Recalibrating The Left

There is now a Hinduism club at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. In their mission statement, they express their intent to “celebrate the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of Hinduism by observing its festivals in the traditional manner” and applaud the “diversity and richness of Hindu culture.” They signed the statement off with the widely popular catchphrase “Jai Shree Ram,” a slogan incidentally also used consistently by Hindu mobs that participate in violent riots targeted at Muslim and “Lower-Caste” Indians and by members of the far-right party BJP that currently holds power in the country[1][2].

The club undeniably exists because of the recent and growing tendency of universities, particularly those in the west, to promote multiculturalism and identity politics from minority groups. The intent is clear; universities want to establish themselves as genuine international institutions by displacing Eurocentric narratives within academia and campus life, replacing them instead with perspectives that challenge their past conclusions and underlying assumptions. A commendable example of this would be the substitution of “white feminism” with other perspectives of feminism previously considered subaltern – because not only do “non-white” schools of feminism exist as more relatable platforms for international students on campus, they also productively challenge the conclusions that older feminism made on topics like war and the liberation of Black women. Does a Hinduism club achieve anything of such sort? Does it produce knowledge that is, in any meaningful sense, counterintuitive to the Eurocentric mind?

I could not imagine a type of identity politics more benevolent to Eurocentrism than Hindu or Hindutva politics. There are direct and indirect reasons for this. The first direct reason is that Hinduism – if not as a whole, then surely as how it is represented by those Indians who study in the west – is perfectly complicit with narratives of Aryan supremacy. This is because, as an unfortunate consequence of affirmative action in India for “Lower-Caste” Indians (Scheduled castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Castes), the Hindu groups outside of India are vastly overrepresented by “Upper-Caste” Indians[3]. UC Indians, especially those that engaged actively against nationwide social justice movements such as the Dravidian movement in the 20^th century, justify their alleged superiority by peddling the myth that they are ancestors of Aryan invaders of India during the Harappan civilization and thus are racially distinct from the descendants of other ancient inhabitants of India[4]. This theory is closely supported or conveniently substituted by the fact that traditional Hindu scriptures believe in the idea of rebirth and consider those born as Brahmins or “Upper-Castes” (caste status of a newborn is determined by the parents’ castes) as intrinsically superior to those beneath them in the caste system, because these newborns had supposedly lived more morally and dutifully in their past lives, and thus are born as beings that are spiritually closer to God[5]. Essentially, Hinduism posits Brahmins and other “Upper-Castes” as already superior at birth and thus rewards them with disproportional access to education or hedonistic pleasures while severely restricting the freedom of the “Lower-Castes.”

An indirect reason for why Hindu expression is radically unchallenging of Eurocentrism, which I refer to as indirect because it is a product of the attitude towards politics that progressivism and neoliberalism fostered, is that a wide variety of minority expression has been sympathized with and even fetishized by the white liberal hegemony, to the extent that their presence is entirely coherent with mainstream, non-radical discourse. That is, minority expression, insofar as it promotes multiculturalism and diversity within existing structures, is hardly beneficial to the victims of the many ramifications of Eurocentrism, such as colonialism and imperialism. Promoting Hinduism is an example-par-excellence: the goal only seems to be to bolden Hindu cultural practices on campus (let’s not forget the oppressive roots of these practices), and thus, those that partake in it have no inclination towards echoing the material struggles of  “Lower-Caste” Hindus or any other minorities.

Considering all this, is there any type of identity politics other than Hinduism or Hindutva that is more like white supremacy besides white supremacy itself? Despite what the proponents of this club or UC Hindus in general will tell you, their material interests lie in not confronting these immanent flaws of Hinduism, and if they do acknowledge it, they would either find no interest in running this club and therefore abandon it, or they’d expose themselves as hypocrites.

