 |
| Mansiya |
Mohan Bhagwat, RSS Supremo,
has decided
that there are no more non-Hindus in India. All Indians are Hindus hereafter.
They are classified into 4: (1) the proud Hindu, (2) the reluctant Hindu, (3)
the unfriendly Hindu, and (4) the ignorant Hindu. In which class does Mansiya
fall?
Mansiya is an
atheist from Kerala with Muslim parents and a Hindu husband. She was forced to
give up her religion, Islam, when her mother was denied a burial in the Muslim
cemetery because Mansiya was a Bharatanatyam dancer. Bharatanatyam is not
Islamic, you see. Mansiya had to choose between Islam and Bharatanatyam and she
chose the latter. Now a Hindu temple in Kerala has banned
her from a 10-day National Festival of Dance and Music because she belongs
to a class which does not exist in Mohan Bhagwat’s new system; she is an Ahindu,
says the temple.
For the
Hindutva Pope, Mansiya is not an Ahindu simply because there are no more
Ahindus in the country. But the Hindu temple in Kerala insists that Mansiya is
an Ahindu. When will these people agree on one thing?
“They have
agreed on one thing, man,” my Marxist friend in the village tells me. “They
have agreed to bring back the old caste system in a new form.”
The old caste
system was created so that one group of people called Brahmins could suppress
and dominate all others, my friend explains. Now Bhagwat is giving us a new
caste system in which the Proud Hindus will suppress and dominate all others.
All Proud Hindus are RSS men. “No, no women, please,” my friend says. “Women
have no place even in front of their gods. Remember the
Sabarimala controversy?”
So, the RSS
men are the new Brahmins? All other Indians are low caste people. Where does
Mansiya with Bharatanatyam as her religion and a Hindu husband whose category
is not known yet [Proud/Reluctant/Unfriendly/Ignorant] fall? Where do you fall,
my dear reader? I suppose they will dump me among Unfriendly Hindus since I
keep questioning the Pope of RSS.
Hinduism is
an alchemist of a religion. It had transmuted the Buddha into an incarnation of
Vishnu though the Buddha was an atheist who questioned the entire Brahminical
system. The Buddha’s fundamental conflict was with the Brahminical oppressions
and exploitations and manoeuvres. He ended up as another Brahminical god! That
is the alchemical power of Bhagwat’s religion.
I am amused
by the comedies provided by this religion. Let me present a few scenes from
that comedy as a conclusion to this post. No comments from me.
The treatment meted out to Mansiya is highly unfortunate and exposes the biases those hitherto remained unexposed.
ReplyDeleteWe are not moving ahead. We as a nation have been taken back by centuries to the time of small minds, smaller fiefdoms, and constricted personal spaces.
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteSemantics never changed the world... and here we have semantics of gargantuan proportion. You can get my stance if you care to read this post, where I finally convey what it is that held me back from full committment... I have always been a square peg!!! YAM xx
Just read your post and I share your suppressed pain at the unpleasant turn of the tide in India. One person is enough to change an entire nation into a chaos. India now has that one person. Please continue to be a square peg. That's better than pretending to be a round one. Many of India's intellectuals have become mere pretenders for the sake of survival.
DeleteWow! Kerala, the ruling classes of all stripes claiming to be the word class, everybody certificated, no one there is freed from the stripe of caste. I used to write about those Kerala caste shenanigans times ago, now watch the show for fun and entertainment. The show continues :)
ReplyDeleteThe show continues. Unfortunately even the leftists have joined the show and have become comics.
Delete