Being Hindu

Being Hindu

Understanding a Peaceful Path

in a Violent World

Hindol Sengupta

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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To my parents and Ishira
By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one
eternal darkness and another.

—Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

[Link]
 Introduction

Believer

I had finished this book and was starting the editing process
when CNN began airing promos of the first episode of its Believer
series with Muslim religious studies scholar Reza Aslan, who I had
heard, in the past, making an eloquent case for the irreparable harm
done by sensationalist depictions of Islam and some of its practices
or passages in the Quran.
I tuned in eagerly hoping for a measured depiction of religious
practices—something like National Geographic’s The Story of God.
Aslan, I thought, would naturally understand the need for
thoughtfulness as a prominent campaigner against extremist
depictions of religions using fringe practices.
But even the trailers deeply disappointed me. Aslan had shot in
Benaras, one of the most holy places for the Hindus with its many
sacred temples and bathing ghats (platforms), where thousands
come to bathe in the holy river Ganga. The most ancient name of
Benaras, and the one most commonly used by Hindus, is Kashi,
literally meaning the City of Light. It is famous for its evening prayers
with hundreds of oil lamps on the banks of the river and the festivity
and color in each temple.
As the Harvard religious studies scholar Diana Eck noted in her
book Banaras: City of Light, it is “a magnificent city”[1] (literally the
first line of chapter 1 in her book) that for more than 2,500 years has
attracted pilgrims and seekers from all around the world.
Riverside cremation happens on only two of Kashi’s eighty-
seven ghats. The burning of the dead bodies on wooden pyres, the
immersion of the ashes in the holy river, and the temples in the
background—all of this has given Hindus a sense of a relentless
cycle of life.
But I was dismayed—not only did Aslan describe Benaras as
the City of the Dead (he had clearly not even bothered to read Eck’s
renowned book, let alone any of the numerous famous books by
Indian scholars about the city), he seemed not to have done even
the most basic research—as basic as a Google search of the words
Benaras and ghats. It took less than a minute on my laptop to search
these two words—the Wikipedia page had the simple detail that out
of eighty-seven ghats in Benaras, cremation happens on two,
Harishchandra Ghat and Manikarnika Ghat. This information is also
found on page 4 of Eck’s book. I conducted this little experiment in
order to determine how lazy Aslan and the CNN research team must
have been—the show’s promo claimed that each of the eighty-seven
ghats has dead bodies burning every day and suggested that the
whole city becomes a sort of a giant pyre.
The focus of the promo and indeed the episode on Hinduism
was on the aghoris—a sect of extremely reclusive monks among
Hindus. So small is the number of aghoris—a few hundred, if that,
among a billion Hindus—that most Hindus have never really even
heard of, let alone met, an aghori. The aghoris believe that nothing is
profane because all that exists in the universe exists in oneself to
some degree. Believer showed Aslan supposedly eating a piece of
charred flesh with an aghori—with CNN flashing a CANNIBAL banner—
and being offered urine to drink. There was a strange dichotomy in
the use of language—the show’s promo insisted that the ashes of
the dead are “dumped” in the river rather than “immersed,” which is
the natural phrase that every Hindu, and certainly every religious
scholar, would use. Clearly Aslan was not unfamiliar with the word—
in one promo he talks about immersing himself in various religious
practices for the sake of the camera.
It was not clear how much immersing Aslan had done but Eck,
after fifteen years of engaging with Hinduism and indeed immersing
herself in the study of the city of Benaras, noted on the same page 4
that “the cremation grounds are holy ground, for death in Kashi is
acclaimed by the tradition as a great blessing. . . . Kashi is said to be
the city of Shiva (the most eminent god in the Hindu trinity), founded
at the dawn of civilization.”[2] Clearly, not the City of the Dead.
Without even the slightest sense of irony, CNN ran these
promos and the show days after a Hindu man in the United States
was murdered by a man shouting racial slurs.
 From the moment Aslan and CNN started tweeting promos of
the show, there was uproar in many parts of the world. In America,
congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of the Democratic Party sent out a
series of eleven tweets, where she said that she was “very disturbed
that CNN is using its power and influence to increase people’s
misunderstanding and fear of Hinduism.”[3]
Gabbard accused Aslan of trying to find “sensationalist and
absurd ways to portray Hinduism.”[4] She wrote:

Aslan and CNN didn’t just throw a harsh light on a sect of

wandering ascetics to create shocking visuals—as if touring a
zoo—but repeated false stereotypes about caste, karma, and
reincarnation that Hindus have been combating tirelessly. CNN
promotional materials and trailers that included a scene showing
a group of Hindus under a caption “CANNIBALS” perpetuated
bizarre and ugly impressions of Hindus and their religion. CNN
knows well that sensational, even false reporting about religions
only fosters ignorance that can lead to terrible consequences.
Hindus are reeling after witnessing terrible hate crimes in the
last few weeks.[5]

Vamsee Juluri, media studies scholar, asked Aslan a simple

question through an essay in the Huffington Post:

Would anyone in their right mind, or with a kind heart, have

done a kitschy and voyeuristic program about an obscure and
violent cult of Muslims on CNN in the years after 9/11? Why was
Reza Aslan, a pleasant and articulate professor, welcomed as
the face of Muslims in America on national TV and not some
obscure hooded figure burning with fundamentalist zeal and
violence?[6]

Before this book went to print, there had been no clear answer
to this question. However Aslan claimed in a tweet that his TV crew
had been the first to shoot at the cremation ghats. This was
immediately called out as false by two senior journalists in India—
Yale World Fellow Rahul Pandita and Washington Post columnist
Barkha Dutt.
Meanwhile, in their dialogue on the subject with Aslan, the
Hindu American Foundation (HAF) asked why Aslan’s series did not
feature any Muslim sects (there were some Christian sects featured
apart from the controversial episode on Hinduism). Aslan said no
insurer could be found for an episode on an Islamic sect.
HAF also noted that, according to the Pew Religious Knowledge
Survey 2013, only 36 percent of Americans could answer a “single
question about Hinduism.”[7] In such an atmosphere, “CNN is
perpetuating . . . a very racist, colonial era discourse of
dehumanization and even demonization,” wrote Juluri.[8]
It seems like the right time to publish a book on Hinduism in
America from the point of view of those billion Hindus who don’t
really eat human flesh or drink pee.

***

When I was in school in Calcutta, from about the age of three

until I graduated at eighteen, I attended chapel service every
morning. There was no choice in the matter. I attended the Assembly
of God Church School. It was—still is—what you would call an
American evangelical Protestant school.
In a city of prestigious Anglo-Christian schools, many of them
Catholic, tracing their history all the way back to the British Raj, my
Protestant school was barely a few decades old. But what it lacked
in history, it tried to make up in two regards: charity dollars from
America and Canada, which helped it build not only some of the
finest facilities in Calcutta (brimming laboratories, beautiful
basketball courts, and even its own hospital—one of the best at that
time in the city); and it took its proselytizing seriously.
The Assembly of God Church School was founded by Reverend
Mark Buntain and Mrs. Huldah Buntain. By the time I was old
enough to have memories of them, Mark Buntain had died. But I
remember Mrs. Buntain vividly. Meeting her was my first encounter
with what I later learned was an American accent. When I first saw
her, she was already in her sixties—a small woman with auburn hair
and oversized tinted spectacles, draped in austerely cut single-tone
satin dresses that were often in striking purple, brilliant blue, and
sometimes coral colors. She was the first woman I had seen who
wore a perfect string of pearls.
Mrs. Buntain, whenever she was in town, addressed us at
chapel service. Often dwarfed by the pulpit, she resorted to using her
voice to throw challenges at us. Were we sinning all the time? What
would happen to those of us that sinned? Were we heading to hell?
Why didn’t we choose “God’s love” and heaven? From my hard
wooden bench in the cavernous school chapel with its burgundy
leather-bound King James Bible in front of each seat, Mrs. Buntain
seemed at once remote and enveloping. She spoke with the “trough-
and-crest modulation” of North American television preachers. One
moment she was whispering with the solemn power of God, the next
she was invoking the sound and fury of the Almighty.
God, she told us, had performed miracles for her. Mrs. Buntain
and her husband had arrived with few resources in Calcutta, and yet
had been able to execute their ambitious mission. Jesus Christ, she
said, was willing and ready to do miracles for us—each one of us.
We believed her. At least my parents certainly did. After all, if it had
not been for the Buntains, what would the status of my English-
language school education be?
My father had neither the clout nor the money to enroll me into
the old elite Catholic schools of Calcutta so with the arrival of the
Buntains’ relatively new English-medium school, my parents didn’t
bother much about the rest. The aggressive Protestant Pentecostal
worldview meant little to them—or to me—except that it had opened
the doors to a much-coveted English language education for me.
This was Calcutta, the first city of the British Raj, and even in the
1980s when I entered school—three decades after the last of the
white sahibs had left India—it was still a city that valued the English
language.
Additionally Calcutta was discovering that English, when spoken
by Americans, could often hint at an altogether different and greater
sense of prosperity. Yet Mrs. Buntain, or Huldah, and her husband,
the late Reverend Mark Buntain, were actually from Canada. Mark
Buntain’s father had been a pastor at a church in Winnipeg before he
moved to Toronto and became the general superintendent of the
Assemblies of God in Canada. Huldah’s grandfather had preached
at a church in Vancouver and her great-grandfather had been a
Presbyterian minister in England. Long before she came to
pestilential Calcutta, Huldah had known the East. Her parents had
been missionaries in Japan, but after her grandfather died, her father
returned to Vancouver to fill his preacher shoes. In 1954, barely in
their thirties, Mark and Huldah and their infant daughter left
Vancouver and traveled to New York. From there they took three
ships and finally a barge to reach Calcutta after three long months
for a stay intended to last only a year.
“When we docked in this city, the poverty . . . oh, the poverty,”
Huldah Buntain used to remind us. “I told Mark, ‘What on earth can
we do here? We have nothing, we are so young.’” And he used to
tell me, “We can’t, but God can.”
Everyone has heard the legend of Mother Teresa but the story
of the Buntains, dear friends of the saintly nun from Albania, is little
known. Few are aware that until she died in 1997, some of the key
doctors treating Mother Teresa were from the 173-bed multispecialty
hospital that the Buntains had built on Park Street, the Fifth Avenue
of Calcutta.
In the heart of a street where, even today, the rich of Calcutta
come to play, where Christmas and New Year celebrations ring
through the night, a sniff away from the quintessential English tea
house Flurys, the Buntains built the city’s most modern church.
When they started construction in the 1950s, it was the first new
church the city had seen in perhaps a hundred years, and the
Assembly of God Church School was one of the biggest
coeducational schools in Calcutta, where the best schools had
always been single-gender twin institutions: La Martiniere for Boys
and La Martiniere for Girls, St. Xavier’s and Loreto House, St.
James’ and Pratt Memorial. The Buntains and Mother Teresa had
approached Calcutta’s searing poverty almost from opposite ends—
Teresa, through sheer will power and empathy, and the Buntains, in
an almost entrepreneurial way, by building public institutions. One of
her last memories of Mother Teresa, Huldah Buntain used to say,
was of the saintly nun holding her hand and expounding: “When you
help the poor, You. Do. It. Unto. Christ.—and hold up a finger for
each word, and at the end you close it and it becomes a fist, strong
and powerful in the aid of your mission.” When Mother Teresa was
dying, yet would not move to their six-floor charitable hospital, Mrs.
Buntain helped build a treatment room at the house where Mother
Teresa lived. Dr. Alfred Woodward, Mother Teresa’s long-time doctor,
was from the hospital built by the Buntains.
After they established the school and the hospital, the Buntains
started daily free food distribution for thousands of the city’s beggars,
homeless, and shantytown poor.
By the time Mark Buntain died in 1989, the couple had created
an Assemblies of God network in India of more than one hundred
schools and seven hundred churches, a feeding program for twenty-
five thousand people every day, and a hospital that treats more than
two million each year—eight hundred thousand of them for free.
I have no memory of Mark Buntain, but his wife gave me my first
bragging rights to a unique “foreign” connection. In a city steeped in
colonial tradition, Mrs. Buntain was the next generation of aspiration.
She came from “America.” We middle-class, provincial
schoolchildren didn’t really understand the distinction between
America and Canada at that time; it was all USA to us. We had
never been abroad; neither had our parents.
Around the time I was born in 1979, Calcutta had begun to
change. The Raj had not been forgotten, evident in its fragile clubs,
as resilient as leaves held between pages of a book, that still insisted
on gentlemen dressing for dinner—but on the streets the smell of a
Communist revolution had begun to rise. Education was divided
between the old pedigreed schools attended by the sons and
daughters of the city’s elite and Bengali-language schools for the
rest; I wasn’t eligible for the first, and there was no chance my
parents would have been happy with the second. (A Bengali
education suggested no future in those days and holds precious little
opportunity even today.)
The Americans of the Assembly of God Church School (AGCS)
shook up this status quo of distinction. In what I later learned to
appreciate as the disrupting power of American money, it unsettled
the pedagogical hierarchy of Calcutta. We at AGCS may not have
possessed hundred-year-old school buildings, but we had Bose
speakers in our chapel and the best American computers, the
biggest Christmas tree, and the most lavish Christmas concert every
year. When the first cola fountains came to Calcutta, my school got
them first, adding to my stock of bragging rights. While the other top
Anglicized schools competed in colonial snootiness, we disrupted
the game. We were Americanized.
The intense chapel services were very much part of the
experience as well.
During mass each day, different pastors solemnly walked up and
stood on the large stage before us, holding fat Bibles full of post-it
notes. Behind the wooden pulpit, which had a looming metal cross
attached to the front, there was a wall-to-floor wooden cross that
also formed the backdrop of the stage. The pastors would tell us
stories from the Bible and the moral lessons those stories held. To
begin with, I suppose one merely treated these stories as an
extension of the imaginary universe one already knew from the great
epics Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Panchatantra, and from the
Bengali Thakurmar Jhuli, a much-loved set of children’s tales. There
were giants and heroes with swords flashing in them. The young
David with a sling before Goliath, the hair of Samson that was the
secret to his magical strength, Jesus miraculously multiplying bread
and fish—it all seemed familiar. What we did not understand for
many years was the deeper message. We did not comprehend that
something else was being said to us, something that held these
stories of magic as not stories of magic at all; lost in the
prestidigitation, we missed the sleight of hand. That there was a
hierarchy was lost on us—that our legends were lesser than their
tales never occurred to us. Our inability to comprehend was also a
reflection of our environment. No one had told us that these
differences existed. We had neither seen nor heard conversations
about ours and theirs. We assumed common ownership to fables
and learned only later that even fables need to establish early their
pole position. It had not occurred to us, at least not to me, that myths
could war between themselves. It was at the question of sin that the
light broke in.
 Often the issue of sin was visited: what was sin, how one was
and became a sinner, and what one could do to become sin-free.
One of the main impressions of these long sessions was the idea
that to not believe in Jesus was to be a sinner; to not “accept Jesus
in your life” was to live a life of immorality that would certainly lead to
hell. To deny the “one, true God” was blasphemy.
I must have been around twelve or thirteen years old when it
first occurred to me that the whole idea of sin was a bit curious. The
eureka moment came during a particularly fervent sermon just
before the Durga Puja holidays—the ten-day break when the entire
city of Calcutta fills with festivity, and gigantic idols of the goddess
Durga are worshipped with fervor. That day, a pastor zealously told
us that the Hindu practice of praying to gods and goddesses was
false and heathen-like and would eventually bring forth greater sin.
Only accepting Christ as “your personal savior” could save us, Mrs.
Buntain had said. I remember giggling—it spilled out suddenly and
without intent. Immediately, fear leaped in. I looked around—had a
teacher noticed? Thankfully no, and so I permitted myself another
grin; it seemed comical to me that after hearing such raucous
exhortations against idol worship, we would merrily slip into a long,
boisterous holiday of idol-worship excess.
It was also the first time I really thought about my faith. I was
born Hindu. My parents are Hindu. So were my grandparents and
their parents. As far back as anyone has ever checked, we have
always been Hindu. But what did that mean? What did it mean to be
Hindu? I had never asked my parents but had unquestioningly
accepted that since they were Hindu, I must be Hindu too.
My parents and grandparents were closely associated with the
Ramakrishna Math and Mission, which worked to propagate the
worship methods and teachings of one of the last great seers of
Hinduism, the unlettered nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna
Paramhansa and his brilliant chief pupil, Swami Vivekananda, the
man who won over America in 1893 with stirring speeches at the
Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. In fact, words from
Vivekananda’s very first speech seem particularly topical today in
America where calls to build a wall against immigrants and for
refugee bans rend the air. On September 11, 1893 (ironically,
another 9/11), the monk said:

I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the

persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of
the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our
bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to
Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which
their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I
am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is
still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will
quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I
remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is
every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the
different streams having their sources in different places all
mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths
which men take through different tendencies, various though
they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”[9]

The devotion of my parents to Vivekananda and the

Ramakrishna Mission meant that they were often present at various
branches of Hindu order to attend prayers and listen to and
sometimes participate in the singing of hymns in Sanskrit, the
ancient language of the great Indian epics like the Ramayana and
Mahabharata and of the founding treatises of Hindu philosophy, the
Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Puranas. But apart from these
hymns and a few mantras at weddings, I don’t remember ever
having heard Sanskrit anywhere. Who knew that this too was part of
my heritage?
Who told us that, in my culture, this language is considered to
take all believers ever closer to God? One would have wanted to feel
the sonorous ring of Sanskrit in the head, but there was no access,
no instruction. Today, I feel that this neglect, this starvation, has kept
me and many like me strangely anemic. We learned about the world,
but what about home? When I realized this loss much later in life, as
I was nearing thirty, it came upon me as a most melancholic thing—
the loss of something very intimate I had not known I possessed.
While they sang hymns, I wondered why Sanskrit, once important to
us as a civilization, was increasingly lost to us. After conducting a
little research, I realized that what we had forgotten was pointed out
by a NASA scientist in 1985. In Artificial Intelligence magazine, Rick
Briggs published a paper entitled “Knowledge Representation in
Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence.”[10] In this work, Briggs wrote,

It is interesting . . . why the Indians found it worthwhile to pursue

studies into unambiguous coding of natural languages into
semantic elements. It is tempting to think of them as computer
scientists without the hardware, but a possible explanation is
that a search for clear, unambiguous understanding is inherent
in the human being. Let us not forget that among the great
accomplishments of the Indian thinkers was the invention of
zero, and of the binary number system a thousand years before
the West reinvented them. Their analysis of language casts
doubt on the humanistic distinction between natural and artificial
intelligence.

