Kanwar yatra and the perils of nostalgic Hinduism

Historians report that in the early parts of the 19th century, Christian missionaries travelling the countryside would ask peasant families about their familiarity with events in the Vedas and other religious books. Their inquiries were met with bemusement and confusion — how to tally the worship of ancestors in Haryana and household gods in the Kumaon region with what was written in the Vedas? The flummoxed missionaries would frequently bemoan the fact that the “Hindus did not know their own religion”. The UP government’s commandment regarding nameplates on eateries and restaurants along the kanwar route is, actually, an extension of the missionary attitude. It suggests that the everyday practice of Hinduism is not what the religion is all about and that Hindus don’t know their own religion. Like so much that has happened in the name of Hinduism over the past decade, the nameplate episode has little to do with the core — everyday — aspects of the religion.

Under modern conditions of life — and the kanwar yatra is a quintessential modern phenomenon in its staging — all projects of seeking “purity” are, at best, flawed and, at worst, comical. They invent pure ways of life through taking recourse to a method of tracing identity — history — that is itself nothing but an account of the mixing of cultures and people. The lived history of Hinduism is nothing but an account of how people learnt to live in the middle of a river of different ideas, practices, foods and beliefs. Standing in the middle of the flow, they don’t drown or shout out nostalgic cries, yearning for a time when the river wasn’t there. There is a difference between propagandists of culture and those who live it. The current reinvention of Hinduism — in terms of purity and impurity — owes a great deal to transformation in the cultures of nostalgia.

Over the past decade, there has been a definitive shift in cultures of nostalgia. Earlier, proclamations of “glorious and pure” past tended to be limited to the anti-colonial and pro-Hindutva campaigns. They primarily sought to show that Indians were no less than Europeans in the realm of ideas and had the same capacity for thought. The current shift relates to the emergence of lifestyle nostalgia where everyday aspects of the past are presented as lost worlds of a better time. Lifestyle nostalgia is a middle-class invention and preoccupation. Ironically, though the kanwariya phenomenon is not, primarily, a middle-class religious event, the nameplates episode derives from the rise of lifestyle nostalgia.

There are three aspects to lifestyle nostalgia. First, it refers mainly to an apparent Golden Age that existed from the 1960s to the 1990s. Second, it imagines this age as an unsullied world of pure relationships between humans. Think of the wide circulation of social-media memes and short videos — usually in evocative black and white or sepia — that tell us of unconditional parental love; joyful family togetherness; the “simple pleasures” train travel; and the delights of frolicking in monsoonal downpours with cousins and friends. The third aspect of lifestyle nostalgia is the striking ways in which goods and commodities from the 1960s to the 1990s have now become markers of a sentimentalised past. There is now an unending supply of social media messaging with images of cassette tapes (with scribbled notes); metal pencil boxes; black-coloured dial telephones; spinning tops; Ambassador cars; and rooftop TV aerials.

Lifestyle nostalgia serves to break the connection between actual conditions of life and its romanticised version. Never mind that parent-child relations could be authoritarian with little scope for personal decision making and forget that in most parts of the city, lack of attention to infrastructure meant annual monsoon misery. Why, also, bother with the reality that the black telephone and Ambassador cars symbolised the hierarchy of access to means of communication and mobility respectively? But the point behind lifestyle nostalgia is, precisely, the great middle-class capacity for self-absorption and the symbolism of the nameplates diktat is addressed to it, rather than those who participate in it. The latter — the mostly non-middle class pilgrims – are fully aware of how their lives are entangled with those of Muslims. Indeed, it is striking that there has been no concerted demand for nameplates from the kanwariyas themselves and many have pointed out that they are met with the same hospitality in “Muslim” areas as in “Hindu” ones.

There are two particular dangers of proliferation of lifestyle nostalgia. The first is that actual life is expected to adhere to an entirely fictional template. And second, that those who are expected to take part in lifestyle nostalgia have had no role in its propagation. But, this is in keeping with the broader trend within movements of religious mobilisation: those who suffer its consequences are rarely those who dream it up. Sepia — though now a template for thinking about it — is never the colour of everyday life. And sepia Hinduism benefits just a tiny minority.

The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London