Zoom in on any map of Japan, and you'll see swastikas everywhere. No, that's not some kind of fascist holdover from World War II. The swastika is the standard Japanese map symbol for Buddhist temples.
In India, you're more likely to see swastikas associated with the Jain religion, though many Hindus use the symbol too. And the swastika is not only associated with religion. To the endless bemusement of international visitors, it is widely used as a commercial logo all across India.
The one place you would never find a swastika is in Nazi propaganda. Adolf Hitler never once mentioned it in Mein Kampf. Quite the contrary. He wrote of his own personal vision for the Nazi flag that:
after countless attempts, I had arrived at a definitive design: a flag with a red background, a white disc, and a black hakenkreuz in the center. After much experimentation, I also determined the precise proportions—the relationship between the size of the flag and the size of the white disc, as well as the shape and thickness of the hakenkreuz. And that is how it remained.
That is to say, the Nazi symbol of hate was a European hakenkreuz ("hooked cross"), not an Indian swastika. Scholars are well-aware of this. They nonetheless persist in using the Sanskrit word swastika to translate the German word hakenkreuz into English. The problem isn't confusion over the symbols. It's confusion over the words.
The Sanskrit word swastika literally means "symbol of well-being." It has only positive, peaceful connotations. The image it denotes is quite literally the ancient symbol of goodness.
It is fundamentally incorrect to call the Nazi symbol a "swastika." Yes, it is the same image. But as the Oxford English Dictionary explains:
In German, the word Swastika is uncommon and typically only used with reference to the symbol in archaeological and ethnographic contexts; the usual word for the emblem of the Nazi regime is Hakenkreuz.
In other words, the 6 million European Jews who were murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators did not understand the symbol of their persecutors to be a swastika. They knew it as the hakenkreuz.
So why have we in the English-speaking world been taught to despise the "swastika"? For that, blame the New York Times.
The Indian swastika has been well-known and well-represented in America since the early nineteenth century. It came in with the Transcendentalist enthusiasm for Hindu spiritual thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson took his theory of the soul from the Bhagavad Gita. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta ... I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug.
The symbol that we now know as the swastika may have been used by ancient peoples all over the world, but the word that we use for it in English arrived in America with the Bhagavad Gita.
Nearly a century later, when Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement adopted the hooked cross as its emblem, English-language newspapers had a word ready in their (and their readers') vocabularies with which to describe it. Adopting the then-fashionable term from Hindu learning, they called it the swastika.
The London Daily Telegraph was first off the rank with a April 15, 1920 brief on "The Ehrhardt Brigade" (a pre-Nazi anti-communist militia) that referred to the hooked cross as a “swastika.” Reuters described the "swastika" as an "antisemitic emblem" in a July 5, 1922 note on the assassination of Germany's foreign minister Walther Rathenau. And in January 1923 the London Times and Daily Telegraph both began reporting on the "swastika" as the party symbol of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
But it was the New York Times that took up the term with gusto. Its first article to mention the "swastika" in relation to the Nazis appeared on February 10, 1921 ("Crisis in Bavaria"). Then in January 1923 its coverage of Hitler and the Nazis exploded. In major articles that appeared every few weeks for the rest of the decade, the New York Times repeatedly referred to the Nazi hooked cross as a "swastika."
Though the London papers must bear part of the blame for translating the German word hakencreuz into English as "swastika," it was the New York Times that widely popularized the term throughout the 1920s. Jews today refer to the Nazi symbol as a "swastika" primarily because their parents and grandparents read about the term in the New York Times.
With New York emerging as the chief center of global media after World War Two, the term stuck, and it has been with us ever since.
It is to some degree understandable that most ordinary people would use the term that they read in print and hear on the news. But intellectuals should be more careful. And those who would ban Nazi symbols should be absolutely precise.
The symbol they want to ban was called the hakencreuz by both oppressors and oppressed. No one wants to ban Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist swastikas. So they shouldn't call the Nazi symbol a "swastika." If hakenkreuz sounds too exotic, they can just call it a hooked cross.
But if our ancestors could learn a little Sanskrit to describe a symbol of peace, certainly we can learn a little German to describe a symbol of hate. Germans didn't invent the symbol of a cross with hooks on the ends. What they did was turn it into a symbol of antisemitism. If we are to condemn it, we should condemn it in German—and let Indian religions celebrate the swastika as the unblemished symbol of goodness it has always been.
Salvatore Babones is the executive director of the Indian Century Roundtable and the author of Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World's First Democracy.
