Why I am a Hindu

by Shashi Tharoor

My thanks to Nanditha for allowing me to use her translation of the Nasadiya Sukta (the Creation Hymn).

‘Hinduism’ is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas.

There are simply no binding requirements to being a Hindu. Not even a belief in God.

the 3,500-year-old Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta or Creation Hymn:

The sage Madhvacharya summarized the Charvaka School in his Sarvadarsana Sangraha as arguing that ‘there is no heaven, no final liberation, no soul (which continues to exist) in another world, nor any ceremonies of castes or orders which are productive of future reward’.

That is the Hinduism most Hindus know: a faith that accords respect and even reverence to the sanctified beliefs of others.

This inclination to revere the Divine, whatever its source, is a notable Hindu trait, reflecting a traditional unwillingness to succumb to doctrinal absolutism.

Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other hand, implies that you have a truth but the other person may also have a truth; that you accept his truth and respect it, while expecting him to respect (and accept) your truth in turn. This practice of acceptance of difference—the idea that other ways of being and believing are equally valid—is central to Hinduism and the basis for India’s democratic culture.

The nirguna Brahman was a philosophical concept at the heart of Hinduism, but people needed to worship something they could imagine and visualize. Hence the idea of the saguna Brahman—the Absolute given form, qualities and attributes, also known as Ishvara or Bhagavan. Strictly speaking, Ishvara is the best translation of God in the Christian or Allah in the Muslim sense of these terms, since those faiths have no equivalent for God in the sense of Brahman.

lotus, the favoured flower in Hindu iconography since it remains pure and unsoiled by the mud and dirt from which it emerges.

As the philosopher Raimon Panikkar has explained, in Hindu thought, God without Man is nothing, literally ‘no-thing’; Man without God is just a ‘thing’, without meaning or larger purpose; and the universe without Man or God is ‘any-thing’, sheer unexisting chaos. In Panikkar’s explanation, nothing separates Man from God; ‘there is neither intermediary nor barrier between them’. So Hindu prayers mix the sacred with the profane: a Hindu can ask God for anything.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that Hindu gods are all married; they are depicted with consorts, each of whom, like the gods and goddesses themselves, have multiple aspects and manifestations. It is a striking feature of Hinduism that our gods can be susceptible to desire; they are depicted falling for apsaras and seducing sages’ wives. Lord Shiva even fell for Vishnu in the transformed appearance of the ethereally beautiful Mohini. Prudery appears to have been imported into Hindu social attitudes only in reaction to the Muslim invasions and Victorian colonial rule.

the Thrissur Pooram, an annual festival which involves the largest processional of caparisoned elephants in the world (usually up to a hundred pachyderms decked up to the hilt),

the temples to the nine planets at Kumbakonam,

Vishnu is reincarnated in various avatars, while Shiva simply ‘is’.

The Hindu scriptures are commonly divided into Srutis, Smritis, Itihasas, Puranas, Agamas and Darshanas.

The four Vedas—Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda—are Sruti, having been revealed to, or heard by, the rishis, codified by the sage Veda Vyasa and passed down through generations of disciples.

It is interesting that the Sanksrit word for philosophy is darshana, literally ‘seeing’: the perception of the seer is as important in Hinduism as his intellectual enquiry.

Similarly the 108 Upanishads, which distil the essence of the Vedic philosophy, are also Sruti.

An entire Upanishad (the Mandukya Upanishad) is devoted to the primal sound, Om.

The Smritis are that which is remembered; they are composed by human beings without any specific divine inspiration and passed on to guide ordinary people in the conduct of their lives and the performance of their spiritual and worldly duties. The eighteen Smritis, written down largely over the five centuries between 300 BCE and 200 CE, are often referred to as the Dharmashastras,

Itihasa literally means ‘the way it was

Their principal purpose remains to impart the values of the Dharmashastras in story form.

The six (the Shad Darshanas) include three lesser-known schools of Hindu philosophy: the Nyaya School, which emphasizes logic and debate; the Vaisheshika School, which sees the universe as made up of countless atoms, each with its own distinctive quality; and the Mimamsa School, which emphasizes the role of sacrifice and ritual in seeking salvation (some scholars describe the Vedic religion as Mimamsa Hinduism to distinguish it from the Puranic Hinduism of later years). A fourth, the Yoga School, is better known around the world for its physical practices, but in fact principally focuses on the control of the mind, the breath and the body as the means to attaining the divine samadhi.

is conventional wisdom that the caste system confined all learning to a narrow privileged caste of Brahmins, yet Veda Vyasa, the compiler of the Vedas, was born to a low-caste fisherwoman, and Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, was a low-caste hunter; both are revered today, even by the Brahmins.

