chapter 15 Is the World’s Largest Indigenous Religion?

Arkotong Longkumer

Introduction

When ,1 international activist for the (vhp), was touring the Northeast of 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.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_017

264 Longkumer and ­‘Hinduism’ in this argumentative context?; and (2) To what extent are ­Hindu-right ideologues, aided by local indigenous elites, successful in deploy- ing the term ‘indigenous religion’ to shape common practices in the service of a unifying national identity? I will chart two simultaneous processes with regard to these interactions: (1) the ‘hinduising’ of these ‘indigenous religions’ by encompassing them un- der the umbrella of ‘Indic civilisation’; and (2) the valorising of ‘traditional cul- ture’ to the extent that ‘animism’ – here used positively – is tied specifically to a form of ‘natural religion’. The strategic way the two interactions move from one to the next are illuminating, particularly in the way ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ is equated with indigenous religions. ‘Indigenous’ then serves the Hindu-right’s purpose in pursuing the discourse of ‘locality’, powerfully articulated through the nationalist term (or Hinduness) that captures its ability to dis- count foreign – de-territorialised – religions ( and ) while forging links with those whose religions are of the soil. While in many scholarly discourses using terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘reli- gion’ interchangeably is highly controversial (for example, Engler and Grieve 2005), in the Northeast of India they are used together (in English). Although these English language terms have their roots in a western understanding, once they are used in another context, often where English is a second language, they can take on new meanings and make distinctions between these terms very unclear. In this chapter I examine how these terms become blurred, espe- cially when the issue of translation between multiple languages and cultures is involved. But this should not surprise us, as many scholars (for example, Asad 1993) have noted how unstable these categories are, especially in cross-cultural situations. What is interesting, however, is how indigenous actors use them and in which context.

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).