INDIA BEFORE SECULARISM

To understand the contours of an India before Nehruvian secularism, it is

essential to grasp the roots: that is, the spirit of India’s core ideals. This spirit and
these ideals are informed by a spirituality rooted in Vedanta, or the Upanishads.
In turn, they reflect themselves in every facet of human endeavor of Indians
even today in howsoever a diminished form, frequency, and fervor: in
classical music, temple architecture, sculpture, classical poetry, literature,
epics, painting, drama, cinema, and more fundamentally, in the attitude
towards food. In all this, there’s an element that’s essentially feminine in the sense of
possessing the innate traits of beauty and the capacity to nurture, nurse, and
sustain.

Dr. S Srikanta Sastri quoted “ The culture of India, like the country itself, is
indivisible and timeless. Just like its indivisible geography that stretches from
Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Vishweshwara to Rameshwara, from Bindu Madhava
to Sethu Madhava, Indian culture too represents this indivisible continuum from the
Rishis of the Vedas all the way up to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa… However, all
these schools also universally recognize the fact that the individual, based on his/her
nature and temperament, is free to lead a life of his/her choosing. It is because of this
that there is no scope for totalitarianism in Indian culture. The spiritual outlook that
lies at the heart of Indian culture is the reason it’s still alive and flourishing in the
world. Indian culture is thus like Atman, the Self: timeless and imperishable.”

PV Kane said that “ Ancient sages laid the foundation by insisting…that there is and
must be harmony between man’s spirit and the spirit of the world and man’s endeavor
should be to realize in his actions and in his life this harmony and unity. The
Upanishads teach that man gains by giving up (by renunciation) and exhorts man not
to covet another’s wealth. there are certain values of our culture that have endured for
three thousand years, Many young men have in these days hardly anything which they
believe as worth striving for whatever the cost maybe, and hence they have nothing to
practice as an ideal. If a large majority of our people and the leaders throw away or
neglect religion and spirituality altogether, the probability is that we shall lose both
spiritual life and social betterment. “

There’s renewed interest in preserving ancient Indian art forms, literature, poetry,
language, and valuable primary texts on numerous subjects. Tireless efforts are also
ongoing to bring back invaluable stolen artifacts[25] and where possible, to bring
such criminals to justice. Numerous initiatives to re-study various aspects of India’s
past purely from a “native” perspective shorn of ideology have made an impact.

But the best of the spiritual and cultural treasures of India are found beginning from
the foundational Vedic era, the Epic age and roughly up to the end of the Classical
Period, or the 13th century CE. At the risk of making a sweeping statement, it can be
said that almost everything that the India of today takes pride in was produced during
this period: from the spiritual and philosophical lore of the Vedas to Ramayana,
Mahabharata, Puranas.
REVISITING THE HINDU TEMPLE ECOSYSTEM

How often have we heard this refrain or its variants: I don’t visit temples. I don’t like
visiting temples…I mean, there’s no point…all that noise, meaningless mantras and
rituals… so unhygienic…I don’t believe in God, I’m not religious but I’m spiritual…
after all, Hinduism is a personal religion and I don’t really need to go to a temple to
pray…

Admittedly, there is a grain of truth in some of these utterances. First the practical,
physical aspects: There’s no dearth of temples in India that are dirty and unhygienic,
have unruly crowds, and appear meaningless and chaotic to everybody except the
most devout howsoever much such devotion as a value in itself is commendable. On
the other side, most Hindus have tragically reduced temple-going to a base activity
that comprises one or several or all of these elements: bribing the Deity as a means of
expiating individual sins. Sometimes, the most devout-looking devotees are bribe-
seeking bureaucrats who in turn bribe God to somehow assuage their consciences; But
what seems incredible is the fact that such criticisms have, far from
diluting the fervour, only given birth to newer and newer temples. Indeed, Hindus
have historically been prolific temple builders. This is an inherited cultural and
civilizational trait that continues unabated till date. In itself, this trait and the fact that
it has been preserved for so long is admirable but it’s nothing to really celebrate
because we have just retained the form, and not the spirit.

