We love essays that blend political timeliness with careful explorations of deep history. They are rare. Serious engagement with premodern materials makes them so. Surprisingly, two of our most popular articles of 2023 contend with identity formations that are simultaneously old and new. Audrey Truschke examines “Hindu.” Gina Anne Tam explores “Han.” Not only are these concepts of immense importance to two of the world’s largest polities, they also invite comparison. And resist it.
Hindu: A History (CSSH 65-2, 2023).
We asked Truschke and Tam to read each other’s work and discuss the correspondences. They did so, literally, by corresponding. Their letters to each other are interesting and artfully composed, so we’ve decided to present them in their original epistolary format. You can read the articles first or start with the letters. Either way, you’ll quickly see what makes the work distinctive. Since we’re eager to receive more manuscripts like these at CSSH, let’s be specific about what Tam and Truschke do:
1. They process large amounts of “old history,” showing how – through various forms of inclusion and exclusion, use and abuse, promotion and invisibility – this “old history” plays a vital role in contemporary political life.
2. They deal with major civilizational complexes, move across large swaths of time/space, and take big political categories seriously by historicizing them and considering how others have done so.
3. They use historical sources of diverse kinds to make sense of local and transregional identities. Their analysis is complex, as is their commitment not to misuse or shy away from problematic identity labels.
4. They go beyond what post/colonial orientations tend to privilege, open up territory that modern/ist historiography tends to ignore, and make possible new kinds of political criticism.
And that’s just the beginning. As Truschke and Tam compare notes, they see immense potential for work done on this scale, in and across their regions, in and beyond nationalist ideologies and the worldviews that preceded them.
It is a fascinating exchange. Enjoy.
June 14, 2023
Dear Gina,
In 2008, China hosted the summer Olympics. Personally, I recall nothing of the games, but I vividly remember photographs of the opening ceremony in which the Chinese state paraded 56 children, dressed to represent 56 Chinese minority communities. The illusion lasted a mere week that China’s authoritarian, human rights-abusing regime had, implausibly, celebrated its internal diversity. Then it was revealed that all 56 children were Han Chinese. The fakery seemed to encapsulate the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s deep commitment to Han hegemony and its accompanying disregard for its minority populations. This memory came to my mind as I read your paper, which offers nuanced background to understand the current cultural program of China that has extensive, sometimes bitter consequences for its 1.4 billion-strong population.
As I understand it, your CSSH article excavates a series of arguments, largely from the early 20th century, that are not fully consistent with one another but collectively underpin Han-ness, an ethnoracial collective identity rooted in a reimagined past. We would call it Han-tva, by the way, in Sanskrit. That is neither here nor there, except that Sanskrit and hegemony have long gone together, and claims about modern Hindu identity, too, are sometimes rooted in swirls of partial and whole fictions about an allegedly Sanskrit-drenched antiquity. Just as you seek to understand Han-ness, in its complexities and without whitewashing, so, too, do I seek to understand various kinds of Hindu identities, including those that engage with Sanskrit. I thought of many possible comparisons between China and India, more specifically Han and Hindu, as I read your wonderful essay. And yet, I find myself hesitating at this point because of my own ignorance about Chinese history.
Inter-Asian comparison. Academics based in North America do not, as a rule, prioritize India-China comparative work. This is hardly a novel observation. Perhaps you recall the 2018 volume What China and India Once Were (Columbia University Press) that was co-edited by a Sinologist and an Indologist, Benjamin Elman and Sheldon Pollock, respectively? Elman and Pollock brought together scholars focused on East Asia and South Asia to co-author articles, but I have not seen a follow-up or next step of that broad comparative project. Instead, we seem to always turn back to the West, comparing to Europe or, for more modern periods, the United States. This can be helpful, such as when you liken the multiple modes of supporting Han hegemony to how monolingual and bilingual education in the United States both enforce whiteness (p. 30). For me, I fear making a mistake in trying out comparisons between India and China, the latter being a region about which I know little other than specific points of intersection with South Asian history (e.g., ancient Buddhist links). Still, your article inspired me to try, and so I proceed with some trepidation but all the good will in the world to think with and through your amazing scholarship.
History and Language. One of the fascinating strands of your CSSH article is how modernity was midwifed in China via thinking about antiquity. You show through specific details and grounded generalizations how late-19th-century to mid-20th-century thinkers—from cosmopolitan intellectuals down to provincial gazetteer authors—thought about premodern China, especially in linguistic and philological modes, to move themselves towards their vision of modernity. I smiled a little when I read your characterization of Zhang Taiyan as a revolutionary and a classicist (p. 32). It is a dual characterization that many might enjoy being applied to them, but few actually deserve.
