Introduction

The biggest tragedy after independence has been the Marxist domination at our premier academic bodies who designed our educational discourses. In combination with the seculars, liberals, and socialists, they have managed to destroy the social and cultural fabric of India over so many decades. The discourses which permeated deeply into our textbooks managed to deracinate many Indians and continue to do so. This understanding and interpretation of India through Western lenses and western theories is now widely prevalent in academia, media, bureaucratic machinery, and, of course, the politicians. The antipathy towards the culture and traditions of India is now difficult to counter. Any attempts to correct some narratives become ‘saffronisation’ immediately. Unfortunately, some elements in the so-called right-wing by their extreme claims and behaviour regarding Indian heritage become representative of all the counter-arguments.

India had a hoary past where scholars could independently reflect on their own experiences and create knowledge. The huge body of texts and scriptures along with great achievements in all conceivable fields is proof of that. As Dr SN Balagangadhara says, the biggest impact of Islamic and colonial rule has been to disrupt the Indian capacity to think independently and thus we stopped creating knowledge. Western theories and western lenses became our own and we moulded ourselves through western frameworks.

Independence and the so-called post-colonial world should have been a break when we should have started looking at ourselves and others too through our own lenses. That never happened and the academics who set the base for the future understanding of India made the same conclusions as the colonials and missionaries did in the past. India was a land of a degenerate religion of Hinduism which generated the evil of the caste system and where Brahmins were responsible for every conceivable problem. The old interpretations of India did not change a bit. This is the colonial consciousness of Dr Balagangadhara- an intellectual violence on the colonized by altering the way they think, but in a different time-frame much after the colonials have left.

The secularists and the liberals added to the mix who present views like India was never a country, the Mughal India was rich and flourishing, and British India was good for the Indian economy. It is a devastating narrative that requires intellectual counters of the highest quality. Dr Saumya Dey now steps in. A product of the JNU and exposed to the most dangerous narratives against India, he brings forth a series of brilliant essays, as a part of his ongoing fight, to put back India on the pedestal which it truly deserves. He is presently an Associate Professor of history at Jindal Global Business School. Each essay takes on various facets of these narratives which our hegemonical academics created for us and tells us why we should reject them strongly.

Indian Academics Adopting Western Narratives of India

A narrative is a structure of relationships between several events or characters which serves a moralizing function. Narrativizing is the act of constructing these narratives. Dey explains that the delivery of value judgements, abundant in western narratives on India,  is by two methods: substantialism where events and characters are manifestations of a ‘changeless essence’ (religion and caste in the Indian context); and reductionism, which reduces phenomena, events, or actors to a set of causal laws (like Marx’s ‘materialist’ history which reduces any historical phenomena to the laws of class struggle).

There are certain stereotypical ways, the leading example being atrocity literature, that Euro-American media and academia write about our country. The moralizing function assumes a condemnatory tone and establishes India as the West’s ‘other’ as a country of a primitive and unjust social order. However, the atrocity narratives derive from western universalist notions of the ‘normal’ and ‘ideal’, basically an enlightenment repackaging of Christian prejudices against non-Abrahamic societies. Dr Balagangadhara and his group detail elegantly how this secularization of many theological ideas now plays havoc with the Indian social and cultural fabric.

The ‘changeless essence’ in the Indian context is, of course, the ‘timeless laws’ of caste and the predominant Indian religion of Hinduism. Indian social organization and dominant spirituality both, in western narratives, are irrational and contrary to reason. The Euro-American narrative representations of India deploy multiple tropes to illustrate Indian irrationality.

‘Idols’ (since colonial-missionary times) and ‘subalterns’ (since the early eighties) are two of these.  Dey quotes Swagato Ganguly who, in his book Idolatry and The Colonial Idea of India, says that ‘idolatry’ signified the primitiveness of India in the eyes of the British colonialist. ‘idols’ were emblematic of Indian irrationality and a justification of the colonial rule.

