Articles by Dr. Shiva

On Being Indian: Globalization, Bharateeyata And Hindutva

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

What does it mean to be Indian today?  And who is defending our indigenous identity?

2002 witnessed the total messing up of the Indian identity.  On the one hand we saw "Hindutva" in ascendancy justifying rapes and massacres of fellow Indians.  On the other we read our Prime Minister's Panaji musings suggesting that "Hindutva" was the same as Bharteeyata -- Indianness in all its diversity and multiplicity. 

The Prime Minister wrote that Hindutva was an all inclusive view, synonymous with Bharateeyata (Indianness):

Both affirm that India belongs to all and all belong to India.  It means that all Indians have equal rights and equal responsibilities.  It entails recognition of one common national culture, which is enriched by all religious and non-religious traditions.

However, the genocide of Gujarat was based on a politics of exclusion, not an inclusive Indianness.

And while a political agenda is being shaped around the category of Indianness -- everything that makes India India and Indians Indians is being wiped out by the economic agendas set by corporate globalization.  While Bharteeyata and Swadeshi provides ground for resistance to globalization, 'Hindutva" is in fact supporting globalization.

Both Indian and Hindu are "geographical indicators" -- they are the name given to us by those who came from outside, especially the west -- we lived in the land beyond the Indus -- "Industan", we were all  "Industanis" -- All of us -- the Ho, he Gonds, the Bhils, the Christians, the Muslims, all the tribes, all the religions, all the races.  Our land was also called "India, within the Ganges" -- "India intra Gangem" was the Latin used by Europeans for many centuries.  This was the name used in Ptolemy's Geographia, published in Rome in 1490. The first time the Persian name "Indostan" was used in a European map was in Gastaldis map of Asia, 1561.

Along the way, the Arabic pronunciation became dominant, and India became "Hindustan", all its inhabitants became "Hindu" sharing a land not a faith.  Hindu is a regional identity, not a religious identity, it is an identity of place, rooted in the land, its rivers its mountains, its vegetation, its food cultures, its clothing, its housing, its languages, its manners.  While these are as varied as the land is varied, they also interconnected through the larger geographical sense of place -- of being Indian, of belonging to the land beyond the Indus, within the Ganges. The word "Hinduism" has no ancient reference.  It was a geographical term mutated into a religious definition during British colonialism. As Francois Gautier states,

Let's say it right away: there are no Hindus... This word was invented by European colonizers to designate a people which lived in the valley of the Indus.  The exact appellation should be "Indu", a term which was actually used for centuries by outsiders, to name all India's inhabitants, be they Muslims, Christians, Buddhists or Hindus.  But when Indus  became Hindus at the hands of western colonizers, it grew to be a source of confusion and had catastrophic consequences for Indian history: it brought indirectly the terrible partition of the subcontinent and is partly responsible today for the inter-religious strife in India.

When Babur (1483-1530) the first Moghul emperor came to India and defeated the Afghan Muslim Lodi who then ruled the Delhi based kingdom in the famous battle of Panipat in 1526, it was the diversity of the land beyond the Indus that impressed him most.

Hindustan is of the first climate, the second climate and the third climate; of the fourth climate it has none.

It is a wonderful country; Compared with our countries it is a different world; its trees, its cultivated lands, its animals and plants, its people and their tongues, its rains, and its winds are all different.

Once the water of Sind is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan wayland, water, tree, rock, people and horde, opinion and custom.

Diversity for Babur was the Hindustan way.  And Hindustan was associated with a region, not a religion.

He was not the first muslim to come to India.  Centuries before him sufis had travelled to and settled in one land.  India's original link with Islam was through a spiritual search -- the distinctive gift of India to the world.  And all faiths of Hindustan were included in being Hindu -- of the land.

The first specification and exclusion of Muslims from their native identity was during colonialism.

The British came to India as a trading company, the East India Company.  In 1756, when they started to expand and occupy their trading post in Calcutta, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, marched to Calcutta and defeated the Garrison.

