In the days to come, intolerance in the name of religion is going to increase from all sides, without exception. Religion essentially “others” a person, and it says, “I am true and you are false.” The only way it gets peace is by either converting or eliminating the other (as in the olden days). This was true of not only Islam but also Christianity. The history of Greco-Roman conversions in the first centuries of the millennium was brutal. European Christianity was a continuing saga of wars within religious denominations of Christianity. This finally came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Of course, Europe gained internal peace, but a new kind of colonial expansionism started, based on nationalism, which became a scourge to the entire world and culminated in the two world wars.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings people have about India is that “Hinduism” or its closest correlate, “Sanatana Dharma ”, is a “religion”. Sanatana Dharma is an independent yet dependent mix of a huge number of traditions (sampradayas and paramparas, where ancestral lineages and gurus count equal to, if not more than, individual deities and doctrines). Sanatana Dharma is the “tree” metaphorically from which all the great traditions of India (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and such) branched out.
Sanatana Dharma is finally a great conglomerate of many Vedic, non-Vedic, and so-called ‘tribal cultures’ interacting with each other in a syncretic manner, independent yet dependent. This, across many thousands of years and in a far greater amount of peace than seen anywhere else in the world, has the greatest capacity to absorb and assimilate any number of thoughts without violence. Almost, all persecuted religions came to India for protection and integrated peacefully into Indian society. It is only when the religions increased in numbers, problems erupted in the social fabric and never when Sanatanis were in majority. What remains after the branching out of the main trunk is perhaps the “Hinduism” we know today, but it remains hard to define for the best scholars.
The fundamental philosophy of traditional lands is “indifference to differences,” and this is the Indian solution for the world to deal with multiculturalism and its consequent strife. Traditions, in contrast to religions, say, “I am true, but you are not false.” Conversions to another stream and completely giving up the previous faith are alien and violent concepts. India dealt with alien religions when they came to India by “traditionalizing” them and making them tolerant in the process.
There is no problem today for any Indian when Christians and Muslims sing the highest devotional praises to Hindu deities without any fear of losing their own religion. A Sanatani can pray in a mosque or a Church with equal devotion as in a temple without losing his or her belief systems. This was always happening at the social level. However, our thinkers at the political and academic levels, instead of continuing this process, started to make our traditions into religions. The efforts to define Hinduism (or Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, or any such “isms”) as a “religion” are causing more harm to society than ever before. The so-called rise of “Hindu fundamentalism” is a consequence of such a faulty understanding. Fundamentalism can arise only in religions and not in traditions. India is one and home to all, but there is an urgent need for us to understand it better and not accept wholly, without reflecting, whatever the colonials said about us. India is the key to world harmony.
RANDOM MUSINGS 