by Sudhir Kakar
Prajapati smiled and said: ‘You must. There is no other way.’
Death protested but the Lord was unbending. He disappeared. She engaged in severe tapas (ascetic practice) for many years, till Prajapati was forced to appear before her.
‘Ask for a boon,’ he said.
‘Please release me from the difficult karma you have given me as my lot,’ Death said.
‘That is not possible,’ said the Lord and returned to his abode.
Death undertook further tapas, with even harder austerities, till Brahma had to appear before her again. On seeing him, Death began sobbing uncontrollably, her tears an unstoppable stream. From this stream of sorrow terrifying images rose up one after another.
‘These are diseases. They are your creations and they will be your helpers,’ said Prajapati.
‘But, being a woman, how will I ever be able to take away a husband from the side of his wife? How will I snatch an infant from its mother’s breast? What of the sin of this heartless work?’
Prajapati gestured to her to stop. ‘You are beyond sin and virtue. You will not be touched by sin. People will call you only through their own karma. Human beings will be victims of wrong conduct and bad conduct, and you will only give them release from pain, peace from storm, a new birth from an old one.’
‘But,’ said Death, ‘when wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers are in the throes of grief, how will I witness those heart-rending scenes?’
The Creator then said, ‘I shall take away your sight. From now on you will be blind.’
‘And their weeping and wailing?’ asked Death. ‘The heart-wrenching cries of men and women?’
‘You will also be deaf. No voice will reach your ears.’
Thus Death is blind and deaf; diseases lead her by the hand toward those people who have summoned her through their own karma. Death is blameless
Like most other major religions, Hinduism denies the finality of death and has its own detailed answer to mankind’s perennial query: what comes after? Hindus are taught to regard death as the end of the physical, material body (dehanta), not the end of existence. Death is opposed to birth, not life. It is an interval between lives and a passage into the next life. Till the final release of moksha or mukti from the cycles of life and death, man is destined for repeated rebirths, and texts enjoin one to view death with equanimity. Life and death, tradition consoles the mourners, are not different ontological entities, in polar opposition to each other, but facets of a single, seemingly endless cycle. Krishna’s words to a mourning Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, often repeated to those who are left behind, have been culturally charged with consoling power for centuries: ‘For death is a certainty for him who has been born and birth a certainty for him who has died. Therefore, for what is unavoidable, thou should not grieve.’14
With the end of the gross, physical body, the process of rebirth and reincarnation begins. From the ‘earth world’ (bhuloka) that had been his home and the object of his senses when the person was alive, his ‘soul’—consciousness without a physical body—now passes into an in-between subtle or astral world where it continues to function with complete continuity. This in-between world (antarloka) has three subdivisions: heaven, hell, and an intermediate ‘world of spirits’ (pretaloka) where most souls dwell for a while before traversing either heaven or hell on their way to rebirth. Heaven and hell are not places of eternal bliss or damnation but way stations where the individual soul enjoys or suffers the consequences of its good or evil deeds. We should add that in the opinion of some (and matters relating to death and rebirth are always contentious), whether the soul will go to heaven or hell depends not only on its karmic balance but also on the dying person’s state of mind and his last thoughts at the moment of death. These will have a powerful influence on the creation of his next life and will determine the place where he will be reborn.
In popular culture, for instance in brightly coloured posters displayed in bazaars and village fairs, the state of heavenly bliss where the soul consorts with gods and other higher beings does not merit much attention. In contrast, the tortures of the twenty-eight hells are depicted in lurid colours and a wealth of gory detail. The punishments for misdeeds seem to be based on the principle of lex talionis, the law of retaliation. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ it seems, is not limited to the Old Testament but also finds place in the Hindu conception of hell. In the hell reserved for the meat eater, the animals and fowl which he consumed when alive are waiting to chew and feast on his flesh. In the hell for the adulterer, the sinner has to embrace a ‘partner’ made of red-hot iron. And the man who made his wife swallow his semen (oral sex is forbidden even in the otherwise tolerant Kamasutra) is cast into a sea of semen where he must survive on the gooey stuff alone.
Caste, too, follows the soul into hell, although with a reverse slant: the punishment for high-caste sinners, especially brahmins, is more severe than for those of lower castes from whom, of course, little is expected in the way of higher morality. Thus, high-caste consumers of intoxicating drinks are cast into a hell where they are forced to drink melted iron; a brahmin who had sexual relations with a woman of low caste will be thrown into a well filled with excreta, urine, blood and phlegm; while brahmins who hunted wild animals must pass through a hell where the servants of the god of death hack off their limbs one by one.
What is most striking about death in the Hindu tradition is the importance of family and family bonds even after death. Immediately after death, rites are performed every day to help the vulnerable spirit which is still hovering between earth and the in-between worlds, confused and disoriented like the loved ones it has left behind, to break all bonds with its former physical existence. On the tenth day, for instance, it is offered pindas—balls of rice or flour—which symbolically reconstitute specific limbs till the astral body is completed by the thirteenth day. Moreover, periodic household rituals and sacrifices, especially at certain times of the year that are set aside for the welfare of ancestral spirits, seek to underline a continuing bond between the dead and the living. In fact, for a very long time to come, at least three generations, the family will remain actively responsible for the welfare of the dead person’s soul by mitigating its suffering if in hell or by pushing it through the upper reaches of heaven toward rebirth and, ultimately, toward moksha—release from the cycle of birth and death.
