Putting thinkers like Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte and Nietzsche in the same basket

The idea of being Indian MRINAL MIRI A critical examination of Golwalkar's thought and his legacy: his conception of Indianness. TERRIFYING VISION — M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India: Jyotirmaya Sharma; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 295. The Hindu Book Review Tuesday, Apr 24, 2007

What is it for me to be an Indian? I was born in what was then, and still is, India; I have grown up loving this country, frequently being proud of it for excellences achieved, through millennia, by people whom I regard as fellow Indians, and, occasionally, being ashamed because of terrible things that have been done in this country. And yet, the question what it is for me to be an Indian is, so it seems to me, not at all an easy question to answer.
There are different levels of articulation of the idea of being Indian. Think, in modern times, of Vivekananda, Gandhiji, Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Coomaraswamy and, quaint as it may sound, Verrier Elwyn, an Englishman turned Indian. These articulations are significantly different from one another; but conversations between them are possible and have indeed taken place — and such conversations, one would like to think, may lead to finer, deeper articulation of the idea of being Indian.
The vision
M.S. Golwalkar presents before us, through 12 volumes of his collected works, published recently, a conception of Indianness, which is different in a rather special way. Jyotirmaya Sharma's Terrifying Vision is a critical appraisal of this depiction of Indianness, which he calls terrifying. The Golwalkar vision is indeed terrifying, but Sharma's account and assessment of it is wonderfully devoid of emotional breast beating that the title might lead one to expect. The book is scholarly without, happily, appearing to be so, written dispassionately in lucid prose, and the author allows the terror, implicit in the vision of the man who led the RSS for 32 years, to sink in through wonderfully deft intellectual persuasion, rather than make an irritating to-do about it on every page.
Assertions
Why is Golwalkar's vision different in a special way? It is so, because unlike the other visions I mentioned and Sharma mentions, it forecloses all debates about its validity. It is embodied in a series of assertions, which are either taken as self-evident or assumed to follow from ones that are so. Therefore any questioning of this vision would, for that very reason, have to be seen as logically unsound, and quite likely to be grounded in dubious motives. There are no open windows — to use a Gandhian metaphor — in this vision. If I am allowed to list (not necessarily in any particular order) some of these assertions:

• Hinduism is a unitary religion and culture, and this unitariness is its moral and intellectual strength;
• differences, "bhinnata", within Hinduism have no basis in truth;
• such differences are, therefore, illusory, based on ignorance;
• Advaita (non-dualism) is the core of Hinduism;
• a necessary step in achieving a knowledge of the radical oneness of things is to dissolve one's individuality in the wholeness of society;
• God manifests himself in the form of society, nation or rashtra;
• society, and not any individual, is the only worthy object of worship;
• the Hindu rashtra is eternal and immortal;
• the present weakness of India is the result of deep forgetfulness of Hindus of their own inalienable strength and the consequent delusions of the primacy of the individual and pursuit of selfish gratifications;
• the only way to regain authentic memory is through a process of re-creating Hindus ("manushyon ki rachana") by instilling into them the virtues of purity, sincerity, integrity and martyrdom;
• these virtues must be defined in terms of the overriding truth of the utter oneness of the individual with the whole;
• Hindus who convert themselves to Islam, Christianity or Buddhism because of their perception of "wrongs" that society has done to them must remind themselves that what society (God) does cannot be questioned;
• non-Hindus — Muslims, Christians, Buddhists (and presumably poor tribal people) — must accept the absolute primacy of Hindu rashtra if India is to be their home or...

The list can be elongated, but this is surely sufficient to convey the totally self-enclosed and claustrophobic character of Golwalkar's vision...Sharma's own invitation, in the "Author's Note" at the end of the book, to the 12 volumes of Golwalkar's collected works must be taken with the seriousness that it deserves.
Critique
My only unhappiness with the book is Sharma's treatment — by no means central to his argument — of "theories of romantic nationalism" in modern Europe. Putting thinkers like Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte and Nietzsche in the same basket needs far greater argumentative support than Sharma has place for in the book. And while Nazism might have claimed Nietzschen inspiration, Nietzsche himself would have been horrified by such claims. Jyotirmaya Sharma's Terrifying Vision is a worthy sequel to his earlier Hindutva. Any discussion of Hindu nationalism will henceforth be terribly inadequate if it fails to take into account his critique of Golwalkar.