In this interview, which is an excerpt of an interview appearing in the most recent issue of Political Theology (vol. 22.7), Mou Banerjee, a historian, and Anustup Basu, a media studies scholar and filmmaker, discuss Basu’s most recent book Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Their conversation ranges from the impact of colonialism on India’s religious and legal trajectory to Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy to the liberalizing force of Bollywood on popular culture. As religious nationalist movements emerge across the globe, this discussion of Hindutva is instructive beyond the Indian context.
Mou Banerjee
Professor Basu, it is my honor and privilege to conduct this interview with you at the invitation of Political Theology. Your book is fantastic. It’s incredibly timely. It’s urgent. You ask us to reconsider what you call Hindutva 2.0. The very first question that I want to ask you is to begin at the beginning. What is the inspiration behind this work? Why were you inspired to write on Hindutva 2.0? What made you think about this topic, how did you start, and how did you figure out what your sources were going to be, what your theoretical apparatuswas going to be? You very interestingly bring Schmitt into conversation with Hindutva. We keep on talking about the idea of the sovereign and the idea of the exception. It has been in some way a conversational point in civil society since the Gujarat riots of 2002. But I have not seen it so beautifully, lucidly explained in an academic space before your work. So, if you could just tell us a little bit more.
Anustup Basu
First of all, thank you for those extremely kind words on the book. I started writing about Hindutva 2.0, which is the recent dispensation that has been in place for roughly two decades. Then, my project kind of worked itself backwards. I kept going back to sources to understand organized Hindu nationalism, which came into being in the 1920s, around the time the Khilafat Movement was going on. It was also around the time of the first waves of modern Dalit assertion in terms of representational politics in South India as well the establishment of the Indian Communist Party. There is what I call a monotheistic imperative in defining Hinduism as if it is a religion, in a kind of a modern anthropological sense. From there, one can proceed to the question of the Hindu nation. I have always been a student of Western political philosophy. I started reading, and I found that this was a pretty consistent idea, actually — tacitly or overtly — that there is a normative Abrahamic supposition when one thinks of a religious nationalism. Nationalism, here, can be imagined on many registers. But if it has to be a religious nationalism in a classical sense, it almost comes with an inbuilt monotheistic imperative. The entire project of a Hindu-normative Indian modernity is responding to that. That response and its various nodal moments I try to track in the book right from the last quarter of the 18th century to the present day. I try to do a deep genealogy, trying to understand the ground of the present.
Mou Banerjee
How would you define political theology of Hindutva 2.0?
Anustup Basu
Political theology, in the sense I deploy the term, is something that generates what I would call a kind of a political jealousy. That is, whichever way you put it in terms of friend and foe or friend, enemy, self, other, you need an axiomatic principle of jealousy and discrimination that very aggressively, monothematically, determines identity. If we take a wide, wide angle view and go back to the last quarter of the 18th century, which is when the book begins, it’s a formidable enterprise. The civilizational complex defines a million different kinds of faith: polytheistic, atheistic, monotheistic, monistic, pantheistic, and a lot more extremely localized cults as well as, the Sanskritic schools and so many other things. The project becomes that of telescoping. This is a formidable spread of faiths involving, amongst other things, apparently three hundred and thirty million gods into a modern, axiomatic religion that can be given a standing for territorial expression in terms of the whole of the Indian subcontinent. This is the organization of the scriptural world, the telescoping of cultural and linguistic expressions of various things dealing with the absence of a congregational church, dealing with the fundamental discriminatory principles of the caste system, etc., by an unfolding Hindu consciousness which proceeded in various directions, and then was addressed in the twentieth century by the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and then the formation of the VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad] as a kind of apex ecumenical organization. That is a process of mono-thematization of the conglomerate of faiths that we call Hinduism. That is what I call the Hindutva political theology.
Mou Banerjee
You’re not only dealing with an actual historical timeline that begins in the late 18th century, you are essentially dealing with a dreamt-up timeline of a Saraswati Cultural Civilization [a conjectured civilization that supposedly originated near the Helmand province and predated the Vedic Age] that might be nine thousand years old, or it might be a million years old.
Anustup Basu
The origin date keeps receding. It was nine thousand years old when Murli Manohar Joshi was giving press briefings. But I think now it’s heading towards 15,000 years or something like that. You’re right about something that begins in the last quarter of the 18th century. Just to mention the obvious, there was no axiomatically Hindu law before that, before the Warren Hastings administration adopted Manu-Smriti, there was a Hindu people that had to become the people of the book and the Bhagavad Gita to emerge in that discursive space as the Hindu Bible.
