Educating ‘Temple Cultures’ Heterogeneous Worship and Hindutva Politics in Kerala

Contrary to the popular imagination of Kerala as a secular, rational left bastion, the state is witnessing Sangh Parivar’s active presence in the domain of temples and everyday culture. This study attempts to examine the anxiety of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its sympathisers about the ‘true’ knowledge on temple culture, and their efforts to teach everyday Brahmanical rituals and other forms of worship such as srividya and kuladevathas. I argue that Sangh Parivar is interested in heterogeneous worship practices in Kerala as part of their ideological expansion. Their obsession for the didactics of temple culture is a response to the modern secularisation process and ambition to educate the Other Backward Classes and Dalits in Brahmanical knowledge, for they are not traditionally inclined to the Brahmanical temples. Finally, the study aims to document the ethnographic details of Sangh Parivar activities in the world of worship and temple culture.

Hindutva: The Larger than Life-size Dream Realized

This article deals with the recent issues of rising mob lynchings, atrocities on Dalits, Adivasis and religious minorities across the state. This study asserts that the Hindutva ideology itself is violence provoking one and the Sangh Parivar has started implementing its ideas into practice now. By committing these atrocious acts by the Hindutva mobs and the BJP governments holding the constitutional position and encouraging the mobs to commit the crimes reflects the same—to send a clear message to the religious minorities to live as second class citizens or else leave the country nothing less or nothing more. And nobody is going to escape this larger than life-size ambition of the RSS that India should be a Great Hindu Nation again like the ancient times.

Religion and Party Politics in India and Pakistan

Until the 1990s, religious influence on party politics in India and Pakistan was primarily through street protests and pressure on mainstream nonreligious parties rather than by religious parties winning power directly. In India, such influence was constrained by the secular constitutional structure and the dominant role of the Congress Party. In Pakistan, however, politically deinstitutionalized parties, weakened by military interference, have never been strong enough to take on the clerics. Instead, party leaders and military regimes have increasingly tried to co-opt or accommodate Islamist parties and pressure groups to strengthen their own positions. Civilian and military governments in the 1970s and 1980s institutionalized much of the Islamist agenda within the state in a way that now seems impossible to reverse. Ironically, the very fact that much of the Islamist agenda is now institutionalized, makes it difficult for Islamist parties to expand much beyond the 10–20% of the votes they now receive. India’s secular consensus, which many observers saw as its greatest achievement, has been profoundly disrupted by the decline of the Congress Party over the past three decades and the rise of the BJP, headed by the dominant figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has deep roots in the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its Hindu nationalist family (Sangh Parivar) of organizations. Modi, especially in his second term (2019–), has used his majority in parliament to try to radically remake India along Hindu nationalist lines, even though that was not central to his campaign platform, nor the reason why most development- and governance-minded voters elected him to office.

Immediate Causes

This chapter examines the two major developments that led Mrs Gandhi to declare the Emergency: the JP Movement and the Allahabad judgment. It analyses how both these challenges to her regime emanated from structural issues, many of which were a decade old. The chapter delineates the role of the Sangh Parivar and social discontent due to a serious socio-economic crisis in making the nation-wide JP movement. Similarly, the Allahabad judgment came after Mrs Gandhi side-lined the judiciary for years, thereby increasing the power of the executive. Therefore, the Allahabad judgment, like the JP movement, was a result of deep-seated resentment from the judiciary and the people.

A Geography of Anger

This chapter reviews the constructivist approach to Hindu–Christian conflict that is recognized with the instrumentalists and discusses the important role of material interests while acknowledging that religion really does matter. It explains how religion provides to proponents of Hindutva a convenient organizing principle that unites disparate local conflicts. It also explores the unifying banner that serves the interests of the largely upper-caste Hindu leaders of the Sangh Parivar that enables them to unify Hindus against a common, external enemy. The chapter describes the Hindu–Christian conflict in India that is often framed by proponents of Hindutva as a clash of incompatible world views. It refers to Hindus associated with the Sangh that perceive in the universalizing religion of Christianity as an implicit rejection of their view that religions are and should be ethnic.

“Darkness, Loneliness, Loud Noises, and Men”

This chapter looks at economic competition and frustration as the significant cause of the Pana–Kandha conflict in Kandhamal. It also describes Pandals as a visible, public demonstration of presence that often precipitate contestation over space, as one did at the beginning of the 2007 riots in Kandhamal. It also follows reports in newspapers that were written after the dust of Kandhamal had settled to some degree and corresponded closely with accounts provided by victims. The chapter refers to Sangh Parivar politicians and sympathizers who alleged that the broad correspondence in the narratives of victims, minority-rights activists, and government commissions were derived from a mutual reliance from the Western, liberal, anti-Hindu, minority-oriented bias of the national, English-language press. It reviews the element of propaganda involved in how both Christians and their critics tell the story of what happened in Kandhamal.

Remaking the Hindu/Nation

Angana P. Chatterji excavates the contemporaneous practices of Hindu majoritarianism in Uttar Pradesh surrounding the 2014 elections. This chapter elaborates on the emergent relations between Hindu cultural dominance and nationalist Hinduism that induce and deepen cultural anxiety, xenophobia, misogyny, as well as hate and violence. This chapter also details select examples of actions to discipline and terrorize religious minority/ othered subjects (including Adivasis and Dalits) undertaken by Sangh Parivar organizations in Uttar Pradesh between January 2014 and September 2018, and those resultant from the undercurrent of hate and estrangement fostered by the majoritarian culture at large. These events pertain to the Ayodhya campaign, forcible conversions to Hinduism, framing ‘love jihad’, opposing reservations and cattle slaughter, and the promotion of hate speech. The everyday and episodic targeting of vulnerable communities is supported by the deeply rooted inequities of caste, class, and hetero/ normative gender, and such targeting, the chapter argues, strengthens cultures of violence and facilitates governance through fear.

How the Sangh Parivar Writes and Teaches History

Beginning with the writings on history by Savarkar and Golwalkar, Tanika Sarkar analyses how Hindu nationalists essentially understand Indian history as a Hindu history. She shows how this understanding of history has slowly percolated through the RSS network of schools and institutions. More recently, this version of history has been inserted into official curricula and history textbooks, from English language textbooks at both the national level, to a range of vernacular textbooks at the state level. Sarkar proceeds to demonstrate that an older and less known Hindu nationalist agenda for historical research has gained force across the country since 2014. This agenda consists of three main aims: a) to elevate the vast corpus of Sanskritpuranas (myths, legends, stories) to the status of literal historical sources; b) to refute the so-called ‘Aryan invasion hypothesis’ and to show that Brahmanical Hinduism is the original religion and civilization of the subcontinent; and c) to incorporate vast numbers of local and tribal gods and legends into an overall national and Brahmanical structure of history and sacred geography. All these initiatives are promoted and generated by a vast base of volunteers and RSS activists across India.

The ‘Infiltrators’ of Delhi

The presence of Bangladeshi migrants in Delhi, and in India itself, became a major element in the election campaigns of Hindu nationalists in the 1990s. For Hindu nationalists, the Hindu Bangladeshis in India are ‘refugees’ and the Muslim Bangladeshis are ‘infiltrators’ who are actively conspiring against the Hindus of India. This chapter investigates the context and timing for the inclusion of Bangladeshi migrants by the Sangh Parivar into their Hindutva agenda. The interviews in Delhi with the influential leaders from the BJP, Congress, RSS, and VHP and notable civil society members provide an insight into the local state-level discourses, and also into the nationwide controversies concerning Bangladeshi migrants in India.