The occasion for this paper on monotheism and its presence or absence in Hinduism is an upsurge in the Arya Samaj’s long-standing campaign to convince Hindus of the superiority and Vedic basis of monotheism.
Founded in 1875, the Ârya Samâj, in effect "Society of Vedicists", was a trail-blazer of Hindu revivalism and anti-colonial nationalism until Independence. It worked bravely for the reconversion of Indian Muslims, the only humane solution to India's communal problem. Some of its spokesmen gave their lives for speaking out on Islam, most notably Pandit Lekhram in 1897 and Swami Shraddahananda (co-founder of the Hindu Mahasabha) in 1926. The Arya Samaj also led the way in the abolition of caste discrimination and the acceptance of widow remarriage, both as a matter of Vedic principle and in order to free Hindu society of its weaknesses which its enemies were exploiting to their advantage.
Unfortunately, in its opposition to the predatory religions of Islam and Christianity, it interiorized some of their beliefs and attitudes. Foremost among these was the assumption that monotheism, the belief in a single God annex the condemnation of all worship offered to any being but Him, is the supreme form of religion. Hence, the Arya Samaj decreed that the Vedic religion had always been monotheistic, so that Islamic and Christian missionaries had nothing to teach the Vedicists about the true religion of the One God. If Hinduism now seemed like the polytheistic religion par excellence, this was partly due to post-Vedic degenerative developments and partly to textual misinterpretation of the seemingly numerous god-names in the Vedas. In reality, or so the Arya Samaj claimed, these many gods were only different faces of the One God.
Until Independence (completed by the struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad for Hyderabad's accesion to the Indian Union in 1948, in which the later Arya Samaj president Vandematharam Ramachandra Rao took a leadership role), this monotheistic reinterpretation of the Vedas could be excused as a tactical device useful in the Arya Samaj's main struggle, viz. against the predatory monotheistic religions. Ever since, however, and especially in the recentmost decades, the Arya Samaj seems to have forgotten its original mission, and is now turning the bulk of its polemics against fellow Hindus who have not embraced this monotheistic reading of the Vedas. In effect, the Arya Samaj has become Christianity's and Islam's first line of attack against Hindu polytheism.
As an organization, the Arya Samaj is no longer very powerful or important, but its message has spread far and wide in educated Hindu society. The same is even more true of a similar movement, the Brahmo Samaj (°1825), a flagbearer of the Bengal Renaissance which tried to translate Hinduism into rational-sounding concepts acceptable to the British colonizers and the first circles of anglicized Hindus. Whereas the Arya Samaj embraced a Christian-like religious theism, the Brahmo Samaj tended more towards a modern Enlightenment-inspired deism, i.e. the philosophical acceptance of a distant cosmic intelligence rather than a personal God biddable by human imprecations and sacrifices. But like the Aryas, the Brahmos rejected Hindu polytheism as a degenerate aberration from the true Vedic spirit.
In the course of the 20th century, the Arya and Brahmo views of Hindu tradition have become mainstream among English-speaking Hindus. Many introductory textbooks on Hinduism used in India, and most of those used in NRI-PIO circles, deny Hindu polytheism and insist that the many Hindu gods are merely faces of the One God. Thus, among the textbook edits proposed by two Hindu foundations that triggered the California textbook controversy of 2005-2009, a prominent one was the replacement of “gods” with “God”.
Before entering the specifics of the monotheism argument, let us say beforehand that we don't believe the contents of this argument have been decisive in the Arya Samaj's prioritizing the struggle against polytheism nor in its abandonment of its original alertness against Islamic and Christian aggression. On both issues, the organization is simply riding with the tide. Now that Nehruvian "secularism" has become the norm, it is just not done to criticize Christianity or Islam (except by the brave) or to describe their conversion offensive as a problem. The Arya Samaj has abandoned its own raison d'être. We may not be able to counter anyone’s opportunistic reasons for being on the safe side of an existing trend; but we are in a position to refute the theological justification which the Arya Samaj proclaims for its adoption of “Vedic monotheism”.
In this article series, we will consider (1) the genesis of monotheism; (2) Christian and post-Christian attempts to discover monotheism in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and tribal religions; (3) Hindu or Arya attempts to discover monotheism behind “apparent” Hindu polytheism; (4) the related issue of ”idolatry” and the Arya campaign to extirpate it from Hinduism; (5) the logical ways for Hindus to deal with the monotheistic challenge. We may take up questions (welcome at koenraadelst@hotmail.com or at the present forum) in a final article.
Read more!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
India Charming Chaos
In October 2011, I wrote this foreword to the book India Charming Chaos by Johnny Fincioen. It is a general presentation of first impressions of India by an unprepared traveller who just followed his nose, or his intuition. Fincioen (1952) and his wife are a successful Flemish-American entrepreneurial couple who in midlife decided to take it more slowly with the IT business. Like for so many others, an exploration of all that life has to offer soon turned out to include the mystical wonderland India. I read the report of their discovery and contributed
Why go to India? Johnny Fincioen, Flemish-American businessman, has found out for himself simply by giving it a try. What he found is a fascinating country going through a cascade of changes. After the Indomania waves of the 19th century and the 1960s and 70s, India is hot once more.
In Antiquity, India was a fabulous land in the distance, reputedly home to unicorns and gold-digging giant ants. The Arabs considered her the center of wealth and knowledge, source of the rakmu’l-Hindi, “Indian numerals”, which we have mis-termed “Arabic”. Places of wealth and luxury tend to come into use as girl’s names, thus in English the name of the South-African diamond mine Kimberley, and the Arabs did likewise with Hind, name of the homeland of gemstone culture, India (e.g. Prophet Mohammed’s principal enemy, Mecca’s first lady Hind bint Utba). When the trade routes to the riches of India were made difficult and expensive by hostilities with the Muslim world, Europeans sought detours to India, discovering America along the way and calling its natives “Indians”. At the dawn of India’s absorption into the colonial system, the subcontinent accounted for 24% of world trade, surpassed only by China with 31%, but way ahead of the European powers.
The first modern peak in India’s popularity in the West coincided with her economic decline, when the country was being plundered by the British East India Company, its technology used in the industrial revolution but its native production capacity dismantled, its native education system dissolved, its ruling class reduced to a colorful parody of its former glory, its working class impoverished. But in those days, the type of people who cared to leave us their impressions of India and Indian civilization in writing were typically more interested in her cultural dimensions, whether the gory anecdotes about snake charmers and widow self-immolation or the profounder philosophical insights that inspired Arthur Schopenhauer and the American Transcendentalists.
The second peak coincided with India’s postcolonial stagnation, when its people’s dynamism and creativity was stifled by Nehruvian socialism. Entreprise was made very difficult and people taking business initiatives were practically treated as criminals. The country’s name had become a byword for extreme poverty and hopelessness. Westerners who took the hippie trail to India accepted as normal that India had very poor hygiene and underdeveloped communications, with begging lepers on every street corner. To add insult to injury, the international public routinely lauded the controversial Mother Teresa as the only hope for India’s poor, thrown into the gutter by India’s callous upper classes.
The Cambridge-trained socialists who had imposed their detrimental policies on India rationalized the resulting stagnation by labeling it “the Hindu rate of growth”, as if economic underperformance and inertia were intrinsic characteristics of the native civilization. The received wisdom as conveyed in the ethnic jokes India’s neighbors tell about Indians always told a different story: they may be depicted as greedy, hung up on bizarre purity taboos, manipulative and other less commendable traits, but nobody ever doubted their business acumen. A reality check was provided by those Indians who had escaped the Nehruvian experiment: migrating to Africa or the Anglo-Saxon countries, taking much of their traditional culture along, they amazed their host societies by their successful entrepreneurship. Margaret Thatcher called them the “model minority”. They also took a leadership role in brain-intensive endeavors like specialist medicine and innovative technologies.
In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh (PM at the time of this writing) made a fairly clean break with Nehruvian socialism. As a result, India started emancipating itself from sloth and poverty. The success story of the diaspora is now reproducing itself in the old country. Like in the precolonial age, India is now a land of budding wealth and opportunity.
At the same time, some old and enduring problems refuse to go away, or are even getting worse. Divisions along religious, linguistic and caste lines are eagerly played up by interested parties. And these are not always the ones identified as trouble-makers in the mainstream media. Thus, many self-styled human-rights watchdogs and do-gooder NGOs, both native and foreign, are more part of the problem than of the solution. Often they are agents of social strife and promoters of artificial resentment, sometimes also conduits of foreign interference. Economic progress has its trickle-down effects to many poorer communities, but also has its left-behinds, such as the farmers who see no way out of their accumulating debts except suicide. Just as the end of Communism didn’t bring the predicted “end of history” at the geopolitical level, the demise of Nehruvian socialism doesn’t mean that the history of India’s struggle with itself has ended.
Meanwhile, for foreign travelers, India has become far more comfortable than the hippie trail of yore. Cleaner, safer (if you stay out of the guerrilla-infested areas), more orderly, far easier to get around, fully up-to-date on ICT. Fortunately or unfortunately, the country has also become less foreign, less Oriental, less exotic: Western cultural models are penetrating the country along with material culture, English is more dominant than ever to the detriment of the status of the vernaculars, and on the Western side, Indian cuisine and music have become familiar even to those who never took a particular interest in India, while many have made acquaintance with Indian-born neighbors and colleagues. The country has also become less hostile to “the foreign hand”, the bogey that used to be invoked to ban foreign participation in India’s industry, markets, media and research facilities. So, while still different enough to be worth seeing, it has become much easier to feel at home there. There are no excuses anymore for postponing your trip to India.
Read more!
Why go to India? Johnny Fincioen, Flemish-American businessman, has found out for himself simply by giving it a try. What he found is a fascinating country going through a cascade of changes. After the Indomania waves of the 19th century and the 1960s and 70s, India is hot once more.
