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E-mai l thi s ar ti c l e

THEME

INDIA UNLEASHED

The invention of the

Hindu
Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the 18th and
19th centuries out of a multiplicity of sub-continental
religions, and enthusiastically endorsed by Indian
modernisers. Unlike Muslims, Hindus have tended to borrow
more than reject, and it has now been reconfigured as a
global rival to the big three monotheisms. In the process, it
has abandoned the tradition of toleration which lie in its
true origins.
By Pankaj Mishra
Author

arlier this y ear, I w as in Rishikesh, the first tow n that the riv er
Ganges m eets as it leav es its Him alay an hom e and em barks upon
its long journey through the North Indian plains. The town's place
in Indian m y thology is not as secure as that of Hardwar, w hich
lies a few m iles dow nstream , and which periodically hosts the
Kum bh Mela; nor is it as fam ous as places like Allahabad and
Benares, ev en holier cities further down on the Ganges. People
seeking greater solitude and wisdom usually head deep into the Him alay as. With its
saffron-robed sadhus and ashrams, its y oga and m editation centres, and its internet
and dosa cafes, Rishikesh caters to a v ery m odern kind of spiritual tourist: the Beatles
cam e, m ost fam ously , in the sixties to learn Transcendental Meditation from
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their quick disillusionm ent seem s not to hav e deterred the
sty lishly disaffected m em bers of the western m iddle class that can be found
wandering the town's alley s in tie-dy e outfits, try ing to raise their kundalini in
between checking their Hotm ail accounts.
I was in Rishikesh to see m y aunt, w ho has just retired to one of the riv erside
ashram s. She has known a hard life; w idowed when she w as in her thirties, she
worked in sm all, badly paid teaching jobs to support her three children. In m y
m em ory , I can still see her standing at exposed country bus stops in the m iddle of
white-hot sum m er day s. She had com e to know com fort, ev en luxury , of sorts in later
life. Her children trav el all ov er the world as m em bers of India's new globalised
corporate elite; there are bright grandchildren to engage her at hom e. But she was

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happiest in Rishikesh, she told m e, liv ing as frugally as she had for m uch of her life,
and dev oting her attention to the end of things.
True detachm ent, howev er, seem ed as difficult to achiev e for her as for the
spiritual seekers w ith em ail. I had only to m ention the political situationIndia was
then threatening to attack Pakistanfor her to say , angrily : "These Muslim s need to
be taught a lesson. We Hindus hav e been too soft for too long."
In the last decade, such anti-Muslim sentim ents hav e becom e com m onplace am ong
the m iddle class upper-caste Hindus in both India and abroad w ho form the m ost loy al
constituency of the Hindu nationalist BJP. They were am plified m ost recently in
Gujarat during the BJP-assisted m assacre in early 2 002 of ov er a thousand Muslim s.
They go with a m iddle class pride in the international prom inence of Indian beauty
queens, software professionals and Bolly wood film s. Perhaps I wouldn't hav e found
any thing odd about m y aunt's anti-Muslim passions had I not later gone up to her
m onastic cell, one of the sev eral in a large quad around a flower garden, and noticed
the large garlanded poster of a well-known Sufi saint of w estern India.
Did she know that she rev ered som eone born a Muslim ? I don't think so. The folk
religion to which the Sufi saint belongs, and which m illions of Indians still practise,
does not acknowledge such m odern political categories as "Hindu" and "Muslim ." I
think the contradiction between her beliefs and practice would only be clear to the
outsider: the discrepancy betw een the narrow nationalist prejudices she had
inherited from her class and caste, and the affinities she generously form ed in her
inner world of dev otion and pray er. It is not easily understood; but it is part of the
extraordinary m akeov er undergone by Hinduism since the nineteenth century w hen
India first confronted the West, and its univ ersalist ideologies of nationalism and
progress.
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THE REMARKABLE quality of this transform ation is partly shown by the fact that
there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British inv ented the holdall category
in the early nineteenth century , and m ade India seem the hom e of a "w orld religion"
as organised and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam . The concepts of a
"world religion" and "religion" as w e know them now, em erged during the late 1 8th
and early 1 9 th century , as objects of academ ic study , at a tim e of w idespread
secularisation in western Europe. The idea, as inspired by the Enlightenm ent, w as to
study religion as a set of beliefs, and to open it up to rational enquiry .
But academ ic study of any kind im poses its own boundaries upon the subject. It
actually creates the subject while bringing it within the realm of the intellect. The
early European scholars of religion labelled ev ery thing; they organised disparate
religious practices into one sy stem , and literally brought into being such w orld
religions as Hinduism and Buddhism .
Not only Hinduism , but the word Hindu itself is of non-Hindu origin. It was first
used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people liv ing near the riv er Indus (Sindhu
in Sanskrit). It then becam e a conv enient shorthand for the Muslim and Christian
rulers of India; it defined those who weren't Muslim s or Christians. Modern
scholarship has m ade av ailable m uch m ore inform ation about the castes, religious
sects, folk and elite cultures, philosophical traditions and languages that exist, or
hav e existed, on the Indian subcontinent. But despite containing the world's third
largest population of Muslim s, India is still for m ost people outside it, a country of
Hindus; ev en a "Hindu civ ilisation" as it featured in Sam uel Huntington's m illenarian
world-v iew.