‘Subaltern studies’ are the voice of the dispossessed and the non-elite. In India, the ‘subaltern studies’ scholars, despite being brown-skinned in many instances, simply took forward the old western notion of India being a place where impulse and irrationality dominate human behaviour. However, these accounts depicted India again in essentialist terms. The Indian ‘subaltern’ seem unmitigatedly immature supplying another trope to the western narratives of Indian irrationality. Fundamentally, all the social theories in post-independent India simply parroted what the colonials said about us and did not make any attempt to understand ourselves better through our own frameworks.

Narrativizing Bharatvarsha: The Bibidhartha-Sangraha In Colonial Bengal

‘India was never a nation before the British’; this is a favourite narrative of the Breaking India forces. Historical narratives generally seek to commemorate, draw moral contrasts (liberty versus tyranny), promote civic pride, deliver moral admonishments or lessons, instruct, use the past as a plea against the present, resort to types of monism, or propose a final destiny for all humanity (a classless society). They differ from chronicles which are documentation of events only.

Saumya Dey says that more than one hundred and fifty years ago, a Bengali journal called the Bibidhartha-Sangraha exhibited most of these tendencies. These narratives commemorated great deeds and gallantry; edified and instructed; delivered moral admonishments; derived from the past arguments to correct the present; and, through it, narrativized Bharatvarsha. It moralized a cultural reality for its readership. According to Saumya Dey, this journal presented for the first time a grand narrative of all India in the Bengali language.

Bibidhartha did not invent India through ‘narrativity’, the obnoxious canard of some influential academics. On the contrary, the Bibidhartha began from the premise that India is a cultural reality and unity. The Bibidhartha did not have to belabour ‘Bharatvarsha’ to its readership. It presented Bharatvarsha as an enormous matrix of morally charged narratives in a grand unity.

Bibidhartha-Sangraha started in 1851 and lasted for ten years. The author could derive much information from a study of its first three years only. A huge mine of information waits for any future scholar. It contained articles concerning history, zoology, arts, and literature aiming for a mass readership. Along with the histories of various peoples (the Sikhs, Rajputs Bhils, the Poligars of Tirunelveli, the Pathans), different regions (Kashmiris) and wide customs (even pig-hunting), they provided the histories of the important political and religious cities of India like Delhi and Kashi. They carried maps of India and Bengal labelled in the Bengali language. Thus, the journal narrativized and even spatially delineated India too. If one were to term ‘Bharatvarsha’ an ancient civilisational awareness and the sense of a ‘felt community’, the Bibidhartha is its first conscious and coherent modern expression in the Bengali language, says the author.

How Rich Was Mughal India?

One story popularised by influential secular historians is a rich India during the Mughal period. The grandeur of Mughal architecture does suggest a rich economy but there was no general prosperity in Mughal India, says Dey. Economic historians see in Mughal rule a ‘Great Divergence’ between India and Europe. Mughal rule was the ruthless exploitation of the primary producers- the artisans and the peasants.

The silver wage data unambiguously suggests the divergence between England and India (4.1 grams per day versus 1.1 grams per day) for unskilled workers. Wage data for skilled workers in Mughal India could not have fared a lot better. European travellers like Francois Bernier wrote about the harsh treatment of artisans and their poor payment by the nobility.

Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India shows the sad plight of the peasantry in the Mughal Empire, its terrible oppression, and the ills that plagued the Mughal agrarian administration. The peasant was poor and debt-ridden despite increased agricultural produce. The diet and clothing of the rural populace were rudimentary.  Famines were frequent. The land revenue levied in the Mughal Empire was steep amounting to half the produce.  In the Gupta Empire, this was at the rate of one-sixth. The tax was high because two sets of people levied it- the jagirdars (who had to maintain expensive armies) and the imperial authorities (who approximated the surplus produce). The jagirdars, transferred frequently, had rarely any long-term vision towards improving agrarian production.

In the middle of the seventeenth century with the Mughal Empire at its peak, in contrast to the rest of the world, commodity consumption in the Empire was heavily skewed in favour of only the higher classes. In 1647, only 445 families received 61.5 percent of all revenues, which were about 50 percent of gross agricultural output. Saumya Dey shows that Mughal India was not ‘rich’, only the Mughal royalty and nobility were.

Robbery to Free Trade: British Rule Good for India?