In Antiquity, India was a fabulous land in the distance, reputedly home to unicorns and gold-digging giant ants. The Arabs considered her the center of wealth and knowledge, source of the rakmu’l-Hindi, “Indian numerals”, which we have mis-termed “Arabic”. Places of wealth and luxury tend to come into use as girl’s names, thus in English the name of the South-African diamond mine Kimberley, and the Arabs did likewise with Hind, name of the homeland of gemstone culture, India (e.g. Prophet Mohammed’s principal enemy, Mecca’s first lady Hind bint Utba). When the trade routes to the riches of India were made difficult and expensive by hostilities with the Muslim world, Europeans sought detours to India, discovering America along the way and calling its natives “Indians”. At the dawn of India’s absorption into the colonial system, the subcontinent accounted for 24% of world trade, surpassed only by China with 31%, but way ahead of the European powers.
The first modern peak in India’s popularity in the West coincided with her economic decline, when the country was being plundered by the British East India Company, its technology used in the industrial revolution but its native production capacity dismantled, its native education system dissolved, its ruling class reduced to a colorful parody of its former glory, its working class impoverished. But in those days, the type of people who cared to leave us their impressions of India and Indian civilization in writing were typically more interested in her cultural dimensions, whether the gory anecdotes about snake charmers and widow self-immolation or the profounder philosophical insights that inspired Arthur Schopenhauer and the American Transcendentalists.
The second peak coincided with India’s postcolonial stagnation, when its people’s dynamism and creativity was stifled by Nehruvian socialism. Entreprise was made very difficult and people taking business initiatives were practically treated as criminals. The country’s name had become a byword for extreme poverty and hopelessness. Westerners who took the hippie trail to India accepted as normal that India had very poor hygiene and underdeveloped communications, with begging lepers on every street corner. To add insult to injury, the international public routinely lauded the controversial Mother Teresa as the only hope for India’s poor, thrown into the gutter by India’s callous upper classes.
The Cambridge-trained socialists who had imposed their detrimental policies on India rationalized the resulting stagnation by labeling it “the Hindu rate of growth”, as if economic underperformance and inertia were intrinsic characteristics of the native civilization. The received wisdom as conveyed in the ethnic jokes India’s neighbors tell about Indians always told a different story: they may be depicted as greedy, hung up on bizarre purity taboos, manipulative and other less commendable traits, but nobody ever doubted their business acumen. A reality check was provided by those Indians who had escaped the Nehruvian experiment: migrating to Africa or the Anglo-Saxon countries, taking much of their traditional culture along, they amazed their host societies by their successful entrepreneurship. Margaret Thatcher called them the “model minority”. They also took a leadership role in brain-intensive endeavors like specialist medicine and innovative technologies.
In 1992, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh (PM at the time of this writing) made a fairly clean break with Nehruvian socialism. As a result, India started emancipating itself from sloth and poverty. The success story of the diaspora is now reproducing itself in the old country. Like in the precolonial age, India is now a land of budding wealth and opportunity.
At the same time, some old and enduring problems refuse to go away, or are even getting worse. Divisions along religious, linguistic and caste lines are eagerly played up by interested parties. And these are not always the ones identified as trouble-makers in the mainstream media. Thus, many self-styled human-rights watchdogs and do-gooder NGOs, both native and foreign, are more part of the problem than of the solution. Often they are agents of social strife and promoters of artificial resentment, sometimes also conduits of foreign interference. Economic progress has its trickle-down effects to many poorer communities, but also has its left-behinds, such as the farmers who see no way out of their accumulating debts except suicide. Just as the end of Communism didn’t bring the predicted “end of history” at the geopolitical level, the demise of Nehruvian socialism doesn’t mean that the history of India’s struggle with itself has ended.
Meanwhile, for foreign travelers, India has become far more comfortable than the hippie trail of yore. Cleaner, safer (if you stay out of the guerrilla-infested areas), more orderly, far easier to get around, fully up-to-date on ICT. Fortunately or unfortunately, the country has also become less foreign, less Oriental, less exotic: Western cultural models are penetrating the country along with material culture, English is more dominant than ever to the detriment of the status of the vernaculars, and on the Western side, Indian cuisine and music have become familiar even to those who never took a particular interest in India, while many have made acquaintance with Indian-born neighbors and colleagues. The country has also become less hostile to “the foreign hand”, the bogey that used to be invoked to ban foreign participation in India’s industry, markets, media and research facilities. So, while still different enough to be worth seeing, it has become much easier to feel at home there. There are no excuses anymore for postponing your trip to India.
Read more!
Friday, December 2, 2011
Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom
Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom is usually interpreted as an act of self-sacrifice for the sake of the Kashmiri Pandits threatened with forced conversion. As such, it is a classic Hindutva proof of the Hinduness of Sikhism, though it is also a classic neo-Sikh proof of the “secularism” of Sikhism (“showing concern even for people of a different religion, viz. Hinduism”). However, this whole debate may well rest upon a simple misunderstanding.
In most Indo-Aryan languages, the oft-used honorific mode of the singular is expressed by the same pronoun as the plural (e.g. Hindi unkâ, “his” or “their”, as opposed to the non-honorific singular uskâ), and vice-versa; by contrast, the singular form only indicates a singular subject. The phrase commonly translated as “the Lord preserved their tilak and sacred thread” (tilak-janjû râkhâ Prabh tâ-kâ), referring to unnamed outsiders assumed to be the Kashmiri Pandits, literally means that He “preserved his tilak and sacred thread”, meaning Tegh Bahadur’s. It would already be unusual poetic liberty to render “their tilak and sacred thread” this way, and even if that were intended, there is still no mention of the Kashmiri Pandits in the story.
This is confirmed by one of the following lines in Govind’s poem about his father’s martyrdom: “He suffered martyrdom for the sake of his faith.” In any case, the story of forced mass conversions in Kashmir by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb is not supported by the detailed record of his reign by Muslim chronicles who narrate many accounts of his bigotry.
Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 was of course in the service of Hinduism, in that it was an act of opposing Aurangzeb’s policy of forcible conversion. An arrest warrant against him had been issued on non-religious and non-political charges, and he was found out after having gone into hiding; Aurangzeb gave him a chance to escape his punishment by converting to Islam. Being a devout Muslim, Aurangzeb calculated that the conversion of this Hindu sect leader would encourage his followers to convert along with him. The Guru was tortured and beheaded when he refused the offer to accept Islam, and one of his companions was sawed in two for having said that Islam should be destroyed.
At any rate, he stood firm as a Hindu, telling Aurangzeb that he loved his Hindu Dharma and that Hindu Dharma would never die,-- a statement conveniently overlooked in most neo-Sikh accounts. He was not a Sikh defending Hinduism, but a Hindu of the Nanakpanth defending his own Hindu religion. However, even Tegh Bahadur never was a warrior against the Moghul empire; indeed, the birth of his son Govind in the eastern city of Patna was a souvenir of his own enlistment in the party of a Moghul general on a military expedition to Assam.
Though Govind Singh is considered as the founder of the Khalsa order (1699) who “gave his Sikhs an outward form distinct from the Hindus” he too did things which Sikh separatists would dismiss as “brahminical”. As Khushwant Singh notes, “Gobind selected five of the most scholarly of his disciples and sent them to Benares to learn Sanskrit and the Hindu religious texts, to be better able to interpret the writings of the gurus, which were full of allusions to Hindu mythology and philosophy". Arun Shourie quotes Govind Singh as declaring: “Let the path of the pure [khâlsâ panth] prevail all over the world, let the Hindu dharma dawn and all delusion disappear. (…) May I spread dharma and prestige of the Veda in the world and erase from it the sin of cow-slaughter.”
Ram Swarup adds a psychological reason for the recent Sikh attempt to sever the ties with Hindu society and the Indian state: “‘You have been our defenders’, Hindus tell the Sikhs. But in the present psychology, the compliment wins only contempt -- and I believe rightly. For self-despisement is the surest way of losing a friend or even a brother. It also gives the Sikhs an exaggerated self-assessment."
Ram Swarup hints at the question of the historicity of the belief that “Sikhism is the sword-arm of Hinduism”, widespread among Hindus. It is well-known that the Sikhs were the most combative in fighting Muslims during the Partition massacres, and that they were also singled out by Muslims for slaughter. The image of Sikhs as the most fearsome among the Infidels still lingers in the Muslim mind; it is apparently for this reason that Saudi Arabia excludes Sikhs (like Jews) from employment within its borders. Yet, the story for the earlier period is not that clear-cut. Given the centrality of the image of Sikhism as the “sword-arm of Hinduism”, it is well worth our while to verify the record of Sikh struggles against Islam.
In the Guru lineage, we don’t see much physical fighting for Hinduism. Guru Nanak was a poet and a genuine saint, but not a warrior. His successors were poets, not all of them saintly, and made a living with regular occupations such as horse-trading. Guru Arjun’s martyrdom was not due to any anti-Muslim rebellion but to the suspicion by Moghul Emperor Jahangir that he had supported a failed rebellion by Jahangir’s son Khusrau, i.e. a Muslim palace revolution aimed at continuing the Moghul Empire but with someone else sitting on the throne. Arjun refused to pay the fine which Jahangir imposed on him, not as an act of defiance against Moghul sovereignty but because he denied the charges (which amounted to pleading his loyalty to Jahangir); it was then that Jahangir ordered a tougher punishment. At any rate, Arjun was never accused of raising the sword against Jahangir, merely of giving temporary shelter to Khusrau.
