On the "Hindu Perspective"

My post about Neeraj Pandey's obnoxiously anti-Muslim movie “Baby” brought an accusation from a reader that I did not have a suitably Hindu “perspective.”

That raises the question, “What is the Hindu perspective?”

One answer lies in the attitudes that Hinduism has promoted throughout its millennial course.

Hinduism began with our ancient rishis compiling the lore of India’s diverse tribes into the Vedas, thus creating a work all could venerate.

That allowed the tribes to stop their endemic conflicts and settle into interdependent castes.

Intense discussions (Upanishads) then drew from the Vedas the concepts that lie at the heart of Hindu belief.

Primarily, the rishis conceived of a universal spirit, Brahman (one who strengthens).

Brahman is manifest as the Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law) holding all Creation in control.

The philosophic implication of that belief is expressed in Vasudeva kutumbhakam (God’s family). It is the basis of India’s unity in diversity and constitutes the fundamental Hindu perspective.

Another important contributor to the Hindu perspective is the confidence that comes from an acute age-old capacity to understand and meet the challenges facing our society.

The Vedas settled warring tribes into castes.

The Upanishads anchored the resulting peace in a profound philosophy of family relationships.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata made that wisdom available to everyman/woman.

When superstition and ignorance blocked understanding of the Dharma the Buddha cleansed it.

When Buddhism lost its reforming zeal, Adi Sankara energized and brought back the old faith,

When caste and invasive Islam caused deep fissures in society, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated the healing that developed into the modern Indian renaissance of Chatrapati Shivaji, Rammohun Roy, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.

That progression makes one thing very clear: Hinduism has never been a blind faith. We have always studied problems, debated issues and come up with insightful and creative solutions.

Our failure to do that in the depths of the Kali Yuga is the primary reason why India fell victim to foreign invaders over the last two millennia.

Now, as we recover from that period, it is critically important that Hindus retrieve their traditional capacity to understand and meet the numerous challenges facing Indian society.

This blog has warned at great length about the greatest danger we face at present, the British campaign, with much help from Indian mass media proxies, to cloud our understanding of issues.

An important part of that campaign has been aimed at poisoning Hindu-Muslim relations.

The creation of Pakistan with its permanent siren call to jihad has, of course, done a great deal of work in that direction already, and if Hindu understanding is to defeat British intentions we must re-examine what actually happened.

To that end, the following section looks at the origin and development of “Islamic terrorism.”

“Islamic Terrorism”

There is no denying that Islam has an enormously violent history, but no more so than Christianity. Since their founding nearly seven centuries apart both religions have been almost ceaselessly at war within their own realms, and, since the 7th Century, with each other.

However, when Christian colonial expansion began in the 15th Century Islam was a generally quiescent faith with an Ottoman Caliph in Istanbul ruling most of what is now called the Middle East, and Persia (encompassing modern Iran, Iraq and a number of adjoining areas), presiding over most of the world's Shia.

The transformation of Islam from that torpor to its current jihadist frenzy is almost entirely due to British policy.

It involved the creation of three States (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel), and the promotion of the violent Muslim Brotherhood as the fount of “Islamic terrorism.”

The Brotherhood had its first mosque paid for by the British in the colonized “Suez Canal Zone” of Egypt, and its initial use was against anyone threatening British assets or allies anywhere in the Middle East.

The Cold War made it a tool against Communists and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made it the source of a “Mujaheddin” army that became Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In that progression, the three British-created States had a key role.

Saudi Arabia came into existence before World War I when the British found in Kuwait the 16-year old scion of the former ruling family of Riyadh and sponsored him to take it back from Ottoman rule. The Saudis brought with them to power the violently extremist Wahhabi sect, long considered “Haram” by mainstream Islam.

What the British did to create Pakistan is fairly well known, so I will not dwell on the details; suffice it to say, they used murderous violence to support the Hindu and Muslim proxies who actually ripped India apart.

Pakistan emerged as a failed State and has remained one with the support of enormous amounts of aid from Saudi Arabia and the West; in return it has become their handy drug dealing rent-a-terrorist supplier, hitting not just India but Afghanistan, Russia, all of Central Asia, Uighur China and South East Asia.

Britain’s record in Palestine – later Israel – is unequaled in treachery.

