HVK Archives: Middle class lupenisation of Hinduism
Middle class lupenisation of Hinduism - The Indian Express
Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
()
13 June 1996
Title : Middle class lumpenisation of Hinduism
Author : Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
Publication : The Indian Express
Date : June 13, 1996
Samuel Johnson, the 18th century English literary giant,
always
felt uneasy when people questioned him about his religious
belief. It was a genuine uneasiness. Religion was such a
personal
affair that he did not feel like turning it into a conversation
topic. He belonged to the group of people who felt it was a
vulgar thing to discuss the deepest things which matter to the
soul - God and one's thoughts about Him. Religious
enthusiasm,
with its evangelic exhibitionism, was treated with a certain
suspicion.
The modern middle class Hindu's reaction to religion is quite
different. It depends on his age. If he is a young or middle aged
man, he pleads ignorance. But on grounds other than that of
Johnson's touching taciturnity. The traditional Hindu of our
times thinks that religion is a matter to be taken up during old
age. Very cleverly he cites the four-stages-of-life thesis, and
says that religion is meant for the last two stages. And an
elderly Hindu certainly turns religious in a very vulgar way. He
goes to temples and listens to sermons. He might have been
a
rascal through his life but he takes to piety like a duck to
water, and hangs on to the rosary. This is one aspect of
contemporary Hinduism.
There is another kind of middle class Hindu: the articulate one
with a modern sensibility. Quite conversant with the work done
by
Western Indologists, who rediscovered the Upanishads for
the
English-speaking Indian, this Hindu speaks of religion in purely
philosophical terms. That is, the watered-down version of it. He
looks through, and looks over all rituals which characterise the
religion in its day-to-day observance, and rationalises all of it
in vague generalisations. This is also the kind of Hindu who
seeks out the saffron-clad guru rather indiscriminately. He is
not in a position to judge for himself whether the so-called guru
knows anything about religion. Much in the same way as the
naive
spiritual-seeker from the West, this Hindu also falls into the
trap of the spurious guru.
A few of them go a step further. They explain the religious texts
and the observances in poetic, aesthetic or social terms. The
Rig
Vedic hymns are sublime poetry. The rituals and festivals
connected with them are social, and therefore secular, in
character. There is nothing religious about it at all. So this
type of Hindu has the best of both the worlds. He enjoys the
social and emotional comforts offered by religion, but remains
untroubled by the questions of faith implicit in the religion. He
puts on a superior air, and is amused, for instance, by the
practising middle class Muslim. The hapless Muslim does not
have
the advantage of rationalisation. The worst response comes
from
those very clever ones who claim, "Hinduism is a way of life, it
is not a religion."
It is this kind of middle class Hinduism - vacant, half-baked,
and at times hypocritical - which has created an intellectual
vacuum into which organisations like the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have
stepped in,
each for its own reasons and each with its exclusionary
agenda.
The RSS uses religious symbology to define its
claustrophobic
nationalism. The middle class Hindu does not know how to
combat
it because his commitment to religion is so superficial that he
does not recognise that something sacred is being
misused
blatantly for a secular concept like nationalism. Most of the
time he does not even see anything wrong in it, nor does he
perceive that religion deals with transcendental and eternal
matters whereas nationalism is a purely political
phenomenon.
Unwittingly, he sacralises the politics of nationalism and steps
into the murky waters of partisanship and fanaticism.
The middle class Hindu is not in a position to challenge the
religious credentials of members of the VHP, constituted by
saffron-clad mendicants, who conspicuously lack learning and
a
sense of tradition of any kind in religious matters. The success
of VHP is clear proof that the Hindu religion has been
lumpenised. The middle class Hindu is a dumb witness to it all.
Serious harm is done to Hinduism, because this faith which
has
renewed itself in religious terms for centuries, is now at a
dead-end. When people who can think do not take care to
talk
about religion, debate and renew its articles of belief -
something which was done time and again till about the 17th
century - it is the charlatans and pretenders who take over the
religious heritage.
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