In 1757, the British, under Robert Clive, entered into a conspiracy with a group of merchant bankers headed by Jagat Seth, to displace Siraj-ud-Daula and have him replaced by general Mir Jafar, who promised the British huge sums of money in return.  A farcical battle was enacted at Plassey on 23^rd June 1757, with Mir Jafar allowing the British troops to wipe out Siraj's forces.

This is how the British rule in India was established through corruption and conspiracy, just as global corporate rule today is being established through corruption and conspiracy.

With a trading company becoming the colonial ruler, rules of governance had to be created. Since unlike West Indies and North America where Native peoples were dispossessed in favour of settlers from Europe, India's indigenous population was vast and diverse.  British rule was therefore based on first establishing the difference between the British and the indigenous people, and then defining what was indigenous.

As Hastings described his `plan' to the directors in 1772, the objective should be to "adapt our Regulations to the Manners and Understanding of the People, and the Exigencies of the Country, adhering as closely as we are able to their ancient uses and Institutions".

However, the colonial powers reduced the diversity of cultures of India and multiplicity of identities with the primary sense of culture and belonging, coming from the land, the region.  The colonisers created an artificial system of law which had nothing to do with the plurality of India customary laws and systems or the multiplicity of cultural identities in the Indian context. Ecology and identity of place was destroyed, and in its place was imposed essentialized immutable singular identities.

Warren Hastings reduced the India of thousands of cultures to a divided India of two mutually exclusive artificially drafted cultures.  He created a legal framework for an apartheid based on false religious identity with which India is still burdened.

For laws regarding marriage, inheritance and the like, Hastings wrote that

the Laws of the Koran with respect to Mahomedans, and those of the Shaster with respect to the Gentoos [Hindus] shall be invariably adhered to'.

An Arab geographical term "Hindu" was mutated by the British into a fictional religious category "Gentoo". The tribals -- the Kols, the Bhils, the Hos, the Nagas, the Mizos -- had all disappeared.  The Sikhs, the Buddhists, the Jains, the Zorastrians had all disappeared.  The British had fought against and displaced the Muslim rulers -- so they recognized the Muslim category -- the rest of Indian diversity was lumped into one unreliable category of "Gentoo", and a fiction of a "Code of Gentoo laws" was created in a land in which religion arose from Dharma, not texts and written laws.

India's struggle within herself today is in large part shaped by the seeds of conflict sown by creating a false apartheid on a double fiction -- that India was two, not thousands of cultures, and the customs and practices of two cultures were defined not by the land, its geography, its plants, the regional languages but by sectarian and separated codes of laws based on ancient texts interpreted by patriarchal, fundamentalist religious elites. The external, imperial definition of cultural identity created a mutation from diversity to divided and separated monocultures, from lived and shared identities derived from the land, to separated identities based on ancient texts, not dynamically evolving cultures.  Even today, for the ordinary "Hindu", it is the teachings and songs of Kabir (1440-1518), Mira Bai (1498-1550), Chaitanya (1486-1533) which are at the heart of every day devotion -- And the devotional classical tradition of Dhrupad is kept alive by a Muslim family -- the Dagars.  The Sufi saints have both Hindu and Muslim following as witnessed in Ajmer Sharif and Nizamuddin Aulia.  Islam in the Indian subcontinent was also Indianized. Consider the case of India's leading Shehnai player, Ustad Bismillah Khan --

A prime example of Indian secularism, Khan is as much a devout Muslim as a worshipper of Goddess Saraswati.  In fact, his guru and maternal uncle Ali Bux was attached to the Vishwanath temple as a Shehnai player."

In the Bengali Nabi-vamsa of the late sixteenth century, Hindu deities were interpreted as Islamic Prophets.  Religion in India was multiple and mixed, not monolith and sectarian.  The imposition of sectarian monolith structures violated the pluralistic forms of indigenous practice, and also sowed the seeds of violence and conflicts in later periods, including the contemporary genocide in Gujarat, the unending crisis of Kashmir.

