:: Friday, November 15, 2002 ::

Sacred Geographies and Imagined Landscapes (Part Two)

Within Orientalist discourse, the city of Benares was often compared to Mecca or Jerusalem as the great centre of Hindu holiness: the singling out of a single centre to which an entire religious community could turn to in prayer or collective memory made sense to the British colonial Orientalists. Within the Hindu tradition Benares (or Kashi/Varanasi) does hold a special sacral position as a tirtha or sacred ford and from this some have made the unwise leap that it can occupy a position analogous to that Mecca does for the Muslims; but such an assertion on closer inspection cannot be sustained. For a careful look at the city shows that singularity is not the primary marker of the city’s significance; indeed everything about “the” holy city is duplicated elsewhere, set amongst a pattern of social signification that makes Benares not unique but rather I would argue, part of a greater landscape shaped by the duplication and repetition of its features. It is not “the” centre, but one of many multiple centres in a polycentric landscape, linked by the tracks of pilgrimage.

Among its pre-eminent theological claims is that Kashi is a place where death brings liberation: Kashyam maranam muktih. But Kashi is clearly said to be one of seven cities that bestow Moksha including Ayodhya, Mathura, Hardwar, Kanchi, Ujjain and Dwarka. Kashi is said to be the earthly manifestation of Shiva’s jyotirlinga, Shiva’s linga of light but so are at least eleven other places, several of them ardently contested, that together constitute the twelve jyotirlingas. Beyond these twelve jyotirlingas are countless other lingas that are also celebrated as jyotirlingas. Kashi is circled by a famous circumambulatory route called the panchkroshi pilgrimage, with five stops along the circuit. However, even this panchkroshi pilgrimage is not a particular pilgrimage, but a type of five-fold pilgrimage that is also found in Ayodhya, in Omkareshwar (on the banks of the Narmada) on Mount Brahmagiri in Maharashtra and in many other places. Kashi and its jyotirlinga, Kashi Vishwanath, are also duplicated, with cities and temples all over India called the Kashi of the South, the “Kashi of the North” or the “Secret Kashi”. Temples of Kashi Viswanath are everywhere, from Mount Abu in Rajasthan to Tirupparankam in Tamil Nadu. This sets each sacral pilgrimage centre within a wider network of signification, which has its own patterns.

The ancient tradition of Buddhist, Jain and Brahminnical Hindu cosmology have in common a cosmos of ring-shaped islands and seas, centred on Mount Meru, a peak not of granite and snow, but envisioned as the pericarp of a lotus of four petals, its southern petal being India. The river Ganga, the Himalayas and the many tirthas of India that are duplicated in the landscape are part of this cosmology, which has spread a kind of “geographical Sanskritisation” in its construction of the imagined landscape of India. The great myths of the Hindu nation “take place” in this imagined landscape and many regional and adivasi traditions have become intertwined with this understanding; by attaching the significance of local places and gods to wider Hindu mythic and epic themes: Ganga fell from heaven in this place, Devi slew the bull-demon Mahisha here on this hillock, the Pandavas stopped here on their journey, or Rama, Sita and Lakshman stayed here during their forest sojourn.

But this imagined landscape is not singular, even from the many perspectives clustered under the broad rubric of “Hindu” and many regional and adivasi groups have never ascribed to this cosmology either consciously or by tacit assent and have their own imagined landscapes. Some have actively resisted being subsumed into the broader Hindu imagined landscape with the patterns of duplicated mountains, sacred rivers and tirthas. The impact of the Indo-Muslim culture has resulted in a flowering an alternative imagined landscape – a land enlivened with the heritage of kings and kingdoms, palaces and gardens, heroes and saints. The intricate Muslim traditions of devotion associated with the Sufis and intertwined with traditions of Hindu and Sikh, Bhakti have created a landscape of shrines and dargahs with their own cycles and networks of pilgrimage. There are many places that we have come to call “Christian”, “Muslim” or “Hindu” through the retrospective labelling of histroy but which have their own lived-history in which devotion has not subscribed to the boundaries of what we see as religious boundaries. The dargah of Moin-ud-din Chisti in Ajmer is famous for attracting both Muslims and Hindus, as does the dargah of Saiyyid Abd al-Quadir Shahul Hamid Nagoori in Nagore, Tamil Nadu and its neighbouring shrine of Our Lady of Vailankanni, participates in a ritual idiom that is shared throughout the pilgrimage networks of Tamil Nadu. Examples of the confluence and the layering of religious traditions around sacred sites abound.

