Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: 1 by Koenraad Elst

Author:Koenraad Elst [Elst, Koenraad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Rupa & Co/New Delhi/India
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

In Shraddhananda’s thesis, however, the role of Islam in degrading Hindu mores is only an aside. His main point is that Hindu society was already on a downward slope, and that it had to pull itself up, back to the Vedic level, if it was to have a chance of survival. Unlike many other Hindu pamphleteers, Shraddhananda was not playing a blame game, not given to endless wailing about the injustice inflicted by others. At the same time, the Swami did see the end of Muslim rule as the golden opportunity for healing Hindu society, but found the Hindus too static to seize it: “The despotic tyrannical Mohammadan rule is a thing of the past, conditions for the removal of social evils, which are eating into the vitals of the Hindu society, have been favourable for the last 80 years, but custom-ridden Hinduism is still stagnant and refuses to move, child marriage still prevails, in the remotest corners of India, among Hindus.”424

This is suicidal for Hindu society, for the combination of child marriage with the prohibition of widow remarriage (another entirely native “social evil”) leads to the existence of a large class of very young widows. Shraddhananda quotes census figures indicating that their number in 1921 was 736,248, “an appalling figure! Out of these 7¼ lakhs of child-widows, there are thousands who lead a life of strict chastity, and it is perhaps due to their Tapasya that the Hindu society still ekes out its existence. But an overwhelming majority consists of those who are compelled to leave their homes on account of the brutal tyranny and lustful attacks of their female and male relatives, and to seek shelter under Muhammadan roofs or to add to the numbers of the daughters of shame. In this way, by reducing the numbers of Hindus, they add to the numerical strength of beef-eating religious societies.”425

This way, Swami Shraddhananda links all the defects of Hindu society to the threat of rival religions which are besieging it. Like the misery of young widows, the ill-treatment of Untouchables chases Hindus of that category towards Christianity or Islam. In the circumstances, Hindus simply cannot afford to tolerate the social evils of their society any longer, for they add to the strength of the enemies of Hinduism day by day.

Acceptance of the Islamic equality thesis

If social evils pertaining to marriage customs caused conversion to Islam, this had to be all the more true for the most outstanding social evil of Hinduism, caste oppression. Swami Shraddhananda surveys the Muslim populations in different parts of India and mentions some specificities of their conversion stories. Thus, the Muslims of Bengal, 36 per cent of the Subcontinental Muslims, had originally “professed a debased form of Buddhism”, had “never been fully Hinduised”, and had therefore been “spurned by the high-class Hindus as unclean”. The result was that they “listened readily to the preachings of the Mullahs who proclaimed that all men are equal in the sight of Allah, backed as it often was by a varying amount of compulsion”.

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