The origin of Aum

 

The following thesis is likely to scandalize many Hindus. It concerns the venerable sound Om, or Aum. This was chosen by the Vedic editor, known only as “editor” (Vyasa), to be the very first word of the Rg-Veda: Aum agnim ile…, “I worship the Fire…” Its written form, the Aum sign, is universally recognized as the symbol of Hinduism. So, a lot is at stake when we open the discussion on its origin.

What I will be saying here is essentially that Hindu spirituality, which since Swami Vivekananda calls itself “scientific”, has evolved just like science. The truth was not revealed by a supernatural being at the beginning. Instead, the first discoveries were humble and then a gradual progress was made.

 

Reincarnation

Thus, the doctrine of reincarnation and karma was not there since the beginning. On the contrary, the Rg-Veda is silent about it, and the Chandogya Upanishad explicitly describes how it was newly introduced. Attention, please: it is not the much-maligned “Western Orientalists” who invented this, but the most venerated Hindu scripture itself that says it.

This does not imply that the belief in reincarnation didn’t exist in Vedic times. Just like Vedic Sanskrit was only one among several Indo-Aryan dialects (which have brought forth the present North-Indian languages),  and just like the Vedic religious tradition was but one among several (preserved in the much later recorded Puranas), beliefs about the afterlife were several and coexisted. We similarly find belief in reincarnation, belief in an afterlife and the belief that everything ended at death existed side by side among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples.

But fact remains that in the Rg-Veda, the belief in reincarnation is absent. Instead, there was an explicit belief, informing a funeral ritual, that human souls went to a specific area of the starry sky. Hindus have e-mailed me many verses from the Rg-Veda which in their opinion contained a reference to reincarnation – mostly the very verses about which I had shown that they are about something else, usually about the restoration of health and vitality after an illness, rather than about a new body after death. Closer analysis has so far failed to find any clear mention of reincarnation – thus proving the Upanishadic information about reincarnation as a new doctrine.

Those who read reincarnation into Rg-Vedic verses display a very typical phenomenon among religious types the world over: they project their present beliefs onto the whole tradition. In reality, their present beliefs have a historical origin, and were not present in early stages of their tradition. In this case, the belief in reincarnation was newly introduced and proved very convincing. People who practiced meditation reported that one side-effect of it was the remembering of past lives. The Buddha even claimed to know all his past lives and recounted past events with the additional information that back then, he himself was in this or that incarnation.

Then it was further developed, and a difference with widespread tribal beliefs in reincarnation set in, by the combination with the Vedic notion of karma, “action”, in particular “action at a distance”. Just as a Vedic sacrifice set in motion a subtle mechanic that caused the materialization of the desired event (victory on the battlefield, restoration of health, a woman’s favours), the ethical contents of your life set in motion a subtle mechanic causing the events of your next life.

We are not concerned here with whether this belief is true or false, only with the fact that it was a historical development. First the doctrine of reincarnation and karma did not exist, then it was adopted, then it was further developed. It was not revealed at the beginning and then preserved as best as possible; no, it was gradually discovered. There was progress inside India’s religious traditions. 

 

Aum

The spiritual significance of the syllable Om or Aum is described in the Mandukya Upanishad and in many more recent works. Its phonetic components A, U and M are said to correspond to the three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, sleeping. Similarly, it should correspond to other threesomes, such as Earth-Atmosphere-Heaven and Sattvas-Rajas-Tamas (the three qualities: Transparency-Energy-Mass).

Its origin is said to lie with yogis who, immersed in meditation, heard this sound. In different forms of yoga, known collectively as Nada-yoga, this internal hearing of sounds is deemed a mark of yogic accomplishment. The humming sound or temple-bell sound was vocalized as Aum. This way, the origin of Aum is linked with the origin of yoga.

Our general thesis will therefore be that yoga, like Aum, has a historical origin and development. We do not believe that it was age-old, revealed at the beginning of creation. It was a human discovery, that grew from its childhood forms to reach maturity in its classical form as laid down in parts of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Since then, it has also undergone transformations, such as the development of Hatha Yoga, and unfortunately also senile distortions.

Western scholars, convinced of the Aryan invasion theory, accepted that the spiritual sense of Aum has become established, but denied that this was were it originated. They preferred something down-to-earth which later got reinterpreted in a spiritual sense. So far, so good: I also think this is a realistic scenario, satisfying the demands of our generally evolutionist view of mankind. But because of the Aryan invasion theory, they perforce wanted to bring the ethnic confrontation with the “native Dravidians” in. So they decided the origin of Aum lay with a Dravidian word for “yes”, Aam.

This sounds convincing for those eager to be convinced, but there is no indication for it at all. Note that the first Dravidian writings are a thousand or more years younger than the first appearance of Aum in the Rg-Veda, and were produced in coastal Southeast India, thousands of kilometers from the cradle of the Rg-Veda: the Saraswati basin west of in present-day Haryana. Note also that Vedic Sanskrit shows some borrowing of words from unknown languages, but that borrowing from Dravidian (e.g. Mina, “fish”) picked up only later. So, that the Vedic seers would have borrowed such a central term from Dravidian is unlikely. It is not more than an ad hoc hypothesis, and not a very persuasive one either.

 

Dirghatamas

Dirghatamas is believed to have been the court-priest of the early Vedic king Bharata. This king patronized the origin of the Vedic tradition. He was a descendent of Puru, hence his tribe is called Paurava, and the clan of which he was the ancestor, is called Bharata. The Mahabharata describes a fraternal fight within this royal clan. India itself is named Bharat after him. The name Dirghatamas, “long darkness”, may be a nickname chosen for its descriptive aptness: he was known as a star-gazer, and some of his astronomical findings are mentioned in the hymns attributed to him, Rg-Veda 1:140-164. He is also said to be the brother of Bharadwaj, known as the principal author of Rg-Vedic book 6 and leader of the earliest clan of seers, the Angiras.

In the history of religion, everybody knows big names like the Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Few people know the lesser names, and if you ask the average man on the street in the West, none will know the name Dirghatamas. Even in India, only a minority will know it. But, together with Yajnavalkya, first formulator of the all-important doctrine of the Self (Atmavada), Dirghatamas was one of the key thinkers of mankind.

His most famous hymn is Rg-Veda 1:164. Among the celebrated elements from it, most people will know the simile of the two birds, one eating and the other just looking on (later a parable for the ego and the Self); the first division of the circle in 12 and in 360; the concept of creation through sacrifice; and the much-quoted (and sometimes abused) phrase Ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti, “truth is one, but the wise ones give it many names”. It is this hymn that also gave me the clue to the real origin of Aum.

 

The cow

What, then, does Dirghatamas say about the origin of Aum? Nothing explicit, for then it would be too clear and easy, and Hindus themselves could have been reminded of it on the best authority. As later explained in the Upanishads, the gods are fond of enigmatic expression, so you have to read between the lines for the true story. The juxtaposition of two elements is, in this case, significant.

