The fire sacrifice performed by Muslim Merat as part of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP)'s reconversion ritual culminates in their taking an oath, ‘Ham pṛithvirāj kī aulād haiṁ’ (‘we are the descendants of Prithviraj’). This is another moment in the making of popular history focusing on the blinding of the ‘last Hindu emperor’, as Tod famously called Prithviraj.

The reconversion ritual also includzes a screening of the film Samrāṭ Pṛthvīrāj Cauhān, which underscores not only Indian civilisation's wounded history but also the importance of the nation. A song from the film sung by Manna De celebrates sacrifice for the ‘birth-giving motherland that is greater than heaven’ (jananī janmabhūmi svarga se mahān hai). Prithviraj performs obeisance to the nation as goddess (Bharatmata) after which the army proceeds for battle. Prithviraj then becomes a significant symbol of the violence and cruelty suffered by Hindus at the hands of Muslims, following a caricatured version of the epic narrative of the Pṛthvīrāja-Rāso, which also demonstrates how it is possible to avenge defeat. In the climatic scene, the blinded Prithviraj targets the Sultan, as the poet Chand utters the famous couplet, killing him instantly.

The research on religious nationalism has been largely unable to show how it captured the popular imagination particularly of India's low caste and adivasi groups. One of the ways it accomplished this is by using popular history to craft individual and community identities. This essay is an exploration of ideological history as a sub-genre of popular history used by the VHP, articulated in its (re)conversion campaign, and the ways in which it ignores not only professional history but also critical scholarship relating to Hindi literature. It addresses the question of how Hindutva has enlisted the participation of subaltern groups by refiguring subaltern memory.

Of the two iconic events of Indian history, one relates to Mahmud Ghazni's seventeen raids on northwest India. His destruction of the Somnath temple has rendered him the standardised iconoclast. The other event is the conquest of India by Muhammad Ghuri and his defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan in a battle in 1192 CE. This encounter between the Afghan and the Rajput is read, according to some accounts, as inaugurating an 800-year period of enslavement of Hindus reversed only recently when Narendra Modi took over as India's prime minister in 2014.

Three Moments

An epic encounter took place with a meeting between Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1909. The students of Savarkar (1883–1966) had invited Gandhi for a discussion of the Ramayana on the occasion of Dashehra, the festival commemorating Rama's victory over Ravana. Each interpreted the figure of Rama differently. For Gandhi Rama represented ethical sacrifice, for Savarkar Rama epitomised the warrior ethic; Rama would violently eliminate evil for the cause of the nation.

The meaning of this epic encounter has to do with the transformation of the political for over a century and has continued to unravel to date as India grapples with hyper-nationalism that harbours a range of approaches from being majoritarian to being viciously anti-minority. Gandhi undertook one of the great experiments in the possibility of an ethical nationalism, one which could strive to be non-violent and other-oriented, its foundations being truth and inner transformation. Even Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1892–1963), who publicly acknowledged his responsibility for the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, would be transformed by Gandhi's practice. Indeed, the killers of Gandhi had also intended the assassination of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and Suhrawardy. The only such grand attempt at non-violence preceding Gandhi's was that of Emperor Ashoka (r. 268–232 BCE), who renounced war even though he had achieved victory on the battlefield.

In Gandhi's assassination in 1948 two kinds of nationalism confronted each other directly. Savarkar saw Gandhi as destroying any possibility of a grand future vision for an ancient civilisation. He saw non-violence as something that would weaken rather than empower India, and articulated a nationalism based on exclusion. His Essentials of Hindutva became a foundational text for the ideology that is often called political Hinduism or Hindu nationalism but is best referred to as Hindutva. Gandhi had hoped to transform his interlocutor and had gone to meet him after his release from the Cellular Jail. Savarkar remained unmoved.

The story of Indian nationalism is variously told and most often associated with the freedom struggle. Ashis Nandy relates it to the publication of Rabindranath Tagore's Gora in 1910, a novel in Bengali that according to him brought together two selves that augured Gandhi and Savarkar in the protagonist Gora.

