Why I am a Hindu

by Shashi Tharoor

(When I went to a temple, I prayed in an odd combination of English, Sanskrit and my ‘mother tongue’ Malayalam, instinctively convinced that an omniscient God would naturally be multilingual.)

Hindu meditation begins with the words ‘Om tat sat’: Om, the primordial sound that encompasses past, present and future; tat, that which exists; sat, Truth.

As Krishna says in the Gita (4. 7-8): ‘Whenever righteousness declines in the world and unrighteousness arises, I return to earth. For the deliverance of good, the destruction of evil and the re-establishment of dharma, I am reborn from time to time.’

As Kamakshi or Rajarajeshwari, she is the Great Mother.

Prudery appears to have been imported into Hindu social attitudes only in reaction to the Muslim invasions and Victorian colonial rule.

The word dharma is formed from the Sanskrit root ‘dhr’, to hold; dharma is therefore that which holds a person or object and maintains it in existence; it is the law that governs its being.

many modern Hindus have grown up rejecting the discriminatory aspects of the caste system, while still observing caste preferences when it comes to arranging the marriages of their children.

‘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.’

If you thought of God as, for instance, an old man in a white beard looking down benevolently at you from the heavens, listening to your prayers and interceding when He saw fit, then it was difficult to accept that His benevolence stopped short of your well-being despite your prayers, or that He was indifferent to the cruelty and suffering assailing His creatures. If you stopped thinking of God that way, however, but saw God in everyone and everything, in the bad and the good, in the unfair as well as the just, as an impersonal cosmic force that just is—then you can come to terms with the world’s tragedies as well as its joys.

Prajnanam Brahma’ (knowledge is Brahman), ‘Ayam Atma Brahma’ (this atman is Brahman), ‘Tattvamasi’ (that you are), and ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ (I am Brahman)—

Ever since its inception, the Ramakrishna Mission has stayed true to its motto of ‘Atmano mokshartham jagat hitaya cha’, which translated from Sanskrit means ‘For one’s own salvation, and for the good of the world’.

‘Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is the way great spiritual giants are produced’.

In both places, the text uses the same Sanskrit word, ‘antara’ which means both ‘interior to (abiding in)’ and ‘different from’.

Hindutva hypocrisy is also much in evidence on the subject of alcohol, deemed to be un-Hindu and officially banned in the prime minister’s own home state of Gujarat (though, reportedly, widely available, at a price, under the table).

‘Vast slices of our multi-religious, multi-cultural heritage—which includes our literature, architecture, language, food, music, dance, dress and manners are being dishonoured and disowned, leaving us shrunk into a monoculture which is not only not Hinduism, but the antitheses of all that India has stood for, worked for, and safeguarded as a proud and cherished inheritance.’

‘Facts and fiction are so interwoven together as to be inseparable, and this amalgam becomes an imagined history, which may not tell us exactly what happened but does tell us something equally important what people believed had taken place, what they thought their heroic ancestors were capable of, and what ideals inspired them... Thus, this imagined history, mixture of fact and fiction, or sometimes only fiction, becomes symbolically true and tells us of the minds and hearts and purposes of the people...’

As Sen wrote about Hindu militants: ‘Not for them the sophistication of the Upanishads or Gita, or of Brahmagupta or Sankara, or of Kalidasa or Sudraka; they prefer the adoration of Rama’s idol and Hanuman’s image. Their nationalism also ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy—secular as well as religious—achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India—explicitly or implicitly—as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers.’

The Hindutva project seeks to reinvent Hindu identity with a new belief structure and a new vocabulary. They seek to make Hinduism more like the Semitic religions they resent but wish to emulate: to pick fewer sacred books, notably the Gita, and exalt them would produce a less ‘baggy’, tighter version of the faith; to focus on fewer gods, notably Shiva, Rama and Krishna, with Ganesh and various forms of Devi thrown in, would provide a sharper sense of Hindu divinity; to standardize religious practices around specific familiar festivals, rituals and gatherings, would provide a greater sense of community.