6 Religion or way of life- the ongoing debate in Hinduism

Manisha Lath

Introduction

This module considers an important and relevant issue in the study of religion and society in India. It raises a pertinent question that has baffled scholars of religion over the past century and a half. The question plainly put is whether it is possible to consider Hinduism a religion or way of life. Quite apart from the fact that all religions incorporate in one way or another the notion of way of life, the issue in Hinduism becomes particularly pertinent as there is neither any consensus on whether there is at all a religion called Hinduism nor is there any consensus whether that what constitutes Hinduism consists of a way of life and if so for whom. In this module we explore the trajectories of this debate by bringing to bear the social, political and religious dimensions of a discourse that continues to be deeply problematic to an understanding of contemporary Indian society.

This module is made up of several sections. In section one we look at how religion has been defined and how these definitions relate to what is understood as Hinduism. In section two, we look at how Hinduism is or is not a religion. In section three, we look at the Supreme Court’s engagement with Hinduism. In section four, we look at how Hinduism can be understood as a way of life.

Section-I

Defining Religion

In common parlance religion refers to belief in gods or the supernatural. Religion was traditionally used to mean something like faith in God or faith in Jesus Christ and in the church and priesthood who serve him. Many writers such as deists have attempted to transform the meaning of religion, reduce its specifically Christian elements, and extend its cross-cultural category. This has stretched the meaning of God to include a vast range of notions about unseen powers. The transformation according to Fitzgerald (2000), has to be understood in the context of modern bourgeois ideology and the creation of a world market. Religion is used in a variety of contexts and include so many different things that they have no clear meaning. Fitzgerald (2000) further writes that the study of religion is a disguised form of liberal ecumenical theology which further theologizes about the world religions, partners with organizations for dialogue and building bridges between religions. The construction of religion and religions as global, has been part of wider historical process of Western imperialism. Thus religion, he argues is tied up with the growth of Christianity. He writes that religion word is thoroughly imbued with Judeo-Christian monotheistic associations and that this category is deeply embedded in a legitimation process within western societies, in the dominant relation of those societies with non-western societies. According to him, there is a direct extension of Christian theism in religion and yet religion is claimed by Mueller and Otto to be natural and all individuals have an innate capacity for regardless of their cultural context. This led to the creation of theology of religion which was dominated by the phenomenology of religion and the world religions industry.

Religion is not just defined in terms of superhuman agents but also in terms of textual traditions. Religion in Fitzgerald’s (2000) opinion is vaguely used to refer to rituals directed towards God and that it becomes a habitual reflex than a deliberate and sustained policy. Religion may also be used deliberately as a non-theological analytical category to make distinctions between religious and the non-religious.

Fitzgerald (2000) outlines certain assumptions that lie behind the phenomenology of religion, such as, it is a universal phenomenon to be found in principle in all cultures and all human experiences. Another pervasive assumption is that religions are defined by a common faith in the transcendent or the divine- belief in superhuman agencies, or preferably in one Supreme Being, who gives meaning and purpose to human history (2000:18). In his opinion, religion should be studied as an ideological category, as an aspect of modern western ideology and as a basis of modern form of theology, with a specific location in history. (2000:19)

Thus, according to him, the ethnocentric Judeo-Christian theological semantic associations of the word religion has not been sufficiently neutralized. Attempt is made to smuggle in some ecumenical assumptions about what can and cannot be sacred or transcendental. With the onset of the twentieth century, other faiths aspired for world religions and described their eligibility based on dominant characteristics of a recognized religion. The world religions according to Weber (1946); are the five religions (Confucian, Hinduist, Buddhist, Christianity, and Islam, Judaism) or religiously determined systems of life-regulation which have known how to gather multitudes of confessors around them. According to him, the religiously determined way of life is itself profoundly influenced by economic and political factors operating within given geographical, political, social, and national boundaries.

Marx too accepts the view that religion represents human self-alienation. He declared in a famous phrase that religion has been the opium of the people. Religion defers happiness and rewards to the after-life, teaching the resigned acceptance of existing conditions in this life. Attention is thus diverted from inequalities and injustices in this world by the promise of what is to come in the next. Religion has a strong ideological element, religious beliefs and values often provide justifications for inequalities of wealth and power. In Marx’s view religion in its traditional form will and should disappear.1

Ambedkar (1987) also illuminates that religion is an institution or an influence and like all social influences and institutions, it may help or it may harm a society which is in its grip. It is a force which can be accepted as good without examining the form it takes and the ideal it serves.

