Hindutva Wakanda And The Future of Modern India

We Indians apparently come from a long line of ancestral race of scientists and technologists. Dinesh Sharma, Deputy Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, has reminded the nation that Sita’s birth from an earthen pitcher in the epic Ramayana was evidence of an ancient “test-tube baby project”. The ruling BJP has reprimanded him and advised restraint in his public comments.

Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Deb claims that the Internet existed during the Mahabharat period, Baba Ramdev promises an Ayurvedic cure for everything from AIDS to “homosexuality”, and PM Narendra Modi sees in the mythical birth of Karna outside his mother’s womb and the grafting of an elephant’s head onto Ganesh’s human torso proof that modern levels of science and technology were available in India’s ancient past. The glory of ancient Hindu science is an essential component of the Hindutva worldview.

The people of this mythical land — a Hindu “Wakanda” — seem to have flourished within the confines of their geography without connecting with other civilisations. They masqueraded as underdeveloped, malnourished and poor while they successfully melded modern science and technology with the traditions of their ancestors. The glorious period of the “Hindu Wakanda” was predictably before the land which is known as India today was conquered and colonised.

The conquerors from outside whether from Central Asia or colonists from Europe obliterated its scientific and technological wisdom. The heroes of the “Hindu Wakanda” are therefore located in myth or in ancient history. Fundamental to the glory of “Hindu Wakanda” was something it possessed in abundance which the rest of the world didn’t the strongest force in the world, spiritualism.

In the Marvel Comics fantasy, Wakanda source of wealth and power were its rare metal deposits of an imaginary mineral, Vibranium. These deposits were finite. Indian spiritualism by contrast was infinite and renewable.

Ancient Indians were thus spiritually rich while the rest of the world, without it, was destined to be poor. While the world struggled to find antibiotics and cures for diseases and epidemics, “Hindu Wakanda” had its own version of the “heart-shaped herb” which could revive people from near-death situations — the Sanjeevani Booti, with which Lakshman was revived after he was fatally wounded by Ravana's son Indrajit. In the distorted mirror of the past, the poor and uneducated people of India are shown to have once lived in happier times. It provides a narrative through which the weak can appropriate the symbolically rich techno-scientific utopia by which the Western world legitimises itself and establishes its supremacy.

It is not insignificant that this fantasy excludes political and social problems from its frame of reference. It does not tell us what society was like in this age of high science.

As in the Marvel blockbuster film Black Panther, fantasising about Wakanda is not about real empowerment. In the Wakanda of Marvel Comics, the people of an African “nation” are empowered not because of their own achievements but because of a mysterious and imaginary mineral, Vibranium, was accidentally “gifted” to them when a meteorite struck their land. These movements can and often do fail with tremendous human cost. The Indian equivalent of Vibranium – that is, spiritualism — is not going to give anyone equal rights, equal access to justice or ensure equitable distribution of resources.

Empowerment in the real world requires political, social and economic change which a class and caste-ridden obscurantist society will not voluntarily proffer. If even an iota of the mythical glory that is touted by the BJP leaders again and again is to be achieved in the real world, then those societal flaws will have to be recognised and addressed which prevent millions of Indians from getting basic rights, including access to world-class education, healthcare and social security.

A society needs to be free of hunger and poverty before it can produce world-class mathematicians, scientists, astronomers, doctors, surgeons, geneticists, space scientists and social scientists in the here and now. Even when they have had the political opportunity, the Hindutva ideologues have demonstrated a complete lack of ability to address these objectives. Merely substituting fantasies for real action towards a just and equitable society is not going to provide us a look at India’s future.