Vasudha Dalmia

Being Hindu in India: culture, religion,

and the Gita Press (1950)
The Gita Press has retained its reputation as the premier Hindu religious publish-
ing concern of North India from its inception in 1926 up until the present day. Its
Hindi monthly journal Kalyan – meaning ‘propitious’, ‘blessed’, ‘beneficiary’ –
was conceived at the same time and continues to enjoy an extensive circulation,
with 200,000 current subscribers.1 The Press routinely brings out a substantial
annual number of the journal, focusing on a particular issue or religious text.
In January 1950, barely three years after independence, the Press published its
voluminous special issue on Hindu Samskriti, or Hindu culture. This publication
constituted a major political and cultural intervention in contemporary discourse
that was to help shape the newly formed republic. The volume has had seven
print runs since then and is still in print today, testifying to the power it continues
to exert over vast sections of the North Indian reading public.2 Given the publish-
ing history of the Press, which focuses on Hindu religious texts and moral tracts
as drawing upon the authority of these texts, it is remarkable that the choice of
focus in this annual issue was not on Hindu dharma, or Hindu religion, but on the
more comprehensive ‘Hindu culture’. In this chapter, I shall focus on the notion
of religion as encased in the broader category of ‘culture’ in this publication. I will
also ask what equation Hindu culture is made to seek with the Indian nation as a
whole, what social imaginary it works with,3 and what space is found for individ-
ualisation within this imaginary.4
The Gita Press was founded by two men of the Marwari merchant community.
These men were responsible for its general tenor and contents both during their
lifetime and after, for their works continued to be reprinted and reissued. The
elder of the two, Jaydayal Goyandka (1885–1965), acted as a mentor and sage for

1 The English Kalyan-Kalpataru, started in 1934, has 100,000 subscribers.

2 The details provided in this paragraph stem from Mukul (2015), a brilliant, wide-ranging, and
comprehensive study that is full of insights. It also carries a six-page account of Hindu samskriti
(276–82). My paper builds upon the insights of Mukul’s book but asks further questions.
3 ‘Social imaginary’, as Charles Taylor defines it, is the ‘way our contemporaries imagine the
societies they inhabit and sustain’ (2004, 6).
4 I base the use of the term ‘individualisation’ on the reflections provided by Martin Fuchs (2016,
105); in particular, I look for the ‘attempt by social actors to fight and overcome conditions that
limit or constrict them with regard to their spiritual as also political wants and needs, their
search for self realisation’.

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1098   Vasudha Dalmia

the younger, Hanuman Prasad Poddar (1892–1971), who served as editor of Kalyan.
Together with Goyandka, he shouldered the responsibility for writing key articles
for the journal and for the Press’s other publications. Poddar was also the editor
of Hindu Samskriti, along with Chimmanlal Goswami.5 There seems little doubt
that Poddar and Goswami were instrumental in shaping the volume, although in
their explanatory words at the end of the volume, they acknowledge the help of
others in the editorial department of the Press. The bulk of the volume consists of
concise articles by a range of Hindu thinkers, leaders, and scholars on the ancient
merits and achievements of Hindu samskriti. It concludes with sections on the
main gods of the Hindu pantheon, on the incarnations of these deities, on prom-
inent ancient sages, on ideal devotees, kings, and great men, including modern
politicians. It also includes accounts of some ideal Hindu women. The scope of
the volume, and its effort to be as comprehensible as possible, to include the new
as well as the old, makes it clear that it was a modern enterprise, and one that can
claim a place of prominence in the contemporary world.6

1 The constitution of India as counter-pole

The timing of the publication of the volume was significant. The Constitution of
India, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on November the 26th 1949, came
into force in its entirety on January the 26th 1950. At this stage, the republic was
defined as both ‘sovereign’ and ‘democratic’. The addition of the words ‘socialist’
and ‘secular’ to the Preamble was a later development, brought about through
a constitutional amendment in 1976.7 However, this was the direction in which
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was already propelling the country.

5 He was editor of the English Kalyan-Kalpataru and became editor of Kalyan after Poddar’s
death, holding the post until his own demise in 1974.
6 Monika Horstman’s important essay, ‘Towards a Universal Dharma: Kalyan and the Tracts of
the Gita Press’, has made the point that the sanatana or eternal dharma propagated by the pub-
lications of the Press served the function of an ideological umbrella for modern Hinduism. The
Press was critical of individual creeds and sects, even as it sought to subsume them within sa-
natana dharma. And finally, though it claimed to represent tradition, it was an entirely modern
venture (1995, 298f.).
7 As the Preamble reads now: ‘We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute
India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, and to secure to all its citizens:
justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
equality of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all, fraternity assuring the
dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation; in our Constituent Assem-
bly this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1099

But this was not the only direction in which the new nation was being pushed.
We have to recall that, in the early years of independence, the nation was a project
very much in the making and one that stood on unsteady feet. The violence of Par-
tition, which occured simultaneously with Independence, had torn apart the fabric
of the North West and the East of the country. In addition to the countless instances
of rape, maiming, and killings that happened on both sides of the border, there
were now six million Hindu and Sikh refugees to resettle in India. This group pro-
vided a fertile ground for the propagation of grievances with Muslims in general.
For them, as for the vast majority of Indians, the fact that Pakistan was an Islamic
state seemed to demand that India too should heed its majority and become a
constitutionally-backed Hindu state. On the other hand, the large segments of the
Muslim population that still remained in India had also to be adequately protected
from Hindu and Sikh violence, which could take virulent forms. It was just two years
since Nathuram Godse, a right-wing fanatic, had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi at a
prayer meeting in Delhi on January 30th 1948. Shortly before this, the Mahatma had
insisted that the new Republic pay Pakistan its due share of the common Treasury.
This had caused much bitterness among right-wing Hindus, many of whom saw the
Mahatma as a partisan of the Muslim cause. His last fast unto death, known today
simply as the Delhi Fast, had been undertaken in the days immediately preceding
his assassination in order to stop the indiscriminate killing of Muslims, not only in
the old city of Delhi but across India as a whole. Godse’s act seemed the logical con-
clusion of the violence expressed against the Mahatma in Hindu quarters.
The Rashtriya Svayam Sevak Sangh (the National Volunteers Corps), although
not directly implicated in the act, was active in the propagation of its vision of a
Hindu India:

Realizing the Rashtriya Svayam Sevak Sangh’s (RSS) adherence to the ideology of commu-
nalism and violence and the hatred that it had been spreading against Gandhi and secular-
ism were the real forces behind the assassination – the RSS men had even celebrated it in
many places – the government immediately banned the RSS and arrested most of its leaders
and functionaries. Nehru, of course, had for some time been characterizing the RSS as a
fascist organization. In December 1947 he stated: “We have a great deal of evidence to show
that the RSS is an organization which is in the nature of private army and which is definitely
proceeding on the strictest Nazi line, even following the technique of organization”.
(Chandra et al. 1999, 79)

The ban was lifted in July 1949, once the RSS accepted the conditions laid down
by Vallabhbhai Patel, the Home Minister. The conditions were that

Constitution’. Sourced from https://www.india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/coi_part_full.

pdf. Last accessed July the 25th, 2018.

