Disclaimer: There is no claim of expertise or primary scholarship in the subject matter. This essay is based completely on the ideas and themes of Dr SN Balagangadhara and borrows liberally from his classic books: Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem and What Does It Mean to Be an Indian, co-authored by Divya Jhingran and Sarika Rao respectively. These books are a must for every Indian to truly understand their own culture from an Indian viewpoint without wearing the lenses of western frameworks. Many of the passages in the article are excerpted directly from the writings and essays of Dr SN Balagangadhara without direct indications in each case. The purpose of the article is to bring his ideas to a wider audience and hopefully stimulate the readers to explore further.
Introduction
One important translation we have in Indian culture is that ‘murthi puja’ is ‘worshipping idols.’ This is a common-sense idea and, as an extension, some even claim that it is a sin or ‘mahapaapa.’ This includes not only the Christian missionaries and the Islamic clergy but also Hindu reformists trying to take back Hinduism to its pristine purity of olden times based only on the Upanishadic philosophy. Raja Ram Mohun Roy, in the latter part of the 19th century, popularised the notion that ‘murthi pooja’ was a ‘mahaapaapa’.
Dr Balagangadhara’s research program, extensively studying and comparing different cultures, show that these are wrong ideas permeating into our national conscience. In sum, he says that when we use worship for puja, it is simply a profound ignorance of both Indian and western cultures since we are delving deep into Christian theology.
Cultural Differences
Indian culture is different from western culture. What is culture and what is the meaning of cultural differences? There are many definitions but Dr Balagangadhara’s research program defines a culture as the resources it has for socialization which helps an individual to cope with its natural and social environments.
Learning a language and learning through actions modelled on family, friends, and society members are important for us to live successfully in a society. Any surviving culture thus builds two rich, complex, and interlinked storehouses of linguistic and actionable items. Languages embody in poems, stories, theories, hypotheses, speeches, and talks. Human actions solidify in human institutions like family, marriage, rituals, child rearing, schools, clubs, legal and political organisations. As we grow up, our elders and ourselves draw upon these multiple storehouses to teach and learn.
In the broadest terms, ‘culture’ is the available resources for socialization and their use. Cultural differences would reside in how the culture uses or utilizes the resources. This outline explains the cultural differences between India and the West by how they use the resources of socialization. For example, despite the same type of institutions (family, day care centers, schools) and same language of English, different child rearing practices in India and the UK would account for some of the cultural differences.
Configurations of Learning
The diverse learning processes (the socialization resources) coordinate and establish a pattern called ‘a configuration of learning.’ Cultures originate, reproduce, and transmit across generations by these configurations of learning and the differences between such configurations constitute these cultural differences. What is it that which coordinates the ‘configuration of learning’ in a culture? Here Dr Balagangadhara comes with his strongest thesis: religion creates a configuration that creates western culture, a role that ritual plays in producing Indian culture.
These ideas are necessary because cultural differences are not along geographical, linguistic, or religious lines. This would mean that belonging to one religion does not differentiate people as members of a culture: one could belong to Indian culture whether a Jain, Buddhist, or a Hindu in the same way a Christian or a Muslim is Indian.
Indian Culture-Does It have Religions
The profound ignorance which traps most intellectuals today is the idea that India has religions like Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, and so on. A theory (like gravitational theory) identifies different phenomenon and instead of ad hoc explanations for each join them in a single framework. There was no such theory when the west unified the various phenomenon and facts (the pujas, the sandhyavandanam, the Sahasranamams, its ‘sacred text’ enunciating the Purushasukta, our notions of dharma and adharma, and so on) as organic parts of a phenomenon called ‘Hinduism’.
The theory that guided western culture was Christian theology and that, unless we want to say that ‘theology is a science’, there was and is no scientific grounds to claim that there is religion in India, whether it is ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’ or ‘Saivism’ or whatever else. The beliefs and practices that went into constructing this unity do clearly exist. The West did not provide a false or wrong description of the social and cultural reality in India.
But problematically, the unity they created by tying these things together is a unity only for them. They created a unified phenomenon because their culture based on religion believed that religion is a cultural universal- all cultures must have a religion. Hinduism, the phenomenon constructed by our colonial masters, is an experiential entity only to them and not to us. In this sense, Hinduism is not a part of Indian culture. It has no existence outside the colonial experiences of India.
