2/8/23, 5:56 PM Hindutva’s ‘Purification’ Drive - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Hindutva’s
‘Purification’ Drive
Christophe Jaffrelot
October 13, 2016
Indian Express

Last month, in the tribute he paid to Deendayal

Upadhyaya on his birth centenary, Narendra Modi
declared, “Fifty years ago, Pandit Upadhyaya said “Do not
reward/appease (puraskrit) Muslims, do not shun
(tiraskkrit) them, but purify (parishkar) them.” The notion of
“purification” is clearly associated with Hinduism’s caste
system, evident from the shuddhi rituals that Swami
Dayananda, who founded Arya Samaj in 1875 and was
the architect of Hindu revivalism, adapted to initiate the
reconversion of Dalits who had become Muslims or
Christians in Punjab. The Arya Samaj played on the craze
for Sanskritisation that prevailed among some known as
“untouchables” in the late 19th century. By passing them
the sacred thread, the Arya Samajists tried to defuse
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centrifugal social forces and invited them to pay allegiance

to savarnas’ values. For Dayananda, the Varna vyavastha
was a model of social cohesion to which each caste could
adhere, including the “untouchables”, after they underwent
shuddhi.

Upadhyaya shared similar beliefs. The organic unity of the

Varna vyavastha is one of the key ideas of his philosophy
of “integral humanism”, referred to as the cornerstone of
their ideology by Sangh Parivar leaders. In 1965, he
wrote: “In our concept of four castes, they are analogous
to the different limbs of Virat-Purusha, the primeval man
whose sacrifice, according to the Rig Veda, gave birth to
society in the form of the Varna vyavastha.” For him, the
Varna vyavastha was endowed with the organic unity that
could sustain the nation-making process.

The resilience of such categories explains why Hindu

nationalist ideologues tried to apply techniques of
“purification”, not only to Dalits but also to those who
converted to other religions. This modus operandum was
particularly relevant in the case of Hindu converts seen as
of the same race — a very popular notion in the 19th and
20th century. Saraswati thought Hindus were descendants
of the ancient Aryans, in whose veins ran the blood of the
founders of the Vedic civilisation. Those who shifted to
Islam could return to the Hindu fold simply by undergoing
shuddhi.

Subsequently, the Hindu nationalist discourse vis-à-vis

Islam shifted in a more political direction. V.D. Savarkar,
who coined the Hindutva concept, wanted to purify
Muslims ideologically, not religiously. He had a problem
with non-Hindus because of the way they related to the
land of Bharat: “Any convert of non-Hindu parentage to
Hindutva could be a Hindu, if bona fide, he or she adopts
our land as his or her country and marries a Hindu, thus
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coming to love our country as a real Fatherland, and

adopts our culture and thus adores our land as the
Punyabhu (sacred land).”

For Savarkar, Mohammedans and Christians possessed

all the essential qualifications of Hindutva, but Christian
Catholics were turned to Roma and Muslims were also
problematic because, he said, “Their holy land is far off in
Arabia and Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas
and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently
their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin.
Their love is divided.”

Which meant for Savarkar, Muslims had to be

“nationalised”, the word he would use instead of “purified”,
and that the Sangh Parivar leaders will use too when they
designate conversion out of Hinduism as a
“denationalisation” process.

Savarkar’s views of Indian Muslims’ allegiance to Arabia

and Palestine are largely due to the Khilafat Movement
which, in the early 1920s, convinced him that Muslims
living in India were not loyal to their country and did not
regard it as their sacred land. But ironically, they did — the
sacredness of the Indian land is even one of the most
remarkable features of Islam in India that reflects the
pervasive influence of Sufism.

None of the Sufi saints — who established Islam in India

— ever went to Mecca or Medina. Instead, they engaged
in intense spiritual conversation with yogis, often
establishing their abodes next to sacred Hindu sites. Their
tombs became pilgrimage centres. Sultans and the great
Mughals — Aurangzeb included — did not go to Mecca
and Medina either (in fact, Akbar stopped Haj caravans
and terminated relations with the sharifs of Mecca).
Instead, they went to the dargahs of Mu’in al-Din Chishti in
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Ajmer, Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi or to still other places.

Iltutmish onwards, Muslim rulers looked at local Sufi saints
as the protectors of their territory. Even their tombs were
built near those of Sufi saints, like Humayun’s, in a Delhi
locality named after Nizamuddin Auliya.

India also became sacred to the Muslims because of the

popularisation of land-related legendary accounts. Amir
Khusro, a poet and a close disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya,
“read” in a hadith that India was where Adam descended
after being expelled from paradise. According to Carl
Ernst, Azad Bilgrami, a 17th century Islamic scholar,
“described India as the place where the eternal light of
Muhammad first manifested in Adam”. For Ernst, this
reveals an eagerness “to show that India was in all ways
closely linked to the essence of the Islamic faith”.

The crowds at the dargahs shows that while ideologues

may be attracted by Saudi Arabia, popular Islam continues
to be turned towards local sacred sites: “Purification”
through “nationalisation” is redundant in the case of Indian
Muslims, who always looked at the land of their saints as
their holy land.

This article was originally published in the Indian Express.

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public

policy issues; the views represented herein are those of
the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Center

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