by Mark Tully
For many years I had a Dalit cook, Ram Chandra, or Chandre as he was always known (and, incidentally, even though he was a Dalit no guest ever hesitated to eat his food). Because he had become the head of a household instead of the sweeper, which had been the customary position for a Dalit, he became an important man in the eyes of his own community. Anyone coming to Delhi from his home village would call on him, and he would spend hours sitting outside the kitchen, sharing a hookah with his visitors, discussing the news from home or that he’d heard on his radio.
Chandre always wanted to know about any weddings that might be coming up within the community. When my partner, Gilly, and I went to his own daughter’s wedding in his village, we discovered that members of his biradari had contributed to the wedding expenses. ‘Mind you,’ Chandre reminded us, ‘I have to contribute to their weddings too!’ We watched the contributions being noted down carefully after a lengthy discussion about who had contributed what to other weddings and how much they should therefore contribute to this one. All contributions were officially loans, but sorting out the repayments would have been beyond the ability of any bank manager.
I nevertheless have to admit that sometimes, when I have attempted to explain that caste is not entirely negative, I have failed to acknowledge the pain and suffering it can inflict. Dr Radhakant Nayak, a former senior civil servant and now a member of the Upper House of Parliament in India, is a friend whose opinion I value greatly. R.K. (as he is fondly known) is a Dalit who was converted to Christianity as a young man by a catechist who visited his village in Orissa, one of the poorest states of India. When I showed him the first draft of this chapter he wrote a lengthy critique in which he suggested that I had been too generous to Hinduism and he criticised the caste system ruthlessly. With his direct experience of what it feels like to be discriminated against and to be at the bottom of the social heap, he decried the caste system as:
… the chain of social hierarchy, reflecting an ascending scale of reverence and descending order of contempt that cannot be allowed to be broken in this life. If you are an ‘untouchable’ you are told you should remain so and you are warned that if you deviate and do not discharge the duties of an untouchable and a scavenger you will not get to a higher position after death.
R.K. also maintained that caste had no conscience and compared Christian beliefs about society with the caste system, saying:
The Church teaches that Christ came for the poor. The rich man is made to feel responsible for the poor and is warned that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is going to be for him to go to heaven. In the caste system the rich man’s conscience is not pricked. He tells the poor: ‘What can I do about your problem? You are suffering for your past life.’
When I sent a reply to his critique suggesting that the suffering of the poor might serve to warn the rich that they will pay for their selfishness in their next lives, R.K. replied succinctly, ‘In my experience it doesn’t!’
While I cannot but respect my friend’s position, especially as I have lived a highly privileged life, it seems to me worth noting that protest movements have arisen in Indian society when the caste system has become too rigid. Buddhism was one of these. Within Hinduism there was also the powerful Bhakti, or devotional, movement in the middle ages, which produced the Hindu mystical poets known as saint-singers. The west Indian Bhakti saint Jnanadeva had a group of devotees that included an untouchable. The most prominent north Indian saint was Ramananda, and he opened his sect to all comers. One of his followers, Sant Ravi Das, is still widely revered by Dalits. In the south, Basavanna, a devotee of Shiva, created an influential sect based on a rejection of inequality of every kind. He did something revolutionary for his time by allowing two of his followers, a boy born an untouchable and a girl from a Brahmin family, to marry. The Sikh movement, which opposed caste, emerged in the Punjab in the sixteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the rise to influence of Bengali reformer Ramohan Roy, who was the first of several prominent Hindus who sought to reinvigorate their religion and remove the divisiveness of caste. In the twentieth century, a high caste Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, led a movement against the excesses of the caste system, and another movement was led by Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Unlike Gandhi, Bhim Rao Ambedkar was a Dalit himself, one of the very few who managed to get a good education in those days, becoming a brilliant lawyer and playing a major role in drawing up India’s new constitution after Independence. Today it is Ambedkar who is the hero of the Dalits, not the Mahatma.