Then What Does India have?
India is a land of traditions. It has broadly many sampradayas (customs of a social unit) and paramparas (individual lineages and relations). The hallmark of multiple traditions is an indifference to differences. This was true of ancient Greco-Roman traditions and this remains true of the existing Indian traditions across millennia. This is the experience which most Indians have of Indian culture.
Rituals form the basis of traditions which bring people together. Though the concept of truth is as robust as possible, the absence of heresy in Indian traditions allows multiple opinions without descending into chaos and intolerance. Though Shankaracharya spoke the truth according to his devotees, Madhavacharya did not speak falsehood even when he countered most points of Shankaracharya’s philosophy.
Many intellectuals, in India and in the West, are transforming some of the multiple Indian traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. The problem lies in trying to fit traditions into the straitjacket of ‘religion’ in the attempt to bring a unity to diversity. While calling oneself a ‘Hindu’ might be convenient, the danger is in trying to develop ‘doctrines’, ‘theologies’, ‘catechisms’ and our own ‘Ten Commandments’, says Dr Balagangadhara.
Calling oneself a ‘Hindu’ (for the sake of convenience) is simply a continuation of ancestral traditions. There is also no need for a ‘reason’ to keep ancestral traditions alive. A ‘Hindu’ means to practice tradition. This is what traditions are and this is how we learn them. These traditions transmit through language, imitation, instruction, repeated performances, and so on. In fact, some or another component could either be missing or barely present in a tradition; such absences do not make it any less of a tradition. Attempting to encapsulate traditions as ‘beliefs’ or ‘rituals’ or ‘festivals’ is to distort their nature.
A tradition transmits simply a set of practices from time immemorial. Changes occur as practices would have adapted themselves to ways of living. In this sense, traditions are extremely dynamic and flexible. Traditions live on precisely because of this adaptability; they are dynamic in their nature and are never static. As to the question who belongs to a tradition, the answer is whether one smokes, drinks alcohol, eats meat, goes to temples, performs rituals or not, one can be a part of tradition. There is also no authority to pronounce whether someone based on his or her personal habits is a part of tradition or not. Though this does not suggest that traditions are either fluid or amorphous, belonging to a tradition is a fine-grained affair; it is not an all-or-none situation.
It is extremely important that traditions distinguish each other as traditions. Being different from the other traditions is crucial to be a tradition. In fact, the vibrancy of a tradition is by the extent to which it can retain its difference from other traditions. As Dr Balagangadhara says, ‘today, we are not yet able to make sense of the presence of these two properties: (a) the enormous flexibility in belonging to a tradition and the sharpness with which the boundaries are drawn between traditions; (b) the possibility that any element could be absent from a tradition and yet it could maintain identity and distinction.’
We describe traditions as variants of religions or philosophies. However, they are not; they are what they are- traditions. In a tradition, a practice does not require a separate ‘reason’ or ‘justification’ for its existence. The existence of a practice is its own ‘justification’. So, those who ask, ‘why practice a tradition?’ commit a fallacy, if they presume that one needs a ‘special reason’ for continuing a practice. The answer is simple: there is no compulsion or obligation; there is no special reason one ‘ought to’ continue a traditional practice.
Thus, there is no denial of ‘Moksha’ if one does not visit temples or do puja. Thus, ‘why do Ganesha puja?’: ‘because I have learnt to do this puja at home.’ ‘Why wear bindis?’: ‘we wear them because it is our practice.’ Nothing more required as explanations.
What Does Puja Mean and Why Do We Do It Especially to ‘Idols’?
We use murthipuja in a nuanced manner. Rarely do we say that we did puja to the ‘murthi’ or ‘vigraha’ of Ganesha when we go to the temples. We say that we did puja to Ganesha. Murthi or vigraha generally refers to statues: ‘the vigraha is very pretty, it was 50 feet long’. These words refer to human creations and physical objects. If this is how we normally use these words, then, it appears that we hardly speak of ‘murthi puja’, let alone do it.
100 knowledgeable Indians about the ‘puja’ of Ganesha might give as many different answers to the question of why. All may appear ‘satisfactory’ in some sense. This simply shows the diversity of Indian traditions and does not appear problematic to us at all. It does however to the westerners, intellectuals, and Indologists who see this a problem and seek solutions. Instead of understanding why the west asks such questions, our intellectuals start giving responses to their ill-formed questions about the nature of Indian practices and rituals.