One could perhaps argue that, despite all this, the Hinduism club could and would exist as a harmless entity that simply celebrates festivals, enables enjoyment and so on. It doesn’t have to productively challenge any metanarrative for it to have legitimacy and the right to exist. Well and true. I’m speaking here specifically to those who either are members of the club but are, outside of the club, people who respect rationalism and social justice and wish to do so consistently, and those who are not actively practicing Hindus who wish to learn more about the religion through this club.

To the former, it is for your own good that you must recognize that Hinduism is a religion founded on structures of domination and oppression. Sure, you seem to only be celebrating festivals, but who are the heroes and villains in the stories behind these festivals? Why do the heroes tend to be members of “warrior” castes and why do the villains tend to be members of “tribal” castes? Why did the widely worshipped Ram kill Shambuka, a Shudra ascetic[6]? Is he, or any Hindu God for that matter, worthy of worship? Whatever you see as a benefit of expressing or practicing your culture as a minority or POC in UBCO, it is definitely not worth the kind of things you’ll implicitly defend or stay mum about once you begin to do so. We, UC Hindus, are quite unlike our ancestors in that we are not aware of the inextricable tie between Hinduism’s social functioning and our positions of domination. They did, and hence they possessed bourgeois class consciousness and acted accordingly. You’d find it very difficult to see a UC Hindu of your parents or grandparents’ age who would not openly profess exclusionary ideas in their religiosity. Our class consciousness, on the other hand, is precisely the kind where we are not conscious of anything, even of belonging to a particular class. That is why we can’t acknowledge that Hinduism itself is a structure of unjust violence that is incompatible with progressive ideals even if we interpellated other progressive positions from our surroundings (such as being pro-LGBTQ, which I assume many of you are). We must become conscious of the inextricable tie between Hinduism and structures of oppression – resisting this is perhaps a sign of a subconscious desire to hold that power of oppressor – and we must reject such injustice and actively promote anti-casteism. If that value means anything to you, you should find the idea of a Hinduism club repulsive.

To the latter, I strongly urge you not to entertain that thought. If you want to learn about Hinduism, I recommend picking up “Annihilation of Caste” by B.R Ambedkar, an exemplary anti-caste thinker. Pick up any of his books. Don’t listen to what the members of this club have to say about Hinduism. For the several reasons that I mentioned, they will, consciously or unconsciously, lie to you. They will evade you when you ask them about caste, or they will say impossible things – something like, “we believe in a Hinduism without caste.” There is very little to nothing that Hinduism offers spiritually or morally that doesn’t involve an element of caste. They will also absolutely not care enough to address the current waves of fascism echoed through Hinduism in India. They will not openly and thoroughly condemn the BJP’s Hindutva rhetoric. If you interact with them in the context of the club, you’re only speaking to a group of people who need a sign, a cultural object, for their minority status, and are absolutely indifferent (as a consequence of their class status), to the ill-contents of that cultural object.

In conclusion, I do not want to set an undemocratic standard for how clubs should be created in this university. I do not wish to cancel them nor do I believe in the possibility of cancelling them. If a Hinduism club never existed, the people who would’ve been members of it probably would have still held the same beliefs. I’m only asking for those who value rational discourse, whether they’re already in the club or were going to interact with them in some manner, to recognize that it is all one big circlejerk between a highly powerful and privileged group of individuals.

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[1] Refer to the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the 2020 Delhi riots.

[2] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/jai-shri-ram-a-slogan-that-changed-political-contours-of-india-1568051-2019-07-13

[3] https://theprint.in/opinion/the-economist-is-wrong-brahmins-become-ceos-in-us-not-because-of-quotas-in-india/797522/. Though Mandal (correctly) points out that such a level of UC migration is only possible because of AA for them where they go, a significant amount possesses the financial and social capital to do so even without AA.

[4] Laxman. K, Shibi. “ARYAN AND DRAVIDIAN METANARRATIVES.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 77 (2016): 697–705. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26552699.

[5] Refer to the concepts of Dharma and Moksha in Vedic scriptures.

[6] https://velivada.com/2019/04/13/celebrating-ram-navami-time-to-know-truth-about-king-rama/