The caste system is shifting now, in a typically Indian way. Changes are taking place, although not necessarily fast enough, but there is no talk of revolution, or of a violent swing against this progress. Paradoxically, caste is also enabling Dalits to stand together in the fight for their rights, and as a result they have become a powerful political force. India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, or UP as it’s always known, has had a Dalit Chief Minister who, moreover, is also a woman. She remains one of the most powerful politicians in UP. In eastern UP, in the village of Jakrauli, near the River Ganga beyond Varanasi, I came to know a Dalit called Budh Ram, an agricultural labourer. The British television network Channel Four had commissioned me and the television producer Jonathan Steadall to make a series of television portraits of Indians to mark the fiftieth anniversary of India’s Independence. These portraits ranged from a Maharaja to a Dalit, and that Dalit was Budh Ram.
We learned that Budh Ram’s biradari had decided that they didn’t want to worship in the same temple as the upper castes but wanted to have their own temple in which to pray to their own saint, Sant Ravi Das. The upper castes had put up stiff resistance to this, and also objected to the Dalits’ annual festival celebrating the birthday of Sant Ravi Das. Because the Dalit biradari had stood together and the local legislator had backed them, by the time we arrived to film they had built their temple, and we filmed Budh Ram worshipping in it. The Dalits were less confident about the future of the festival, but later I discovered that it continued to take place each year.
Because the Indian way, as I understand it, is the middle way – a gradual process of balanced progress – I have found that I must strive to change my own way of looking at things accordingly or become out of balance myself. But the search for balance can also be taken too far. It can lead to woolly-mindedness or indifference. Once I came to believe that it was unbalanced to claim that Jesus was the one way, the one truth and the one light, following that way seemed less important and I gradually stopped being a practising Anglican.
In my early fifties I was brought up with a jolt when I nearly died from measles. The period of recovering from a serious illness is often a time of introspection, and for me it also proved to be another of those significant moments in my life in which free will played no part. The British High Commissioner of the time, Sir Robert Wade Gearey, came to visit me and gave me a copy of the Jesuit Gerard Hughes’ book The God of Surprises. I don’t know why he chose that book, because I had never discussed religion with him before, but it proved an inspired choice.
Gerald Priestland, a great religious affairs correspondent of the BBC, had also recommended God of Surprises, saying it might be particularly useful for those ‘who find it hard to forgive themselves: the stumblers and agnostics who hardly dare believe that God is in them’. He was right. At that stage in my life I was little more than an agnostic who had stumbled very often. I found the book more than useful: it made me realise how agnostic I had become and what a loss that was. In the directions Gerard Hughes gave for beginners seeking the God he said was in all of us, he seemed to me to be talking of the God of experience, the God of inner reality that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan has also written about.
But at the same time, the Jesuit also warned against ‘go it alone’ religion, saying, ‘Because we are liable to self-deception and tend to use God and Christ to justify and support our narrow ways of thinking and acting, we need the institutional and the critical elements
of the Church as a check to our self-deception.’ I realised that I also needed the Church’s worship, liturgy, and sacraments, which had first awakened in me that sense of the transcendent I believe is latent in all of us. So I returned to the Anglican tradition, and although I have found it difficult to commit myself fully, I believe that if I ever come as close as Gerard Hughes has done to the God within me it will be within the tradition of my Church. I have certainly conceived a love for that Church’s tradition that I never felt before.
That said, it’s impossible to live in India for long without taking an interest in yoga, which is not a normal Anglican practice, although it too is concerned with spiritual awareness. In its many different forms yoga is much more than a mere keep-fit technique or an alternative to the ubiquitous gyms which are one of the latest Western imports to India. Gyms seem to me to be little more than torture chambers and one of the first things my yoga teacher taught me was that you should never torture your body; you should make gradual progress. She told me, ‘You have a saying – “a healthy mind in a healthy body” – and that is what yoga is about. It teaches that the mental and the physical have to be kept in balance.’ Of course, physical exercises are just one part of yoga and even they, properly understood, have a goal beyond physical and mental welfare.