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1100   Vasudha Dalmia

[t]he RSS would adopt a written and published constitution, restrict itself to cultural activi-
ties and not meddle with politics, renounce violence and secrecy, profess loyalty to India’s
flag and Constitution and organize itself along democratic lines.
(Chandra et al. 1999, 79)

‘Culture’ would become a very loaded word, masquerading for a number of

political and social agendas. The experience of Partition strengthened views
which pulled society in two opposing directions. At one pole was the vision of
a pro-Hindu India, exemplified by groups such as the R.S.S.. The other pole was
expressly secular and pluralist, determined to overcome the trauma of partition
not through the elevation of one particular group but, rather, through the removal
of a state religious identity.
The Committee formed to draft the Constitution was headed by Dr. Bhimrao
Ramji Ambedkar, the icon of Dalit aspirations. It was Ambedkar’s concept of the
social order, as much as that of Jawaharlal Nehru, that guided the vision of India
that was enshrined in the Constitution. As Nehru wrote in the troubled period
immediately after Partition, ‘I believe in India being a secular state with complete
freedom for all religions and cultures and for cooperation between them. I believe
that India can only become great if she preserves that composite culture which she
had developed through the ages’. And in this expressly secular and pluralist social
order, ‘I am anxious therefore that the Muslims in India as well as all other reli-
gious groups should have the fullest freedom and opportunity to develop them-
selves. I am entirely hostile to Hindu or any other communalism in India’ (Nehru
2003, 173, letter to the Nawab of Bhopal, July 9, 1948). As Sunil Khilnani points out,

A specifically Indian compromise was needed, and he [Nehru] saw strengths in this. That
compromise was outlined in the practical adaptation, after 1947, of the state into a distinc-
tive model shaped by Nehru’s understanding of the Indian past: a model committed to pro-
tecting cultural and religious difference rather than imposing a uniform “Indianness”.
(Khilnani 2004, 167)

It was a powerful and mellow vision:

In his imagination, India appeared as a space of ceaseless cultural mixing, its history a
celebration of the soiling effects of cultural miscegenation and accretion, “an ancient pal-
impsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no
succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously”.
(Khilnani 2004, 169)

It stood to reason, then, that the western model of the nation, with one language
and one religion uniting it, could not serve for India.8

8 As pointed out by Khilnani (2004, 173).

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1101

Further, the Constitution envisioned a democratic and egalitarian order with

the provision of ‘reservations’ for the lowest castes, the ‘untouchables’, in gov-
ernment offices and educational institutions. This could not but be offensive to
the vast majority of those who held the caste order to be sacred. It is against this
background that, in January 1950, Hindu Samskriti was published in an effort to
influence the political and cultural direction of the newly founded republic by
insisting on the validity of caste hierarchy and the inherent Hinduness of India.
That the title of the volume spoke of culture rather than religion, though it
placed the Hindu religion, as interpreted by it, at its core, speaks for its effort
to be as comprehensive as possible. Therewith was posited a pan-Hindu culture
which dominated and occupied all of India, for ‘culture’ includes all aspects of
the person’s life, aspects that would, on the face of it, fall outside the scope of reli-
gion in the narrower sense. This double move, to speak not of religion but of
culture as determining the past, present, and future of Hindus, and thus of the
Indian republic at large, while at the same time placing religion at the heart of
this culture, is a well thought out strategy. It is followed consistently through-
out the massive volume: 904 pages in small print in octavo format. It did not
foreground Aryans (and we shall see below why), but insisted rather on Hindu
and Hinduness. It placed a series of Vedic hymns in the original Sanskrit, with
translations into Hindi, at the beginning of the volume followed by short quota-
tions from the Upanishads, from the epics – Valmiki’s Ramayana and the Mahab-
harata – and concluded with a brief excerpt from the Bhagavata Purana. In thus
including the canonical text of the Vaishnavas – one branch of the vast family
of faiths now grouped together as ‘Hindu’ – Hindu Samskriti, followed a pattern
which was sustained throughout the volume. Religion and the social order pred-
icated on it form the core of culture. This will become apparent as we proceed.
I shall focus on three articles I consider key to understanding the propositions
advanced by the volume as a whole.
The opening salvo is fired by Shankaracharya Brahmanand Saraswati of
Jytorimath, Badrikashrama, in an article entitled simply ‘Hindu-Samskriti’
(23–32). There are five present-day Shankaracharyas, each heading his own
monastery in five different corners of India. All five trace their origin to the Adi,
or Ur-Shankacharya, who is thought to have lived in the ninth century CE.9 The

9 The Dakshiānmnāya Sri Sharada Peetham (main matha) at Sringeri Sharada Peetham in Shrin-

geri, Karnataka. The Uttarāmnāya matha (Northern matha) at Jyotir Math in the city of Jyotir-
math, also known as Joshimath, Uttarakhand. This is the seat of the Shankaracharya referred
to above. The Pūrvāmnāya matha (Eastern matha), or the Govardhana matha at Puri, Odisha.
The Paśchimāmnāya matha (Western matha), or the Dwaraka Pitha at Dwarka, Gujarat. Final-
ly, Sarvagna Peetham Kanchi Moolāmnāya Sri kanchi Kamakoti Peetham (Sarvjna Peetham), or

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1102   Vasudha Dalmia

successive Shankaracharyas enjoy enormous religious authority in modern India.

Depending on his particular bent and personality, a Shankaracharya can become
a public figure whose stance on specific issues is given weight and prominence
by the media.
The second article I shall consider is by M.S. Golwalkar (1906–1973). Gol-
walkar’s contribution appears immediately after those of the major religious
leaders of Hindu India,10 despite the fact that he was the head of that ostensibly
secular force, the R.S.S., founded in 1925, at more or less the same time as the Gita
Press.11 Finally, I will discuss the article on – rather than by – Mahatma Gandhi,
placed two thirds of the way into the volume. The location of this article has its
own significance. The question that I will ask in this chapter is, what do these con-
tributions say about being Hindu and about individualisation in the new republic?

2 Religion as Hindu culture

The substantial discursive part of the volume begins with a vehemently worded
article by Shankaracharya Brahmanand Saraswati of Badrikashrama. He
launches into his exposition by outlining a definition of the two terms in ques-
tion: ‘Hindu’ and ‘samskriti’. He takes up the term ‘Hindu’ first, which he sees
as a denomination of ‘jati’. Jati can be translated as ‘caste’ and I will draw upon
this usage elsewhere in the present chapter. However, here it stands rather for
‘specific or generic characteristic or distinction’.12 There are two bases, the Shan-
karacharya says, for determining the jati of a people. They are desh or country
and dharmagrantha or religious texts. The country defines how some peoples
are named, thus: Germans, French, Bengalis, and Panjabis. But there is also a

the  Kamakoti at Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. Information sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/Shankaracharya. Last accessed July 25, 2018.
10 Eight articles by figures from prominent Hindu religious institutions follow. These are writ-
ten by the Shankaracharya of Dwarika, Karpatri Maharaj, an anonymous Mahatma, the Head
of the Ramanuja Sampradya, an anonymous Mahatma of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal,
Madhavanand Maharaj (presumably the head of the Madhva Sampradaya), Aurobindo and the
Mother – head of the Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. Aurobindo’s article is translated from
the English and is not written originally for the volume.
11 Anderson and Damle 1987 still remains the most detailed and reliable account of the organi-
sation, its history, and the mode of its functioning. See also Basu et al. 1993 for a critical account
of the Hindu Right.
12 Platts, John T: A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (369): http://dsal.uchicago.
edu/dictionaries/platts/. Last accessed on July 25, 2018. I refer to Platts throughout for the trans-
lations of Sanskrit terms I give.

