Worship and religious inquiry

The almost desperate embracing of Western thought by scholars of religion, moving away from the people, has robbed religion of its vitality.

THE recent flutter created by a statement from the actor Jayamala that she had touched the idol in the Sabarimala temple when she visited it 19 years ago has taken a number of interesting forms. There are, of course, those who see it as a terrible act of sacrilege, and the number of such people is not confined, as one may be led to believe, to credulous, simple-minded devotees. A correspondent writing about the incident in a major newspaper kept referring to it as "this shameful incident", the "sordid incident" throughout the report. Many television channels also reported it as a "shocking" incident almost as naturally as they cover, say, a train accident. What all of them were referring to was, of course, the act of a woman touching the idol.

There have been commentators who have seen in the incident another example of the patriarchal nature of our society. They not only point to the fact that women are not allowed into the shrine to worship but also argue that barring women from the shrine is totally repellent in this century and must be summarily done away with. There have been others who seek to look into the origins of the practice, which is admittedly unusual, because women worship in all other temples and shrines. The god in Sabarimala is a brahmachari, it is argued, and hence women are not permitted into his shrine; the practice is rooted in the original nature of the shrine which may have been a Buddhist monastery, where women would not have been permitted just as men are not permitted into a nunnery or the cloisters of a convent.

But if one were to stand back a little from the animated, even heated, arguments on the subject what becomes evident is the very thin line that exists between the Hindu religion and myth. "Myth creates the context in which the ritual becomes effective," says T.S. Maxwell in his book The Gods of Asia, "In entering the realm of mythology," he continues, "it is necessary to be fully aware that it is the very landscape of the gods themselves... . In legitimising their beliefs, theologians mobilised a stock vocabulary of myth motifs, only modifying it so as to emphasise and aggrandise the sectarian view which they wished to propagate."

Maxwell's argument may be or may not be valid, wholly or in part; what is more relevant is the fact that in the times when these myths were created or were emerging in the forms in which they exist today, and when, perhaps at the same time, beliefs were being formulated and the great philosophical treatises, the Upanishads, were being put together by scholars, both processes were taking place as a part of a larger public discourse. It is not as if these were eclectic scholastic exercises in remote schools and ashrams; these could not be, for the simple reason that they are a part of the patrimony of the Hindu community at large.

It may be that a myth that grew up around the Sabarimala shrine spread as devotees - who must have initially come to know of the shrine from travelling monks and others - came, worshipped, and returned to their homes and related accounts of their ecstasy or sense of deep reverence to their neighbours. The neighbours then visited the shrine themselves and did the same thing in their turn. And while it is true that this shrine is known more in the south of the country, it is nonetheless extensively known in the region and generates a degree of devotion that makes thousands undertake the pilgrimage every year.

The point one is trying to make is that the two processes were not only not carried out among a selected few but were in fact spread among people as a whole, sometimes in parts of the country, and on some occasions across the face of the subcontinent. The cosmopolitan crowds of devotees at Vaishno Devi, in Varanasi, or in Tirumala bear testimony to this.

Because these activities were a part of a live, responsive structure of belief and thought, and because they were so presented to people, they found a great response in them, and with the passage of years these evolved with the evolution of thought and the common accounts of myths. What the Sabarimala incident highlights is something that has been a characteristic of present-day society in the country: the dichotomy that has crept into the study and evolution of philosophical thought which was earlier rooted in and integral to religion, and the static nature of beliefs and dogma that characterise Hinduism today. The one has been a direct result of the exposure of Indian scholars to Western philosophy and education, where philosophy has been straitjacketed and cut off from civil society and made a rarefied, esoteric area of study; and the other has been handed over to mendicants, semi-literate priests and sadhus who flourished as illiteracy grew and sat like a blight on people.

The process of inquiry has retreated from the Hindu religion, and has been confined to some scholars in universities and other institutions - increasingly in the affluent and comfortable West. Great court is paid to Western scholars of Indian philosophy, from Max Mueller to Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. It is as if Indian philosophical thought gains validity when it is studied by Western scholars. The links with the people of India have become virtually non-existent; occasionally some scholars resident abroad - or the much acclaimed Western scholars - will come to the country and spend some time with a few mahants and local scholars, something that has nothing to do with and does not affect society at all. And almost at the same time the once dynamic nature of mythmaking and the explicatory nature of collective acts of devotion - such as the Kumbh Mela - are increasingly lost in the coils of dogma that cannot be questioned, as questioning is equated with heresy and is not uncommonly met with violence.

Many years ago Dr. S. Radhakrishnan noticed this growing trait and wrote of it in anguished terms. In his two volume Indian Philosophy he writes: "It is forgotten that religion, as it is today, is itself the product of ages of change; and there is no reason why its forms should not undergo fresh changes so long as the spirit demands it... To say that the dead forms, which have no vital truth to support them, are too ancient and venerable to be tampered with, only prolongs the suffering of the patient who is ailing from the poison generated by the putrid waste of the past" (Vol. II, page 777). The almost desperate embracing of Western thought by scholars of religion, moving away from the people, has robbed it of its vitality, induced a deadness and bigotry.

If the Sabarimala incident exposes anything, it exposes this tragic condition of religious inquiry in the country. But perhaps, in a slow reversal, philosophic inquiry will return not just to the country, but become accessible to the people. It has happened in other areas of activity, like information technology, so the thought is not entirely fanciful.