There may be different purana stories to tell why our ancestors did puja to Shiva Lingam or to Ganesha sitting on a rat but one may express dissatisfaction of their ‘truth value’. However, why should these stories be either true or false? To the ancient Greeks and Romans, ‘true’ and ‘false’ were simply not applicable to the many stories about their deities. These stories were not about human beings and earthly events where ‘true’ and ‘false’ predicates apply. These predicates ‘true or false’ do not apply about godly events in their world and the divine actions in our world.
Dr Balu tells us how we can possibly answer Indologists by shifting the background of questions from the western culture to Indian. For example, when someone asks ‘why’ one should do Shiva puja, the reply is either it is our tradition, or one is a Bhakta of Shiva or Ganesha, or because one’s mother said so. On the question why Shiva has the form he has (a Lingam) or why Ganesha has a unique mode of transport, the answer would be a story from the Puranas or a ‘sthalapurana’ (a story about the specific temple). ‘This is how we do it’ is perhaps the simplest answer to most of our practices and rituals. What does a puja or Lingam mean in English? The best answer would be, ‘Puja is a ritual and Lingam is the ‘form’ in which this ritual is performed.’
Worship as a Theological Idea
‘Indians worship idols’ and ‘murtipooja is a mahapaapa’ said people of all kinds (missionaries, colonials, Hindu baiters, and Hindu lovers) across time. Is there anything intrinsically wrong in performing idol worship the way something is wrong with robbery? Dr Balagangadhara says we are again drawing an analogy between idol worship and human actions towards fellow-human beings. This analogy breaks down because idol worship is not a relation between human beings but between an act of a human being and the entity worshipped.
To the missionaries, we were idolaters worshipping the Devil and his minions; to the liberal of today, we are mere polytheists. The missionaries and the colonials asked the questions of ‘Hindus’ whether they ‘worship’ lingam, stones, monkeys, rats, and such like. It is most important to consider the fact that ‘worship’ is a deeply theological concept – nothing like our notion of ‘puja’. One can worship only the One True ‘God’.
One can possibly worship false gods (deceived by them when you worship images created by human beings), believing that it is the ‘God’- The Perfect Being, The Creator, The Lord of the Universe. The question is, which idiot ever thought that a rat, a cow, a crow, or the stone ‘lingam’ can be such a God? Should whole cultures and peoples (from Asia to Africa) comprise only of such people, no cultures could ever survive. India is a culture and it has survived for a couple of thousand years.
Problematically, the English word ‘worship’ comes from theology where one worships either the God or the Devil. No interpretation of such a theology would allow us to consider Shiva as ‘God’. This leaves us only with the possibility that Shiva is either the Devil or is one of his minions. Does this mean Indians are worshipping the Devil or one of his minions? In that case, we are not discussing the meaning of words but the truth of Christian theology.
One might deny these theological roots and say that ‘worship’ means ‘reverence’. However, by accepting this definition of worship as reverence, there is a violence to the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim cultures. In all these cultures, one can show ‘reverence’ to the elderly, to the king, and to the powerful. To say that they show ‘reverence’ to God in the same way they show reverence to these other things is to transform all of them into ‘idolaters’, which, according to their theologies, is the greatest sin. From this definition of reverence, it would follow that they are not ‘worshipping’ God at all. Thus, the translation of ‘puja’ into ‘worship’ is not a mere linguistic issue without it raising theological questions.
Another argument would be that dictionaries and Indian Sanskrit teachers who know English, translate ‘puja’ as ‘worship’. Surely, they know the subject. Dr Balagangadhara answers this rhetoric by saying that we learn English through Indian languages and one teaching was that ‘Puja’ means ‘worship’. The first generations of translators ‘decided’ to translate ‘puja’ as ‘worship’ because they were convinced that we are ‘idolaters’ and ‘worshipped’ the Devil and his minions. Hence, we must discuss historical issues about colonialism and what it means to a culture like ours to resolve the issues of translation.
