Pawan Varma’s The Great Hindu Civilization highlights indifference to our own roots

M Rajivlochan

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In this extremely readable book, Pavan Varma points out that Hindu culture and civilisation have been short-changed by the “academic elite” in India. He accuses them of being “liberal” enough to be strongly judgemental and derisive about the religion of the Hindus, but not liberal enough to make any effort to actually try to understand this religion. He also blames the non-academic Indian, once again ‘liberal’ is the word that he uses, for not being particularly curious about their own culture and civilisation which enabled the academic elite’s viewpoint to hold sway. His ire is mostly that 200 years of subordination to the British resulted in the Indians internalising much of the critique by the British of the Hindus, so much so that today it is fashionable to deny that there is such a thing as a Hindu civilisation in the first place.

The current fashion to show concern for the redevelopment of many parts of Lutyens’ Delhi attracted Varma’s attention. Lutyens, he points out, held Indian architecture and culture in extreme contempt. Lutyens reportedly opined that the Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines along the ghats in Banaras appeared like ‘a cactus or children’s toy tree on a steep mountainside, decorated at the top with flags on crazy bamboo poles’. Even the Taj Mahal did not find much favour with Lutyens. He reportedly told his wife that the Taj, when ‘compared to the great Greeks, Byzantines, Romans… it is small but very costly beer, and alongside the Egyptians, it is evanescent’. Obviously, this is a comment on the slavish effort by those campaigning to preserve Lutyens’ structures in Delhi even after they had become dysfunctional.

Varma points out that if the achievements of Hindu civilisation are held in scant regard internationally, this mostly has to do with the deep indifference shown by Indians to their own roots. They have not, he underlines, even cared to study their own texts, religion, philosophy, art and architecture; the result being that whatever biased picture the British painted of colonial India, continues to survive even today and frequently gets repeated in academic writings.

Varma is sensitive to the fact that there is a bogey which forces Indian academics to ignore many aspects of India’s past. He points out that they fear that any engagement with India’s Hindu past might lead to strengthening Hindu chauvinism and xenophobia. That, according to him, cannot be a good enough excuse for a refusal to research India’s past truthfully.

He says that the very eclecticism of the religion of the Hindus makes it vulnerable to any analyst who believes that a religion needs to have a book underpinning it. The Hindus have none. Even the Manusmriti, such a darling of those who wish to trash Hinduism, wasn’t a holy book for anyone and most followers of Hinduism did not even care for it. Varma points out that the greatest strength of Hinduism is that different, often conflicting, philosophies like Adi Shankaracharya’s monism, Ramanjua’s theism and, Charvaka’s materialism could happily co-exist. Such easy-going diversity among the Hindus, he says, needed to be a point of great appreciation. Yet, in the liberal academics’ worldview, it was not, since it did not fit in with the western-trained academics’ understanding of religion. As a result, in parrot-like fashion, they repeat the allegations made by western Indologists that such diversity of ideas only suggests that there is no such thing as Hinduism.

The way forward, he concludes, is that we need to research our past with greater care and energy — avoiding unscientific assertions — and educate our children about the great Hindu civilisation.