To put it bluntly, a considerable majority of those who utter such lofty sounding
nothings—I’m not religious but spiritual, etc—base their criticism about temple-going
on ignorance. This also definitely applies to those Hindus who learn their Hinduism
from one or more of these sources: The Western Curators of Museum Hinduism
typically characterized by the notorious Chicago School of Indology led by the likes
of Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright and other luminaries. The New Age Guru variety,
which is selective in choosing specific Hindu symbols, practices and techniques,
divorcing them from their Hindu roots and claiming them as their own, original
creations. And so, at the risk of oversimplification, the genuine, Lamenting Hindus
are truly caught between the Devil and the Deep Sea: the former with a covert and
overt agenda to undermine and subvert Hinduism, and the latter with a purely
commercial agenda to exploit their typical target audience.

The plan, design, and structure of almost all classical and medieval temples
was well-defined, scientific and followed the rules of Indian architecture laid
down in the Shilpa Shastra and related texts. Contemporary temples too,
more or less follow this model of construction. A visit to any of these stillsurviving
temples makes it clear that areas are earmarked for specific purposes: dormitories for
pilgrims, halls for debates and allied activities, a Yajnashala, a Natyashala, the water
tank, platforms for students to take their lessons, dining halls and so on. Indeed, the
actual temple itself forms a small part of this grand architectural scheme. In a way,
Varanasi by itself is one massive temple that houses hundreds of mini-temples within
its precincts. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Temple Culture is in the field of
our classical performing arts. The Temple Culture also produced superior human
resources required to sustain not just these endeavors but, indirectly, a kingdom itself.
It produced ministers, advisors, strategists, artisans, and teachers. Therefore, when a
temple was destroyed, it also simultaneously destroyed almost every cultural facet of
the kingdom that protected and sustained it. In North India and in south especially in
Goa there is no temple left because of barbaric invaders. Post Independence, under the
rule of the first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the Temple Culture was
systematically relegated to neglect. This paved way eventually for more brazen State
interference in the affairs of Hindu temples, an interference which has reached the
nadir in Tamil Nadu. While State control of Hindu temples has not physically
destroyed temples, it has ensured the same cultural outcome that colonization
achieved: of discouraging even devout Hindus from visiting them thanks to shocking
maintenance, filth, squalor, and corruption.

SYMBOLISM OF SARASWATI

A couple of years ago, a reader wrote to me with an experience that he says vexed
him. The relevant portion of his email is excerpted below: …during a talk with a
liberal friend of mine, regarding the MF Hussain episode…friend talked on the lines
of what liberals usually speak i.e kamasutra khajuraho…But…his explanation that
Brahma marrying his creation (daughter) Saraswati amounted to incest which
according to him means Hinduism sanctifies such relationships…made me quite
uncomfortable and disturbed.

This kind of “explanation” typically stems from the colonial—or more recently, the
Chicago School of Indology. If viewed only literally, Brahma who married his own
daughter, Saraswati is definitely a case of incest.

At the risk of oversimplification, one can reasonably say that the traditional method of
interpreting our lore falls under three categories: Adhibhautika ( Pertaining to living
beings), Adhidaivika ( Pertaining to supernatural forces), Adhyaatmika (pertaining to
the “atma,” or “soul.) and therefore, to interpret any aspect of the vast corpus of our
lore, it requires years of study and training in numerous auxiliary disciplines.

At a very mundane, everyday level, if we create something from our own imagination
—a painting, a poem, a tune, a sculpture–it becomes ours in the sense that it is
something we gave birth to using our imaginative, mental, and physical faculties. This
is typically why we say “ “labour of my love,” “my baby,” “breathed life into it,”
“manifestation of my creativity,” and so on. But if it’s nothing more than a marriage
between a man and a woman, why was Brahma so attracted to his own daughter?
Being Creator, how difficult was it to create a wife for himself?

