Some time last year, I along with my
family attended the wedding of the sister of our electrician, Abid. It was real
fun. A brightly lit venue, hundreds of guests milling about, lots to eat, joy
rides for the children, people shaking a leg to the latest music, the elders
sitting peacefully on decked-up, cushioned furniture . The marriage itself was a
simple ceremony and keeping with tradition, away from all the sights and sounds
in a secluded room. Eventually the couple emerged and we all had food, gave away
our gifts, and went our ways.
It was much later that it struck me:
I hadn’t seen many women in hijabs or even burqas, certainly not the young and
even the middle-aged, only the really old women of the family sticking to the
black cloth. There wasn’t much of religion visible there either: no prayer
beads, no incantations, in fact the Qazi who conducted the marriage was himself
at ease, happily gorging on the sweet-meats, sharing a joke or two with those
around him. The dresses the people wore were of the latest fashion and cut, kids
and adults alike taking selfies and otherwise shooting anything moving with
their cell phone cameras.
Abid laughed when I told him about
my recollection of that night. They were religious, he said, but not to a point
of boredom – his phrase. They learn the religious rituals at home, but they
don’t go to any madarasa. It’s a personal thing, this religion business, he told
me, and that’s at least how his own family explains its transition from
orthodoxy to a live-life-full-and-well attitude.
But isn’t his religion at the centre
of an international conflict of political interests? Yes, he says, but he really
doesn’t know if the problem is with the religion, its interpretation, the
interpreters or the followers. He is sure of one thing, though. People of his
own generation – the current one – are beginning to talk about this whole issue,
of how the world looks at them, interprets their actions, and they’re not happy
with how things are.
Abid is not alone in voicing
unhappiness. There is a quiet but expanding tumult of annoyance among the
Muslims the world over about how the world has been seeing them since 2001:
Brushing all Muslims as violent and Islam as a religion of violence. At no
point of time in the past has there been such a resonance for the call of
reformation. The call is already at shrill at the academic and intellectual
levels. For every subtle message for reform of a Justice Amir Ameer Ali there is
a strident call for denouncing the impracticalities of their religion by a Ayaan
Hirsi Ali. The debate across world media portals between two up-coming, modern
Muslim intellectuals – Qasim Rashid and Irshad Manji -- on whether the reform
should be conservative or aggressive is catching undivided attention. Akeel
Bilgrami, the Indian-origin, reformist-philosopher at Columbia has no less a following than philosopher Charles
Taylor, his Christian contemporary from Canada
Christianity and Judaism have had
their share of the eye-for-an-eye violence with the backing of religious
doctrine. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the warrior Popes, the Christian
justification of slavery, global colonialism in the name of propagating
Christianity; the Cross was the ultimate symbol of Christian violence right up
to modern times like in the USA during the KKK years. Just as the “Purity of
Arms’ code of the Israeli forces are in contrast to Israeli attacks without
bothering about collateral damage. Radical Zionists have in the past relied on
religious doctrines to justify violence against Arabs in Palestine , just as Jewish militia before the birth of
Israel
What churning may be is beginning to
happen in the Muslim world came out centuries ago for the Christians and Jews
whose religions survived the periods of Reformation and Enlightenment to emerge
as a cultural condition for new-age secularism defined both as an absence of
religion as well as non-belief in religion. Suffice to say the spread of
Reformation and Enlightenment in northern Europe coincided with the advent of
the Industrial Revolution whereas in southern Europe, during the same period,
its absence coincided with the orthodoxy in Italy, for instance, following up
the trial of Galileo Galilei for heresy with rejecting the telephone for being
against natural law. Modern times saw both religions witnessing pacificist
movements within and without the sanction of religion – like Martin Luther King
Jr’s non-violence, Baptist politics or the establishment of churches with
non-violence and conscientious objection as foundations of their beliefs.
American philosopher Charles Taylor
in his book, A Secular Age, de-constructs the Christian world’s coming to grips
with the concept of secularism. It was best summed up as recently as on February
5 by US President Barack Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast: “Unless we get
on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that
during the crusades and the inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the
name of Christ. And in our home country, slavery, and Jim Crow, all too often
was justified in the name of Christ….And in today's world when hate groups have
their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in
cyberspace, it can be even harder to combat such
intolerance….”
Obama’s statement is certainly not a
recognition of the premise that these religions no longer have practitioners of
violence. Of course there are. But they are the fringe. Much in contrast to the
Muslim world in which the reformists, however loud they may be, continue to
constitute the fringe. Is that also the case with
Hinduism?
The lament is that I don’t see even
that fringe in India
Long after Jainism, Buddhism and
Sikhism, the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj movements in modern history
conformed to social reform, but preserved the centrality of the Vedas to the
concept of social order. Their names exposed their rigorous doctrines even
though they stood against oppressive traditions like subjugation of women,
untouchability and temporal culture. Between these two movements and the next
one nurtured by Bal Gangadhara Tilak lies the period in which the word
‘Hindutva’ was coined.
The credit goes to Bengali scholar
Chandra Nath Basu who in 1892 published “Hindutva” A review of this book
appeared in the Calcutta Review in July, 1894 and reads: “Babu Chandra Nath’s is
the first work which treats of the Hindu articles of faith. It aims at being an
exposition of the deepest and abstrusest doctrines of Hinduism, not in a spirit
of apology, not in a spirit of bombast, but in a calm and dispassionate spirit.
The work is a difficult one. The Hindus are notorious for the diversity of their
transcendental doctrines, every individual school having a complete set of
doctrines of its own. Babu Chandra Nath has selected the noblest doctrines of
Hinduism, but he has not followed any one of the ancient schools. Yet he does
not aim at establishing a school of doctrine himself. His sole object is to
compare, so far as lies in his power, the leading doctrines of Hindu faith with
those of other of other religions.”
Tilak, whose stature in the Congress
party is as important as Gandhi’s, while espousing the cause of independence
re-introduced devotionalism – through mass celebration of the Ganesh festival –
and adulation – through resurrection of the memory of Shivaji. In no time both
became tools of Hindu aggression. The coinciding of the festival with Muharram
and the portrayal of Shivaji only as the victor against Muslim rulers had
obvious implications. The history of Hindu ‘resurgence’ movements since then and
till the present day is a lesson in the use of religious aggression and even
violence to establish a nationalist polity, a euphemism for rule by the majority
of the majority for the majority.
Yet, the promoters of bullish
Hinduism in India
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