The Significance of Hindu Society by Sita Ram Goel

The Significance of Hindu Society
Sita Ram Goel

Hindu society is the only significant society in the world today, which presents a continuity of cultural existence and functioning since times immemorial.

Most other societies known to human history-East and West, North and South-have suffered a sudden interruption and undergone a traumatic transformation due to the invasion and victory of latter-day ideologies-Christianity, Islam, Communism. The pre-Christian, pre-Islamic and pre-Communist cultural creations of these societies are now to be met only in libraries and museums, thanks to the labors of antiquarian scholars.

Hindu culture can meet the same frightful fate if there were no Hindu society to sustain it. This is the point, which is not always remembered even by those who take pride in Hindu culture.

There are many Hindus who cherish the great spiritual traditions of Hinduism and its scriptures like the Gita and the Upanishads in which that tradition is enshrined. But they do not cherish with an equal enthusiasm the Hindu society, which has honored and preserved these traditions and scriptures down the ages.

Again, there are many Hindus who proclaim with great confidence that Sanãtana Dharma that is Hinduism can never die. This is true in a sense. There will always be individuals in non-Hindu societies who will recover the mystique of Sanãtana Dharma through their efforts at self-discovery. But Sanãtana Dharma will surely suffer an eclipse and no more inform mankind at large with its message, if there is no Hindu society to sustain it.

Lastly, there are many Hindus who are legitimately proud of Hindu art, architecture, sculpture, music, painting, dance, drama, literature, linguistics, lexicography, and so on. But they seldom take into account the fact that this great wealth of artistic, literary and scientific heritage, will die if Hindu society, which created it, is no more there to preserve, protect and perpetuate it.

But the death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which cannot be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies. Suffering from a loss of its élan, it has become a house divided within itself. And its beneficiaries no more seem to be interested in its survival because they have fallen victims to hostile propaganda. They have developed towards it an attitude of utter indifference, if not downright contempt. Let no Hindu worth his salt remain complacent. Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before.

It would be relevant to recall the history of Hindu society in order to put the record straight. For, there is very little in that record which invites indifference or contempt, and a good deal which deserves honor and homage.


A word about misunderstandings first. At one time the dominant school of Western historians and their Indian disciples, for whom Hindu history commenced with Alexander’s invasion, presented this history as a series of successful foreign invasions to which Hindu India invariably succumbed. They even invented an Aryan invasion of India in the second millennium BC to round up their cherished image of this country as some sort of a free for all into which any adventurer could descend and dwell at will.

The Aligarh school of historians have come out with the thesis that Hindu society being basically an oppressive and exploitative society since its very inception, the invaders did not have to mount much of an effort in order to break whatever resistance it could muster at any time. The minority of oppressors, we are told, retired into fortified towns and citadels, and the majority of oppressed masses came out in support of the invaders who were hailed as liberators.

The Marxist historians, in their turn, have welcomed this Aligarh approach with open arms. Their materialist interpretation of history stands vindicated. They have extended the Aligarh thesis to mean that the invaders were not only liberators on the social and political plane but also great incentives to forces of production. These foreign invasions, we are informed, were thus so many steps out of economic stagnation and towards material and social progress.

It is little use crossing swords with the stalwarts inspired by Mecca and Moscow. It has been seen again and again that whatever be the facts, their conclusions remain the same. Their conclusions remain the same because their motives are the same. The motives are to malign and misrepresent Hindu history in order to denigrate and destroy Hindu society. Now many Indians too have joined the game.

Responsible Western historians, however, concede that Hindu history is much, very much, older than Alexander’s invasion. They also concede that the theory of an Aryan invasion of India is at best a conjecture for which there is no positive evidence, literary or archaeological. They admit further that the account which the Hindus gave of themselves in the face of foreign invaders has been quite creditable and by no means dishonorable. And they agree that whenever the Hindus suffered a defeat it was largely due to their neglect of and consequent inferiority in the art of warfare rather than any serious defect or deficiency in their social system or cultural milieu.

There was a time, not very long ago, when Hindu culture was a revered culture throughout the civilized world. Its seers and sages, its mystics and monks, its scholars and scientists, its missionaries and merchants took its message to the farthest corners of world-East Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia; Sumeria, Assyria, Babylonia, Chaldea and Iran; Burma, China, Japan, Korea and Mongolia; Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand; Pacific Islands, West Indies, Mexico, Peru and Columbia; Asia Minor, Central Asia, Greece and Rome. The history of a hundred cultures and nations provides evidence of this hoary heritage in their religions and philosophies, languages and literatures, sciences and technologies, manners and mores.

