Rearming Hinduism

Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism, Westland Ltd, Chennai, 2015

Vamsee Juluri’s Rearming Hinduism offers a new approach to confronting Hinduphobia, particularly the biased perspective often perpetuated by Western academia. This bias, rooted in a hegemonic attitude and a ‘white man’s burden’ to civilize India, is effectively challenged through Juluri’s work, helping Hindus articulate their resentment against such academic and cultural distortions.

Although the title Rearming Hinduism may suggest militancy, the book is anything but that. As Amish Tripathi, author of the Shiva Trilogy, notes on the back cover, the book instead provides intellectual resistance to Hinduphobia. Juluri offers an “astute and devastating critique” of how Hinduism is portrayed in today’s academia, media, and popular culture. He shows that Hinduphobia not only distorts the truth and elegance of Hindu thought but also attacks the very sanctity of the natural world itself (back cover).

The book isn’t an easy read, especially the first part, due to Juluri’s academic style, as he primarily addresses his peers, such as Wendy Doniger.1 However, once readers begin to understand his arguments, they can join in his spirit of intellectual defense, finding the book valuable for confronting attacks on Hindu civilization and values from any source.

The following excerpt from the book provides insight into Juluri’s perspective:

One way of looking at what our epics and all our god-stories are doing, in simple, universal, modern, rational terms, is that they try to give us a sense of ethics through aesthetics. We believe, whether as myth, or history, or as something uniquely bigger than both, that poetry was born in the feeling of pain, not for one’s self, but of another living being’s. (p.101)

         Our stories may be reduced mostly to entertainment and commerce these days, but for us god is more than a superhero. We are at a time in our history when we are not yet sure of how to speak about our gods; we wish to believe in them now as heroes in history, and we wish to worship them now still as superheroes in legend.  But even if we are fascinated by new ways of reimagining our past, even if we welcome newer and new age gurus, motivational speakers, evangelist-style Gita teachers, mythologists, spiritualists, experts (and textperts), we are steeped in the idea that Rama and Krishna, Hanuman and Ganesha, Shiva and Vishnu, Lakshimi and Saraswathi, all of them are our Gods.

         We know them as Gods, and we feel them as Gods. We have not yet found the intellectual resources to speak of them that way though, in academica at least.  Because academia, right now, is hell-bent, for lack of a subtler phrase, on proving that our god-stories are fiction. We argue, in turn, that they are history Between these two positions we forget the obvious.  These are neither myth, in the sense of fantasy-tales for entertainment, nor are they histories, in the sense of what social groups do with each other.  They are god-stories; a truly significant, enduring, and inspiring form of culture.  God-stories are stories about God. We may not all agree that God is real, but we can recognize, in simple modern, rational, universal terms, that the social and cultural investment that has gone into these stories, into the meanings of these stories, is undeniably of value.  For generations, poets, philosophers, patrons, audiences, parents, elders, women, children, sculptors, performers, singers, priests, farmers, workers, everybody, virtually has cultivated and embodied an emotional and intellectual discipline about the expression and experience of stories about God.  We might speak about Krishna and Rama in many ways, but still, not in any old way.  We might not accord the same cultural value or spiritual importance, or ceremonial reverence to every depiction of Rama, but we do place our sensibilities in honouring them. For example, some of us do not (p.102) take books, any books, into the bathroom, still.  Some of us might do so, but not books about God. We might not go to a temple only in traditional clothes, but we do still wash our feet when we enter.  We respect certain codes with our bodies and lives because we know these practices are bigger than us.  The stories we hear about the gods, the words through which we still remember them, these are like the temples and shrines of our culture too. There is only so much we can secularize them, and there is very little we can tolerate in their brazen and deliberate distortion too.

…Instead of meanings, the Hinduphobic historian grasps some kind of an apparitional sense of texts, and illusions about the social and political conditions supposedly reflected in those texts.  Doniger declares, for instance, that there is no proof of someone called Rama ever having lived or not lived in Ayodhya, but by interpreting the Ramayana in relation to its historical context, we can prove that is a work of fiction.  What Rama means in Hinduism is of course so vast that it seems almost a petty waste of time to respond to that.  Typically, Hindus have believed that Rama was real, lived on this earth, and was an avatar, or God-incarnate.  That belief was and is a part of our culture, a democratic, egalitarian part of our culture at that we can believe that a human being can be god.  But we have not insisted that others subscribe to our belief either.  Our faith did not need to coerce others into seeing things our way. But we have arrived  at a point where the Hinduphobic compulsion to deny us our meanings has reached a point of absurd cruelty. If you are a secularist who disagrees, please try this exercise in empathy: if the collapse of the three domes of the Babri mosque could symbolize painfully India’s tolerance, democracy (p. 103) and secularism crumbling (Dalyrmple quoted in Doniger),  if the symbolism of those domes was so sacred to secularism, to a 50 year old idea of India, imagine, beyond the specificities of this one dispute, in general, just how much more sacred the name of Rama is to the millennia-old soul of India.

He critiques Western academic approaches that view Hindu texts as mere reflections of social and political conditions, rather than understanding their deeper meanings. He quotes Doniger’s assertion that there is no proof of Rama’s existence, labeling such statements as attempts to deny Hindus their cultural and spiritual heritage. Juluri argues that while Hindus have traditionally believed that Rama was both real and divine, they have never coerced others to subscribe to this belief. Now, however, Hinduphobic efforts to dismiss these stories have reached a level of “absurd cruelty.”— Juluri, pp. 101-103

In this book, Juluri challenges many of the misconceptions about Hinduism and provides a solid foundation for intellectual defense against Hinduphobia.

Notes:

1. Juluri points out that Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin/Viking, 2009) perpetuates the false notion of a dominant narrative in Hinduism. He refutes the idea that Hinduism ever had centralized, bureaucratic, fundamentalist power, either in ancient or post-independence India. According to Juluri, there is no “mainstream” Hindu history against which an “alternative” narrative must struggle to rise. (p.53)