Author: Gail Omvedt
Publication: The Hindu
Date: February 25, 2003
URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/02/25/stories/2003022500251000.htm
Introduction: The antagonism to
conversion rests on an ideological foundation which takes ethnicity, that
is a presumed community of blood and heritage, as central.
In 1996, during a six-month employment
in Bhubaneshwar, fascinated by the beauty and antiquity of the area, I
travelled with friends to Konarak and to Puri. Here, I was interested in
seeing the temple of Lord Jagannath, considered to be the symbol of Orissa.
At the temple, however, while my friends were allowed to enter, and confront
the solicitude and greed of the Pandas, I was not. The warning sign, "non-Hindus
not allowed" clearly meant me. In the Puri temple at least, a white skin
was the sign of a non-Hindu.
A couple of years after that, I
attended a conference in Madurai, and decided to go see the great Meenakshi
temple with a friend, a Chinese woman who had also read a paper at the
conference. Though I was not particularly interested, she wanted to go
into the inner sanctum, not taking the "only Hindus allowed" warning very
seriously and hardly imagining that a temple of a god could be exclusionist.
But she was also turned away. Clearly, yellowish skin and folded eyelids
also indicated a "non- Hindu" to them.
Does this mean Hinduism is racist?
This is a somewhat loaded term, but it is clear that "Hinduism" as it is
seen today by the Hindutva forces has been consistently given an ethnic
interpretation. The basis is one of taking it as a religion of a people
who have inhabited a territory. In spite of significant differences among
them in colour and racial features, there is in fact a sense in which South
Asians - people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka - share
enough common features to gain an identity. It is an identity that is known
in the U.S. today as "brown" - and after 9/11 "brown" has been seen as
an object of racism and chauvinism by many Americans, including American
officials. Brown Muslims are the main target, but "brown" is an identifying
mark, so that while beards and turbans are the most dangerous, any "brown"
person is considered suspicious. With the George W. Bush Government taking
the lead, thousands of Americans have been subjected to tyranny, and thousands
of foreigners have been humiliated.
This is rightly condemned as racist.
The Dalit position during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban,
South Africa, in August-September 2001, which argued that the birth-linked
characteristics of caste are also similar to racism, is also correct. Both
racism in the U.S., which includes discrimination against all "brown" people,
and casteism in India, which stigmatises those considered of "low" birth,
are social forms of cruel discrimination in which groups of people are
seen as somehow biologically inferior and socially dangerous.
But what do we call it when a religion
is identified in ethnic terms? That is what took place during the 19th
century when the founders of Hindutva formulated their ideology. The modernisation
of traditional varna Hinduism at that time was expressed by the attempt
to bring all Dalits and OBCs into one ethnically-defined, territorially-linked
community. As the main ideologue, it was Sarvarkar who most clearly formulated
the themes. According to him, "a Hindu is someone who views India as his
holy land and fatherland". What this means is that a Hindu is not simply
a person who has a particularly belief, but also a person whose ancestry
is in a particular territory. In other words, it is an ethnic definition.
It sought to create solidarity by overriding differences among those classified
as "Hindus" - differences of language, region within India, and caste and
status.
This attempt to create solidarity
was an early way of dealing with objections of Dalits and OBCs that the
discrimination against them on the grounds of their birth amounted to something
like racism: it proclaimed that they had a racial, that is ethnic, origin
in common with that of the upper castes. But, while denying an ethnic difference
along caste lines, the Hindutva position simply formulated a different
ethnicity as the basis of a religious community. It included and excluded
people from the religious community on grounds of birth. That is, it excluded
not only people from India who accepted religions whose "holy land" was
elsewhere (the clear references were to Mecca and Jerusalem!); it also
excluded people whose ethnic origin was from outside India, that is, whose
"fatherland" (why not motherland?) was elsewhere. It continued in a different
form the old idea that one can only be born a Hindu one cannot convert
to it. Strikingly, the only other major religion of the world today which
takes such a position is Judaism.
The antagonism to conversion rests
on an ideological foundation which takes ethnicity, that is a presumed
community of blood and heritage, as central. It suggests that the choice
of a religion cannot be on the basis of aspiration, of a questioning and
a spiritual search that transcends all barriers and resists all limitations
to the human mind. It insists that this choice has to be bound by ancestry,
by blood, by family and habit. What justifies this is the idea that somehow
a religious faith is bound to a "people" so much that the heritage of blood
and family cannot be transcended, and that those who don't share that heritage
can never truly be a part of that religious faith. This in turn denies
individual human creativity and freedom. The argument for "no conversion"
seems to assume that humans are less than human, that they are tied down
to instinct and heritage.
This is a strange idea, in many
ways, to come in a land from which the first great missionary religion
of the world, Buddhism, originated. It is perhaps not so strange, however,
when we recall that many of the debates between Buddhists and their more
orthodox opponents were on the issue of whether a person's worth was determined
by action or by birth. In any case, the ethnic definition of religion is
in many ways very pre-modern. To Ambedkar, agonising in his early days
over what this "Hinduism" was that excluded him not only from temples but
also from households, streets, water tanks, and the whole basis of public
life, this ethnic definition of religion was unacceptable. In one of his
early essays, "The Philosophy of Hinduism", he classified world religions
into those of "modern" and "antique" societies. In cultural terms, he argued,
the main difference was that the religions of antique societies identified
god with a particular community and so had a community-centred collectivist
ethics, while those of modern societies were universalistic, seeing god
as the father/creator of all humans and centring their ethics on the individual
rather than on the community. Ambedkar here was using the term "modern"
in a different sense from the sociologists of today, to identify societies
which proclaimed a universalistic morality based on a universalistic religion,
societies which date back thousands of years.
This in turn led him into an attack
on Hinduism as denying the equality and freedom necessary for a truly modern
society. However, even apart from the issues raised by this attack, his
distinction between community-based religions and universalistic religions
is important.
The denial of the right of conversion
amounts to the ethnicisation of religion. And, it was this denial that
Ambedkar fundamentally challenged when he proclaimed in 1936 that "I have
been born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu". Claiming the right to convert
was a challenge to the ethnic definition of religious identity. And this
remains the issue at stake in regard to conversion laws: are the religions
of India to be defined in terms of one community, or universalistically?
