Dr. Shashi Tharoor on Hinduism’s origins and its philosophical concepts

Now here we are, this is Dr. Shashi Tharoor, author of 16 books, Simcha Now, who wrote an era of darkness, the British era in India. I don't know what is called inglorious empire here for the position and after that cheese, this is the current book why I am Hindu now of course. Before we start a conversation, a very quick question: did you meet at Empire Drive? Yes your religion, in many ways, is part of my part of who I am. It was simply an opportunity to, let's say, address the audience that I discovered through the other book. with something quite different, well I have seen the introductory words: she was the United Nations and the Secretary General, who really should have become Secretary General if India played its cards right and I also think that the UN wants the faceless men , but here the minister in the UPA government is the MP currently and I want you to listen to this and try to pronounce it after me, zero ananthapuram, welcome also known as Trivandrum, so before we start I think maybe you could read a few pages , that's how it is.

I thought it might be of interest. to all of you who I helped set the tone for what the books are about, so she until no one introduced me. I am, I know how to edit, a columnist and cultural entrepreneur who runs the Taffer live literature festival in Mumbai, so someone who curates good writing, hence the book is called Why I Am Hindu and I think maybe to guide you about what the books are about in tone and the nature of their approach, you could read five or six minutes at the very beginning of the book and then we can have a conversation with Anna, but at least it will give you some background in context about how they express themselves the concerns of the book, so I will literally start from chapter one, why am I a Hindu?

This question is, of course, because I was born in a place where most people didn't have much choice about the faith they grew up with. She was selected for them at birth by an accident of geography and the cultural foundations of her parents. The overwhelming majority of Hindus in the world were born Hindu, a small handful inspired by marriage migration or

philosophical

conviction, adopted the faith generally through a conversion process unknown to the majority of Hindus, unlike that small minority, I was never anything else. I was born a Hindu, grew up as such and have considered myself one of them all. my life, but what does it mean to be Hindu?

Many of us began to have to question ourselves in the late 1980s, when the world media began talking and writing about Hindu fundamentalism. This was strange because we knew that Hinduism was a religion without foundations, without a founder or prophets, there is no organized church, there are no obligatory beliefs or rites of worship, there is no uniform conception of the good life, there is no single holy book, my Hinduism was a faith. lived was a Hinduism of experience and ours bring a Hinduism of observation and conversation not one anchored in deep religious study. Although, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive.

He knew a few mantras, only a few fragments of hymns and practically no Sanskrit. My knowledge of sacred Hindu texts and philosophies came entirely from reading them in English translation when I went to a temple. I had to pray in a strange combination of Sanskrit English and my mother tongue Malayalam instinctively convinced that an omniscient God would be naturally multilingual a little about my ignorance and what I have done to alleviate and then I continue with the first challenge, of course, was the definition of the Hindu name. itself denotes something less and more than a set of theological beliefs in many languages, French and Persian, among them the word for Indian is Hindu originally Hindu simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu or Indus, but the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan and to make matters worse, the word Hindu did not exist in any Indian language until it was used by foreigners.

It gave the Indians a term to define themselves. Hindus, in other words, call themselves by labels that they did not invent themselves in any of their own languages, but rather happily adopted when others started. To refer to them with that word, of course, many Hindus prefer a completely different term so as not to endure eternal faith anymore. I talked about it later tonight, but not now, Hinduism is the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It encompasses an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism, from faith and reincarnation to belief in the caste system, but none of them constitute a mandatory creed for a Hindu.

There is none, we do not have mandatory dogmas. This, of course, is quite unusual for a Catholic. a Catholic because he believes that Jesus was the son of God who sacrificed himself for men a Catholic believes in the Immaculate Conception and the virgin birth offers confession genuflection church and is guided by the Pope and a celibate priest children a Muslim must believe that there is no God and that Muhammad is his prophet. An Jun appreciates the pentatonic of him and the Talmud of him. A Parsi worships in a fire temple. A Sikh honors the teachings of the Guru Granth.

I am above or there is no Hindu equivalent for any of these beliefs. there are simply no binding requirements to be a Hindu not even a belief in God I grew up in a Hindu home our house always had a prayer room where paintings and portraits of various divinities jostle for space on the shelves and the walls with faded photographs of deceased ancestors , all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devoted parents. I have written before how my first experiences of piety came from seeing my father in prayer every morning after bathing.

