chapter 15 Is Hinduism the World’s Largest Indigenous Religion?
Arkotong Longkumer
Introduction
When David Frawley,1 international activist for the Vishva Hindu Parishad (vhp), was touring the Northeast of India in 2002, he claimed at a Janjati (tribal) Festival in Guwahati that “Hinduism is the largest indigenous tradition in the world, which is inclusive of all indigenous traditions” (Bhide 2004: xx). Frawley was referring to the idea that different indigenous traditions in the Northeast of India were in harmony with the rest of Hindu culture, highlight- ing the fact that tribal and Hindu practices shared many similarities. He was also making the case for a unified ‘Hindu’ culture in an effort to include those marginal ‘tribes’ in the Northeast of India who have often argued that they are culturally distinct from ‘Hindu’ civilisation. During my own work on the activi- ties of the Hindu-right in the Northeast, I realised the significance of Frawley’s observations. What happens once Hinduism is seen as an indigenous religion? Do our notions of indigenous religions change, simply because of Hinduism’s numerical strength and popularity? In answer to these questions, this chapter will examine the way the con- cept ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ is viewed and represented as ‘indigenous tradition/ religion’ by the Hindu-right in the Northeast of India. For them, Hindu/Hindu- ism is a practice developed in the realm of ‘Mother India’. This notion plays into the discourse of the global indigenous movement itself in which images of ‘mother earth’ and ‘sacred land’ are powerfully evoked to draw legitimacy and claims over land (Johnson and Kraft 2017, introduction in this volume). It could even be suggested that the very notion ‘indigenous’ serves to globalise local traditions. This ability to ‘encompass’ a wide variety of religious practices, including indigenous religions, it is argued, means it has the potential to be- come the world’s largest indigenous religion. This chapter responds by asking: (1) How are we to understand the status and deployment of the terms ‘Hindu’
1 Frawley is the Founder/Director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and has toured the Northeast of India on several occasions.
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Hindu or Hinduism
Before proceeding further it is important to give a sense of the scholarly de- bates concerning the two ambiguous terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’. Much has been written on whether Hinduism is a religion at all and the extent to which lay people understand the term ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ to signify their sense of be- longing within the vast geographical space of the sub-continent (for example, Sweetman 2003). This essay does not rehearse all the numerous positions, but simply points to debates that are pertinent to the argument I will be pursuing. Also keenly debated is the nature of the relationship between the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ (Lorenzen 1999; Searle-Chatterjee 2000; Lipner 2006).