interview to digital Swarajya

(interview by e-mail, Swarajya, 16 April, to questions by Shitanshu Shekhar Shukla)

 

Q. Do you think the BJP is still in opposition, ideologically speaking? If so, what must the party do to turn the tables on the secularists?

 

On economic issues, the party has the advantage of the identification of its adversaries with mismanagement. The Congress's return to socialism undid the high growth rate India enjoyed at the end of the previous BJP government. However, the blind adoption of American free-market policies is at odds with any Swadeshi commitment the BJP once had, and is chasing away some important constituents.

 

On the cultural front, the less said, the better. Even when in power -- no, let me correct that: when in office, for "power" means the ability to change things according to your own designs, and the BJP shows no signs of wanting to change anything. So, even when in office, the BJP plays by enemy rules and even thinks in the categories laid down by its enemies, with Hindus as an ugly overbearing majority that needs to be kept in check, and the poor hapless minorities as needing extra favours. 

 

Everybody could see this at the time of Barack Obama's visit. Fed hostile stories about the BJP's "Hindu fanaticism" by the secularists, he berated this government for injustice to the minorities. Instead of giving the arrogant US president a lecture about India as a shining example in its treatment of religious minorities and refugees, Modi swallowed the misplaced reprimand and reproduced it himself to his own countrymen the next day. That was Hindu-bashing secularism issuing from the mouth of the Hindu Hrdaya Samrat. It was Nehru speaking through Modi.

 

 

Q. How will you like to describe the volatile situation in India in the wake of incidents in JNU? Is it rise of internet Hindus or that of angry India?

 

Freedom of speech does include the right to make anti-national statements. If it doesn't mean the freedom to offend, it doesn't mean anything. The Motherland is not above criticism, even if misguided, just as the Prophet is not above criticism. So I am sorry to break ranks with most Hindus, but I think these anti-national slogans at JNU are much ado about nothing. It is commotion over mere words illustrating a lack of action, of real steps towards more national integration. Angry India should calm down and instead do the needful to fully Indianize Kashmir.

 

 

Q. What do you think the Modi government must do for the right without offending the minority community? Especially when he has been knocked out of Delhi and Bihar?

 

Where does the minority come in? Apart from raising the Hajj subsidy, how has Modi harmed any minority? At any rate, nobody should be harmed, not Akbar, not Anthony, and not Amar either. You worry about not offending the minorities, but the majority should not be offended either. In that regard, some constitutional, legal and policy reforms are needed to undo the existing discriminations against the Hindus, especially in education and temple management -- and all this without diminishing a single prerogative of the minorities. But the Modi government is not moving at all in this regard.

 

Moreover, it is a bit rich to call Indian Muslims and Christians "minorities". Not only are they more numerous than the population of many countries (say, Saudi Arabia), but they are only the Indian branch of worldwide movements. They benefit from international financial and media support that the Hindus cannot even dream of.

 

More fundamentally, the concept of "minority" is reprehensible in itself. Every democrat can understand that the law should equally apply to all, regardless of religion. Every Indian citizen may sociologically be a member of one or more communities, but legally, he is just an Indian citizen. That is the minimum for a state to be secular. India today is not a secular state at all. An Indian political analyst or a foreign India-watcher outs himself as incompetent when he asserts or implies: "India is a secular state." It is not.

 

Q. What do you think should be roadmap for the BJP to return to power in next Lok Sabha elections in 2019?

 

Right now, the BJP is assiduously following a roadmap towards massive defeat. The BJP secularists, dominant in the party's upper layer, claim that this government was elected on a secular platform of development. But even charitably assuming this, the party's inconsistent economic policies are chasing away several of its natural constituencies. 

 

In reality, Narendra Modi was brought to power because the dominant hostile media had successfully portrayed him as a militant Hindu,-- an image which the BJP itself downplayed or denied. The often sceptical Hindu voters turned out in large numbers because here at last they saw a man whom they expected to fight for Hindu causes. Baba Ramdev spoke for millions of Hindus when he said: "I voted for Modi, not for the BJP."  But once in office, the BJP disowned the numerous volunteers who had worked for Modi's victory and systematically let its Hindu constituents down. Millions of Hindus will not return for the next campaign nor even in the voting booth. And if they do, it will not be to support the BJP. 

 

Two factors still work in the BJP's favour. One is the opposition's weakness. Its capacity to unite and defeat the BJP, as in Delhi and Bihar, is harder to repeat at the national level; and Congress remains impotent as long as it doesn't side-line Rahul Gandhi. Second and most important, the BJP might still develop a Hindu conscience. (A third potential factor is: winning an Indo-Pak war just before the elections, as in 1999.)

 

Not that these mindless time-servers will suddenly feel guilty about having betrayed the Hindu cause. But politicians care about winning elections, and it might suddenly dawn on them that the secular Vikaswallahs ("development"-ists) in the government will never gain them a majority. These BJP secularists have been useful in the BJP's bid for a pat on the shoulder from the Nehruvians (in vain, but count on the BJP not to notice this outcome), but they are not the ones who will do the campaigning for the party. Only Hindu volunteers, including many RSS militants, will do that. I have plenty of criticism of the RSS, but I acknowledge that its rank-and-file has its heart in the right place and is willing to put in real work for the Hindu cause. However, if they don't get to feel that this has been a really Hindu government, they will fail to show up in 2019. And without them, the BJP has no chance.

 

An insider to the BJP's core group told me that that the AB Vajpayee government erred in not doing anything visibly pro-Hindu at all. He admitted that this had been a major cause of the BJP's surprise defeat in the 2004 elections. The proper lesson would be to implement pro-Hindu policies this time around. Abolishing the anti-Hindu discriminations in education and temple management would not ruffle feathers among the minorities, all while being very consequential for the future of Hinduism; so a pro-Hindu government should not waste time in taking these issues up. (By contrast, enacting a Common Civil Code, while fully a demand of secularism, would arouse a revolt among the Muslims.) However, that is not what the BJP has in mind. All they want to do is to "keep the pot boiling": whip up some Hindu emotions, but without doing anything. So, when visiting Dhaka or Kathmandu, BJP dignitaries make sure to be filmed while visiting a local temple in order to suggest a difference with the previous, secular government. That costs them nothing and yields Hindu society nothing, but it looks Hindu. The cow slaughter issue also came in handy, it arouses real feelings among the Hindu masses. But in the long run, this is not going to save the BJP. You can't run after the approval of your enemies (who will never vote for you anyway) while spitting on your core constituency.

 

 

Q. How do you look at serious negationism in India against the Islam?

 

The issue should not be dramatized. It is only history. And of course contemporary Muslims should be left free to distance themselves from the crimes of Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb. But the true story must be told. However, after Murli Manohar Joshi's failed attempt to rewrite the history textbooks ca. 2002 (a horror show of incompetence), there is not even an attempt in this direction.

 

On this front, the mendacious secularists have been gaining a lot of ground, in spite of eating humble pie in the Ayodhya controversy. The attempt by the Eminent Historians (and their Indian and foreign dupes) to deny the existence of temple foundations under the Babri mosque has been completely discredited. Yet, their underlying message that there never was an Islamic policy of temple destruction, and that it emulated a similar pre-existent Hindu policy, has won the day. Thus, when I speak about the Ayodhya affair, there is always someone in the audience who asks whether that temple destruction wasn't but an imitation of what Hindus had done. That belief wasn't around twenty years ago.

