Guest post by R. Srivatsan

Contemporary India is something of a conundrum for most political theorists.  What is it?  How does it hang together?  What do people believe in?  Given the large canvas, I’d like to focus here on one small aspect of belief in Hinduism and Hindutva today.  Towards this objective, I’ll take up a somewhat old pronouncement by the foremost BJP leader and prime minister, in 2014, during a conference of doctors and other professionals that there must have been plastic surgeons in ancient India who attached an elephant’s head on a human body and created Ganesha.  And, that Karna’s extra uterine birth suggested that there was a knowledge of the science of genetics during that period.  The scientific community and those adept at history were appalled, rolling their eyes in dismay at the confusion between true history and mythology.  Is such a response, i.e., a scorn or embarrassment about the unscientificity of the claim regarding the existence of these ancient sciences/events, adequate to the statement made?  Did the prime minister actually believe this?  What is it that is being said by Hindutva politicians, ideologues and thinkers when such pronouncements are made, or for example, that vedic mathematics was the progenitor of mathematics as a discipline?  And what about the rewriting of history books to valorize the Hindu past, erasing a “dark medieval period” and denigrating Muslim “invaders”?

We may draw limited parallels with Christian anti-evolutionism, and the disbelief among some devout Muslims that Neil Armstrong actually did land on the moon (a divine body) in 1969; limited, because we will see later in the essay where Hindutva’s hubris deviates from these.

The fundamental question here is what is belief?[1]  There is a long philosophical tradition of defining this term as opposed to knowledge, and reason.  When you can reason something, and can demonstrate its correctness by observation and argument, you know the truth.  Belief, on the other hand, has been accepted in modern philosophy (since the eighteenth century) as the immediate (unmediated, unquestioned) acceptance of an intuition as the truth.  There has also been a history of seeing belief as dialectically progressing from blind faith or lived ethical substance (among the ancient Greeks for instance) to stoic acceptance of tyranny, skepticism, spiritual unhappiness, enlightenment, understanding and reason.[2]  And that was not the end of the story either: as a response to the Enlightenment’s attack of reason on faith and religion, there was in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, a resurgence of faith as an immediate knowledge of the truth of god and of objectivity in general, whose presence or actuality cannot be reasoned by finite human thought.[3]  This lineage of resistance to secular reason has continued in Christianity and emerged in other cultures down to our present time (and is probably the root of contemporary anti-evolutionism).  I would like to call this resistance recalcitrant belief: a belief that defies secular reason.  My argument is that the assertion of plastic surgery or genetics in ancient Indian knowledge is neither simple deception nor naivete:  it is an expression of recalcitrant belief on the part of the speaker who insists on it in the face of modern scientific knowledge. 

There have been two arguments that have emerged in poststructuralist thought that contradict this history of the trajectory of belief’s transformation into reason, knowledge and truth, both of which I will briefly account for in the following paragraphs.

Paul Veyne has explored ancient Greek texts to argue that Greek writers, philosophers and politicians did not necessarily, all the time, believe in their myths.[4]  To put it in my words, what these Greek public figures said, what they believed in, could not simply be boxed into the secular-liberal categories of lies, humbug or bullshit.[5]  It depended on what was perceived by them to be the appropriate thing to say to a given audience in a given context according to well established conventions.  Thus, the truth for a historian and the truth for a speaker to the people were different and called for different ethical goalposts.  The implicit point in this is that the argument that the Greeks blindly believed in their myths (or lived immersed in their ethical substance as Hegel would have it) could itself be seen as a myth constructed in the modern project of portraying what the truth develops to become.  Veyne theorizes what he calls the constitutive imagination: an overarching horizon or epistemic-ontological formation (a fishbowl, if you will) within which life was lived, myths perpetrated and truths believed.  Belief, for him, is a statement of truth that obeys a constitutive imagination of a culture. 

In the opposite direction within the same contestation, Michel Foucault has argued that truth (what we usually see as associated with reason, freedom and science) is actually linked to power – both in the traditional sense of force or authority, and in the sense of his own concept of power which, rather than act as a repressive force, is that which positively transforms how we live from within ourselves.[6]  One example of this is the “truth” of the value of education (and here I am speaking of India), which we believe in and acquiesce to  for different reasons:  it gives us a chance at finding a stable job (though this is more and more being shown to be mythical in today’s neoliberal world); it is the pathway to an enlightened life; it is a system that produces disciplined, docile subjects and workers; it is a system that produces free citizens in the real sense of the term; it is a source of business that is legitimate and profitable; it is a necessary aspect of how to form modern India as a living, organic Idea.  These interlocking forms of belief that shade into one another are the substance of our thought with respect to education out of which our common subjectivity is forged.  They are the luminous material out of which one aspect of the idea of India is constituted in our imagination.