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1103

further determination by reference to the religious texts of a people, thus Chris-

tians because of their belief in the Bible or Muslims because of their belief in the
Quran. On closer inspection, country proves to be an inadequate base for defin-
ing a people. Bengalis, for instance, can be Hindus or Muslims. It is the religious
texts, then, that define the ultimate affiliation of a people. Jati is thus determined
by religious texts rather than country or manners and customs.
Saraswati also notes the belief that there originally existed a single Aryan
people who migrated to different countries and, in doing so, acquired different
names. If they had all believed in the Vedas and other Shastras, then, regard-
less of the country in which they settled, they would have remained ‘Arya’ or
‘Hindu’. However, some turned instead to the Bible and the Quran, proving that
the primary definition of a people is not their having originally belonged together
but, rather, the religious texts to which they now adhere. The Hindus (Arya is now
simply dropped) are of one jati because they believe in the Vedas and other Shas-
tras; a Hindu bases his (the reference is always male) conduct, in both this- and
other-worldly contexts, on actions propagated by the srutis, smritis, Puranas, and
the epics. He believes in the varnashrama order (23). More on this order below.
Being Hindu is, then, based on belief in a given social order drawn from spe-
cific religious texts. This first premise makes no political or nationalist claims for
being Hindu, although these will follow.
The Shankaracharya then embarks on a lengthy and involved description of
samskriti, deriving it from Sanskrit roots to mean ‘bhushan bhuta samyak kriti
ya cheshta’, that is, ornamented actions and exertions in their entirety. Samskriti
enfolds all fields pertaining to cultivated activity. Of all creation, it is human
activity alone that qualifies for this definition, not that of other species, for this
activity leads to happiness and peace. Samskriti is further based on its philosoph-
ical texts. The questions of who I am, where I come from, where I will go, who is
the creator of this universe, and so on, are all issues that are resolved by philoso-
phy. In short, its religious and philosophical texts, which ultimately deal with the
means of attaining mukti or release in this life, are the defining characteristics of
a jati (25). The Shankaracharya is circling back here to his original proposition
regarding the centrality of religious (philosophy is subsumed within this) texts as
the defining feature of a people and their culture. The most dynamic form regard-
ing manners and conduct of this culture is the varnashrama order, the belief in
the division of Hindu society into four varnas or castes13 and in the four ashramas
or stages of life (24, 26). This culture is auspicious and beneficiary (kalyan) not

13 These are Brahmans or priests and scholars, Kshatryiyas or warriors, Vaishyas or merchants
and Shudras or servers.

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1104   Vasudha Dalmia

only to Hindus but to the entire universe. Following the varnashrama order makes
for the most complete development, both personally and socially.
The Shankaracharya then elaborates on the four ashramas in conventional
terms: brahmacharya, or celibacy in student life; grihastha, or domesticity in
married life; vanprastha, or part-retirement from family and social life; and,
finally, samnyasa, or asceticism towards the end of life. He offers no new insights
for the adjustments presumably needed to fit these ancient notions into modern
lives. This is also the case with the four-fold varna division. In Hindu samskriti, a
person’s jati, here meaning caste, and, consequently, his actions and professions,
are decided according to birth, and thus accord with the nature with which he is
originally endowed. If a person is made to follow a life pattern that differs from
the one he has been endowed with, he will have to exert himself all the more,
losing unnecessary energy in the process. But if all act in accordance with their
place in the given social order, everything will be achieved peacefully and easily,
leading naturally to societal progress in which there will be no conflict between
old and new. Varnasamkarta, or the corrupting mixture of varnas, leads to the
destruction of society and nation. Here we see the notion of ‘nation’ creeping in
unannounced, for without further discussion, Hindu society has become coeval
with the Indian nation at large. In fact, though, this equivalence has been inher-
ent all along, given that it is the Hindu order alone which constitutes the nation
(27). The notions of purity-impurity, touchability and untouchability, are a dis-
tinctive quality of Hindu samskriti (28). It was still politically possible to make
such pronouncements in 1950; today they would need to be made more covertly.
The Shankaracharya goes on to exalt the ethical qualities that make Hindu
samskriti so outstanding: respect for women, respect for the elderly, and so
on, there being no space for hatred of any kind in this culture. Ultimately, he
emphasises again, it is the societal division into the varnas and the stages of life
that determines what constitutes Hindu samskriti. By making the belief in reli-
gious texts the centre of the definition of Hindu, the Shankaracharya explicitly
excludes Christians, Muslims, and others from any form of belonging within the
social order, which is universalised even as it is extended and made peculiar to
all of India. Further, by speaking of the four castes as alone determining this
social order, Dalits, referred to as antyaja, that is, outside the four-caste order, are
placed entirely outside the Hindu social order and with that the nation.
According to the Vedas and other Shastras, temples, and the icons installed
in them, are defiled by the entry of the antyaja. Ghosts and spirits enter such
temples instead of divinities and the worship of these entities strengthens evil
tendencies. This results in the prospering of conflict, anger, and hatred, while
sickness and natural calamities, such as excessive rain, droughts, earthquakes,
etc., make for the destruction of the king and his subjects (31).

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1105

Addressing Hindus at large, the Shankaracharya proclaims: yours is the

leading culture in the world. There is no worldly or otherworldly goal that you
cannot attain. You have withstood the most atrocious attacks over the ages; now
you need to stay firm on your path. He then takes on those in charge of the gov-
ernance of independent India, asking that they oversee the creation of an order
in accordance with pure Indian culture, for it is Hindu culture alone which con-
stitutes Indian culture (29). If this does not happen in an independent India,
what meaning and value would political independence have? There should be
no interference in, or opposition to, the right of Hindus to follow their varnash-
ramadharma. It is not possible to remove this order and try to set up another that
is classless and casteless. This is the very least that the Hindus can expect from
their own government, that their svarupa, or own form, not be attacked as if ruled
by a foreign government (30).
The Shankaracharya ends by formulating seven demands of the government:
that governance be moulded according to Hindu culture; that there be a law
against the lowest castes entering Hindu temples, so that divine wrath not fall
on all; that cow slaughter be banned; that the laws of purity and pollution not be
eradicated so that the Hindu jati should not face decline; that marriage within the
gotra14 and outside the varna, and divorce, etc., should not be enshrined in law;
that a societal order without varna and jati not be ordained, thus undermining
the Hindu order; and, finally, that the Hindu Code Bill and similar legal enact-
ments be entirely dropped.15 The Shankaracharya closes with a prayer to the lord
to save the Hindu jati.
The order that is propagated here is entirely Brahminical or as defined by
Brahims, making no concessions to change and with a narrowly defined role for
each citizen (always conceived of as male), one entirely derived from varnash-
rama. Man is straitjacketed by it; he has to follow the path laid out for him. He
derives the meaning of his social existence entirely from his place in this order. He

14 A Hindu clan tracing its lineage from a common ancestor, usually a saint or a sage.
15 See Mukul (2015, 257–66) for an account of the resistance offered by Gita Press and Poddar
and Goyandka to the Hindu Code Bill, on the table in the Legislative Assembly from 1944. Gita
Press campaigned vociferously against it. When reintroduced in post-independence India, with
Dr. Ambedkar as the Law Minister, the bill excited the same violent response. When had equality
brought happiness? Inter-caste marriage, the restriction placed on polygamy, the relatively liber-
al laws of inheritance, adoption, would all play havoc with the system. A Hindu man could marry
a low-caste girl, or a Christian, or a Muslim. Hindu women would theoretically be free to marry
even Muslim men. The Indian National Congress’s landslide win in the first general elections left
such arguments behind, and the Hindu Code Bill was finally passed in the form of four separate
bills between 1954 and 1956, much watered down but none the less promising men and women
much greater flexibility than before.

