The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 8: Hinduism for Fascists

Mike Isaacson: Ride the tiger, bro.

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Mike Isaacson: Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can support the podcast by subscribing to our Patreon or donating to our PayPal or CashApp. Today, we’re going to touch on esoteric fascism by talking to someone who actually knows something about Hinduism. Shyam Ranganathan is a translation theorist and philosopher at York University in Canada. He is the author of several books including his most recent, Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Ranganathan.

Shyam Ranganathan: Thanks for having me.

Mike Isaacson: Okay. So the central contention in your book is that the West has gotten Hinduism wrong. How does the West get Hinduism wrong?

Shyam Ranganathan: Right. It's an even weirder contention. There are two parts to this. There's first a historical observation that religious identity is actually a creation of Western colonialism. You wouldn't know this if you only paid attention to the exemplars from the Western tradition, but even then the evidence is pretty much there. Jesus was crucified by the Romans, and Christian identity was formed within the context of Roman imperialism. So even that isn't really an exception to this rule, and of course Jews were colonized by the Egyptians and the Romans and it's within the context of Roman imperialism that we first get this idea of religion, which is the precursor to our idea of religion. So the Romans had this idea that there was some type of acceptable traditional practice but wasn't the standard practice. There's some type of standard practice that everybody has to be involved in, and that evolves into our idea of secularism and then there are these kind of traditions that are tolerated. Overtime what happens is this then gets converted into a way of making sense of the European tradition as a kind of universal standard, and then anything that's got origins outside of Europe, any origins at all, ends up being called religion. Now this is most obvious, I mean, it's kind of stark when you look at the development to religious identity in Asia, because prior to Western colonialism there was no religious identity. So one of the things I point out is that if you look at the history of South Asian philosophy, they disagreed about the right and the good, and that's just what you disagree about in moral philosophy. They had a word Dharma that they use to disagree about the right or the good, and that was just how they got along. They had different views on Dharma, and some people were really famous like the Buddha. He had a very influential view and lots of followers. But under Western colonialism, there's this need to box in the people that are being colonized. And so the British end up using a Persian word for South Asia Hinduism or rather Hindu was the Persian word. And it has a similar route to our word India, and there's a place in Northern India called the Sindu, and these are all cognates. So anyways, the Persians had this way of talking to South Asians and the British decided to use that as a word for all indigenous South Asian religion, whatever that is, and it was a way to try and make sense of South Asians in contradistinction to Islam, which has a long history, but not a very ancient history in South Asia. So the British wanted to try and just have a word to refer to some type of native or indigenous practice.

Now the thing is prior to this, no South Asian called themselves a Hindu, and then overnight you have like millions of people calling themselves Hindus because it happened under a condition of colonialism where people had to conform to these expectations in order to be recognized. So there's a kind of before and after moment when we want to study Hinduism, because there's the before moment where there's the entire history of South Asian philosophy and everybody was just happy to disagree with each other. And then there's the moment of naming this tradition of religion Hinduism, and then there's the after history that we have inherited where South Asians and everybody else tries to make sense of the indigenous tradition in terms of religious categories. And then they read these categories backwards into the history of South Asia. So people ask nonsensical questions like what did Hindus disagree with? What were the disagreements between Buddhists and Hindus in ancient times? There were no Hindus, there ...