LEFTIST SCHOLARSHIP IN INDIA
By David Frawley (Vamadeva Shastri),
Director AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF VEDIC STUDIES
PO Box 8357, Santa Fe NM, 87504-8357
http://hindubooks.org/authors/david_frawley/arjuna/ch5.htm
How would you expect that Hinduism, the world's oldest
and most complex religion, would appear as seen through the eyes of Marxists?
Naturally it would not look very good. After all Karl Marx himself declared that
religion was the opiate of the masses. However now communism has fallen all over
the world and religion, including Hinduism, is still going strong. We have
learned that the real truth has been that Marxism was the opiate of the
intellectuals, as it has been called, not that religion itself is an illusion.
Unfortunately, the universities of India have been
strongly influenced by Marxists since independence and their view of Hinduism
has often become entrenched in the educational system. A name which comes to
mind readily is that of Romila Thapar,
Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which is
itself well known in India as a center of Marxist activity. Thapar is neither
the most important, nor the most prominent figure of Marxist circles, but she
has been very much in the news lately and represents a wider phenomenon, and her
name has been picked here for no other reason. She and her colleagues are
responsible for a number of textbooks in India on the history of the country,
which not surprisingly are negative about the majority religion of the land.
Thapar is not unique in her thought, but she affords us a good example of
leftist scholarship has worked in India.
If we understand that historians like Thapar are
Marxists the logic behind her studies becomes obvious. Thapar's historical
criticisms of Hinduism are quite negative, and it is often easier to get more
sympathetic accounts of Hinduism from professors in the West, particularly those
who have practiced some professors in the West, particularly those who have
particularly those who have practiced some Hindu-based yogic or meditational
teachings. Thapar even doubts whether Hinduism as a religion really existed
until recent times. She portrays Hinduism not as a comprehensive tradition going
back to the Mahabharata or to the Vedas, but as a relatively modern
appropriation, and therefore misinterpretation, of older practices and symbols,
whose real meaning we can no longer know as we are not products of that cultural
milieu which produced them in the first place. This view is called "deconstructionism"
in the West and is the product of French Marxist thinkers.
By this view Thapar sees Hinduism, and religion in
general, as reinterpreting cultural symbols for purpose of social and political
exploitation. She tries to point out that Hinduism is mainly a vehicle of social
oppression through the caste system and is not worthy of much respect for any
modern rational or humanistic person. This is standard deconstructionist
thinking about religion which is based on the assumption that there is nothing
eternal in human beings and therefore there can be no continuous meaning in
religion. In other words she interprets Hinduism and religion which are supposed
to deal with the eternal, only in terms of time and history. Such people have
failed to understand the correct development of reason (buddhi) according to
Hindu sages, whose real purpose is to allow us to discern the transient from the
eternal, not to deny the eternal in favor of the transient such as is the
movement of the logic of thinkers like Thapar.
In particular, Thapar tries to show that the
non-violence and tolerance generally ascribed to Hinduism are myths that Hindus
or India never really followed. There are a few historical in stances of Hindus
being violent or oppressive of Buddhists and Jains, which she emphasizes. There
are also historical instances of Buddhists being oppressive of non-Buddhists.
Such is the egoism inherent in human nature that is difficult to root out. But
these are exceptions. There is no Hindu or Buddhists tradition of crusades or
holy wars like that of Western religions of Christianity and Islam there is a
tradition of non-violence (ahimsa), which however imperfectly followed, was
honored in India more so than anywhere else in the world.
What is most interesting about Thapar's studies of
Hinduism is that they are devoid of any spiritual dimension. She ignores the
great Hindu yogis and gurus and does not discuss the Hindu Philosophy of the
universe or higher states of consciousness, which she does not give any validity
to. She sees the institution of Sannyasa or monastic renunciation as another
source of social authority (and therefore oppression of the masses), not a
spiritual institution. Her interpretation of Hinduism follows purely social and
political lines. Yet as an atheist and Marxist can we expect that she would
understand or appreciate Hindu devotional or yogic practices? You will certainly
never find her quoting the Upanishads or the Gita in a Favorable light. In this
regard I am reminded of a communist poet of Maharashtra whom I once met, who
described the Gita as "the greatest mystification the human mind has ever
produced." No doubt Thapar would be inclined to concur.