The divide and rule policies of the British colonial powers was intensified during the anti-colonial period.  A two nation theory was born -- resulting in the partition in 1947, and the continuing "partitions" of our times.  These ideologies based violence and exclusion violate the philosophies which emerged from the soil of Hindustan - philosophies of compassion and mutual interdependence - philosophies which emerged from the soil of Hindustan -- philosophies of compassion and mutual interdependence philosophies which invoked "Let all being be happy" (Sarve Bhavantu Sulemah) -- including in the circle of happiness and well being not just all humans but also all species.  The Indian mind had the capacity to grasp the interdependence and indivisibility of all creation -- "Sohum" -- I am thou".  Tragically, in the name of defending "Bharteeyata", our distinctive Indian capacity for non-dualism in thought is being replaced by categories of western, dualistic, cartesean thought -- of mutual exclusiveness - which in diverse and interwoven cultures like ours can only lead to genocide and extermination to create monocultures.

When Tagore gave his speech "Tapovan" he contrasted western civilization and its tendency towards monocultures to Indian thought and its reflection of diversity and pluralism.

Contemporary western civilization is built of brick and wood.  It is rooted in the city.  But Indian civilization has been distinctive in locating its source of regeneration, material and intellectual, in the forest, not the city.  India's best ideas have come where man was in communion with trees and rivers and lakes, away from the crowds.  The peace of the forest has helped the intellectual evolution of man.  The culture of the forest has fuelled the culture of Indian society.  The culture that has arisen from the forest has been influenced by the diverse processes of renewal of life which are always at play into the forest, varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight and sound and smell.  The pluralism, thus became the principle of Indian civilization.

Not being caged in brick, wood and iron, Indian thinkers were surrounded by and linked to the life of the forest.  The living forest was for them their source of food.  The intimate relationship between human life and living nature became the source of knowledge. Nature was not dead and inert in this knowledge system.  The experience of life in the forest made it adequately clear that living nature was the source of light and air, of food and water.

If there is any distinctive civilisational characteristic of Indianess, it is what we used to until recently call the "Aranya Sanskriti".  However, Sanskriti derived from Prakriti is now being forgotten.  "Forests and rivers" are being destroyed.  There is a war against tribals who are trying to defend their right to land and forests, guaranteed under schedule V of the Constitution.  In Nagarnar, in Wynad and throughout tribal areas, the last remnants of our Aranya Sanskriti are being wiped out.

The new ideology of Hindutva is not Indian.  It is moulded by imported western Cartesian philosophy - it amounts colonisation of our minds by categories of division separation and exclusion.  It is doubly alien -- because it has no place for nature, ecology, the land and is creating a fictitious "culture" empty of its rooting in nature and the land.  It is also alien because it is replacing our capacity to live and think non-dualistically with dualistic thought and politics which must spread the virus of violence.  That is why the "Hindutva" forces are targetting shrines of mixed, non-exclusive worships -- Bhojshala in Madhya Pradesh, Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan and a Sufi Shrine in Karnataka.

Reductionism, exclusion, dualism, monocultures are not indigenous categories.  They are legacies of a historical colonialism and convenient constructions for contemporary imperialism.  When the "either-or" categories of exclusion replace the rich "and" of diversity and pluralism, war and violence becomes inevitable.  Bush had said "You are either with us or against us".   Echoing the false polarisation of the emerging empire, Pravin Togadia formerly a cancer specialist and now the General Secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had said at the Dharam Sansad of Feb 22-23, 2003, "Jo Ram ke saath nahin hai, who Babar ki aulaad hai") If you are not with Ram, you are with Babar) (India Today, march 10, 2003 p 29)

Babar's empire existed 500 years ago.  Another empire is now being established.  Would not a focus on Bush rather than Babar be less anachronistic? Or is the obsession with the past a deliberate diversion from the colonisation of the present?

There is an opportunistic convergence between the rise of "Hindutva" as an ideology of cultural exclusion and the rise of a new western imperialism as the project of corporate globalization, based on economic exclusion.  Both assault our Indianness -- our Bharteeyata and aid and abet each other.

