THE UNEDITED VERSION OF THE LETTER PUBLISHED ON 31 DECEMBER 2023
Ramu Sharma’s “Ayodhya Temple Visit” (THI 30 December 2023) is an incisive piece detailing the politics involved in the Ayodhya temple. Despite all proclamations of secularism, which needs to keep politics away from religion, that never seems to happen. The attempts to become secular seem to generate paradoxical strands. Shashi Tharoor is a prime example of such confusion, where the professed Hindu identity conflicts with secularist ideals of neutrality. All this points to the fundamental problem of whether secularism can be a true solution for dealing with our multiculturalism.
Another important thing to consider is whether all the indigenous phenomena like ‘Hinduism,’ ‘Sikhism,’ ‘Jainism,’ and ‘Buddhism’ are even religions. Balagangadhara Rao and the Ghent scholars show that Indian phenomena are not religions in the first place. Best described as traditions, they stand in contrast to religions in the definitional sense, which are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In such an understanding, Sanatana Dharma, the essence of our nation, is a conglomerate of many Vedic, non-Vedic, and so-called ‘tribal’ traditions.
Traditions differ from religions in the basic sense that the former says, “I am true, but you are not false,” while the latter says, “I am true, and you are false.” The configuration of a religious culture is intolerance, and that of a traditional land is an ‘indifference’ to differences. The fundamental method with which India dealt with its multiculturalism, especially the faiths that came from alien lands, was to ‘traditionalize’ them. These made the alien religions traverse the path from intolerance to indifference, and this was always happening at a social-cultural level.
Secularism was a solution for European Christendom during a specific period of its history, when the various denominations were fighting each other over individual doctrines. Secularism, which achieved the separation of church and state, was not a universal solution for all cultures. The influx of Islam into Europe and the persisting, nay increasing, communal problem in India show the deficiencies in the secularism model. India dealt with its multiculturalism in a far better way than Europe and the rest of the world. We have seen problems and violence, but they are in no way comparable with the fanaticism of the western lands.
As Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy kept insisting, the separation of the “spiritual” from the “profane” does not make the least sense in Indian traditions, where there is “spiritualization” of every aspect of human life, be it music, arts, sciences, literature, or even politics or economics. Calling our traditions religions and then applying secularism is like calling apples oranges and then getting worried why the fertiliser meant for oranges is not working for apples. Serious scholars are not surprised that secularism has in fact increased intolerance, even as most of our academia, politicians, and intellectuals, steeped in western ideals, insist on making our traditions into proper doctrinal religions, thus traversing the path from indifference to intolerance. The solutions for India and the world have always existed within our culture. We only need to rediscover them.
RANDOM MUSINGS 