I once made a radio programme about one of the great yoga teachers of our time, B.K.S. Iyengar, whose centres are now found throughout the world. We started the programme with Guruji, as he is known to his followers, talking to me while standing on his head. At the age of eighty he was still amazingly fit and able to do the most advanced yoga exercises, but he stressed that these were not just bodily exercises. ‘Why develop like a racehorse, as is the case with so many wrestlers, athletes, and gymnasts? In time the racehorse becomes a cart horse,’ he said. ‘Instead, realise that the body and the mind have to be integrated and spiritual awareness has to flow with each movement.’
The aim of all forms of yoga is to achieve spiritual fulfilment. But does practising yoga mean that we can dispense with organised religion, as so many in the West seem to think? I had never thought that yoga conflicted with my Anglicanism, but when I decided to write this book I felt I should discuss this issue. So Gilly and I caught the misnamed Mussourie Express from Delhi, travelling overnight at an average speed of about twenty-five miles an hour, to arrive at Haridwar, a historic pilgrimage place on the Ganga, just after dawn. There, we took a taxi up to Rishikesh, another site sacred to Hindus.
When I first visited Rishikesh more than forty years ago, it was a small pilgrimage centre for those who wanted to worship the Ganga as she emerges from the Himalayas to begin her long journey across the north Indian plain. Pilgrimage has now become an essential part of India’s leisure industry, to the extent that one bank of the Ganga is scarred by the ramshackle urban sprawl that is standard throughout Indian towns that have developed too rapidly.
A walk across the suspension bridge named the Laxman Jhula, or ‘swing of Laxman’, after the god Rama’s brother, leads to the garish temples, the ashrams and the dharamsalas where pilgrims stay. We were headed for an ashram some distance away from the centre of Rishikesh to discuss the relationship between yoga and organised religion with Swami Veda Bharati, one of the leading teachers of yoga meditation. Before setting out I had read his book, which has the bold and some might consider presumptuous title, God. In the book he says:
God, for me, is truth, and truth is that which exists in all times – the past, present and future. It is self-existent; it was never born, so it never dies. It is the fountainhead of light and love … That truth is both within and without, so one can directly attain it by realizing the truth within himself. It is possible to do this.
The truth, Swami Veda Bharati believes, can be experienced through yoga meditation, but he would never suggest this is the only way to experience it.
Swamiji’s master, Swami Rama, was a renowned teacher who had spent long years in the Himalayas learning from the ascetics who lived in caves there. He had many strange experiences, which he recorded in his autobiography. These included witnessing a Swami decide the day he should die – and did die – only to return to life again because he was so disgusted by the Hindus, Muslims and Christians squabbling among themselves over who should perform his last rites. Stories like this are difficult for most of us to accept, but they did nothing to damage Swami Rama’s credibility among his followers.
His own powers, his magnetic personality and his spirituality attracted disciples of all religions and from all parts of the globe; and they were not necessarily unworldly credulous people. They raised the money to buy an old monastery in the United States to convert into a meditation centre, and during the last years of Swami Rama’s life they enabled him to build a large modern hospital and medical school near Rishikesh. I was shown around the hospital by a doctor who had returned from an eminent career in America – so eminent that a kidney complaint was named after him. He wasn’t a man to accept lightly that there could be a return to life after someone had been declared clinically dead, yet it was Swami Rama who had inspired him to give up his career in America and to come to this hospital in a remote part of India.
Before he died, Swami Rama appointed Veda Bharati as his successor. Veda Bharati had already taken the vows of a Swami in a long ceremony during which he had to state that he had risen above the desire ‘for sex and family, for wealth and comfort, for fame and honour’. He was also asked whether he would abandon his ‘previous name, previous life and previous relations’, and performed the ceremony for honouring the memory of the dead as an acknowledgement that ‘everything of I and mine is dead’. After the ceremony, the only possessions Veda Bharati would be allowed were a water vessel, a loin cloth for underwear, upper garments, lower garments and wooden slippers. At the end of the ritual he was presented with robes the colour of ‘the light of the rising sun’ and told: ‘Wherever you walk you bring peace of the morning, of the light of dawn, the light of the rising sun … From now you are a being of light.’
