My grandfather’s puja room in Coimbatore was narrow, rectangular, always slightly chilly, and a few shades darker than the rest of the home. One of the longer walls served as my grandmother’s pantry, open shelves heavy with boxes of rice and dals, spices and snacks. The far wall was packed with images and idols of various deities from the Hindu pantheon. The becalming scent of camphor always hung in the air. He would spend an hour there every morning, right after his bath, and I would, sometimes, sit alongside him. His hair and skin would still be damp as his tall, broad frame entered the room, draped in a white veshti1 and topless, apart from the sacred thread around his torso and the thin white towel that always hung over his shoulder. He might indulge me in some chit-chat as he set himself up, pulling out and dusting the wooden plank that he sat on, cleaning and rearranging the space in front of him, filling the panchapaathiram with water for the rituals to come. And then, after a moment of silence, he would begin his routine. I would rest my back against the wall and watch as he muttered verses in a low voice, his eyes partially closed.
On most days I would quietly slip out after about ten minutes. But on some days I would stay with him all through, observing the dance he did with his hands - a dab over the eyes, a vice-grip over the nose, drops of water placed in the cup of his right palm and rapidly sipped three times. The staccato rhythm of the chants set off a mild churn within me; without understanding why, I would sense my heart rate slightly increasing. The mantras, the incense smoke, the darkness of the room - it all pulled me into a meditative space. The clanging of the bells at the end would yank me out of this state, and I would watch quietly as the rest of the family came into the room, in single file, to receive the lit camphor and prostrate before the Gods.
Growing up, religion was something that was always around me, without ever being made into a big deal. My parents were not strict practitioners of the intricacies of Dharma, neither were they God-fearing believers; but they certainly were not antithetical to religion. For them, Hinduism was simply who we were, it was the tradition we came from, it was part of our identity, it was the way of our lives. Our Hindu identity was inseparably merged with our Indian identity, our Tamil identity, and the multiple other identities that together defined who we were. My parents felt no reason either to thump their chests about their Hindu identity or to rail against it. Our Dharma was in the stories handed down by my grandmothers, it was in the food we ate, it was in the rituals we performed at different times of the year. It was in many of the values we imbibed, sometimes deliberately, often unconsciously.
Our religion was one with our culture; it was a matter of practice rather than belief; it was a question of tradition more than faith. We were not devout by any stretch, but we certainly were Hindu.
Since religion was not forced onto me, I watched it from a bit of a distance. The rituals associated with our tradition fascinated me, in particular the homams (fire-sacrifice rituals) - the leaping up of the flame as ghee is poured into it, the thick black smoke filling up the room, the metrical and somewhat haunting mantras pushing their way through the smoke. Other children would run away from the smoke but I would sit and watch through stinging, teary eyes. Not out of any particular devotion but simply because I was fascinated.
I couldn't put my finger on it then - perhaps I still cannot - but the fire rituals seemed to point toward a world beyond the everyday.
Because I looked at religion somewhat from the outside-in, I had many questions to ask. My parents gladly answered them - no question was out of bounds, though not all questions had good answers. I needed to realize that some questions will remain forever unanswered.
Looking back now, I can see that there was a religious tendency in me as a child. I use the world 'religion' here in the general sense. 'There is a Beyond,' Max Muller wrote, 'and he who has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has gazed at the sun - wherever he looks, everywhere he sees the image of the sun.' I might not yet have caught a glance of the Beyond, but I had an inkling that there was more to existence than meets the eye.
More than anything else though, I was gripped by the realization that my very existence - and the existence of the World - is an incredible, insurmountable mystery. I have written about these moments of weightlessness here. This very moment, right now, and everything around me at this moment, is simply impossible. Yet I exist, and I am certain I exist, nothing could be more certain. The impossible seems to have happened. How? Why? I didn't know, but there was nothing more important to want to know.
Thus I perhaps could have called myself an Agnostic, not in the narrow definition of the term as it pertains to a belief in God, but in a broader conceptualization about the ultimate unknowability of everything.
An agnostic I might have been, but I continued to consider myself a Hindu. There didn't seem to be any contradiction between my questions and doubts about the world, and the simple fact that I was a Hindu. Being a Hindu had nothing to do with faith, it was simply a way of being, it was my cultural inheritance, my communal identity. One could be an agnostic Hindu, an atheistic Hindu, what's the big deal?
This non-confrontational approach to questions of religion and identity began to shift when I was 15 or 16. Multiple factors converged to result in this. The Gujarat riots of 2002, coming shortly after the 9/11 atrocities, shook me awake to the realization that religion can become a very potent weapon in dividing people; that religion could stir awake demons in the human heart and provide - for some - a ready justification for their horrible acts. Any identification with Hinduism, in the face of what I was witnessing around me, seemed to make me complicit in these atrocities. Setting aside socio-political currents, though, my reflecting adolescent mind found religion illogical and even silly; when the ultimate answers are so elusive, how ridiculous it is for the whole world to carry out these elaborate charades.