As Creator, Brahma brought to life Existence itself: both the sentient and the inert. In
other words, he created the physical world that we perceive through our sense organs
and try to understand that world using our mind. And how does the mind make sense
of this physical world? To put this in plain language, we look at a tree and our mind
won’t rest in peace unless it finds a word (nama) to define it accurately so that when
you say “tree,” you know exactly what it is without having to actually look at it with
your eyes.
It is evident that this process of defining the physical world falls in the realm of
thought. And any thought is expressed through speech, which when heard once again
transforms itself as thought in the mind of the listener. Thus the shapes and forms that
Brahma gave to his thoughts became the physical world. When he expressed it in
language, it became speech. And this speech is Saraswati, his daughter. This stands to
reason when we observe the fact that the Indian tradition worships Saraswati
primarily as the Goddess of speech (or vaak), language, and learning. As symbolizing
the meaning of the word, Saraswati is Brahma’s wife, inseparable like the wife who
stays with her husband for life, through good and tough times. An outlook shaped by
and steeped in literalism and hard realism has indeed led to the near-total destruction
of classics—Greek, Roman and Indian—in both the academia and popular
imagination.

Equally, we can’t be selective in choosing literal meanings for some, and symbolic
meanings for others. For instance, we can consider the story of the Trimurtis. Why do
those who accept the symbolism—not literalism—of the Trimurtis as symbols of
creation, preservation, and destruction, selectively take only the literal meaning in the
marriage of Brahma and Saraswati?

FACETS OF CULTURAL UNITY OF INDIA:

The month of August of every year witnesses the annual celebration of the Naga
Panchami (or Nagara Panchami) festival across India and the world. All Hindu
festivals without exception underscore a key aspect of Hinduism or Santana Dharma:
celebration. Of life, nature, the living and the non-living in all myriad hues—black,
white, and all the shades of grey. The modalities, the manner, the custom, and the
tradition of celebrating any Hindu festival widely differ depending on which part of
the Indian geography one is located in but the festival is celebrated with the same
fervour and devotion.
We can take Makara Sankranti as a representative illustration of this fact. People in
Karnataka exchange a mixture comprising sugarcane blocks and shapes of Gods,
Goddesses, flowers, fruits, animals–white sesame seeds, jaggery, and a piece of
sugarcane. In Andhra Pradesh, sugarcane is replaced by the jujube fruit. Assam have
on offer at least 10 different varieties of Pitha, a sort of rice cake. To Gujaratis,
Makara Sankrati is the occasion to fly kites, and make Undhiyu and Chikkis.
Maharashtra feasts on Tilgul (sweetmeat made from sesame) and Gulpolis, and wish
each other peace and prosperity. Tamil Nadu offers us varieties of pongal–thai pongal,
mattu pongal and kannum pongal. Every state, city, and town—from Bundelkhand,
Rajasthan, Punjab, Bengal,Goa, Kerala, to Odisha–has its own unique way of
celebrating Makara Sankranti. And all of these are connected by an invisible, ancient,
and subterranean thread that binds them with India. The fingers that weave this thread
even today are the same fingers that enabled India to withstand the most barbaric and
sustained attacks in the history of mankind.

Reasons for the strength of Sanatan Dharma

1. ADAPDIBILITY: It is only Sanatana Dharma that has proven in myriad ways the
truth of the dictum that “change is the only constant.”. Sanatana Dharma responds to
change in a manner and with a flexibility that is both unrivalled and unique. This
adaptability as history shows us, is multipronged, multifaceted, and dynamic.

