Skip to main content

Do I hate Hinduism?

 


One of the many allegations I face occasionally, after Mr Modi became the PM, is that I hate Hindus or Hinduism or both. This allegation was hurled at me yet again yesterday on Facebook by a person who worked with me for a couple of months in the same school where I taught in Delhi.

It began with a 4-year-old blog post of mine in which I argued that the RSS view of Onam, which is the same as the North Indian view, will never be acceptable to Malayalis for whom the Asura Maveli, rather than the god-incarnate Vamana, is the real hero for obvious reasons. The above-mentioned friend first questioned my knowledge of Hindu scriptures because he, like most others of the fold, thinks that a non-Hindu does not care to study Hinduism. When he realised that I had perhaps more knowledge about Hindu scriptures than himself, he changed his charge against me. He said I refused to accept his good intention. When I questioned his intention, he changed his allegation again: I lacked “the purity of heart, mind, and body” required for understanding the Hindu scriptures. When I pointed out the crimes committed by acknowledged Hindu leaders of today (yogis and such ‘holy’ people) as a contrast to my alleged impurity of heart, he chose to hit me below the belt like any other mediocre bhakt. He said I was driven by hatred of Hindus and Hinduism.

This is an allegation I hear again and again from Modi bhakts. Where do I begin my answer to this?

Let me start with saying that I have a lot of friends who are Hindus. They know me personally and hence they also know that I don’t hate any particular community or religion. Questioning something is not tantamount to hating it.

Why do I question Hinduism? This, I think, is the crux of the problem. Is it because I hate Hinduism? The answer is plain: I don’t hate Hinduism. You think I hate Hinduism because I question Modi and his kind of politics which makes use of Hinduism as a political tool. What I question is not Hinduism but Modi and his religious politics. Vamana and Rama and Krishna all enter the discourse in the process. Obviously. When Modi the Prime Minister stoops to behave like a primitive temple priest on behalf of a mythical king who belonged to an age that history has no record of, it is not only Modi who enters the critical discourse. Myths are man’s creations and Modi is the grandest myth-maker today and so myths are inextricably interlinked with Modi-discourses.

Secondly, Modi is the Prime Minister of a country that carries a population equal to that of the whole of Europe and the USA put together, a population marked by more cultural, religious, linguistic, and ethnic diversity than the entire Europe and the US. Obviously, whatever Modi does is under the scanner. When he begins to exterminate the diversity in his country for the sake of what he envisages as a nation with uniformity, it becomes a matter of concern for certain people among whom I count myself. So it’s natural that I question Modi’s wrong policies. This questioning is no indication of my hatred of anything, let alone Hinduism.

The plain truth is that I don’t like religions, be it Hinduism or anything. I don’t like them because they necessarily blind people. They make people absolute ignoramuses and nauseating bigots. They start wars in the name of non-existent creatures who are imagined to be sitting smugly somewhere in the outer space watching a few billion simians fighting for the safety and security of non-existent, omnipotent, divine entities. I have wished many times for at least one god to become real enough to come down to this planet and give a few nice kicks in the asses of their most idiotic devotees. Since the omnipotent gods don’t do it, I do it as best as I can.

Hinduism enters my writing more frequently merely because I live in a country whose rulers are Hindus, whose majority are Hindus, whose culture is largely Hindu, whose whole national dialectic has been Hinduised. Can I escape from this national proselytising process? I am like a centipede on a road over which massive road rollers and bulldozers move up and down wearing a particular colour. At any time, my existence can just vanish into the gigantic wheels of that one nationalist colour. Obviously, I question the validity of that colour. Obviously, I assert my right to exist. As what I am, and not what any particular religion wants me to be. If the majority religion that sought to pulverise me was Islam, I would question that too. Or whatever else it was, I would question. Question, not hate.

No, mine is not hatred. It is an assertion of my identity, my personal worth. I am ready to fight for that identity and its worth till the last drop of my blood. Because I love real creatures more than imaginary gods and demons. I love while your gods hate.

Comments

  1. Questioning something is not tantamount to hating it This is what which applies to all.
    .I put some questions and you levelled me hater and bhakt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hope this post makes it clear why i regard you a bhakt. If not, i can't help it. Too much time has already been take up by you, first at fb and then here.

      Delete
  2. I appreciate your thoughts. There is no need to hate any ism (except fascism perhaps). And, to be frank, there is no need to love any religion or faith also if we are true to ourselves and nurture things like piety, truth, justice and benevolence in our hearts. Religions have only contributed to dividing the mankind. We don't need them at all. The biggest trouble created by the present Indian premier is that he has taken self-aggrandizement to such great heights that his followers have converted themselves into Bhakts forfeiting all their wisdom, rationality and conscience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a pity we have to discuss religion this way at all. Religion should remain a personal affair of the heart, as you also said. Instead our present leaders and their vapid bhakts insist on dumping their personal affairs on others. Hence this sort of discourses. So tragic we have ended up with such myopic leaders.

      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

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...

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...