Is the Claim of the Chief of RSS Mohan Bhagwat that there are no aHindus in India an indication of times to come? Is there a constellation of ideas that enabled its articulation inn our days? It does not seem that his discourse has fallen from nowhere? Has this discourse rendered talking about being a Christian in India in communicado? Has being Christian in India and talking about it come under new codes and protocols? In the voices that we hear today, we cannot find a echo of discord from the silent majority. These voices that have become louder post 2014 are making claims over the past of all Indians. This past is mistaken as Hindu and all Indians are invited to identify with it. Therefore, we may ask: are the present Christians are challenged to be the last Christians in India? Hence forth, are all Christians are pressured to be Hindu Christians? How are Christians to respond to these summons to be Hindu Christian?
What is truly speaking to the Christians out of the Past of our country? The fact that Christianity came to India in the first century, the voice of the past complicates matters. What came to be called as Hindu and accepted by all at a later time was existing contemporarily but did not have the name it has today. But we may ask what is there in the name? Name is no empty signifier. It has a lot to do with us. It positions us and brands us into the socio-political market of our society. In this context, the voice of the past can only be called Hindu in hind sight. It is only in retrospection that we can name the past of all Indians as Hindu. Our Past does not carry it and hence cannot be indexed as Hindu.
Hindu was a geographical ascription. It was the Mughals who used the term Hindu as a catch all term to bring the those that were not Muslims, Buddhist, Jains or Christians and subject them to their administration in the 14th century AD. It was in the 19th century the term Hindu becomes slowly acceptable to the majority of Indians who today seamlessly believe that they are Hindus. It was Rajaram Roy who is the first Indian to call himself Hindu. Even in 1960s we have court cases in the High Court of Mumbai where the upper castes Brahmins refused to be called Hindus because it would mean that they will have to accept every other Hindu , especially lower castes in their temples. This is why it appears that the past is identified as Hindu by the RSS chief only to create a Hindu present and a Hindu future .
Naming the past as Hindu opens the possibilities of creating a Hindu present and a Hindu Future. Hence, the naming of the past has promises to keep. It opens up an unactualized, unfinished past that can be given a present and a future. India’s past is nested as Hindu not for religious reasons but for political ones to create a nested present and a future. Thus, we may notice that to speak of Christian past in India as Hindu is to speak about it from a certain otherness. This is why it has been immediately contested and rejected by the CBCI .
India’s past cannot be properly called Hindu. But by naming it as Hindu, all Indians are summoned to properly belong to India and to properly belong to India one has to be a Hindu. This is why the claim that there is no aHindu in India by the RSS chief is talking of the temporality of the time to come. It is not really talking of the past. It is talking of a future anterior. It circumvents conventional modalities of presence and past and hold time open to the coming of another/ the Hindu time. It is the coming of the future as a redeeming and has messianic tones in the Christian sense. It is period when the lost joints of time will come together again. Time in this context takes the stand. By calling the past Hindu and naming all Indians as not aHindus the RSS chief has set a framed past into motion. The past thus has not come to a stand still . It is on the move into the present and into the future that is wished to be Hindu. Doing so it has opened Hindu horizon and so the past, present and future then become seamlessly Hindu.
This ,thus, has successfully reworked the coordinates of times for us Indians and has become unsettling for Christians and other minorities. It has brought about a stasis of time. Time has come to a halt to them. It only allows only a last Christian. There cannot be Christians in the future. All the Christian to come have to de-Christianize themselves. They have to castrate or deconstruct themselves to be counted as properly belonging to India. Thus, the coming to be of a Hindu India in the present is also a passing away of many Indias. This coming to be of the Hindu Present and the Future is also a going away of many pasts , presents and futures of India. By naming India’s past as Hindu the heteronomous flow of time is arrested and homogenous swelling of the past , present and future is set up. This coming to be, therefore, has the passing away of many Indias.
India has lost it fertility and has become other India that has closed its plural possibilities. The present is no longer the vertex of the coming to be and passing away of time but an imposed past has become the vertex that indexes the past, present and creates a future. How are we to circumvent this deIndianizing of India? Perhaps the challenge is to aHinduise India . The CBCI has taken the right steps to reject the discourse of the chief of RSS. The rejection of the summons that invites Christians and other minorities to identify with the past appointed as Hindu is just a beginning. The wight of history rebuts the view that paints the past as Hindu. It is therefore, urgent and necessary that we Indians return to the authentic pasts of India.