The earliest, pre-Islamic threat to Sanatana Dharma arrived in an era when Buddhism
had degenerated. BR Ambedkar said “ There can be no doubt that the fall of
Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans… To the Muslims,
they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols thus became the
mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but
wherever it went. Before Islam came into being Buddhism was the religion of Bactria,
Parthia, Afghanistan, Gandhar and Chinese Turkestan, as it was of the whole of
Asia... The Musalman invaders sacked the Buddhist Universities of Nalanda,
Vikramshila, Jagaddala, Odantapuri to name only a few. They raised to the ground
Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in
thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. A very large number were
killed outright by the Muslim commanders. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by
the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians
themselves.…”.

Needless, the next big threat to Santana Dharma came in the form invading Arab
Muslims motivated by Islam and greed for looting India’s fabled riches.

2. The Bhakti Movement as a Counter and a Rejuvenating Force: A big factor of the
Bhakti movement was characterized by a widespread retelling our epics and Puranas.
Indeed, the Bhakti movement arose precisely due to Islam’s record of cultural
homicide marked by an industrial scale destruction of Hindu temples, disallowing
new ones to be built and existing ones renovated. The Bhakti saints exhorted people
to preserve their way of life and worship in whatever form–nothing was taboo. A big
component of Bhakti saints comprised saints, poets, and singers who wandered across
India exhorting Hindus to preserve their time-tested ways of life, tradition and life.
They worshipped Hindu Gods and Goddess in songs composed in simple and/or rustic
lyric in the local language that was easy to memorize and recall, and could be set to
tune.

As Hari Ravishankar said “ When we see the great bhakti poets - be it Shankar Dev of
Assam, Narsinh Mehta of Gujarat, Meera of Rajasthan, Ravidas of Uttar Pradesh,
Akka Mahadevi of Karnataka, Tukaram of Maharashtra, or Auvaiyar of Tamil Nadu -
we find that they hail from all classes of society and from varied backgrounds.” Thus,
when the Ramayana or stories from our Puranas could no longer be recited or
performed openly under an oppressive Islamic state, the Bhakti saints made them
immediately accessible, by making Rama one’s neighbor, while Krishna was just
waiting on the other side of the river. These saints drew parallels, analogies, and
illustrations from everyday life, which helped retain Sanatana Dharma as a living and
lived tradition. Centuries of such sustained efforts eventually led to a great pushback:
the rise and rise of the legendary Shivaji who successfully defied Aurangzeb and laid
the foundation for the later expansive and mighty Maratha Empire is a
shining illustration of this fact.
3. THE ROLE OF THE NEW INDIA RENAISSANCE:

After the fall of the Mughal Empire and with the eventual takeover of India by the
East India Company, the 19th Century witnessed the unprovoked attack by
Christianity against Sanatana Dharma. Conversions of Hindus into Christianity was
an accepted organ of the British imperial policy. It was indeed a renewed attack: as
the scholar-historian R.C. Majumdar says, the British takeover of India was an event
during which India merely changed masters. The attack that Christianity launched
against Sanatana Dharma was sophisticated but equally brutal and far reaching in its
consequences. India is yet to recover from the damage it has wrought. In the early
days, when Christian missionaries failed to persuade Hindus to convert through
various devices and sustained efforts, it re-clothed its message and equated its
Messianic preaching with whatever parallel it found in Sanatana Dharma. The story of
how the “Roman Brahmin” (sic) Roberto De Nobili wore a “Christian sacred thread”
to imitate Brahmins as a ploy to convert Hindus is a case study in point. A strong tide
of Hindu resurgence led by the likes of Swami Dayananda Saraswathi and Swami
Vivekananda pretty much scuttled such conversion attempts. That was when
missionaries targeted the poorer sections of Hindu society, a tactic that remains
unchanged till date. However, the greatest damage that British rule did to India was to
carve out what is now infamously known as the Macaulayite class of Indians.
Needless, majority of this Macaulayite class are upper caste Hindus. Our Marxists,
secularists and liberals are the descendants of the worst of this Macaulayite class. In
the early stages of this project, Swami Vivekananda stood as the foremost counter by
his tireless efforts to reawaken Hindus to their own past glory. Needless, he continues
to remain a great source of inspiration. His efforts were followed by a whole galaxy of
Indian scholars who began investigating different aspects of their past and publicizing
their findings to the world.

