Skip to main content

A moral tale from Pakistan


Anita Joshua’s article in The Hindu, ‘A growing intolerance’ (Aug 21, 2012), shows how Pakistan has become a nation of haters.  The Pakistanis hate not only the Hindus (7 million Hindus live in that country – imagine the magnitude of the hatred!) and Christians (who are, according to the article, changing their names to “Shahbaz, Shazia, Nasreen, Tahira, and such like”), but also the Muslims of denominations other than Sunni.  Shias, says Joshua, “are pulled out of buses and summarily executed in broad daylight in various parts of the country.”  Sufi shrines are bombed.
“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated,” says Undershaft, a Shavian character (Major Barbara).  How can there be so many cowards in a country who feel so intimidated as to hate such large numbers of people?
Joshua’s article quotes Harris Gazdar of the Karachi-based Collective for Social Science Research: “Some of these crimes might be committed by groups with religious motivation, but most such crimes are motivated by money.”
One wonders why Pakistan spread so much hatred in India recently, hatred which prompted thousands of people from the Northeast to leave their jobs in diverse states of India and rush back to their hometowns.  Does that have any economic basis? 
This post is about both: religion and money.
Undershaft, who is quoted above, like many other characters of Shaw, is of the opinion that people in general are quite thoughtless, complacent and sentimental.  The real villains in Shaw’s dramas are the audience.  It is their thoughtlessness and sentimentalism that Shaw sought to purge out. 
Religion is one of the most prominent sources of sentiments.  Most people attach too many sentiments to their gods and scriptures.  And, unfortunately, these sentiments are touch-me-nots.  Unlike touch-me-nots, however, these sentiments don’t droop when touched; they metamorphose into guns and bombs.
Undershaft’s family members are complacent, if not sentimental, in their religious and moral outlooks.  One of them, the protagonist Barbara, is ultra-religious.  She is a Major in the Salvation Army.  Her only goal is to save souls.  Undershaft undermines her religion altogether.  (One wonders whether the protagonist is Undershaft rather than Barbara.) In fact, he ‘converts’ his entire family away from their kind of religion, the complacent, holier-than-thou kind of religion. 
“Well,” says Undershaft who is an arms dealer to his soul-harvesting daughter, “you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not.  It doesn’t fit the facts.  Well, scrap it.  Scrap it and get one that does fit.  That is what is wrong with the world at present.  It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.  What’s the result?  In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.  Don’t persist in that folly.  If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow.”
According to Undershaft’s religion, poverty is “the worst of crimes.”   Poverty poisons us morally and physically.  It kills the happiness of society.  Religions and moralities make a virtue of poverty.  And yet the religious people go around amassing wealth because they know too well that without money they won’t be able to harvest souls.  The Salvation Army in Major Barbara accepts donations from a liquor baron and Undershaft, the arms dealer!
It’s not only money that religionists accept from the arms dealer, they accept arms too.  They indulge in violence of the worst kind in the name of religious virtues.  When they feed a starving fellow creature, it is with the bread donated by some liquor baron.  When they tend the sick, it is in the hospitals built with the black money donated by the industrialists.  These are some of the lessons that Barbara learns from her father. 
There is no running away from the evils that life inevitably throws before us.  We’ve got to act, do what we can to resist the evil.  That is the duty of each one of us.  This is what Shaw’s plays suggest.  (How we will do it depends entirely on each one of us – it’s an individual affair.) Hundred years after they were written, today Shaw’s plays still remain relevant.  Because the human species hasn’t grown up a bit (except in producing better machinery, as Undershaft said above) from the time the Darwinian ape shed its tail and stood erect on two legs.  
Pakistan is merely an example.  Most of us will do much better if we “scrap” our religion and get one that “fits the facts.” 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...