The UnQuestionable Quest

‘She tried to cry herself to sleep but it mingled with the water leaking from the roof. Why did she have to put her bed in the bath room when all she wanted to do was to sleep? But her husband’s stern reproach resounded in her head. “Never question; just do it”. She thought he knew best and always listened to him. Now and then there were the questions of course. They rose sly and unbidden from some cavernous depth of her heart. Was it so hard for them to let her be?’

My grandmother had to experience this when she was a little girl of just 15, married to a man who controlled every aspect of her life. During her menstrual cycle, her bed was placed in the bathroom which had a leaky roof. No one thought of her as a child but as an adult with a huge cultural responsibility to shoulder. The daughter-in-law (my aunt) could not cook for the father-in-law or cross his path because she did not belong to our caste and had not been branded with the sacred symbols of the Vaishnava sect. Human dignity did not find a place in the strong holds of religion.

The eternal perplexity of man has been linked to religion and spirituality. There are so many questions which arise as we grow up and begin to comprehend and logically reason out. A traditional upbringing saves no room for analysis. The rules have been there from time immemorial and acceptance is not a reasoned choice; it is an unquestionable legacy.

I was brought up in one such family which held up the staff of religion for whatever action was done. Nothing before or beyond. It was law. Individuality and opinion were crushed as soon as they decided to have a free rein. Childhood was the beginning of a rigorous training for a lifetime of docility and a spotless character.

Women were not allowed to go into the shrine during their menstrual cycle when they were regarded dirty because of the very mechanism which endowed the family with an heir. We were not permitted to enter into the puja room or touch the idols as they would become impure. The meaning failed to register. How could a bronze idol feel my dirt when I had just had a bath? There were no answers for this. I had always heard that God was supposed to be beyond everything. Then how could that great God have the time to feel my dirt? My opinions were just snubbed or never heard. If the concept of God was even questioned, it was considered worthy enough to be guillotined. When I raised this with my mother I was told not to question….not because she believed this but because she did not have an answer to give. Is this how spirituality and religion operated? With no base?

My first tryst and continuing battle with religion began when I was two. My grand father, the one person whom I loved beyond anyone in this world, passed away. He was 65 with a son who was barely 12. God had decided to just be an idol. Why didn’t he respond when my grandfather died? If he could feel my dirt then he could feel my pain too. But I didn’t see his response. Why then do we follow meaningless rituals without reasoning out why they are actually being followed?

I saw my mother being subjected to torturous rituals without a care about whether she was well or not. She just had to pull on. What kind of God was this who didn’t understand the pain of a mother and was selfish enough to want offerings when my mother was in pain? Religion, for me, always meant bondage and limitation of ideas and rational thought. There was always a ‘do-this’ and a ‘do-that’. There was no freedom of thought. Culture is just a cloak of the ignorance inherited from generations.

To this day, I have not found an answer to my question because all the people whom I have spoken to have themselves been puzzled. Is this really inscrutable or have we been conditioned in such a way that we do not want to question at all?

Requiem to the English Dream

As Indians in the contemporary world, we are faced by this nagging question of our identity. When we are abroad we voraciously plead guilty to being Indian. Comfortably nestled in our home ground, we obnoxiously advocate our Kannada legacy or Rajput ancestry. In our narrow mohallas, we audaciously kick the dust up others’ noses as we triumphantly trample their religious beliefs. Each one of us nurses a secret whim of making our religion the one to become the face of the world. At the end of the thought is just another selfish person who forgets the spirit of being bound as a country, a nation which has, though badly beaten, emerged from the smouldering embers as one to be reckoned with.

It began with the East India Company’s systematically slow but steadily methodical sponging of our country’s soul right from the day the Queen signed the charter in 1600. When we shook the sleep out of our eyes, it was time to go to work, to build the British legacy in India. We saw our own country being bedecked with English graffiti. But our national pride took a strenuous and arduous journey to get to where it has now.