True, the Hindus never constructed a strong, centralised state, like that of ancient Iran and Rome, which could tyrannies over its constituent units and invade the neighboring countries. Yet their society was a strong, steadfast and stupendous creation based on a highly decentralized yet a cohesive social fabric made of organic units such as the clan (kula), caste (jãti), village (grãma), town (nigam), metropolis (nagar), country (janapada) and empire (sãmrãjya). Imperial systems rose and fell. But the infrastructure survived the test of time and remained vigorous and vibrant till very recent times.

Greek historians who accompanied and followed Alexander tell us that before this adventurer led his short-lived raid against the republics on the Punjab and Sindh, only two other foreign invaders had had the courage to cast covetous eyes on India. Queen Semiramis of Babylonia in the 8th Century and Cyrus the Great of Iran in the 6th Century BC attacked India with vast armies but were defeated at the borders and made to flee with very few survivors.

Plutarch leaves us in no doubt that Alexander himself had to beat a hasty retreat from the banks of the river Beas which, baffled by the brave resistance from a series of small republics, his armies refused to cross. And his successor in East Asia, Seleucus Nicator, was soon humbled and not only made to cede conquered Indian territory but also pay homage to the Indian emperor by a matrimonial alliance.

But the wheel of time turns. The Hindus lost some of their vigour and vitality and vigilance, and neglected the art of warfare which was acquiring new dimensions in neighbouring lands. The Scythians, the Kushanas and the Hunas who stormed in after the disintegration of the Mauryan and the Gupta empires did succeed in conquering and ruling over large parts of northern and western India. This spell of foreign rule, however, was rather short-lived. All these invaders were not only defeated by the rising tide of Hindu heroism but also absorbed and integrated into the vast complex of Hindu society and culture.

This triumphal course of Hindu history suffered a severe setback only with the advent of the Muslim invaders in the middle of the 7th Century AD. The Hindus were now faced with an adversary who was not only qualitatively superior in the art of warfare but also armed with an ideology which was altogether alien and uncompromisingly inimical to the basic premises of the Hindu weltanschaung. The war which the Hindus had to wage against this new adversary was ceaseless and long-drawn-out. The armies of the Arab Caliphate which had humbled the Persian and the Byzantine empires, which had conquered vast territories stretching from the Hindukush to the Atlantic Ocean, and which had converted to Islam vast populations en masse, could not advance beyond Sindh in spite of repeated invasions. The Ghaznavids, the Ghoris, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs and the Mughals who followed fared much better and succeeded in establishing imperial dynasties which ruled over large parts of India for several centuries. But Hindu resistance did not cease for a day. The Rajputs, the Vijayanagar Empire, the Marathas, the Bundelas, the Jats and the Sikhs rose in fierce revolt, one after another, till the fabric of Muslim rule was destroyed and dispersed by the middle of the 18th Century. And the number of converts which Islam-considering its political power and intentions-could win during its long spell of seven centuries was rather small.
This victory of the Hindus over the Islamic hordes could not be consolidated due to the intervention of the British invader who wielded not only an unprecedented superiority in the art of warfare but also a much subtler weapon of diplomacy. The Hindus were enslaved once again. The British also brought with them, in the form of Christianity, an ideology which too was altogether alien and intensely inimical to the basic tenets of the Hindu way of life.



Fortunately for the Hindus, Christianity in the West including Britain was soon overwhelmed by the rising tide of humanism, rationalism and universalism inspired by the revival of the Greek heritage. Christianity, therefore, could not obtain an unbridled sway in the counsels of the British rulers, as Islam was able to do in the courts of the Muslim kings. It was only under an earlier invader from the West, the Portuguese, that Christianity was able to harass the Hindus for some time and in some areas.

The struggle against the British invader was also not as long-drawn-out as against the Muslim marauders. The rise of liberal democracy in Britain was a great help to the Hindu freedom fighters. Nonetheless, the battle had to be fought on many fronts, revolutionary and constitutional, violent the non-violent. It is a point of some pride for the Hindus that their struggle for freedom inspired similar struggles in many countries of Asia and Africa, and that the dawn of Indian independence in 1947 heralded an era of independence for many an enslaved nation.