My father stood in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel and with wet hair. Still disheveled and chanting his mantras in Sanskrit, but never forcing me to join him, he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, prayer is between you and whatever image of your creator you choose to worship in the Hindu way. . my own truth I think so. I am a believer despite a brief period of school atheism of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and is accompanied by the recognition of its limitations and I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not only because it is the faith I was born into, but for a number of other reasons your faith requires no reason one reason is cultural as a hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people.

I'm proud of the story. from my faith in my own land from travels about Shankara who traveled from the southern tip of the country to Kashmir in the north who taught in the Western Addition in the East debating spiritual scholars everywhere preaching his beliefs establishing his matzo monasteries and reaffirming this atavistic loyalty by Harvard scholar Diana Eck in writing about the sacred geography of India linked by countless stretches of pilgrimage by reiterating my loyalty to Hinduism, unconsciously reclaiming this geography and history, its literature and civilization, identifying myself as one in a million. heirs of a venerable tradition dating back to time immemorial, I fully accepted that many of my friends, compatriots and fellow Hindus do not feel a similar need and that there are Hindus who are not Indians or are no longer Indian, but I am comfortable with their Hinduism cultural and geographical anchors me to my ancestral past, but another reason for my belief in Hinduism is the lack of a better phrase, its intellectual fit.

I feel more comfortable with the principles of Hinduism than I would otherwise, but those are the other religions I know. I have long considered myself liberal not only in the political sense of the term or even in relation to the principles of economics, but as an attitude towards life that consists of accepting people as you find them, allowing them to be and become. whatever they choose and encourage them. Let them do what they want, as long as it doesn't harm others, it's my natural instinct. Rigid and serious beliefs have never appealed to my temperament in matters of religion.

I found my liberal instincts reinforced by the faith I grew up in, Hinduism. It is based in many ways on the idea that the eternal wisdom of the ages and of divinity cannot be limited to a single holy book, we have many and we can delve into each one to find our own truth or truths. As a Hindu, I can claim adherence to it. a religion without an established church or priestly papacy religion as rituals and customs I am free to reject a religion that does not require me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign my subsidy is subsuming my identity in any collectivity not even for a specific day or time or the frequency of worship there is no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Vatican, no Hindu Catholicism, not even a Hindu Sunday.

As a Hindu I follow an attack that offers a veritable smorgasbord of options to the worshiper of Divini for adorning himself and praying rituals to him. whether or not to observe customs and practices to honor or not to honor a fast to keep or not as a Hindu I subscribe to a creed that is free from the restrictive dogmas of Holi rich who refuses to be chained by the limitations of a single volume of holy revelation as a Hindu I appreciate The fact that Hinduism does not profess false attitudes, its ability to express awe at creation and simultaneously skepticism about its missions from the Creator are unique to Hinduism.

Both are captured beautifully in this verse from the 3500 year old Rig Veda and then a Sathya sucked the creation out of it and I have printed the retention in the book but I will only read to you the last four lines which go like this, who knows where he had his origin of this creation, whether he created it or not. that he examines everything from the highest heaven, he knows it or maybe he doesn't even know it, maybe he doesn't even know it. I love a faith that asks such a fundamental question about none other than the Supreme Being that the creator of the universe himself may not know it.

I know for a fact who we mere mortals are, to be kicked to claim knowledge of which not even he can be sure. Fall there. I had marked a few more bits to read, but I think I knew I'd get more out of it than if I just kept reading. thank you very much, thank you the first and obvious question is why you write this book in particular and I will expand on the topic because I believe that with modernity a modern person like you, who was a writer, was immersed in culture and politics with a modern perspective, not You suspect they have religion at all and one certainly didn't expect you to be religious, yes, it came from us.

I was hoping you would write the book empire about the British, but this, let me see first. All of this shows that people do not read me as diligently as I would like because many of the concerns of this book are prefigured in some of my previous books, for example, the great Indian novel which I think is the first book that led me to In 1989 I had this great concern about the Dharma and the role of the codes by which we must live. I talked about the onset of Hindu Muslim violence with the rise of Hindu chauvinism in my book India from Midnight to the Millennium twenty years ago now.