Mou Banerjee
I’m suddenly reminded of a conversation I had with Amartya Sen when I was at Harvard. I made the mistake of saying the Gita is the Hindu holy book. There was this immediate correction – he said it was a Hindu text. I think that what you are trying to do is to show that imaginatively, historically, from the nineteenth century onwards, the way Hinduism is imagined and defined is this legacy of the colonial prioritization of the Gita to the exclusion of almost every other Hindu text. It is the Gita that starts becoming the central locus of political ideology. You trace it from Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Gita patronized by Warren Hastings. You talk about the Manu-Smriti.
When I was reading your book, I kept thinking colonialism has a very ghostly presence in it. It never quite comes out clearly and apparently as when you’re talking about these intellectual formations of Hindutva. Choosing the Manu-Smriti, changing a sacred text into a legal code, it also happens because of a colonial desire to impose a system of precedence upon a legal system which had, until that point, thrived on customary decisions. I’m just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about this ghostly presence of colonialism and why you think it’s something that we can both name and not name when we are trying to talk about Hindutva. The internal discourse of Hindutva only names Islam and never colonialism. But those 200 years are the period in which Hinduism and Hindutva both found themselves.
Anustup Basu
One of the important things that I wanted to accomplish in this book is to point out the obvious: that the Hindu nationalist project is out-and-out an Orientalist one. It is not indigenous. It is inspired almost entirely within a colonial, Orientalist framework of knowledge. It operates with a primary historical imagination that we get from James Mill. And so on and so forth. Now, you mention about Manu-Smriti. The British colonial understanding of the law is the law of precedence. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, talks at length about the distinctions between the British law and the French law in the 1830s. While the French advocate is trying to prove whether something is rational, the British advocate simply must prove whether this is something that was certified by the ancestors. In this sense, the adoption of Manu-Smriti within a colonial framework of knowledge and its juridical apparatus begins to eviscerate the million forms of local jurisprudence and custom. In the so-called Hindu world for the first time, this imposition creates the ghostly presence of dead fathers with their very strong imperatives. It brings that presence into thousands of vernacular worlds and colonizes them. It is from that point that Indian law comes with an absolute principle of precedence and ghostly authority.
Mou Banerjee
I would like to return to the central theoretical axis of your book. A founding principle of your book is Carl Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy. On your reading, Hindutva 2.0 subsumes all into a nation of jealously that guards the national space, the national culture, the national religion. How can we parlay this idea to understand what we are seeing in terms of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, as well as the mishandling of COVID health care, which has led to, by some estimates, more than a million deaths in India? How do we talk about the emergent movement against democratic norms and traditions, constitutional norms and protections, and the duty of a government? How do you situate Hindutva 2.0 in this new government dispensation that sees everyone as an enemy, thus, there are no friends? Essentially, what is the future of Hindutva 2.0?
Anustup Basu
The first thing to remind ourselves is that the Hindutva project is full of contradictions in its historical and conceptual framework. Schmitt’s notion of the friend presumes uniformity and homogeneity, which he takes for granted in his European historical context. For Schmitt, it does not matter whether that principle comes from language, from mentality, from culture, or from religion. It only matters as long as that principle is compelling and can invite a citizen to lay down his life. You must use the male pronoun here. He can lay down his life without regard for his personal salvation. That is what he would call a secular martyrdom. Any idea which is capable of supporting this secular martyrdom is what Schmitt calls the political, and accordingly, one can distinguish the friend from the foe.
Political Hindu nationalism has always struggled with being a principle of uniformity. Within a caste society, there is Hindu unity without Hindu equity. When we are talking about these millions of unique ontotheological life-worlds, these universes of piety, they are brought together with what are Christian terms. There is one providential narrative and one principle of eschatology, one vision of heaven and hell and one of deliverance.
As an example, during the pandemic, about 140 million people marched hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometers to their homes. It was the biggest mass exodus in history after the Indian partition. I think this exodus is, in a sense, only possible in a caste society. This example is where I see Schmitt. That kind of apathy, insensitivity, and habitual cruelty is possible only in a caste society. Even if there might be people who say they, themselves, do not practice caste. At the same time, they partake in a structure of feeling, expressed in terms of class, or the rural-urban divide, or otherwise, where they can completely stop thinking and feeling about millions of fellow country people and what they are going through right now.
Hindutva 2.0 wants a Hindu uniformity and a Hindu unity, which is basically the amplification of high caste North Indian male Savarna caste authority. It is the amplification of that authority over a pretty formidable geopolitical space.
Mou Banerjee
Thank you so much for speaking with me. Fantastic conversation. I learned so much.
Anustup Basu
It was such a pleasure. Thank you.
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