 

This shows the systematicity of secularist propaganda. While the Eminent Historians thought they could simply enforce their denial of Islamic iconoclasm, their American sympathizer Richard Eaton understood that at least some iconoclasm had to be admitted, but that the blame for it could be passed on to the Hindus. So he spun the story that a few cases of "idol abduction" by Hindu warlords, who re-installed captured icons in their own temples to continue their worship, amounted to the same thing as the thousandfold Islamic cases of destruction of icons. Immediately the secularists seized upon this story and propagated it through all channels. By contrast, my paper refuting this story was completely ignored by the Hindu militants, too smug and lazy to even take notice. The result in a sizable anti-Hindu switch in public opinion, even among common Hindus.

 

 

Q. The Hindus are more individualistic. They lack collectiveness. Is it a death instinct?

 

To some extent it is a healthy attitude. The Indian Republic is very correct in giving only a negative definition of "Hindu": any Indian who is not a Muslim, Christian or Parsi. That is also the historical definition applied by the Islamic invaders who imported the word "Hindu". A Hindu is just a normal person who happens to live in India, whereas Christians and Muslims are defined by their adherence to a superstitious belief. But yes, this common belief unites and mobilizes them, whereas the Hindus have to do without this standard to rally around.

 

 

Q. Must the Hindus in India have a media house exclusive to the community? Kindly elaborate.

 

"A media house exclusive to the community" is the kind of refuge that a minority would seek comfort in. Hindus should be more ambitious, and wrest the leading media houses back from the secularist stranglehold. They don't need to be exclusively Hindu. Just fair to Hindu positions, open to Hindu contributions, free from their present Hindu-bashing, that is good enough.

 

Exclusive media support to one religion, like state support to religion, is a bad thing. Long ago, I lived in Varanasi, and my landlord was Prof. Veer Bhadra Mishra, the head priest of the famous Sankat Mochan temple. When, some ten years ago, Islamic terrorists killed many worshippers at his temple, he gained a lot of applause with his plea for self-control and against Hindu revenge. He made a very important point on the need to keep religion and state separate: "A religion that is supported by the state, will become weak." When I see the religious landscape in Belgium, with a once-dominant Catholic Church completely crumbling in spite of plenty of state support, I can confirm the wisdom of Mishra's words. So, Hinduism does not need media houses of its own, it simply needs a level playing field. And that is an achievable goal: the anti-Hindu discriminations in the Constitution, the laws, policies and media, should go.   .

 

 

 

 

Dr. Koenraad Elst (Belgium 1959), who deliberately calls himself an "Orientalist", is the author of many publications on Indian religion and politics. Among them is the book On Modi Time (Delhi 2015), evaluating how the BJP's policies measure up to its erstwhile Hindu ideals. 

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Chronicle of the Ayodhya controversy

(Below the full version I had written. In the paper version of The Pioneer, a slightly abridged version  has appeared on 10 April 2016.)

The controversy on Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, where a Hindu temple was forcibly replaced with a mosque known as the Babri Masjid, was very consequential. It raged at its fiercest around 1990, when it led to the fall of two national governments, the dismissal of four state governments, two electoral victories of the BJP  ultimately leading to its present power position, riots claiming a few thousands of lives, dozens of temple demolitions from England to Bangladesh, and terrorist attacks pioneering a now-popular new tactic, viz. many  synchronous attacks at different locations within one city, first tried in Mumbai on 12 March 1993. While that seemed to be the closing date of Ayodhya-related violence, the controversy again played a minor role in the next major communal conflagration, the Gujarat riots of 2002. These started with the arson of a train coach carrying Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhya, and helping to make CM Narendra Modi the undisputed Hindu leader and today the PM.

So many books are published about religion and politics in India, that one would expect such a consequential affair to generate a whole library. Very partly, this has indeed been the case. In the 1990s, every Indian political “scientist” and every foreign India-watcher hurried to publish an account of or comment on the Ayodhya controversy. On that occasion, almost all of them followed in the footsteps of the “Eminent Historians”, who had decreed in 1989 that there had never been a Hindu temple at the site. This way, they overruled the consensus existing till then (even among the Muslims and Britons), viz. that the mosque had of course been built in forcible replacement of a temple. These “experts” all took it as a given that any pro-temple voice was that of a history-falsifier or Hindu fanatic.

In 1991 already, an officially organized scholars’ debate highlighted plenty of evidence for the demolished-temple scenario, but it effectively got drowned out by all the loud anti-temple shouting that bullied most public figures into conformity. In the Court-ordered excavations of 2003, however, archaeologists dug up the foundations of the temple and provided the definitive proof: the Eminent Historians had taken the nation for a ride. All the “experts” who had parroted their mendacious account were left with egg on their faces. This explains why all of them have firmly looked the other way and discouraged anyone from further writing about the affair.      

So we are happy to report that at last, the Ayodhya library is starting to grow. After the 2010 Court ruling essentially leaving the site to the Hindu litigants, we had as yet only one new Ayodhya book: history professor Meenakshi Jain’s Rama and Ayodhya (2013), meticulously detailing the evidence and revealing the complete loss of face by the Eminent Historians when questioned in Court. Three years later, we can welcome Anuradha Dutt’s book Sri Ram Mandir, published by Shubhi Publications (Gurgaon 2016). As a veteran journalist, she has followed the whole controversy from day to day since the 1980s. Naturally, the format here is looser, more journalistic, but covering far more ground than just the historical data.

In his foreword, retired historian Prof. Saradindu Mukherji already surveys the evidence and the misbehaviour by the Eminent Historians. He highlights the contribution to the debate by outsiders, especially by Arun Shourie and by the late AK Chatterjee, two people with a reputation for uprightness and incorruptibility. His opening line sums it all up: “The sacred spot in Ayodhya, worshipped by Hindus since time immemorial, (…) has unfortunately been made the subject of a contrived and unnecessary controversy in the last three decades.” (p.7)

Mrs. Dutt chronicles the history before Independence very briefly, the more recent history in detail. The evidence (p.29-116) is interwoven with the polemic between real and would-be professionals and the mediacrats. Then she relates the politics of the affair, including background facts (Shah Bano divorce rights, Mandal reservations), successive governments, the internal faction struggle among Dharmacharyas, and the hostile spin which the Dravidianists and their Marxist supporters put on any story involving Rama. On the way, she does of course present the episodes in the narrative of the “temple liberation” movement itself. Since I don’t want to spoil the reader’s pleasure, I will give no further details here.

She also gives the theological background, with the Puranic lore about the divine incarnations and the pilgrimages, and the Islamic theology of iconoclasm. This does not base itself on Hindu precedent, as the secularists nowadays claim, but on the Prophet’s precedent: “The first polytheistic shrine that was taken over by Mohammed and his followers was the Kaaba in Mecca, an old pilgrimage centre, on December 11, 629 AD.” (p.119) 

While this book is packed with data, for the more recent period even many hitherto unknown data, a reviewer may be forgiven for nitpicking about a few shortcomings. One is a fine point that most readers won’t even notice: she posits in passing that at the time of “militant Islamic intrusion, (…) Adi Shankara and other theistic crusaders succeeded in worsting heterodox preachers in debate”. (p.144) This suggests a relation between Islam and these polemics. But in fact, there isn’t any connection between the Islamic invasions and Sankara’s polemic against intra-Hindu “heterodoxy”. Not that he was entirely unaware of them. For most of India, these invasions had not started yet, but Sindh was already under Muslim occupation. That is where Shankara had planned to establish the westernmost of his four abbeys: in Hinglaj on the western side of the Indus. But because of the Islamic occupation, he had to settle for Dwarka in Gujarat.

Yet, his writings, as well as those of numerous later Dharmacharyas, show no awareness at all of the Islamic challenge. More than a thousand years after confronting the Islamic presence did Hindu society first spawn a critique of the Quran, viz. by Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda Saraswati. It is one of the worst failings of Hindu society that it has responded to the Islamic challenge only with lying low or with being heroic and dying, and never with informed arguments against the ideology that motivated them.