I would just like to recount some of the prominent instances which bound us together as one and when people thought only of the Nation and its freedom. The revolt of 1857 was not one of the earliest struggles but one with very far reaching effects. There had been many scattered but small attempts to oust the British. The revolt made the people realize that they could combine their individual efforts into one powerful force. As unexpected, it left the British dumbfounded that their toys could work without keys. The people felt the true power of being one and the first tiny fledgling of hope of being a free country fluttered to life.

Revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Mangal Pandey were able to garner the support of the masses and exploit their energies in the right direction. Bhagat Singh’s famous fast in prison bolstered the people to take up the cause of the nation. The need to fight against injustice and to take what belonged to us was valiantly demonstrated by them. The Kakori Conspiracy and the death of policeman Saunders did just that. It alerted the intruders that these were no empty threats. Mangal Pandey’s protest against the biting of gun shells with pig fat just made Indians realize that they were being made to do things essentially against their culture. But Bhagat Singh’s soul searing words “Mera rang de basanti chola Maaye rang de” called out to all Indians to have unrequited love for their Mother, Mother India.

Gandhiji’s entry just secured the locks of the chain that bound the people. Despite belonging to different religious sects, people came together to fight for one cause. “Poorna Swaraj” became the nation’s religion. They lived, ate and breathed it. The birth of the Indian National Congress with statesmen like Nehru, Tilak and Sardar Patel at its helm, gave a steadiness and sense of direction to the struggle. The later meandering into the Extremists and Moderates did not deter them from the main cause. Gandhiji’s Dandi March and the Quit India Movement only choked the British administration more. The Tricolour became a witness and symbol of a nation’s struggle and its awakening. But the national spirit was to bear the brunt of individual struggles too. The shackles had hardly been taken off when the nation was again bound and this time by those who had fought for Her. Petty internal struggles bellied the sense of new found freedom. Sacrifices were forgotten, the struggle ignored. The nation was still to witness the horror of the Bengal riots and in its wake, the assassination of Gandhiji. Then came Partition. Jinnah won but India lost. Pakistan was formed but thousands died reaching it not because of the distance but because of hate. As an afterthought, Bangladesh became a separate nation in 1971.

The British strategy of “Divide and Rule” became more popular among us than we can ever imagine. We are no longer a nation of proud Indians, preserving the legacy of independence left behind by our grandfathers and great grandfathers. We have a mind of our own which likes following its British enslavers. The disturbances in our country are mainly due to the issue of religion. Otherwise the Godhra riots would not have taken place nor would the Babri Masjid have been bombed. Innocent Sikhs were killed when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Our country is being hopelessly compartmentalized into religious communities and everything is seen through the lens of religion. The cause and the reason for what we once came together are only a part of history textbooks now.

Our culture has always advocated embracing all the religions of the world. But we seem to be comfortable in our Hindu, Muslim and Sikh shells. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) and its right hand the BJP have always wanted to make India a completely Hindu country. The countless Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis who have stayed here from the times of their forefathers are as much a part of the fabric of our country.

The Christians on the other hand, are sorting to conversion at a feverish pitch. To counter this, even innocent Christians like the Father and his two sons were mercilessly butchered in Orissa. We cannot confer the right to take away some one’s legacy just to prove the supremacy of one religion. In our haste, we even forget the rich culture that we share individually and as a nation. Each state has a full fledged flourishing culture of its own. We are not leaving any stone unturned to uproot that very culture, that groundwork that defines us and our nation as a whole. The 28 states, 6 union territories and innumerable dialects do not show how different we are but rather the strength of a country to stay together despite so many differences and yet those being complementary.

In the end, our National Culture is of oneness, respecting all religions and treating all people as equal and not following Cultural Nationalism by engaging in our own inconsequential disputes over religion so that one religion becomes that of the nation.

Maybe it’s time we paid our last respects to the East India Company’s ingenuity.