Kancha Ilaiah - Post-Hindu India

Post-Hindu India

Post-Hindu India

A Discourse on DalitBahujan, Socio-Spiritual
and Scientific Revolution

Kancha Ilaiah

C opyright Kancha Ilaiah, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 2009 by

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Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10/12pt Goudy Old Style by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ilaiah, K. (Kancha), 1952

Post-Hindu India : a discourse on DalitBahujan, socio-spiritual, and scientific revolutio n / Kancha Ilaiah.

p. cm.

1. HinduismSocial aspectsIndia.2. BrahmanismSocial aspectsIndia.3. DalitsSocial conditions.I. Title.

BL1215. S64I53294.508694dc2220092009032026

ISBN: 978-93-5280-197-8 (ePub)

The SAGE Team: Rekha Natarajan, Sushmita Banerjee, Mathew P. J. and Trinankur Banerjee

For,

The God who created all human beingsmen and womenequal
and in his likeness; prophets who taught and practised equality
Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Marx and Ambedkar; and
my mother and father who were born unequal, lived unequal
and illiterate, and, died unequal.

Publishers Note

In this book the readers would come across many coinages such as meatarianism, orature, and so on. These words have been used by the author, given his unique methodology and subtleties of argument. The publishers have not interfered with the unconventional narrative structure of this book. Digna con utem zzriusto consequi eniatio odolore tie feugiam, vendiatet, summy nos nulputate dolorpero eum volobortie facilisit exeriuscin vulluptat.

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Contents

The social masses, who have lived as oppressed castes and communities, suffering for centuries at the hands of the culture of caste, superstition and exploitationand whose very suffering became the source of this bookI thank them immensely for accepting me as one of them, and sharing their knowledge and experiences.

And, of course, the DalitBahujan movements that have sustained my interest in life and work. I thank all those who are involved in these enduring movements. I thank all my friends for their unsparing criticism of the draft of this book. I have always believed that a good friend is one who, while sharing my broad ideology, does not hesitate to rip apart the bad arguments I tend to develop in any of my writing. Many of my friends helped me in finessing my arguments. My students also gave significant inputs which helped me in writing this book. I thank them all .

I would like to sincerely appreciate the assistance that I got from the SAGE team. Sugata Ghosh, Vice President, Commissioning persuaded me to give this book to SAGE and Rekha Natarajan and Sushmita Banerjee diligently worked on this book to bring it to its present form.

Finally, I thank my family members, who shared the burden of day-to-day life while I was working on this book for more than a decade. Since I am not married, I stay with my brothers family in a small urban apartment. My brother underwent a heart valve replacement surgery 30 years ago, so he falls sick quite often. However, he is able to cope up with life because of the assistance from family members. I am thankful to God for having let me be born in this country, in this wonderful family and for assigning me the job of teaching, reading and writingthat too in English.

MAPPING THE SUICIDAL COURSE OF HINDUISM

This book was born out of a gut feeling that the Indian nation is on the course for a civil war; a civil war that has been simmering as an undercurrent of the caste-based cultural system that Hinduism has constructed and nurtured for centuries. The Hindu cultural system is slowly unveiling its self-destructive contradictions, creating tensions in every layer of the caste society. This book covers a wide range of DalitBahujan cultural, scientific and economic knowledge systems, analyses their overall relationships with each other and also with the Hindu religion as a spiritual system. It establishes that Brahmanical Hinduism adopted an anti-production and anti-scientific ethic, compared to the scientific, technological and productive knowledge systems that the DalitBahujan communities have developed and nurtured over the years.

The social, spiritual, economic and educational deprivation imposed on the DalitBahujan castes by the Hindu religious institutions have led, to the organization of different DalitBahujan castes and an articulation of their ideological positions, thereby brewing up tensions. The tensions between the lower and the upper castes are leading to clashes on an everyday basis. On one hand, the spiritual and political aspirations of historically deprived castes and communities are increasing, leading to the expansion of spiritually democratic religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. On the other hand, new political parties are shaping up to fight the hegemony of the upper castes. Thus, the hunger of DalitBahujan castes for powerwhether spiritual, political or socialhas set the stage for a war of power, of nerves, and also of weapons. These multiple processes have created a degree of tension that might explode into civil war at the slightest provocation. This book aims to highlight the contradictions within the caste layers and map the future course of the Indian nation. It aims to show how the Hindu religion, which is one of the worlds four major religions, is on the course of a slow but sure death because of these processes. It is a demise that would reposition the cultures of the world in a major way. It would be impossible to predict how the post-Hindu India would shape up. What this book does however, is dissect the body of the Hindu cultural system and expose the fatal nature of the caste cancer that it has created within itself, show how it is unwilling to undergo a modern medical surgery, leading, consequently, to its suicide. It is a self-constructed disease with a self-determined course.