Among those around me, however, I did not see many people
who thought of Sanskrit and artificial intelligence in relation to one
another.
I often joined my parents at the hymn sessions at various
branches of the Ramakrishna Mission. What seemed most attractive
to me at that time was the cleanliness and quietude in these temples
that, unlike most other Hindu temples, were almost always calm and
reticent, publicity- and hyperbole-shy—except of course when the
hymns were being sung. Even then, the music was sonorous, not
cacophonous.
Paramhansa, during his mystical explorations, had studied with
a Muslim maulvi and a Christian priest; and Vivekananda admired
the teachings of Christ and the Buddha (whom he often spoke of as
“the perfect man”). The Ramakrishna Math and Mission, then,
accepted all faiths as being equally relevant paths to God, a thought
summed up in Paramhansa’s famous teaching, “joto mot, toto poth”
or in other words, as many views as there are among men, there are
ways to reach God.
 Apart from their work with the Ramakrishna Math and Mission,
my parents, like other Bengali Hindus, celebrated various festivals,
including an elaborate Janmashtami to celebrate the birth of Krishna
—one of the main avatars of Vishnu, the “preserver” in the Hindu
trinity of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva. As a schoolboy, all of these festivals
only meant holidays and good food to me until that one day at chapel
service when I began to wonder what being Hindu really meant to
me—not to my parents, but to me, personally.
In a sense, I have been writing this book ever since. It has taken
me a very long time, nearly two decades, to try to understand what
my faith—which I share with a billion others—really translates into
when interpreting everyday dilemmas. What was the relevance of
God, it seems apt to ask once again, in a world being made
unrecognizable by human intelligence, where today’s magic is
rapidly transforming into tomorrow’s gadgets? In other words, what
on earth does it really mean to be Hindu?
I prepared for years by reading ideas, interpretations, and
evolutions of the principal tenets of the faith, but by the time I started
writing this book, all the notes seemed inadequate and the words
would not come. I realized that research was not enough; in order to
write this book, I would need to question my own beliefs. Only by
questioning my private vulnerabilities could I address what I thought,
or felt, about my faith. As important as it was to me to understand
what being Hindu meant theologically, it seemed even more urgent
to discover what it meant to me personally. I turned to a man I
usually turn to in moments of confusion—Vivekananda.
Vivekananda was a proponent of the Vedanta, a word often
used to describe the core philosophies of the Vedas and other allied
texts together; these are the most ancient spiritual texts known to
man, the first of which were written, by some estimates, in 1700 BCE
or more than 1700 years before Christ walked this earth. (It must be
added here that different historians have given different timelines to
the composition of the first Veda, anywhere between 1700 to 1200
BCE.) But the Vedanta is not confined to one book or even a few
books. It is often used to describe the sum total of the whole body of
Vedic and Upanishadic literature, and commentary on that literature,
which stretches from the obscuring mists of ancient mankind right up
to the present day. This makes the Vedanta unique in a way that is
sometimes difficult to grasp entirely. The point is that the Vedanta
and its teachings are not finite or time-bound. Even today, the arrival
of a true mystic could further evolve the nuances of the Vedanta’s
teachings. While technically the Vedanta represents one of several
schools of Indian philosophical and spiritual thought—indeed the
Vedanta itself has multiple iterations—to me, as a common
practitioner, the Vedanta holds many sublime ideas which deal
directly with the everyday practice of Hinduism. This book is not an
academic exploration of the subtle nuances between various
philosophical schools of Hindu thought; rather, it is a collection of
lessons, such as they are, from the experiences of one practitioner
trying to make sense of what the dialectic means in real life and in
the day-to-day practice of a faith.
In this regard, the Vedanta is perhaps one of the only truly alive
spiritual texts the world has ever known, a text unfettered by time
and unrestricted by historicity. It lives and transforms unremittingly
because its fundamental core beliefs are held to be timelessly true.
What are these beliefs—this sanatana dharma or eternal law—
that claim to live on unaltered and yet are constantly absorbing,
assimilating, adjusting for several millennia? The English novelist
and Vedanta explorer Christopher Isherwood wrote a distillation titled
What is Vedanta?[11] on this question, which I think is apt. He says,
“Reduced to its elements, Vedanta philosophy consists of three
propositions. First, man’s real nature is divine. Second, the aim of
human life is to realize this divine nature. And finally, all religions are
essentially in agreement.” Each of these propositions, or truths if you
will, and the exploration of what they really mean in everyday life—in
my life and in the lives of millions of other Hindus—is what propelled
me to write this book.
The world of theology is divided into the Abrahamic and non-
Abrahamic faiths or, to simplify, faiths that have one guiding book
and those that do not. To illustrate, the three great monotheistic
faiths—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—each uphold that there is
only one true path to God and share the character of Abraham as a
founding father; they are also religions that abide by the principles
stated in one guiding book. With the exception of Sikhism, this is not
true for religions that emerged from the Indian subcontinent such as
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism and those from other Eastern
faiths such as Taoism and Shintoism.
But what does all this theory really mean in everyday life? As I
entered adulthood in India, one thing became increasingly and
starkly apparent to me. After the terrorist-hijacked planes crashed
into the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, the global
conversation about faith narrowed to swirl around what it means to
be Muslim, and in contrast, what it means to be Christian.
Samuel Huntington, father of the “Clash of Civilizations” theory,
was not only a renowned conservative political scientist but was also
the cofounder and the coeditor of the influential Foreign Policy
magazine and so, I often think, it is not surprising that Islam versus
Christianity was a theme long before it became breaking news. The
“Clash of Civilizations” theory argues that religious and cultural
beliefs will be the main source of strife and violence in the post–Cold
War world. With Islamist terror attacks mushrooming around the
world, and a backlash against Muslim migration across Europe and
America banning the entry of people from some Muslim majority
countries, this scenario seems inevitable to many people.
I began thinking about my book in the aftermath of 9/11. As a
young journalist, when I saw the twin towers come crashing down on
the TV set, I knew my own world and the world in general would
never be the same; I remember asking myself, where does all this
leave us, the Hindus? Which side, if any, are we on? (I hoped that
we would promote peace among all faiths, but in the middle of
conflict, was that too simplistic a deduction? I fervently hoped—and
continue to hope—not.) It was impossible for me, as an Indian, not to
see that my own country—with its long and varied history of
invasion, occupation, and unequal assimilation as well as violent
partition between Hindus and Muslims, with smaller skirmishes
between Hindus and Christians or Sikhs—was continually vulnerable
to such fissures. Religion, I had often heard, was the soul of India.
But history also makes clear that that soul can easily be wounded,
and that dormant resentments can quickly and volcanically come
alive. My own grandparents fled what is today Bangladesh during the
partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from British
colonial rule in 1947.
This subject is particularly complicated and dangerously prickly
in a country whose history is so diverse and complex. Christianity
came to India around the sixth century, some believe with the
Apostle Thomas, who visited the southern state of Kerala. At last
count, around 24 million (2.3 percent) of Indians were Christians.
Islam, which first appeared in India around the seventh century CE,
really took root with the Turkish invasions around the twelfth century.
Islam’s high noon, of course, was the three-hundred-year-long
Mughal Empire which, at its zenith, stretched from Samarkand in
Central Asia all the way up to the Deccan Plateau in southern India.
Today, nearly 180 million Indians, or more than 14 percent of the
population, are Muslims.
Just under 80 percent of India remains Hindu—evidence of a
resilient, and sometimes bewilderingly, polytheistic faith with a
legendary 330 million gods and goddesses—which neither
Christianity (with a hundred-year British Raj and, before it, Jesuits
from Spain, Italy, and, later, France and Portugal) nor centuries-long
Islamic rule could subdue or convert. In fact, Hinduism assimilated
both those faiths in the country, allowing the flourishing of Sufism, a
relatively liberal and tolerant subsect of Islam that holds some ideas
similar to Hinduism, including patron saints or pir, and numerous
holy shrines (dargahs) where the faithful gather. None of these are
incorporated into the orthodox, puritanical ideas of the Islam of
Arabia where the faith was born. As I finished editing the American
edition of this book, I further questioned what issues will dominate
and determine the world of tomorrow. Everywhere I look as a
journalist, the answers seem to throw two broad answers at me:
Conflict between Islam and Christianity (the latter sometimes
referred to as “the West”); and the rise of Asia.
In all the current discussions about China’s growing influence
and Japan’s prosperity, there seems to be a far greater global
awareness about Buddhism—if not about Confucianism, Shintoism,
Taoism, and so on. Much of this is due (to the permanent irritation of
China) to the expansive efforts around the world of His Holiness the
Dalai Lama and his many confidants and disciples, including those in
Hollywood.
But the mainstream understanding of Hinduism still seems
superficial, perfunctory, and reduced to caricatures and platitudes.
For instance, Hindus are one of the fastest-growing communities in
the United States, but a poll by the Pew Global Research Center in
2014 showed that Americans had distinctly mixed feelings about
Hindus, with a positive perception ranking of barely fifty out of a
maximum of a hundred. This statistic was just ten points above
Muslims in spite of the fact that Hindus have been consistently one
of the most integrated immigrant communities in America with little
history of conflict. There have been no American troops in “Hindu
lands” and no Hindu suicide bombers, no discussions of drones and
no comparisons of good Hindu/bad Hindu, no incidents of terror and
no suggestions of an occupation dressed up as democracy. Hindus
in America have mostly been spoken of in terms of their involvement
in information technology, finance, mathematics, and the sciences—
more attention is given to “geekiness” than to grievances. Yet, some
prejudices persist. Those who profess a faith that sees itself as the
vessel of eternal truth have been caricaturized as worshippers of
cows, monkeys, and snakes. Hinduism has seen its virtues isolated
and commercialized, its vices red-flagged.
Helpfully, the survey also pointed out that although yoga is
soaring in popularity amongst cosmopolitan Americans, few connect
it to Hinduism, although in reality it is an intrinsic act of the faith first
practiced by the ancient sages. Its noncanonical, non-base text,
polymath approach often results in Hinduism being reduced to
caricatures—as the survey also hinted—or to the worship of cows
and the social stigmas of caste. One would think that a faith that
accepted all religions and expressions of faith as equally valid 1,700
years ago would be the most studied and treasured in a world of
sectarian religious strife—but clearly that is not true.
Millions of Indians went about their daily rituals in keeping with
the path of Hinduism they followed, but I noticed a growing and
persistent lack of enthusiasm, a hesitance, about declaring
themselves Hindu, especially among youth in general, but among my
colleagues and friends as well. I felt it too. As one of my closest
friends complained, “It is much clearer for Muslims and Christians—
you read the book and you make up your mind. It is so much more
complicated for us; there is just too much ambiguity and too many
layers.”
Curiously, since the core beliefs of Hinduism leave almost all
decisions to the individual—after all, even atheists can technically be
Hindu—more and more people felt their understanding to be hazy
and undefined. Instead of seeing the undefined as liberating, we had
begun to view it as faith unresolved and unsubstantial. It was almost
as if we were asking that the responsibility of spiritual choice to be
taken away from us, or at least not left to us to this vague extent.
While the world waited for the Indian elephant to rise (or dance,
as some put it), apparently few really understood the nuances of the
civilizational beliefs of most Indians. In fact, we Hindus, as well as
Indians belonging to other faiths, didn’t really understand them
either, or we had forgotten.
While writing this book and in my work as a journalist, I often
hear things like, “Hinduism is the bulwark against Islamofascism in
India” or “the Buddha will find the common ground amongst the great
Asian civilizations—China, Japan, and India. After all, the Buddha
came from India.” In the meantime the rise of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), often unflatteringly described as the “Hindu Right,” and
the grand victory of prime minister Narendra Modi in 2014, has
brought about a spate of new writing—some hysterical and fear-
mongering, some faintly ridiculous—about impending doom in
religious harmony in India, or even genocide. Extreme statements
from some elements of fundamentalist fringe Hindu organizations in
India have also caused problems. From an inherently come-as-you-
are pacifist faith, Hinduism seems to have acquired, in many minds,
an unprecedented ultra-militant edge. A few attacks by fringe groups
of Hindu hardliners on Muslims and other minority groups—
especially with regard to the issue of cow slaughter and the sale and
consumption of beef, considered abominable by most Hindus and
illegal in most parts of India—have also sullied the atmosphere.
Even though India is one of the biggest exporters of buffalo meat in
the world, killing and eating the meat of cows remains a taboo for
most Hindus, and is banned by law in most of India. The authors of
the modern Indian nation-state advised against cow slaughter,
keeping in mind popular sentiments in the Indian constitution as well.
This is not new. While there is some evidence that ancient Hindus
may have eaten cow meat, beef eating has been repugnant to
Hindus for hundreds of years. In the medieval period, the Muslim
emperor Babur, who started the Mughal dynasty in India, warned his
son in a letter not to allow the slaughter of cows as it would turn his
(mostly) Hindu subjects against the ruler. But even so, the attacks,
vile and immoral, shocked me; in a sense it made my resolution to
write this book even more steadfast. It seems it is the right time for a
believing, modern Hindu to speak up and assert the values he has
imbibed.
Amid the frenzy, what is missing is a studious attempt to
understand what is really happening to a billion-strong faith. There is
little understanding on how Hindus see themselves and their role in
this world. What are the unique virtues, if any, that India’s Hindu
civilization has to offer in the twenty-first century? What are the
values, systems, and ideas that this civilization can hold forth for the
future? In centuries of assimilation and alteration, how has
Hinduism’s own perception of itself transformed, and how does it see
itself and the world today? If India, where a majority of the people
are Hindus—though the state is constitutionally secular—is to be a
determining pillar of global polity in the twenty-first century, answers
to these questions are critical, not just for Indians but also for the
world. A nuanced understanding of what it means to be Hindu and
how to handle Hindu identity in the twenty-first century is critical to
India’s comprehension of its role in the modern world.
Progress cannot occur unless Hindus first understand who they
are, where they come from, and where they are going; we need to
comprehensively and cohesively explain what the worldview of our
faith, so often intertwined in our moral and geopolitical belief
systems, really is. There has been a myth in India that Hindus do
not, ever, place their moral and political superstructures and points of
view in the philosophies of their faith. This is untrue, and one of the
people who truly understood this was Gandhi. His infusion of Hindu
belief systems, idioms, iconography, and commitment to plurality—
which came directly from the core principle of the Rig Veda: e kam
sat vipra bahudha vadanti (truth is one, the sages manifest it
variously)—lifted the moribund Indian National Congress from a
tepid, elite debating society to a fervent national movement. At every
step of his life, in every decision, Gandhi declared that his guiding
principles came from the Bhagavad Gita, the moral lessons
embedded in the epic Mahabharata given by the god Krishna to the
warrior Arjun on the meaning of life, God-realization, and the
essence of conflict on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Gandhi called
the book his spiritual dictionary.
So unapologetically sanguine was Gandhi on his (and his
faith’s) commitment to plurality—and especially in India’s case, the
deep and historic bonds between Hindus and Muslims—that he was
murdered by a Hindu bigot who believed that Gandhi had
orchestrated the partition of India at the end of the British Raj to
create Pakistan, a homeland for Muslims, even though around 14
percent of India remained Muslim and, therefore, was never in
correlation a homeland for Hindus alone. Gandhi’s faith in this
communal cohesion, even after the partition brought with it a
massacre of a million people in sectarian riots—largely between
Hindus and Muslims—and his complete disregard for his own
personal safety finally felled him to an assassin’s bullet in 1948,
barely a year after independence.
And here is the unique twist that only the inherent, genetic
plurality of Hinduism could have given to this tale: Gandhi’s murderer
Nathuram Godse proclaimed his own belief in plurality and the right
of Hindus and Muslims to coexist in India! In his infamous speech in
court, before he was tried and hung—a fact that was banned from
publication in India until 1968—Godse declared that he had killed
Gandhi because of the division of the land between the two
countries, and because he believed Gandhi had allowed it to make
the Muslims happy. But it is almost never noted that Godse did not
make the claim, nor express a desire, that Hindus and Muslims
should not share a homeland after the British left India. As an
avowed “Hindu nationalist” as he is often declared to be, it is curious
that he made no demand for the creation of a Hindu nation as one
might expect given that death-row statements on behalf of a cause
generally receive wide attention. On the contrary, Godse said in
court, “In my speeches and writings, I have always advocated that
the religious and communal consideration should be entirely
eschewed in the public affairs of the country; at elections, inside and
outside the legislatures and in the making and unmaking of
Cabinets. I have throughout stood for a secular state with joint
electorates. To my mind this is the only sensible thing to do.”[12]
Here are two men doomed by the nefarious force of history to
be martyr and assassin, and thus to define the soul of an old yet
modern nation. Both of them declare their faith in plurality: Gandhi
through his martyrdom and Godse even through his last words when
he could have cried out for a Hindu nation if he had so wished. Both
were never anything but Hindu. The story of Gandhi’s death (and
life) is so ubiquitous that it has become, in some ways, almost
stripped of deeper meaning by incessant mythologizing. But as I
discovered and pondered on this commonality, it threw me off guard.
Here were the saint and the sinner both vouching to the end for the
plurality of Hinduism. I do not wish to give the impression here that I
am in any way making some sort of moral equivalence between the
opinions of Gandhi and Godse. What I am trying to show is that even
when it seems logical for Godse to demand a Hindu-only state,
somehow, through some astonishing mind shift, he talks instead
about a secular state. Here are two Hindus at the two very extremes
of an argument, but somehow their faith leads them to say similar
things—even when one kills the other. I am presenting you, the
reader, with this compelling scenario, and leaving you to decide what
to make of it.
This book is not meant to be the final word in historical treatise
writing, and I am not a historian. Instead, it is an account of my
personal journey in trying to understand what being Hindu means to
me as well as to many others I have met through my decade-long
effort to understand my faith. It is important to emphasize that while
Hinduism has many streams of thought and many philosophies, I
have here described what appeals most to me—the Hinduism taught
by Vivekananda, and before him, by Shankaracharya, said to have
lived sometime between the sixth and eighth century CE—whose
