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.

The EPIC Channel’s Assault on India

Among the shows airing on the new EPIC channel the scurrilous sitcom Yam Kise Se Kam Nahin sitcom  is not exceptional. Other shows are also offensive and some are historically misleading.

One feature length movie, Shaheed Udham Singh, tells of the communist Sikh revolutionary who, in revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, assassinated Michael O’Dwyer in London in 1940. The movie creates the impression that O'Dwyer was the man who commanded the troops at Jallianwalla when he was, in fact, the administrator of the district. (The man who led the troops was Reginald Dyer; he died peacefully in bed.)

The day before the assassination Udham Singh is shown celebrating in a London bar, doing the bhangra holding aloft three mugs of beer. At one point in the movie he derides the value of freedom to the poor of India. (Anyone inclined to agree should look at the ascent of Indian life expectancy after independence.) The show has several dumps on Mahatma Gandhi and one character refers scornfully to “Gandhi-priya” Indians. The producer is Iqbal Dhillon.

Dharmakshetra (26 episodes), is touted as going “beyond” the Mahabharata. The EPIC web site says “Well known characters from the epic” will be “questioned in a divine court where they explain their side of the story.”

In the episode I saw bits of costumed dramatization were interspersed with commentary by the host of the show, a woman whose name I could not decipher in the fast rolling credits. (Probably as a result of my identifying the producer of Yam Kise Se Kam Nahin, the credits on EPIC were – at this writing – either too blurred or rolled too fast to be read. A number had “Produced by” but no name. One had “Produced by R.”)

The show’s producer displays an extremely blunt understanding of Hindu scripture. At one point, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna “I am satya and also asatya,” a stunning statement nowhere in the Gita. The scriptwriter was either carried away by a misreading of the grand eloquence of Chapter 10 of the Gita or is engaging in a traditional missionary distortion.

Krishna is also shown saying that no one knows the mystery of life and death! As I have pointed out previously, the Katha Upanishad is focused entirely on that issue, and Krishna explicitly repeats the teaching in the Bhagavad Gita.

Some of the host’s interactions with "experts" chosen to provide illuminating commentary on the Mahabharata reinforce the impression that she and the producer are completely at sea about Hinduism. For example, she asks at one point, "Krishna could have stopped the war but did not. Why?”

The reply: “He didn’t want to stop the war because it was necessary to destroy adharma.”

Both question and answer are ignorant.

 Her question is based on the incorrect premise that India shares with ancient Greece and the Semitic/Western tradition, the deus ex machina concept of divinity (ie gods capable of magically transforming human narratives). The Indian concept, laid out at some length in the Gita and in common lore, is that Karma (causality) is a binding and universal law inherent in godhood itself.

The answer to her question is also stupendously wrong. The war did not destroy adharma; the Pandavas won but at a huge moral cost. The war augured the Kali Yuga when adharma is dominant.

In a more mundane take on “history,” EPIC provides brief bits on ten warrior heroes. In those I saw, Prithiviraj Chauhan is represented as killing Mohammad Ghori after he is captured and blinded by the invader.

The piece on Tipu Sultan gives the French credit for developing the rocket technology that Indian forces used with devastating effect against the British; in fact, it was entirely unknown in Europe. Bangalore techies built the weapon the British later incorporated into their own army and used against George Washington’s forces (the American national anthem's reference to “the rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air” recalls the vivid impact).

A more respectable contribution to the history genre is “The First Heroes of the R&A Wing.” Eleven episodes will tell of the exploits of Indian intelligence agents. The first episode dealt with the role of Indian intelligence in helping Bangladesh to independence. The credits absolutely whizzed by so I could get no details about who produced it.

The show was strictly factual and made no move to follow the Western track of glamorizing intelligence operations; but the Indian political establishment must keep careful watch to prevent mischief.

Britain has traditionally glamorized intelligence operations as a way of diverting attention from its frequently thuggish and criminal pursuit of elite interests. The James Bond novels and movies, casting a serial killer as a hero, are a case in point.  

The United States offers a cautionary example that India should take to heart. After Churchill launched the Cold War in alliance with the American military-industrial complex in 1946, the nascent CIA (and FBI in cahoots with the mafia), took on the “license to kill” ethic of the British., In effect that subverted American democracy and ushered in an unprecedented era of high level assassinations and human rights abuses. Things have got so bad that hit men and mafiosi have become the stuff of romance and comedy in Hollywood films, neutering the outrage that should be the democratic response to such fascism.

Another of EPIC’s historical contributions was on the excellence of ancient Indian steel production; it noted, very briefly and sotto voce, that the British had killed that technology.

Most of the rest of EPIC programming is either utter nonsense or incredibly boring.

The episode of Daanav Hunters that I saw presented an endlessly repetitive battle against blood-sucking demons with occasional detours, one to ridicule a Tamil fan of superstar Rajnikant and another to present an NRI woman scientist’s view of India as a “strange country.” It should be noted that blood sucking demons and the living dead are not part of Indian folklore the way Vampires and Zombies are in the West (where they reflect the creative artistic response to the realities of the colonial and industrial eras). It remains to be seen if 20 episodes of Daanav Hunters will change that.

If the lugubrious Mughal era costume drama Siyaasat has a plot it escaped me, probably because the love story of crown prince Salim and Meherunissa will drag out over a staggering 42 episodes. 

By way of travelogue a lanky long haired host (whose name I did not catch), walked in slow motion around the overgrown crumbling ruins of Ross Island, where the British once lived in the Andamans. He is set to do the same in 10 other shows on “abandoned places” in India.

Another host, Jaaved Jaffrey, mocked at interminable length the plot of a golden oldie film, Victoria #203. He is set to do the same with a lineup of other popular old Hindi movies. This is the opposite of nostalgia; it is “feel-bad” programming.