A society which has survived invaders who devastated and ultimately destroyed so many ancient societies, should be rightly regarded as the wonder of world history. The foreign invasions of India have been brought into bolder relief by the very fact that Hindu society defeated and dispersed all of them in the final round. Only that society can boast of freedom from foreign invasions which has lost its identity, body and soul, into that of the conqueror. Such a society leaves no successors who retain a racial or cultural memory, and who can spread out in national homage a roll of honor for its heroes. With all its weaknesses, Hindu society has never been such an imbecile society.

In the normal course, the Hindus who had such a glorious history should have come into their own after 1947 and resumed their career of newer cultural creations. But the balance sheet of this saga of struggle and sacrifice for freedom has not turned out to be favorable to the Hindus. They have lost to an alienated section of their own race some of the hallowed lands, which were at one time the very cradle of Hindu culture and civilization. And they are no longer the honored citizens even in their own homeland. A permanent stigma seems to have stuck to the terms Hindu and Hinduism. These have now become terms of abuse in the mouth of that very elite which the Hindu millions have raised to the pinnacle of power and prestige with their blood, sweat and tears.

How did this happen?

I have come to the conclusion that the Muslim and British invasions of India, though defeated and dispersed, have yet managed to crystallize certain residues-psychological and intellectual-which a battered Hindu society is finding very difficult to digest. These residues are now in active alliance with powerful international forces, and are being aided and abetted on a scale which an impoverished Hindu society cannot match. And, lastly, although at loggerheads amongst themselves, these residues have forged a united front, which is holding Hindu society under siege. The danger is as much from within as from without.






What are these residues of foreign invasions which are holding Hindu society under siege?

The Muslim invasion of India crystallized one residue which we shall name as Islamism. The British invasion, on the other hand, gave us two residues which we have named Christianism and Macaulayism


The Residue of Islamism

The most malevolent of these residues is Islamism, the residue of the Muslim invasion of India spread over several centuries. Its basic tenets are ultimately derived from the teachings of Islam which has so far succeeded in sealing itself off from every shade of empiricism, rationalism, universalism, humanism and liberalism, the hallmarks of Hindu as well as modern Western culture. But in the context of India where Islam failed in its mission of lasting conquest and total conversion, these tenets have acquired a singularly sinister and subversive character

What we mean by Islamism is a self-righteous psychology and a closed cultural attitude which make it impossible for its converts to coexist peacefully and with dignity with other people. There are many Hindus who share several tenets of Islamism. On the other hand, there are many Muslims who are frightened by Islamism and who would gladly join the mainstream of Indian nationalism if they are freed from the whip hand, which a minority of theologians, politicians and hooligans has come to wield in their community
We can safely summaries the credo of Islamism in the following five fundamentals:
1. That Indian society before the advent of Islam was living in utter spiritual, moral and cultural darkness (jãhilîya) like pre-Islamic Arabia;
2. That Islam brought to India the only true religion, the only authentic moral values, the only humane culture, and the only progressive social order;
3. That this civilizing mission of Islam in India could not be completed, as in many other lands of Asia and Africa, due to the intervention of the wily British who cheated Islam of its empire in India, mostly by means of fraud;
4. That while the creation of Pakistan has been a triumph and consolidation of the power of Islam, west of the Ravi and east of the Hooghly, the conquest of India by Islam remains an unfinished task;
5. That Islam has a right to use all means, including force, to convert this Dãrul-harb of an India into a Dãrul-Islam, so that a Hakûmat-i-Ilãhiyah could liquidate all traces of jãhilîya and impose the law and culture of Islam.


