Today there is a sense in which alienation does not function in the way it used to like a sense of exclusion from practices or celebrations designating a sense of belonging. Today I claim alienation is experienced precisely in partisan terms as a form of resistance, as that which we do not belong to. This I think is the secret essence of Zizek’s joke on coffee without cream and coffee without milk. And is this not how we conceive of subjectivity in any given situation? For us to even have a sense of who we are, speaking from the position of living bodies in a material world, we would at the very least, in terms of our sensory perception require to have a sense of where I or we end and the brute materiality of the physical world starts.
There is a necessity to acknowledge how even philosophically this is not a question of incomplete sublimation. Even in terms of enjoyment itself we utilise a sense of resources, as in like bodily energy to be able to stimulate that which reach for, even if it is a hypothesis, however let us say that in our resistance to that which we would want to exclude, like shit or excretion, acts of mourning that also form a part of our social life, to be able to enjoy properly speaking means at the very least the exclusion of these elements.
This is why I find the movement that is Hindutva fascinating as the kind of excitement which animates the sensibility that drives temple movements for example are amphibious in the sense that they are carnivalesque suspensions of any exclusivity, everyone is invited to the party, like the maha kumb mela on the banks of the Ganges, probably one of the largest conglomerations of human beings on the planet. Distinctions in terms of our actually inhabited communities break down or dissolve in such moments and hence it is not communitarian in an exclusive sense. On the other side of the puzzle we have a supreme court judgement which claims that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life - and that it is possible for someone to be a Muslim and a Hindu, Christian, sikh etc. in this sense it becomes a kind of catalyst for participation, a stamp of approval by a majority which chooses to remain anonymous and undefined.
There is a question which we should raise here. Is there not a sense of empty paranoia in accepting such a fronting of the hindu agenda by the state? Even in terms where it is unwilling to define itself, or where its only mode of self determination is via negating that which it is not? Exclusion is not the defining principle here socially speaking, but a sense of graded exclusion is what is introduced when we refer to a religion as a form of life which can be practiced.
This is of course from a perspective of an outsider, as one who does not actively participate in the formalised rituals which are recognised to be traditionally a part of the hindu way of life. However, can we not ask, whether if hinduism is ‘a way of life’ not incompatible with other religions, can I not be an anti Hindutava Hindu? An anti-hindu Hindu? Like the way self depreciating white men call on a sense of guilt at what was basically a history of settler colonialism?
If it is indeed different, then we should perhaps explain why in the Indian parliament questions of genetic diversity are in fact raised as issues of contention. Is there not, drawing from the history of caste and its relation to varna, a racial element to how inclusion or exclusion in the hindu fold is practiced in everyday life?
We have here the basic coordinates which a polytheistic religion has always tried to incorporate via the positing of distinct anthropomorphic deities who are indeed characteristically different from each other in form, sex and temperament. So not unlike disneyland where the whole school gets to pick which ride they go for, the vaishnavites can worship Vishnu, indulge in rituals that signify reincarnations and the stories that go along with it, the shaivaites can get high on bhang at holi, the worshipers of Saraswati can pursue whatever form of learning that they please etc. etc.
The question that emerges, is what unites this fold which formally speaking does not call itself a religion and denies an incongruity between practicing another and belonging to this. Sociologists, cultural theorists and the like cite differences in the spoken and written idiom operating - yet what such a dichotomy does is merely use a wedge to ply apart two necessary mediums of communication which govern how we conduct our day to day affairs.
I think the old Grascian strategy, of thinking such a situation in terms of hegemony is also to be resisted. There is nothing that is posited tactically in merely acknowledging that hindutva exercises a sense of being the dominant religion in the land; and that once this is in place that which is in legislature is irrelevant lest we are willing to concede complete barbarism and grant that there isn’t an operating government.
What is the way to meet this dilemma? I think it is useful to take a leaf out of the book of profanity that a republican president has to offer. Profanity, insults about the other’s mother, about rape, about what you would do to their children become common parlance is a difficult situation to accept for any family, yet we have already established that the conglomerates we are dealing with are not familial in any biological sense, this is why Hinduism, or at least hindutva has to posit the entity known as the sangh, a kind of umbrella organisation consisting of many subsets which takes care of organisational responsibilities and ideological and emergency work as well. These are cadre based organisations and while pronouns may be used and a sense of camaraderie prevails these are not families in the sense of ties by blood or marriage, nor are they familial in the sense of sharing a living space like a house as a family. In this sense there is a clear misnomer in thinking of Hinduism as a family.
So the weird yet perverse question comes to my mind, how does a hindu enjoy themselves? And the answer here is not simple unless we concede that acts of consumption, ritualised like familial meals becomes sites where the family share what happens in their day to day lives. This is a sense of cloistered communitarianism that does have resemblances to frightened communities is oppressed conditions, but why is this so, especially if there is a majority that does explicitly identify themselves as hindu? The question is simply this, as with any religious identification not all bonds to the claim of being a hindu are made equal.
Here, we obviously confront the history of caste - yet inheritance of occupation is an increasingly diminishing prospect in our world. Also, questions of linguistic incomprehension in a country with 20 + official languages are likely to be far more immediate issues in any attempt at integration especially when moving from state to state, and the mobility of labour is only increasing. Racial questions do emerge, as do cultural conflicts. There is a sense in which what India has been experiencing is not unlike the Maoist experiment of sending People’s Liberation Army recruits to the villages in remote areas as a part of their training, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers were sent on trains to remote parts of the countryside in China to get a sense of the people and their ways and create a solidarity among the peasantry which supplied the army with the labour they required.
Yet, we are not in any position to have this done, particularly not under an organised and centralised leadership, which is good - for I believe conscription to be a regressive act, and to be exercised only in highly modified and near utopian lines; however what these movements have led to is a solidifying of prejudices in regions about others.
In the midst of these differences, not to mention in the competition of finding a job to make money; how much of an integrating factor is hinduism or hindutva is an open question and one which deserves to be raised. More importantly why should I or anyone else be or call themselves a hindu? What is in it for me? Are there special sweets distributed at prayers, reservations of jobs, access to public institutions? How does being a hindu help the average Indian citizen is the question that any religious scholar in the country should be asked to hazard an answer.
Chennai, 2021