At the 5th Gathering
of the Elders (Mysore, 1-4 February 2015), I was originally only present as an
observer. But when a Hindu lady speaker had addressed the social philosophy of
the Gond tribe, I felt it necessary to give a fitting reply, as it was contrary
to the whole aim and spirit of the conference. To my good fortune, the next
speaker failed to show up, so the chair asked me if I could improvise a lecture.
How deep the Christian
missionary influence has penetrated the Hindu psyche, was shown by this rendering
of their worldview. The first aim of the missionaries is to convince the tribals
that they are not Hindus. (After that, they will tell them that their religion
is very close to Christianity, that their self-acknowledgment as Hindus would
constitute a “conversion” while their baptism would only constitute a “fulfilment”
of their natural religion.) So, the lecture on the Gonds taught us that their
religion is the very opposite of Hinduism because:
·
1. they worship
Barâ Dev while Hindus worship Ishwar;
·
2. They consider
the North auspicious; Hindus, the South;
·
3. They bury
their dead; Hindus cremate them;
·
4. They
believe in service to others (“jai seva!”), Hindus only in their own
Liberation;
·
5. They
believe the world is real, Hindus believe it is Maya (illusion).
·
6. They
are divided in 12 exogamous phratries, Hindus in endogamous castes.
Against this, we
notice that:
·
1. Barâ
Dev, “great god”, is modern Indo-Aryan for Sanskrit Mahadeva, same meaning and
a name for Shiva (“the benefactor”, which itself is a flattering name for the
fearsome god Rudra, “furious”), for whom another name is Ishwar (“lord”).
Within Hinduism, it is perfectly normal for a god to have different names, and
for different divine personalities to overlap. There is simply no opposition
between Barâ Dev and Mahadeva.
·
2. In
Vastu Shatra, a front-door should not be built in the south, as it is deemed inauspicious,
which is the same valuation of the south as among the Gonds. (For now, I take
the speaker’s word for what exactly constitutes Gondi culture.) Even if it was
different, it wouldn’t constitute a meaningful contrast: in China, the local habitat
edology (fengshui) holds the south as positive and as the correct location of
the front-door, due to a different climate: I the cold Yellow River valley,
warmth was welcome, so the sunny south was good, whereas in hot India, men
shield themselves against the sun. Yet, nobody derives therefrom a meaningful contrast
between Indian and Chinese traditions, least of all the missionaries. Whether Chanakya
or Confucius, all non-Christians are going to hell.
·
3. Hindus
since Vedic times have known both cremation and burial. Infants and saints are
still buried. In some corners, Hindu burials persist, e.g. among the Gonds.
·
4. Hindu
society has always believed in social responsibility (Dharma, ca. “taking up
your role as a specific part of the whole”), including the need for Seva, “service”,
a genuine and ancient Sanskrit word (in contrast with Adivasi, “aboriginal”,
which is a neologism devised by the missionaries in the colonial period). This
was not put in the centre, and rightly so, but it was fully accepted. This duty
was not discharged by clerics, as in Christianity, where hospitals were
traditionally manned by nuns, but by laymen, mostly in the extended family.
Ascetics, by contrast, were freed from social duty because they had taken up
another duty, viz. pursuing Liberation, which to the laymen is mostly but a
theoretical goal which they don’t actively pursue. Liberation is not “selfish”
but impersonal, and requires a great deal of self-abnegation, even more than Seva.
·
5. Only a
small percentage of the Hindus even know about Mayavad, the doctrine that the
world is a fata morgana created by the magic power of the gods. It is a
specific philosophy of Shankara, conditioned by his struggle against Buddhist
idealism (Shunyavad, “doctrine of Emptiness”), which in turn is also not the
whole of Buddhism (indeed, the Buddha himself would not have recognized it as
his own teaching). Shankara is widely appreciated as a great debater and as the
founder of the ascetic Dashanami order, but his philosophy has few takers. Gonds
too are free to follow Mayavad, nothing prohibits that, but they too would by
and large accept the world as real. And anyway, even if there were a difference
in worldview pitting all Gonds against all Hindus, that would not save them: as
long as they don’t believe in Jesus, they are all going to hell.
·
6. The
Gonds are, like most tribes, an endogamous group, and this group is internally
divided in twelve exogamous groups, which anthropologists have called
phratries. Hindu castes are by definition endogamous groups, Jati-s or “castes”,
and are divided in exogamous groups called Gotra-s. If you consider each caste
separately, you could, by this logic, start saying that they “don’t have caste”,
because internally they are not divided in endogamous groups, only in exogamous
groups. So, the situation among the Gonds is exactly like in Hindu castes.
Tribals are just as endogamy-conscious as Hindus. When a Flemish Jesuit in
Chotanagpur ca. 1890 wanted to put his converts to the test, he had them sit
together across tribal lines for a joint meal, a very small matter compared to
intermarriage, and even this they found scandalous, so that most invitees did
not show up and 7000 converts in the region defected. It is one of the many
myths professed by the secularists to spite the Hindus that tribals are “noble
savages” practising Ur-communism and not afflicted by social divides like caste.
The whole discourse on
tribals is warped by the Aryan invasion theory. As a consequence of the
hypothesis that speakers of proto-Sanskrit entered India ca. 1500 BC, the
American situation is projected onto India: in both cases, a European
population came to dominate the natives. Then, just like the European
conquerors of America were considered civilized and Christian, while the Amerindians
counted as tribal and Pagan, this cultural equation was projected onto India:
the Vedic conquerors were non-tribal and non-Pagan, while the natives count as
tribal and Pagan. So, working inside this paradigm, the missionaries tell the
scheduled tribes to maximize their differences with the Vedic backbone of
Hinduism, and the secularists have written a few times that Hindus cannot count
as Pagans and that tribals who get “sanskritized” into the Vedic mainstream are
“converts to Hinduism”.
The picture becomes
very different when, as all evidence indicates, the Vedic Aryans were native to
India. This implies that there simply were different tribes, including the
Veda-composing Paurava tribe, some of which became more “civilized” than
others, e.g. some became literate, others only later, yet others not until the
modern state foisted literacy upon them; or some developed business acumen
while others remained economically naïve. This is a normal development found on
all inhabited continents.
That is why many
features deemed tribal and contrasting with the image a foreigner gets of
Hinduism when the taxi brings him from the airport to his hotel in the
metropolis, also appear in Vedic tradition when you go and see it in the
countryside, or when you study how it was in the past. Thus, worship in the
open air is not a tribal feature contrasting with Hindu temple worship: in
Vedic society, worship was equally in the open air. The tribal feature of aniconic
nature worship, always contrasted with the Hindu worship of idols, was just as
much in evidence in Vedic society and is still seen in the “primitive” layers
of Hinduism, where you fing snake worship, tree worship, sun worship, etc.
Yet, even if there had been an Aryan invasion, that would
not have made the Vedic Hindus any less demonic. We have heard here testimonies from Latvian
and Lithuanian Pagans, who take pride in their language being closely akin to
Sanskrit. They are not Indian, yet they are just as much Pagan. If the Vedic
Aryans had contrasted with the native Indian tribals, if they had been
different in all objects and practical details of worship and of mores, that
would still not have saved either the one or the other from hellfire. For that
is ultimately the criterion for being Pagan or not, regardless of all the
distinctions invented to confuse matters. You are a Pagan if you do not partake
of Christian salvation, i.e. if you go to hell. And that is where they belong: being
to a smaller or larger extent fire-worshippers, Pagans must feel most at home
in the endless fires of hell.
(HHR, 4 Feb. 2015)
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