Sam Thinks He Knows Enough to Write About Religion in India: Proceed With Caution

I hear a good journalist is suppoed to let the reader have the last word, but I feel like I have more to say about religion as I've encountered it here in India, especially after Pujie teased me last post about visiting India and claiming disinterest in religion. So, here, I'd like to put forth some observations about Hinduism (and, to a lesser extent, Islam) in India, in the context of how these faiths are interpreted and enacted by people. I'd also like to try and explain why I think this is more interesting and more important that the religious beliefs and texts themselves. The usual disclaimer about me being uninformed and ignorant applies in full force, especially because my observations come from conversations with not very many people.

So basically, you can sort your academis into two camps. First, you can follow Marx, and take the view that it's all economis. The first historical act, the first act of civilization, he argues, was the economic organization of society. Everything people do has the struggle to meet their physical needs at its root, and this includes religion.

Durkheim, on the other hand, believes that religion informs economic activity. He takes the example of the Protestant work ethic leading to the success of capitalism in the West.

Elisabeth Bumiller has another example of religion informing other cultural practice in her book, "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons." Hindu women, she writes, are happy to go along with arranged marriages because of a religiously based fatalism--that karma, our actions from past lives, prescribes our destiny.

This argument is ok, and you have to admire the interdisciplinary spirit, but there's one problem; where did this religious philosophy come from? In the West, arranged marraiges wer ecommon, and a tool for maintaining the socio-economic status quo. The economic arrangement was at the heart of the practice, and I imagine that it's at the heart of the Indian practice as well, at least historically.

What's strange is that Christianity is a religion that emphasizes choice above all else--not fatalism. If religion leads to all else in society, and totally opposite ideas can lead to the same ends, you don't exactly have a logical system for explaining social practices.

I'd like to avoid all sorts of religious reductionism, Marxian and Durkheimian--but it seems clear that people use religious texts to justify anything they want (compassionate conservatism, anyone?). I had a conversation with Shubhra the other day, where she argued that advanced religions have made the jump from worshipping an all-powerful, judging god, to a powerless, loving one. In Hinduism, you get the baby Kirshna; in Christianity, it's baby Jesus.

I have two problems with this argument; first, it puts Christianity up as an upgrade form Judaism, which seems looney and antisemetic. Second, the Jesus that mainstreamt Christians worship is the one who sacrificed himself on the cross, suffered the fires of hell, and then ascended to heaven. The nativity story is the prologue, at least as Christianity is commonly practiced. The interpretation, not the text, is key.

Making matters worse for the Durkheimians is the immense complexity of Hinduism. There are 33 crore gods to choose from (1 crore = 10 million), a number which you can get from doing permutations and combinations on the number of senses and virtues identified by Hindus. The reason for Bhuddism's decline in the land of its birth is that Hinduism has a kind of all-consuming tolerance. You want to worship Bhudda? Be a Hindu. Like Jesus? Join the Hindu club. Amartya Sen writes that when he became convinced that he was an atheist, and he told his very religious grandfather that he was not a Hindu, grandpa said, "Oh no, you're just out on the atheistic brance of Hinduism." All in all, you can be a Hindu however you want.

So I'm just not convinced that by learning the lists of sense and sins and virtures and the sites where the pieces of Sita's body fell (her left toes are in Kolkata at the Kalighat temple) you can know much about the people of India. And anyway, it's not like the world needs more Westerners to "discover" Eastern mysticism.

This is emphatically NOT to suggest aht India and Hinduism do not have a rich philosophical tradition which continues to pervade contemporary Indian discourse. The Mahabrat is used as the rhetorical playing field for conversations about politics and ethics, not to mention gender and marriage and nationalism. But it's that rhetorical playing field that I'm most interested in, and which, according ot Marx, may be rooted in something underlying the texts and traditions explicitly identified as religious. I'm interested in the questions, "What kinds of things make sense to people? How do they justify and explain their lives?"

So this is what I mean when I say that, as a traveller and a student, I care more about religion in practice that I do in theory. I want to ask Bumiller, "where did Hinduism come from?" and Durkheim, "why did the Protestant work ethic come from?" Otherwise, it seems, you have no explanatory foundation.

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Not, incidentally, that I've found such a foundation: and as a result, the next series of anecdotes can be grouped only under the heading, "Look at all these anecdotes about religion!" Sorry Ms. Talton; no thesis statement here. But that's the luxury in having your own blog.

One thing I've noticed from the Hindus I've spoken talked with here (everyone in Vikramshila is Hindu, actually) is a total disinterest in the kind of arguments about literalism we seem to get hung up on in Christian traditions. Standing with our feet in the Ganges, one of the holy rivers of Hinduism (I don't know all of them, but one is reportedly underground), Shubbhradi told me that the river is symbol of life; changing and yet unchanging, peaceful and turbulent, all at once. I asked her about the ritual of bathing in the river, and she said that the force of life flows through the river.

"So it's a symbol and more than a symbol?" I asked her.

"Sure," she said, indifferently.

Later, I attended one part of a lecture series, where the speaker, a scholar on the Mahabharata and a monk, read from the text and held discussions. During the question and answer session, a woman and the monk expressed profound ambivalence to whether or not "Man created God" or "God created Man." The end, they felt, was the same.

After the discussion, I approached the monk, and we talked a little, and I asked him if he took the Mahabharata literally--if it was true.

"Is Dickens or Chekov true?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Is the Mahabharata? Was Krishna a real person?" He considered for a moment.
"I just love the character!" he said.

