Tag Archives: religion

Capitalism, Debates, Education, Law, religion

When public good faces a faith hurdle

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Moderation and acceptance are parts of a continuous struggle to ensure that democracy does not get subsumed by majoritarianism.

When Public Good Faces a Faith Hurdle

‘The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous,

and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.’ –Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason.

The idea of public good faced a faith hurdle in Kerala recently. The issue was the widening of National Highway 66 on a stretch in Umayanalloor village, Thazhuthala, and adjacent towns of the Kollam district. A batch of petitions challenged the highway because two temples and mosques were in its alignment. It was a tricky situation, and a hasty decision may well have had consequences.

Without wavering on constitutional principles, the Kerala High Court handled the case skilfully. A single-judge bench of Justice PV Kunhikrishnan rejected petitions that opposed the land acquisition and asked citizens to rise above difficulties for better highways for all citizens. It emphasised that courts could not intervene in acquisition proceedings unless there is patent illegality or malafide action.

( Read the full text here)

Bad ideas

Imagining an Antifascist Coalition Today

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The debate on the meaning of AAP’s victory in Delhi and the Hindu idiom that its spokespersons have adopted continues as indeed on the implications of its refusal to play the electoral game in the way the BJP was intent on setting it up. But to keep our perspective right, we need to remember that this was just one stop on the long and arduous journey that still lies ahead. We also need to remember that AAP is only one of the forces and Delhi only one of the theatres of the anti-fascist struggle.

The lessons of the antifascist struggles in Germany or in Europe at large clearly are of no use in our battles here. At one level, we are all destined to repeat the grievous mistakes of the German communists (and the Comintern) for concentrating their main blow at the Social-Democrats, pronouncing them ‘social-fascists’ – till it was pretty late in the day and Nazism was already on the way to consolidating its power. In states other than Delhi, there are instances where this mindset can be seen to be in full operation. In Delhi, thankfully, this is not the scenario and most non-BJP political parties assess the situation differently, though an entirely negative stance towards AAP’s victory can be seen among many people. However, I do not intend to engage them in a debate in this post, having already stated my position on AAP’s victory quite categorically. Continue reading Imagining an Antifascist Coalition Today →

Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Government, Language

Picking Humanity Over Religion: A Small but Critical Step

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The idea of education being imparted without any compulsion to declare one’s religion is definitely a welcome thing

Bethune_College_Kolkata

Principal’s office of Bethune College, Kolkata, which included Humanity as an option under the religion category. Image Courtesy: college dunia

 

A college admission form introducing new options under ‘religion’? Talking about humanity, secular, non-religious, atheism!

Well, in an ambience loaded with religiosity and its increasing conflation with the State, it is rather difficult to believe that some colleges may take such a creative step to convey how they see what is happening around them? No doubt this is a small step but, as noted by analysts, this is an attempt to break/challenge the ‘construction of identity, thought and social and political space, indirectly conveying the vision of a secular and diverse India.’

The significance of this little step can be better understood if one looks into the fact that the elections held to the 17th Lok Sabha — which has returned the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power — have demonstrated that BJP is ‘the most preferred party of young India’. It drew support cutting across caste as well as class lines. This is the same BJP which, along with its ‘Parivar’ siblings, has consciously tried to conflate religion with exercise of power and has been successful in collapsing the majority faith into rabid nationalism that targets differences and dissent and other specific groups, as the ‘other’ according to its worldview.

( Read the full article here : https://www.newsclick.in/Religion-Humanity-College-Admissions-BJP-School-Education)

Debates, Politics, religion, Theory

Gandhi – A Religion of the Question: Ajay Skaria

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[The following is the ‘Preface’ to AJAY SKARIA’s recent book, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance by Ajay Skaria. The preface raises interesting questions not only about Gandhi’s politics but also about the idea/s of secularism and religion in what we might call a postsecular world – a world that is, where the naive and uninterrogated binary between the two terms is constantly put into question. Also of interest to readers might be the attempt made by the author to read Gandhi’s writings as a long and ongoing struggle to articulate or ‘understand’ his own politics – a politics that Skaria claims is as much premised on equality among humans as it is on the equality of all being/s.]