On the one hand, verse 39 asks for the “syllable” of praise to the gods. The composer says it is a mystery, though known to the select people present. But the whole hymn talks of a sound not longer than a syllable.

On the other, in the preceding verses, the sound made by the cows is repeatedly mentioned, as well as the care of the cow for her young. The root  vat- means “year” (Latin vetus, “having years”, “old”), the word vatsa means “yearling”, “dependent child”, hence “calf”. What goes on between cow and calf is vatsalya, still the Hindi word for “tenderness”, “affection”. This affection is uttered by the cow’s lowing and the calf’s lowing back. Repeatedly, the cow is praised and the sound of the cow is invoked.

So my penny dropped: the syllable that encompasses all Vedic hymns, that is also used in the beginning of the opening hymn, Aum, is nothing but a human vocalization of the sound made by the cow. In English it is usually rendered as Mooh.

In some religions, it would be blasphemous to explain the most sacred sound as nothing but the lowing of the cow. Not so in Vedic Hinduism. The cow may or may not always have been inviolable, but she has always been held sacred. The cow was the centre of the Vedic cowherd’s economy. A Vedic boy grew up tending the cattle, like Krishna, a fulltime activity punctuated by the sound of cows lowing. Long before the yogi heard a sound during his meditation, the Vedic or pre-Vedic cowherd was familiar with the lowing of his cattle. This he vocalized as Aum and he imitated the sound in what he held most sacred: the hymns to the gods assembled in the Veda collections.

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Heathenism in Central Germany

 

My special friend Heidi convinced me to go along with her spiritual group De Kleine Herderstas to the borderland of the German states of Sachsen-Anhalt and Thüringen. So we went. In my case, unprepared.

Our residence was in the village Wickerode, near the town of Stolberg and bordering the village of Questenberg. On the latter’s hilltop, we saw the giant wreath on a pole, which is replaced once a year on Pentecost Day in a big ritual. It illustrated nicely how Heathenism had survived for centuries by taking a Christian guise.

 

Friedrich Barbarossa

The first place where we stopped to visit, was the fortress built by Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I, whom his rebellious Italian subjects called Barbarossa, “redbeard” (r.1151-90). It is on a hilltop in Kyffhaüser, from kaifen, “fight”, hence a “military house” or “fortress”. An excellent guide showed us around the place, which I had never thought of nor realized that it even existed. He reigned over a united empire, including my own dukedom of Brabant, and his rule was fondly remembered by the people as a time without pestilence or famines and limited warfare. He died during the third crusade, drowning while crossing the … river in Southeastern Anatolia. (His grandson and successor Friedrich II would conclude a peace treaty with the Muslim ruler of Jerusalem securing the safe passage for Christian pilgrims that had been the object of the Crusades to begin with.)

Half of his army went back home, thinking his death was a bad omen. The other half continued but failed to conquer Jerusalem. Friedrich Barbarossa’s corpse, meant to be buried in Jerusalem, was lost. But the people didn’t believe he had really died. According to a legend traceable to 1519, he is only sleeping, waiting in a cave for the occasion to rescue his people when the need is really high. Every hundred years, a dwarf comes out of the cave to see if the ravens are still circling overhead. When they finally don’t, time will be ripe for his return. Otherwise, another hundred years of slumber follows. It is believed that in 1990, exactly 800 years after his death, he had a big hand in reuniting the two Germanys.   

A giant and really beautiful statue adorns the fort. It shows a sitting Barbarossa in his slumber, with one eye half-open, waiting for the sign to wake up and save us. On top of it, another, less inspiring giant statue was built: on horseback, Kaiser Wilhelm I, fresh from his victory over France and the founding of the Second Empire in 1871, overlooks the surroundings. Former army men had it built ca. 1890 because they thought this at last was the salvation the German people had longed for.

Anyway, skeptics say that the legend of a king sleeping underground and biding his time to save his people is an old one, told among others of king Arthur, and also of Barbarossa’s successor Friedrich II. It was reapplied to Barbarossa when he was remembered after his death as a good ruler, and especially during the Napoleonic wars when the Romantically animated Germans longed for national unity. Barbarossa, the once and future Emperor!

 

Thomas Müntzer

We also paid a visit to the Panorama museum in Bad Frankenhausen, built by the erstwhile German Democratic Republic. It houses a giant circular painting by Werner Tübke, commissioned in 1976 to depict the peasant revolt of the 1520s. After a long preparation, he painted it in 1983-87. The Museum was purposely constructed to house this one painting, 14 meters in height and 123 meters around. It opened its doors on 24 September 1989, less than two months before the Berlin Wall fell. The GDR thereby honoured the memory of the peasant revolt led by Thomas Müntzer.

In Marxist historiography, peasant revolts were a regular and necessary feature of premodern society, but invariably ended in failure: mostly they were defeated, or if they succeeded, the leaders simply took their place in the existing power structure, changing its personnel but not its basic oppressive features. These revolts could only be turned into a successful and enduring revolution when they disposed of a scientific theory and method, viz. Marxism itself. This way, the “early bourgeois” revolt against the power of the Church and the nobility was a meritorious attempt at creating a more just society, but the conditions were not yet ripe for its completion.

What happened was that in 1524-25, the peasant revolt which had briefly been in control of a large tract of central Germany, was defeated . Its military and ideological leaders, Heinrich Pfeiffer and Thomas Müntzer, were beheaded on 27 May 1525.

Müntzer was a young priest who had followed Martin Luther in his Reform of Christianity. He left the Catholic priesthood and married, but remained very active as a preacher. Like the contemporary Anabaptists in Western Germany and Frisia (and like the followers of the Zoroastrian rebel Mazdak in Iran a thousand years earlier), Müntzer was a bit of a  millenniarist and utopianist. He expected the Second Coming of Jesus, and his utopian society was based on the selection of a specific part of the Christian message: the glorification of poverty and the need of justice to the poor.

As depicted by Tübke, the troops mobilized by the nobility for the final battle were far better equipped and trained, and the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Jesus did not descend to help his faithful, and the utopian society was postponed sine die.

Another good thing which the GDR admittedly did, was to erect a statue for Müntzer in the historical centre of his birthplace Stolberg. His birthhouse burnt down in the 19^th century, but pieces that could be saved from the fire were included in this tasteful structure. The sculpture was inaugurated in 1989, 500 years after his birth, and in the nick of time before the Wende.

 

The mythology road

In the town of Thale, we walked down the Mythology Road. Twelve statues and an additional number of sculptures and sculpted benches adorn the city park (around the statue “to the victims of fascism”) and the surrounding streets ending in the Karl Marxstrasse. They were all taken from Germanic mythology, featuring Wotan, the world tree Yggdrasil, the goddess Freia and the god Balder (not yet finished), the god Aegir, the ring Draufnir, the dragon Nidhogg etc.