Tegh Bahadur’s son and successor, Govind Singh, only fought the Moghul army when he was forced to, and it was hardly to protect Hinduism. His men had been plundering the domains of the semi-independent Hindu Rajas in the hills of northeastern Panjab, who had given him asylum after his father’s execution. Pro-Govind accounts in the Hindutva camp equate Govind’s plundering with the Chauth tax which Shivaji imposed to finance his fight against the Moghuls; they allege that the Rajas were selfishly attached to their wealth while Govind was risking his life for the Hindu cause.
The Rajas, after failed attempts to restore law and order, appealed to their Moghul suzerain for help, or at least to the nearest Moghul governor. So, a confrontation ensued, not because Govind Singh had defied the mighty Moghul Empire, but because the Moghul Empire discharged its feudal duties toward its vassals, i.c. to punish what to them was an ungrateful guest turned robber.
Govind was defeated and his two eldest sons killed in battle; many Sikhs left him in anger at his foolhardy tactics. During Govind Singh’s flight, a Brahmin family concealed Govind’s two remaining sons (Hindus protecting Sikhs, not the other way around), but they were found out and the boys were killed.
The death of Govind’s sons provides yet another demythologizing insight about Govind Singh through its obvious connection with his abolition of the Guru lineage. A believer may, of course, assume that it was because of some divine instruction that Govind replaced the living Guru lineage with the Granth, a mere book (a replacement of the Hindu institution of gurudom with the Book-centred model of Islam). However, a more down-to-earth hypothesis which takes care of all the facts is that after the death of all his sons, Govind Singh simply could not conceive of the Guru lineage as not continuing within his own family.
After his defeat and escape (made possible by the self-sacrifice of a disciple who impersonated the Guru), Govind Singh in his turn became a loyal subject of the Moghul Empire. He felt he had been treated unfairly by the local governor, Wazir Khan, so he did what aggrieved vassals do: he wrote a letter of complaint to his suzerain, not through the hierarchical channels but straight to the Padeshah. In spite of its title and its sometimes defiant wording, this “victory letter” (Zafar Nâma) to Aurangzeb is fundamentally submissive. Among other things, Govind assures Aurangzeb that he is just as much an idol-breaker as the Padeshah himself: “I am the destroyer of turbulent hillmen, since they are idolators and I am the breaker of idols.” Aurangzeb was sufficiently pleased with the correspondence (possibly several letters) he received from the Guru, for he ordered Wazir Khan not to trouble Govind any longer.
After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Govind tried to curry favour with the heir-apparent and effective successor, Bahadur Shah, and supported him militarily in the war of succession. His fight was for one of the Moghul factions and against the rival Moghul faction, not for Hinduism and against the Moghul Empire as such. In fact, one of the battles he fought on Bahadur Shah’s side was against rebellious Rajputs. As a reward for his services, the new Padeshah gave Govind a fief in Nanded on the Godavari river in the south, far from his natural constituency in Panjab. To acquaint himself with his new property, he followed Bahadur Shah on an expedition to the south (leaving his wives in Delhi under Moghul protection), but there he himself was stabbed by two Pathan assassins (possibly sent by Wazir Khan, who feared Govind Singh’s influence on Bahadur Shah) in 1708. His death had nothing to do with any fight against the Moghuls or for Hinduism.
So far, it is hard to see where the Sikhs have acted as the sword-arm of Hinduism against Islam. If secularism means staying on reasonable terms with both Hindus and Muslims, we could concede that the Gurus generally did steer a “secular” course. Not that this is shameful: in the circumstances, taking on the Moghul Empire would have been suicidal.
In his last months, Govind Singh had become friends with the Hindu renunciate Banda Bairagi. This Banda went to Panjab and rallied the Sikhs around himself. At long last, it was he as a non-Sikh who took the initiative to wage an all-out offensive against the Moghul Empire. It was a long-drawn-out and no-holds-barred confrontation which ended in general defeat and the execution of Banda and his lieutenants (1716). Once more, the Sikhs became vassals of the Moghuls for several decades until the Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire in the mid-18th century. Only then, in the wake of the Maratha expansion, did the Sikhs score some lasting victories against Moghul and Pathan power.
We may conclude that Ram Swarup has a point when he questions the Hindu attitude of self-depreciation and gratefulness towards the Sikh “sword-arm”. Sikh history has its moments of heroism, but not particularly more than that of the Marathas or Rajputs. And like the Rajputs and Marathas, Sikhism also has a history of collaboration with the Moghul throne.
Read more!
In most Indo-Aryan languages, the oft-used honorific mode of the singular is expressed by the same pronoun as the plural (e.g. Hindi unkâ, “his” or “their”, as opposed to the non-honorific singular uskâ), and vice-versa; by contrast, the singular form only indicates a singular subject. The phrase commonly translated as “the Lord preserved their tilak and sacred thread” (tilak-janjû râkhâ Prabh tâ-kâ), referring to unnamed outsiders assumed to be the Kashmiri Pandits, literally means that He “preserved his tilak and sacred thread”, meaning Tegh Bahadur’s. It would already be unusual poetic liberty to render “their tilak and sacred thread” this way, and even if that were intended, there is still no mention of the Kashmiri Pandits in the story.
This is confirmed by one of the following lines in Govind’s poem about his father’s martyrdom: “He suffered martyrdom for the sake of his faith.” In any case, the story of forced mass conversions in Kashmir by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb is not supported by the detailed record of his reign by Muslim chronicles who narrate many accounts of his bigotry.
Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom in 1675 was of course in the service of Hinduism, in that it was an act of opposing Aurangzeb’s policy of forcible conversion. An arrest warrant against him had been issued on non-religious and non-political charges, and he was found out after having gone into hiding; Aurangzeb gave him a chance to escape his punishment by converting to Islam. Being a devout Muslim, Aurangzeb calculated that the conversion of this Hindu sect leader would encourage his followers to convert along with him. The Guru was tortured and beheaded when he refused the offer to accept Islam, and one of his companions was sawed in two for having said that Islam should be destroyed.
At any rate, he stood firm as a Hindu, telling Aurangzeb that he loved his Hindu Dharma and that Hindu Dharma would never die,-- a statement conveniently overlooked in most neo-Sikh accounts. He was not a Sikh defending Hinduism, but a Hindu of the Nanakpanth defending his own Hindu religion. However, even Tegh Bahadur never was a warrior against the Moghul empire; indeed, the birth of his son Govind in the eastern city of Patna was a souvenir of his own enlistment in the party of a Moghul general on a military expedition to Assam.
Though Govind Singh is considered as the founder of the Khalsa order (1699) who “gave his Sikhs an outward form distinct from the Hindus” he too did things which Sikh separatists would dismiss as “brahminical”. As Khushwant Singh notes, “Gobind selected five of the most scholarly of his disciples and sent them to Benares to learn Sanskrit and the Hindu religious texts, to be better able to interpret the writings of the gurus, which were full of allusions to Hindu mythology and philosophy". Arun Shourie quotes Govind Singh as declaring: “Let the path of the pure [khâlsâ panth] prevail all over the world, let the Hindu dharma dawn and all delusion disappear. (…) May I spread dharma and prestige of the Veda in the world and erase from it the sin of cow-slaughter.”
Ram Swarup adds a psychological reason for the recent Sikh attempt to sever the ties with Hindu society and the Indian state: “‘You have been our defenders’, Hindus tell the Sikhs. But in the present psychology, the compliment wins only contempt -- and I believe rightly. For self-despisement is the surest way of losing a friend or even a brother. It also gives the Sikhs an exaggerated self-assessment."
Ram Swarup hints at the question of the historicity of the belief that “Sikhism is the sword-arm of Hinduism”, widespread among Hindus. It is well-known that the Sikhs were the most combative in fighting Muslims during the Partition massacres, and that they were also singled out by Muslims for slaughter. The image of Sikhs as the most fearsome among the Infidels still lingers in the Muslim mind; it is apparently for this reason that Saudi Arabia excludes Sikhs (like Jews) from employment within its borders. Yet, the story for the earlier period is not that clear-cut. Given the centrality of the image of Sikhism as the “sword-arm of Hinduism”, it is well worth our while to verify the record of Sikh struggles against Islam.
In the Guru lineage, we don’t see much physical fighting for Hinduism. Guru Nanak was a poet and a genuine saint, but not a warrior. His successors were poets, not all of them saintly, and made a living with regular occupations such as horse-trading. Guru Arjun’s martyrdom was not due to any anti-Muslim rebellion but to the suspicion by Moghul Emperor Jahangir that he had supported a failed rebellion by Jahangir’s son Khusrau, i.e. a Muslim palace revolution aimed at continuing the Moghul Empire but with someone else sitting on the throne. Arjun refused to pay the fine which Jahangir imposed on him, not as an act of defiance against Moghul sovereignty but because he denied the charges (which amounted to pleading his loyalty to Jahangir); it was then that Jahangir ordered a tougher punishment. At any rate, Arjun was never accused of raising the sword against Jahangir, merely of giving temporary shelter to Khusrau.
Tegh Bahadur’s son and successor, Govind Singh, only fought the Moghul army when he was forced to, and it was hardly to protect Hinduism. His men had been plundering the domains of the semi-independent Hindu Rajas in the hills of northeastern Panjab, who had given him asylum after his father’s execution. Pro-Govind accounts in the Hindutva camp equate Govind’s plundering with the Chauth tax which Shivaji imposed to finance his fight against the Moghuls; they allege that the Rajas were selfishly attached to their wealth while Govind was risking his life for the Hindu cause.
The Rajas, after failed attempts to restore law and order, appealed to their Moghul suzerain for help, or at least to the nearest Moghul governor. So, a confrontation ensued, not because Govind Singh had defied the mighty Moghul Empire, but because the Moghul Empire discharged its feudal duties toward its vassals, i.c. to punish what to them was an ungrateful guest turned robber.