1 http://www.sociologyguide.com/religion/marx-and-religion.php

Section-II

Hinduism as a religion

Based on the discussion above how does one recognize the status of Hinduism as a religion. A critical review of Hinduism will not only help in grasping the complexities involved in religions but also in appraising whether it is a religion in the way that the scholars above have discussed the concept of religion. Existing scholarship on the subject involving scholars like David Lorenzen, Vasudha Dalmia, Robert Frykenberg, Chritopher Fuller are completely agreed on the fact that Hinduism as a category of intellectual exploration emerges in the 19th century as a result of certain historical developments that call for its construction. Clearly prior to the existence of this category we know that the sub-continent as Thapar (1997) points out is filled with a diverse range of sects and cults whose beliefs and practices have little to do with the category of Hinduism as it comes to be established in the 19th century. According to Madan (2006), Hinduism is not a religion, for it does not have a founder, or a single foundational scripture, or a set of fundamentals of beliefs and practices. A notion of the supernatural is not central to it, and the idea of moral law that may be considered a substitute is highly relativistic. These and other similar doubts have been around for a long time. Srinivas himself acknowledged them, and wrote about the ‘amorphousness’ and ‘complexity’ of Hinduism and the difficulty of defining it (1952, 1958; Srinivas and Shah 1968). (ibid). Clearly from the writings of these scholars it becomes evident that the category of religion that is being used to characterize Hinduism is one that is developed from an understanding of monotheistic faiths like Christianity and Islam. Weber considered reverence for the Vedas and belief in the sacredness of the cow as defining features of Hinduism (1958: 27), but he too noted the virtual lack of dogma in Hinduism (ibid:21) and the fact that the term itself was a recent western coinage (ibid: 4). He observed: ‘Hinduism ‘simply is not a “religion” in our [Christian”] sense of the word but is a cultural tradition (ibid).

Madan (2006) further writes, that some have objected that Hinduism is not an old tradition, that it is only a nineteenth century fabrication of Christian missionaries, Orientalists, builders of the colonial archive, and would-be makers of an Indian nationalism. ‘What has survived over the centuries’, Romila Thapar writes, ‘is not a single monolithic religion but a diversity of sects which we today have put under a uniform name’ (1997: 56). The great traveler-scholar Alberuni, also sarcastically notes the Hindus’ willingness to argue with words in defence of their religion but not die for it, as apparently every good Muslim would Madan (2006).

Ambedkar (1987), on the other hand, writes, that in case of positive religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam where the origins can be traced to the teachings of great religious innovators one does not have to search for its scheme of divine governance. It is not like an unwritten constitution. On the Hindu scheme of divine governance is enshrined in a written constitution and anyone who cares to know it will find it laid bare in that Sacred Book called the Manu Smriti, a divine Code which lays down the rules which govern the religious, ritualistic and social life of the Hindus in minute detail and which must be regarded as the Bible of the Hindus and contained in the philosophy of Hinduism.

Clearly Ambedkar epitomizes the problem in a central way when he points out that Hinduism was not a religion because it lacked the principles that define and legitimize a moral and social order. Instead what was termed Hinduism was a set of prescriptions and prohibitions that framed along caste lines provided a vast diversity of beliefs, rituals and practices followed by diverse groups all over the sub-continent. In this sense, Hinduism could not be considered as a religion but it is important to note here that the diverse sects and cults that were a part of Indian culture were religious communities that practiced religion much like religion anywhere else. In other words, they comprised religious communities, they adhered to a set of ritual practices, beliefs, they subscribed to a doctrine of a transcendental, and in this sense they were deeply embedded to the idea of reverence for their Gods. Hence, while it may be difficult to comprehend Hinduism as a monolithic religion there is no denying the fact that the diverse existence of sects and cults clearly point to the existence of a rich religious diversity in the sub-continent. It is in this context of religious diversity that we shall now turn to an engagement with the debate on Hinduism as a religion in a contemporary modernist setting.