All in all, the proof of the pudding so far is unavoidable: EPIC presents in its shoddy line up of shows a view of India that is confused, misleading, and in its political content, indistinguishable from British propaganda.

So who are the people responsible for all this?

In operational charge of EPIC is Mahesh Samat, who quit in 2012 as Managing Director of Disney India. The head of Development is Ravina Kohli, formerly of Yash Raj Television and Sony Entertainment.

Some 20 production houses are reported to be contributing content. They include Balaji Telefilms, Green Light Productions, Bolt Media, A Bellyful of Dreams, Rose Audio, Face Entertainment and Rangrez Media.

It is obviously in these production houses, under the watch of Samat and Kohli that
the offensive content of EPIC is planned and produced. To be fair, much that I have pointed out was probably under the radar of the executives at EPIC.

But there is no denying malign intent. The question is, where is it coming from?

The promoters of the channel are India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra, head of a $16.5 billion industrial conglomerate, and Rohit Khattar, a biggie in the hospitality business who headed Mumbai Mantra Media Ltd, the communications wing of the Mahindra Group.

As none of these figures has any reason for shaping the kind of content EPIC is airing, we have to look elsewhere: to EPIC’s almost sole advertiser, Aquaguard water purifiers.

Aquaguard is a product of Eureka Forbes, which is part of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, the largest single holder of stock in the TATA Group. To fill out the picture: Cyrus Mistry, who took over from Ratan Tata, is a scion of the Shapoorji Pallonji family; his billionaire father (living in Mumbai) has traded his Indian citizenship for that of Ireland.

Both Shapoorji Pallonji Group and TATA have long-standing and strong British ties. I think that somewhere in their nexus of interests is hidden the directive British element of EPIC.

If the programming does not change course as a result of what I have written, we should expect the British propaganda element in EPIC programming to become more overt.

In closing it is necessary to note that with the enormous clout of EPIC’s promoters the channel could be a major force for India’s intellectual decolonization. It is tragic that on its current tack it will only becloud our national awareness and extend the colonial mind-set.

The Reality of the Kali Yuga

The transmigration of individual souls, long derided as the most fantastic of Hindu beliefs, has in the last century been made irrefutable by the scientific discoveries of the matter-energy continuum and the genetic code. When a person dies the indestructible energy pattern of the body floats free and transports the unique soul to a new material form, much as a radio wave carries a human voice to a rightly tuned antenna around the world.

That leaves only one fundamental belief of Hinduism without a publicly argued rational explanation: the long four-stage moral cycle from a Golden Age of virtue to the dank corruption of the Kali Yuga.

This lack of argument should be seen as part of our general cultural amnesia, for our ancients never postulated anything without reason. Indeed, it does not require much analysis to reveal the rationale for the four yuga cycle.

The first phase, when virtue is “firmly founded on four feet,” harks back to the time when humanity was part of Nature and cultural behavior closely reflected the instinctive. Ideas of the “Noble Savage” and “primitive communism” reflect somewhat similar thinking in the West. This was the time when the Saptarishis, seeking peace among the many tribes of India, assembled all their sacred lore into the Vedas, thereby underlining large commonalities among the groups and creating a common object of veneration.

The second phase of reduced but still excellent virtue was the time of the Upanishads, when rishis in their forest abodes agreed on the existence of a Paramatma universally immanent as the Eternal Law (Sanathana Dharma). The idea that a firm and unbreakable chain of karmic causality controlled individual destiny countered the tyranny of the tribe and gradually reduced groups to vague caste identities associated with specialized functions in an interdependent society. 

As hunter gatherer tribes settled into agricultural existence a protective monarch became necessary; the Ramayana captured and promoted the ideal of that new political reality. The change caused a drop in virtue from the previous era because the concentration of political power and land ownership inevitably introduced a considerable measure of negotiation and thus guile into social relations.

The third era, the time of the Mahabharata, saw the lust for power explode into great imperial conflict. Sri Krishna, acknowledged as the only “purnaswaroop” of Vishnu’s incarnations, set right the growing imbalance of the age and, in the Bhagavad Gita, instructed the virtuous how to endure the Kali Yuga to come.

That final age of overweening corruption can be seen rationally as the shadow of material progress in the preceding Yugas.

The specialized division of labor and the freedom of individuals to make moral and economic choices – a combination that Adam Smith in 18th Century England would describe as the essential attributes of a wealth-creating free market – had made India an immensely rich country. Its luxurious products, ranging from spices that preserved food to fine cotton cloth and diamond jewelry, attracted traders from the far ends of Eurasia and further added to the country's fabled wealth.

As imperial power had corrupted older ideals of governance, so wealth and luxury undermined the spiritual value system founded on the teachings of the Upanishads. 

The tamasic qualities of greed, jealousy and anger unmoored “practical” men and women from the fine concern with the truth founded in concern for karmic consequences. As that phenomenon grew it led to a larger closing of the Indian mind, preventing the society from perceiving and responding to internal and external threats. The ineffectiveness of leadership resulted in things falling apart at the slightest challenge; every invader found Indian allies and collaborators.

Interestingly, India did not attract invaders just with its wealth; its religious concepts -- or rather, incomprehension of them -- were key factors stirring them into action.

Within India, the concept of a Universal Spirit was firmly anchored in the concepts of Dharma and Karma, both preventing any individual or group from setting rules on behalf of the Almighty. Those anchors were lost as monotheism made its way from India to the philosophy of Plato. and then into the first Greek translation of the Jewish Bible three centuries before the advent of Jesus.