In 1997, in fact, I talked a little bit about my faith and my personal convictions and my background as a Hindu, so in many ways there are clues, so to speak, to these concerns scattered throughout the last three decades of my writings. , but with this book I was responding to a sense of moral urgency because people like me, who never felt the need to advertise our faith, and your question confirms that I didn't, people like me, instinctively liberal, at the same time, took for granted our own Hinduism, we are acquiring more and more. We are most shocked by the hijacking of Hinduism by the bigoted and bigoted chauvinist brigade that has now come to power in our country and will unleash forces in the name of Hinduism that we Hindus do not recognize in them and therefore the need to expose what my faith was about, challenge the distortion of the faith that manifests itself in his descriptions of it, and then make a call to reclaim Hinduism, so to speak, for the inclusive liberal faith that I think most of us We practice, that's what's behind it. the spokes that's why this book now from the introduction that you read and we are all aware of this, is the problem with Hinduism.

I think it is very difficult to define and very often people say that Hinduism is not a religion, it is a way of life now, how do you define a way of life? Just live it right, so the fact that you pointed out that there is no Church, there is no Pope, there are no profits, there are no compulsions, there are no applications for this or that, all we have is many gods, how many gods have? Please clarify what gods means in this context because it is often said that there were 333 million along the way. Yes, this is the Hindu theorem in religious philosophy that was argued from the beginning and I am talking about. 3,500 years ago they argued that creation could not be reduced to any visualization of he or she or she or it is essentially God was beyondof the quality was omnipresent that the creative force called Brahman permeates the entire cosmos and that is why they could not assign forum agenda qualities to the idea of ​​God, now they discovered that this created a rather abstruse fish that ordinary people found It was difficult to continue.

Many common people worshiped fire, trees, or symbols of nature because they wanted an object they could focus on. His worship since this formless Brahman attained Nirguna was impossible to conceptualize and that is why Hinduism invented the idea that since none of us has actually seen God, known God, touched God, then God can be visualized. in whatever form suits our imaginary needs. Therefore, we can imagine God as a saguna brahman, which is the brahman with qualities and these qualities then reflected human need as if it were a crutch to lean on to achieve the divine, so we created these multiple gods or manifestations of God. corresponding to the human need both to be able to imagine God and to look for certain qualities in the god that we wanted to worship and therefore Hinduism has this multiplicity of gods of names of god the forms of god and what he isMore many of the forms of God are associated with particular qualities.

Particular strengths are worshiped for particular purposes. There is a goddess of learning who you worship when you want to pass your exams. There is a goddess of wealth that you worship when you want to be successful in a business. There is a God whom you worship when you want obstacles removed from your path, etc., all of which are simply multiple forms of the formless, these are ways of attaining that which cannot be achieved, and so well this is that. It means that from the point of view of Hinduism, nothing was beyond the limits. You want to imagine God as a potbellied man with the head of an elephant.

Ganesh, you can do it. You want to imagine God as an armed woman of age riding a tiger. Durga, your truck to do. So, and by the same logic, if you want to imagine God as a bleeding man on a cross, that's fine too because essentially all these forms are the same, in fact, Swami Vivekan and the great Hindu preacher who did a lot to put wisdom into the world. Consciousness at the end of the 19th century said that justice is that several rivers and different courses flow into the same sea, so also various ways of worshiping God end in the same divine, it certainly does not matter which path you choose, which I believe which is a great strength, even the news made means that I am never obliged, in fact, one of the passages that I did not read, in a way praised the answer to the question, as a Hindu, I belong to the only major religion in the world that It doesn't pretend to be. the only true religion.

I find it immensely pleasant to be able to confront my fellow men of other religions without feeling burdened by the conviction that I have embarked on a true path and that they have somehow overlooked this dogma that lies at the core of the Semitic. religions Christianity Islam and Judaism the Bible contains the words I am the way, the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through me John 14:6 there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet declares the Koran denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption and much less of salvation or paradise, while Hinduism says that a belief is always equally valid and Hindus readily venerate the saints and sacred objects of other religions.

