The Open Circle

Vijay and his gynaecologist wife were caught in the welter of morning chores. I met Fida, though. We had breakfast even while Vijay was getting dressed, and I made whatever small talk was possible in the Monday morning atmospherics of an urban family. Sentences darted across, from the kitchen to the housemaid, to me, to Vijay, and from Vijay to me and his wife.

Breakfast over, Vijay was putting on his shoes, his tie already thrust into his shirt pocket.

“Hey, was there no objection to a Muslim daughter from your Hindu
family?” I asked Vijay, obviously wanting to play on the beautiful name
of his first born. Fida.

“I have a shippie uncle. He is a little bossy occasionally. He said I should not have named her Fida. I told him, go climb a wall. I will name my daughter what I like.”

Vijay was the son of a police officer. He’d got a good education, a snob school one in fact, but his father died early. That left Vijay with the burden of some huge debts, besides the upkeep of his family of three sisters. Sisters are a “burden” to any brother in an Indian family.
Because they have to be found husbands, and those husbands would have to be of an equal social status, better education and better financial standing. And, for a family with no head except a boy out of school, the very prospect of holding on to the current social station itself must have been a very intimidating one. Vijay beat great odds, fought off nosy and sometimes greedy relatives, educated his sisters, and got them married at the right age. In effect, he had fulfilled a lot of onerous duties for which he had had to make some huge sacrifices.

He was genial, plump, but tall. With his moustache, when he smiled he looked that most unusual thing in India, a genial and loveable cop. His large frame was the only time his legacy ever kicked in. Otherwise he was a very level headed, and a wee bit precocious, young businessman.

And yes, there was another thing that suggested the authoritarian attitude of the policeman. He rarely took advice on matters that were close to his heart. Like his daughter’s name. From all accounts, if Fida grew up and fell in love with a Muslim boy, Vijay would play the elder once again, just as he did when he lost his father. From what I know of Vijay, he would only look at the rational aspects of the match, like education and a secure future. I could not see Vijay remotely objecting.
Not on grounds of religion.

In some aspect religion has lost its defining quality for a lot of midnight’s grandchildren. The Indian subcontinent has always been religious; almost like a geographical character of the land and its people, religiosity has been part and parcel of all born here.

And Hinduism is the name of that mythical single mother of this sensibility. A religion so cut off from the state that, immaterial of who was ruling, it always fed the Indian sensibility, even when it had fractured, and bloomed as flocks that wandered into different, and more modern faiths within India. Or were cut off from the land and eked out a mimic Hinduism kept alive on a dose of dead rituals. Like that of Naipaul’s forefathers in the West Indies.

The cornerstone of Hinduism is the place for irrationality, which was not sought to be explained away so much as accepted. And this irrationality that Hinduism accommodated in its worldview has always been easily explained away as fatalism. And, come to think of it, its easiest definition is exactly that.

All religions subsist on some kind of faith, and a set of rituals. The more well-defined these rituals, as well as the rubric of do’s and don’ts, the more tightly bound will be the religion. In that sense, most revelatory religions closed their circle, and found a definition. An identity. And when these faiths reached new shores, there too, the circle clearly held, and defined the people within it as distinct from the geographical culture of that place. Creating identities within identities.

Hinduism never seemed to have been bothered by the anxiety of wanting a clearly defined identity. And lacking an inviolable rubric of do’s and don’ts, it never closed its circle. It kept enriching its confusion rather than ordering and straining for lucidity, definition, distinction or identity.

Even today across Hindu communities in India, too many looked for, found and married mates who spoke the same language, were from the same caste, and spoke the same language. And yet, each could have a family god different from the ruling popular gods of Hinduism’s numberless pantheon.

Hinduism has the phlegmatic nature of a non-revelatory religion, and a trajectory of survival that seemed to forever seek only longevity at any cost. A meaningless longevity that seems to be borne as a karmic curse, rather than any systematic crossing of historical milestones, through the course of civilization. This and a total lack of an anxiety for identity, made for a vast amorphous value system where all units were legitimate, and the whole was infinite. And this baggage of value systems somehow was a baggage that never lost itself, because it was a holdall with infinite capacity.