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1106   Vasudha Dalmia

is not free to change it; he cannot, for instance, marry outside his caste without
causing chaos in society.
The article is followed by a five-stanza hymn to Hindu Bharat or Hindu India
by someone who calls himself simply ‘Ram’ (33). The hymn brings out once more
what has been ostensible all through the Shankaracharya’s expostulations – that
Dalits,16 non-Hindus, most of all Muslims but also Christians, simply do not figure
in the new republic. They are accorded no space, no rights.
In her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), published a year after Hindu Sam-
skriti, Hannah Arendt spoke of the German and Slavic pan-movements of the first
part of the twentieth century. These movements accorded the individual a new
meaning as a member of a cohesive whole and were to merge seamlessly with the
agenda of totalitarian governments when the time came. What the Shankaracha-
rya, and the mass of articles in the volume that follow in his footsteps, depicts is
not unlike the goals of these pan-movements. In propagating the universal and
all-comprehensive reach of Hindi samskriti, a pan-Hinduness is being posited,
which swamps the rights of all non-Hindus while, at the same time, claiming
divine rights for Hindus as a whole. As Arendt pointed out:

The tribalism of the pan-movements with its concept of the “divine origin” of one people
owed part of its great appeal to its contempt for liberal individualism, the ideal of mankind
and the dignity of man. No human dignity is left if the individual owes his value only to
the fact that he happens to be born a German or a Russian; but there is, in its stead, a new
coherence, a sense of reliability among all members of the people which indeed was very
apt to assuage the rightful apprehension of modern men as to what might happen to them if,
isolated individuals in an atomized society, they were not protected by sheer numbers and
enforced uniform coherence. (Arendt 1976, 235)

If it robs the caste-Hindu of a sense of individuality, of the freedom to disagree, to

evolve his thoughts and pursuits, his sense of the self, outside of the order, it also
lends him, as Arendt puts it, a sense of a new coherence, of mutual support from,
and belonging among, others of his kind.

16 There are two further articles on untouchability in the volume, one dealing with why Dalits
are forbidden to enter temples (214–7) and the other discussing the logic underlying this and
other such practices (218). Mukul has discussed Poddar’s acrimonious correspondence with Ma-
hatma Gandhi over the latter’s fast against the British award of a separate electorate for untouch-
ables. The ideas put forward by Poddar are identical with Shankaracharya’s (2015, 53–7).

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1107

3 The political-theological grid of the Hindu Right

A different route that leads to the same sense of absolute merger and absolute
affiliation is proposed by Madhavrav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the Sarsanghsamcha-
lak, or chief executive, of the R.S.S. from 1940 to 1973. Golwalkar’s contribution
is also entitled ‘Hindu samskriti’.17 It is just four pages long but it puts forward
its propositions boldly and clearly (57–61). Golwalkar is versed in the Sanskritic
tradition; his language is also Sanskritic in the extreme. He is regarded as learned
by his followers, hence his title ‘Guruji’. Here I retrace the moves he makes and
the apparent simplicity with which he proceeds to set out his argument. There are
many religious paths, he says, for mankind to attain ultimate happiness. They fall
into two broad groups: those that try to attain happiness by devotion to Ishvara
or the lord, understanding him as the essence, and those who believe that what is
apparent is the essence of the universe, seeing nothing other than this and trying
to obtain the means to satisfy natural needs and desires as easily as possible.
Much modern thought has taken this latter direction. However, as time passes,
these paths breed dissatisfaction. There are two reasons for this. First, it is impos-
sible to satisfy all sensory needs and it is in pursuit of the fulfilment of such needs
that the most fearful wars are fought. Second, man is not without understand-
ing (nirbuddhi). In the course of time, he understands that happiness lies not in
external things nor in fulfillment of these sensory needs but, rather, in pacifying
sensual desires (vasana).
It is out of this thinking and these expectations that religious paths are born.
But these are paths founded on faith alone, whilst man is not able to forget the
joys and sorrows of life. These religious paths seem unable to take care of the joys
and sorrows of every-day life as it is lived. Man is thus faced with fearsome irres-
olution and this leads him to turn towards faith-less materialism. However, man
also has buddhi (understanding, intellect, discernment). He searches for the ulti-
mate reality and alights upon a range of options. The sages of ancient India have
pondered upon all these. These sages understood that happiness is based not
in things but, rather, in the self (atmanishtha), and that man can attain eternal
peace (chirantan shanti) without any kind of material plenitude.
It is the jiva, the living Self, the vital principle or spirit, that is endowed with
happiness (sukhamaya). All creation is, thus, endowed with happiness, is the
manifest form (vyakta rupa) of endless truth. In addition to the jiva, the living

17 As Mukul notes, Golwalkar and Poddar admired and appreciated each others’ work; Gol-
walkar had visited the latter in Gorakhpur (2015, 66, 155f.). On Golwalkar’s early life, his induc-
tion into the R.S.S., and his general orientation as its leader, see Anderson and Damle (1987, 41–5,
112f.). On his significance in today’s India, see Bal 2017.

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1108   Vasudha Dalmia

Self, and the jagat, the world, there is a third point, brahma, who forms the
entire mandala of the universe, pervading all while yet being apart from all and
entirely independent. Experiencing the presence of this brahma is the ultimate
happiness. The paths that lead to the attainment of this experience are fourfold:
karma, action; bhakti, devotion; yoga; and jnana, knowledge. The jiva is himself
ultimately brahma, because it is the all-pervasive brahma who manifests in the
form of jiva. The vaster the jiva feels, the more happiness he attains. The ‘I’ and
‘mine’ impose limits on him. He has to abandon the slavery of these limits and
become a renouncer. Golwalkar is here merely reproducing in accessible form
what is familiar to most educated Hindus, in one form or another, as advaita: the
monistic/non-dualistic philosophy propagated in various sophisticated schools
of philosophical thought in the subcontinent at least since its first fully-fledged
articulation by Shankara in the ninth century CE. But the next step Golwalkar
takes is surely peculiar to his thinking.
Once renunciation has led to the obliteration of the feeling of limitedness
(samkuchit bhavana), what first offers itself for consideration is a vaster entity,
that is, one’s own society: the nation (rashtra). The feeling emerges that the
brahman who exists in the jiva, who says ‘I’, is manifest in a vaster form in this
rashtra. Rashtra or nation is thus raised to a transcendental form. There is no
question here of positing a divine origin for the Hindu nation. Much more than
this, the nation is part of the brahman. Golwalkar does not seem to be speaking
of nations in general when he propounds this principle but, rather, of the Hindu
nation alone.
Let us pause for a moment to consider the significance of the term rashtra in
Golwalkar’s thinking. In his 1939 treatise, We or Our Nationhood Defined, which
he later disowned,18 Golwalkar lays out his understanding of rashtra19 in a way

