U.R. Ananthamurthy - Hindutva or Hind Swaraj

HINDUTVA
OR
HIND SWARAJ

Translated from the Kannada by
Keerti Ramachandra
with Vivek Shanbhag

U.R. ANANTHAMURTHY

HARPER

PERENNIAL

Shiv Visvanathan

People often claim that the age of manifestos is virtually over. They claim that it has been replaced by the expert report replete with information. The classic manifesto combined speech and text to create a political genre. It was as if the manifesto was responding to two traditions, the oral and the written. Manifestos had to be read aloud, declaimed, recited as speech so that one could celebrate the power of voice, and yet, manifestos had to be deconstructed as texts. Between the demands of the hermeneutic and of orality, the manifesto acquired both power and eloquence. There is a textual, in fact scriptural, economy to a manifesto. It would not be more than a hundred pages. It had to be terse, quotable, cryptic, but for all its rhetorical power, it had to be compressed like a crystal in the centrality of the message. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the last age of the great manifestos. In fact, one can list among the classical manifestos, Marx and Engelss The Communist Manifesto and Mahatma Gandhis Hind Swaraj. One can also think of Thomas Paines Rights of Man. These texts were essentially political. There were also specialized manifestos in art and architecture that proclaimed a new style, a new cult. While the first transformed societies, the second altered disciplines. As a literary form, the manifesto often seems a dying art, to be revived desperately when need arises.

Fortunately, U.R. Ananthamurthys Hindutva or Hind Swaraj signals that the age of the manifesto is not yet over. One of Indias greatest storytellers chose the manifesto as the genre for his swan song. One needs the speech of manifestos to cut to the very core of Indian politics, the heart of darkness we call the nation state. When Narendra Modis victory was imminent, an impassioned Ananthamurthy cried out that he would not like to live in an India ruled by Modi. An irked BJP ideologue asked him to leave for Pakistan. Ananthamurthys answer to Giriraj Kishore and other vociferous critics was this text. His last work was more than a manifesto. It was a prayer, a confession, a plea, an argument, a conversation capturing a world we might lose. Unconsciously, Ananthamurthy, whom we all know most of all as URA, sets it up as a dialogue, an approximation of a play exploring options, choices, outlining the ethical consequences of each political act. It was the last testament of a remarkable man, a storyteller who quietly became the conscience of an era.

There is no doubt that Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is a little book written in a desperate hurry, by an author who knew he was dying and yet who understood that the only way to confront death was to affirm life and the living. It is not an exercise in self-pity. It is an attempt to cut to the bone, to state the fundamentals, especially the fundamentals of the state as a regime. It is the testament of a man who refuses to live in a world ruled by Modi. His is not a blanket rejection of Modi, the person or the persona, because no man is alien to him; his is a rejection of Modis categories, the grids of thinking, the classificatory exclusions practised by the regime. URA becomes a tuning fork of the ethical possibilities of the Modi era. His sense of urgency does not make him topical or journalistic. He reads Modi as a symptom of a deeper malaise. One has to answer Modi in terms of the longue dure, of civilizational logic, as part of the challenges India faces in the future.

Ananthamurthy states his methodology clearly. He warns that the dialogic encounter he seeks to develop is distinct from the debates of the ancients, the pointcounterpoint of older debates and discourses. He places before the reader two sets of texts, which are roughly contemporary, Gandhis Hind Swaraj confronts Savarkars writings, and URA contends that Modi is only enacting the logic of a Savarkar script. Modi is thus not an original but merely a mimic, following the logic of a historical position. Ananthamurthy reads Modi as a giant clone, a copy of the original Veer Savarkar. There is an aesthetic of layers in his presentation. It begins from the topical and moves to the philosophical and ethical. Eventually, what he presents is a civilizational response to Modi. He begins by admitting he is confronting a majoritarian regime with hegemonic propensities, and that majoritarianism cannot be the basis of either a rule of law or a rule of reason. In fact, as a repressed unconscious of a collective, majoritarianism can be brutal in its treatment of differences. But what is even more critical is the logic of a majoritarian nation state. It can be demonic.

URA argues that one must challenge the shibboleth that, merely because one has ascended to power through a majority, one can exonerate it from reason. Democracy, he claims, thrives by providing space for the non-majoritarian. Yet he locates such a politics in a wider space as part of an understanding of evil. He realizes that one has to go back to the very notion of evil and explore the evil that lurks behind words like patriotism and development. He notes that a phrase as unpoetic as in the national interest seems to permit any kind of crime or atrocity. URA as poet is measuring the genocidal quotient of words, and especially evaluating the official concepts of the Modi regime, like nation state, development and democracy.

Evil and the Nation State

Evil, as any literary inventor will tell you, summons a Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Russian novelist understood evil, invented characters who played out the logic of evil, creating a literature which went beyond theology to unfold the nature of ethics. Anathamurthy argues that one needs a Dostoyevskyan understanding of evil in India but through Indian categories. The evil that haunts India is the new demonology of the Indian state.

To understand evil, one needs a cartographer, a mapmaker who reads signs and concepts, and finds in those indices the seeds of future evil. Ananthamurthy acknowledges the role of political activists Aruna Roy, Medha Patkar and Teesta Setalvad, each seeking to give voice and theory to suffering. He claims that they can recognize evil and serve as warning signs for the future. He literally sees them as the Cassandras of activism.

URA unfolds three moves in his script. Firstly, nature and history, he claims, are being hypothecated in new ways to the state.

For Ananthamurthy, the rituals of evil begin in erasure not amnesia. Amnesia is a poignant forgetfulness. Erasure is the systematic destruction of memories. More than erasure, what makes History obscene is a utilitarian view of history. Ananthamurthy points out that, for Savarkarites, history is an ersatz idea used to fabricate Hindutva. History is useful for the herd. This is why Ganga worship becomes a photo opportunity for the Modi regime; memories need to be mnemonically constructed. One can almost smell an Orwellian department of memory management.

As history is manufactured, there is a cosmos being lost in Modi-land. Development needs not only a false history but a destruction of nature. Ananthamurthy argues that nature is also a form of memory, a world view. Our ancestors, he claimed, knew how to live in harmony with nature. Nature as a chain of being, as a connectivity of worm, soil, seed, ant and butterfly was the guru of farming wisdom. Reading nature was part of the semiotics and hermeneutics of agriculture. Nature was respected and societys gratitude was marked by ritual time. There was a sense of food as the gift. URA talks of the time when alms were available and people survived on weekly meals and generosity. Nature itself was so gracious that the tribal survived on the generosity of nature. The subsistence economy had shades of the commons, of community and sharing. Hospitality allowed for the pilgrim, before the pilgrim became a commodified tourist. URA nostalgically remarks that in the Malnad where he grew up, for the thirsty traveler on foot, who asked for drinking water, there was buttermilk. He moans that those who were generous in the past have now become brokers of development. There is no free lunch in a developing economy.