The Residue of Christianism
The eight fundamentals of Christianism in India may be summarised as follows:
1. That the Hindus have never had a Saviour whose historicity can be ascertained, with the possible exception of the Buddha;
2. That Jesus Christ whose historicity cannot be questioned has superseded all earlier Saviours of Hinduism (if they were Saviours at all and not disciples of Lucifer) and rendered superfluous all subsequent Hindu saints and sages;
3. That St. Thomas, an apostle of Jesus himself, was specially chosen by the Church to win India for his Master’s message:
4. That St. Thomas could not complete his mission in India because he met an untimely martyrdom at the hands of some Hindu, most probably Brahmin, heathens;1
5. That the converts made by St.Thomas, the first century Christians of the South, establish beyond doubt that Christianity is an ancient Indian religion and not a Western import as alleged by the Hindus;
6. That it is the sacred task of the Christian Church to complete the mission of St. Thomas and see to it that India becomes a Christian country, once and for all;
7. That if there is any thing good and wholesome in Hindu religion, it is not because Hindu saints and sages ever made any direct or conscious contact with Truth but because they merely stumbled upon some of it in the workings of Universal Nature which was preparing itself over a long time for the advent of Jesus Christ;
8. That no Hindu, even if he follows the Ten Commandments in letter and spirit and lives by the Sermon on the Mount, can ever hope to escape eternal hell-fire unless he has been baptised in a Christian church and administered the Christian sacraments.
These tenets have their source in the Christian religion which also, like Islam, is an extremely exclusive religion.2 Christianity too claims for itself a monopoly of truth and virtue, swears by the only true God, the only true Saviour or the only Son of the only true God, the only true Revelation, the only true way of worship, and so on. It too has to its discredit a long and unrelieved record of wanton destruction of ancient religions and cultures and a large-scale killing of heathens. The annals of Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and America, particularly Central and South America, provide harrowing details of this destruction and bloodshed
But we did have a taste of the intrinsic spirit of Christian aggression in our first encounter with the missionaries who swarmed towards our shores in the wake of Western victories from the 16th Century onwards. When the Portuguese seized Goa and adjoining territories the Catholic Church lost no time in setting up an Inquisition for the benefit of native converts who were likely to recant or relax in their faith. Francis Xavier, whom the Catholic Church hails as the Patron Saint of the East, expressed a deep satisfaction at the sight of six thousand dead Muslims whom the Portuguese had slaughtered. He also made forcible conversions, demolished Hindu temples, smashed Hindu idols, and inaugurated that anti-Brahmanism which has by now become the sine qua non of all progressive thought and politics in India

This campaign of calumny against everything Hindu continued till late in the 19th Century. Swami Vivekanada was referring to this crude campaign when he cried with anguish in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago that “if we Hindus dig out all the dirt from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and throw it in your faces, it will be but a speck compared to what your missionaries have done to our religion and culture”.

An example will serve to illustrate the spiteful spirit of the Christian missionaries at that time. They spread a canard in India and abroad that many Hindus voluntarily rushed under the wheels of the great chariot during the annual rathayãtrã at Puri, and got themselves crushed to death in order to attain salvation. The great chariot, according to them, was always accompanied by droves of dancing girls who sang lascivious songs and made obscene gestures towards crowds on both sides of the broad street. The “great” William Wilberforce, who ruled the circle of Christian crusaders in Britain and who adamantly advocated the Christianization of India by an unstinted use of state power, demanded immediately that the temple of Jagannath be demolished to stop this “devil-dance” for good. The British Commissioner of Puri at that time saved the situation by writing a long letter to a liberal British M.P. in which he stated that he along with many other British civilians in the district had been a regular witness of the rathayãtrã for twenty years but had never witnessed a single victim under the wheels nor found anything immodest in the songs and symbolic gestures of the dancing girls. The English word “Juggernaut”, which according to the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary means “any relentless destroying force”, is a living witness to the inventive imagination of the early Christianity.

The Residue of Macaulayism
Now for the second residue of British rule, Macaulayism. The term derives from Thomas Babington Macaulay, a member of the Governor General’s Council in the 1830s. Earlier, the British Government of India had completed a survey of the indigenous system of education in the Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. A debate was going on whether the indigenous system should be retained or a new system introduced. Macaulay was the chief advocate of a new system. This, he, expected, will produce a class of Indians brown of skin but English in taste and temperament. The expectation has been more than fulfilled. The system of education introduced by the British performed more or less as Macaulay had anticipated. Hindus like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahamanã Malaviya, Veer Savarkar, Sri M.S. Golwalker, to name only the most notable amongst those who escaped its magic spell and rediscovered their roots, were great souls, strong enough to survive the heavy dose of a deliberate denationalization. For the rest, it has eminently succeeded in sweeping an ancient and highly cultured people off its feet. Macaulay does deserve the honor of a whole ‘ism’ of which we have not seen the last yet.