Unconditional Equality by Ajay Skaria
Unconditional Equality by Ajay Skaria

Somewhere in the early 2000s, while preparing to teach Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s English translation of Hind Swaraj to my undergraduate class, a passage about history in the text intrigued me. Since I happened to have the Gujarati version of that text at hand, I consulted it. The divergence is striking. The Gujarati text criticizes “history” (the English word occurs in the Gujarati text) and contrasts  it to itihaas [usually translated as “history”]. The English text criticizes “history,” but in it there is no equivalent for itihaas; the contrast between history and itihaas is thus obscured. The gap between the Gujarati and English texts, I have since come to realize, is symptomatic of Gandhi’s struggles to think his politics. What this politics involves is by no means clear to him; perhaps he writes so prolifically and indefatigably (his collected works run to ninety-eight volumes in English) precisely in order to try and understand his own politics. This politics becomes even more intriguing when we attend not only to Gandhi as an author or “intending subject,” but to his writing.[1] By dwelling in and on the gaps (between Gujarati and English and also within each of these languages) in his writing, this book tries to draw out his politics.

For me, writing this book has been difficult also because of another gap—that between Gandhi’s insistence that there can be “no politics without religion” and the secular inheritance that I have, as far as I know, no desire to abandon. Gandhi repeatedly describes satyagraha (his most famous neologism, which he coins initially as a translation of “passive resistance”) as his “dharma” or “religion,” even as the religion that stays in all religions.[2] Symptomatic of my difficulty with this religious politics was my inability for long to even recognize it. When Vinay Lal first asked me in 2007 to write an essay on Gandhi’s religion for a volume he was planning on political Hinduism, I protested that I was not interested in this aspect of Gandhi. But with his characteristic persistence, Vinay did not accept my protests, and I ended up writing that essay, which became a precursor of this book.

In the process, my own understanding of dharma and religion as “concepts” has been transformed.[3]

Continue reading Gandhi – A Religion of the Question: Ajay Skaria →

Theory, Violence-Conflict

The Terror That Is Man: Shaj Mohan

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Guest post by SHAJ MOHAN

Manifold is the un-homely, yet nothing is more un-homely than man — Sophocles

The middle of the previous century is understood to be the termination of all kinds of containments of man, having witnessed the worst containment in the Camp[i]. This termination resulted from a crisis that is both philosophical and political: what is the de-termination of man such that he is not the contained? A summary of this scenario is found in a trivial understanding of Foucault’s statements concerning “the end of man” (The Order of Things) and Derrida’s deconstruction of the notion of the “the end” in his essay “Ends of Man” (Margins of Philosophy). As a result of the exigencies of the philosophical and the political, the concept of the state located itself, in the occidental domain, away from the containers. The State would no longer claim to be the clergy and the sovereign of containers such as race and religion. Instead, the State demanded only the right to primary containment—first Indian and then Muslim, first British then White, first Spanish then Basque. The list, the differences, the classification and the management of all the other containers—religion, caste, language, race, public, private—were left up to the new clerics, the new academic disciplines and the NGOs. If all containers were opened up then everything should have flooded out and mixed to form a substance of a new world of people; rather, a substantiality for the in-terminable formation of people. This new people-substance should have dissolved the traces of all the containers, the way science-fiction often imagines the future to be. It should have left for us tales which are the negative of memories, that is, taboos, or myths. For example, the tales that we received about incest from the ancients, the tales of cannibalism in fairy tales, the tales of the world’s resistance to Nazism. Continue reading The Terror That Is Man: Shaj Mohan →

Bad ideas, Debates, Everyday Life, Right watch

An old RC ruminates on his ‘Pseudo-Secularist’ roots: Hartman de Souza

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Guest post by HARTMAN DE SOUZA

The background and context to this not-so-enigmatic title is very simple. By today’s standards, I am old – I get a hefty discount travelling by train which I am still hooked on, and I am still counting the years and sniffing my coffee. The ‘RC’ is a lot simpler:

Travelling by train from Mumbai to Delhi many, many moons ago, a man in the compartment, in his thirties, got into conversation with me. After I had answered his opening bullet shot questions – You are from? You are doing what? Your father is doing what? – he told me I spoke English like a ‘foreigner’.

I was still fresh from Kenya those days, where I was born, so I got a lot of grief from having a different accent that no one could place.

This was of course much, much before you could study for an undergraduate degree in India (where you were born) and then, if you had the means and the SATs, go and study in the US for a few years. There, in the land of beef and honey, as we now note with pride, many Indians also discovered the ‘free market’ and their ‘authentic’ Hindu roots – then came back to spew communal venom with a makeshift American accent and the dollars to back it.

As if it was stamped on my bloody forehead, he then asked: “You are Christian?” He pronounced this as “Kir-tchin’.

I pretended I hadn’t heard. So he repeated the question. I nodded, hoping he would disappear and let me get on reading my book.  He did not. Instead had a broad grin on his face, like he knew in which bag he could drop me in.  “You are RC!” he said, almost triumphantly.

For a few seconds, he almost had me stumped. I raised my eyebrows.

“Ro-maan Catholic,” he offered.

