Today, September 5, is the birth anniversary of S. Radhakrishnan. It is celebrated as Teachers’ Day in India.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher president of India, delivered the Upton Lectures in 1926 at Manchester College, Oxford and these lectures formed the material for his book, The Hindu View of Life. In a series of four lectures, one can discern that he assumes a certain received view of religion and presupposes the existence of Hinduism as a monolithic indigenous religion. He attempts to emphasise a certain essentialist view of Hinduism in these lectures. Such an assumption needs to be examined in the light of recent scholarship on Hinduism.
Radhakrishnan was conscious of the plurality of practices and beliefs of different faiths – at times leading to conflict – that prevailed in this land throughout its history but his anxiety to see a unity is revealed by his continuous emphasis about a certain spirit that binds the religious experiences of the people of this land. Such a bond is captured and “conceptualised in terms of one category”, in the words of Robert N. Minor, namely the category of Hindus.
Having spoken of diversity in the beginning, he then goes on to expatiate on the one stereotypical idea of Hinduism rooted in Vedas. The Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita are, for him, the sacred texts of the Hindus. He holds up such an essence of monolithic Hinduism by his rhetoric of spirituality and mysticism that, to a great extent, makes his views obfuscated and lacking in analysis.
He presents the idea of Hinduism with the underlying assumption that it is a monolithic religious entity but with the capacity to “absorb” multiple beliefs, customs and ideas. But this variety, for him, instead of undermining the idea of monolithic Hinduism, is what makes it so vibrant (perhaps this idea is often eulogised, in later discourses by others, by the phrase ‘unity in diversity’). Further, he portrays this capacity to absorb as one of growth, progress and conservation in the thoughts of the Hindus but rooted in Vedanta. Without making an argument for the existence of the monolithic idea of Hinduism he presupposes this as something that is given. What underlies the unity of the Hindu thought is the spiritual oneness that he so passionately appeals to. He thus attempts to reconcile, rather unconvincingly, the pronounced diversity of multiple faiths, which evolved in the course of the history of this land, and a hammered unity conceptualised under the category of Hinduism.
Radhakrishnan’s focus is on the aspect of spirituality in his grand discussion on Hinduism. By virtue of combining the right measure of seeming profundity and concealed ambiguity in the use of the term ‘spirituality’, throughout his discourse, he attempts to pull together the diversity of faiths and beliefs that prevailed in the country under his monolithic concept of Hinduism. It is a slippery and nebulous term that succinctly conveys a meaning which many think they can comprehend but anyone could read any meaning they wished with a feeling that they have plumbed profound depths in their supposed comprehension of this term.
He, in his attempt to expound the nature of spirituality, with rhetorical flourish, harnesses the slipperiness of the term to construct an essentialist notion of monolithic Hinduism. He thus presents, what would appear to be, a seemingly rich discussion on Hinduism to any lay reader. Moreover, a point that needs to be noted is that spirituality, a term laden with obscurity, is a modern Western construct that Hinduism has appropriated in the 18th and 19th centuries through the Protestant missionaries and Orientalists.
Radhakrishnan, from the very first lecture, develops a view that assumes a unified religion (or civilisation or culture) called Hindu. It never occurred to him to examine how this monolithic entity involved a process of invention and construction, particularly in the colonial times – an idea that was taken up and popularised by Swami Vivekananda. The Hindu View of Life is replete with obscure expressions and analogies and appears to be more a laudatory exposition of Hinduism than a work of an analytical mind.
An analytical understanding of Hinduism, as it later evolved – one that is expected of a philosopher – seems missing in this book. Gauri Viswanathan, a scholar at Columbia University, well captures such an understanding of modern scholarship, in her essay “Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism”, where she notes:
“One of the most striking advances in modern scholarship is the view that there is no such thing as an unbroken tradition of Hinduism, only a set of discrete traditions and practices reorganized into a larger entity called ‘Hinduism’… If there is any disagreement at all in this scholarship, it centres on whether Hinduism is exclusively a construct of western scholars studying India or of anticolonial Hindus looking toward the systematisation of disparate practices as a means of recovering a precolonial, national identity.”
Issues pertaining to the characterisation and meaning of religion become significant in this context. In meticulously presenting how the meaning of the term ‘religion’ evolved in history, William Cantwell Smith argues in his classic work on religion, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) that religion is nothing but a constructed entity. Drawing upon this work, Richard King, religious studies scholar and historian of ideas notes (in his essay Orientalism and the Modern Myth of “Hinduism”), how a ‘myth of homogeneity’ is created in fashioning the meaning of religion as a systematised entity.
A “highly abstract and univocal systems of thought” is imposed on multifarious religious experiences and on human cultural diversity. Coming specifically to Hinduism, King notes that the implications of this generalised and constructed view of religion can be seen in the construction of the “Modern Myth of ‘Hinduism’”. The doctrines of this modern Hinduism is sometimes referred to as “Neo-Hinduism” (a term employed by Paul Hacker, a German Indologist, and Robert Antoine, a Sanskritist), the newness in the “Neo-Hinduism” being a factor of Orientalist and Western influence on the study of religious experiences of the people of India. Swami Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan are counted primarily, among others, as being associated with this form of homogenised Neo-Hinduism.
Radhakrishnan’s exposition, through the grandiloquence of language, gives rise to a view of a culturally superior, monolithic-essentialist Hinduism that is home grown. Such grandiloquence conceals the “heterogeneity of Indian religiosity” and instead constructs an ideological and hegemonic discourse that best supports, as King notes, cultural and political elitism.
His constructivist presentation can further be seen as espousing the idea of Hinduism that is more prescriptive in nature (i.e. by prescribing what constitutes Hinduism) rather than descriptive. It is bound to be prescriptive as any constructivist agenda, particularly in matters of faith, cannot be descriptive.
Such a prescriptive view of Hinduism may serve the agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its pro-Hindutva adherents but falls far short of the standards of philosophical and historical scholarship. Not surprisingly, the Bharatiya Janata Party thrusts that very monolithic and hegemonic notion of Hinduism across the country. As Jawhar Sircar, a prominent public intellectual and a member of Rajya Sabha, observes:
“The BJP just does not appreciate that in different corners of the country, every shade of Hinduism and every cult represents something historic to its supporters. The party comprises largely-unthinking fatuous minds that obviously blunder when they miss the subtleties, oversimplify, or view the world from their narrow prisms.”
S.K. Arun Murthi has taught philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab.
