Politics of Defining Hindu texts

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In the context of rightwing student protest on Delhi University campus in 2011 to demand the withdrawal of an essay written by Prof A K Ramanujan, there developed a politico-legal situation in which students deployed both political pressure as well as legal suit to achieve their goal. This incident raised not only questions of political involvement in defining what Hinduism should be and how its sacred texts ought to be read, but the debate also attempted to shape the ‘sacred text’ by carefully and systematically obfuscating select materials to fit in with the viewpoint from a particular section of the Hindu society. In this paper I wish to examine some of the underlying issues in regard to the broader issue of religious sentiment. I examine the issue of rationalizing Hindu texts through moral discourse, the role of Hindutva ideology in rationalizing Hindu texts, and the role of modern Hindu tendency to restrict Hinduism to Vedānta ideas and thereby creating an unintended consequence toward a prejudicial understanding of Hinduism. I also wish to analyze the role of rightwing organizations in taking the neo-Vedānta ideas and using them for their own political agenda. I wish to argue that by rejecting Ramanujan’s essay the Hindu rightwing students effectively defined what Hindu texts ought to have contained in them by denying the fact that any other narratives ever existed in the ‘sacred’ texts of the Hindus.

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Politics of Defining Hindu texts

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