Researchgate. 2012. Sterilization regret among married women in India. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234133191_Sterilization_Regret_Among_Married_Women_in_India_Implications_for_the_Indian_National_Family_Planning_Program.
Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan).
Varma, Pavan K. 2005. Being Indian: The Truth About Why the Twenty-first Century Will be India’s (New Delhi: Penguin Books India), p. 47.
Wright, David. 2016. Poll: Trump, Clinton score historic unfavorable ratings. CNN, 22 March.
10Religion
In India, the cradle of four world religions, we somehow expect tolerance, peace and harmony to thrive. At school, we are taught that India is multicultural and that our strength lies in the diversity of languages, cultures and religious beliefs. Hinduism, India’s most popular religion, is itself supposedly a collection of various regional practices and beliefs, and so it is assumed that it must be accepting of differences.
We hear mosques calling out prayers and temple bells chiming on the same street. The queues for langar at gurdwaras make a blessed and excited cacophony. We assume that the visitors to these institutions get along with each other, that there is fraternity despite diversity.
When I was six, our family lived a few years in Agra, the city that boasts of the Taj Mahal. A few kilometres away from this beauty, inside the air force camp, I would watch my father visit a cramped and modest local temple, more often when he needed a favour from the gods. I saw my mother pray harder and the box of sweets in my father’s hand grow larger with each temple visit, as the desperation for the favour increased.
My parents were ‘modern’, a word that at the time meant being educated, English-speaking and Western in social habits. Yet, it was not out of character for them, no matter where we lived, to install a temple at home—a wooden holder placed in a corner of my parents’ bedroom—and go to a local temple to offer sweets when the going got tougher. At the same time, they also offered me the lifelong freedom to visit neither the temple at home nor the one outside—as a child, I once told them that I could not understand why idols had to be worshipped because my faith resided within me.
Much later, living in a different part of the world, I would often hear inhabitants of foreign lands talk of India’s ‘spiritual’ aspect. They would ask me about the sacred cow, karma, yoga, and mendicants in Benares. They would vociferously marvel at how even the poor were so content in India, assuming that the gratification, despite all that poverty, must be related to their belief in religion. Most of these people had not visited India.
Those living abroad and following the news are horrified by the news of the frequent rioting, violence and murder in the name of religion in India. They knew that through the seventy years of being independent, we have killed thousands of our fellow citizens for reasons related to defending our religion, by that coin opposing that of others.1 Then, of course, there is the carnage of Partition in 1947, when one to two million people were killed, 75,000 women raped and mutilated, numerous villages set afire, and fifteen million people uprooted as Muslims were forced to trek to West and East Pakistan (the latter is now known as Bangladesh), while Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction.2
My association with my Bengali Brahmin parents and the Muslim Farooqui family in Delhi has sensitized me to the angst and complex emotions on both sides of the divide.3 In my twelve-year relationship with the Farooquis’ son, we spent about eight years living together in various parts of the world. Every face-off between Hindus and Muslims would rock the chances of the societal acceptance of our relationship in India. This was despite the fact that the vicious hostility, based entirely on religious differences, of my family towards the Farooquis in the initial four years or so had gradually changed to fond friendship based on human values. My father discovered that he shared many typical middle-class Indian values with the Farooquis. ‘They are the same as I,’ he finally declared after six years of knowing them. Yet, this fortunate and uncommon reconciliation between the families could never drown out the condescending voices from the rest of society. A pandit once ousted my father from the temple after chiding him publicly for having ‘given away’ his daughter to a Mohammedan.
Caught between the two religions for so long, I have perhaps become more sceptical of the petty religious differences in our country. Indeed, my perspective on religion, as I write about it today, is a consequence of deeply private experiences, as much as it is of my intellectual curiosity. As I sought reasons I read and learnt about Hinduism and Islam in India. I painstakingly researched religion and eventually even wrote my master’s thesis on the Indian Muslim community in Paris during my studies in the city.
Instances of religious violence in India are far too many and frequent to list, but here is just a glimpse. Millions of Hindus and Muslims died during the Partition of India, and in the riots that followed. A few decades after Independence, certain sections of Sikhs in Punjab were unhappy about domination by Hindus and started seeking political autonomy. In 1984, under orders from Indira Gandhi, the Indian army attacked the Golden Temple with tanks and armoured vehicles, killing many Sikhs. Thereafter, Indira Gandhi was assassinated on 31 October 1984 by two Sikh bodyguards. The assassination provoked unprecedented mass rioting in India against Sikhs—thousands were burnt alive or killed, and many displaced and injured.4
Communal violence in Kashmir continues too. While Kashmiris continue to live in constant fear for their lives, since the late 1980s, large numbers of Hindus who chose to remain in Kashmir have been driven out. Meanwhile, spurts of anti-Christian violence have frequently occurred in independent India as well. These days, even atheists are not spared. Recently in 2017 in Coimbatore, Farook, who had abandoned Islam
