|
Yankee Hindutva: Indian Jim Crow in “Victim” Garb |
|
|
|
Written by Raja Swamy
|
|
Friday, 20 January 2006 |
|
Page 1 of 3 Raja Swamy is a writer and activist based in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at:
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
 2005 has been a terrible year for the human rights of
African Americans in the United States. Facing assaults on livelihoods,
falling incomes, rampant police violence and brutality, cuts in social
spending and a generally cruel and undisguised contempt from the
reactionary Bush administration, African Americans will remember 2005
as the year that saw the destruction of the great city of New Orleans,
first by the hurricane (made possible by years of neglect and siphoning
of levee funds to the “war on terror”), followed by the cruel racism of
the state, media and mainstream white society as survivors were
classified as “looters”, “holdouts” and “thugs”, which opened the way
for a full-scale forcible displacement of the African American
population of the city. To date, the city’s whiter and affluent
residents have received far more generosity and care from the
government, corporations and mainstream media than have African
Americans. Worse, most of the city’s poorest residents, overwhelmingly
African American, are being deliberately kept out of their city, their
homes and residences targeted for bulldozing and sale through the use
of nefarious means reflective of the worst legacies of racist America.
This means then that the struggle of African Americans for equality and
justice in America is not a historical event lodged in the past but an
ongoing and present reality necessitated by institutionalized racism
and oppression. This is where the comparison between African Americans
and immigrant communities becomes a problematic issue. As bad as any
form of racism is, it is a stretch for instance to suggest that the
treatment of Indian Americans is comparable to the oppression of
African Americans. But it is a bizarre departure from reality when a
supremacist movement represented by a well-funded, very affluent
section of the immigrant Indian American community claims to be
oppressed like African Americans, especially when this claim is couched
not in the aftermath of some terrible episode of racial violence or
institutionalized brutality, but in the context of an effort to rewrite
middle-school history textbooks in California.
California’s school textbooks come up for review every six years.
Recently the State Board of Education has become the center of an
intense struggle over the content of middle school history textbooks
pertaining to ancient India. [1] It is widely acknowledged by scholars
that these textbooks leave much to be desired, some of these problems
being factual errors (such as the idea that Hindi is written in the
Arabic script with 18 letters) and others glaring displays of text
writers’ ignorance and ethnocentrism (such as asking “do you see any
monkeys around” after stating that Hindus worship a monkey god). What
is needed is a thorough inspection and revision of these textbooks to
overcome these problems with the view of advancing knowledge of ancient
India consistent with the available historical research on the subject.
Sensing an opportunity given the shoddy nature of these textbooks, an
alliance of organizations with names such as “Vedic Foundation,” “Hindu
Education Foundation” and “Hindu American Foundation” have attempted to
radically rewrite these textbooks by proposing various edits that not
only fail to address the problems inherent in these textbooks, but
actually attempt to promote views that are consistent with Hindu
supremacist ideology.
The edits proposed by these organizations are consistent with the
institutional and ideological ties these organizations have with the
Hindu supremacist movement (Hindutva) led by the R.S.S. (Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh) in India. What is surprising and disturbing for
anybody concerned with the rights of minority communities in the United
States, is that these supremacist organizations have cast their efforts
to rewrite California’s textbooks as if they were a struggle for
minority rights. This claim could hardly be farther from the truth. The
HEF and VF have together proposed edits to the textbooks that seek to
erase the importance and centrality of the ancient Indus Valley
Civilization by asserting without evidence and contrary to the
established body of historical evidence, that Indo-Europeans (Aryans)
are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. They wish to mask and
downplay the oppressive character of the caste system by treating it as
if it were a form of social contract between people endowed with
different capacities. This is a grievous insult to the historical
experience of Dalits (erstwhile “untouchables”) and Sudras (lowest
caste, mostly manual laborers and peasants). Additionally these
proposed “edits” change references to the unequal rights of women in
caste Hindu society into idyllic notions of “different duties” for men
and women.
Take for example the following paragraph from a MacMillan/McGraw Hill
published history textbook, and the alternative proposed by the HEF
which follows:
MacMillan/McGraw Hill, page 252 last paragraph:
“There was one group that did not belong to any varna. Its members were
called untouchables. They performed work other Indians thought was too
dirty, such as collecting trash, skinning animals, or handling dead
bodies.”
HEF wanted to delete the above paragraph and replace it with:
“There was one group that did not belong to any varna. Its members were
called untouchables because they performed dirty work such as skinning
animals or handling dead bodies.”
What this edit suggests through the subtle use of the word “because” is
a causal relationship that inverts the reality of caste society. People
are supposedly classified as untouchables because of the “dirty work”
they do. In reality the term “untouchable” was part of an imposed
social order whereby forms of labor considered impure by the social
elites were imposed on those classified as untouchables. Elsewhere the
HEF changes references to the mention of the “four castes” in the Rig
Veda (an ancient sacred text of the Brahmins) into the
“interrelationship and interdependence of the four classes” again with
the intention of erasing caste as a system of discrimination and
inequality. For a comprehensive account of the proposed edits by the
HEF and the VF please see:
www.friendsofsouthasia.org/textbook/TextbookEdits.html
The similarities between racism and the caste-based discrimination
prevalent in India has been the subject of vigorous debates, most
recently at the 2001 U.N. Conference against Racism in Durban, South
Africa. [2] Dalit efforts to make the issue of Dalit human rights a
part of the conference’s agenda faced stiff opposition from Hindu
supremacist organizations in India who objected to this inclusion on
the grounds that the abolition of the caste system would constitute a
violation of Hindu human rights! The HEF and VF however believe that
the oppression of Dalits in contemporary India is nonexistent since in
their view such things cannot happen in post-independence India where
untouchability is outlawed in the constitution. Such a denial is
definitely comparable to the ridiculous notion that racism in the
United States is nonexistent since the law forbids it! In fact the
erasure of caste based discrimination proposed by these edits is far
worse: the HEF and VF want to remove the word Dalit itself from the
textbooks. These supremacist organizations are in effect targeting for
silencing and erasure from history and the present, the very people who
suffered most from millennia of caste-based discrimination.
|
Friday, 29 August 2008
