To what extent did Hinduism and particularly its modern, polemical avatar Hindutva originate in India, and how much of its aura—to speak the language of a spiritual Gen-Z—was conceived in unexpected and unlikely places? Likewise, how much of the celebratory Hindu identity has indeed been shaped in the 21st century, which has seen its most emphatic articulation? Is it conceivable that a significant dimension of this aggressive identity today actually originated outside our time and place? More pointedly, might one say that a significant part of it is actually an external construction by protagonists far removed from today’s vocal and violent champions? As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh steps into its second century, these questions make for a difficult but unavoidable reckoning.

The understanding of Hindutva as a significantly colonial and Victorian project with a sanitary morality rooted in prudish Protestantism is now fairly well-entrenched. Somak Biswas’ provocative book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940, offers a new twist to this tale by reinforcing the foreignness of the forces behind ideas of Hindutva as well as Hinduism. The book shows how crucial white Westerners were in crafting the idea of India and Hinduism, and in the nationalist conjunction of the two. An argument that offers a particularly harsh reality check is that the romantic engagement of white Westerners with India was rooted primarily in “upper-caste Hindu imaginaries”.

For Biswas, this engagement came to exist and prosper through influential networks around three key figures: Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Gandhi. His claim that all three shared pride in “Aryan civilisational greatness” is provocative. But it is equally important, as he notes, that this greatness found forceful global championship in the thoughts and works of notable Western followers, most significantly C.F. Andrews and Sister Nivedita who upheld “belief in Aryan superiority, borne by contemporary ‘scientific’ claims about the distinctiveness of this ‘racial stock’.”

If today’s Hindutva is indeed at least partially a construction of colonial India, these white Western disciples of the gurus were important links in that constructive machinery. As such, contemporary Hindutva’s investment in some of these figures (most significantly, Swami Vivekananda) cannot be dismissed as entirely opportunistic, particularly because we identify through these figures a lineage of liberal Hindu identity that has otherwise been established as distinguished and beneficial for Indian society.

Biswas describes the Indophile white disciples of Gandhi, Tagore, and Vivekananda as “affirmative Orientalists, who were apologists of Indian culture”, whose positions were usually “non-official” and often “anti-colonial”. This affirmation, indeed, celebration, originated in the fertile ground of fin de siècle Europe, which embraced alternative traditions such as vegetarianism, social utopianism, and feminism, many of which were seen to be of “Eastern” origin.

Even as India consolidated its anti-colonial movements, the work of these Indophiles helped create some of the most sympathetic global opinions of India and Indians. What is conveniently forgotten, however, is that this globalisation of Indian culture was rooted exclusively in upper-caste identities and eventually went on to shape a global foundation of Hindu supremacy. “The spread of pan-Aryanism, for instance,” Biswas points out, “shows how racial (mis)identification was strategically used by high-caste Indians to reify their claims to equal citizenship in the United States.”

More than a century later, as we witness “Make America Great Again” racism dismantle every claim of South Asian participation in the idea and practice of the American nation, it is intriguing to imagine white Western Indophilia as having gained momentum under a cloud of fascism across the late-19th and early-20th century Europe. But we now have a clearer picture of the hands of friendship of the rich-white and upper-caste Hindu stakeholders who came together over the celebration of pan-Aryanism.

Nonetheless, this is a complex entanglement as many claims of native rights and freedom from British colonial rule also came from the white champions of India. That they forcefully argued for “the extension of metropolitan rights and privileges to imperial subjects” is acknowledged, for instance, by Raja Rammohun Roy, who went on to admit that “their active presence in Indianist enterprises became a morally legitimising force.”

Globalising Vedanta

Perhaps the most disturbing quandary this book foregrounds is that it is difficult to separate legitimate anti-colonial struggle and positive social reforms from the affirmation of Hindu supremacy at home and abroad. Vivekananda’s Western travels, Biswas argues, globalised Vedanta by enforcing a “subtle form of Hindu supremacism”. Although there are intricate layers to Vivekananda’s version of Hinduism, including his attempt to universalise it beyond Brahminical control, contemporary Hindutva appropriation of Vivekananda is hard to dismiss as mere political opportunism. The high-Brahminical posturing today of the image of the “vishwaguru” (world leader) has a distinguished ancestry ironically reinforced by a white-Western network of patronage and Indophilia.

Cultural and religious identities are slippery customers who are in the business of making unusual allies, particularly as they evolve over time. The wide and lasting impact of what Biswas calls Vedanta as “a bhadralok cultural project” can be fully realised by looking at how the early liberalism of Bengali thinkers gave way to strident cultural nationalism by the end of the 19th century. This is the complex shift within which Biswas places Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay; a full understanding of the political faith behind Bankim’s song “Vande Mataram” that recently tremored through the rhetoric of national imagination requires attention to the emergence of bhadralok Vedanta.

Unlikely alliances spring from and shape unexpected founts of synergy. There are plenty of such details in Biswas’ exploration of the white networks around brown gurus which include, apart from figures well-known in India such as Nivedita and Andrews, Western patrons and Indophiles such as Sara Bull, Josephine MacLeod, William Pearson, Sarah Waldo, and scholars such as Romain Rolland.

Particularly interesting to me are the subterranean sexual currents swimming through the white Indophiliac networks around Tagore, Gandhi, and Vivekananda. As someone who has written about the unexpected but all-too-real sexual intimacies in a Hindu monastic boarding school, I was drawn to the homoerotic affinities Biswas reads between brown gurus and white disciples such as Andrews, Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi, and Tagore.

For a nation now with a leader who affirms austerity and male celibacy shaped by Hindu monasticism, the emphatic imagination of the other Narendra as a figure detached from what his guru Ramakrishna called “kamini kanchan” (women and gold) remains powerfully alive today, such as in the assertion by Swami Turiyananda of Vivekananda: “Look at Swamiji! What was his power? He was free from lust. He lived among beautiful women, yet there was dispassion in his heart.”

Male celibacy, particularly of monastic character, hinges on the power of rejection, especially when the man is faced with erotic interest. Such is the legend of Vivekananda’s purity in his refusal of erotic admiration for white women disciples. In contrast, the silence on homosexuality shapes a saffron network of support for deep homoerotic bonds which then become the invisible glue for Hindu spiritual kinships. All that is real melts into the air the moment we put them into words.

Saikat Majumdar is the author of five novels and four books of nonfiction and criticism.

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