Looking Beyond the Modern: A Catholic response to the terror of Hindu nationalism

Hindu nationalism seems poised to rule the roost in India for the near future. How do Catholics in India deal with this crisis? In May 2018, Anil Couto, the Archbishop of Delhi, wrote a letter inviting Catholics in the Archdiocese of Delhi to begin a regime of prayer and fasting in the period leading up to the recent parliamentary elections. By upturning modernist and liberal assumptions about politics and opening up the political field from the immanent to include the transcendental, Archbishop Couto offers a way forward that includes an opportunity to correct the mistakes that Catholics have been committing for some time now.

Exposing the modern

The significance of the modern period lies in the fact that it dramatically changed how the world was perceived. Henceforth, we would think in terms of binaries: the individual and the community, the private and the public, the state and the Church, religious and secular, the immanent and the transcendental, etc. This period also saw the rise of the nation-state, which sought to contain one nation within a single state, persecuting those groups that either could not or refused to be assimilated into the national. Further, it sought to be the only authority within a definite space or territory. This was a novel desire given that earlier political arrangements had witnessed a plurality of legal authorities such that every person was subject to multiple jurisdictions. This pluralism allowed for a system of checks and balances that enabled groups to play one power against another, preventing the rise of absolute hegemonies. The modern state also desired to control both time and space. Promising utopia on earth, it was within the limited time of the immanent that it functioned best, constructing a parallel sacred realm, where the nation replaced God, offering a cult of national heroes and martyrs to parallel the saints and a national liturgy of anthem and flag.

In Europe, these ambitions ensured conflict with the Catholic Church, whose politics exceeded the bounds of hived-off nation-states. More importantly, it preached a life that extended beyond the immanent or the material. That there is a life beyond the grave allows for a range of political actions. These actions eventually undermine the modern state, as does the teaching that the cycles of unspeakable violence in modern times are the result of man assuming the terrifying powers of God to realize utopia.

Looking beyond the modern

Therefore, the horrors of contemporary Hindu nationalism are not an aberration but part of a longer continuum that begins with an apparently benign secular nationalism. In other words, Hindu nationalism has its origins in Indian nationalism, with Nehruvian secularism merely a pit stop en route to a fast-approaching destination.

Then, clearly, the solution to the current crisis cannot be found in liberalism or other modernist philosophies. Rather, the response must come from a post-liberal order which transcends modernist binaries to restore a holistic vision of the world while simultaneously encouraging greater legal pluralism.

Such a suggestion would, understandably, elicit the response that the collapse of the secular–religious binary is exactly what the Hindu right seeks. However, by its very logic, nationalism is a religion. As many scholars have highlighted, Hinduism is a modernist production from the late nineteenth century amalgamating the beliefs of dominant castes to enable the capture of state power. The modernist lenses that we have adopted simply prevent us from appreciating that the Church is already collapsed into the state.

We must also challenge modernist and secular notions that all religions are essentially the same, because the implications of the sacral order vary across ideologies. To Islam and Christianity, the body of every human being is sacred, which is not so in brahmanism, for example, where only the bodies of the brahmin and the king are considered sacred, while the rest are marked by decreasing levels of dignity.

Archbishop Couto’s letter is critical to articulating a Catholic politics that transcends modernism and liberalism because, by proffering prayers and fasting as useful strategies, it affirms a broader conception of time and space. It also explicitly affirms Christ’s agency in our politics, reminding us that our role is merely to work towards the kingdom; the establishment of utopia is His alone. Critically, this recognition prevents us from going down the road of identitarian politics, which is precisely what an immanent politics engenders and indeed what Hindutva will push us towards. More importantly, recognizing that we may not see utopia is a pragmatic necessity because things in India will likely get significantly worse before they get better. We are obliged, therefore, to articulate a politics rooted in faith that recognizes how Jesus consoles – in an Ignatian sense – those who suffer by pointing out that eternal life is about standing up for truth even in the face of terror.

