Amit Chaudhuri, a novelist and professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, looks at BJP's Hindu nationalism in an interesting way (See India's new Hinduism is about order). Rather than focusing on Modi, he asks the readers to see how Hinduism has changed and is currently being used in India. Religion, 'the sacred is not meant to cause wonder, but to impose order and obedience and curb visceral urges.' He gives evidence to prove his point.
Let me provide an example. “Prophylactic Hindu tiles”, as I’ll call them, have been proliferating in India for the past two decades. You see them on walls, the sides of urinals, and staircases. They have on them a Hindu deity Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh painted in the European style that is a cliche of kitsch Hindu iconography. Their function is to discourage urinating and spitting on public surfaces, both compulsive national masculine pastimes. The argument they embody never actually inscribed in either ancient scripture or even a municipal text is that no one would dare urinate or spit betel juice on a deity. I can think of no more tasteless use of the sacred, but the bizarre interpretation of religion in contemporary India means that hardly anybody thinks the tiles an outrage.
Hinduism was always open and syncretic. What European had started is now bearing fruit. Hinduism has been changing into a modern semitic religion, with specific gods, precepts and practices. According to Chaudari, BJP has done two things to speed up this process.
The BJP’s contribution to the reshaping of Hinduism has been twofold. First, by turning metaphorical moments such as the birth of Rama into historic events to be fought over, it has made Hinduism a literal-minded, Europeanised, Semitic-style faith. By taking away from Hinduism its complexity and contradictoriness, both the BJP and the free-market “new India” in which it has flourished have produced a generation that knows little about Hinduism.
Second, the political, instrumental use of Hinduism to defend and assert identity while assailing other identities, and a general ignorance of religious experience on the part of the most active religionists, means that not only do we live in an age when to be Hindu is to constantly take offence, but the line separating obeisance from offence, the holy from the disgusting, religious pride from poor taste, is blurred. Indians are being schooled to defend the sacred, but have absolutely no idea how to recognise it.
But why the markets love BJP/Modi? Markets love them because Hindutva promises to bring order to this humongous country. Modi's developmental model is all about completing projects and not worrying about niceties. Maybe a poor and minorities are expendable, if it later results in stability and growth for the next twelve years. Maybe the argument is that if India has to compete with China, it has to be like China where human rights are not important. Read about Gujarat model and big business love for Modi here (See Narendra Modi a 'king among kings', says Anil Ambani at Vibrant Gujarat summit),
2 comments:
A nice article to share Raja sb. but I am not convinced by last paragraph as Chinese never saw parliamentary democracy and most of them belong to same race while India is different and only secularism bind them together
What you are saying is correct. I agree that China and India are different as India is much more diverse. And it is democracy and secularism that has saved Indian state. What I was pointing out was the desire of Indian big business and many others (in media and bureaucracy)to have something like a Chinese state (where if state agrees, it does not matter whether public agrees or not). So, growth can be accelerated close to Chinese pace. A centralized state like China would, however, destroy India.
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