To suggest that to be a good Hindu you had to practise caste discrimination is therefore theologically unsound.

philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has explained, ‘Hinduism contains within itself the philosophical resources to sustain an internal critique of reprehensible and unjust social practices that have sometimes emerged in Hindu societies.’

Manu S. Pillai recounts a legend from the same period: ‘The sage Vararuchi, son of Sankaracharya’s preceptor, married a pariah woman, and fathered 12 children with her. One became a Brahmin, another a carpenter, and one was even a Muslim. Yet another sibling, when they all met for a feast, brought to the table food that he enjoyed: the udder of a cow, or beef if you will. Of course the story goes on to transform the meat into a plant that everyone then consumed, but the lesson is simply that though they were different in what they did and what they ate, they were all born of the same parents, and children of the same land.’

despite the ‘C’ in ‘OBC’ referring to ‘classes’, the OBC lists contained castes and sub-castes just above the Dalits in the social pecking order.

Hindu society may have maintained a distasteful practice, but no one can credibly argue that it is intrinsic to the religion.

It is true that a Hindu without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and is subject to many of the same disabilities.

‘a lost man doesn’t care if a rapist gives him direction. A hungry man will take food from a murderer’s hand’.

Advaita Vedanta is only one—and arguably the last—of the six schools known as the ‘six systems’ (Shad Darshanas) of mainstream Hindu philosophy, but it has proved the most enduring. Shankara emphasized the importance of pramanas or methods of reasoning, tempered by anubhava or intuitive experience, which empower the seeker to gain the spiritual knowledge adumbrated by the sacred texts.

Adi Shankara also authored the Vivekachudamani, 581 verses spelling out the qualifications required in a student of Vedanta: to be able to discriminate between the real and the unreal; to be able to maintain a spirit of detachment from this world; to have the capacity to control sensory perceptions; and to feel an intense desire to attain self-realization and moksha. The Vivekachudamani reviews the entire range of Hindu philosophical thought and argument, from the Upanishads to the Bhagavad Gita.

In Verse 7 of his Bhaja Govindam, he laments the fact that children are interested in play and young men in pretty girls, but the old worry since no one is interested in the Absolute.

The supreme truth of Brahman is sat-chit-ananda (truth-consciousness-bliss),

As to Jainism, the acceptance of ahimsa as a basic principle in Hinduism was clearly a response to Mahavira Jaina’s emphasis on this doctrine. The adoption of vegetarianism as a superior form of life by a large number of Hindus especially Brahmins is also a Jain contribution to Hinduism.

His challenge to caste was uncompromising. ‘Loaded with the burden of the Vedas,’ he said dismissively, ‘the Brahmin is a veritable donkey.’

The protection of life, religion and chastity introduced rigidities into Hindu practice: restrictions on entry into temples (to safeguard their treasures from prying eyes), child marriages (to win protection for girls before they were old enough to be abducted by lustful invaders) and even the practice of sati (the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) were all measures of self-defence during this turbulent period of Indian history, that devolved into pernicious social practices wrongly seen as intrinsic to Hinduism rather than as a reactions to assaults upon it.

It also created a conversion ritual called shuddhi, complete with formal certification, for non-Hindus wishing to enter the faith, something which had never existed before and which seemed to have been inspired by Christian practices of baptism.

In 1999, Sree Narayana Guru was voted by the readers of the most popular Malayalam-language magazine the greatest Keralite of the twentieth century.

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), who came of age at the culmination of all the developments I have earlier chronicled, was also heir to the grand, diverse and varied traditions of Hinduism, for he had drunk deeply from the well of a faith whose eclecticism he saw as a strength.

It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world.

This dismissal of Western catechisms enabled Vivekananda to argue robustly that Advaita was science rather than philosophy. Hinduism has always been free of the science versus faith conflicts that have bedevilled other religions.

To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the

religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress.’

Idolatry in India ‘is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths’.

Hinduism was as much a civilization as a set of religious beliefs.

‘Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it.

He argued that it is an insult to preach religion to a man with an empty stomach, and for many in India, he said, God will only appear as a loaf of bread.