

We can speculate on the likely course of events in case
the British had not arrived on the scene. Personally, I
do not, as a rule, engage in such speculation. I regard
it as futile. We have to interpret facts as they came to
obtain on the ground, for whatever reason. In such an
approach, it is relevant to discuss the factors behind a
particular development. But it is far more pertinent to
concentrate on the consequences. That is what, in any
case, I propose to do, of course, in relation to my
central proposition that we are set on the path to Hindu
rashtra. The consequences of the Raj form a vast and
complex subject. If, however, it is not possible for us
to deal with it in a meaningful manner here, it is also
not urgent.

It is a commonplace that the Raj was very different from
Muslim rule. Two differences have been spotlighted by any
number of historians and commentators. They have said
that the British remained foreigners, while Muslim
invaders and immigrants made India their home, and that
the British drained India of its wealth which Muslim
rulers did not because the latter settled down here for
good.

For me, however, there is a third difference which is of
critical importance. This difference is that the British
did not come to India -- and did not rule over India - as
part of a proselytizing enterprise in the religious
realm. Indeed, it was with great reluctance that the
authorities in Calcutta, acting on behalf of the East
India Company, yielded to the pressure from London to
allow Christian missionaries to enter India and engage in
proselytization. In the absence of backing by the state,
however, the Christian missionaries could achieve only a
pretty limited measure of success and, that too, largely
among weaker sections of society, which could be tempted
and manipulated. This absence of a direct link between
the state and the Church offered great relief to Hindus
and ensured their survival in freedom, and, therefore,
held out the prospect of Hindu self-affirmation. It is my
contention that a process of self-affirmation, in fact,
began with the establishment and consolidation of British
rule. I view Raja Rammohan Roy and other reformers as
much in that light as men such as Ramakrishna Parmahansa,
Swami Vivekanand, Sri Aurobindo and Maharishi Raman.

The British ruled over India as representatives of
Western civilization. Christianity was doubtless a major
constituent of that civilization. But with Renaissance in
the fifteenth century and Enlightenment in the
eighteenth, Christianity ceased to be its informing
principle. The Graeco-Roman heritage took its place. This
heritage was pagan; it provided for plurality in every
sphere of human activity; and it therefore promoted
acceptance of a relativist approach. As such, Hinduism
could easily come to terms with it and, in fact,
accommodate it. And precisely for the same reason, Islam
could not come to terms with it. By virtue of being a
legatee of Western civilization (rooted at least as much
in an ancient pagan civilization, similar to India's, if
not India's sister or daughter via Egypt, as in
Christianity), the Raj constituted a challenge to Islam,
while it served as a stimulus to Hindus for self-
discovery and recovery.

As it happened, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, some British and other European scholars were
launched on a search for the origins of their
civilization. In this search they discovered links not
only between Latin, Greek, German, English and French
within Europe, but also between classical European
languages, that is Latin and Greek, and Sanskrit and the
original language of Zend Avesta. This again is a long
and complex story which certainly does not run in a
straight line. But it would suffice for our purpose to
note that the efforts of Orientalists - Sir William Jones
clearly the most outstanding among them in the latter
part of the eighteenth century which was of critical
importance by virtue of its being the formative period
for the Raj as well as for Hindu India in the new context
- restored to Hindus confidence in their heritage. This
confidence has in a fundamental sense, not been shaken
since, whatever else might have happened in between. And,
needless to add, no similar advantage flowed to Islam in
India, or for that matter anywhere else, from the British
Raj, or any other Western empire, or contact.

The British, of course, did not come to India primarily
as representatives of Western civilization; they came
principally as traders and settled down as rulers. The
consequences of the first role have been extensively
discussed and I have not much to add to the broad
consensus that this led to our deindustrialization and
therefore, impoverishment. The same is largely true of
other consequences of their rule. Here, too, a broad
consensus obtains. Even so I would draw attention to a
couple of points which, in my opinion, have not received
the attention they deserve.