The second point pertains to the Ayodhya narrative itself, particularly the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. “Analysts debated, as they still do, whether the demolition was a spontaneous act (…) or a planned move.” (p.26) And she leaves it at that non-committal observation. But shouldn’t a journalist be curious about the responsibility? And not just the present author, but the hundreds of reporters on the Ayodhya events?

The vast majority of commentators refrained from wondering about the mechanics of the demolition. Out of a desire for maximum damage to the hated BJP, they declared LK Advani responsible, the BJP leader who presided over the gathering, though the demolition took place against his will. Most of the activists who achieved the demolition, assure us that it was all spontaneous. But from some voices inside the RSS, I have heard the name of an engineer who prepared a few technical aspects of the demolition. After he and his assistents had given a lead, the mass of unprepared volunteers joined in. All these years I have kept this name to myself, and I will continue to do so. I want to leave the honour of revealing this name to an inquisitive Indian journalist. Very belatedly, he can make headlines with a photograph captioned: “This man demolished the Babri Masjid”, or: “Meet the Demolition mastermind”. This is what any of the hundreds of journalists could have done in 1992, but they were so partisan that they spurned this moment of glory for a predictable and untrue accusation against Advani.

The last point is a partisan attitude that shines through. I do not mean: partisan in favour of the temple thesis, for that would cast aspersions on a stand for the truth. After the tons of filth thrown at the truth about the Ayodhya history, it is only right for an author to set the record straight. I mean the choice for one political party over another, as if more naturally favouring the Hindu ownership. She writes that after the BJP was put on the defensive by the Demolition, as a “clever strategist, [PM Narasimha] Rao formulated a plan for the Congress to hijack the temple cause”. (p.182) How so, “hijack”? This is not the property of a political party. And if it were, then more of the Congress than of the BJP.

The first major politician to call for the liberation of the Rama Janmabhumi was Gulzarilal Nanda, the former Congress interim-PM. Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi was working on a peaceful arrangement for a Hindu temple at the site, a move thwarted by the shrill and mendacious claims made from the Eminent Historians’ pulpit. And the “clever strategist” Narasimha Rao (the best PM independent India ever had) allowed the Demolition to take its course because that way, not only would the BJP be embarrassed, but at least the mosque would be out of the way and a solution that much closer. Meanwhile, the BJP used the Ayodhya enthusiasm to make gains in the 1989 and 1991 elections, then dropped it like a hot potato.

In spite of these minor remarks, this book contains such a wealth of material on the facts and backgrounds of the Ayodhya controversy that I can unreservedly recommend it. And if you don’t care for the text, then at least enjoy the many pictures of the Hindu implements dug up at the contentious site.

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The Sati strategy. Review of Meenakshi Jain’s book Sati

 

(Bharat-Bharati, 24 March 2016; Swarajya, 27 March 2016)

 

After making history with her book on the Ayodhya controversy, Rama and Ayodhya (2013), Prof. Meenakshi Jain adds to her reputation with the present hefty volume Sati. Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse (Aryan Books International, Delhi 2016). In it, as a meticulous professional historian, she quotes all the relevant sources, with descriptions of Sati from the ancient through the medieval to the modern period. She adds the full text of the relevant British and Republican laws and of Lord Wiliam Bentinck’s Minute on Sati (1829), that led to the prohibition on Sati. This book makes the whole array of primary sources readily accessible, so from now on, it will be an indispensible reference for all debates on Sati.

But in the design of the book, all this material is instrumental in studying the uses made of Sati in the colonial period. In particular, the missionary campaign to rally support for the project of mass conversion of the Indian Heathens to the saving light of Christianity made good use of Sati. This practice had a strong in-your-face shock value and could perfectly illustrate the barbarity of Hinduism.

 

Indignation

In the preface, Prof. Jain surveys the existing literature and expresses her assent to some recent theories. Thus, Rahul Sapra found that Gayatri Spivak’s observations, e.g. that the 19th-century British tried to remake Indian society in their own image and used Sati as the most vivid proof of the need for this radical remaking, don’t take into account the changing political equation during the centuries of gradual European penetration. In the 17th century, European traders and travellers mostly joined the natives in glorifying the women committing Sati, whereas by the 19th century, they posed as chivalrous saviours of the victimized native women from the cruel native men. This was because they were no longer travellers in an exotic country and at the mercy of the native people, but had become masters of the land and gotten imbued with a sense of superiority.

Indians in large numbers, and especially the many indefatigable but amateurish “history-rewriters”, tend to be defective in their sense of history, starting with their seeming ignorance about the otherwise very common phenomenon of change. When I hear these history-rewriters fulminate against the West with its supposed evil designs of somehow dominating India again, it seems that in their minds, time has frozen in the Victorian age. Similarly here, there is not one monolithic Western view of Sati but, apart even from individual differences of opinion, there are distinct stages, partly because of the changing power equation and partly because internal changes in the Western outlook have influenced the Western perception of things Indian. So it takes a genuine historian to map out precisely what has changed and what not, and which factors have effected those particular changes.

Then again, It is of course interesting to realize the continuity between the present-day interference in Indian culture by Leftist scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock and that of the British colonialists: “We know best what is wrong with your traditions and we come to save you from yourselves.”

In this respect, the changes in the Western attitude to Sati run parallel to that regarding caste. Until the early 20th century, caste was seen as a specifically Indian form of a universal phenomenon, viz. social inequality. Nobody was particularly scandalized when in 1622, the Pope gave permission to practise caste discrimination between converts inside the Church. Around the time of the French Revolution, the idea of equality started catching on, but only gradually became the accepted norm. At that point, it became problematic that people’s status was said to be determined by birth. In this case, determination by the inborn circumstance of being a woman, unequal in rights compared to men, and never more radically unequal than in committing Sati. After World War 2, the norm (henceforth called Human Right) of absolute equality and increasingly of absolute individual self-determination made the tradition of caste and of Sati too horrible to tolerate. Therefore, the indignation about Sati is far greater today than when Marco Polo visited India. Today, Sati is already a memory, but the commotion around the exceptional Sati of 1987 gave an idea of the indignation it would provoke today.

 

Evangelization

In this case, an extra factor came into play to effect a change in British attitudes to Sati. In Parliamentary debates about the East India Company charter in 1793, there was no mention yet of Sati though it had been described many times, including by Company eyewitnesses. But by 1829, Sati was forbidden in all Company domains. This turn-around was the result of a campaign by the missionary lobby.

Ever since the missionaries set out to convert the Pagans of India, they made it their business to contrast the benignity of Christianity with the demeaning atrocities of Heathenism. This was an old tradition starting with the Biblical vilification of child sacrifice to the god Moloch by the Canaanites. The practice was also attested by the Romans when they besieged the Canaanite (Phoenician) colony of Carthage. The Bible writers and their missionary acolytes present child sacrifice as a necessary component of polytheism, from which monotheism came to save humanity. And indeed, we read here how Rev. William Carey tried to muster evidence of child sacrifice too (but settled for Sati as convincing enough, p.178)

In reality, the abolition of human sacrifice was a universal evolution equally affecting Pagan cultures such as the Romans. In the case of Brahmanism, it is speculated that the Vastu-Purusha concept (a human frame deemed to underlie a house) is a memory of a pre-Vedic human sacrifice. Even if true, fact is that in really existing Brahmanism, human sacrifice has not been part of it for thousands of years; if it had, we would be reminded of it every day. In this respect, Brahmanism was definitely ahead of the rest of humanity.