To put together Hinduism and Buddhism along with
Christianity and Islam is itself not a very bright idea and can barely be
sustained intellectually, but Indian Marxists' view of Hinduism is on the same
order as Karl Marx's view of Christianity, or the Chinese communist view of
Buddhism. Going to them to understand Hinduism is a lot like going to Marx to
understand Christianity or Mao to understand Chinese Buddhism. Following their
Marxist mentors, they accuse Hinduism of having a political agenda in the guise
of religion (which since there is no God in their view, religion could never
have any real spiritual agenda anyway). Yet there is no doubt that such Marxist
thinkers, seeing the world only in political terms, have an entirely political
agenda. For instance, Thapar's recent historical accounts are clearly meant as
attacks on the Hindu revivalist movement in India, which the communists have
always regarded as their main enemy. As Hindu revivalists are emphasizing the
continuity of the religion and the ongoing relevance of its traditions, Thapar
and her associates are looking for ways to deny it.
Marxists like Thapar like to appear as social liberals
and objective academicians and some intellectuals trained in the Western
tradition may look at them in this light. Thapar does not parade her Marxism,
particularly in recent years, and her criticism of Hinduism, though harsh, is
presented in an indirect scholarly style, which makes it less obvious. But we
should understand the background of such thinkers, which is hardly objective or
free of political motives.
I am conscious of the fact that the subject is big and
my treatment of it is sketchy. I am, for example, not discussing at all the
tie-up of Marxists in Indian universities with Marxists in European and American
universities, how the two stand together and by each other, how the Indian
Marxists have found hospitality in Western universities, and so on. What I am
pointing out is that simply because a don comes from India does not mean that he
or she is providing an accurate or sensitive account of Hinduism or the history
of India. In fact, India scholarship often tends to be very second-hand, and
Indian scholars, in the absence of a perspective of their own, tend to be
imitative. I must say that the most Westernized, anti-religious, materialistic
intellectuals I have ever met were in India, not in the West, and they were
often teachers in universities. The same inability to understand or even
appreciate religion can be said of many professors in America, who as products
of materialistic Western academia are similarly likely to analyze religion not
as a spiritual phenomenon but as a purely social-political institution. Leftist
scholars in India look to such Western thinkers for their inspiration and have
little regard for the Hindu spiritual and philo-sophical tradition which they
neither understand nor feel any kinship with. If they have any God or guru, it
is Marx, and Hindu system like Vedanta are as foreign to them as they are to any
non-Hindu.
Hindus who are religious-and the great majority are
strongly religious-should not mistake such Marxist views for an objective
pursuit of truth, whether they come from India or elsewhere. Fortunately with
the downfall of communism in the world, the influence of communism in India is
on the wane, but just as the old communists are holding on to their declining
power in the political institutions of China (and Bengal), they are holding on
in the educational institutions of India. It is unlikely that they will let go
of their line of thought.
As a westerner writing on Hinduism in a positive light
it is strange that the main opponents I have run into are Hindus them selves,
that is the Marxist Hindus, who like many rebels are the most negative about
their own cultural traditions which they have but recently abandoned. The views
of these leftists are often on par with the anti-Hindu views of Christian
fundamentalists while the latter see Hinduism as a religion of the devil, the
former see it as a personification of social evil, the manifestation of caste
division which is their devil (though curiously Marxism works to encourage class
hatred, not to promote social harmony and peace between the classes).
Hindus today, like followers of other religions, should
no longer accept the Marxist view of their religion and their history, but to do
so they must first unmask it. This does not mean that Hindus have done no wrong
or that they should not reform their social system or become more compassionate.
The proper social changes that need to be done in India or anywhere else in the
world do not require rejecting religion in the true sense, or adapting
communist-socialist policies which are failing every-where. On the contrary, the
appropriate changes follow from a better understanding of the spirit of
universality in Hinduism, which is the essence of its religious view, its
recognition of God as the self of all beings.
Observing such Marxist thinkers one is reminded of the
Katha Upanishad: "Living in the midst of ignorance, considering themselves
to be wise, the deluded wander confused, like the blind led by the blind. The
way to truth does not appear to a confused immature mind, deluded by the
illusion of wealth (materialism). Thinking that this world alone exists and
there is nothing beyond, they ever return again and again to the net of
death." The Upanishads saw long ago that materialistic thinkers who regard
that this world is the only reality only lead us to ignorance and sorrow. It is
about time that people in India started to heed the words of their ancient
sages, even if it means questioning modern professors.
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