Exploring the sacred: old questions in a new language

Dear Devi-kulis,

I wonder what prevents us from communication through media like this blog...we should make regular, skilful use of it to clear our thinking and to come up with new ideas in the course of exposing our reflections to intelligent, respectful friends in a spirit of trust.

So here is another attempt to get you to think about some of the themes of avowed interest to all of us in the learning collective. I came across this piece by Saikat Majumdar in The Hindu recently. It is called Dreaming of a Hindu Left  (not that I personally believe in the Left-Right spectrum; however, many of you do).

Therein, Majumdar writes:

Way back in 2002, Ruth Vanita mourned the lack of a Hindu Left. It’s missing in India, she’d argued, unlike the continuing presence of the Christian Left and the Islamic Left, which often collaborate with the secular Left in different parts of the world. Apart from a very few like Ramchandra Gandhi and Ashish Nandy, she insisted, it is the rare Indian thinker who has tried to integrate religious and leftist thinking.

Vanita’s post-mortem of the Hindu Left is painfully perceptive. The 19th century experienced debates between right and left-wing Hinduism, but the latter eventually died under the corrosive force of what Ashish Nandy has called “Christianising Hinduism.” This was the shame British colonialism successfully conferred on the polytheistic experience of Hinduism, branding idol-worship backward and barbaric. Over time, progressive, English-educated Indians internalised this shame of Hindu identity, and not long after the assassination of Gandhi, whom Vanita calls the last left-wing Hindu, the Hindu Left got lost between the militancy of the Hindu Right and the shame of the secular Left.

In recent times, Madhavi Menon has foregrounded the dialectical relation between Kama and Yoga; the latter is meant to still and negate the former, and yet in a curious way they recreate each other through this opposition. The relation between religious and literary sensibilities in modern India offers a bizarre parallel. Modern literary-intellectual consciousness, primarily secular, has thrown religion under the rug and dimmed its fire. Whatever else they have achieved, by disowning religion, the majority of writers and intellectuals have given it away to forces that have fanned its passion to unholy flames.

Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with religious aesthetic without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religion? Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd has invoked the pitfalls of the Shashi Tharoor way, where a version of liberal Hinduism becomes possible only at the cost of suppression of the netherworld of the caste system that, as Ambedkar said, is a synonym of Hinduism itself.

It would be madness to deny the tremendous aesthetic and emotive power of religion. Literature, and all art, have lived ancient lives enabling — and being enabled by — the beauty, emotion, mystery and terror of religion till secular modernity pried them apart. But even our longing for a moving literary embodiment of religious force cannot rest free of the question: can this force ever appear as enabling to the worst victims of the religion itself?

What do you make of this line of thinking? The questions raised here are particularly significant if you have studied Gandhi and Rabindranath a little, or have meditated on the question of modernity and tradition in the Indian/global context - as in the YIF courses on Indian and/or Global Ecosophy.

Here are some questions to think over:

1. How inevitable is it that an intellectual or spiritual engagement with, say, Advaitic thought (for instance, of Ramana Maharishi, or Tagore in certain moods) implies an endorsement of the worst aspects of the infamous 'caste system'?

2. Is there such a thing as 'Hindu Liberalism'? If so, what does it consist of?

3. Why is it that our intellectual elites since 1947 have accepted such things as a 'liberation theology' in Christianity, or an 'Islamic/Muslim liberalism', but are unwilling to explore the same possibilities within Hinduism, when in fact, properly considered and handled, there might be greater scope for these experiments within a pantheistic faith like Hinduism than monotheistic faiths?

4. Is intolerance a merely religious phenomenon? Or is there also such a thing as 'secular fundamentalism', analogous to 'market fundamentalism' on one side and 'religious fundamentalism' on the other? 

5. The secularisation of the polity has followed a very different trajectory in India, compared to that in the Western world. What is to be learned from this? (Reading Ashis Nandy or someone like that may be helpful here).

6. What does the secularisation of the polity imply about the human community's and species' relationship to ecosystems and the natural world?

7. Is the infamous 'disenchantment' of modernity (Max Weber's term) inevitable?

8. What exactly do we mean by modernity and how remorseless is it? What is its exact relationship to capital and capitalism?

9. Is there a modernity we can happily live with?

10. Last, not least, the most important thing - of the most priceless value - may be the human experience of the Eternal. Is there room for it in modernity - or in any of the religions known to us? 

These are some key questions, some of which have been touched upon in our discussions in Indian or Global Ecosophy. They are worth thinking over again!

Your reflections and questions would be welcome.

Hope you are all having a good year at YIF/MLS at Ashoka...also hope to hear from some of you soon!

Warm wishes,
aseem