After getting command of the territory through a League of Nations Mandate, it allowed unrestricted Jewish immigration from Europe, ostensibly to create a "Jewish Homeland." It then sponsored Arab terrorism against Jews. During WW II a “Jewish Brigade” in the British Army shaped the core of the Israeli Self Defence Force that beat back invading Arab armies in 1948.

One thing important to note about this whole scene is that the Arabs, who had not ruled themselves for over 800 years, were manipulated at every turn by Britain and France.

After WW I, when London and Paris created a number of new countries in the former Ottoman territories, they consistently arranged for political instability.

In Sunni majority Syria they gave power to the Shia; in Shia majority Iraq they empowered the Sunni. France created Lebanon to give power to Christians. With British prompting, Saudi Arabia took the territory containing Mecca and Medina, vaulting Wahhabi Islam to unprecedented global influence.

In surveying this history it is important to note that the Muslim populations of the Middle East and Pakistan have been the worst victims of “Islamic terrorism.” They have shed the most blood, lost the most resources and suffered the worst political manipulations.

An Indian Perspective

There can be no “Hindu perspective” in dealing with this situation for several reasons.

First and most important, our entire tradition depends upon each person being free to accept God in any form and worship in any way; those are matters decided by individual karma in which no one else can interfere. Sri Krishna says explicitly in the Bhagavad Gita: “do not disturb the faith of another. No matter to whom a person bows, he bows to me.”

Beyond the question of religion is that of politics, and there too is a strong argument not to strive for a “Hindu perspective.” Indian Muslim perceptions of their co-religionists elsewhere are likely to be far more acute, and it would be silly for Indian policy not to benefit from that.

If we want to help steer the world out of its current vortex of “Islamic terrorism,” it is essential that Muslims be part of the Indian team. They already are in the Ministry of External Affairs, but we need greater cultural heft in what is now purely policy.

It is only when Muslims in Pakistan see Indian Islam as a viable political alternative that we can wash back the blood-dimmed tide that Britain drowned us in; only in such circumstances can Arabs and Jews exchange Salaams and Shaloms in the Middle East and mean it.

The Weight of History

To foresee Hindu-Muslim unity as the foundation of India is hardly visionary. Guru Nanak set off the modern Indian renaissance five centuries ago by declaring “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim;” his first disciples (Sikhs), were drawn from both religions and all castes.

He was, in fact, making a formal statement of what had become part of life. In the centuries since Islam's entry into India Hindu and Muslim kings never stopped fighting each other; but they made liberal use of soldiers of both faiths.

One of the greatest of Indian national heroes, Chatrapati Shivaji, now celebrated as an icon of Hindu resistance to Mughal rule, endowed and prayed at Sufi shrines and employed Muslims at every level in his armies.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the easy interfaith coexistence of those times as Netaji Palkar, one of his commanders who joined the Mughal army, converted to Islam and spent ten years fighting the Afghan tribes under the name of Quli Mohammed Khan; after that he returned without fuss to Hinduism and Shivaji's service.

The Mughals meanwhile were equally tolerant. Akbar’s main general was his former enemy, Man Singh. After Akbar the Mughals were by blood as Indian as alien, and culturally they were entirely indigenous. Aurangzeb, the most intolerant of them, endowed Hindu temples even as he destroyed others.

As British colonial rule spread over India, the resistance was nowhere divided along communal lines.

Tipu Sultan exemplified that unity: all his top commanders were Hindus and his capital took its name from the Vishnu temple of Sri Ranga Patnam which he endowed and prayed at. Tipu was finally defeated and his stronghold taken after a Persian Islamic scholar he had favored opened a door in the outer wall to British forces. Tipu's body was found under several others, all Hindus who had died to prevent the British from taking and desecrating it. The great Sultan remains a living memory: last November a mass rally at Haveri in Karnataka celebrated the 264th Tipu Jayanthi.

The British poisoned that long and liberal tradition. It is up to modern Indians of all faiths to reclaim our national heritage.

Britain and Hinduism 5: The Path of Karma

The story goes that Shiva and Parvati were watching from Kailas one day as a poor old man trudged along a desert road hungry, thirsty and miserable.

“Why don’t you help him?” Parvati asked.

“I can’t” said Shiva. “It is his karma.”

