----‘Hinduism’ and the ‘mainstream’; how frequently are these words juxtaposed, and made synonymous, with each other by the ruling political party! ‘Mainstream’: the word that would mean, in a democratic nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority; and those who don’t belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and suggestion, anti-democratic, and breakers of the law.
----Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream. Saffron, or ‘gerua’ in the Indian languages: its resonances are wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, ‘vairagya’, the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point, and how, did the colour of renunciation, and withdrawal from the world, become the symbol of a militant, and materialistic, majoritarianism? ‘Gerua’ represents not what is brahminical and conservative, but what is most radical about the Hindu religion; it is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of Hinduism, and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.
----We perhaps owe the politicization of the colour saffron, its recent use, in India, as a sign of national pride, to the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). We largely owe to him, too (more than we do to any other single person), the notion of ‘Hinduness.’ Vivekananda is a curious figure, and an exemplary one; his story is inflected with the conflicts of interest, the contradictions, of the emergence of Hinduism into modernity. Vivekananda’s real name was Narendranath Datta; he was a graduate of Calcutta University, and had studied European religions carefully. Like many other middle-class, educated men of his generation, in India and elsewhere, he was a seeker after metaphysical and religious truth; but his search was related to the self-awareness of a colonial subject. After rejecting the major religions and philosophies he was surrounded by, Datta finally found his master in a rustic visionary and saint, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who was a priest in a town north of Calcutta, who spoke in parables and homilies and claimed to have ‘seen’ Ma Kali. Ironically, and characteristically of the time, he first heard of Ramakrishna from an Englishman, Professor W. W. Hastie. And it was Ramakrishna who reportedly identified Datta’s spiritual potential, and named him Vivekananda – ‘the one who exults in a clear conscience and in discernment’.
----Ramakrishna was an extraordinary man himself; he had experimented, literally, in varieties of religious experience. He could practice, for periods of time, faiths such as Islam and Christianity; his immersion, during these trance-like periods, in these alternative modes of worship was so complete that he would begin to internalize the habits and customs of other religions, to spend, for instance, long spells inside a mosque, and eat beef; he’d even experience a sort of revulsion towards his beloved deity, Kali. His experiments led him to conclude, influentially, that all paths led to God (‘jata mat tata path’ – ‘there are as many paths as there are faiths’). This, then, was part of Vivekananda’s liberal inheritance; but it was an inheritance quite different from that of the liberal humanism that had come to exist in Bengal by this time, and which Vivekananda, as Narendranath Datta, would probably have subscribed to had he not met Ramakrishna. It was a middle-class humanism that decreed tolerance towards all faiths, regardless of whether or not you adhered to one yourself.
----Ramakrishna, on the other hand, located these various religions not in the society or nation he lived in, but in himself; it was here they co-existed and competed with each other, often annihilating each other temporarily; history animated him from within. The liberal humanism of the Bengal Renaissance formed the basis of the secular Indian state; the experiments of Ramakrishna, in which different ways of seeing existed in a sort of tension within oneself, formed the basis of the creativity of the modern Indian. It is no accident that every significant Indian writer or artist has negotiated seemingly antithetical world-views or languages in his or her work. But the relationship that the BJP and the new BJP-governed middle class have with Hinduism is prescriptive, not creative; for years now, the BJP’s satellites of the far right have imposed a violent, if illegal, ban on imagined offences to the Hindu religion, and abused and harassed artists and writers for their supposed transgressions. This is not only a failure of secularism; it speaks to us of the imminent death of Ramakrishna’s inheritance: leaving us unable to negotiate, any more, the different ways of seeing in a way that might create rather than destroy.
----In 1893, a penurious Vivekananda travelled to Chicago to attend the Parliament of World Religions. By this time, he had abandoned the white apparel of the brahmachari, the celibate-devotee, for the saffron of the sannyasi, the wandering holy mendicant. As a follower of Ramakrishna, he had graduated from brahmacharya to sannyas, from celibacy to renunciation; and yet it was now that he and his religion would embrace the world, not only in a metaphorical and metaphysical, but in a new, global, sense. His address in Chicago, in which he announced a resurgent Hinduism to the West, made him famous; and made, by association and almost by chance, the colour he was wearing the sign of that resurgence rather than of liminality.
We might think we see some of the lineaments of today’s Hindutva in Vivekananda’s revived faith; and, while it is hard to deny the lineage, it’s important to distinguish between the two. Certainly, Vivekananda wanted Hinduism to stand on its own two feet, to become less inward-looking, and exhorted it to become a more ‘manly’ religion. Like other figures of the Bengal Renaissance, he welcomed Western rationalism, science, and materialism, and wanted Hinduism to enter into a transaction with these things. Hindutva continues that journey Westward; but the West itself has become a different entity from what it was in the late 19th century. Vivekanada would not have foreseen a West that is synonymous, principally, with the benefits of the free market, which the twice-born Hindutva now rushes towards. Moreover, Ramakrishna, the rustic seer, was important to Vivekananda as the vernacular root of Hinduism; he couldn’t have known that the religion he helped revive would venture so far into the world that it would become, in essence, a globalised urban faith, in Delhi and Bombay, London and New York, divorced from the vernacular experience that Ramakrishna represented. The followers of the post-modern Hindutva still ritually, and piously, celebrate Vivekanada, but, a hundred years after his death, no longer exult in conscience or discernment.

Originally published in The Times Literary Supplement