Not to idealize matters, we have to admit that, like the Biblical writers, who used the vilification of the child-sacrificing Canaanites as a justification to seize their land (and even to kill them all), Pagans who had left the practice behind equally used the reference to it to score political points. The Romans had practised human sacrifice within living memory and then abolished it, so they were acutely aware of it and tried to exorcize it from their own historical identity by rooting it out in conquered lands as well. (This is the same psychology as among modern Westerners who remember their grandfathers’ abolition of slavery and therefore feel spurred to support or engineer the “abolition of caste” in India.) Using that mentality, Roman war leaders would emphasize this phenomenon of child sacrifice among the Carthaginias to portray them as barbarians in urgent need of Rome’s civilizing intervention. Later Caesar would also demonize ashuman-sacrificers the Druids of Gaul, another “barbarian” country the Romans “liberated” from its own traditions after conquering it. Likewise, the Chinese Zhou dynasty justified its coup d’état (11th century BCE) against the Shang dynasty by demonizing the Shang as practising human sacrifice.

This way, Sati came in very handy to justify an offensive in India. Mind you, in a military sense India had partly been conquered already, and British self-confidence at the time was such that the complete subjugation of the Subcontinent seemed assured. The offensive in this case was not military, its target was the Christianization of the East India Company, to be followed by the conversion of its subject population. Around 1800, the Company was still purely commercial and even banned missionaries: their religious zeal might create riots, and these would be bad for business. So, the Christian lobby had to convince the British Parliamentarians that the Christianization of India was good and necessary, and therefore worthy of the Company’sactive or passive support, namely to free the natives from barbarism. To that end, there was no better eye-catcher than Sati.         

Here I will skip a large part of Prof. Jain’s research, namely into the details of the specific intrigues and events that ultimately led to the success of the missionary effort. While these chapters are important for understanding the Christian presence in India, and while I recommend you read them, I have decided for myself to limit my attention for colonial history as it is presently eating up too much energy, especially of the Hindus. The study of colonial history is instructive and someone should do it, but for the many, it is far more useful to study Dharma itself, to immerse yourself in Hindu civilization as it took shape, rather than in the oppression of and then the resistance by the Hindus. India is free now and could reinvigorate Dharmic civilization, which is a much worthier goal than to re-live the comparatively few centuries of oppression.

Let us only note that the missionaries are responsible for associating Hinduism with Sati much more prominently than would be fair. The missionary assault on Hinduism dramatized the practice of Sati, which had been “an ‘exceptional act’ performed by a minuscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries”, of which the occurrence had been “exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and Anglicize India”. (p.xix)

 

Krishna

Many Hindus believe that Sati is an external contribution, probably triggered by the Muslim conquests. In reality, Sati is as old as scriptural Hinduism. Already the Rg-Veda (10:18:7-8, quoted and discussed on p.4--5) describes a funeral where the widow is lying down beside her husband on the pyre, but is led away from it, back to the world of the living. So it already provides a description of a Sati about to take place, as well as of the Brahmanical rejection of Sati.

Likewise, the Mahabharata, the best guide to living Hinduism, features several cases of Sati. Most prominent is the self-immolation by Pandu’s most beloved wife Madri. Less well-known perhaps is that Krishna’s father Vasudeva is followed on the pyre by four wives, and that Krishna’s death triggers the self-immolation (in his absence) of five of his many wives. But unlike Mohammed, Krishna need not be emulated by his followers. By contrast, Rama’s influence on the women in his life is not such that they commit Sati (on the contrary, his wife Sita comes unscathed out of the flames of her “trial by fire”),-- and he counts as the perfect man, the model whose behaviour should serve us as examplary.  

The oldest foreign (viz. Greek) testimony on Indian Sati reports on the death of an Indian general in the Persian army. His two wives fought over the honour of climbing his funeral pyre. Both had a case: one was the eldest, the other was not pregnant (whereas the eldest was, and should not deprive the deceased man of his progeny). So the authorities had to intervene, and they ruled in favour of the younger wife. It should be repeated, for the sake of clarity, that “favour” here really means the honour of committing self-immolation, as emphatically desired by the young widow.

Indeed, a woman wanting to commit Sati needed some will-power, for Hindu society did not take this as a matter of course. A per the many testimonies, she usually had to overcome the dissuasion from her family and from worldly or priestly authorities. (But rather than leading her away in chains for her own good, as modern psychiatrists would do, they give her the decisive last word.) That is why the first British report on the practice spoke of “self-immolation of widows”. Contrary to allegations of “murderous patriarchy” by modern feminists (who hold the same ignorant prejudices about Hindu culture as the average foreign tourist), women themselves chose this spectacular fate.

Contrary to a common assumption, the practice was not confined to the Rajputs or to the martial castes in general, where passion and bravery were prized. Prominent Hindu rulers like Shivaji Bhonsle and Ranjit Singh were followed on their pyres by a big handful of wives and concubines. Among the lower castes, like among the Muslims, life usually resumed and a widow soon remarried, not to let any womb go to waste. But nevertheless, a British survey in Bengal found that no less than 51% of Sati women belonged to Shudra families. Among the other upper castes, and among the majority of women even in the martial castes, widows would be confined to a life of service and asceticism. But no matter how rare the actual practice of Sati, it remained a glamorous affair, honoured among the Hindu masses with commerorative stones (sati-kal) and temples (sati-sthal).

 

Hindu Sati?

Sati was not confined the Hindu civilization. It existed elsewhere, both in Indo-European and in other cultures. Rulers in ancient China or Egypt are sometimes found buried with a number of wives, concubines and servants. In pre-Christian Europe, the practice was related (directly, not inversely) to the status of women in society: not at all in Greece, where women were very subordinate, but quite frequently among the more autonomous Celtic women. Among the Germanic people, a famous case is that of Brunhilde and her maidservants following Siegfried into death. Yet Indian secularists preferentially depict Sati as one of the unique “evils of Hindu society”.

The only shortcoming is this wonderful book is not a mistake but a hiatus, less than a page long. One important point I would have liked to see discussed more thoroughly, is the question raised by Alaka Hejib and Katherine Young in their paper: “Sati, widowhood and yoga”. (p.xv-xvi) They see a ”hidden religious dimension: yoga; though neither the widow nor the sati was conscious of the yogic dimension of her life”. Indeed, “the psychology of yoga was instilled, albeit inadvertently, in the traditional Hindu woman”. Well well, yoga as the most consciousness-oriented discipline in the world is imparted unconsciously: “instilled, albeit inadvertently”. Prof. Jain reports this hypothesis but does not comment on it. So I will.

Naïve readers may not have noticed it yet, but here we are dealing with as instance of a widespread phenomenon: the crass manipulation of the term “Hindu”. Every missionary and every secularist does it all the time: calling a thing “Hindu” when it is considered bad, but something (really anything) else as soon as it is deemed good. Many Hindus even lap it up: it is “instilled, albeit inadvertently”.

Thus, whenever Westerners show an interest in yoga, the secularists and their Western allies hurry to assure us: “Yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism.” (It is like with Islam, but inversely, for whenever Muslims make negative-sounding headlines, we are immediately reassured that these crimes “have nothing to do with Islam”.) There may be books on “Jain mathematics”, but never about “Hindu mathematics”, for a good thing cannot be Hindu. If the topic cannot be avoided, you call it, say, “Keralite mathematics” or fashionably opine that it “must have been borrowed from Buddhism”. So, yoga cannot be Hindu when its merits are at issue. However, when it is presented as something funny, with asceticism and other nasty things, then it can be Hindu, and even used as middle term to equate something else (something nasty, of course, like Sati) with Hinduism. So: Sati is Hindu!

