Hindol Sengupta’s new book Being Hindu probes a panoramic view of history, philosophy and everyday practice to build the case for understanding the world’s most plural and resilient faith. Excerpts from an interview by Uma Nair:
Why does it seem more controversial to be a Hindu today?
We have to start by accepting that in many cases, most Indians have received little education about our own history that deals with Hinduism. Let me take my example. I went to one of the swankiest schools in Calcutta and by the time I left school, after 14 years of attending chapel service, I knew a lot about Christianity and could (and can) recite the Lord’s Prayer in my sleep. But what did I learn about the Ramayan, the Mahabharat, the sublime philosophies of the Vedas and Puranas? Almost nothing.
This void is almost cruel. When Manjul Bhargava, the Fields Medal (the highest prize in mathematics) winner, said that he was able to do some of his most complex work because he was introduced to the work of Brahmagupta, the seventh century Hindu mathematician, how many of us could recall who Brahmagupta was? Rohan Murty, who funded the Murty Classical Library at Harvard, and I once had a conversation about how we were taught the greatest poets of the English language but what about Kalidasa and others? How many of us had been introduced to the classical works of India?
Our education system violently tore us away from our ancient classical culture, our heritage, our intellectual treasures from the Hindu tradition. The ironic thing is that that tradition is also one of the most plural and assimilating in the world.
This has caused for years, through colonial history and afterwards, a great sense of frustration of identity that mere politics and economics can no longer fulfil. All this old frustration has got enmeshed into politics, and that always causes controversy. It is time we distinguished the knowledge debate from the extreme politics.
Why has the debate on vegetarianism become so shrill? What kind of historical evidence do we have on this?
There is no historical evidence to suggest that Hinduism has any fundamental connection with vegetarianism. Some Hindus are vegetarian. Some are not. In the Ramakrishna Mission, some monks in the east will eat fish. Some in the south are vegetarian. There is no blanket rule in history. Swami Vivekananda wrote clearly about the fact that vegetarianism came forcefully into India in the Buddhist period.
Is Hinduism misunderstood?
Often, yes. Its biggest strength is it is open to constant evolution but that has been turned, often via politics, into its greatest weakness. It’s so diverse that it is dismissed as having no founding philosophies. That is untrue.
There seems to be an anger among many Hindus. Where does that come from?
A lot of it comes from a sense of being cut away from traditional roots, including institutionally by the state. It is a sense of irritation that comes from having little contemporary knowledge about the science behind the faith. It’s being trapped in rituals and tugged away by modernity. A lot of people are unsure what the rituals in Hinduism really mean. They are emotionally attached but intellectually embarrassed and constantly socially pressurised to detach. The only solution to this is greater information and knowledge.
Isn’t Hinduism more of a lifestyle than a faith?
I don’t agree with this at all. This ‘lifestyle’ business has been used to denigrate customs and rituals sacred to most Hindus. Hinduism, or the better phrase is Sanatan Dharma, is a sublime theological philosophy. It is an ancient religion with an intricate and very evolved sense of the world and the Self.