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The persistence of such labels in the West is not just due to ignorance, or to som e
lingering Christian fear of unconv ertible heathens. Perhaps, the urge to fix a single
identity for such div erse com m unities as found in India com es naturally to people in
the highly organised and uniform societies of the West, w here cultural div ersity now
usually m eans the politically expedient and hardened identities of m ulticulturalism .
Perhaps, people who them selv es are defined alm ost exclusiv ely by their citizenship in
the nation-state and the consum er society cannot but find w holly alien the prem odern w orld of m ultiple identities and faiths in which m ost Indians still liv e.
Certainly , m ost Hindus them selv es felt little need for precise self-descriptions,
except when faced with blunt questions about religion on official form s. Long after
their encounter w ith the m onotheistic religions of Islam and Christianity , they
continued to define them selv es through their ov erlapping allegiances to fam ily ,
caste, linguistic group, region, and dev otional sect. Religion to them w as m ore
unselfconscious practice than rigid belief; it is partly why Indian theology
accom m odates atheism and agnosticism . Their rituals and deities v aried greatly ,
defined often by caste and geography ; and they w ere also flexible: new goddesses
continue to enrich the pantheon ev en today . There is an AIDS goddess which
apparently both causes and eradicates the disease. At any giv en tim e, both snakes
and the ultim ate reality of the univ erse were w orshipped in the sam e region,
som etim es by the sam e person. Religion v ery rarely dem anded, as it did with m any
Muslim s or Christians, adherence to a set of theological ideas prescribed by a single
prophet, book, or ecclesiastical authority .
This is why a history of Hinduism , no m atter how narrowly conceiv ed, has to
describe sev eral v ery parochial-seem ing Indian religions, alm ost none of which
contained an ev angelical zeal to sav e the world. The first of thesethe Vedic religion
began with the nom ads and pastoralists from central Asia who settled north India in
the second m illennium BC. It was prim arily created by the priestly class of Brahm ans
who conducted fire sacrifices with the help of the Vedas, the earliest know n Indian
scriptures, in order to stav e off drought and hunger. But the Brahm ans who also
form ulated the sacred and social codes of the tim e wished to enhance their own glory
and power rather than propose a new all-inclusiv e faith; they presented them selv es
as the m ost superior am ong the four caste groups that em erged during Vedic tim es
and were based upon racial distinctions between the settlers and the indigenous
population of north India and then on a div ision of labour.
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A NEW RELIGION WAS also far from the m inds of the Buddhists, the Jains and m any
other philosophical and cultural m ov em ents that em erged in the sixth and fifth
centuries BC while seeking to challenge the power of the Brahm ans and of the caste
hierarchy . People dissatisfied with the sacrificial rituals of the Vedic religion later
grew attracted to the egalitarian cults of Shiv a and Vishnu that becam e popular in
India around the beginning of the first century AD. Howev er, the Brahm ans
m anaged to preserv e their status at the top of an ossify ing caste sy stem . They
zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit, esoteric texts, and their expertise in
such m atters as the correct pronunciation of m antras. Their specialised knowledge,
and pan-Indian presence, gav e them a hold ov er ruling elites ev en as the m ajority of
the population followed its own heterodox cults and sects. Their influence can be
detected in such Indian texts as the Bhagavad-Gita which w as interpolated into the
m uch older Mahabharata, and which, though acknowledging the irrelev ance of ritual
sacrifices, m ade a life of v irtue, or dharma, inseparable from follow ing the rules of

