Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Ironically, the Hindu ‘religious identity’ is barely 200 years old. The practices that today constitute Hinduism can be traced back to about 1200 BC, but the emergence of Hinduism as a religious identity for Indian people is—and I will explain how—as recent as the nineteenth century.7 Prior to this, neither did these groups have a name for themselves as a religious unity, nor did they consider themselves members of a single religious collective. Hindu religious identity is a recent phenomenon when compared to the establishment of other world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Jainism, which dates back to at least 1500 years. Yet, we can marvel at how in a comparatively short time, it has come to wield incredible power and taken the high ground of authority over various regional groups of vernacular languages and practices.

  The history of the creation of the Hindu religious identity is fascinating. As recently as three centuries ago, ‘Hinduism’ was a largely geographical reference. It did not have a religious connotation. The term ‘Hinduism’ comes from the Indus river. Persians to the west of the Indus used the term, modifying it phonologically to ‘Hind’, to refer to the land of the Indus Valley. From Persian, it was borrowed by Greek and Latin, with India becoming the geographical designation for all unknown territories beyond the Indus. Meanwhile, Muslims used the term ‘Hindu’ to refer to the native people of South Asia, and more specifically, to those South Asians who did not convert to Islam, lending the term, for the first time, some religious significance.

  It was only in the nineteenth century that the colonial British, in common parlance and later in their census, began to officially use the word ‘Hinduism’ to refer to a supposed religious system, encompassing the beliefs and practices of Indian people who did not follow other ‘named’ religions such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism or Jainism. By then, a series of distinct individual world religions had come to be defined, each with its own essence and historical timeline. A unifying umbrella of Hinduism as a religion, bringing together the various disparate practices of people living east of the Indus, was seen by locals in India too as a useful construct and counterpart to the seemingly monolithic Christianity of the colonizers.8

  If we trace the origins of some religious practices in India that we now kill each other over, we can find explanations that point to a trivial incident or mortal whim in ancient times. Their origins forgotten, however, we now accord these incidents immense value with a blind fervour that has no place for reason, letting them legitimize atrocities, plunder and murder. Perhaps we cling to this blind fervour—or faith, as we call it—because it also provides us hope in hopeless times, makes us optimistic by offering ways to effect life-changing, logic-defying miracles, and lends itself as a pivot for our mortal life. Who then cares about its origins?

  For those of us who do, let us take the example of the varna scheme, or the caste system, as we know it today, which is the basis of the Hindu stratification of society accorded by birth.

  The first instance of the social institutionalization of Brahmin dominance—indeed, of the varna scheme or caste system—can be found in the Purusha Sukta hymn of the Rig Veda (10.90).9

  When later Vedic texts such as the Yajur Veda further emphasized the role of sacrifices and prescribed sacrificial procedures ranging from modest domestic rites around home fires to elaborate public ceremonies sponsored by kings, the notion of sacrifice grew in importance.

  As the role of sacrifice grew, so did the status of the new group of religious specialists who called themselves ‘Brahmins’. The poets of the earlier Rig Veda had used the term ‘Brahmin’ to refer to the Vedic hymns—now popularly known as mantras. By extension, the Rig Veda poets also used the term to refer to those who fashioned and recited the hymns. The Brahmin reciters of the Rig Veda did not constitute a hereditary or endogamous social group. But gradually, towards the end of the Vedic era, the term ‘Brahmin’ came to be defined by the Brahmins themselves as a hereditary occupational social group, specializing in rituals and the teaching of the Vedas.

  Not everyone agreed. Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatriya born in the foothills of the Himalayas in about 566 BC, and the founder of the Buddhist religion, denounced the public sacrifices advocated by Brahmin specialists as overly costly, violent and unreliable. He ridiculed the Brahmins’ claims to authority. He pointed out that anyone could see that Brahmins emerged not from the mouth of the Purusha, but from the same female bodily organ as everybody else. He also defied Brahminic claims to a special inborn authority, questioning other claims that the Vedas were ‘revealed’ texts. The Buddha, instead, emphasized that the Vedas were poems, not divine interventions, and human in origin.10

  The Buddhists, Jains, later religious teachers such as Kabir and also the Bengali bauls—each originating and developing their specific philosophies in the Indian subcontinent—continued to question the authoritative claims of the Brahmins.

