The idea of the satyagrahi could be articulated in any faith and spoken in a variety of dialects. C.F. Andrews, Khan Abdul Gafar Khan, Gandhiji and Dalai Lama explored their own traditions of religious beliefs
THE OTHER SIDE Democracy in India cannot work without a dialogue of faiths. Our Constitution might be secular, but our tacit constitutions, our cosmologies and meaning systems draw from a confluence of religious beliefs
— SHIV VISVANATHAN
A history of faith can be written in many ways. One can summon the testaments of belief from Nanak and Kabir to Blake, Weil and Gandhi, where faith can be seen as a polyphony of news around a unity or a mystery. This place I am outlining is more instigated by two questions that have haunted me for the last decades. One is the former President George Bush’s axis of evil argument. It found its ideological reflections in Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, predicting a struggle between Christianity and Islam.
A beautiful reaction to it came from the Dalai Lama who said, almost pithily, that George Bush brought out the Muslim in him. It is a profound statement claiming that one has to embrace the religion of the other to sustain one’s religious self. It is a statement which says that God or pantheon of Gods might be complete, but religions need another to complete or resonate themselves.
Yet there are moments in history that destroyed this plurality. Moments which erased wonderful world of pluralism and I think one of them was 1492. 1492 is a grand date in Western history. It marks the era of Columbus discovering America. Where Christianity, imperialism and science invade a continent. 1492 also marks the defeat of the moors at Grenada. 1492 is seen as a significant date marking the rise of the official West. It was the rediscovery of America that was tragic. It was the death of Granada. The Muslims had created a pluralistic city where Christians Jews and Muslims evaluated their philosophies, their medicines and their worldviews. Libraries were created where such comparative scholarship was sustained. It was only with the death of Granada that the Jews were expelled from Spain belonging their history in no mans land. The novelist Amitabh Ghosh talks of Travancore of the time as a mix of Hinduism and Islam, a conversation of differences wondering why this wonderful mutuality that marked the true cosmopolitanism and pluralism of such port towns disappeared. Groups which were once friendly neighbours, question each other as distant strangers. The death of Granada created a schizophrenic world. Faiths which overlapped like ripples in a lake now became suspicious of each other.
The inquisition and the crusades as prime act of intolerance were born soon. The first of Khomeini’s Savonarola embodied the picture of an indialogic faith. The age of witch hunting was soon to follow. The other both within as gnostic, occult, heretic was to disappear as intolerance became paradigmatic.
In fact, the split of history of faiths creates a divide. On the one side we had the Bhakti movement, the reign of Akbar, on the other forced conversion, genocide, with the Portuguese at their rampant worst. One rewrites histories forgetting it was the Islamic faith that kept the Western civilization alive, that when Christianity was almost barbaric, it was Islamic scholars who kept the work of Aristotle alive. 1492 created a set of polarities between Islam and Christianity, Jew and Christian, tribal and imperial all of which turned genocidal.
Yet there is an alternative history that we must keep alive. The pity was that illiterate history of science added to the split among religions. It takes a little to appreciate that modern science appeared out of Christian theology. The conflict between science and religion was created during the battle of universities during the middle of the 18th century. Christianity in the West might have been monotheistic, but Christianity in India embedded itself in our culture. It was the advent of the Christian missionaries in India that ruined colonialism as a pluralistic possibility. The early colonists were quite happy without their Christian wives. In fact, it was the colonies that kept plurality alive, allowing even the West to recover some sense of plurality through interaction.
I am emphasising this history because there is a danger of India semiticising itself. India today faces a challenge between pluralising and semiticising itself. The Partition was one such moment and Saadat Hasaan Manto articulated a faith in pluralism through Bombay Talkies. Our medical systems were another pluralising force and as the historian A.L. Basham said our medical systems could never be accused of communalism what with our practitioners simultaneously comparing their medicines and their belief system. The freedom movement was another moment where thanks to Gandhi, Gaffar Khan and C.F. Andrews, each faith explored its own traditions of non- violence. The idea of the satyagrahi could be articulated in any faith and spoken in a variety of dialects. Democracy in India cannot work without a dialogue of faiths. Our constitution might be secular, but our tacit constitutions, our cosmologies and meaning systems draw from a confluence of religious beliefs. Our music is a collaboration of faiths with Guru and shishya belonging to different faiths. Our religions do not need a missionising zeal or positivist science. Our power, our diversity, our mythic ability to invent difference is based on our syncretism. This syncretism is not a confusion, or a lazy collage. It is an attempt to realise that truth needs an infinity of faiths and the power to stick to one. This much history and folklore teaches us. Our powers that be, believed in divide and rule, but our people believed in live and let live. It is this mutual tolerance that has made us one of few civilizations to continue from time memorial.
1492 is a date inscribed in the Western and colonial unconscious. As a national movement fighting against imperialism we can liberate ourselves as a people. But the categories, the hierarchies, the classifications of 1492 inscribed in our historical and political consciousness need an act of emancipation. We have to create frameworks of faith and freedom which go beyond liberal and secular manifestoes. We need a recharging of faith, an encounter of differences, a dialogue of civilizations within the structures of everydayness to create pluralism as a lived in space. For this one needs a different set of myths beyond current ideas in science, management and economics. One has to treat the multiple faiths as a commons of ideas to retain these imaginaries of freedom. Exorcising 1492 is one of the challenges religion and democracy in India has to face in the future.
The author is research fellow Compost Heap.
(courtesy : “The Hindu”, 05 July 2013)