Thomas Hansen

Reflections Upon 'Civilizationisms'

I think of the term ‘civilization’ as a descriptive and abstract category that over time have acquired a political and emotional/ideological force on the ground that makes it into something akin to a social fact. 

In 18th century Europe, civilization was deployed as a counterpoint to the category of ‘primitive societies’, that emerged in the Iberian/European conquest of the Americas and the slave trade. Societies in Asia were described as ‘decaying civilizations’, fallen from an initial era of vitality and power, stifled by ‘oriental despotism’. 

In South Asia, the idea of the fallen/decayed cultures focused on what Indologists and colonial officials began to call a ‘Hindu civilization’, collapsed and disintegrated over time only to be ‘dominated’ by Muslim conquest from the 10th century onwards. 18th and early 19th century India was a veritable laboratory of attempts to retrieve Hindu cultural codes from the rubbles of history as it were: to convert the Vedas and other ancient sources into written texts; to promote and retrieve Sanskrit as a shared cultural code across the subcontinent; to retrieve and resurrect the powerful but also decaying Buddhist layers of texts and art, etc. This was set against Muslim traditions seen as ‘alien’ to the region. Muslim courts and states were described as given to vice and moral corruption depleting their ability to rule, while conveniently positioning British colonial rule as a benign cultural and political salvage operation.

The hypocrisy of colonial ideology notwithstanding, the idea of retrieving the civilizational unity and ‘genius’ of India became one of the strongest themes among upper caste Hindu intellectuals and early nationalists in the subcontinent. Virtually every major South Asian political thinker of the late 19th/early 20th century – from Savarkar on the right to Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru on the left - embraced the notion of India as a unified civilization that had to be reawakened. Today, ‘civilizationism’ is everywhere in the subcontinent – in public discourse, in textbooks, self help manuals and in popular history books in multiple languages one can buy at any book seller, and in the common sense historical consciousness of millions of people. The civilizationist discourses range from ‘softer’, spiritually and ethically oriented versions of ‘our cultural values’, to the harder majoritarian version we today see in the Hindu nationalist celebration and promotion of India as a civilizational state and great power, the legitimate heir to the (Hindu) glories of a very long past. 

The current argument is that India is, and has always been, a Hindu civilizational state that is remarkably tolerant of other religions as long as they recognize the political and cultural pre-eminence of Hindus and Hindu civilization as the basic cultural matrix of the entire South Asian region. 

India is projecting its great power ambitions in this civilizational language. For the Hindu right, India should encompass all of ‘Akhand Bharat’ – undivided India – that comprises all of what used to be British India, incl. Burma, but also Afghanistan, Tibet and most of South East Asia, incl. Indonesia and much of the Indian Ocean (often called ‘Sindhu Sagar) as a historical territory of ‘Hindu civilization’. This ‘revanchist’ desire to undo Partition and re-establish Hindu supremacy throughout the entire region (and beyond) is stated loudly and clearly across India, mainly for domestic consumption.