This was also the time that the New Atheists in the West gained a good amount of prominence. I eagerly read Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest, my teenage mind thrilling to their bold, irreverent takedown of the religious establishment. By that time I had read most of Dawkins' books on evolutionary biology, and he was one of the people I highly respected; when the God Delusion came, I lapped it up. Even then I could see that the book took down a very particular manifestation of religion, an Abrahamic and more specifically modern-American manifestation, with perhaps not much relevance to India and Hinduism. For instance, a large portion of the book was spent on demolishing creationist arguments against evolution by natural selection, or ridiculing literal-interpretations of the Bible such as the Young-Earth Creationism. These were not positions held by most Indians regardless of religion, and certainly were not problems of which one could accuse Hinduism. And I of course did not grow up in a claustrophobically religious family setting. So, logically speaking, Dawkins' polemics should not have held any relevance for me. But I was, quite simply, charged up by the notion that a widely respected public intellectual could so openly attack religion. It was liberating.
I found a label I could proudly paste on to my chest - I was an Atheist. And I erased the Hindu-ness from my personal identity - I was not an Atheist Hindu (or a Hindu Atheist) - I was an Atheist, full stop. And like a typical 16-year old atheist, I didn't leave anyone in doubt about my lack of belief. You didn't need to speak with me for more than 5 minutes before I, somehow, would steer the conversation towards religion and my atheism. Blind belief and an unthinking adherence to the letter of ritual were clearly illogical to me - then and now - so I felt justified in my scorn for the faithful.
My parents tolerated my strident attacks on Hinduism with no fuss - there was sadly no backlash. I was a rebel without anything to rebel against.
I even signed up to the mailing group of an atheist society that called itself the 'Brights' - because, of course, we unbelievers were the bright ones, and the rest were dimwits. The group had Dawkins and the other New Atheists as champions, and for a few months I read their monthly dispatches eagerly (even my enthusiastic teenage self couldn't handle their ripe self-adulatory prose beyond a point). And I fought against some of the instincts that I deemed tainted by Hinduism. For instance, I held myself back when, each time I stamped accidentally on a piece of paper or a book, I would begin to bend down toward it seeking forgiveness. I was a diligent, practicing atheist.
My positions held firm through to my mid twenties. These were years in which I was dealing with psychological demons (will write about this later), but I was never tempted to weaken my unbelief. It did, though, lose some of its teenage stridency. The Dawkins charm wore off quickly (he started to seem as hysterical as the believers), and it became tiring talking about my lack of belief; most of my friends were irreligious too, so there weren't too many debates to be had. So while being anti-religious (or more specifically anti-Hindu) lost some of the coolness factor it had in my teenage years, I didn't fundamentally change in my stance. Disassociating from religion just seemed like the logical and humane thing to do. It didn't seem like a rebellious stance to take, merely the right one. The world - and India in particular - didn't need religion, it was holding us back, it was tearing us apart; it was time to look ahead. I was not a militant atheist anymore, but I continued calling myself an atheist to whoever cared to ask.
I continued this way till just a few years back, till my early-thirties. At which point things started to get complicated.
Through my teens and twenties I was someone who looked ahead, at the decades and centuries to come, at the possibilities for societal change, at man’s journey to the stars (not surprisingly, I was a keen reader of science fiction as a teen). The past held a certain amount of curiosity for me, but it didn’t really matter beyond a point; what had happened was done and gone; one should rather, I felt, look ahead and build the world we want.
Two and a half years back, though, a little girl came into my life, and quietly brought about a shift in me.
Becoming a father alters your perception about some things in ways that you simply cannot anticipate. Holding that fragile, feather-soft little baby in my hands, I felt the weight of the responsibility now on me. I was responsible for this life.
As I thought about the world she would grow into, I started to truly understand the immense supporting pillars that society provides; I began to value the balancing and moderating influences of society and history. As an unattached individual, concepts such as revolution and revolt and ‘crushing the status-quo’ were attractive; as a progressive-minded young adult and an instinctively liberal person, certain extreme points of view held a certain thrill. But did I want my daughter to grow up in a world where anything goes, a world of ‘revolution’ and complete irreverence, a world of flux and uncertainty? No, I wanted her to grow up with the shields and moorings of society, of culture, of family. How can I, having grown up in society’s lap, supported and nurtured by heritage, throw my daughter into a world of randomness?
Being a father, then, made me look backwards; it made me look with a lot more respect at our past, at our ancestors - at the structures they had built, brick over painstaking brick, across millennia. Being a father did not suddenly blindfold me to the problems of the past, but it did make me look at the vastness beyond these problems. Being a father made me realize the value of tradition. I realized the wisdom of Roger Scruton’s words when we wrote:
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”
For they were the property of this little person I held in my hands.
