Two weeks ago, I went for a walk with my daughter to the
Birla temple. It is not far from where I live and I have seen it coming up
for years, from a time when I did not actually live in Calcutta but when,
during long or short periods of transit, would look at it from the balcony
of this flat. It was built – this plush Orientalist artefact – by the
family after which it is named: the Birlas, whose forefather moved from
Rajasthan to Calcutta and made his fortune here.
I can’t say I unreservedly enjoy going to this temple;
there are, however, only so many places to walk about in Calcutta. My
daughter, though, does enjoy going there, without reservation, and this
was both her second visit and mine. The first time must have been almost
exactly a year ago. I remember the warm marble floor under our bare feet
from that excursion, the floor that must have absorbed the heat all day to
give it out in the evening. I can also remember my daughter, a year
younger, running across the space before the main shrine. On our second
visit, the marble was warm again beneath our feet.
On this visit, the precincts of the temple were more
crowded than the first time I went there. It was a site of recreation –
men and women, and some children, sat in the large space before the steps
that led to the sanctum in which the arti (evening prayers offered
to the deity) was being performed. They looked content, like people at the
seaside. My daughter, easily frightened, was alarmed at the sound of the
bell and did not want to investigate the arti – the familiar tune,
which one can hear these days even when certain domestic water filters are
used, was being played on a tape – and so we roamed around the premises. A
thought came to me: would these people condone, or at least defend, what
was happening in Gujarat?
The question was probably grossly unfair but impossible to
keep out of my head or leave unasked. In the last ten years, gradually,
the idea of the ‘peace-loving Hindu’ has been turned inside out. The most
innocent-seeming of activities appear to be charged with unarticulated
violence. To walk in the Birla temple was to sense – perhaps to imagine,
but to imagine powerfully – that subterranean violence which Hinduism is
now charged with in its totality: because you cannot isolate one kind of
‘religious’ activity from another.
Perhaps it was the location; perhaps I wouldn’t have felt
this discomfort if these people had gathered at a more ancient, less
ostentatious, place of worship. I have never really cared for the Birla
temple, for its security guards who hover not very far from you once you
enter, its marble floor and enormous chandelier, its expansive air of a
lobby in a four star hotel, its spotless, garish, unimpeachable idols.
This spectacle is part of the production of a version of
Hinduism that has been a steadily developing enterprise in independent
India: Hinduism as a rich man’s, a trader’s, religion. Although aggressive
exhortations are made on behalf of Lord Ram, the principal deities of this
religion are Ganesh and Lakshmi: not Ganesh, the wily and rapid
transcriber of the Mahabharata, but the bringer of good fortune to
the black marketeer; not Lakshmi, the agrarian goddess, but the goddess
who presides over the urban dowry system. As ever, our divinities bless
their devotees indiscriminately.
I have heard Hinduism celebrated for the resilience with
which it, unlike other religions, has embraced capitalism, but perhaps it
has embraced capitalism a little too well. It has left the Hindu with an
importunate will to fit into the modern world, and without a social
conscience.
Hindutva – the BJP’s frequently used ontologically and
culturally assertive term for ‘Hinduness’ – does not so much promote
religion as it does material success for the followers of the Hindu
religion. Success, in the nineties, has been its keyword, but success for
the majority only. It will not barter or share it with anyone else; it
will even pretend no one else exists. If they do, it will see to it that
they cease to. I presume it is not a coincidence that the extreme measures
of ethnic cleansing in Gujarat should be undertaken by those who have been
the most effective proponents of the new Hinduism’s mantra of material
well-being. Many of the sources that fund our new kitsch Hinduism are also
those that fund, or quietly encourage, a government that has a chief
minister who defends and protects murderers, and a prime minister (Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, this piece was written in 2002) who defends and protects
that minister. Then there is the largesse that flows in from overseas,
from businessmen in London, from expatriates in England and America. Does
it only take an arti to keep our gods happy?
Hinduism was never in the past (unlike Christianity) at
the heart of a revolutionary political movement precisely because it was
never an evangelical religion; it had no word, or truth, to spread. The
killings done in its name today are not part of a jihad and nor are they
the residue of a misguided evangelism. They are a brutal and calculated
exercise of power in a moral vacuum: Hinduism as the punitive instrument
of the powerful.
Christianity has often had a quarrel with modernity and
the materialism it denotes in its eyes; Islam has a related quarrel with
the West, modernity’s synecdoche. That is why Islamic militancy, even at
its worst, has the dimensions of an ideology albeit a distorted one.
Hindutva, on the other hand, has no problem with modernity or with the
West and it rushes to embrace the latter’s material benefits. This happy
concordance, in Hindutva, of cultural extremism and materialism makes it
less like a ‘fundamentalist’ religious movement than like fascism.
‘Hinduism’ and the ‘mainstream’, how frequently are these
words juxtaposed and made synonymous with each other by the ruling
political party! ‘Mainstream’: the word that would mean, in a democratic
nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the
newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority and those
who don’t belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and
suggestion, anti-democratic and breakers of the law.
Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream.
