The RSS Chief is Partly Right and Partly Wrong on Hindu Texts

 

The RSS Chief is Partly Right and Partly Wrong on Hindu Texts

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

Recently, I have written a number of articles highlighting the treacheries of the BJP Parivar (of which the RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a subsidiary) which has a long history of stabbing Hindus in the back, this tendency becoming particularly virulent whenever it manages to come to power.

[Although it started out with the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the present BJP, being a subsidiary of the RSS, power equations changed over time, particularly in the last decade, and now the RSS has become the subsidiary]

But in the last few days, there is one recent speech of the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, or at least one point in his speech as expressed in the caption below, which has received sharp criticism from many staunch Hindus, and this point requires to be examined:

 

The matter is reported yesterday (4 March 2023) without any critical comment in the leftist scroll.in:

https://scroll.in/latest/1045016/mohan-bhagwat-says-there-is-a-need-to-review-hindu-texts-and-traditions

The full report in this leftist site is as follows:

 

"Mohan Bhagwat says there is a need to review Hindu texts and traditions

Bhagwat’s remarks came two months after Swami Prasad Maurya had demanded removal of some parts of Hindu epic ‘Ramcharitmanas’.

Scroll Staff

 

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat on Thursday said there is a need to review Hindu texts and traditions, ANI reported.

“Earlier, we did not have scriptures; [knowledge] it was passed down through oral tradition,” Bhagwat said while addressing a gathering in Nagpur on Thursday. “Later, scriptures were developed and some selfish persons added some wrong things to them.”

Bhagwat’s remarks came two months after a controversy had erupted over Samajwadi Party MLC Swami Prasad Maurya claims that parts of Hindu epic Ramcharitmanas contained objectionable language about Dalits, Adivasis and backward classes. He had called for their removal.

Maurya was booked by the Uttar Pradesh Police under provisions of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to hurting religious sentiments, intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of peace and statements aimed at creating enmity between classes.

In his Thursday address, Bhagwat said that Hinduism is a religion that balances life.

“Our religion follows the principles of science,” the RSS chief said. “Religion is necessary for the benefit of humans, as it helps to bring science to their aid...In our traditions, our ancestors have made contributions in the pursuit of knowledge in every field.”

In January, Bhagwat had said that members of the LGBTQ community and transgender persons have the same right to live as others.

The RSS chief had said that the Hindu society does not see transgenders as a problem and that members of the LGBTQ community deserve to have their own private and social space.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the parent organisation and the ideological backbone to a host of Hindutva groups including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party."

 

 

This whole matter has some very ironical aspects:

1. A leftist journal has reported the matter without any critical comments, and, in fact, has referred to another earlier statement of the RSS chief in the same article in a manner which would seem to be showing approval of the RSS chief's comments in general.

2. Many staunch Hindus on the social media have criticized the RSS chief in sharp terms. I note only a comment by one person because he prefaces his critical comments with the phrase "Mr Talageri is right" and goes on to state: "The way Bhagavat is throwing people under the bus, it's 100% White Guilt rebranded as Brahmana guilt (read as Purvajon ke paap)" and claims that Bhagwat's statement will be quoted by enemies of Hinduism since it is "playing right onto their agenda".  

 

 

Since my name has appeared in this context, and it is in fact a context about which I feel strongly, I want to make some points clear on this:

 

1. It is claimed in the article that a Samajwadi party MLA called for the "removal" of certain parts of the Ramcharitmanas as they contained objectionable remarks about "Dalits, Adivasis and backward classes", and that this statement of the RSS chief was in some way an endorsement of the SP MLA's call. But (even if his speech was in that context) the word samīkṣā  used by the RSS chief simply means "review", which is not exactly the same as "removing" anything from any Hindu text (although I cannot presume to speak for him).

 

The fact is that not only does no-one other than the writer or composer of any written or composed piece have the right to "remove" anything, good or bad, from that written piece, but in fact "removing" any part of, or even "banning", old and established writings to keep them from being read by anyone else has never been a part of Hindu thinking.