I'm proud that I can honor the sanctity of other religions without feeling like I'm betraying my own, so that's a pretty long answer to another question. Well, I think that also brings us to this observation that what Hinduism does is kind of all-encompassing, yes, and therefore even the separatist movements that we've had like Buddhism, for example, but the guys now consider Hindu reincarnation , reincarnation was a break, but Hinduism also expected to be an agglomeration in front of Jainism again, so it is a very convenient religion, it is a wonderful religion for a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like India, where people of various beliefs, practices and

origins

have to coexist, yes, yes, and I also think that the wonderful thing about Hinduism is that many of the gods are very happy gods, you know, you don't have to do penance or go through what to do, yes, but some God like Christopher, for example, absolutely a God like Krishna, he has multiple Goofy, that's how you would consult, okay, multiple consoles and he cavorts with them, when they have problems with egos and seal their clothes, they are naked, I mean, what God would do.

I mean you really have to look at Hinduism in many ways, first of all it is the oldest continuous religion, it goes back in recorded time at least 3500 years and if you look at the ancient contemporary faiths of the ancient Greeks and Romans , etc., There were gods who were equally playful or, let's say, equally capable of actions and beliefs, etc., that today Western religions do not consider divine, but I think humanity had a much more realistic appreciation that God existed thanks to man, therefore conscious. and therefore God could be man like yes, now many of the Western Semitic weights have moved away from that neutral, we have clung to it, did you read that we do not have a book of Hinduism, yes, multiple, I like you or the The Quran or the Bible, that's right, but now there is a movement to make the Gita the book of Hinduism, how do you react to that?

Well, I'm a big fan of the average Gita in multiple translations. I think it has a powerful message that it conveys. It lends itself to multiple interpretations, but the general idea about Hinduism is precisely that, as I say in a metaphor in Book I, I say that it is more like a vast library full of different volumes, none of which is exhausted and where you can be one or the other, even if it hasn't actually been read in a thousand years to find justification or otherwise for the point of interpretation you wish to adopt, this makes Hinduism, in some ways, a frustratingly amorphous faith for some people. understand it, but in another sense, the The good thing about this is that it gives you all these options and you can create your version of Hinduism in a very modern way.

It's like you know you can go online if you want and just follow the places you want to follow. as natives, I mean a long time ago, if you don't think about it, that a thousand years ago, approximately at the end of the 10th century, the Shankers of the greats in Philosophy were already dealing with hundreds and thousands of famous Hindu sacred texts. He formed a kind of revived Hinduism on the basis of only three things: the Bhagavad Gita, ten of the one hundred and eight punishments and the Brahma sutras, and that was all, so he left out the Vedas completely in his creation of the essence . of Hindu philosophy, so one of the strengths of Hinduism has been precisely that it lends itself to the kinds of things I'm a big fan of a stream, not least because he did much of his Hindu preaching in English, so he didn't out You know, I'm not subject to the criticism that I was reading a bad translation here, I'm actually dealing with the original, so to speak, and with Swami Vivekananda, someone who relied heavily on our interpretation of Shankara's Hinduism, so to speak. say it.

You can take this vast literature and reduce it to any book, it is okay for an individual to want to do that or for a school of four fish to do it, however, it is not the only possible way to look at the face, yes, but about its danger. that because in two senses one is first of all one should be mentally and spiritually equipped to deal with this great choice, someone like you can do it, many people thought that that is the second thing that by allowing me to reinterpret religion in my own light I could take it into account. a very dangerous direction, yes, you see, the second point I will address separately, but on the first point let me emphasize that the great teachers of Hinduism have always recognized that not everyone is capable of performing the same forms of worship or, therefore Yes, we all have an innate healing to reach out our hands towards the divine, but all the teachers do it and suggest that there is only one way to do it, so broadly speaking, there are four ways to practice Hinduism.

One is, in fact, what is called Jana yoga, the

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search, reading texts and understanding their ideas, etc., the second is the party aura which is just worship and most common people They practice their faith by belief and certainly many Hindus do so simply by going to temples and praying to their idealism. Do you get the idea of ​​Delta membership from What worship of whatever God you serve? Some will go and worship the goddess regularly, some will go and worship Hanuman, who gives strength, or Ganesha, who removes obstacles, or Balaji, who confers wealth and blessings, or whatever, and suddenly, they will worship them all. on different occasions and for different purposes. and that is all well and good, but reducing Hinduism only to a blind act of worship and obedience would not please the philosophers but would be, from their point of view, a valid way, if something less is less satisfactory, of approaching God, then There is what is called Karma Yoga, which is worship through service, Westerners have the idea of ​​the missionary, of course, karma yoga basically says that by fulfilling your Dharma, you live by that code that forces you to serve your peers and that is the way. worshiping God and many of these sannyasis, the monks who wander the country in the ocher, often woke up with nothing more than a begging bowl and a jug of water, ate what the people were willing to give them and did not eat If they were there, they did not eat and meditate and preach and teach, so that is also supposed to be a form of service, that someone likes it.

