RSS and the Hinduism Project - Part 1: The Hinduism Project

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS). Known to the Hindu rightwing as the vanguard of Hindurashtra (Hindu state), and reduced to Hindu fascists by the armchair woke activist. In this series, we will try to look into some of the core aspects of the RSS, and some of its strategies. The picture that will emerge will show us that it is a far more malevolent and shrewd organisation than simple garden-variety fascists. This exploration of the RSS will by no means be complete as it is a diverse organisation employing a myriad of strategies, varying with every nook and corner of India. It is a deeply rooted organisation that understands the pulse of the country far more than its detractors, and is able to comprehend that strategies in Indian politics need to seethed in regionalism in order to succeed. Its final goal is indeed to destroy this very regionalism and erect a homogenous, integrated, European-styled nationalism with the integrating essence being what we shall be calling as the Hinduism project. This first part will be an attempt at understanding the Hinduism project.

Hinduism and Hindutva:
Two side of the same coin

There is this old cliché of Hinduism versus Hindutva. Even historians fall prey to this segregation. This stems from a deep-rooted belief that all non-Abrahamic religions of India constitute Hinduism, and hence the fascism-like Hindutva ideology needs to be segregated from it. This is far from the truth. This then leads to the natural question, if you don't segregate Hinduism from an ideology like Hindutva, aren't you transgressing on the faiths (note the plural) of a significant portion of the Earth’s population, something you clearly shouldn't be doing? Nopes, not at all. Why you ask? Since Hinduism isn't a faith, but a colonisation project that appropriates faiths according to the rules set down by the people of the Indo-Gangetic basin. 

To understand this process one needs to step out of the Abrahamic worldview on religions which primarily see religion as a revelation by a one true god thereby setting down a strict set of do's and don'ts. Indeed, people moulded by an Abrahamic worldview often try to analyse religions of the subcontinent through its scriptures, which they feel are equivalent to the Abrahamic scriptures representing a strict set of guidelines. However, in the Indian subcontinent, much like other parts of the world, religion developed organically and highly locally, with local deities being born out of sacred groves, or springs, or deities representing forces of nature like lightning, fires, etc. These local worships did not (originally) adhere to a scripture. Several parts of the world still retain the worship of these local deities, including the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the religion is the Indian subcontinent is a truly living phenomena as the faithful have even started worshipping different variations of a new Covid-19 goddess.  

Ma Shitala, 
the Bengali Goddess of small-pox

These myriad of faiths of India did not originally use Hindu as a self reference. It was a term to primarily used by south west Asian monarchies from the Sassanids to refer to the people beyond the Indus, what constitutes modern day North India and Pakistan. During the colonial period, European colonists tried to view India through the lens of their own successful national integration projects back home. Hence they used the existing term Hindu to unite almost all non-Abrahamic faiths in India under one single religion, which came to be known as Hinduism.

But was the Hinduism project only a European construction? Of course not. The British knew approximately which faiths to classify in Hindu fold and which not to. How did they know this? This is because there was something already binding the myriad of local faiths stretching across the Indian geography. What was it? Enter caste systems, the building blocks of the Hinduism project.

The caste systems are a colonial system since like a colonial project they divide geography into the metropolitan (the Gangetic plain), and the periphery (loosely, the rest of India). The cultures of the metropolitan sets down rules of social hierarchy, i.e., which lineages are to be identified as upper castes or bramhans, and how the remaining lineages are to arranged, what are the intermarriage rules etc. This would also involve a few scriptural retcons. The deity of the lineages identified as upper castes would be incorporated into the Hindu fold (aka the scriptural world of the Gangetic basin), whereas the deities of the lineages of the societies identified as lower castes would either be made to lose caste (for example, identify them as an avatar who fell from grace for some random unethical act) or be seen as anti Gods (for example, the mahishashur of Bengal), and then give these stories scriptural legitimacy. The Puranas were possibly the most vigorous of these retcons, where local deities and their local geographies were inducted into the caste system, turning their geographies into pilgrimage centres. This would also follow taking over of shrines and remodelling them according to the ‘proper’ Hindu fold. Such acts of colonialism can in fact be gauged from Puranic tales like that of the Vaman Avatar of Vishnu. The tale recalls how the adivasi king Bali (appearing in the scripture as a demon) is tricked into giving up his territory to Vishnu, aka the caste Hindu. Vishnu appears as a Vaman or a dwarf in front of Bali and requests him to cede the territory he can cover in three steps. The noble Bali obliges, and once the deal is sealed, Vishnu simply takes up his true form and covers his entire territory in three steps. 

The God of Kamru village, Himachal Pradesh.
A classic case of colonialism, the image is identified as
Badrivishal, a mountain based avatar of Vishnu,
one of the most important Gods of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
The Kamru villagers do not identify the God as Badrivishal.

These colonised faiths often try to retain some semblance of their original identities. For example, in this video from the Kamru village, Himachal Pradesh, the village devotee maintains that like the person from the plains they also worship Shiva, but their deity comes first. However, as revealed in the video, the celebration is made to coincide with a day after Holi, a major festival of the north Indian plains. 

The most agreed upon boundaries of
"Akhand Bharat"

The modern Hinduism project was born out of the marriage of the caste systems and the nationalism projects of Europe exported to southeast Asia by the colonisers. Indeed, caste systems now started to have a definite geographical boundary (aka the British colony of India, and a few neighbouring states, often referred to collectively as Akhand Bharat), on which will be constituted a nation of Hindus (aka Bharat or India), with its own ‘pure’ national religion (Hinduism), ‘pure’ national culture (aka the Sanskritic culture), a national language (Hindi), and its own system of social rules to be converted into a code of law. Indeed, the English made generous strides to ensure that last part, by canonising the vitriolic text of Manusmriti as the law of the Hindus. Thankfully, due to a major intervention in the form of the Indian Constitution, drafted by Dr B R Ambedkar, the true father of the Indian nation, this project has been thwarted so far.

Statue of William Jones holding
the Manusmriti, which he translated
from Sanskrit to English

There were a myriad of organisations that sprang up to become the vanguard of formulating the new Hindu nation, with the Anushilan Samity, and the Arya Samaj being a few examples. The most dynamic of these has been the RSS, founded in 1925 by K B Hegdewar. In the subsequent parts, we will try to illustrate a few of the strategies undertaken by RSS in the present times to further progressing towards making project Hinduism a reality.