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caste.
At the sam e tim e, India rem ained too big and div erse to be m onopolised by any one
book or idea. Today , the Hindu nationalists present Muslim rulers of India as the
flagbearers of an intolerant m onotheism ; but there was ev en m ore religious plurality
during the eight centuries of Muslim presence in India. Sufism m ingled with local
faiths; the currently popular dev otional cults of Ram a and Krishna, and the netw ork
of ashram s and sects expanded fast under the Mughal em pire. Mediev al India
furnishes m ore ev idence of sectarian v iolence between the worshippers of Shiv a and
Vishnu than betw een Hindus and Muslim s.
In the 1 8th century , the British were both appalled and fascinated by the excess of
gods, sects, and cults they encountered in India. It was a religious situation sim ilar to
the pagan chaos a Christian from the eastern prov inces of the Rom an em pire m ight
hav e encountered in the West just before Constantine's conv ersion to Christianity . As
it turned out, like the powerful Christians in Rom e, the British in India sought and
im posed uniform ity . There were intellectually curious m en am ong them : a judge
called William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, whose am ateur scholars
began in the late 1 8th century to figure out the strange bew ildering country the
British found them selv es in. Jones, a linguist, confirm ed the sim ilarity between
Sanskrit and Greek. Another official, Jam es Prinsep, deciphered the ancient Indian
script of Brahmi, the ancestor of m ost Indian scripts, that the British found on pillars
and rock faces across south Asia, and threw the first clear light on the first great
patron of Buddhism , Ashoka. A m ilitary officer called Alexander Cunningham
excav ated the site near Benares where the Buddha had preached his first serm on.
These day s, there is a com m on enough presum ption, which was popularised by
Edward Said's Orientalism, that m uch of western scholarship on the Orient helped,
directly or not, western im perialists. Som e people take it further and assert that any ,
or all, western interest in India is tainted with bad faith.
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IT WOULD BE TOO sim ple to say that this great intellectual effort, to which w e owe
m uch of our present knowledge of India, was part of a colonialist or im perialist
enterprise of controlling newly conquered peoples and territories. What's m ore
interesting than the by now fam iliar accusations of Orientalism is how the
assum ptions of the earliest British scholars m ingled with the prejudices of nativ e
Indian elites to create an entirely new kind of know ledge about India.
These scholars organised their im pressions of Indian religion according to what
they w ere fam iliar w ith at hom e: the m onotheistic and exclusiv e nature of
Christianity . When confronted by div erse Indian religions, they tended to see
sim ilarities. These sim ilarities were usually as superficial as those found between
Judaism , Christianity and Islam . But the British assum ed that different religious
practices could only exist w ithin a single ov erarching tradition. They also started off
with a literary bias, which was partly the result of the m ass distribution of texts and
the consequent high degree of literacy in Europe in the eighteenth century . They
thought that since Christianity had canonical texts, Indian tradition m ust hav e the
sam e. Their local interm ediaries tended to be Brahm ans, w ho alone knew the
languagesprim arily Sanskritneeded to study such ancient Indian texts as the
Vedas and the Bhagav ad-Gita. Together, the British scholars and their Brahm an
interpreters cam e up with a canon of sorts, m ostly Brahm anical literature and
ideology , which they began to identify with a single Hindu religion.
The Brahm anical literature, so sy stem atised, later created m uch of the appeal of