At around the same time I came to another revelation. The metaphysical questions have been constant and central companions in my life. I have mentioned about how I have been struck - viscerally, not just intellectually - by the sheer miracle of my existence, by the fundamental inexplicability - even inexpressibility - of this world. A powerful sense of awe has always washed over me in these moments of contemplation, with the world around me seeming like a shimmering, ungraspable mirage.
But for very long these simply remained unanswerable questions, an aspect of existence that I would turn my attention to from time to time, but nothing beyond that; I did not put serious thought into these mysteries, I did not direct my mind toward the implications of these ultimate questions. I coasted along as a supreme agnostic. Since I was convinced that these questions cannot be answered, all intellectual pursuits in that direction were ultimately futile, all theories of science (including theories of ‘everything’) seemed to miss the larger point. In the shadow of these mysteries, certainties of any sort were hollow - both scientific and religious certainties.
And then, about the same time my daughter came into my life, I discovered philosophy. In particular, Vedanta metaphysics.
I have written about my early, haphazard wanderings in the labyrinthine corridors of philosophy elsewhere, but here is the pertinent point to this essay - in classical Advaita Vedanta I experienced a rush of recognition; this was a metaphysics that addressed my core concerns and yearnings, and did so in a manner that clicked with my deepest-felt instincts. Advaita Vedanta doesn’t claim to provide the answers to everything; the World - why, for instance, does it seem to exist in this particular manner and not any other - might forever remain unknown, anirvachanIya. But contrary to my absolute agnosticism, Vedanta says that there are indeed certainties, ideas that we can be absolutely in no doubt about, the foremost of these being the Self, the ever-present, unchanging Observer. This is, for me, such a logically as well as experientially striking position. I realized that there are indeed pathways to arrive at a better understanding of our existence, and while they may not satisfy all of one’s intellectual curiosities, they will take you, in very deliberate and structured steps, to the very borders of our understanding, beyond which lies the leap of spiritual insight. As Bryan Magee said:
“There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.”
I realized that what I was seeking, for most of my conscious life, was all the while lying right in front of me, in my own cultural inheritance, in my own tradition.
And simultaneously, as I dove deeper into Shankara, into the Upanishads, I realized how precious this Indian civilization is, which has served as the vehicle for these subtle ideas across many millennia. Millions upon millions of verses have come down to us from the dawn of civilization, for the most part - quite remarkably - via a vocal tradition. What an immense undertaking this is, perhaps unparalleled in human history; how criminal it will be if we do not do what is our duty, if we do not - with care and respect - pass it on to the next generation.
Ideas exist within a context, as part of a society’s codes of living; ideas are imprinted into culture. If the civilization that birthed and nurtured these ideas crumbles, if the society that lived by these ideas degenerates, then the ideas will die out. I want the wisdom of Vedanta to live, now and forever; for which I want Indian - indeed Hindu - civilization to live and grow stronger. I believe it is possible to build a nation that is very Indic in ethos, while also being fully accepting towards people of all faiths; in fact acceptance of diversity is very fundamental to the Hindu spirit. I shouldn’t have had to wait till my thirties to discover Vedanta - why was it (and the other Indian schools of philosophy, including Buddhism and Jainism) not introduced to me in school? We knew Descartes but not Ramanuja. Why didn’t we learn about Indian theories of aesthetics and art at any point in all our years of Indian education?
I do not see why we cannot build a modern and truly liberal nation that is unapologetically Hindu in its soul. Certainly there are many undesirable aspects of our civilization, some deep-rooted inequities - we will correct these, we are already correcting them. We can fix these problems without diluting the essence of our tradition. We must.
These realizations, quietly, have brought about a shift in my religious attitude. Religion doesn’t seem so silly anymore; I can now understand the impulse that drives all people of faith, even if I may never be devout myself. Advaita Vedanta in particular is, to me, a heady combination of reason and intuition.
I am still uncomfortable and sometimes strongly opposed to many things that pass under the umbrella of Hinduism. I continue to remain in opposition to many of the political manifestations of Hinduism today. But I would rather fight the battle from within the fold, rather than as a deracinated outsider. I have started feeling an ownership of these ideas, a trusteeship of this heritage.
It isn’t as though, one fated day, the skies split and a divine light shone down on me. Nothing nearly as dramatic as that of course. Instead this has been a gradual opening up of my perspective. To everyone around me, I am the person I always was; I would be surprised if they notice any difference. But there is a slight shift inside me, in the way I see myself. I touched earlier upon the matter of Identity. To the list of those identities, I must now add one more. I am now a Hindu.
Nicely written. Very similar journey for me as well, although I started reconsidering my Hindu identity (or lack of it) some time before I became a father. Now I am trying to recover the beats, the rituals, just so that I can pass it on to my child.