In this case, the poor hapless secularists are even right. Sometimes even a deplorable motive, like their single-minded hatred for Hinduism, makes men speak the truth: Sati is Hindu. Sati is not Brahmanical: the Rg-Veda enjoins continuing life rather than committing Sati, and the Shastras either don’t mention it or prefer widowhood, for which they lay down demanding rules. Many of the testimonies cited here mention Brahmanical priests trying to dissuade the woman from Sati. Not Brahmanical, then, but nonetheless Hindu, a far broader concept. A Hindu means an “Indian Pagan”, as per the Muslim invaders who first introduced the term in India. And indeed, Sati has existed in many countries but certainly in India, and it is not of Christian or Islamic origin, so it may be called Pagan. And so can the rejection of Sati. See?

This, then, makes for half a page that I would have done differently. The rest of this book, 500-something pages, is designed to stand the test of time. It will survive the flames that tend to engulf its topic: the brave Sati.

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Why Brussels?

(Daily O, Delhi, 25 March 2016: "Why ISIS targeted Brussels")

 

22 March is henceforth an iconic date in Belgian history. Bomb attacks in the departure hall of Brussels Airport and at the Maalbeek underground station near the European Parliament building killed dozens of people. I have been hundreds of times at these locations, and must count myself fortunate that I was’t there at the wrong time.

Is there a reason why Brussels was singled out for bomb attacks claimed by the Islamic State? Yes, there was, and we in Belgium felt it was only a matter of time before such a thing would happen – though the actual event still came as a shock. In fact several reasons.

Militants of the Islamic State, the self-styled Caliphate, are acutely aware of Islamic history, and that contains one reason, dim to us but very vivid to them. IS statements about the attacks identify the victims as “crusaders”, and Belgium is indeed strongly identified with the crusades. The First Crusade was led by the proto-Belgian earl Godfrey of Bouillon, who became the first King of Jerusalem in 1099; his equestrian statue adorns the highest place of Brussels, next to the Royal Palace. The Crusader elite corps of the Knights Templar had a tactical alliance with the Assassins, a Shiite militia dedicated to fighting the (Sunni) Caliphate. Today, the neo-Caliphate (IS) is continuing that thousand-year-old struggle against both Shiites and Crusaders.

The second reason is the symbolic value of Brussels as containing the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, incarnations of armed infidelism. The Caliphate is at war with these entities, and Belgium is among the Western nations bombing the Iraqi part of the Caliphate. Many Leftists have transferred their old sympathy for Cuba and Vietnam to the Islamic challengers of Western imperialism. Therefore they tend to minimize the seriousness of terrorism by alleging, not incorrectly, that even a small country like Belgium has already killed more Arab civilians (apart from Caliphate fighters) than have died in any of the terrorist attacks on Madrid, London, Paris or now Brussels. Being killed on the way to work by a sudden bomb explosion is exactly as bad in Mosul as it is in Brussels, so “Belgians shouldn’t complain”.

The third reason is the relative laxity of the Belgian authorities. Within Belgium itself, when compared to the second city, Antwerp, the administration of Brussels counts as undisciplined, chaotic and corrupt. The over-all Belgian standard is not so good either, as the security forces are badly underfunded. For decades, whenever budget cuts have been considered, the army has served as a milch-cow. Soldiers are not expected to complain, but the result is that today they are ill-equipped to deal with the terror threat.

Within the calculations of the IS strategists, the fourth reason, at least explaining why it happened now, is that it had to happen fast. Last week, Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the cell that carried out the Paris attacks in November, was arrested in Brussels. The Belgian Government was triumphant and expected to extract important information from the terrorist. For the very same reason, IS feared that its plans for further actions would become known, so it preponed the bomb attacks that have now taken place. That explains why they targeted easily accessible places: IS showed that it could fast adapt to the constraints of the new situation and still achieve a very tangible and sensational result.

But the most controversial and politically charged, is the fifth reason. Using Brussels as a staging-ground for preparing attacks in Madrid, Paris or Brussels itself is fairly easy, because the militants can always count on a large population of sympathizers. As Ernesto Ché Guevara wrote, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In the Muslim neighbourhoods of Brussels, there is a strong anti-System feeling, and even moderates will never betray a member of their own community. Take the case of Salah Abdeslam, whom it took four months to catch. He had not been roaming as a fugitive, but lived in hiding with an extremist family in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. His brother, who lived nearby, had told the police he hadn’t heard of Salah and feared he was dead. Yet, he and many in the neighbourhood knew Salah’s whereabouts, but nobody spilled the beans.

The Belgian population frowned when it learned of this display of disloyalty. This form part of a long-running and far-reaching debate on immigration, ethnic relations, religious pluralism and the secular state. At any rate, in a realistic assessment, Brussels had it coming. Belgium’s Home Minister, Jan Jambon, had warned last week that the latest catch of a terrorist did not mean that the terror threat had died down. He was proven right sooner than he expected.

 

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The confabulated murder of Saint Thomas

On 21 Dec. 2015, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article by David Green propagating the Christian claim that "Thomas the Apostle was murdered in India".
(http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/this-day-in-jewish-history/1.692829?date=1457643796561). In the brief letter below, published on 11 March 2016, I set the record straight:

The confabulated murder of Saint Thomas

                 So your source is "common Christian tradition"? Fortunately, we are past the stage where we believe a story just because "tradition" says so. Therefore, we don't believe the blood libel against the Jewish people anymore, eventhough for centuries it has been supported by "common Christian tradition". Likewise, we don't believe the blood libel against the "priests of Kali" either.

Nothing of this legend is proven. The only written source for it is already some 50 years younger than this Thomas's suppose martyrdom: the apocryphal "Acts of Thomas". There, he is presented as coming to "India", then a very large term (when Columbus landed in what he thought was Zipangu/Japan, he called the natives "Indians", meaning Asians), in a part that was desert-like and where the people had Persian names. This describes Afghanistan or western Pakistan well, but not the lush and rich tropical landscape of South India. When he has committed several crimes against society, the king asks him to leave, and only when he refuses this diplomatic solution does the king have him executed.     

I first learned about the hollow mythical nature of the Saint Thomas story while studying in Leuven Catholic University, from a Jesuit Professor of Comparative Religion, Frank de Graeve. Not exactly a "fanatical Hindu" source. More recently, Pope Benedict XIV publicly declared that St Thomas had come to Western India, and that from there, after an unspecified amount of time, Christianity (not Thomas) reached South India. I am aware that Indian Christians have raised hell against this scholarly assessment, and have pressured the Vatican into removing this statement from its website. But that is not going to alter the verdict of scholarly historiography: there is no evidence at all to support this story.

And when Christians did reach the coastal area of South India, probably as 4th-century refugees from the Persian empire that had turned hostile after the Christianization of its Roman rival, they were welcomed rather more cordially than any treatment given by Christians to Pagans. Far from being "murdered by the priests of Kali", they were given hospitality and integrated into Hindu society, without any questions asked about the contents of their religion. Hindus have extended their hospitality more recently to Parsis, Armenians and Tibetan Buddhists; and more anciently to the Jews. That glorious record is the target of gross injustice in the fictional story of Saint Thomas.


read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/this-day-in-jewish-history/1.692829?date=1457643796561

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Pluralism in Ilā’s city

My speech at the Allahabad conference on Vedic pluralism

(On 16-18 February 2016, the Sanskrit Department of Allahabad University hosted an international conference on the Rg-Vedic verse Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti. I was invited to participate in the opening ceremony, before the serious work began. My talk strikes a lighter note but nonetheless makes a few points, one even fully original and appreciated as such by the audience.)