  Besides ideological difference, another plausible explanation of the rejection of the Brahminical order by Buddhists and Jains could be their stiff competition for the same pool of economic resources. Mendicants depend on alms, and the surplus production that could be offered to support various claimants—Hindus, Jains, Buddhists—was finite. So in this competitive situation, perhaps, the Buddhists and Jains developed a penetrating critique of Vedic practices.11

  However, notwithstanding these criticisms, the Vedas became a gauge for Hindu orthodoxy in later times. As a consequence, many new Hindu groups, honouring new deities or new forms of worship, claimed allegiance to the Vedas. The epic Mahabharata posed as the ‘fifth Veda’, Vaishnava devotional poetry is said to be the ‘Tamil Veda’, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj movements sought to return Hinduism to what they claimed were its ‘purer Vedic roots’. Gradually, it was established that those like the Brahmins, who adhered most closely to the Vedic tradition, had a status superior to ‘others’, such as the other Hindu castes or those following other religions, which were placed outside the Vedic fold.

  Let us take another example: the origins of the Hindu concept of rebirth. Around the seventh century BC, at the conclusion of a royal sacrifice, a sage named Yajnavalkya declared to the king that he was the most knowledgeable in Vedic matters out of all those present. As a reward for his achievement, he demanded a thousand heads of cattle. A large number of people questioned him to test his claims, and Yajnavalkya proved himself each time. However, while doing so, he introduced several important concepts that were hitherto unknown in the earlier Vedic tradition. This included the notion that upon death a person is neither annihilated nor transported to some other world for perpetuity, but returns to worldly life to live again in a new mortal form. This concept of the succession of life, death and rebirth grew out of an earlier Vedic concern with the natural cycles of day, night and seasons, and was termed in the Upanishads as samsara or wandering.

  But Yajnavalkya’s notion of rebirth raised two new perplexing issues: What determines a person’s subsequent form in rebirth? And is there an end to this cycle of rebirth?

  To answer the first question, the all-knowing Yajnavalkya redefined the Vedic notion of karman, which simply meant ‘action’ in a very broad sense. In the Vedas, karman referred particularly to the sacrificial act. In Vedic sacrifice, all ritual actions have phala or fruits—consequences often not apparent at the time, but which will inevitably ripen. Yajnavalkya extended this notion of causality and gave it a moral dimension—that the moral character of one’s actions in this life determines the status of one’s rebirth in the next, a notion thereafter established as karma in Hinduism.

  To answer the second question, Yajnavalkya suggested that a person may attain liberation by abstaining from desire, since desire is what engenders samsara in the first place, hence establishing for the first time the popular Hindu notion of moksha or salvation.12

  After I returned to live in India three years ago, I decided to travel, explore and seek answers about the tremendous power of faith which fill
s us with hope for miracles, and makes us so blind to fact and reason.

  I travelled widely and spoke to pilgrims and priests at various religious sites, delving into conversations—if they were comfortable discussing these—about their personal faith and religious motivation. I felt that I needed to understand the subject from the perspective of those who perceived and experienced religion differently from me.

  A year ago, I visited the Lord Venkateshwara temple, one of the holiest of all Hindu pilgrimage sites,13 and by no coincidence considered among the wealthiest holy sites in the world as of 2016.14 The temple is lavish, spread over 25 square kilometres atop the Tirumala hill, located in the south of India. It had a massive footfall of 27.3 million people who trekked up to visit the temple in 2016.15

  My driver Irfan was a stubbled twenty-five-year-old dressed in denims and a loose chequered shirt, with a bunch of colourful lockets on golden chains around his neck. He was an employee of the temple guesthouse, where I was to stay. He was a chatty and helpful fellow who had picked me up from the airport of the nearby township of Tirupati. On our way up the 3000-foot winding road, he told me cheerfully that Lord Balaji—as Venkateshwara is fondly referred to by the locals—was in fact his brother-in-law.