It is quite a statement that this German town, very marked by its GDR heritage, now chooses to attract tourists (in a bid to offset the region’s job losses) by building a path devoted to the Germanic gods. Apparently the nearby hilltop called Hexentanzplatz (“witches’ dancing-place”) had already given the region a Heathen association, so they exploited it further. They don’t even hide behind the “Scandinavian” origin of the book the Edda which describes these gods, where Christianization took place centuries later and the Heathen heritage was preserved better. Instead, they boldly name the supreme god Wotan, the German form, rather than Odin in the Scandinavian epic. It seems the Germans are shaking off the Leftist stranglehold which demonized the entire German history including their ancient religion.

By contrast, in the West, at the Externsteine, a natural formation of standing rocks, which we revisited on the way home, political conformity still reigns supreme. On the rocks, there is a 12^th-century sculpture depicting the victory of Christianity over Heathenism, with a Jesus taken off the cross in the upper half, and the Irminsul (“great pillar”, symbol of Heathenism) being broken underfoot, with the dragon at the foot of the Heathen world-tree down below. In the museum, this significant sculpture is hardly mentioned, and the Irminsul, easily recognizable as such, is turned into just a palm-tree. This fits in with the strongly highlighted fact that the Nazis organized archeological diggings at the site, hoping to find traces of Germanic use, but found nothing. This again fits the Christian attempt to downplay the Heathen prehistory everywhere (e.g. to turn Hindu beliefs into Christian influences in disguise) and to deny the Christian destruction of Paganism.

But there is, in spite of the Nazis, no need for a specifically Germanic prehistory. The Indo-Europeans including their Germanic component may have entered the region fairly late, say 2000 BC, which is long after it was inhabited by humans. The place was, according to archeologists, used in the Stone Age, and for millennia it lay near a much-used trade road. Given the mentality of the age, it would be strange if such a remarkable feature of nature were not a cultic place. The rocks themselves have a hole where the rising sun shines through on Solstice day, a characteristic of numerous cultic places. It also has an altar stone, predictably Christianized. So the site is one of the thousands of Pagan cultic sites that were purposely turned into chapels or on which churches were built. This was in tune with Pope Gregory’s instructions to let the Pagan population continue to gather at its Pagan sites, but for a Christian service, so that they could gradually adapt to the new religion. Till today, this policy is applied by the missionaries as a matter of “inculturation”.

That the Irminsul stood at or near the Externsteine was a Romantic belief but need not be true. It was a general symbol of Heathenism, upheld by the Saxons in their resistance against the Christian emperor Charlemagne. He is reported to have ordered it broken down, but no details are available on its whereabouts. He also had thousands of recalcitrant Saxons killed, earning him the nickname “slaughterer of the Saxons”. That sealed the Christianization of the area. Still, we were surprised to see how much of the pre-Christian religion survived a millennium of Christian supremacy.

 

Goseck

We had been in Goseck (though not in the museum) and in Nebra before, but now we really took the time to understand the sites and what was discovered there. Built nearly 5000 years BC, Goseck is one of the oldest solar observatories in the world, to my knowledge the oldest one identified as such, preceding Stonehenge by more than two thousand years. Unlike the later generation of stone circles, such as the later phases of the repeatedly redesigned construction at Stonehenge, it does not yet contain a reference to the 18-year cycle of the Lunar Nodes, the two points of intersection between the Lunar and the Solar cycle, i.e. the points where eclipses occur. But it does make the year cycle visible, with the extremes of the Solstices.

The most important festival for the builders of this woodhenge was clearly the Winter Solstice or Yuletide. Gates mark the places where the sunrays fall at sunrise and sunset on the Solstice day. The second  most important one was not the Spring Equinox (or Ostara, Easter). Nor was it the Summer solstice, a paradoxical day on which the sun culminates at its northernmost point, but also starts its descent to the south. It was May Day or the Walpurgis night (30 April, 1 May), nearly at the midpoint of spring. This is when the sun is already very high and still rising, a more optimistic time than the Summer Solstice. The sunrise and sunset on this day are marked by a smaller opening in the wooden fence.

This confirms the modern Pagan use of the “eight year festivals”: both the points defining the seasons, viz. the Solstices and Equinoxes, and the seasonal midpoints. The former probably received a higher emphasis among the Germanic tribes, the latter among the Celts, which is why they are mostly known by their Celtic names: mid-spring or Beltane, mid-summer of Lughnasad, mid-autumn or Samhain, and mid-winter or Imbolc. Both types of festival were already in evidence 7000 years ago in Goseck.

 

Nebra

The village of Nebra has built an archeo-astronomy museum around one small artifact found less than fifteen years ago: the disk of Nebra. In about 1600 BC, the transition point between the early and late bronze age, the disk was made out of copper, with golden images of celestial bodies. It shows the crescent moon and 32 stars in total, of which only the “Seven Sisters” or Pleiades form a recognizable asterism. According to Nebra researchers, it shows the lunar phase (three days after New Moon) at the time of conjunction with the Pleiades, and marks the time when an extra thirteenth lunar month had to be inserted so that the lunar year could keep pace with the solar year. I am not sure I am convinced by this explanation, but it makes sense.

Later, two sidebars were added marking the distance between the sunrise points at Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice. After a few generations, when the disk’s original usage had been forgotten, it was thrown in a grave together with a host of weapons and utensils.

Here again, the village of Nebra shows the will of the Germans in the former GDR to endow itself with a new identity. If the disk, or the woodhenge at Goseck, had been discovered in the age of German nationalism, a cult would have grown up around them extolling them as national heritage. Now this is completely absent. The approach is purely scientific.

Effectively, when the disk was made, the area may already have been Indo-Europeanized, but just as likely Celticized as Germanicized. The Germanic languages had their first known focus in northern Germany, whence they gradually expanded. The Celtic languages were at that time dominant in Central Europe, and even non-Celtic tribes adopted Celtic nomenclature because it conferred prestige. Other branches of Indo-European which have later disappeared may also have been involved. When the stellar observatory at Goseck was built, the region was probably not yet Indo-European-speaking at all, let alone Germanic-speaking.

 

Conclusion

This trip convinced us that Heathenism is doing well, thank you. With the decline of Christianity there is more openness towards the pre-Christian heritage. It is also more relaxed than in the Romantic and nationalist periods, when this tradition was distorted by contemporary ideological fashions.

We cannot hope to get a fully satisfying spirituality out of our ancestral traditions. Probably our forebears had not more than the ritual traditions and the mythology we vaguely know. Or if they did have some kind of yogic practice, it has at any rate been lost irretrievably. So to an extent, we have to borrow from the Orient or develop new insights and techniques. However, a tradition which has been murdered by Christianity has a right to resume its life. In that sense, we should be glad to see the ongoing revival of Heathenism.

