Shri Ram Swarup

Hindu Renaissance

India has been under attack for a thousand years. The new attacks were
not like the old raids known before; these were buttressed by an ideology
of heavenly sanction, a permanent motive and system of ideas. Long before
Europe of the "white man's burden" appeared on the scene, Asia was
witnessing in the birth of Islam an ideologically fortified imperialism
commanded by Allah. Any economic and political gain - and it was in on
very small - was merely a just reward for an activity which was
essentially religious.

In a way, Islamic imperialism was nothing new. It had a model to follow
in Christianity which had a similar mandate, but it too made significant
contribution to the doctrine of imperialism. It gave us the concepts of
darul-harb (non-Muslim world) and darul-Islam (Islamic world), the former
subject to permanent jehad (holy war), subjugation, enslavement and even
slaughter of the latter, other important concepts were booty
(al-ghanimah), zimmi and jazia, etc. Islam believed that the world
belonged to the believers and the infidels were mere squatters, it had to
be repossessed.

Then came the Europen Era. India's contact with Europe was not negative.
Through it, India came to know a world it had to know. It also received
from this source unintended political help.  Islamic powers in the
middle-east and Central Asia and denied them sea lanes; this weakened
Islamic encirclement of India gave local freedom forces a better chance
to assert themselves.

India's first major contact began when Vasco da Gama landed with gunboat
and priests. The newcomers were not only pirates and merchants but also
believing Christians; they had the pope's mandate to convert heathens in
the lands they took possession of. They found that the natives had a
flourishing religion of their own. They took to destroying their temples
in earnest.  Within decades of their occupation of small coastal parts,
they had destroyed according to their own records 601 temples in 131
villages - all important Christian Orders taking part in this pious work.
Franciscan friars destroyed 300 temples in Bardez, Jesuits 280 in
Salcete. St. Francis Xavier who fully participated in this meritorous
work wrote back home: "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village .....
When all are baptised I order all the temples of their false gods to be
destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no
idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done."

Hindus got relief from the active religious persecution when the British
came. But they too were not without a powerful missionary lobby of their
own whose aims were no different from other Christian missions. Though
the missions were not allowed to apply their usual muscular methods, they
were free to propagate their religion. Their aim was conversion of
heathens to the true faith and to that end they began to attack Hinduism
in different ways. They attacked it for having too many gods, not one of
them the right Biblical God; they attacked it for being idolatrous; they
attacked all its leading ideas - karma, incarnation, moksha, compassion
for all being, etc.

The attack on Hindu religion was supported by attack on the Hindu people
and society. Hindu rites, customs were all evil, and their morals and
manners even worse, if that were possible. With so much depravity around
and and with such fine and disinterested teachers at hand, they looked
forward to a Christian India in not too distant future.  The colonial
administrator was not unsympathetic to the missionary attack. Though he
discouraged its excesses, he found it useful. He knew that Hinduism was
India's definition and its deepest and also its principle of unity and
regeneration and unless this principle was attacked, India could not be
necessarily ruled; he knew that what upheld Hinduism also upheld India
and its political struggle. A people who had lost pride in themselves,
who were demoralised were welcome to him.

Colonial scholars reinforced the missionary attack by their own from
another angle. They taught that India was not one country, that it was a
miscellany of people, that it had never known independence, that it had
always been under the rule of foreign invaders. The rulers had a clear
motive, a clear goal. They wanted an India which had no identity, no
vision of its own, no native class of people respected for their
leadership. They were to be replaced as far as it lay in their power by a
new class of intellectual comparadores. Meanwhile, the concerted attacks
succeeded. They were internalised and we made them our own. There was a
crop of "reformers" who wanted India to change to the satisfaction of its
critics. Above all, there appeared a class of Hindu-hating Hindus who
knew all the bad things about Hinduism.  Earlier invaders ruled through
the sword. The British ruled through "Indology".  The British took over
our education and taught us to look at ourselves through their eyes. 
They created a class Indian in blood and colour, but anti-Hindu in its
intellectual and emotional orientation. This is the biggest problem
rising India faces - the problem of self-alienated Hindus.

The missionary-colonial attack was reinforced by another attack -
Marxism.  Its source too was Europe and it was even more Eurocentric than
regular Imperialism. It used radical slogans but its aims were
reactionary. It taught that Europe was the centre and rest of the world
its periphery - not by chance but by an inherent dialectics of History.
Marx fully shared the contempt of British Imperialists for India. He
said: "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history.
What we call its history, is but the history of succesive intruders."  He
also said that India neither knew freedom nor deserved it. To him the
question was "not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but
whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Briton." This also became
the faith of his Indian pupils.

In India, Macaulayism prepared the ground for Marxism - early Marxists
were recruited from Macaulayites. Marxism in turn gave Macaulayism a
radical look and made it attractive for a whole new class. While Marxists
served European Imperialism, they also fell in love with all old
Imperialist invaders, particularly Muslim ones. M.N. Roy found the Arab
Empire a "magnificient monument to the memory of Mohammad." While the
Marxists found British Imperialism "progressive", they opposed the
country's national struggle as reactionary. They learnt to work closely
with Muslims both during and after Independence.

It is widely agreed that India's independence struggle derives from Hindu
Renaissance, but it is not equally realised that it can also only be
sustained by it. Hinduism is the principle of India's self-renewal.
Anything that hurts that principle hurts India, hurts its civilisational
role, therefore, hurts future religious humanity.

"Organiser", Dec. 10th, 1995