 

It is the Catholic Church which had the practice of "proscribing" texts and writings which they felt went against Catholic ideas, ideals or principles, or exposed things the Church did not want exposed to the public eye. In fact they even had an official list of such books called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Christianity and Islam went even further and burnt and destroyed books on a massive scale whenever they found it expedient and possible: the famous ancient library of Alexandria in Egypt, which contained a huge collection of books from all over the world as then known to the Greeks, and was established by King Ptolemy I Soter (the Graeco-Egyptian ruler of Egypt 323-285 BCE) was destroyed once by the orders of Roman Christian Emperor Theodosius in 391 CE as part of the wholesale destruction of Pagan structures, and then the refurbished library was again completely destroyed by the Muslims on the order of the Khalifa Omar ibn-al Khattab, whose alleged declaration on the occasion has become famous: "If these books agree with the Book of God (the Quran), they are useless and need not be preserved [i.e. read instead directly the Book of God], if they disagree, they are pernicious and have to be destroyed". The Muslim invaders of India, and the Portuguese in Goa (but not the British, who, in fact helped in preserving and studying ancient texts, whatever their purpose, scholarly or otherwise) followed the same procedure wherever they could, and the Islamic destruction of the countless ancient manuscripts in the Indian Universities of the time are too well-known (and recorded by themselves, as noted by Dr. Ambedkar among others).

 

Indian tradition, on the other hand, believed in full freedom of expression. People were free to "review", criticize and even condemn anything written earlier by anyone else (and maybe even to advise people not to read something), but this never in any context meant destroying the writings completely so as to see to it that no-one read them. I will quote here what I wrote in my article "Apologetics in the Guise of A "Hindu" Response to Criticism of Puranic Personalities" (although in a different context: the context there was to show that criticizing, but not banning or "removing" from circulation or from the public eye, was a perfectly legitimate exercise in ancient India and in the Hindu way of thinking):

 

"To begin with India has a very great variety and range of philosophical thoughts and ideologies since ancient times. Orthodox Vedic tradition encapsulated some of these many systems of thought within six categories of official orthodox schools of philosophy: Pūrva Mīmāṁsā, Uttara Mīmāṁsā (Vedānta), Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeśika, which were only required to pay lip service to the Vedas as the fount of all wisdom. The texts of each of these six systems taught ideas which often contradicted each other (as well as the ideas of all the other systems of thought not included in these six categories, including numerous and often conflicting systems of Buddhist, Jain, Cārvāka and numerous other philosophies), and the numerous commentators of all the basic texts of these various systems were extremely sharp in their criticisms of all systems other than the ones they were arguing for. Even within any one of the orthodox schools (e.g. Vedānta) there were numerous schools (Dvaita, Advaita, Viśiśtādvaita, Śuddhādvaita, etc.) which all criticized each others' texts and doctrines.

 

But it was not just criticism of each others' doctrines, but even of the Vedic texts themselves, and even abuse of the Vedic composers, in the Buddhist and Jain texts, and in the texts of various writers like Charvaka, etc.  There was quite an impressive list of such writers.

 

Even apart from these, there were numerous other thinkers who rejected the authority of the Vedas. As Dr. Ambedkar puts it in his book "Riddles in Hinduism" (published by the Government of Maharashtra in 1987): "If the opinions of the Charvaka and Brahaspati are not accepted there is plenty of other evidence. That evidence is recorded in the books of the various schools of philosophy such as the Nyaya, Vaishashikha, Purva and Uttar Mimamsa. It must be said to the credit of the authors of the text-books of these philosophies that before proceeding to defend the authority of the Vedas they have been very careful to set out the case of their opponents who were opposed to the authority of the Vedas. This fact enables us to prove two things: (1) That there was a school of thought which was opposed to recognize the Vedas as books of authority; (2) That they were a respectable group of people whose opinions the defenders of the authority of the Vedas were bound to consider." (AMBEDKAR 1987:39).

 

Dr Ambedkar, in his above book (AMBEDKAR 1987:59-60), points out that many texts dismiss the special importance of the Vedas, and many discuss the "errors" in the Vedic texts, and this is not just in the texts of the Buddhists, Jains and Charvakas, but even in other more expressly Hindu religious texts: thus various Puranas insist that the Puranas are equal to the Vedas in importance, and even that they were created first by Brahma and that the Vedas were created after them. The Brahma Vaivarta Purana claims to be refuting the errors of the (other) Puranas and Upa-Puranas and of the Vedas. The Tantrik texts are even more dismissive of the Vedic texts, and according to Ambedkar, "they claimed that the Vedas, the Shastras, and the Puranas are like a common woman, but the Tantras are like a highborn woman" (AMBEDKAR 1987:60). The Upanishads also declare their philosophies to be superior to the Karma Kanda of the Vedic texts. And the truly Wisdom books like the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesa did not hesitate to make fun even of the more pious homilies in the Vedic texts (such as vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam), as pointed out by me in my earlier articles.  

