Thread by @Hiranyareta

As we saw yesterday in the debate on NDTV, a "Hoomanity" Prof from IIT was calling what we Hindus know as Hinduism as ‘neo-Hinduism’ ie 19th/20th century creation, a false ideology. Many mocked her as an ignorant but where was she coming from?

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Few tweets on the myth-making of neo-Hinduism (Hinduism is a British colonial era construct) and the ideological motivations behind it.
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The thesis (or myth) of neo-Hinduism is not the brainchild of a single scholar but was developed by several individuals over a long period.
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Its roots lie in the Christian missionaries’ characterization of India’s past as being chaotic, incoherent and without clear ethical and philosophical foundations.
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Even in the 1800s and early 1900s, many Western missionaries were writing that Hinduism was merely an eclectic, amorphous collection of disparate elements.
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For example, in 1902, one T.E. Slater of the London Missionary Society argued that what characterizes Hinduism is a vague eclecticism, an amalgam of past religious ideas, riddled with caste and custom. The caste system was in his view the defining characteristic of Hinduism:
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‘Wherever caste is, Hinduism exists’, he said. The non-existence of Hinduism as a unified entity was clearly linked, in his mind, to the lack of national integrity of India. He called India no more than a ‘geographical expression’, concluding:
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"No assumption of its [Hinduism’s] being a universal religion is therefore possible; it is rather a congeries of divergent systems of thought, of various types and characters of the outward life, each of which at one time or another calls itself Hinduism,1+
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but forms no part of a consistent whole."

Western scholars subsequently began to amplify such views in their own voices and crystallized the notion that contemporary Hinduism was an attempt to fabricate a common identity that had never before existed.
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The attached pic below depicts the main players and flow of events in the construction of the myth of neo-Hinduism as understood in the humanities and social sciences.
The box at the top shows the pioneers who established this thesis.
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The box on the left lists some of the prominent Westerners who elaborated and spread this thesis, while the box on the right lists some of the scholars working in India who have written influential works along similar lines.
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The box at the bottom shows that many Hindus have adopted this thesis, sometimes with naïve intentions.
The top of the diagram shows the importance of Paul Hacker, who was the first academic scholar to develop this set of ideas in the 1950s.
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Hacker was a prominent Sanskrit philologist of considerable competence. He spent his career in the intense study of Sanskrit and its texts, as did many other Europeans during the past two centuries.
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He published a series of academic works over several years to put forth this thesis as a serious proposition.
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In these writings, he popularized the use of the term ‘neo-Hinduism’ to refer to the modernization of Hinduism that had been brought about by many Indian thinkers, the most prominent being Swami Vivekananda.
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Hacker charged that ‘neo-Hindus’ had disingenuously adopted Western ideas and expressed them using Sanskrit. What is less known about Hacker is that he was also an unabashed Christian apologist, who freely used his academic standing to further the cause of his Christian agenda.

