by Sudhir Kakar
THE HINDU WORLD VIEW
Every civilization has a unique way of looking at the world. This world view, the civilization’s centre of gravity, is a cluster of ideas which define the goal of human existence, the ways to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided and the obstacles to be expected on the way. The world view interprets central human experiences and answers perennial questions on what is good and what is evil, what is real and what is unreal, what is the essential nature of men and women and the world they live in, and what is man’s connection to nature, to other human beings and to the cosmos.
For instance, if we look at China (and Chinese societies around the world), we can define the following elements in the dominant, Confucian world view: There is no other world than the one we live in. The ultimate meaning of life is embedded in and not separate from ordinary practical living. The meaning of life is then realized through a personal self-cultivation within the community and through mutual aid in the family, clan, school and workplace. The glue that binds society is not law but what the Chinese call li, a civilized mode of conduct. A predominant feature of the Chinese world view is a sense of duty rather than the demand for rights.
Similarly, in India, there are identifiable, specific elements in the dominant, Hindu world view. Here, we are not concerned so much with philosophical doctrines that are relevant only for religious and intellectual elites, but with the beliefs and attitudes—many of them not conscious—of a vast number of Indians that are reflected in their lives, their songs and their stories. These beliefs are disseminated through myths and legends, proverbs and metaphors, enacted in religious rituals, conveyed through tales told to children, given a modern veneer in Bollywood films and television serials, and glimpsed in the admonitions of parents or in the vision they have of their children’s future. The world view that we are talking about, then, is absorbed from early on in life, and not through the head but the heart.
Three interlinked elements comprise a major part of the Hindu world view: moksha, dharma and karma. Our interest in these concepts is not philosophical, textual or historical, but psychological. What we want to look at closely is the contribution of this ancient trinity in the formation of the Indian mind and its reverberations in the thoughts and actions of contemporary Indians.1
Moksha, the goal of life
Moksha, which variously means self-realization, transcendence, salvation, a release from this world, has been traditionally viewed by the Hindus as the goal of human life. The idea of moksha is intimately linked with the Indian conviction in the existence of another, ‘higher’ level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies and our emotions. A fundamental value of most schools of Hinduism (and the Sufis of Islam) is the belief in the existence of an ‘ultimate’ reality—related to everyday reality in the same way that waking consciousness is related to a dream—and it is an unquestioned verity of Indian culture, the common thread in the teachings of the culture’s innumerable gurus. This ‘ultimate’ reality, whose apprehension is considered to be the highest goal and meaning of human life, is said to be beyond conceptual thought and indeed beyond mind. Intellectual thought, naturalistic science and other passions of the mind seeking to grasp the empirical nature of our world thus have a relatively lower status in the culture as compared to meditative practices or even art, since aesthetic and spiritual experiences are supposed to be closely related. In the culture’s belief system, the aesthetic power of music and verse, of a well-told tale and a well-enacted play make them more, rather than less, real than life.
This emphasis on the spiritual which underlies the practices of the various schools of ‘self-realization’, such as those of Yoga, colours the emotional tone of the way an Indian looks at life. To most Indians, life is a combination of the tragic and the romantic. It is tragic in so far as they see human experience pervaded by ambiguities and uncertainties where man has little choice but to bear the burden of unanswerable questions, inescapable conflicts and incomprehensible afflictions of fate. But superimposed on the tragic, the Indian vision of moksha offers a romantic quest. The new journey is a search, and the seeker, if he withstands the perils of the road, will be rewarded by exaltation beyond normal human experience.
The belief in the existence of an ‘ultimate reality’, this nostalgia of the Indian soul, is a beacon of ‘higher feeling’ in the lives of most Indians, cutting across class and caste distinctions, bridging the distance between rural and urban, between the illiterate and the educated, between the rich and the poor. The ironic vision of life, which brings a detached and self-deprecating perspective on the tragic and in which gods have feet of clay, is rarely found among Indians. Even among those living in enclaves of Western modernity, an ironic stance towards the spiritual is at the most an affectation of a few young people which normally disappears as they begin to age.