In conclusion, our observations on the body, health and Ayurvedic healing in India further elucidate, as they emphasize, some fundamental qualities of the Indian mind which we shall elaborate upon in the concluding chapter. The mental representation of our body—the body image, a basic element of the psyche with which we ‘see’ the world—is as much cultural as it is individual. The body, then, is vital in forming our view of the world and our place in it. Here, the Indian body, less differentiated from the environment and engaged in a ceaseless transaction with it, differs from a sharply bounded Western body. An average person in the West takes the primacy of inner, biological processes in health and healing for granted. The average Indian, due to the Ayurveda-inspired view of the body having a basic material identity with the environment, tends to take a more transactional view of health. In other words, whereas a consequence of the Western body image is to see sickness as something foreign and ‘poisonous’ inside the body (bacteria, virus, etc.) that needs to be rooted out, the traditional Indian view regards ill-health as a disturbance of harmony between the body and its environment that needs to be corrected and balance restored.
As far as death is concerned, Hinduism does not hold out the consolation of St Paul’s promise that at the moment of death we will come face to face with god, and that then ‘shall we know even as we are known’. Instead, it seeks to mitigate the universal dread of death by viewing it as an interval between lives, not as an end to the often painful, sometimes happy, but always engrossing and, above all, familiar life-in-the-world. In the words of an old Punjabi woman, as reported by the anthropologis
t Veena Das, death is ‘like being shifted from one breast to the other breast of the mother. The child feels lost in that one instant, but not for long.’15
Religious and Spiritual Life
It is often said that Indians have an intuitive relationship with the Divine. Outwardly, he may be indistinguishable from any other trendy ‘citizen of the world’ but even the most modern Indian’s inner terrain is liable to be imbued with a matter-of-fact religiosity. Visits to important temples and pilgrimage places, regular ritual fasting and turning to traditional religious practices or gurus have not declined with globalization and its worldly temptations. In fact, these have increased since the 1980s, and most conspicuously in the growing, new middle class.
Hinduism (and this chapter is exclusively concerned with the faith of the majority) has been shaped by many crosscurrents throughout its long history. Over the centuries, the interaction and synthesis of these currents of belief has resulted in contemporary Hinduism with its varied teachings and diverse cults. ‘Belief in stones and trees having souls (Animism, Pantheism) exists side by side with the belief in higher gods, the monotheistic worship of one god is as much possible as the polytheistic or demonical adoration of many gods, demons and spirits,’ writes the Indologist Axel Michaels. He continues, ‘The religion is lived through ritualistic (Brahminism, Tantrism), devotional (Bhakti), spiritual-mystic (asceticism, Yoga, meditation) and heroic forms...And yet to a large extent all these forms are peacefully practiced beside each other. One can almost say that religious post-modernism has been realized in India: “Anything goes”.’1
Here, we are not concerned with describing the various manifestations of Hindu religiosity. Instead, we seek to understand the influence of modernity on the contemporary religious imagination, and the religious responses to the powerful processes of social transformation. Our interest, therefore, is on current developments, such as a rapidly growing Hindu nationalism and the changing religious practices of the urban middle class where it is not religion per se but old religious norms and values which are losing their old verities and must be renegotiated and invested with new meaning. In the following pages, we will talk of two important actors on the contemporary religious scene—the ‘Hindu nationalist’ and the ‘flexible Hindu’—and their varied responses to the challenges of modernity and globalization.
THE HINDU NATIONALIST
In searching for alternative modes of life as a response to the disruptions of modernity, the reformulation of Hinduism is being strongly influenced by a nationalist, religious activism.2 The Hindu nationalists we are talking of belong to the ‘Sangh parivar’. This is a more or less loosely knit system of political, social, cultural and religious formations revolving around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which provides them with much of their ideological light and activist heat. Tracing its origins to the nineteenth-century reform movements within Hinduism, such as the Arya Samaj, which were born out of a resistance to European cultural domination and the Christian missionary offensive, Hindu nationalism began to gather impetus in the 1920s with the founding of the RSS.3 But the period in which it expanded most rapidly was in the late 1980s and 1990s, the era of India’s economic liberalization and the beginning of the country’s integration with a global economy. In other words, the onset of globalization coincided with the explosion of Hindu nationalism.
The Hindu nationalist is attempting to confront the processes of modernization and changes in family structure with a new articulation of Hindu values and norms. For one, his is the call to keep the Hindu family atmosphere free of all cultural pollution. Since he believes the ongoing invasion of Indian cultural space by Western values is a conspiracy by forces determined to weaken India by uprooting it from its traditions, the Hindu nationalist reacts by seeking to build a united front against the cultural assault of globalization from within the family. In this defensive mobilization, the primary role assigned to the woman is that of a carrier and mediator of tradition while the man’s role is that of the provider and protector.
