The First and the Last Hindu

In the beginning, there was the Hindu…There goes the story of India. We all submit to this narrative and it’s sway over us even without knowing it. This undefined Hindu is condition of possibility of being Indian. It is an invisible blank point works as an apriori condition to image and shape our being Indians. Everyone is driven by it. Retorically, we may call it the first Hindu. The first Hindu is unbound and it’s connotation is loose without being fixed. But it marks us all born in India. It becomes our mirror image. We identify with It but find ourself as not matching It. It produces a lack in us. This sense of lack produces a castration anxiety within our scopic field. The scopic field of an Indian consists of our desire to see ourselves as fitting into a phantasmatic image. The phantasmatic image today is one of the Hindu. It works as an internal censor that generates our drive to be an Indian. This means we get a sense of a return of the gaze that Jacques Lacan has taught us. The gaze that returns produces a lack as well as a desire to fill in the place of lack.

All Indians are under the reign of a internal censor. Every Indian, therefore, forms himself / herself with an intimate sense as a alienated lacking self. The inner censor, the phantasmatic Hindu castrates us all the time. Hence, we can never be Indian enough. This means the internal censor works like object petit a of Jacques Lacan and converts our entire life into a project to be a Indian in its image and likeness. Only in death maybe we fully actualize all our potentials of being Indians. In some sense everyone of us dies as a last Hindu setting oneself free from the shackels of the castrating effects of the first Hindu. All our life we are under the gaze of the censor that produces a sense of being a lacking Indian through its censorship. This means being Indian becomes a dynamic response to the mechanism of censoring castration that produces a sense of being not Indian enough. Everyone of us is haunted by the first Hindu internalized by us.

The imagined gaze of the censoring inner gaze of the first Hindu is primary and haunts every Indian irrespective of their religious affiliations. Each of us respond to the sense of being hallowed out or being not at home differently. This condition of being under the gaze of the eternal censor that we called the first Hindu constitutes the subjectivity of each of us. The inner censor mediates our subjectivity. Today the inner censor has acquired almost fixated semiotic shape and is intensely censoring us. It alienates us from ourselves and from each other. The inner censor is driving us to be more and more Hindu. Indeed, the first Hindu within us is pushing to be the last Hindu. The last Hindu who may only come to be at our death is anticipated and everyone is forced to image the last Hindu.

Our society, therefore, is on a run to become a last Hindu. By a monomorphic homogenization of the image of a Hindu, we are steadily moving to the last Hindu impoverishing the ways of being Indian. In fact , the first Hindu that was an amorphous censor has today become rigid and fixated phantasm. The first Hindu, therefore, has become a last Hindu narrowing the possibilities of being Indians differently. Hence, we can feel that the last Hindu has taken the place of the first Hindu. We, therefore, have all become image of the last Hindu and are actively censoring each other to nail the last Hindu in us. The death of the first Hindu in the rise of Hindutva politics is killing the generative power of Hinduness. It makes it impotent and disables it from nurturing diverse ways of being Indians. The death of the last Hindu, therefore, has castrated Hinduism as well as our modes of being Indians. Hence, only with return of the first Hind that India, Indians and Hinduism can really flourish.

The awareness that we are both objects and subjects of gaze as taught by Lacan can truly set us free. We have a gaze watching us ( the first Hindu) that objectifies us at the same time we are subject actively shaping our ways of being Indian (last Hindu). This is why we cannot let the first Hindu die in us and replace it with crafted last Hindu. We need the dialectics within the first Hindu and the last Hindu. Therefore, to let India be truly what it is we need to let there be the first Hindu generating ways of being Indians. Hence, the sutra that says : in the beginning there was a Hindu is the oxygen of being Indians. Hindutva is threatening to kill that Hindu. We have to save that Hindu and save India and the modes of being Indians.