In India, too, there is a modern movement “to be the inheritors of the language that hews closest to the origin of a civilization” so that one group might “inherit a rightful claim to represent its history” (p. 28). Specifically, Hindu nationalists claim Sanskrit as their cultural legacy along with the sole right to narrate South Asian history. Both claims are sketchy, which sounds broadly similar to pseudo-intellectual attempts regarding the Han and Chinese history. But, and this I want to underscore, Hindu nationalist claims regarding Sanskrit are wild in that most Hindu nationalists are completely ignorant of the language. The Indian government sponsors Sanskrit education in schools, but I have never met a graduate who can read any Sanskrit text even after years of study. And Sanskrit has never been a spoken language, outside of reified scholarly circles. Hindu nationalists and the current Indian regime want the cultural legacy they imagine Sanskrit to represent, but they do not care a fig about the language itself or its vast premodern literary culture.
This embrace of Sanskrit-sans-understanding seems rather different from Mandarin and other Chinese languages, and I wonder why. Is it because local Chinese languages (fangyan) are spoken vernaculars historically and today, whereas Sanskrit is not? Does it have something to do with origins? There is substantial modern Hindu nationalist anxiety about the origins of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language whose roots connect it to migrant groups that entered the subcontinent from further west roughly 3,500 years ago. Does that make Sanskrit not Indian, somehow? Hindu nationalists seem to fear it might, and so some vehemently deny the most basic contours of language family trees. Do you see such concerns regarding Chinese languages? Based on your article, it seems that anxieties regarding fangyan predominantly concern internal hegemony. This issue arises in India regarding vernacular languages, but nobody has ever had much success in advocating for Indians to speak a single tongue owing to regional tensions.
I raise these questions and comparisons to point out how thinking about the premodern origins of categories and the logics of modern hegemony projects are critical to both of our work but with distinct emphases.
Hegemony all the way down. You argue that there were different roads, but they all ended at the same place of buttressing Han-ness. It seems that, even when individuals and groups tried to resist, they supported the oppressive structures all the same, even against their own interests. Some endorsed the narrative and others the counter-narrative—saying that Han is best or others contributed to Chinese culture too—but all paths led to support of Han hegemony. I know you end the meat of your analysis in 1949 and it is 2023 at present, but I must ask – How do we get out of this, even now? After all, Han ethnoracial dominance is still very much an issue, especially insofar as it is harnessed to support the current Chinese regime. Is there a way to release ourselves from uplifting Han-ness, to sidestep this damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t seeming inevitability?
For Hindu nationalism (i.e., Hindutva), there is a way out, and part of it involves recovering the multivalence of the term “hindu.” I will admit, I see no such redemptive possibilities for “nationalism,” and so in this sense I cleave the phrase, separating “Hindu” from “nationalism” (or “Hindu” from “-tva”). Given that the two parts were only clubbed together quite recently, about a hundred years ago, and “hindu” had a long history before that, I stand on firm historical ground in this separation. Do you similarly question primarily the “-ness” of “Han-ness”? It seems to me that the answer might depend on what “Han” meant in premodern Chinese contexts, which you address only briefly (n. 15). I know it is unfair to keep asking for more breadth and depth than what you provide in your amazing article. In my mild defense, premodernity is never far from my mind, and in this case, it led me to wonder about the semantic and cultural possibilities of “Han” over centuries rather than decades.
Questioning the Sacred. You mention a myth featuring the Yellow Emperor, “the first ancestor of the Chinese people” (p. 34). In India, the closest parallel is Rama (i.e., Ram), a mythical king of Ayodhya who fought against demons to the south of his northern kingdom. In religious terms, Rama is generally considered an incarnation of Vishnu, a Hindu god, and in human terms, Rama was a kshatriya, the caste of kings. While Rama was a myth, many kshatriyas today are very real, and the caste system holds immense power in India in terms of advantaging some and disadvantaging others. Caste informs who one can marry, what jobs one can hold, access to education, and even expected lifespan. Here is a thing – Just as you note that not all Chinese are thought to be descendants of the Yellow Emperor (p. 43), so too not all Indians are kshatriyas. In fact, the caste system only works if there are groups at the bottom to oppress, whom we call Shudras and, beneath them, Dalits.