Yet, as we survey the spread of its spell over Hindu society, particularly Hindu intelligentsia, we can spot some of its paralyzing processes. The most prominent are the following five:
1. A skeptical, if not negative, attitude towards Hindu spirituality, cultural creations and social institutions with solemn airs of scholarship and superior knowledge. Nothing in Hindu India, past or present, is to be approved unless recognized and recommended by an appropriate authority in the West;
2. A positive, if not worshipful, attitude towards everything in Western society and culture, past as well present, in the name of progress, reason and science. Nothing from the West is to be rejected unless it has first been weighed and found wanting by a Western evaluation;
3. An intellectual inclination to compare Hindu ideals and institutions from the past not with their contemporaneous ideals and institutions in the West but with what the West has achieved in its recent history-the 19th and the 20th Centuries;
4. A mental mood to judge the West in terms of the ideals and utopias it proclaims from time to time, while judging the Hindus with an all too supercilious reference to what prevails in Hindu society and culture at the present time when the Hindus have hardly emerged from a long period of struggle against foreign invasions;
5. A psychological propensity to scrutinize, interpret and evaluate Hindu culture, history, society and spirituality with the help of concepts and tools of analysis evolved by Western scholarship. It is never granted that the Hindus too have well-developed concepts and tools of analysis, derived from their own philosophical foundations, that it would be more profitable to use these concepts and tools of analysis for a proper understanding of the Hindu heritage, and that it is less than fair to employ alien and incompatible methods of evaluation while judging this heritage. If the Hindus use their own concepts and tools of analysis to process and weigh the Western heritage, our Macaulayists always throw up their hands and denounce the exercise as unscientific and irrelevant to the universe of discourse.
The intellectual and cultural fashions and fads of our Macaulayists change as freely and frequently as the intellectual and cultural climate in the West. Now it is English Utilitarianism, now German Idealism, now Russian Nihilism, now French Positivism or Existentialism, now American Consumerism-whatever be the dominant trend in the West, it immediately finds its flock among the educated Hindus. But one thing remains constant. The platform must first be prepared in the West before it could or should find an audience in India.

And this process of approving, rejecting, judging and justifying which Macaulayism promotes among its Hindu protagonists does not remain a mere mental mood or an intellectual inclination or a psychological propensity, that is to say, a subjective stance on men and matters. It inevitably and very soon expresses itself in a whole life-style which goes on rejecting and replacing Hindu mores and manners indiscriminately in favor of those which the West recommends as the latest and the best. The land from which the new styles of life are imported may be England as unto the end of the Second World War or the United States of America as ever since. But it must always be ensured that the land is located somewhere in the Western hemisphere. “Phoren” is always fine.

The models which are thus imported from the West in ever increasing numbers need not have any relevance to the concrete conditions obtaining in India such as her geography, climate, economic resources, technological talent, administrative ability, etc. If the imported model fails to flourish on the Indian soil and in India’s socio-economico-cultural conditions, these must be beaten and forced into as much of a receptive shape as possible, if need be by a ruthless use of state power. But if the receptacle remains imperfect even after all these efforts, let the finished product reflect that imperfection. A model imported from the West and implanted on Indian soil even in half or a quarter is always preferable to any indigenous design evolved in keeping with native needs and adapted to local conditions.
Starting from the secular and socialist state and planned economy, traveling through a casteless society and scientific culture, and arriving at day-to-day consumption in Hindu homes, we witness the same servile scenario unfolding itself in an endless endeavor. Our parliamentary institutions, our public and private enterprises, our infrastructure of power and transport, our medicine, public health and housing, our education and entertainment, our dress, food, furniture, crockery, table manners, even the way we gesticulate, grin and smile have to be carbon copies of what they are currently doing in the West. Who could be more acutely aware of the shortcomings in Hindu society than Maharshi Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Hedgewar? But that awareness did not inspire them, as it does the victims of Macaulayism, to join the Nirad Chaudhries of their days. Nor did they welcome, as our victims of Macaulayism do, the acrimonious accusations which Islamism and Christianism were advancing against Hindu society in their days.
Conclusion
Thus Hindu society not only presents itself as a prey to these exclusive, intolerant and imperialist ideologies but also acts as a buffer between them. India is secular because India is Hindu. It can be added as a corollary that India is a democracy also because India is Hindu. If Hindu society permits this free for all any further, the days of Secularism and Democracy in this country are numbered. Let the Hindus unite and save themselves, their democratic polity, their secular state, and their Sanãtana Dharma for a new cycle of civilization, not only for themselves but also the world.