34 "Presenting" the Past
the Divine Mother—the Hindu Nation." This "worship from an unde-
serving child of Her Own" begins with a complaint about the "strange
times" when "traitors" sat enthroned as national heroes but "patriots"
were heaped with ignominy. And the intended outcome of the worship
is "national regeneration and not ... hap-hazard [sic] bundle of politi-
cal rights-the state."^77 Golwalkar spoke in Delhi in 1965: "Building up of
strong nation means primarily arousing a sense of an intense devotion
to this our motherland." The motherland has "to be worshipped in its
totality" as "our ancestors have venerated it as Vishnu-patni, as a devi."
According to Golwalkar, "Every particle of it is sacred, every peak of it is
the abode of Divinity."^78 This religiosity becomes instrumental in commu-
nal nationalism, as it reifies the ideologues' ideological dominance, politi-
cal hegemony, and social control.
The nation worship does not take off just with the nation as the god-
dess and the Brahminical orthodoxy as the chief priests; there has to be a
legend, historicity, to legitimize the system. Buying into Western histori-
cism and the Semitic religious patterns, mythological characters such as
Ram and Krishna are counterposed as Hindu heroes and/or prophets
against historical figures like Jesus and Mohammed. Locations such as
Ayodhya and Mathura become the exact places where the prophets were
born. The popular epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are
preferred to more religious scriptures to be designated as the book(s) of
Hinduism. All these symbols are effectively translated into a coherent
set of metaphors and emotionally laden expressions at the backdrop of
historicity.
Exhorting to study, understand, and write "our history ourselves" and
discard the designed or undesigned distortions, Golwalkar periodizes
the Hindu history into the dim past, epic age (4,500 to 5,000 years ago),
the period of Buddha and the great emperors of "peace, power and, [sic]
plenty," Muslim invasions and 800 years' war, and British usurpation. All
in all, "we—Hindus—have been in undisputed and undisturbed posses-
sion of this land for over 8 or even 10 thousand years before the land was
invaded by any foreign race." Golwalkar would "positively maintain that
we Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous chil-
dren of the soil always, from times immemorial and are natural masters
of the country."^79 The summation of the "History of Hindusthan" then is
the following:
In a nutshell we may state that in this land of ours we have lived for God knows
how long, a great Nation of the grandest culture, that though, for the last thousand
years or less, the land has been infested with murderous bands of despoilers in
various parts, the Nation has not been conquered, far less subjugated, that through
all these years it has engaged in terrible struggle to free the land of this pest and
the great struggle is still relentlessly raging with varying success to both sides.^80