There is consensus in India that caste-based oppression is an ongoing social phenomenon, but some defend this as religion. Caste is justified in some premodern Hindu texts, including its worst features such as untouchability and violence to enforce segregation. Many modern Hindus reject those parts of their ancient tradition, but some tout them still as central to their religious practice, as sacred. Sanskrit, too, intersects with caste. It was often restricted to Brahmin (the highest caste) men, especially in Hindu contexts such as Vedic rituals and temples. Can oppression be sacred? Historically, absolutely, but what about today? If so, if human oppression is still sacrosanct to some, then I’m prepared to question the sacred. Do you question the sacred when you question Han-ness and the Yellow Emperor?
In the South Asian studies world, many of us receive hate mail and harassment from far-right groups and individuals, upset at our perceived irreverence or that we do not toe a Hindu nationalist line. Do you also see political pushback again scholars in the East Asian studies world? How do you all address this and persist with scholarly analysis and integrity? Whatever the answer, I am glad that you do so. Your cogent analysis of power, ethnicity, and language in the pages of CSSH historicizes an identity that some would rather project as timeless. I found your arguments convincing and inspiring for thinking about my own academic work.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I very much look forward to your response and to reading more of your scholarship in the future.
Sincerely,
Audrey
June 21, 2023
Dear Audrey,
Thank you for such a generous response to my article, and for the opportunity to read yours in turn. I’ve organized this response according to the themes in your letter, though forgive me if I stray a bit—there is just so much exciting material to work with!
Your CSSH article “Hindu: A History” marshals a truly impressive body of multilingual sources to offer a longue durée history of the term Hindu. The result is a sweeping history that shows just how much the term has evolved, how much it intersects with a number of different markers of identity such as language, caste, political regime, religion, ethnicity and race, and how its pre-modern usage is not a “prelude” to its modern form, but the key to understanding its usage today.
When I began working on the topic of language and identity, I was often asked about the potential for comparative work, in particular with South Asia. As I read your article, the overlaps between our work are both obvious and exciting. Yet I, too, struggle with the thought of comparative work. I feel like the more I study China, the less I know about it—to think of comparing it to another big, diverse country whose communities are tied to long, storied histories feels overwhelming. I would imagine the feeling is mutual.
Yet we are starting to see some really interesting comparative work in our respective fields. In addition to Benjamin Elman and Sheldon Pollock, who have done more than one collaboration (they also co-published the volume World Philology, which includes essays on both Chinese and Sanskrit philology), I’m aware of a few new books that bring the histories of India and China into conversation: in literature (Gal Gvili’s 2022 book Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962 and Adhira Mangalagiri’s 2023 book States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century); in history (Andrew Liu’s 2020 book Tea Wars: A History of Capitalism in China and India and Kyle Gardner’s 2022 book Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the making of the India-China border, 1846-1962); and in urban studies (Xuefei Ren’s 2020 book Governing the Urban in China and India). This sampling consists mostly of work by Sinologists, but it is representative of a renewed interest in comparative studies.
This scholarship is not only interesting, it is also particularly important given the frequency of comparisons in popular news media. As I write this, Narendra Modi is coming to Washington DC to address Congress. His visit has inspired numerous throwaway contrasts between Modi and Xi Jinping, arguing that they are cut from the same authoritarian, ethnonationalist cloth. While I believe these overlaps exist and comparisons can be fruitful, there are real nuances that I fear are being lost in popular discourse. What is needed to make better sense of Xi and Modi in this moment are comparisons that pay attention to historical contingency—not unlike this dialogue! I hope this can be a small beginning to a long, robust conversation about the ways in which histories of hegemonic identities, histories of the relationship between national identity and constructed antiquity, and histories of anti-imperialist movements in China and India, respectively, can inform one another.
History and Language. In your letter, you explain that Hindu Nationalists claim Sanskrit as their cultural heritage. Yet, as you point out, this claim is tricky because Sanskrit’s linguistic history has roots in spaces and communities that are seen today as decidedly not Indian or Hindu. The Chinese script is certainly deeply intertwined with nationalist narratives, yet those nationalistic narratives rarely have to grapple with allegations that the script has foreign origins. Because the Chinese script has existed for such a long time, was directly tied to and disciplined by the first recorded Chinese polities, and was and is recognized as “Sinic” by nearby non-Chinese states like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, it is hard to imagine any effort to trace its origin to non-Chinese roots gaining widespread or enduring traction. There were attempts in the early twentieth century to replace characters altogether with a Roman script, but that failed in part because early PRC intellectuals tied the maintenance of Chinese script to anti-imperialist politics, framing the possible adoption of Roman letters as nothing less than a success for Western hegemony. That is not to say there are not controversies about ownership over script. People in Taiwan frequently claim that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deliberately wants to destroy Chinese “tradition” through the simplification of characters. Of course, this claim is diminished by the very long existence of short-hand forms of Chinese characters, not to mention the sponsorship of similar efforts to simplify characters by the Republic of China (the state that occupied the island of Taiwan after World War Two) well before the CCP launched its own policies.