Colonial economic exploitation was enormously high to compensate for any small benefits of an ‘open liberal economy’ (propagated by a few economic historians) in the last part of their rule. This exploitation took three successive forms: ‘mercantile’, ‘free trade’ and ‘finance capitalist’. Saumya Dey describes the economic brutality of the first two forms negating any romantic views of British colonialism.

In its mercantile stage, the colonial appropriation took the form of plain large-scale plunder by East India Company (EIC) with monopoly trading rights. In the ‘free trade’ transition, industrial capitalism in England made India into a huge market for manufactured goods and a provider of raw materials to feed industrialization.  The third, ‘finance capitalist’ stage allowed the industrial and banking houses to make India a fertile investment field.

After the battle at Plassey in 1757, EIC gradually gained political power over Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, and the South. The company itself ran into great debts pleading for intermittent bailouts but the individual officers made huge amounts of money through greed, corruption, and violence. Sanjeev Sanyal (The Ocean of Churn) informs us how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before removal from his post on suspicion of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth went into the funding of Yale University. Sanjeev Sanyal says, ‘Thus, one of North America’s leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.’

The EIC exploited by securing forced deliveries of goods, squeezing primary producers, and manipulating markets. The author finds in its many correspondences, everyday victims of the EIC’s tyranny like the weavers, brick contractors, salt makers, and ordinary merchants even during famine conditions. EIC was now increasingly using Indian money to finance its operations in India.

The depredations of the EIC and the industrial revolution in England which needed markets finally forced the British Parliament to pass a bill in 1813 allowing free trade to India ending the monopoly of EIC. Indian industry and manufacturing gradually extinguished under the onslaught of cheap machine produced British manufactures. ‘Free trade’ with Britain, thus, reduced India, from an erstwhile position of a leading manufacturing country to a ‘deindustrialized’ net exporter of raw materials to Britain. The British state replaced a band of robber merchants to economically exploit India.

Cultural Marxism

The author discusses the origins of ‘cultural Marxism’ in an important chapter that now plays havoc on the integrity of India and results in widespread Hinduphobia, including the film industry. Cultural Marxism, the intellectual basis of the global victimhood industry, employs a tool called ‘deconstruction’ to identify what it claims to be the ideological underpinnings of a culture or society (‘Brahmanism’ or ‘patriarchy’) and a set of victims (Dalits or women). It creates countless oppressor-oppressed binaries.

Originally, Marxism was an interpretation of history (historical materialism) that inspires a specific kind of politics favouring the proletariats over the capitalists. Dey discusses the work of thinkers and academics (Frankfurt School) laying the basis of cultural Marxism starting in the 1930s. They thought that culture and morality were cynical instruments of the ruling classes to manipulate the masses. Gradually, these tools included music, films, radio programs, newspapers, and advertising. They theorized “how sub-cultural groups resist dominant forms of culture and identity” and strengthened the practice of pitting identity against identity.

A New Left, which included many students, emerged after the disruption of Soviet Russia and now “condemned Stalinism” while emphasizing their “fidelity to Marxism.” The late 1960s and early 1970s saw political and cultural radicalism challenging the authority of governments, institutions, and ways of thought.   They attacked “the nuclear family, traditional gender roles and moral conformism” while seeking to “engage with communal living, sexual liberation, feminism and gay rights.” The New Left activism looked at ‘humane’ cultural causes to distance itself from the inhumane Soviet order.

In the early 1980s, academic Marxism took a declared ‘culturalist turn’ and grew on university campuses. The irrelevant political Left in India (and the world) has no option but to endorse this identity and cultural politics through the oppressor-oppressed binaries. The student bodies at universities, best represented by JNU, now do a considerable amount of ‘cultural Marxist’ propaganda.

JNU and The Breaking India Enterprise

Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan coined the term, ‘Breaking India enterprise’ which is an activity pursued by a nexus (church groups, private think tanks, academics, and NGOs) and engages many within and outside India. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is the intellectual headquarters of this enterprise, says Dey. The protagonists are of two main sorts: those who exploit Indian faultlines to breed separatist identities (Dravidian or Dalit); and those who seek to alienate Indians through persistent narratives of ‘oppression’ and the artificiality of the Indian nation. An influential segment in both the faculty and the students are simply against the Indian nation-state.