Bhadrajanāḥ,

Mama nāma Kūnrāḍ Elst asti, aham Pascimadvīpād Beljamdeśād āgatosmi.

Unfortunately, that is about all the Spoken Sanskrit I can muster. I only learned the Devabhāśā as a literary language, a storehouse of political and philosophical insights and terminology, but not as a daily medium of communication. For anything more sophisticated, I will have to switch to a language in which I can express my thoughts more comfortably. Isliye, mein abhī Angrezī me bol duṁgā. Kṣamā kījiye.

However, I do have the intention of learning spoken Sanskrit properly after my retirement, so that I have mastered it by the time I die. That way, when I go to heaven, I will be able to converse with Varuṇa, Mitra and the other gods shining brightly up there.


Pluralism

We are gathered here to ponder on the Rg-Vedic verse Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti, “Reality is one, the sages formulate it in many ways”, or: “Truth is one, the sages give it many names.”
We are here in the city of Allahabad, founded in 1575, by Moghul emperor Akbar, who was posthumously turned into the patron saint of Indian secularism. More recently, it became famous as the homebase of first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, the theoretician and propagator of “secularism”. The temptation must be palpable to treat this maxim as the cornerstone of this uniquely Indian ideology. Indeed, whenever it is brought up in the public debate nowadays, it is as an argument of authority for secularism. Yet, it voices a rather different idea: pluralism. Let me explain.

In its European countries of origin, secularism (French: laicité) wanted to be a way to contain the Christian Churches, to make and keep the State free from interference by the Church. In the budding United States, the emphasis was slightly different: to keep the Churches free from interference by the State. At any rate, the core idea was separation of Church and State. The most fundamental characteristic of a secular state is the equality of all its citizens before the law, regardless of religion.
In that sense, India is not a secular state at all. Its Constitution mandates quite a bit of State interference in religious laws and institutions, at least those of the Hindus, and formally as well as effectively discriminates against its religious majority.

It does not satisfy the very first criterion of a secular state, viz. the legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion. On the contrary, in family matters, there are different sets of laws for Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. The most famou example is of course that a Muslim man can have four wives, others cannot. The discrimination lies not only in the the State’s perpetuation of a consequential inequality, but also in the genesis of that inequality through State intervention, viz. by the abolition of polygamy where it existed in Hindu society versus its deliberate non-abolition among Muslims. One can recognize an incompetent India-watcher by his pompous claim that “India is secular state”. It is not, period.

Fortunately, that is not what our verse is about. It is not about secularism, whether genuine or Nehruvian. It is all about pluralism, not plurality and co-existence of different law systems, but legitimate co-existence of different viewpoints.
Thus, a person may be given a passport name at birth. In intimate circles, he also acquires a house-name. Among his friends he may get a nick-name. When he succeeds in life, he is given a title, or be named after an award he earns. If he is a writer, he may be known by a pen-name. In China and other civilizations, he may later receive a postumous name. Moreover, he may be described as some’s son, someone’s brother, father, boss, employee, neighour. But all these names refer to the same person. Many names, one reality. And likewise with Ultimate Reality.



Quotations out of context

When I get to hear a famous quotation, I would want to know its context: both the phrases surrounding it and its place in life (German: Sitz im Leben). For famous quotations have a way of, let us say, emancipating themselves from the author’s original intention. They may even come to mean the very opposite.

Thus, having come all the way from the West, I am often reminded here of Rudyard Kipling’s verse: “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” It is one of the most famous poems in English but was written in India; Kipling was a native Mumbaikar. However, as it stands here, the verse means just the opposite from what he had in mind, and this becomes clear from the context:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

So, in simple prose: the eastern point and western point of the compass will never meet, alright, but when two people of calibre encounter each other, the accidents of birth are not of much consequence anymore.

Ahiṁsa paramo dharma, “non-violence is the highest ethics/righteousness”, is another quotation cut in half to suit contemporary purposes. In a Gandhian context, it has come to stand for absolute pacifism. But in the original Mahābhārata, it is only half the picture: the other half is dharma hiṁsa tathaiva ca, “and righteous violence”. So, non-violence in some situations, but righteous violence in others. And that happens to be far more realistic.

Suppose you are walking in a quiet forest lane, and suddenly you are set upon by a gang of rapists. Before the worst can happen, a knight in shining armour appears on the scene, beats up the rapists and puts them to flight. Wouldn’t you be grateful for this bit of “righteous violence”? Wouldn’t you at once trade all the Gandhian pieties for this bit of forceful salvation? To be sure, it is still the lesser evil, we have to keep striving for a system in which violence is completely unnecessary. Yet provisionally, in the real world, violence may still be the lesser evil compared to full adharma, unrighteousness.

Vasudhaiva kutumbakam, “the whole world is one family”, is a very oft-quoted verse, and very much taken out of context. It nowadays functions as the creed of Hinduism, at least for public consumption. Hindus often think it has been taken from the Vedas or from the Bhagavad Gītā, but it comes from a fable collection, the Hitopadeśa. And there, its meaning is not that positive.

When a jackal targets a deer for his meal and cleverly wins its trust, a crow gets alerted by the sinister sight of this sudden interloper. However, the jackal protests that suspicion is misplaced: vasudhaiva kutumbakam! The crow has to bow out, but remains vigilant from a distance. When the jackal finally tries to strike, the deer is saved by the crow’s intervention. Moral of the story: only a knave would assert, and a fool believe, that “the whole world is one family”. Fortunately there are still a few clever skeptics who don’t let down their guard, and who see through this unrealistic maxim. I wonder what it says about modern Hindus that they all run away with this saying and even advertise it as the essence of their worldview.

Instead, I stand by another Sanskrit maxim. It is one that can’t be shaken by any possible context, because it is always a reliable guiding principle: Satyameva jayate, “truth verily triumphs”, “truth shall prevail”. This is from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, and nothing in the context gives a different or contrary message. It has become India’s national motto, and I feel so strongly about it that I have put in on my business card. When it conflicts with more popular phrases, I will drop those others any time.

And now, let us see what this care about the context would mean for the maxim that we have thematized for this conference.

Polytheism

The oft-quoted part of our mantra (RV 1:164:46) says that: Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti, and is nowadays read as an affirmation that a single reality underlies seeming plurality But the mantra further says (and then sums up in the quoted part) that they worship this reality as Indra, as Yama, as Mātarīśvan, as Garutman, as Agni and other gods. That is to say: it affirms a form of religion we know as polytheism. According to this verse, it is perfectly alright to picture the divine as a heavenly bird Garutman, or as a fire (Agni), or as any of many other forms.

This bears emphasizing, as during the last two centuries there have been many Hindu “reformers” and “modernists” who contrived to define Hinduism as “monotheistic too”. That is to say, monotheistic like the Christian or Islamic role model. In evaluating a doctrine, most people are guided not by its truth but by its effectiveness as a social passport, as a gateway to status. So, when monotheism became prestigious, many Hindus started saying: Hinduism too is monotheistic. Indeed, this very verse is often given as proof of the Vedas’ “monotheism”. See, the seeming manifoldness of the Vedic gods hides an underlying “one God”, so we are as good as them!

It seems that Hindus (at least the unrooted ones who try to live up to borrowed ideals) are eagerly appropriating words which they do not properly understand, such as "monotheism"; and which they would not consider so desirable it they did understand them. In Bible and Quran, it is said that there is only one God and others are false. Is that what you would want to venerate as the Vedic doctrine? In this verse, however, there is no such thing as a “false god”, on the contrary. In Bible and Quran, there is said to be only one God and no others, but here it is said that He is the same as the others, and that they are all legitimate. After all, the sages use many names, right?

