The Hindu Reaffirmation: How civilisational roots would shape the future of India

 AT PRECISELY 12 NOON on November 25, on the auspicious occasions of Vivah Panchami (union of Lord Ram and Sita) and Abhijit Muhurat (a time of victory and coronation), Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoisted a triangular saffron flag 20-feet-long and 10-feet-wide, on the 161-feet-high shikhar or pinnacle of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to the back­drop “Jai Shri Ram” cheers, Vedic chants and prayers echoing from some 7,000 spectators. They included saffron-sash sporting sadhus, workers, artists, and artisans involved in the making of the magnificent temple. As they looked on, Modi, overcome by emotion, bowed his head to the dhwaj and did Namaskar with uncharacteristically trembling hands and a visage suffused with the unshed tears triggered by the realisation that some­thing momentous was in the making. “These shaking hands carried the weight of 500 years of tears, trials and triumphs. Legally, patiently, Hindus endeared the liberal cabal’s calumny for daring to reclaim their soul,” a faithful wrote on X.

It was no ordinary event. Modi, the first Indian prime minister to proudly embrace the tenets of Hindu Dharma and champion the return of the faith’s tallest deity to his home, described the event as “epochal”, signifying the end of centuries of pain and the fulfilment of a 500-year-old promise. Modi had offered prayers at Shri Ram Darbar Garbhgriha, bowing before the idol of Ram Lalla amid the chanting of mantras prior to the dhwajarohan ceremony, after traversing Ayodhya town showered with flowers.

The grand right-angled flag, made of parachute-grade cloth and gold threadwork sporting three symbols of Sanatana Dharma, including the Om symbol, the Sun and the Kovidar tree and mounted on a 42-feet flagpole, pierced the skyline of Ayodhya for the first time in centuries, an insignia of the ascent of Ram Rajya. The flag itself was a unified emblem of Hindu dharma and its hoisting signalled continuity through centuries of trials and tribulations, invasions, denial and cancelling of a vibrant culture kept alive not by governments or lawmakers but by ordinary people. Every witness, both in Ayodhya and outside, was cognisant of the fact that this was no ritual signal­ling the completion of the Ram temple and its being thrown open to the public. It meant a splendorous celebration of a 5,000-year-old civilisation.

“Today, all of India and the entire world are suffused with the holy spirit of Lord Ram. There is extraordinary exhilaration in the heart of every devotee and boundless gratitude. There is unfathomable supernatural bliss. The wounds of centuries are  being healed and the pain of centuries being put to rest today. The resolve of centuries is being fulfilled. Today is the completion of that sacrifice whose fire remained lit for 500 years,” an emotional Modi said. Ayodhya, he emphasised, was more than just a town; it was the cornerstone of Hindu belief. And Lord Ram was not just a mythological figure; he represented a value system, a discipline and guiding light of righteousness, justice, and leadership. Referring to the 42 crore devotees who have thronged the temple town since the prana pratistha ceremony early last year, with its impressive air and train connectivity, Modi said that today, it represented rapid devel­opment and prosperity in a new India guided by Lord Ram. “In the Treta Yuga, Ayodhya gave humanity its code of conduct, and in the 21st century, Ayodhya is offering humanity a new model of develop­ment. Ayodhya is emerging as the backbone of a developed India.”

Modi declared that if India was to become a developed nation by 2047 and all sections of society were to be empowered, Lord Ram must be the pathfinder to achieve this goal, and this could only happen if each one of us channelled our inner Ram and conse­crated his values in our hearts. “There could be no better day than today to take this pledge. Today has brought another extraordinary moment of pride in our heritage and the Kovidar tree reminds us that when we sever our roots, our ancient glory is buried in the pages of history.” With the values and worldview of Lord Ram as the guiding light, India’s foundations should be strengthened for the coming thousand years. “We must learn from his conduct... the chariot of growth should be powered by truth and the highest conduct and policy, intent, and moral­ity should never be compromised. These qualities of Ram must guide us in building a strong, visionary, and enduring India, fusing together our glorious past heritage with a prosperous future, tradition with modernity.”