Puja as Seen by Semitic Religions
For someone rooted in Semitic religions, one needs a reason to continue practicing a religion, or switch between religions or become atheists. Because this is how their religions are, they also want to know what ‘Hindus’ believe while thinking that ‘Hinduism’ is a religion. The questioners think Hindus too have “Scriptures” the way they have their own. They think that the puja of the Hindus expresses beliefs about how ‘God’ “ought to be worshipped”. According to Semitic religions, the ‘priests of Hinduism’ (namely, the Brahmins) have been propagating ‘fake news’ about God and His worship for more than three thousand years. The ‘photos’ of our Deva’s and Devi’s or their sculptures in our temples are ‘deep fakes’.
However, if morality is obedience to God’s will, then idol worship is intrinsically wrong because one disobeys God’s will. Not only has God forbidden idol worship but has also revealed the how of worship. Each Semitic religion has a ‘how’ of worship. False worship condemns one to damnation for all eternity. The fundamental freedom that God has given to human beings is to choose between Him, salvation, and eternal life; or the false gods, false worship, and eternal damnation. In this sense, idol worship has a very clear meaning and reference in the theologies of the Semitic religions.
For example, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim worship their (Biblical) God in certain ways because this (Biblical) God has imposed on them the obligation to do so. In worshipping idols, icons, and images, they see worship of the Devil. If someone believes that these claims are true, such a person has good reasons not to do puja to Ganesha. But their good reason not to do puja to Ganesha is not a good reason for us to abandon doing the ‘murthipuja’. It is a part of our tradition to do puja to the statue of Ganesha or the lingam and we do it because it is our tradition.
Freudian Explanations and Symbolisms to Indian Traditions
It is in current fashion of many influential Indologists to apply themes of sexual repression and Freudian theories to Indian practices like the puja to the Lingam. Many ‘experts’ argue that Shiva Puja is an ancient fertility cult worshipping the Lingam which symbolizes the phallus. Most Indians are apparently ignorant of this symbolism. Their repressed attitude to sex indexes the truth and strength of this symbolism. In contrast, the factual claim of an Indian says ‘Lingam is not a symbol of anything or anybody, but simply the ‘how’ of Shiva Puja, as contrasted to that of Vishnu or Rama by Indians’. However, the interpretation of the expert says that the factual claim of the Indian is wrong.
In reverse, would this not also show the other person’s obsession with Linga and Shiva due to their ‘prudish’ nature and ‘sexual repression’? But importantly, why would a culture which gave the Kama Sutra or sculpted nudes on the temple walls first invent a symbol for the phallus and then deny this symbolism. Why take a devious route instead of simply saying that one worships phallus irrespective of its form or size? These, the experts must answer but do not. Also, how, and why are we seduced into doing puja to Shiva Lingam because of ‘sexual repression’?
Compared to this complicated and non-existent narrative, there is a simpler Occam’s razor account: We do puja to Shivalinga because that is how elders taught us to do puja to Shiva. Furthermore, there is also a puranic story about it. This simple account without symbolism or deviousness is better than a non-existent, complex narrative.
If the Indologist appeals to fertility symbols and ancient cults, we can say that ‘Lingam’ is not a symbol; nor do we need symbolisms to speak of deities. In fact, it is a 1000-year-old doctrine of Pope Gregorius to see either the Cross or an icon as a symbol for the divinity (or the deity), something that ‘simple minds’ need or require to understand ‘God’. ‘He’ is ‘outside’ the Cosmos and is ‘outside’ space-time in this idea; thus, there is a need to symbolize this transcendent in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The ‘modern’ research of symbolisms thus turns out to be an old Christian claim.
In contrast, Indians do not see Lingam as the symbol of Shiva. The Lingam is the Shiva- the ‘para’-devata is in the ‘apara’. It is the form in which Shiva is present in the Cosmos. But “why has Shiva this form?” The answer would again be a story from the Puranas adding that to perform puja to Shiva means to perform the ritual to this form. Because the traditional description has the form of a definition (Shiva puja=ritual to this form) no sensible discussion about traditional practice is possible.
Freudian postulations between sexual instincts, shape of the stone object, and apparent religious beliefs comes to explain the neurotic behaviour of Indians when they do puja to the Linga. These explanations make one’s experiential entities like Shiva, Lingam or puja disappear. The explanations may even derive that an Indian doing Shiva puja is neurotic and has repressed sexual instincts; it becomes more nonsensical when it says that these are all false experiences.