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Indian culture for its foreign connoisseurs, such as the Germ an rom antics,
Schopenhauer, Em erson and Thoreau. The strange fact here is that m ost Indians then
knew nothing or v ery little of the hy m ns, inv ocations and liturgical form ulae of the
four Vedas or the philosophical idealism of the Upanishads that the British and other
European scholars in Europe took to be the v ery essence of Indian civ ilisation. These
Sanskrit texts had long been m onopolised by an elite m inority of Brahm ans who
zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit. It was these Brahm ans who educated
the British am ateur scholars. So they studied earnestly the canon of w hat they
supposed to be ancient Indian tradition and m anaged to rem ain m ostly unaware of
the m ore num erous non-textual, sy ncretic religious and philosophical traditions of
Indiafor exam ple, the popular dev otional cults, Sufi shrines, festiv als, rites, and
legends that v aried across India and form ed the worldv iew of a m ajority of Indians.
But the texts prov ided the British the standards with which to judge the state of
contem porary religion in India. Since few Indians at the tim e seem ed capable of the
sublim e sentim ents found in the Bhagav ad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, Hinduism began to
seem a degenerate religion, full of such social ev ils as w idow -burning and
untouchability , and in desperate need of social engineering: an idea that appealed
both to British colonialists and their Brahm an collaborators who had long felt
threatened by the non-Brahm anical form s of religion that m ost Indians followed. It
was equally conv enient to blam e the intrusion of Islam into India for Hinduism 's
fallen state, ev en the caste sy stem , and to describe Hindus as apathetic slav es of
Muslim ty rants: a terrible fate from which the British had apparently rescued them
in order to prepare their path to a high stage of civ ilisation.
These ideas about the Muslim ty rants, Hindu slav es and British philanthropists
were originally set out in such influential books as History of British I ndia, written by
Jam es Mill, a Scottish utilitarian, and the father of John Stuart Mill. Such books now
tell y ou m ore about the prosely tising v igour of som e enlightened Scots and
utilitarians than about Indian history .
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BUT THEY HAVE HAD v ery serious political consequences. Many w esternised uppercaste Indians, including m iddle class Hindu nationalists, now believ e that Muslim
inv aders destroy ed a pure and glorious Hindu civ ilisation, which a m inority of
Brahm ans then m anaged to preserv e. The rather crude British generalisation that
Hindus and Muslim s constituted m utually exclusiv e and m onolithic religious
com m unitiesa v iew w hich was form ed largely by historians who nev er v isited
India, such as Jam es Mill, and which was then institutionalised in colonial policies of
div ide-and-rulew as ev entually self-fulfilled, first, by the partition of British India,
and then by the hostility between India and Pakistan.
Ev en at the tim e, these ideas had a profound im pact on a new generation of uppercaste Indians, who had been educated in w estern-sty le institutions, and so were w ell
placed to appreciate the im m ense pow er and prestige that Britain then had as the
suprem e econom ic and m ilitary nation in the world. These Indians wished to im itate
the success of the British; do for India what a few enterprising m en had done for a tiny
island; and they found a source of nationalist pride in the new ly -m inted "Hinduism ."
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, educated people ev ery where in the
colonised countries of Asia and Africa were forced into considering how their
inheritance of ancient tradition has failed to sav e them from subjection to the m odern
West. This w as what preoccupied such Muslim intellectuals as Moham m ed Iqbal, the
poet-adv ocate of Pakistan, the Egy ptians Moham m ed Abduh, the intellectual founder