He led a parallel life passionately advocating Christianity while presenting the academic face of being neutral and objective.
Hacker saw Advaita Vedanta as a world-negating and impractical worldview.
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He writes: ‘The traditionalistic Advaitists hold that the world, in fact, all matter, all difference and diversity, all action, and all psychic phenomena are ultimately unreal. Phenomenal reality is a mere appearance'
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Such a world-negating philosophy was incapable, in his view, of inducing Indians to act in the mundane world as a unified people and to face the West assertively.
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Hacker and his cohorts contend that Vivekananda saw this flaw in Vedanta and intentionally re-engineered it to make it look world-affirming and hence attractive to Westerners. But this fabrication, they claim, was based on copying Western ideas.
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Hacker’s work was endorsed by his fellow-German Wilhelm Halbfass, who was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Halbfass was one of the most influential Indologists of his time. He invited Hacker to teach at his university in 1971 and edited the translated collection of Hacker’s numerous works on neo-Hinduism.
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The compilation of Hacker’s writings (edited and compiled by Halbfass) started to influence other Westerners.
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Halbfass boosted the credibility of Hacker’s thesis by writing in the introduction to this edited compilation, that Hacker may be seen in the same light as other important post-colonialists, such as Edward Said and Ronald Inden.
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Many other well-established scholars joined in praising Hacker’s work. Patrick Olivelle, an eminent Sanskritist at the University of Texas, called Hacker ‘one of the most important modern scholars of Indian philosophy’.
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Francis X. Clooney, a Jesuit, now at Harvard, and one of the most prominent interlocutors in the dialogue between Hinduism and Christianity, called Hacker’s work ‘indispensable’ for its understanding of Vedanta’s past1+
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and present; he praised Hacker’s essays as ‘ground-breaking’, ‘philologically expert’, ‘historically attuned’, and above all, ‘sensitive to deeper religious and theological issues’
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The German Indologist Heinrich von Stietencron wrote on the same subject, mostly repeating Hacker’s claims. He described Hinduism as ‘an orchid bred by European scholarship … In nature, it does not exist’.
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He depicted the unity of Hinduism as a nineteenth-century invention which conceals a collection of irreconcilable sects in India.
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Before the nineteenth century, Stietencron claims, there was no Hindu religious identity that transcended narrow sectarian boundaries, and the idea of a unified Hindu religion is counter both to religious practice and to the theological doctrines of Indians.
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It is noteworthy that the early Indologists who championed this neo-Hinduism thesis and gave it academic credibility were all Germans and/or Austrians who had lived through the Nazi era: Paul Hacker, Leopold Fischer (who adopted the name Agehananda Bharati),1+
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Wilhelm Halbfass and Heinrich von Stietencron.
They were clearly influenced by the Nazis in complex ways, including the ways in which they reacted against the Nazis, perhaps out of a sense of associative guilt.
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Bharati (Fischer), for example, had a romantic fantasy about Indian culture and languages since childhood. He studied about India in Vienna and later joined the German army.
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His job was to use his knowledge of Indian languages and culture as a means of influencing Indians living in Germany at that time.
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Following the war, he went to India to get initiated as a Hindu monk, and then taught in Banaras Hindu University and the Nalanda Institute for Buddhist Research and Pali.
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However, his experiment in becoming a Hindu was not sustainable for various reasons, so he switched from being a devout practitioner of Hinduism who had been impressed with its ancient traditions to being an outspoken critic of contemporary Hinduism.
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His career then changed to teaching the anthropology of Hinduism in the West. But he did not return to Europe. His experience as a Hindu sannyasin in India changed him and he went to North America instead.
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It was in this phase of his career—i.e., after leaving Hinduism as a practitioner and teaching ‘about’ it as an outsider in the West—when he wrote his scathing attacks on Hinduism.
He is known mainly under his Hindu adopted name, Agehananda Bharati.
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He coined the phrase ‘Pizza Effect’, to explain his theory that contemporary Hinduism was largely a romantic projection of Europeans, re-imported into India by Indians themselves to bolster a faltering sense of self-worth.
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It is important to point out that the German romanticizing of India since the eighteenth century had culminated in the Aryan theory, and this subsequently served as the mythology on which Nazism was based.
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During Hacker’s and Bharati’s formative years, their German 52 Indologist predecessors had romanticized the Vedic texts to the extent of suggesting they were authored by German Aryans.
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Hacker, Bharati and other German Indologists like them later witnessed the horrific sights of Nazism, which in turn led to the need to reject the glorified Aryan identity.
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The Lutheran Church had been close to the Nazis, and it is not surprising that Hacker later rejected Lutheranism and converted to a different denomination.
Similarly, Bharati’s experiences serving in the German army caused him to revolt against it as well.
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In both cases, a part of the purge to remove the ghost of Nazi guilt involved a rejection of Hinduism, which they had associated with Aryanism. Vivekananda became a convenient whipping boy to vent their anger as they launched a campaign to discredit Hinduism.
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More or less contemporaneously with these developments, the Harvard professor of comparative religion W. Cantwell Smith wrote: ‘There are Hindus, but there is no Hinduism.’
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In other words, while there are people who call themselves Hindus, there is no coherent religious position which they share. Hinduism is thus a bogus category.
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The Harvard Gazette characterized Smith as one of the most influential figures of the past century in the field of comparative religion.
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Another early participant who deepened the theory of neo-Hinduism was the British Indologist Ursula King, who, like the others, shifted her focus from her earlier general study of Hinduism to target neo-Hinduism as an artificial and dangerous construct.
