Organizers: Neeti Nair, University of Virginia and Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California, Irvine
Chair and Discussant: David Washbrook, Oxford University
This panel examines the regional differentiation in
the conceptualization of Hindu India as a way to reconsider both the religious
and political histories of modern South Asia. Each paper proposes an understanding
of the origins of Hindu nationalism within a regional framework—Kerala, Maharashtra, and
Punjab—and thereby permits a reconsideration of the larger arguments around
nationalism in India. Dilip Menon’s paper studies texts of Hindu apologetics
that were produced in an atmosphere of renewed Christian proselytization in
Kerala. These texts lend insight into the regional as well as pan-Indian dimensions
of early Hindu nationalism, to debates within multiple strands of Hinduism as
well as their engagement with Buddhist and Christian polemics. Neeti Nair’s
paper focuses on the discourses of minority and majority rights produced in
the immediate aftermath of a riot in Kohat in the North West Frontier Province.
These shed light on the slippery and contingent quality of Hindu nationalism
that put its roots in 1920s Punjab. Vinayak Chaturvedi’s paper examines
the career of Chitragupta’s Life of Barrister Savarkar to reflect on Savarkar’s
uses of his history to imagine a Hindu India. Together, the papers lend depth
and variety to our knowledge of Hindu nationalism, sourced as it currently
is primarily from histories of Bengal and the United Provinces. The purpose
of the panel is also to provide an historical context to the later, postcolonial
developments in arguing for a Hindu India.
Dilip Menon, Delhi University
I am currently working on a religious figure from Kerala, Chattampi Swamikal,
who engages with Christian missionary criticism of Hinduism in the late
19th century and produces a text of Hindu apologetics followed by a history
of ancient Kerala. The first text seemingly recuperates a space for Hinduism
in 1890 by a scathing critique of Christianity that reflects the circulation
of anti-Christian polemic from Ceylon to western India and the Punjab. The
second text then makes a regional argument against Brahmins and complicates
the notion of Hinduism by speaking about a tradition of egalitarian Saivism
in opposition to Brahminical Hindusim. I would like to put this alongside
the history of the recovery of Buddhism at the same time in southern India
by figures like Iyothee Thass and look at the critiques of Hinduism that
are at the heart of the non-Brahmin enterprise.
Neeti Nair, University of Virginia
In 1924, a riot in Kohat in the North West Frontier Province was brought
about by the circulation of a bigoted anti-Muslim poem. The riot highlighted
the consequences of a sanghatanist discourse that mocked Islam while relying
on fears of Muslim “fanaticism” to unite all Hindus. The riot was
unusual because for the first time in the checkered history of “communal” violence
in India, the British helped the minority community to evacuate the province.
In the ensuing debates led by the Congress, Punjabi Hindu fears as a religious
minority -- they were 3% of the population of NWFP -- were emphasized over the
unanimity of interest that came with belonging to a region with its own traditions
of protection of minorities or hamsaya. Soon after the riot, Lajpat Rai wrote
a series of articles pleading with both Hindus and Muslims to stop demanding “absolute
rights” over issues such as the banning of cow slaughter or the playing
of music outside mosques; however, he simultaneously advocated a partition of
the Punjab between a “Muslim India and a non-Muslim India”. Rai
resigned from the Congress, and in his 1925 Presidential address to the Hindu
Mahasabha, he insisted that “unity cannot be purchased at the cost of
Hindu rights.” Yet in a year’s time, he returned to the Congress
and agreed to grant minority Muslims reserved seats in the new reforms expected
of the British, a measure opposed by the Hindu Mahasabha. The politics advocated
by Lajpat Rai suggest that the roots of Hindu Nationalism in northern India
lay with in provinces where Hindus were a minority.
Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California, Irvine
In this paper, I will examine the importance of the uses of history in arguing
for a Hindu India through a study of Chitragupta’s Life of Barrister Savarkar
(1926), the first English-language biography of V. D. Savarkar. Savarkar had
asserted that in order to create a Hindu nation, it was important to make historical
claims for the past while using the claims for political purposes in the future.
For Savarkar, the writing of history served an important strategic purpose.
This point is further evident as a later edition of Life of Barrister Savarkar
reveals that Chitragupta was the pen-name used by Savarkar to write his own
biography. Savarkar as Chitragupta provides key historical claims about his
own intellectual and political development, from childhood in the 1880s to the
arrest in Britain in 1910, as a way to declare his own role as an anti-Muslim,
Hindu patriot. As the British government banned Life of Barrister Savarkar,
it quickly became an underground classic in which the story of Savarkar’s
life depicted in the text circulated throughout India and served as an example
for all Hindu nationalists to follow in the making of the nation. I argue that
it was Savarkar’s own use of personal history that has served as a framing
for the ways in which Savarkar is interpreted in most, if not all, later
historical writings that argue for a Hindu nation.
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