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of m odern radical Islam ist, and Say y id Qutb, the fundam entalist activ ist w ho
inspired Osam a Bin Laden.
These w ere m ostly people from the m iddle class who were educated form ally in
western-sty le institutions and w ho becam e the leading m odernist thinkers within
their respectiv e traditions. Their m ost crucial encounter was w ith the West w hose
power they felt daily in their liv es, and whose history they learned before they learnt
any thing else.
Trav elling to the West in the late nineteenth and early tw entieth centuries, they
cam e up against the paradox that the western nations, w hich were m ortal enem ies of
each other, and brutal exploiters in their colonies, had created adm irably liberal
civ ilisations at hom e. They rem ained opposed to the colonial presence in their
countries and aspired for independence. But they were also dazzled by the power and
prestige of the West, and they couldn't but grapple with the com plex question of how
m uch space to giv e to w estern v alues of science, reason, secularism and nationalism
in the traditional societies they belonged to.
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THIS QUESTION BEGAN to haunt Viv ekananda when in 1 89 3 he trav elled to the
West for the first tim e in his life. Born in a m iddle class fam ily in Calcutta, he was
educated in western-sty le institutions, and was study ing law, in preparation for a
conv entional professional career, w hen he m et the m y stic Ram akrishna
Param aham sa and renounced the world to becom e a sannyasi. He trav elled all across
India and first exposed him self to the m isery and degradation m ost Indians then liv ed
in. When he trav elled to the Parliam ent of Religions as a representativ e of the Hindu
religion in 1 89 3 , he hoped partly to raise funds for a m onastic m ission in India and,
m ore v aguely , to find the right technology for allev iating pov erty in India.
The Parliam ent of Religions was part of a larger celebration of Christopher
Colum bus's so-called discov ery of Am erica. The organisers planned to "display the
achiev em ents of w estern civ ilisation and to benefit Am erican trade." Viv ekananda
addressed him self directly to such self-absorption. He spoke eloquently and
enthrallingly on Hinduism in Chicago, drawing on his great knowledge of western
philosophy . He claim ed that it was an Indian achiev em ent to see all religions as
equally true, and to set spiritual liberation as the aim of life. Am ericans receiv ed his
speech rapturously . He lectured on Hinduism to sim ilarly enthusiastic audiences in
other Am erican cities.
The new s of Viv ekananda's success flattered insecure m iddle class Indians in India
who w ished to m ake Hinduism intellectually respectable to both them selv es and to
westerners. But Viv ekananda him self, during the next few y ears he spent trav elling
in Am erica and Europe, was to m ov e away from an uncritical celebration of Indian
religion and his hostility towards the West. He cam e to hav e a new regard for the
West, for the explosion of creativ e energy , the scientific spirit of curiosity and the
am bition that in the nineteenth century had m ade a sm all m inority the m asters of
the world. He could barely restrain his adm irations in letters hom e: "What strength,
what practicality , w hat m anhood!"
Viv ekananda also claim ed to sense a spiritual hunger in the West, w hich he said
India w as well-placed to allay . He thought that India could be Greece to the West's
Rom e, by offering its spiritual heritage to the West in exchange for the secret of
m aterial adv ancem ent. Together, he hoped, India and the West would lead a new
renaissance of hum anity .
Viv ekananda returned to India after three y ears, his adm iration for the West

