Inner Metamorphosis

In India any form of Hindu assertion or defence is quickly labelled as being pro-Hindutva. Indeed, the term ‘Hindutva’ is clearly used in pejorative sense in media, and many youngsters who unquestioningly consume the left-liberal dominated media propaganda are prompt to affix this tag who anyone who attempts to defend Hinduism and criticize other religions. What exactly is Hindutva? Hindutva is Persian-cum-Sanskrit neologism meaning “Hinduness” or “Hindu identity”, born in late 19 th century and credited to Savarkar. Hindutva is a political movement, which argues that India is the “homeland” of Hindus, and defines ‘Hindus’ as those who consider India as their motherland, fatherland and holyland. Note that the definition is purely in cultural terms which include Indic religions like Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. But this surely clashes with the two Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, for whose followers, the holyland lies outside of India. To put it rather bluntly, Hindutv...

Chetan Bhagat’s (CB) recent column created a furore, chiefly because of his audacity to speak for Muslim community and what many people conflate with his support for Narendra Modi’s Prime Ministerial ambitions.   But what interested me most - and what this post would focus on - is questioning of his literary merit (or lack of it). Many journalists ridicule CB’s style of writing and his oversimplistic portrayals of characters sans nuance or sophistication. But I suspect this has more to do with the fact that his readers alone far outnumber the combined readers of many journalists - a point that many don’t appear capable of digesting. No takers for layman’s language! When Tulsidas rewrote Ramayana in Avadhi (a local contemporary dialect then), many conservative sections of society came down heavily upon him for defiling the sanctity of a much revered epic (originally written in Sanskrit). When Quran was first translated in Urdu (by Shah Abdul Qadir in 1798), it faced...