In addition, the Hindu nationalist seeks to reformulate religious beliefs by assigning central importance to two aspects: Ramabhakti and deshbhakti, devotion to Lord Rama and devotion to the nation. The first has as its goal the elevation of Lord Rama as the central and highest Hindu divinity, while deshbhakti foregrounds the loyalty towards ‘Mother India’ (Bharatmata). Both have the ultimate goal of welding together a Hindu society that is fragmented in castes, sects and local traditions so as to prepare it to meet the challenges of globalization.
Media and modern technologies have not played an unimportant part in the realization of these objectives. The nationalist’s desired homogenization of Hindu religious traditions has been propelled by the global communications revolution, especially the wide diffusion of television and now the Internet. Television, for instance, that had become a truly mass medium by the end of the 1980s, presented not only a vision of a soon-attainable consumerist heaven in its advertising spots but also a series of ‘mythologicals’. The weekly broadcasts of the enormously popular serial Ramayana, for instance, first broadcast on the national network in 1987 to record audiences, harked back to a past golden age and defined the Hindu nationalist view of what was the essence of Indian culture. The television broadcast of the Ramanand Sagar version of the Ramayana not only raised Lord Rama to a pan-Indian integration figure but also played a major role in relegating the many regional traditions of the epic to the sidelines while privileging a version very close to the Hindu nationalist’s heart.
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Hindu nationalism, with its proclivity to homogenize the wide variety of myths and symbols deriving from the multifarious world of Hindu gods and goddesses has become a major force on the Indian political and cultural scene. Its religious arm, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which has the task of providing the integrative framework—the cultural foundation—for a new unity and solidarity among the Hindus, is trying hard to project itself as the premier if not sole representative of Hindus all over the world.
The VHP’s own ideology has been decisively influenced by the writings of V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966) who coined the term Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’) that made a clear distinction between Hinduism as a religion—Hindu dharma—and Hindutva as a social-political force which seeks to mobilize all Hindus against foreign religious and cultural influences.4 Defining a Hindu as one whose faith originated within the borders of an undivided India (this includes the Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs but excludes Christians and Muslims), the VHP has as one of its goals the fostering of a united Hindu nation through an institutionalized collaboration between Hindu religious leaders and Hindu nationalist activists. Here, it is the missionary activity of Christian and Islamic religious institutions that is a special object of the Hindu nationalist’s ire since he believes that conversions undermine nationalism. The VHP’s opposition, however, though primarily couched in the militant discourse of Hindutva, also incorporates an appeal to Hindu religious sentiment. Thus, for instance, alluding to the consumption of beef by Christians and Muslims, the VHP distributed a series of leaflets at the Maha Kumbh, a gathering of thirty to forty million pilgrims on the bank of the Ganga at Allahabad, in January 2001, where one of the leaflets stated that by stopping one conversion a Hindu could save five cows.5 According to the VHP, conversion activity must be strenuously opposed since it destroys peace in Hindu society, ‘turning brother against brother’, and results in violent agitation by the converted population, such as by the Christians in north-eastern India, for separate states of their own. In a joint declaration at the 2001 Maha Kumbh, the VHP succeeded in enlisting the support of influential Hindu religious leaders, as also of the Dalai Lama, in opposing conversion by any religious tradition.
Many in India, Hindus and others, regard the VHP as a fundamentalist organization which seriously distorts traditional Hinduism. Indeed, in its efforts to define an essential Hindu identity by privileging a mythology centred on the figu
re of a militant Lord Rama and distilling a small number of key doctrines and practices from the remarkably diverse Hindu traditions, the VHP is slowly making the division of Hinduism into various sampradayas (sects) obsolete. Traditional Hindu religious leaders now routinely talk of a Hindu dharma rather than of Vaishnavism or Shaivism, to mention just the two largest Hindu sects, each with several hundred million followers.
The Hindu nationalist, then, whether a member of the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), champions homogeneity and a singular identity. He is governed by deeply conservative notions of social and family life. In his fear of a cultural alienation, especially through missionary religions and the onslaught of a cultural and economic globalization, he may be combative in spreading his ideology of a strong Hindu nation. Yet the militancy of his outlook and actions is also constrained by two binding elements of Hindu religion and culture: the themes of tolerance and universality. He is not free from these fundamental aspects of his religious-cultural identity that are also the major themes running through the grand recit, the ‘master narrative’, of Hinduism’s encounter with other religions, secular ideologies and historical forces of change.
The first, the ‘Hindu tolerance’ theme, emphasizes Hinduism’s willingness throughout history to negotiate other worldviews and accept changes without sacrificing an unchanging, essential core. The other major theme, that of Hinduism’s ‘universality’, is somewhat different from the ‘universalism’ claim of other major religions. Universality for the Hindu is the conviction that the fundamental insights of his faith also lie at the heart of all other religions. In other words, the ‘foreign belief’ is ultimately always a part of one’s own. Both these themes, as we shall see below, have consequences for the nationalist’s actions. They do not in any manner lessen the propensity for extreme violence that he shares with the fundamentalists of all religions, but they can weaken the singular conviction underlying his violent acts.