At the peak of the Gujarat massacre, when the forces of Hindutva were  claiming to defend our Indianness -- they were also selling off India, and her resources, substituting laws and policies rooted in our land and our philosophy and ethics with laws and policies that subvert the very core of India and Indianness.   The din of "Hindutva" drowned the selling off of the life blood of India... her water, her biodiversity.

Seeds, which we have held sacred, and viewed as a common heritage were commodified.  Now genetically engineered seeds were commercialised.  When we sow we pray "let this seed be exhaustless".  The new patent laws introduced during 2002 allow seed to be owned as private property.  It gives corporations the right to treat saving and exchanging of seed by farmers as "intellectual property theft" and a crime.  Our "dharma" is being redefined as illegal, it is being criminalized.  And while the very foundation of our culture is eroded, "cultural nationalism" is increasingly talked about.

New patent laws and biodiversity laws also enable Biopiracy -- the patenting of traditional indigenous knowledge, the patenting of our medicinal plants and our seeds and crops.  Conagra has an "atta" patent, Ricetec took a Basmati patent, W.R. Grace took a neem patent.  We view our biological and intellectual heritage as the core of our Indianness our Bharateeyata. Which India is "Hindutva" defending if as a result of patents on indigenous knowledge, our Ayurvedic practitioners, can no longer practise Ayurveda, holistic system of health science disappear and Ayurvedic medicines are sold as the propriety medicine of giant pharmaceutical multinationals?  Which India is "Hindutva" defending if our mustard, our coconut, our sesame are pushed to extinction, and with them the meaning of Basant in the North, and the very meaning of Kerala (the land of Coconut) in the South. Which culture do we leave our children if rob them of indigenous food cultures and feed engineered `corn-soya" blend for mid-day meals?

While "Hindutva" as an ideology based on "cultural nationalism" is being shaped our indigenous culture is being destroyed by globalization.  Our sacred rivers are being privatized and sold, damned and diverted.  We have venerated our rivers as mothers, we have prayed,

O Holy Mother Ganga, O Yamuna, O Godavari, O Saraswati, O Narmada, O Sindhu, O Kaveri, may you all be pleased to manifest in these waters with which I shall purify myself.

We had the power to link rivers to us in our consciousness, wherever we were.

In our consciousness we linked our rivers to the bucket or "lota" of water we used to wash, to bathe, to clean.   Today in the much touted "river linking" project, we are "linking rivers" through cement and separating them from our ourselves our indigenous cultures and ecosystems.  The technosphere is replacing the ecosphere in which indigenous cultures evolved.

The market is replacing water rights and water duties.

Precisely because rivers and waters were sacred, we did not overuse and waste water.  The culture of "no limits", "no boundaries", "no integrity" is now being imposed on our civilization.  The culture of water conservation that built johads, eris, talabs in the past and water harvesting systems today is being displaced by the alien culture of consumerism.  The rights of communities are being substituted by rights of corporations to commodify and privatize water.  Private property rights in water, biodiversity and knowledge are violative of the Indian ethos and the customary, community rights of the Indian people.

India is her rivers and her biodiversity, her food systems and knowledge systems.  India does not survive if her rivers are diverted and killed, her waters are privatized and commodified, her biodiversity is patented and either pushed to extinction or transformed into toxic genetically engineered plants, her farmers commit suicide because of debts and thousands die of starvation. Our civilization is based on simplicity and the small scale which are pre-conditions for ecological sustainability and economic justice. Because as the Ishoupanishad reminds us, taking more than one needs is theft of someone else's needs.  Globalization is wiping out the sustainability and beauty of simple living, replacing it with the violence and vulgarity of consumerism and giganticism. The 2003 budget is largely a budget to promote consumerism, not to relieve peasants of their debt burden or the poor of their hunger.

If there is a real threat to our Indianness-- our Bharteeyata, it comes from corporate globalization and the uncontrollable corporatisation, commodification and consumerism which it unleashes in every sphere.   It is the politics of Swadeshi, not "Hindutva", which will defend and reclaim our Indianness.  It is through strengthening economic nationalism, not cultural nationalism, that we will survive as a nation -- facing the dissipative  forces externally and internally.