Yet accusations of foreign origins are often levied at spoken languages—that certain spoken languages, or fangyan, are not purely “Chinese” in origin. As my paper shows, it is common for people from the south of China to claim that northern-based Mandarin has been adulterated by non-Han people. Interestingly, nationalistic Mandarin speakers will sometimes make the inverse claims about southern languages—they will claim that people who speak Cantonese or Fujianese are more closely related to non-Han people from the south of China’s current borders than to the imagined “actual” ancestors of the Han people from the central plains. It is, of course, difficult to prove or measure any of these claims, but such accusations demonstrate a widespread notion of the close relationship between language and racial purity.
Your work raises interesting questions about language networks. Something truly unique about Hindu is how the term subsists and evolves in a multi-lingual, or at least multi-script, ecosystem. How fluid are the boundaries between these scripts, and how mutually intelligible are the languages upon which they are based? And with the rise of ethnonationalism today, are there attempts to silo these scripts and make them seem more independent than they were historically?
Your point about Sanskrit is fascinating as well. I’d love to hear more about how Hindu nationalists negotiate their own claims with empirical evidence. How do they deal with the relationship between Sanskrit and its Indo-European roots? Do they disavow it? Create another kind of alternate history?
Hegemony all the way Down. I find it so perceptive that you began your letter with the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics—it was truly a masterclass in how the current Chinese government presents its idealized national identity. In addition to the memorable exhibition of China’s supposed “56 ethnicities,” the ceremony also featured a series of performances that narrated China’s civilizational history, told as a story of a unified “China” marked by cultural progress. These two juxtaposed displays reinforced several key components of Chinese national mythmaking. The historical narrative presented a teleological history in which a core authentic “Chinese-ness” progresses over time, but its cultural core, political system, and even borders were never changed or challenged. This history, which ignored centuries of imperialistic conquest by Chinese dynasties, long stretches of political disunity, or the influence of non-Han polities that ruled and thrived in the space we call China today, is a Han-centric story, but not explicitly so, instead seamlessly rolling Han-ness, Chinese-ness, and Chinese citizenship into one identity. The images of the nation’s minoritized groups, on the other hand, present an ahistorical China that is, and has always been, peacefully and harmoniously multiethnic. To juxtapose these two performances in one ceremony is both ironic and strategic. Together, they celebrate an imagined history of unity, cultural achievement and prosperity while smuggling into silence the actual history of violent occupation and settler colonialism conducted by Chinese empires in the geographic spaces to which many of those minoritized groups are indigenous.
Our comparison of Hindu nationalism and Han hegemony brings to mind an important text called Critical Han Studies (Mullaney, Leibold, Gros, and Vanden Bussche, eds., 2012). The introduction of the volume points out that Han, like Hindu as you describe it, is a “soft and slippery term,” that slips quietly in and out of “cultural” or “biological” definitions, depending on context and what is needed to defend its coherence and power. To your question of pre-modern usages, one essay in the volume, Mark Elliott’s “Hushuo 胡說: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese,” addresses this directly, tracing the pre-modern usage and evolution of the term Han. He shows that, while its origins begin as a geographic location (the Han river) and then a dynasty (the Han dynasty, 206BC-220AD), its roots as an ethnic signifier can be traced back to the fifth or sixth century as a descriptor of people in the central states (an area we often think of as the origin of Chinese civilization) by people from the northern steppe (an area whose original inhabitants we, today, often consider not “Han”).
I can see, having read your essay, that there are clear differences between the evolution and modern usages of the terms Han and Hindu. First, there is contemporary usage. Han is upheld by the PRC state as the country’s ethnic majority. Hindu, on the other hand, is primarily, though uneasily and not exclusively, a religious term. Another distinction is the relative stability and instability of the terms over time. While both very clearly evolve in their connotations and usage,the use of Han to describe something recognizable as ethnicity goes back a long time. Elliott contends that the term came to resemble what it means today only in the 15th century, and its nationalistic usage is decidedly modern. Yet, as early as the sixth century, the term was being used by various dynasties, religious figures, and literati as an ethnonym that distinguished “Chinese” people from groups thought of as outsiders (though the boundaries of that ethnonym, geographically, culturally, and politically, would shift wildly over the course of the following millennia, hardly mapping onto people or places we would consider “Chinese” today). Hindu, from what I understand in your article, intersected (and still intersects) with religion, caste, geography, and language in ways that seem significantly more diverse and multivalent than the word Han. Moreover, the evolution of the term Han, as far as we know, can only be traced through texts in the Chinese script, even when the authors do not identify as “Han.” Hindu, on the other hand, evolved in meaning through a plethora of different languages and scripts, as you so artfully show.
