https://www.thehansindia.com/my-voice/myvoice-views-of-our-readers-20th-october-2020-652050
The controversy from a simple and beautiful advertisement points to a deeper problem in understanding Indian society. Defining religion in Indian context through a book, a God, a doctrine, a Temple is problematic. India does not have religions but a huge number of traditions (sampradayas) with rituals as its foundational basis. Rituals unite people and religions divide people. The defining aspect of any traditional culture is an indifference to differences going beyond the standard tolerances or acceptances. It is a metaphysical and sociological impossibility that Indian culture knows of religions as reasoned by eminent scholars. No state or court possesses an impartial uniformly applicable scientific criterion of identifying and delimiting religion. Core issues of Uniform Civil Code, temple control by governments, and proselytization become key sore points in the discourse of secularism in the country.
Europe, in its framework of a religious culture, understood traditions as religions in India. Indian traditions confused the intellectuals with many texts, sub-texts, stories, Puranas, mythologies. They finally zeroed on to the ‘Vedas’ and Upanishads. Anything explicitly not religious like ‘grammar’ became non-holy. Despite this, frustratingly most Indians had an indifference to the differences in the texts, and were oblivious of most of the doctrines. Hinduism turned loose, non-canonical, vague, wavering, illusory, obscure, inconsistent by people like Hume and James Mill.
It never occurred to people then and now also that the amorphous nature of Hinduism is simply because ‘Hinduism’ did not exist. It was an imaginary entity, conjured up in the best minds of Europeans due to their absolute conviction that there had to be a religion in the natives. The standard understanding of religion has only given us wars, strives, conversions, and Inquisitions. To understand ‘religio’ as a tradition allowing varied practices with a characteristic indifference to the differences will build up far more harmony and understanding in the world still in the grip of religious frictions. The West in trying to make sense of the tree of Indian traditions, took hold of the branches and made them into different religions, sometimes even fighting each other. Sadly, we have collectively and completely internalised these discourses.
Ironically, secularism seems to be generating fundamentalism instead of being an antidote to it. Huge problems arise when a solution for a Western non-plural society at a specific time became a universal solution for all societies. In Europe, the separation of politics from religion resulted from a specific understanding of confessional strife which divided Christendom into various factions, each claiming to be the true religion. The continuum of theological and political principles firmly established the two kingdoms of the secular and the religious- the realm of the public and the private respectively. In India, secularism becomes problematic in defining the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘public life’ needing separation.
Historically, Indian society was far more tolerant and liberal than any society so far. For over a millennium, India had presence of Vedic, non-Vedic, and even atheistic traditions living with Zoroastrian Parsis, Muslims, Jews, and Christians in mostly peace. Indian society never disintegrated despite the diversity; hence it must have known successful practices and mechanisms of coexistence. The assumption that all conflicts are in support of ‘ultimate ideals’ and ‘truth value’ of individual groups is brilliantly wrong in the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India. Different from religious conflicts between Christian confessions or between Islam and Christianity in the West, these conflicts have been more socio-economic and political. There are no attempts to study this.
Religion needs to demarcate by doctrines; traditions are plural and flexible involving the inherited practices of the community rather than doctrines. For reasons unclear now, Christianity and Islam took the character of traditions like other traditions in India; they lost the fixation on distinguishing between the true and the false and the resulting proselytizing drive. A syncretism with Hindu thought also grew in India with some fine examples all over the country. These aspects need urgent explorations to finally reject our previous inappropriately transferred concepts from the European context to deal with our problems.
Due to an inappropriate secularism, a flexible, absorbing mass of traditions slowly converts to a religion in trying to define holy books, principles, and ideals. Starting with the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj, through Savarkar’s writings, through the political movements post-independence, a rich mass of pluralistic traditions stringently defines itself, crystallizing into ‘Hindutva’, which the critics want to eagerly label as the almost oxymoronic ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ or even ‘fascism’. Secularism is flawed to the core and will continue to fail in the country. We need to look within ourselves to seek better models which we always had; perhaps even a solution for the world grappling with multi-culturalism. The answer might be in traditionalising religions rather than religionising traditions.
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