(By Jyotirmaya Sharma) There were those that branded this writer as a secular fundamentalist, believing that using a term they think is pejorative is an alternative to an informed discussion.
Others questioned my knowledge of Indian traditions, including my knowledge of Sanskrit and other Indian languages. In this instance, neither do they know what I know or how much I know, but I too remain in the dark about their legitimacy to question my competence.
There were those who blamed my ‘westernised’ education for my views.
I do not know what schools they went to, nor do I know what schools their children go to, but I hope they get a better deal than their parents have got or I have.
Strangely enough, the name- callers do not provide a single instance of a reasoned argument that rises above sentiments, platitudes and clichés.
Some of those who agreed with me also did so for the wrong reasons. But there are several ways in which the critics and those who praise are joined together in a strange kind of alliance. On the surface, they share common attributes: inability to listen, lack of an inherent capacity to alter a well- entrenched view, and, most of all the democratic civility that ought to be granted to dissenters.
Why is this so? The primary reason for this is that many in India partake of a shared myth. This myth transcends political ideologies or affiliations. It binds people together and produces strange bedfellows. They share in the belief that there is a unified idea of Hinduism. Further, they believe that Hinduism is inherently tolerant, mild, inward- looking, non- threatening and other- worldly. From these assumptions arises another myth: India is secular and democratic because of Hindu society. In this vast sea of presumptions and subsumptions, the truth is lost somewhere in the rhetoric it generates.
Hinduism
It proposes as crude an evolutionary schema as the eventual emergence of butterflies from caterpillars.
These myths are beyond discussion and fall into the realm of faith and piety. While delineating these myths, it is not being remotely suggested that they are not true or that they are patently untrue. What is being suggested is that those who hold on to these myths in a non- discursive fashion rob the very tradition that they purportedly seek so enthusiastically to defend the luxury of self- reflection.
It is this unquestioning attitude that makes Justice Liberhan indict the sangh parivar for demolishing the Babri Masjid on the one hand and argue on the other hand that ‘ Hindu society is a well rooted and established patient society since time immemorial… The basis of secularism is the tradition of acceptance of complex, multilingual, multi- ethnic and multi religious diversity as demonstrated in the historical process of thousands of years’. It is this attitude that provides the foundation for every one of those who repeat the well- worn platitude of Hinduism being a way of life and not a religion. Even if one were to entertain this banality, one would be constrained to ask a simple question: whose way of life? Is it the way of life suggested over the centuries by Brahmins and the upper castes? Is it the way of life proposed by godmen of various hues and colours? Is it the model followed by the RSS, the VHP and the Bajarang Dal?
Religion
This brings us to the question of religion itself. The efforts to define religion in India from the nineteenth century onwards, and, in particular, Hinduism as a religion, have been extensively commented upon by serious historians and scholars. What is pertinent here is that in order to construct as broad as possible a definition of religion, everything other than doctrines and dogmas were subsumed under the rubric of religion.
Influential nineteenth century definitions of religion persuaded us that religion was neither in texts, nor in doctrines nor in dogmas, but in serving the poor, wiping the tears of every hungry and naked individual and promoting fellow- feeling and brotherhood among people.
The problem with this kind of omnibus definition, however, is that it fudges the distinction between religion, and, let us say, an NGO working towards feeding people or alleviating poverty. Brotherhood, fellow- feeling and solidarity is also promoted by football clubs and cricketing associations.
The unintended result of this conflation of all ordinary life with religion has, over the years, resulted in the sanctification and deification of almost every facet of public life in the name of religion and religion- driven cynicism. It also meant an end to any serious theological debates within society, where, on the one hand, the politicians and nationalists appropriated the space vacated by theologians; the nationalist bullies with a bent towards religious politics sought to freeze a single definition of both religion and Hinduism as religion.
But it also generated the parallel process of totalising religious categories within the public realm, largely because of the fuzzy and overarching definition of religion. Both these contradictions still exist and flourish side by side in contemporary India even today.
Finally, the legacy of the nineteenth century in characterising India as spiritual and other- worldly, and the West as this- worldly has had serious repercussions. If one does not take government propaganda seriously, and does not reduce progress and development to mere statistics of growth, or the ascendancy of the stock market, then, there is not much that independent India has to show for original ideas or even economic power. In the absence of anything more tangible to defend, an inflamed nationalist rhetoric replaces reality.
Sentiments
Books, paintings and cinema seem to hurt sentiments more than conspicuous poverty, a moribund public education system, a health service that has collapsed decades ago and, to top it all, rampant corruption. No sentiments get hurt when a corruption scandal breaks out.
Is one to believe that religion sanctions corruption? No sentiment gets hurt when a large number of government schools go without the most minimum of facilities. Is one to believe that despite our lip service to the goddess of learning our sentiments are secure from being hurt despite this sorry state of affairs? Why is it that these sentiments get hurt only when Husain paints Saraswati? One day the Indian people will have to give up their share in partaking of this myth of what they have come to believe religion is, and more specifically, what they have come to believe of Hinduism as religion. Till such time, our own home- grown version of the Taliban will have its sway. Amidst all this cacophony, the ‘ secular fundamentalists’ are anyway a minority, deliberately discredited in democratic India, and ready equally to be eliminated in a Talibanised version of the nation.
The writer teaches politics in University of Hyderabad
Jyotirmaya Sharma