Today in Hinduphobia June 4, 2020: Elephant
Elephant
A pregnant elephant stood in the water and allowed herself to die slowly.
Her mouth had been blown apart by an explosive.
The first reports about this incident stated that she had been fed a pineapple filled with firecrackers by some locals in the Malappuram district of Kerala in south India.
India’s Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change tweeted that his government has “taken a very serious note of the killing” and that “this is not an Indian culture to feed fire crackers and kill.”
Since then, the details about what happened, and why, have been caught up in a confusing tussle of words and labels reflecting the complexity of and contestation over the identity politics of our time.
Speculation began about how it might have been a bomb rather than a firecracker, considering an elephant would not likely have put an object with a burning fuse in her mouth.
Indian environmentalist and former minister Maneka Gandhi said that the region where this incident occurred is notorious for violence against animals.
Many social media users began to speculate this might well have been a deliberate act by radical Islamists to offend Hindus (who associate elephants with the God Ganesha) and also cited the example of the Kerala Congress party slaughtering cows and calves to make beef curry a few years to mock cow-protection policies (video here, graphic).
Other social media users began to argue that the cause of the elephant’s injury and death was not deliberate but more likely some kind of explosive traps set by farmers to kill wild boars. Al Jazeera reported that Muslims were being scapegoated. Some argued that Muslim suffering was being denied by “drama” over the elephant.
As of the time of my writing this article, it is not still fully clear what happened here.
But a haunting image persists. Of the lone mother returning to infinity in a river far from the madness of this human-unmade world, like a sage unconcerned with even anger for lesser beings.
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The Lost World of the Hindu Dream
I have not written about animal issues for a long time (I used to, a few years ago, when I had my contributor platform back on Huffpost). Watching this picture, and the reactions to it, I could not help thinking how much this cruelty towards animals is caught up, historically, culturally, politically, and intellectually, with the phenomenon I am trying to document in this Medium series, with Hinduphobia.
Hinduphobia, for me, has not been only about the way in which Hindus and Hinduism are represented in media, but also about how colonization has violently erased Hindu sensibilities and the lives and livelihoods to uphold those sensibilities, when it comes to the question of human relations towards non-human animals and the rest of the living world. In my 2015 book Rearming Hinduism, I wrote:
“What the Hinduphobic worldview denies virulently is not only the truth and elegance of Hindu thought, but the very integrity and sanctity of the natural world itself.”
As a Hindu, somehow I never even thought it was necessary to think of myself “as a Hindu,” as different, as part of some club that guaranteed some better future to only those who labeled themselves a certain way (and labeled “outsiders” a certain other way, as disdained “others”). I had my gods, temples, festivals, and I saw these as my path to love and self-improvement, just as my non-Hindu friends had their equivalents. It was not like I was naïve that some of my friends could never reciprocate my universalism because of their beliefs. I just assured myself it was all fine. I could, in time, find a way for all of us to agree on right and wrong as modern, post-religious, secular subjects. Just as I taught about racism, sexism, orientalism and Islamophobia in my classes, I could in time broaden the conversation by making a case as precisely and professionally as I could, that a critique of “Hindu Nationalism” should not be used to silence the growing evidence of outright bias and deception in the media rooted in centuries of marginalization and violence against Hindus by colonizers, evidence of Hinduphobia, that is.
I still go on making this case, in forums like this and among my peers in academia. But in the shadow of a dying elephant’s photograph, I feel an incredible sense of helplessness, and powerlessness. All my training as a critical scholar holds me back, telling me I should see my own privileges more and not feel powerless, that I should never forget that my case for Hinduphobia rests not on my feelings or that of other middle or upper class Hindus but the very lives of hundreds of millions of poor, colonized, exploited, Hindus in India and in the diaspora, and all the people around the world who have ended up where they have now because of the violence of colonization.
I feel I can write, study, share, because I have had the privilege of being here, and the blessing of being able to represent, at least in some measure, what people who lack that privilege (not only of material location but of cultural capital, access, ‘voice,’ as well) seem to feel in their practices of Hinduism, the joys of mother goddesses, the delights of child gods, the majesty most of all of that elephant god himself.
But I feel helpless and powerless. I feel the powerlessness of my people, my culture, my worldview more than ever.
Do we Hindus have not one land where our view of sacred nature can hold sway?
Where no forests will be destroyed to make way for dams, malls, and factories and other illusions of progress?
Where no government experts with colonized heads (and their business enablers) deny indigenous wisdom to prescribe animal slaughter protein as the only way to cure malnourishment and advocate for soil scorching, planet warming, cattle massacres?
Where birds can fly with the freedom that the humans below see in them their ancestors’ omens and messages as they once did instead and will be left alone instead of being seen as some object to be shot down and sold?
Where cows and buffaloes are treated with care and companionship as any pet would?
Where elephants are no longer bulldozed by ever growing railway tracks and smaller animals by highwaymania?
Where every human sees every non-human with the depth and attention they deserve?
Where every human sees other humans too the same way?
And finally, where every human sees their own self the same, kind, insightful, empowering way too?
My despair spans the world it seems, from nature to culture, from the outer to the inner, the “material” to the “spiritual.”
Where does this world get off from where it’s been going? What is the meaning of this catastrophic behavior, from pregnant elephant murder to cold ruthless police brutality to everything in between? And why does this keep happening even after all that the planet has been through since the start of the Covid pandemic and shutdown?
What have we learned ? I feel like asking, like Charlie Brown in an old cartoon staring at war cemeteries commemorating glorious victories…
And as a teacher and a writer, I can’t also help asking what we are teaching ourselves still.
Why can I not teach my world, my ancestors’ wisdom of ahimsa and satya, any more than the little I do now?
