March 17, 2002, Pg. B01

A Culture Struggles With All That Defines It

By Shankar Vedantam

In a remote hamlet deep inside India's western state of Rajasthan, stonesmiths have been toiling for more than a decade to prefabricate a Hindu temple. Workshops have echoed with the patter of metallic rain, the effect of mallets tapping on chisels. Scores of giant pink sandstone pillars have been trucked hundreds of miles to the fertile heart of the country, to the city of Ayodhya, where, according to the epic, "The Ramayan," the Hindu god Lord Ram was born. There Hindu revivalists want to build a temple dedicated to him. For now, however, the pillars lie in the open air, waiting to be assembled.

Hindu revivalists are forging something more subtle, more significant and potentially far sturdier than stone: They are creating a new narrative of Indian history, aimed at righting slights from previous centuries. In 1992, a Hindu revivalist mob tore down an Ayodhya mosque, charging that it was built over a Ram temple, which had been demolished in the 16th century. More than 2,000 Indians were killed in riots that followed. Recent clashes have killed 700 more.

The headlines obscure a deeper struggle to appropriate India's past, and thus define its future. Every country has its myths, shared narratives that weave together the conflicting threads of its past and point the way forward. Some of these stories are true, some aren't; some unite nations, some promote radical change, and others are manipulated for self-serving ends. The United States has its Puritan tale about immigrants coming to a new world in search of religious freedom. Ancient Romans believed that Aeneas founded their city as an instrument of providence.

In India, Hindu revivalists are revising the nation's founding myths. They contend that India is essentially Hindu, and its Muslims and Christians have been misled about their identity. Revivalist groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, argue that Hindus should assert themselves through aggressive nationalism and that "Hindu interest is the national interest."

Not so, cry Indians who believe the secular state should not favor any religion. The country is the birthplace of many faiths and home to the second-largest Muslim population in the world. There are even many interpretations of Hinduism and the VHP's focus on Lord Ram and Ayodhya is a modern conceit, they say, modeled on monotheistic religions, and aimed at uniting Hindu voters from a multitude of sects, castes and linguistic groups. Many Indian Muslims and Christians also note that their ancestors converted from Hinduism to escape the caste system.

Some Indians say the true compass of the nation is the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, himself a deeply religious Hindu, who drew on Islam and Christianity as he preached tolerance, nonviolence and material simplicity.

To know Gandhi's place in India's modern political mythology is to appreciate the sad ironies of recent events. The train full of Hindu revivalists that was attacked late last month by Muslims was called the Sabarmati -- the name of Gandhi's ashram. Much of the subsequent anti-Muslim rioting occurred in Gandhi's home state of Gujarat. Gandhi abhorred militant Hinduism and was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu extremist.

I received a tutorial in Hindu revivalism during a reporting assignment in Rajasthan and Ayodhya for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. Temple-builders told me that the new temple would have more than 200 giant pillars, stretch the length of a football field, and last for a thousand years.

"This is a question of our identity," said Ramesh Sompura, who runs some of the Rajasthan workshops. Although the proposed temple site is bitterly disputed, he said that the national government, dominated by revivalists, would ensure it was built.

The controversy extends beyond Ayodhya. Hindu revivalists have also targeted mosques at Mathura and Varanasi, two other holy Hindu sites. "There are 30,000 sites that Hindus have lost," says Shyam Tiwari, an Atlanta software developer and a spokesman for VHP of America, a U.S. group that supports the revivalists. "We are asking for three of the holiest sites." Mathura is the mythological birthplace of the Hindu God, Krishna. In Bombay, VHP activist Ramesh Mehta told me he saw no reason Muslims should object: "Krishna is not my God," he said. "He is the God of every Indian."

In recent weeks, leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People's Party, which is closely linked to the VHP and leads the coalition government, have come under intense pressure to let construction of the Ayodhya temple move ahead, even as their coalition allies resist.

