“Modi’s BJP is a tragic affront to India’s secular beginnings. Hinduism is at least as ridiculous as Islam. Between them, these two idiotic religions have betrayed the ideals of Nehru and Gandhi.”
If one reads this tweet from Richard Dawkins, without knowing the context, one would assume that an act of cataclysmic proportions has been committed by Hindu zealots, similar to 9/11 or worse, to invite such damning terms as “ridiculous” and “idiotic” for their religion — Hinduism. Ironically, Dawkins was reacting to an editorial in Nature magazine, which claimed that the topics of Periodic Table and Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had been dropped from the school education curriculum in India. As it turned out, it was yet another case of fake news; for, the topics had not been removed but merely shifted from Class X to Class XI.
The damage, however, was already done. Hinduism was now a certified “idiotic” religion! And its tenets were “at least as ridiculous” as those of Islam! Ironically, when it comes to Hinduism, one witnesses a rare unanimity in the West across ideological, religious and even political fault lines. Remember Dr Jordan Peterson, a best-selling author and a clinical psychologist by training, who didn’t only post an image of Maa Kali in his tweet but also called her “sheer unadulterated narcissism in action” and “the devouring mother arises from the underworld”.
Coming back to Dawkins, his tweet has been particularly unsettling given a sense of familiarity most Hindus have for him. They own him up as their own, celebrating his books, especially The God Delusion, for bringing out the ills of organised religions — just the same way they stand for Christopher Hitchens, especially since The Missionary Position exposed “Mother Teresa in theory and in practice”. What they find hard to believe is that Dawkins, or for that matter Hitchens — just like an old Belfast joke about a person asking another if he were a “Protestant or Catholic atheist” — remains a Christian atheist at best. Their understanding of Hinduism is based on their own Western experiences.
Dawkins, in that way, is a victim of his own upbringing. Being born a Christian, he understands Christianity and by extension Islam and Judaism — the other two Abrahamic religions. But the same cannot be said for Hinduism, which is everything that an Abrahamic religion isn’t. In 1929, Japanese thinker Watsuji Tetsuro wrote about three types of cultural ecologies: The Monsoon Climatic Area, the Desert Climatic Area and the Meadow Climatic Area. The ethos of Hinduism-Buddhism represents the monsoon climate; Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the articulations of the desert; and Western technology is a result of the meadowland. The rigid, deterministic, man-versus-nature outlook of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is the result of its desert origin, while a monsoon (riverine) religion like Hinduism is innately non-static like a river — always moving, always evolving, always assimilating, and always updating itself.
What also doesn’t help the cause of Hinduism is the fact that it reaches the Western shores in a largely distorted form. Most so-called Hinduism academic centres in the West, attached to American/European universities, are manned by people with deep reservations, if not distrust, for India’s civilisational past. Worse, as Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan write in their 2022 book Snakes on the Ganga, these very Hinduism centres find donors in some of the richest Indian entrepreneurs. Ironically, while the Western institutions researching Hinduism are run by usual suspects, in India the authorities are largely apologetic about having any Indic centres attached to universities and colleges.
No wonder, for an outsider, the notion of Hinduism is shaped by those who view it with distrust, if not distaste. A Dawkins or a Hitchens, therefore, sees Hinduism in a denigrating light without ever realising their prejudiced mind. No wonder when one reads Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, one find nothing about Hinduism, except a few disparaging paragraphs condemning it as an extension of Christianity and Islam. All The God Delusion, for instance, does in the name of explaining Hinduism is that it quotes Jawaharlal Nehru saying how the “spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it”. He again quotes Nehru to say that “in a country like India, which has many faiths and religions, no real nationalism can be built up except on the basis of secularitry”.
God Is Not Great, in that way, fares comparatively better in exploring Hinduism. It at least attempts to see Hinduism — as in the chapter “There Is No ‘Eastern’ Solution” — through the prism of Sai Baba and Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. Even here, Hitchens chooses the physical (or should we say sexual?) aspect of Rajneesh’s ashram, and completely glosses over his actual teachings. He reminds the readers how he was irritated to read the “little sign” at the entrance: “Shoes and minds must be left at the gate.” This was a double whammy for Hinduism. First, Hitchens chose Rajneesh’s sect, which was in the first place organised to woo Western audiences, to reflect upon Hinduism; then, worse, he focused on the most boorish (physical) aspect of that sect to write an obituary for the entire religion.