Swami Vivekananda emphasized that it was not enough to simply teach them metaphysics but in fact let us give people practical knowledge and he urged many religious teachers to go out and teach useful things like science and mathematics as well and finally we have Raja Yoga which is more the application of mental meditation and inner reflection because, ultimately, one of the curious things about Hinduism is that in most religions you look for God in the heavens, in Hinduism you look for God within yourself, for which the search for the divine is very much an inner search in Hinduism, which is a challenge and is a greater challenge for some than others, in essence.

Wouldn't you agree that Hinduism represents tolerance, but are you right? Yes, I should emphasize that even tolerance may not be enough. I mean, I love the quote from Swami Vivekanand, who spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and said: I am proud to speak here about a faith that has taught the world not only tolerance but acceptance. I read that quote when I was a teenager and it has stayed with me ever since because I found it to be a profoundly important idea in coming to understand my own faith. look at tolerance, we were all raised to believe that tolerance is a virtue.

The history books of our childhood are full of wise references to tolerant kings and tolerant regimes and systems, but when you really think about intolerance it is ultimately rather condescending because what is tolerance? Tolerance says I have the truth you are wrong but I will magnanimously indulge you in your right to be wrong while acceptance is very different acceptance says I think I have the truth you believe you have the truth I will respect your truth please respect my truth and that is fundamental For Hinduism it does not question the veracity, the authority, the legitimacy of any other truth that others may profess, but it expects that they also do not challenge the truth that I seek and that I practice, in my opinion, it is an extremely, very excellent way , to organize.

In a multi-religious society, you all get along and no one feels obligated to hit anyone over the head for their beliefs in Hindu thought. Each soul has a body, so basically the soul is the permanent thing, it occupies a body for a certain period and when it served, that body has fulfilled the purpose that the soul sought in it, the soul discards the body and moves on to another , so he passes into another body which is reincarnation until he finally attains moksha or salvation and merges with Brahman. Now, as I said, I was a little critical of the reincarnation sherry because it seemed like too convenient a justification for social inequalities and social oppression, but the more I read about it, the more I realized that the theorists who emerged with this idea we really only care about the concept of the soul and not the social circumstances of the body that all this occupies, so socially it was possible for me to reject the notion that people had to be content with their lot because they know it.

It wasn't their fault or anyone else's, and I could argue intellectually that there are, in fact, things you can and should do to change your destiny on this planet while still appreciating the conceptual notion that the permanence of the soul is the sustaining thought because, for example, that idea is much easier to reconcile with what we see around us in the world than the ideas of other religions.really a kind-hearted, omniscient, all-knowing, beneficent God who nevertheless seems to allow suffering on this earth because it seems to me that the failure of that kind-hearted God to cure suffering has real questions about the goodness of that beneficent God , while in Hinduism.

God is present everywhere God is present in your suffering and in your pain and God is present in your happiness and in your success that this unique presence of God is what explains the fact that you are never really without God not even in your worst moments and that therefore you do not have to point the finger of blame since, as the theory would say, you would have to live with the notion that the divine incorporates both negative and positive aspects, the idea of ​​​​the eternal damnation of the Fire of the Hell does not really exist in Hinduism. because ultimately the idea of ​​hell implies that there is a place where God is not, yes, and that is not possible because God is everywhere.