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The lost honour of India studies

 

S.N. Balagangadhara, better known as Balu, is Professor of Comparative Culture Studies in Ghent University, Belgium. Balu is a Kannadiga Brahmin by birth, a former Marxist, and his discourse has a very in-your-face quality. In his latest book, Reconceptualizing India Studies (Oxford University Press 2012), the attentive reader will see a critique of the Indological establishment in the West and the political and cultural establishment in India. Like Rajiv Malhotra’s recent works, it questions their legitimacy. The reigning Indologists and India-watchers would do well to read it.

 

Orientalism

Two of the eight papers that make up the book deal with Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism (1977). Although Balu was very critical of Said in an article reacting to his uncritical obituaries, here he is quite generous with his praise: “He has provided us with the ‘Archimedean point’ to move the world.” (p.48) Not a word about the books refuting Said on numerous points of fact and on his interpretative framework, which has the character of a conspiracy theory: all those scholars were only pretending their many viewpoints (often identifying with the culture studied) and were in fact agents of colonialism.

Anyway, to the extent that Said is right, and that the colonial-age Orientalists were being unfair to Asia, we must see the mental constraints on all scholars of that period. The Orientalists were determined by the thinking of their societies: “Consider the possibility of Albert Einstein’s being born as a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas’s. Would he have been able to formulate the theory of relativity? Given what we know about human knowledge today, our answer can only be in the negative: he would not have had access to the experimental data and the theoretical concepts required to frame his theories. In this sense, even a genius is limited by his time.” (p.46)

Orientalism is a useful notion at least in analyzing Western attitudes to India and Indians in the present. Analyzing the examples of Jeffrey Kripal’s and Paul Courtright’s writings on the Hindu saint Ramakrishna and on the Hindu deity Ganesha, he shows how Western scholarship is marked by fundamental logical and conceptual flaws (such as circular reasoning, proving what has first been assumed) and by the tendency to talk about rather than with Indians. Their trivializing theses are characterized as “violence” (p.135) and “blind” (p.139). Scholarship should advance knowledge, but these academics are only fostering colonial-originated prejudices.

The concept of Orientalism has two roots, one of which was important to understand Said’s personal stake in it, the other to appreciate the concept’s enormous popularity. Like all Middle-Eastern Christians, he was wary of the imperialist designs of Latin Christianity, which he saw as the origin of its secularized expression, the science of Orientalism (which did indeed start with the late-medieval outreach of Rome to the Middle-Eastern Christians). At the same time, his strongly pro-Muslim sympathy, which took the form of culpabilizing any scholarly critique of Islam as a Western imperialist project, was due to the Christians’ centuries of living as Dhimmi-s (“charter people”, protected ones), used to bending before and singing the praises of Islam. Said’s defence of Islam, over 90% of his book and the topic of several other publications of his, together with his sowing suspicions against Western scholarship, were exactly what trendy Western and westernized intellectuals needed, and what the Islamic world has gainfully instrumentalized since.

                Balu does not go into the autonomous precolonial imperialism of Islam, a factor of religious riots in South Asia quite independent of colonial rule and its heir, the secular state. But in several other chapters, he identifies a more contemporary factor of communal violence: the worldview underlying that same “secular” state.

 

Secularism

Look at the secularists, who for decades now have gone gaga over Said’s concept of Orientalism: “Orientalism is reproduced in the name of a critique of Orientalism. It is completely irrelevant whether one uses a Marx, a Weber or a Max Müller to do so. (…) the result is the same: uninteresting trivia, as far as the growth of human knowledge is concerned; but pernicious in its effect as far as Indian intellectuals are concerned.” (p.47) India has produced intellectual giants like (limiting ourselves to the 20^th century:) R.C. Majumdar, P.V. Kane or A.K. Coomaraswamy, but the Indian secularists are intellectually very poor copies of their Western role models.

The most acute case of “Orientalism” in the Saidian sense in precisely Nehruvian secularism, the consensus viewpoint shared by most established academics and media. Thus, about caste, “Nehru used Orientalist descriptions of the Indian society of his day and made their facts his own.” (p.74) Citing as example a Western India-watcher, Balu notes that the latter “is not accounting for the Indian caste system by using the notion of fossilized coalitions in India; he is trying to establish the truth of Nehru’s observations (that is, the truth of the Orientalist descriptions of India)”, because the social sciences “where uncontested, (…) presuppose the truth of the Orientalist descriptions of non-Western cultures.” (p.74) That is the problem of the existing “South Asia Studies” in a nutshell. It underscores the need for more serious comparative studies, a field in which Balu has been a pioneer.

This critique applies especially to the dominant treatment of India’s “communal” problem: “When Indian intellectuals use existing theories about religion and its history – for example, to analyse ‘Hindu-Muslim’ strife – they reproduce, both directly and indirectly, what the West has been saying so far. (…) the ‘secularist’ discourse about this issue can hardly be distinguished – both in terms of the contents or the vocabulary – from Orientalist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (p.47) Secularism is the direct heir of the colonial dispensation.

Balu’s explanation of intercommunal relations in India and the state’s role therein is original and clear. In his opinion, the secular state is not there to curb religious violence, but is in fact the cause of this violence. He focuses on its position in the question of religious conversion, which is forbidden in some neighbouring countries and demanded to be forbidden by many Hindus (both Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu nationalists). But it is upheld as a right by the Muslims and especially by the Christian missionaries -- and by the “secular” state. The latter clearly takes a partisan stand in doing so; and it would also be partisan if it did the opposite. It is impossible to be impartisan.

                The whole “secular” discourse on “religion” and intercommunal relations is borrowed from Christianity. The basic framework to think about religion is informed by Western experiences and fails to see the radical difference between these and the native traditions: “the secular state assumes that the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions are instances of the same kind” (p.203). In realities, Hindus and Parsis don’t missionize and refrain from basing their religions on a defining truth claim. By contrast, Christianity and Islam believe they offer the truth, and consequently want everyone to accept it.

Secularists decry as cheap Hindu propaganda the assertion that Hinduism is naturally pluralistic and innocent of religious strife and exclusivism, which is considered to be typical of the converting religions. But in fact, Christian missionaries and Muslim observers noted the absence of sectarian violence among the Hindus: “The famous Muslim traveler to India, Alberuni, also noted the absence of religious rivalry among the Hindus”. (p.205) This Hindu phenomenon even affects Alberuni’s own community: there is much more violence between rivaling Muslim sects in Islamic Pakistan than in Hindu-populated India. If the secularists want to promote religious harmony, as they claim, they had better promote traditional Indian values rather than side with Christianity and Islam.

 

Conclusion

Balu’s theses are uncomfortable and sure to provoke debate. So far, the attitude of the India-watching class and of the elites in India has been to ignore any criticism of their worldview. But this man’s stature as a leading professor who heads a very active research department in a major secularist university in the West will make many of them sit up and notice.