 

So far as the heroes and important personalities of the Epics and Puranas are concerned, there are numerous Jain texts which present sharply different versions, but, more to the point here, many Jain texts sharply criticize many of these personalities for acts which go against Jain principles of morality or ethics, and even consign some of them (e.g. Lakṣmaṇa) to "hell" for long periods.

 

All these above things may be debatable, but one thing is certain: none of these writers were influenced by "Western" perspectives, since most of them wrote long before the birth of even Christianity: they were writing from their own points of view and their own purely Indian (and therefore purely Hindu) "perspectives"."

 

Similarly, it is perfectly possible that Bhagwat, in the present context, was referring to "reviewing" the ancient texts to recognize the wrongness of certain wrong things given in those texts, from a purely Hindu point of view, without any anti-Hindu motive involved.

 

So far as "banning" or "removing" things from texts are concerned no true Hindu who has thought things through logically will ever talk in general about "banning" texts or books, or "removing" things from them. Sita Ram Goel, the true Bhishma Pitamaha of modern Hindu Thought and Hindutva Ideology, even in the extreme case of the Quran, and in his preface to the second edition of his book on "The Calcutta Quran Petition" (First edition 1986, second edition 1987), made it "absolutely clear that we do not stand for a ban on the publication of the Quran. We take this opportunity to state unambiguously that we regard banning of books, religious or otherwise, as counterproductive. In the case of the Quran, we believe and advocate that more and more non-Muslims should read it so that they know first hand the quality of its teachings".

 

In the case of the Quran, although it has often been said that it was revised many times before it reached its present form (e.g. see "Why I am not a Muslim" by Ibn Warraq), it is an absolute matter of faith intrinsic to the very identity of Islam that the book is an asmānī kitāb, (heavenly book which has always existed!) which cannot possibly have been revised by any human being. So Islam intrinsically forbids any kind of "review" of the Quran.

 

But such ideas, however much many would-be-Abrahamic Hindus (especially many among the Hindu critics of my analysis of the Rigveda) try to apply them to the Vedic texts, are not intrinsic to Hinduism in any way. The Rigveda, the very oldest book not only in Hinduism but in the whole world, itself contains the earliest testified case of man-made compositions and later additions, through an account in the Aitareya Brahmana (VI.18), about the dispute between two families of composers, the Viśvāmitras and the Vāmadeva Gautamas, about the authorship of three hymns in Book 4 (IV.19,22,23), which was resolved by allowing the Viśvāmitras  to insert six new hymns (III.30,31,34,36,38,48) within Book 3.

 

So even actually revising, let alone merely "reviewing" the contents, of Hindu texts was an ancient Hindu practice, and it is a positive point in Hinduism as opposed to the Abrahamic religions. Once the texts were written down in the final form(s) in which they came down to us, we cannot "revise" them now (as that would be tantamount to censorship and editing the writings of other people, and that too other people from the ancient past, and would also amount to a kind of Orwellian 1984-style fraudulent rewriting of the past). But we can indeed review them, and that is what Bhagwat seems to be suggesting.

 

[Though not relevant to this article, I must at this point mention another kind of fraudulent rewriting of the past which is going on regularly and on a massive scale all over India. And that is the replacing of place-names from the days of British rule with "Indian" names. It must be understood that British rule over India was a part of our history, and while we are obviously perfectly justified in condemning it, we cannot wipe the memory of that rule out of existence, 1984-style, by changing the names of places built by the British, with the names of present-day politicians or their relatives and friends. Even the changing of the name of the starting-point of Indian Central Railways from Victoria Terminus to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus is in a sense a fraudulent appropriation: Chhatrapati Shivaji, although he was a thousand times superior, and a thousand times dearer to us, than Queen Victoria of Britain, was not responsible in any way for the construction of the Terminus, and certainly not for the establishment of Railways in India. It is an unprincipled act to take a structure built by or under someone, and consequently named after him/her, and then to rename it in the name of someone else unconnected with the structure. If the idea of a Victoria Terminus was so repugnant, the entire structure should have been pulled down and a new one built there, with a new name ─ I am not advocating such a weird procedure, but only pointing out how even that would have been a little less historically wrong than just changing the name!! Lazily renaming the structures built by others with names of our choice is to my mind definitely a travesty of history: instead the effort should be to build new and grander structures, and name them after Shivaji (or any other person of choice). After all, if we disliked the idea of a statue of Queen Victoria in a prominent part of India so much, we would be more justified in pulling down that statue and putting up one of an Indian personality there, than simply changing the name of the statue of Victoria to "Gandhi Statue" or even "Savarkar Statue" while leaving the actual statue intact. This kind of historical appropriations (not to be confused with historical correctives like renaming Allahabad, which was itself a historical appropriation, back to Prayagraj, or replacing the Babri Structure back to the structure of a Rama temple) can go to extreme lengths. In Mumbai, buildings in the Fort/Fountain area, the commercial heart of South Mumbai, are considered heritage structures because they represent grand specimens of the British architectural styles of the era of  British rule, and are protected from restructuring. I once heard a full-length harangue from a staunch Hindu who felt all those buildings should be torn down and rebuilt since they represent a colonial legacy. But history cannot and should not be wiped out in this destructive manner. Every piece of history is history. And heritage is heritage, to be preserved, unless it can be shown to have been built on the destruction of an earlier local heritage which deserves to be revived, or if it represents something particularly obnoxious, as for example a statue of General Dyer near Jallianwala Bagh].