Within the Jewish fold the loss of constraints on the concept of God had little negative effect because of the belief in Israel’s exclusive covenant with YAHWEH; but as the messianic faiths of Christianity and Islam advanced exclusive claims on God that delegitimized each other and all other religions, the result was unending conflict.

The economic and political fallout was heavy. As Islamic conquests around the Mediterranean cut off Christian Europe’s access to the Indian spice trade it inspired an ongoing search for alternate routes to India. Marco Polo skirted north of Muslim lands to China, and his book describing a return to Europe via India, gave Christopher Columbus the idea that another path to the Orient might lie across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, an old Phoenician legend recounted by Herodotus that Africa was an island led the Portuguese to explore a southward sea route. 

Six years after Columbus made landfall at Hispaniola, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern cape of Africa and a Gujarati pilot took him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. A later Portuguese expedition to India was blown far off course by a storm off the western coast of Africa and landed up in Brazil. Within a matter of decades Europeans moved from belief in a flat earth to circumnavigating the globe.

I have described in an earlier post the horrendous consequences of European expansion for the people of the newly discovered regions. In India the European intrusions were preceded by those of Arabs, Turks and Afghans occurring as it were, in slow motion over the period of a millennium. There was no concerted response even though Guru Nanak went throughout the country seeking to spark a renaissance. It took the mass murder and dire poverty inflicted by the British to bring his efforts to fruition four centuries later.

As the country now looks to a period of sustained economic growth it is well to remember that the path out of the Kali Yuga must be essentially spiritual and that enormous challenges face us. Our political elite is sodden with corruption, our policing authorities are wolves, the intellectual leaders who should be helping India recover its true self are in the pay of our most bitter enemies, and even some of the leaders of our fighting forces, men who should value honor above life itself, have sold their integrity for that most pitiable of rewards, money.

I firmly believe that our exit from the Kali Yuga is unstoppable. The power of the bhakti of the great mass of Indians – certainly the only thing that has kept the country on an even keel through the worst disasters – will ultimately cleanse the elite. However, there is no predicting the pace of change. It will depend entirely on the moral conduct of younger generations. If they are committed above all else to personal integrity and sacrifice in the service of the country India can recover itself swiftly. If not, we could linger for generations in the current bewildered and weakened state at the mercy of brutal foreign forces.

There are many signs those forces are strengthening. The latest is the announcement of an Indian chapter of Al Qaeda, which has from its inception been under British control. I take it as an indication that the British incubus is readying like some real life Voldemort to return from the realm of the undead.

As with the evil Lord of the Harry Potter stories, Britain has a range of allies awaiting the return, from corporate leaders, media houses and poisonous advertising agencies to openly anti national A-list film stars and of course, the corrupt in every field with black money under British management.

Also, a slow coup d'etat seems to be gathering strength from within the civil service that runs everything from elections to our unconstitutional and out of control Intelligence Bureau. The death of a popular BJP politician in a car accident in Delhi, the fall that put another outspoken leader into a coma in Rajasthan, the attempt to tar the most active environmental activists in the country, and now the bid to bring the judiciary under bureaucratic control, are not incidental straws in the wind. .

They should put everyone on alert. In fact, everyone should be prepared for a 9/11 type attack that will justify declaration of an Emergency and suspension of civil rights and procedures.

The Essential Hindu

It is often said, even by Hindus, that Hinduism is "a way of life rather than a religion."

It would be far more accurate to say that Hinduism is a religion that has shaped a way of life.

In a land of great diversity it has provided a unifying framework that encapsulates the highest philosophy as well as the popular culture of folk tales and traditions.

As that unifying drive has been its primary impetus, Hinduism's powerful core beliefs have not been enunciated with clarity.

Essentially, a Hindu is one who believes that God exists as universal Truth (Dharma), manifest in human affairs as the law of causality (Karma).

All else in Hinduism is explanatory.

Our gorgeous philosophy, our wonderfully humanized universe of legend and fable, our colorful customs and rituals, our view that all living things are "God's family;" the whole amazing superstructure of our tolerant and humane culture, has been a flowering of those beliefs.

Evil exists in Hinduism not as the opposite of the Good, but as a falling away from Truth and the values required to express and safeguard it.

Bad karma is rooted in delusion; sin springs from moral confusion.

Good karma is to see the Truth clearly and live by its dictates.

As India marks on the 15th of August its release from a destructive and demeaning period, let us celebrate the core beliefs that have made a people of endless diversity a nation.

God Save Hinduism from Ignorant Clots

The editor of “Hindu Voice” in Mumbai has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi advising him on “Simple ways to Hinduize Bharat.”

His 24 recommendations include:

1. Making “the slogans ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ compulsory for every citizen, to ensure their absolute loyalty to India.”

2. Making “the singing of our National Anthem - Jana Gana Mana, and ending it with ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ - compulsory for all candidates at the time of filing their nomination papers for MPs and MLAs.”

3. Banning “the word ‘minority’.

4. Bringing in an “Endangered Civilization Protection Act to save Sanatan Hindu Dharm.”

5. Giving “Moral Policing Powers to some of our Hindu Organizations.”

And so on, each more idiotic than the other and entirely against the spirit and tradition of the faith he claims to represent.

Recommendation 22 caught my eye as especially ignorant:

“Change the name of our Motherland to 'Bharat' by removing the ambiguity in the Constitution and the word 'India'.”

He seems to think the word India is a British creation.

It is not.

Arrian’s history of Alexander, written at a time when the Anglo-Saxon tribes were prancing around in animal skins, has a chapter on Indica.

India is from the same root as Hindu and Sindh, all derived from an ancient word for river.

Indians/Hindus are the People of the River.

Ignorant Commentary

The weekend issue of Business Standard has a column by one Arundhuti Dasgupta that is outright ignorant.

