I have been stuck on the question of what filial love and kinship can and should look like when it pertains to those who proudly flaunt a caste-Hindu identity, whose identification I feel distant from more and more each day. I was witness to a Hindu ugliness — a Brahmin ugliness —from my own family targeted at a dear Christian friend a few weeks ago that I could not shake off.
Why, I kept asking myself, was it that the people I could be sure loved me from the deepest corners of their hearts were unable to extend a similar love towards individuals whose lives, beliefs, and histories are not their own? Why do they find it so easy to see these persons as only representatives of a single collective identity? As Muslim or Christian, as Dalit or lower-caste or tribal? How do they so simply declare a separation from themselves — their Brahmin-Hindu selves — and my community of friends and comrades as non-Hindu?
***
The accusation typically levied on me is that I do not care for Brahmin feelings, Hindu feelings. That I have never felt the need to reassure these Hindus about their anxieties that revolve around casteist and Islamophobic paranoias. Why is it so hard for me to believe that Dalits can be “opportunists” with reservation? Why do I persist in painting men of my caste and arranged marriage as evil? Why do I defend Islamic “invasions” and their destruction of Hindu temples as “history”? Where, an aunt once asked me, is my sense of empathy and solidarity with my own kin, presumably my own caste & faith?
Of course, what the boundaries of this faith are among my kin remain nebulous — my father has been an atheist throughout my lifetime but loosely locates his origins with the Vaishnavite Madhwa Brahmin tradition around Raghavendra Swami. My mother while being an Iyer has been a longtime devotee of Shirdi and then Sathya Sai Baba. My father’s extended family fully claims allegiance to Udupi Krishna’s Madhwa rituals. A maternal Iyer aunt who married into a lower-caste Maharashtrian family primarily worships Ganapathi and Vithoba/Vitthal in traditions regional to the Vidarbha region. Her brother, my uncle, while living an irreligious life nonetheless reverts to Iyer rituals for weddings, funerals, and whenever his moral worldview is called upon. [One more sister, located in the US, recently converted to Christianity through a Church of South India-affiliated church, but obvs, that faith is quietly ignored when the topic of religion comes up.]
This hodge-podge Saivite-Vaishnavite believing-nonbelieving guru-worshipping variety-show type Hinduism has scarcely made sense to me, despite my having identified as a practising Hindu for most of my teens. I tried for years in my adolescence to be devout through Bhagavad Gita classes, bhajan sessions, regular prayer, ritual chanting — most often amongst other Brahmins and few if any lower-caste families in these circles. I eventually gave up unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being both religious and a youthful feminist, and recognizing a lot of my vulnerability as stemming from mental health issues. Yet as a composite, this hodge-podge imagination has a tremendous hold over how my family identifies as “Hindu” over the years, now with more concrete boundaries because of the current Hindu Raj.
And these boundaries have hardened so as to coagulate the concepts of faith and nation to the point that “India” and “Indian” only gain meaning as an ethnostate, a nation of the Hindus, by the Hindus, and for the Hindus. Caste-Hindus around me believe that an ethnostate is the best way to serve and safeguard what Hinduism means. And without a primary adherence to “Hindu” as an identity, if an individual is in fact anti-religious and by default anti-Hindu, they can only be that most fashionable of terms — an anti-national.
That this faith has long been dead to me is irrelevant — birth has decided where my loyalties should lie, what caste I belong to, what religion I should be loyal to, and I am now branded a traitor for abandoning those loyalties. My crime of being faithless is now equal to sedition.
That they cannot imagine a love for my nation could be non-Hindu in its orientation says volumes.
***
Of course, I am not the first caste-Hindu to find myself mired in an argument about tribalism and humanism; the anti-colonial movement is littered with Brahmin-savarnas stuck on the “the caste question” and what “Hindu” can mean with and through caste rituals. The prognosis back then was dispiriting. Either a Gandhian rejection of untouchability while still operating as a Hindu society maintaining the social relations of caste, class, and capital a.k.a Hindu liberalism. Or a Hindu Mahasabha-esque embrace of caste as “natural” and logical to Hinduism with “lesser” Hindus and “more” Hindus, both forced to co-exist through the social relations of caste, class, and capital a.k.a Hindu conservatism.
