How is it that a third-generation descendant of tremendous economic and political privilege, a beneficiary of material inheritance, gets to think it is “social justice” to call for the genocide of a tradition of merely cultural inheritance – and, presumably, the people who follow such traditions?
The comments of Udhayanidhi Stalin, son of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, comparing Sanatana Dharma to a disease and calling for its eradication, have stoked outrage, but the truth is that this comment is only a slightly more visible manifestation of an idea long normalised and even celebrated in academia in India and abroad.
Even though many Hindus today are calling out the comparison of dharma to diseases as a classic dehumanisation trope used by fascists and racists before committing genocide, the “Hindu exception” has long been deployed to somehow argue that in the Hindu context, such calls for extermination don’t count as fascism or racism because it is a call for resistance coming from weaker or poorer groups against more powerful, oppressive ones.
Narrow understanding of Sanatana Dharma
Many young urban Indians in privileged schools and colleges today are perhaps likely to agree with this position. In their narrow understanding, Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism is just Brahminism, a violent, oppressive ideology used by colonising elites to enslave and exploit their victims. So, it is perfectly acceptable for the victims to call for its eradication. It can’t be considered dehumanisation or genocidal.
But all around us in India, the contradiction remains directly before our eyes. Those who inherited cultural traditions, or obligations, to be more accurate, barely have economic privilege to pass on, except if they abandon their traditional duties as temple priests, for example. Those who inherit enormous amounts of wealth and power and even political positions despite the pretensions of democracy and equality in the modern world, on the other hand, make their money and their supposedly moral claims by attacking the inheritors of cultural obligations as if they have been the hoarders of economic privilege.
Also read: Udhayanidhi’s ‘eradicate Sanatana’ not a call to genocide. It’s internal critique of Hinduism
Unbreakable inherited privilege
Economic inheritance is a form of privilege and exclusion that everyone can see from the local to the global levels. From my old school in Hyderabad, the children of former chief ministers and Members of Parliament have become chief ministers and Members of Parliament now. In every state capital, and of course, in New Delhi, multi-generational families have held sway over wealth and power for decades.
Whatever their squabbles, that kind of inherited privilege, it seems, is unbreakable by any redistributive rhetoric or policy. And lest it be seen as an Indian thing, one should recall that just a few days ago, the news of George Soros passing on his empire to his son reached us. And Mr. Soros, as we know, is also reputed to care deeply about democracy in India.
Also read: India was a land of dharma but Europeans reduced it to Hinduism, Islam. And we accepted it
Contrast between cultural, economic inheritance
Power and wealth remain entrenched “vertically” across generations, while egalitarian, “horizontal” ideals seem to merely function as distractions for the destruction of another form of vertical, intergenerational inheritance, that of culture, of what the scholar D. Venkat Rao calls “biocultural formations”.
These “vertical” sensibilities could be something as simple as whether a family teaches its children to perpetuate their honouring of the sanctity of some sacred trees, or a local shrine, or a holy rock. Or whether, in the course of one generation, they decide that all that was “superstition” and that anything can be razed for profit or “progress”.
Another form of cultural inheritance might be the continuation of a traditional family practice like story-telling or theatre, and whether they have the community’s support in being able to do so. A vivid image I recall from my childhood is when my mother took me to see the Surabhi family’s production of Maya Bazar. As the play went on in a cold, open field in the night, the audience burst into delighted laughter suddenly. Even as the principal character, Ghatotkacha, performed his part on centre stage, a group of children of varying ages also dressed up like Ghatotkacha came onto the side of the stage. They stood for a few minutes, imitating their family elder in his memorable role, learning the family art.
The contrast between cultural and economic inheritance in the public sphere also came up in the Telugu media a few months ago in relation to a sad moment in my own family. My mother’s passing was preceded or followed by the death of several other Telugu film personalities. It turned out that the government had extended official state honours at the funerals of two stars, while it had failed to do so in the case of my mother and the great classical-revivalist-reformist director K. Viswanath.
Members of the public were reportedly upset about this, and a news programme had a whole episode devoted to this. The hosts were bluntly critical of the politicians. The stars who did not have children following them in the film industry did not get state honours, while the stars whose children also happened to be stars did. It was not about respect for the departed artistes, but just about what they could get out of the spotlight, that’s all.
The wider problem is that while political and economic inheritance goes on ruthlessly, biocultural inheritance of the kind associated with “Sanatana Dharma” in its most ceremonial and traditional forms is being demonised and stamped out through colonial-era, monotheist-informed platitudes and policies euphemistically labelled “reforms” generation after generation.
It is important, therefore, for educators, cultural creators, and students in India to start thinking and talking about the difference between cultural inheritance and economic inheritance.
After all, it is inheritance, in a political and economic sense, which informs philosophies of social justice. In India, it might be about caste and reservations. In America, it might be about race, reparations, and affirmative action; and also, of late, about caste.
The contexts differ, but the questions are similar. How much are people who live today accountable for the lives of their ancestors? Are their present privileges the result of their ancestors having deprived others? Equality or equity?
In India, neither the BJP nor the opposition disagree on policies like reservations. Neither is there much difference of late in the rhetoric around caste between the supposed Left and Right.
Caste is understood to be synonymous with inequality, and the antidote to both is understood broadly to lie in the rejection of biological or ancestral forms of identification in favour of an individualistic, meritocratic outlook.
But then, the way this plays out in real life is becoming painfully obvious.
The charade of politicians who inherit billions from their families pushing slogans and policies that destroy the modest livelihoods of traditional temple archakas who live on petty salaries and offerings from devotees should become a wake-up call to anyone who really cares about social justice, society, or justice. It should be very obvious to them that those shouting about eradicating Brahminism or Sanatana Dharma as if doing this would usher in utopian socialist redistribution of wealth and equality for all are people with deep interest in preventing this from happening in real life.
Young Indians need to become truly “woke” to this sort of phoney, religiously bigoted, genocidal “wokeness.”
Vamsee Juluri @vamseejuluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)