“You are all-mighty God,” said Parvati. “You can change his karma.”

“I can’t” said Shiva. “The Law of Karma is unbreakable and unbendable.”

“Surely, you can change little things” Parvati argued. “What’s to stop you from giving that wretch some food and drink and making him rich?”

“Watch this,” said Shiva. He waved his hand and on the road in front of the man there appeared a table laden with a rich feast and a pot of gold.

Just at that moment the old man thought to himself, “All my life I’ve walked around with my eyes open. Now here’s a straight road with nothing to see. Let me walk with my eyes closed for a change.” So he closed his eyes and walked past the table.

The story has two lessons. One is that our individual karma determines how the world affects us. The second is that to appreciate God’s gifts we must keep the eyes open, and not just to see but to understand.

Individual Karma

Once, when the Buddha was preaching, he noticed that a leper on the side of the audience had quietly, instantly, understood his whole aim and purpose. The Enlightened One pointed out to the audience what had happened and explained that it was the man’s meritorious karma that allowed such comprehension. We normally never think of our karma in such a direct way, but if we do, it is clear that for good and ill, the past is a profound presence in every moment of every life.

If we imagine that our eyes do not see in space but in time, it is possible to envision that reality: each person would appear as the end of a very convoluted flagellum stretching back to Creation/Big Bang. That scene is easier to picture as a single enormous body containing all life – the Purusha of our Creation Myth. Far from being fanciful imagination, that is the exact scientific truth: each of us is a long and complex causal chain with mind-boggling millions of tangles in the backward stretch.

The karmic energy that drives each individual life is thus not entirely a distinctive factor; it is closely connected to everything around it and operates in synchrony.

So how do we “understand” our individual karma?

Jesus summed it up beautifully in “Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not. Neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

To “understand” it is necessary to drop all shows and affectations and be your-self.

That takes the utmost seriousness of spirit without being heavy. It requires quiet time in which to shed your various roles and stresses and breathe free. People often call this meditation, and there is a lot of mumbo jumbo about watching candle flames, breathing incense and so on, but essentially all it involves is relaxing and gently sidelining any stressful thoughts that well up in your mind. The mind achieves first a state of calm and then of joy. That joyful feeling indicates you are in touch with your karmic self – a term that is a synonym for God here, for the one is the face of the other.

In such a state you can ask any question, express whatever aim you have in life, and there will be a creative response. To quote Jesus again, “Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find.”

What you get will be direction. Gandhi in moments of crisis would consult his “still small voice” and be guided fully by it.

Experience at a humbler level, my own, allows me to say that once you find the inner voice you have to hang on no matter how difficult the guidance. If it takes you over rough terrain, consider it necessary. In my case, it involved quitting a career contract at the top level of the United Nations professional cadre and striking out as the editor/publisher of an independent newsletter on the UN, an occupation comparable in status and security to the itinerant vending of vegetables. What made it especially difficult in my case was that the formidable American national security Establishment found the venture suspicious and ensured that it would not be a commercial success. I stuck it out by doing a number of odd jobs, including stringing for The Times of India (under Dileep Padgaonkar), and undertaking a wide variety of freelance assignments. As the difficult years went by, I developed an altogether new perceptual and critical quality in my writing, had an altogether more nuanced appreciation of the United Nations, and began to see shape and structure in the chaotic progression of international affairs. I doubt that if I had remained with the Secretariat any of that would have happened. Things have not got any easier now that I am back in India, for the fuzz here have taken up where the Americans left off, and there is nothing a writer can do in self defence; but I have no doubt about my path even though it could dip me into new miseries at any moment.

That brief personal aside is to underline that what I write about is not all theory. It is also to highlight the significance of the message the ancients telegraphed by putting the hymn to Agni at the opening of the Rig Veda and making the sacred fire Witness to every Hindu ceremonial of sacrifice, marriage, death and remembrance. Agni leaps the cusp of matter and energy. It symbolizes our material and spiritual being. It is God with us and within us, the life force, the karmic energy.

Agni signals also the magical nature of the universe, its unfathomable size, brilliance and energy, every aspect miraculous in our mundane sight.

The fortunate among us learn early that the sense of the magical is the basis of all faith, that it leads the truly blessed to Bhakti, a prayerful devotion that is at one extreme the last resource of the powerless, and at the other, the common secret of the successful, of grace under pressure, of champions in every field.