Underlying this polytheism, there is a oneness, a common essence, “one reality” indeed. And yet, the more conformistic Hindus who try to live up to the norm set by Christianity or Islam, are wrong to deduce that “Hinduism is also monotheist”. They are “me too” monotheists; at least, if they are monotheists. Like the Ārya Samāj, who translate every one of the Vedic god-names as “God” and thus declare themselves monotheists. Hopefully they simply haven’t realized that monotheism would mean you do not allow pluralism. That is what it has always meant for Christians and Muslims: smash the statues and temples and rituals reminding the people of Jupiter, of Apollo, of Horus, of Ishtar and Marduk. Is that Hinduism? Is that (and I will now use it positively: ) secularism?

The Vedas would say: “They call it Jupiter, they call it Apollo, they call it Horus, they call it Ishtar, they call it Marduk: the sages call the one reality by many names.”

Really becoming monotheists would mean for Hindus, rewriting the (say) Hanumān Cālīsā, and inserting into it an injunction: “Hanumān wants you to go and destroy the temples of Śiva! And destroy the statues of Sarasvatī too, and the sculptures of the rest of them. Hanumān alone!” For a “monotheist” is not someone who worships one god – sticklers for precision in the science of religion would call that a “henotheist”. A Hindu who worships a chosen deity is not a “monotheist” but a henotheist. (And usually a “serial henotheist” at that, sometimes worshipping other gods as well.) A monotheist worships one god to the exclusion of all others: they are deemed false and/or evil.

The Greek word monos does not mean “one”, it means “one alone”. It is not inclusive but exclusive. It is the very opposite of what our Vedic verse expresses. That mantra is not directed against anything, but if at all you want to bring monotheism into the picture, then it is against monotheism.

Dīrghatamas

The verse we are considering, was written by one of the earliest Vedic seers, the ṛṣi Dīrghatamas, in the last one of his 25 hymns, the “Riddle Hymn” (RV 1:164) His name means “long darkness” and this is sometimes explained as referring to blindness. However, he is also known for his astronomical insights (including the first-ever division of the heavenly circles in 360°, on top of that in 12), and it is hard to do astronomy when you’re blind. Rather, “blindness” seems to have been an accepted circumlocution referring to a certain attitude of deep concentration and piercing research. The Greek poet Homer was likewise described as “blind”.

Two very basic ideas pervading Hindu thought first find expression in Dīrghatamas: renunciation and monism. To be sure, these may even be older, it is by no means certain that he invented either of them. But he has the distinction of being the first one to articulate them.

Renunciation is the guiding idea of the verse (RV 1:164:20) where he contrasts two birds in a tree: one eats the berries, the other merely looks on. One man enjoys life, the other merely contemplates. This is the foundation of the entire science of meditation, India’s greatest gift to the world. Numerous later thinkers developed it further and founded their own schools of meditation, but its essence is already encapsulated in this verse.

Monism is what finds expression in the verse under consideration: Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti. It characterizes what underlies the multiplicity of viewpoints and ways of understanding as a single reality. It is unity in diversity. It is the integration of the many into the one. The belief that a visible plurality masks a deeper oneness was part of the Vedic outlook since the very beginning.

A third idea that may also stem from the Riddle Hymn, and that has strongly marked Hindu tradition throughout, is Dīrghatamas’ notion of the “syllable”, apparently the Oṁ sound. Given the context, with mother cows expressing their tenderness (vatsalya) for their young by lowing at them, and the young lowing back, it looks like the unspoken syllable is another vocalization of Mooh. But I am confident that this august company of Sanskrit scholars has a loftier explanation. Then again, the Vedic sages must have had a lot more humour than their bookish descendants.

In the West, it is said that the whole tradition of philosophical thought is but a series of footnotes on the Greek philosopher Plato (whom you might know from Urdu sources as Aflatūn). Here, you could say that all Indian thought is but a series of footnotes on Dīrghatamas.

Islam

Now we come to the point where I should start saying the very thing you have gotten me here for. I came thousands of miles to brook the subject that all Hindus seem to be afraid of. Well, not all Hindus, but at least those who are into interreligious dialogue. That subject is Islam.

Tomorrow, this conference, this hall, this very table, will feature an interreligious forum. There will be a Buddhist and some other Dharmics, as if they are the ones with whom problems of coexistence have to be resolved. There will be a representative of Christianity, already a bit touchier. But the real elephant in the room is of course Islam. When it is emphasized before a Hindu audience that ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti, it means effectively: don’t you Hindus dare to harbour suspicions against Islam! Hindus have to suspend their opinions of Islam, but no one dares formulate just what opinions Muslims should suspend regarding Hinduism.

Frankly, I wonder just what they sermonize on these occasions against Muslims to make them more appreciative of Hinduism. Hindus always justify their acts of “Muslim appeasement” by saying: “But we have to live with them!” It seems they never think about its logical counterpart: teach them to live with us. And I wonder what verse from the Quran they intone to propagate an interreligious understanding among Muslims.

I will not embarrass anyone by asking the question whether such is also the intention behind this conference, and of course I remain perfectly willing to get convinced otherwise. But until then, I believe the Hindu psychology of Muslim appeasement is so strong that even the present organizers have not been able to escape it. Indeed, a Hindu present here in the audience asked me this very morning not to go into the Ayodhya controversy, about which I have published, as there would also be one Muslim present. (I certainly am going to mention Ayodhya, but not the controversy.)

One Muslim among hundreds of Hindus, and already Hindus want to conceal their opinions. Already all those Hindus are ready to bend over backwards to please that one Muslim, without even asking him! This must be an underground society, used to living in hiding. And yet, what for? Are they “Islamophobic”, meaning “afraid” of Islam?

Well, I am not. I don’t think Muslims are a bunch of humourless touch-me-nots who freak out as soon as you mention the rougher edges of pluralism. I will not alter my speech just because one Muslim is present, or many Muslims, or only Muslims. They are our own countrymen, they are fellow human beings born with the same capacities and propensities. A certain conditioning by a certain religious doctrine has formed a surface layer, but deep down they are the same. So, address Muslims not at the level of their indoctrination, but at the deeper level of their general humanity.

I am here to join in this effort and make everybody feel that we are in the same boat together. Since we have already done so much to satisfy Hindu tastes (lighting lamps, garlands, coconuts, a Sarasvatī statue), let us now say certain things that Muslims would feel good about.

People who know my critical work on Moḥammed (Arabic: “The praised one”) would not lend me any credibility if I started praising him. Yet, there is one merit of his that I greatly recommend. As you might know, he was an orphan, brought up by relatives. While they looked after him with one hand, they deprived him of his parental inheritance with the other. And so, Mohammed remained very sensitive to this problem and always emphasized that you should not deprive children of their inheritance. Well, in this respect at least, we should all be followers of Mohammed: don’t lose your rightful inheritance. Don’t let them make you embrace any artificial imposition instead of what is naturally yours. Stay true to your legacy, to your roots.

Otherwise, I may have my second thoughts about Mohammed, but for now, let us focus on Allah. Indeed, I am all for Allah. If there is one thing great about Islam, it is Allah. Nay, He is not merely “great”, he is “greater”.

Allāh, the ilāh

Let us analyze the word Allāh, as students of the devabhāśā would. You may know that Deva, “god”, literally means “bright one”. Now, the bright ones living in heaven are of course the stars. And indeed, in Sumerian hieroglyphics, five thousand years ago, the concept of “god” was rendered as a radiant star. This sign was pronounced Dingir in Sumerian, and El in Akkadian Semitic. It is the same El that we find, through Hebrew, in Gabriel (“My strength is God”), Uriel (“My light is God”), or Michael (“Who is like God?”).

