The Hindus (6 page)

Moreover, some of the people we now call Hindus did, when they wanted to, for more than two millennia, find ways to describe themselves as a group, in contrast with Buddhists or Muslims (or particular subsects of Buddhists or Muslims). They called themselves the people of the Veda, or the people who revere the Brahmins who are the custodians of the Veda, or the people who have four classes and four stages of life (
varna-ashrama-dharma
, in contrast with Buddhists). Or they called themselves the Aryas (“nobles”), in contrast with the Dasyus or Dasas (“aliens” or “slaves”) or barbarians (
mlecchas
). The texts called the Brahmanas, in the seventh century BCE, define
mleccha
s as people of unintelligible speech, as does a dharma text of the period, which adds that they also eat cow flesh,
¹⁴
implying that the Aryas do not. The lawmaker Manu too, in the early centuries CE, treats
mleccha
as a linguistic term, contrasted with Arya (which he correctly regards as a linguistic term) rather than with Dasyu (an ethnic term); those outside the four classes (
varna
s) are aliens (Dasyus), whether they speak barbarian (
mleccha
) languages or Arya languages (10.45). A commentator on Manu, named Medhatithi, glosses
mleccha
with the Sanskrit word
barbara
, cognate with the Greek
barbaroi
(“barbarian,” someone who babbles, “
barbarbar
”). No one ever comments on the religious beliefs or practices of these people.

But religious belief and practice are aspects of Hindu identity that both we and they can and do recognize. Caste, the most important of the allegiances by which the people whom we call Hindus do identify themselves most often, is closely regulated by religion. Some people would define a Hindu through exclusion, as someone who doesn’t belong to another religion;
^15
q
officials of the British Raj used the term “Hindu” to characterize all things in India (especially cultural and religious elements and features found in the cultures and religions of India) that were “not Muslim, not Christian, not Jewish, or, hence, not Western.”
¹⁶
Taking the opposite tack, the inclusive tack, the Indian Supreme Court, in the Hindu Marriage Act (1955),
¹⁷
ruled that any reference to Hindus shall be construed as including “any person who is a Buddhist, Jaina or Sikh by religion,” as well as “persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion,” a blatant appropriation that most Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists would resent bitterly.
^r
It also defines a Hindu as someone who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jew, but who is (in addition to a Sikh, Buddhist, or Jaina) one of a rather arbitrary selection of people whose marginality made the court nervous: “any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms or developments, including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj.” Significantly, the definition was needed because different religions have different marriage laws; the horror of miscegenation, always lurking in the Brahmin heart of darkness, was exacerbated by the British legacy within the law code.

But in addition to the circularity, mutual contradictions, and blatant chauvinism of the “not a Muslim” definition, such paraphrases list only other religions available
in India
(they seldom specify “not a Navajo, not a Confucian”); otherwise the word “Hindu” might simply have replaced “gentoo” or “heathen.” The political problems that arise from this geographical assumption will resurface below when we consider the word, rather than the concept, “Hinduism.”

In what seems to me to be something like desperation, a number of people have defined Hinduism as the religion of people who cannot or will not define their religion. This view was only somewhat sharpened by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (president of India from 1962 to 1967), who defined Hinduism as the belief “that truth was many-sided and different views contained different aspects of truth which no one could fully express,” which would, I think, make all Unitarians Hindus, or by the militant nationalist B. G. Tilak (1856-1920), who added helpfully that “recognition of the fact that the means to salvation are diverse; and realization of the truth that the number of gods to be worshipped is large, that indeed is the distinguishing feature of Hindu religion.”
¹⁸
The Supreme Court of India in 1966, and again in 1995, codified and reconfirmed these two nondefinitions of Hinduism.

