A senior politician, commenting on the rituals at the inauguration of the new parliament building, said that India was going ‘backward’, clashing with the Nehruvian scientific temper so essential for constructing a modern new India. This is an important example of the gross ignorance of our political, academic, and constitutional thinkers about both the nature of Indian traditions and Indian history. Fundamentally, India is a land of traditions, not religions. As the strong hypothesis of Balagangadhara says, only Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are ‘religions’ in the definitional sense. Religions have a strong basis in their doctrines and their truth values. The fascination with ‘true’ or ‘false’ and the ‘why’ question has a few consequences: religious wars on truth values and the true God; religious conversion as an important dynamic; ‘tolerance and mutual respect to the ‘other’ as a solution for harmony; atheism when the ‘why’ question finally questions religion itself; and science too as an extension of the ‘why’ mind, amongst other things.
Traditional lands (like India or the Greco-Romans of the past) have ‘rituals’ as their basis, and their focus is on the ‘how’ question, and their solution for harmony is an ‘indifference’ to the differences. The construction of various ‘religions’ in the Abrahamic mould of the various traditions of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism) has been the single most important contribution of the colonials. Unfortunately, our dominant ideology-driven academia and naïve politicians in post-independent India did not question this narrative. Rituals and traditions do not have the ‘why’ but the ‘how’ as their basis. Performative ability and practical learning takes a precedence in such traditional cultures. Science develops in such frameworks without any clash from the ‘orthodoxy.’ The clash of religion with science is a straight western import, transferring the clashes of the church with its scientists to Indian traditions, where it is an almost unknown phenomenon.
For those who believe that India was scientifically primitive before the colonials came, the slightest reading of the works of Dharampal would bring enough light to dispel their ignorance. India had highly developed mathematics, astronomy, architecture, metallurgy, agriculture, and engineering, apart from the arts, before the colonials came. The colonials had an initial sense of awe and wonder, but later it was one of the important requirements to project a primitive civilization to justify the ‘civilizing mission’ of the colonials. Indians still continue to believe that story.
The solution to harmony in India was to convert the religions that came from alien worlds into traditions. Reversing this process, we are converting our traditions into religions, which is responsible for much of the mess going on in India. We are transitioning from an ‘indifference’ to an ‘intolerance’ characterising traditions and religions, respectively, in their pure form.
Looking for a spouse and then marrying someone from my own ‘jati’ is not discrimination against the rest of the world. Similarly, building a hostel catering to a specific varna, jati or religious group is not discrimination against all the other varnas, jatis, or religions. This is narrowing the search domain, as we do in all fields to get better results, as Balagangadhara says. Conducting rituals in one format is never discriminatory against all the other traditions (or religions) of the land. This is a fundamental thing that modern social scientists thriving on western literature and our political thinkers should understand when they hold forth on topics such as discrimination and oppression.
At the root of all this is the tremendous problem of applying secularism in a traditional land where the separation of the ‘religious’ from the ‘secular’ becomes difficult. If some ritual colours every aspect of life from birth to death, then clearly, the definition of Sanatana traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and so on) as religions may not be true at all. A Saraswati Vandana before an academic programme or the lighting of the lamps for any inauguration are rituals and traditions of our civilization. By calling it ‘non-secular’ or a ‘majoritarian religious domination’, it is an intense violence to the civilizational culture of the land arising from a poor understanding or, rather, inappropriate western frameworks in Indian contexts.
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