Now, this El is rendered into a generic substantive (cfr. god > godhead, deus > deity, deva > devatā): Hebrew eloha, Arabic ilāh. In Arabic, then, this generic noun is coupled with the article al to become al-ilāha, “the deity”, “the god par excellence”. This expression is contracted to become a name again: Allāh, “thé god”, “God”.

As you all know, Allah is great. And even greater: Allāh akbar, “Allah is greater”. The phrase has gained a bit of a bad name, but in fact it is quite profound. Muslims often use it as a reminder that their plans and designs may ever be so clever, but it is God Who has the last word. In those instances, it is a sign of humility. No matter how important a given concern may be, it is always dwarfed by the divine.

The name Allāh acquired the monotheistic meaning of “only God” with the Islamization of Arabia in the 620s. Before that, it had a generic meaning. Thus, it is described how someone kneels down before a statue of the moon-god Hubal and then “prays to Allāh”, i.e. “prays to the deity before him”, viz. Hubal. So, the word Allāh belongs in the polytheist landscape.

This moon-god Hubal presided over the Ka’ba, the shrine built around a meteor stone fallen from heaven. In an unsculpted stone, Hindus will readily recognize the Śivaliṅgam, the symbol of the moon-carrying god (Candradhāra), the Lord of the Moon (Somanātha), Śiva. Hubal’s or Śiva’s crescent has become the main symbol of Allāh. And like Śiva, “the deity” Hubal comes with a triad of goddesses: in India they are Pārvatī, Durgā and Kālī, in Arabia al-Lāt (< al-Ilāhat, “thé goddess”, the sun), al-‘Uzza (“the strong one”, the planet Venus) and al-Manāt (“fate, doom”, the night). Remark how in Arabic, like in German, the word “sun” is conceived as female, the word “moon” as male, which facilitates the personification of the moon as the god Hubal, and of the sun as the goddess al-Lāt.

I don’t know if Hindus and Muslims are all that different, but Indians and Arabs clearly are not. Their religious imaginations have generated very parallel families of gods.

Among Hindus with an excitable fantasy, this has led to the belief that “the Ka’ba used to be a Śiva temple”. This is exaggerated, but through the theme of the moon-god, Śiva does have a link with the Ka’ba. Indian traders visiting Arabia used to worship there, and Arabs used to worship at the Somnāth temple on the Gujarat coast. Later, Mahmud Ghaznavī believed that the Arab goddesses, chased out of Arabia by the Prophet, had found refuge there.

So, it is not at all far-fetched to sing: Īśvar-Allāh tere nām, “Īśvara (= Śiva) and Allāh are equally your names". The Gandhians and Nehruvians have churned out a lot of nonsense, such as the absurdity that “all religions are equally true”; but they are right to repeat this songline. Nor is it weird to go on pilgrimage to the Ka’ba in Makka, just as Hindu pilgrims go to Ayodhyā, to Sabarimalai, to mount Kailāś, or indeed, at the time of the Kumbha Melā, to Ilāhābād. The Ḥajj pilgrimage existed since long before Islam, which has only borrowed it, and it deserves to be perpetuated. (This should not be done through a “Hajj subsidy” though, not at tax-payer’s expense, for that defeats the whole purpose of a pilgrimage, intended as a form of sacrifice.)

In the West, some anti-Muslim crusaders are saying that we should bomb the Ka’ba. On the contrary, we should ensure that it remains unharmed and honoured as a sacred site. Indeed, like Gurū Nānak before us, we should go there ourselves. An armed expedition will do no more good than the Western military interventions in Iraq and Libya, which have turned out totally disastrous and counterproductive. What the Muslim world needs is not even more polarization and war. What it needs is a thaw. In a situation of peace and prosperity, the minds can evolve. People can then expand their perspectives and learn about the spirituality that their neighbours have to offer. For starters, they can practise the meditation techniques that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is now offering all over the Middle East. So, as an unapologetic Islam critic, I am nonetheless emphatically wishing the Muslims salām, “peace”.


The Dīn-i-Ilāhī

Emperor Akbar, already at age thirteen a ghazī (“raider against the infidels”) reputed to have killed the Hindu emperor Hemacandra with his own hands, gradually grew away from Islam. He started his own private and non-dogmatic religion: the Dīn-i-Ilāhī, the “religion of the deities” or the “divine religion”. A Sanskrit translation could be Daivika Dharma. And who could be against that? Not Mitra, the lord of the day-sky, nor Varuṇa, lord of the night-sky. Nor Uśā, lady of the dawn, for that matter. All the 33 Vedic gods smiled when crude monotheism had to make way for this Daivika Dharma, this Dīn-i-Ilāhī.

This step was not without risks, however, since court cleric Aḥmad Sirhindī denounced it as “blasphemy”. After Akbar’s death, it would wither away under the reassertion of orthodoxy. Yet, it was based on a commendable and correct observation: that no religious doctrine can claim a monopoly of the truth. This observation was very close to our maxim Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti.

In the spirit of this new religion, he called the city he founded Ilāhābād, “city of the deity”, “divine city”. It lay on one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, the saṅgam (confluence) of Gaṅgā en Yamunā. The British interpreted the name wrongly as Allāhābād , with the Arabic article al-. But another explanation is possible, and we will invent it herewith.

The foremother Ilā

“On the saṅgam is a city / where the girls are so pretty /…”

At least five thousand years before Akbar, this area was the habitat of Ilā, the daughter and eldest child of Manu. He in turn was the founding patriarch of mankind, or at least of a part of it. His daughter, in spite of her primogeniture, had to leave the succession to the throne to her younger brother Ikṣvāku, who stayed in the paternal capital Ayodhyā and founded the Solar dynasty. Being myself an eldest son but second child, I know how it must have felt: Ikṣvāku always looked up to his elder sister and felt a bit indebted to her.

On her part, Ilā moved out to Pratiṣṭhānapura, next to the virgin land where Akbar was to build his divine city. This is where her son Purūravas founded the Lunar Dynasty.

One descendant of theirs, Nahuśa, moved westwards to the Sarasvatī valley, where one of his own descendants was Yayāti, after whose five sons the “five tribes” were named. Pūru headed the central Paurava tribe. One of his progeny was Bharata, after whom India is still called Bhāratavarṣa. In his clan grew a tradition of composing hymns, and these were collected in the Vedas. Later sources describe Dīrghatamas as his court priest. The Vedic seers rightly glorified their ancestress Ilā, who became a goddess and member of a typical goddess triad: Ilā, Bhāratī and Sarasvatī.

So many cities have already been renamed, and I will presently propose to rename Ilāhābād as well, viz. as, well, Ilāhābād. It can retain its name, that saves us all the renaming on road maps, street signs and letterheads. Only, it would get a new interpretation: “city of Ilā”. So, after her, this city’s name should be re-analyzed as Ilā-h-ābād, “city of Ilā”. Normal rules of phonetic harmony would contract this into Ilābād, but that could also refer to an ābād founded by a man named Ila (short -a). So to make sure that we know a lady is being eternalized in this divine city, we intersperse a /h/ sound, like a sigh of joy, and make it into Ilāhābād.

Hospitable people of Ilāhābād, and especially you, ladies of Ilāhābād, I salute you as carriers of the heritage of the Vedic grandmother Ilā. Without her, no Dīrghatamas would have been there to compose the verse: Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti. As the Prophet has enjoined: don’t let your rightful inheritance be snatched away from you. Revive Ilā’s memory and continue the work she began: the Vedic civilization, no less.

Thank you all.

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