Why They Hate Us

THE STORIES WE TELL ourselves structure the world for us and justify our place in it. Through religion or politics, these stories become proxies for our identities. In a sense, they are our identity. You can tell that by the attacks on them: To make Ravana the “good guy” in a telling of the Ramayana, someone unjustly harmed, is a way of inverting the moral polarity of the figures in the story, undermining devotion to Rama by undermining Rama. Missionaries commonly declare the Gods of the Hindu pantheon to be demons in reality, just as they once did the Gods of the Mediterranean pantheon.

Casting in doubt a tradition’s cherished story is dangerous to the tradition. People who need that story to be true, who conflate that story with their identity, can be driven to hatred or even violence in response. The Jewish denial of the Messiah has led to centuries of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Christian world, culminating in the Holocaust. The Catholic Church burned heretics and persecuted Galileo to maintain its control over civilisation’s storytelling on matters both spiritual and scientific. The loss of that control triggered the process that has resulted in the collapse of European Christianity. Blasphemy laws are desperate attempts to prevent that from happening in the Islamic world; several Islamic countries have outlawed the preaching of other religions entirely to avoid the challenge of competing or contradictory stories.

What if there were a group of people who managed to undermine the civilisation-defining narratives of several other groups at once? What if they did this simply by continuing to exist?

Hindu history, over the past thousand years, has featured repeated defeats, scattered resistance, subjection, and, most shamefully of all, avid collaboration. (This held true even among subgroups traditionally associated with religious or political resistance: the 19th-century British Indian Army, for example, fielded entire regiments of Brahmins and Mahrattas (Marathas), who did the bid­ding of white Christian officers.) To this day, in the political arena, the Hindus are an adversary’s dream: quick to fall out along caste or linguistic lines, content with gestural victories like Ayodhya’s Rama temple, unaware of or untroubled by legal disadvantages, and largely harmless to missionaries. Indian Hindu elites are eager to enrol their children in prestigious Catholic schools, while the rank and file remain more enamoured of films than collective self-assertion. Nor can any foreign people, whether Arabs, Persians, Central Asians, or Europeans, complain about any Hindu warlord galloping or sailing forth to demolish their architecture, enslave their women, and rename their cities. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Yet notice the hatred, contempt, and vilification this religious group gets, even though it remains largely uninterested in prosely­tisation, and even though it has rarely mustered effective political unity—regardless if it is in the majority, as in India or Nepal, or in the minority, as in the diaspora.

The circumstances vary, but there is a single, unifying principle that underlies global Hindu hatred. Hinduism is the universal exception. Hindus, simply by existing, disprove the stories various people tell themselves around the world. Collectively, we are a bone stuck in the throat of history, the dissonant note that jangles the self-soothing music of the lie.

Consider the pattern in all its manifestations. In the West, both in the US and in Europe, the political rightwing claims that immigrants are disproportionately violent criminals and drains on the public welfare system. Yet Hindus are almost completely absent from jails in the UK and the US when it comes to convictions for violent crime. In the US, because of their overrepresentation in the professions and the nature of the tax code (wages are looted yearly, but not capital gains), American Hindus “pay in” several multiples of what they will ever “take out”. They are a law-abiding, financial net positive for the US government. Hindus are living proof that the Right’s prevailing image of immigrants is false, or incomplete. A recent online brouhaha over America’s H-1B system revealed the animus that Indian—more specifically, Indian Hindu— immigrants have provoked. They are the exception to the narrative that race-proud white Americans rely on to preserve their self-esteem, one in which the white population is the most capable group for intellectual work of any kind, while non-white immigrants are good only for manual labour.

America’s progressive Left, by contrast, insists that Ameri­can society is “systemically” racist. This is how it explains poorer outcomes in many minority groups. American Hindus have the highest educational attainment and highest average income of any group in the US, including white Americans. Other Asian groups disprove this theory also, but none so vis­ibly or overwhelmingly as Americans of Indian Hindu birth or immediate ancestry. It is the Indian Hindu diaspora, and not the diasporas of East Asian or Middle Eastern Asian countries, that keeps producing high-profile politicians and business leaders, for now. The West’s Hindus keep reminding the Left that its most cherished narrative about American society might well be untrue, or at least in need of serious revision.

Political narratives are not the only kind that Hindus upend. Christianity tells itself a story about its superior message overwhelming the pagan peoples of the world with its truth, beauty, and moral power. Yet Christianity showed up early in India and stalled there for two millennia. It has made substan­tial gains under two circumstances: first, during the Goan Inquisition, when Portuguese priests tortured Hindus into con­verting; second, in the modern era, when American and British capitalist wealth supercharged missionary efforts, primarily in the tribal east of India. (The first ‘conversion’ is always dollars to rupees; other conversions are downstream of that.) Hindu indifference to Christianity has been the lament of generations of missionaries. The ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’ still holds less interest than the Ramayana there, which spread, in antiquity, through puppet plays and poems, songs and sculptures—not through war, organised inculcation, or a Gideon Society.