I shook my head and smiled back. “No,” I replied “Retired Catholic…”

He didn’t get the joke. Guys like that still can’t. Continue reading An old RC ruminates on his ‘Pseudo-Secularist’ roots: Hartman de Souza →

Culture, Education

Real Estate of Religion:Satya Sagar

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Guest Post by SATYA SAGAR

 

Several years ago a friend of mine filed a petition in the Indian Supreme Court against – believe it or not- the tenth incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu! Or at least, against a fellow who claimed to be ‘Kalki Bhagwan’ and has in the past two decades drummed up a significant following in the southern part of India.

Blasphemous as the claim of this fake avatar was the court battle itself was not really about the finer details of Hindu mythology or theological doctrine.Based on several years of painstaking investigation and research it was my friend’s claim that ‘Kalki Bhagwan’, had taken money from the public for ‘rural development activities’ and fraudulently diverted it to his personal bank accounts as well as that of his close relatives.

From being an ordinary clerk working for the Life Insurance Corporation in Chennai thirty years ago today the ‘Tenth Incarnation of Vishnu’ is allegedly worth many million dollars and owns vast properties in many parts of South India. It is a trajectory that is tragically very common everywhere, with spurious spirituality – ironically also a form of ‘insurance’-being the fastest way to material wealth and power since ancient times. Continue reading Real Estate of Religion:Satya Sagar →

Bad ideas, Culture, Empire

Impossible Lessons: Ravi Sinha

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Guest Post by RAVI SINHA

Far away from Peshawar five men and a woman sat in a physician’s waiting room in Lucknow. The television screen that ordinarily shows some Bollywood film or a cricket match had a news channel on. It was day after the slaughter of children. The assistant who maintains the waiting list of patients and collects the doctor’s fee said something very predictable, even if heart-felt, expressing his horror and revulsion. The matter would have passed as unremarkably as most things do most of the times, except for what an elderly gentleman waiting to see the doctor had to say in response.

In a feeble yet firm voice whose conviction and sincerity was unmistakable, he said – dhaarmikata ko badhaava doge to kattarta badhegi; kattarta badhegi to aatank upajega, haivaaniyat saamne aayegi. (If you will promote religiosity, fundamentalism will grow, and from that will emerge terror and barbarism.) After a pause he added – hamaare desh mein bhee yahee ho rahaa hai, haalaan ki abhee hum pehle daur mein hain, dhaarmikata badhaane ke daur mein. (Same thing is happening in our country too, although we are in the first phase so far – that of promoting religiosity.) Continue reading Impossible Lessons: Ravi Sinha →

Bad ideas, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Left watch

मई दिवस और गणपति

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मई दिवस और गणपति में सम्बन्ध ही क्या हो सकता है? दोनों की न तुक मिलती है और न ही अनुप्रास की छटा दोनों के पास–पास होने से बिखरती है. फिर गणपति  शुद्ध हिन्दू देवता हैं, गणेश चतुर्थी के अवसर पर तो उनका नामजाप समझ में आता है, लकिन मई दिवस पर उनका आह्वान? इससे बड़ा दूषण हो ही नहीं सकता और इसका दंड उन्हें तो किसी न किसी रूप में भुगतना ही पड़ेगा. सो हुआ.

सती  अनामंत्रित अपने पिता दक्ष के घर गई थीं  और अपमान न सह पाने के कारण उन्हें यज्ञ वेदी में ही कूद कर जल  मरना पड़ा . किसी भी जगह बिन बुलाए  नहीं जाना चाहिए, इसकी सीख देने के लिए   यह कथा वे  सुनाते हैं जिन्हें इस समय भी कुछ कथाएँ याद रह गयी हैं. निश्चय ही त्रिथा को यह प्रसंग या तो पता न होगा या वे इसे भूल गईं जब मई दिवस पर जवाहरलाल नेहरु विश्वविद्यालय में  एक वामपंथी छात्र संगठन द्वारा आयोजित एक संगीत संध्या में मंच पर वे  अनामंत्रित गाने चली गईं. एक तो वे स्वयं अनपेक्षित , अतः किंचित अस्वस्तिकर उपस्थिति थीं , दूसरे आयोजकों और श्रोताओं  को , जो मई दिवस पर संघर्ष और क्रान्ति के जुझारू गीत सुन कर अपने शरीर के भीतर जोश  भरने आये थे इसकी आशंका थी कि वे इस पवित्र अवसर पर जाने  क्या गा देंगी. और आखिरकार  उन्होंने इस आशंका को सही साबित कर दिया, जब वे शास्त्रीय संगीत के नाम पर वक्रतुंड, महाकाय …. गाने लगीं. थोड़ी देर पहले जो  सैकड़ों शरीर ‘हिल्लेले हिलोर दुनिया ‘ पर झूम रहे थे, उनसे नहीं–नहीं का शोर उठा. इस छात्र जनता के नेता जन–भावना का आदर करते हुए मंच पर पहुंचे और त्रिथा को अपना गाना बीच में रोक कर मंच से जाना पड़ा. Continue reading मई दिवस और गणपति →

