"... After all, can Hinduism be without caste? This is the question that
now needs to be revisited by all Hindus who see themselves as progressive.
One way or another, the answer cannot be allowed to be an easygoing
Hindutva shibboleth ("vasudhaiva kutumbakkam", that the world is one
family), one that fails to dismantle millennia-old caste structures, and
stifles dissenting voices and alternative visions. Will Hindus be able to
perform such a self-surgery? "

http://www.himalmag.com/new/The-liberation-theologists-of-the-Hindu-past_nw1953.html

Himal, Sept 2008

The liberation theologists of the Hindu past *By: Balmurli Natrajan*

Seeking Begumpura: The social vision of anti-caste intellectuals by Gail
Omvedt, Navayana, 2008

Seeking Begumpura, the latest work by the American-born sociologist and
longtime Indian citizen Gail Omvedt, marks a watershed in the battle to
uncover the hearts and minds of the oppressed and powerless – the
'subalterns' of the Subcontinent's history. Over the past quarter-century,
two scholarly traditions have been torchbearers in this task. The first is
the Subaltern Studies Group, which includes historians inspired by the
Vienna-based historian Ranajit Guha; the second are the 'critical
traditionalists', best known through the ideas of the 'political
psychologist' Ashis Nandy.

The focus of the former group is on the communitarian peasant or Adivasi
who resists the 'disciplining modernity' of the coloniser, as well as the
elitism of Indian nationalists. The individual on whom the latter focuses,
meanwhile, exults in what can be thought of as an 'anti-modernism' – not
only preferring indigenous traditions that have been denigrated by
colonial brutalities, but being almost naturally nativist. In both
traditions, however, the subaltern figure is not a cultural revolutionary,
but seeks instead merely to preserve his or her own cultural traditions.

Caste, meanwhile, has been largely absent from both schools of thought. In
1993, Gail Omvedt criticised the Subaltern Studies Group for largely
neglecting the issue, posing the question to them: Would B R Ambedkar be
considered a 'subaltern'? On the other side, Meera Nanda, a historian of
science, more recently challenged the critical traditionalists by
emphasising a Dalit view of modernity that does not valorise Indic
'tradition' in ways that an easy postmodernism of privileged classes,
castes and gender would attempt to do. Meanwhile, the response from both
of these groups to such caste-based criticism has been either dismissive
(see Nandy's latest book, Time Treks) or chillingly silent.

As such, one must turn to those other traditions of scholarship that have
identified and constructed the dispossessed of Southasia's history very
differently. This could be, for instance, where subalterns appear as
cultural revolutionaries seeking to fundamentally transform traditional
culture, not simply as political radicals. These other traditions attempt
to achieve this by celebrating the arrival of modernity in India as a
source of potential liberation from the shackles of traditional social,
political and economic orders. In this, scholars have at times taken
recourse in either pre-Vedic or non-Vedic (such as Buddhist) Indic
traditions, at which point oppression is seen as a product of India's
traditional social order. Subaltern consciousness was, hence, directed to
the fundamental modes of subjugation, along the lines of class, caste and
gender.

Chief among these 'alternative' traditions are those of Marxism, feminism
and the approaches of Ambedkar and Jyotirao Phule, or anti-caste
scholarship from Dalit and bahujan perspectives. The aims of these
approaches have always been not only the recovery and representation of
histories of the dispossessed, but also the active reshaping of the
present along the lines of subaltern visions of a better world and life.
Although some trends do exist within the feminist tradition that tend to
be anti-modern, by and large feminism in India is closer to the Marxist
and the Phule-Ambedkarist traditions: seeking visions of liberation not in
order to resurrect some mythical 'golden past', but rather to build a new
future along the lines envisioned by exploited castes, working classes and
feminist visionaries throughout history. Over her long career as a public
intellectual, Omvedt has had the rare honour of being instrumental in
participating, shaping and revising each of these three traditions.

*Radical bhakta*

In Seeking Begumpura, Omvedt works to recover what she calls "utopian"
visions of society from the corpus of teachings and writings, songs,
poetry and prose of various Dalit and bahujan intellectuals since the 15th
century. This heralds the "modern era" for Omvedt, much earlier than
conventional scholarship, and allows her not to simply see modernity as a
'gift' of colonialism. The visionaries that Omvedt references since the
advent of British colonialism in the 18th century were not easily viewed
as either anti-colonial or anti-modern. Instead, they made complex
assessments of British colonialism (and Mughal rule before it) as having
brought positive changes in socioeconomic life, but also having failed to
break the fetters of caste.

From a Marxist perspective, Omvedt identifies the hope expressed by these
anti-caste thinkers of long ago within narratives of the development of
society's forces of production, and their social organisation at that
time. Thus, we are able to see how early-modern visionaries such as Nama,
Kabir, Ravidas, Tuka, Kartabhaja and Namasudra of Bengal, and late-modern
ones such as Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar and Ambedkar
had to make their own histories and visions of utopia under conditions not
of their own choosing.

So why does Omvedt choose to highlight these voices as 'radical'?
Conventionally, radical has referred almost exclusively to those
individuals and groups associated with a broadly understood class-based
socialist vision. Now, perhaps for the first time, we are able to view the
visions of those relegated to being 'other-worldly' as also being radical
for this world. To accomplish this, Omvedt has had to rescue what she
calls the "radical bhakta" (with bhakti referring to India's major
traditions of mysticism and devotionalism, plus the Sufi traditions) from
a historiography that has sanitised the histories of the bhakti movements,
by co-opting its votaries into a Brahminical Hinduism.

