Skip to main content

Religion and Cruelty

Pillar in Vellore Fort commemorating the Revolt
Image from Wikipedia


Today is the anniversary of the Vellore Mutiny which took place on 10 July 1806 when the Indian soldiers (sepoys) revolted against the East India Company for imposing certain rules that the Hindus as well as Muslims did not like. The Hindus were prohibited from wearing religious marks on their foreheads and Muslims were required to shave their beards and trim their moustaches. The turban was replaced with a hat which the soldiers identified with Christianity.

The soldiers would certainly have looked smart and trim with the changes, which indeed was the purpose. But religion, like popular condoms, is extra-sensitive, and tickles too many tissues and issues. Half a century later, a bigger revolt of the same nature would be triggered by very similar reasons in Meerut.

Mindless violence followed the revolt in Vellore. The rebels killed 14 of their own officers and 115 men of their regiment. The revolt was soon suppressed and the rebels were punished ruthlessly.

One of the many punishments meted out to the mutineers was blowing away from guns. The culprit was tied to the mouth of a cannon which was then fired so that the culprit’s body would be shattered to smithereens. The ulterior intention was to preclude religious funeral rites. It was a terrible punishment for religious believers, a punishment that went beyond death.

Religion has been a cause of much brutality throughout history directly or indirectly. While it is understandable that people would not accept the defilement of whatever they hold as sacred, what remains beyond my comprehension is how something like religion which is supposed to make people compassionate actually makes them monstrously cruel.

Of course, the East India Company was not bothered about religion. They wanted power. And servile discipline. The Company was prompt to punish their own officers responsible for the offensive dress regulations. All the senior British officers involved were recalled to England. The Company even refused to pay John Craddock, the Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army, his passage expenditure as he was sent back to his country. The offensive rules were revoked.

But why did the Company have to be so brutal in the punishments given to the Indians? I think it was not merely about making the punishments “exemplary” for potential rebels. I think religion makes people more inhuman than any other entity. Would the punishment have been less severe if religion was not involved?

Arguably religion has been the largest killer in human history; at least, the largest perpetrator of violence and cruelty.

We witness religious violence even today in the country. It takes the forms of lynching, raping, and plain shooting. Some of our leaders are openly supporting such acts of violence too. The otherwise loquacious Prime Minister has not condemned such acts of violence or chastised his ministers who support them. Religion lends legality to such acts of violence!

Religion and violence. Their harmonious coexistence is a contradiction that has baffled me time and again. It is one of the things that makes me detest religion. I know I can do nothing about it: except stay as far away from it as possible.


Comments

  1. pushpendra dwivediJuly 10, 2018 at 10:34 PM

    thoughtful interesting story telling

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anita SabatJuly 11, 2018 at 6:39 AM

    Many lives were lost in our quest to earn freedom.
    Had such brave soldiers not revolted, we wouldn't be enjoying our present status.
    'Jo shaheed huye hain unki zara yaad karo kurbani'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 11, 2018 at 7:08 AM

      I do appreciate the contributions of every freedom fighter. The point is something else.

      Secondly, did violence win independence? The British suppressed every violent revolt too easily. The Vellore Mutiny, for example, did not last beyond 24 hours. It was Gandhi's non-violence that the British could not retaliate.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more