Faith, Hindus, Christians and Cynics: A Letter to Sudin

Dear Sudin,

A couple of weeks ago, I read a letter to the editor in one of our local newspapers. Written by a Hindu gentleman who had visited a temple dedicated to Shantadurga, the letter does not indicate to us why he went there. One presumes however, that he was there to perform a ritual. While at the temple, he came across a farmer who was there to beg the intercession of the Goddess. He had suffered rodent damage to his crop, and was convinced, or so the narrator of this letter tells us, that sprinkling the teertha (holy water) in the fields would save him and his crop. This simple (and perhaps naïve) faith of the farmer proved too much for our gentleman narrator, and in his letter to the editor, exhorts that we must cease such practices of blind superstition and adopt scientific principles and rationality.

I have to confess on reading this letter I was most upset. While I might join the narrator in thinking the farmer’s practices naïve, surely they are just as naïve as the reasons that the narrator was in the temple in the first place? For what was our narrator doing in the temple? Was it not to honour a deity of graven stone?

You will realize that I am not rubbishing the practice of the worship of the Goddess. I am merely challenging the supercilious attitude of our narrator, asking him to indicate where blind superstitious faith ends, and rational belief begins! While the formulation above was clear to my mind, I nevertheless felt that I was missing something in my analysis of the issue.

A few days ago, in the course of a virtual chat, I was eager to impress you that I speak about the importance of faith in public life, not in religion. You retorted, indicating that perhaps this ‘faith’ was something you (Christians) have, whereas we (Hindus) don’t need it, it is enough that ‘we’ perform the ritual. No sooner had you made this suggestion, did I realize what was bothering me about this letter I have just elaborated on above. My response will deal with two issues; the first the whole idea that the Hindu/ Indian is alien to faith (this being a Christian/ Western innovation) and second the implications of this faithless religion.

In its attempt to dominate the world, colonialism set up certain binaries of virtues. Thus if the colonizer was material, the colonized was spiritual. If the colonizer intelligent, the colonized innocent. In these binaries, the colonized always landed up with the least flattering, as the colonizer was cast as the mature and pragmatic sibling in the relationship. These binaries were wildly popular during the halcyon days of nationalism. In the attempt to give the colonized a voice, rather than challenge these binaries, these binaries were valorized and made the basis of the colonized’s challenge. While we don’t engage in such childishly embarrassing binaries today, the tendency remains. There is an attempt at shallow sophistication. Thus colonialism is now tied to Christianity, and this faith-tradition is counterposed to the native traditions, and differences trotted out. Christianity has a text, Hinduism does not. Christianity has faith, Hinduism does not, and so forth. The idea is to cast colonialism as bringing modernity, and in face of the problems and violences of modernity, to suggest that the non, and pre-modern can provide a useful platform for a challenge to our modern mess. This is the intellectual origin of the suggestion that the Hindu has no need for faith.

Surely the encounter in the temple narrated above should convince you that the ‘pagan’ native is capable of and not innocent to faith. Empirically therefore, your argument should fall flat on its face. It is possible that you would choose to argue that this native has learned faith from the Christian. I trust you will not go down this embarrassing path and deny the bliss of faith to the native. Should you choose to do so however, what you are effectively doing is to suggest that Christianity is forever alien to native soil (a preposterous position for reasons beyond my being a South-Asian Christian). Secondly, you would be suggesting that the native faith traditions have somehow emerged fully formed, without any evolution, or that any evolution has been entirely indigenous.

In response to your argument however, I will not deny that there are Hindus who operate without faith. This is not however, exclusively a Hindu domain, since this dubious facility is shared by Christians, Muslims and Jews as well. These people fulfill their religious obligations, but do so recognizing that these are religious rituals that must be performed for the social sanction they obtain. Thus John Fernandes will take his children to mass, and introduce them to First Holy Communion, even though he thinks the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection to be ‘scientifically impossible’ and thus akin to our farmer’s use of teertha.

In these days of religious revivalism, fundamentalism et al, it is not the faithful that I fear. It is the religious. That is, those who operate in the field of religion without faith. It is true that the fields of faith and religion intersect so often that it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. The faithful can be gullible, but it is the cynical, those who perform religious ritual, without a belief in its spiritual merit, that are perhaps more to be feared.

In the course of my itinerations round Goa, I have seen the cynics that populate the temples, obsessed more with using the Goddess as a tool to power, rather than falling prostrate at Her feet. The narrator of the letter, I would wager is one of them. The product of his cynicism, is that not only is there a failure to grow in the virtues of trust and mutual dependence that faith brings, but it brings also, as was so obvious from the letter to the editor, a certain disdain for those of the lower order. These ‘superstitious’ are seen as in- need-of-education, and at the end of the day, merely tools for us to reach the paradise that we have deemed fit for creation. Indeed, as the good Pope Benedict XVI repeats constantly, contemporary man, having displaced God, arrogates unto himself the power of God, but in the process renders fellow humans less than human. Setting out to create paradise, he invariably produces the hell of contemporary existence.

To these ramblings, I would welcome your comments.

(Sudin, is the pseudonym for a Goan (Hindu) currently engaged in a PhD in the UK. While Sudin is a pseudonym, all other references are entirely factual.)