A book, What the Nation Really Needs to Know, carries all the opinions and propaganda used by the breaking India protagonists at the JNU campus. This ‘bundle of bile and toxicity’, as Dey calls it, originated in the aftermath of the shouts against the Indian state in a cultural evening mourning the death of two terrorists. The general outcry of the country against the JNU led to a series of lectures (later edited as this book) by the JNU members.

According to the scholars at JNU, India is incoherent, fragmented, and marked by foundational differences; branding as anti-national of any Indian nurturing love for another country is ‘right-wing’ (hence bad); attachment to the land of India is troubling; Kerala does not really belong to India; ‘Tamil nationalism’ rests on linguistic pride and official antipathy for Hinduism (though 88% of Tamil Nadu called themselves Hindus in the 2011 census); and so on. Casuistry, rhetoric, obfuscation of facts, falsification of history, cherry-picking of data- everything is game in this agenda.

Some other scholars hold forth on India’s artificiality as a nation-state and its oppressiveness. Thus, India is an illegal occupier of Kashmir. The sanctity Indic religions attach to the Indian earth is irrelevant and anyone wanting to discuss changes in the external, political boundaries of India is free to do so. Such is the bile thrown out against the nation by an institute that runs on government money ironically.

The Incomprehension of a ‘Felt Community’ By the Left

Standard western theories (Hobsbawm, Gellener, Anderson) trace the origins of nations in institutional, economic, and technological transformations. The democratic state and its elite ‘create’ nations through a cultural homogenization by invoking symbols and ‘inventing’ traditions (national anthem and a national language). Industrialization through a homogenizing educational policy; ‘print media’ by uniting people into an ‘imagined political community’ are some other mechanisms for creating nations according to these Marxist scholars.

These scholarships only enlighten us on the emergence of modern ‘governmentality’ to attain greater efficacy but not nations and nationalism, say Dey.  The Greeks, English, and the French were an ancient ‘felt community’ much before printing presses, democracy, or industrialization. ‘Nation’ does not do justice to India’s expression of oneness.

India is an ancient ‘felt community’ because it does not emerge through deliberate cultural or linguistic systematization.  It functions and forms through a sense of belonging to the land disseminated through symbols. This process manifests itself as ‘culture’ working autonomous of the state. Thus, people could belong to the same set of meanings and land, by perceiving the same symbols as a great unity. This is even if they do not form one linguistic community. Indians, denizens of Bharata, have been a ‘felt community’ for thousands of years exactly like this.

The swastika, the lotus, the Devatas of temples, the tirthas, Sanskrit language as a bearer of meanings par excellence, of both practical and spiritual relevance, are examples of these interconnected symbols. They evoke and collectively assimilate Indians into the same matrix of meanings. These symbols map onto Bharata (like for the ancient Greeks) in the form of a grid, making it sacred geography.

As Diana Eck says in the book, India: A Sacred Geography (in the more sensible non-political sections when she does not talk about Aryans or the Ram Mandir), ‘…for well over two thousand years the landscape of India has been made three-dimensional by the power of myth, narrative, and pilgrimage.’ She says that some groups like the four dhams, the seven liberation giving cities, the twelve lingas of light, and the fifty-one seats of the Goddess, cast their imaginative net across virtually the whole of India.

The Left is now two groups of people, the political Left, and the academics in our universities. For the former, culture is only a cynical instrument for domination; the latter imagines nations as pure constructions. For these scholars, the unity of India as a cultural entity is way beyond their thinking capacity. Dey shows that what emerged as freedom in 1947 was the expression of an ancient ‘felt community’ and not an elitist or colonial construction.

Deracination-The Example of Nirad C Chaudhary

Dey details the life of prolific Bengali author Nirad C Chaudhary, a passionate Anglophile, who transformed himself completely into a brown Englishman. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and A Passage to England are some of his well-known works. Colonialism and English education gave rise to diverse Indian intellectual responses. Writers and philosophers like Bhudev, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, who though appreciative of western intellectualism, held a firm belief in the intrinsic worth, even superiority, of Hindu spirituality and way of life.