18 After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, following which Golwalkar was
incarcerated for a time, the work became authorless as Golwalkar and the R.S.S. disowned it. It
has recently been reprinted by Shamsul Islam (2006, second edition 2015). Islam discusses the
publication history of the work – the last of its four editions came out in 1947 (63) – showing in
his introduction that although the treatise became authorless and went out of print, Golwalkar
continued to think along the lines laid out therein (13–99). Jaffrelot sees this work as the charter
that the R.S.S. had previously lacked (Islam 2005, 68).
19 We or Our Nationhood Defined glosses the term rashtra as follows: ‘The word Rashtra, which
expresses the whole of the idea contained in the English word “Nation” is as old as the Vedas
and in the ancient works is described in a general way, as being so (Rashtra in truth) when it
included “Swaraj” – independence, the power of the National Race over the whole land from sea
to sea […]’ (Islam, 187f.). As Mukul has shown, the 1947 annual number of Kalyan opened with an
extract from a speech by Golwalkar. Entitled ‘Sachcha Rashtravad’ or True Nationalism, the piece
rails against the following blunder: ‘We accepted India has many nations and like the Americans

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1109

that, he maintains, follows the definitions of the ‘learned political thinkers of the
world’20:

In fine, the idea contained in the word Nation is a compound of five distinct factors fused
into one dissoluble whole [,] the famous five Unities: Geographical (country), Racial (Race),
Religious (Religion), cultural (Culture) and linguistic (language).21

He then considers these five factors in some detail, first in general terms and then
specifically in the Hindu case. In doing so, he fuses religion and culture into one,
just as the Shankaracharya had done in the preceding article. As he proclaims:
‘Culture is but a product of our all-comprehensive Religion, a part of its body and
not distinguishable from it’ (Islam 2015, 158).22 Religion for him is not an individ-
ual question that needs to be kept out of ‘public and political life’. Rather,

agreed to have a federation. This gave rise to a mutilated version of sub-nationalism in India’ that
‘lacks true Bharatiyata (Indianness)’ (2015, 248). In June 1947, Kalyan carried another incendiary
speech by Golwalkar (ibid., 253).
20 As Jaffrelot has shown, Golwalkar drew inspiration for his definition of what constitutes the
nation from German thinkers, amongst others from ‘Bluntsley’, or Johann Kaspar Bluntschli,
who defined nations as ‘organic beings’ with a ‘national spirit’ and ‘national will’. The nation
was not composed of an arbitrary combination of men but of those rooted in a specific civiliza-
tion as articulated in the physique of the race and in their language and manners. Golwalkar’s
understanding of race differed from the German; it was not obsessed with purity of race but
rather with common cultural traits as inherent to the group, collectively inherited from their
forefathers (2005, 70–4).
21 Islam 2005, 154.
22 Golwalkar differed in his conceptions of Hindu culture and religion from that other great
ideologue of the Hindu Right, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), who was president of
the Hindu Mahasabha from 1937 to 1943. His best-known work, The Essentials of Hindutva was
published in Nagpur in 1928. Excerpts here are from the web edition of the work: http://www.
savarkar.org/en/hindutva-hindu-nationalism/ essentials-hindutva. Last accessed on July 25,
2018. The overarching concept for Savarkar was culture rather than religion, which was sub-
sumed under ‘common fairs and festivals, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments’. His
definition of Hindu was threefold, whereby culture was defined, amidst its other attributes, by a
common history, common literature, etc., rather than theologically: ‘A Hindu then is he who feels
attachment to the land that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu as the land of his forefathers – as his
Fatherland; who inherits the blood of the great race whose first and discernible source could be
traced from the Himalayan altitudes of the Vedic Saptasindhus and which assimilating all that
was incorporated and ennobling all that was assimilated has grown into and come to be known
as the Hindu people; and who, as a consequence of the foregoing attributes, has inherited and
claims as his own the Hindu Sanskriti, the Hindu civilization, as represented in a common his-
tory, common heroes, a common literature, common art, a common law and a common jurispru-
dence, common fairs and festivals, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments’.

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1110   Vasudha Dalmia

Religion in its essence is that which by regulating society in all its functions, makes room for
all individual idiosyncrasies, and provides suitable ways and means for all sorts of mental
frames to adopt, and evolve, and which at the same time raises the whole society as such,
from material, through the moral to the spiritual plane. (159)

Politics itself becomes a small factor ‘to be considered and followed solely as one
of the commands of Religion and in accord with such commands’ (160). He denies
the validity of sects, in short the plurality of Hindu belief systems, by proclaiming
that they are ‘only parts of religion’ and not a multitude of religions (161). Finally,
language, in the Hindu case Sanskrit, is ‘an expression of the Race spirit, a man-
ifestation of the National web of life’ (162).
We can return now to Golwalkar’s article in our volume. After having pro-
claimed the identity of this ‘I’ with the nation, he proceeds to further develop
his proposition.23 The person becomes vast (vishal) following the identification
of the individual (vyakti), society (samaj), and the world-Self (vishwatma). Bring-
ing these three together, he experiences a vastness that is difficult to experience
in this world. A philosophical-theological edifice is thus restructured to include
as an integral part an entirely modern concept, samaj or society. This is further
equated with rashtra or nation, as if it had existed as such since time immemorial
and had integrally belonged there. Society and the nation thus acquire metaphys-
ical dimensions.
This identification of man with nation, as Golwalkar goes on to explain it,
makes for great happiness and peace in society. The people who constitute this
society are of the same kind, have been created out of the same essential princi-
ple (sattattva), and therefore love one another. Society will be happy, progres-
sive, and best (shreshtha) in the same measure as the number of knowledgeable
(jnani) people who exist in it (59). By this he presumably means those who have
attained a higher state and merged with the nation. To dream of ‘Anarchism –
withering away of the state’ (English in the original, 60) is possible only in Hindu
culture. But while we wait for this situation to come about, Hindu culture seeks

23 As Damle and Anderson put it, Golwalkar in his Bunch of Thoughts, ‘mentions four virtues that
characterize the ideal man. The first is “invincible physical strength” […] referring to the calm re-
solve needed for commitment to disciplined activity. The second virtue, which Golwalkar called
“character”, is a personal resolve to commit oneself to a noble cause. These two virtues must be
guided by “intellectual acumen”, the third virtue. Lastly, “fortitude” is a virtue which permits the
honorable person to persevere in a virtuous life. To summarize, the virtuous life is, above all, char-
acterized by industriousness combined with a zealous and painstaking adherence to dharma’ (1987,
74; the authors have used an earlier edition of Golwalkar’s work, the page numbers they give do
not tally with my edition). Golwalkar remains consistent in his thinking. The adherence to dharmic
norms precludes any deviance from them, readying the individual for his merger with the nation.