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 13 Jan 2010)

La Vie en rose: Why the material is mystical

Some months ago, the current Commissioner of NRG Affairs, Mr. Eduardo Faleiro inaugurated a debate over the matter of the management of Church properties in Goa. Initially it appeared that a suggestion was being made that the State take over the management of Church properties, or at the very least have a say, supervisory control over this properties. Howls of indignant protest followed, most pointing out that to suggest that the State have such a power would be like setting the cat among the pigeons. These objections pointed out that the State machinery itself has ruthlessly presided over the sale of common properties impoverishing the common man in the State, and such an institution is likely to only complicate matters further. In light of this rather robust response, Mr. Faleiro presented a document to the Archbishop that suggested internal reform and vigilance.

Among the many suggestions, there was one that particularly caught my eye, especially because it seemed to one that had purchase in some of the meetings organized by Mr. Faleiro. The suggestion reads “Administrative committees, duly constituted, may be truly empowered, so that lay persons feel really responsible for the administration, as the Church are Christ's faithful and the assets of the Church are their assets. Administration of the ecclesiastical assets should be their domain mainly. If this happens, priests will be left free for what is their proper field, viz. apostolate”. An interesting suggestion is being made here, that priests have really no business administering property, since property is a material good and priests have committed themselves to the spiritual. As such, leave property to be managed by those in the secular and material world. A version of ‘To Caesar that what is Caesar’s, and to God…’

Superficially the argument makes eminent sense. It extends one of the principles of secularism, of separating the Church/religion/spirituality from the State/secular/material life. Unfortunately however, this logic works well only if restricted to the secular world, it does not work at all if one does not admit of this distinction between the material and the secular. On the contrary to apply this logic to the operations of a religion, would ensure that religion ceases to have any meaning at all. The mistaken assumption of Faleiro and the secularists is that religion is about ritual and the spiritual, and it has no connection to the material. Making this assumption, they can extend the principle of secularism as they do. However, religion admits of no distinction between the spiritual and the material. On the contrary, religion is about precisely how to guide one’s material life, and as such has everything to do with the material. It is not as if Catholic culture does not admit members of the laity to be models to be emulated. On the contrary, there are a number of such examples, and priests more often than not, operate in parishes across the world in active participation with lay individuals who are identified (either by them or by social consensus) as significant members of the community. However, Catholic culture nevertheless gives the priest, one trained in the scripture, thought and tradition of the church, a preeminent place in guiding the community in its life. And because there is no such thing as a purely spiritual life, and life is lived out in a material world, this pastoral guidance necessarily extends to how we must mould our material life.

However Faleiro’s suggestion is troubling not only because it turns the idea of religion on its head. His suggestion is troubling because it perpetuates other deeply disturbing, though admittedly popular, distinctions. This distinction is between that of the public and the private. One of the reasons for the early continental European separation of Church from the State, was not because these republicans were necessarily averse to Christianity. On the contrary, their public culture continued to echo Western Christian tradition. The separation was necessary because the Church, as a human institution, was closely tied to the feudal order that the bourgeois republicans were seeking to destroy. These liberals also forged the distinction between the public domain and the private. In the private you could continue with your religious (and other traditions), and in the public they cultivated the religion of the State. Feminists for a few decades now have pointed out the problems with this distinction, pointing out that this distinction serves only to blind the eyes of State justice to abuses that go on in realms that are marked out as private. Just as there is no distinction between the material and the spiritual therefore, there is no distinction between the public and the private. Echoing the phrase ‘the personal is political’, popularized by the feminists in this context, will make the overlap between Faleiro’s suggestion and this larger ‘secular’ tradition strikingly clear. [As an aside, I should mention that this proximity between the spiritual and the feminist argument should make some in the clerical hierarchy sit up, take off their bigoted blinkers, take notice, and start thinking!]

One of the reasons I seek to articulate this critique, is because this separation that is being pushed will have a perilous impact on public life. What it will result in, is the further reduction of religion to ritual. Most of us, already thoroughly secularized in our thinking, even if we consider ourselves devout, understand religion to be ritual. Ritual in religion is however, animated by a spirit that makes meaning of it all. When that spirit is divorced, ritual is emptied out, becoming what secularists and atheists hold it to be ‘empty ritual’. The danger of empty religious ritual is that it becomes a kind of a communal marker that is then pandered to, building up the foundations of communal tensions in multicultural societies. Shorn of the mystical element that gives it meaning, and in fact allows us to transcend narrow social markers, ritual becomes the basis for marking difference. We can already see this operating in the Indian polity. ‘Hinduism’ is emptied out of the ethical values it contains to become Hindutva, an empty shell of symbols and rituals that are believed to represent a community. Islam is similarly emptied of its ethical values to become the political agenda of the jihadi. Similarly Christianity. The State panders to these symbols, only exacerbating the problem, when in fact the ethical practitioners of these faith traditions would, in daily life, normally transcend these barriers.

This particular suggestion that Faleiro makes therefore, has multiple problems for which it must be firmly ignored. The larger point however, is of the problem with this binary ‘secular’ logic; that has more followers than just Mr. Faleiro. It is a logic that is so built of partitions that it fails to allow us to lead holistic lives where we can see the connections between each other. It is a logic that builds solutions on partitions, rather than transcending the divisions that are created or may exist. If the feminists suggested so many decades ago that the personal is political, may I now suggest that indeed, the material is mystical?

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 29 Oct 2009)