A book that is often seen as a manifesto of the downtrodden, Why I am Not A Hindu, now in its third edition, is its author's testament to what it has been like for the Dalitbahujans (Dalits and OBCs) of India.
Writing with passionate anger, laced with sarcasm, on the. caste system and Indian society, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd looks at the socioeconomic and cultural differences between the Dalitbahujans and Hindus in the contexts of childhood, family life, market relations, power relations, gods and goddesses, death and, not the least, Hindutva.
My request to Brahmin, Baniya and neo-Kshatriyas [upper-class Sudras) is that in your own interest and in the interest of this great country, you must learn to listen and to read what we have to say.'
KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD is Former Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, and Former Head, Department of Political Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad.
Why I Am Not a Hindu was first published in 1996 in the context of the growth of Hindutva, the ideology of the RSS that undergirds the BJP, which led to its campaign to mobilize Sudras (the agrarian and artisanal castes that include all listed Other Backward Classes and also castes like Jats, Patels, Marathas, Reddys, Kammas, Nairs and Mahishyas, and so on, who are outside reservation) and Dalits as Hindus. This enabled the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The book became controversial the moment it came into the market. Several reviews, attacking and appreciating the book, were written. Within a short time it became a bestseller. It was one of the four books selected by The Pioneer as a change-making millennial book at the turn of the second millennium.
The new millennium started with the RSS/BJP coming to power in Delhi. Though, thereafter, the Congress ruled for ten years, the RSS/BJP came back to power with significant support of the Sudras/OBCs in 2014. The upper caste forces within Hindutva also have reconciled with the strengthening of caste identities in the post-Mandal times and promoted a very controversial Other Backward Class (OBC) Hindutva leader-Narendra Modi-as the prime minister. A party that was known as a Brahmin-Baniya, urban middle-class party, had appointed Vajpayee, the first Brahmin from the Hindutva camp as prime minister. The most prominent prime ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and P. V. Narasimha Rao, though, were also Brahmins, were from the Congress secular heritage. However, when the RSS picked up Modi and projected him as the first OBC prime ministerial candidate of India and launched a massive campaign about his OBC background, the OBCs in significant numbers shifted to the BJP. Though Deve Gowda, an upper Sudra/OBC from Karnataka, was prime minister for a short time they projected Narendra as the first OBC candidate to get the OBC votes across the country. They succeeded in their design. Even the memory of Charan Singh as the first Sudra prime minister was never talked about.
The Congress and Left parties could not grasp the implications of RSS promoting Narendra Modi as an openly declared OBC prime ministerial candidate. The RSS/BJP won two consecutive national elections and Ram Mandir is now being built exactly where Babri Masjid was. Modi, an OBC prime minister, has consecrated the Ram Lalla idol in the temple. The traditional Brahmin Shankaracharyas boycotted the consecration because a non-Brahmin and non-priestly person has consecrated the temple idols. The Congress boycotted the Ram temple consecration with an open statement that a religious ritual is being performed by the central government for electoral gains.
I was born in a small Telangana village in the early 1950s and grew up in the 1960s. Our villages had undergone all the turbulence of the freedom movement as they were part of a historical struggle known as the Telangana Armed Struggle. Perhaps as a part of the first generation that was born and brought up in postcolonial India, an account of my childhood experiences would also be a narrative of the cultural contradictions that we are undergoing. Village India has not changed radically from my childhood days to the present. If there are any changes, the changes are marginal. Urban India is only an extension of village India. There is a cultural continuum between village India and urban India.
Suddenly, since about 1990 the word 'Hindutva' has begun to echo in our ears, day in and day out, as if everyone in India who is not a Muslim, a Christian or a Sikh is a Hindu. Suddenly I am being told that I am a Hindu. I am also told that my parents, relatives and the caste in which we were born and brought up are Hindu. This totally baffles me. In fact, the whole cultural milieu of the urban middle class the newspapers that I read, the T.V. that I see-keeps assaulting me, morning and evening, forcing me to declare that I am a Hindu. Otherwise I am socially castigated and my environment is vitiated. Having been born in a Kurumaa (shepherd caste) family, I do not know how I can relate to the Hindu culture that is being projected through all kinds of advertising agencies. The government and the state themselves have become big advertising agencies. Moreover the Sangh Parivar harasses us every day by calling us Hindus. In fact, the very sight of its saffron-tilak culture is a harassment to us.
The question before me now is not whether I must treat Muslims or Christians or Sikhs as enemies, as the Hindutva school wants me to do. The question is What do we, the lower Sudras and Ati-Sudras (whom I also call Dalitbahujans), have to do with Hinduism or with Hindutva itself? I, indeed not only I, but all of us, the Dalitsbahujans of India, have never heard the word 'Hindu' not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days. We heard about Turukoollu (Muslims), we heard about Kirastaanapoollu (Christians), we heard about Baapanoollu (Brahmins) and Koomatoollu (Baniyas) spoken of as people who were different from us. Among these four categories, the most different were the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. There are at least some aspects of life common to us and the Turukoollu and Kirastaanapoollu. We all eat meat, we all touch each other. With the Turukoollu, we shared several other cultural relations. We both celebrated the Peerila festival. Many Turukoollu came with us to the fields. The only people with whom we had no relations, whatsoever, were the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. But today we are suddenly being told that we have a common religious and cultural relationship with the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. This is not merely surprising, it is shocking.
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