My Recollection of Shri Sitaram Goel

It was in 1980 that I met the late Sitaram Goel in the company of my father who had corresponded with him. We had received an invitation to stay at his family home in the old Delhi where we found the traditionally warm Indian hospitality with the hearty Punjabi flavour which was also reflected in our host’s strong earthy features, outgoing temperament and blunt speech. The years of his youth spent in Calcutta had not altered his ancestral rootedness which included a mastery of Urdu and Punjabi, though perhaps it had given him the Bengali fondness for passionate and contentious debate.

Sitaramji credited his physique, his command of Urdu and his fidelity to native clothing for saving his life during the massacres of the August 1946 ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta where he and his kin had narrowly escaped being butchered by a Muslim mob when they took him for one of theirs. That harrowing experience had a determining influence on him, together with his readings which turned him away from Marxism a couple of years later. Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and Sri Aurobindo were to make of him a fierce anti-Communist and a staunch Hindu, not solely from habit or out of mystical penchant but owing to moral and intellectual conviction.

He remained a vigilant opponent of tyranny in any form and particularly in its modern garbs. This libertarian awareness inspired him to translate into Hindi George Orwell’s 1984. When we came in contact with him Sitaram Goel was working on some of the works that were to be recognized as his most notable, including Hindu Society under Siege and How I became a Hindu. He had not yet established the ‘Voice of India’ publishing house but was already acknowledged, along with Ram Swarup, as a leading intellectual in the nationalist camp and a pioneer in the struggle against Nehruvian secular socialism. He told us that the rejection of Marxism, sharpened by the trauma of the 1962 war with Maoist China, had been the source of his profound antipathy for Nehru’s politics and vision of society which he regarded as ruinous for India’s civilisation. I remember him saying that he had been a free thinker and an opponent of any totalitarianism before taking up the cause of Hindu resurgence because he saw the Dharmic social philosophy as a bulwark against clerical and political regimentation. He remained however suspicious of nationalism per se and inimical to any religious and ethnic communalism. We were surprised by his outspoken espousal of rationalism which is usually associated with agnosticism or scientific atheism. “I became closer to my native Hinduism out of rationalism” he explained methodically “and indeed I am truly secular. Nehru’s view of secularism for India is based on wishful thinking. He wanted India to downplay its ancestral religion to accommodate minorities, mostly Muslims and Christians. Actually, personally Nehru would have liked Hinduism to become almost clandestine as he was at heart an agnostic who felt closer to Islam in an abstract way and wanted to replace religion with what he called the scientific temper. He had an aversion to so-called ‘idolatry’ and elaborate religious rituals which Hinduism is so prolific about. That came from his early education as a theosophist and his later conversion to Fabian socialism. He found the ancient Hindu mandirs in the South gaudily ugly and saw hydroelectric mega-dams as the ‘temples of new India’. My opposition to Nehru brought me closer to traditional Hinduism as a reaction to his false secularism which, instead of protecting society from the paramount influence of a single authoritarian religious structure weakened the Hindu fabric of the nation and supported the unwarranted colonial veto right of monotheistic minorities on the country, even though Muslims had in large numbers elected to have a separate state of their own not to be part of multireligious India’.

Sitaram Goel was a persuasive speaker. He was self-assured but not self-righteous, held strong opinions without being opinionated and never refused debate. I was struck by his openness to contrary views even on topics where he held basic convictions such as Islam. He had a familiarity with the Persian language and a genuine regard for Arabic literature and philosophy. “It is wrong

to say that Islam appeared in a primitive desertic environment’ he argued. ‘The influence of Judaism and early Oriental Christianity was very strong in Arabia at the time of the Prophet and it combined with the local tribal customs and laws to shape the new faith…It was initially urban, not born among illiterate nomads’. Christianity and the figure of Jesus was another theme on which were had long conversations. He was an avid reader and a stern critic of Biblical and Gospel texts.

