On Being A Hindu. Simply.A short introduction to the Hindu religionPart 1: God

Sengamalam

AuthorFirst edition 2014

Published bySanghamitrasangha0mitra@yahoo.co.uk

Foreword

I have found it easy to be a Hindu. You can believe in God without engaging in any form of worship, or you can be indifferent to the existence of a supernatural being as such. You can worship a personal God in the form of an idol, pray to a picture, or simply perceive the presence of the divine as an abstract entity anywhere and everywhere. You can go out and seek a place of worship, or find God within your own heart. There are canonical texts, yes, but you can be a Hindu, even a devout Hindu, without ever getting to know what they really say! Though I have been a Hindu for the half a century since I was born, religion has not been the default marker of my identity, much less so caste, community and other such classifications that are commonly associated with the Hindu religion. I confess I like the traditional way of life, prefer it even. But that is because experience has shown me that many aspects of it are worth preserving and passing on: they are often simple good sense, and are sustainable. The food I eat, most cultural observances at home, many of the stories in my head, and several of the songs in my heart are all received bits and pieces of the milieu in which I was born and live. Despite this deep familiarity, however, I can only describe my relationship with my religion as placid, at best. Like most things familiar, I have taken my religion for granted. If yet I make bold to write this essay, it is because I have felt compelled to by a series of recent events: An occidental scholar plays footsie with bizarre theories in the guise of writing an alternative history of the Hindu religion; she gets away with it because self-styled guardians of the Hindu faith who drag the books publisher to court agree, eventually, for an out-of-court settlement to ban the book in India instead of ensuring a public hearing in court about the Hindu faith and limits to free speech. And the intelligentsia, which is quick to denounce the Hindu right, not only reneges on its responsibility to provide a scholarly critique of the provocative piece of prose that was taken to court, but also shows a singular lack of zeal in facilitating open-minded discourse and debate on the Hindu religion in a manner that is accessible and intelligible to the lay person, in other words someone like me, for whom religion is dynamic a part of everyday life and not an esoteric externality that can be dissected from a distance. Is it ignorance of languages such as Sanskrit and Tamil languages of the literature that Hindu religion has amassed over the duration of its long history which prevents academic commitment to such dialogue from public fora? Or is it an awkward attempt to avoid being seen as conflating religion and philosophy, or conceding secular space to iffy matters? Should the people of a land where the Hindu religion is practiced by millions remain indifferent while their religion is allowed to become a mere contrivance for vested interests to use in any manner that suits them? Doesnt it deserve more? We are talking here about a benign faith that has lived through subjugation, re-inventing itself with remarkable chutzpah, and an active, working philosophy that retains its links to pre-history. In one mythological tale, Vedam or the Vedas as they are known, which, etymologically, is synchronous with Knowledge, appeals to be saved from those who are small-minded those who will misuse Knowledge to deceive. While I can do nothing to take on the architects of my angst, I can share a small slice of the Hindu religion as it is practiced by millions of ordinary people like me. For cradling me in comfort through the years, quietly and unobtrusively working to choreograph my life as I muddle my way through it, I owe my religion this.

God

When I was two or three years old my mother told me a simple story, which I think was my first formal introduction to God. The story went like this: Once upon a time, in a remote village on the edge of a thick forest, there lived a little boy and his mother in a small hut. The boys father had died and the mother had to work very hard to eke out a living. In due course, the boy became old enough to go to school. But he was scared to go as it meant walking several kilometres through a thick forest. The little boy begs his mother to come with him. However, as she had to work every day from early in the morning till late in the evening, she could not take her son to school at all, and so the days pass. One night, the mother tells the little boy the story of Lord Krishna and persuades him to go to school from the next day. All you have to do is to call Krishna if youre frightened and the Lord will come running, she says, reassuring her son, cradling his head on her bosom. Next morning, the little boy wakes up early and gets ready to go to school. He sings a merry song and walks through the forest. He isnt scared at all as daylight streams through the thick canopy, patterning the path in gold and grey. But in the evening, as he makes his way home from school, the forest is full of dark shadows and the little boy is very scared to walk alone. He remembers his mothers advice, and calls out loudly to Krishna. A young cowherd appears and asks, Why did you call me? The little boy is puzzled, and replies that he was actually calling the Lord Krishna because he was scared to walk alone through the dark forest, all the way to his village. The cowherd laughs and says, My name is also Krishna. Ill come with you, and holds out his hand to the boy. The duo walks through the forest, chatting gaily till they reach the forest fringe. Call me whenever you want, and Ill come, the cowherd tells the little boy when dropping him off at the edge of his village. Every evening, on his way home from school, the boy cries out, Krishna! Krishna! and the cowherd unfailingly turns up and keeps the boy company till they reach the village. After several days, the mother, who is very happy to see her son going to school regularly, tells him he is a brave boy for going through the forest all alone. The little boy then tells his mother about his young friend. The mother wants to thank the cowherd who has been accompanying her son all the way through the forest, and comes one evening to meet him at the forest fringe. The moment he sees her, the cowherd disappears. The mother realizes that it was indeed Lord Krishna himself who had been coming to her sons help in the guise of a cowherd.

