HINDU REVIVALISM AND EDUCATION 25 revivalist stand was no more confined to the active followers of the Arya Samaj, the RSS, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (ex Jan Sangh). Hindu revivalism has now found a voice that seems remarkably organised, and in the perception of the Westernised elite, rather frightening. The elite is alarmed, and has proved willing to compromise on many frontiers. The prolonged serialisation during the latter half of the last decade of the epic Ramayana on the government-controlled television was a mark of such compromise. True, the Ramayana (as also the Mahabharata which was serialised afterwards) is an essential part of India's national heritage, but the manner in which it was scripted and visually presented left little doubt about its being used for evoking nostalgia for a mythologised Hindu past. What gave this telecast a distinct political significance was the parallel build-up of a movement aimed at reclaiming Rcim's alleged birth-place (or rather spot) from a mosque at Ayodhya. This movement has acted as the biggest symbolic drama staged in India since Gandhi's salt satyagraha. The contrast between the narrow communal ends of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and the secular message of the salt satyagraha is a measure of the pressure liberalism in India has had to bear over the last sixty years. To return to the religiously inspired telecasting of the Ramayana, such signals of the elite's readiness to bend to the popular world of revivalist ideology raise the question: 'How far would the elite be willing to compromise before it barters away its secular identity which is linked to its legitimacy as a ruling group?' The politics of revivalism has recently entered an advanced round of its struggle for power, symbolised by the significant gains made by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1989 parliamentary elections and by the intensifying of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. In the meanwhile, champions of secular values have also gained political ground among the poor and oppressed sections of north Indian society. How much better they will fare in taming the forces of revivalism than the Westernised elite fared is one of the crucial questions to be answered in the coming years. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Cf. Gandhi's article in 'Young India' on May 29, 1924, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 24 (Delhi: Publications Division, 1967), p. 145. 2. Cf. Romila Thapar's 'Syndicated Moksha?' in Seminar, 113 (September 1985). 3. H.L. Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 4. For details of Allahabad's development, cf. C.A. Baily, The Local Roots of Indian Politics, Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 5. For a detailed study of Saraswati, cf. Ram Vilas Sharma, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi aur Hindi Navjagran (Delhi: Rajkamal, 1977). 6. Cf. Amrit Rai, A House Divided (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). 7. Cf. J.T.F. Jordens, Dayanand Sarftswati, His Life and Ideas (New Delhi: OUP, 1978).