It is a shaggy-dog take on alliances in the Mahabharata and the Odyssey, ostensibly to give perspective to the current Indian political scene. None of it makes any sense because her basic premises are wrong.  

For instance, she thinks the Pandavas had the upper hand going into the Kurukshetra war.

She does not seem to have noticed that the Mahabharata goes to great lengths to emphasize that the Pandavas are the underdogs. After 14 years of exile in deprivation and hardship they are powerless and willing to settle for just five villages of their usurped empire.

The Kauravas not only had more allies and the larger army, they had the awesome Bhisma as commander-in-chief and the invincible Drona.

Perhaps nothing illustrates Dasgupta’s ignorance of the Mahabharata more than her take on Duryodhana’s elation at getting Krishna’s army while Arjuna gets Krishna as a noncombatant charioteer.

“Without their commander the soldiers were not as effective; and Krishna provided a huge moral, tactical and psychological advantage even though he did not fight on the battlefield.”

That is not the point!

Krishna is God. Duryodhana in his egoism does not see that all the armies in the world cannot help him if Krishna is guiding the other side.

That blinding egoism defeats the Kauravas at every turn as they spiral down to defeat.

Further along in the column, Dasgupta writes: “Strategic relationships have been a critical aspect of the mythology of the subcontinent. Vishnu, for instance, who is part of the trinity and highest in the hierarchy of gods, rides on the Garuda (a mythical bird) and rests on the Ananta Nag (the world serpent). The two were strong animistic deities who were assimilated in the Vedic fold, albeit in positions lower than the main gods. Alliances with the tribal gods helped spread the Vedic way of life. They widened their influence.”

Was there no one at the Business Standard to ask Dasgupta if she has ever read the Vedas? If she had even skimmed through them, the idiocy of her statements would have been clear.

The Vedas are entirely a collection of tribal hymns (Rig), rituals (Yajur), songs (Sama) and magical spells (Atharva). There is no “Vedic fold” or “Vedic way of life,” separate from the tribal.

The Vedas (literally, “Seen”), are the only holy books of Hinduism that are “sruti,” of divine origin and thus eternal. All else, including such revered books as the Bhagavad Gita, is “smriti,” the remembered works of human origin.

Why that difference? Because tribal lore is the “seen” reality of the universe dating to the very beginnings of the human race.

The hymns to Agni (the first deity invoked in the Rig Veda), Surya, Vayu, Indra the wielder of the thunderbolt, Varuna the upholder of law, and Yama the god of death, give voice to the most elemental poetic/religious experiences of homo sapiens.

Why were the Vedas compiled? Most probably to end inter-tribal conflict by creating a common source of veneration and allowing tribes to settle into interdependent castes. There is solid genetic evidence that each caste was once a tribe.

The persons credited by tradition with putting the Vedas in order were the Saptarishis, the seven sages memorialized as the stars that point to the unmoving North Star.

Straddling the Sruti and Smriti canons is the Vedanta. That is the net wisdom of the Vedas extracted by the Upanishads (literally, “discussions”) organized by the rishis (literally, “seers”).

The teachings of the Upanishads shaped the world view and the value-system we call Hinduism. Its key element is belief in a universal immanent Spirit that a devotee can approach in any form.

Upon that basic faith rests the view that all Creation is “God’s Family,” and that life and death are an infinite continuum through which individuals progress according to their observance of the Dharma (Eternal Law/Duty) and Karma (burden of moral causality).

Two wonderful epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata, spread that grand perspective to every village in the country and far afield. Celebrated in music, song and dance, their stories told and retold in religious and secular drama, they shaped the customs, festivals and observances that have given us a common Indian culture and spirit.

The colonial British tried to fit the complexity of Hinduism into the Procrustean view of their own faith, itself the crippled child of a church created by the savage lust of Henry VIII. Not surprisingly, they could not comprehend it, and resorted to a number of self-aggrandizing theories, including the "Aryan invasion" and the Orientalist invention of Hinduism. 

Fortunately, the British are now long gone. Unfortunately, their confusions continue to haunt us through the works of Dasgupta and her ilk.

Romila Thapar and the Hindutvadis

David Davidar, formerly of Penguin India and Penguin Canada, has warmed up the fake culture war between Romila Thapar and the Hindutvadis just in time for the most divisive elections in our history.

Our "elite" English language Press has risen smartly to the bait, and there have been interviews in the TOI and DNA presenting that face-off as a real thing.

It is not real, for both sides of the debate are part of Britain's propaganda war against India.

With the Hindutvadis that is an open and shut case.

The philosophy of "Hindutva" was first enunciated by Damodar Vinayak Savarkar after he had been tortured into submission in a British prison.

It was written while he was still in prison and its political message was a HIndu version of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's "two nation" theory.

With Jinnah and Savarkar as proxies, the British then proceeded to rip Indian society apart. 

Romila Thapar is a more complex case because scholarly credentials hide her involvement in the propagandistic colonial history project.

Perhaps the best way to expose that is to compare her 1966 A History of India with its thoroughly revised and enlarged edition of 2004.

The two versions offer a fascinating contrast in their treatment of Hinduism.

The Pelican Original of 1966 had this to say about Hinduism on page 132 of Chapter 6:

“Brahminism did not remain unchanged through all these centuries, nor was it impervious to the effects of Buddhism and Jainism. Some of the Vedic gods had quietly passed into oblivion and some were being reborn as new gods with additional attributes. This was the time when the Brahminical religion assumed features which today are recognized as Hinduism. To call it Hinduism at this stage is perhaps an anachronism, since the term was given currency by the Arabs in the eight century A.D, when referring to those who followed the prevailing religion of India, the worship of Shiva and Vishnu. But for the sake of convenience the religion may be described as Hinduism from this point onwards.”