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Her importance is considerable, both in her own right and because she groomed the young Indian scholar Anantanand Rambachan, who is instrumental today in perpetuating the thesis.
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Ursula King chaired his Ph.D dissertation committee, and it was in this dissertation that many of the prevailing myths of neo-Hinduism became solidified.
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Rambachan became the first scholar in Hacker’s school of thought who used the teachings of moksha in Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta as the criterion for judging modern Hinduism.
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Shankara is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest Hindu philosophers, and as the founder of the Advaita Vedanta system.
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This was the first time any prominent scholar in the Western institutions engaged in religious studies had stood on Shankara’s shoulders to fire against contemporary Hinduism. In this manner, Rambachan advanced the neo-Hinduism thesis to a deeper philosophical level.
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His allegations are far more serious than those of his predecessors, for he argues, on the basis of a philosophical comparison with Shankara, that Vivekananda’s core ideas are fundamentally flawed and borrowed from Westerners.
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Rambachan likes to note that under colonial influence, the upper strata of Indians had become disconnected from their own traditional sources of knowledge and were increasingly dependent on European accounts of their own history and culture.
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He points out correctly that the 1800s was a time when Protestant and Catholic missionaries constantly denigrated and criticized the Hindu scriptures. Their attacks against the Vedas had become troubling for Hindu reformers of the Brahmo Samaj prior to Vivekananda.
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Under these conditions, Western Unitarians arrived in India as a welcome relief, for they interpreted Hindu theology as being open, rational, experiential and science-friendly, compared with how orthodox Protestants had portrayed it.
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Unitarians adopted a positive approach to Hinduism, albeit still from a Western perspective. Sensing a good fit, the Brahmo Samaj sent its bright youth to Unitarian seminaries in England for training to become Samaj leaders.
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As a result, the Samaj started to adopt the framework of Unitarian Christianity in order to identify alternative sources of authority within Hinduism that would support this kind of universal and ‘scientific’ ideology based on experience.
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This, according to Rambachan, laid the groundwork for the way in which Vivekananda incorporated the principle of direct experience and intuition into his newly invented Hinduism.
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He (Rambachan) claims that such notions were derived from Unitarian sources and had no real precedent in classical Indian thought.
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Hacker, Rambachan and others from this school of thought also accuse Vivekananda of introducing Western scientific inquiry and direct experience in order to bring Hinduism on par with Western thought, and in the process downgrading the textual authority of the Vedas.
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Rambachan’s harshest allegation is that Vivekananda did an illicit reinterpretation of the famous dictum of Vedanta, tat tvam asi, or ‘that art thou’, as the basis for the Hindu social ethic.
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Its original meaning, he argues, had nothing to do with social ethics and was strictly about private mystical unity. Similarly, he claimed that Vivekananda’s emphasis on ahimsa as social non-violence differed from its traditional meaning.
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Thus, Vivekananda becomes, somewhat anachronistically, the culprit for an artificial construction of a new religion with proto-fascist tendencies.
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Rambachan directly attacks Vivekananda’s unified approach to the four major paths of yoga—jnana yoga (knowledge), raja yoga (meditation), karma yoga (selfless service) and bhakti yoga (devotion).
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He argues that three of these (raja, karma and bhakti) violate Shankara’s ideas on attaining moksha (enlightenment) because he insists that only jnana is capable of leading to moksha.
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He further alleges, based on extensive argumentation, that these four systems lack consistency and coherence. He faults this four-path system for its inability to explicate the fundamental problem of avidya, or ignorance, as the major bar to moksha.
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Rambachan writes that in Vivekananda’s work ‘there is no attempt to carefully relate the nature of each method to the assumptions of avidya as the fundamental problem’. He adds that Vivekananda is vague and obscure in connecting them to moksha.
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But Rambachan is too narrowly fixated on moksha and disregards the fact that vast majority of practising Hindus pursue goals of dharma that are not limited to moksha per se.
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The issue of Hinduism’s unity and legitimacy cannot be based solely on whether all its lineages agree on the same approach to moksha.
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Rambachan concludes that because Vivekananda desired to engineer a rapprochement with the West, his idea of Hinduism lacks intellectual rigor, promotes yogic mystification and spiritual experience over reason, and weakens the Advaita Vedanta founded by Shankara.
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Rambachan’s implicit assumptions are that Shankara is the sole authority on Advaita, Advaita Vedanta speaks for all Vedanta systems, and Vedanta represents all Hinduism.
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It will become clear later that both Shankara and Vivekananda are being oversimplified in order to highlight and exaggerate a disagreement within Hinduism in order to demonstrate its lack of unity and coherence.
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The myth of neo-Hinduism has spread far and wide beyond the academic circles where it began. It has entered mainstream media, government policy-making, and even popular cultural portrayals of India.
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It is often the official version of Hinduism taught in American school textbooks. It is increasingly assumed by cosmopolitan Indians who imagine they are the well-informed, proud citizens of an emerging superpower.
This myth has clear social and political ramifications....
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Soon after Rambachan’s Ph.D dissertation appeared, Romila Thapar wrote a widely cited article in which she states that the Hindutva political movement had created a new form of Hinduism by artificially collapsing the earlier pluralistic and1+
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variegated realities of India into a neo-Hinduism monolith.
She labels this monolith ‘syndicated Hinduism’, and this term has now become popular.