BREIF SURVEY OF RAMA AND RAMAYANA IN SOUTH INDIA

One of the greatest losses of the so-called Dravidian discourse in Tamil Nadu is the
loss of a number of Hindu Devatas or deities in the civilizational consciousness of the
Tamil people. To restate the obvious, most ancient and medieval era temples in Tamil
Nadu today have become dens of corruption, squalor, and pettiness at all levels. This
rampant degradation continues unchecked as we speak. The Government-appointed
administrative heads of these temples are not only ignorant of even something as
basic as the temple’s kshetra or sthala puranas – oral and even written history – but
dismiss it with a contempt that has to be seen to be believed. Perhaps nowhere is the
loss of Hindu deities more visible, greater or more destructive than in the case of
Rama. From the likes of writers who intentionally named themselves Ravanan all the
way up to Karunanidhi. The Sangam corpus is typically used as a reliable primary
source for much of the historical information about Tamil Nadu. The Sangam era’s
historicity spans roughly from 200 BCE to 200 CE. It is therefore reasonable to start
tracing the Rama tradition in Tamil Nadu from this source. In general, Sangam
literature contains numerous references to Vishnu and his prominent avatars like
Narasimha, Rama, and Krishna. And then , a collection of about 400 poems contains
references to the Ramayana.
Post the Sangam era, the Alvars were the true pioneers of the Vaishnava bhakti
movement in Tamil Nadu. In a way, they were the spiritual progenitors of Sri
Ramanuja, founder of Srivaishnavism, who held them in great reverence. The term
(Alvar) means ‘one who is immersed’ (in devotion to the lord). Between the twelve of
them, the Alvars composed what is known as the Naalaayira Divyaprabandham
(literally, ‘the 4,000 divine verses’) dedicated to all forms of Vishnu. References to
Rama are abundant in this Prabandham literature, most notably in the poetry of
Kulashekara Alvar (a 9th century CE king from Kerala) who dedicated his life to
worshiping Rama. What is even more significant, a fact that our history textbooks
conceal, is that in an age where the varna system had reached deplorable levels,
Thiruppaan, an untouchable was hailed as one of the Alvars by the sheer force of his
devotion, and was carried on the shoulders by a Brahmana priest of the Ranganatha
temple at Srirangam. Then there is Kambar’s popularly known as the
Kambaramayanam. This is the definitive, and epoch-making work that helped spread
the Rama tradition throughout the Tamil land. Inspired by Valmiki, Kambar retold the
epic in about 10,000 verses in Tamil. This work contributed not just to classical Tamil
literature, but over time, became inseparable from routine Hindu religious worship.
The next saint-philosopher to significantly propagate the Rama movement was
Sadashiva Brahmendra who lived in Tiruchinapalli in the 18th century He initiated the
concept of Rama Parabrahma or ‘Rama as Brahman.’ And the celebrity-follower of
Brahmendra was the musician-composer Tyagaraja whose entire life centered on
Rama. His music, lyric, and Rama bhakti have become immortal. The Thanjavur-
Kaveri belt in Tamil Nadu came under the Rama bhakti spell owing to these
influences. Other stalwarts of the Rama bhakti movement include the legendary
Vedanta Deshikar, who wrote a thousand verses on Sri Rama’s (sandals/footwear)
known as the Paduka Sahasram; Sridhar Sastry Aiyyaval; C. Rajagopalachari whose
Chakravarthi Thirumagan is an acknowledged modern classic; the Kanchi
Paramacharya; and the Ahobila Jeeyar. The Rama tradition also finds its expression in
the names Tamil people give their children. Raman, Rameshwaran, Ramaswamy,
Ramabhadran, Ramagopalan, Sitaraman, Sivaraman, Sivaramakrishnan,
Ramasubramanian, and so on.