Putting the smile back on Hanuman

The Living Stream

A morphed version of the ubiquitous saffron and black image of Hanuman came my way last week. The angry grimace and the menacing eyes had made way for a genial smile and gentle eyes. After having suffered the distortion of Hanuman from across large car and bike stickers for the last couple of years, the revised image felt liberating. Radiating helpfulness and kindness, Hanuman had now gone back to being his endearing self.

The Aam Aadmi Party’s spectacular win in the Delhi Assembly election probably inspired the anonymous artist to recover the non-distorted Hanuman. Its leader Arvind Kejriwal’s fluent recitation of Hanuman chalisa, the devotional hymn, on television during the election campaign alongside an emphatic claim that he was a kattar (staunch) Hanuman devotee had disrupted the symbolic monopoly that Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, had established over him in recent years. Comfortable about expressing his religiosity openly, Kejriwal had also taken a holy dip in the Ganga before starting his campaign against Narendra Modi in Benares during the parliamentary elections in 2014.

As so many observers have noted, the Hindu right-wing has distorted figures in the puranas for political ends. To take a common example, Rama has been turned into an aggressive muscular icon, an image that is at a remove from the soft-natured, morally considerate one found in the original Ramayana. The vision of the epics gets distorted, too. If the Mahabharata and Ramayana speak of the necessity and difficulty of being morally responsible, these epics, in the hands of the Hindu right, turn into mere symbolic assets of the Hindu community to be used for asserting power over non-Hindus.

The secular disdain for engaging religious and mythical symbols and narratives in modern politics, which resurfaced recently in criticisms of Kejriwal’s expression of religious piety, has often shown a lack of familiarity with the living normative energy of those symbols and narratives.

The concerns that myths and faith traditions raise about right conduct, about injustice, about human suffering, among others, which render illegitimate a politics that seeks to dominate fellow human beings, are a precious moral inheritance. The indifference of secular activists to moral conversations in Indian tradition, ranging across the realms of the classical and the folk worlds, has had heavy costs. It has meant an impoverishment of the political imagination and a shrinking of the scope for moral creativity in the present. Indeed, the cultural amnesia has often meant an inability to counter the misappropriations of traditions effectively.

Modern activists often disown their community selves in public with a desire to relate with each other in the public as individual citizens. Noble as the desire to not want their community’s majority or minority status to matter publicly might be, the option of embracing one’s faith or one’s community membership in non-violent and friendly ways is left abandoned.

Crafting a reconstructive politics obliges a creative engagement with living community attachments and memories. Activist efforts to overcome social evil in the present can ill-afford to feel embarrassed about it.