Section-III

Rethinking a judicial controversy

The Supreme Court’s “Hindutva judgment” delivered by Justice J.S.Verma on December 11, 1995, in relationship to a plea filed by a candidate seeking the court’s intervention in the use of the terms Hindu/Hindutva/Hinduism for electioneering purposes which was seen by the election commission as a malpractice. This clearly brought out the problematic dimension of Hinduism as religion or way of life. The court ruled that “no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms Hindu, Hindutva and Hinduism; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage. It is also indicated that the term Hindutva is related more to the way of life of the people in the subcontinent”.2 The judgment put forth the central argument that Hinduism cannot be confined to the narrow limits of religion, in contrast, it clearly pointed to how within the sub-continent, Hinduism is a way of life.

Ram (1996) however contends that such a judicial observation is devoid of any social responsibility and political understanding. On the contrary, he argues that such a judgment seeks to discredit the secular and democratic spirit by foregrounding either the religiosity of majoritarian Hinduism or its way of life.

In its effort to elaborate on the distinctive nature of Hinduism, the court judgment further observed “unlike other religions in the world, the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet, it does not worship any one God, it does not subscribe to any one dogma, it does not believe in any one philosophic concept, it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances, in fact, it does not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion or creed. It may broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more.”3 In stating such a position the court clearly indicated what it meant by the term religion. To that extent it may be pointed out that such an understanding of religion is clearly derived from the monotheistic faiths of Christianity

2 http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2013/05/understanding-hindutva-the-supreme-court-judgement-part-3/ (24.5.15)

3 Ibid and Islam (more specifically Christianity) which served as the reference model for the development of Hinduism during the 19th century Hindu reform movement. In one sense, it may be said that what the court judgement did was to establish a continuity between what the 19th century thinkers and the honourable judge of the Supreme Court believed were the ingredients that make up a religion. The obverse logic of such an assertion by the court also proves the shortcomings of the reform movement in the 19th century, i.e., the efforts to develop a unified religious community called Hindu and Hinduism proved to be completely out of sync with the civilizational diversity of Indian society. To that extent both the at the level of culture and the diverse sects that populated the sub-continent such a project of unifying and homogenizing a religion called Hinduism proved to be deeply inadequate. It is this inadequacy that compelled the protagonist of the two-nation theory to impose a majoritarian ideology called Hindutva on the nation suggesting that it had links to the other project of unifying Hinduism that prevailed in the 19th century. To that extent then the court’s judgment was correct in saying that Hinduism was not a religion but it was equally incorrect in holding that Hindus did not have a religion because factually we know that the vast amounts of sects that comprise the category of Hindus do have a system of beliefs and practices that correspond to the idea of religion. Finally, the idea that Hinduism is a way of life has been deeply misrepresented by the court to suggest that Hindutva is a way of life. Neither is Hinduism related to Hindutva nor are all the believers of the Hindu community subscribe to the idea of Hindutva. If anything, the court should have rightly observed that Hindutva constitutes an ideology which grows out of the two-nation theory that its proponents sought to propagate. What such an ideology deeply misrepresents is the diversity that constitutes the Hindu community and its various belief/ritual systems that are syncretically organized to give the impression of what Marriott (1955) spoke of as the great tradition and the little tradition. In other words to return to the question, whether Hinduism is a religion or a way of life, it is necessary to look at how the category of Hinduism denotes a way of life.

Section-IV

Hinduism as a way of life

How does one understand the claim or the assertion made that Hinduism is a way of life. Cleary if we move away from the Euro-centric understanding of religion as Fitzgerald (2000) observes we encounter societies in various regions of the world where that what is recognized as the religious phenomenon is often constitutive of the world view and life-world of a culture. It would not be wrong to suggest that people’s beliefs and practices become synonymous with their cultural life-world. It is in this sense that it becomes useful to think of Hinduism as a domain of religious diversity embedded in life-worlds that provide for its practitioners a cultural world view within which they live out their lives. The life-world, as elucidated by Schutz (1973), gives us significant insights to understand how religion functions in the day to day life of a community. In the every-day life-world human beings take many things for granted in the province of reality, this enables them to communicate, work and be understood by their fellow-beings. Thus humans also believe that others are endowed with similar consciousness and therefore the outer world is the same and it carries the same meaning for all. It is in this experiential sense, it become important to understand the way the religiosity of the diverse sects have come to co-exist and live with one another in what many scholars would identify as the syncretic consciousness that is embedded within the Indian population. Clearly such syncretism militates against those who wish to define the life-world of the individual and community within a narrow and exclusivist construction. What the Indian sub-continent has witnessed by way of a religious experience is the flowering of a spiritual consciousness that has spawned a huge number of belief-systems and practices. Any attempt to understand the origins and workings of these sects and cults would necessarily call for a historical perspective to examine the conditions both material and ideological that give rise to these different sects how they converge on certain issues and how they diverge on others.