 

 

2. The particular critic of Bhagwat's statement whom I have quoted above writes that his statement reeks of "White Guilt rebranded as Brahmana guilt" and "Purvajon ke paap". Well, why should it, and what does the question of "White Guilt" have anything to do with ancient Indian texts or the Brahmana caste? Is any and every white American or European, who is not actually a woke leftist, who criticizes, accepts or refers to the fact that white people just a century or two ago were slave-owners and persecutors of black people ("negroes" in Spanish, or people of African origin, in America) also expressing "White Guilt"? If so, every human male on earth should be crawling all the time under the burden of "Male Guilt" for the countless evils inflicted on human females by males throughout history, and which are continuing in full force even today in every corner of the world. Basically, why should any person feel guilty for sins and wrongs not committed by himself/herself personally (whether or not they were committed by "ancestors"), and which he/she would not commit anyway because he/she considers them to be sins and wrongs? And why should anything prevent a person from accepting that such wrongs have been committed or are being committed, and from trying to correct those wrongs ─ and why, if anyone wants or tries to correct those wrongs, should it be considered as "guilt" in any way? If something is wrong, it is not just permissible but absolutely necessary to accept the facts and recognize that the thing is wrong, and, far from representing "guilt" of any kind, this represents a very genuine purely Hindu sentiment of always trying to do the right thing, of moving from untruth to truth and from darkness to light, and of wanting to see everyone legitimately happy.

Many Hindus (for whom the word adhikāra now has some kind of Abrahamic meaning) claim that "only" some particular category of people have the right to point out something in ancient Indian texts, which is truly an Abrahamic point of view worthy of Zakir Naik and not of a true Hindu. Going by the authority of texts, licensed scholars or priests/holy men is not the Hindu way of thinking, a true Hindu goes by his viveka-buddhi..

This tendency to refuse to accept facts, and to think the "elephant in the room" will just disappear if we ignore it, has the two following self-destructive corollaries for Hindus: (1) Hindus fail to take up cudgels for social justice among Hindus, and thereby leave the field open to anti-Hindus to pretend to be more concerned (than privileged Hindus) for oppressed or discriminated Hindus. (2) Hindus are ever ready to blush and feel ashamed for things in their texts and eager to hide those things (which their enemies will never allow) and equally unwilling to highlight the thousand times worse things in other religions (as Nupur Sharma's case highlighted for the umpteenth time), although the followers of other religions never blush about the thousand times worse things in their texts.

 

 

3. In this particular case, Bhagwat seems to be saying that Indian traditions were originally oral, and that when they came to be written down in specific texts, selfish or self-interested people inserted in those texts certain things for their own benefit (or for the benefit of whatever category of people they themselves represented, whether on the basis of gender or social position or community). He is perfectly right, and whether the person who did this inserting was a male, a brahmin, a king, or anything else, that fact is totally irrelevant so far as sentiments like "guilt" etc. are concerned. The only sentiment should be of correcting mistakes and wrongs from the past and not of blushing about them or going to the other extreme and whitewashing or glorifying them.

 

This raises several subsidiary questions: can Hindu texts contain insertions? Can such insertions represent "wrong" things? If so, can the people who inserted "wrong" things be branded as representatives of certain castes (and the "guilt" for this be supposed to be carried forward genetically to actual or assumed "descendant members" of that caste)?