While slogans, which pledge to build the Ram temple at Ayodhya ‘at that very place’ (hum mandir wahin banayenge) seem to participate in a discourse that is familiar, setting it in a wider context brings out dissonances that before were obscured. The mahatmyas and sthala puranas of Hindu India’s thousands of tirthas do indeed extol and praise ‘this very place’, and employ the poetic licence commonly called arthavada to amplify the greatness and glory of ‘this very place’. However, these are always in the context of a wider peripheral vision in which the tirthas and their mahatmyas are not unique but utterly numberless, limited not by the capacity of the divine to be present, but by the capacity of human beings to discover and to apprehend the divine presence. The dissonance arises out of a sense of the exclusivity and uniqueness more typical of monotheistic religions, which are superimposed, on the mythic presuppositions of Hindu divine plurality and plenitude.

Pilgrimages and the Mythic landscapes:

Pilgrimage to tirthas has been a common aspect of Hinduism for the last 2,000 years and these tirthas are related to a vast corpus of stories, ancient and modern. These tirtha mahatmyas and sthala puranas tell how the sites become holy and how can benefit from visiting them. Wendy Doniger observes in her book, Other Peoples’ Myths: “A myth cannot function as a myth in isolation; it shares its themes, its cast of characters, even some of its events with other myths. This supporting corpus glosses any particular myth, frames it with invisible supplementary meanings and provides partially repetitious multiforms that reinforce it in the memory of the group.”

These observations can be applied to Hindu sacred placed – tirthas, pithas and dhams. They do not stand alone in isolation. Even those in the most remote places, in the farthest mountain reaches of the Himalayas, where the rivers rise and the shrines are snowbound half the year, are not isolated, but part of a complex fabric of reference and signification that constitutes a cumulative landscape replete with its own “invisible supplementary meanings”. Many Indian scholars have noted the significance of the network of pilgrimage places in construing a sense of Indian “nationhood”, not as a nation-state in the modern usage of the term, but as a shared, living, landscape with all its cultural and regional complexity. For example, T.V. Rangaswamy Aiyengar, introducing the Sanskrit text of Tirthavivencana khnada, Lakshmidhara’s 12th century digest of pilgrimage places writes: “ Long before wise statesmanship attempted or accomplished Indian unification, Akhand Hindustan had sprung from the wonderings of pilgrims.” Aiyengar wrote in the early 1940s in the last years of the Indian independence movement. He wrote of a 12th century context but also as a scholar in a 20th century context, which had seen pilgrimage, not diminish but grow considerably with the expansion of mass transport.

The very idea of an imagined landscape cast by the network of tirthas has contributed immensely to the construal of a Hindu sense of ‘nationhood’ that is now exploited by the votaries of Hindu nationalism; making it imperative to investigate these links historically. I would argue that much of the Indian imaginative landscape has been constructed in Hindu and Indic mythic and ritual contexts, most significantly in the practise of pilgrimage. The vast body of Hindu and Indic mythic/epic literature is not a free-floating literature of devotional interests to the Hindu and of scholarly interest to the structuralist, comparativist or psychoanalytically minded interpreter; Hindu and Indic mythology is profusely linked to India’s geography – its mountains rivers, forests, shores, villages and cities. IT ‘takes place’ so to speak in thousands of shrines and in the culturally created mental map of Bharat.