Around the mid-1980s when the Vishva Hindu Parishad's (henceforth VHP) Paravartan was at its height, forty-six cases of image breaking occurred in Beawar. They were widely reported in the local and national press. According to the police, these were primarily cases of Muslims breaking Hindu icons and were popularly represented as having been caused by Muslim fanatics. Indeed, I myself had presumed, when I began my fieldwork in the area, that certain local Merat Muslims were responsible for the mass image breaking. There seemed to be an irrefutable logic at work here, for who else would break ‘Hindu’ icons? The ‘image-breaking’ was explained by their new Islamic identity that had become particularly prominent in recent decades as a consequence of the work of several Muslim educational and reformist organisations. The investigations in some of the villages where the imagebreaking episodes were concentrated, such as Nimgarh and Chang, brought home instead a drastically different world of popular religious practice and of a lived Hinduism, in the making and transmission of which the Merat Muslims had played an important role and, indeed, continued to do so.

As detailed in the previous chapter, after a major campaign of two decades, the VHP claimed to have made the largest number of conversions in the country in Beawar, a subdivision of Ajmer in northwestern India. According to data published after the first decade in 1991, 1,03,025 persons from 900 villages and 19,460 families had been subject to Paravartan, or had been ‘reconverted’. Umashankar Sharma, the architect of the Beawar conversion drive launched another in the adjacent locale of Udaipur in February 2014 and claimed to have converted 40,000. This chapter explores the Paravartan campaign and the disputes relating to conversion and the politics of icon vandalism that arose in its wake. The ethnography of Hindu nationalism is used as a point of entry into the transformation of Hinduism that is under way. The VHP claims to promote Hindutva, or Hindu-ness, that is, the quality of being a Hindu. But the project of social and religious reform and the accompanying purging of ‘social evils’ associated with the Paravartan campaign are changing conceptions of what it means to be a Hindu. The argument that follows will attempt to show how a canonical closure with respect to Hinduism is being attempted.

Consider what Ali Muhammad, a Merat, was told by an antagonist on 15 February 1996:

The icon-breaking episodes detailed in the previous chapter assumed that Muslims were responsible. Let us interrogate this assumption that came from the police administration, activists of religious nationalism and the anthropologist, that is, my own initial reaction, all of which came from our internalisation of the modern idea of Religion. Ali Muhammad's statement tells us of his bewilderment as some members of the family have been arrested for attacking gods, while some others are active followers of certain gods and goddesses. This is then the tension that is explored in these life histories—the introduction of the modern idea of religion as also what follows and what precedes it, not only temporally but as dissent. Mark the violence of Hindutva activists as they seek vengeance against members of their own community by attacking their ancestral deities which are, in effect, pagan practices from the standpoint of exclusive monotheism. The fraternal is not the site of either brotherhood or friendship but that of enmity.

This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of two interwoven strands, namely modernity and religion. It focuses on two interrelated fields, namely the work performed by the modern idea of religion and understandings of conversion. The two questions addressed are, What is the nature of religiosities before and after the advent of the modern idea of religion? What are perceptions and articulations of ‘conversion’?

On 30 January 1948, Gandhi died, falling to gun shots fired by Nathuram Godse (1910–49). This was the confrontation of two different ideologies of nationalism, two competing values of loyalty to truth and to the nation, and of two contrary emotions, namely love and anger. Gandhi believed in non-violence and was prepared to extend forgiveness to his interlocutors and even potential assassins. Savarkar, the mentor of the assassins thought non-violence was sinful and stood for violence against the enemy and an idea of national belonging that included only those whose sacred sites were in the subcontinent, thereby excluding Muslims and Christians.

James Douglass’ wonderful book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth sees Gandhi as a ‘martyr to the unspeakable’. The idea of the Unspeakable comes from Thomas Merton and refers to the void that enters public and official pronouncements that makes them ‘ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss’. Douglass sees in the systemic evil of murders not only the deceit and denial of the state, but also the possibility of confronting evil courageously, unveiling the face of the truth. Gandhi had foreseen his violent death, prepared for it for half a century, and was ready to meet his assassin with love—this was the key to his encounter with the Unspeakable. He had ‘trained himself, step by step, to die nonviolently to violence. It would be his final experiment with truth…. Walking with Gandhi means walking joyfully and nonviolently into God's arms—the arms of truth and love— through death. That is a way of hope,’ writes this Catholic theologian and activist for non-violence.

Douglass writes forcefully of Savarkar and Gandhi's ‘developing visions of violence and nonviolence, terrorism and satyagraha (truth-force), assassination and martyrdom, [that] competed then—and compete now with greater urgency— for the future of India and the world’. The two conflicting philosophies facing humankind today that Narayan Desai refers to in his blurb to Douglass’ book are really two versions of nationalism, one of them being an extreme nationalism that inspired Gandhi's assassination.

At the trial the defendants tried to murder Gandhi all over again, Douglass points out, decrying his person and vision.