On the whole, Balu’s thesis is optimistic. He offers solutions to the problems he analyzes, mostly solutions that he himself has already worked out or has been practising for years. It is not as if any fate condemns Indian policy and academic India-watching to their present prejudices. He also believes in the promise of the age of globalization, and thinks Indians and Europeans genuinely have something to offer each other.

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Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary

The revolutionary movement was an epic of bravery and self-sacrifice, and this deserves to be celebrated. Indians proved that they were willing to fight and would no longer put up with the ignominy of foreign rule. In that context, young Bhagat Singh, who was sought for his killing policeman John Saunders, committed his attack on the Central Assembly in 1929. However, here we want to focus on the lessons to be drawn from this experience, and therefore we will pay attention to the mistakes made.

At the time, the Congress leadership incarnated in Mahatma Gandhi condemned these violent acts in pursuit of a cause which was also his own, viz. freedom from British colonial rule. Congress president Madan Mohan Malaviya approached the British authorities for clemency to Bhagat Singh, which was not granted, but the movement's official judgment of Bhagat Singh's act was still negative. It was merely influenced a bit by the freedom fighter's great popularity. So, at age 23, he was hanged.

Was Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of Bhagat Singh and of the revolutionaries in general correct? For him, it was first of all a moral issue: freedom should not be won at the cost of British or Indian lives. If the opponent could be violent, we should show our moral superiority by not being violent. This position should not be taken as lightly as the critics of Gandhi (those of the left a well as those of the right) tend to do. He who fires the first bullet generally doesn't know what kind of conflict he is letting himself in for. World War 1, the conflict by which everything was measured in those days, started with young men singing ang carring flowers in their rifles on the way to the front, but ended up becoming four years of miserable trench warfare, poison gas, and futile offensives resulting in mass death. But even if the quantity of violence can be contained, that first bullet still remains morally reprehensible. That killed policeman is likely just following orders, he has a grieving family too, and even if he is guilty he is not so to the extent that you have a right to execute the death penalty.

But to Gandhi, non-violence was not just a moral stance, it was also a strategy. By being non-violent, his activists would appeal to the colonial rulers' conscience and thus convince them to vacate India. The Indian republic formally still upholds the myth that this Gandhian strategy of non-violence won India's freedom. In fact, in the crucial years of World War 2 and its aftermath, Gandhi was politically paralyzed and his only campaign, the Quit India movement of August 1942, was a failure and anything but non-violent. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister during the transfer of power, testified later in an interview that Gandhi's influence on the decesion to decolonize had been "minimal".

 

On the contrary, purely military factors had been decisive: the weakening of British power by the war and by its economic effects, and the creation of a large Indian army of which the loyalty had become doubtful. Whereas Gandhi had given a call for boycotting the incipient war effort, the business class massively made money out of the war production (after the US, India became the great economic victor of the war), and Mohammed Ali Jinnah's Muslim League as well as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's Hindy Mahasabha called on Indian young men to join the army. This they did in their millions, and Indian troops were crucial for the Allied victories in North Africa, Iraq and Southeast Asia. During the war, many Indian soldiers in Axis captivity defected to Subhas Chandra Bose's Azad Hind Fauz, and after the war, the Naval Mutiny had driven home to the British that their Indian troops would not obey their foreign masters in the event of a national revolution.

As a strategy, Gandhi's non-violence was not much of a success. In South Africa, for instance, the African National Congress adopted it as their policy until the political position of the Blacks had deteriorated so much and the prospects for advancement so bleak that it founded an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). In India it was discredited further when Gandhi refused to use his ultimate pressure instrument, the fast unto death, against his second major opponent, the Muslim League, when it forced the Partition and the creation of Pakistan on an unwilling India. It has become a habit among Indians of all political persuasions to blame the British for the Partition, but in fact the British wanted none of the idea when Jinnah presented it to them. Only in 1947 did they start considering it inevitable -- but so did the Congress leaders, including, by June 1947, the Mahatma himself. At any rate, it was the Muslim League that had been working overtime to push its Pakistan plan, which it had officially adopted in 1940.

It is only as a moral stand that Gandhian non-violence proved durable. As a strategy, it moved some individual minds but it did not shake the colonial power structure. But does this mean that Bhagat Singh's strategy was better?
 

In the short run, it was an obvious failure as well. First of all, the Central Assembly was a symbol of the colonial dispensation, no doubt, but it was also an embodiment of India's incipient democracy. Surely, the revolutionaries could have chosen a less ambiguous symbol of British rule. Secondly, the revolutionaries threatened the lives of individual British administrators and security personnel (which is why they preferred to deal with Gandhi and his non-violence) but not the colonial establishment. All they achieved was that they themselves ended up in jail or on the gallows. But if the movement had caught on, if political leaders had supported it, if foreign powers had provided weapons and safe havens, it could have worked. The British in India were very few, and it is said that the British Empire was based on bluff. There is no way the British could have held on in India if the revolutionary movement had grown from stray acts of terrorism to a coordinated and purposeful effort on a larger scale.

In the 1970s, as I remember vividly, our neighbour Germany was rocked by the abductions and bomb attacks of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction). When the first-generation leadership was in prison, the second generation committed abductions to force the authorities into setting them free. One of them, Horst Mahler (who later converted to the right), refused this forcible release. He was allowed to explain his motive on TV. While in prison, he had joined the Maoist party Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), and said his party preferred organized mass revolution at the right time to the stray acts of terror of the RAF. He concluded with an optimistic: "Onwards, with the KPD!" This analysis was historically correct: when an anarchist managed to kill the Czar in 1881, he found that it was easy to kill an indidual czar but very difficult to dislodge the czarist power structure. Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher who had inspired the RAF, commented that acts of terrorism can be useful in a revolutionary situation, when the masses only need a trigger to join the action; but that, alas, what prevailed in Germany at that time was a counterrevolutionary situation.

Applying this to Bhagat Singh's situation, we can say that the situation in India was by no means ripe. Stray acts of violence were like seeds falling on the rock, because the masses were not ready for violence, and because the political leadership had opted for another strategy. Gandhian non-violence may or may not have been the right choice, but it resonated with the Indian masses. It also formed a continuum with the strategy of the so-called moderates, reformers who sought to achieve big changes by using to the fullest the little steps that were possible within the system. These forces had prepared the ground for a different form of activism than the armed struggle of the revolutionaries.

Another shortcoming of the revolutionary movement was the lack of a consistent ideology. The first revolutionaries in Bengal, including Sri Aurobindo, were animated by an unfettered nationalism. It was for them that Savarkar translated the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini's writings. To dissuade them from anarchic terrorism against British individuals, the authorities gave them Marxist literature in prison, because orthodox Marxism believes in mass violence once the revolution arrives, but not in stray acts of violence. The British would take care that the great revolution never came, and meanwhile the terrorists-turned-Marxists would remain physically harmless. That is how Bengal as the hotbed of revolutionary nationalism became the centre of Indian Marxism.

