276. identity
of India and Hinduism, most Indians complied with the dominant, Western view of
Hinduism and its history. Hindus allowed the history of their religion to be told to
them and, in the process, became alienated from it. They became outsiders as they
heard and read a contrived version of their religion and its history. The system of
education that the British introduced into India was directly implicated in this
process of alienation from Hinduism.
The creation and legitimization of a genuine discipline of Hindu studies, there-
fore, represents a special battlefield. Hindu intellectuals and scholars must bear a
major responsibility in this battle in a number of ways, in the manner suggested
by Franz Fanon, who has left us a revolutionary manifesto of decolonization and
the founding analysis of the effects of colonialism upon colonized peoples and
their cultures. Following Fanon, one may identify three levels through which the
westernized, diasporic Hindu intellectuals will have to make their journey back
over the line.
In the initial phase, such intellectuals and academics tend to be keen to prove to
their Western peers that they have been thoroughly assimilated into the Western
culture of knowledge. While most remain content to settle for the status quo and
spend all their academic life submerged in this milieu, a small minority of them
begin to enter a second phase, in which they become restless and dissatisfied with
their assimilation. Now they have a desire to recognize and find their academic and
cultural roots and to recover the fast-receding connection with their own past. In the
third phase, these intellectuals begin to realign themselves with their own history,
culture, and tradition and actively seek to awaken their brethren by producing “rev-
olutionary” literature that is reinterpreted anew.^12
The growing interest at present in doing away with the misrepresentation of Hin-
duism in the diaspora may be understood in this light. The challenge for many
Hindu intellectuals and scholars is how to position themselves strategically as intel-
lectuals (1) within the academy, (2) within India, and (3) within the Western world,
where many of them actually work. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one
may argue that the major problem for Hindu scholars remains the problem of being
taken seriously:
For me, the question “Who should speak?” is less crucial than “Who will listen?”
“I will speak for myself as a Third World person” is an important position for po-
litical mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that posi-
tion, I should be listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism.^13