If spirituality has been at the centre of the Indian world image, it would be reasonable to expect that it has continued to condition the Indian mind, colouring its intellectual, artistic and emotional responses in certain distinctive ways. In other words, there are various cultural consequences of this belief. One of these is the pervasive presence of hope, even in the most dismal of life circumstances. For centuries, Indian civilization has conveyed to the growing child the almost somatic conviction that there is an order, even if hidden and unknown, to our visible world. That there is a design to life that can be trusted in spite of life’s sorrows, cruelties and injustices. The Indian mind, then, tends to convert even the slightest ray of hope into a blaze of light. Consider this man from a village in Rajasthan who is living in a Delhi slum. He works a back-breaking fourteen hours a day on a construction site, lives with six other members of his family in a single-room tenement and eats, if at all, stale food in a chipped enamel plate. Yet he rejects the idea of life being better in his village with surprised astonishment. The city, with its possibilities, for example schooling for his children, has provided him with a sliver of hope. The cynic might see his aspirations for a better life as completely unrealistic, look at him as someone who clutches at the thinnest of straws, who has never learnt that there is something as hoping too much, or hoping in vain. But what keeps this man and so many millions of others cheerful and expectant even under the most adverse economic, social and political circumstances is precisely this hope which is a sense of possession of the future, however distant that future may be.
Another consequence of the spiritual orientation, the unshakeable belief in a ‘higher’ reality, is the average Indian’s fascination with and respect for the occult and its practitioners. Astrologers, soothsayers, clairvoyants, fakirs and other shamanic individuals who abound in Indian society are profoundly esteemed for they are thought to be in some kind of contact with the ultimate reality. In India, it is the ‘god-men’, the gurus, rather than political, social or intellectual leaders, who have come to incorporate our childhood yearning for omniscience and perfection in parental figures. Scholars or the scientists may be respected, but only the ‘holy men’, the men of god, are revered. Their presumed contact with another reality is supposed to confer on them supernatural powers, superhuman status and a moral excellence that is beyond the ordinary lot.
Psychologically, perhaps the most important consequence of the Hindu spiritual orientation, the widespread belief in the ultimate reality, the divinity immanent within each human being, is the feeling of self-worth that comes from a pre-conscious conviction of one’s metaphysical significance. However socially demeaned or economically irrelevant a person may be in day-to-day life, the feeling of being central to the universe and not banished to its remote extremities, of being connected equally with everyone else to the Urgrund of human existence, quietly nourishes the individual’s self-esteem and stands as a bulwark against despair and rage at life’s inequities.
Right and wrong
If moksha is the goal of life, then dharma, variously translated as law, moral duty, right action, confo
rmity with the truth of things, is the means through which man approaches the desired goal. Today, there is widespread bemoaning of the lack of dharma in social institutions and individual lives. Traditional and modern Indians agree that there is hardly any institution left where those in positions of power have not veered away from dharma. Whereas modern Indians will also point to the great social churning that is taking place with the advent of modern egalitarian ideologies, traditionalists see the disappearance of dharma as solely responsible for the social conflict, oppression and unrest that characterize contemporary Indian society. And as for dharma in individual lives, here too the oft-heard lament is that things are not as they were. At one time, in the utopian long, long ago, every person knew that it was not what he did that was important for his spiritual progress but whether he acted in conformity with his dharma. The activity itself—whether that of a shoemaker or a priest, a housewife or a farmer, a social worker serving others and alleviating misery or an ascetic apparently indifferent to the suffering around him—was considered equally good and equally right if it was consistent with dharma. And since traditional Indians are inclined to tell stories whenever they wish to prove a point or convey what the world is like or ought to be like, using narrative as a way of thinking and as an inquiry into the nature of reality, they are likely to tell a story very much like this one:
There was once a king who was strolling along the banks of the Ganga with an entourage of his ministers. It was the monsoon season and the river was in spate, its swirling waters rushing towards the sea. The broad sweep of the swollen river and its strong current filled the king with awe. Suddenly mindful of his own insignificance, he addressed his ministers: ‘Is there no one on this earth who can reverse the flow of this river so that it flows from the sea to the mountains?’ The ministers, shaking their heads, smiled at the king’s naivety. But a prostitute who overheard his question stepped forward and addressed the river thus: ‘O Mother Ganga, if I have striven to fulfil my dharma as a whore by giving my body to all comers, without distinguishing rich from poor, handsome from ugly, old from young, then reverse your flow!’ The waters stood still for a moment, as if in deliberation, and then the river started flowing backwards.