One God would not disappear, so this idea of ​​God is quite a bit broader than what is found in other religions and that makes it intellectually and otherwise, even in some ways morally easier to accept and helps you accept the existence of human evil, of human suffering, of human loss, because God is, so to speak, on both sides of that tonight, yes, but the theory of reincarnation also has this. that if you lead a life of virtue and goodness and do good deeds in your next birth, you will ascend higher, that is what I meant by the theory of social conformity, so there is something positive in it too, yes, it is in your hands to do something. about it, yes, there are several forms of this and that is that you are born with some of the good or bad actions that your soul already did before you got here, yes, of course, I mean, surely you are the only thing that you are a vivacious.60 and so many, while your soul has been around for a few millennia and has no doubt been very active and busy all this time to wake you up into a new darker tomorrow, depending on how good you have been a darker tunnel, it is It may not actually be necessary. reborn again because it reaches its purpose reborn associative oh my god you didn't answer my question would you like to be reborn like now I mean that really trivializes it a bit I'm not going to answer that simply because there is a difference between the continuity of the soul and the mind, which is actually part of your body.

Yes, in fact, my mind is not aware of any of my soul's actions or misdeeds and is therefore almost irrelevant. brought me here body and mind because I have no idea what I did to deserve this, whether good or bad, that is happening to me and that will also be true in my next entries, so to speak, so I think I will skip Before I address the audience, I could ask the last question, which is, going back to the beginning, why did you write this book, was it a response to what is happening in India now, it is true, we are going towards a kind of Hinduism militant as if it is a response to militant Islam, don't you think?

And it is a huge corruption of interests. That's right, first of all, Hindutva is a political ideology and its roots date back to the 1920s, exactly the period when fascist ideologies emerged in many countries. In fact, in some parts of Europe there is the man who came up with the concept of Hindutva. VD Sarkar, in fact, in one or two places uses the word race to talk about Hindus, which is a betrayal of the kind of thinking that was happening all over the world. theories of racial pride in racial self-affirmation and that is why it always began by saying that, in that way, in India it was a marginal movement until very recently, only now it has the approval that its followers are really in power and for the first time At one point in the history of independent India we have a president, a vice president and a prime minister, all of them adherents, former members of the RSS who are believers and in that philosophy there was time to call a spade a spade and say that Hindutva It is not Hinduism.

It is a political ideology anchored in the political ideas and racial theory of the 1920s, it is an intolerant ideology that defines Hinduism in opposition to other groups of believers, which is not Hinduism at all, so what I have tried What I do in the book is define and describe the Hinduism I've been talking about for forty-five minutes, but then contrast it with Hindu philosophy, which is a much more sectarian, intolerant and narrow-minded view of faith, and then argue to Please return to Hinduism forever. the rest of us and by doing so and basically saying that what these people are talking about is not Hinduism, you cannot take the majesty of the metaphysical philosophical ideas of the Upanishads, the Vedas, the vision of the text and I have been talking about these ideas . and reduce them to something like the identity badge of the British football hooligan because that is essentially what is happening: you are seeing a group of people reduce Hinduism to a banner or a club that can be used to beat up supporters of the rival teams in Head with and in my mind, that's not Hinduism, because Hinduism, on the other hand, actually says that their views and the team they support is just as valid as the team I support, so, where the hell do they make these?

These pretenders get their ideas of Hinduism from wrong sources and that is essentially what the book also tries to argue. Well, let's hope that beyond all hope destroys this idea a little and let's hope that it is hampered 12 meters down and becomes nothing in the near future. future good because right now they control the walls that I know and people like me are trying to shoot them with slingshots for the sniper, that's right, let me go to the audience and right, they are microphones, a year ago, there is already one there, thank you. you as for mr.

Thoreau, thank you for a wonderful book, thank you sir, it is excellent. The second half of the book. I'm afraid the politician comes out a lot more than the first half, but sorry, the second half is where the politician appears again. I get a lot more out of it yes because politics drove that part again but my question to you is do you think the politicization of Hindu religion started with Gandhi when he talked about Ram Raja, every speech he gave in all his meetings started with RAM ? Then he talked about the Gita, it is the most fundamental book of Hinduism.

Anil ji just said it, didn't it start there? Obviously it has become more violent now, but the world is much more violent now and Gandhi was covered by the halo of it. What he did was covered by a great greeting from the Mahatma, so I think he started there, but let me explain to you the big difference between that and what is happening now. Gandhi, of course, was the first of India's nationalist leaders to take politics, politics from the drawing room as if to the streets appealing to the masses in a language that most illiterate and uneducated Indians could understand and capture and therefore used images, metaphors and language that common people could easily understand, up to that point, yes, he talked about Ram.