The mute unexplained strength of Bhakti is karmic energy, and it is the primary driver not only of individual lives but of all human affairs. We can trace its flow from the beginning in India.

The Saptarishis who put the Vedas in order, the anonymous authors of the Upanishads, Valmiki the lowborn brigand who became a poet to celebrate Ramrajya, and Vyasa the grandsire of the Bharata clan, all mustered an awesome karmic force. So did the Buddha in replacing Hinduism when it grew decrepit, and Adi Sankara in reviving the old faith when Buddhism flagged.

From South India, the modern Bhakti movement passed across India in several generations of saint poets during the first third of the last Millennium to help sustain Hinduism against invasion in the north. At a time when Babur was still a youth in Ferghana, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated what became, after the interruption of two empires, the current Indian Renaissance. Raja Rammohun Roy gave it firmer structure in opposing the British in Bengal, and after him, it became countrywide. With Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, the struggles for human rights and national liberation spilled into the rest of the world and led to the great transformations of the 20th Century.

What is remarkable about this entire sequence is that soldiers, bureaucrats and kings had nothing to do with primary initiatives; they came wholly from individuals who saw what had to be done and did it.

All this should jar readers, especially the young inured to the post-colonial expectation that government is the solution to all our problems.

Government played little part in the life of traditional India; it rose in importance because of its colonial role as Chief Thief and Exploiter. Since independence, there is an expectation that government should solve all problems and provide compensation for misfortunes. That attitude, promoted by a pandering, sensationalist Press, is deeply unhealthy. Government intervenes in the life of society at the cost of liberty. The monetary compensation it provides is not care and comfort; it is a cold bureaucratic gesture and index of control.

The result of expecting the government to be a nanny is a learned helplessness in society. Young people today should consider that the quality of daring is the clearest difference between Indians today and those held out as exemplars of nobility and achievement in our sacred literature. The two outstanding examples Hindu children learn of are Prahlada and Eklavya, one a prince, the other a teenager from the low Nishada caste.

Prahlada is a bhakt who resists tyranny so steadfastly that his karmic energy calls up Narasimha, the half-man half-lion incarnation of Vishnu; the Universe itself bends to the power of his faith.

Eklavya’s story is among the most painful and disturbing in the Mahabharata, and it is to the great credit of the epic's numerous editors down the centuries that the story remains in all its unvarnished brutality, an unmistakable indictment. He comes to Drona, teacher of war to the Pandavas, asking to study archery; but the high-caste warrior will not consider it. Undeterred, Eklavya goes off into the forest, builds a clay figure of Drona and practices before it until he is better than Arjuna. Drona, who has promised to make Arjuna the best in the world, deals with the situation by demanding that Eklavya give him the thumb of his right hand as the gift due to a guru. The boy cuts it off without a plea.

The lesson to draw from the story of India as a whole, and those of Prahlada and Eklavya in particular, is that in a world of many inequities the aroused karmic force cannot rest. If Maya does not hide from our eyes what needs to be done, it is imperative to do it. If something is incomprehensible, it is necessary to struggle until it is clear. Every victory contributes to the next one. Failure does not matter, only the effort does: it makes your karma more powerful.

How humanity will fare in the 21st Century now hangs in the balance. We are now at a critical period in the evolution of world order, when the momentum of the European industrial era has weakened almost to a standstill. What will come in its place is going to depend very largely on what we in India do.

Part 6 of this essay will look at the emerging world scene and India's potential role.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Remembering Guru Nanak

Two saint-poets stand at the beginning of the Indian renaissance that is still gathering force. One was Kabir, a Muslim foundling raised by a Hindu, the other was Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion.

Both of them revived the distilled excellence of Indian tradition, freeing it from centuries of meaningless ritualism.

They were born (Kabir 1440 and Nanak 1469) before Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola and Vasco da Gama came ashore in Kerala; but their legacy is very much part of the modern Indian mainstream.

Both were “Bhakti” (devotional) poets, part of a movement rooted in the Gita that was revived in Tamil Nadu during the long, slow decline of Buddhism, first by the Saiva Nayanars (5th-10th Century) and then the Vaisnava Alwars (6 to 9 Century).

