Hinduism was (and still is not) a clearly defined category. It became a ‘thing’ in the modern era and upper castes realized the importance of this as a way to maintain their hold over the lower castes.
Religion as a concept, would have evolved fairly late, only when peoples from different parts of the world started interacting with each other and then needed to articulate the differences in their ways of living and their cultures.
In India, we have such a multiplicity and diversity of (what we would now call ‘religious’) beliefs and practices. For a long time, people did not think of themselves as belonging to a coherent framework called Hinduism.
That came later with the British, as a managerial and administrative concept. And as the quotes below show, upper caste Hindus latched on this as a way to maintain control. The implications of this are huge. If a single monolithic Hindu religion were not the reality, then upper-castes would be a minority and easily susceptible to having their power taken away from them. If lower-caste people could be convinced that they were Hindus, they could continue to be kept below in the social hierarchy in the new nation-state despite its egalitarian aspirations. Today when some people make a big deal of questionable conversion practices of Christian evangelists in India, it is good to keep in mind that they are working with fertile ground. The continued oppression of the Hindu lower castes makes them much more susceptible. And the anger of upper caste Hindus at this conversion is at root, self-interest — if all the lower-caste Hindus get converted, then who is there for us to boss over? There will be upper-caste Hindus, who sincerely protest that the thought hadn’t crossed their minds and they were only looking at it from the perspective of protecting the Hindu faith. Again, the obliviousness of the priviledged rears its head — you never gave a thought to the indignities faced by the lower castes, and now you want to control their freedom to pick a more dignified way of life.
This opens up a whole new perspective — a fundamental question to ask of any event or development related to religion or Hinduism (or even more broadly anything at all in India) is whether it does anything for the emancipation of the lower castes. And if it doesn’t or it maintains the status quo, it should be questioned.
The article also does refreshing takedowns of many of the leaders we revere from the freedom struggle. It points out that from the perspective of caste, they were very much a product of their time and didn’t question the conventional wisdom. I think this is a useful addition to our understanding of our history and our leaders. It is also a nice illustration of the importance of textbooks as a carrier of ‘truth’. Our textbooks presented the freedom fighters as pristine, and rarely explored their dark side, like, in this case, caste politics. Therefore we all grew up thinking of Tilak and Gandhi and their ilk as near-perfect individuals, something that serves an ideological agenda. One can better understand now the battles over textbook content.
I’ll now get into extensive quotations from the article, which will illustrate the points above.
On the recency of ‘Hinduism’:
While it is claimed to be an ancient religion, there is wide academic consensus that Hinduism is a fairly recent invention. For a belief system to be given the designation of a religion, it needs to be understood as one by the state and also by a group of people that share that belief system. In the case of Hinduism, it is only in the early twentieth century that the British government tried to define a criteria for who could be considered a Hindu. Till then, the British officials had used Hinduism as a term of convenience, having inherited it from Christian missionaries who used it as a negative concept — to identify those who were neither Christians, Jews nor Muslims.
On the diversity of practices and beliefs that had to be labelled ‘Hindu’:
As Lewis McIver, a British civil servant, wrote in the 1881 Madras Census Report: “Regarded as a definition of religion, or even of race, it is more liberal than accurate. From the point of view of race, [the term Hinduism] groups together such widely distinct peoples as true Aryan Brahmins and the few Kshatriyas we possess, with the Vellalas and Kallars of the South, the Nairs of the West, and the aboriginal tribes of the Southern hill sides. As a religious classification it lumps the purest surviving forms of Vedic belief with the demon worshippers of Tinnevelly and South Canara.”
The cultural practices of tribes and oppressed castes have changed drastically. For example, in Odisha, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the longstanding traditional deities such as Maari Amman, Bhuāsuni, Manināgeśvarī, Mādan and Thampurān have been displaced by the “the great Hindu gods” such as Shiva and Durga.