On the other hand, we believe that vaccines are good for us, even though we have no theoretical or practical way of demonstrating that they protect us as individuals.  No doubt they may reduce the statistical incidence of a given disease, but in most instances, there is no way to prove that you as an individual belong to that fraction of the population that is protected by the vaccine, as opposed to that fraction that may not have gotten the disease anyway.  And yet we believe in vaccines – as people, as governments, as scientists, as biotech and pharma companies for different interlocking reasons that provide that belief its historical stability.  Scientific demonstration may carry its own authority; but as Latour has shown, that authority rests upon increasingly complex networks of material and institutional stabilization.[7] In the contemporary biomedical field, however, the very scale of financial, regulatory, and political entanglement can render such stabilization a source not merely of durability but of suspicion.  The point here is not a bucolic rejection of immunization or in simple terms an anti-vaxxer position.  We believe in immunization in spite of these difficulties.  This is the fishbowl of the truth of our time. 

Foucault calls this modern power-knowledge formation a regime of truth:[8]  a constitutive horizon within which we believe based on a “rational” authority what the truth is, and in doing so, subscribe and subjectivate ourselves to a given form of authority and a given way of living. 

Both Veyne and Foucault resist the idea that historical transformations of thought are oriented toward a final or absolute truth — whether conceived as cumulative scientific maturation (Comte) or as dialectical self-realization (Hegel). Instead, they treat regimes of truth as historically contingent formations without ultimate telos.  They either imply, or explicitly posit, that a given historical horizon of thought, or what they call a historical a priori,[9] is random, not progressive, and even if “progressive”, not necessarily benign.  We will follow their concepts for some distance in this essay after which we move beyond them.

Seen from this perspective, Christian anti-evolutionism, Muslim ideas about the divinity of the moon, or Hindutva assertions of ancient Indian surgical and medical science appear as contestations of the secular modern programme of truth. They are forms of recalcitrant belief in the face of this programme, a programme which offers us a “transparent” access to facts.  They are assertions of alternate forms of the constitutive imagination.    

And here is where the Hindutva example differs from the anti-evolutionism or the divine moon objections.  While the latter two are flat out rejections of modern secular science and technology, Hindutva’s claim about ancient India is, “We were there before you.”  Thus, it is not a “minor” rejection of science or modern knowledge, but a statist/political claim to originality and prior access.  Thus, when the prime minister asserted to an audience of a modern medical community that plastic surgery or genetic science must have existed in ancient India, he was not simply stating a dogmatic blind belief.  He was in fact inviting that community to share a constitutive imagination that differed from the dominant universal one (and it is testimony to the strength of the truth regime of modern science that he seems to have failed).  And yet, perhaps, his true audience was not confined to those elite doctors and scientists physically present at the prestigious event—the speech enacted a defiant reclamation of an indigenous foundation for modern science, confronting a formation of consciousness schooled into accepting the epistemological inferiority of the Hindu past.  It thereby functioned as a performative repudiation of civilizational subordination and as the projection of an alternative imaginative order, one in which Hindu greatness was asserted beyond the immediate boundaries of the event.  Drawing from Nivedita Menon’s felicitous title and distorting it, I would like to call Modi’s performance obscurantism as misdirection.[10]  It is obscurantism, because of its anti-scientific claim, and it is misdirection, because the explosive shock of its immediate performance veiled its deeper agenda.

The assertion of ancient science in India by our Hindutva ideologues is not an isolated occurrence.  It is a piece of a larger and more worrying strategic initiative – changing the science curriculum, the language strategy, replacing the older guard of secular social science researchers with the new who are more open to unfounded assertions of ancient Hindu competence, altering the academic atmosphere and composition of the universities, etc.  What is happening is that disciplines that are grounded in the secular epoch are being destabilized and made amenable to a less factually oriented programme of truth.  The point is not that the assertions are false; they may well be proven to be true.  It is rather that the rigour of a truth regime that would prove it through reason is being challenged by immediate, recalcitrant belief.  Two questions: a) is this project possible? b) is it to be left uncontested?

The question of possibility hinges on the way in which the constitutive imagination is actually constituted.  Such an imagination is not the outcome of conscious effort and intention alone, of even fairly large cultural/political entities like the RSS.  Firstly, a constitutive imagination is a product of history – not simply as an enveloping occurrence that is beyond the ken of individuals who live in the epoch, but also as a living, breathing, spiritual interaction between individuals and community/social values, laws, rituals, rewards and penalties.  It is a way in which we are ingrained to think and live our lives.  In effect, the constitutive imagination serves as the living constitution of our nation-state.  Therefore, the idea of replacing a living constitution by a conveniently forgetful “memory” that excludes the Muslim “dark age”, or reimagines colonial dominance, or constructs an unsupported fantasy of past Hindu cultural and scientific greatness, is never likely to succeed because it carries the birthmarks of these earlier interactions with Islam and colonialism – Hindutva ways of thought are indelibly marked by their passage through this history and its categories and goals are shaped by it.  Secondly, a constitutive imagination is not a single way of thinking either.  It is capacious enough to permit contradictory lifestyles of whole civilizations.  Stoking these differences and contradictions for political purposes, making explicit their quiet coexistence in the habitus of Indian life in order to provoke violence, riot and pogrom is likely to have very limited success in the long run, while their immediate effects may well be catastrophic. The living constitution cannot be wished away by an imagination of greatness that tries to vault over its own present, erasing its own history.

