Between blind communalism and mindless secularism

Communalism is a deadly infectious pandemic. Once it infects our minds, we end up distorting everything. Mythical times become contemporary history and we imagine adversaries who do not exist and attribute conspiratorial motives to innocent people.

We are creed-drunk and intoxicated with a pyrrhic sense of victory, a philistine majoritarian complacency.

All our deities are anthropomorphic. We can only create them in our image as signifiers of our own anxieties, greed, aspirations, dreams, fantasies, desires and phobias.

We make grandiose statements such as ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ (the universe is a family), but what about our pluralist ethos now? People who watched Ramanand Sagar’s ‘Ramayan’ serial and rhapsodised about Ram Lalla arriving in Ayodhya must also watch Anand Patwardhan’s ‘Ram Ke Naam’, a documentary that unmasks the macabre side to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It shows how a political party uses religion to manipulate the masses.

On the other hand, a jaundiced notion of secularism interprets any religious sentiment as a sign of fundamentalism and obscurantism, and perceives it as potentially fascist. I won’t invoke those ideas of secularism either. I understand bhakti but cannot endorse communal politics. I am a practising Hindu. As a Hindustani classical vocalist, I sing Meera bhajans, and the devotional compositions on Ram by Purandaradasa and Kanakadasa, Goswamy Tulsidas and Surdas. I also listen to Tyagaraja compositions rendered soulfully and am inspired by them.

This does not mean that I support barbaric hate politics and desecrating of the sacred spaces of the religious minorities. ‘Thumak chalat Ramachandra, bajat paijaniya’, an enthralling description of Ram as a baby, is one of my all-time favourites and I sing the bhajans ‘Janaki nath sahay kare’ and ‘Sri Ramachandra kripalu bhajaman’ passionately. My ‘Ram bhakti’ recoils against the spectacle in Ayodhya that we have
seen recently.

This is not what the hetero-theistic, heterodoxical Hindu religion is all about. We pay tribute to visionary bards like Kabir and Shishunala Sharifa. We make offerings at dargahs. We bow before
Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti and Nizamuddin Aulia, seeking their blessings. ‘Mushkil karo aasan Khwaja meri’ in raga Purya Dhanasri rings in my ears as I think of similar invocatory bandishes immortalised by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Gana Saraswati Kishori Amonkar.

Let us not lose our sanity and yield to the hate rhetoric of Islamophobia or xenophobia. No one who understands the poetry of religion can demonise one religion and uphold another. I am moved by the bridal mysticism of Meera whose sweetheart is her ‘Giridhar Gopal’ and images of ‘Sita kalyana vaibhoga’ in Tyagaraja kritis. At the same time I cannot help swaying involuntarily to the richly melodious cadence of the ‘azan’ prayer. I am immensely captivated by the Penitential Psalms of the Bible too. “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth” is one of my perennially favourite lines from Matthew.

I believe how the citizens of the majority religion treat fellow citizens from the minority communities is the foremost barometer of civilisational progress. And articulating these questions does not make me any less of a Hindu.

(The author teaches English literature and sings Hindustani classical music)