First, the British disarmed us, for the first time in
history. Till the consolidation of British power in India
in 1858, the Indian peasantry was armed. According to the
Ain-i-Akbari, four and a half million armed men were
available for military service in North India in the
sixteenth century and possibly a similar number below the
Vindhyas, judging by the fact that the Vijaynagar empire
could field up to one million soldiers. This subject has
not been discussed much. But the gap in this field has
been ably filled by a recent publication - Dirk H.A.
Kolff's Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy.3 Broadly, it makes the
points that the Indian peasantry in modern Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (which is the area of Kolff's
research) was armed; that a substantial labour market
existed; that there was no dearth of employment
opportunities for would-be soldiers; that these recruits
came from all strata of society including the lowest in
ritual terms; that there was no discrimination in the
recruitment and treatment of soldiers of any kind on the
basis of caste; indeed, that caste is a modern ideology
inasmuch as it restricts mobility because from the
fourteenth to the eighteenth century Rajput status was
accessible to soldiers; and that a Hindu soldier had more
than one identity.

Clearly, so dramatic a development as the disarming of a
people used to carrying and wielding weapons could not
but have had major consequences. Clearly this issue
deserves to be studied at length. In the present context,
I would wish to underscore the point that the British
move affected Muslims more adversely than Hindus for the
simple reason that Muslims were more dependent on the use
of the sword than Hindus who had successfully maintained
their primacy in business even during Mughal rule4 and
had been much quicker to take advantage of the
opportunities Western education offered them for entry
into professions such as law and government employment.

I am convinced that a significant and fundamental shift
took place in the power balance between Hindus and
Muslims as a result of the consolidation of the Raj and
the disarming of the populace which began in 1818 and was
completed in 1858, and that this shift was not reversed
by the pro-Muslim change in the official attitude,
starting from the 1870s, and the policy of divide and
rule, though it led to partition in 1947. Indeed, it
could not be reversed.

The British, of course, had no desire to help the re-
emergence of Hindus. Indeed, as educated Hindus began to
assert claims to equality, demand share in government and
resent racist slurs, the British took steps to contain
them. But all that is besides the point. The relevant
fact is that the Raj made possible the rise of a self-
confident Hindu elite on an all-India basis, the like of
which had not existed since the beginning of Muslim rule.
Partition was a logical corollary to the rise of Hindus.
The British assistance to the Muslim League during the
Second World War, however important, only accelerated the
pace of events; the alternative to partition, in the
shape of continued separate electorates, weightage and
special reservations would have been disastrous and
though partition did not settle the civilizational
contest that began with Muslim rule, it facilitated the
task for Hindus since they had now a well-organized and
powerful pan-Indian modern state of their own.

These observations will almost certainly be quoted to
show that I endorse Muhammad Ali Jinnah's two-nation
theory. There is nothing I can do to avoid this risk. For
my readers, however, I would emphasize not only that I
think in civilizational as distinct from national terms,
but also that, by my reckoning, Muslims in undivided
India could represent only a fragment of Islamic
civilization and were, therefore, incapable of becoming a
people.

Jinnah could call Indian nationalism, as espoused by the
Indian National Congress, Hindu nationalism on the ground
that the Congress was a Hindu body, which it was, by
virtue of its ethos if not by that of its ideology and
composition, and pit Muslim nationalism against it. But
he could not possibly overcome the obstinate fact that
Islam, on the one hand, does not admit of nationalism
and, on the other, does not help overcome local and even
tribal loyalties.

Thus, while Jinnah could bring Muslims together on an
anti-Hindu platform and force the country's partition, he
could not lay the foundations of a Pakistani nation. It
is not surprising that Pakistan continues to define
itself in anti-India and anti-Hindu terms. It could not
possibly overcome its essentially transient character and
disruptive role and it has not. The military muscle it
has acquired, thanks to US bounty and Soviet stupidity,
has inevitably increased its capacity for mischief but
not its ability to define itself in terms of itself.