Another way that the kind of questions we ask about religion in the West are irrelevent to Hindus is the question of mono- vs poly-theism. I remember a discussion in my 9th grade World Civilization class about whether Hindus belived in many gods, or if the 33 crore which actually just manifestations of one big God. I asked this question to a couple of people, and they just didn't really know what to do with it. I don't mean to sound too Confuscian about it, but the answer is that there are both one and many gods, and why are you asking me this?

It's this kind of thing, the shape of the rhetoric surrounding religion, that I think speaks more to the consciousness of Hindus than anything else. Christians and Hindus don't just believe different things about the supernatural. They approach the supernatural from different angles, with different interests and needs. I'll have to ponder longer what this disinterest in pinning down truth to simple, statable maxims means, but it's certainly intriguing.
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Another thing about the people I've spent time with here is that they display a fair distaste for Islam. Immediately, I'd like to qualify this statement. Bengalis also express distaste for other ethnic groups, like Punjabis and Marwatis, and while you don't hear about violence between those groups as you do between Hindus and Muslims, I think those kinds of resentments may be different in degree more than in kind. Furthermore, the people at Vikramshila spend most of their energy on working with Muslim communities, who, thanks to the way the partitions of Bengal and then India played out, are among the most impoverished in India. I don't want to make a big stink about people who say slightly insensitive things about Muslims, and then make it their life's work to help people who are Muslim.

But that distaste is there. I've heard several people say that such and such a person is difficult to talk to because he is "so orthodox!" Others have claimed that much of the discrimination against women in India can be attributed to Islam.

"Did you know women cannot enter the mosque?" I was asked, as if I was being let in on a terrible secret. What's weird is that, when I ask Hindus about gender discrimination amongst Hindus, people say "oh no, men and women are far more equal." A couple people have told me that the purdah, or seclusion, of women, is a practice predominantly of Muslims.

But I've read in two unrelated sources that, in fact, the purdah is common amongst high-caste rural Hindus, and that it is immitated to the degree possible by lower caste families. Dowry crimes, which often involve dousing women with kerosene and lighting them on fire, are relatively rare, in the scheme of things--but the practice occurs among Hindus. Finally, and most distressingly, rural women in India, regardless of religion, work far more than their husbands, and yet have hardly any access to economic resources. This is not to claim that Hindus or Muslims have a leg up in terms of achieving gender equality. It just seems clear to me that no faith should be claiming the moral high ground.

I've also heard people say that Muslims are incredible sensitive to any discussion about the demographics of India, like the fact that nearly all the Bangledeshis who migrate into India are Muslim, and that therefore the population of India is becoming slowly more Muslim. This is politically incorrect, I was told--Muslims say that this is the kind of rhetoric used to discriminate against them.

They say this because it's true; the Hindu nationalist movement, led by the conservative BJP, has long tried to return India to its "true" Hindu origins. Claims of a Muslim invasion are part of their arsenal. If I were Muslim, I'd also be sensitive to people saying things like, "There are so many Muslims coming into this country! Watch out!" And this is assuming that the Hindus I've spoken to haven't exaggerated the depth of Muslim sensitivity.

I was given an insight into the attitudes of Hindus towards Muslims in the car ride back from Mushidabad. In the car were te driver, who didn't speak English, and three Vikramshila people. We were discussing religion, and someone said, "Well you know, almost all the Muslims in India are converts anyway."

This seemed to me to be totally bogus; there has been a large Muslim presence in India since the time of the Moghuls; the Taj Mahal was built by Muslims; all the Bangledeshis who have immigrated to India since Independence are Muslim. How could "most" or even a large proportion of Indian Muslims be converts. I expressed this skepticism, and all three of the English-speaking Hindus in the car emphatically agreed the original statement.

"Many of these families have only been Muslim for seven, eight, or nine generations!" someone said.

I explained that, to me, a "convert" is a person who "converts" to a religion during their life time. My three companions scoffed at this quaint idea.

The issue here is that Hinduism accepts no converts at all.

"It's really more of a way of life," it was explained to me. There's no date of founding, and many of the things today considered essential to Hinduism (like the awful caste system which continues to be a source of social and economic inequality) came to it relatively late in the life of the Indus valley civilization. To a religion that's more than three thousand years old, it looks like Islam is kind of faking it--the same with Christianity. When I pushed the issue, the three people in the car agreed that every single Muslim, Christian, and Bhuddist is a convert.

"And anyway," Shubhra said, "The Indians who convert to Islam are usually at the bottom of the caste system, and have suffered because of it. Islam is an escape from that social inequality." The implication was that such converts were, more or less, in it for the money.

"But if it's the case that poor and low-caste Indians convert to Islam because Hinduism has served them badly," I asked, "isn't it also the case that rich and high-caste Indians stay Hindu because it has served them well?"

Shubhra sat quietly, gazing out the window.

"I'm not going to respond to that," she said, laughing. "Now you're arguing just to argue."

And there we are back to Marx. The economic, social, and relgious lives of people in India and elsewhere are inextriably intertwined. And while religion certainly influences behavior, it also seems to me that religion is the way we talk about things that are important to us.

This isn't to say that Hinduism or Islam or any other religion isn't central to the identities of many people here.I've listened to several people tell me about the deep, personal importance they place on religion, and how such faith has been a guiding light in their lives. I'd write more about it, but these people talked to me more or less in confidence, so I feel uncomfortable putting it up on the ol' internet. Furthermore, the Muslim practice of praying five times a day made a lot of sense to me when I was in Bigha, and the farmers took rest from the grueling work of farming to have a few minutes to center themselves, as well as to sit in a cool and shady place. Suffice it to say, many (most?) people here do make their religion an intergral part of their lives.

Anyway, that's all I have for now on religion. Pujie, you can now have the last word.