There are also interesting parallels. For instance, powerful actors in both India and China are trying to enforce singular definitions for Hindu and Han, project those definitions back in time, and then proclaim themselves the only authorities who can defend those definitions as a way to gain political and cultural power. As Elliott writes, “the ethnic unity of the Chinese as seen in the adoption of Han to describe themselves is really more the product of repeated efforts to create and foster political unity than it is the source of that unity” (in Critical Han Studies, 2012). Elliott here refers to people who lived well before the modern period, but it rings true today—it is clear that powerful actors, including but not limited to the PRC government, are engaged in widespread efforts to flatten, essentialize, and weaponize both Han-ness and Chinese-ness, and it is incumbent upon historians to rescue the term from these efforts. If I understand your article correctly, you are engaged in a similar project. You are attempting to rescue “Hindu” from a whole host of actors: from contemporary Hindu nationalists who tie Hindu identity to an invented past, from the epistemic imperialism wrought by the British, from the racialization of the term in the United States, and even from scholars who fetishize “origins over usage.” The way you frame the political implications of your history strikes me as truly important. The ability to gatekeep an identity grants an enormous amount of political power, but doing so in a way that presumes a calcification of the identity’s borders can be extremely damaging, both to people who are considered part of the “in” group and those who are not. Restoring an awareness of how terms evolve over time not only ensures that our histories are more accurate, but also more just.
Yet, as you point out, the restorative potential for Han-ness is complicated. How should we study the constructedness of identity while being respectful of people who find the identities meaningful? You say the way out of this dilemma is to cleave “Hindu” from the way Hindu nationalists use it, highlighting its multivalence so as to offer a different kind of Hindu identity from which people can gain or derive meaning. There is a similar trend within Chinese studies. Called “Sinophone studies,” or the study of Chinese-language(s)-speaking communities overseas, scholars in this field criticize both the idea of a relationship between Chinese-ness and the Chinese state and the idea of a static, pure, or authentic “Chinese-ness.” Instead, they focus on the plurality of Chinese identities. Yet Sinophone studies, because of its origin in the study of Chinese diaspora, has limitations, in that it struggles to explain how Chinese-ness functions within the PRC where it is closely tied to state power. On the flip side, there are scholars of the PRC proper who, in studying the Han majority, tend to focus either on its undefinability due to its profound diversity or its cultural and political hegemony (or, often, both). Some have even compared “Han” to whiteness in how it functions within Han-majority spaces, in that Han is often the “default, presumed” identity, like it was presented in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and the primary source of China’s political, economic, and cultural power. Yet this, too, can be a troubling comparison. By treating Han-ness like white-ness, it becomes incredibly easy to downplay or dismiss the very real discrimination ethnic Chinese have faced in white-majority spaces. Han supremacy, unlike white supremacy, is significantly more contingent and complicated, and the term “Han supremacy” has the potential to flatten that contingency. I’m not sure we have a good way to truly grapple with Han supremacy without dismissing a meaningful identity as nothing more than an expression of power. It is an ongoing process.
This conversation and your article bring up two additional questions. As an unabashed modernist, I am fascinated by how different scripts interact, but I often find myself knowing very little about those interactions. Because of the (relative) stability of the Chinese script, people across not just what today we call China, but also Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were and are able to write to and for one another. Throughout the period you cite here – in, say, the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries – how much were individual people reading in all these different scripts? In other words, did the word “Hindu” evolve through the intersections between and interactions among these scripts? How, also, do we trace these interactions?
My second question regards the criticism of origin. You mention V. D. Savarkar’s writings about origins in relationship to Hindu nationalism. Forgive my ignorance if this is not the case, but this seems related to your comments about other attempts to calcify Hindu as an identity (such as tying it to antiquity, Sanskrit, and other historical markers). Is this the case? Is this textual origin problem something that predates Hindu nationalism? One of the ways orientalism functions is by privileging an “originalist” idea of texts over lived experience (i.e., white people know more about what Confucianism/Islam/Hinduism is than the people who practice it because of what the texts say). Is this related to your criticism?