works are the foundation of the Advaita Vedanta doctrine. This book
does not in any way claim to distill down all of Hindu thought. It is
meant to be read as an intimate journey of personal experience and
not academic theorizing. The core lesson I have learned from my
experience of Hindu thought is that, at its very heart, Hindu is
concerned with understanding the truth, and the truth, one is told,
lies not in the world but in one’s self. In their exhaustive series on the
history of philosophy, Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri quote
from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “It is one’s self that one should
see and hear and upon which one should reflect and contemplate for
it is by seeing and hearing one’s self and by reflecting and
concentrating on one’s self one gains the knowledge of this whole
world.”[13] This simple but limitless idea is the bedrock on which my
experience of Hinduism stands.
Hinduism, as I see it, teaches that there are really only three
questions that deserve answering—who am I, what do I want, and
what is my purpose? And of these, the most important is: who am I?
It is said that it takes a lifetime even to understand the questions
properly, let alone to find the answers.
Perhaps to intellectually understand Hinduism is impossible—
much like the Vedic description of the truth encapsulated in the
expression neti, neti (not this, not this). The phrase suggests a
philosophical line of inquiry where once you negate all that you can
materially comprehend, that which remains is the truth, the Absolute,
the Brahman. You can only fully comprehend the Absolute when,
through spiritual evolution, you are one with it. (If I were already, of
course I wouldn’t be writing this book, you see.)
As I keep circling the question in my mind: what on earth does
this mean in everyday life? I want to try to understand and, perhaps
in the process of understanding, help to explain. If this exploration
reveals some aspects of Hinduism and how it relates to the world,
thereby helping someone else understand, I will naturally be
delighted.
1. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin India,
1992), 3.
2. Eck, Banaras, 4.
3. Abhipsha Mahapatro, “Tulsi Gabbard Slams Reza Aslan, CNN
Over Portrayal of Hinduism,” The Quint, March 7, 2017,
[Link]
reza-aslan-cnn-believer-over-portrayal-of-hinduism.
4. Tulsi Gabbard, Twitter, March 7, 2017,
[Link]
5. Gabbard, Twitter.
6. Vamsee Juluri, “CNN’s ‘Believer’ Is Reckless, Racist and
Dangerously Anti-Immigrant,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2017.
7. Hindu American Foundation, “HAF Presents Community Concerns
about ‘Believer’ to Show Host Reza Aslan,
[Link]
believer-show-host-reza-aslan, March 5, 2017.
8. Juluri, “CNN’s ‘Believer’ Is Reckless, Racist and Dangerously Anti-
Immigrant.”
9. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami
Vivekananda, vol. 1 (Mayavati: Advaita Ashram, 2007), 3.
10. Rick Briggs, “Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial
Intelligence,” Artificial Intelligence Magazine 6, no. 1 (1985).
11. Christopher Isherwood, “What Is Vedanta? An Introduction,” in
Living Wisdom: Vedanta in a World Community, ed. Pravrajika
Vrajaprana (Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1995), 13.
12. Nathuram Godse, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi:
Farsight Publishers, 2014), 47.
13. “Begin at the End: Introduction to Indian Philosophy,” podcast,
September 19, 2015, History of Philosophy without Any Gaps,
[Link]
[Link]
 Chapter 1
How to Write about Hindus
I was once asked: “Is it true that the Hindus believe in dancing
gods?” A nearly naked dancing god—was that part of Hinduism?
This was the question of a polite elderly gentleman who was a
distinguished member of the Harvard Club in Manhattan where I was
giving a talk. He was referring to the Nataraj statue, from CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is home to the
Large Hadron Collider, and was intrigued by its presence. We had a
long conversation about the relevance of the dancing Shiva in which
I tried to explain to him the philosophy of the Nataraj: the
representation of the constant chain of creation and destruction in
the universe. As the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy has also
written, the dance represents the god Shiva’s five activities—creation
and evolution; preservation; destruction and further evolution; illusion
and rest; and release, salvation, and grace.[1] What to most Western
eyes is a wild-eyed image of a man—in a tiger skin, dancing dervish-
like, drum in hand, his matted locks in a storm—is in reality the
succinct representation of relentless creation and destruction, and
the creation again of life itself. A fascinating belief system, yet
packaged in caricature to audiences. Over the years that I have
pondered writing this book, I have been fascinated by the many
curious beliefs about Hinduism, some funny, some fantastical,
almost all unrecognizable to practicing Hindus like me.
As I spoke to people, friends and strangers, around India and
the world—on Delhi streets and Kolkata bookstores, in Mumbai
restaurants and Bangalore clubs, waiting for the train at Notting Hill
Gate station, in a village in Rajasthan, at a bar in Copenhagen,
outside the Harvard Club in New York—wherever I could, I’d work a
question or two about Hinduism into the conversation. The answers I
received sometimes amused, sometimes perplexed me. Yoga was
frequently mentioned (yet not much about the spiritual principles
behind it), and I heard about cows and the caste system as well as
the refrain “many gods and goddesses,” but it seemed that the
“color”—as we journalists say—more often than not obscured any
understanding about the richness of the philosophies, some of the
oldest, most evolved principles known to man. The caricatures, it
seemed to me, had hardened into prejudices that blurred the core
philosophies.
It occurred to me that knowledge about this multitudinous,
multilateral faith—with its numerous sub-belief systems and also one
great, foundational narrative—is almost impossible for most people
outside the country (and indeed, even inside the country) to
comprehend and communicate. In this specific context, most Hindus
have experienced a simple unwavering quality in their faith, which
has seen them through hundreds of years of Islamic and British rule,
as well as hundreds of invasions. But ask most Hindus to explain the
principles, history, and belief systems of their faith and they struggle.
There is a reason why this is true. Conversion or proselytizing has
never been core to the worldview of Hinduism in any shape or form,
whereas these are essential practices in Islam and often in
Christianity as well. Ask a Hindu if he or she knows of verses,
scriptures, or active efforts to convince and convert—and the answer
will mostly be no. The idea of proselytizing or spreading the faith by
inducting more followers is not a characteristically Hindu way of
thinking. The emphasis in Hinduism is on the personal, the private,
and so the spread of the collective has less meaning. There are
some Hindu groups like the Hare Krishna movement which actively
seek “members,” but this is not central in any way to the manner in
which most Hindus access and address their faith. The lack of pros­e­‐
ly­ti­zing zeal means that the average Hindu is far less articulate in
distilling his or her vast polytheistic philosophical ideals than
someone who practices a monotheistic faith. At an everyday level,
I’ve observed, the Hindu relies not so much on scriptural texts but on
life experiences. A Hindu usually finds it easier to describe his
relationship with the divine, with the spiritual part of his life, than to
explain the faith in its totality. Since the subtexts are so diverse
(remember those 330 million gods and goddesses?), ordinary
worshippers are often not able to identify and articulate the dominant
themes of Hinduism. They can, however, talk about their personal,
empirical faith.
In no way does this imply that there are not dominant or core
themes and values embedded in Hindu literature and rituals; they
are often deeply complex and nuanced theological ideas. What
happens more often than not is that believers or practitioners, people
like me for instance, tend to become obsessed with the rituals at the
cost of understanding the philosophies. We will address some of
these themes through the book, but for the moment, let us return to
my initial discoveries of what many people think about Hinduism. For
instance, I learned that some shared the point of view that the great
Hindu epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—were “fantasy
stories,” essentially fiction with no intrinsic historical value. Some
even said that to confer any historicity to mythology is illiterate and
idiotic. However, I disagree. I do not believe that every idea and
thought in every so-called Hindu text should be accepted as the
truth. That would go against the Hindu idea of relentless inquiry, that
it is our duty to question everything before believing in it. But some
have grains of truth.
Let us take an example from the lectures delivered by D. R.
Bhandarkar, one of the finest Indian archaeologists of his day, on
ancient Indian history (specifically the period between 650 and 325
BCE) at Calcutta University in February 1918.[2] In his exploration of
antiquity, Bhandarkar constantly points out how references in the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, written as they were by men who
attempted to capture the zeitgeists, help confirm many historical
facts. I shall illustrate only three points from Bhandarkar’s lectures as
examples.
In one lecture, Bhandarkar talks about a Kshatriya (the warrior
caste of the four primary Hindu castes) tribe called Bhoja. He
confirms their existence from references in Kautilya’s Arthashastra—
which is the great ancient Indian socioeconomic treatise predating
Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli’s advice on statecraft, The Prince, by
around 1,600 years—to the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, one of
the important appendices to the Mahabharata.
Then there is a reference to the Ikshvakus, a major ruling clan
from the north of India. Bhandarkar confirms the presence of the
Ikshvakus from three sources: first, inscriptions that have been
discovered by archaeologists from the third century that talk about
the reign of King Madhariputra Sri Virapurushadatta of the Ikshvaku
family; second, from the Ramayana we know that Lord Rama—the
hero of the text—was part of the Ikshvaku race; and finally, Buddhist
texts tell us that so was the Buddha.
My final example from Bhandarkar’s teachings has to do with
the Brahmin sage, Agastya. Now, Agastya is mentioned in the
Ramayana as among the first to have crossed the Vindhya
mountains and is admitted by all Tamil grammarians as the founder
of the Tamil language, the great Tamirmuni, or sage of the Tamils.
Also, Bhandarkar points out that if you read Robert Caldwell’s
Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages,
there is mention of a hill where Agastya retired after his work in
bringing forth the Tamil language.[3] This hill, called Agastiar
(Agastya’s Hill) by local tradition and later adopted by the British, can
still be found in the Tinnevelly district of Tamil Nadu, a state in
southern India. The point is simply this: it is erroneous to suppose
that myths and legends are not intertwined with history. What might
be considered merely myth often has deep connections to real
events and real people.
Bhandarkar’s commentary is of prime importance, “I am not
unaware that these are legends. It is however a mistake to suppose
that legends teach us nothing historical.”[4] This is exactly the point of
revisiting ancient mythology from a historical perspective—to ensure
that we make relevant connections between the myths and our
everyday landscape so that the legends do not remain fantastic and
far away. The purpose is not to prove that Rama was a historical
figure per se but to show the connections between what we know as
history and what we know as myth, and to examine how the two
cross-pollinate to give us a sense of our national moorings. This
reflexive relationship between history and mythology is exactly the
point Lord Meghnad Desai, noted economist, historian, and British
Labour Party peer, once made to me on the subject. He emphasized
that the Bible had been studied for historical references as had The
Iliad and The Odyssey in relation to Greek history.
The great Indian historian, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, who
edited the definitive eleven-volume History and Culture of the Indian
People, talked about the importance of the work done by Frederick
Eden Pargiter, a British expert on ancient India, “to reconstruct a
continuous historical narrative from the data, particularly the royal
genealogies, contained in the Puranas and the epics like
Mahabharata and Ramayana” which Majumdar said “offer the only
fair basis on which the ancient political history of India can be built
up.”[5] “Pargiter has at least successfully demonstrated that it is a
mistake to regard such great historical figures like Puru, Mandhata,
Nahusha, Yayati, Kartavirya, Arjun, etc., as mere fanciful and
mythological, and any theory that gives them some sort of historical
setting cannot but be regarded as of great value,”[6] Majumdar
writes. The question here is simple but often not easy to absolutely
answer—which parts of our myths and legends are intrinsically tied
to history and which are not? I have felt that we in India, especially
due to our long history of subjugation, have often been derisory and
dismissive about our ancient achievements. This attitude probably
also comes from a post-independence ethos wherein tradition is
sometimes seen as archaic and redundant as the nation searches
for a modern identity. Nehru famously called big dams the temples of
modern India but, as we advanced along that line of thinking, did we
somewhere develop a feeling that the only way to view temples is
with intellectual disdain? Did we retain the sneer of our oppressors
with regard to our own culture and science? Have we done enough
to approach and embrace our heritage with confidence and without
condescension?
All of these questions occurred to me when I heard the assertion
that any talk of scholarship, especially in the sciences, in ancient
India was fraudulent, and then something curious caught my eye. A
mathematician of Indian origin, Manjul Bhargava, won the Fields
Medal in 2014, one of the highest prizes for excellence in
mathematics. One of Bhargava’s greatest achievements was solving
a two-hundred-year-old mathematical problem. How did he do it?
Bhargava says he was able to accomplish this by reading old
Sanskrit manuscripts that had been preserved by his grandfather,
Purshottam Lal Bhargava, as head of the Sanskrit Department at the
University of Rajasthan. In the library reserves he found the work of
seventh-century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta and he
realized, using Brahmagupta’s work, that he could crack a problem
unresolved for two centuries. Essentially, when two numbers which
are both the sum of two perfect squares are multiplied together, the
result is also the sum of two perfect squares. He found a
generalization of this principle in Brahmagupta’s work that helped
him simplify the expansive composition law introduced by German
Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1801.
Stumbling onto such examples in my research, where myth and
history meet practical circumstances, is fascinating because so often
I hear how most ancient Indian knowledge is, at best, dated and of
little value today. I decided to dismantle and understand a few things
about ancient Indian knowledge for myself. Further research
revealed that Brahmagupta was one of the greatest mathematicians
of all time, the first to introduce in India the concept of negative
numbers and to spell out their rules of operation. His two seminal
books are Brāh­masphuṭasiddhānta and Khaṇḍakhādyaka. The only
reason Bhargava could access this text and theory was because of
his grandfather’s knowledge of the Sanskrit language and its texts.
While I was catching up on history, a controversy broke out
about celebrating Sanskrit Week in India (some felt that celebrating
Sanskrit Week and searching for the River Saraswati would offend
followers of minority religions in India and make the country less
secular); and a government-led search for the Saraswati River,
whose trail had dried up and disappeared long ago, led to acerbic
commentary, even though it was conducted by the highly reputable
ISRO (the Indian Space Research Organisation, which made
headlines in 2013 for launching the cheapest Mars mission in the
world and again in 2017 for sending the largest number of satellites,
104, into space via a single rocket) and despite the fact that the river
had also been rediscovered in 1855 by a French geographer, Louis
Vivien de Saint Martin. The debate on Sanskrit prompted me to look
up what others had to say with regard to this language of ancient
Indian religious and social texts. To my surprise, I found that many of
the well-known experts on Sanskrit, and even on Hinduism, are
found in the West, especially in the United States. Since most
theological documentation, especially the near-infinite variety found
in the Hindu system, is intrinsically open to interpretation,
conclusion(s) are highly dependent on the contextual lenses used. I
realized that however scholarly they might be, some Western
experts use Western idioms, ideologies, and theories to interpret
Indian theology and philosophy, which might yield faulty
explanations. Since India is producing few experts of its own who are
experienced in the practice of the faith, some of these inaccurate
notions tend to swiftly become regarded as “truth,” not just by
Westerners but by everyone. What ought to be a debate has leap-
frogged into a monologue. At least in India, Sanskrit and ancient
systems of knowledge have gathered a thick film of “colonial sneer”
which many years of postcolonial history have struggled to remove.
Ironically, I found that the early Orientalists were some of the last
great champions of Indology. William Jones, one of the great
Orientalists before the Bengal Renaissance (the nineteenth- to early
twentieth-century social reform movement in the eastern Indian state
of Bengal in India that saw a flowering of intellectual talent and the
eradication of many forms of social discrimination), wrote that he
found Sanskrit to be “more perfect than Greek, more copious than
Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.”[7] Henry Colebrooke,
another strikingly diligent Orientalist, discovered that Brahmagupta,
and the sixth-century astronomer Aryabhata, were some of the
pioneers of algebra and arithmetic.
Comparing Aryabhata’s work to that of the Hellenic Diophantus,
Colebrooke even concluded that the algebra of the Indians was more
distinguished than that of the Greeks. I began to ask—do we only
accept our own knowledge if it comes branded, interpreted, and
neatly labeled from the West, like our understanding of yoga? Was
this that old Indian servility rearing its ugly head again—a
perpetuation of the joke that we never consider anything we have or
do to be good enough unless the West says so? It seemed to me
that the decolonization of our minds could only begin if we start to
consider that our history might be what others did not write. As I
looked around and read all that was being written about India and
often about Hinduism, I struggled to find the right language to
describe what I was feeling. Then I found a marvelous, cliché-
shattering short essay by the African writer Binyavanga Wainaina,
“How To Write About Africa.” Wainaina’s contribution critically
examines the Western gaze on Africa, while engaging with his own
identity as a Kenyan homosexual writer who rose from modest
beginnings to become an author of renown, as well as the director of
the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Writers and Artists at Bard
College. This essay pointed out, all at once, the taboos and
hypocrisies about Africa embodied in spirited lines like, “Describe, in
detail, naked breasts . . . or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals.
Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead
bodies. . . . Remember, any work you submit in which people look
filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa.’”[8] It
painted, in harshly sarcastic terms, the flawed language employed to
box in and caricaturize descriptions of Africa, especially by those in
the West. It used the language of the West to portray the deep-
seated prejudices that Africa continues to face. In 2007, it became
clear that Wainaina was not just another talent discovered in the
Third World when he declined the Young Global Leader award,
which is presented to people who demonstrate a potential to
contribute to shaping the future of the world. As a reply to the
nominating authority, he wrote a letter that acknowledged the
temptation to attend the award ceremony, but placed it secondary to
the point that he was trying to make. He wrote, “The problem here is
that I am a writer. And although, like many, I go to sleep at night
fantasizing about fame, fortune and credibility, the thing that is most
valuable in my trade is to try, all the time, to keep myself loose,
independent and creative . . . it would be an act of great fraudulence
for me to accept the trite idea that I am ‘going to significantly impact
world affairs.’” Reading his essay was a moment of epiphany for me.
I had found the guru of my voice. So I wrote an essay—sort of an
ode to “How To Write About Africa”—which I called “How To Write
About Hindus With A Left Hand.” This short essay gave me the tone
and verve of what I want to say in this book; it told me what I should
leave out, and what I should keep. It taught me to fiercely focus on
the issue at hand as I see it.
This is what I wrote:

Always use the word “Hindu” as if you really meant to write

“Hindoo” (colonial spelling used to suggest parody) but are too
polite. Words like “dusk,” “soul,” “heterodox,” “bourgeois,”
“traditional,” “Orientalist,” naturally, help. Subtitles may include
the words “ancient,” “plural,” “civilization,” “alternative,” “sex.”
The last one is of the most vital significance. Without it, your
book (article, essay) and Hinduism are doomed. Its soul will
never be discovered.
The pictures you use along with the writing can never have kind,
well-adjusted, pleasantly God-fearing folk. They should have
great matted hair. A bushy chest. A trident in the hand really
helps. They can’t wear too many clothes. It spoils the image of
the warrior sadhu—the monk doth protest too much is a
powerful tool. Don’t treat it lightly. Or you can have a
bespectacled, grouchy old man holding a grammatically
incorrect banner. Looking angry.
Make them stand on the right side of the frame of your image.
That explains the number of times you will be writing right-wing.
If they are helpful, they can even lean a little to the right.
Preferably using the trident (carried as a weapon by the god
Shiva, the Destroyer in the Hindu trinity; the other two are
Brahma, the Creator, and Vishnu, the Preserver). Or the
misspelled banner.
In your text, constantly refer to the vastness of Hinduism; use
poly- a lot (it can be theistic, even gamy); put
heterogeneousness in every other sentence, but essentially
treat Hindus as one slightly off-centre whole. You will use the
word monolith—it means one uniform entity. That’s how you
should treat Hinduism. Though you must not, ever, say so.
Always call Hinduism a “way of life.” It’s like saying “Open,
Sesame.” “Way of life” is like the sari. It hides a multitude of
sins. All the greedy excess and binge drinking neatly hidden
behind its pleated folds. Once you declare “way of life” you are
free to say anything.
Begin by writing that you love all gods and goddesses. The
Hindus have many of these. So there are many books (articles,
essays) to be written. But nowhere have you mentioned snake
charmers or elephants. So your work is not about hunting down
the exotic. It is scholarship. Oh, sorry, you did mention an
elephant god. You said his trunk is the penis. Or his penis is the
trunk. One can’t be entirely sure but there is some cock (and
bull) there. It is, after all, a way of life.
Move quickly to sex. Too much meditation and spirituality
becomes boring. Or like yoga. And why would someone read
you for that? Bikram does it better. George, you know?
Clooney? Him, and Madonna, and Lady Gaga—they all go
there. One client for every generation.
Taboo subjects—Hindus quietly praying. Hindus writing
philosophy. Or theology. Hindus going about their daily lives; or
Hindus not beating women, not raping women, not showing
penis, or breasts or vagina.
One of the biggest points of your book must always be that
there are no rules in Hinduism. You must profess great love for
Hinduism at the beginning of the book. It could begin by talking
about your mother showing you the colors of India. From your
mother’s cheap batik scarf to loving Hindu texts is a small
distance—which your book can easily cover.
Describe in detail the colors of India. The colors of mud (on
Hindus who are naked), the colors of the trees (which are
standing up, you know, like penises), the color of the sky (blue,
like what the woman feels like after coitus sometimes), the color
of the festivals (red, like menstrual blood)—say that you love all
these colors. Especially if there are naked people in them. And
that all those colors are colors of copulation for the Hindus.
Always subtly hint that while you have read and mastered all
Hindu texts, there is actually nothing called Hinduism. This must
be the great consistent revelation of your book. It is also great
preparation just in case someone spots your errors and takes
you to court.
The more you write that you love the openness in Hinduism, the
better it is for you. Because if nothing exists, and there are no
rules, no facts, no realities and no texts—if there is no Hinduism
—then you can write what you want. And anything you write will
make you a scholar.
So in this nothing-exists-ness, you can cleverly make everything
into those three vital truths about the Hindus—naked, vagina,
and penis.
Try never to say anything good about any Hindu god or goddess
(unless you are saying something about their penis or vagina or
 both). But always say that all the villains in Hindu stories were
actually the good guys. Only misunderstood and misrepresented
—like the National Rifle Association, or the Taliban. Never talk
about the penis or vagina of the villains. Never describe them as
naked. But the heroes must always be sex crazy, lustful and
raping. Only gods rape—demons don’t. That’s another great
revelation you will discover during your research.
Never get your book reviewed by any practicing Hindu.
Your book needs a cover where many gods and goddesses and
people are naked or showing their vagina or penis or doing
things with their vagina or penis. Never ever have a cover
showing someone meditating because everyone knows that
meditation was discovered in America. And then exported to the
rest of the world. As a global super brand.
Always end your book with Mahatma Gandhi saying something
about Hinduism. Then quickly mention something about his sex
life and use the words “naked young girls” in the sentence.
Because you love Hinduism. And its openness.
Because you care.

1. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva (New Delhi:

Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2012).
2. D. R. Bhandarkar, Lectures on the Ancient History of India (New
Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2013).
3. Caldwell was a Christian missionary and linguist in the second half
of the nineteenth century.
4. Bhandarkar, Lectures on the Ancient History of India.
5. R. C. Majumdar, The Vedic Age: The History and Culture of the
Indian People, vol. 1 (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1951), 27.
6. R. C. Majumdar, The Vedic Age, 27.
7. Subrata Dasgupta, Awakening: The Story of the Bengal
Renaissance (New Delhi: Random House India, 2011), 38–39.
8. Binyavanga Wainaina, “How To Write About Africa,” Granta 92
(January 19, 2006), [Link]
[Link]
 Chapter 2
Who Is A Hindu?
What does it mean to be a Hindu? Some would say a Hindu is
what a Hindu does. And what does a Hindu do? This question is of
the greatest importance because for so many Hindus, their faith is
about the fulfillment of customs and rituals they have known for
generations, hence the constant reference to Hinduism is as a “way
of life.” I believe that the phrase “way of life” lacks the depth to
capture the profundity of Hinduism and is often used so colloquially
that it has lost all meaning. But it is undeniable that it captures an
everyday essence of doing things—various little acts and rituals that
construct meaning for countless believers. There is also a
geographical aspect to this. The Persians, who considered the River
Sindhu (Indus) as one of the boundaries to their empire, supposedly
could not manage the “s” in the river’s name and replaced its
pronunciation with an “h” to suit their own tongue. Everyone who
lived south of the Sindhu (now Indus) came to be called Hindu and
this, it is said, is how Hinduism got its name. North of the river was
the mountainous terrain that was the land route to Central Asia
through Afghanistan. Countless invasions from the Islamic world
through the medieval period of Indian history occurred along this
path, including one led by Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, from
Samarkhand, who had two powerful bloodlines flowing through him
—those of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan—Turk and Mongol. Babur
founded the Mughal Empire.
But can the birth of our identity as Hindus be that simple? Are
linguistics and geography our raison d’être? This query is far from
frivolous because it strikes at the heart of a question that has been
asked since our independence in 1947—if Pakistan is the land of the
Muslims, created specifically as such, then, conversely, is India
indisputably the land of the Hindus? The Constitution of India
answers “no.” It envisions a secular state in which each individual
and community finds a place. But, nearly seventy years after
independence, this question has become still more urgent to address
as it is raised again and again in Indian politics—both internal and
external—with regard to the relationship between Hinduism and the
State of India, how that relationship has evolved, and where it stands
today.
For as long as I can remember, there has been relentless
debate in India about whether or not this vast, multicultural,
pluralistic nation is, or is not, the land of the Hindus. This debate
reverberates not just within a sociopolitical context but also becomes
ultimately personal as the idea of a sacred homeland—the abode of
its gods and goddesses, and of its consciousness—is so
fundamental to Hinduism. The phrase “land of the Hindus” has been
used and abused by polemicists of every political allegiance in
support of various statements—some that are absolutely ridiculous—
that are disrespectful of the enlightened and unique history of India.
The question has been furiously debated, often with every side
coming to the table with an agenda—and yet, it is important to note
that, in the understanding of the common Hindu and in a deliberative
analysis of the query, the answer is not thorny or irretrievably
complex. The answer lies in the practice of Hinduism and is verified
by numerous historical authorities.
With regard to collective identity, then, the question to ask is,
what really defines the collective memory of a nation? How does it
take shape in national consciousness? What are the characteristics
that define its boundaries? Is it not true that a nation is, in reality, first
and foremost a subconscious construct? You imagine the nation
before it exists, and so it exists. In the colonial narrative, there was
no “India” before the British consolidated more parts of the
subcontinent under one political rule than had ever existed in the
region before. This is, more or less, the central theme of James Mill’s
three-volume History of British India.[1]
Mill—political theorist, historian, and father of John Stuart Mill
(who later gave us On Liberty[2])—argued, in essence, that India was
a regressive dark hole until the light of the English renaissance via
colonial rule shone on it. “A duly qualified man can obtain more
knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could
obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes
and ears in India,”[3] James Mill wrote, thus presumably eradicating
the need to visit a country and meet its people before embarking on
a grand project to write its history. The political point here is simple:
India itself had been invented, so to speak, by its colonial masters,
and therefore, where better to understand India than from the books
in England? What could one learn in India? Better to learn from
those who invented India—its victorious colonial rulers.
Some of James Mill’s harshest words were for Hindus and the
Hindu culture, which he described as a despicable hell-hole of
oppression and drudgery. He writes, “under the glossing exterior of
the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy . . . in truth,
the Hindoo [colonial spelling] like the eunuch, excels in the qualities
of a slave . . . dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess
which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society.”
The Hindu, “Cowardly, unfeeling,” wrote Mill, was also “in physical
sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses.”[4] History
of British India, one of the most influential colonial books ever written
about India, was later described by the American historian Thomas
Trautmann as “the single most important source of British
Indophobia.”[5] That India is a colonial construct, and had no locus
standi as a civilization, far less as a member of the body politic of
nations before colonial rule, is an old argument. In fact, it is a
colonial argument. It essentially states, and quite correctly so as far
as the geographical boundaries were concerned, that before the
British Raj arrived in India there had not been a nation-state as we
understand the modern concept. This much is true. But does a lack
of physical boundaries of a definitive land imply that there was no
sense of a culture, bound by religion—used here in its Latin root
word sense ligare, “to bind”? Of course not; it had been in existence
for centuries. And therein lies the nuance of this rather facile debate
—at least I think so—for anyone who spends even a little time
tracing the history. The idea of a unified, plural, composite, cultural
homeland called Bharat or Bharata has existed perhaps for 3,000
years, though it could well be much older, from around the time that
the first foundational text of Vedanta literature, the Rig Veda, was
composed, compiled, and memorized. Conceptually, how do we
understand this metaphysical “Bharat” and how is it different from
modern India? Indeed, is it any different? No, not really. On revisiting
the idea of collective memory—which is a construct based on
historical writings, oral traditions, and myths—we arrive at the
conclusion that the imagination of the landscape is far older than
what today’s maps suggest. The land called Bharat had been
conceptualized in sacred texts and everyday rituals long before
cartography drew its lines.
Such a motif has been explored in several critical works by
academics interested in the subcontinent’s ideological beginnings
and subsequent contemporary trajectory. In her masterly treatise,
India: A Sacred Geography, professor of comparative religion and
Indian studies at Harvard, Diana Eck writes, “Bharata is not merely a
convenient designation for a conglomerate of cultures, such as
Europe has been for so much of its history or such as Indonesia has
become in modern times. Nor was Bharata ever the name of a
political entity like a nation-state, at least until 1947, when it became
the proper name of independent India. And yet it is arresting to
consider a sense of unity construed in and through the diverse
imagined landscape . . . a sense of connectedness that seems to
have flourished for many centuries without the need for overarching
political expression or embodiment.”[6] Here, Eck explains how
Bharata has been a philosophical construct complete with broad
definitions of borders that almost entirely replicate the conventionally
cartographic span of pre-1947 India.
Reinforcing a similar point of view, the scholar T. N. Madan
further writes in “Hinduism: An Introductory Essay,”

When the ancient Brahmanical text Vishnu Purana (3rd century

AD) describes the Indians as the children of the land called
Bharat, which is then described geographically as the country
lying to the north of the ocean and south of the snow-clad
mountains, it should be remembered that in the traditional
worldview the oceans and the mountains are sacred places with
their presiding divinities; indeed they are themselves divinities.[7]

