[Reader-list] Karan Mahajan: India in pieces (New Yorker)

[Patrice Riemens]

original to:  http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/india-in-pieces

India in Pieces
Karan Mahajan


Sunil Khilnani’s new book attempts to show how India’s past has been, 
and continues to be, constructed.

Last year, a professor at the Indian Science Congress, in Mumbai, 
claimed that India possessed airplanes seven thousand years ago. He 
isn’t alone in such beliefs. When a certain swathe of India’s population 
considers the country’s ancient past, it doesn’t see a country 
fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in 
poverty; rather, what’s envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire 
stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari. This imagined 
entity brims with characters from Indian epics and spits out grand 
inventions that would put scientists in the twenty-first century to 
shame—not only airplanes but cars, plastic surgery, and stem-cell 
research. What these Indians see, in other words, is an India that was 
once greater than any other nation on earth, and which has since fallen 
into a cruddy, postcolonial despair. Muslim and British invaders, they 
insist, have sapped the subcontinent’s energies over the past 
millennium.

This is a major strand of the nativist philosophy espoused by Prime 
Minister Narendra Modi and the flotilla of parties and social 
organizations that escorted him to power, in 2014. It is, in the 
rippling and echoing way of world events, in step with archaic 
right-wing movements everywhere—Make India Great Again would be a 
suitable slogan—and it is untroubled by facts. In the past year, 
right-wing mobs have lynched and beaten Muslims and Dalits (the former 
untouchables, who have often refused to be co-opted by 
upper-class-dominated Hindu nationalism) in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar 
Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand for allegedly eating 
beef, a crime that these nationalists cannot condone after a millennium 
of their religion’s supposed persecution. (Hinduism has always been the 
majority religion on the subcontinent.) Dormant laws in Indian states 
banning cow-slaughter and beef consumption are now being enforced. In 
January, a Dalit Ph.D. student at Hyderabad University hanged himself 
from the ceiling fan in his room after right-wing groups bore down on 
him for his activism. Elsewhere, emboldened nationalist groups have 
intimidated fiction writers, scholars, and publishers into silence for 
wounding religious sentiments. Student protests are branded 
“anti-national” and slapped with sedition charges.

In India, right now, the past is violently alive, and it is being 
bandied about like a blunt instrument, striking down those who try to 
speak sense to the present or who try to point out that this past is 
itself a fiction.

One of the intellectuals involved in calling the right’s bluff is the 
Indian scholar Sunil Khilnani, who has just published an incisive work 
of popular history, “Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives.” Where the 
opposition is clamorous, the book is calm; where the opposition flexes 
its Vedic muscles, the book is undercutting, irreverent, and impish. It 
attempts to show, through prodigious but lightly worn scholarship, how 
complex and heterodox the Indian past was, and how it has been, and 
continues to be, constructed.

Khilnani begins with the Buddha, who lived around 500 B.C.E., and is 
thus, Khilnani writes, the “first individual personality we can 
recognize in the subcontinent’s history,” as well as an apostle of 
neutrality and nonviolence. The Buddha’s religion has receded in India, 
except as a balm to the Dalits, who escaped into it, and as a self-help 
tool for a sliver of the upper classes, who have embraced it the way 
that some people in the West do. Buddha prefigures many of the themes in 
the book. A sheltered man, he is moved by his first encounter with 
suffering, and leaves behind his wealthy family to wander India in the 
thrall of slowly budding new ideas. He is serene and centered amid 
violence. He is open-minded and against sects in a Brahmin-dominated 
society. He calls for a total reinvention of Hinduism—one that becomes 
its own religion. He critiques Hinduism in the usual way, characterizing 
it as overrun by ritual, with no path to personal enlightenment. To show 
a way out, he makes an example of his own life.

That example has been followed by many others in Indian history, 
consciously and unconsciously. The mystics and reformers Mahavira, Adi 
Shankara, Basava, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Jyotirao Phule, Vivekananda, and 
Gandhi all left home at a young age to embark on radical 
self-experiments. Mahavira founded Jainism; Shankara came up with the 
monist philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta; Guru Nanak inaugurated 
Sikhism. Each embodied a critique of Indian society and showed a way 
forward.

The social reformer Jyotirao Phule was born into the low “maali,” or 
gardener, caste in Poona (now Pune) around 1827. Educated at a Scottish 
missionary school and expelled from a friend’s wedding in his teens for 
being lower-caste, he began to see caste as an “an engine of suffering 
and exploitation.” In his early twenties, along with his wife, 
Savitribai, whom he had educated, he started a school for girls and 
untouchables at a time when both classes were considered beneath 
schooling. The couple was ostracized; Phule’s father kicked them out of 
his house. Savitribai was pelted daily with “mud and stones and garbage” 
on her walk to school, and had to keep a clean sari in her classroom to 
change into when she arrived. But this, Khilnani writes, only gave the 
couple “new freedom to be social provocateurs.” Phule went on to write 
searing Jacob Riis-like critiques of poverty and compared Brahmins to 
“slave masters” in the U.S. Later, when lower-caste movements gained 
steam in independent India, he was resurrected as a figurehead.

