Why I am a Hindu

Title: Why I am a Hindu

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789386021106

Pages: 297

Shashi Tharoor is a politician well known for his cosmopolitan views and liberal outlook. He contested for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006, lost to Ban Ki-moon and returned to India as a junior minister in the Congress government headed by Manmohan Singh. Tharoor is an intellectual having several well-researched books to his credit. However, he is known for mixing his ideas with partisan politics and presenting them as time-honoured truths. Sensationalism is his hallmark as seen in the strange assertion in his last book titled ‘An Era of Darkness’ (reviewed earlier) in which he claimed that India's caste system was a flexible one and that it got solidified during the British rule. In this book, he eulogizes the Hindu religion’s credentials as an inherently tolerant belief system that is well adapted to the spiritual requirements of the 21st century world. He is piqued by the attempts to reduce Hinduism's message to religious bigotry made by his political opponents in the Hindutva-inspired rightists of India.

The book’s attempt to present the basics of Hindu philosophy and ethos in a format that can be easily understood by the readers is remarkably effective. Most of it is lifted from more famous references, but the credit for the lucid condensation must be given to Tharoor. Hinduism has no founder or prophets, no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no uniform conception of a good life and no single sacred book. In this sense it has no fundamentals and hence no fundamentalism. There are no binding requirements to being a Hindu, not even a belief in God. The authorial diversity of Hindu scriptures and tenets is so vast that the author likens it to Wikipedia. Right in the beginning, Tharoor points out two reasons for writing this book. One is to himself try and understand the extraordinary wisdom and virtue of his faith and the other is to show that the intolerant and violent forms of political Hindutva went against the spirit of Hinduism. This itself is idiosyncratic as he describes aspects of Hindu thought that matter to him and questions practices that he is less enthusiastic about.

Tharoor reiterates time and again that he subscribes to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, one that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single volume of holy revelation. It is the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Its tolerance to other faiths and modes of worship is legendary. An example presented in the book is that of Bene Israel, a community of Jews who reached India in the first century CE. It was astonishing that their Hindu neighbours did not see them as people practicing a different religion through all these centuries until a wandering Rabi from Jerusalem identified the tribe in the twentieth century.

The revival of Hinduism began with the British rule, or so the author claims. In the early period of the colonial administration, native reformers were somewhat embarrassed at the dark superstition and malicious rituals accreted on mainstream Hindu practice. Raja Ram Mohan Roy exemplifies this stream. However, the religion bounced back with full vigour in a few decades in which Swami Vivekananda becomes the representative figure. Tharoor contrasts this with a sharp observation: “It took a Vivekananda, not a Roy, to preach seven decades later, a robust, modernist and universalist Hinduism, anchored in its own precepts that could look the rest of the world’s religions in the eye and oblige them to blink “(p.115).

One great drawback of Tharoor is his propensity to mix politics with his literary work as he is a sitting MP of India's major opposition party. He laments that today's national leaders talk only about GDP growth, fiscal balance and foreign direct investment. They wear imported sunglasses and highest quality tailored linens. What do these have to do with our present topic of discussion? And this rebuke at markers of wealth coming from a flamboyant political icon as Shashi Tharoor is rather amusing. During his tenure as minister, he reportedly rued to a friend that as part of an austerity drive, he is forced to fly on ‘cattle class’ (economy class) along with other sacred cows!

Any discussion on Indian tolerance to other faiths must address the issue of how this salutary feature of Hinduism was battered mercilessly during foreign invasions that lasted a millennium. Tharoor faces this task but passes off with an apologist stance in favour of the invaders. He concurs that ‘some’ Muslim warlords had a proclivity to attack temples for their treasures and demolish them in the process. Similarly, he condones forced conversion as ‘an inclination’ of some of the conquered people to adopt the religion of their conquerors (p.103). After a few vaults of such intellectual riffraff, he grudgingly confesses to the existence of religious zeal in the Muslim warriors to smash the seats of idolatry (p.104). Tharoor also comments on the immense resilience of Hinduism. It survived innumerable invasions, raids, attacks and outright conquest. Each time, it stood strong and bounced back where lesser faiths in other countries crumbled before the invader and the majority of the population converted to the conqueror’s faith. However, Islamic invasions led to a defensive closing of the ranks and the adoption of retrograde protective practices that entrenched restrictions and prohibitions previously unknown. Restriction of entry into Hindu temples came about probably with a view to safeguard their treasures from prying eyes. Child marriage was instituted as protection for girls and even the practice of Sati were all measures of self-defence during this turbulent period of Indian history that evolved into pernicious social practices wrongly seen as intrinsic to Hinduism rather than as a reaction to assaults upon it.

The author’s firm opposition to Hindutva ideology flow out like a great stream throughout this book. As is usual in such rhetoric, a lot of half truths and plain falsehoods are also included. Anyhow, this tirade does not stop him from accepting that a temple indeed stood earlier at the site of Babri Masjid (p.181). Concerning the outrage caused by noted painter M F Husain’s nude and obscene portrayal of Hindu goddesses, he advises the Hindus to feel flattered by the fact that a Muslim artist had drawn liberally (italics mine) from Hindu ethos! This does not stop him from observing that Husain was much more circumspect and reverent towards Muslim figures he represented on the canvas. He once painted the prophet's wife as a fully clad woman in a saree which even covered her head (p.236). This articulation of freedom of expression is not extended to the Danish cartoons which portrayed the Prophet. Tharoor acknowledges them as insulting! Double standards, indeed. In another twist, he also admits that the Sangh Parivar, having seen successive governments pandering to the offended sentiments of minority communities, now want to show they could be offended too, and thereby bend society to their will (p.233). Tharoor even admits that Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva is so expansive that it covered everything that a scholar today would properly call Indic (p.145). In another self goal, he concedes that there is much to admire in Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s thinking (p.194). India's secular existence is made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus (p.199). With such arguments it seems to readers that Tharoor keeps a political backdoor half open to India's right wing ruling party.

It is well known that Tharoor is assisted in his literary effort by a team consisting of people with remarkable talent. It may be due to this team work that some of the ideas are seen repeated with slight changes at different locations. This has not precluded some unconscionable errors from creeping into the narrative. Babri Masjid is said to be demolished in December 1991 rather than 1992 (p.206). Similarly, the author contends that hundred elephants are decked up for the Pooram festival at Thrissur in Kerala (p.39) whereas the actual figure is around thirty. These are no big deal, being clerical mistakes, but the carelessness of the editorial team is shocking. So is the claim that Jainism is only a separate sect in Hinduism rather than a separate faith which maybe offending to Jains (p.24). But the author might be confident that the peace-loving Jains would not go after him with brickbats, which is the only consideration some authors have in publishing sensitive content. The book is easy to read even though the author tries his usual tricks with the rich source of vocabulary at his command. Almost the entire latter half of the book is a worthless rhetoric of political correctness, having no connecting link to the issues at hand.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star