Govind was defeated and his two eldest sons killed in battle; many Sikhs left him in anger at his foolhardy tactics. During Govind Singh’s flight, a Brahmin family concealed Govind’s two remaining sons (Hindus protecting Sikhs, not the other way around), but they were found out and the boys were killed.
The death of Govind’s sons provides yet another demythologizing insight about Govind Singh through its obvious connection with his abolition of the Guru lineage. A believer may, of course, assume that it was because of some divine instruction that Govind replaced the living Guru lineage with the Granth, a mere book (a replacement of the Hindu institution of gurudom with the Book-centred model of Islam). However, a more down-to-earth hypothesis which takes care of all the facts is that after the death of all his sons, Govind Singh simply could not conceive of the Guru lineage as not continuing within his own family.
After his defeat and escape (made possible by the self-sacrifice of a disciple who impersonated the Guru), Govind Singh in his turn became a loyal subject of the Moghul Empire. He felt he had been treated unfairly by the local governor, Wazir Khan, so he did what aggrieved vassals do: he wrote a letter of complaint to his suzerain, not through the hierarchical channels but straight to the Padeshah. In spite of its title and its sometimes defiant wording, this “victory letter” (Zafar Nâma) to Aurangzeb is fundamentally submissive. Among other things, Govind assures Aurangzeb that he is just as much an idol-breaker as the Padeshah himself: “I am the destroyer of turbulent hillmen, since they are idolators and I am the breaker of idols.” Aurangzeb was sufficiently pleased with the correspondence (possibly several letters) he received from the Guru, for he ordered Wazir Khan not to trouble Govind any longer.
After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Govind tried to curry favour with the heir-apparent and effective successor, Bahadur Shah, and supported him militarily in the war of succession. His fight was for one of the Moghul factions and against the rival Moghul faction, not for Hinduism and against the Moghul Empire as such. In fact, one of the battles he fought on Bahadur Shah’s side was against rebellious Rajputs. As a reward for his services, the new Padeshah gave Govind a fief in Nanded on the Godavari river in the south, far from his natural constituency in Panjab. To acquaint himself with his new property, he followed Bahadur Shah on an expedition to the south (leaving his wives in Delhi under Moghul protection), but there he himself was stabbed by two Pathan assassins (possibly sent by Wazir Khan, who feared Govind Singh’s influence on Bahadur Shah) in 1708. His death had nothing to do with any fight against the Moghuls or for Hinduism.
So far, it is hard to see where the Sikhs have acted as the sword-arm of Hinduism against Islam. If secularism means staying on reasonable terms with both Hindus and Muslims, we could concede that the Gurus generally did steer a “secular” course. Not that this is shameful: in the circumstances, taking on the Moghul Empire would have been suicidal.
In his last months, Govind Singh had become friends with the Hindu renunciate Banda Bairagi. This Banda went to Panjab and rallied the Sikhs around himself. At long last, it was he as a non-Sikh who took the initiative to wage an all-out offensive against the Moghul Empire. It was a long-drawn-out and no-holds-barred confrontation which ended in general defeat and the execution of Banda and his lieutenants (1716). Once more, the Sikhs became vassals of the Moghuls for several decades until the Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire in the mid-18th century. Only then, in the wake of the Maratha expansion, did the Sikhs score some lasting victories against Moghul and Pathan power.
We may conclude that Ram Swarup has a point when he questions the Hindu attitude of self-depreciation and gratefulness towards the Sikh “sword-arm”. Sikh history has its moments of heroism, but not particularly more than that of the Marathas or Rajputs. And like the Rajputs and Marathas, Sikhism also has a history of collaboration with the Moghul throne.
Read more!
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Against Hindu identity
Among Indologists, it is now advised to avoid or at least problematize the word “Hindu”. Among the reasons for this wariness: Hindus themselves have only been using it for a few centuries, it is not mentioned in scripture but was tagged onto them by outsiders, it blurs important inter-Hindu distinctions and conflicts, and most objectionably, it is now the badge claimed by Hindu nationalists. Retired Delhi University historian Dwijendra Narayan Jha has continued the process of “Deconstructing Hindu identity” in an essay for the general public with that title, and it has now been published in a booklet, Rethinking Hindu Identity, along with essays on the “myth” of Hindu tolerance and on the sacred cow.
Regarding the latter point, his case is convincing enough. A good handful of passages in ancient texts are shown to confirm that the Vedic cattle-herders considered beef a normal part of their diet. In the pre-Buddhist age, the cow’s (like the horse’s) very aura of sacredness sometimes caused it to be ritually eaten. Her inviolability is among the sclerotic-eccentric traits typical only of the Puranic-Shastric phase of Hinduism crystallized from the Shunga era (2nd BCE) onwards.
On Hindu identity too, he doesn’t find it difficult to show that the term “Hindu” is fairly recent and introduced by Muslims in the catch-all sense of “any Indian non-Muslim”. Even in modern legislation, “Hindu” is only a “negative appellation” comprising “all non-Abrahamic religions” of India (p.65). The term Sanâtana Dharma, by contrast, is already “mentioned frequently in the Brahmanical texts”, though in varied meanings, but it too only acquired its value of indigenous synonym for the exonym “Hinduism” in the 19th century (p.20-21). Likewise, the notion of Bhâratvarsha, far from being eternal in its classical sense of “the Subcontinent”, is documented to have originally referred to smaller territories, not including Magadha and the Deccan. Alas, this paper is marred by an unsubstantiated accusation against colleague Prof. B.B. Lal, dean of Indian archaeology, for “systematic abuse of archaeology” (p.14), viz. for seeing continuities between Harappan and Hindu material culture.
Prof. Jha’s bias is showing badly in his paper on tolerance, which attacks the received wisdom that Hinduism is comparatively tolerant of other religions and of dissent in its own ranks. Here, he casts his net for instances of “Hindu intolerance” very wide. Mere doctrinal disputes, the very life-blood of intellectual culture, are cited as proving “inherent intolerance”, e.g. the denunciation of the Buddha as a false prophet incarnated merely to “brainwash” the demons (p.45). So is the principle that non-Hindus were welcome to convert, and ex-Hindus to reconvert, to Hinduism (p.47); or that the Virashaivas “engaged in conversion activities in a systematic manner” (p.44). Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.
His eagerness to accumulate incriminating testimony makes him include allegations made by modern and arguably partisan sources as if they were actual evidence, e.g. a colleague is cited as claiming a Tibetan chronicle Pag-sam-jon-zang for “the burning of the library of Nalanda by some ‘Hindu fanatics’, not by Bakhtiyar Khilji as is commonly believed” (p.35). This Tibetan chronicle can be consulted online, and we haven’t found anything about “Hindu fanatics” there. This allegation is a 20th-century “interpretation” at best, far from the primary testimony a historian should prefer. It is also highly implausible.
It says, after all, that mostly Hindu kings of the Ganga plain had patronized Buddhist institutions for 16 centuries (-5th to +12th), letting them flourish mightily according to Chinese and Tibetan visitors, then suddenly destroyed them in the nick of time before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors, who boast in their records of having destroyed the Buddhist institutions of which they had only found the smoking ruins. Khilji’s starring role in the destruction of Indian Buddhism is well-documented in contemporaneous Muslim sources and cannot be shifted to unnamed Hindu bogeys so cavalierly.
During the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on the evidence for the demolished Ayodhya temple in 1990-91, Jha was a member of the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s delegation against the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Like then, his intervention now in the debate on the purported tolerance and the very existence of “Hinduism” is not an impartisan source from which debaters could borrow authoritative arguments; it is itself one side of the polemic. Which is permitted, but should be kept in mind by the reader.
Review of D.N. Jha: Rethinking Hindu Identity, London/Oakville: Equinox, 2009. 100 pp., $85 HB, $28,95 PB. Published in Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, August 2011, p.872-874.
Read more!
Regarding the latter point, his case is convincing enough. A good handful of passages in ancient texts are shown to confirm that the Vedic cattle-herders considered beef a normal part of their diet. In the pre-Buddhist age, the cow’s (like the horse’s) very aura of sacredness sometimes caused it to be ritually eaten. Her inviolability is among the sclerotic-eccentric traits typical only of the Puranic-Shastric phase of Hinduism crystallized from the Shunga era (2nd BCE) onwards.
On Hindu identity too, he doesn’t find it difficult to show that the term “Hindu” is fairly recent and introduced by Muslims in the catch-all sense of “any Indian non-Muslim”. Even in modern legislation, “Hindu” is only a “negative appellation” comprising “all non-Abrahamic religions” of India (p.65). The term Sanâtana Dharma, by contrast, is already “mentioned frequently in the Brahmanical texts”, though in varied meanings, but it too only acquired its value of indigenous synonym for the exonym “Hinduism” in the 19th century (p.20-21). Likewise, the notion of Bhâratvarsha, far from being eternal in its classical sense of “the Subcontinent”, is documented to have originally referred to smaller territories, not including Magadha and the Deccan. Alas, this paper is marred by an unsubstantiated accusation against colleague Prof. B.B. Lal, dean of Indian archaeology, for “systematic abuse of archaeology” (p.14), viz. for seeing continuities between Harappan and Hindu material culture.
Prof. Jha’s bias is showing badly in his paper on tolerance, which attacks the received wisdom that Hinduism is comparatively tolerant of other religions and of dissent in its own ranks. Here, he casts his net for instances of “Hindu intolerance” very wide. Mere doctrinal disputes, the very life-blood of intellectual culture, are cited as proving “inherent intolerance”, e.g. the denunciation of the Buddha as a false prophet incarnated merely to “brainwash” the demons (p.45). So is the principle that non-Hindus were welcome to convert, and ex-Hindus to reconvert, to Hinduism (p.47); or that the Virashaivas “engaged in conversion activities in a systematic manner” (p.44). Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.