Babasaheb’s rejection of Hindu reform AND Hindu dharma, and most of all, Hindu class relations through the annihilation of caste holds up all the way to the 2020s through this morass.
“ It is no use seeking refuge in quibbles. It is no use telling people that the Shastras do not say what they are believed to say, if they are grammatically read or logically interpreted. What matters is how the Shastras have been understood by the people. You must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took. You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion — the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste. Will you show that courage?” — Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1936), “The Annihilation of Caste” [Section 20]
I have maintained this position consistently because I have no imagination of what being a Hindu who rejects Hindutva looks like. If a majority of Hindus today do not distinguish between Hinduism and Hindutva, how material and real can such a distinction be for progressives?
As an example, look at Ganesh Chaturthi and Ramnavami celebrations where public spaces are overtaken by men waving saffron flags, crowds screaming Jai Shri Ram, and rave party-like atmospheres. Hindutva has staked a claim on all public forms of Hindu-ness and has won. Where and how can even a liberal reclaim some qualities of this faith today?
Under the conditions of Hindu Raj, is it even possible to be in solidarity with Hindu believers outside of their entwinement with Hindutva? Who can model to us what it is to be Hindu, but to be anti-Hindutva, anti-caste, anti-ethnonationalism, anti-patriarchy in this current political moment? Where are these ideologues?
When I ask my liberal caste-Hindu kin who reject Hindutva if there is even an imagination of Hindu egalitarianism in their faith, I get this Sanskrit phrase, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” the world as one family. Well, the Sanghi leadership peddles this phrase constantly as an ideal for state diplomacy and on public stages declares that even Muslims are to be included in this vision.
Even as their organizational extensions hypocritically enact brutal violence on vulnerable Muslims.
How do liberal Hindus reject the Sanghi definition of this phrase? Can you continue to use it for a liberal Hindu vision alongside the Sangh? Can you insist on a liberal interpretation of it while declining to differentiate it from the Sanghis’?
***
I have been as consumed with the question of what to do about my caste-Hindu kin as they have been with what to do about me. Left-liberal activists around me continually stress the need to engage, the need to humanize other caste-Hindus, to appeal to their morality, conscience, and humanitarian impulses and bring them to some middle ground. To not reject their desire to identify as Hindus but to have them hone this desire so it embraces a humane, nonviolent faith practice.
I have to ask if this is where our best efforts have to be invested or to turn more comprehensively towards social movements outside of the Hindu sphere — anti-caste struggles, Muslim-led civil society collectives, workers’ movements, student organizing.
When something like the Karnataka colleges banning students wearing hijab explodes into our consciousness, do we work with hateful invective within our caste-Hindu enclaves or do we strengthen civil society groups trying to intervene so that these young women’s education is not disrupted? Which is more valuable solidarity work at this moment? Which will further a clear-eyed assessment of the caste and communal power dynamics in this region?
Christina Sharpe writes of what to do with kinship in a different context — one that is imperialist, white supremacist, built in the afterlife (that is still a present life) of slavery and segregation.
Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship. Kinship relations structure the nation. Capitulation to their current configurations is the continued enfleshment of that ghost.
Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice.
“Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative.”
Maintaining and sustaining these old kinships means circling around the problems of caste-kinship, not wholly being able to join in anti-caste, anti-communal, socialist, feminist socially liberatory struggles.
“Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative.”
Perhaps rend the foundations of what kinship means and has always looked like. Rend the value of blood relations and build alternative kinship.
I don’t have any “solutions” for how to do this. I have a network of friends who do embody this for me, but we are scattered and adrift on our own life paths. To sustain this kinship, expand it, strengthen it, open it up to other kinship-renderers is a long-standing ambition of mine. To further embed it in political action is still a dream, but like all dreams, I nurture it in the hope some of it can be realized in the near future.
Till then, I work on losing my kin. And mourning.