Just as myth is linked to the land, so the land is alive with mythic meanings and stories. The Vindhyas are not just low-lying hills, but mountains, which bowed humbly to the sage Agastya as he approached on his way south, vowing to remain in such a posture until he returned which he never did. Just as the Ganga is said to have descended from heaven to earth to give life to the dead and purification to the living, the Narmada is said to have risen from the very body of Shiva, and the Godvari is said to be the Ganga, falling to earth not in the Himalayas, but on the Brahmagiri in the Western Ghats.The journey of the Pandavas and the forest sojourn of Sita and Rama are elaborately inscribed in the land, to such an extent that numberless local shrines and temples subscribe, as it were, to the metanarrative, linking their own place to the drama as one of the halting places of the Pandavas or as one of the Kitchens of Sita.

Mapping the land has not simply been the domain of imperial cartographers as Benedict Anderson suggests; in many Indic traditions, map-making has been the domain of both cosmologists and mythmakers and it is arguable that the map they have created is far more powerful that Bartholomew’s map of India. The imagined landscape bears imprints of meaning: the self-manifest eruptions of the gods, the footprints of the heroes, the divine origins of the rivers, the parts of the body of the Devi. Geography is overlaid with layer upon layer of story; each river, each hillock, each village has a story. Some of them are local; some are linked through their stories to a network of shrines all over India. Most important however, is the fact that the landscapes is a system of references in which each tirtha functions as part of a whole fabric of tirthas. It is the linking the network, the duplication, the substitutions of tirthas that cumulatively constitutes a landscape. Indeed the internally complex sacred geography of a city like Kashi is impossible to decipher without putting it in a landscape system. The examples I have cited here are drawn from a wide variety of sources, textual and ritual, ancient, and modern, from the Rig Veda to the ephemeral pamphlets of today’s tirthas, from the so-called classics of literature to folk art and wall paintings.

There are many strategies through which a sacred landscape can be established, many distinctive ways in which the divine has been experienced, named and storied. For example elements of the symbolic landscape descended from heaven to earth, like the rivers, or were retrieved from the sea by the gods like the coastlands. The divine erupted from the earth like the many jyotirlingas, or clung spontaneously to the earth and could not be moved by human hands, like the image of Ranganathaswami at Shrirangam or the linga at Gokarna. The gods and temples of the Tamil south are located in the ‘five landscapes’ of nature: mountain, forest, countryside, seashore and wilderness. All these ways of speaking of divine presence begin to constitute an imagined landscape, patterned with sacred places.

Duplication is one of the strategies, which creates an interlinked network of such sites. A piece of the Himalayas is transported to Saurashtra or Tamil Nadu; the Ganga falls in Maharashtra or gushes from the underground in Orissa; a temple of Kashi Viswanath is re-created in the south or a linga is brought from the Himalayas to the shores of the southern sea. To paraphrase Doniger, this supporting corpus of tirthas relates to other tirthas and frames it with supplementary meanings and provides partially repetitious multiforms that reinforce and amplify its significance from the local to the translocal. In examining the different strategies and techniques used in the construction of India’s storied sacred geography; we can ask whether the lifting up of single tirthas within this complex landscape for unique singular treatment, for example the RamJambhoomi site at Ayodhya, is really in accordance with a religious tradition that has plurality not exclusivity as the marker of significance.

Maritime Motifs:

The sacred land recovered from the sea is a recurring motif in Indic sacred geography. Along the coasts of India there are stretches of land as well as individual murthis that are said to have emerged from the sea, having long been lost in the waters. The most extensive use of this mytheme is along the west coast of India from Goa to Trivandrum, a coastland said to have been retrieved from the sea by Parashrama. According to the popular series of myths associated with the decent of Ganga from the heavens, the princely ascetic Bhagirath led the river across northern India to the sea, where her waters filled the seas to overflowing and submerged part of the sea coast, especially the lush green low-lying lands with myriad temples in the west. The sages propitiated Parashrama to help rescue the land from the sea again. There are many tellings of the tale. Parashrama stood on the hills of the Western Ghats and drew back his bow. At the very sound of the great bow the sea god Varuna recoiled in fear and agreed to withdraw from the coastlands. In other tellings Parashrama actually shot the arrow, or hurled his battle-axe and in doing so claimed the land he was able to cover with the strength of his mighty arm. The land along this western coast is referred to by inhabitants as ‘Parashrama Kshetra’, the land of Parashrama. This regions is variously described as being modern Kerala or stretching fro Kanya Kumari to Gokarna or even further up the Konkani coast. In anycase there are countless temples that link themselves to this story: the hill in present day Mangalore where he performed his austerities, the place at the top of the Ghats near Udipi where he stood to shoot the arrow; or the linga at Gokarna that was reclaimed after he made the sea retreat.

