Brian K. Smith's treatment of Hindutva is excellent and contains both analysis and advocacy. I agree with his worry about current tendencies towards a kind of Hindu chauvinism. What I want to do here is to fill something of a hole in his account of modern Hinduism preceding the Hindutva movement. He hints at what I am about to say, but I would like to spell out what I see as the dominant modern Hindu ideology. It is this ideology which essentially lies behind the main wave of Indian nationalism up to and beyond independence and behind the 'secular' (i.e. pluralistic) constitution. The ideology does more than declare the amorphousness of Hinduism. It was first proclaimed in a highly successful way by Swami Vivekananda, but there are quite a few other proponents, notably President Radhakrishnan, and in his own way Gandhi. It is important for us to grasp the ideology, since it is a view shared by much of the Hindu elite. It is, moreover, a general position which characterizes much of modern traditional Hinduism. I use this apparent oxymoron to delineate the modern expression of what is taken to be tradition (though it is not so really). It represents the main response to the numerous aspects of the Western, and in particular the British, challenge.
This challenge had many parts. Evangelical Christianity attacked Hindu polytheism. Utilitarian reformers in London's India Office criticized caste and child marriage, etc. English higher education posed questions to the Sanskrit heritage. Railways and a roughly unified administration undermined India's disunity. New economic arrangements had various effects on Indian products. Science posed queries about traditional doctrines and philosophy. Vivekananda's and others' modern Hindu ideology created a Hindu philosophy which dealt with all these problems. While some reformers, calling on older resources, went back to the Upanishads and Vedas, Vivekananda went back to a recast version of Shankara's non-dualism. This had sketched a system with two (or three) levels of truth or reality. This provided the framework for the notion that all the religions (existing at the lower level) point upwards to the higher Truth. Those who criticize the many manifestations of God in India fail to see the gods as partial representations of the One: Christianity, in taking its own symbols so literally, is itself superstitious. Moreover, the Hindus have long known that the gods are merely refractions of the One. It is this comprehensiveness which is the glory of Hinduism. This is modern Hinduism's response to Christian evangelical religion.
But we need to note that this position has a deeper meaning in relation to the burgeoning Indian nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was important that the movement should be pluralist, so that it could appeal to Muslims, Christians, Parsees and so on as well as to Hindus. The notion that all religions point to the same Truth is a useful position from this angle. Moreover, it was carried on well by Gandhi, who added an extra dimension-an alliance with the Harijans. Untouchables might in a certain sense entertain some Hindu values, but they were scarcely likely to be very loyal to elite Hindu mores. Vivekananda and Gandhi together could lay the groundwork of a pan-Indian national movement. But this did not make Hinduism as conceived in the new ideology amorphous. For a time Advaita Vedanta, rather loosely interpreted, and expressed in English, became its working philosophy.