On the other hand, some like poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Nirad C capitulated to the ‘intimate enemy’ and considered British rule the best for India. Indian nationalism coalesced with “Hindu xenophobia.” Nirad identified himself as a Hindu all life but with considerable self-loathing. For him, the contemporary Hindu was a “European distorted, corrupted, and made degenerate by the cruel torrid environment of India.”

Dey says that Nirad Chaudhary represents a phenomenon prevalent in urban educated Indians employed in academia and English language media. Like him, they derive their notions of India from western representations. Hence, they do not mind caricaturing their country and suffer from self-loathing as Hindus. They term the Hindus ‘intolerant’ just as Nirad C. called them ‘xenophobic’.

The Academic Delegitimization of Hinduism and the Bogey of Brahminism

One of the persistent colonial-missionary narratives about India was a ‘degenerate and false’ Hindu religion devised by the wily Brahmins to stay at the top of the hierarchy. They attributed an enormous amount of power to the Brahmins and every social evil finally had the ‘caste system’ at the roots. The missionaries thought that Brahmins were their biggest obstacle. Francis Xavier wrote that they came in the way of making India into a Christian land. Instead of questioning these narratives, most intellectuals in the post-independent era, influenced by Marxism and other imported social theories, persisted with them. Their conclusions about a regressive Hinduism and an all-powerful ‘Brahminism’ corrupting every aspect of society remained much the same.

Mainstream ideas in the ‘Social Sciences’, ‘Humanities’, or ‘Liberal Arts’ declare that Hinduism is a twentieth-century invention and Hindus are a ‘false majority’. Saumya Dey discusses in detail and rebuts three influential historians in this enterprise of delegitimizing Hinduism and denying its antiquity: D.N. Jha, Romila Thapar and Robert Eric Frykenberg.

For Jha, strangely the absence of the word ‘Hindu’ in pre-colonial Sanskrit texts or the inability of medieval Muslim scholars to grasp it fully declares the illegitimacy of the Hindu identity. Romila Thapar thinks that the ‘Hindu’ identity was the outcome of some people in colonial India needing to create a ‘community’ behind them. She also suggests that Hinduism is an imitation of, and in response to, Christianity that emerged in India in the nineteenth century. This was a ‘Syndicated Hinduism’ by the upper castes. Robert Eric Frykenberg, Professor of History, argues that Hinduism was a result of three successive constructions: by the varna order in early times; by the Mughals in the medieval times; and finally, by the colonials in the British times. Extraordinarily, he goes on to say that during the Mughal period to “be Hindu, Hindavi or Hindutva…was to be part of an eclectic, syncretistic, and tolerant regime” which the Mughals created!

The ‘Blame it on the Brahmin’ behaviour expresses a tendency in academia and rights’ advocacy, but is now endorsed by popular culture as well.  ‘Brahminical’ and ‘Brahminism’ are theorization efforts in institutes like JNU in which the Brahmins become the source of every ill motive and evil.  Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, one of the first intellectuals in modern times to theorize on this Brahminism, terms it a “philosophy” with six cardinal principles. In a detailed rebuttal, Dey shows that these principles are invalid from a historical, social, and economic point of view.

In recent times, insurgent scholarship at ‘radical’ institutions such as JNU, Hyderabad Central University and Jadavpur University, go further in blaming Brahmins for everything wrong in colonial and post-colonial India. Accordingly, Brahmins were co-conspirators with the British who, in turn, set the Indian society on Brahminical norms. The falling out with the British, the independence movement, the post-independence problems in education or industrial development are all again due to this Brahminism.

“Brahminical patriarchy” becomes an elaborate social regimen, derived from a textual tradition authored by Brahmins, to control and restrict women. Brahminism, in all these social evils, reflects the Brahmin caste’s ‘impenetrable and murky consciousness’. Even the so-called ‘rape culture’ and ‘fees hike’ in institutions reflect Brahminical attitudes according to the students at these universities.

Saumya Dey shows elegantly these polemical claims as without foundational facts but based on assumptions and biases. It becomes imperative for scholars to persistently theorize ‘Hinduism’ and its resultant ‘Brahminism’ as overarching systems of oppression. They all have eventually one-pointed objective– weakening and eventually dismantling Hindu society by creating faultlines. This noxious but influential scholarship delegitimizes the spontaneous feeling of belonging to the habitus of sacred experience, meanings, and cultural practices. Saumya Dey discusses this in two incisive chapters dealing with delegitimizing Hinduism and the bogey of Brahminism respectively.