In 1966 the Indian Supreme Court was called upon to define Hinduism because the Satsangis or followers of Swaminarayan (1780-1830) claimed that their temples did not fall under the jurisdiction of certain legislation affecting Hindu temples. They argued that they were not Hindus, in part because they did not worship any of the traditional Hindu gods; they worshiped Swaminarayan, who had declared that he was the Supreme God. The court ruled against them, citing various European definitions of Hinduism and others, including Radhakrishnan’s cited above.
¹⁹
But the Satsangis had brought their case to the court in order to challenge the 1948 Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act, which guaranteed Harijans (Pariahs, Untouchables) access to every Hindu temple; if the Satsangis were not Hindus, this law would not force them to open their doors to Harijans. Thus the legal ruling that defined Hinduism by its tolerance and inclusivism was actually inspired by the desire of certain Hindus to exclude other Hindus from their temples.

In answer to several of the objections to the word “Hinduism,” some scholars have tried to identify a cluster of qualities each of which is important but not essential to Hinduism; not every Hindu will believe in, or do, all of them, but each Hindu will adhere to some combination of them, as a non-Hindu would not. Scholars differ as to the number and nature of those forms,
²⁰
and we have seen the attempts of the Indian Supreme Court to come up with an inoffensive cluster, but perhaps we can be a little more specific. The elements from which the clusters are formed might include some combination of belief in the Vedas (which excludes Buddhism and Jainism), karma (which does not exclude Buddhism and Jainism), dharma (religion, law, and justice), a cosmology centered on Mount Meru, devotion (bhakti) to one or more members of an extensive pantheon, the ritual offering (
puja
) of fruit and flowers to a deity, vegetarianism as an ideal (though only between about 25 and 40 percent of Indians are actually vegetarian
²¹
), nonviolence, and blood sacrifice (which may or may not be mutually exclusive). This polythetic approach, which owes much to the concept of family resemblance laid out by the philosopher Wittgenstein,
²²
could be represented by a Venn diagram, a chart made of intersecting circles. It might be grouped into sectors of different colors, one for beliefs or practices that some Hindus shared with Buddhists and Jainas, another largely confined to Hindu texts in Sanskrit, a third more characteristic of popular worship and practice, and so forth. But since there is no single central quality that all Hindus must have, the emptiness in the center, like the still center of a storm, suggests that the figure might better be named a Zen diagram, which is not, as you might think, a Venn diagram with just one ring or one that has an empty ring in the center but one that has no central ring.
²³

There is therefore no central something to which the peripheral people were peripheral. One person’s center is another’s periphery;
²⁴
all South Asia was just a periphery, for instance, to those Delhi sultans and Mughal emperors who viewed everything from a Central Asian perspective. We may speak of marginalized people in the sense that they have been dispossessed and exploited, but Hinduism has porous margins and is polycentric. The Brahmins had their center, which we will refer to as the Brahmin imaginary, but there were other centers too, alternative centers.

The configuration of the clusters of Hinduism’s defining characteristics changes through time, through space, and through each individual.
²⁵
It is constantly in motion, because it is made of people, also constantly in motion. Among the many advantages of the cluster approach is the fact that it does not endorse any single authoritative or essentialist view of what Hinduism is; it allows them all. Any single version of this polythetic polytheism (which is also a monotheism, a monism, and a pantheism), including this one, is no better than a strobe photograph of a chameleon, a series of frozen images giving a falsely continuous impression of something that is in fact constantly changing. Like the man who proudly displayed a roomful of archery targets, each with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, but was forced to confess that he had shot the arrows first and then had drawn the targets around them, we can decide what aspects of Hinduism we want to talk about and find the cluster of qualities in which that aspect is embodied—and, if we wish, call it Hinduism. Or backing off ever so slightly, we can speak of beliefs and practices that many Hindus share, which is what I intend to do.

It is often convenient to speak of a Brahmin-oriented quasi-orthodoxy (or orthopraxy—see below), which we might call the Brahmin imaginary or the idealized system of class and life stage (
varna-ashrama-dharma
). But whatever we call this constructed center, it is, like the empty center in the Zen diagram of Hinduisms, simply an imaginary point around which we orient all the actual Hindus who accept or oppose it; it is what Indian logicians call the straw man (
purva paksha
), against whom one argues. The actual beliefs and practices of Hindus—renunciation, devotion, sacrifice, and so many more—are peripheries that the imaginary Brahmin center cannot hold.