The essence of Hinduism, as many argue, did not exist until it was invented in the 19th century. Religion is said to have undergone a different kind of revolution and transformation. Hinduism being defined and understood as a way of life is yet another significant shift which seems to have played crucial role in its transmission. Thus Ram (1996) observes that Hinduism emerged as an identity for people in this subcontinent only from –medieval times, and it is only much later that it is being projected as a national religion centering around Ram (the god) and Gita (the holy book). Historically there were multiple belief systems but Vedas was given prominence as an essential component of Hinduism. Consolidation of Brahminical ethos took place during the Maurya period around Upanishads, Vedantic thoughts and Manusmriti. Every religious thought that had once found expression in India, and handed down as a sacred heirloom, was preserved by the Indian mind, instead of one thought superseding the more exalted thought. Hinduism soon attained social and political hegemony over Jainism and Buddhism after violent confrontations. Despite the existence of streams, cults and identities, the Brahminical domination propagated Hinduism based on Vedas and Brahmans as the religion of India. But many did not identify with it as they worshipped the non-Vedic Gods under the trend of Sikhism and Bhakti. In the twentieth century Hinduism did away with pluralism and the term Hindutva emerged along with geopolitical nationalism. This led to exclusions of other faiths having equal status with Hindus. Upper class heroes like Ram were worshipped and popular movements like Bhakti were excluded. It projected homogeneity, rigidity through the sangh parivar; achieved hegemony over society asserting that Hindus constitute the nation and are original inhabitants/creators which was to tackle the non-Hindus (esp. Muslims). A “social common sense” was developed to institute amongst the people that Hinduism is superior to all other cultures and Hinduism or Hindutva was made to appear a way of life Ram (1996).

Hinduism as we know did not affirm to single God, institution or holy book, hence religious organizations were formed which constituted new community of believers of Hinduism with an aim to mobilize against the dominant religion, Christianity. These groups/organizations emulated the Christian tradition, built itself around the idea of gurus and described religion as a way of life where they elaborated the concept of seva- as the set of practices to follow along with allegiance to the Gurus; sevaks volunteered for teaching, disaster relief and medical help. The idea behind the concept of seva as propagated by RSS and others was to attain peace, moral and spiritual fulfilment, and to worship God through serving society as God resides everywhere. This notion of seva to oneself, the family and God was again enlarged to incorporate the socio-political dimensions. It was thus reframed to provide a new religious-political identity in an imagined Hindu nation. The Hindu majoritarian movement further fueled aggressive integration of Hindu identity and also legitimized everyday caste and gender violence. The everyday practices and lives of the people are defined by religiosity, ethnicity and communalism. The process of defining religion as way of life and the conversion of everyday practices into majoritarian projects generate new knowledge and meanings Patel (2007).

Conclusion

The debate as to whether Hinduism is a religion or a way of life is one that will no doubt continue into the future with scholars from different vantage points taking up positio ns on Hinduism of one kind or another. While those with a constructivist understanding of the phenomenon would no doubt emphasize the growth of Hinduism as a religion from the 19th century onwards, those emphasizing the cultural way of life would no doubt borrow on ideas of syncretism, co-existence and religious diversity to reveal the diverse and varied religiosity among the different sects and cults within Indian society. While it is possible to look at both these perspectives with a scholarly intent pointing to the different ways in which assertions of Hinduism are pronounced and legitimized, it is important to note that such a debate as discussed in section t hree can become politically intolerant when it begins to emphasize an exclusivist conception of Hindu/Hinduism and Hindutva. It would be worth noting for the sake of clarity that while the term Hindu has been used by scholars to denote a geographical community, the term Hinduism is one that has been used to construct a religious community and belief system much like that prevailing within Christianity from the time of reform movement. Lastly, Hindutva as Ram (1996) is an ideology of exclusion that seeks to politically unite these geographically diverse communities under the banner of a unified religion called Hinduism. Such a political project remains an unfulfilled aspiration among those sections of the Indian population who continue to hold on to the belief of a two -nation theory Thapar (1997).

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