His eagerness to accumulate incriminating testimony makes him include allegations made by modern and arguably partisan sources as if they were actual evidence, e.g. a colleague is cited as claiming a Tibetan chronicle Pag-sam-jon-zang for “the burning of the library of Nalanda by some ‘Hindu fanatics’, not by Bakhtiyar Khilji as is commonly believed” (p.35). This Tibetan chronicle can be consulted online, and we haven’t found anything about “Hindu fanatics” there. This allegation is a 20th-century “interpretation” at best, far from the primary testimony a historian should prefer. It is also highly implausible.
It says, after all, that mostly Hindu kings of the Ganga plain had patronized Buddhist institutions for 16 centuries (-5th to +12th), letting them flourish mightily according to Chinese and Tibetan visitors, then suddenly destroyed them in the nick of time before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors, who boast in their records of having destroyed the Buddhist institutions of which they had only found the smoking ruins. Khilji’s starring role in the destruction of Indian Buddhism is well-documented in contemporaneous Muslim sources and cannot be shifted to unnamed Hindu bogeys so cavalierly.
During the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on the evidence for the demolished Ayodhya temple in 1990-91, Jha was a member of the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s delegation against the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Like then, his intervention now in the debate on the purported tolerance and the very existence of “Hinduism” is not an impartisan source from which debaters could borrow authoritative arguments; it is itself one side of the polemic. Which is permitted, but should be kept in mind by the reader.
Review of D.N. Jha: Rethinking Hindu Identity, London/Oakville: Equinox, 2009. 100 pp., $85 HB, $28,95 PB. Published in Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, August 2011, p.872-874.
Read more!
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The Greek referendum
All Saints' Day 2011. After the EU leaders have cobbled together a financial arrangement intended to save the Greek exchequer and economy at huge expense to the North-European taxpayers as well as to the Greek workers and pensioners, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou now risks exploding the whole operation by calling a referendum. The Greek electorate, less than enthusiastic about the sternly conditional "aid package", may well abort it. Some first thoughts on the Greek referendum.
(1) The decision to decide by referendum is in itself excellent. The problem is that, like most referendums under parliamentary regimes and dictatorships, it is just a one-off referendum, not one embedded in a stable political culture based on regular lawmaking by referendum. True to type, it is called by the executive, not by the citizens themselves. This way, governments call referendums when they expect the popular preference to coincide with their own, all while avoiding or suppressing them in the opposite case. So, as an exercise in democracy, this promises to be a tainted referendum.
(2) Nevertheless, for most Eurocrats and their pall-bearers in the media, the Greek referendum is already far too democratic. Just last week, they already clamoured that Europe and her future were being "taken hostage" by the German Parliament when it insisted on exercising its constitutional right to decide on Chancellor Merkel's plan for saving Greece and the euro. In the Eurocratic view, echoing the rhetoric of all despots and anti-democratic ideologues throughout history, unelected Eurocratic committees should have their hands free to make the policy of their choosing,
unencumbered with democratic procedures. In fact, the expected conflict between the EU-charted course and the will of the people (not just the Greek people, for in this case, the Dutch or Finnish voters may well be on the same wavelength, viz. unenthusiastic) would have been avoided if earlier phases of the financial and economic policies affected had already been subjected to referendums. There was no need to fear a democratic vote on the Greek bail-out if a democratic mandate had earlier been secured for the steps that got us to this impasse, such as the introduction of the euro.
(3) In the expected and much-feared event of a "No" vote, the EU leaders have the option of taking the Greeks at their word and withdrawing the whole operation. That would mean: letting the Greek state go bankrupt. Considering contemporary citizens' dependence on the state, most observers will take that eventuality as too horrible to contemplate. But perhaps we just ought to take the wager. If Greek society collapses along with the state and cries for help, we can still send food aid, an ad hoc police force and all that. But possibly the Greek citizenry will prove more resourceful than to let it come to that point. Should be an interesting experiment.
(4) Since Eurocrats don't like experimentation, they can be counted on to unleash every trick in the book in order to prevent the Greeks from voting or, if that goes through somehow, from voting "wrongly". A multiple of the intimidation used on the Irish when they were forced to re-vote on the Lisbon Treaty (the renamed European Constitution draft) will now be rained down on the Greeks. To be sure, the Eurocrats may be right to this extent that in economic terms, their plan is perhaps a lesser evil compared with the prospect of Greek bankruptcy. But because present policies have never had a serious democratic basis, they will now resort to subverting or overruling democracy in order to force their solution on the people.
(5) Greece is now accused of being ungrateful. Of course, the EU powers-that-be are really trying to save the banks that have partly caused this mess and entangled themselves in it because the fall of those banks would in turn badly affect the whole other European economy; it is not like as if they are being altruistic towards Greece. Yet some tough questions do indeed deserve to be asked. Have any Greeks protested when their politicians were lying their way into the Eurozone by giving their EU partners false data about Greek state finance? Who among them has tried to stop their public spending from running wild? (Likewise, the Icelanders could be asked whether they reined in their banks when these were bringing in the money of duped investors who later demanded their money back from the Icelandic taxpayer.) Granted that the banks are selfish and irresponsible and thieves, and that it is an ugly sight to see taxpayers forced to bail them out, but the politicians and the common people also share in the responsibility.
(6) In an undemocratic system, such as the present parliamentary system with its delegation of powers to unelected levels of decision-making such as the EU, the temptation is very strong to contrast "the people", those innocent sheep, with "the politicians", that band of robbers. On many issues, the interests of the political class and of the citizenry diverge; but in the case of Greek financial irresponsibility, they may have converged. When it came to over-spending on social security and civil servants' wages, and to cheating the EU partners into facilitating this over-spending by allowing Greece prematurely into the Eurozone, the impression exists that Greek commoners and Greek politicians were on the same wavelength. Democratic-minded people should get out of this mindset of blaming a political class placed above them and washing their own hands off all responsibility.
(7) The great virtue of direct democracy is that decisions are made by those who bear the consequences of these decisions. Some commentators are sure to protest that the consequences of the Greek referendum will affect all Eurozone and even all EU citizens, most of whom are not entitled to cast a vote in Greece: "The Greeks are holding hundreds of millions of Europeans hostage!" They said the same thing about the Irish when they were delaying the Lisbon Treaty, when in fact the Eurocrats and these commentators did what they could to prevent all those other Europeans from voting, knowing fully well that the far more numerous German or British electorate would likewise vote it down if given a chance. As said here at the outset, the Greek referendum is tainted because it is held in the context of a non-referendum-based system. But if we ever want to make a start with European democracy, we should not postpone the opportunity and make the most of it. Even the certainty that the anti-democratic forces are going the use any problems accompanying the outcome as trump arguments to criminalize the very idea of popular sovereignty should not be accepted as an excuse. Let Greece be the trailblazer of direct democracy once more.
Read more!
(1) The decision to decide by referendum is in itself excellent. The problem is that, like most referendums under parliamentary regimes and dictatorships, it is just a one-off referendum, not one embedded in a stable political culture based on regular lawmaking by referendum. True to type, it is called by the executive, not by the citizens themselves. This way, governments call referendums when they expect the popular preference to coincide with their own, all while avoiding or suppressing them in the opposite case. So, as an exercise in democracy, this promises to be a tainted referendum.
(2) Nevertheless, for most Eurocrats and their pall-bearers in the media, the Greek referendum is already far too democratic. Just last week, they already clamoured that Europe and her future were being "taken hostage" by the German Parliament when it insisted on exercising its constitutional right to decide on Chancellor Merkel's plan for saving Greece and the euro. In the Eurocratic view, echoing the rhetoric of all despots and anti-democratic ideologues throughout history, unelected Eurocratic committees should have their hands free to make the policy of their choosing,
unencumbered with democratic procedures. In fact, the expected conflict between the EU-charted course and the will of the people (not just the Greek people, for in this case, the Dutch or Finnish voters may well be on the same wavelength, viz. unenthusiastic) would have been avoided if earlier phases of the financial and economic policies affected had already been subjected to referendums. There was no need to fear a democratic vote on the Greek bail-out if a democratic mandate had earlier been secured for the steps that got us to this impasse, such as the introduction of the euro.
(3) In the expected and much-feared event of a "No" vote, the EU leaders have the option of taking the Greeks at their word and withdrawing the whole operation. That would mean: letting the Greek state go bankrupt. Considering contemporary citizens' dependence on the state, most observers will take that eventuality as too horrible to contemplate. But perhaps we just ought to take the wager. If Greek society collapses along with the state and cries for help, we can still send food aid, an ad hoc police force and all that. But possibly the Greek citizenry will prove more resourceful than to let it come to that point. Should be an interesting experiment.
(4) Since Eurocrats don't like experimentation, they can be counted on to unleash every trick in the book in order to prevent the Greeks from voting or, if that goes through somehow, from voting "wrongly". A multiple of the intimidation used on the Irish when they were forced to re-vote on the Lisbon Treaty (the renamed European Constitution draft) will now be rained down on the Greeks. To be sure, the Eurocrats may be right to this extent that in economic terms, their plan is perhaps a lesser evil compared with the prospect of Greek bankruptcy. But because present policies have never had a serious democratic basis, they will now resort to subverting or overruling democracy in order to force their solution on the people.
(5) Greece is now accused of being ungrateful. Of course, the EU powers-that-be are really trying to save the banks that have partly caused this mess and entangled themselves in it because the fall of those banks would in turn badly affect the whole other European economy; it is not like as if they are being altruistic towards Greece. Yet some tough questions do indeed deserve to be asked. Have any Greeks protested when their politicians were lying their way into the Eurozone by giving their EU partners false data about Greek state finance? Who among them has tried to stop their public spending from running wild? (Likewise, the Icelanders could be asked whether they reined in their banks when these were bringing in the money of duped investors who later demanded their money back from the Icelandic taxpayer.) Granted that the banks are selfish and irresponsible and thieves, and that it is an ugly sight to see taxpayers forced to bail them out, but the politicians and the common people also share in the responsibility.