Not long after she told me this story, my mother gave me the image of a deity to play with. This tiny, upright figure of the Lord Ganesha fashioned intricately in brittle plastic was to be my personal God. I kept him through my childhood, fitting him diagonally into a soft plastic soap dish, also pink, lined with a soft cotton cloth, with a folded silk piece for a head-rest. The soap dish would be stood up vertically on its edge every morning, and laid flat on its side every night. I enjoyed the ritual of waking up God and putting him to sleep. I believed that just as Lord Krishna unfailingly turned up to help the boy, my Ganesha too would always be there for me. A child has several sadnesses and anxieties which elders cannot always appreciate or do not always have the time to attend to: friends and siblings can be mean, parents can fall sick, teachers can be unfair, and a child may have moral dilemmas that cannot be shared. At all such times I would turn to my Ganesha. He became my friend, a repository of my secrets. And, every time, I felt better after sharing with him my fears and sorrows. As I grew into adolescence, my Diary became my confidante and my toy Ganesha became a treasured memory. But God, in the abstract, had already become a very strong source of strength. I have always been sure he will be there for me, whenever I need him.As a child I also learnt, from stories heard and read, that God takes various forms: poor and rich, dwarf and giant, child, woman, man, reptiles, simians, and animals aquatic, land or air-borne or a combination of these. I also learnt to regard as sacred books, tools and implements, in fact all things in Nature both in their anthropomorphized forms and in the abstract. For instance, God, I was told, is present in books, in the words the books contain, and in the knowledge the words contain; God is present too in the ground beneath our feet and hence we ask the earths forgiveness before we step on it every morning; in the trees and plants and hence we do not pluck the leaves wantonly or pinch flowers except when needed; in the water and hence we do not defile her by spitting or urinating in water bodies; in everyone and everything in fact, and so we seek to thank for being allowed to plough a field, sculpt a stone, strike a ball, pound some flour, and also to be pardoned when we hit, kick, bang, pummel or punch a fellow creature. As I grew from adolescence and into college, I understood that not everyone shared my simple notion of God. But my faith was deep-rooted: God could come in any shape; he could take a human form or be available to us as a brittle piece of pink plastic; and no ones God is any lesser than anothers. Like in most Hindu households, we venerated a cornucopia of deities, including those of antithetical religions. Thus, idols in various shapes and sizes, made of materials that ranged from clay to precious metals, framed pictures, and calendar sheets of Muslim and Parsi saints sat choc-a-bloc with images of Jesus Christ and Mother Mary of Velankanni in that corner of our house which was allotted for worship. Decades later, when I was exposed to the poems of the Tamil Bhakti saints (the Azhwars), I understood that Hindu literature of yore is suffused with the same message: Nammazhwar, the pre-eminent saint of the Sri Vaishnava sect, in his composition, Tiruvaimozhi, asserts that God, whom he describes as both that repository of goodness higher than which there is none, and that which cleanses the mired mind and allows the goodness to reveal itself is amenable for conception by each individual in the manner that occurs to them'. No ones God is inferior to anothers, the saint-poet asserts, and each ones God becomes available for discovery as conceived [1.1.1, 1.1.2, and 1.1.5]. The Bhagavad Gita also alludes to the spontaneity of the act of worship by asserting that God becomes available to whoever desires to faithfully worship any particular form, whichever one it is [7.21].As I walk into the sunset of my life, I am grateful to the Hindu ethos that celebrates the utter simplicity of God who inheres in and subsumes everything and everyone. He is present in all things big and small from a mammoth column that holds up a palace to a speck of dust that flies past, as Prahlada tells an incensed Hiranyakashipu who is thirsting for a duel with the invisible God in the popular story of a demon and his divine son. God permeates every particle in every nook, and stands as a symbol of unification assimilating in himself everything, everywhere (Tiruvaimozhi, 1.1.10) says Nammazhwar, making the metaphysical divine so easily available for those who seek it in the material world. He and She and It, and that and this and everything that you can think of, or cannot, is God, proclaims Nammazhwar and marvels at those who doubt: for them, where and what can God, ubiquitous though he is, ever be? For those who believe, he is so accessible. Where is he not? But even he who is so much within our grasp becomes such an enigma to the sceptic!Every street corner temple, every composers signature deity, every potters clay idol, calendar-art and computer graphic is a recognition of the extremely subjective nature of an individuals notion of, need for, and relationship with the divine. To my mind, the Hindu believes that God is one but his forms many. Three hundred and thirty million is only a symbolic figure for the number of gods a Hindu may worship. The religion allows for limitless expansion to accommodate the aspirations and imaginings of the devout. It is not a pagans pantheon. It is the latitude of laissez-faire that recognizes that each individual can have their own notion of the supernatural. And no one persons conception can be thought to be any less than anyone elses. The sun is a favourite motif to explain the Hindu notion of a single, universal God who can yet be so personalised. Just as the Sun is one for all the world, and yet rises at different times in different regions, and is viewed differently by different people so too is God one, though his forms are many.

Forthcoming topics in the series

God and the Seeker of GodThe Hindu EthosHymns and PrayersMyths, Mythologies and Parables