Spreading to North India as Islam made inroads into Indian society the vibrant faith of the Bhakti poets sustained Hinduism as it came under foreign assault and, especially in Kabir and Nanak, sought to enfold the invading religion.

Kabir’s impact on India was spiritual and literary; that of Nanak was more: like the ancient Rishis, the Buddha and Sankara; he set the wheel of Dharma moving anew. The rise of the Sikhs as a warrior community sparked that of the Marathas under Chatrapati Shivaji, and together they doomed the Mughal Empire. To say that is not to slight the Mughals, who were by then thoroughly Indian by blood and vision; but they were, barring Akbar, firmly of the country’s past as Nanak and Shivaji betokened its future.

On 10 November, Nanak's  542nd birth anniversary, all Indians owe it to themselves to consider the significance of his life, for he set India as a whole on the path to rediscovering its own lost self.

He preached a rigorously sensible faith scorning caste and Hindu-Muslim divisions, and asserting without philosophical complexity an intense devotion to the loving, universal and indivisible reality of God.

Almost uniquely for his time, serving the poor was always a special concern to Nanak. At 12, when his father tried to initiate him in business and gave him some money to invest, he fed a number of poor people, declaring that “true business.” The gurudwara of Sacha Sauda now stands where he fed the poor.  

He accepted followers from all backgrounds, declining only those who lived ascetic, isolated lives outside society, a rejection that emphatically located spiritual life within the household. His teachings were an antidote to the weaknesses of India’s fractured, caste-ridden society that had made it possible for Arab, Persian and Afghan invaders to make slow inroads into the country, bringing with them the missionary religion of Islam.

Nanak addressed frontally the new split those invasions had caused, beginning his career as a religious leader in 1496 with the dramatic proclamation: "There is no Hindu there is no Mussulman. I follow the path of God who is neither Hindu nor Mussulman."

His own relations with Muslims were always close: at 16, he went to work as storekeeper for the Muslim ruler of Sultanpur, where he befriended the much older Sufi minstrel, Mardana, later his boon companion as he preached across the length and breadth of India. Nanak went as far as Assam in the east, Kabul in the north, Tamil Nadu in the south and beyond Sind to Mecca in the West.

The scope of his travels underlined his desire to reform the whole body of Hinduism rather than to create a new sect. Islam was as much his object of reform as Hinduism: the story is told that in Mecca, when upbraided for sleeping with his feet towards the Kabba, he asked his inquisitor to point them in the direction that God did not exist.

Did Nanak fail in his wider aim of reforming Hinduism and Islam? Does the existence of the Sikhs as a minority religious community mean that the rest of India has remained and will remain unaffected by his distillation of all that is best in our traditions, Hindu and Muslim?

The answer must be categorically in the negative. If there is one overwhelming lesson from the Indian past, it is that history does not move in a straight line. It has subtle detours and byways, triumphs that turn into long term defeat, weaknesses that evolve into strengths, contradictions that resolve themselves in magical new unities.

Nothing exemplifies that as much as the transformation of Nanak’s legacy. When he died in 1518, the Portuguese were the only Europeans in the Indian Ocean and Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was still a youth in Afghanistan. In the time the Mughal Empire rose to its intolerant peak Nanak’s peaceable community changed under nine successive Gurus into a cohesive society of warriors, and that had a direct influence on the upbringing of Shivaji in Maharashtra.

The rise of the Sikhs and Marathas doomed the Mughal Empire, laying India open to the stealthy invasion of the British, who sought to strengthen their tenuous control of the country by setting its people against each other on the basis of religion and caste.

In the aftermath of that era the Granth Sahib, containing the hymns of the ten Gurus and of 22 Hindu and Muslim sages, offers the nonsectarian vision that is at once the best of Indian tradition and the hope of our future. For an India committed to the physical welfare of its people yet sustained by its spiritual core it is an invaluable guide. In moving towards that goal, the following extract from one of Guru Nanak’s hymns should serve as an essential adjunct to Satyameva Jayate:

 “Though man perform lip-devotion, penance, and austerities,
   Dwell at places of pilgrimage, bestow alms and perform acts of devotion,
   What are these without the True One?
   As he sows so shall he reap; human life is lost without virtue.
   O silly one, happiness lies in being a slave to virtue.”