Pavan K Varma’s latest work, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and The Way Forward, is a 400-page read. However, not for a minute is it anything but absorbing, insightful and eclectic in its scope. Drawing upon decades of reflecting on similar themes—two of his recent, much-acclaimed titles were Adi Shankara: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker and The Greatest Ode To Lord Ram: Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas—it expounds the view that Hinduism’s role in shaping India’s civilisational ethos has been given short shrift by well-intentioned academics who fear that a study of religions as part of history may threaten the nation’s secular fabric. However, non-academic Indians, too, have made ‘indifference to it a virtue.’ Thus, seeing any merit in Hinduism is equal to promoting bigotry.
Against the backdrop of the rising muscular revanchism that characterises Hindutva, the book asks a provocative question: ‘Why have Hindus themselves not made enough efforts to discover the grandeur of their past?’ It attempts to answer this by explaining how the elite of the country have tended to dismiss Hinduism’s past achievements and by outlining why exactly it is not easy to engage with the Hindu past. ‘In Hinduism there is no Pope, no one text, no inflexibly mandatory ritual, no compulsory congregations, and no presiding temples.’ Thus, Hinduism’s heterogeneity—that once facilitated coexistence among opposing philosophies from Adi Shankaracharya’s monism to Ramanujam’s theism to Charvaka’s materialism, and also accommodated ‘protest’ faiths such as Buddhism and Jainism—has become the problem today: ‘The naysayers argue that Hinduism never had a unified core.’
Varma demolishes this argument by showing why Hindu civilisation has continued to thrive—because ‘it began its journey in overwhelmingly cerebral terms.’ The thought process that shaped its spiritual quest for ultimate truths accepted that ‘the path to truth can be many things but not simplistic or dogmatic.’ While this strand of inquiry tried to fathom the meaning and purpose of life, there was, at the same time, a separate strand fixated on ritualised religion. However, it was the former that was the stronger and led to foundational texts, such as the Upanishads. A tradition of cognitive thinking and openness to dialogue and debate preserved Hinduism—‘not coercion, violence and acrimony.’
In a chapter titled The Realm of Ideas, Varma elaborates how the quest for knowledge influenced art and culture. Focussing on the ‘approach to aesthetics as the cerebral rumination of what constitutes beauty and qualifies to be art,’ he offers a stunning exposition of the theory of rasa, developed around 200 CE, which ‘still remains a remarkable contribution of India to the world of creativity’ and maintains that ‘the beautiful must be liberating.’ From temple architecture to sculpture, painting, music, dance, theatre and literature, the rasa theory is the product of generations of scholarly work, but more than that it is ‘the leitmotif of an entire civilisational epoch.’
Military conquest, the next theme that the author tackles, examines how the Turkic invasions and the British colonisation left their mark on Hindu civilisation. The arguments are hard-hitting. Even as the efforts of the well-intentioned to gloss over or, in some cases, airbrush these periods of history, are ripped apart, the basic premise that ‘Reconciliation with history is best done through acceptance, not by evasion or suppression’ stands firm.
Though the Turkic invasions and the subsequent Muslim rule were ‘committed to the destruction of a culture,’ and the ‘need to convert unbelievers’, Hinduism survived by its innate ability for reinvention—leading to the flowering of the Bhakti movement. However, the British colonisation was something else altogether, not just in terms of the physical subjugation but for its more insidious impact that first gagged, by taking away the native languages, and then constrained, by ridiculing ‘native culture and creativity.’ Result: ‘a colonisation of the mind.’
An effect that has been furthered by intellectuals who claim to defend enlightened values but fail to realise that they are perpetuating the colonial-era narrative of cultural and intellectual inferiority relative to the “advanced” world. Not surprisingly, this narrative is being reversed by the grotesque mutation we see today when the responsibility of glorifying the Hindu past has been appropriated of those who, well-intentioned though they too are, in fact, caricature or, worse, police it. To stem the tide, new strategies are needed and they lie, Varma suggests, in a wider, deeper societal engagement with the original grand ideas of Hinduism. While another renaissance may seem slightly optimistic right now, reading this book is certainly a great start.
The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and The Way Forward
By: Pavan K Varma
Publisher: Westland
Pages: 416
Price: Rs 799