However, it would be wrong to see that British calculation as the only factor of Marx' popularity in India. After the Bolshevik Revolution, many naïve but action-oriented youngsters the world over waxed enthusiastic over this new socialist utopia. The Panjabi student Bhagat Singh was likewise touched, and called himself a socialist. He spread the slogan "Inqilab zindabad" (Persian-Urdu: "long live the revolution"), which the Soviets had used to garner support among the Central-Asian Muslims against the Czar, a common target of the Muslims and the Bolsheviks. Bhagat Singh was executed, but his ideological preference went on to become independent India's official economic policy. With the benefit of hindsight, contemporary Indians judge socialism one of their country's most tragic failures. While Indians abroad were impressively successful as businessmen, India itself became proverbially poor under Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors. We can forgive young Bhagat Singh, he hadn't thought about those matters and died too young to get much real-life experience. He is remembered not for his ideological excursions, only for his nationalist acts.

We may conclude that Bhagat Singh cannot serve as an example to be emulated by today's Indians. His political-economic vision, still inarticulate, was to prove wrong. His strategy was not the best for his country at that time, though it deserved a more nuanced judgment than Gandhiji's condemnation. His love of his nation, however, was genuine and heartfelt. His acts were morally ambiguous but undoubtedly patriotic and heroic. It is in that sense that Bhagat Singh must be remembered.



(Law Animated World, Hyderabad, 15 March 2013)

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No rebirth in the Rg-Veda

  

            In my article about Sati, I had written that Sati dates back to the time when the Hindu people did not yet believe in reincarnation, and that it was also known among other people who didn’t have the doctrine of reincarnation, such as the ancient Egyptians and Chinese. Predictably, some Hindus reacted furiously, stating that Hindus had always believed in reincarnation and quoting chapter and verse from the Vedas to prove it. Here is my answer: the Rg-Veda, at least, does not contain the doctrine of reincarnation at all, and it is a post-Rg-Vedic text that explicitly introduces it. So, this is not a foreigner’s answer, it is the answer of one of India’s own great seers.

The concept of reincarnation is first explained in the Chandogya Upanishad. The Brahmin young man Shvetaketu returns home from his studies, where he supposedly has learned all Vedic knowledge including the core doctrine of the Upanishads (the Self, Atmavada), and meets his childhood friend from the Kshatriya caste, who quizzes him about the knowledge he has gained. Has he learned what happens to us after death? No, admits Shvetaketu, that wasn’t part of my curriculum. So we can already conclude that the core doctrine of the Upanishads is not dependent on a theory of the afterlife, such as the theory of reincarnation.

In Buddhism and Jainism, reincarnation is absolutely central, and it is fair to laugh at Western converts who insist on declaring themselves Buddhists but refuse to accept reincarnation. In Hinduism, by contrast, it is merely the factual situation that most people believe in reincarnation, but the core doctrine in its original form is not dependent on it. The goal of Buddhist meditation may be conceived as stopping the wheel of reincarnations, but the goal of Hindu meditation is not so defined. Check Patanjali, who mentions knowledge of past lives in passing, but doesn’t define the goal of yoga in terms of the reincarnation cycle. It is simply, technically, the isolation (Kaivalya) of consciousness from its field of objects in which it is mostly entangled, egardless of what happens to the conscuious subject before birth or after death. Buddhism in its Zen form has rediscovered this view, where the here and now is all-important and beliefs about past lives or the afterlife don’t matter. Hindus, by contrast, have become crypto-Buddhists and have come to believe that liberation means stopping the wheel of reincarnation. Not so Shvetaketu.

Now, when even Shvetaketu’s father Uddalaka doesn’t know the answer to this question, they go and ask the king. He turns out to know, and to have known all along. So he teaches them the doctrine of reincarnation for the very first time in Vedic literature and in all the writings of mankind. He also says that this doctrine is commonly believed in among Kshatriyas. No wonder the doctrine is so central in the traditions of Mahavira Jina and the Buddha, both Kshatriyas. He finally reveals that this belief is the secret of the Kshatriyas’ power. Indeed, those who consider their bodies as merely clothes they can take off and replace with new ones, are not afraid to kill or to die, they are fearless and win the battles, and hence they enjoy the power.

The Upanishadic account is confirmed by the reincarnation doctrine’s absence in the Rg-Veda. Yet, my reader claims: “Contrary to mischievous propaganda taking prominence in last few months, Vedas have their foundations in theory of rebirth.” Note first of all the immature debater’s assumption that a statement with which he disagrees must necessarily be born from “mischievous” motives. In reality, a statement may be right or may be wrong regardless of the speaker’s motives; but let that pass.

The reader claims: “Almost all mantras of Vedas implicitly assume that rebirth happens across various species and situations as per Karma or actions of the soul.” This is definitely untrue. He may project his own beliefs onto the  Vedic mantras, but most of these can be read without evoking in the reader’s mind the notion of reincarnation or any other doctrine of a life after death. For instance, the two most famous mantras, Vishvamitra’s Gayatri Mantra and Vasishtha’s Mrtyunjaya Mantra, are unrelated to reincarnation or to the afterlife. The first one is a hymn to the rising sun and asks it to enlighten the worshipper’s mind. The second one is a hymn to Shiva and asks him to deliver the worshipper from mortality. Come to think of it, this presupposes exactly that death is considered the problem, unlike in the doctrine of reincarnation, where rebirth (i.e. non-death) is an automatic given, and completely unlike the Buddhist and generalized Hindu belief that continuous rebirth is the problem and that liberation consists in getting rid of these repeated rebirths.

            The reader them claims to “provide some mantras from [the] Vedas that specifically talk of rebirth”, and starts with RV 10.59.6-7: “O Blissful Ishwar, Please provide us again healthy eyes and other sense organs in next birth. Please provide us powerful vitality, mind, intellect, valor again and again in next births. We achieve bliss in this life and future lives. May we keep looking up to your glory always. Keep us in peace with your blessings. O Ishwar, you provide us space, earth and other elements again and again so that our sense organs function. You provide us the ability to have good health and enjoy life in every birth. You make us strong again and again in various births.” But in fact, the Sankrit original doesn’t mention rebirth (punarjanma), it merely asks the god to give this vitality etc. “again”, i.e. after having lost it. The hymn is about “quickened vigour” and “health-giving medicine”, i.e. about health and longevity, about non-death. It requires very special pleading to read multiple lives into this.