Even as Hindutva garners support through popular history and the modern idea of religion, it encounters its fiercest opposition from another religious language—that of spirit possession. Hindutva activists dismiss ideas relating to spirits as ‘superstition’. But among both Hindus and Muslims are beliefs and practices relating to spirits as inhabiting the cosmos and porous bodies. These constitute shared mythic spaces and, as I have argued elsewhere, are the basis of living together amid conflict, a humbler translation of cosmopolitanism. Sushila Rawat, healer of Husain Tekri, represents a larger phenomenon involving both multiple shamanisms and also medical pluralism.

Strangely enough Sudhir Kakar identified a Hindu–Muslim divide in the discourse of possession and argued that a Hindu is usually possessed by a Muslim bhūt, or malignant spirit. This is ironic as it was his seminal work on India's healing traditions that brought out diverse meanings and expressions of possession and exorcism. Kakar writes:

In one of Kakar's case studies, a Brahman priest demanded to eat kababs during his trance. Kakar grants these the status of preconscious attitudes of Hindus towards Muslims. The communal imagination is well entrenched in childhood, he argues, although the drives continue to be suppressed. ‘Bhutna seems less an individual childhood anxiety than a collective fear of Indian Muslims.’

For me the following questions were salient. Are Hindus possessed predominantly by Muslim spirits? Do Hindu women betray sexual anxieties with respect to Muslim men? Does the discourse of spirit possession and exorcism suggest the otherness of the Muslim for the Hindu?

After his defeat by the Sultan Alauddin Khalji, Rana Bhim Singh, then ruler of Mewar, pondered the means whereby at least one of his twelve sons might survive

The princes contended for becoming the first victim of the goddess. After eleven had been killed, the Rana contemplated self-sacrifice. ‘But another awful sacrifice was to precede this act of self-devotion’, in that horrible rite, the jauhar, the rite through which ‘females are immolated to preserve them from pollution or captivity’.

A near century after James Tod's account, the Bengali writer-artist Abanindranath Tagore's famous collection of children's stories called Rājkahānī dramatically retells Sultan Alauddin's siege of Chittor. The goddess appears before Maharana Lakshman Singh and the room comes alive with the fragrance of her flowers and tinkling anklets. Lakshman Singh beholds Chittoreshwari Ubar Devi, the goddess of Chittor, and is both paralysed with fear and a sense of wonder and devotion at this spectacular sight. The lamp drops from his hands when she says,

In Abanindranath Tagore's retelling the sacrificial deaths are for the nation as Motherland.

Tod's images have reverberated in prose and verse, been amplified in histories and pamphlets, and have resounded from stage and podium. Few persons have had such a lasting impact on the Indian popular nationalist imagination.

This is a book about the making of the modern ultra-nationalist Hindu self. The emergence of ultra-nationalism did not just suddenly come about in the 1980s, leading to the Bharatiya Janata Party's consolidation of one-party dominance replacing what used to be the Congress system and, in addition, creating a unipolar ideological universe. Scholars such as John Zavos have tracked the origins of Hindu nationalism to the 1920s. Many identify it with the publication of Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva in 1923. Ashis Nandy sees its beginning in Tagore's novel Gora (1907). I argue that the publication of Colonel James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han in 1829–32 had an electrifying effect on vernacular nationalism. In its aftermath the fields of literature and history both became sites of national devotion.

The process has had a long gestation over a couple of centuries. The temporal frame examined in this book is 1812 to 2014, from Tod's Report on the Pindaris to what has been called New Hindutva and its coming to power with the election of Narendra Modi. In no case has there been a unilinear trajectory; indeed, there have been many setbacks as from Champaran through Chauri Chaura and the early 1940s when a more multicultural nationalism held sway. Surely the politics leading to Partition and its aftermath again demonstrated the strength of hyper-nationalism reacting to the Muslim League's demand for greater representation.

On colonialism my intervention relates to two arguments posed in the public debate on the topic: that it was a different form of imperialism grounded, first, in the idea of race and, second, in the modern idea of religion that could be used to bolster sovereignty through divide and rule. Colonial modernity produced new organisational forms that mobilised Hindus, Muslims and others. The British Empire played a diabolical role resorting to partition in four troubled regions, Ireland, India, Palestine and Cyprus and fostered identity politics. The deeper problem was the colonisation of the Indian mind. Two ideas, in particular, played havoc in the subcontinent. The idea of History and of Religion, both in the upper case.