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1111

to regulate matters, to provide a corrective to disorder and misrule. Hindu culture

and social order are here made coeval with the state without any further discus-
sion. Non-Hindus are obviously excluded from this order, since the same fellow
feeling and love cannot exist outside the religion which fuses them together.
Hindu culture has sought to provide an order to curtail the injustice perpe-
trated by those with wealth on those without wealth. This is the first and only
mention of social inequality; it is immediately countered. For Hindu culture has
seen that mutual dependency, mutual cooperation, fellow feeling, and affection
are what keep society well ordered. Hindu culture has sought to follow this prin-
ciple in the constitution of its social order (60).
Golwalkar concludes by reverting to his central thesis: ‘In everyday (vyava-
harik) life, all people should follow the resolve (dharana) that this society is the
manifest form of the incorporeal Highest Self (amurta paramatma)’. This Highest
Self is the lord of the world.

The individual, becoming vast, in order to attain this happiness-filled (sukhamaya) Highest
Self, has the duty to serve this manifest form of the Highest Self by becoming one with it,
by renunciation, by selflessness, with his body, mind and speech, by offering it body, mind
and wealth. Only by fulfilling this duty with his entire feeling (sarvabhava), can he attain
success in this life, can attain happiness. (60)

The wise who practice this Hindu culture will see that only this will lead to world
peace and they will light the path for those who have forgotten their culture. Gol-
walkar closes by offering his short article at the feet of the Highest Self in the form
of the Hindu nation (61).
This idea of the individual as part of a whole is repeated incessantly in Gol-
walkar’s writings, though elsewhere less explicitly clothed in a theological edifice
than in the above formulation. Expressed in more general terms, which are of
some significance for our considerations here, he says in the translated version of
his writings compiled under the title Bunch of Thoughts:

In the same manner, individuals, though imperfect, when merged into a corporate whole,
can give rise to a perfect society. And therefore the superficial differences born out of the
imperfections of the individuals are only indicative of the diverse manifestations of the one
great and perfect and mighty reality – the society. This appreciation of the inherent spark
of Truth, of Divinity in every individual, has penetrated into our various components and
spheres of life – religious, social, political and economic – and patterned them for a har-
monious pattern of mutual goodwill and respect. This catholicity of spirit is an altogether
unique contribution of our culture to world thought. (Golwalkar 1980, 51f.)

As Golwalkar puts it a little later in Bunch of Thoughts: ‘The ‘permanent’, there-

fore, is the national life. The ‘impermanent’ is the individual’ (61). This, then, is

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1112   Vasudha Dalmia

a consistent pattern of thinking: national life is identified with the transcend-

ent Highest Self, or Ultimate Reality, and the individual is asked to merge with
this national life in order to acquire perfection and permanence.24 Once again,
Hannah Arendt provides a crucial insight into the kind of thinking that underlies
pan-movements such as this:

The pan-movements preached the divine origin of their own people as against the
Jewish-Christian faith in the divine origin of Man. According to them, man, belonging inev-
itably to some people, received his divine origin only indirectly through membership in a
people. The individual, therefore, has his divine value only as long as he belongs to the people
singled out for divine origin. He forfeits this whenever he decides to change his nationality,
in which case he severs all bonds through which he was endowed with divine origin and
falls, as it were, into metaphysical homelessness. The political advantage of this concept
was twofold. It made nationality a permanent quality which no longer could be touched by
history, no matter what happened to a given people – emigration, conquest, dispersion. Of
even more immediate impact, however, was that in the absolute contrast between the divine
origin of one’s own people and all other nondivine peoples, all differences between the indi-
vidual members of the people disappeared, whether social or economic or psychological.
Divine origin changed the people into a uniform ‘chosen’ mass of arrogant robots.
(Arendt 1976, 233f.)

Golwalkar takes the hierarchical thinking of the Shankaracharya, and the bulk of the
articles in the volume that echo him, to another level of abstraction, in which varna,
the social status one is born into, is to be considered natural and innate to the person.
The ground reality can be whatever it is; he leaves it untouched and uncritiqued. In
Golwalkar’s thinking it becomes irrelevant. He does not address any notion of social
inequality, any question of social injustice. The same is true of all sense of individu-
ality. Difference of personhood is considered superficial, a sign of imperfection. Indi-
viduality is regarded as something that needs to be submerged into a greater whole
to achieve its potential, into samaj or Hindu rashtra. This is but one step towards a
yet greater whole, paramatma or the Highest Self, making the rashtra or nation part
and parcel of a transcendence that is absolute, unreachable by history.
What of those who are not Hindus? In his 1939 book, the author who then
identified himself as Golwalkar maintained roundly that,

all those, who fall outside the five fold limits of the idea [nation], can have no place in the
national life, unless they abandon their differences, adopt the religion, culture and lan-
guage of the Nation and completely merge themselves in the National Race.
(Islam 2015, 181)

24 Jaffrelot also makes this point briefly: ‘This ideologically based cohesion coincides with a
devaluation of individuality in the R.S.S.; the “new man” must sacrifice his personality to the
cause’ (2005, 79).

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1113

As long as they maintain their difference, they are foreigners and live at the mercy
of the national race. They ‘may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the
Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential
treatment – not even citizen’s rights’ (Islam 2015, 183f.).
As in the view of the Shankaracharya, the social and cultural order proposed
by Golwalkar as the base of the Hindu nation is Brahminical in its terminology
as much as in its orientation. As Jaffrelot has pointed out, although the R.S.S.
was conceived of as egalitarian, the view of its leaders continued to be based in
the varna system, its pracharaks or preachers being drawn overwhelmingly from
the Brahmin caste. The appeal to the low castes was surely in part due to the
process of Sanskritisation, or the upward social mobility that belonging to this
order entailed.25
To return to the Gita Press volume, the universal impact of Hindu culture
on other cultures is proclaimed by no less a personage than C. Rajagopalachari
(1878–1972), the then Governor-General of India (1948–1950), in his one page
article. It is titled ‘Hindu samskrit hi vishvasamskriti hai’ or ‘Hindu culture alone is
world culture’ (63). As far as Rajagopalachari is concerned, there is no question of
mutual interaction with other cultures; the action is entirely one-way. The univer-
salistic claims of Hindu culture are maintained also by two historically sketchy arti-
cles in the volume which deal with the influence of Hindu religion and culture on
Islam and Sikhism, written, respectively, by a Muslim, Saj Rehmani ‘Firdausi Baba’,
and a Sikh, Gyani Santsingh Pritam. These articles are intended as evidence that
Rajagopalachari’s proposition is accepted by the followers of these two religions.
In the concluding section of this essay, I turn to the treatment in the volume
of Mahatma Gandhi, who identified himself as a believing Hindu through his life
and who was arguably the most significant Hindu of his time. Two thirds of the
way in, the Gita Press volume contains a five-page article on ‘Mahatma Gandhi
aur hindu samskriti’, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and Hindu culture’, by Pandit Lakshm-
inarayan Garde, a member of the editorial department of the Press and of the
editorial board of our particular volume.26 This article is sandwiched between
an article on death rites in Hindu culture and a set of three articles on the place
of the cow, and on its protection, in Hindu culture. The Mahatma’s thinking is
presented largely in accordance with the general editorial bent of the volume,
though his marked deviations from it are impossible to entirely ignore and are

25 Savarkar differed from those who believed in preserving the purity of the caste system. He
believed in cross-caste marital unions.
26 Ibid. 598–604. As Mukul has noted, the Kalyan did not register the assassination of the Ma-
hatma in its February 1948 issue. In fact, Poddar was actively involved in defending the R.S.S.,
which, as noted above, had been banned for its alleged role in the killing (2015, 58f.).