(6) In an undemocratic system, such as the present parliamentary system with its delegation of powers to unelected levels of decision-making such as the EU, the temptation is very strong to contrast "the people", those innocent sheep, with "the politicians", that band of robbers. On many issues, the interests of the political class and of the citizenry diverge; but in the case of Greek financial irresponsibility, they may have converged. When it came to over-spending on social security and civil servants' wages, and to cheating the EU partners into facilitating this over-spending by allowing Greece prematurely into the Eurozone, the impression exists that Greek commoners and Greek politicians were on the same wavelength. Democratic-minded people should get out of this mindset of blaming a political class placed above them and washing their own hands off all responsibility.
(7) The great virtue of direct democracy is that decisions are made by those who bear the consequences of these decisions. Some commentators are sure to protest that the consequences of the Greek referendum will affect all Eurozone and even all EU citizens, most of whom are not entitled to cast a vote in Greece: "The Greeks are holding hundreds of millions of Europeans hostage!" They said the same thing about the Irish when they were delaying the Lisbon Treaty, when in fact the Eurocrats and these commentators did what they could to prevent all those other Europeans from voting, knowing fully well that the far more numerous German or British electorate would likewise vote it down if given a chance. As said here at the outset, the Greek referendum is tainted because it is held in the context of a non-referendum-based system. But if we ever want to make a start with European democracy, we should not postpone the opportunity and make the most of it. Even the certainty that the anti-democratic forces are going the use any problems accompanying the outcome as trump arguments to criminalize the very idea of popular sovereignty should not be accepted as an excuse. Let Greece be the trailblazer of direct democracy once more.
Read more!
Friday, October 7, 2011
Clash of civilizations cancelled
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the attention of the public intellectuals was drawn by two influential books spelling out the post-Cold-War world situation. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History claimed that utopia had started with the definitive victory of liberal-democratic capitalism, which would soon turn the whole world into a US suburb. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations provided a dystopian counterpoint, predicting that all civilizational identities would reassert themselves and provide the grounds for new worldwide conflicts, especially between the still-dominant West and two challengers, the Islamic world and the “Confucian” civilization of China.
However, no one has really gone on to theorize the conflict of interests between the West and China in civilizational terms, framing it rather as old-style Great-Power politics. So, the “clash of civilizations” effectively means the conflict between the West and Islam. Incidentally, Huntington was not aware that already in the 1980s, Times of India editor Girilal Jain discussed the triangular Hindu-Islamic-Western conflicts of interest in civilisational terms. Apart from the clash’s Western and westernized-Indian theorists, the vast majority of adherents to the doctrine of civilizational conflict are militant Muslims, who see this as merely a continuation of the religious war declared by Mohammed against the Infidels.
Now two French intellectuals, demographer Youssef Courbage and historian-anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, have come out with a presentation of demographic and anthropological data that should undermine the whole notion of the fabled clash. It is titled Le Rendez-Vous des Civilisations (Le Seuil, Paris), i.e. “the meeting of civilizations”. In the main, they develop two theses. One, the demographic explosion of the Muslim world so feared by Westerners (and Hindus) is largely a thing of the past. Two, Islam is highly insufficient as explanation for the conduct and the policies of “Muslim” societies, because they preserve many local pre-Islamic customs and sensibilities, often sharing these with societies on the other side of the “civilizational” border, as well as adopting post-Islamic ideologies, most of all nationalism.
Muslims no different
The authors give a detailed overview of demographic evolutions worldwide of the past few centuries and identify the factors of a decline in birth figures. Exceptions notwithstanding, the best predictor of a decline in fertility is female literacy, with 50% female literacy typically coinciding within a decade or so with a sharp downturn in fertility. This trend is as visible among Muslim as among Christian and Hindu populations. But truth to tell, the authors’ own data, while confirming a similar trend among Muslims, also show that by and large, the resultant fertility level among educated and affluent Muslim populations is still sizably higher than among non-Muslims, even remaining very high in wealthy Saudi Arabia, so that they continue to gain demographic ground over the non-Muslim populations.
And in cases where Muslims do follow Christians (or, most ahead, the Japanese) to a fertility figure below replacement level, a threshold recently crossed in Iran and in Bosnia, the fact that it happened much later among Muslims assures further comparative demographic gains before a net population decline sets in. Thus, in Iran the number of children including girls has grown rapidly in the preceding decades, so now the number of young mothers is still rising and even with fewer than 2.1 births per woman, the number of births also continues to rise. And when that number finally starts to decline, it will still for many years be higher than that of elderly Iranians dying, so in the authors’ estimate, Iran’s population will still rise another 20 million or so before levelling off. Even if the reproductive conduct of Muslim societies cannot be described as “demographic aggression”, it does lead to a steady rise in Muslim percentage in practically every country concerned.
For South Asia, the authors’ data, based on many surveys and sources beside the official census reports, confirm the picture given by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj in their detailed study Religious Demography of India (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003). In every state in India without exception, including the economically and educationally most advanced, the Muslim growth rate is far above replacement level and far above the figures for the Hindu majority and for other minorities. If stated by a Hindu, Indian secularists usually dismiss this finding as mere “hate propaganda”. In 1993, Mani Shankar Aiyar claimed that the Muslim percentage in India would forever remain at 11%; but only 15 years later, it is easily 14%. And on top of this, India is outpaced by her Muslim neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, whence millions more are bound to seek living space in India.
With 4,6 children per woman in 2005, Pakistan grows faster than the Arab countries (except for Yemen and the Palestinians) and much faster than India. Indeed, it is on course to overtaking the US as third most populous country in the world well before the end of the century. Bangladesh used to be praised by demographers because it realised a downturn in birth rate in 1970, decades before reaching 50% female literacy (simply due to the physical pressures of overpopulation), but now disappoints them with a continually low marriage age and with a birth rate steady at ca. 3 per woman. According to Courbage and Todd, “the Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end.” (p.103)
Mind you, these are the findings of two scholars who have set out to counter the current anti-Muslim alarmist feelings in Europe and, by extension, in India. If any bias could be detected here, it would be on the slightly pro-Muslim side. Thus, they claim that the stagnation in Bangladesh’s population control policies is due to low literacy rather than to the impact of Islam, overlooking the fact that religion does have an impact on a society’s enthusiasm for literacy. They relay, doubtlessly in good faith, the Pakistani-cum-secularist story that the “Urdu-speaking Mohajirs” were “expelled from India after the Partition in 1947”, when in fact the Mohajirs migrated by choice to Pakistan, the promised land they themselves had created by campaigning for Partition in the preceding years. The “symmetry fallacy” of evenly distributing guilt between two warring parties, in this case by pretending that Muslims in India had been given the same eliminationist treatment as Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, is one of the cheapest disinformation techniques around, because it resonates with the public’s mental laziness so averse to making distinctions.
The “Islamophobic” image of the Muslims as a phalanx united and mobilized for demographic warfare is successfully deconstructed here, yet the hard data keep on showing a Muslim advance. While rising Muslim percentages may not stem from a conspiracy, Muslim leaders do read strategic implications into the trend. Thus, Algeria’s Houari Boumédienne and Libya’s Moammar al-Kadhafi have openly said that they expect to take over Europe by breeding a Muslim majority there. They certainly believe in a clash of civilizations and expect to come out victorious.
If there need not be much of a clash, as I am inclined to think, the reasons are other than demographical. It is simply that born Muslims may lose their commitment to Islam, and in many places are indeed leaving Islam, either formally or at least mentally. Even Islamic militants are interiorizing modern “Western” values and modes of thinking faster than they realize. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a flourishing film industry. Even if films are made glorifying Muslim heroes in order to instil Islamic enthusiasm in the audience, the very use of the medium of cinema is already intrinsically un-Islamic. Apart from breaking the taboo on the depiction of human beings, it brings in all kinds of ideas and attitudes typical of Infidel centres of soft power like Jewish-dominated Hollywood and Hindu-tainted Bollywood.
In Holland, two competing Muslim media corporations are doing a good job of presenting the Muslim angle of current developments, and here again the medium proves to be the message that overrules the Islamic message. Smartly dressed and camera-savvy Muslims with a fine Dutch accent conduct group discussions or interviews brimful of borrowed Western values, e.g. invoking principles of free speech or freedom of religion while defending Muslim interests against the ambient Infidel society. They (like the “Islamophobes”) think they are making clever use of Western values as weapons in the service of Islam, but in the process they themselves are getting transformed.
Pre-Islamic customs
Courbage and Todd also develop another line of argument against the black-and-white view of civilizations in confrontation. Deep social and cultural structures exist underneath people’s surface adherence to historical religions. Often these constitute a common heritage of different societies now seemingly living in conflict. Thus, a common Mediterranean attitude to marriage and sexuality, e.g. emphasizing a bride’s virginity and threatening honour vengeance, exist both in Arab and (at least until recently) in Latin countries, contrasting jointly with Nordic or African mores.
In particular, the pre-Islamic layer in Muslim society may explain some unexpected or otherwise puzzling data. Islam is reputedly harsh to women, so why is it that the Arab countries don’t have the problem of massive female foeticide that afflicts Korea, China and India? The authors don’t explain this, as Muslim preachers would, with reference to Mohammed’s condemnation of female infanticide. They point out the ancient difference in family structure.
