The newly built Ram temple at the city of Ayodhya, believed to the birthplace of the revered Hindu deity Ram is scheduled to be inaugurated on January 22. The temple was built at a place where once stood the Babri Masjid, commissioned and built by Mughal emperor Babur during 1528–29, before being demolished on December 6, 1992 by Hindu nationalists on the contention that a Ram temple stood at the site before Babur destroyed to build the now destroyed mosque over it. The truth about these claims and counter claims remained a matter of controversy entangled in court cases.
In September 2010, the Allahabad High Court ruled a temple originally stood at the site of the demolished mosque and okayed the construction of the Ram Temple where the central dome of the mosque was, but also awarded a third of the temple complex area to build a mosque. This ruling was challenged in the Supreme Court by both contending sides, and on November 9, 2019, a 5-judge bench of the Supreme Court quashed the lower court ruling and awarded the whole of the controversial complex to those who sought to build a temple over it. Those who wanted the mosque rebuilt and restored at the same site were given an alternate site almost twice as big as the disputed complex, at a site 30 km away from this original site. Today, the newly build Ram temple is ready for inauguration. There nothing left to be done about the matter now, and this being so, we do hope everybody comes to term with this reality, and acceptance of this reality will heal the 3-decade old division that this has caused rather than accentuate the divide more.
Beyond the contest however, there are larger concerns and this has basically to do with a change in the nature of Hinduism the religion. None has put it better than well known public intellectual, Pratap Bhanu Mehta in a recent column saying what the nation is witness to today is the first landmark of a major colonisation of Hinduism by political power. It is true that such alliance between religion and political power has been a prominent feature in the history of the Abrahamic religions, and wars had been fought along religious divides for centuries till the advent of secular liberal democracy. The Crusades of Medieval Ages and the 30 years war between Catholics and Protestants in Europe which led to the two Treaties of Westphalia in 1648, are just two historical evidences of this outlook. Indeed, in the Western historical sense, secularism has been defined as the separation of Church and State, and from the point of view of the State, all religions will have the same weight.
Eastern religions were not like this. For long they were private matters of the heart and soul, having little to do with statecraft. But it is only to be expected that all other religions and indeed outlook to life would come to be influenced overtly or covertly by the most dominant thoughts in every era. There can be no dispute that in the “modern” era, this dominant force has been the Western world, therefore it is only to be expected that its influences, good and bad, would also begin cause gradual conformity of all other alternate outlooks to life, including the very idea of “modernity”. Other well known Indian intellectuals like psychologist Ashis Nandy have said as much. So what is it to be modern?
The connotations of the word “modern” are many and much beyond the simple and straight dictionary (Oxford Concise) meaning that defines it as “of the present and recent times”. In painting and architecture, the word can become a technical classification of styles and thoughts, in literature, philosophy, sociology and history it can carry myriad and indeed radically varying meanings. By and large though, there is a general understanding that envelopes all these entire range of meanings. In one word, this is Westernisation. The politics of the word is obvious, for it seeks to put the West at the apex of a presumed linear progress of society and civilisation, thereby giving the Western man a presumed advantage over all other “non-Westernised” societies, as he is somebody who has long left these stages where other societies and civilisations are struggling in. He was also thus bound by a self-ordained and self-fulfilling prophesy to carry out a mission to civilize the rest of the world.
Hence, apart from its exploitative economics, Western colonialism was also about this civilizing mission, whereby the Western man is given the moral liberty to recreate the world in his own image. Although it was towards the closing chapter of the colonial era, American President Woodrow Wilson’s famous and impassioned speech in 1917, canvassing in a joint session of the US Congress for America to agree to enter the World War I, said just as much. He said America had the mission to make the world safe for democracy. These words might as well have described the energy behind the expansion of Western colonialism in the 19th Century. Democracy is no colonialism, but the arrogance of many Western minds has made it appear so.
The epistemology of the word “Westernisation” hence is well known, so is the tyranny of the understanding of the notion of modernity which is a direct corollary. This realisation notwithstanding, its influences have penetrated so deep into the minds of the former colonised world, that even those who supposedly oppose this hegemony are still prone to its unseen dictates, even if unconsciously. Long after the physical end of colonialism, the mind is not free of its shackles. The introduction of various forms of the idea of monotheism into Hinduism, as was sought by Swami Dayanand and indeed the Ramkrishna Mission, was an attempt to refashion the Hindu mind in the image of Western thinking, making respected Indian scholar Ashis Nandy, call these reformist movements the modern “Churches” of Hinduism, quite contrary to the true nature of Hinduism in his book Intimate Enemy. Progress, knowledge and enlightenment had all come to be seen as a consequence of Westernisation.
Perhaps Hinduism is going through another phase of unseen “modernisation” by leaving behind its past of formless devotion to eternal deities that reflect the human longing for peace, security, fraternal bondage, common humanity, creativity and longevity etc., into one which is militantly political, and in this way unconsciously reflecting the qualities of what it overtly claims it wants to discard.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