  ‘How so?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘See, I was born in Tirupati town, right?’ he began to explain.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘So Lord Balaji’s second wife, Bibi Nanchari, is Muslim like me. She also lives in Tirupati,’ he clarified, pointing down the hill to the town we had left behind an hour ago.

  ‘She lives there? The Hindu god’s wife is Muslim?!’ I found it hard to hide my astonishment.

  ‘Yes. She is the daughter of a sultan. She saw the Lord Balaji’s idol and fell in love with him. She was dedicated to Balaji, even though she had never seen him in person. The sultan was angry, but then Balaji appeared in the sultan’s dream and told him he would marry his daughter. The sultan agreed.’16

  Bibi Nanchari’s story reminded me of any contemporary fangirl tale. ‘Okay. So why does she live down there, then?’

  ‘At his feet,’ he replied. ‘The lord’s first wife, Padmavati, lives in his heart in Tirumala temple, and his second wife, Bibi Nanchari, lives at his feet down the hill in Tirupati.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said.

  At Tirumala, I was greeted by the exuberant guesthouse manager, former army subedar Surender Reddy. He wore a beaming smile, besides a loose white shirt and dull grey trousers on his short, portly body.

  ‘The gods have brought you to us, maa,’ he said, welcoming me.

  Surender Reddy, aided by Irfan, would be my guide at the temple. That evening, we walked around the temple city of Tirumala—barefoot, as per the rules—so that I could understand the various structures and facilities.

  One of the most striking aspects of Tirumala is its self-sufficiency. Transportation is free of cost to pilgrims as the publicly run electric buses have been gifted by donors. Electricity is provided by wind turbines set up on their own premises. Food is cooked using solar power generated by panels on the campus, and the meal ingredients are either homegrown or sent by donors as well.

  The temple city premises and its facilities, including hospitals and schools, as well as more complex processes such as budgets, donor relations, pilgrim accommodation are overseen by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, popularly known by the abbreviation TTD. They have taken religion online with all seriousness, offering ‘e-seva’, ‘e-hundi’, online auction of hair, and even a virtual queue system.

  ‘TTD employees do not suffer from blood pressure, ulcers or other workplace stress ailments because employees are volunteers on rotation. We are here because we love working here. Moreover, everything is getting digitized,’ said Madhu, an employee at TTD’s donation cell, almost reading the questions on my mind.

  Religion—in ancient and modern India—receives the largest chunk of philanthropic funds,17 and Tirumala’s wealth is at stratospheric levels. One of the wealthiest holy places in the world, Tirumala’s budget for the financial year 2015–16, approved by TTD, was a massive Rs 2530.10 crore, or approximately $392 million.18 In comparison, even the Vatican’s total annual budget was far less, at about $274 million for the same period!19

  Madhu handed me the donor brochure, a handbook providing guidelines for pilgrims about donation amounts and the corresponding privileges. It read as follows:

  Privileges for donations of Rupees 1 crore and above

  Donor and family (not exceeding five members) will be provided free accommodation for three days in a year in VIP suit of value of Rupees 2500. Donor and family will be admitted for Break Darshan and Suprabhat Darshan for 3 days each in a year free of cost. On any one day in a year chosen by donor, Veda Ashirvachanam will be given by Veda Pandits at the temple. Ten big laddus will be issued to the donor. One dupatta and blouse piece will be presented to the donor. One gold dollar of 5 grams in addition to one gold plated silver medallion will be given at the time of the donor’s first visit only. Ten mahaprasadam packets will be issued to the donor once a year during donor’s visit. Sarvakamaprada Lakshmi Srinivasa Maha Yagnam will be performed at Srinivasa Dangapuram as desired by donor on any one occasion. These privileges are for lifetime of the donor in case of individuals, and for 20 years in case of companies.

