Introduction

The complete title of this book reads: Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism. Authored by one of the most brilliant scholars of our time, Dr.Koenraad Elst, this is a must-buy work for anybody who seeks to understand Hindu revivalism in post-Independence India. It is based on his doctoral dissertation on the same subject.

This seminal work spans over 600 pages with more than 1500 footnotes and about 30 pages of bibliography. These features by no means distinguish it; rather, it stands out singularly for some of the most original insights that few researchers in this field has ever provided in recent times.

Which is why writing a review on this book took me more than two years of feet-dragging. The problem I faced in writing this review was directly proportional to the astonishing gamut of topics Elst has covered.

Decolonizing the Hindu Mind delves into, and challenges truckloads of myths that have assumed legitimacy in the discourse about Hinduism, Hindu revival, and Hindutva. It is quite pertinent–and interesting–to mention how Elst developed the interest to study this subject. Elst was intially curious of the BJP’s rapid rise to prominence. A paltry 2 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to 179 in 1998 counts for a stupedous achievement, which, according to Elst needed deeper examination.

The period which interests us . is the period of Hindu revivalism’s breakthrough to political prominence, c. 1988-1998… from two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to 161 in 1996 and 179 in 1998, enough to form a Government and win a confidence vote with the help of its allies. [.] But our focus is not on the performance of political parties… It is mainly in the realm of ideas that the decade under consideration has witnessed a revolutionary breakthrough…

This sets the tone for the rest of the 600-odd pages of the book. This is perhaps one of the most dispassionate, and cold-blooded logical analyses I’ve ever come across. Elst examines the arguments on both sides and tracks them down to their logical conclusion, as we shall see later. He presents fundamental sources rather than media/journalistic reports, which he says–with good reason–are biased.

As to method, I will not try to win a prize for originality. On the contrary, I insist on going back to basics. The way to find out about the thought animating a social, cultural and political movement is simply to listen and read what its acknowledged spokesmen have to say. If this seems obvious, a survey of the primary sources, basis of the prevalent discourse on Hindu revivalism is a painful eye-opener… the need of the hour is to get acquainted with what Hindu revivalists are really saying.

And so, Elst goes back to the basics by examining the works/sayings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Bankim, Swami Shraddhananda, Sri Aurobindo, and the most hated figure of them all: Savarkar. Nor does he spare the RSS, which he thinks needs to sharpen its intellectual rigour.

In spite of . bursts of chauvinistic bluster, Hindus are not very aware of the treasures of their . civilization; most RSS people, who chant a . litany of . great Hindus… would not be able to say with any precision what was so unique about the contribution of a Panini or an Aryabhatta. By contrast, all modern-educated Hindus are acutely aware of the “evils of Hindu society…”

Thus, the balance of power in the present discourse is heavily tilted against Hinduism.

It is quite common among professional Hindutva-watchers to use only documentary information, often produced by the movement’s declared enemies, without ever having met a single human representative of the movement itself. Consequently, it is equally common to publicize allegations about Hindu revivalist spokesmen which no one with inside knowledge could possibly sustain, e.g. to call the mild-mannered … Advani a “demagogue,” … qualifications which are hard to match with the fact that Advani is criticized precisely for his soft line.

And further, the way the discourse itself is shaped mostly by the much-celebrated postmodernist method, which is a subtle disguise of Marxism,

…which denies the very notion of objective knowledge, which assumes that knowledge is conditioned by one’s social belonging and . insists that “all research in the social sciences has a political agenda.” This means in practice that once you have identified an author as a representative of the wrong interest group, his arguments are ipso facto wrong or vitiated.

This pretty much explains why any statement by pro-Hindu groups is often openly ridiculed in the mainstream media. And more dangerously

There is .. an assumption of cultural solidarity between Western India-watchers and their Indian colleagues:the former consider the latter as “our men in India…

And “our men” only eagerly bend backwards to please their Western masters brethren.

This lengthy preface was necessary to follow the rest of this book review.

Part 2: The Concept of Hindu Fundamentalism

[tags]hinduism, decolonizing the hindu mind, koenraad elst, hindu revivalism, book review, RSS, BJP, indian politics[/tags]