The term Swadeshi Muslim needs Rethinking
- In History & Culture
- 09:20 AM, Jul 20, 2018
- Sreejit Datta
Today we are living in a highly logocentric world, and it so happens that the act of uttering a word as well as the utterer's clout together determine meaning. The latter is especially true in today’s discourses as the universities and the establishment media remain inundated with the postmodern idea that our world’s affairs can be explained in terms of a struggle for power in one form or another, in which different groups, which are inherently antagonistic, try to overpower each other. Therefore the meaning of words and expressions that summarise broad concepts, capture their essence in a precise manner, and in turn help us understand complex ideas, depends upon the way they are handled by individuals who have a certain amount of influence on a group of people, and hence on the latter’s narrative. The manner in which words – and especially certain keywords that define, initiate, legitimise and empower a movement in the realm of thought – are used by thought-leaders may determine the course of such movements in the short as well as long run.
Manners maketh man, and likewise we could say that meaning maketh the universe. In our universe however, fates of battles are decided long before a single shot is fired at the enemy, nay, before one has even set foot on the battlefield. As such, battles of arms and the men have been replaced by battles of warring narratives. Logos rules supreme, and throughout the past couple of centuries Euro-American colonialism-imperialism has seen to it that logocentricism gains unbridled universality. For good or for bad, nowadays the word – both spoken and written – holds supreme sway over us. This is why the outpouring of newspaper articles, reports, blog entries, social media updates and Twitter-wars. It will hardly be an exaggeration to say that the present and the future of entire communities and nations now depend upon the result of the battle over narratives that rages on as we read this article. Case in point: the last US Presidential elections and the controversy over Russia’s role in influencing people’s opinion in favour of a specific party through bots and other tools that impact the electoral narrative. And in the battle over narratives, words are everything – arms, ammunition and explosives. The importance of coining words and terminologies favourable to a specific end is paramount. That is to say, it will suffice for winning the present-day ‘Great Game’ to own words and to command the power to infuse your intended meaning into them, to breathe life as you understand it into those words – such vivid life that words alone would be able to move men and their precious resources. Lose your command over the word and you've lost the Game.
The Great Game I’ve alluded to in the previous lines pertains to the struggle to establish unswerving and unchallenged dominion over the peoples of the world. It seeks to homogenize a world which is naturally diverse. It has been waged (and is constantly being waged) by rigidly monotheistic worldviews and their modern derivatives. Where do we Hindus – as an ancient nation with a rich legacy to look after – find ourselves in the present state of affairs? Ours has never been a struggle to dominate the lives and minds of people, but to keep the fire of Truth burning, to protect the multiple ways of connecting with the One – each invaluable in its own right – and to that end ensure our own existence. For if we are gone – our identity, distinctiveness, wisdom and all – and with us gone the mission of keeping the flame alive, what would befall the world that our children inherit? Hence ours is a struggle to ensure existence, against such odds as infinitely hostile fanatic troops who seek to homogenize humankind and claim an unrivalled monopoly on the Truth. Ours is a promise to keep, a promise to repay our debt to the ancestors by preserving what remains of our ancient ways of experiencing the Truth: i.e. our own true Self as the One.
Not long ago Mr Rajiv Malhotra of ‘Swadeshi Indology’ fame has coined a phrase: ‘Swadeshi Muslims’. The introduction of this new terminology has courted much controversy, raised many eyebrows, and a churning has definitely started to occur both within the admirers of Malhotra as well as among his critics. According to this concept, which Malhotra claims to be “a novel, new idea”, Muslims who see themselves as “proud Bhāratīyas” are to be designated as “Swadeshi Muslims”. Malhotra goes on to add that Indic-origin Muslims like Tarek Fatah who call for reform within Islam, as well as those who are seeking to find their way back to their ancestors’ fold are to be ignored. It is another matter that Malhotra grossly misinterprets Tarek Fatah and such other reformists by claiming that they have “rejected Islam”. Nothing could be farther from truth. Prominent Canadian Muslim commentators like Fatah and especially Iranians represent a strong voice within Islam who call for religious and social reform, in order to make Islam compatible with modern democracies. To this end, Fatah and the brilliant Iranian-Australian Imam Tawhidi have recently started to collaborate, largely overlapping with Fatah’s liberal and pro-India, pro-Israel stance as well as borrowing his witty yet profoundly meaningful coinage “Mullah’s Islam Vs Allah’s Islam”. Add to that the many sensible voices who describe themselves as “Ex-Muslims”. These are the people who have actually rejected Islam – not Fatah, not Imam Tawhidi, who only strive towards reformation – they are a sizeable and ethnically diverse group who hail mainly from Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Palestine, and some even from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan! The quest of many Ex-Muslims to re-establish connection with their old civilizational link is real, and very visible. They constitute a significant chunk of the population that has or had something to do with Islam. Those who regularly chart the less-highlighted web territories of video blogs and niche internet discussion groups are quite familiar with these dissenting voices, and their numbers only keep growing by the day as their voices get louder and louder.
