And 2 More

I do in fact agree with both aditya and sigmund. The first post was written only for shock value and to get this blog going but since people are actually interested, here is a small follow up. Seriously this time.

the Ram angle is at best a sub plot as sigmund says. I attempted earlier, perhaps unsuccesfully, to only identify the tone of dissent.

this has been something i have trying to observe, study and segregate for years now. i cant fight the feeling that opinions especially on delicate subjects are seen and delivered through a veil of subtle angularity and employment of loaded phrases that have been sanctified by repetition.

In the US for example, i noticed that after a public racist rant by a minor celebrity, news channels were racing to condemn the chap: "how could he say that? in this day and age? its a tragedy. how could he say that?" A social anthropolist at NYU wrote weeks into the event, "it is perhaps telling of our society that not one public personality has come forward demanding to know: how could he think that?" the argument being that we veil our emotions, load our statements, watch what we are saying and all the while making it clear as to what exactly we are thinking. I dont think i need to press this further.

this is the point where you start wondering how i imagine this ties into my public hindu theory. permit me one last small diversion.

for all its bold claims, i do not believe that the philosophic morality of Democracy is much more than a facade. It is simply the most convenient form of governance. Yes i am aware that a dictatorship is far simpler. However, democracy provides a self sustaining morality in itself which functions as a drape to cloak fully the centres of power and wealth. The agencies of power use the instrument to perpetuate the illusion that representative democracy works and that the common people can effect changes. This belief is the ultimate perversion allowing the ruled class to enjoy a sense of control.

Democracy provides the attractive illusion that we are all of us actors in the governance of our country. The truth sadly, as we are all aware, is that the vast millions of this country are acted upon rather than being actors. They are the audience. Granted, a participatory audience- but as in all theatre of this genre the audience suffers from a serious lack of characterisation. They are seldom humans. Mostly they are sexes, religions, castes, ages, classes, professions, places.... but seldom people. The only people are those who are the true actors who keep the play running and the show going on year after year. the collectives. the incorporated establishment. All the way to the 5th estate.

See this and you will appreciate how vulnerable the acted upon are at the hands of the actors. i am saying nothing new i wish to only illuminate this factor in the backdrop of my earlier controversial post.

Coming back to the analysis of the tone of dissent, the reason my earlier post began with a condemnation of communist historians was that I observed in indian intellectual circles and among opinion makers and teachers and journalists an abyss of silence or worse, ruthless indifference, on issues that i thought ought to be burning pages and searing thoughts. Forced conversions being a case in point. It was pathetic how TV cameras panned village backdrops with wailing villagers claiming a local gora missionary threw a piece of sacramental bread in their well and claimed for his flock everyone who drank from it. Here in the studio, a cultivated bishop sits before the camera and regrets the misplaced zeal of his brother, for all the world to see. That provoked at least a minor reaction, but actions such as offering to pay cash and gifts of new clothes in exchange for conversion, receive to comment! We condemn bribing the populace to get parties in power. We condemn Sharad Pawar for farmer sops to his sugarcane lobby in return for keeping him in power. But all our journalists and teachers and media and historians see nothing wrong in asking people to forever abandon one religion for another in exchange for money and a new saree?

It is the conspiracy of silence that terrifies me. And i am beginning to see patterns. I agree with Sigmund that the masses have never been more publicly hindu which is why it might be difficult in recent times to see the effects of the collective embarassment that i used to describe the silence. Whitewashing records of Mahmud Ghazni, Aurangzeb. Textbooks were amended to omit references to destruction of temples, forcible conversions and slaughter of Hindus. Akbar the tolerant, we did learn about. We have objective whitewash for objective history. And any attempt to rewrite it- is communal.

On just the one point of whitewashing the mughal era, Shourie says, "they have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as "India", just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity - that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history."

Does this knowledge make me, as the first anonymous comment to my earlier post noted viscerally- one of the "intellectuals" believing themselves to be "spiritually conscious"? I guess it does

So to sigmund and aditya and akash and my anonymous friend i say only that I can see a systematic chipping away at, of all that is hindu in this country. It could be a reacation to secularism and a mutated form of the anti-white-influence movement that caught so many white americans, a self loathing that is neither novel nor uncommon. It could be one of the many things that I am unable to perceive or identify about our collective consciousness. But at any rate, I see it happening. And examples of grassroot level resurgence of hindu practice take nothing from this. Nor does a single act of democratic defiance prove its claims. I hope i have made myself understood.

Let the blows come...

Sushrut Desai