(Here is an intellectual conversation among well-meaning and knowledgeable Orientalists on the subject titled above. The subject has great geopolitical intellectual importance in our volatile world, where different human-segaments are ardently following different – and often conflicting – trajectories. The general masses in India and elsewhere need to get educated on such an issue. In view of its importance, we are presenting here different viewpoints of the individuals concerned. The opening article is written by Dr. Koenraad Elst, which is followed by interjections on his position on this subject by 1. Aditya Singh, 2. Ragini Sharma, 3. Come Carpentier, 4. Koenraad Elst (response to certain allegations), 5. Ram Sharma, 6. Aditya Singh (response to Koenraad Elst’s article), 7. Ashok Priya and 8. Ram Sidhaye).
By: Dr. Koenraad Elst
Here (in recent tweets by many knowledgeable Hindus), problems have been created by a tendency among Hindus to live up to expectations raised by their enemies.
Thus, in the 19th century already, The Brahmo and Arya Samaj insisted that, like Christianity and Islam, Hinduism is “monotheistic”, with Arya translations of Vedic passages rendering Indra, Agni, Varuna etc. all as “God”. As Talageri remarked, this is like Hindus saying in the heyday of racism: “Yes, white is indeed superior to brown, but we Hindus are whiter than the Brits!”
Today, we see many Hindus live up to the reigning Cultural Marxism by claiming that Hinduism is “egalitarian”, “feminist” and even “pro gay marriage”.
First of all, this has never impressed the enemy, of whom not one has abandoned his Hindu-bashing, just as no missionary ever changed his mind because of Arya claims of monotheism. It is only your own people whom you have a chance of convincing of your new party-line. Outsiders look through these claims and conclude that they only add to their already established opinion of Hinduism as hypocritical (“wily Brahmins”).
Trying to live up to your critics’ standards is a game you can’t ever win.
But more importantly, these claims are not only unconvincing, they are untrue.
Egalitarianism is a strictly modern concern, no premodern society lived up to these standards (except, in the Marxist view, a very primitive pre-differentiation society, which had “Ur-communism” and even matriarchy). Thus, among the body parts, it is purely a modern apologetic innovation to claim that the face is “equal” to the feet; that is not how the Rishis or later Hindus saw it. All body parts are necessary, of course, but that doesn’t make them equal; just as the president and the cleaning-lady are both necessary but not equal. You have no chance at all by claiming that Hinduism (after the early layers of the Rg-Veda) had no caste hierarchy, but you are on more solid ground if you point to inequalities elsewhere, such as slavery practised by Mohammed.
As for feminism, ancient Hinduism had a more natural role division, with e.g. some women becoming Rishikas and Acharyaas, but less than men, which in the medieval period become a more black-and-white division. You are always going to have more men than women in top posts, but in medieval times women were altogether excluded from these top posts. I think Hindu society was also somewhat subject to this evolution, but less so. But if you say that “women were honoured”, you should notice that this is not the same as “women were equal”.
A really extreme example where you can see right away that this attempt to live up to Cultural-Marxist standards doesn’t work, is gay marriage. Some Hindu associations in the US have claimed that this was never a problem for Hinduism. Hindu traditionalists have countered that in this case, Hinduism recognizing 8 forms of marriage was more enlightened and pluralistic than Christianity, alright, but that nonetheless, none of these 8 was gay marriage. To be sure, Hindus are free to change their mind about this, to evolve new norms, the Shastras explicitly provide for this, which is more enlightened than the eternal Shari’a.
But that is up to them now, to make such claims about the past is just untenable.
The willingness of Hindus to sacrifice their own tradition in the entirely vain hope of thus pleasing their enemies, stems from a thorough inferiority feeling. That is all understandable and explainable, I am not throwing any stones here. But nonetheless, you have to free yourself from this negative psychology and own up the past of Hinduism as it really was. From there on, you are free to judge some parts as negative or outdated and thus up for change; but you will not bring that outcome any closer by denying them as facts of history.
As for the Partition, indeed, this was purely the handiwork of the Muslim community. It had competing tendencies, all united regarding the goal, viz. Muslim domination, but divided regarding the means thereto. In the circumstances then obtaining, the majority was carried by the pro-Partition Muslim League (ML), with some 85% of the Muslim votes. In order to deflect Hindu ire against the Muslims, the culprits of Partition, the Nehru Congress launched the myth that Partition was imposed on both Muslims and Hindus by the British, a convenient scapegoat, all the more so since they had gone. This myth was spread on a war footing and many Hindus have swallowed it, so that today you can always get applause from a Hindu audience by blaming the British. Hindus who take this view may rationalize their position in all sorts of ways, but any outsider can see through this and identify fear of Muslim displeasure and eagerness to fall I line with dominant Nehruvianism as the real determinants.
To defend this enemy myth, the fact is cited that in the final stage, the British did cooperate with the Partition plan. Yes, and so did Congress, not to mention Ambedkar who had already accepted it on principle as soon as the ML made it its demand, in 1940. Until 1945, the Brits rejected any thought of relinquishing India, so the question of Partition didn’t pose itself. At most, they may have enjoyed the sight of Congress getting embarrassed by this sharp non-solidarity from the ML. Anyway, it is easily verifiable that the Partition idea grew in Muslim circles in the 1930, when the British were still confident that their empire, made more viable with the Gvt of India Act 1935, would last forever.
But then, the special pleading begins. Ah, but the British supported, even patronized, the creation of the ML in 1906. True, but its demand was then not Partition, but “to inculcate in Indian Muslims a loyalty to the British empire”. The Brits looked after their own interests, and any concessions they made to Muslim interests were subservient to that larger goal. But Muslims only played along as long as they were weak. As soon as they were strong enough to openly pursue their own agenda, they opted for Partition. That was the accomplished fact which the British, as soon as they were weakened by the war, started to take into account.
Those who claim that the ML had been prompted by the British (such as the RSS claim that Jinnah had been “brainwashed by the British”), are white supremacists. They insist that no brown Muslim can have his own agency, that he can only act when puppeteered by the white man. I am only taking the decolonized view that natives do have their own agency, and that Muslims pursued the power agenda instilled in them since the 7th century, long before the Brits appeared on the scene.
More special pleading is the endless claims, partly true, of how terrible the Brits had been. Not that their famines were “genocide”, i.e. the intentional pursuit of a plan to exterminate a targeted population, but it was indeed not nice. Fine, but none of that amounted to Partition. And when you point that out, more claims of British atrocities are thrown at you, as if they can make any difference at all to the responsibility for Partition. A newone is the claim that had the Brits not appeared in the 18th century, Hindus would have thrown the Muslim rulers out. Though that is a totally different issue immaterial to the politics of the 1940s, a second thought made me hesitate about this claim that I had hitherto taken for granted. After the victories by Shivaji and Bajirao, you got the defeat at Panipat, and perhaps even more telling, Scindia’s formal acceptance of Moghul suzerainty in 1770, though he was militarily the most powerful man in India and could have folded the Moghul empire there and then. Meanwhile, the Brits in Bengal 1757 did not support the Muslims against the Hindus, but defeated and removed the Muslim ruler to the applause of the Hindus. And in 1857, supposedly the first war of independence, those Hindus who joined in the rebellion (many refused to) accepted the decadent Moghul ruler as their leader. Maybe the Brits saved you from an ignominious Nehruvianism avant la lettre.
At any rate, here I am only taking a position within debates that are ongoing between Hindus. It is not the position propagated by the secularists or the Cultural Marxists in Western and Indian academe. The question of a U-Turn just doesn’t arise.