Internet discussions have further spread this myth.

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For example, a Canadian web site on Perennialism features articles from ex-followers of the Ramakrishna Mission who have converted the Mission’s ideas first into Western Perennialism, then into Transpersonal Theory, and now into something called Integral Christianity.

One such article, titled ‘The Neo-Vedanta of Swami Vivekananda’, describes the Swami and his influence as inauthentic.
kelamuni.blogspot.com/2006/09/neo-ve…
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Some senior scholars trusted by the Hindu diaspora have echoed these ideas. Take, for example, the work of John Stratton Hawley, who for many years headed the programme in Hinduism studies at Columbia University, and leads many initiatives on Hinduism in India and the U.S. 79/n

In his influential article on Hinduism, Hawley begins with the following sarcastic statement:

"Hinduism—the word, and perhaps the reality too—was born in the nineteenth century, a notoriously illegitimate child.
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The father was middle-class and British, and the mother, of course, was India. The circumstances of the conception are not altogether clear."

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Earlier, in a similar vein, J.A.B. van Buitenen had written in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on Hinduism:
"As a religion, Hinduism is an utterly diverse conglomerate of doctrines, cults, and ways of life … 1+
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In principle, Hinduism incorporates all forms of belief and worship without necessitating the selection or elimination of any … A Hindu may embrace a non-Hindu religion without ceasing to be a Hindu."

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More bluntly, Frits Staal states that, ‘Hinduism does not merely fail to be a religion; it is not even a meaningful unit of discourse. There is no way to abstract a meaningful unitary notion of Hinduism from the Indian phenomena.'
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Another well-known scholar, Robert Frykenberg, agrees: ‘There has never been any such thing as a single “Hinduism” or any single “Hindu community” for all of India … The very notion of the existence of any single religious community by this name has been falsely conceived.’
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Claiming that Hinduism lacks any ‘concrete elements or hard objects’, he asserts that it has been used by those who ‘have tried to give greater unity to the extreme cultural diversities that are native to the continent’.
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Heinrich von Stietencron claims that prior to the nineteenth century, there was no notion of a unity of practice or doctrine among the people who are now called ‘Hindus’.
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Julius Lipner, another influential scholar of Hinduism, recommends that the term ‘Hinduism’ be used (at least in the humanities) only to refer to Hindu culture and not to a single unified faith.
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David Lorenzen, a professor of South Asian history at the College of Mexico’s Center for Asian and African Studies, notes that a number of Indian academics teach that Hindu unity did not exist before the nineteenth century.
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One of the mainstream’s loudest critics of this so-called nationalist neo-Hinduism is the journalist Pankaj Mishra, who has written for The New York Times and published widely acclaimed international works.Mishra has a direct, journalistic style using plain and simple words.
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In his article ‘The Invention of the Hindu’, he articulates his thesis that ‘Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’
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Of special concern to Mishra is that Hinduism, starting with its alleged origin in British rule, was designed to be antagonistic to Muslims. Hinduism, he claims, did not even exist prior to the arrival of Muslims in India, and then it got crystallized by the British.92/n

The neo-Hinduism myth is even being communicated in sensational and sexualized terms in journalism and social media.
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An op-ed piece in Indian Express by leading scholar and columnist, Ashutosh Varshney, states that in neo-Hinduism, ‘a singular national identity was also equated with masculinity by Hindu nationalists. 94/n

Vivekananda, whose sayings Narendra Modi tweets, came to promote ‘three Bs’ for Hindus: beef, biceps and the Bhagavad-Gita’.
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indianexpress.com/news/why-india…

Although the thesis of a pernicious and distorted neo-Hinduism acquired the aura of academic respectability only after India’s independence, the seeds of it are also found in the views of prominent Indians who could not understand a coherent Hinduism.
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‘Hinduism, as a faith’, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in his monumental, The Discovery of India, ‘is vague, amorphous, many-sided, all things to all men.
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It is hardly possible to define it.’ Ironically, the patriotic writer, B.G. Gokhale, writing on Indian nationalism in 1958, also adopted the position that Hindu ethics were formed under the colonial influence of Christianity.
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Such leaders did not intend to undermine Hinduism or the concept of Indian unity, but they inadvertently perpetuated the myth that Hinduism has appropriated Western constructs and hence it lacks legitimacy.
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Proponents of the neo-Hinduism thesis are surprisingly consistent and homogenous in their views. Rarely, if ever, does one encounter any internal disagreement among them.
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The starting point implicit in many of their writings is a socio-political ideology of the current political fragmentation.
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This gets projected back in time to emphasize how one group of Indians exploited another and to conclude that there was never a unity and historical continuity.
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This is correlated with highly exaggerated philosophical conflicts. The end result is to claim that Hindu practices are senseless, abusive and dangerous.
Thus any notion of Hindu unity is a dangerous fabrication.
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Text for abv tweets were taken (cut &paste) from chapter-2 of the book titled "Indra's Net" by @RajivMessage
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