Capitalism, Culture, Movements, Politics

Caste and Exploitation in Indian History: Bharat Patankar

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Guest post by BHARAT PATANKAR translated by GAIL OMVEDT

Introduction: The Process of Exploitation

Exploitation arising from the caste hierarchy is a particular feature of the South Asian subcontinent. There was no such exploitative system in other continents or in countries outside of South Asia. But since caste exploitation has been a reality for 1500-2000 years this shakes the belief that only class can be the basis of exploitation. And because of this we have to transcend the attempt to find a way only pragmatically and deal with the issue on a philosophical and theoretical level. Class has been theorized extensively in terms of exploitation; to some extent gender also, but not caste. Exploitation as women in various forms has also been a reality for thousands of years; this also is not through “class”. This reality from throughout the world gives a blow to the idea that exploitation can only be class exploitation. This can also be said of exploitation arising on the basis of racial and communal factors. Continue reading Caste and Exploitation in Indian History: Bharat Patankar →

Countryside, Ecologies, Movements, Right watch

Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics

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Cover - Green and Saffron

My book Green and Saffron is just out. The book details and an interview  are on the blog of Permanent Black. From the publishers’ notice:

This book examines contemporary environmental issues and movements in independent India on the one hand, and the development of Hindu conservative ideology and politics on the other. It includes the first thorough investigation of Anna Hazare’s movement in Maharashtra.

Mukul Sharma argues that these two social currents—environmental conservation and Hindu politics—have forged bonds which reveal the hijacking of environmentalism by conservative and retrograde worldviews. This, he says, constitutes a major aspect of hinterland political life which neither academics nor journalists have seriously analysed. Environmentalism and politics cannot be seen as separate from each other, for environmental issues are being defined in new ways by an anti-secular form of Hinduism. In turn, Hindu ideologues are gaining mileage for their ideology by espousing major environmental projects. Continue reading Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics →

Culture, Everyday Life

Where have the pilgrims gone?

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The Journey is an integral part of any pilgrimage, the manner in which it is conducted is crucial to the successful conclusion of the endeavour. An edited version of this article first appeared in the travel and culture magazine Terrascape, published from Delhi. Photos: Himanshu Joshi/Curun Singh

Pilgrims at Puri, outside Jagannath Temple

There is a scene in Mughal-e-Azam, the early 1960s blockbuster of a movie by K Asif, where Akbar and his queen, the mother of his first son Jahangir (wrongly identified by K Asif and also by Ashutosh Gowarikar as Jodha Bai) stumble through the hot sands of Rajasthan under the mid-summer day sun that seemed intent on drying up and burning everything in sight. The two are on a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage was to fulfill a vow that Akbar had taken.

What I have to say in this piece can best be prefaced by narrating the story of that vow. Continue reading Where have the pilgrims gone? →

Bad ideas, Culture, Identities, Law

‘Locking up gods within caste’

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This note comes via Malarvizhi Jayanth. Those in support can leave a comment saying so, and add their designations to their names, if they wish.

We call for all those who support democracy and free speech to express solidarity with Thirumavalavan, Meena Kandasamy and Samya.Kathavarayan and Madurai Veeran are among the gods who are acknowledged to be Dalit and are worshipped by many castes. Clearly, in the oral history of the people, the gods have castes and these castes are not determined by who worships them. The twin brothers Ponnar Shankar inhabit the realm between hero and deity. They have been fictionalised, recreated for the silver screen, and are worshipped across communities. Their origin myth remains contested territory – it is variously read as symbolic of the conflict between agriculturists/warriors and hunters, as part of founding tale of the land-owning agriculturist Kongu Vellala Gounder sub-caste and, in a textbook example of how Hindutva functions, have recently been claimed as reincarnations of the Pandavas. Like other deities of the people, they are firmly located in a historical imagination among a society of human beings, and not in a mythos of gods.

In a footnote in Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers by Thirmavalavan, MeenaKandasamy describes Ponnar Shankar as dalit. M Loganathan, an advocate from Nanje Goundanpudur and Students Wing Convenor of the Kongu Nadu Munnetra Kazhagam (KMK), has been quoted in news reports as saying that there is evidence proving that Ponnar and Shankar are Kongu Vellala Gounders and claiming that depicting them as Dalits will lead to caste tension. Continue reading ‘Locking up gods within caste’ →