The theme of the submergence and reappearance of shrines is a major part of the mythology of Dwarka, the westernmost tirtha in India, in Gujarat. Dwarka is a busy pilgrimage town, dominated by the temple of Krishna Dvarakadhish, but the ancient Dwarka of Krishna is said to have been submerged by flood. Not surprisingly many other shrines are linked to the disappearance of the ancient image of Krishna at Dwarka: including Guruvayor in Kerala and Jagannath Puri in Orissa.

The Sacred Rivers:

Since much of the attention has been directed at the role rivers play and the sacredness of rivers it might be worthwhile to have a quick look at this aspect of Hindu sacred geography. The rivers that are regarded as sacred are held to have descended from the heavens; the words avatarana, avatar and tirtha all come from the same verbal root [tr] meaning to ‘cross over’. The most famous examples of this kind of descent are the avatars of Vishnu, but the notion of descending avatarana, is common to many Gods as well as rivers. Tirthas are literally the ‘crossings’ or the ‘fords’ where one crosses the other way – to the far shore of the river or the far shore of the heavens. While many tirthas are indeed river fords they have become, more significantly spiritual fords. The language of crossing has wide symbolic reference: from the descending and the ascending flow of life between this world here below and the worlds of heaven above to the ultimate crossing of the ‘river’ of birth and death to the ‘far shore’ of liberation. Tirthas are where such crossings can be made.

The rivers themselves are the great descenders. Many of India’s great rivers, the Ganga foremost among them, are said to have crossed over from heaven to earth. According to myth, the Ganga was originally a divine river flowing across the heavens. Through the ascetism and prayers of Bhagirath, the sage-king, she agreed to flow down to earth to raise the dead ancestors of the line of Ilshavaku line of kings. To break the force of her fall, Ganga fell first upon the hair of Shiva in the Himalayas and then flowed across the plains of north India. Other sacred rivers such as the Narmada and the Godvari repeat this pattern of divine descent. The Narmada flows from the body of Shiva at Amarakanthanak in the hills of eastern Madhya Pradesh. The Godvari, brought to earth by the sage Gautama, descended on the top of Brahmamgiri in the Western Ghats of what is today Maharashtra. These sacred rivers form an interferential network of meanings and are commonly linked together in groups, like the seven Gangas. They are knotted together in braids, like the many trivenis or ‘triple-braids’ where a confluence of two rivers is joined by a third, the deep symbolic waters of the underground Saraswati which has long since vanished. The best-known triveni is at Prayaga, but there are other tirvenis all over India, which express the triple confluence of rivers. One could even argue that wherever water drips from a pot above a linga of Shiva in the sanctum of a temple or are poured lavishly upon the shaft of the linga, the avatarana of the Ganga might be said to be ritually repeated.

The idea that India’s sacred rivers are fundamentally seven in number, all purifying and of divine origin, is very old in Hindu tradition. The river hymns of the Rig Veda speak of the seven ‘mother-rivers’ of the seven Sindhus, calling them all by the name of the mightiest, the Sindhu, now called the Indus, they are called the ‘goddess-waters’ and are praised as purifying, nourishing, cleansing and never-sleeping. The seven rivers in these early times are identified with the ‘five rivers’ of the Punjab (the land of the five rivers) as well as the Sindhu and the Saraswati. These were meant to be the rivers of northwest India, the first land of the Aryan seers. The Ganga and the Yamuna rivers of northern and central India were eventually incorporated into this group of seven. When the extensive mythology of the Ganga was elaborated, the notion of the seven divine rivers continued in the popular myth of her descent from heaven: the Ganga herself split into seven branches – three flowing east, three flowing west and one the Bhagirathi flowing south into India. These seven Gangas were meant to water not only India, but in this vision of things, the whole inhabited earth. Still later came the notion of what are today called the sapta nadhi, the ‘seven rivers’ of India, sometimes called the ‘seven Gangas’: Gangas, Yamuna, Sindhu, Narmada, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri. This group of rivers are frequently invoked in rituals invocations of sacred waters within Hindu worship in many regions of India.