Thus, whereas the authoritative Sources of Indian Traditions, long used as
text in US universities, paints the 15th-century Ravidas not as a radical
(claiming that "he probably meant his vision of equality to be applied
only to the spiritual realm"), Omvedt feels otherwise. She convincingly
shows how Ravidas, in his poem "Begumpura", was not only speaking of a
spiritual world. Instead, he was also painting a picture of a radically
egalitarian "earthly utopia", where all the sources of oppression – taxes,
private property, political prisoners and torture – did not exist, and
where all were one.

Omvedt also works to rescue the radical anti-caste vision of the
Kartabhajas of Bengal, who spoke about 'caste mixing'; as well as the
works of Kabir, who denounced casteism, ideas of pollution, the 'book
knowledge' of priestly specialists, and ritual practice. Both the
Kartabhajas and Kabir have long been co-opted by various conservative
forces. Finally, Omvedt underscores the fact that, unlike the
"professional renouncer" enjoying institutionalised support, the radical
bhakta is almost always a householder with responsibilities – one who is
simply acutely conscious of social relations, all of which contribute to
their social visions.

*Updating inequality*

Perhaps the most enduring contribution of Seeking Begumpura will be the
tracing of continuity from the early-modern anti-caste visionaries to the
modern or late-modern ones. The author is able to establish the existence
of a radical tradition of anti-caste thought over roughly five centuries.
Steering clear of the hagiography of the proponents, the reader is able to
assess the power, potential and limits of modern anti-caste visions – the
Bali Raj of Phule, the Buddhist commonwealth of Iyothee Thass, the
feminist Mukti Sadan of Pandita Ramabai, the Dravidanadu of Periyar, and
the Prabuddha Bharat of Ambedkar. These ideas appear importantly different
in their approaches to the problems of caste, but unified in their
uncompromising anti-caste visions. However, as the author observes in her
sobering conclusion, in a post-Independence era dominated by non-radical
visions of a Gandhian Ram Rajya, a Nehruvian Hindutva-laced socialism or a
Hindu Rashtra of someone such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the
revolutionary vision of the abolition of caste has not happened. Instead,
it has resulted in an "updating and restructuring of caste inequality".

In distilling the current debates around caste, Omvedt calls for
translating Ravidas' "Begumpura" into "a vision appropriate to the new
(globalising) era", where the nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries
seems overshadowed by the trans-nationalism of corporate globalisation,
and a still-fledgling global socialism. Such a call resonates with the
need to counter the resurgence of Hindutva in India and overseas, by also
addressing its contradictions. After all, among the youth in the
Subcontinent and overseas who are attracted to the approach of Hindu
traditions, there are also those who consider themselves to be socially
progressive, especially with respect to being anti-caste, anti-patriarchy,
and pro-human and civil rights. For them, Seeking Begumpura could also be
addressed as an invitation to do the hard intellectual work needed to make
possible a radical Hindu identity. This is necessary because Hindutva
needs to be challenged from within its protected domain, by Hindus who are
not only conscious of the threat that it poses to all but also cognisant
of its strengths, which need to be the target of any ideological war.

Pursuing this line of thought, Hindutva today must be seen to embody a
neoliberal trans-nationalism favouring private property and profits over
public ownership and common good – a direct contrast to the utopias
envisioned by Omvedt's anti-caste visionaries. At the same time, Hindutva
today has gone beyond the imaginations of the late-modern anti-caste
visionaries who were talking about nationalism and colonialism, by
constructing a hegemonic 'cultural chauvinism' that no longer needs a
territorial nation. That this is the vision of Hindutva is clear in the
recent campaign to rewrite school textbooks in the US state of California
with a Hindutva bend. Culture and civilisation are the new terms of
Hindutva, which seek transnational spaces for the accumulation of economic
as well as intellectual capital.

*Neo-Hinduism*

It becomes imperative for any cultural revolutionary vision today to
attend to the ways in which hegemony is being constructed by Hindutva.
How, for instance, Hindutva constructs a unified phenomenon called
Hinduism, while attempting to erase fundamental conflicts of caste and
gender within the so-called Hindu community, all of this based on a
supposed 'golden past'. Attention to the lives of anti-caste thinkers of
the past (some of whom also opposed patriarchy) becomes critical to mount
any challenge to Hindutva's claims. This is necessary not only to show how
heterogeneous the Hindu space actually was and is, but also to constantly
reiterate that any communal space is always embattled.

Many historians have contributed to this task before this, but the
importance of Seeking Begumpura lies in its potential to begin to locate
the contours of what could possibly be a 'neo-Hinduism'. This can only
emerge from a thorough internal critique that sheds all of the baggage
that is being termed 'retrogressive' in the 21st century. Such a level of
critique and reconstruction of Hinduism has never before taken place, as
previous reform movements never saw the need to formulate a Hindu
liberation theology and practice.

Only such a neo-Hinduism could properly be called radical, however, and in
this there are lessons to be learned from Nama, Kabir, Tuka, Phule and
others. Significantly, with the exception of Phule, all the late-modern
radicals rejected the possibility of a reconstructed Hinduism, and chose
instead to build upon Buddhist, atheist or Christian traditions, radically
interpreting them in the process. After all, can Hinduism be without
caste? This is the question that now needs to be revisited by all Hindus
who see themselves as progressive. One way or another, the answer cannot
be allowed to be an easygoing Hindutva shibboleth ("vasudhaiva
kutumbakkam", that the world is one family), one that fails to dismantle
millennia-old caste structures, and stifles dissenting voices and
alternative visions. Will Hindus be able to perform such a self-surgery?

* <http://www.himalmag.com/new/month_ty1953.html>*

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