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undim inished. He set up a m onastic order dev oted to social serv ice and to reform ing
Hinduism which he saw as a decadent religion. In the m idst of his endeav ours, he died
y oung, at thirty -nine. Nothing m uch could com e out of w hat w as m ostly wellintentioned rhetoric: India was too far away from the West, which was then only in
the m iddle of its extraordinary rise. It was not up to India, then a subject country , to
im pose term s on any one.
Viv ekananda appeared to hav e struggled in his short life with m any new ideas. He
didn't alway s hav e clear solutions. His v alue lies in that he was am ong the first
Indians to realise clearly the fact of western dom inance ov er the world; he attested
abov e all to the inev itability of the West's presence, if not superiority , in all aspects of
hum an life. There were other people w ho had reached the sam e conclusion:
Europe is progressiv e. Her religion is....used for one day in the week and
for six day s her people are following the dictates of m odern science.
Sanitation, aesthetic arts, electricity etc are what m ade the Europeans
and Am erican people great. Asia is full of opium eaters, ganja sm okers,
degenerating sensualists, superstitious and religious fanatics.
This could be either Viv ekananda or Iqbal. It is actually Angarika Dharam pala, the
greatest figure of m odern Buddhism . Born in Sri Lanka (then Cey lon) in 1 864 ,
Dharam pala was just a y ear y ounger than Viv ekananda. He ev en went to the
Parliam ent of Religions in Chicago as a representativ e of Buddhism but was m ore
prom inent than his Indian colleague. Like Viv ekananda, Dharam pala w as influenced
by the West, particularly by the Protestant m issionaries that cam e with British rule
ov er Sri Lanka, and cam e to denounce traditional religion in Sri Lanka as corrupt and
unm anly . He wished to m odernise Buddhism and also giv e it a political role.
Follow ing these contradictory desires, he becam e an anti-colonial nationalist, and the
m ajor icon of the Sinhalese nationalism that later brought Sri Lanka to civ il war in
the 1 9 80s.
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COMPARED TO SUCH Hindu and Buddhist m odernists as Viv ekananda and

Dharam pala, the Muslim intellectuals were m ore div ided in their attitudes towards
the West. Som e of them , such as the y oung Turkish intellectuals of early tw entieth
century , w ished totally to rem ake their countries along western lines so as to reach
the sum m it of pow er and affluence that the West had arriv ed at. There were m any
others w ho chose the way of suspicion or antipathy . Iqbal stressed the need of Indian
Muslim s to form their own state where they could follow Islam in its m ost spiritual
form and be able to resist the m aterial way s of the West. Qutb adv ocated a return to
the Koran and preached rev olutionary v iolence against the West and its v alues that
he saw incarnated in Arab nation-states.
But w hether choosing nationalism or rev olution, alm ost all of these intellectuals
from colonised countries seem ed to concede that the West had becom e the best source
of ideas about effecting large-scale change and organising hum an society . They
adm itted the need for m odernisation ev en in the sphere of religion and for cultiv ating
a rational and scientific outlook.
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ONLY A TINY MINORITY of upper-caste Indians had know n m uch about the
Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas until the eighteenth century w hen they were translated

