THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
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THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR |
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Roehampton Conference Abstracts 12. Tapan Basu (Hindu College, Delhi University, India):
Tapan Basu is Reader in English. His books include Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (1992, co-authored), T.S.Eliot: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (1993, edited), Translating Caste (2003, edited), and numerous papers on Indian education policy, black American literature, and Indian literature in English. He is also a GIPSC Project coordinator. My paper will focus on the politics of the production and projection of ‘heritage’ in the context of the Hindu nationalist movement, especially in its contemporary phase during which it has been assiduously attempting to obtain for itself a global reach beyond its Indian roots. The climax of this phase of the so-called Hindutva enterprise was, in a sense, arrived at nine months after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (V.H.P.), roughly translating as the World Hindu Council, had successfully realised its mission to demolish the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, constructed, according to the V.H.P., at the birthspot of the Hindu icon, Lord Ram. In September 1993, the V.H.P. of America set up a conference entitled Global Vision 2000 at Washington D.C. The conference was ostensibly organised to commemorate the centenary of Swami Vivekananda’s address to the World Parliament of Religions in the Chicago in 1893. In convening this meet, the V.H.P., by now nationally notorious, was not only flaunting its formidable international following, but also establishing for itself a one-hundred-year-old lineage. My paper will study the somewhat contradictory trajectories of the so-called
Hindutva enterprise that emerge out of this self-fashioned V.H.P. lineage.
I shall begin my analysis on the ground laid down for such an analysis
by the Hindutva ideogogues themselves by examining late nineteenth century/early
twentieth century endeavours at endowing Hinduism with the transnational
identity of a world religion. In the initial section of my paper, I shall
look at the ‘missionary’ activities in the West on behalf
of Hinduism on the part of Hindu sanyasis such as Swami Vivekanada of
the Ramakrishna Mission and, a little later, Swami Yogananda of the Yogoda
Satsanga Society. This was a historical period in which there was hardly
any Hindu constituency outside India or any Hindu consolidation inside
India. In the next section, I shall focus on the decades between 1950
and 1980, decades of sustained spread of Hinduism into foreign, notably
Western, territories, thanks to the entrepreneurship of a host of peripatetic
sanyasis such as Maharshi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation fame,
Swami Prabhupada of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness
and Swami Chinmayananda of the Divine Life Fellowship . This was also
the period in which Hinduism developed the contours of a coordinated unity
with the harnessing together, in 1964, of its numerous sects under the
banner of the V.H.P. It has been the agenda of the V.H.P., under the tutelage
of its parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (R.S.S), to promote
Hinduism as the national religion of India and make the Indian nation
coterminus with the Hindu religion. On the flip-side of this agenda has
been the xenophobic exclusion of the non-Hindu religious minorities of
India, particularly the Muslims and the Christians, from the pale of Indian
nationhood for being un-Indian, if not anti-Indian. In fact, the 1980s
and the 1990s, which will be covered in the final section of my paper,
witnessed a significant increase of attacks on members of the minority
communities by the R.S.S., the V.H.P. and the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P),
the political wing of the R.S.S. The B.J.P.’s stranglehold over
state power in India since 1998 has indeed facilitated the fulfilment
of the V.H.P.’s exclusionist Hindutva nationalism. But, as its setting
up of Global Vision 2000 attested, the V.H.P. is increasingly having to
operate within a wider and wider international terrain beyond Hindutva’s
native soil in order to garner material as well as ideological support
for its agenda. The growth of a substantial Non-Resident Indian (N.R.I.)
population across the world in the 1980s and 1990s has been a most enabling
factor for the V.H.P. in this regard.
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