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1114   Vasudha Dalmia

partially noted. In the following, I present the main points of the article. I then go
on to discuss how the Mahatma’s deeply personalised moral vision, his radical
reformulation of views he held earlier, is essentially either not realised and regis-
tered or is passed over deliberately in this account.

4 Gandhi’s vision as second counter-pole

Garde begins by proclaiming that Hindu samskriti itself was incarnated in the
person of Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma was proud to be a Hindu. He pro-
claimed himself a sanatani or eternal Hindu.27 There was no trace of communal-
ism in his thinking, and Garde draws from this the conclusion that Gandhi was
proof of the fact that the Hindu is, in general, not communal; he has love for all
in his heart. The Mahatma’s universal love manifested itself in his dharma to free
India. He showed by his work in South Africa that there was no feeling of enmity
in his heart (598). Garde cites an excerpt from an interview with an English jour-
nalist at the beginning of 1937 as evidence that the Mahatma had full faith in his
god that India would win its independence from the British, a belief that was
fulfilled on August 15th 1947. This belief in God is the root base of Hindu culture,
from which originates the second base, religion (599). Once again, we see that the
wider term ‘culture’ envelopes the more particular ‘religion’.
Garde follows these propositions with a second, partial quotation from the
Mahatma. In this very early quotation, from Young India, September 29th 1920,
Gandhi makes four declarations: that he believes in the Vedas, Upanishads,
Puranas and all Hindu religious texts; that he believes in varnashrama dharma;
that he believes in cow protection; and that he does not disbelieve in the worship
of murtis or icons. Garde adds that the Mahatma did not believe in socialism or
communism. His was a belief in religion, in ishvara, the lord, and in the tradi-
tionalism of Hindu samskriti. Having proclaimed this, Garde is forced to make
important admissions on the grounds of the Mahatma’s later radical qualifica-
tions of his early statements, though he treads with great caution while doing so.

27 ‘Sanatana Dharma’ or eternal, perpetual Dharma, to which most mainstream modern Hindus
see themselves as belonging, is a nineteenth century creation. It projects itself as monolithic,
pan-Hindu, and as enshrined in the oldest texts of the Hindus. As Zavos has pointed out in the
context of the Sanatana Dharma Sabhas or Associations that sprang up from the late-nineteenth
century in response to reform movements, practice and structure (image worship and caste hi-
erarchies) – as opposed to a theological core – were propounded as the defining features of this
dharma (2000, 50–7). The Mahatma, in fact, does not fit into this mould, as we will see. The
others represented in Hindu Samskriti do.

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1115

There were certain things in Gandhism, he explains, that, in the eyes of the san-
atani Hindus, were not in accordance with the Shastras, the institutes of religion.
However, despite thus deviating, the Mahatma continued, from his own perspec-
tive, to base his views in Hindu samskriti. For example, although he believed in
the varna order, he did not observe the present rules regarding commensality or
inter-caste marriage. Nevertheless, he agreed in principle that marriages work
best within one’s own culture. And although his effort to improve the lot of the
lower castes and to promote Hindu-Muslim unity will always remain praisewor-
thy, if a person knowledgeable in the Shastras were to proclaim these beliefs to
be outside the realm of these institutes, his saying so would not be out of place.
Garde then quotes the Mahatma as saying that the store of Hindu samskriti is as
overflowing as nowhere else in the world, something that the people do not yet
know, as they have been kept far from it and have not yet recognised its virtues.
As Garde proclaims, it is thanks to the British that they have forgotten their own
cultural wealth (600).
This is followed by general observations on the decentralised economic order
that the Mahatma wanted to see established, the dismantling of large indus-
trial units, and his regard for honesty in public transactions, all of which were
patently being disregarded in newly independent India. The socialism that was
being followed was not in accord with Hindu samskriti (601). This was happen-
ing because Hindus were turning away from god, from the Mahatma’s belief in
the Bhagavadgita. However, the Mahatma also used the Muslim terms for god –
Rahim, Karim, and Allah – to persuade Muslims to acknowledge god, although
it was unclear what effect this would have had on them (602). The rest of the
article deals at length with the Mahatma’s own emphasis on the significance and
value of chanting the name of Rama, and the crises from which this chanting had
saved him (603). Garde closes with the observation that it was through this belief
in the name of Rama that God procured independence for India. This independ-
ence should be used today in the cause of Rama. Only then would it be protected
and prosper, leading to the spread of the rule of Rama throughout the world. The
Hindu religion is then to rule the world as much as the nation.
With the exception of his two equivocations concerning Dalits and Muslims,
Garde presents the Mahatma’s thinking rather schematically in an effort to
contain him. He does not falsify so much as omit or suppress that which does not
fit into his generally conservative view of the Mahatma, although he does note
where the Mahatma falls entirely out of line with the normal trends of conserva-
tive Hindu thought. It is important to see what aspects of the Mahatma’s thought
he leaves out and ignores in order to make clear what he cannot afford to enter-
tain as worthy of note – the issues which would question the central ideas of the
volume as a whole.

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1116   Vasudha Dalmia

The Mahatma’s key ideas were evolved over time as part of his active life
and they can often seem contradictory when taken out of chronological order. In
order to understand his notion of Hinduism, I have mostly relied on the meticu-
lous work of J.T.F. Jordens (2012). Jordens’ interpretation, while taking cognisance
of key studies of the Mahatma’s life and works, relies almost exclusively on the
Mahatma’s own writings in laying out his views on the most salient aspects of
his beliefs. Jordens pays particular attention to the changing of these views over
time, for the Mahatma often revised his own earlier opinions. He was not apolo-
getic about this. Jordens cites his proclamation that,

“I have never made a fetish of consistency”, and [he] advised the reader to reject his earlier
statements for his later ones.
(Jordens 2012, 108, citations from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, henceforth CW,
vol. 59, 62).