To return to the subject under discussion, independence,
accompanied by partition, removed two constraints -
British control and Muslim intrangience - blocking our
march forward and, in objective terms, therefore, paved
the way for the re-emergence of Hindu India in
civilizational, and not just in physical, terms. In
physical terms, independent India has been Hindu India.
But a civilizational India has yet to emerge.

As I see it, several obstacles have blocked this process.
First, as a rule, without any exception, for decades, to
the best of my knowledge, we Hindus have viewed our
civilization in parochial terms; even those of us who
have related it to other pre-Judaic faiths have not
realized that the West has achieved what we are
struggling to achieve; that the Europeans, in plain
terms, have successfully resurrected and renewed an
ancient civilization by way of a series of movements
beginning with the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth
century. Instead of seeing it as a sister civilization in
view of its emphasis on reason, rule of law and spirit of
inquiry, we have condemned the West on the ground that it
was materialistic, as if material well-being was not one
of the principal concerns of our forefathers.

Secondly, we have taken a territorial and, therefore, a
mechanical view and not a civilizational view of
ourselves as a people. Thus, by reckoning, we were
Indians by virtue of living in a country called India and
we were equally justified in calling every inhabitant of
the territory Hindu since Muslims named it Hindustan.
This theory is reflected in the writings and utterances
of not only secularists, but also BJP leaders. But for
this mechanical concept, we could never have accepted the
proposition that the Indian state is an impartial arbiter
between the two communities. The contrast between the
secularist-national position and the Hindu position on
this question is sharp.

The secularist-national position is that the Indian state
embodies an ideal, and is there to serve it; that while
it is a creature of the Constitution, it is above the
people; that in our multireligious society, there is no
other choice. In the Hindu view, the state has to be an
expression of the Hindu ethos and personality. Such a
state cannot either discriminate against any religious
group or seek to impose a uniform pattern on the
inhabitants. Indeed, it would feel obliged to look after
their well-being and the preservation of their ways of
life. But the state would see itself as an instrument for
the promotion of Hindu civilization.

The final point that I wish to make here is that we opted
for the policy of non-alignment with a visible anti-
Western bias because we took a parochial view of our
civilization and wrongly defined the nature of the state
as independent India. Pandit Nehru saw himself as an
arbiter between rival camps in the cold war, in disregard
of the horror that was communism, just as he saw himself
as an arbiter between Hindus and Muslims within the
country. Obviously, the cost on both counts has been
pretty heavy. If non-alignment has meant the isolation of
India from true centres of power in our area, the concept
of secularism has meant the moral disarmament of Hindus.
Pakistan and China could not have posed the kind of
threat they have to our security if we had made common
cause with the West and the Muslim problem would not have
remained wholly unresolved if we had not misdefined the
nature of the Indian state.

----------------------

Notes And References 

1 The Muslim kings were never able to consolidate their
hold over India. Even the Mughal empire, at the height of
its power, was plagued by what J.C. Heesterman has called
the inner frontier i.e., the frontier beyond which its
hold was tenuous. Indeed, the Mughal rulers, too,
functioned essentially as super zamindars and remained
critically dependent on the support of local nobles. 

2 This translation has been brought out by Aditya
Prakashan, New Delhi, 1991. 

3 Dirk H.A.Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, Cambridge
University Press, London, 1990. 

4 Muslim rule, however we may define it, did not bring
about a significant change in the economic order. The
same old castes, for instance, continued to serve as rent
collectors and dominate the country's commerce and trade.
Thus, by and large, economic power, remained with the
same groups. This is best illustrated by the fact that,
during his struggle for power, Aurangzeb borrowed Rs. 4
lakh from a Hindu banker in Ahmedabad, and, at the time
of the British takeover of Bengal in the eighteenth
century, a vast majority of rent collectors were non-
Muslim. That is how they became the principal
beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement. 

http://www.hinduunity.org