The monk Vivekananda, who popularized Hinduism in the West and is today 
misread as a proto-Hindu nationalist, had a similarly tortured 
trajectory. Born in 1863, he grew up in Calcutta in a privileged family 
and proceeded, over his lifetime, to study everything from the Vedas and 
the Upanishads to Freemasonry, Buddhist meditation, Hegel, and Thomas à 
Kempis’s “The Imitation of Christ.” He could, Khilnani writes, “recite 
pages from The Pickwick Papers as readily as sutras from Panini’s 
Ashtadhyayi.” But after he finished college, both his father and mentor 
died in quick succession. Suffering a breakdown, Vivekananda retreated 
to the banks of the Ganga to worship under the spiritualist Ramakrishna 
Paramhansa. He became a mendicant and began wandering India, and was 
“driven mad with mental agonies” over what he encountered: ritual, 
poverty, disease. Hinduism appeared to provide none of the salves it 
promised; instead, the caste system and child marriage had oppressed the 
majority of the population. Vivekananda began to turn away from 
mainstream Hindus and Brahmins and to pursue a purer form of Hinduism, 
one that was practical and geared toward social uplift. This was the 
revelation he supposedly had on the southernmost tip of India, one that, 
the next year, sent him sailing to the U.S. to spread the word about 
Hinduism at the Parliament of World’s Religions, in Chicago, in 1893. He 
crashed the Parliament and became one of its stars, earning the 
admiration of Henry and William James, who hung “on his utterances.” 
During pauses in his lecture circuit, he wrote the central text of 
modern yoga, “Raja Yoga.” But Vivekananda also kept his eyes open. He 
came back to India impressed with the “social openness, the comparative 
freedom of women, the ability of people to act collectively in their own 
interests,” and the relative dignity afforded to the lower classes in 
America. He began recommending the American habits of eating beef and 
bodybuilding to Indians. He was, in every way, a more liberal 
figure—well-read, curious, sensitive—than he is remembered as today.

One of Khilnani’s projects is to rescue such figures from the vise-grip 
of nationalists. Another is to show how the construction of the Indian 
past has changed. Both Phule and Vivekananda offered Indians grand 
narratives about the country’s past; so did the reformers Rammohun Roy, 
Annie Besant, Gandhi, and other figures whose lives are recounted in 
Khilnani’s book. The present that each of them experienced was 
frequently a tableaux of despair, full of poverty, death, and 
oppression. But to see India this way was to see a country almost 
through the colonists’ eyes; as a country so sick it deserved to be 
shackled. So these thinkers dove into the great Indian texts—the Vedas, 
the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the epics—and came back with the 
notion that Hinduism, in its purest form, had been trouble-free, 
uncorrupted by caste or child marriage or sati. Phule imagined “an 
ancient golden age before the Brahmins, or Aryans, arrived to 
subordinate the original Indians, or Dravidians.” Roy believed “that 
ancient Indians had governed themselves democratically—a rejoinder to 
the British insistence that Indians were culturally habituated to 
despotic rule and unaccustomed to democratic ideas.” These were useful 
tools to persuade followers and themselves, but, of course, they were 
elaborate fictions.

The right-wing movements of today share this desire to look 
inward—rather than to the West—but they generally refuse to think about 
the present-day failures of Hinduism. They celebrate Vivekananda not for 
his wide learning but for “his insistence that Hinduism is superior to 
all other religions, and uniquely peaceful and tolerant, ‘because it has 
never conquered, because it never shed blood.’” Modi himself has 
endorsed the idea that the God Ganesha is an example of ancient plastic 
surgery. The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for 
the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, 
rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India’s 
sophisticated philosophical traditions.

Khilnani offers a fresh, cosmopolitan way of examining the Indian past. 
Everywhere he looks he sees rivers of influence and thought and 
ideas—ideas flowing through the minds of thinkers like Phule, 
Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Gandhi, Bhimrao Ambedkar, and 
others. Gandhi is fertilized by Victorian self-help literature. Roy 
corresponds with Thomas Paine and Jeremy Bentham. Annie Besant and the 
Theosophists go gaga over Indian spiritualism as a means to herald a 
worldwide revolution.

What Khilnani sees when he looks at the present, we don’t really know, 
though we can surmise. For better or for worse, he has only included the 
dead in his book of Indian lives.

Karan Mahajan is the author of “The Association of Small Bombs,” a 
finalist for the 2016 National Book Award.