Similarly, pre-modern Islam told itself a story of God-willed conquest. But in India that floodtide broke, and hundreds of millions remained unconverted and unimpressed. Temple demolitions, a tax specific to infidels (jizya), political subjuga­tion and enslavement did not succeed uniformly. Contempo­rary Islam, by contrast, has eschewed triumphalism, at least in its public-facing stance; in a neat inversion, it tells itself and others a story of victimisation. Yet maps and demographic data—in Pakistan, in Kashmir, in Bangladesh—tell the opposite story. Like today’s Turks faced with photographs, first-hand accounts, and statistical proof of the Armenian genocide, the only recourse is denialism, the frenetic falsifica­tion of history. The persistence en masse of the Hindus, like the ghost in Hamlet, will not let the crime be forgotten.

Extinguished pagan civilisations have no voices; it is hard to imagine one billion tree-revering Celts in modern France raging against French Catholicism’s ancient demolition of a sacred grove, but that is something like the current situation. Hindu civilisa­tion still has innumerable voices, lying in wait online to swarm any propagandist’s latest Orwellian inversion of the truth. Social media has made it harder to get away with lying; in today’s environment, university-based propagandists must strive far harder to create the same distortions of the historical record.

Even atheists or scientific materialists have a hard time maintaining narrative consistency when faced with the Hindu exception. They tell themselves a story in which religion quenches the scientific spirit of inquiry and the study of physical reality. Yet ancient Hindu mathematical treatises start with invocations to Ganesha, yogic breathing exercises have gained vindication from physiologists, and India’s tilak-sporting space scientists engage in millennia-old religious rites to sanctify a launch. Modern atheists also love to claim that believers activate violence to spread their faith and enforce an intellectually stunting conformity of thought. But Hindu his­tory is full of various sects engaging in the religious equivalent of parallel play, and Hindus have no uniformity of belief, no litmus test credo to ‘get into heaven’. Vaishnavas debated Bud­dhists, certainly—and learned from them, exchanged ideas, and eventually declared Buddha an avatar of Vishnu. The Cath­olic-Protestant and Sunni-Shia feuds have a different historical character, one that includes hot wars, not just wars of words.

Nalanda was founded by the Vaishnava king Kumaragupta I, and both its donors and students were a mix of Buddhists and Hindus. Unlike the modern, secular university, this was a religious institution—but a hybrid one, or one that did not draw much of a distinction between the ‘isms’ as we do today. To understand how differently Hindus and Buddhists originally related to one another, contrast Nalanda with the impossibility of a hybrid madrasah-seminary; consider, also, how modern-day Thailand’s Buddhists, currently ruled by King Rama X, worship Ganesha. Their relationship upends the atheist’s notion of reli­gion being a source of constant, intractable human conflict.

Marxism managed to enter Russia and China alike, causing paroxysms of famine and mass political murder. Smaller Asian nations like Cambodia, too, suffered a bout with this 20th-cen­tury ideological disease. Yet India, though it has produced its share of communist intellectuals (Stalin’s daughter’s boyfriend among them), and though it has had troubles with Maoists in its Northeast, never quite fell under the spell. Its massive agrarian population and unequal distribution of wealth made it a country no more or less susceptible to a Red revolution than 20th-century Russia or China. (Marx himself would have expected it to take place in an industrialised society.) Yet here, too—as pent-up revolutionary energy dispersed into anti-colonial, inter-religious, and inter-caste conflicts—the Hindus proved an exception, deaf to the siren song of utopian ideologues. They are modernising, with ever-increasing inter-caste marriages, and various alterations in the nature of Hindu worship. But so far, they have spared themselves, and their fellow Indians, any gulags or Cultural Revolutions.

MUCH OF WHAT I have claimed about the Hindus, both the native population and the diaspora, could also be said of the Chinese. Yet even leaving aside China’s capitulation to communist mass death under Mao, there is another crucial difference. China has rounded up and ‘re-educated’ Muslims in Xinjiang province; it banned Christianity entirely until 1976, and today that religion, restricted in several ways, has been driven partly underground. Hindu taxpayers in India, meanwhile, surrender thousands of acres yearly to the Waqf Board while funding Christian colleges that reserve half their seats for Chris­tians. Yet the Chinese do not provoke a fraction of the contempt, rage, and vilification from either imperial faith. This is because Hinduism proposes, and represents, a rival absolute truth in a way that worldly Confucian insights and Chinese folk religion do not. The Upanishads posit sweeping ideas of karma, rebirth, and Brahman; the Gita dares a Vision of the Universal Form. Hindu civilisation does not threaten their believers—it threatens their belief.