Alas for his Christian upbringing, Dawkins fails to realise that the very notion of secularism is Christian in nature; it makes little sense in pluralistic societies like India. In fact, Hitchens himself writes in God Is Not Great how excessive and obsessive secularism backfires, as was the case in Albania, where the then communist state “tried to extirpate religion completely and to proclaim an entirely atheist state”, leading “to even more extreme cults of mediocre human beings”. Nehruvian India, obsessed with minority-first secularism, too witnessed a similar Hindu uprising in the 1980s which gathered steam in the coming decades to let Narendra Modi, in 2014, head the first majority government in three decades.
On Darwin too, Dawkins’ sense of rage against Hinduism is completely misplaced. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution finds stiff opposition in the West, but it comes naturally to Indians and their sensibilities. As one Los Angeles-based surgeon told authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “If you trust evolution, you distrust God…” (God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World; 2009). There’s no such compulsion in India.
In his 1959 article, “An Indian Perspective of Darwin” (The centennial Review; Vol 3, No. 4), British-Indian scientist JBS Haldane wrote, “To Europeans and Americans, it inevitably seems that Darwin’s greatest achievement has been to convince educated men and women that biological evolution is a fact, that living plant and animal species are all descended from ancestral species very unlike themselves, and, in particular, that men are descended from animals… But in India and China, this distinction has not been made; and according to Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina ethics, animals have rights and duties. My wife has stated categorically that Darwin converted Europe to Hinduism. This is, I think, an exaggeration, but is nearer to the truth than it sounds.”
Liberalism and pluralism emerge organically in the Indic scheme of things. Unlike in the West, even religion and science are not antagonistic, irreconcilable blocs in India; they often complement each other. The reason being, as Watsuji Tetsuro articulated almost a century ago, the riverine (monsoon) origins of the Indic civilisation, making it an ever-evolving, ever-assimilating and ever-updating culture — very unlike the desert religions that are static, rigid and commandment-based.
The ethos of the Indic civilisational open-mindedness, a hallmark of unadulterated liberalism, pluralism and rational/scientific outlook, is best articulated in the Rig Veda’s ‘Nasadiya Sukta’, which begins with the following questions:
There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?
The Sukta, then, ends with the following statement:
Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.
Dawkins, if he were true to his rational calling, would relate to — and appreciate — the civilisational idea of India. For, it is this civilisational candidness to indefinite and endless possibilities that has made India an inherently liberal society. The country’s pluralism is definitely not a Nehruvian gift, which Dawkins and Hitchens erroneously want us to believe.
Let’s, however, be honest: If the world today finds a grossly misinterpreted idea of India and Hinduism, the failure primarily lies with Indians for having failed to correct that notion more than seven decades after Independence. The government of the day could have done better in bringing in an educational reform wherein the distortions of history and culture are dealt with thoroughly rather than in a piecemeal manner, as seems to be the case today. But one also expects the likes of Dawkins to do the basic research before writing obituaries for a religion that is one of the last surviving widows to the rational, civilisational antiquity of humankind.
Dawkins is a self-proclaimed atheist. What he doesn’t realise is that he still bats for Christianity. He criticises Modi for being a Hindu. But the same Dawkins calls Barack Obama an atheist. And then Obama goes to church!
Maybe his Christian upbringing has stopped him from understanding that, as Micklethwait and Wooldridge write in God Is Back, “one reason why Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton was that he succeeded in out-Godding her”. In fact Obama himself writes in his memoirs, The Audacity of Hope, “Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”
By unreasonably ridiculing Hinduism, Dawkins manifests the ills of the rootless mind — modern, Western and secular. It’s time he stopped being ‘idiotic’ and ‘ridiculous’.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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