This geographical construct has been defined, to use the words

of a favorite tutor of the historian Simon Schama, using “the archive
of the feet”[8] emphasized for several millennia in hymns, prayers,
myths, legends, and countless journeys undertaken by pilgrims.
Schama details the geographical theology of an imagined landscape
in his seminal work, Landscape and Memory.[9] For instance, there
are similarities in approach between the geography—in the mind and
on the ground—traversed and established by the Hindu tirtha (or
pilgrimage map) and the Christian notion of towering trees being
contemporaries of Christ. The point here is simply this—the tales of
theology may not, sometimes, be as far away from history as we
imagine. What, after all, is the battle between Israel and Palestine
but the urgent power of theology on geography where the legends of
faith have been brought to life and dispute over the land? In 1920,
the historian Radhakumud Mookerji spoke about such imagined
boundaries of Bharata when he referred to the river hymns of the
Vedas. Mookerji writes, “As the mind of the devotee calls up in
succession the images of these different rivers defining the limits of
his country, it naturally traverses the entire area of his native land
and grasps the image of the whole as a visible unit and form.” The
river hymns of the Rig Veda, said Mookerji, were the “first national
conception of Indian unity such as it was.”[10] This reference to
knowledge of geography also comes, as the historian A. K.
Mazumdar has noted, in Alexander Cunningham’s The Ancient
Geography of India.[11] Cunningham, the founder of the
Archeological Survey of India, elucidates how the ancient Hindus
knew the approximate shape and size of their own land; how the
distances to places across the country were known and measured in
krosankas or milestones. The point here is that there was always a
clear understanding of the measure and breadth of the geography
that constitutes the nation. At every level, whether through myth or
history or popular distance measurement, the geography of the
nation was deeply embedded in popular imagination.
Of course, there are more traditional arguments in favor of the
idea that nothing called India existed before there was a definitive
map. In this line of thinking, until the literal colonial (and then with
partition, postcolonial) demarcation of the modern boundaries of
India was charted, there was no entity called India. Why does this
matter? The point is that if there was no India as such, then how
could it have a consistent national civilizational value? But as Eck
explains, this approach is a fundamentally flawed way to look at
India, because mythology and geography have always shared a very
close linkage in the country’s culture and history. The epics like the
Ramayana and Mahabharata, for instance, as well as the Puranas,
often describe not just incidents, but detailed locations that have
actually existed in the landscape. “Not only was the geography of the
land expounded most prominently in Hindu mythological texts, but
conversely, Hindu mythology in these texts was constantly grounded
in the topography of the land of India,”[12] says Eck. She adds,
“There is arguably no other major culture that has sustained over so
many centuries, and across such diverse regions, a fundamentally
locative or place-oriented world view.”[13] It is the char dham or the
four pilgrimage spots, spread across four corners of the imagined
landscape, that patterned and created India’s Hindu landscape
through countless treks by thousands of pilgrims who archived the
first indigenous idea of the Indian nationhood through their feet. It is
these itineraries of pilgrims that planted the roots of a dream of the
homeland. There is a small but important point to note here, which is
often overlooked in polemical debate. The largest part of the history
of the land we now know as India involves philosophies of what we
today call Hinduism. In that sense, those ancient philosophies are
the founding blocks of our civilization. Furthermore, that same
foundation has allowed the assimilation of many cultures within it
and because of this, the political entity, the nation-state called India,
is a secular democracy today. These are two independent ideas that
do not have to be in opposition to one another. Both can, and have,
coexisted for centuries.
This coexistence is not surprising to any practicing Hindu, nor
even to those who are nonpracticing since even atheism is a valid
theological and philosophical position in the faith. In fact, such
theories are not just confined to Hindus, as Eck also points out; it is
in this sacred geography that Muslims built scores of shrines
dedicated to saints, to an extent that is even incongruous to the
Arabic idea of rigid, monotheistic Islam. In a similar manner,
Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists (India being the birthplace of the
Buddha, after all), and even Zoroastrians (who found shelter in India
when they were being persecuted in Persia) have shared in the
Hindu imagination of a sacred geography that defined the foundation
of a plural nationhood, allowing the newer faiths to add their own
bricks to this palimpsest (as the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru
called it) and to assimilate over time. Swami Vivekananda himself
made this distinction, “In Europe, political ideas form the national
unity. In Asia, religious ideals form the national unity. There must be
the recognition of one religion throughout the length and breadth of
this land. What do I mean by one religion? Not in the sense of one
religion as held among the Christians, or the Mohammedans, or the
Buddhists. We know that our religion has certain common grounds,
common to all sects, however varying their conclusions may be,
however different their claims may be,”[14] he said. Vivekananda
adds that there are certain commonalities among all and that “this
religion of ours admits of a marvelous variation, an infinite liberty to
think, and live our own lives.”[15]
What Vivekananda describes here is the Hindu plural
imagination that has sustained its civilization for 3,000 to 4,000
years, during which periods the Vedic texts were composed—before
the arrival of the Islamic age (800 years of Muslim invasions and
then Mughal rule) and British colonial rule (less than 200 years). As
R. C. Majumdar explained in the introduction to The History and
Culture of the Indian People,[16] it is pre-Islamic India that laid the
philosophical bedrock for the syncretic, composite culture that India
has been able to build; therefore to credit this foremost Hindu
imagination of a tolerant geography is neither incorrect, nor is it in
any manner, shape, or form discriminatory.
Moreover, this is what the Indian archaeologist D. K. Chakrabarti
explained in his masterly essay “Cultural Unity of India,” where he
uses the discovery of objects and the existence of land routes to
map out the ancient cultural unity via the geography, as it were, of
India. To make his point, Chakrabarti quotes the British geographer
H. J. Mackinder writing in 1922: “The one clear unity which India
possessed throughout history has been geographical. In no other
part of the world, unless perhaps in South America, are the physical
features on a grander scale. Yet nowhere else are they more simply
combined into a single region.”[17]
But in all this discussion, there is an unanswered question. What
if the ancient Vedantists, the Aryans themselves, were outsiders?
What if, instead of the sages and ascetics of our imagination, there
were marauders on horseback that destroyed an earlier civilization—
the Indus Valley civilization—and instead brought an influx of their
texts, their chants, their prayers? What if these Vedantists, these
Aryans, were not “indigenous”?
Whether the Aryans were truly invaders or not is one of the
oldest theological, historical, and political debates in India. Why?
Because for a long time, the arguments on both sides depended on
the “original” geographical location of the Aryans. This is how the
logic went—if the Aryans were indigenous people, their philosophies
would be the core of Indian civilizational philosophy. If they were
invaders—like Babur from Samarkand and then the British, who
attacked India and then set up empires after defeating many local
kingdoms—then the roots of Indian civilizational history are lost in
the mists of time and nothing is quite authentic. Such debate, often
raucous, has gone on and on.
Beyond historians and polemicists, how does the ordinary Hindu
approach the debate on the origin of the Aryans? Most historians no
longer see the Aryans’ entry into India as an outright, gory invasion
but instead assert something called Aryan Migration Theory (or
AMT). This line of thought, which has nearly universally replaced the
earlier Aryan Invasion Theory (or AIT), essentially visualizes less of
an invasion and more of a steadily assimilating movement,
crisscrossing many routes and gene pools.
Now, let us look at some data. In 2011, the American Journal of
Human Genetics published the findings of a three-year-long
research program led by a team of international scientists which
proved that Indians have had the same genetic makeup for the last
60,000 years. At the time of publication, senior scientist Gyaneshwar
Chaubey said that the entire AIT was based on “low resolution
genetic markers. This time we have used autosomes, which means
all major 23 chromosomes, for our studies.” He stated, “We have
proved that people all over India have common genetic traits and
origin. All Indians have the same DNA structure. No foreign genes or
DNA has entered the Indian mainstream in the last 60,000 years.”[18]
Another member of the team, the molecular biologist Lalji Singh,
India’s foremost geneticist, added: “The Aryan-Dravidian
classification was nothing but a misinformation campaign.”[19]
 Then there’s more. A document published in the American
Journal of Human Genetics in 2006 shows that, as the writer
Sanjeev Sanyal says, “India’s population mix has been broadly
stable for a very long time and . . . there has been no major injection
of Central Asian genes for over 10,000 years.”[20]
The point here is that, increasingly, scientific research shows
that the old Aryan-Dravidian divide, upon which so much political
conflict in India has been built, may have been far less definitive than
earlier assumed. As D. K. Chakrabarti has rhetorically asked, “If the
Harappan religious beliefs should not be viewed through the lens of
later-day Hinduism, with which lens should it be viewed?”[21] He
explains that the attempt to “relegate Hinduism to the status of just
another ‘immigrant’ religion in the subcontinental context has a long
history and different modern manifestations, including the one which
denies Hinduism the privilege of being a single religion and ascribes
its current status as the majority religion of India to the decision of
the British census operators not to classify people according to their
Saivite, Vaishnavite and myriad affiliations.” He also notes that
“Hindus preferred to call their religion sanatana dharma, a term
which occurs in a Sanskrit inscription of 6th century AD.”[22]
Now, beyond scientific data and archeological arguments, what
is an empirical way of tackling this question?
What if we were to embrace both the Indus Valley civilization
and the Aryan texts (classifying them as such, for argument’s sake)
as our collective foundational legacy of engineering and urban
planning on one hand and philosophical, ethical heritage on the
other? Why is this the wise thing to do, you ask? Simply because
both offer undeniable treasures to our historical bedrock, and placing
them in some ideological crossfire is almost horrifyingly comic.
So, what does the Indus Valley civilization bring? Its people
were responsible for remarkably nuanced city building, broad roads
free of encroachments, diligently designed public and private
spaces, and sustainable water resources management, including
rainwater harvesting and sanitation—something modern India has
failed to achieve so that it now faces water wars and news headlines
point out that mobile phones are more rampant than toilets in the
country. The Indus Valley civilization as a society, French-born
Indologist Michel Danino wrote, was “largely free from warfare or
man-made destruction [and] devoid, too, of a glorified ruling elite,
military structure.”[23] Danino has pointed out that some of the
renowned Indus Valley seals show kingly figures in asanas or
postures (specifically the mulabandhasana) of yogic contemplation.
It shows, Danino has argued, a rare interweave of the spiritual and
the worldly.
On the other end of the spectrum, Aryan influences brought into
being what are irrefutably our definitive knowledge texts. For
thousands of years, these philosophies, whether written or recited,
have formed the uniqueness of the Indian mind. As Sanyal says,
“The reality of complex back-and-forth linkages make[s] it very
difficult to decode history using the linguistic layers. This may explain
why traditional timelines based on linguistics were far shorter than
those being suggested now by genetics and technology . . . one
does not need either conquest or large-scale migration to drive
linguistic and cultural exchange.”[24]
In our globalized world, for a period of time it was fashionable to
claim that the idea of cultural uniqueness was old-fashioned, even
bigoted. Thankfully, that age has passed. We have come to value
globalization not as an identity-flattening steamroller than makes us
all vehicles of the same brand but rather as endless introductions,
endless bursts of understanding and insight into how infinitely varied
being human really is. This understanding of managing diversity is
repeated again and again in Hindu texts. It is the backbone of the
Hindu idea of self and how the self interacts with the universe. In a
world where migration from the Middle East to Europe and other
parts of the world is growing exponentially, there has never been a
more appropriate moment to strengthen the idea of unity in diversity.
Globalization began with us cheering our commonalities across
cultures, but we are progressing on the journey by celebrating our
differences. The question of assimilation is growing deeper and more
detailed around us. It is no longer enough to get everyone to wear
the same clothes, to eat the same food, watch the same movies or
ball games; we now understand that external uniformity does not
make us one. So, even as the German Constitution is translated into
Arabic to assist the hundreds and thousands of new German citizens
who are refugees from the Middle East, we now also understand that
globalization and our search for oneness needs to go deeper,
unpeeling the real layers of prejudices that the likes of McDonald’s or
Disney cannot hide.
Even Pico Iyer, the ultimate savant regarding travel, preaches
the art of being still. There are philosophical and prosaic reasons to
seek stillness. It impacts both the selfish and sublime. Recent
research at Stanford shows that multitasking—a prized
postmillennial skill—is actually damaging our brains and leaving us
hopelessly scrambling, because we are no longer able to award
proper attention to any singular activity. Without that attentiveness,
our goals are often unmet and our ambitions unfulfilled, which in turn
leads to more multitasking, more damage. The search for stillness
also comes from an acute sense of losing our “centers,” which many
of us constantly feel as we try to multitask our way to success. In a
world of flexible work routines, we cannot even seem to find real
downtime. Why does this stillness evade us? The search for inner
peace can only arise from a society that embraces the concept of
inner unity.
When we have been everywhere and seen everything—so
much easier in the Internet world than ever before—what remains is
the uniqueness of our minds. That is the intelligence of our
civilization. If there is one central idea of civilizational intellect, it is
the understanding that inner oneness among human beings lies at
the heart of understanding the intelligence of the universe. There is
less fear of the outsider if the comprehension exists that there is no
difference between us and The Other.
This notion of unity is the greatest lesson from Indian antiquity; it
is the sum of the teachings of the Vedas and the Upanishads—the
Indian embracing of diversity comes from these Hindu texts which
teach the fundamental alikeness of man.
The Vedic period of Indian history gives us its civilizational
intelligence. This intelligence is not just about the complex
mathematics or the medicinal prowess of ancient Indians. It is not
just about the finesse of textiles or the dexterity of handicrafts (which
the Roman historian Pliny the Elder once complained were draining
the coffers of Rome whose citizens couldn’t get enough of cloth as
fine as a whiff of smoke from India).
The Hindu idea of unity in all things is the base on which all
meditational practice and what we call mindfulness today stands—it
teaches the simple lesson that to know the world one must first know
oneself fully and uncompromisingly.
The Hindu idea of learning about the universe and the galaxies
and all the life they contain is to simultaneously comprehend the life
within each human being. There is something incomprehensibly wise
and unfathomably vast about this idea, that to know the universe is
to look within. The Greek philosopher Socrates is famous for his
statement, recorded by his student Plato, “I know that I know
nothing.” The Hindu way of looking at this is different. I know that I
only know myself—says the Hindu yogi—and therefore I know God.
To know myself in its entirety is to know God. The idea that divinity is
nothing but the highest manifestation of man is a typical Hindu
assertion. All four Mahavakyas or the Great Sayings of the
Upanishads assert this unity.