Today, the conservatives will continue, the ideologies of Western modernity with their notions of egalitarianism and individual choice, their highlighting the importance of material rewards rather than the spirit of human activity, their emphasis on human aspirations rather than limits, have led to widespread social envy, unbridled greed and selfishness in Indian society. Most would achingly agree that of the major elements of the traditional Hindu world view, dharma is the one that is most endangered and perhaps already crumbling under the impact of modernity. Yet there is one aspect of dharma that continues to be of vital importance in understanding the Indian mind, and not only that of the orthodox Hindu. For even if one rejects many traditional values associated with dharma, it is still pivotal in the formation of the Indian ethical sensibility.
The main feature of this sensibility, in which it diverges from its Islamic and Judeo-Christian counterparts, is a pronounced ethical relativism which has become entrenched in the Hindu way of thinking. For how does any individual know what is right action, that he is acting in accordance with moral law and in ‘conformity with the truth of things’? The traditional answer has been that he cannot since right action depends on the culture of his country (desa), the historical era in which he lives (kala), on the efforts required of him at his particular stage of life (srama) and, lastly, on the innate character (guna) that he has inherited from a previous life. An individual can never know the configuration of all these factors in an absolute sense, nor even significantly influence them. Nor is there a book, or its authoritative interpreters such as the Church, which can help by removing doubts on how the individual must act in each conceivable situation. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, then, are relative; depending on its specific context, every action can be right—or wrong.
In lessening the burden of the individual’s responsibility for his actions, the cultural view of right action alleviates the guilt suffered in some societies by those whose actions transgress rigid thou-shalt and thou-shalt-not axioms. Instead, an Indian’s actions are governed by a more permissive and gentle, but more ambiguous, thou-canst-but-try ethos. On the one hand, this basic uncertainty makes possible the taking of unconventional and risky actions; on the other hand, actions are accompanied by a pervasive doubt as to the wisdom of individual initiative, making independent voluntary action rare for many who look for psychological security by acting as one’s ancestors did in the past and as one’s social group—primarily the caste—does at present. The relativism of dharma supports tradition and modernity, innovation and conformity.
The ethical relativism of dharma has been broadened by the late poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan to embrace the very way Indians think in most situations. In his stimulating essay ‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?’2 Ramanujan begins his exposition with a survey of Indian intellectuals done some thirty years ago where they were asked to describe the ‘Indian Character’. As one can imagine, given the Indian talent for self-criticism, the intellectuals wrote quite sharp comments. They all seemed to agree on one thing: the Indian trait of hypocrisy. Indians don’t mean what they say, and say different things at different times. Many occidental travellers in the last centuries complain about the same thing and, in fact, in the famed Indologist Max Mueller’s lectures of 1883 on India, he felt compelled to counter these accusations by writing a chapter called ‘Truthful Character of Indians’.3
The Indian inconsistency is still regarded as puzzling: How can a reputed astronomer, working at a well-known institute of fundamental sciences, also be a practicing astrologer? How can the Western-educated executive of a multinational corporation consult horoscopes and holy men for family decisions? Why does an Oxford-educated cabinet minister postpone an important meeting because the hour is astrologically inauspicious for a meeting?