The source quoted is 19^th-century reformer Dayananda Saraswati’s notoriously fanciful translation, in which e.g. the names of the different gods are rendered as “God”, making the Vedic seers into quasi-Christians. Like many modern Hindus, he projected his own Christian-influenced beliefs onto the Vedic text. Most Hindus read the Vedas, to the extent that they read them at all, through Puranic lenses, applying the post-Vedic Hinduism which Dayanand Saraswati claimed to despise but which still determined his interpretation to a large extent. What he added and what set him apart from mainstream Hinduism in his day, was that he also tried to bring in quasi-Protestant monotheism and anti-idolatry which he had interiorized from his colonial masters. But in this case, it is not a Christian but a post-Vedic Hindu notion of reincarnation that he projects onto the Rg-Vedic verses.

The reader then quotes Rg-Veda 1.24.1-2: “Question: Whom do we consider the most pure? Who is the most enlightened one in entire world. Who provides us mother and father again in the world after gifting us ultimate bliss or Mukti? Answer: The self-enlightening, eternal, ever-free Ishwar alone is most pure. He alone provides us mother and father again in the world after gifting us ultimate bliss or Mukti.”

The word Mukti (freedom, liberation) and the concept of ultimate bliss are completely imaginary here, the special pleading that pervades later Hindu reading of the Vedic compositions. The original speaks of “seeing” father and mother, whom we shall indeed see in the hereafter. That is what the Rg-Vedic seers  believed in: the same story which we tell our children, viz. that our dead relatives are waiting for us in the hereafter. Sometimes we tell our children also that that particular star over there is where grandfather has gone to; and a Brahmanic funeral ritual (which, a Tamil Brahmin told me, is still performed) does indeed specify which part of the starry sky welcomes the deceased souls. This hereafter is incompatible with the notion of reincarnation. The verse contains the word “punah” (again), and this seems to be reason enough for our reader to believe that reincarnation is meant.  

That’s it for the Rg-Veda. The other quotes which the reader gives, are taken from the younger Yajur- and Atharva-Veda. They were partly contemporaneous with the older Upanishads, and it is not unreasonable if we come across reincarnation beliefs there. Yet, even here we find similar mistranslations. According to him, i.e. to Dayanada Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, this is what Yajurveda 4.15 says: “Whenever we take birth, may our deeds be such that we get a pure mind, long life, good health, vitality, intellect, strong sense organs and a powerful body. In next life also, keep us away from bad deeds and indulge us in noble actions.” But other translations, and indeed the Sanskrit original, don’t speak of reincarnation. They say that breath and life and consciousness have come “again”, but doesn’t imply that we first must have died. At least one translator even specifies that the hymn was said upon awakening.

            As for Atharvaveda 7.67.1, the reader or his source again indulges in misdirection. If that book contained the doctrine of reincarnation, it would still prove nothing about the Rg-Veda; but the verse quoted doesn’t even contain this doctrine: “May we get healthy sense and work organs in next life as well. May I [be] full of vitality. May I have spiritual wealth and knowledge of Ishwar and Vedic concepts again and again. May we be selfless for welfare of world in next lives again and again. May our deeds be noble so that we get human life and always get purity of mind and actions so that we can worship you and achieve salvation.” This translation is really very far from the original, which is another prayer for health and longevity, this time obtained from a specific medicinal herb. Many hymns of the Atharva-Veda are about health-restoration and medicine, i.e. about saving and prolonging life rather than counting on a next life.

            About Atharvaveda 5.1.2, he translates very freely: “One who conducts noble actions obtains noble lives in next births with strong body and sharp intellect. Those who conduct bad deeds get birth in lower species. To experience the fruits of past actions is natural trait of soul. After death, the soul resides in Vayu, Jala, Aushadhi etc. and again enters the womb to take next birth.” We don’t see these “next births” there, but maybe we should sit together and perform a word-by-word translation. This hymn is significantly called the Immortality Hymn, a name which we have already shown to be at odds with the reincarnation doctrine and certainly with the later quasi-Buddhist doctrine that we are tired of these endless rebirths in this Vale of Tears.

            In Yajurveda 19.47, however, the reincarnation doctrine may indeed be implied:

“There are two paths for the soul. One path Pitryana provides birth again and again through union of father and mother, good and bad deeds, happiness and sorrow. The other path of Devayana frees the soul from cycle of birth and death and provides bliss of salvation. The whole world reverberates with both these paths. And after both, the soul again takes birth as progeny of father and mother.” This is the same concept enunciated repeatedly in the older Upanishads: that either we can go to heaven (way of the gods) or we can come back here (way of the ancestors). This doctrine has the same origin as the doctrine of the old Upanishads, where indeed it is introduced as an innovation.

Our reader ends his letter with some lengthy quotations from “Maharishi Swami Dayanand Saraswati`s masterpiece `Light of Truth’”, which only prove that he, like most 19^th-century Hindus, believed in reincarnation and could not imagine life without it. The Swami’s organization, the Arya Samaj, claims to this day that he abhorred the decadence into which Puranic literature had thrown the Hindus and that he merely wanted to restore the Vedas to the pristine purity they once enjoyed. In fact, he too was a “Puranic Hindu” who read the Veda through Puranic eyes. He believed that the Veda was of supernatural origin, hence his attempt to translate all reference to mundane people and places out of it.

But in fact, we know the family relations of the Vedic seers, the places where they lived or travelled, the reasons why they waged war and the tribes against whom they did battle, even their fondness for the psychedelic Soma brew. Short, they and their books were human, all too human. Of course they changed their mind once in a while, and they learned from their surroundings or from their own discoveries. This way, they first believed in a hereafter where we would meet again, but later came to the notion that we returned from the hereafter to be born again. Since this belief is attested among many different tribes the world over, and since India knew many tribes of whom the Vedic (Paurava and esp. Bharata) tribe was only one, we opine that it existed among some Indian tribes too at the time when the Rg-Veda was composed. But it was new to the Vedic seers, who had cherished a different belief for long. Only when a successful class advertised the new and hitherto secret doctrine of reincarnation as its key to success, did the doctrine catch on. This way, Hindu history is also the history of progress.  

 

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The Rg-Vedic reference to Sati

 

 

                The Rg-Veda contains a famous passage mentioning Sati – and preventing it. To a widow who is with her husband on his funeral pyre, the text says: rise up, abandon this dead man and re-join the living (10:18:8). The Vedic testimony proves two things: (1) Sati already existed, and (2) it was disapproved of by the mainstream of the Hindu tradition.

Of course it already existed, going back at least to Proto-Indo-European days. It is also recorded among the Germanic and Celtic branches of Indo-European (in the Siegfried saga, his beloved Brunhilde follows the hero into death). As a general rule, it was more frequent in societies where women had honour to uphold, whereas societies where women were treated as household commodities (like the Greek) did not know the practice at all. Variations on Sati, with harem wives and servants following their kings into death, are recorded in ancient Egypt, ancient China, Mongolia (where the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism put an end to it) and other societies. So India was not that exceptional.