1. Prajñānam Brahma—the supreme consciousness is the

Absolute or the divine (Divine intelligence is Brahman)
(Consciousness is infinite, the absolute, the highest Truth)
2. Ayam Aātmā Brahma—the Self is the Absolute or the divine
(The Self is Brahman) (The Self is the infinite)
3. Tat Tvam Asi—You are That (Absolute, divine) (That thou
art) (Thou art that)
4. Aham Brahmasmi—I am the Absolute or the divine (I am
Brahman) (I am that infinite)[25]

All this can be quite befuddling, especially when added to the

oft-misunderstood Hindu concept of maya—the idea that the world
as it appears to most human beings is an illusion and there is deeper
truth waiting to be discovered.
The Hindu ascetic Ramana Maharshi used to explain that it is
not quite true that the ancients taught that the world is unreal. “They
only meant that the world is unreal as the world but real as the Self,
the innermost consciousness. If you consider the world outside the
self, it is not real.”[26] This is one of the most intriguing assertions for
a Hindu. How can the world be unreal as the world—which it clearly
is—but real as ourselves? Isn’t the world the reality we have to deal
with everyday? Do we not exit from that reality when we delve deep
within ourselves? I have tried to understand this concept in a simple,
ordinary way. The universe that we see is really what we are within.
The world looks happy when we are joyous—and gloomy when we
are melancholy. The inner and outer worlds reflect one another in a
circle of action and reaction, where every action or reaction of ours—
determined by what we are feeling within—transforms our
experience of the outer world. What, then, is the illusion? The illusion
is the division in our minds between the inner and the outer world.
The illusion prevents us from seeing unity and forces us to perceive
a demarcation that does not exist. It is only when this illusion breaks
that we are able to be what Gandhi urged us to be—the change we
want to see in the world. This idea of the world as an illusion,
“maya,” and the “truth” as a unified idea both within and without the
self is seminal to the way a Hindu looks at the world. After many
years of grappling with this concept, I now have a simple, private
understanding of it. I realize that the result of my reality depends on
my reaction to it. At every step, every day, our reactions to hundreds
of situations determine the outcome of that moment, that day, week,
and even year. We can even say that our reactions to people, to
ideas, to the monsters in our head determine what we call our
destiny. In the vein of this argument, I realized that this striving for
inner unity, inner stillness, in ourselves and in all things could
actually help in tempering our reactions. How angry can I get at you
if I think that you are “also me,” and that we are the same? In this
method of questioning, I have tried to use the window of reaction to
understand the deeper philosophy of oneness that the Vedanta
preaches. You may well have another dimension or construct
through which you might access this interpretation. But in the end,
we are bound to reach the same conclusion since the truth is but
one.
The fundamental design of the universe remains consistent. If
you know the atomic, you know the cosmic. It only depends on the
level of complexity. To truly know yourself is to know the universe—
this is at once an incredibly empowering and intimidating idea. The
Hindu, it seems to me, has only one thing to fall back upon—
intelligence, that which is within.
“Indian civilization,” wrote Irishwoman Margaret Elizabeth Noble,
who later became a Hindu monk and took the name Sister Nivedita
under Vivekananda’s tutelage, “has educated its children from the
beginning to the supreme function of realizing ideas.”[27]
Unsurprisingly, then, as Vamsee Juluri, a writer and teacher of media
studies, has reminded us, one of Hinduism’s oldest and most
revered hymns, the “Gayatri Mantra,” sung every morning by
thousands for perhaps 3,000 years or more—is a prayer for
illumination, for radiance, for knowledge, for that intelligence which is
eternally enlightening. One of the earliest and most convincing
devotional pleas was for intelligence—not material blessings, not
refuge, not solace, not providence, but intelligence. “Hinduism is
about intelligence, more than anything else,”[28] writes Juluri.
Imagine that.
1. James Mill, History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock and
Joy, 1817).
2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1859).
3. James Mill, History of British India.
4. James Mill, History of British India, 12.
5. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Oakland:
University of California Press, 1997), 117.
6. Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York City:
Harmony Books, 2012), 47.
7. T. N. Madan, et al., “Hinduism: An Introductory Essay,” in The
Hinduism Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2003),
12.
8. Blake Morrison, “Today’s Past Master,” The Independent, April 8,
1995.
9. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press,
1996), 9.
10. Radhakumud Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (London:
Theosophical Publishing House, 1921), 52.
11. A. K. Mazumdar, The Hindu History (Delhi: Rupa Publications,
2008), 39.
12. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, 53.
13. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography, 55.
14. Swami Vivekananda, “The Future of India,” Madras (Chennai),
February 1897, in Lectures from Colombo to Almora (Belur Math:
Advaita Ashrama, 2005), 215.
15. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 215.
16. R. C. Majumdar, ed., “Introduction,” The Vedic Age: The History
and Culture of the Indian People (New Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya
Bhawan Educational Trust, G. Allen & Unwin, 1951).
17. Dilip K. Chakrabarti, “Power, Politics and Ariya Mayai,” in Nation
First: Essays in the Politics of Ancient Indian Studies (New Delhi:
Aryan Books International, 2014), 116–117.
18. Kumar Chellappan, “New Research Debunks Aryan Invasion
Theory,” DNA India (December 10, 2011),
[Link]
invasion-theory-1623744.
19. Chellappan, “New Research Debunks Aryan Invasion Theory.”
20. Sanghamitra Sengupta, et al., “Polarity and Temporality of High-
Resoultion Y-Chromosome Distributions in India Indentify Both
Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal Minor Genetic
Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” American Journal of Human
Genetics (February 2006).
21. Chakrabarti, Nation First: Essays, 116–117.
22. Chakrabarti, Nation First: Essays, 116–117.
23. Michel Danino, Indian Culture and India’s Future (New Delhi: DK
Printworld, 2011), 17.
24. Sanjeev Sanyal, Land of the Seven Rivers (New Delhi: Penguin
India, 2012), 29–33.
25. “Six Mahavakyas,” The Hindu Universe,
[Link] and
“Awakening of Intelligence,” part 2, New York 197, Jiddu-
Kirshnamurti, [Link]
intelligence/1969-07-26-jiddu-krishnamurti-awakening-of-
intelligence-four-mahavakyas-from-the-upanishads.
26. Shri Ramana Maharshi and Arthur Osborne, The Teachings of
Ramana Maharshi (London: Rider Books, 2014), 7.
27. Sister Nivedita, Footfalls of Indian History (Belur Math: Advaita
Ashrama, 2014), 164.
28. Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism (New Delhi: Westland Books,
2014), 5.
[Link]
 Chapter 3
What Makes You A Hindu?
What makes you a Hindu? Think about this: How do you know
that you are Hindu? What do you do every day, or any day for that
matter, that conclusively proves that you are Hindu? I spent two
extensive parts of my early life pondering this.
The first such period, as mentioned earlier in the book, was
during the many years of my life in a Christian missionary school
when I was told that I am a sinner. The second was during the two-
and-a-half years I spent as a master’s student at the AJK Mass
Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia in New
Delhi. These years developed a deep curiosity in me about
Christianity and Islam, and the Hindu interaction and response to
them.
During my readings on Christianity and Islam—and their
troubled and fascinating journey in India—I have been moved by the
profound, therapeutic silence of the cathedral and the poetry of
Islamic devotion. I have attended masses and prayer services—and,
indeed, I have prayed—in more churches and cathedrals around the
world than I can recall. Even today, one of my favorite things to do is
to spend time at quaint (and quiet) cathedrals in small European
towns. At London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, listening to its famed free
afternoon classical music recitals, I have wondered why more
temples don’t have Hindustani or Carnatic music concerts. In my
solemn moments, the poetry of the Sufi mystics has comforted me.
In the course of time, I spent years having conversations with
practicing Muslims and Christians about their faith, people who
believed and believed themselves to be believers. Through it all, one
distilled thought emerged: more often than not, the practicing Muslim
or Christian is more certain about what constitutes an identity of
“being Muslim” or “being Christian.” The idea of “being Hindu” is far
more amorphous, esoteric even. Its spectrum is vast; its canvas
touches everything from Naga sadhus on river banks to couch
potatoes addicted to television serials depicting the imagined
shenanigans of gods and goddesses.
 But what, if anything, do they have in common? Is there a
foundation of belief(s) that define the Hindu? Where is the common
ground? I had heard relentless chatter about India’s, indeed
Hinduism’s, diversity, but what about its soul unity? What has kept
Hinduism intact for thousands of years as the bearer of a living
civilization while all others—Egyptian, Greek, and Roman—have
died out? What binds this diversity together? What churns this
endless assimilation which, no matter who the conqueror is, keeps
its identity animate?
“The chief difference,” wrote historian R. C. Majumdar, “between
India and the other ancient countries . . . lies in the continuity of her
history and civilization. . . . The icons discovered at the Mohenjodaro
are those of gods and goddesses who are still worshipped in India,
and Hindus . . . repeat even today the Vedic hymns which were
uttered on the banks of the Indus nearly four thousand years ago.”[1]
As one of India’s greatest writers, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
wrote, “With other peoples, religion is only a part of life; there are
things religious and there are things lay and secular. . . . To the
Hindu his relations with God and man, his spiritual and temporal life
are incapable of being distinguished. They form one compact and
harmonious whole, to separate which into components is to break
the entire fabric.”[2]
But why does this continuity exist? What is this knowledge that
binds Hindus over thousands of years? What relevance could it
possibly retain from century to century?
In my small journey through the faith, I have found that the
answer is that Hinduism survives because it sets people free. What
does that mean? Let us consider the absolute basic meaning. The
fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity, and
Hinduism, is their differing approaches to understanding and
explaining the nature of truth.
All religions are concerned with truth or the purpose of human
existence. What does human life mean? What does it achieve? What
is it all for? Where does it all lead? And how can we make it better?
Aren’t these in essence the questions that every religion or faith
explores?
 The answer, according to Islam and Christianity, is to become
better. How does one become better? By following a revelation that
comes from the one to which it was revealed. And where is it
contained, this revelation, its lessons, its exhortations? It is
contained in words in a book.
In Hinduism, there is no truth to be found outside oneself.
“All this universe is Brahman. The self of all beings is
Brahman,”[3] says the Mandukya Upanishad. “He who sees the self
in all beings and all beings in the self, henceforth, has no more
remorse,” says the Isha Upanishad. The truth is hidden behind
maya, “the cosmic ignorance thrown up by the material world.”[4]
“The recognition that the world and its contents are an illusion,
that material objects inevitably decay, that skills and talents fade,
that no relationship lasts forever, is the first step towards moksha or
enlightenment,”[5] the philosopher Kenan Malik has explained.
The first step to knowing the truth is to acknowledge that it does
not lie outside since everything outside is an illusion. But that’s just
step one. The next, more vital step is to comprehend what is within.
“One only comes to know the self, the Upanishads suggest, by
becoming the self, and one only becomes the self by recognizing
that at some fundamental level the self and the world are one,”[6]
writes Malik.
In the epilogue of the book that made him famous (What Is
Life?), German Nobel Prize–winning nuclear physicist Erwin
Schrödinger explained, “Consciousness is never experienced in the
plural, only in the singular. . . . Consciousness is a singular of which
the plural is unknown.”[7]
Schrödinger is best known today for his thought experiment
famously known as “Schrödinger’s Cat.” What happens in this
experiment is that a cat is left in a chamber with a flask of poison
containing a radioactive element. As the element decays, the flask
breaks and the cat dies, but how does one know whether the cat is
dead or alive until it is observed? Until the time it is observed, the cat
can be said to be both dead and alive. The most common
interpretation of this experiment is that any system stops being a
superposition of states (the cat is both dead and alive) and becomes
one or the other once an observation happens. It is the act of
observation that defines the final state, and the two are irretrievably
connected.
Quantum physics breaks away from the thinking that, at the
fundamental level, the reality of the universe is what American
theoretical physicist David Bohm calls “elementary parts” which
constitute everything (in various complexities), and that these
elementary parts can be separately analyzed.
Instead, quantum physics shows that reality at the very
fundamental level is an unbroken wholeness, an essential
interconnectedness where the object being analyzed changes with
the situation of the observer, and it is this interconnected reality that
is the most fundamental truth. That’s why Schrödinger wrote that
what seems to us as plurality is “merely a series of different aspects”
of the same thing, the same truth. “Sensory deception” or what the
Hindus call maya gives us an illusion of many-ness where the reality
is but one.
Schrödinger understood the commonality between the scientific
theories he was working on and the metaphysical knowledge of the
Vedanta. He wrote, “This life of yours which you are living is not
merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the
whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in
one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express
in that sacred mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so
clear: tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as—I am in
the east and the west, I am above and below, I am in this entire
world.”[8]
This was not just esoteric mystical rambling. Walter Moore,
biographer of Erwin Schrödinger, wrote that the scientist saw that the
concepts of unity detailed in the Vedanta resonate with the “unity and
continuity of wave mechanics.”[9] It was men of science—and not
sages or ascetics—like Schrödinger and German theoretical
physicist Werner Heisenberg who altered the vision and
understanding of modern physics from “a model of a great machine
composed of separable interacting material particles” to “a universe
based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability
amplitudes.” It is a view that any student of the Vedanta would
immediately recognize as apt, tat, naturally knows the Vedanta, must
finally lead to asi.
John Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the term
“black hole,” detailed this even further. He said in essence that
quantum mechanics dissolved the old scientific term of the
“observer” and brought in a new term that the Eastern mystics
always knew to be true, that of the “participator.” “Nothing is more
important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the
concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely
separated. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron,
he must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment.
It is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or
momentum. Moreover, the measurement changes the state of the
electron. The universe will never afterwards be the same. In some
strange sense the universe (therefore) is a participatory universe.”[10]
The Atman, the soul, or the essence of the soul, the self, as it
were, fuses into the Brahman, or the essence of the universe—and
to understand that is to attain enlightenment.
“The manifestation of Brahman in the human soul is called
Atman,”[11] wrote Fritjof Capra in his best-selling book, The Tao of
Physics. He explains why Eastern faiths and their philosophies are
closest to science, and distills this idea which he calls the “unity of all
things.” “The most important characteristic of the Eastern worldview
—one could almost say the essence of it—is the awareness of the
unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience
of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic
oneness,”[12] Capra wrote. “All things are seen as interdependent
and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different
manifestations of the same ultimate reality.”[13] Or as the Mundaka
Upanishad says, “Brahmaivedam-amrtam” (This whole manifested
universe is the immortal Brahman.)[14] Capra’s point is that what
ancient Hindu texts express as a mystical experience is quite close
to what modern atomic physics describes as an interconnected
cosmic phenomenon.
As Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum
mechanics, discoverer of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and
winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, said, “Natural science
does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay
between nature and ourselves.”[15]
So far so confusing.
Does this mean—literally—that people in India knew thousands
of years ago what quantum physics has, and is, discovering in the
modern age? Frankly, most rational people would dismiss such a
grandiose, sweeping statement. If we were to accept such a broad
statement then it would lead to all sorts of nativistic
aggrandizements. There is a better way of explaining this.
To understand how, I spoke to Ankur Barua who teaches Hindu
studies at the University of Cambridge. He first studied physics at the
graduate level, then switched to read theology, and now lectures at
the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge.
First of all, when it is said that some theories of quantum
theories are similar to “Hinduism,” what Hinduism are we really
talking about?
We are talking about the Upanishads written in a period starting
from about 800 years to 500 years before the birth of Christ. The
accumulated knowledge of the Upanishads is what we refer to as the
Vedanta.
To understand this, Barua explained, you need to understand
two terms—idealism and realism. In philosophical parlance, realism
is the belief that the existence of everyday material objects around
you is in no way dependent on you perceiving them.[16] This means,
for instance, a box of food that you put in your refrigerator exists
there even when you are not looking at it. This is almost common
sense. Idealism is the view that the existence of so-called material
objects is somehow dependent on you perceiving them.
When we talk about the correspondence between quantum
mechanics and Upanishadic knowledge, we are really talking in
terms of an idealistic interpretation or understanding of quantum
physics and of the Upanishads. Physicists and philosophers who
argue in favor of this view opine that if the idealistic interpretations of
both systems are compared, since they are both idealistic, they must
therefore correspond.
 Why would anyone want to be an idealist? Take a bottle. What is
a bottle really? It is a bundle of sensations, isn’t it? Some are visual,
some tactile, some olfactory, etc., right? A combination of five
senses is involved in perceiving the bottle. Now think about this.
These five categories of sensations, what are they? They are mental
events. And mental events are just ideas. So this is an idea, this
bottle is an idea. Why do you want to go beyond these ideas? It is
much more economical to just say that all I mean by a bottle—or
matter—is an aggregate of mental sensations, of ideas. So what
have I done? I have demonstrated the dependence on the mind of
so-called matter or matter’s dependence on the mind. So we are
inching towards an idealist view.
Classical physics is almost always unreflexively realist. In
classical physics, for example, I can tell through some calculations
the precise location of the moons of Jupiter. I don’t have to look at
them. The fact that I am not looking at them does not alter their
physical location or momentum in any way. When we move into the
subatomic domain (the domain of quantum physics), subatomic
phenomena are extremely queer and mysterious and complex and
mind-boggling and counterintuitive. Somehow we are not able to
determine with completely certainty and exactitude both the position
and the momentum of one of these subatomic particles. So if you
observe them, somehow their positions seem to change.
Since 1925 (the birth of quantum physics) there has been a
huge argument on this—if quantum mechanics is our most
established science and everything works according to it, what is the
best metaphysical explanation for it?
Broadly, Barua explained to me, we need to understand two
ways of looking at this. One is called Instrumentalism. This says
actually there is nothing very deep happening in quantum physics. It
is just a set of equations correlating theories with predictions. It does
not give you any inkling on the deep knowledge of reality.
The other is called the Idealistic Interpretation of quantum
mechanics. Some physicists like Henry Stapp (Berkeley) have
worked on this. And it is their work that recognizes the role of
perception in the manifestation of phenomena which corresponds to
some ideas of the Upanishads.
 Now it is important to note that there is no “realism” or “idealism”
in the Upanishads. Such concepts are of a much later date. Adi
Shankaracharya, the Indian monk (788–820 CE) who propounded
the Advaita Vedanta philosophy—to which quantum mechanics is
most commonly compared—is not interested in materialism or
science; his goal is the spiritual. His goal is much further—it is the
Brahman. Brahman, loosely, can be translated as God. Advaita
Vedanta in essence provides a cohesive interpretation to the entire
Upanishadic knowledge and argues that all that we see or
experience is merely a manifestation of the Brahman or God. It says
that in essence we, ourselves, are God, as in everything we perceive
is nothing but the Brahman. As the nineteenth-century monk
Vivekananda, a major modern proponent of Advaita Vedanta,
explained: “Each soul is potentially divine.” We are all God or we all
have God within us—we just haven’t realized it yet.
Now to come to the question of correspondence with quantum
mechanics—is there a world independent from human cognition?
Shankaracharya says no. The so-called material world is a
transformation, a manifestation of the Brahman. If you told Shankara
about the idealistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, he would
say—well, that’s only a halfway house. You have only gone halfway.
Sure, all of this is maya (illusion), etc.—but what about the
Brahman? Where is the eternal, timeless, indivisible Brahman?
So the point is—it is an upside-down positioning to say oh, the
sages of the Upanishads “knew quantum physics.” In a sense, that is
not just incorrect, it is also underselling the Upanishads. The way to
put it is—if Adi Shankara were to come alive today, he would
recognize or understand many theories of quantum physics easily.
Or today, after we have read and understood quantum physics,
when we go back and read the Upanishads, we recognize many
echoes or threads in it from the theories of quantum physics.
Ankur Barua said that this has brought him to a position he calls
“religious agnosticism,” that is, there are no good logical arguments
that conclusively either establish or negate the possibility of
something beyond time and space. One would like to believe that the
universe is hospitable to human flourishing—that somehow the
universe is not running against those values (kindness, for instance)
that we human beings hold to be important. But one can’t
demonstrate it inexorably.
This is explained in a different but equally powerful way in the
introduction to Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of
the World’s Greatest Philosophers. Wilber, an American writer on
mysticism, philosophy, and science, collected together in this book
thoughts on mysticism from some of the greatest scientists the world
has ever known—physicists Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger,
Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, James Jeans, Max Planck,
Wolfgang Pauli, and Arthur Eddington. Wilber asks a basic question
in the book, how is it that all these physicists, some of the finest
minds on the subject, “rejected the notion that physics proves or
even supports mysticism, and yet every one of them was an avowed
mystic”?[17]
Does that mean that modern physics can easily dismiss what
Wilber calls “mysticism” (so much of Hinduism’s core ideas can be
placed in the realm of mysticism)? On the contrary, Wilber explains
that these great physicists were steeped in mysticism because they
realized that modern physics was grasping bits and pieces of the
reality that mysticism interprets. Wilber quotes Eddington as saying
that “the frank realization that physical science is concerned with a
world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent
advances.”[18]
The point here is that physics—scientists today understand—
grasps only an image, a shadow, a mathematical picture of reality,
and not reality itself. James Jeans writes: “Many would hold that,
from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding
achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of
relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of
quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or
the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are
not what they seem: it is the general recognition that we are not yet
in contact with ultimate reality.”[19]
Eddington adds: “Physics most strongly insists that its methods
do not penetrate behind the symbolism.”[20] Echoing Jeans, “We are
still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only
watch the shadows on the wall.”[21]
This is the common ground between the mysticism of Hinduism
and modern science. Modern science recognizes that it sees only a
part of the Truth. Hindu mysticism realizes, too, that science is, as it
were, a partial verification of the ultimate Truth. As Barua told me, it
would be incorrect to say the ancient sages knew “quantum physics.”
But there are echoes. Once you understand modern physics and
then you go back and read the ancient Hindu texts—you hear
distinct echoes. As my friend, the cosmology enthusiast Ishira
Mehta, is fond of saying, “It is almost that modern science is
verifying, accurately, logically, some things which the ancient mystics
knew in somewhat of an instinctive manner.” Eddington understood
this when he wrote: “Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of
ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending
the methods of physics, supplies just that . . . which science is
admittedly unable to give.”[22] The renowned string theorist Edward
Witten has admitted the limitations of science to decipher
consciousness in a recent interview with the following words:

