The Hindu Phenomenon

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The Hindu Phenomenon (ISBN 81-86112-32-4) is a 1993 book by Girilal Jain. The book is in the form of an essay, where the author discusses every aspect of Hindu self-renewal and self-affirmation.

[edit] Overview

The book, in the form of essay, is divided into 6 chapters along with four appendices.^[1] The six chapters of the book are titled as

The Civilizational perspective
A Unique phenomenon
Hindu Nationalism: The First Phase
Retreat and Rage
The Nehruvian Framework
Ayodhya: A Historical Watershed

The four appendices are respectively

Resolving the Ancient Language Problem
Islam and the Nation Concept
The old order changeth
Combining Bhakti with power

The author traces the rise of Hindus from the establishment of the British rule. He believes that a fundamental shift took place in the power balance between Hindus and Muslims as a result of the consolidation of the British Raj and the disarming of the populace which began in 1818 and was completed in 1858. This shift, according to him, was not reversed by the pro-Muslim change in the official attitude, starting from the 1870s, and by the policy of divide and rule, though it led to the partition of the country in 1947.^[2]

The author also contends that the socio-economic-political order that Jawaharlal Nehru fashioned was as much in throes of death as its progenitor, the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist order. The two major planks of this order, secularism and socialism, have lost much of their old glitter while the third, non-alignment, has become redundant.^[3]