These rivers along with the other rivers of India provide a litany, which allows the mind’s eye to trace the land. The whole scheme of seven sacred rivers with their headwaters in seven ranges of mountains came to constitute an important part of a systematic geography – a thoroughly ordered imaginative world extending from the outer reaches of myth to the rivers and mountains of present day India’s topography. Even when local rivers substitute for one or more of the seven, as they often do, the mental construction of an imagined landscape watered by divine rivers remains. The specific rivers may change, but the structure of duplication and its resonances links these rivers, however enumerated, into an ordered whole coextensive with the locale, the region and the land of Bharata.

Imagined Landscapes:

To speak of imagined landscapes does not mean one speaks of fanciful or unreal ones – we all live in imagined landscapes not in two-dimensional maps; culturally and individually these contain their own conceptions of charged centres of meaning and dim peripheries, terrae incognitae and resevoirs of personal, lived meaning. Such landscapes are three-dimensional and arouse powerful sentimental and emotional responses with their bordered terrains and the loyalty they can inspire, with holy or valued places private or public, religious or secular. My own intention is to probe to what extent such landscapes are constructed and how they are indeed imagined: I hold that this tells us much about those that imagine them. The examples I have provided for example are drawn very much from the Hindu tradition which is only part of a much broader and much more pluralistic Indic tradition which has many other strains and elements. All who live in India today either as citizens or are part of the global Indian diaspora are part of this Indic tradition with its myriad-braided strands and one should not make the error of conflating the Hindu with the Indic: the former represents only a sectional and very particular reading of Indian history, culture and thought and should not be confused with the much more complex and rich reality. Unfortunately as part of the Semitising of Hinduism undertaken by the Saffron Right that is taking place; the part does frequently mistakenly be taken to stand for the whole. This is a metonymic exercise which has had quite severe repercussions on society and polity within India and the Indic tradition. The recounting of India’s sacred geography I have outlined in these last two posts, for example, will only make sense to and appeal largely to caste Hindus within the Brahminnic and Sanskritic versions of Hinduism. For other religious groups/traditions in the continent, like Buddhist, Animist or Muslim and for other groups such as Adivasi, Dalit and interstitial groups that live between the boundaries of more clearly demacrted communties alternative imagined landscapes exist – ones that are no less powerful and that are frequently in contradiction to and in antagonistic struggle with the established orthodoxy of sanatan dharm Hinduism.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:14 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Indic Tradition: Sacred Geographies and Imaginary Landscapes (Part One):

I think Vikash provides an excellent summary of the dangers of Archaeology in India today. In particular it has been hijacked by saffronite elements to buttress up their claims of Hindutva. The main bugbears seem to be the Aryan invasion/migration theory and what I call the sacred geography of ancient India which is used to create an imaginary landscape that purports ex ante to offer a justification to the Hindutva project of nation-building. Given that Sarvarkar’s definition of a Hindu was someone who regarded India as the their Holy Land and the sacred land of their race-origin; any argument that shows that much of the Brahminnic-Aryan culture originated outside India would destroy this claim as it would shows historically that the Indo-Aryans were nothing more than the first in a long line of invaders to the sub-continent. This makes a nonsense of current saffron claims that Muslims are somehow “foreign” or firangis to India as various Muslims incursions have done just what other groups did before them.