 

Firstly, all texts in the world are written by human beings: no God or Divine Power writes, dictates or "shows" texts. And all human beings have some faults or the other, some prejudices and biases or the other, and some self-interests or the other. And these faults, prejudices/biases and self-interests can manifest themselves openly in their writings or leave subtle clues therein. But only that particular human being concerned is responsible for those faults, prejudices/biases and self-interests: the guilt simply cannot automatically carry forward to his cultural descendants or even to his actual genetic descendants. The notion that guilt passes through generations to descendants is a purely Abrahamic notion: the New Testament of the Bible goes to the silly extent of showing the particular group of Jews (who are alleged to have asked the Roman authorities to crucify Jesus) actually chanting that the consequences of their action should be carried forward to their descendants: "Let him be crucified …. Let his blood be on us and on our descendants"  (Matthew 27.23-25)!!

 

In the case of "wrong things" inserted into Hindu texts in ancient times, this could only have been done by some Brahmin, since all the texts were written in Sanskrit and only Brahmins knew Sanskrit well enough to write and study texts in Sanskrit or insert things into them. And that many of the insertions are very clearly made by some Brahmin writer is very blatant in most cases. In the Uttara Kanda of the Valmiki Ramayana, the story of the killing of Shambuka and the story of the injured dog were very clearly fictional tales inserted into the text in order to give "authority" for extremely special privileges to Brahmins: the idea that if a non-Brahmin (and specifically a Shudra) performed austerities, Brahmin children would start dying and it would be the king's duty to kill that Shudra and restore complete monopoly of the rituals to Brahmins only; that no king had the right to punish a Brahmin; and that the only way a brahmin could be punished for "bad deeds" is by the operation of the law of karma in his next life, and that even here, the only "bad deeds" that the law of karma would be allowed to punish him for are "bad deeds" affecting another Brahmin; and that a "bad deed" towards a Brahmin can include even a small lapse or inadvertent shortfall in doing his sewa, such an inadvertent shortfall resulting in being born as a dog and consequently being stoned to death!! Is it possible that anyone who was not a Brahmin would insert these particular grotesque ideas into any text?

 

But then, why should this result in any kind of shame or "guilt" for any individual today who happens to be a Brahmin? Even the sons or daughters of criminals and mass murderers (unless they participated in some way in the father's acts) would not be guilty of any sin or crime. And even the "One and only God" and his "prophets" in the Abrahamic texts are guilty of extremely heinous crimes: certainly no person, simply because he is born a Christian or Muslim becomes automatically guilty, or would consider himself to be personally guilty of those crimes! Guilt and shame cannot be about the acts of forefathers and the events of ancestral cultures. It is only Hindus who feel, or have been successfully brainwashed into feeling, that they are guilty for "bad things" in their ancient texts, and that they must primarily stonewall all such "bad things", or, if forcibly brought to their notice, should whitewash, justify or glorify them à la the Abrahamics ─ all the while maintaining the saintly attitude of not raking up the much more massive dirt in the texts and theologies of the Abrahamic religions.

 

Bhagwat, in his speech, was partly right and partly wrong: Here is where he was partly right: the RSS has been a unifier of different caste groups, and there is probably less casteist discrimination within the RSS than within any other all-India organization in India. Indeed, in all my sharp critical writings on the RSS I have never accused it of any kind of casteism or evil social ideology ─ whatever may be the case in respect of the BJP which will fan any kind of divisions in society if it can bring in votes, power and wealth. In my very first book in 1993, I wrote that the present hierarchical/discriminative caste system is "a feature, of Hindu society, which every genuine Hindu, and Hindu Nationalist organisation (like the RSS), has sought to wipe out, or at least, to neutralise; and which every Leftist and secularist politician and intellectual, and Muslim and Christian force, has tried to strengthen and perpetuate with the full, conscious or unconscious, cooperation of the vested interests among the various castes". So the point made by Bhagwat was indeed partly right., and in keeping with the socially unifying nature of the RSS within Hindu society.

 

Then where does the partly wrong aspect come in?

 

It comes in where Bhagwat calls for a critical "review" of Hindu texts, but shows by his silence that he would not only refuse to advocate similar critical review of the texts of Islam and Christianity but would probably strongly oppose it and instead advocate unequivocal respect for those texts.

 

And this is the crux of the problem even in matters where the Parivar seems to be right or partly right: the approach of the Parivar is always a matter of two different standards for Hindus and non-Hindus, and therefore turns out to be a wrong suicidal and self-destructive policy so far as Hindus and Hinduism are concerned.