In the much expanded 2004 edition, the topic of Hinduism was moved up to page 3 of Chapter 1, and Thapar expressed a completely different view.

“In the course of investigating what came to be called Hinduism, together with various aspects of its belief, ritual and custom, many [British Orientalists] were baffled by a religion that was altogether different from their own. It was not monotheistic, there was no historical founder, or single sacred text, or dogma or ecclesiastical organization — and it was closely tied to caste. There was therefore an overriding need to fit it into the known moulds of familiar religions, so as to make it more accessible. Some scholars have suggested that Hinduism as it is formulated and perceived today, very differently from earlier times, was largely born out of this reformulation.”

The British “reformulation,” Thapar explained, “influenced the emerging Indian middle class in its understanding of its own past. … It was believed that the Indian pattern of life was so concerned with metaphysics and the subtleties of religious belief that little attention was given to the more tangible aspects.”

That was “the genesis of the idea of the spiritual east,” a theme “firmly endorsed by a section of Indian opinion during the last hundred years” because it “was a consolation to the Indian intelligentsia for its perceived inability to counter the technical superiority of the West …. At the height of anti-colonial nationalism it acted as a salve for having been made a colony of Britain.”

Thapar did not explain her dramatic shift in assessing the nature and history of Hinduism, but it is not difficult to see that in the second version she has clearly bought into the colonial theme that Hinduism does not exist, that the billion of us who call ourselves Hindu are just plain confused.

However, the explanation is obvious and can be summed up simply: 1984.

Obviously, she has been hurt and traumatized by the events of that terrible year, and the vociferous attacks of Hindutvadis on her various writings have pushed her over the edge.

It is a pity that she did not put what happened in 1984 in the larger context of Britain's merciless manipulation of the Sikhs.

But as for the rest of us, we should look on the Romila Thapar versus the Hindutvadis as a specious culture war entirely of British creation, presented at a critical time in our history by one of their most effective proxies in India, David Davidar.

Britain and Hinduism 9: Ending the Kali Yuga

Bhima traveling alone through a forest finds the path blocked by a large monkey who claims to be too old and weak to move out of the way. The strongest of the Pandavas tries to lift his tail and pass by, but cannot move it a hair. Realizing someone of awesome power is before him, Bhima falls to his knees and asks the monkey who he is. It is Hanuman, the son of Vayu from a previous age, and thus Bhima’s older brother. In telling when he is from, Hanuman sums up briefly a uniquely Hindu aspect of Time: it has a moral dimension reflected in the quality of human virtue that changes in a cycle of four Yugas (eons).

In the first, the Krita (Perfect) Yuga, Virtue is whole and stands firmly on four legs. Life is effortless and the Vedas are an integral whole open to all eyes. In the Treta Yuga Virtue diminishes by a quarter but is still stable on three legs. Various diseases, lust, and natural calamities afflict people, and they undertake sacrifices and penances to avoid them. The Ramayana is set in the latter part of this period.

In the Dwapara Yuga half of Virtue remains intact, maintaining an unsteady balance on two legs. Dishonesty is a growing factor in human relationships and meritorious achievement requires great effort. The Vedas are in four parts and unknown to many. The war at Kurukshetra occurs at the end of this period and only Krishna’s presence on earth prevents the immediate onset of the degenerate Kali Yuga, when only a quarter of Virtue survives, standing unsteadily on a single leg. Evil is rampant in this final phase. Most people no longer remember the Vedas or know their own spiritual nature; only one in four is honest.

We are now in the Kali Yuga that began with the death of Krishna 16 years after the end of the Kurukshetra war. Gandhi’s political advent in South Africa a century ago marked the beginning of a period of transition, and the hugely positive changes since then signal that we are moving towards a new age of virtue. The Brahma Kumaris say we are now in a time of “Confluence,” with potential for revolutionary positive change.

How rapidly we realize that potential depends on each of us becoming aware that the corruptions of the Kali Yuga have blinded us to the nature of the world and of our own true selves. This whole series of posts has aimed to remedy that situation and in this one I look specifically at the origins and significance of Hinduism.

Who We Are

In September 2009, Nature published the report of a genetic mapping project by an Indo-American team of scientists that had studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. As one of the senior researchers told the Press, the team found evidence that “castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society,” and that the proportion of shared genes in the population ranged from 49 to 80 percent.

That evidence blew out of the water the ludicrous colonial-era theory that the caste system was a means of preserving the racial purity of White blond protoEuropean “Aryans” from the Caucasus, the “original Brahmins” the British credited with composing the Vedas while driving their chariots and cattle up and down the high Himalayan passes.

The genetic evidence pointed to the emergence of the caste system from an accommodation among indigenous tribes.

How did that happen? 

Most probably, it was the result of a successful effort to end the conflicts endemic among the many tribes of India by compiling their sacred lore into a work all could revere, the Vedas. Supporting that theory is the fact that the Vedas are the only Hindu texts considered divine in origin (shruti); all the rest are remembered works of human composition (smriti). The distinction makes sense only if the former contains the ageless Seen reality (veda) of the tribes. It is likely the compilation was done by the Saptarishis, the seven sages memorialized by ancient tradition as the stars pointing to Polaris.

Modern readers usually find Vedic hymns repetitive and often mundane, but to their original tribal audiences they must have been powerfully evocative of their commonalities of worship and ritual. The hymns celebrated Agni, sacred to all as ruler of altar and the hearth, cleanser, protector, receiver of sacrifices and messenger to the gods. They praised all things the tribes held in awe, the Sun and the Moon, Wind Thunder and Storm, the starry wheel of heaven and the lovely dawn. They propitiated the gods of the hunt and husbandry, weapons of war and the tools that built altar and home. They expressed wonder at the eternal mysteries of the spirit-world that lay beneath the great cycles of seasonal growth, death and rebirth. In all things the Vedas made obvious the deep kinship of the tribes, ending conflicts and allowing them to settle into a system of interdependent castes.

