Ramjanmabhumi: Hinduizing Politics and Militarizing Hindudom 111been a major criterion of being a Brahmin. Although self-denial, knowl-
edge of the Vedas, and birth into the Brahmin caste are the three condi-
tions of being a Brahmin, only a person born of Brahmin parents should
be given Vedic education.
Justice S.A.T. Rowlatt's Sedition Committee Report of April 15, 1918,
which had gone into the causes and methods of the armed activities
against the British, found out, among other things, that leaders such as
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Chaphekar brothers, Ranade, Kanhere, Shivram
Mahadev Paranjape, the Savarkar brothers, and others belonged to the
Chitpawan Brahmin caste. The latter-day Hindu Mahasabha leaders, such
as B. S. Moonje, N. C. Kelkar, and M. R. Jayakar, were also Chitpawan Brah-
mins. Most of the seven men who plotted the assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi—Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte, Vishnu Karkare, and Gopal
Godse—were Brahmins. My point here is not any skewed casteist accusa-
tion, nor do I suggest that the feeling of hostility and animosity toward the
British was limited to this particular community. All I want to point out
here is that, as I develop fully later, the role of reactionary Brahmins and
Brahminism is quite crucial in churning out a virulent Hindutva ideology
and status-quoist forces. Incidentally, it was V. D. Savarkar who coined and
defined the terms Hindutva, Hindudom, and Pan-Hindu in his presidential
address at the Hindu Mahasabha Calcutta session in 1938. According to
him, Hinduism means "the school or system of religions the Hindus fol-
low." Hindutva "refers not only to the religious aspect of the Hindu people
as the word 'Hinduism' does but comprehends even their cultural, lin-
guistic, social and political aspects as well. It is more or less akin to 'Hindu
Polity' and its nearly exact translation would be 'Hinduness.'" And the
"Hindu people spoken of collectively" is meant by Hindudom.^5
The "innocence, somaticity, and strength" themes of the Brahminical
orthodoxy need to be elaborated here in order to understand the geneti-
cally degenerated modern Hindutva versions. The cosmological orienta-
tions and social configurations of Hinduism have been formulated by and
for Brahmins, who occupy the topmost position in the caste hierarchy. The
creation began, according to their story, with the Golden Age (the Age of
Truth), when polarities of differentiation such as the mundane reality and
the ultimate reality, or life and death, had not been distinguished. When the
mundane world was created as a process of dismemberment of the Brah-
min by human nature or time, that self-differentiation created a tension
between mundane and cosmic orders, or pollution and salvation. The two
complementary ways to overcome this chasm were performing the ritual
activities ascriptively allocated to groups on the basis of the purity of their
bodily substance (varna), and renouncing the world (sanyasa). Although
these two approaches were distinct, they were closely interrelated.^6
This religiously oriented taxonomy of varna creates a quadripartite
division of the society that is legitimated by the cosmogonical discourse
and presented as primordial, eternal, and given. The Vedic texts organize