In addition to transcending modernist binaries, we must also restore a distinction between the sacred and the profane, while affirming not only that the sacred can percolate into the profane but that it is important that this mundane world be sacralized by Christ and His message. Indeed, India desperately needs to appreciate the sacrality of human life. While the notion of rights does this in a limited manner, we must go beyond this formal notion of rights and highlight the Christian spirit of this law of human rights rather than remain restrained by the letter of state law. In other words, we urgently need a renewed preaching to all Indians of the social teaching of the Church instituted by Christ.

The idolatry of nationalism

As much as Archbishop Couto’s letter offers these grand Christian possibilities, it nevertheless lingers on the threshold of idolatry by making constant reference to the national. Urging the love of one’s country within the context of a belligerent nationalism that brooks no competition effectively encourages the idolatry of nationalism. It is critical, therefore, that we change our language to use the word “state” rather than “nation”. The philosopher Hannah Arendt presents the nation-state as a symbol of the conquest of the state by the nation. Through this conquest, the modern state has been perverted from an instrument of law into one of lawless discretion in the service of the nation. Indeed, we are called by Jesus to preach to “all the nations of the world”, such that in the end, there is “neither Greek nor Jew”. That is, we are to work to undo national boundaries rather than consolidate them. In these times of nationalism on steroids, it is critical that Catholics insist on the valid argument that a refusal to work for the nation does not translate to working against the state. Rather, working for the well-being of all persons is ultimately in the larger interest of the state, even if current occupants of government fail to realize this. Service to the nation-state, therefore, may well be incompatible with service to Christ.

In sum, in the face of rampant Hindu nationalism, we must rely on the recognition that we have reached the limits of modernism and that one cannot effect a cure by administering more of the poison that caused the sickness. Rather, the way forward must rely on a rejection of modernism and an insistence on the universalism preached by Christ and His Church.

(A version of this post was first published in Matters India on 13 Dec 2019.)

 

What Amitav Ghosh can teach us

While a number of litterateurs across India were making a symbolic protest against the rising intolerance in India under the Modi regime by returning their awards from the Sahitya Akademi, a bunch of Sahitya Akademi award winners from Goa, along with two Padmashri awardees, made a very odd statement.  On the fifteenth of October these persons made a statement indicating that “[s]ome of us wanted to return the awards but we have withheld the decision in view of Sahitya Akademi’s incoming Executive Council meeting where the Akademi is hopefully expected to condemn the cultural talibanism in the country.”

This seems like a bizarre statement. First, rather than mention Hindutva violence, they refer to the Taliban. Further, as I have discussed elsewhere some of these notables themselves have been associated with Hindutva violence.  But most bizarre of all is their announcement of an intention to return the awards. After all, if you want to return your award and make a point about the scuttling of various freedoms in contemporary India and the threat of a breakdown of law and order, one should do so. To indicate that we would like to, but will not, because we expect the Executive Council to issue a statement seems bizarre at best. One gets the sense that these awardees may have slipped down a rabbit hole to Wonderland.

If one looks at their company, however, one realises that these notables from Goa may have acquiesced to the logic of Amitva Ghosh, who as a result of his part-time residence in Goa seems to have integrated into some of the local literary circuits. In interventions in the Indian Express and Scroll.in, Ghosh made it very clear that while he is appreciative of the actions of those who returned their awards to the Sahitya Akademi, he himself will not follow suit. Ghosh suggests that outrage “should be directed at the present leadership of the Sahitya Akademi rather than the institution as such.” Ghosh articulates that there was a time when the Sahitya Akademi was held in greater esteem, that there have been presidents and office-bearers of the institution who would have protested vociferously against the current political climate in the country, and “that to return the award now would be more than an expression of outrage at the Sahitya Akademi’s current leadership: it would amount to a repudiation of the institution’s history.”

Does Ghosh have a point? Is the problem merely with the current leadership of the Akademi, and by extension with Modi, or is it possible that there are larger problems with the Sahitya Akademi itself and the project of the Indian nation-state?

