The Poverty Of The Hindu Gods
By Prakash Kona
10 October, 2010
Countercurrents.org
The only Hinduism that I recognize after all these years is the Hinduism of Sri Ramakrishna and Gandhi – not even Vivekananda with the visionary glare of an eagle who can more easily be admired and respected rather than loved and the fact that militant Hinduism has appropriated him making him the ideologue of an authoritarian version of what it means to be a Hindu. Both Gandhi and Ramakrishna saw that spirit is without bounds and truth can come from anywhere. A true believer makes no distinction between his gods and those of others. Both of them understood that the sacred is a being whether it is a stone, a blade of grass or a person.
In Sri Ramakrishna the spirit shows itself in its formlessness; in Gandhi it shows what the sacred means in the world of action. This is not the Hinduism of those who have declared war on minorities – a Hinduism that stagnates in the cesspools of superstition and mental backwardness - and would do anything to preserve the hierarchies of caste, class and gender in India.
There is no sacred for the modern-day Hindu. Only meaningless rituals that have no place for the concerns of ordinary men and women except to take advantage of their anxiety and give them a false sense of security. Bigotry and narrow-mindedness that make people irrational have made the sacred a mockery. It is a religion that has degenerated to the extent that it cannot produce a Gandhi or a Sri Ramakrishna. It can only produce organizations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party and their war-mongering leaders.
This is the commercialized Hinduism of Bollywood with a brand name of its own, a user-friendly, packaged version of religion where the gods actively defend the properties and vested interests of the rich and are meant to fulfill middle class aspirations. In other words, the gods are holding the contradictions of a class and caste-based society and making sure that nothing changes. This is the Hinduism of temples like Thirupathi in South India whose walls are made of gold but whose soul is hard as death. This is the Hinduism of cults like that of Sri Sathya Sai Baba and Asaram Bapu that exploit the ignorance and fear of people and in particular play on the guilt of the upper and middle classes for what they have done to make this country unlivable to the poor.
In the communal award of 1932 the British using their time-honored strategy of “divide and rule” in an already divided and colonized India, granted separate electorates to Muslims, Sikhs and Dalits, previously referred to as “Depressed Classes” with the agreement of Ambedkar, the leader of the “untouchables.” Gandhi rejected the award with the force of body and soul knowing that this would separate Hindus forever and went to the extent of fasting unto death if this award was not dropped.
After all Gandhi was an upper caste Hindu at the end of the day. Gandhi’s sympathy for the so-called lower castes was infinite but he did not suffer rejection in the same way that Ambedkar and his ancestors had endured for centuries. Ambedkar despised Gandhi’s patronage of the lower castes and saw nothing virtuous in Gandhi’s fast-unto-death at Yerawada jail. To Gandhi’s credit he shrewdly recognized that the award would divide Hindus as a society given the terrible oppression of the lower castes which is colonialism of another kind within a colony. Ambedkar never quite forgave Gandhi for this act of coercion. Irrespective of whether it was the right or wrong thing to do in the face of the colonizer, it’s a fact that Hindu society would be no more Hindu society but for Gandhi’s “coercion.” The Dalits would be an alternative discourse to mainstream Hinduism. However, Gandhi lacked the same foresight when it came to the Hindu-Muslim question. He failed to see the partition whose seeds were sown long before India’s independence.
Caste system is many times worse than slavery not just because it has a longer history than slavery. A slave may have been a slave but a slave is touched. Caste system in its maniacal drive to separate the pure from the impure created this system called untouchability where an individual’s labor is used for all practical purposes but who is not worthy of even being touched. Coming from the so-called lower castes Ambedkar knowing the pain of exclusion supported the communal award which he saw as a way of bringing his people out of the nightmare of suppression by upper caste Hindus.
Colonialism hand-in-glove with the upper castes of India did everything it could do to decimate the local gods and goddesses. Each village and region had its own gods in an India that was a society before it was a nation. Hindu nationalism which is a brain-child of colonialism unites people under the banner of sameness – that we’re all Hindus. But, we’re not. We don’t have to be. India flourished as a society of differences under the Buddhist king Ashoka. A rigid caste system and the oppression of women destroyed us as a society. A morally impoverished society made it possible for the incursions that lead to an India ripe for colonialism.
At the global level, with the onset of patriarchy, institutional religion hijacked the sacred which only means that feminine sensibilities were forced to submit to masculine logic and ritual became more important than spirit. In turn sanctity turned into one huge performance for the gallery with no regard to the truth. The job of religion is to monopolize the sacred and exclude others. That’s what Blake meant when he said that brothels are built with bricks of religions and prisons with stones of law.
The temples of India aspire to the kind of institutionalization that the churches in the West came up with. Just as the church appropriated tradition, the upper castes of India “brahminized” tradition – which means appropriated it as being the product of the priestly class. But it is not. This whole idea of Brahmins or the upper castes as the creators of tradition in India or white Europeans as the makers of the modern world is close to the most idiotic thing you could ever imagine. The intelligence, will-power and labors of countless groups and individuals go into the making of a tradition. The rest is only interpretation by those who have the power to do so. The best in tradition belongs to nobody.
We need a people with scientific outlook before we can have modern technology. We cannot have a traditional mind dabbling with gadgets and imagining that he has entered the modern world. Technology is not independent of culture. India is modernizing externally but internally we’re still peasants and that’s what we’re going to be for a long time to come. My point is simple: people using the latest technology don’t necessarily become modern. And modern doesn’t mean that you’re responsible for nobody and nothing. That’s the “modern” of the upper classes. Modern, in my view, is to minimize routine jobs with the help of technology, and offer each individual an opportunity to a creative life. The “modern” of a capitalist system is wage-slavery where money is the sole means to freedom and the “modern” of a feudal system is where hierarchies of gender, age and status – either caste-based or economic – use the backing of tradition to maintain social inequalities.
Bertrand Russell said that "Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to exercise cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case." Rumi, Ramakrishna and Saint Francis believed in a God who was gentle, kind and forgiving. The defenders of institutionalized religion believe in a God who is vindictive, powerful and knows damn well how to wring the necks of those who dare to disagree with him. Most believers unfortunately fall in the second category.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad .
