There has been a clamour over the recent movie ‘The Kerala Story.’ It seems to be whipping up passions on both sides of the religious divide. It is one of the peculiar aspects of secularism in the country that the process of reform and criticism applies only to the majority religion. There is a certain element of fear and hesitation to address some issues in ‘minority’ religions, even as secularism has largely come to mean appeasement. The movie is about ISIS and how it uses Islamic ideology to brainwash people.
This is a known phenomenon, but as has always happened in the country, the intellectuals and the moderates of the minority religions have persistently failed to set the corrective narratives. They have bowed down to the diktats of the clergy and thus attempted to defend the indefensible many times. The hate speeches that go in the mosques and the churches against the Hindus are well-known and documented facts, yet our intellectuals and the seculars go blue in the face denying it.
Today, it is unfortunate that a blind hatred rather than any rational critique binds the Christians and the Muslims as a group against the BJP and Modi. The BJP does not represent the Hindus; it is only an outcome of the angry Hindus exposed to the consistent anti-Hindu policies of decades of Congress rule after independence. Secularism became the appeasement of the minorities, and liberalism became the abuse of the majority in political parlance. Hindus had a lot of hope in the BJP to restore the true Sanatana Dharma of our land, but they have been disappointed on more than one count in its two successive terms.
The hesitation to integrate into the ethos of the country has been a constant feature of the Muslim segment in the country, and we need to reflect on this. The Islamic rule in Delhi since the 13th century was not one of happiness for the Hindus, despite our secular historians trying their best to whitewash the well-recorded accounts of the contemporary historians of those times. The anxieties of the Indo-Muslim elites, or ashrafs, in the second half of the 19th century ensured that the Muslims were never with the Indian National Congress. The Muslims of the country overwhelmingly voted for the Muslim League just before 1947, which was almost a referendum on Pakistan, despite knowing that most of them would be staying back in India. Individual examples include lyric writers like Kaifi Azmi and Majrooh Sultanpuri, who wrote passionate poems for Pakistan but, after independence, became communists and stayed on in India to reap the benefits of a ‘secular’ India.
As someone has quipped, Muslims before independence got Pakistan, and Muslims in India after independence got secularism. It is a sheer failure of Muslim intellectuals, successive governments, and sundry supporters of all hues when one cannot even raise an objection to practises going on in the name of religion. The denial going on in the country when one addresses Kashmir, Bengal, or Kerala is problematic and is largely due to the silence of the Muslim moderates. There have been problems in Hindu societies too, but the reform movements have been mostly from within, by people belonging to all strata of society. Such is the case with Christian cultures too, but the reforms came mostly within the framework of secularism, which separated the church from the state. Reform and ‘scientificity’ meant the complete shunning of religion.
In Indian culture, as profound thinkers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Sri Aurobindo have articulated, the spiritualization of practically every aspect of human life from birth to death and in all fields makes the separation of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ irrelevant and almost nonsensical. Secularism, which tries to weed out the ‘secular’ activities from the ‘religious’ ones, ends up simply as violence against Indian culture and Hinduism.
Scholars from the Ghent school (initiated by SN Balagangadhara) show that Sanatana Dharma is not even a religion in the definitional sense. It is a conglomerate of a huge number of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions. These traditions consist of many sampradayas and paramparas, and of more importance than the gods and books are ancestral lineages and guru-shishya paramparas. In a culture where Sanatana Dharma is the defining essence, different traditions branch off, some of which, like Buddhism and Jainism, reject the Vedas as an authoritative source and yet maintain a vibrant non-confrontational connection with the mainstream. Many so-called ‘tribals’ have variable interactions with the Vedic culture.
India is a traditional land where the characteristic essence is an indifference to differences. Thus, atheism, traditions not believing in the Vedas, and isolated dwellers unconnected to the Vedas were never in fear of physical extermination by the ‘majority’ culture. Alien religions become traditions and integrated over time into Indian culture without major issues. The fights that happened between Muslims and Hindus were rarely based on ‘truth’ values but on mostly socio-economic reasons. The Hindu-Muslim encounters were unlike the Christian religious wars of Europe or the Christian-Muslim encounters, which were based mostly on truth values and doctrines and the need to prove the superiority of one particular god or prophet. Such encounters are an impossibility in the traditional land of India.
Instead of continuing the process of traditionalizing the alien religions, secularism is making Indian traditions into religions, which, as a paradox, generates the intolerance and fundamentalism typical of religious cultures. Christianity appears benign today, but its history during the conversion of the Greco-Roman empire in the first centuries of the millennium (Catherine Nixey: The Darkening Age) and the later religious wars were equally brutal as the periods of Islamic expansion by conquest.
Hinduism is a nebulous entity for which perhaps nobody can give an essential definition. However, to use a metaphor, it is the trunk of the tree called Sanatana Dharma, where all the individual ‘named’ traditions are its branches. What remains of Sanatana Dharma and serves as a fountainhead for any further branching after the individual branches (Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism) is perhaps Hinduism as we know it today. In such an understanding of our true essence, there is space for all alien religions, faiths, and cultures, so long as they behave as just another tradition.
At a social level, this was always happening. Only the political-academic understanding of the nature of India was deeply flawed, and they insisted on making all our traditions into proper religions in the Abrahamic mould. That remains the meta-problem of the day. At another level, the Muslim moderates remain silent or start defending the indefensible without any thought to reform, allowing the clergy to have an uninterrupted run. There are problematic passages in the scriptures which seems to motivate terrorists across the world. How Muslim moderates and intellectuals across the world choose to deal with it will remain a critical issue for the future of all humanity.
RANDOM MUSINGS 