Be that as it may, here we are to focus on the predicament of the Hindus, especially those who live in the present-day Republic of India, and how the coinage of such neologisms add to their and their civilisation’s detriment. In the talk where he introduces this neologism, Malhotra clearly states that he rejects those Muslim voices of Fatah’s ilk; and that he does not think that efforts of “ghar-waapsi” are going to work. (Work in favour of who? One wonders.) One can sense a certain amount of laxity, a lack of rigour and seriousness – almost to the point of being whimsical – right at the moment when during his talk Malhotra introduces the term “Swadeshi Muslims” with a chuckle, saying “So I have a name for it…and I have a domain name also […] and I’m calling such people Swadeshi Muslims”. (24:35 – 24:52 of the same talk). He further adds, and rightly so, that the term “Indian Muslims” is problematic as people tend to argue over the definition of “India” itself.
Perhaps after sensing displeasure (and in some cases, backlash) from several quarters, Malhotra has subsequently uploaded a video on his YouTube channel, announcing a live Q&A session where he seeks to clarify and discuss his new idea. He acknowledges that this idea of “Swadeshi Muslims”, which he claims will snowball into a movement in good time, is in a nascent stage and he is open to “changing and evolving it”. In this video, he briefly offers an explanation of his new brainchild, proffering a categorisation involving terms like ‘Swadeshi’, ‘Hindu’, ‘atheists’; and that’s where the problem gets worse.
Malhotra seems to imply that the two terms 'Swadeshi' and 'Hindu' stand for two mutually exclusive categories, when in the video he says that "We must define the necessary and sufficient terms for someone to be a Swadeshi; be it a Hindu, or a Muslim, a Christian or anybody." This statement by him helps us see his own subtly reformulated conception of the terms ‘Swadeshi’ and ‘Hindu’, a shift from his brilliant exposition of ‘Swadeshi’ in The Battle for Sanskrit, where he clearly defined the term and put it in the context of building an Uttara-pakṣa, a literature survey-cum-rigorous response of western Indology from an insider’s perspective. By insider, he had explained in the 2016 work, he indicated those who are practicing Indic religionists, especially the practicing Hindus. The words/phrases ‘dharmic’ and ‘dharma-based traditions’ were also wonderfully utilised to lay the groundwork of the Swadeshi Indology series of conferences, which has been a huge success in terms of impacting the narrative at an academic level, sensitizing many Indic academicians about the issues at stake as well as in spreading awareness of the problem among the general public. No doubt the Swadeshi Indology movement has been steadily gaining momentum and a certain degree of legitimation in the minds and works of many intellectuals and concerned individuals in India and abroad.
Now, after a careful perusal of his upcoming Q&A announcement video, it appears that in his mind and conceptions ‘Swadeshi’ and ‘Hindu’ – these two represent two different categories, and he clearly draws a distinction between these two. This becomes clearer in the way he chooses to close his call for discussion by peremptorily declaring that following his upcoming Q&A session on the matter, “people can choose to be, or not to be, a Swadeshi”. In effect, this way he is creating more confusion around the term 'Swadeshi' and its connotations. We are at a juncture in the history of Hindu existence when we simply cannot afford to create such confusions about the few uncolonized terminologies like Swadeshi that we are left with – for enough conceptual confusion, enough cultural mayhem has already been created by around a thousand years of colonisation under Islamic Middle East as well as Central Asians and Christian Europeans. Due to the effects of such an unnaturally prolonged colonisation of our Sanātana Bhāratīya Sabhyatā (or what we call the Indic Civilization in English), we have already lost such words as India (Malhotra would agree), Bharatiya, and to a certain extent even the word 'Hindu' to colonialism,
Marxism and several hues of liberal interpretations (including Congress-brand liberalism). This is a time when we should be focusing wholly on reclaiming those words through decolonization and infusing them with pro-Hindu, pro-Indic, pro-Bharatavarasha implications alone. It is sad to see through this video that Malhotra is now trying to scramble over what in my opinion is an endless rhetorical pit, where he has not only let himself fall by attempting this new coinage, but more unfortunately he has caused the fall of a immensely successful terminology into that same pit. Ironically, it was Malhotra himself who had popularised the term ‘Swadeshi’, introduced it to academic discourses in an impactful manner by coining the phrase ‘Swadeshi Indology’ (to be distinguished from the disciplines of Indology or India studies or South Asian Studies as practiced in western universities) in his seminal book The Battle for Sanskrit which proved to be a game-changer; and as such the word, used in its proper context in the battle over narratives, is now a familiar term for any person of Indic origin with the slightest interest in what has been happening in that figurative battlefield. If the goal is to bring such Muslim individuals who take pride in their “Bhāratīyatā” to the forefront and make them a favourable stakeholder in the battle over India’s grand narrative, then why not simply call them proud patriotic Muslims? Why dilute a term like Swadeshi which has already been established to imply the ‘emic’ or insider’s point of view in all matters Indic, and especially Hindu, for the followers and purveyors of a religious ideology that is so drastically and essentially different from Indic-ness? We have an apprehension: at a time when many who had turned away from Hinduism or other Indic ways of life for various reasons in the past are trying to find a way back into the fold of their ancestors, this sort of ill-thought-out, ill-founded ideation will only prove as a setback for the cause of dharma's revival, if that is really what we are looking for.
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