There is also a caste angle as Vikash points out; as the origins of varnashradhamra are obscured and presented as a timeless or deeply embedded social system rather than one, which was imposed, and fluid. Ram Sharan Sharma is also the author of a well-researched study entitled “The Shudras of Ancient India” where he investigates some aspects of the ancient Indian caste system. His conclusions are interesting and I am surprised that they are not more widely discussed as along with Thapar, Kosambi and Jha our understanding of this period has substantially changed. The consensus now seems to veer around to an Aryan migration theory rather than a simple invasion and shows by comparison of different types of archaeological artefacts – quaintly naming cultures/communities by their physical finds for example Grey Pottery Ware or Ochre Pottery Ware that migrating Aryan tribes actually co-existed with many pre-Aryan settlements and urban centres and traded with them forming a symbiotic network of exchange and trade. Indeed Sharma recounts that written and oral evidence find that such pre-Aryan urban communities were mostly traders, craftsmen and artisans of one sort or another and were called the Vis by the migrating Aryans. Many of the Vis intermarried and were gradually absorbed into a more stratified social order as Aryan society became less nomadic and more settled and that many of the current supposedly ‘shudra’ classes are remnants of these old specialised communities. Such a process is yet to be clearly mapped out and described in detail but offers a better understanding of the Indian caste system than the old Orientalist version of caste, which was a Varna interpretation, based on race. Equating caste with race fitted well with the wider colonial view of India, as due to the labours of the early Orientalist like William Jones the ancient advances and glories of the Indian civilisation were all too apparent and could not be easily dismissed; yet some basis for superiority and British hegemony was needed in the cultural sphere as well. The Aryan invasion theory provided an ideal solution as it allowed the British to claim kinship with the muscular, dynamic Ancient Indian kingship groups who had reached a high level of sophistication by imposing their superior Aryan culture (read Caucasian) on a debased primitive one (read colonial subject) but through the evils of soft living, interracial mixing and a degenerate environment gradually succumbed to the wiles of the exotic East and allowed themselves to dissipate and lose their superiority by mixing socially, politically and genetically with the pre-Aryans. This served not only as a justification for the inherent degenerate nature of India which corrupted all invaders from the Aryans to the Muslims and thereby justified the British annexation but also served as a warning to the British especially after the Mutiny of the danger of racial mixing and letting their guard down (as well as some of the more ridiculous exercise regimes the British had to ward off the supposed debilitating effects of the Indian climate). One can see how easily the saffronists have adopted some version of this for their purposes.

How many times have I had to roll my eyes when to bolster national pride after some attack on India’s economic or social performance, there is always a reference to the “three thousand year old culture/Hinduism” of India. Quite often there is wide scale ignorance about what this three thousand old culture actually was and how different it is from anything the Saffronists want to impose today. Interesting though that so many of the advocates of this kind of thinking tend to be individuals with very distinguished and respectable scientific backgrounds: Hedgewar was a doctor, Gowalkar a lecturer in Zoology, Pravin Togadia of the VHP is actually a brain surgeon and much of the flurry over these imagined aspects of sacred geography come from students in India’s IIT – premier institutions of science which are highly competitive and well respected. This seems at an initially glance to be a paradox – why are scientists or those trained in the scientific tradition so vulnerable to such discordant views on religion and culture.

The Islamic Comparison:

I find it intriguing to be reading more on the politics of the Middle East and Islamic movements there and to see some potential comparisons emerging in looking at Islamic fundamentalism and its Hindu counterpart. For example, Elbaki Hermassi’s study of the Movement de la Tendence Islamique (MTI) in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt found that 80% were university students, with 75% of the leadership consisting of either secondary school teachers or university students. Valerie Hoffman notes that in Egypt since the 1970’s the professional associations of engineering and medicine have been under Islamic control. Similarly in Pakistan nearly all of Maudid’s successors as leaders of the Jamat-I-Islami attended modern schools and obtained graduate degrees in science, with the broader leadership drawn from the modern professional or business sectors, only 8% had come the traditional classes of landlords, Ulema or Unnani medical practitioners.

Martha Mundy had argued that the scientific backgrounds of many Islamists have an important bearing on their readings of foundational texts and their own literature: instead of reconstructing Islamic legality by a return to the spirit of the original reforms suggested by writers such as Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb but by the word and adopting a literalist reading of such scriptures. Legal modernists seek to harmonise Islamic tradition with contemporary realities, while literalists readings refuse to allow any degree of historical relativity. The traditions of textual analysis enshrined in the great law compendiums represent a developed sense of history, a tradition of commentators and interpreters. But while legal reformism retained the medieval tradition of historical textual analysis and the glosses of the scholars as sources for variant readings, the Islamists movement had no patient with these ‘decadent elaborations’.