The Sahitya Akademi was instituted in 1954, when the Indian nation-state was still young, and there was a need to assert cultural homogeneity in the country, and a need to assert uniformity within regional literary cultures. This agenda may look innocent, and indeed the institution may have awarded and promoted literature and critical litterateurs, but this is but one side of the story.  Linguistic development in colonial South Asia was critically tied to orientalist ideologies. This ensured that it was dominant-caste forms of South Asian language that came to be recognized as the forms deserving of becoming the standard. Consequently, language forms of the marginalized caste groups, and their speakers, were actively disparaged in the process of standardisation.  To this extent, the post-Mandal challenge regarding the meaning of merit, needs to be levelled against the works that the Akademi awards.

This modus operandi of the Akademi is eminently visible in the case of the Konkani language. If one has a look at the list of those who have been awarded for production in the Konkani language one is confronted by a long list of almost exclusively Brahmin names. Further, as many Konkani litterateurs will testify, despite the fact that the Konkani language is written in five scripts, it is only the Nagari form of the language that has merited awards, despite extensive or greater production in the Roman script and the Kannada scripts. These choices have as much to do with the privileging of upper-caste forms of language that is dominant in India, as with the casteist politics that has dominated the sphere of the Konkani language. Since at least 1987, when Konkani in the Nagari script alone was recognized as the official language of Goa, the language, and its speakers, not just in Goa, but also in the other states where it is spoken, have been held hostage by the assertions of the Saraswat caste and allied individuals who seek to convert Konkani into a brahmanical language. This has meant privileging the Antruzi form spoken by Saraswats in Goa, linking it with Sanskrit, and Aryan heritage, and also tying it to the Nagari script. This has meant that the peculiar history of the language, where it was first produced and popularized through missionary efforts since the sixteenth century, and subsequently given form through the lyrics, poems, and plays of laboring caste Catholics have been ignored entirely. In fact, until the mid-twentieth century, Konkani was seen largely asa language of laboring Catholics, and disparaged both by Hindu brahmins and upper-caste Catholics in Goa. Despite these facts, the Konkani committee of the Sahitya Akademi has been party to the attempt to destroy the language form in the Roman script in Goa.These facts are not extraneous to the question I pose to Ghosh’s argument, since it is with these persons that, either consciously, or unconsciously, Ghosh has combined with in Goa.

The point is that these politics are not an aberration from the Indian norm. Ghosh may think otherwise, and indeed, many of those returning their awards, like Ashok Vajpeyi, also seem to think that India stands for a liberal tradition of tolerance and acceptance. If anything, however, this image of India is a myth created in a large part by upper castes groups, and especially Hindu upper-caste groups who dominated Nehruvian India.

A view from the perspective of the many marginalized groups within the country, whether caste, ethnicities, or religions, would suggest a less tolerant India. For these groups, it appears that the problem may not be the current political dispensation, as much as the ‘idea of India’ itself, a country created to satisfy the desires of dominant castes across the subcontinent, and united through varying degrees of Hindu nationalism.

When Ghosh suggests, therefore, that it is merely the current dispensation of the Sahitya Akademi that is the problem he is merely speaking from the position of the Indian nationalist, refusing to see, and in the process preventing an exposure of, the deeper rot. Merely blaming the Modi government is simply not going to resolve the tensions that we are witness to today. These tensions have been building up since the start of Indian independence. In other words, the problems lies with the project of the Indian nation-state itself. This is, of course, not surprising, given that, as I have pointed out in an earlier observation on Ghosh's statements, that Ghosh speaks, and indeed writes, from a position of the imperial Indian. An India that would like to speak for the rest of the global south, even as more fundamental issues, like that of internal equity, are left unattended. Take, for example, his interview with the magazine Guernica, where he suggested "one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be." This would be more than a bad joke for the many marginalized groups in India for whom their very non-Hindu and/ or non-upper caste identity is the reason for quotidian violence.

(A version of this post was first published in Round Table India on 22 October 2015)