Incidentally, the Hindu relation­ship to China consists, since antiquity, of another kind of exception. Indians have largely proven immune to Chinese influence, while the reverse is emphatically not the case. The Himalayan boundary is often cited as the reason for this psycho-spiritual firewall; it is also true that China’s population is concentrated in its east­ern half, and the large region adjacent to India is relatively sparsely peopled. But the geographic and demographic explanation ought to hold true in both directions, and it does not. Dharmic religion transformed Chinese art and spirituality. Chinese pilgrims account for many extant descriptions of clas­sical India, and they were studying at Nalanda when Muslim invaders de­stroyed it. Relatively little of Chinese thought and culture percolated south into India. To understand how excep­tional this is, recall how thoroughly Sinic civilisation has transformed its neighbours in almost every direction except India’s. Even Japan, a civilisation that seems to have its own distinct centre of gravity, has learned from its neighbour: the Japanese script (Kanji), early painting schools, and poetic conventions are all derived from China. China’s main spiritual contribution to Japan—Zen (Ch’an)—ultimately comes from India; as a form of Buddhism, its ultimate origin lies in the Upanishadic culture of philosophical self-transformation. So in the context of Asia, too, the Hindus are an exception, not the recipient of Chinese genius but its quickener.

The ultimate reason for this at times self-destructive drive towards exceptionalism may well be theological, deeply rooted in the Hindu mind. Historically, we have entertained two contradictory attitudes towards our environment.

On the one hand, there is intense group conformity to the demands and obligations of jati. The desire to preserve the cus­toms, quirks, habits, and grudges of a tiny in-group led to the biologically unique phenomenon of Indian caste endogamy, preserved over centuries. Genetic evidence suggests this took hold well into the post-Vedic period, but regardless of the de­tails, this rigorous fixation on small-scale conformity created a strange environment neither Islam nor Christianity could fully penetrate. Both of those religions relied on the highly networked, freely mixing societies of the Roman Empire for their rapid successes. Arab Muslim conquests of Iberia, Egypt, and Syria all took advantage of roads paved with Roman concrete; in 846 CE, they even sacked Rome itself, including the Old St Peter’s Basilica. Christians to this day have Latin and Greek churches that follow Diocletian’s original division of the empire. Both religions, entering caste-compartmentalised In­dia, encountered something strange, unique, purity-obsessed, closed off—the opposite of freely mixing. After the society was broken with violence, some fragments of it converted— but other fragments resisted even harder. Small-scale group conformity resulted, paradoxically, in non-conformity to the totalising fantasies of the Ummah and the Mother Church.

Simultaneously, the theological emphasis in Hindu thought has always been on individual pursuit of the divine. There is no moksha en masse; it is always a singular atman’s journey, from birth to death to rebirth. Accordingly, traditional Hindu­ism is not a congregational religion; Hindus do not all prostrate themselves at the same time in the same direction, nor is there choral singing. Many famous Hindu temples cycle a crowd past the murti; each individual does darshan, perhaps says a quick prayer, and is shuffled along. This is why there are such long lines at Hindu temples, as there are at the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Each individual tourist wants their own picture of and with the object of aesthetic veneration; each Hindu wants his or her personal moment with the object of religious veneration.

So ultimately it comes down to individualism. America loves to characterise itself as the individualistic culture par excellence, but its politics permits only two parties, and its culture has divided, accordingly, into pre-packaged ‘red’ and ‘blue’ varieties. Nonconformity consists of not conform­ing to a single other way of thinking (and voting). Hindus, by contrast, are the real individualists of history, and both the past and the present prove it. Chronically divided and chronically conquered, their willingness to show up vociferously on every side of every debate has ensured that the most effective check on pan-Hindu political unity today comes from Hindus themselves, emphasising every variation in regional or caste identity.

This universal exceptionalism is not always a virtue or a factor in favour of survival. In time, it may prove the reverse. Alarmingly, Hindus have proven, so far, an exception to the rule that persecution short of eradication hardens, unites, and activates a religious group. Instantaneous dissemination of images of attacks on Hindus—whether a pogrom in rural Bangladesh, or a brutal temple invasion in Canada—have yet to conjure effective, transnational mass agitation. Ongoing persecutions are already being erased or reframed; no wonder the same holds true of recent and remote ones. The horror of 1971 is called a ‘Bangladeshi genocide’ to elide how it disproportionately targeted Hindus—thereby uncoupling it from recent pogroms in that region. Bengal is one more example of Hinduism’s great contraction, as its many indigenous traditions have been rooted out in the northwest, the tribal east, and Kashmir.

Whether this one form of exceptionalism changes, over the coming years and decades, may well decide the fate of the religion as a whole. Because Hindus do not fit into the most cherished narratives of so many groups, these groups will con­tinue their centuries-long quest to resolve the contradiction by destroying the anomaly. Like an immune system, they react against this universal antigen. Hindus are the snarl throwing off every pattern, frustrating all foreign humanity-reshaping endeavours, whether imperial, ideological, or religious. The challenges will never cease; we will never be left alone. The only question is whether we can prove an exception to our own rule—and, for the first time in our history, fight back as one.

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