Why I am a Hindu

by Shashi Tharoor

the Hindu religion has undoubtedly been complicit in caste discrimination, and the faith’s identification with caste oppression has long been the principal negative held against it. Is a religion responsible for the worst behaviour of its followers? Perhaps not; but Hindus collectively need to continue doing all that they can to wash the stain of caste discrimination off the face of their faith.

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Speaking for myself, any attempt to reduce my Hinduism—which sits comfortably with the Nehruvian notion of Indianness—to a sectarian notion of Hindutva is a travesty of what Hinduism really is. I too, as a Hindu, can say, when people tell me ‘Garv se kaho ki tum Hindu ho’, that I am proud to be a Hindu, but in what is it that we are to take pride? I take pride in the openness, the diversity, the range, the lofty metaphysical aspirations of the Vedanta; of the various ways in which Hinduism is practised, eclectically, and of its extraordinary acceptance of differences.

My kind of feeing.

My notion of Indianness and Hinduness is very much caught up in what Dr Radhakrishnan so memorably spoke of as a view of life. That view of life has very little room for intolerance, for dogma, for attacks on others because of what they do or do not believe. I am a Hindu, and I am a nationalist, but I am not a Hindu nationalist. My nationalism is unquestioningly, all-embracingly, Indian.

Agree.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

Indianness.

Hinduism is analogous to an open-source operating system on top of which others can build applications to be deployed in the receptive hardware of human brains.

Dr Karan Singh, the former maharaja of Kashmir and Indian politician who is also a superbly readable scholar of Hindu philosophy, identifies five major principles in Hinduism that lend relevance and validity to the faith in today’s world. At the risk of inadequate paraphrase, these are, according to him: the recognition of the unity of all mankind, epitomized in the Rig Vedic phrase ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’, the world is one family; the harmony of all religions, epitomized in that Rig Vedic statement that was Swami Vivekananda’s favourite, ‘ekam sat, vipra bahuda vadanti’; the divinity inherent in each individual, transcending the social stratifications and hierarchies that have all too often distorted this principle in Hindu society; the creative synthesis of practical action and contemplative knowledge, science and religion, meditation and social service, in the faith; and finally, the cosmic vision of Hindu philosophy, incorporating the infinite galaxies of which the Earth is just a tiny speck. In Dr Singh’s own words: ‘such is the grandeur and mystery of the Atman that it can move towards a comprehension of the unutterable mystery of existence. We, who are children of the past and the future, of earth and heaven, of light and darkness, of the human and the divine, at once evanescent and eternal, of the world and beyond it, within time and in eternity, yet have the capacity to comprehend our condition, to rise above our terrestrial limitations, and finally, to transcend ...