In order to identify who was a Hindu, the enumerators devised checklists of criteria, but the answers in all provinces disproved their initial assumption that a great diversity of beliefs, forms of worship and self-identification somehow formed a unified, homogenous religion. The so-called “Hindus” of the east preferred vegetables to meat, but elsewhere they were indiscriminate meat-eaters. Some prayed to one god and some others prayed to too many. Some had access to Brahmin priests, some had priests of their own castes and some had not needed priests at all. Some “Hindus” practiced burial and some others burned their dead. There were “Hindu” gods who were impure for some other “Hindus.” The census enumerators worried that this would result in an extraordinary number of religious categories, which moreover duplicated the caste categories. The checklist’s criteria were conceived from a Brahminical perspective. On narrowing and making specific the criteria for who was a Hindu, a massive number of people fell into the category of “Other,” rather than “Hindu.” The census began to reveal many different religions claimed by significant numbers of respondents — for example, the Mysore census revealed the presence of Shaivas, Madhavacharis, Lingayets, Swami Narayens, Ramanujas, Wallabhacharyas, Brijmargis and Kabir Panthis, while the Coorg census showed that people declared themselves Srivaishnava, Vishnuvite, Jain, Buddhist, Coorgs, Brahmin, Smarta and Sivite rather than “Hindu.”
On the introduction of the term Hindu by the British:
So, while they were painfully conscious that they could not ascertain the substantive defining content of who was a real Hindu, the census officials continued to use the term. And yet, they considered the first census, of 1872, to be a failure in treating “Hindu” as a religious category both in terms of its distinguishing traits and in terms of its definite membership. They admitted, in the words of Henry Beverley in the 1872 Bengal Census Report, that “the term ‘Hindu’ is used in the simple sense of non-Mohamedan as any other.” The name “Hindu” had been found convenient by the census officers because it was a good negative concept.
The British began expanding the participation of elected Indian representatives in the government. Since the size of a population could affect its share in government, of resources such as education and other privileges, numbers became highly important. The structure of elected local governance that was being implemented across the colony meant that the majority lower castes, who were beginning to mobilise, were set to have at least an equal role in the rule of the subcontinent for the first time in millennia. The reversal of the balance of power could be prevented provided the lower-caste majority was distracted from these statistical revelations and retained within the administrative provisions of colonial law as a category similar to the upper castes, and subordinated to them.
The document was an attempt to devise “the criteria which might be taken to determine whether or not a man is a genuine Hindu.” It asked the superintendents to enumerate castes that deny the supremacy of Brahmins, deny the authority of the Vedas, do not worship “Hindu gods,” have no access to Brahmins as priests, are considered as polluting by the upper castes, are not allowed in temples, bury their dead, eat beef and do not revere the cow. The results, which were published in the 1911 census, revealed that although the dominant castes, especially the Brahmins, shared a more or less uniform set of codes and practices across wide geographical distances, they had little in common with a vast population that had been counted as “Hindu.”
“In the Central Provinces and Berar a quarter of the persons classed as Hindus deny the supremacy of the Brahmins and the authority of the Vedas,” the 1911 census notes. “A quarter do not worship the great Hindu Gods, and are not served by good Brahmin priests; a third are denied access to temples; a quarter cause pollution by touch; a seventh always bury their dead, while a half do not regard cremation as obligatory; and two-fifths eat beef.”
On the realization of upper castes, that the Hindu religion had to be coined to maintain their dominance:
The exigency that changed the Arya Samaj’s mind about “Hindu” and mobilised upper-caste leaders of the Congress and other organisations behind it was statistical — the prospect of being exposed as a minority. Census statistics would not have mattered to the upper castes and their organisations such as the Congress had it not been for the electoral reforms and modern juridical practices that were being implemented by the British colonial administration.