Susan Waltz supports this view, by arguing that liberal arts students studying Western ideas are exposed to the evolution of those ideas and to the weaknesses of Western culture, whereas students in science and technology are more apt to see Western culture as monolithic and properly hegemonic. In the latter view as outlined by Sayyid Qutb, the West is seen as wholly materialistic, devoid of spiritual values and is a philistine, vulgar culture. Islamism in this light is the mirror image of Orientalism. The problem is that as modernity involves the institutionalisation of doubt and uncertainty is fundamental to modern science this creates a tension. Some observers like Daniel Easterman comment that the real scandal for many Islamists is that knowledge acquired through doubt has proved more powerful in creating material prosperity than revealed knowledge. This would not matter for spiritually minded Muslims who eschew material prosperity or place it in the context of mystical humanism. But for those Muslims who believe in what Malise Ruthven calls the “Argument from Manifest Success” where the early conquests of Islam are seen as demonstrations of God’s approval, even proofs of his existence, the ‘scandal’ of post-Enlightenment Western success seems to be unbearable.

Well, this has wondered far from the topic and the significance is to see how relevant this is to Hindu fundamentalism. I do believe that some lessons and linkages can be discerned. A good section of saffronties come from highly educated parts of society, are frequently white collar professionals and usually work abroad in Europe or the US as professional migrants in the IT, business or engineering sector. It is perhaps surprising that these groups should be the ones who are amongst the forefront of Hindutva in one guise or another but much I think does have to do with the insecurity they feel as a class and as an ethnic group. Within disciplines where Western forms of rationality and modes of thought appear to be paramount, there is perhaps a tendency to idealise domestic Indian traditions and cultural elements and a sublated need or desire to move out of the “spiritual sphere” as Partha Chatterjee has called it when referring to the realms of legitimacy that Indian nationalism sought in order to resist Colonial hegemony and move into the material/public sphere to assert national pride, greatness and the power of India both as a nation-state or as a civilisational unit (this is a purely constructed and highly questionable concept). Maybe the celebrations which greeted the nuclear tests, the bizarre celebrations on the anniversary of the Kargil conflict and now these moves to try and “prove/assert” Hinduism’s superiority/antiquity by recourse to supposedly scientific arguments such as the Lanakan bridge, the location of the river of Saraswati is part of this more general tectonic shift in the consciousness of chattering classes that see themselves as unproblematically “Hindus” to gain some sort of respect from the Other. That is the remarkable thing – all these claims seem to be directed at some Other from whom respect, proper treatment, recognition seems to be demanded from: therefore we have claims that “Now that India is a nuclear power she will be respected, or that no one can bully us now” or that “Hey, with miracles such as the Ganesh statues drinking milk, the discovery of Saraswati, people will see that Hinduism isn’t just a collection of odd rituals or some sort of paganism that claims to be a religion but is actually a much older religion that Christianity or Islam”.

Apart from the validity or the truth-value of these claims, which I will not go into now, what strikes me is to whom they are directed. Who are these people or entities that disrespect India, or bully her? Who is it that derides Hinduism as paganism or a collection of sham rituals with little or no real historical meaning? In other words who is the Other to whom such claims are addressed? The answer can shift according to the particular question in mind: from the Western developed world, to the followers of Semitic religions, to proponents of Western rationality and aggressive secularism to other countries such as China which seem to have overtaken India in the Asian continent and to the chorus of leaders from the NICs who berate India for being inefficient, slow, divided, unpunctual and well for being just India really…

What is most depressing for me is that such claims however they are framed and to whomever they are addressed indicate to me that we have become a country that is not secure about our past and fearful of the present. Nations that have a secure sense of their own histroy and are content in the present would not indulge in these forms of justifications for alleged national greatness.