Raja, the idealized Kingdom of Lord Rama, began with prayers and spectacles, but he was always careful to incorporate the ideas, prayers and hymns of other religions in his allusions in his message, so his favorite hymn, for example, was Bhupati Raghava Rajaram. Ishwara and Latarian tera naam there are every word, the Sanskrit or Hindi Hindu word for God and Allah, the Arabic word for God, both are their name, so this idea of ​​an inclusive Hinduism was explicitly propagated so as not to threaten any other community. . In it, I have quoted them in the book and he says something notable when he was asked about his faith and he said that I am from the Hindu Christian Jewish party etc. and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, fully responded that only a Hindu could say that, but in the sense.

That was the point for Gandhi, there was no difference between these various religions and forms of worship, so his Hinduism was an inclusive, all-encompassing Hinduism, which is not the Hinduism that sought to be perpetuated, promoted and aggressively promoted today. by those in power, so he would not believe all the sin and feat of Gandhi. Yes, the first thing I would like to say is: can you stand up? Yes, of course, first I would like to thank you for your annual visit and for educating and inspiring. Again, my question relates to religion, society and politics, and in the UK since 1930, church attendance has fallen from 30 percent to about 5 percent today and is forecast to fall another 20 percent by 2025 and with that it seems that we have lost. simultaneously a loss of a centrist, tolerant, collaborative form of social politics and a movement toward, you know, the populist right and the socialist left that is creating a divide in our society that we can't seem to fix.

Does this have parallels and I think that's happening in the United States and if this has parallels to what you're talking about with the situation of Hinduism in India, it's a very interesting question because, in fact, I think it's a much more Western phenomenon. than many in the West believe. In reality, we have the paradox that both are a decline in religiosity in many European societies and an increase in the assertiveness of Christianity in particular in the same societies, but by very small groups and increasingly, if you will, fringes that are also translating into political movements and parties that have been gaining increasing support in India, however, there has never been a marked decline in visits to temples, mosques and churches, if anything, they have all been great.

I am told that the fastest recorded growth in Christianity today is in an India that is The highest rate of growth of conversions to Catholicism and various angelic forms of Christianity is faster and higher in India than anywhere else. , including the fact that in the United States there is at the same time a strongly reinforced Islam, even Muslims whose, say, my generation and their parents had become largely secular have become more religious in the next generation, in part thanks to a phenomenon world well-funded with Saudi money that has promoted or propagated an idea of ​​what it takes to be a good Muslim that is actually much more conservative than what Islam had become a generation ago, for example, in my state of Kerala in India, when I was a child, it was almost impossible to see a veiled Muslim woman, twenty-one percent of the Muslim population, but today no one was veiled.

It is almost impossible to see a Muslim woman who has not failed. Meanwhile, we have had a generation of Indian Muslims from Kerala who have gone to the Gulf, seen what Islam is supposed to be like, and come back and had those ideas instilled in them. in their families, so that now it is almost the characteristic of a Muslim woman that she at least covers her head with a scarf, even if she is not completely covered, so all these things show that, in some way, religions in many developing countries and certainly, from what I've seen, India have grown up and become more conservative versions of themselves, which is, in my opinion, somewhat alarming.

India officially prides itself on being a secular democracy, but secularism in India has never meant what it means in the West. Not a distancing or an absence of religion, secularism in India actually means a profusion of religions that are allowed to flourish and none of which are privileged by this; Now that kind of secularism risks teetering on the brink of a series of competitive contests. fundamentalisms and that is something that people like me are trying to speak out against and against. Well, yes, thank you very much. A question I'm not thinking about really stands out to me because of what you've said because it sounds like you're speaking with a real moral voice. and you seem to be really interested in, for example, acceptance, tolerance, on the one hand, but, from what you say, clearly there are limits to that as well, so in philosophical terms you could say, well, you know, the Indian religion seems to be quite relativistic.

You know you can be a vision of it, or she vite or whatever, but on the other hand you want to speak very strongly against it, you know certain elements and expressions within BJP and you know he really wanted to get a little bit more. of a sense of good, isn't there a problem in terms of being relativistic on the one hand but then falling into absolutism at some particular point and how you position that point in relation to those

concepts

? Yes, I mean you. I am absolutely right because in India it seems almost as if there is an attempt to blind the eyes.

