The Hindu Left?

November 30, 2007

For another side to the issues covered in David Frawley’s article that I linked to in the previous post, read Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left? by Ruth Vanita at the Infinity Foundation website. Ruth Vanita is an Indian academic, activist and author who specializes in lesbian and gay studies, gender studies, and British and South Asian literary history. One of the focuses of her academic work is deconstructing the somewhat Gandhian stereotype that India has gone back and forth between arranged heterosexual marriages and ascetic celibacy. I quote from her article below:

Here, the position of Muslim, Christian and Sikh leftists is somewhat different. Because these happen to be minorities in India, the left has to support their rights, hence there is somewhat less embarrassment attached to acknowledging these identities as a modern Indian leftist. Secondly, they do not have to carry the burden of being called backward polytheistic idol-worshipers. Secular feminist organizations and Christian women’s organizations, such as the YWCA, often work in coalition in urban women’s movements. Complete agreement on all issues is not required in such coalitions; basic agreement on the issue at hand is sufficient. However, anyone who theorizes positively about Hinduism is almost invariably labelled “communalist” by the Indian left. Again, this is anomalous in a world context. Christian and Muslim leftists are taken seriously as thinkers in most parts of the world by atheist and agnostic leftists. In the U.S., where Hinduism is a late-comer, and does not have the particular history it does in modern India, many followers of Hindu gurus, such as Gurumayi, are active around liberal and leftwing causes, without perceiving any contradiction between these stances.

The consequence of this rigid positioning and labelling process in twentieth-century India was to push Hindu organizations such as the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission into a defensive stance, and, in some cases, into the arms of the Hindu right. The more such groups refused to disown Hinduism, the less seriously the English-educated secularists treated their social and political reform agendas, while the Hindu rightwing also was convinced that such groups were basically on its side. The irony here is that the social agenda of the secular left and the Hindu one-time left was in large part the same, despite the use of very different theories, language and terminology. To a considerable extent, it continues to be the same even today. On ground level, for example, women’s wings of different parties and organizations deal with the same issues of dowry, domestic violence, and rape. Except for those that advocate violent revolution, most other organizations working with the poor work on health and literacy, and set up employment generation programs and childcare centers. While they differ on many issues, they do not differ on all issues, yet they find it almost impossible to acknowledge this commonalty in public.

Unlike Frawley, Vanita is not a Vedic scholar, so I take issue with some of what she says in the article. However, on closer examination her main point is actually not different from Frawley’s, namely that this knee-jerk leftist opposition to Hinduism has to cease, and that progressive politics are easily incorporated by a Vedantic spiritual base.

I think secular leftists in India would be surprised to find Sri Aurobindo being rather sympathetic to communism in principle, as is evident in his work. What he objected to were the mechanical authoritarian schemes conceived of by the Europeans to implement communism. He saw, and history has proven, that communism and anarchism can only come to fruition when human nature itself changes. I quote from his illuminating aphorisms again:

Governments, societies, kings, police, judges, institutions, churches, laws, customs, armies are temporary necessities imposed on us for a few groups of centuries because God has concealed His face from us. When it appears to us again in its truth & beauty, then in that light they will vanish.

The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.

The communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all the practical schemes of Socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny and a prison.

If communism ever reestablishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a world-wide fiasco.

Vedanta realised is the only practicable basis for a communistic society. It is the kingdom of the saints dreamed of by Christianity, Islam and Puranic Hinduism.

India had three fortresses of a communal life, the village community, the larger joint family & the orders of the Sannyasins; all these are broken or breaking with the stride of egoistic conceptions of social life; but is not this after all only the breaking of these imperfect moulds on the way to a larger & diviner communism?

The individual cannot be perfect until he has surrendered all he now calls himself to the divine Being. So also, until mankind gives all it has to God, never shall there be a perfected society.

What socialist can read these quotes and still claim that Hinduism is “right-wing”? There is even a book on the subject, namely, Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: Integral Sociology and Dialectical Sociology. Another reading of Marx in the light of Sri Aurobindo is The Fallacy of Karl Marx: A Critical Appraisal of Marxism in the Light of Sri Aurobindo’s Social Philosophy. Moreover, as I understand it, Auroville was meant to be a spiritual commune. Mother abolished private property, personal profit, and inheritance. I don’t know to what extent these rules are still followed in Auroville, but I know that this was the approach the Mother took. (See Beyond Capitalism and Socialism? from the Auroville site for more details.)

Freedom, equality and brotherhood are the goals of socialist philosophy. The problem is that neither freedom, nor equality or brotherhood, are to be found in the physical body in its present state. Freedom, equality and brotherhood are characteristics of the soul, and it is in the soul and its flowering alone that true and lasting communism can prevail. And that, I think, was Sri Aurobindo’s message.

In any event, the whole right/left political division is another trick of the binary mind to keep the soul hidden from us.

I really can’t wait to visit India and feel the pulse and experience it for myself. The year 2009 seems too far away.

Posted by ned.
Filed under Contemplations, South Asia.