Knitting nation-building with spirituality, Modi emphasised that this was only possible when every Indian put the nation be­fore self-interest. The 21st century is very important, he said, high­lighting that in the 70 years after Independence, India became the world’s 11th largest economy, but in the last 11 years alone, India has become the fifth largest economy. “The day is not far when India will also become the world’s 3rd largest economy... the com­ing decades are of new opportunities and new possibilities, and in this crucial period the thoughts of Lord Ram will continue to inspire the nation.”

MODI’S EMOTIONS WERE understandable. January 22, 2024, the date of the prana pratistha or consecra­tion of Ram Lalla, was a cornerstone of an emerging, self-asserting India of the 21st century even when reclaiming its centuries-old cultural heritage. “This is a temple of India’s vision, India’s philosophy, India’s direction. This is a temple of national consciousness. Ram is the faith of India; Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the only idea of India; his law is the law of this nation,” Modi had said then, contesting the entrenched Nehruvian ‘idea of India’ by which the intelligentsia had sent Ram on vanvaas.

It was but natural that an ardent, unapologetic Hindu and com­mitted Rambhakt like Modi, official patron of the consecration cer­emony, would preside over the Dhwajarohan ceremony to dedicate the most sacred of Ram’s temples to the public. The Ram Mandir event last year was an instance of generational angst finding release in a convergence of dharma, socio-cultural resurgence, and confi­dence in nation-building. An emotional LK Advani, who had led the Ram Mandir movement, had asserted “Modi is the chosen one”.

Modi’s reclamation of all things Hindu was always part of a larger project of de-conditioning and decolonisation, an extension of which worldview was apparent at the flag-hoisting ceremony. Modi’s address now, too, rested on how for centuries ordinary peo­ple were shamed and forced to expunge their heritage in public and labour under a slave mentality that even denied the essence of Ramatva, or the belief system surrounding Lord Ram. This was done despite Ram manifesting himself in the faith of people across the subcontinent, enshrining core values like integrity, inclusiv­ity, unity, and equality. “He taught us that the collective strength of society had to be harnessed, without fear or favour, in order to achieve development and prosperity,” Modi said. “If we resolve to free ourselves completely from the slave mentality within the next ten years, such a conflagration of confidence would ignite the achievement of a Viksit Bharat by 2047. This is crucial,” Modi said. He asserted that only ridding the nation of Lord Macaulay’s project of intellectual bondage within the next decade, which would mark 200 years of his holding Indians in mental thrall, would free India of all forms of Western servitude and subjugation.

“A single shelf of a fine European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” That was how Thomas Babington Macaulay insulted the people of the subcontinent and derided their traditional education systems. On February 2, 1835, the British historian and Whig politician delivered his Minute on Indian Education, which sought to establish the need for Indian “natives” to receive an English education. This marked a pivotal moment in India’s colonial history, advocating the promotion of English education and decisively shaping the trajectory of the country’s educational landscape. Macaulay’s thoughts on Indians and their education system were deeply influenced by his belief in the superiority of European learning. He believed that Indian learning was inferior to European learning, particularly in terms of physical and social sciences. His Minute aimed to create a class of Indians who could support and uphold British interests, which he described as “Indian by blood and colour, but English by likes, beliefs, morality, and intellect.”

He dismissed the worth of traditional Indian learning, such as gurukul, which emphasised all-round academic, spiritual, and physical knowledge and health, maintaining that this was stagnant and outdated. He also disdained Vedic literature, Sanskrit scholar­ship, mathematics, and native sciences. Macaulay was a member of the Governor General’s Council in the 1830s. Earlier, the British government of India had completed a survey of the indigenous system of education in the presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. A debate was going on whether the indigenous system should be retained or a new system intro­duced. Macaulay expected that English education, uprooting all forms of tradi­tional learning, would produce enough ‘brown sahibs’ to power the colonial en­gine in the subcontinent with solely Brit­ish interests at heart. And to a large extent he succeeded, a success those favouring Oriental forms of education claim still exists, dividing the elite and the poor in socio-economic success.

Speaking before a select audience at Chatham House, London, on October 20, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi had said: “I say without fear of my figures being success­fully challenged that India today is more illiterate than it was before a fifty or hun­dred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.”