So, Hinduism only survived. It rarely flourished. And whatever drama one might attach to its alleged innovativeness and reinvention, the truth is Hinduism went through all the paroxysms of a culture rather than a religion, with minor fireworks occasionally.

In fact, Hinduism’s trajectory suggests the wayward route of an overly, and confoundingly long-burning flare. Like a weed that bore attractive flowers. Invariably, despite its prettiness, it could not help being the weed that it was. And unless it was an unqualified weed, come to think of it, it could not have been a “way of life.” The tenacity of the weed alone explains a value system that seems to have dodged the dialectics of religious history.

Even during the struggle for Independence, Hinduism could not be marshalled as a unifying, galvanizing force to define a nationalism for emergent India, which is a political identity. Hinduism’s clay was bad material for moulding identities.

This is however being challenged by the new Hindu right. They are trying to do what has never happened in 4000 years. You can rejuvenate faith, like the Bhakti movement did, but you cannot force Hinduism to close its circle.

And yet, the first real challenge to such a sensibility came during the Independence struggle itself. And it sprung forth not from within the folds of Hinduism, though the RSS did initiate an attempt with Sarvarkar’s idea of Hindu nationalism. It’s most potent challenge came from Jinnah’s two nation theory. Till then, the Indian National Congress was spearheading the independence movement. And in true Hindu fashion, the party was everything for everyone. All kinds of people flocked to the party. The party had, besides the non-definition as definition as an intrinsic character of Hinduism, a mechanism of dispute resolution that was also very Hindu, patriarchal. It was this benign patriarchy that managed to contain fractures within the Congress through the differences of outlook with Subhash Bose and later the Sardar Patel, However, the most triumphant dissent was Jinnah’s two nation theory.

Debate rages on the individual motivations of Jinnah and the Congress leaders of the time. However, it is to Jinnah’s credit, that he was able to beat to shape an Indian Islamic identity that was rapidly “Hinduising” since the time of the Mughuls, and feed that apparition shape political substance. The substantiation of the idea of Muslim nationalism, the closing of the circle within the open circle, had its imperfections. For example, it could not be a pan-Indian, admittedly India itself was how the British by then had formed on the map. Most who veered, and later were consumed by the two nation theory, were the Muslims of Northern India. The geographic location and the topographical intensity of the Muslim population, and a reignited political passion found a contiguous landmass to be the home of the nation that could “not” live with Hindu India, without fear of majority persecution. Jinnah also got a huge part of united Bengal which fulfilled the conditions of geography, as in a contiguous landmass united by a common religious identity. However, as history marched into its third decade after Independence, the two nation theory, itself a more modern construct in an ancient land, collapsed under the might of another shock; which too was not so much from Hindu India as much as other set of modern ingradients that were seminal building blocks of political identity.

The unified identity carved on religion, collapsed under the overload of other similar factors that were crucial to the modern idea of identity building. Language. Geography. Besides, political differences that were brought into sharp relief because of inequity that gave a booster shot to linguistic and geographical passions. Jinnah’s version of the two nation theory was based on the fear that Muslims of the subcontinent would be “second class” citizens in Hindu India. And yet, the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 proved the efficacy of Jinnah’s modern tools, but also through the triumph of language, culture, and shared customs of a people also paid its respects to the potency of more ancient ties. Just as modern ideas of identity and distinction first cleaved the amorphous Hindu Congress, it later turned on itself and in its turn cleaved the two nation theory.

Other misfortunes also hit Pakistan. Had Jinnah, pork eating, westernised Jinnah, managed to stay at the helm of affairs in Pakistan as long as India’s westernised Kashmiri Pandit prime minister after the partition, his idea’s more positive possibilities would have been fully or partially accomplished. IN the process, the prodigal won his battle, but the war was left for his people to fight. And torn away from the “joint family” support structures that the unified national independence struggle made available to leaders of the time, was beyond reach for Pakistan’s next set of leaders. While Jinnah’s ideas for Pakistan remain in extant text of his numerous speeches, essays and other works, Nehru’s socialistic leanings and grand designs of “moral leadership of the third world” infused Hindu India’s formative years. It provided stability, killed some anxieties, but lived and flourished long enough to be bequeathed to a unified country now mostly critical of those precise ideas of its first prime minister.