If we can agree that there is something out there worth naming, what shall we call it? The main objections to calling it Hinduism or to calling the people in question Hindus are that those were not always the names that Hindus used for themselves or their religion and that they are geographical names. Let us consider these two objections.

Most of the people we call Hindus call themselves something else, like Golkonda Vyaparis,
²⁷
or, on the rarer occasions when they do regard themselves as a group, refer to themselves not as Hindus but as people with the sorts of definitions that we have just considered (Aryas, people who revere the Veda, who follow the system of class and stage of life, and so forth). Moreover, “Hindu” is not a native word but comes from a word for the “river” (
sindhu
) that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE
²⁸
), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and the Arabs (after the eighth century CE
²⁹
) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as the Indus. James Joyce, in his novel
Finnegans Wake
, in 1939, punned on the word “Hindoo” (as the British used to spell it), joking that it came from the names of two Irishmen, Hin-nessy and Doo-ley: “This is the hindoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy.”
³⁰
Even Joyce knew that the word was not native to India. It was an outsider’s name for the people who inhabited the territory around the Indus River, which the Persians called Hindustan,
³¹
as did the Mughal emperor Babur in his memoirs in the sixteenth century CE: “Most of the people in Hindustan are infidels whom the people of India call Hindu. Most Hindus believe in reincarnation.”
³²
It is noteworthy both that Babur singles out reincarnation for the defining belief of Hinduism (one of the circles in our Zen diagram) and that he does not ascribe this belief to
all
Hindus (implicitly acknowledging their diversity). “Hindu” has, however, been an insider’s word too for centuries, and it is the word that most Hindus do use now to refer to themselves. And it is not uncommon for one culture to take from another a word to designate a concept for which the original culture had a concept but not a word.

That the word has a geographical basis is, as we have seen, absolutely true. But it is not just the word but the very concept of Hindus and Hinduism that is geographically rooted in history. The textbook of legal code (dharma) attributed to Manu (first century CE) does not use the word “Hindu” but does offer a geographical definition of the people to whom his dharma applies (a definition that, it is worth noting, uses animals to define humans):

Much has happened since the time when one could define India as the land where the (deer and the) antelope play from sea to shining sea (eastern to western). The belief that all Hindus (should) live in India may have been strong once, though more honored in the breach than in the observance. The Hindus are, after all, one of the great merchant civilizations of the world, and the diaspora is very old indeed. Even Manu merely expresses the pious hope that the upper classes “make every effort” to stay within the boundary lines. Granted, many Hindus did suffer loss of caste status when they headed west across the Indus (particularly under the British Raj). Nevertheless, Hindus spread first through Southeast Asia and later through the British Empire, and they now live all over the world; there are approximately one and a half million Hindus in the United States, some 0.5 percent of the population.

So it has been said for much of Indian history that ideally, all Hindus should live in India. But the corresponding implication, that everyone in India is (or should be) a Hindu, was never true, not true during the millennia of cultures before either the Indus Valley or the Vedas, not true of most of India even after those early settlements of North India, and certainly never true after the rise of Buddhism in the fifth century CE. Nowadays there are still enough Muslims in India—15 percent of the population, almost as many Muslims as in Pakistan
³³
—to make India one of the most populous Muslim nations in the world, and Muslim input into Indian culture is far more extensive than the mere numbers would imply. Yet Hindu nationalists have used the geographical implications of the word to equate Hinduism with India and therefore to exclude from the right to thrive in India such people as Muslims and Christians; in 1922, V. D. Savarkar coined the term “Hindutva” to express this equation. But not everyone who uses the word “Hinduism” can be assumed to be in their camp, an assumption that would reduce an intellectual problem to a political problem and a move that we need not make. When we use the word, we can, like Humpty Dumpty, pay it extra, in this case to mean not “the people of India” but the intersecting clusters of Hinduisms outlined above.