Conclusion

Western scholars (the likes of Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger) and their Indian followers indulge in intellectual violence against India continuously in many ways: they put forth discredited Freudian theories to understand our ‘idol worship’; call the ‘linga puja’ as phallus worship; theorize Ramakrishna Paramhansa’s life as homoerotic; consider themes of gender discriminations in temple traditions; call India a construction; discuss Brahmins as eternally oppressive; call Sanskrit a tool for oppression; fantasize on the benign nature of Mughal rule; question the antiquity of Indian heritage; foist Aryan-Dravidian racial theories on us; and so on.

Most of the time, these narratives are so shocking that they generate a numb silence as a response. Not knowing how to counter intellectually, some extreme elements pick up stones and break the glass. We lose the case further even as the other side gain a moral victory. What we need to develop are strong counterarguments as a first step. These arguments not only should disband the toxic narratives against us but lay a basis for an independent enquiry into ourselves and others through our own lenses. Using western theories to study ourselves finally give the same results the west had always given us.

The huge body of knowledge existing in our texts and scriptures is evidence of how Indian thinkers reflected on their experiences extensively and created knowledge. The five groups of texts – Vedas, Upavedas, Vedangas, Puranas, and Darsanas with their thousands of texts laid the foundation for the knowledge and the wisdom of our heritage. These covered the concrete and the abstract, the secular and the spiritual. Michel Danino quotes David Pingree that India has at least 30 million surviving ancient manuscripts in Indian libraries, repositories, and private collections. They deal with every topic under the Indian sun: philosophies, systems of yoga, grammar, language, logic, debate, poetics, aesthetics, cosmology, mythology, ethics, literature of all genres from poetry to historical tradition, performing and non-performing arts, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, chemistry, metallurgy, botany, zoology, geology, medical systems, governance, administration, water management, town planning, civil engineering, ship making, agriculture, polity, martial arts, games, brainteasers, omens, ghosts, accounting, and much more — there are even manuscripts on how to preserve manuscripts! The production was colossal and in almost every regional language, says Danino.

The Islamic rule followed by the colonial rule severely impacted this capacity of Indians. We went into a shell and became only defenders of the body of knowledge to prevent it from complete destruction. The colonial rule inspired a different kind of intellectual response which was moulding ourselves in their frameworks to answer the criticisms they levelled at us. The attempts to ‘purify’ Hinduism of its ‘superstitions’ and ‘bad practices’ was a part of this response. In the post-colonial world, intellectuals sitting in influential places and setting the discourses had no clue about the Indian past. The Marxist scholars and the politicians had a classical linear view of history (past equals primitive, future equals advancement; India represents the past, Europe-America the future). They simply glossed over this extraordinary corpus of literature dealing with hundreds and thousands of topics and what came to represent the frozen nature of ‘Hinduism’? A corrupted interpretation of Purusasukta hymn and some selected passages from Manu smrti.

Starting with the Islamic rule, unfortunately, our intellectual output was that of a response but not independent thinking. We failed to look at the West or its religions critically through our eyes. Independence was not a break as it should have been. Political and academic factors ensured that the same colonial discourses continued the process. Intellectual violence replaced the previous physical and economic violence.

Now, we have a dedicated group of deracinated Indians who refuse to believe anything good about India (unless sanctioned and approved by a westerner). False notions of secularism and liberalism, the Marxist domination for decades in academia, and the ‘colonial consciousness’ of educated Indians ensure that Indians still are not able to create independent knowledge as in the past but remain a pale variant of the west parroting both their theories and conclusions.

Saumya Dey speaks from the authority of an insider who has studied and obtained his doctorate too at the JNU, the fountainhead of this enterprise against Indian ethos and culture. This book with thought-provoking essays is an important weapon for anyone genuinely interested in the country to fight the inimical discourses bent on destroying us. At the end of seven decades, through our own doing, we stand on the ashes to which our discourses have reduced India. It is tiring but we need to raise India from these ashes and reclaim our pride and prestige. It is never too late to begin.

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