:: Conrad Barwa 1:46 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Indus and Saraswati Debate:

Ram Sharan Sharma is one of the most eminent historians of ancient India. He has written an article that uses the material evidence to refute the claim that the Indus civilization was Saraswati based and Rg Vedic in character. He also takes on the hypothesis that the Aryans originated in India. The article, "The Indus and the Saraswati" was published in Akhbar Delhi Magazine.

This clear and concise article is worth reading if for no other reason than to arm oneself against some of the questionable claims of the saffron brigade.

:: Vikash Yadav 9:12 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Archaeology & Politics:

Archaeology is a political science in South Asia. It is not possible for an archaeologist to present his or her work before the pundits draw their own conclusions.

So it is with the latest debate on the origins and location of the Saraswati River. Saffronites are eager to claim that the river and the Harappan civilization associated with it are part of an ancient Hindu culture. The aims of the Saffronites are rather transparent: (1) Present Brahamanic culture as indigenous to the sub-continent so as to cast Islam as alien; (2) Sublate the presence of sophisticated pre-Aryan cultures; (3) Rename and reclaim the Indus valley civilization for India as the "Indus/Saraswati Civilization" even though the archeological sites are geographically in Pakistan and claimed by Pakistan as part of its "ancient heritage."

The Harappan and Mohenjo-daro archaeological sites have created problems for saffronites since their discovery. As Stanley Wolpert noted, the discovery of Harappa in 1921 "... emphatically reversed the relative cultural status of India's Aryan conquerors and her pre-Aryan peoples. The pre-Aryan dasas, or "slaves," whose darker skins differentiated them from Aryan "color," were suddenly revealed as more advanced, sophisticated, and technologically precocious than the semibarbaric hoard of Aryan invaders from the west, whose only "civilized" advantages seem to have been some superior weaponry and the use of harnessed horses." Saffronites are eager to incoporate this pre-Aryan civilization into their version of history, much in the same way that they attempt to coopt the name of M.K. Gandhi without studying the origins or implications of his philosophy. The term "Harappa" like the name "Gandhi" have become codes for prestige and legitimacy even as their meanings threaten to subvert the goals of the saffronites. Hence, one can see why archaeology is so politicized and contested in India -- saffrons use achaeology as signs, but the signified betrays the signifier.

Saffronites have attempted to re-examine these archaeological sites to argue that they show evidence for a caste system. Whether or not the pre-Aryan civilization shared some elements of a "caste" system is a complex debate both in terms of material evidence and in terms of its political implications. I believe that Conrad is much more qualified to comment on aspects of this debate than I am. Regardless of how the evidence is analyzed, however, I think we would both agree that armchair archaeologists should keep a few simple rules in mind before adding their interpretations to material evidence:

1. The Earth has changed over the millenia. Rivers move and some dry up. A city or site referenced in a classical text (e.g., Ayodhyah) may not be in the same location as a city or site in the contemporary text. A river referenced in a classical text (e.g., Saraswati) may even be located outside of contemporary India/Pakistian/Bangladesh (e.g., Afghanistan).

2. Mythology does not need physical evidence to be important and productive. One should not stake one's culture or beliefs on physical evidence. Mythology has a great deal to teach as a form of knowledge and wisdom. Mythology is about interpretation and for it to be alive, myths must be constantly reinvented and reinterpreted. Physical evidence should not be used to support an ossification of myth making.

3. Physical evidence does not need to be part of a myth to be important and productive. Fitting parts of physical evidence into a neat narrative is intellectually lazy. For example, the presence of a "man-made" land bridge between India and Sri Lanka does not necessarily tell us anything about the Ramanyana. The evidence of a landbridge may be important for many reasons besides its relation to a myth -- for example, it may tell us a great deal about human migration patterns.

4. Definitive conclusions are premature in archaeology. There are always new discoveries that will be made, and new techniques to analyze the evidence at hand. We have at best an incomplete historical record.

5. We are not our ancestors. Whether our ancient ancestors were conquerors or victims, as if we could not find elements of both in anyone's history, tells us very little about who we are today. The social structures of our ancestors are no guide to how we should live today. The modern nation-state serves different functions and faces different challenges than ancient city states or empires.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:19 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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