These observed traits of inconsistency, however, Ramanujan asserts, have nothing to do with the level of a person’s education or logical rigour. They are better understood if we recognize that different cultures seem to prefer either context-free or context-sensitive rules in their thought processes and that Indians operate on the basis of context-sensitivity rather than context-freedom. Let us elaborate.
There is no notion of a universal human nature in Indian culture and thus we cannot deduce ethical rules like ‘Man shall not kill’ or ‘Man shall not tell an untruth’ or any other unitary law for all men. What a person should or should not do depends on the context. Thus Manu, the ancient Indian law giver, has the following to say: ‘A kshatriya [a man belonging to the warrior castes], having defamed a brahmin, shall be fined one hundred [panas]; a vaishya [someone belonging to the farmer and merchant castes] one hundred and fifty or two hundred; a shudra [a man belonging to the servant castes] shall suffer corporal punishment.’4 Even truth-telling is not an unconditional imperative. Here is a quotation from another law book: ‘An untruth spoken by people under the influence of anger, excessive joy, fear, pain or grief, by infants, by very old men, by persons labouring under a delusion or being under the influence of drink, does not cause the speaker to fall [that is, it is not a sin].’5
The Christian injunction against coveting ‘thy neighbour’s wife’ is shared by Hindu law books, which proclaim that ‘in this world there is nothing as detrimental to long life as criminal conversation with another man’s wife.’ In fact, Hindus are even stricter in defining adultery; talking to a woman alone in the forest, ‘or at the confluence of rivers’, offering her presents, touching her ornaments and dress, sitting with her on a bed, are all adulterous acts. The nature of punishment, of course, depends on the respective castes of the adulterous couple and there are also exceptions, such as the one which condones adultery with ‘the wives of actors and singers’.6 Though it contains a chapter with the title ‘Other Men’s Wives’, the
Kamasutra, too, shares the Hindu disapproval of adultery. But here again there are exceptions to the rule, for instance, if your unrequited passion makes you fall sick, and once these have been listed, Vatsyayana proceeds to outline the various ways to seduce other men’s wives.7 His position seems to be: You shouldn’t do it. But if you must, then these are the ways to proceed. But, of course, you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
Virtues, too, are as dependent on the context as are transgressions. Bravery may be a virtue for the kshatriya, the warrior, but it is certainly not one for the baniya, the merchant. Ramanujan remarks that for a Western-Christian tradition, which is based on the premise of universalization—the golden rule of the New Testament—such a view that each class of men has its own laws, its own proper ethics, which cannot be universalized must be baffling and, ultimately, a producer of denigration.
Context-sensitivity is not just a feature of traditional moral law but extends to many areas of contemporary Indian life and thought. The cultural psychologist Richard Shweder, who has compared descriptive phrases used by Oriyas from eastern India and mid-westerners from the United States, has shown that the two describe persons very differently.8 Americans characterize a person with abstract, generic words like ‘good’, ‘nice’, while the Oriyas use more concrete, contextual descriptions like ‘he helps me’, ‘brings sweets’, etc. The descriptions provided by the Indians were more situation-specific and more relational than those of Americans. Indian descriptions focus on behaviour. They describe what was done, where it was done, and to whom or with whom it was done. The Indian respondents said, ‘He has no land to cultivate but likes to cultivate the land of others,’ or ‘When a quarrel arises, he cannot resist the temptation of saying a word,’ or ‘He behaves properly with guests but feels sorry if money is spent on them.’ It is the behaviour itself that is focal and significant rather than the inner attribute that supposedly underlies it. This tendency to supply the context when providing a description characterizes the descriptions of Indians regardless of social class, education or level of literacy. It appears, then, that the preferred Indian way of describing people is not due to a lack of skill in abstracting concrete instances to form a general proposition, but rather a consequence of the fact that global inferences about people are typically regarded as neither meaningful nor informative.