Throughout the twentieth century, upper-caste leaders have tried to create a Hindu constituency, through assimilation and appropriation of lower-caste people. They have tried to create a homogeneity of religious beliefs, through the promotion of gods worshipped by the dominant castes and the obliteration of the traditions of the lower castes. Heinrich von Stietencron, a German Indologist, speaks of the “colonisation of India” by the gods and goddesses of the upper castes from the northwestern provinces and notes that “the continuing process of Hinduization of local deities could be cited from several parts of India.”
The very fact that societies are invested in the difference between “religion,” “sect” and “cult” shows the managerial and political character of these classifications because to be one or the other carries consequences in civil law.
In India, we can witness the challenges faced by Lingayats to gain the status of a religion for their beliefs.
As the historian Sandria B Freitag wrote in a 1980 essay, “Always have Indians identified themselves by their caste.” In other words, the only invariant in the Indian subcontinent is caste oppression.
The findings united various dominant-caste leaders and groups in protest — from the Congress to the Arya Samaj to the Sanatana Dharma Sabha.
Lajpat Rai was candid that the real “Hindus” are the upper castes and the “non-Hindus” are the people the upper caste would neither acknowledge as their own, nor even touch: “One fine morning the learned pundits of Kashi rose to learn that their orthodoxy stood the chance of losing the allegiance of six crores of human beings who, the Government and its advisors were told, were not Hindus, in so far as other Hindus would not acknowledge them as such, and would not even touch them.”
Lajpat Rai’s concern with “losing the allegiance” of a large population of lower castes gives away the game that “Hindu” was to be adopted so as to mask both the gulf that the upper castes maintained between themselves and the lower castes, and the conditional, calibrated “allegiance” they desired from them. Allegiance, after all, is claimed by lieges.
The definition of “Hindu” lacks objective reality and runs contrary to recent scholarship in various disciplines. The religion has been used to suppress and control the political aspiration of the oppressed castes, who were slipped into the Hindu religious category in the last century without consultation. By adopting this recently invented religious category as the identity of the majority, the Hindu nationalists led by the Brahminical RSS have been able to claim that they represent the majority. In this way, the upper castes are able to exercise political power in a modern constitutional democracy and distort the history and everyday reality of caste oppression in the subcontinent. The popular understanding of “Hinduism” and the self-perception of the majority of lower-caste people in the subcontinent has also changed to an extent over the last century due to the more or less silent acceptance of this term by some historians, intellectuals and the media.
Takedown of political leaders. Tilak in particular gets a bruising:
Tilak and his followers were at the origin of the Hindu political project, which was to be defined strictly in keeping with the Brahminical world view. Tilakites were strenuously opposed to the liberation of the lower castes and of women from the caste order. They rejected everything that they considered foreign, including Muslims, who had been living on the Indian subcontinent for more than a thousand years.
A gruesome bit: Tilak declared that denying public space to women was essential to “Hindutva.” When a case was registered against the husband of an 11-year-old girl because she “died due to injuries sustained during intercourse with her much-older husband,” the academic Dorothy M Figueira writes, Tilak defended the man and opposed raising the age of consent by accusing the girl of being deformed and one of “the dangerous freaks of nature.”
Gandhi proved particularly deft in dealing with lower-caste agitations. By acting as a mediator between the lower castes and the priestly class, he often managed to de-radicalise anti-caste movements. His international fame helped conceal his supremacist views on race and caste, and his clear support for the oppressive caste hierarchy. Ambedkar would emerge as Gandhi’s only challenger during the period.
Gandhi’s duplicity on caste was strategic. In a 1955 interview, Ambedkar accused Gandhi of writing in opposition to the caste system in English-language papers while writing in support of it in the Gujarati papers he published. In 1936, after the Poona Pact negotiations where Gandhi had theatrically declared his commitment to alleviating the suffering of lower-caste people, he wrote an essay titled “The Ideal Bhangi.” In it, he demanded that the people condemned to inherit manual scavenging as their caste occupation should embrace it as their highest duty:
My ideal Bhangi would know the quality of night-soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give a timely warning to the individual concerned. Thus he will give a timely notice of the results of his examination of the excreta. That presupposes a scientific knowledge of the requirements of his profession. He would likewise be an authority on the subject of disposal of night-soil in small villages as well as big cities and his advice and guidance in the matter would be sought for and freely given to society. It goes without saying that he would have the usual learning necessary for reaching the standard here laid down for his profession. Such an ideal Bhangi, while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words, he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it.