The Hindu faith movement in many ways is born from an inferiority complex. These are people who remember the humiliations of being conquered by the Muslims who ruled them for centuries and then being ruled by the British for a couple more centuries and feeling subjugated and inferior and therefore this is partly a reaffirmation of themselves as a religious identity in terms of one aspect of their approach and the second is that they are The second manifestation of the inferiority complex is the desire to be like the same religions that they resent and thereforeThey envy the fact that, for example, Semitic religions have a communal cult that is not a characteristic of Hinduism.

Hinduism is an intensely personal faith that you go and pray for. you yourself can pray at home, you don't have to go to the temple on a Sunday morning at a certain time and listen to a common sermon that others do and that seems to unite them, so there is a great desire on the part of the Hindutva revivalists to to create a much more collective and communal cult there is this desire, as Anil has already pointed out, to privilege one of our many sacred books, in this case the Bhagavad Gita, and make it Dean. It did not cover the Hindu equivalent of the Bible of In the Quran there is an attempt to exalt a manifestation of God, particularly Lord Rama, who is worshiped particularly in the northern heartland, where India is spoken, as a kind of figure to whom pay allegiance to it, and so on, so there are all these attempts to make Hinduism more like other religions and therefore less like itself, which is paradoxical and ironic, but I think its proponents intend, at the same time, to less unconsciously, position it better in some kind of national competition against the other religions, while the Hinduism that I know, practice and appreciate does not feel in competition with anyone does not seek to compete it defends itself with a kind of self-confidence and comes from knowing that has survived reformist movements attacks attacks invasions even and has been able to constantly regenerate itself over these 3,500 years by being a faith that is capable of self-transformation, as it has this wide area of ​​choice of how it wants to focus, which is why we have Hindu sects , for example, Arya Samaj in the 19th century, partly in reaction to British mockery of Hindu idol worship, abandoned idols.

In short, the Arya Samaj temples do not worship the image of a Hindu god, in quotes, but they are very, very Hindu and, furthermore, they are the only Hindu sect that allows conversions to Hinduism. They have the equivalent of a baptism. ritual with a certificate attached, so many non-Hindu spouses of Hindu husbands or wives who want to become Hindus find that the only way they can be certifiably Hindu is otherwise they do not give the impression that there could be this kind of things. you have all these phenomena happening, you have attempts to simplify faith, attempts to simplify faith, attempts to link faith with Semih, but faith in a sense is able to accommodate all this and more, and it will be yes, as long as the perception about faith among your own followers don't be reduced to this narrower version, that's the key madly, but last question short question and short answer sorry, thank you very much for a fascinating talk on a very, very complex topic, separate thanks. from talking briefly about mentioning a God who is a woman, everything that everyone else you've mentioned has been a man, that no, it doesn't assign a gender to the God of Divinity of the divine, there is, there is, there are many, many , many temples of goddesses.

In fact, throughout India there are probably more temples dedicated to goddesses than to gods and the various manifestations of the feminine principle in the divine that are worshiped there is the notion of bhagavati. In fact, the great Guinness Book of Records records the largest single gathering of women on the planet anywhere once it takes place in my constituency in another forum in the temple of the FEM article where there is a cult of the goddess that is It takes place once a year in what is called the pond gala and it is where literally millions of women congregate at the same time in one place for this act of worship and men who worship Bhagwati, the goddess, an extremely common principle. among the very many Hindu men who worship the goddess, sir, the various qualities of female goddesses are not just the kind of female qualities there are, I am not just talking about mercy, grace and love etc., there are goddesses very fierce ones who are conquerors of evil, there are goddesses who represent power, Shakti, the word for power is a feminine name and one of the names.

Of the female Deity that you have, you have the goddess who destroys evil and demons actually represented in quite grotesque ways, but she is a very powerful and strong deity that many worship and seek to propitiate, she is again a woman, so you have both There are many forms of goddesses and they are not purely as I say in the old conventional ways of seeing women, so that is very much in Hinduism, that does not mean that every Hindu is a feminist, they should be, but they are not. that many of them tend to challenge the woman or the maternal Iser, but they don't really know how to deal with the autonomous young woman who is their equal and that is a different challenge in Hindu society, but as I said in response to a question about castes A distinction must be made between the Hindu faith and Hindu society and the latter is often an inadequate manifestation of the great ideas of the former.

Good thank you.