There is a certain poetic justice in their dilemma. The party, once a marginal force, used the Ayodhya temple to win power. In 1990, BJP leader L.K. Advani led a cross-country procession to press for the temple. Now the second-most-powerful person in the Indian cabinet, Advani rode a chariot mounted on a truck, evoking images of Lord Ram, whipping followers into a frenzy. Today, the party wants to avoid the controversy, but finds that myths once created are not easily dispelled.

The Ayodhya issue tapped into a feeling that runs through the milieu I grew up in, the influential middle class of modern India. This group, which forms the core of the revivalist movement, shares a sense that India has been disinherited of its wealth, splendor and rightful place in the world. Much like India's freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi, the revivalists have turned a set of inchoate fears and longings into tangible goals.

Unlike Gandhi, the VHP rejects nonviolence. The revivalists equate it with weakness and say that when Hindus were weak, Muslim and Christian invaders took over. One of my college classmates once told me that the only thing wrong with Gandhi's assassination was that it hadn't happened earlier. In portraying a martial Lord Ram, the VHP says that if only Hindus were strong, the country would be respected, prosperous and successful.

The emphasis on military power prompted the BJP-led government to order a series of nuclear tests in 1998. "The BJP and the more nationalistic people that emerged in the last few decades have categorically said the Gandhian approach to the world gets no respect anymore," said George Perkovich, author of "India's Nuclear Bomb."

The revivalists link interpretation of the past with policies in the present. Item 20 of the VHP's 40-point agenda says that "the distorted presentation of modern, social and cultural history of (India) will be rewritten by honest, patriotic and learned historians and archaeologists. The teaching syllabus shall be accordingly reformed."

Not surprisingly, this has sparked fierce battles with prominent historians, especially over the revivalists' most potent symbol, the temple at Ayodhya. In Atlanta, Tiwari says several Ram temples existed at the site. Based on religious texts and mythology, he calculates that the first temple was built in 3100 B.C., the second around 150 B.C., and another in 57 B.C. A temple built in the 12th century was torn down by Muslim invaders in the 16th century, he says, citing documents and artifacts, and was replaced with the mosque that lasted until 1992.

The VHP's opponents charge the revivalists with distorting Ayodhya's history to suit their ends. Romila Thapar, a professor emeritus at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University and the author of a widely read history of ancient India, calls the VHP's version "historically baseless fulminations." Some historians even question whether the Ayodhya mentioned in mythology is the same city as modern day Ayodhya. Johns Hopkins University historian Gyanendra Pandey says modern Ayodhya may have originally been called Saket and may have changed its name in order to identify itself with the city in the Ramayan.

Revivalists ignore Hinduism's metaphorical messages by focusing on a single plot of land, Pandey says. "It made no difference whether there was a temple or not," he says. "What happened in the 16th century -- whatever it might have been -- cannot be set right by actions in the late 20th century."

Many historians say that repeated references to Hindu victimization in the past only lead to a grisly series of present-day attacks on mosques, churches and missionaries. Sumit Sarkar, a Delhi University scholar, wrote in a recent essay that the revivalists have "remarkably little to say about the crucial problems of Indian society, above all mass poverty and social injustice. Endless harping on the past misdeeds, real or imagined, of other religious communities is an excellent diversion. . . ."

But political myths, however tenuously linked to facts, possess remarkable power. State governments allied with the revivalists have rewritten textbooks to describe the repeated desecration of the Ram temple and the perils of Hindu passivity. The police and judiciary have become polarized over the issue. Discussions about law and order increasingly prompt questions about whose law and whose order. During the recent bloodletting in Gujarat, and the previous round in 1992, the police were accused of tacitly allowing the mayhem to unfold.

In Ayodhya's winding streets in 1998, I met Ansar Husain, a Muslim who said his ancestors had lived in the city for several centuries. "There is a rotation," he said ominously. "Muslims destroy what Hindus build. Hindus destroy what Muslims build. There was a mosque, there will be a temple, there will be mosque again. . . ."

There is a larger lesson to be drawn from this battle: As the past weeks have shown, when scholarship becomes the weapon of politics, mobs become the historians, spears become quills and the pages of history run with blood.

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