From Premchand’s play ‘Karbala’, to BR Ambedkar: What the idea of the ‘non-Hindu’ Hindu offers us

A century ago in 1924, Premchand, the north Indian writer, published his play Karbala. In 680 Common Era, Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussain, contesting Caliph Yazid’s authority, was killed at Karbala. These events, cementing Islam’s Sunni-Shia split, came to define Shia selfhood and are commemorated annually during Muharram.

Premchand’s play, however, is not an internalist retelling of Karbala’s tragic arc. It is instead framed by the dislocation of Hindus in West Asia. In the writer’s telling, Hindu Brahmin brothers, led by Sahas Rai, live in seventh century Mesopotamia. Outraged by the oppressive caliph, they take up arms alongside Hussain and are murdered at Karbala.

Premchand crafted his play inspired by early 20th century tales circulating in north India. Some Punjabi Brahmins – in the Mohyal, Dutt and Hussaini sects – say their ancestors were martyred at Karbala, in present-day Iraq.

In 1911, British official TP Russell Stracey, while stationed in the Punjab, recorded the kavit or poetry of Dutt Brahmins. In their warrior myths, they suffer alongside Hussain, while survivors undertake an odyssey, through Bukhara and Kandahar, back to India.

The Dutts praise their ancestor Rehab Singh, believed to have lost sons at Karbala. Of him it is said: “Dutt sultan, Hindu ka dharma, Musalman ka iman. Adha Hindu, adha Musalman” – Dutt the king, Hindu of religion, Muslim of faith. Half Hindu, half Muslim.

Premchand’s foreword to his script considers other ways that Hindus ended up at Karbala. After the Mahabharata’s earlier events, he wrote, “the descendants of Ashwatthama went and settled there”, referring to the character who, after fighting for the Kauravas, is doomed to eternal exile.

The playwright further speculated that “the Aryans in Arabia were the progeny of the Hindus who were captured and taken there by Alexander”, the Macedonian king who invaded India in 327 Before Common Era, before retreating to Greece.

Nowadays, Premchand is generically seen as a proto-Nehruvian, his writings slotted into the unity-in-diversity camp. Yet this soft nationalist reading underplays his radical quality as a writer. For his play Karbala doesn’t validate community creeds or national inclusion. Instead, it points to a restless capacity for heresy, animated by universal convictions.

For example, early in the theatre script, Imam Hussain meets a Hindu yogi at Muhammad’s grave. This sadhu has made the pilgrimage from India to Medina because “Maharishi Muhammad made the whole universe reverberate with that same sound”.

The yogi tells Hussain: “the flame of knowledge, which rose from this land, will radiate across the globe and make Truth and Justice shine far and wide”. Here, a critical attunement to an undifferentiated moral universe trumps fealty to one’s group or sovereign.

Throughout, Premchand prizes such unorthodoxy over loyalty. In the play, Hussain says, “you’re worried that my dissent will cause schism within Islam, but you must understand that Truth is better than accord. Accord without truth is like a body without a soul.”

Even more striking, in Premchand’s vision, Islam and Hinduism are not hermetic dogmas demanding that others submit. Rather, they are borderless visions existing outside territory.

In the play, after Suhas Rai and his brothers sacrifice themselves at Karbala, an observer comments of these Hindus: “Islam exists outside the realm of Islam. These men are true Muslims”. Here, identity, in our contemporary sense – an inherent, mutually exclusive quality – is irrelevant. One can be a Hindu while also being a Muslim, for divinity stems from what is immanent or all around us.

In sum, Premchand’s Hindu characters do not embody bracketed beliefs but general ideals. Even more intriguing, a distance from one’s native turf fosters principled action: the Brahmin brothers fight not for their religion or nation but for the ethical commons.

Premchand’s play opens up a different way to think and act as a Hindu. Borrowing from Isaac Deutscher’s idea of the “non-Jewish Jew”, I propose that Premchand’s characters – and some Indian political thinkers – embody what we might call the “non-Hindu Hindu”.

I first outline the non-Jewish Jew’s insurrectionary and nomadic qualities. Then we look at one of India’s heterodox intellectuals: BR Ambedkar, Dalit lawyer and framer of India’s constitution. In him, we have something like the non-Hindu Hindu: a way to engage with, but not adhere to, our inheritances, and forge a non-denominational politics.

In 1958, Isaac Deutscher coined a certain type of European intellectual: the non-Jewish Jew. Seventeenth-century Spinoza and twentieth-century Freud were exemplars of “the Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry”. The non-Jewish Jew – Deutscher’s examples include Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx – emerged from mixed elements.

As social marginals, they were vulnerable to ethno-nationalist rejection. At the borderline of multiple tongues and cultures, they eschewed a single community. They were familiar with yet deliberately distant from Jewish spaces, such as the ghetto or synagogue. Self-aware modern figures, they shunned mystical Judaism. Each such thinker, Deutscher wrote, found Jewish tradition “too narrow, too archaic, too constricting”.

The non-Jewish Jew was thus little tempted by primordial community and ethnic confines. At the same time, they were rejected by bullying nationalisms that regarded Jews as pariahs. Deutscher’s own life is instructive. Moulded by the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire and tsarist (and later Soviet) Russia, he wrote in Polish, Yiddish, and English.

He wrote of himself: “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated”. Deutscher and other non-Jewish Jews were like Premchand’s minority Hindus in Arabia: out of place, disobedient, alert to suffering.

Such theorists, (self-)exiled from minority strictures, were also evicted by homogenous patriotisms. They broke with Jewishness even as their thought – in its dissent and displacement – emerged from an interstitial place. Spinoza’s philosophy, for example, like Premchand’s play, expresses a non-compartmentalized desire for justice and truth, both writers drawing from braided traditions.