  Surender Reddy announced to me proudly that just a few days ago, the chief minister of India’s newest state, Telangana, had donated gold ornaments worth Rs 5.6 crore to Lord Balaji at the Tirumala temple. The chief minister was fulfilling a vow he had made earlier that he would present gold ornaments to various deities if a separate state of Telangana was indeed formed.20

  The Lord Venkateshwara temple’s annual budget showed that in 2015 alone, donations amounted to Rs 905 crore, and in 2016 they increased further to Rs 1010 crore!21 These numbers did not include contributions from pilgrims through tonsure and the sale of thousands of kilos of their hair each year, entry tickets, the enormous amounts of cash collected in the hundi from visitors donating inside the temple, or the sale of the laddu prasadam—famed and so coveted that the temple has patented its laddu under the Registration and Protection Act.22

  In a country that today accounts for the largest number of malnourished children and people living below the poverty line in the world (in 2013)23—adding up to almost 800 million poverty-stricken people—crores of rupees are donated every day at this temple. Was this not a failure of India’s wealth distribution?

  ‘We do not send financial statements to donors about their money,’ Madhu told me. ‘The donor tells us which aspect of the temple facilities they want their money to go to, and we do that. We do not reveal money details to anyone.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. TTD’s donor cell is open for pilgrims to visit 24/7—clearly the staff could use some of their time for transparency and reporting.

  ‘God is watching us. We don’t need security cameras or managers or donors overseeing us,’ Madhu explained.

  Glancing over my shoulder at the queue of pilgrim donors waiting to be attended to, Madhu smiled at me impatiently.

  I stepped outside the TTD donor cell office, slightly cold in the winter breeze blowing in from the surrounding hills. Night had fallen, and the sounds of devotional songs resounded from Lord Balaji’s temple a few hundred metres away. The mood was calm. It seemed that the flurry of devotional activities of the day had eased.

  However, as Irfan, Surender Reddy and I drove to the residential premises of the temple city, the action picked up.

  Along the roads, there were a few large, hygienic night shelters—similar to Indian bus depots—providing nothing but a roof to pilgrims. Men and women slept on the floor here, with a bundle of clothes under their head as pillows.

  Sprinkled across the temple hill town of Tirumala were modest yet clean rooms, crammed into a few dozen three-storey buildings, with shared toilets and freshly washed clothes hanging on strings outside common corridors. Residents, often neighbou
rs just for a day, spoke a medley of languages, and planned their temple visits together. Irfan and I ate with the pilgrims that night, in a massive public dining facility that efficiently fed 5000 people every ten minutes.

  A little farther away were the bungalows of a bevy of Indian billionaires. The Ambanis, Birlas, Mahindras, Jindals, Shiv Nadar, the Sannareddys of Sri Cement, Ramesh Chandra of Unitech, the Singhanias of Raymonds—they were all there. You could name any billionaire industrialist in India, and chances were they had a glistening home here at the feet of the lord. Each bungalow was distinct in design or in the display of expensive art inside, and unlike the crammed shelters and buildings for the masses, they seemed rather vacant. En route to our guesthouse, we stopped to visit Vijay Mallya’s bungalow. Irfan was excited—he said that Mallya’s bungalow was auspicious as it had the best view of the temple.

  As I went to bed later and recounted the events of the day, I found it hard not to be dismayed and saddened at this glaring contrast in resources and status, even in the house of God.

  While the dew was still fresh the next morning, Surender Reddy and I set off with Irfan at the wheel for a sighting of the lord.

  Irfan drove us to the entry point. Ditching the quick VIP entry, we decided to take the scenic route through the long queues and pilgrim waiting rooms, a winding row of fully covered ‘compartments’, each entirely digitized for security and replete with provisions of food, fresh milk and water.

  However, there was no way to ascertain the number of hours the journey would take. The TTD continuously adjusts the sequence of compartments according to the number of pilgrims in queue, adding more compartments to the route and opening up more waiting rooms as the numbers increase—so we were now, quite literally, at the lord’s mercy.