                The Mahabharata confirms the practice’s existence among the aristocracy, esp. with the self-immolation of Pandu’s beloved wife Madri (while his other wife Kunti does not consider it). She may have felt guilty, having seduced Pandu to have intercourse with her in spite of knowing that he was cursed to die from it; but she may also not have valued life without her husband. Greek sources of the last centuries BCE testify that the wives of Indian warriors killed in battle committed self-immolation. One episode  even describes how a dead soldier’s two widows quarrel over who will be the Sati. Mind you, they quarreled for the right to self-immolate, not to make the other one self-immolate, for it was voluntary and indeed required some will-power to overcome the family’s resistance. The Hindu warrior caste, at least in some areas, upheld the practice until the collective Sati of several of Shivaji Bhonsle’s and of Ranjit Singh’s wives. The last great self-immolation by a Hindu ruler was indeed committed upon the death of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh in 1839. (If Sati is Hindu, the latter incident only offers extra proof that, much to the displeasure of the Khalistanis, Sikhism is Hindu.)

It is not true that, as some internet Hindus claim, Sati dates to the Muslim or even to the British period. It may be true that in some cases, families forced widows to commit Sati under pressure from altered British inheritance laws, but under these new circumstances it was still Hindus themselves who misused a hoary Hindu practice. They even cited a skewed reading of the Rg-Vedic verse in support of Sati, a classic case of the pliability of “tradition”. As for the Muslim period, typical for some battles was that Hindu warriors fought to the death and their wives who had remained in the towns committed collective self-immolation  or Jauhar, not to fall into the hands of the Muslims. This was a specific practice building on the long-existing Hindu practice of Sati, but not to be confused with it.

It was confined to the real or would-be warrior castes, though, in keeping with their ethos of pride and passion. For Brahmins it was forbidden, a negative judgment going back to this Rg-Vedic verse. Taking such a momentous decision within at most 24 hours between the husband’s death and his cremation, under the impact of heavy emotions, was deemed to be in conflict with the Brahmin ethos of self-control. It is only logical that some rulers in the Brahmin-dominated Maratha confederacy forbid the practice even before the British East India Company Governor Lord William Bentinck (under prodding from Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy) abolished it by law in 1829. Brahmin and other high-caste widows were expected to remain loyal to their deceased husbands and refrain from remarrying, no matter how young they were. They became white-clad widows, often kept at a distance because of the stench of death figuratively hanging over them: primitive belief held them responsible for the death of their husbands (the converse implication of the belief that the wife’s force protected the husband). Though lower castes widely emulated this practice by the time European travelers recorded Hindu customs, the rule and often still the practice among low-castes had been that no womb should go unused and so widows remarried.

What is so puzzling about Sati for moderns in general and multiculturalists (in India: secularists) in particular, is that as per numerous testimonies, most self-immolating widows went into the pyre voluntarily, often overcoming pressure from their relatives or from the authorities not to do it. The shrill feminists who were protesting the Sati of Roop Kanwar in 1987 (calling it “murder”, a view which the Court refused to uphold) don’t want to understand this, but the testimonies are clear. The problem is that willing Satis confront the multiculturalists with a really different view of death, of freedom and of a woman’s place. Multiculturalism may be fun as long as it’s about exotic cuisine or Buddha statues in the garden, but here it gets really serious: actual difference between our and their conception of the rights of woman. Here was a class of women who, even as brides, knew very well that their husband’s death would leave them with the option of self-immolation, and accepted the custom.

Then again, we’ve been here before. In some Western countries, progressives have stood up for the right of women (effectively, of their parents) to commit female circumcision. All over the Western world, it is considered progressive to stand up for the right of Muslim women to cover their faces, even on passport photographs. Under their creed of cultural relativism, progressives ought to defend Sati as well, instead of being judgmental and applying narrow-minded Western prejudice to it. Alternatively, they might hold on to the modern “prejudice”, condemn Sati, and admit that multiculturalism has its limits.

Only a tiny minority of the Hindus, and even of the caste most famous for it, the Rajputs, ever committed Sati, but the practice had and largely still has a much wider constituency of supporters. Temples are erected for the women who committed it, where their heroism and loyalty is venerated: the Satisthal-s (now rebaptized as Shaktisthal-s, since Roop Kanwar’s Sati triggered a prohibition on the glorification of Sati). In South India, these women are commemorated with standing stones or Satikal-s, while men who have died while defending their villages get their Virakal-s, “hero stones”. So, whereas few women ever committed Sati, those who saw and venerated the heroism of it, were many.

But is it a “Hindu practice”? Firstly, the practice goes back to the time when the current belief in reincarnation didn’t exist yet. Husband and wife were supposed to go to heaven together, for “going to heaven” prevailed over reincarnation. The later version that they would “reincarnate together” is an unconvincing compromise. If there is anything to reincarnation, it means that if we are somehow entangled, we meet again even if we don’t die together.

Secondly, Hindu scripture largely frowns on it but accepts it for the warrior caste. A good but also difficult point in Hindu ethics is its relativity: depending on caste, age group and circumstances, the rules may differ. Caste autonomy is also recognized, and the decision of the caste Panchayat (council) effectively overruled anything written in the so-called law books. For instance, Brahmins wrote law books sternly condemning abortion, yet pre- and postnatal abortion was rife in some castes. The current problem of female feticide is based on this “Hindu” tradition, yet is clearly forbidden by the equally Hindu law books. So, Sati also had a place in the Hindu commonwealth even if it was forbidden for most people.

The well-known Somali-born ex-Muslim writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while campaigning for atheism as an alternative to Islam, accepts that Muslim women in large majority will go on believing in Allah and venerating Mohammed for a while, and therefore encourages a progressive interpretation of Islamic law, esp. regarding the treatment of women. But one problem she runs into, is the decentralization of Islam: no matter that a lone liberal Mufti (jurisconsult) issues an opinion giving a progressive reading of Islamic law, this innovation is not binding on other Muftis or on the masses. It is not like in the Catholic Church, where the Pope or the Council can take decisions which are binding on every Catholic. Reform may be slow, but at least it has teeth. By contrast, in decentralized religions, paradoxically it is very difficult to impose change. In particular, no matter how many Hindu authorities or commoners say that they don’t want Sati, if one caste upholds it, it will continue at least in that community.

Hindus, however, much in contrast with Muslims, can effect reform starting below, through a change in mentality. Even the law books, deemed a hotbed of unchanging orthodoxy, explicitly lay down that reform is permissible, esp. if effected by those familiar with the spirit of the law books, who judge that in new circumstances it is better served by a new concretization. Hindus have spontaneously adapted much better to modernity. With some prodding from the secular state, but mainly be an evolution in mentalities, Sati is becoming a quaint memory. The conviction that for a widow, there is life after the death of her husband, is becoming generalized even among the castes where self-immolation was customary.   

(Hindu Human Rights,)

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