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The Subaltern Question
I wish I could leave that as a rhetorical question or a plea to the universe but I know the answer.
Hinduphobia dominates in every sense and Hindus are far away from anything like a homeland for themselves and their non-human neighbors even in their own ancestral country, even in spite of a supposedly “Hindu First” (critics’ quotes, not theirs) party being in power.
The truth is that the whole thing about Hindus being in charge of anything is a lie, least of all their own country. Hindus are not in charge of their forests, mountains, temples, rivers, non-human friends (even the supposedly sacred cow), and most of all their own representations. Even after a thousand years of being massacred, colonized, told ‘convert or die,’ Hindus are misrepresented in academia and media as the most incorrigible colonizers, racists, religious supremacists and source of danger to the world. The banner of Islamophobia rises on the global Left (and on occasion for good reason) against the tyranny of Empire and White Supremacy and other Arundhati-esque social scientific poetry. I admire its resistive power but also wonder if the reason Hinduphobia doesn’t rise is because it didn’t have half the imperialist history of privilege others who now profess alterity and a case for justice even through violence, once did.
That’s some powerlessness for the Hindus who lose their lands, lives, minds, and animal friends every day since dominionism and colonization.
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Change
But I believe still in resistance, change, even revolution perhaps. The Anti-Hinduphobia uprising will happen. Not because Hindus will get smart about the conditions of their oppression and organize and represent and win elections and change laws and all that (a poor caricature of that has of course started happening in India) but because the world, the whole anthropo-head-aching world will see what Krishna told us to see in each other and in all of life itself (or your name for Krishna, whatever works for you).
The end of Hinduphobia will also have to be the end of the kind of cold madness that gives joy to people in blasting pregnant elephants’ mouths, burning newborn puppies, crushing hamsters, razing forests, the whole mad project insatiable and unworthy of who we really are.
The global echoes of the American race crisis is a reminder that one of the biggest weapons we have allowed to run amok in our minds and lives is the question of who we are, identity itself. Despite gestures towards decolonization and anti-racism, much of what passes for identity politics today is a disguised version of the same hideous, cruel, divisive, bigoted, calumny against the living world that got hatched in tyranny centuries ago.
Both Left and Right today are stuck in that trap, pushing forward and pushing back but without stopping to look at the real sources of that disconnect, that dishonesty; our forced separation from the rest our shared consciousness into one chosen species pretending not to hear or care the voices of the silenced billions of this planet, mothers, babies, neighbors, elephants in rivers…
Identity is the site of the most vicious kinds of propaganda today, each of us left to face the peculiar pain, madness, and injustice of the stories that the history of power has cast upon us. For African Americans, it is the insanity of being abused and used, again and again. For indigenous people everywhere, it is the silencing of who we were and who we think our land, our habitat, our sheltering hills and trees and rives once saw us as. For Hindus in particular, denied the dignity of Indian indigeneity even thanks to colonial racist Aryan theory bunkum, it is the peculiar burden of being the global capitalist economy’s most docile Gunga Din Kick-Me sticker flaunting community. Colonized into anti-Hindu upper classes and ineffective and silently resentful “RW” identifying middle classes, the relatively privileged Hindus go forth into the future clueless about what they have been torn from, oblivious to what their gods and goddesses are speaking to them still, in the voices of the planet everywhere.
Meanwhile, there is the noise. There is the sensorial colonization to live through and get past.
The Nationalist Indian government proclaims that feeding elephants firecrackers is against Indian culture. The progressive Kerala government gets set to defend against what it sees as anti-Muslim bigotry around this issue. The Bollywood celebrity-McConscience machine leaps in linking the Hindu elephant god Ganesha to this tragedy, as if any evil act must perforce be cured with an admonition of Hinduism. Cartoonists depict Ganesha crying and rejecting pujas from devout Hindus, and naïve Hindus share the cartoon not realizing they are being played once again, that the focus of the event has been shifted instantly from human (or a particularly animal-unfriendly sort of human) cruelty towards animals to the endlessly repeatable trope of Hindu hypocricy. We have seen so much of this; when ISIS beheads people, blame goddess Kali for it as an example of some generic notion of “religion,”; when governments ignore environmental warnings and allow disasters to unfold, blame the Hindu god Ayyappa and the “Vedas.” It’s an efficient apparatus indeed.
But this inevitable maelstrom of propaganda cannot conceal forever what is at stake. It’s not “our future” in some abstract sense. It is our deepest self that is in hiding now, a self we yearn to find again but can barely even see because of our sensorial and intellectual colonization by “modern” education and media (I mean, it’s only modern in its delivery technology but really medieval still, like “animals have no feelings” and let Dr. Descartes beat dogs to death to prove they are only objects kind of medieval).
Elephant, Monk, Avatar
This, I believe.
The pregnant elephant of the Kerala river has to be to our conscience what the burning monk was to the Vietnam war. She marks the culmination of a hundred years of industrial-size violence against animals, and to our last great land-neighbor animal elder at that. The industrial age phase of animal violence began with the spectacle of a “criminal” elephant being executed by electrocution (with Thomas Edison being blamed sometimes for it).
I hope it all ends with this now, somehow. I hope we can say, not too long from now and in our own lifetimes (and in the lifetimes of all those non-humans running from our greed every day)the words post-industrial, post-globalization, post-destruction, post-dominion, at long last.
In some long ago age or culture, the elders and story-tellers would have told the children that she was no ordinary animal, but an avatar herself. She did not go mad with the pain from the blast in her mouth and ravage the human inhabitations. She returned calmly to the river and stood.
In secret thoughts with her never to be born child.
In secret thought with all of us included maybe. If we learn to listen. Somehow.
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