Questioning the Sacred. There are always attempts, it seems, to find systems of power around the world that we can compare to “caste,” and China is no exception. Yet it seems these comparisons are more harmful than helpful. I am not a pre-modern China historian, but to the best of my knowledge, in various times of Chinese history, there were different classes of people, and those class identifications were often inherited by birthright. Yet they were, to quote a presentation I recently attended, not a particularly “sticky” identity, in part because they were so closely tied to the state. There is a longer tradition of defining “insiders” and “outsiders,” or of defending a “Sinitic” culture that is sometimes, though not always, tied to Confucian traditions.
The history of the Yellow Emperor as a religious figure is complicated. He is certainly mentioned in texts that date back millennia, though he is primarily presented as a historical, if not romanticized, political figure. Sometimes he appears as a quasi-religious figure, especially in Daoist traditions, where he is a master of longevity practices. Yet the idea of the Yellow Emperor as the progenitor of all Chinese people is unique to the twentieth century, and very much tied up in early twentieth-century ideas about racial purity.
Scholars today are split on whether there is sufficient empirical evidence to conclude whether the Yellow Emperor, and the dynasty his successors founded called the “Xia,” truly existed, with prolonged debates over whether we ought to call the Yellow Emperor and the Xia dynasty, “quasi-mythical.” Yet such debates rarely spill into hate mail or abuse. Rather, most popular vitriol focuses on scholarly attempts to question narratives about China’s territorial and national integrity, either in the past or today. I do not study colonized border regions like Tibet or Xinjiang, but scholars who do are subject to the most abuse. Overseas ethnic Chinese, in particular women, who write things critical of the Chinese state are also subject to ferocious criticism. The latter attacks often emanate from the idea that the state holds some degree of ownership over the loyalties of anyone who is ethnic Chinese, whether or not they were born in or lived in China. This kind of abuse from grassroots social media users shows that the CCP has been very successful at equating criticism of the Chinese state with defamation of the Chinese people.
Your comments bring up a final question—what, to scholars of India or Hindu nationalists, constitutes antiquity? This is another concept that has changed markedly across the history of modern Chinese nation-building. At one point, some early twentieth-century Chinese scholars actually adopted elements of de Lacouperie’s Sino-Babylonian theory, which purported that the people of the central plains migrated there from ancient Babylon, which helped to connect Chinese antiquity with the origin of humanity (in particular, it made the people of the central plains, coded here as Han, seem more civilized than the Manchus they were often juxtaposing themselves to). Yet antiquity in China most often begins in popular discourse with the five mythical emperors (approximately 5000 years ago). What about in Hindu nationalist writings?
There is so much more we could talk about. This is a small beginning to what I hope will be a fruitful conversation about comparison, power, and identity. Thank you for taking the time to engage!
Yours truly,
Gina
June 28, 2023
Dear Gina,
What a rich letter! You have given me so much to think about, and, in response, it seems best to start with the present. As much as it chafes me as a premodernist, we are always in our own time in history. So, let’s talk about, as you mentioned, who came to dinner at the White House last week.
India and China in 2023. The Biden administration hosted Narendra Modi for an official state visit on June 22, 2023. It was a stunning turnaround given that Modi has been banned from entering the United States for the better part of the last two decades because he oversaw a pogrom against Indian Muslims in 2002, when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. Last week, Modi was not only welcomed on US soil but also given an honor rarely afforded to even our closest allies, namely an address of the US Congress. India is not an American ally, much less a close one, but, critically, it is big, Asian, and not China. Many commentators of the visit observed that Biden rolled out the red carpet for Modi largely to cultivate India as a possible counter to China.
It seems to strangely dovetail with our back-and-forth about comparing China and India that, in the case of Modi’s state visit, we cannot cleave the two. The answer to why the US courted India last week is, in a word: China. You refer to those who flippantly compare Xi Jinping and Modi as “cut from the same authoritarian, ethnonationalist cloth.” I see this in more aspirational, rather than realistic, terms on Modi’s part. He wishes for the robust state apparatus enjoyed by his Chinese counterpart, but Modi does not yet have such an iron grip except, arguably, in Kashmir. In fact, to make a perilously broad generalization, China often seems to have stronger state control as compared to India throughout history.