In patriarchal societies like Confucian China and Hindu India, a daughter leaves her family upon getting married. This affects the status of the girl child negatively, making her education into a burden on the family that will only profit another family. Arab society, pre-Islamic as well as Islamic, is no less patriarchal, but there the girl child benefits of an idiosyncratic factor: tribal inbreeding. Hindu society is thoroughly familiar with endogamy, but this inbreeding within castes was counterbalanced by gotra (clan) exogamy. Brahmanical tradition, like the Roman Catholic Church, frowned upon inbreeding and imposed forbidden degrees of consanguinity. This taboo does not exist in most West-Asian and North-African countries. More often than not, a young man will marry his first or second cousin; or a slightly older man, his niece. (A similar system prevailed in Dravidian societies until the penetration of the North-Indian marriage rules.)
One consequence is that a newborn girl is expected later to marry a young man who is now already known to her parents, viz. their young nephew living in the same home or at least growing up nearby in their brother’s house. Conversely, the bride joining her husband in his parents’ home is not a stranger on whom a frustrated mother-in-law can avenge her dissatisfactions. No, since birth she was known to her in-laws, a member of their extended family, and is treated accordingly. (One objection often raised against Western society by Muslims in e.g. the Dutch TV talk shows mentioned, is that it is lacking in the human warmth which they have experienced in their home families.) There is no occasion then for the Indian attitude that “raising a daughter is like tilling your neighbour’s land”, since that neighbour is a close relative and your daughter remains a member of your extended family even after being married off. This way, these Muslim societies have less of an incentive to treat girls like a wasted effort or to pre-emptively abort them.
So, that’s a point worth pondering, especially for certain wealthy communities in India who can easily afford a daughter’s dowry yet set records in female foeticide. But the deep pre-Islamic structures of Muslim societies also have entirely different consequences relevant to the “clash of civilizations” debate.
Consider the situation in Iraq. The Americans’ stated goal was to introduce Western democracy there, a post-Islamic system presupposing a new post-Islamic mindset. That was not a big success. Yet, recently major progress has been made in containing Al-Qaida and mobilizing Iraqis on the American side. The secret was not to insist on establishing post-Islamic institutions anymore, but to return to a pre-Islamic structure and mentality silently underlying the Islamic institutions that have held sway there for some 13 centuries: the tribe and its tribal loyalty. While only highly ideologized young men will take to arms to fight for a cause dictated by a shady leader living (or dead) in a cave on the Pak-Afghan border, it is easy to recruit fighters for the militia led by their own tribal leader whom they have known and learned to respect since infancy. This is not typically Islamic, it would be true anywhere, and it can be turned against those who wage the holy war of Islam.
In conclusion, this book is a welcome antidote to the narrow focus on the religious factor now common in analyses of the world situation. Especially because it is never sweeping and exaggerated nor dishonest, as “secularist” attempts at arguing the same point often are. The authors don’t deny the importance of religion in motivating societies, but keep it in perspective.
(VijayVaani, October 2008)
Read more!
However, no one has really gone on to theorize the conflict of interests between the West and China in civilizational terms, framing it rather as old-style Great-Power politics. So, the “clash of civilizations” effectively means the conflict between the West and Islam. Incidentally, Huntington was not aware that already in the 1980s, Times of India editor Girilal Jain discussed the triangular Hindu-Islamic-Western conflicts of interest in civilisational terms. Apart from the clash’s Western and westernized-Indian theorists, the vast majority of adherents to the doctrine of civilizational conflict are militant Muslims, who see this as merely a continuation of the religious war declared by Mohammed against the Infidels.
Now two French intellectuals, demographer Youssef Courbage and historian-anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, have come out with a presentation of demographic and anthropological data that should undermine the whole notion of the fabled clash. It is titled Le Rendez-Vous des Civilisations (Le Seuil, Paris), i.e. “the meeting of civilizations”. In the main, they develop two theses. One, the demographic explosion of the Muslim world so feared by Westerners (and Hindus) is largely a thing of the past. Two, Islam is highly insufficient as explanation for the conduct and the policies of “Muslim” societies, because they preserve many local pre-Islamic customs and sensibilities, often sharing these with societies on the other side of the “civilizational” border, as well as adopting post-Islamic ideologies, most of all nationalism.
Muslims no different
The authors give a detailed overview of demographic evolutions worldwide of the past few centuries and identify the factors of a decline in birth figures. Exceptions notwithstanding, the best predictor of a decline in fertility is female literacy, with 50% female literacy typically coinciding within a decade or so with a sharp downturn in fertility. This trend is as visible among Muslim as among Christian and Hindu populations. But truth to tell, the authors’ own data, while confirming a similar trend among Muslims, also show that by and large, the resultant fertility level among educated and affluent Muslim populations is still sizably higher than among non-Muslims, even remaining very high in wealthy Saudi Arabia, so that they continue to gain demographic ground over the non-Muslim populations.
And in cases where Muslims do follow Christians (or, most ahead, the Japanese) to a fertility figure below replacement level, a threshold recently crossed in Iran and in Bosnia, the fact that it happened much later among Muslims assures further comparative demographic gains before a net population decline sets in. Thus, in Iran the number of children including girls has grown rapidly in the preceding decades, so now the number of young mothers is still rising and even with fewer than 2.1 births per woman, the number of births also continues to rise. And when that number finally starts to decline, it will still for many years be higher than that of elderly Iranians dying, so in the authors’ estimate, Iran’s population will still rise another 20 million or so before levelling off. Even if the reproductive conduct of Muslim societies cannot be described as “demographic aggression”, it does lead to a steady rise in Muslim percentage in practically every country concerned.
For South Asia, the authors’ data, based on many surveys and sources beside the official census reports, confirm the picture given by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj in their detailed study Religious Demography of India (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003). In every state in India without exception, including the economically and educationally most advanced, the Muslim growth rate is far above replacement level and far above the figures for the Hindu majority and for other minorities. If stated by a Hindu, Indian secularists usually dismiss this finding as mere “hate propaganda”. In 1993, Mani Shankar Aiyar claimed that the Muslim percentage in India would forever remain at 11%; but only 15 years later, it is easily 14%. And on top of this, India is outpaced by her Muslim neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, whence millions more are bound to seek living space in India.
With 4,6 children per woman in 2005, Pakistan grows faster than the Arab countries (except for Yemen and the Palestinians) and much faster than India. Indeed, it is on course to overtaking the US as third most populous country in the world well before the end of the century. Bangladesh used to be praised by demographers because it realised a downturn in birth rate in 1970, decades before reaching 50% female literacy (simply due to the physical pressures of overpopulation), but now disappoints them with a continually low marriage age and with a birth rate steady at ca. 3 per woman. According to Courbage and Todd, “the Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end.” (p.103)
Mind you, these are the findings of two scholars who have set out to counter the current anti-Muslim alarmist feelings in Europe and, by extension, in India. If any bias could be detected here, it would be on the slightly pro-Muslim side. Thus, they claim that the stagnation in Bangladesh’s population control policies is due to low literacy rather than to the impact of Islam, overlooking the fact that religion does have an impact on a society’s enthusiasm for literacy. They relay, doubtlessly in good faith, the Pakistani-cum-secularist story that the “Urdu-speaking Mohajirs” were “expelled from India after the Partition in 1947”, when in fact the Mohajirs migrated by choice to Pakistan, the promised land they themselves had created by campaigning for Partition in the preceding years. The “symmetry fallacy” of evenly distributing guilt between two warring parties, in this case by pretending that Muslims in India had been given the same eliminationist treatment as Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, is one of the cheapest disinformation techniques around, because it resonates with the public’s mental laziness so averse to making distinctions.
The “Islamophobic” image of the Muslims as a phalanx united and mobilized for demographic warfare is successfully deconstructed here, yet the hard data keep on showing a Muslim advance. While rising Muslim percentages may not stem from a conspiracy, Muslim leaders do read strategic implications into the trend. Thus, Algeria’s Houari Boumédienne and Libya’s Moammar al-Kadhafi have openly said that they expect to take over Europe by breeding a Muslim majority there. They certainly believe in a clash of civilizations and expect to come out victorious.
If there need not be much of a clash, as I am inclined to think, the reasons are other than demographical. It is simply that born Muslims may lose their commitment to Islam, and in many places are indeed leaving Islam, either formally or at least mentally. Even Islamic militants are interiorizing modern “Western” values and modes of thinking faster than they realize. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a flourishing film industry. Even if films are made glorifying Muslim heroes in order to instil Islamic enthusiasm in the audience, the very use of the medium of cinema is already intrinsically un-Islamic. Apart from breaking the taboo on the depiction of human beings, it brings in all kinds of ideas and attitudes typical of Infidel centres of soft power like Jewish-dominated Hollywood and Hindu-tainted Bollywood.
In Holland, two competing Muslim media corporations are doing a good job of presenting the Muslim angle of current developments, and here again the medium proves to be the message that overrules the Islamic message. Smartly dressed and camera-savvy Muslims with a fine Dutch accent conduct group discussions or interviews brimful of borrowed Western values, e.g. invoking principles of free speech or freedom of religion while defending Muslim interests against the ambient Infidel society. They (like the “Islamophobes”) think they are making clever use of Western values as weapons in the service of Islam, but in the process they themselves are getting transformed.
Pre-Islamic customs
Courbage and Todd also develop another line of argument against the black-and-white view of civilizations in confrontation. Deep social and cultural structures exist underneath people’s surface adherence to historical religions. Often these constitute a common heritage of different societies now seemingly living in conflict. Thus, a common Mediterranean attitude to marriage and sexuality, e.g. emphasizing a bride’s virginity and threatening honour vengeance, exist both in Arab and (at least until recently) in Latin countries, contrasting jointly with Nordic or African mores.
In particular, the pre-Islamic layer in Muslim society may explain some unexpected or otherwise puzzling data. Islam is reputedly harsh to women, so why is it that the Arab countries don’t have the problem of massive female foeticide that afflicts Korea, China and India? The authors don’t explain this, as Muslim preachers would, with reference to Mohammed’s condemnation of female infanticide. They point out the ancient difference in family structure.