The question whether we should contest these assertions too is not a matter of naïve choice.  The contradictions that coexist within the given imagination of life lived together will doubtless result in protest when a uniformity is imposed in the name of an imagined cultural heritage.  These contradictions are not necessarily only “good” cultural assertions – e.g., dalit politics; they are also inherited privileges (whether democratic or caste-hierarchical) that are the result of existing social structures.  I have argued elsewhere that these contradictions (however ugly) and the way they play out are signs of health and are part of the Idea of India.[11]

The final question is, should we simply accept the randomness of our predicament and not strive towards any norms of the good life?  At this point, I would part from the polemical letter of Veyne’s and Foucault’s poststructuralist relativism and return to Hegel, perhaps reading him against the grain of his own Christian European normativism, seeking a telos, a direction of the absolute in our context.[12]  It is my belief that arises from my own roots in the specificity of our living constitution, i.e., in contemporary India with all its contradictions, that we should strive to develop ethical norms that are rooted in our constitutive imagination.  Our definitions of what we progress towards should neither be a simple acceptance of Western normativity that characterized much thought through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor a simplistic assertion of a mythic past that seeks to erase our history.  Is it not our task to believe in and participate in the constitution of an imagination that is consistent with our present and future?

In expressing this belief, I am not simply stating a subjective attitude – my subjective attitude arises in the way India is constituted, and is a legitimate, objective force that emerges in that constitution.  Whatever the truth may turn out to be (and not being informed by the owl of Minerva[13] we cannot know), the logic of the Idea of India is an actuality that also expresses itself in this belief.[14]

NOTES

[1] For a contemporary survey on the philosophical concept of belief, see entry on the term in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

[2] This trajectory of consciousness as moving from blind belief to absolute knowing is traced in G.W.F. Hegel, 2018.  The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Michael Inwood.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.

[3] The foremost post-Kantian thinker who argued this position was the German philosopher F.H. Jacobi in the early 19^th century.  For a clear exposition and critique of his work, see section titled “C. The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing (§§ 61-78)” in G.W.F. Hegel, 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusatze). Translated by T.F. Gereats, W.A. Sutching and H.S. Harris. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. pp 108-124.

[4] P. Veyne, 1988.  Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?  An Essay in the Constitutive Imagination. Translated by Paula Wissing.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[5] These are categories of untruth that have been investigated in depth by liberal philosophers in the following works:  Sissela Bok, 1979.  Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life.  New York: Random House; Max Black, 1983.  “The Prevalence of Humbug” in The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays.  Ithaca, NY.  Cornell University Press; Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005.  On Bullshit.  Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press.

[6] The clearest statement of Foucault’s linkage between truth and power and the concept of “regimes of truth” comes in the interview, “Truth and Power” in his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977.  New York: Pantheon Books. pp 109-133.

[7] Bruno Latour, 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[8] Op. cit., p 131.

[9] See “The Historical A Priori and the Archive” in Michel Foucault, 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.  pp 126-121.  Also see “There is no a priori that is not historical” in Paul Veyne, Foucault, His Thought, His Character.  Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Books.  Pp 22-38.

[10] Nivedita Menon, 2023. Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

[11] R. Srivatsan, “What is the Idea of India”, The India Forum, forthcoming.

[12] Partha Chatterjee in the early 1990s argued for reading Hegel against the grain, seeking love in the space of community and not in the bourgeois nuclear family (which then becomes the prototype of the state’s ambition).  Perhaps this essay is a sign that about 35 years later, we need to contest and reclaim the idea of a national community – not reducible to the programmes of a State bureaucracy, but as a contradictory unity, an Idea that is shaping itself, and participating in it.  Partha Chatterjee, 1993.  The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.  Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp 230-233.

[13] “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. G.W.F Hegel, 1821. The Philosophy of Right.

[14] By using the term belief in this way, to express my own position after critiquing it through the essay, I am standing firm with the Hegelian insight that immediate belief is supported by a historical mediation – a situatedness.

R Srivatsan is a political theorist, formerly a senior fellow at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies. He is currently working on religion, health and development. He has been part of a Hegel reading group since 2016.