The next step in the evolution of Indian society involved discussions (Upanishads) among the country’s best and brightest that led, over time, to a coherent philosophy, a universal worldview and a humane value system. The Upanishads postulated an indefinably abstract and undifferentiated Brahman as the basic reality of the universe. From its manifestation as the Universal Soul (Paramatma) there emerged the endless diversity of Creation, governed by a Law (Dharma/Rita/Satya) inherent in every particle and pervading the cosmic reaches of Space and Time. A flux of endless delusion (Maya) cloaked the unity of Vasudev Kutumbakham, God’s family.

The Upanishads asserted that individual souls are of the same divine substance as the Universal Soul and thus immortal; but blinded by Maya, they are unaware of their true nature and must learn of it through long experience of repeated material reincarnations. The most enlightened souls escape the cycle of rebirths by merging with the Universal Soul (moksha); all others continue to be reborn until the cataclysmic end of all things (pralaya) at the conclusion of a Mahayuga.

In this dispensation the highest attribute of virtue/wisdom is the dispassionate observance of personal dharma; death is of little consequence as it only opens the door to a new life; and possessions are a hindrance to those seeking a clear view of the realities governing their soul’s progress.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata

The spare and noble philosophy of the Upanishads entered the everyday life of India through the Ramayana and Mahabharata, composed millennia apart and entirely different in significance and spirit, but unified in their concepts of what is of value in life and what is without worth. Celebrated by every generation in sacred legend, drama, dance and song, the two epics laid the foundations of a unified Indian culture and consolidated it as a civilization. They also marked key stages in the political evolution of Indian society.

The Ramayana records and extols the step up from caste-federation to unitary State. It is important to note how differently this change occurred in Europe and India. In Europe, unity came through conquest and oppression. India accomplished the transition peacefully because the Kshatriyas already had the established role of ensuring security, and it was necessary only to define the qualities and responsibilities of the king.

The Ramayana takes that in hand. Rama is not a military dictator. In the devotion to his father, love for Sita, loyalty to Laxman, and generosity towards Kaikei, he is the archetype of the good family man. He goes to war not to extend his kingdom or for profit but to regain his wife. In misfortune, he is graceful, in victory, modest. Rama is the God-king next door, neighborly, considerate and kind. Those qualities make him accessible to all Indians regardless of caste or social status, a point the Ramayana is at pains to underline. The gods applaud Rama sitting comfortably on the ground with the lowborn forest-dweller Guha. The Prince of Ayodhya eats the fruit a poor woman offers him after biting into it to make sure it is sweet; Lakshman protests but Rama silences him; she acts out of love. That unforced love of the ruler is the basis for Ramrajya, the ideal State.

The Ramayana also makes clear the iron commitment necessary from the ruler. Rama goes willingly into exile to uphold a pledge his father made; he sends away his beloved wife because of murmurs among the citizens of Ayodhya that Sita’s pregnancy soon after returning from Ravana’s clutches implied a violation that made her unfit to be queen. The lesson in both cases is the same: the integrity of the ruler is the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of the State; it must be beyond moral reproach. The personal happiness of the king cannot take precedence over that fundamental consideration.

Ravana serves as a negative foil to Rama in every way. Although a man of great accomplishments –thus the ten heads – he is arrogant, vicious, tyrannical, feared, and endlessly self-indulgent. Ramarajya is a time of golden contentment to the people of Ayodhya; Ravana’s rule brings disaster and ruin to Lanka.

The Mahabharata tells of a much later stage in India’s national life, when the ideals of Ramrajya are long gone and corrupt power-hungry men have control of the State. The whole work is a guide to survival in dark and confusing times. Ugrasrava, the narrator of the epic, lauds its high worth. “As the sun dispels the darkness, so does the Bharata by its discourses on religion, profit, pleasure and final release, dispel the ignorance of men. As the full moon by its mild light expands the buds of the water lily, so this Purana broadens the human intellect. With the lamp of history it illumines the whole mansion of nature.” The Mahabharata is the “fifth Veda” he says, outweighing the others because it makes their mysteries explicit.

Some 3000 years after its composition, the epic remains a sophisticated and surprisingly relevant work of political, philosophical and moral guidance. Consider, for example, the hidden significance of the origin and nature of the Pandavas and Kauravas.

Although always referred to as “cousins,” the two sets of siblings, are unrelated by blood. Pandu cannot father children because he is cursed with instant death if he has sex; his five sons are the progeny of different gods invoked by his two wives. Yudhisthira the firstborn is the son of Dharma. Maruti the Wind begets Bhima of immense strength. Indra king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt fathers Arjuna, the perfect warrior. The twin Aswins, skilled in the arts and husbandry that support life, are the parents of Nakula and Sahadeva.

Together, the sons of Pandu represent the strengths essential to any civilization: Law, Power, the capacity for war and the skills for peace. Despite their disparate parentage the Pandavas share an indissoluble brotherhood, and Vyasa clearly intends the brothers to exemplify India's unity in diversity; it requires no stretch of the imagination to see in Draupadi the beautiful and fruitful land that all of them love.