He liked to underline the harsher statements attributed to Christ, particularly those that expressed his reported ‘Messiah complex’ and his condemnation of Jewish religious behaviour. On this topic my father (and I) could not agree with him as we saw in Jesus the mystical teacher who had highlighted the fact that all people are one with the spiritual source that he called The Father.

‘Jesus is the son of Man and the Son of God by his own admission’ my father pointed out. “It is a misinterpretation of his words which made the Church declare him to be the Only Son of God. Orthodox Jews could not accept either the Christic notion that God and his creation is one or the Ecclesiastic doctrine that God can have a son who lived a human life. Jesus said that he spoke for the Law and the Prophets. He wished to regenerate the Mosaic tradition, not wipe it out’.

Goel’s sympathy for Judaism, very common among Hindus, did not let him admit easily that the exclusive absolutism of monotheism has its root in that Semitic denomination which Christianity tempered and transformed within the Graeco-roman ‘pagan’ milieu in which it grew. As can be argued about all religions, especially those based on one book, Christianity’s message is indeed ambiguous and its interpreters tend to choose whichever part of it suits their interests or convictions, which is why the doctrine requires periodic adaptations and reforms.

No depiction of Sitaram Goel’s work can omit a reference to his complex relationship with the RSS and its allied institutions. As a fiercely independent Intellectual, he had no natural affinities with any organised political body and showed scarce tolerance for the compromises and concessions required for peaceful coexistence in the very diverse and divided body politic of India. He rued his exclusion from certain RSS and Jan Sangh-affiliated publications, caused by his unabashedly polemical statements. He blamed LK Advani in particular for what he saw as ideological softness. “Too Sindhi for my taste’ he snorted once with a half-smile about the Jan Sangh leader. ‘He is still in love with the Hindu-Sufi syncretism of his native region whereas I know that this so-called

Ganga-Yamuna synthesis only existed in the cultured minds of some high-brow aristocrats, poets, and musicians who saw Hinduism as a kind of disguised monotheism which could survive under Mughal rule but had to accept the periodic destruction of its temples to be replaced with mosques and dargahs; not to mention other humiliations’.

In retrospect, it appeared that the RSS leaders had found Sitaram Goel’s repeated condemnation of Nehru’s policies damaging to their movement at a time when the first Prime Minister of India was a hegemonic figure on the national scene under de-facto one-party rule. The Sangh was under the permanent threat of being banned and could probably not afford to define itself as radically anti-Nehruvian, after having opposed Gandhi’s policies on partition, as well as his prescriptions for inter-religious relations, and suffered heavily for it. Likewise, the RSS, as a nationwide organisation would not condone Sitaram’s exegetic analysis of Islamic texts as it was too polemical in a society in which several communities did not admit criticism of their founding scriptures.

In Sitaram Goel’s opinion, the RSS had sacrificed intellectual freedom to discipline and given preference to social mobilisation over cultural empowerment. He also distrusted the movement’s tendency to homogenize the Hindu nation. He saw that from his standpoint as a former follower of the Arya Samaj which had also intended to unify the myriad strands of Vedic and para- Vedic practices and schools of thought into a single aniconic set of prayers and rituals. ‘Eventually, he concluded, I find my guidelines in Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, Buddha, and Aurobindo, not exclusively of course as nothing in the Sanatan Dharma is exclusive but these three figures sum up the trajectory of Indic thought over thousands of years up to our century, from its civilisational origins through its expansion across Asia and its universal contemporary dissemination’.

Exchanging ideas with Sitaram Goel was always enriching, stimulating, and challenging. His life journey from Gandhism and Marxism through liberal rationalism and humanism had taken him back to his spiritual home, the Sanatana Dharma in which he welcomed many former Socialists and atheists with a characteristic mixture of cheerfulness, intellectual sharpness, erudition, and eloquence. The uncompromising honesty with which he professed his convictions often caused great difficulties to him and his family but he accepted them with fortitude and equanimity in the spirit of the warrior extolled in the Bhagavad Geeta: ‘sukhe duhkhe same krtva labha alabhau jaya ajayau…’