Appropriation in Guise of Tolerance: Neo-Hinduism and its Reception of the 'Other'

Abstract

Hinduism, in the writings of Indian (Hindu) intelligentsia in the nineteenth century and beyond, right from Radhakrishnan to Amartya Sen, has been eulogistically portrayed as very tolerant and receptive of other religions-cultures. No knowledge is ever neutral; rather it serves the purpose of those who produce it. This article, therefore, re-examines these (often hyperbolic) claims and the underlying motivations involved therein. This is not however to say Hinduism is/was intolerant. But the objective of the paper is to scrutinize the politics of the truth claim in saying that Hinduism is tolerant and the nature of identity politics inherent therein. The article demonstrates ‘how one [read: the ‘modern-secular’ Indian] construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future’. (Weinreich & Saunderson, 2004: 120) It points to how in the collective memory (of the ‘secular’ Indian) Hinduism has always been construed, needless to say anachronistically, in tandem with the idea of 'India' which is barely a few decades old. The article reveals how this politics of remembering oneself within the discursive legacy of purported ‘tolerance’ actually dismembers certain ethnic groups from one’s cultural past.

Keywords: Religion, Hindu, Muslim, India, Identity Politics, Historiography