The last time I had met Swami Veda Bharati was at the greatest of all Hindu festivals, the Maha Kumbh Mela, at Allahabad in 2002. On the most auspicious bathing day of the Mela, he had taken part in the procession of one of the Akharas, or Hindu monastic orders, down to the confluence of the sacred rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The procession had been led by naked ascetics dancing, jumping and shouting like children in their excitement. Then came a long line of more sober monks robed in garments the colour of the rising sun. Swami Veda Bharati had been among the few who were enthroned on chariots pulled by a tractor. At one time they might well have ridden on elephants, but elephants had been banned from the Mela for fear that they might run amuck. The chariots were reserved for the men and women who had been awarded the title of Mahamandaleshwar, the most senior honour bestowed by the Akharas on scholars. It had been awarded to Swami Veda Bharati in recognition of his knowledge and his understanding of the Vedas and yogic texts.
However, Swami Veda Bharati’s elevated status has not gone to his head. He remains warm-hearted and welcoming. When I e-mailed him about this book, he immediately suggested that I come to his ashram in Rishikesh. His book God had aroused doubts in me about reconciling yoga with Anglicanism, or indeed any form of organised religion. Swami Veda Bharati said, ‘In yoga one simply practises the methods and waits for the doctrine to emerge out of the experience.’ To my mind, that seemed like putting the cart before the horse, as doctrine had come first in my life. The doctrines of organised religion seemed to be very much a secondary concern in yoga. According to Swamiji: ‘The yogi ministers to people of all faiths, lets them see the ever-present God in their own church, temple, mosque, or pagoda, but first see him in the temple which is the human personality.’ While I wanted to find the God in my human personality, I also wanted to stand in the Anglican tradition as a check to the sort of self-deception Gerard Hughes warned against.
It was a busy time at the ashram because a fifty-day yaj
na (a Vedic sacrificial rite) was coming to an end, and one of the Shankaracharyas – the holder of an important, historic Hindu office – had come to take part in the final rituals. Gilly and I were allotted a small cottage opposite Swami Veda Bharati’s, but it wasn’t until the evening that he was able to spare us some time.
The Swami is quite small and appears to be almost swamped by his robes, which are the colour of the rising sun. But unlike many Hindu holy men, he has quite neatly cut grey hair and is clean-shaven. He speaks with a slight North American twang.
The Swami travels a great deal in North America and so we talked about the individualism of American culture. When I suggested that America had got this out of balance, he replied, ‘I’ve found that every weakness is a weakening of a strength. American pioneers had two strengths: one was their individualism – you can’t be a pioneer without that. The other was their interdependence: they couldn’t have constructed America without working together. Now their interdependence has weakened.’
We discussed the lack of a religious sensitivity in the West today and the lack of humility in a culture that exalts itself above nature. Eventually coming to the subject that had brought me to Rishikesh, I said to Swami Veda Bharati, ‘I get the impression from your book God that yoga doesn’t have much time for religious traditions, their scriptures, liturgies, rituals and teachings.’
Swami Veda Bharati smiled. ‘Surely I must have some time for organised religion or why would I be a member of an order of Hindu monks and why would I have accepted the title of Mahamandaleshwar?’
‘But how do you reconcile your practice of orthodox Hinduism with your belief that personal experience must come first?’ I wondered.
‘There are two parts to everything, from outside in and inside out,’ he said. ‘The great prophets and founders of religion – did they have any doctrine to develop their religion from? No, they had their experience and they translated that into language. For a large number of people, however, religion is the path to God. It’s only the other way round with the ground-breakers: God gives them the religion.’