Any analogy between Jewish intellectuals in Europe and Hindu thinkers in India poses limits. The European Jew is a minority while the Indian Hindu is a majority. The former, anchored in cosmopolitan, multilingual cities, possesses no territory, while the latter has a homeland.

Yet the parallels still shed light on our political present. European Jews and Indian Hindus have grappled with similar issues over the last century: the limits of a modern identity in a secular mould, the impasses of assimilation in complex societies.

Where, in India’s modern landscape, do we find something akin to Deutscher’s notion? Can the non-Hindu Hindu point to a path of engaged itineracy and rebellious universalism?

Ambedkar’s story is stamped by his final months of life in 1956. Our understanding of a novel’s character is changed by their final decisions and death. Likewise, Ambedkar’s narrative retrospectively bends towards reappraisal, due to his public conversion to Buddhism, just two months before dying.

Ambedkar’s conversion invites us to believe that just as caste Hindus, in their ingrained subordination of Dalits, had no place for Ambedkar, so too was he destined to eject himself from the Hindu community. Our idea of Ambedkar becomes a biographical fait accompli, his renunciation inevitable.

Clearly, Ambedkar eschewed Hinduism, as a social structure of enforced privilege and debasement. And he made clear his disinterest in the tidy tinkering with caste hierarchy that Mohandas Gandhi favoured. Ambedkar was not a reformist staying in the fold but a revolutionary dismantling segmentation.

It is from this perspective that it is useful to consider Ambedkar as something like a non-Hindu Hindu. Someone who, like Trotsky and Freud, was deeply conscious of his biographical bequest, yet whose thought transcended the parochial for the social.

In tracking this arc, consider that Ambedkar was a beneficiary, as a Mahar, of educational prerogatives given to Hindu martial castes that served the colonial state. As he came of age, Ambedkar became attuned to the ways that Hindu social life revolved around intricate forms of access and denial – to water tanks and temples and schools. Later on, he did deep dives into texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Manusmriti. In other words, Ambedkar was conditioned by Hindu codes, spaces, and consciousness.

Yet from his particular origins Ambedkar became – like Luxemburg and Premchand’s characters from Karbala – a polyglot nomad. He roved continuously between cities and villages in India, and wrote in both Marathi and English. He studied and lived in America and England; his view of African-Americans navigating the colour line shaped his analysis of Indian caste.

He even discussed, with Tamil reformer Periyar in 1944, a territory for lower castes called Dravidistan, ultimately rejecting the yoking of land and people as a solution. An outsider within Hinduism, Ambedkar’s nowhere place generated a non-assimilationist politics. In this, we see a resonance with Freud’s 1939 work, Moses and Monotheism, where the Jewish prophet is Egyptian, putting otherness at the centre of Jewishness.

This also helps explain Ambedkar’s embrace of the French Revolution’s universal republicanism, and his translation of its deracinated notions into fellowship (maitri), equality, and autonomy. Ambedkar’s dislocation drew him to what was politically unanimous, not territorially bounded or self-nucleated.

Most fundamentally, Ambedkar can be considered something like a non-Hindu Hindu for his heresy. He observed the cult of personality around political figures like Mohandas Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah – which he termed “hero worship… the serf’s fealty to his lord” – with distaste. In 1943, in a preface to an essay on such public figures, Ambedkar wrote words that might have been Deutscher’s on dissident Jews: “I am no worshipper of idols. I believe in breaking them”.

Ambedkar’s example, seen through the prism of Deutscher’s theory and Premchand’s fiction, isolates three elements in the figure of the non-Hindu Hindu. First, a rebellious attitude where loyalty is skeptically seen. Second, an itineracy inviting affiliation with others, and neutralising self-supremacy. And third, the forsaking of particular interests for general principles.

A rather different leitmotif shapes today’s Jewish and Hindu thinking, shaped by a nationalist refrain in India and Israel: historic humiliation can be absolved, and community pride secured, by policing others and oneself.

Hindu and Jewish intellectuals are perhaps most acutely constrained not by outright xenophobia but by the liberal clamour for rapprochement. Thus we have, in India, sentimental declarations as to “why I am a Hindu”. Or demands that moderates “take back” Hinduism. Public discourse is thereby shackled to silly schisms: one can only be a good or bad Hindu, a patriot or an anti-national.

These responses echo Jewish critics of Marx regarding the latter’s essay “On the Jewish Question” from 1843. The rhetoric lobbed against him of Jewish self-hatred is paralleled by today’s trolling of so-called Hindu sellouts. In both Judeocentric and Hinducentric visions, there is only the self and the enemy: all dissenters are timid traitors.

Joseph Roth, the early 20th century essayist and novelist, was another intellectual befitting the category of a non-Jewish Jew. Roth roamed restlessly across Europe to write about societies emerging out of imperial collapse and industrial formation. Shunning identification with both his inherited community and new European nations, Roth called himself a Weltbürger or citizen of the world.

This extra-territorial, cosmopolitan reading of oneself, in both Jewish and Hindu communities, has become muted. We do well to retrieve Indian examples of the heretical humanism embodied by Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jews.

The non-Hindu Hindu implies the dislocated and disobedient consciousness Premchand imagined in Karbala, and that Ambedkar embodied in his counter-orthodoxy. This is a position within and without: not a cozy retreat into communal identity but a grasping beyond, a bending towards others.

If Premchand’s words – “truth is better than accord” – have meaning, it is in grappling with, not submitting to, our rich and troubling legacies, and forging from them a roving and unspecific politics.

Ajay Gandhi teaches at Leiden University.