It is a paradox that religious violence is rampant despite the subcontinent having historically been the womb of the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh religions. But it is a greater paradox that the modern Indian nation state is constitutionally secular but even more inextricably trapped in the baffling, blinding and immense power of our own mortal creation—religion. This entrapment has, in a Frankensteinian turn of affairs has led to differences.
In other parts of the world too, at different points of time, religion has become larger than life, perhaps whenever we have forgotten that it is a man-made creation and not divinely ordained.
In Europe, during the Middle Ages, we killed each other in the Christian Crusades against Muslim invasions. A few centuries later, there were bloody wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants. More recently, we massacred innocents in terror attacks in the name of jihadist Islam. Nation states and corresponding governing structures, such as in Pakistan and Israel, have been created on the basis of religion, and committed atrocities on believers of minority religions. Each time we have felt justified in taking lives in the name of religion is when we have perceived religion as a cause much greater than ourselves.
So if the whole world is killing each other over religious differences, why should we be surprised when we Indians do the same?
But we are surprised, because somehow, we do not expect this in India. Just as those outside India presume there is spiritual peace here, we Indians believe in unity in our diversity.
There are two popular perspectives to Hinduism, which is followed by 79.8 per cent of Indians today6—a massive 966 million, approximately. One, pluralists envision a decentralized profusion of diverse ideas and practices that are happily incorporated under the big tent of Hinduism. I believe that this is the perspective that has made it to our school textbooks. The second perspective is the kind of Hinduism currently in practice, of the centralists who identify themselves as part of a single, pan-Indian, more or less hegemonic, orthodox tradition, centred on an ancient Vedic lineage of texts, transmitted primarily in Sanskrit by Brahmins. This orthodox manifestation of religious identity is prone to rejecting anyone who differs from it. It also points to a Hindu rashtra, deemed by divine ordinance, its purity measured by the proximity of its inhabitants to the ancient Vedic culture, and polluted by anyone whose faith is different.
Ironically, the Hindu ‘religious identity’ is barely 200 years old. The practices that today constitute Hinduism can be traced back to about 1200 BC, but the emergence of Hinduism as a religious identity for Indian people is—and I will explain how—as recent as the nineteenth century.7 Prior to this, neither did these groups have a name for themselves as a religious unity, nor did they consider themselves members of a single religious collective. Hindu religious identity is a recent phenomenon when compared to the establishment of other world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Jainism, which dates back to at least 1500 years. Yet, we can marvel at how in a comparatively short time, it has come to wield incredible power and taken the high ground of authority over various regional groups of vernacular languages and practices.
The history of the creation of the Hindu religious identity is fascinating. As recently as three centuries ago, ‘Hinduism’ was a largely geographical reference. It did not have a religious connotation. The term ‘Hinduism’ comes from the Indus river. Persians to the west of the Indus used the term, modifying it phonologically to ‘Hind’, to refer to the land of the Indus Valley. From Persian, it was borrowed by Greek and Latin, with India becoming the geographical designation for all unknown territories beyond the Indus. Meanwhile, Muslims used the term ‘Hindu’ to refer to the native people of South Asia, and more specifically, to those South Asians who did not convert to Islam, lending the term, for the first time, some religious significance.
It was only in the nineteenth century that the colonial British, in common parlance and later in their census, began to officially use the word ‘Hinduism’ to refer to a supposed religious system, encompassing the beliefs and practices of Indian people who did not follow other ‘named’ religions such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism or Jainism. By then, a series of distinct individual world religions had come to be defined, each with its own essence and historical timeline. A unifying umbrella of Hinduism as a religion, bringing together the various disparate practices of people living east of the Indus, was seen by locals in India too as a useful construct and counterpart to the seemingly monolithic Christianity of the colonizers.8
If we trace the origins of some religious practices in India that we now kill each other over, we can find explanations that point to a trivial incident or mortal whim in ancient times. Their origins forgotten, however, we now accord these incidents immense value with a blind fervour that has no place for reason, letting them legitimize atrocities, plunder and murder. Perhaps we cling to this blind fervour—or faith, as we call it—because it also provides us hope in hopeless times, makes us optimistic by offering ways to effect life-changing, logic-defying miracles, and lends itself as a pivot for our mortal life. Who then cares about its origins?
For those of us who do, let us take the example of the varna scheme, or the caste system, as we know it today, which is the basis of the Hindu stratification of society accorded by birth.
The first instance of the social institutionalization of Brahmin dominance—indeed, of the varna scheme or caste system—can be found in the Purusha Sukta hymn of the Rig Veda (10.90).9
When later Vedic texts such as the Yajur Veda further emphasized the role of sacrifices and prescribed sacrificial procedures ranging from modest domestic rites around home fires to elaborate public ceremonies sponsored by
