In ‘Let All Hindus come together’ (TNIE, June 17), François Gautier proposes that a council of Hindu leaders should assume spiritual authority over all Hindus a la the Supreme Council of Iran. The stakes have to be quite high for such an upside down Lutheran Reformation; and they are: ‘It is not only Hinduism that is at stake, but the ‘knowledge infinite’,’ he writes.
What Gautier fails to realise is that it is only the ‘knowledge infinite’ that is at stake — Hinduism matters only so far as it is a suitable vehicle for expressing it. And the surest way to ensure that as a religion, Hinduism loses its ability to channel the universal spirit is to hand it over to the dictates of a set of self-appointed godmen; some of dubious credentials and none of any real stature.
As a Hindu, I find offensive the very suggestion that any man, god-realised or not, can issue adesh that would control the way I or any of the one billion Hindus practise their religion. The very thought is a blasphemy (and the only one that Hinduism would label so), that strikes at the very heart of the Sanathana Dharma — the liberty of each individual sadhaka to find his path to the Absolute. How dare anyone tell me how to face my god? How to love him, how to act for him!
The steps that Gautier suggests are incalculably insidious to Hinduism’s foundations. The establishment of any kind of spiritual authority threatens the very identity of Hinduism as a religion without an organised church. Unlike the Semitic religions, starting from the Vedic ages, spiritual truth in India was founded on the mystic’s perception rather than the edicts of priests. It has been Hinduism’s strength, not its weakness.
This is something which Swami Vivekananda emphasised: “If you want to be religious, enter not the gate of any organised religions. They do a hundred times more evil than good, because they stop the growth of each one’s individual development… Religion is only between you and your god, and no third person must come between you”. (Complete Works, Volume 1)
If spirituality has declined in India it is not because of youngsters aping Western lifestyle or Indians discovering the wonders of cable TV; if the life force of Indian spirituality rested on such fragile foundations, it would have died out long ago. A religion cannot hope to survive on a policy of cultural protectionism; if it does so it will become a creed.
Swami Vivekananda once recounted the incident of a protestant missionary preaching hell fire in an Indian village. As the preacher continued to hurl vitriolic abuse at their gods and beliefs, the villagers listened quietly and curiously, asked some questions and then went back to their homes calmly. The frustrated missionary was heard remarking that if the people had such faith that they could listen to their religion being criticised, India could not be converted in a thousand years.
If Christian proselytising is making inroads into the country’s poor as it could not even when India was lying prostrate under British imperialism, we should seek the reasons for it inside Hinduism itself.
After the second half of the Nineteenth Century, led by Sri Ramakrishna Parmahamsa and followed by titans like Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Narayana Guru, Swami Sivananda and others, Hinduism witnessed a spiritual Renaissance comparable in importance only to the Bhakti movement and the advent of Sankara.
Advaitic in tenor and rigorously rational in its language, Neo-Vedanta was both India’s response to the naturalist philosophy of the West and an attempt to set its own house in order by extricating Hinduism from the mire of Brahminism, ritualism, oddball fakirism and miracle-mongering it had got stuck in. It was also in many ways, an evolution; the next step in Hinduism’s dynamic growth as a religion.
From those exalted heights, from a Vivekananda who burst upon the spiritual consciousness of the world proclaiming that “Krishna, the Christ and Buddha are but waves on the infinite ocean that I am” — we now have avatars who conjure knick-knacks out of air and deign to give their adoring devotees darshan.
If the spiritual ideal of the nation was once the half naked ascetic, today’s spiritual discourse has degenerated into mass hysteria over godmen and new age gurus, whose contribution to the corpus of Hindu thought is about zero, but to PR management is significant. No wonder that entry to Gautier’s supreme council is based on popularity, not spiritual knowledge. And the media, far from hounding them as he alleges, has happily licked up every last morsel of viewership they promise, thus helping in creating the phenomenon of the ‘celebrity guru’.
For instance, Nithyananda claimed to be a paramhamsa till he was caught on video romping with a Tamil actress. Gautier is right to say that Nithyananda was persecuted for having consensual sex, but the culprits were not Sonia Gandhi-backed Christians or migrant Muslim Gulf workers, but a Hindu public baying for the blood of their fallen idol and a shamelessly complicit BJP government.
For months, Karnataka witnessed the farcical spectacle of the state executive trying to assuage public wrath by cooking up any number of cases against poor Nithyananda; from tantric sex rituals to illegal possession of kerosene.
Interestingly, none of Gautier’s supreme council of Hindu leaders spoke up against the injustice to their comrade. But Nithyananda received a surprise visitor the day after his release. Pramod Mutalik, who has been rendering yeoman service to Indian culture and Hinduism by organising assaults on defenceless girls and by hiring out riots, gave the finishing touch to this drama of the absurd by crowning Nithyananda a second Vivekananda.
govind@expressbuzz.com