This difference in state control comes up in your astute observation that the Chinese state is inextricably involved in defining “Han,” whereas the Indian state has a weaker claim on “hindu.” I concur, although the observation brings up a general comparative problem, namely that when we contrast India and China, we posit both as coherent entities. We assume or argue that there is a China and an India, both singular, that can be compared. But India’s internal diversity is so robust and its history so internally uneven that it defies such singularity. There was no Indian state for most of known human history but rather clusters of rulers in specific, shifting regions. Are we ready yet to compare regions of India and China, or would a Guangdong-Gujarat comparison defy comprehension for most of us? In the meantime, might we do a disservice to our own attempts to parse “Han” and “hindu” by placing them in China and India, respectively? Perhaps there is something to what the Persian poet Rumi once wrote: “I am neither from India nor China.”[i] In any case, the challenges of plurality and specificity become even thicker when we turn to literary cultures.
Language and Scripts. You pose a number of questions about Indian languages and scripts, and here things quickly become gloriously complicated. In general, we distinguish language and script in South Asian history because the two being closely linked is the exception, not the rule, at least until modernity. It helps to know that Sanskrit literary culture emphasized orality, and in fact our earliest Sanskrit texts, the Vedas, were not written down until millennia after they were composed (they were memorized akshara-by-akshara, syllable-by-syllable and accurately transmitted). Once Sanskrit was written, it could be and was written in whatever local script was available, such that there is no “Sanskrit script,” even today. We have some cases where South Asian religions were articulated through a language (e.g., early Buddhists used Pali to avoid Sanskrit) or through a script (e.g., Sikhs used Gurmukhi to write various languages to help articulate a separate religious identity), but “hindu” identity always cut across both languages and scripts. Although, I can articulate the nature of that multiplicity with more precision for language versus script.
One thing that your questions about script and language, as well as seeing how you discussed them in the Chinese context, have helped me to cognize about my own work is that there is peril in taking specific kinds of diversity for granted. South Asia has so many scripts and languages, it can be easy to fall back on assumed plurality without bothering to articulate, precisely, what kinds of multiplicity we see operative in particular contexts. As you outline regarding “Han-ness,” there were many definitions and reifications but within a finite set rather than a total free-for-all. Things were similar for “hindu.” It did not occur to me to ask while doing research for my article what script certain works were originally written in (and we may not always know this; the subcontinent is hot and humid, which is hard on manuscript preservation). Still, I shall strive to be more attentive moving forward.
Regarding languages, the question looms of communication between speakers and users of discrete Indian tongues. Nobody ever knew only Sanskrit in premodern India, so a given Sanskrit intellectual was also fluent in at least one other language, whether Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Kannada, or another tongue. Sometimes we can surmise a likely candidate based on a combination of name and location, but harder is discerning direct transfers across linguistic lines. I am quite clear that “hindu” traveled between vernacular and cosmopolitan languages in premodern India, but I am unsure, exactly, of the mechanisms. We are even more in the dark regarding possible transfers between cosmopolitan traditions, such as Sanskrit and Persian. Did the later Kashmiri Sanskrit Rajatarangini writers, whom I mention in my article, hear “hindu” in spoken Persian or even read it in Persian, a major courtly language in 15th–16th century Kashmir? Quite possibly, but I can only conjecture without firm evidence.
Orientalism and Truth. You wonder about the relationship of Hindu nationalists to the truth of linguistic origins, and here they have done a 180-degree turnaround. I mean to write about this someday, because it is an exception to the general rule that Hindu nationalism has been stable over the last hundred years. In brief, V. D. Savarkar (d. 1966), the ideological godfather of Hindutva, accepted the bland reality that Sanskrit has Indo-European roots, and he celebrated Hindus as the original colonizers of the subcontinent. In contrast, many Hindu nationalists today blatantly deny this linguistic connection. They engage in lots of shenanigans and even forgeries to try to “find” Sanskrit’s subcontinental origins. Intellectually, the arguments are silly, but politically they hold power and thereby imbue the most basic foundations of scholarship on South Asia with political implications. This might be hard to believe given my current scholarly life, but at an earlier point in my career I preferred to avoid politics. Then I realized that this was impossible (and, also, a tad dull). I decided I would do better to analyze the politics of history, a thread that runs through my CSSH article.
