Sharma - Our Religions

Mahatma Gandhi is acknowledged, even by his critics, as the greatest Hindu of modern times. However, on the evening of January 30, 1948, he was shot to death by a fellow Hindu, Nathuram Godse, for acquiescing in the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Godse bowed to Gandhi reverentially before shooting him to death, and Gandhi raised his hand in a gesture of forgiveness as he fell. In performing these surreal acts of spiritual chivalry, both acted as they did in the name and spirit of Hinduism. How are we to define a religion that embraces both the victim and the assassin?

Time passes, but paradoxes persist. When Gandhi was killed by Godses bullets, the last word heard to escape his lips was that of Rmaone of the Hindu names for God. Almost half a century later, on December 6, 1992, militant Hindu activists demolished a 464-year-old mosque, virtually with their bare hands, to replace it with a temple dedicated to the same Rma in whose name Gandhi had laid down his life for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity. Many Hindu women fasted the day after Gandhi died in 1948, but in 1992 many women volunteers were seen crying, presumably with joy, as the domes of the mosque began crumbling under persistent pounding and a crescendo built up with chants of Jai Shr Rma (Hail Lord Rma).

Hinduism does not make it easy for its followers to define it in the best of times, and the journey from Hindu piety to Hindu militancy under the banner of the same god does not make it any easier.

What is true of the gods of Hinduism is also true of the Hindus. The Hindus, no less than their gods, are difficult to pin down. This aspect of Hinduism is best illustrated by the experience of the Muslim savant of the eleventh century, Alberuni, who wrote a masterly treatise on India known by the title of its English translation as Alberunis India. At several points he is constrained to observe: The Hindus differ among themselves or that some Hindus believe until, finally, he bluntly states that there is not one thing that one Hindu says that is not denied by another!

Can such a religion ever be defined? To begin to answer this question, let us first turn this minus into a plus and reflect on what the problem of defining Hinduism itself tells us about Hinduism.

The problem of defining Hinduism has its positive side: It helps to reveal Hinduisms distinctive nature in several ways. First, it tells us that Hinduism has a special relationship with India. After all, most Hindus believe that Rma, like them, was born in India. Second, it shows that Hindus share a special kind of relationship with all Indians, Thus Hinduism is inclusiveparticularly in the Indian context. Hindus today are quite willing to accept Buddhists, Jainas, and Sikhsmembers of some other faiths of Indian originas Hindus, although the Buddhists, Jainas, and Sikhs may demur. Hinduism tends to extend this attitude to the Indian followers of the faiths of even non-Indian origineven though these may demur even more strongly. Pushed to its logical extreme, a Hindu can claim that one is most a Hindu when least a Hindu, that is, when one has dissolved ones Hindu particularity in Hinduisms all-embracing inclusiveness. Hinduism in this extreme formulation paradoxically becomes identical with its own negation! Such a Hindu is like anyone ekeonly more so. Some Hindus are indeed willing to go that far but most still remain tied to India with a sacred thread, however attenuated it might become. Third, the difficulties in defining Hinduism tell us that not only does Hinduism have ethnic roots and tends to be inclusive but also that, in its eagerness to be inclusive and in its tolerance of diversity within, it is willing to overlook contradictions and may even generate them.

Given such diversity, it seems as if Hinduism is constantly seeking some anchor for the floating mass of diverse beliefs and practices that it encompasses. It is as if the storm itself generates a center, not so much that a storm forms around a centerwhich is the more usual way in which religions grow. Several such centers have been suggested and may have functioned as such. In classical India, the Vedasa body of revealed textscame close to occupying that position; Alberuni suggests that belief in reincarnation might have played a similar role in medieval Hinduism; and adherence to caste and the acceptance of the sanctity of the priestly class of brahmins and/or of the cow have also been suggested as constituting such centers. But while indicative of Hinduism in their own ways, none of these features is definitive.