Vivekanada is not spared:
For Vivekananda, civilisation was racially bound to the “Aryan” race and its transmission to non-Aryan races was impossible without “Aryan blood.” “The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilised. Teaching alone will not do,” he said in a lecture delivered in the United States in 1900.
While the textbook leaders are tarnished, others like Jyotirao Phule are lionised:
“What fool would accept their advice to drive the English, who have rescued us from the slavery of the bhats” — Maharashtrian Brahmins — “away from our land,” Phule wrote. “Thank God that He helped the brave English to subdue the rebellion of the bhat.” Phule’s progressive polemic turned the “Aryan” discourse against its proponents, Tilak most notable among them. Phule asserted that the upper-caste “Aryans” were oppressors rather than representatives and leaders of India. He interpreted the Aryan migration theory as Aryans being an outside force that had conquered the indigenous people of India. He talked of Aryans not as a racially superior, civilising force, but as barbaric oppressors. He saw Rama as a symbol of the Aryan conquest of India and attacked the ideas of the Vedas. Along with his wife, Savitribai, Phule became a proponent for the education of India’s oppressed communities, such as Dalits, Shudras and women. Through his intellectual and organisational work against caste and all forms of conservatism, he spearheaded the birth and growth of a genuine social revolution on the subcontinent.
In Kerala, Ayyankali and Sahodaran Ayyappan emerged as prominent leaders of the lower castes. Ayyappan denounced the nationalist movement as an upper-caste project, saying, “I am ashamed of being a nationalist because nationalism is deceptive and it is a strategy to maintain the upper-caste hegemony.”
Moving on to more recent times
Other, Indian postcolonial critics began asserting native pride and values, which were confused and hidden by colonial rule. The title of Ashis Nandy’s work The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism reveals aptly the meaning of this project, whose goal was to recover the lost pride of the upper castes. When Rup Kanwar was killed in the sati practice in 1987, Indian feminists held protests. Nandy wrote an essay reprimanding and mocking them, saying that they were unable to understand the value systems of India and were enthralled by the West.
Leading proponents of postcolonial theory such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak installed a discourse about the history of the subcontinent in which the only dramatis personae were the “masters” — the white colonisers — and the “natives,” whom the upper castes alone represent. The Native was used as a category for an undifferentiated brown mass of resistance, slyness and “aporias.” Caste divisions and oppressions vanished into the category of the native with its moral superiority within the postcolonialist dyad. In the writings of postcolonial theorists, the upper castes’ lamentations about colonial humiliation alone appear before the international audience, obliterating the discursive space for lower-caste people’s historical interventions and political desires. The dominance of these two disciplines in academia is congruent with the rise of Hindu-nationalist politics in India.
And some more:
Muslims have been constructed as a common enemy to distract lower-caste people from demanding social justice from the dominant castes. The construction of a false “Hindu” religion created a false Hindu majority, which suppressed the fact that the lower-caste people were the real majority with political aspirations. Muslims and other religious minorities are victims of the Hindu hoax.
Predictably, then as well as now, conversion was also seen by the upper castes as the most threatening strategy against their dominance. Several Indian states have laws to curb religious conversions even today.
https://despoki.medium.com/https-ca...r-castes-invented-hindu-majority-c1620f016ad3
Above article is just a gist of the original, Original article is behind a paywall, See if anyone can access is somewhere.
https://caravanmagazine.in/religion/how-upper-castes-invented-hindu-majority
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