The Kauravas are also not the natural sons of blind Dhritrashtra. His wife Gandhari (from Gandhara, modern Afghanistan), is childless and becomes pregnant only through the magical intercession of Vyasa. Throughout the Mahabharata Vyasa’s appearance signals didactic intent, and in this instance it underlines a theme that drives the narrative to the end. Gandhari’s pregnancy is abnormally prolonged, and upon hearing of the birth of Pandu’s first son she loses patience and induces birth. What emerges from her womb is not a baby but a horrible ball of flesh, hard as iron. Vyasa returns to remonstrate with her. If she had not lost patience, her son would have been of unrivaled splendor. However, all is not lost: he cuts up the ball of flesh into a hundred and one pieces, putting each in a separate jar. When the test-tube babies emerge, all boys except for the youngest, they seem normal, even splendid; but the Kauravas are inescapably demonic.

As the Pandavas exemplify the attributes of a healthy society, the Kauravas illustrate the monstrous consequences of incontinence. Dhrithrashtra’s congenital blindness and Gandhari’s decision on her wedding day to assume a permanent blindfold, establish a theme Vyasa returns to repeatedly in his depiction of the Kauravas: Evil is rooted in the incapacity or willful refusal to see reality. Every fateful choice as they spiral down to doom illustrates the delusive power of egotism, greed, anger, hate and envy. No Satan plots their downfall, for Hinduism has no such entity; what seals their fate is a failure of compassion, the inability to see the kinship of all things underlying the world’s vast differentiation; without that spiritual cognition, they lack understanding and misjudge reality at every turn.

Such hidden teachings appear throughout the narrative and have generally gone unremarked because attention has focused overwhelmingly on the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra. The spiritual teachings of the Gita have also overshadowed the advice on matters relevant to social and political governance in the Book of Peace (the longest section of the epic) and Book of Instruction, which follow immediately after the profound lamentation of the Stree Parva (Book of Women) at the end of the war.

It is important to note that while Vyasa emphasizes Kshatriya dharma in Krishna's counsel to Arjuna and the whole narrative hinges on a great war, the epic is solidly against the chest-thumping warrior code.

Understanding the Caste System

After the end of the Kurukshetra war Bhisma, the revered granduncle of the Bharata clan, lies impaled on a bed of arrows for an excruciating 58 days, waiting for the most auspicious time to die. It is the second dramatic freeze frame in the narrative. As the receding roar of armies underlined the urgency of Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on waging the battle of life, so Bhisma’s agony gives poignance and edge to the practical guidance he offers to Yudhisthira, the new Emperor. 

An issue he addresses at length and with the highest authority is the nature and significance of the caste system. Quoting no less a personage than Shiva, Bhisma says: “Brahma himself said during the process of creation” that the “distribution of human beings into the four orders dependent on birth is only for purposes of classification. Neither birth, nor purifying rites, nor learning, nor offspring, can be regarded as grounds for conferring the Twice Born status. Verily, conduct is the only ground.” Any “pious person “imbued with knowledge and science, purified from all dross, and fully conversant with the Vedas,” should be considered a Brahmin.” It is “by such acts that a Sudra may become a Brahmin refined of all stains and possessed of Vedic lore. … A Sudra who has purified his soul by pure deeds and subjugated all his senses deserves to be waited upon and served with reverence.” Contrarily, a Brahmin who does not conduct himself like one deserves no respect.

That was not just ideal theory; it was the lived reality of caste through most of Indian history, attested to by British observers before the great uprising of 1857 gave them a political incentive to lie. Monstuart Elphinstone’s 1841 History of India, written after many years in the country, noted that: “In the main, the Brahmin rules of life have been greatly relaxed. The castes below the Kshatriyas have now become extremely mixed and extremely numerous; a servile caste no longer exists. A man who loses caste is excluded both from all the privileges of citizenship and all the amenities of private life. As a rule, however, the recovery of caste by expiation is an easy matter.”

The report of the first census of British India in 1871 said of the Brahmin caste: “there are few trades in which some of its members are not engaged. So minute and endless are the ramifications of caste, that, when Mr. Prinsep took a census of Benares in 1834, no less than 107 distinct castes of Brahmins were found in that one city.” That was nothing new: Bhisma noted a long list of occupations that disqualified a Brahmin from officiating at a religious ceremony.

How did we get the idea that caste preserved pure bloodlines and was an iron system of class oppression? We got it from European theorists who judged Indian realities by their own historical experience of societies formed by layers of defeated tribes. The conclusion that conquering Brahmins imposed the caste system on the diversity of India is patently absurd if we consider that they are about 4 per cent of the population.

Caste conflicts as they now exist are a legacy of the 1871 census which, for the first time, enumerated  groups and presented the system's fluid realities in a Procrustean hierarchy. It set off a great and rancorous competition among groups that was without precedent because it was never before necessary: throughout Indian history, evident in such illustrious examples as Chandragupta Maurya and Shivaji, caste status was open to radical adjustment.

The hierarchical British ordering of castes was deliberately malignant; as Dharampal noted, two-thirds of royal families in pre-colonial India belonged to groups now classified as “Other Backward Castes.” That was nothing new; the Mahabharata mentions Eklavya not only as the low caste boy brutally treated by Drona but also as the Nishada king who led an army at Kurukshetra.

From the British perspective, downgrading the status of influential castes was effective psychological warfare and sound political strategy. It set off bitter inter-caste altercations at every level as groups jockeyed for status; and the issues were petty beyond belief because there was nothing substantive involved. The murderous quarrels we read about today over such things as an upturned mustache or a turban tied too high were as unknown in precolonial India as the Hindu-Muslim “riots” the British engineered.

The Indian Intellectual Tradition

The compilation of the Vedas by the Saptarishis, the formulation of the philosophy of the Upanishads, the didactic use of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, all indicate the extraordinary capacity of Indian society to understand and meet existential challenges. The intellectualism evident in the formation of Indian civilization came to rich fruition in the millennia that followed.

Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), perhaps the most articulate voice of the Indian Renaissance in the early 20th Century, noted in an essay in Arya the “strong intellectuality” of Indian tradition. It was “at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement … a seeking for the inner law and truth of things … of each human or cosmic activity.” Ancient India had assembled a “colossal literature” on “philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences.”

India’s curiosity had “embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing; all the 64 accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind.” Even on “such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants,” each topic “had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature.” Such intellectual labour had “no parallel before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science,” Aurobindo noted; all “that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished … with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf.”

He did not note two attendant marvels.

One was that when travel was slow, difficult and dangerous, India sustained across its vast distances an intellectual community that shared works, debated differences, and agreed on conceptual outcomes. Benares was the hub of that community; the Buddha came there from the foothills of the Himalayas, Adi Sankara traveled up from Kerala, Guru Nanak came from the Punjab and Raja Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda from Bengal. These are only some of the most prominent of the millions of Indian travelers who brought to life the rich cultural and intellectual life of a civilization all recognized as a unity spreading from the Himalayas to the seas lapping the peninsular spread of the country east, west and south. The role of masses of anonymous itinerants in shaping Indian society and carrying its impact to the rest of the world has been little noted. They took our cosmology, the Zero and differential calculus to China, Persia and Arabia (from where they spread to Europe). The Tamil gopuram traveled across the Himalayas to become the Pagoda of East Asia. The unarmed combat taught in the Kalaris of Kerala went with the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma to the Shaolin monastery in China, and the manual he wrote there disseminated the art throughout the region. 

The other marvel, unremarked not only by Aurobindo but by everyone I have ever read, is that Indian society and civilization were possible only because of the quality of the general mass of our people. Their reverence for the divine, their respect for learning and their generosity of spirit are the bedrock on which our leaders built. Those qualities allowed the Saptarishis to unify the tribes by compiling the Vedas; they assured the impact of the epic compositions of Valmiki and Vyasa; without them, Gandhi could not have succeeded. The fact that Indians for many millennia have accepted Rama as the ideal man and Krishna as the exemplar of wise leadership speaks to the quality of the devotee as much as to the objects of worship. The “Indian Dream,” even at the nadir of the Kali Yuga, has always been of God, and that has shaped our intellectual constructs, our expectations from life, our destiny.

The Nature of Reality

In the heyday of their arrogant power Europeans were given to dismissing Indians as fatalistic losers and contrasting our backwardness with their own world-beating "progress." Those attitudes persist even after the poisonous nature of that progress is widely known and hundreds of millions of people have paid with their lives in imperial contests for its temporary fruits. Many Indians continue to think that our traditions are a drag on progress, that bhakti is superstition, and that Western Science is a superior form of knowledge. There is an element of truth in those assessments to the extent that tradition is tied to ignorance, bhakti to scoundrels, and science to the healing arts. But beyond that, the European intellectual tradition is not superior or even equal to that of our own. To see why, we have to ask about the reasons for seeking knowledge and the nature of reality. Compare, for instance, the vision of the cosmos presented in the Mahabharata (the language has been thinly edited), with what Science has to say on the matter:

In the darkness there appeared the mighty golden egg Mahadivya containing the true light, the eternal Brahman, wonderful and inconceivable, present alike in all places, the invisible and subtle cause of entity and non-entity, progenitor of all things seen and unseen. From Brahman there emerged … after many eons the oceans, the heavens, the earth, the air, the sky, the points of the heavens, the years, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, days and nights, and all things known to man.

What is seen in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. At the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each other in the due order of their seasons. Thus continues perpetually to revolve in the world, without beginning and without end, this wheel of Time that causes the destruction of all things.

Science has validated part of that vision, finding evidence of Mahadivya in the Big Bang; but it has not ventured to express an opinion on what comes before the universe winks into existence and what will follow its extinction. That is because both Beginning and End are “Singularities,” beyond which basic scientific laws are presumed not to hold. Past those points, Science is blind.

On what basis does Hindu cosmology assert a continuity of cycles, each beginning with a Mahadiya? How does it venture the view that in between cycles Brahman continues to exist as unmoving Witness, holding incipient the explosive energy of the next Mahadivya? What significance should we attach to the overall Hindu concept?

To answer those questions we have to look at the nature of thought. Does each individual generate his or her own thoughts? Or are thoughts preexisting constructs that we merely perceive?

The entirety of Hindu tradition leans towards the latter. In our schema for training the intellect, the student phase is aimed at finding out what is known already and gaining the right orientation of spirit to allow the pursuit of knowledge, an essentially intuitive process. To be successful, the seeker must be in full control of his passions and have the mind in a state of fine concentration; then, prolonged tapasya (worship oriented to understanding), will reveal the truth about the specific object of inquiry. Put another way, the dedicated seeker with a finely trained intellect will be able to read the thought forms that constitute the universe. 

The evidence-based approach of Western Science is also oriented to discovering the laws that order the Universe; where it differs from India’s insight-based tradition is in motive and aim.

Science seeks understanding in order to manipulate and profit; the sages of India seek it to know the will and direction of the Universe.

Because of that difference, even when Science focuses on pure theory, it must proceed on hard evidence, quantifiable proof; and when the secrets of the universe are unlocked, the “applied Sciences” take over to turn erstwhile mysteries into profit or power. We can see the unavoidably demonic results in a world economy that is killing the planet's life systems, in the existence of nuclear and biological weapons that could end all life, in obscene inequalities of wealth and poverty, and the use of mass fear to control the world.

What this means is that our self-discovery in exiting from the Kali Yuga must be more than regaining memory of the past; it must look to the future and understand how to respond to the grim context of Western modernity; it must envision and move towards a better world.

*******

Part 10 will focus on what we can do to accelerate the end of the Kali Yuga

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.