Presenting the Past Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India

(^114) "Presenting" the Past
do away with the dependence on the lower castes and learn combat skills
themselves. This analysis transpired in the inaugural meeting of the RSS
in 1925 also.^15
Take celibacy as an example. As sexual ecstasy becomes a symbol for
the ecstasy of man's union with God, the coupling of the earthly and the
divine makes any copulation a psychologically uncomfortable experience,
devaluing the somatic in the process. The orthodox Brahmin thus gets pre-
occupied with the value and the power of semen, and avoiding the loss
of it and the pleasures of sex. The exercises by which advanced yogis can
draw up spilled semen suggest that it is not the pleasure of orgasm so
much as the draining of "strength" that has to be avoided. Along the lines
of the "twice-born" theory of Brahmins, one Hindutva zealot puts it, "Our
first birth is the result of sex-subservience and our second birth comes
from sex-sublimation." The sex-sublimation leads one to self-realization
and power.^16
These predilections and preoccupations of Brahminical orthodoxy took
a unique political shape when a few Maharashtrian and Punjabi Brahmins
reacted to the developments of their time. As far back as 1923, Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966) articulated in his pamphlet Hindutva/Who
Is a Hindu? the modern Hindutva ideology, with clear delineations on
who was a Hindu, what were the preconditions to be a Hindu, and who
could be "the Other" of Hindus. In 1925, another Maharashtrian, Keshav
Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940), took to the task of providing an organi-
zational backup by founding the RSS. The location and the timing were
important. The decline and collapse of the Congress-Khilafat alliance right
after Mahatma Gandhi's unilateral withdrawal of the Non-cooperation
Movement in February 1922 was followed by widespread riots across the
subcontinent. The mid-1920s witnessed a massive communalization of
political life in Malabar (the Moplah rebellion of 1924), Bengal, Multan, and
Punjab. Although there were no major riots in Maharashtra and Muslims
were such a small minority, there had been a powerful anti-Brahmin move-
ment of "backward" castes from the 1870s, when Jyotiba Phule founded his
Satyashodhak Samaj. By the 1920s, the Dalits (poor and downtrodden) also
organized themselves under Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Moreover, the Maratha Kunbi rich peasantry was given reserved seats
in the Legislative Council, and between 1920 and 1923 the non-Brahmin
representatives started a sustained attack on the privileges of the Brahmin
elite. The Montague-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 also played an impor-
tant role by extending franchise to the rich sections of the rural areas and
creating traumatic effects for the Brahmins in Punjab, who until then had a
monopoly in education, bureaucracy, and overall Punjab politics. The gov-
ernment in Punjab increasingly favored agrarian interests of rural areas
that appeared to be Muslim at the cost of the urban centers because of the
rich peasant lobby. The fears of Muslim dominance in Punjab and Bengal