Historian Sita Ram Goel observed: “It is not easy to define the doctrine of Macau­layism in as authentic terms as we could do in the case of Islamism and Christian­ism... nor is Macaulayism malevolent like Islamism or mischievous like Christian­ism. It is rather mild and well-meaning, more like an imperceptible breeze which blows in silently, fins up the psychological atmosphere, creates a mental mood, in­spires an intellectual attitude, and finally settles down as a cultural climate—perva­sive, protean and ubiquitous.”

Quite contrary to Macaulay’s con­tention that the indigenous system of education was both stagnant and obso­lete, Goel refers to Dharampal—who compiled in 1971 the Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts—and his book on the state of indigenous education in India on the eve of the British conquest. Goel states, “Dharampal has documented from old British archives, particularly those in Madras, that the indigenous system of education compared more than favourably with the system obtaining in England at about the same time. The Indian system was admittedly in a state of decay when it was surveyed by the British Collectors in Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Yet, as the data brought up by them proved conclusively, the Indian system was better than the English in terms of (1) the number of schools and colleges proportionately to the population, (2) the number of students attending these institutions, (3) the duration of time spent in school by the stu­dents, (4) the quality of teachers, (5) the diligence as well as intel­ligence of the students, (6) the financial support needed to see the students through school and college, (7) the high percentage of lower class (Sudra and other castes) students attending these schools as compared to the upper class (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaisya) students, and (8) in terms of subjects taught.”

Goel contends that the indigenous system of education was al­lowed to atrophy not because its educational capacity was inferior but because it was “not thought fit for serving the purpose they had in mind”. That is, to replicate the English system of education in India, one that was highly centralised, geared towards maxi­misation of state revenue, manned by ‘gentlemen’ who despised the ‘lower classes’ and were, therefore, ruthless in suppression of any mass discontent. As crucially, the new system of educa­tion focused on promoting and patronising a new Indian upper class who, in turn, “would hail the blessings of British Raj and cooperate in securing its stability by churning out hundreds of brown sahibs who would essentially dress, speak and think like the Colonizing powers. In essence, their core allegiance would be to the British Empire and not to their moth­erland or its primary interests. These objectives were completely alien, even anathema, to the indigenous education system. Stands to reason it had to be destroyed, the British planned to be here a long time and needed thousands of Brown Sahibs to do the heavy lifting for them in the Em­pire while they lorded it over them.” With the exception of a select few Indian intellectuals like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mahatma Gandhi, Veer Savarkar and Guru Golwalkar, the rest suc­cumbed to the charms of the occidental educa­tion and thinking introduced by Macaulay after ruthlessly decimating the bulk of the traditional education system. Sarcastically, Goel asserts, “...it has eminently succeeded in sweeping an ancient and highly cultured people off its feet. Macaulay does deserve the honour of a whole ‘ism’ of which we have not seen the last yet”.

Once entrenched, Macaulayism paralysed Hindu intelligentsia internally and externally in five key ways, Goel contends. It introduced a sceptical, if not negative, worldview that dis­missed Hindu spirituality, culture, heritage and social institutions, and allowed selective approval only when seen through the Western prism. Everything Western was consequently considered scientific and rational unless criti­cised by the West itself, Hindu ideals and cultural history were compared, not with contemporane­ous ideals and institutions of the West but with the achievements of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, even when sugarcoating all the plunder, slavery and bondage, the decimation of entire societies and cultures by claiming the Western worldview was “superior” and “civilizing”. As an offshoot, the intelligentsia learned to judge the West by the standards set by itself in any era while denying the same privilege to Hindu society which had yet to emerge into its own, throwing off the yoke of invasion and subjugation. Lastly, Macaulayism propagated a “psychological propensity to scrutinize, interpret and evaluate Hindu culture, history, society and spirituality with the help of concepts and tools of analysis evolved by Western scholarship.” This, while denying that Hindu civilisation too had well-developed concepts and tools of analysis, derived from its own philosophical founda­tions, that it would be more profitable and fair to use these con­cepts and tools of analysis for a proper understanding of Hindu heritage. Any attempt to adopt the latter tools was promptly decried as unscientific.

By rediscovering Lord Ram as the perennial touchstone and by reawakening the values of their faith guided by him, modern-day Indians, who share a common heritage of Hinduism, are reclaim­ing their cultural and religious identity while forging ahead into the future. With Modi at the helm.