Saffron, or ‘gerua’ in the Indian languages: its resonances are
wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, ‘vairagya’,
the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point,
and how, did the colour of renunciation and withdrawal from the world
become the symbol of a militant and materialistic majoritarianism?
Gerua represents not what is brahmanical and conservative but what is
most radical about the Hindu religion. It is the colour not of belonging,
or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while
rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of
Hinduism and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the
passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and
demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.
We perhaps owe the politicisation of the colour saffron,
its recent use in India as a sign of national pride, to the Hindu
revivalist, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). We largely owe to him too (more
than we do to any other single person) the notion of ‘Hinduness’.
Vivekananda is a curious figure and an exemplary one; his story is
inflected with the conflicts of interest, the contradictions, of the
emergence of Hinduism into modernity.
Vivekananda’s real name was Narendranath Datta. He was a
graduate of Calcutta University and had studied European religions
carefully. Like many other middle class, educated men of his generation in
India and elsewhere, he was a seeker after metaphysical and religious
truth, but his search was related to the self-awareness of a colonial
subject. After rejecting the major religions and philosophies he was
surrounded by, Datta finally found his master in a rustic visionary and
saint, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who was a priest in a town north of
Calcutta, who spoke in parables and homilies and claimed to have ‘seen’ Ma
Kali. Ironically, and characteristically of the time, he first heard of
Ramakrishna from an Englishman, Professor WW Hastie. And it was
Ramakrishna who reportedly identified Datta’s spiritual potential and
named him Vivekananda – ‘the one who exults in a clear conscience and in
discernment’.
Ramakrishna was an extraordinary man himself. He had
experimented, literally, in varieties of religious experience. He could
practise, for periods of time, faiths such as Islam and Christianity. His
immersion, during these trance-like periods, in these alternative modes of
worship was so complete that he would begin to internalise the habits and
customs of other religions, to spend, for instance, long spells inside a
mosque and eat beef; he’d even experience a sort of revulsion towards his
beloved deity, Kali. His experiments led him to conclude, influentially,
that all paths led to god (‘jata mat tata path’ – ‘there are as
many paths as there are faiths’).
This, then, was part of Vivekananda’s liberal inheritance
but it was an inheritance quite different from that of the liberal
humanism that had come to exist in Bengal by this time, and which
Vivekananda, as Narendranath Datta, would probably have subscribed to had
he not met Ramakrishna. It was a middle class humanism that decreed
tolerance towards all faiths regardless of whether or not you adhered to
one yourself.
Ramakrishna, on the other hand, located these various
religions not in the society or nation he lived in but in himself. It was
here they coexisted and competed with each other, often annihilating each
other temporarily. History animated him from within.
The liberal humanism of the Bengal Renaissance formed the
basis of the secular Indian state. The experiments of Ramakrishna, in
which different ways of seeing existed in a sort of tension within
oneself, formed the basis of the creativity of the modern Indian. It is no
accident that every significant Indian writer or artist has negotiated
seemingly antithetical world views or languages in his or her work.
But the relationship that the BJP and the new BJP-governed
middle class have with Hinduism is prescriptive, not creative. For years
now, the BJP’s satellites of the far right have imposed a violent if
illegal ban on imagined offences to the Hindu religion, and abused and
harassed artists and writers for their supposed transgressions. This is
not only a failure of secularism; it speaks to us of the imminent death of
Ramakrishna’s inheritance: leaving us unable to negotiate any more the
different ways of seeing in a way that might create rather than destroy.
In 1893, a penurious Vivekananda travelled to Chicago to
attend the Parliament of World Religions. By this time he had abandoned
the white apparel of the brahmachari, the celibate devotee, for the
saffron of the sanyasi, the wandering holy mendicant. As a follower of
Ramakrishna he had graduated from brahmacharya to sanyas, from
celibacy to renunciation, and yet it was now that he and his religion
would embrace the world, not only in a metaphorical and metaphysical but
in a new, global, sense. His address in Chicago, in which he announced a
resurgent Hinduism to the West, made him famous and made, by association
and almost by chance, the colour he was wearing the sign of that
resurgence rather than of liminality.
We might think we see some of the lineaments of today’s
Hindutva in Vivekananda’s revived faith and while it is hard to deny the
lineage, it is important to distinguish between the two.
Certainly, Vivekananda wanted Hinduism to stand on its own
two feet, to become less inward-looking, and exhorted it to become a more
‘manly’ religion. Like other figures of the Bengal Renaissance, he
welcomed western rationalism, science and materialism, and wanted Hinduism
to enter into a transaction with these things. Hindutva continues that
journey westward but the West itself has become a different entity from
what it was in the late 19th century. Vivekananda could not have foreseen
a West that is synonymous, principally, with the benefits of the free
market, which the twice-born Hindutva now rushes towards. Moreover,
Ramakrishna, the rustic seer, was important to Vivekananda as the
vernacular root of Hinduism. He couldn’t have known that the religion he
helped revive would venture so far into the world that it would become, in
essence, a globalised urban faith, in Delhi and Bombay, London and New
York, divorced from the vernacular experience that Ramakrishna
represented. The followers of the postmodern Hindutva still ritually, and
piously, celebrate Vivekananda but, a hundred years after his death, no
longer exult in conscience or discernment.