Buddhism in India

Colonial Challenges and Buddhist Revival 223

nationalists and social reformers, can be seen in the writings of a

man considered practically the father of ‘Indian secularism’—

Jawaharlal Nehru. In his influential Discovery of India, written

while in prison, Nehru undertakes a vast interpretive survey of his

country (see also Aloysius 1997: 155–62). He refuses to accept the

‘conquest’ aspect of the Aryan incursion and instead sees the ‘great

cultural synthesis and fusion...between the incoming Aryans and

Dravidians’ which produced the basic Indian culture, but he sees a

‘wide gulf between the two’ with the Aryans considering them-

selves ‘vastly superior’. He cites the Rig Veda as the origin from

which ‘flow out the rivers of Indian thought and philosophy, of

Indian life and culture.’ Caste, to him, is a solution to the problem

of organising the coexistence of different races (Nehru 1959:

39–47). In fact, he sees it as so central to Indian social life that its

annihilation ‘may well lead to a complete disruption of social life,

resulting in the absence of cohesion, mass suffering and the devel-

opment on a vast scale of abnormalities in individual behaviour,

unless some other social structure, more suited to the times and the

genius of the people, takes its place’ (ibid.: 149).

This is indeed a warning against social reform! Caste is part of

‘the genius of the Indian people’, where the emphasis is on group

life as opposed to western individualism. It has stood through the

ages, and its power and cohesiveness derive from its functions!

Brahmans, he argues, retain their prestige because of their learning.

The idea of dharma, the basis of social order, ‘stands out in marked

contrast to the modern assertion of rights, rights of individuals, of

groups, of nations’ (ibid.: 52–53). In spite of wars and conquest, nation-

alism was an underlying theme of Indian history—from Chanakya

and Chandragupta Maurya onwards, and Brahmanism was at the

heart of it:

in the ages since the Aryans had come down to what they called

Aryavarta...the problem that faced India was to produce a synthesis

between this new race and culture and the old race and civilization

of the land. To that the mind of India devoted itself, and it produ-

ced an enduring solution built on the strong foundations of a

joint Indo-Aryan culture. Other foreign elements came and were

absorbed... [after periodic invasions] The reaction was essentially a

nationalist one.... That mixture of religion and philosophy, history and

tradition, custom and social structure, which in its wide fold included

almost every aspect of the life of India then, and which might be called

relative simplicity and heroism. The varna system was re-theorised
as representing a basically stable, cooperative and harmonious
society which had only degenerated with Muslim rule.
Nationalism was seen in cultural terms—as unity derived from a
special religious and spiritual identity, and religion was seen as its
essence. It was admitted that India was a racially and culturally
diverse country, but the core of this diversity and its essential unity
was embodied in a cultural stream which had its fountainhead in
the Vedas and the Vedantic belief in a universal soul underlying all.
‘Hindu’—a word which had originally had a geographical conno-
tation (an Iranian mispronunciation of the river ‘Sind’ and the area
beyond it) but which was gradually applied to the non-Muslim
inhabitants of the subcontinent, and then used by the British to des-
ignate all who were not Muslims or Christians—was appropriated
by the Brahmanic elite to identify their religion. It was given a
national interpretation: ‘Hinduism’ was the religion of all the people,
who may worship god in diverse images and ways, but all were
now said to have in common ‘national’ deities such as Ram and an
ultimate allegiance to a Vedantic supreme being.
It was within this framework that the debates over social reform
developed. As historians like Sudhir Chandra have shown, there
were strange overlaps between those characterised as ‘orthodox’ and
those characterised as ‘reformers’ (Chandra 1994: 71–115). Both
appealed to the same traditionally sacred texts; both sought to justify
their position with reference to the ancient Vedic religion. Names
such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj illustrated this. Some of
this emerging elite appealed to the emotionalism of bhakti move-
ments (Brahmans in the Prarthana Samaj in Pune, for instance,
played the instruments and sought to work themselves into a trance).
Reformers argued that bans on widow remarriage, sati and other
apparently obnoxious customs were not really part of Vedic society
but had developed as later ‘excrescences’, deriving from conditions
of the time, for example the need to veil women and keep them
protected from marauding Turks. This view became all-pervasive.
Even the low castes were urged to view Hinduism as ‘theirs’, to
refuse conversion to an alien religion but instead try to reform their
own degraded customs and fight the disabilities they suffered under.
The fact that the new ideology of ‘Hindu nationalism’ had
spread so widely among the elite, that it formed the unquestioned
framework of thinking of ‘orthodox’ and ‘conservative’ alike, of

222 Buddhism in India