Skip to main content

Communalism - a brief history


One of my favourite books in my early twenties was Richard Bach’s Illusions.  It begins with the story of a water creature whose fellow beings spent their entire lifetimes clinging to the river bottom “for clinging was their way of life.”  This one creature decided one day that its existence was absurd.  “Clinging, I shall die of boredom,” it said and let itself go.

It went down the stream trusting itself to the current.  The creatures downstream said, “See a miracle!  A creature like ourselves, yet he flies!  See the messiah, come to save us all!”

The creature told them that he was no messiah.  That only they could be their own messiahs.  He asked them to let go and embark upon the adventure that life really is.

But the creatures loved to cling.  Clinging was what they were used to for generations and generations.  Clinging, they made stories about a Messiah who came to deliver them once upon a time. 

Richard Bach’s story ends there.  We may carry on and say that the creatures erected a church (or temple or mosque or whatever) and installed an image of the Messiah, their God.  Then they made scriptures.  Rituals followed soon.  Some people emerged as priests to interpret the scriptures.  Interpretations varied.  The community split into sects.  More churches (or temples or mosques or whatever) were erected.  The shape of the God changed a little from church to church. Maybe the colour changed too.  And then people started fighting for the sake of the shape or the colour of their own God’s image.


PS. The real teaching of the perceived Messiah – that life is an adventure, don’t cling, let go – was never understood.  In spite of the churches (or temples or mosques or whatever), priests, other leaders and their warriors.

Indian Bloggers

Labels:

Comments

  1. Sneh AsnaniJanuary 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM

    So true!! i am also a big fan of Richard Bach's books!!

    http://www.bootsandbutter.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. D.NambiarJanuary 6, 2017 at 9:42 AM

    Reminds me of those lines-- Manushyan mathangale srishtichu, mathangal devangale srishtichu...

    Happy 2017!! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 6, 2017 at 10:08 AM

      Yesudas used to sing that song frequently in the olden days. Very meaningful and true.

      Delete
    2. D.NambiarJanuary 13, 2017 at 6:03 AM

      I swear it is.

      Delete

Post a Comment

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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more