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by British scholars and then presented as sacred texts from the paradisiacal age of
som ething called "Hinduism ." But in the nineteenth century , m ov em ents dedicated to
reform ing Hinduism and recov ering its lost glory grew v ery rapidly . The inspiration
or rhetoric of these neo-Hindu m ov em ents m ight hav e seem ed archaic. In fact, they
were largely inspired by the ideas of progress and dev elopm ent that British
utilitarians and Christian m issionaries aggressiv ely prom oted in India. Modernist
intellectuals in Muslim countries then exposed to European im perialism sim ilarly
absorbed w estern influences, but their distrust of the Christian and secular West was
deeper.
Unlike Muslim s, the Hindus tended to borrow m ore than reject. Ram Mohun Roy
(1 7 7 2 -1 9 3 2 ), who is often called the "father of m odern India," was a Unitarian. He
founded the Brahm o Sam aj, a reform ist society that influenced the poet
Rabindranath Tagore and film m aker Saty ajit Ray , am ong other leading Indian
intellectuals and artists, as part of an attem pt to turn Hinduism into a rational,
m onotheistic religion. The social reform er Day ananda exhorted Indians to return to
the Vedas, w hich contained, according to him , all of m odern science, and echoed
British m issionary denunciations of such Hindu superstitions as idol-worship and the
caste sy stem . Ev en the m ore secular and catholic v isions of Gandhi and Nehruthe
form er a dev out Hindu, the latter an agnosticaccepted the prem ise of a "Hinduism :
that had decay ed and had to be reform ed.
Gandhi drew his political im agery from popular folklore; it m ade him m ore
effectiv e as a leader of the Indian m asses than the upper caste Hindu politicians who
relied upon a textual, or elite Hinduism . But it was Swam i Viv ekananda who in his
lifetim e w as witness to, and also m ostly responsible for, the m odernisation of
Hinduism . Viv ekananda was the m iddle-class disciple of the illiterate m y stic
Ram akrishna Param hans; but he m ov ed v ery far away from his Guru's inwardlooking spirituality in his attem pt to m ake Hinduism , or the inv ention of British and
Brahm an scholars, intellectually respectable to both Westerners and westernised
Indians. In his lectures in England and Am erica, where he acquired a m ass follow ing,
he presented India as the m ost ancient and priv ileged fount of spirituality a line that
m any Indian Gurus w ere profitably to take w ith their western disciples. At the sam e
tim e, he exhorted Hindus to em brace western science and m aterialism in order to
shed their burden of backwardness and constitute them selv es into a m anly nation.
Viv ekananda borrow ed from both British-constructed Hinduism and European
realpolitik. In doing so he articulated the confused aggressiv e desires of a westernised
Indian bourgeoisie that was then try ing to find its identity . But his am bition of
regenerating India w ith the help of western techniques did not sunder him entirely
from the folk religious traditions he had grown up in. He rem ained a m y stic; and his
contradictory rhetoric now seem s to prefigure the oddly split personality of the
m odern Hindu, where dev otion to a Muslim saint can co-exist with an anti-Muslim
nationalism .
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HIS IMPORTANCE DOESN'T END THERE. The m arriage of Indian religiosity and
western m aterialism Viv ekananda tried to arrange m akes him the perfect patron
saint of the BJP, a political party of m ostly upper caste m iddle class Hindus that
striv es to boost India's capabilities in the fields of nuclear bom bs and inform ation
technology and also rev eres the cow as holy . A hundred y ears after his death, the BJP
has com e closest to realising his project of w esternising Hinduism into a nationalist
ideology : one w hich has pretensions to being all-inclusiv e, but which dem onises

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Muslim s and seeks to pre-em pt w ith its rhetoric of egalitarianism the long ov erdue
political assertion of India's lower caste groups.
Viv ekananda's m odern-day disciples are helped considerably by the fact that the
Indian bourgeoisie is no longer sm all and insignificant. It is growingthe current
num bers are between 1 50-2 00 m illion. There are m illions of rich Indians liv ing
outside India. In Am erica, they constitute the richest m inority . It is these affluent,
upper caste Indians in India and abroad w ho largely bankrolled the rise to pow er of
Hindu nationalists, and who now long for closer m ilitary and econom ic ties betw een
India and western nations. The new conditions of globalisationfree trade, faster
com m unicationshelp them work faster towards the alliance Viv ekananda proposed
between an Indian elite and the m odern West. As a global class, they are no less
am bitious than the one which in the Rom an em pire em braced Christianity and m ade
it an effectiv e tool of worldly power. Hinduism in their hands has nev er looked m ore
like the Christianity and Islam of Popes and Mullahs, and less like the m ultiplicity of
unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for m ost Indians. Their growing prom inence
suggests that Viv ekananda m ay y et em erge as m ore influential in the long run than
Gandhi, Nehru or Tagorethe three great Indian leaders, whose legacy of liberal
hum anism m iddle class India already seem s to hav e frittered away as it heads for
intellectually and spiritually oppressiv e tim es.
PANKAJ MISHRA
Author. Regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New Statesman and
the Times Literary Supplement as well as several I ndian publications.
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