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In a string of mass congregations, the VHP has made clear its intentions to resuscitate the symbol not only in its spiritual dimensions but also materially, through the mass distribution of tridents among Hindus in Trishul-Diksha (ritual initiation in the use of the Trishul) programs. Its first such attempt in Rajasthan was a failure with the State Government ordering the arrest of Mr. Tagodia and slamming charges of treason against him. Released on bail on the understanding that he would initiate no further programs of the kind in Rajasthan, Tagodia moved to Delhi where an immensely successful Trishul Diksha was organized.ÝThe trident is essentially a weapon and the VHP's reputation for instigating communal riots throws a question mark over its motives for the trident program.
In a country caught in the swamps of general economic misery where poverty and unemployment eat at the vitals of youth, religious symbols exert immense influence and power. They hold out hope, provide energy and life in an atmosphere of general uncertainty and ever dwindling chi. Amidst famine, floods, heat waves, and an abundance of slums and poor living conditions, people need faith to hold out and religious symbolism holds out hope with an immediacy that government programs cannot. The VHP has been quick to make political capital of mass psychology.
Historians have often sought to answer the riddle of Hinduism's survival in the face of the continuous occupation of India's mainland by Moslems and Christians over a period of nearly a thousand years - since Mahmud of Ghori defeated the valiant Prithviraj in 1192 C.E. The most common answer has been the Caste System and the conditions that the system of hereditary specialization of labor, congealed over centuries, has created.
Highly resilient to change, the system has undoubtedly been the major factor contributing to the continuity of Hindi social life. Even in the midst of hostile occupation forces, the system allowed the carving out of a cultural space where the Hindu form of life could be celebrated. What is often missed is that the system created conditions where religious symbolism could flourish, adapting to the new conditions, retaining old psychological associations and creating new ones that were necessary for survival. What helped in this process was the fact that for a thousand years, until the Moslem invasion, India's varied races and communities had generated a multitude of symbols, a variety unmatched by the old civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece.
While the caste system was a common thread running through these various communities and principalities, the symbols were varied and they were often transported over sub-cultures through trade, commerce and political contact. The result was a rich variety that has survived until this day, while the psychological associations themselves have been immensely fluid, answering to the needs of the hour and the environment in which the Hindu life form found itself.
Like all old communities, however, warlike symbols have dominated and the better known symbols of the Hindu religious life are all related, in some way, to war and to the primitive desire for racial survival at the cost of competing socio-cultural forms. Popular religion, in this sense, is at variance with the meditative islands of elite Brahmanism and in another sense, complements the latter. The warrior and the philosopher coexist in the Hindu religious life as complements even as they did in the political life of ancient and medieval Hindu kingdoms.
These symbols, again, being engraved on the Indian psyche, are easily evoked and when pointed and directed at a specific object, become potent political weapons, as powerful as a call to Jihad by rifle-wielding separatists in Kashmir. Powerless of themselves and latent in their psychological associations, symbols can become immensely powerful when an object is found whereto the psychological energies of its hosts can be directed. Hitler knew that when he resuscitated the Swastika out of Tibet. The Jewish communities knew that when they used the Pentagram to unite and survive throughout the various lands where they lived during the Middle Ages. And the VHP realizes it when it directs the warlike Trident, instrument of destruction, at the enemies of Hinduism, namely those who live a different way of life and whose minds carry associations other than those of a very ancient India.
The use of religious symbolism to forge a sense of nationhood is not new to India. Gandhi's own movement for India's independence was full of religious symbolism. One of the very first uses of religious symbolism in India's experiment with nationhood came at an early stage in the freedom struggle when the motherland was conceptualized as "The Mother", a form of the Mother Spirit that holds such a prominent place in Tantric mysticism.
Bankim Chandra's "Ananda Math" depicts an imaginary account of the Sanyasi rebellion where the Sanyasis in their cave maintain three idols of the mother representing the mother as she was, as she is and as she will be. And before these deities they sing Vande Mataram ( Mother, I bow to Thee), a song whose lyrics remain to this day a bone of contention with Muslims refusing to sing it because of its association with idol worship and the VHP and its allies insisting that this is sure sign of the Muslim's infidelity.
India's freedom movement abounded in the use of religious symbolism particularly in the use of "The Mother" as an image of the motherland. This was a powerful image because the cult of the mother-goddess was India's most widely practiced religion and the image naturally evoked a strong emotional response.
Led by the educated upper classes, the Swadeshi movement freely made use of religious symbols to forge a sense of nationhood among the dispersed peoples of the subcontinent. R.C Mazumdar cites a report from the Ananda Bazar Patrika on the grand worship ceremony held at the famous Kalighat temple towards the beginning of the Swadeshi movement of 1905 in support of the movement. During that ceremony, according to the report, the Brahmins in the temple urged on the gathering to "worship the motherland before all other deities". This movement was to become the basis for India's struggle for independence. Mazumdar cites "The elevation of patriotism into a religion and transformation of religion into patriotism" as one of the defining characteristics of the new nationalism that grew out of the Swadeshi movement.
Aurobindo similarly spoke of the "realization of the motherhood of God in the country, the vision of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother" (cited by Mazumdar in his History of the Freedom Movement in India, Volume II).
What is important to note here is that a patriotism that is born out of a sense of the nation being in some sense a metaphysical truth and Reality, rather than a geo-political or demographic entity, can be dangerous. Anyone who does not subscribe to the same metaphysical notion is easily interpreted as antithetical to the notion itself and his interest deemed to be at variance with that of the motherland (a living cognizant mother) . It is not difficult to see that such contemplations breed xenophobia. He whose Holy Land is in distant Mecca or Rome or Jerusalem is not, in the proper sense of the term and according to this definition of nationhood, a "son of the soil".
The persistent use of the religious symbolism of the majority cult, however, did not bode well for India's experiments with secularism. In the first place, it led to a sense of unease among and consequent alienation of the Muslim gentry out of which the movement for Pakistan was born.
In addition, it failed to inspire India's Christian population. Continued with equal vigor after independence was won in 1947, this glorification of "The Mother" has meant that avowed secularism notwithstanding, there has always been a tendency toward the Hindu State. India remains a Hindu nation steeped in the myths, symbols and attitudes of an ancient past. The newly proposed Bill seeking to ban cow-slaughter, already cleared by the Central Cabinet and awaiting debate in Parliament is another evidence of this.