It’s been a super ODD fortnight: I can live with the Western media’s disregard of fact-checking and wildly berating India because that’s their modus operandi. Even if they had some valid criticisms of how India will/is autocrat, journalistic write-ups disregarded the common sentiment of a billion plus Indians. In a nutshell, I love Modi, but Modi is not India. And while India is a democracy now, the democratic outcomes (I am from Bihar) have always been questionable.
But what’s made me super uncomfortable is how the Indian diaspora view Hinduism.
To give you some context about my generation – we are cultural Hindus who celebrate Diwali (because who doesn’t!?) but have always steered away from talking about religion with each other.
There is real shame associated with being anything but atheists. I have spent my twenties judging my own brethren when they talk about Hinduism and faith. NOT Christians or Jews, but other Hindus.
And this “shame” is an after-effect of a thousand years of invasion and wiping out Indic culture. You couldn’t say the word “Hindu” on national radio or TV in the ’80s or ’90s. Our historical textbooks were written to favour colonalism. Many factors, including poverty, wiping out Indic culture created in our parents and still many of my generation an aspiration to reject everything that is Indic and Hindu and adopt everything about the West.
I didn’t know this, but this has not sat well with me for many years now. I feel a more complete person, now that I have willingly said (and not admitted in public) that
I don’t know enough about Hinduism. I don’t know enough about my culture and nor did my parents or grandparents. But you know what, I am happy that I am part of a generation that gets to do so.
Ram is not Zeus
The Indian diaspora on LinkedIn repeatedly describes Ram as a “mythological character” in the Western sense of the word.
When I think of mythology, I immediately think of Zeus, who sounded like a man that has no redeeming qualities except he may possibly have been a God. His inability to keep his pants on, is particularly amusing (See this reference https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zeus).
Why is Ram important?
Ram may have existed BUT he is not Zeus. Ram is an ideal, and his functionality is twofold.
First, how to establish just rule for a nation (Ram rajya) and to live it. In the world of Ram, the unwavering importance of citizens is paramount because his purpose was to establish nationhood. A nation that did not separate politics from religion from daily life. In India today, there are too few examples of such men: Ratan Tata, PM Modi, Yogi (and if you need to ask who he is, then seriously this is not the blog for you)
Secondarily, he is willing to fight a seemingly unwinnable war for the love of his life, his wife. In some narrations of the Ramayana, Ram says to Sita, I don’t want heaven if it is without you. Ram is such a difficult example to follow because he is all about one thing: the call of duty.
For Hindus, what Ram means to us is aspiration. Our culture is full of debate as to what he should have done – this does not make us less Hindu. In fact it does the opposite.
What it means to be Hindu
Ask any Hindu what they want and the answer is “moksha.”
Your ambitions might be provincial and parochial because you want to accumulate a few pennies in a single lifetime and become a multi-billionaire.
Not a Hindu – he is focussed on his next lifetimes and his ambitions are always bigger.
What makes me Hindu? The fact that I go through bouts of faith, atheism, that we constantly disagree with each other on interpretation and that we are encouraged to do so. We are on our own spiritual path which is concurrently selfish and pluralistic.
Our brand of pluralism is wider then any concept of Western secularism that separates state and religion.
What worries me is this:
- We need a new and separate language about how we talk about Hinduism, its place in modern India and how we own it.
- I am concerned that in the absence of such grammar, we are always going to be put at this juncture of secularism/religion/politics, which is a very Western and new concept
- A thousand years of invasions has deprived our culture of so many intricate details of our religion. For example, we do not have Rishis in the true sense of that word. Is it not time to rediscover what it means to be Hindu
My view…
I don’t very much care whether or not the West or elite Indians think we are secular or not – but I do care that we have once in a lifetime chance to discover what it means to be part of a living and breathing Indic culture that was not presented to our grandparents – or reject it. Let’s not waste it.