According to Jordens, the two most balanced statements of the Mahatma’s views
of Hinduism were published in 1921, the first in Gujarati in Navajivan under the
title ‘Who is a Sanatani Hindu?’, and the second later in the year in English in
Young India, under the title ‘Hinduism’. The Mahatma affirmed the fundamental
tenets of Hinduism; a Hindu was one who believed in the existence of the atman,
the Self, and the paramatman, the Highest Self; who believed that the atman did
not go through birth and death but passed from existence to existence; and who
believed that the atman could attain moksha or release from this cycle. He also
dealt in these writings with the question of revelation. As he wrote in the English
article, he had deliberately omitted the words ‘divine revelation’ with regard to
the Vedas as he did not believe in the exclusive divinity of the Vedas. The Bible,
the Koran, and the Zend Avesta were also divinely inspired. Secondly, not every
word and every verse of these texts was divinely inspired. These had to pass the
test of reason and morality before they could be accepted as true. And finally,
he repudiated the authority, if they claimed it, of the ‘present Shankaracharyas
and shastris to give a correct interpretation of Hindu scriptures’. People capable
of doing so could emerge in the future but, in the meantime, ‘we, the common
people, may cling to the essentials with a simple faith and live our lives in bhakti
to God’ (ibid., 88–90; the Mahatma’s statements from CW 21, 246). This repudia-
tion of the claim of the Vedas to be the sole divine revelation, and of the author-
ity of the Shankaracharyas and other religious leaders to interpret them, con-
tradicts in its entirety all that is represented as Hindu Samskriti in article after
article of the Gita Press’s publication. We should also to note that, in his later
years, the Mahatma took care to distinguish between religion and culture, as
Kumkum Sangari has shown. Regional and professional commonalities, shared

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customs and languages, common suffering in the context of colonial domina-

tion, and the struggle for independence, all of these undercut religious differ-
ence (Sangari 2002, 8f.).
As for the belief in varna and ashrama, the Mahatma held to their basic
validity all his life. But if he had originally claimed that they exercised bene-
ficial restraints for promoting self-control, he later modified his opinion radi-
cally with regard to intermarriage and interdining, as Garde had also pointed
out. Lack of restraint in these matters, according to the Mahatma, had lead to
the creation of innumerable jatis,which had created chaos. The original varna
scheme had placed no restriction on intermarriage and interdining, which had
now been brought into operation. It was necessary now to revert to the original
order:

The law of varna has nothing to do with these restrictions. People of different varnas may
intermarry and interdine…But a Brahmin who marries a Shudra girl or vice-versa commits
no offence against the law of varna.
(Jordens 2012, citations from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, henceforth CW)

By 1931, he had declared that according to his definition of varna, ‘there is no

varna in operation in present day Hinduism’. It had become extinct. By 1933 he
was declaring both intermarriage and interdining to be a personal matter.
His writings on the issue of untouchability are voluminous. As he stressed
again and again, he was vehemently and expressly opposed to the doctrine and
denied that it was sanctioned by scripture:

If I discovered that those scriptures which are known as Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavadgita,
Smritis, etc. clearly showed that they claimed divine authority for untouchability […] then
nothing on this earth would hold me to Hinduism. I should throw it overboard as I should
throw overboard a rotten apple. (Jordens, 112f., citation from CW 57, 7)

Untouchability was contrary to reason; it was a violation of truth and of non-

violence. And it was in conflict with the fundamental precepts of Hinduism (ibid.,
112f., CW 26, 265). We have seen above that the Shankaracharya saw the practice
of denying temple entry to Dalits as not only in consonance with varnashrama
dharma but also in keeping with the natural order of the cosmos, prophesying
dire natural disasters if it was transgressed.
In the present context, three further issues warrant a closer, if necessarily brief,
look. First, the Mahatma’s insistence in his last years that religion was a personal
rather than a political matter, that it could never be a state concern: ‘Religion is a
personal matter which should have no place in politics’ (Sangari 2002, 4; citation

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1118   Vasudha Dalmia

CW 76, 402, from the Mahatma’s paper, Harijan, 9 August 1942). As he specified in
another context:

I do not believe in State religion even though the whole community has one religion.
State interference will probably always be unwelcome. Religion is purely a personal
matter. There are in reality as many religions as minds. Each mind has a different con-
ception of God from that of another.
(ibid., 6, citation from Harijan, 16 March 1947, CW not specified)

Secondly, we need to take note of the intensely personal nature of his moral
vision. As Jordens points out, ‘in the final instance the supreme authority in
matters religious is vested in the individual conscience. This primacy has been
given the name of “the inner voice” by Gandhi’ (Jordens 2012, 152, citation CW
26, 140). To safeguard against capricious use of it, the Mahatma at various times
specified under what conditions it could be held to be valid:

We should listen to everybody’s advice, but do only what our conscience tells us. And in
order that our conscience may speak, we should observe the yama-niyamas [rules and regu-
lations for the spiritual aspirant similar to the Ten Commandments]. Everybody cannot hear
the inner voice. We need divine ears to hear it.
(Jordens 2012, 153, citation CW 49, 311)

In speaking of the decision to embark on his 1932 Poona fast in his fight against
the communal award of separate electorates to Dalits in response to hearing the
inner voice, he spoke once again of the preparation needed in order to hear it:

Realist things are only relatively so. For me the Voice was more real than my own existence.
It has never failed me, and for that matter, anyone else. And everyone who will can hear
the Voice. It is within everyone. But like everything else, it requires previous and definite
preparations. (Jordens 2012, 144)

The point to be made here is the radical individuality of his moral vision. It stands
in sharp contradiction to the primacy given to the authority of texts as propagated
by the Shankaracharya and the other contributors to the volume.
Finally, it will be worth considering the Mahatma’s ideas on pluralism, which
he put forward in his later years, modifying his earlier views about the supremacy
of Hinduism over other religious systems. Jordens once more: ‘in his writings after
1930 no single statement can be found affirming or even suggesting the superi-
ority of Hinduism, which he had repeatedly referred to before that date’ (Jordens
2012, 166). The change was deliberate and, according to Jordens, can be dated to
a letter written to Narandas Gandhi on the 23rd of September 1930:

Equality of Religions. This is the new name we have given to the Ashram observance which
we know as “Tolerance” […] I did not like the word but could not think of a better one.

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 Being Hindu in India: culture, religion, and the Gita Press (1950)   1119

Kakasaheb, too, did not like the word. He suggested “Respect for all religions”. I did not
like that phrase either. Tolerance may imply a gratuitous assumption of inferiority of other
faiths to one’s own and respect suggests a sense of patronising, whereas ahimsa teaches us
to entertain the same respect for the religious faith of others as we accord to our own, thus
admitting the imperfection of the latter. (ibid., 165; citation CW 44, 166)

It has been necessary to devote considerable space to the Mahatma’s views

in order to set into sharper relief the views expressed in the two leading arti-
cles of our Gita Press volume, which the mass of other articles in, and contri-
butions to, the special issue on Hindu samskriti follow and confirm in their
own ways. The Mahatma differed in all key aspects from them: in the matter
of religion and culture being one, in acknowledging the absolute authority
of the Vedic corpus or the authority of religious leaders as sole interpreters of
it, in the belief in the inviolability of the varna order and in the legitimacy of
untouchability. He regarded religion as a personal matter: there were as many
religions as minds, it was certainly not a political concern, and there could be
no legitimate state religion. And, finally, he differed from them in his belief in
pluralism. These views and beliefs the Gita Press volume obliterated entirely
in its effort to offer an authoritative and cohesive view of Hindu culture, com-
pounded as it was of a range of similar positions. The Shankaracharya and
Golwalkar held identical views on the superiority of the all-pervasive culture
of Hindus in India, rooted in their religion and philosophy, as laid down in
their canonical texts in Sanskrit. Being Hindu meant adhering to these texts.
Their mental make up as part of the varna order, their common culture and
religion, bound all Hindus together; there could be no difference amongst
them. They alone constituted the nation. There could be no space for individ-
ual Hindus to form themselves meaningfully outside this scheme of things.
Neo-traditionalisation had won the day.

References

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The Constitution of India, https://www.india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/coi_part_full.
pdf (last accessed July 25th, 2018)

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1120   Vasudha Dalmia

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