Translations, Understandings, and Violence
We learn that ‘‘pooja’’ translates as “worship”, “murthi” as “Idol”, “paapa” as “sin”. In the act of translation, one is establishing some kind of “equivalence” in meaning between these words. Those who undertook these translations did believe that Indians worshipped idols, cows, rats and so on. They established these ‘conventions’ and none of the Indian intellectuals across time protested.
All such intellectuals genuinely believe that they ‘understand’ the meaning and reference of these words in the English language. The problem is not the lack of ‘understanding’ of English but in their lack of understanding of the western culture. We have no clue about the extent to which theologies have established firmly in linguistic practices.
As much as the Semitic religions did not understand Indian traditions, we too do not understand them. We do this partly because of the way we have learnt English: ‘deva’ was ‘god’; ‘puja’ is ‘worship’; ‘atman’ is ‘Self’; Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Saivism are ‘religions’; ‘sadhus’ are our ‘holy’ men or even our ‘god-men’; ‘tapas’ means doing ‘penance’ and so on. Theologically inspired frameworks inspired people to coin these terms. To them, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ were not only religions but also pagan or heathen religions, with worship of the Devil and his minions.
As we grow up and discover that there is ‘ayudha puja’, ‘gopuja’ and ‘lingapuja’ either we are embarrassed to discover their English equivalents or insist that we do not really worship instruments, cows, or the phallus. Instead of answering any questions that these are simply rituals, we go around trying to give complex explanations and symbolisms to these practices.
We routinely translate ‘idolatry’ as ‘murthipuja’ but insist that people do not really worship these images but merely look at them as ‘symbols of Divinity’. Thus, the questions come: what are our people doing when they do ‘puja’? Are they worshipping or not? The point is this: most of us have learnt English through the mediation of our local languages. We have not established the equivalences based on our knowledge of phenomena like ‘worship’, ‘God’, ‘religion’ etc. We have merely learnt that they are equivalents.
This is not a question of translation, that is, one of finding the ‘right’ words (from our languages) to translate English (or any other European language). Rather it is one of understanding what these English words mean not by consulting an English Dictionary but by understanding the nature of religion.
We must speak of experiences that make them ‘Indian’ (like doing puja to Shiva Linga). But the explanations of Indian experiences that we routinely reproduce (fertility cults, symbolisms, sexual repressions, hypostatizing abstract concepts like ‘nation’, reification of experiences into objects, and so on) hint that there is no such thing as an ‘Indian experience’ unless they are Indian ‘hallucinations.’ The result is feeling a sense of ‘wrongness’ but not knowing how to reply, there is silence for an answer. This is the lot of cultures of colonized peoples.
There may have been fertility cults; the person doing Puja may be having neurosis or sexual repressions. However, an explanation that one cannot have the experience while doing Shiva Puja because it is altogether a different phenomenon (neurosis) becomes epistemic violence. Thus, explanation is at loggerheads with experience. Instead of rejecting such explanations and interpretations which make Indians into morons or psychologically imbalanced, we unfortunately try to imbibe and internalize those explanations.
Conclusions
We need to re-think what we learnt about who we are and what we do. Our question should not be how it translates into English, but what is it we Indians do, when we do Puja. This applies to many other things that we have imbibed along with other diatribes against ‘Hinduism’. Some of us can at least attempt to undertake the job of critically reflecting on our own experiences instead of reproducing barren third-rate ideas borrowed from second-hand sources, says Balagangadhara.
Different cultures teach us to structure what we undergo in different ways. Whether about how to do puja, or ideas of friendship or how to think about ourselves, the way we experience these are determined by what our culture teaches us. We thus structure our experiences and we learn how to do that from our cultures.
Theories about Indian culture should not tell us that we have false experiences; instead, they must show us why we experience the world the way we do. We do not hallucinate when we see the Sun moving on the horizon. An Indian does not hallucinate or lie when he or she does puja to Shivalinga. This cannot be an expression of neurosis or ‘sexual repressions’ unless there is a theory why we are having such neurosis while doing a Shiva Puja.
Questions about puja and other traditional practices should prompt us to make our children first understand that these questions have their roots in the Semitic religions and the contempt these religions have for Indian traditions. Tell them subsequently that it is their task to figure out what ‘puja’ is, because it is not ‘worship’.
RANDOM MUSINGS 