In patriarchal societies like Confucian China and Hindu India, a daughter leaves her family upon getting married. This affects the status of the girl child negatively, making her education into a burden on the family that will only profit another family. Arab society, pre-Islamic as well as Islamic, is no less patriarchal, but there the girl child benefits of an idiosyncratic factor: tribal inbreeding. Hindu society is thoroughly familiar with endogamy, but this inbreeding within castes was counterbalanced by gotra (clan) exogamy. Brahmanical tradition, like the Roman Catholic Church, frowned upon inbreeding and imposed forbidden degrees of consanguinity. This taboo does not exist in most West-Asian and North-African countries. More often than not, a young man will marry his first or second cousin; or a slightly older man, his niece. (A similar system prevailed in Dravidian societies until the penetration of the North-Indian marriage rules.)
One consequence is that a newborn girl is expected later to marry a young man who is now already known to her parents, viz. their young nephew living in the same home or at least growing up nearby in their brother’s house. Conversely, the bride joining her husband in his parents’ home is not a stranger on whom a frustrated mother-in-law can avenge her dissatisfactions. No, since birth she was known to her in-laws, a member of their extended family, and is treated accordingly. (One objection often raised against Western society by Muslims in e.g. the Dutch TV talk shows mentioned, is that it is lacking in the human warmth which they have experienced in their home families.) There is no occasion then for the Indian attitude that “raising a daughter is like tilling your neighbour’s land”, since that neighbour is a close relative and your daughter remains a member of your extended family even after being married off. This way, these Muslim societies have less of an incentive to treat girls like a wasted effort or to pre-emptively abort them.
So, that’s a point worth pondering, especially for certain wealthy communities in India who can easily afford a daughter’s dowry yet set records in female foeticide. But the deep pre-Islamic structures of Muslim societies also have entirely different consequences relevant to the “clash of civilizations” debate.
Consider the situation in Iraq. The Americans’ stated goal was to introduce Western democracy there, a post-Islamic system presupposing a new post-Islamic mindset. That was not a big success. Yet, recently major progress has been made in containing Al-Qaida and mobilizing Iraqis on the American side. The secret was not to insist on establishing post-Islamic institutions anymore, but to return to a pre-Islamic structure and mentality silently underlying the Islamic institutions that have held sway there for some 13 centuries: the tribe and its tribal loyalty. While only highly ideologized young men will take to arms to fight for a cause dictated by a shady leader living (or dead) in a cave on the Pak-Afghan border, it is easy to recruit fighters for the militia led by their own tribal leader whom they have known and learned to respect since infancy. This is not typically Islamic, it would be true anywhere, and it can be turned against those who wage the holy war of Islam.
In conclusion, this book is a welcome antidote to the narrow focus on the religious factor now common in analyses of the world situation. Especially because it is never sweeping and exaggerated nor dishonest, as “secularist” attempts at arguing the same point often are. The authors don’t deny the importance of religion in motivating societies, but keep it in perspective.
(VijayVaani, October 2008)
Read more!
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Holiday in the Lake District
As a confirmed workaholic, I never ever go on holiday. On work trips, my hosts sometimes take me out to the usual places for sight-seeing, if not too far out of the way, but that's it. In all my stays in India, I have never seen the Taj Mahal or the Khajuraho temples. Outdoors ventures are even rarer, because my legs are slightly crippled by various ailments, nothing truly prohibitive but quite hindersome nonetheless. Why bother taking the obligatory holiday when I can have a more productive and cheaper time at home? And yet, in the spring of 2011, in spite of sore knees and a gout attack on my right foot, I had a very good week walking on hills in the Lake District, in good company.
"To walk on hills is to employ legs as porters of the head and heart, jointly adventuring towards perhaps true equanimity", as Robert Graves put it in his poem on hilltop walking. That was indeed the effect of walking on wind-swept hillslopes, with the help of "Nordic" walking-sticks. As Graves continues: "To walk on hills is to see sights and to hear sounds unfamiliar. When in wind the pine-tree roars, when crags with bleatings echo, when water foams below the fall; heart records that journey as memorable indeed; head reserves opinion, confused by the wind."
In my case the walking also took some gnashing of teeth, but the gout wore off as the miles passed away under my feet. I also spared myself the toughest excursion, the climb of the Old Man of Coniston. Those who reached the top, afterwards bought a cup proudly announding: "I climbed the Old Man of Coniston".
That hill overlooks Coniston, the town where we stayed, close to the house of 19th-century art historian and social thinker John Ruskin. His gravestone in the churchyard is quite a sight. The nearby town of Ambleside was the home of William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet. Fellow poets came to spend time here to get some inspiration from the wild.
It was an exceptional week in that it hardly rained. The waterfalls were smaller than normal, to the despair of the National Trust people who do so much to tend all the numerous heritage sites. Well, for a total amateur it was just as well that we weren't exposed to the full force of the elements. Contrary to what local postcards promise, we didn't get wet, nor did we get lost.
My lady-love (I don't do "girlfriends") had dragged me into this. She's a tour guide for heritage sites, both in Belgium and in Britain. We were in a group of 18, the Hindu lucky number, mostly from her native Limburg, our easterly province known for its meek and slow people with their sing-song dialect. The group is vaguely spiritual-oriented, with a whiff of Druidry and Shamanism but not too seriously, so we honoured the places we visited with a bit of appropriate ritual.
On the way, we dropped into a Mithras temple near Hadrian's Wall where Roman soldiers once celebrated the Invincible Sun. The sites that most interested us were the stone circles and other megalith formations. For the large circles Swinside and Long Meg and her Daughters, we had to do some serious uphill walking outside the trodden paths. Catlerigg, by contrast, is just next to a main road. Two centuries ago already, it was the first stone circle to attract mass tourism. Samuel Coleridge, who had been invited there by his friend Wordworth, was disappointed by all the unromantic human presence. But we did get our silent moment there.
In the Lake District, we met thousands of native Britons walking and trekking, and big handfuls of visiting Dutchmen and Germans, but altogether only four "new Britons": one African who was there in the company of his native partner, one Hindu couple and one Pakistani. A few years back, the New Labour authorities even scrapped the option of free guided tours because these only attracted a "hideously white" public,-- as if the people who do show up are to blame for the absence of immigrant visitors. This absence is strange, considering that not far to the south, there is a string of cities with a large Hindu and especially Paki population. What is keeping them from integrating into their adopted country by exposing themselves to the landscapes that shaped the British character? Hindus in particular, who like to pride themselves on being naturally devoted to care for the environment and on continuing the pre-Christian culture that once spanned the whole world: what is keeping you from exploring Britain's mountains and heath and paying your respects to the pre-Christian sacred sites of the local ancestors?
Read more!
"To walk on hills is to employ legs as porters of the head and heart, jointly adventuring towards perhaps true equanimity", as Robert Graves put it in his poem on hilltop walking. That was indeed the effect of walking on wind-swept hillslopes, with the help of "Nordic" walking-sticks. As Graves continues: "To walk on hills is to see sights and to hear sounds unfamiliar. When in wind the pine-tree roars, when crags with bleatings echo, when water foams below the fall; heart records that journey as memorable indeed; head reserves opinion, confused by the wind."
In my case the walking also took some gnashing of teeth, but the gout wore off as the miles passed away under my feet. I also spared myself the toughest excursion, the climb of the Old Man of Coniston. Those who reached the top, afterwards bought a cup proudly announding: "I climbed the Old Man of Coniston".
That hill overlooks Coniston, the town where we stayed, close to the house of 19th-century art historian and social thinker John Ruskin. His gravestone in the churchyard is quite a sight. The nearby town of Ambleside was the home of William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet. Fellow poets came to spend time here to get some inspiration from the wild.
It was an exceptional week in that it hardly rained. The waterfalls were smaller than normal, to the despair of the National Trust people who do so much to tend all the numerous heritage sites. Well, for a total amateur it was just as well that we weren't exposed to the full force of the elements. Contrary to what local postcards promise, we didn't get wet, nor did we get lost.
My lady-love (I don't do "girlfriends") had dragged me into this. She's a tour guide for heritage sites, both in Belgium and in Britain. We were in a group of 18, the Hindu lucky number, mostly from her native Limburg, our easterly province known for its meek and slow people with their sing-song dialect. The group is vaguely spiritual-oriented, with a whiff of Druidry and Shamanism but not too seriously, so we honoured the places we visited with a bit of appropriate ritual.
On the way, we dropped into a Mithras temple near Hadrian's Wall where Roman soldiers once celebrated the Invincible Sun. The sites that most interested us were the stone circles and other megalith formations. For the large circles Swinside and Long Meg and her Daughters, we had to do some serious uphill walking outside the trodden paths. Catlerigg, by contrast, is just next to a main road. Two centuries ago already, it was the first stone circle to attract mass tourism. Samuel Coleridge, who had been invited there by his friend Wordworth, was disappointed by all the unromantic human presence. But we did get our silent moment there.
In the Lake District, we met thousands of native Britons walking and trekking, and big handfuls of visiting Dutchmen and Germans, but altogether only four "new Britons": one African who was there in the company of his native partner, one Hindu couple and one Pakistani. A few years back, the New Labour authorities even scrapped the option of free guided tours because these only attracted a "hideously white" public,-- as if the people who do show up are to blame for the absence of immigrant visitors. This absence is strange, considering that not far to the south, there is a string of cities with a large Hindu and especially Paki population. What is keeping them from integrating into their adopted country by exposing themselves to the landscapes that shaped the British character? Hindus in particular, who like to pride themselves on being naturally devoted to care for the environment and on continuing the pre-Christian culture that once spanned the whole world: what is keeping you from exploring Britain's mountains and heath and paying your respects to the pre-Christian sacred sites of the local ancestors?
Read more!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