You bring-up Orientalism, and indeed this bubbles up repeatedly in discussions related to South Asia, especially in contexts where “hindu” is defined. Depressingly recurrent is the idea that everything Indian is reducible to religion, and that Hinduism has an ancient, untouched, Sanskritic core. European men spearheaded formulating these ideas and then weaponized them during colonialism to disempower and oppress Indians. Hindu nationalists are the primary ideological inheritors of British colonial thought, and they regurgitate this set of Orientalist ideas rather uncritically. On this point, they are not alone. Hindu reform movements of the 19th century also responded to Orientalist ideas, and did not always fully reject them, such that some modern forms of Hindu identity include such strands, often recast in a positive light. Additionally, one can find projections of an overly spiritual India alive and well in your local yoga studio, in US popular culture, and many other places.
One of the harms of Orientalist thought is denying Hinduism’s dynamic history, instead projecting the tradition as ossified. Sometimes my students ask me how Hinduism has survived for thousands of years, whereas many other religions have died out. I have two basic answers, one of which is that the question is flawed. The second answer is that Hindu traditions were flexible and changed. The history of “hindu” is distinct from the history of Hindu religious practices, especially since “hindu” was not always a religious term. But “hindu,” too, survived through fluidity rather than fossilization.
Whereas I am clear how to get out of Hindu nationalist attempts to shackle “hindu” (at least intellectually), I find Orientalism a tougher nut to crack. It is part of some people’s identity, a complication you note regarding “Han-ness” in your letter. Also, Orientalist ideas are older than Hindu nationalism (Orientalism dates to the 18th century and even earlier in the case of India), so if we peel away the layers of bad Orientalist assumptions, we are left with premodern terms and ideas that may or may not make sense in a modern world. My hope is that my article offers some ways of thinking through this for “hindu” and usefully unsettles the modern presumption that our own terms bear clear contours. Still, there seems to be a divergence here between “Han” and “hindu.” You say that “Han” is an identity clearly used for more than a millennium. Even given the evidence I mustered, “hindu” has a lighter footprint, especially in antiquity, whenever that might have been.
Ancient Indias. I saved the best for last, namely, antiquity (a term I do not typically use). In brief, we have two distinct “antiquities” (if we are to use that term) in northern India, with a historical break between them: the Indus Valley Civilization and early Vedic culture.
The oldest known Indian civilization, often upheld as one of the four centers of the ancient world—alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China—was the Indus Valley Civilization, 2600–1900 BCE (also called Harappan Civilization). We cannot decipher the Indus Valley Civilization’s writing, and we only have brief seals of a couple of characters, not long texts, anyways. Consequently, we know little about them, including nothing about what languages they spoke (maybe Dravidian or Munda tongues, some conjecture). We do know that they built large, impressive cities that lay largely forgotten until the 19th century. Even once archaeologists began to dig, it took them a while to interpret what they found. It was quite the upset to the timeline of Indian history when—in the early 20th century—the Indus Valley Civilization was conceptualized as a distinct ancient culture and dated to 2600–1900 BCE. Indo-European migrations, by the folks who soon developed Vedic Sanskrit, are typically dated by linguists to a few centuries later (circa 1500 BCE). So, there is a historical break between the Indus Valley Civilization and early Vedic India, which we might dub “Antiquity 2.0” except that the two had little in common.
Where is “hindu” identity in either of India’s antiquities, you ask? Well, who knows, really? Vedic peoples did not use the term “hindu,” and we simply don’t know regarding the Indus Valley Civilization. Like so many things about India, many people assume “hindu” must be ancient, dating back to the region’s earlier layers of recoverable human history, but it is quite a bit newer. This is why my article begins only in the 500s BCE, whereas we are circling back to earlier periods only now, at the tail end of our discussion.
The note of everything-has-a-history seems a good place to end this wonderful, fruitful exchange. I have thoroughly enjoyed our correspondence and will continue to think about your work and arguments in the months to come. Do keep in touch.
All the Best,
Audrey
[i] Nicholson (ed), Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (New Delhi, 2004), p. 124 (my translation).
Audrey Truschke is Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books: Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016); Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press, 2017); and The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press, 2021). Culture of Encounters won the John F. Richards prize from the American Historical Association for the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history in 2017. Dr. Truschke believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower, and so also writes public-facing scholarship.
Gina Anne Tam is an Associate Professor of Chinese history and co-chair of Women and Gender Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and a current Wilson China Fellow (2022-2023). Having received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016, her research and teaching focuses on the construction of collective identity—national belonging, ethnicity, and race—in modern China. In addition to her first book, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020, winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize), she has also written about the relevance of her work to current events in Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and Dissent. She currently serves as the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, and was a member of the seventh cohort of Public Intellectual Program Fellows through the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Currently, she is working on a new book project on the role of women and gender in the history of grassroots protests in post-war Hong Kong.