I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that’s what I

tend to believe. I tend to think that the workings of the conscious
brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps
physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But
why something that we call consciousness goes with those
workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much
easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I
have imagining how we can understand consciousness.[23]

This comprehension of consciousness is, to me, the greatest

legacy of the Hindu mind.
What does all this mean to me as a practicing Hindu? It means I
feel—and have felt consistently—at once unbelievably free and
surreally bewildered. As you peel off layers of rituals that exemplify
everyday Hindu practice, you realize—at least I have—that none of it
is designed as a final, unalterable route. It is all a morphing,
changing, experiential process wherein the final destination is the
same not just for me but for every single living being (since the
essence of all life is the same), but the journey can vary infinitely.
“The truth for the Hindu,” wrote Michel Danino, “is inexhaustible;
there can be no end to the revelation, no only child, no last prophet.
No Indian teacher ever said that his message was final and there
could be nothing beyond it. Anyone is free to start a new teaching,
give a new message to the world, found a new school of thought.”[24]
Why does such liberty exist? Because Hinduism teaches that no
matter what the path or methodology, finally all seekers of the truth
will arrive at the same destination. That’s why Hindus find it easy to
accept other faiths as entirely valid; after all, whether it is Christ,
Moses, or Muhammad, the destination is the same, says Hinduism.
There is a lovely little story I was told as a child by my parents
about the spiritual teacher Ramakrishna Paramhansa who was
asked how he could justify the worship of clay idols; surely God is
formless?
“You believe God is without form; that is quite all right. But never
for a moment think that this alone is true and all else false.
Remember that god with form is just as true as God without form.
But hold fast to your own conviction,”[25] said Paramhansa.
The questioner was adamant. “But,” he said, “one should
explain to those who worship the clay image that it is not God, and
that while worshipping it, they should have God in view and not the
clay image. One should not worship clay.”[26]
Paramhansa answered, “This is the one hobby of you Calcutta
people—giving lectures and bringing others to the light! Nobody ever
stops to consider how to get the light himself. Who are you to teach
others? God has arranged all these forms to suit different people in
different stages of knowledge.” The idols that my school preachers
paid so much attention to were merely incidental in the path to
discovering pure consciousness.
In this journey, Paramhansa is saying what pioneering
psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was immensely influenced by the
Ramakrishna Mission and Paramhansa’s teachings, said, “the
individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and
his own spiritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an
extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering
influence of external factors. The individual who is not anchored in
God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical
and moral blandishments of the world.”[27]
At this point, it is easy to think that Jung is wrong. Surely in a
world that has always fought over whose God is better, and still
does, requires not more religion, but less? But that’s exactly the
point. Jung’s understanding of God realization is noncompetitive,
non-exclusivist, and nonthreatening. It seeks no convert or kingdom.
It is an entirely internal journey of self-discovery. Jung wrote, “he [the
human being] needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience
which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable subversion
in the mass.”[28]
It is to keep the sanctity of this sacred internal journey that Jung
spoke against the dictator state when he argued, “along with the
individual it swallows up his religious forces. The State has taken the
place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist
dictatorships are religious and State slavery is a form of worship. But
the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way
without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed
so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trends towards mass-
mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is
overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in its turn is used
as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition.”[29]
Jung makes for critical reading to understand the difference
between an internal and external spiritual journey. He is as
vehemently against the rule of the dictatorial state (in his time
especially concerned with the excesses of the eastern European
Communist countries) as he as against dogmatic religion. His focus,
as the Eastern religions have always held to be true, is man’s search
for the truth within. Eastern philosophies, said Jung, shifted the
“centre of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to god.”[30]
In Roberto Calasso’s Ardor, which is the retelling of the wisdom
of the Vedic age, there is this utterly enlightening conversation
between Yajnavalkya—the pupil of Surya (the sun god) and the
master of all yajnas or sacrifices—and the sublimely wise King
Janak. Janak asks Yajnavalkya, “What happens after death?”
 Yajnavalkya talks neither of heaven nor hell or everlasting life,
nor sin or salvation. He says what happens after death is that we
become “that person which is reflected of us in the eye of another
person looking at us.”[31]
Just think about the deceptively simple but overwhelming worth
of that answer. We become the image in the eye of another. Why?
Because we are not the senses. We are that which observes the
senses and the ego.
If you think about this, you will realize that this is exactly what
the Adi Shankaracharya is famously singing about in his most
glorious hymn
Chidananda rūpah Shivoham Shivoham
manobuddhyahaṃ
kāra cittāni nāhaṃ
na ca śrotrajihve na ca ghrāṇanetre na ca vyoma bhūmir na tejo na vāyuḥ
cidānandarūpa śivo’ham śivo’ham[32]

It translates as: I am not mind, nor intellect, nor ego, nor the
reflections of inner self (citta). I am not the five senses. I am beyond
that. I am not the ether, nor the earth, nor the fire, nor the wind (the
five elements). I am indeed, that eternal knowing and bliss, the
auspicious (Śivam), love and pure consciousness.
Or, as Vivekananda said, “Never forget the glory of human
nature! We are the greatest god. . . . Christs and Buddhas are but
waves on the boundless ocean which I am.”[33] The “I” here is not
Vivekananda but the common pure consciousness in every human.
The notion that the human being could find within himself the source
of the divine and is, therefore, everywhere and in everything—since
the divine is everywhere—is the glue that holds together the Hindu
worldview; it is both the cornerstone and the wings of the faith.
This idea is often almost unfathomable. That which is in us—the
pure consciousness that observes all our senses, emotions, and ego
and is beyond it all—is what we really are. And that pure
consciousness is common to every living thing on earth. It is an idea
that inevitably stops you in your tracks. It is an idea to end all ideas:
in essence, every living thing is the same.
In a video that has gone viral, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson, the Fredrick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at
the Rose Centre for Earth and Space in New York, has explained it
as “the most astounding fact” about the universe.

Many people feel small, because they’re small and the universe
is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.
There is a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in
life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant. You
want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on of activities
and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by
being alive.[34]

Just by being alive, at every single moment, you are not just part
of the universe, you are the universe.
In the Upanishads, there are two marvelous little set pieces that
illuminate this idea. Both are very short conversations between a
man and a son.
In the first, the father asks the son to fetch him the fruit of a
banyan tree. It goes like this:

Father: Fetch me a fruit.

Son: Here it is, Father.
Father: Break it open.
Son: I have broken it. Here.
Father: What do you see?
Son: Very tiny seeds, Father.
Father: Break one seed.
Son: Here it is; I have broken it.
Father: Now what do you see?
Son: Nothing.
Father: What you cannot see, my son, is the essence, and in
that essence this giant banyan tree lives. In that essence is the
Self of all that is. That is the truth; that is the Self. And you are
that Self too.

In the other story, the father asks the son to put some salt in a
glass of water at night and bring it to him in the morning. In the
morning, when the son does that, the father asks him to remove the
salt from the water and bring it to him. But the son cannot do that
because the salt has dissolved. The following conversation ensues:

Father: Now taste the water from the top. How does it taste?
Son: Salty.
Father: Taste the water from the middle of the glass.
Son: This tastes salty too.
Father: Finally, taste the water from the bottom. How about that?
How does it taste?
Son: This also tastes of salt.
Father: You don’t understand the one reality that is in your body,
my son, but it is there. Everything is that one reality, that one
essence. Everything is that soul. And you are nothing but that
reality, that soul.

But what does all of this really mean in your life and mine? To
me, at least, this idea has been infinitely liberating. Here’s why: For a
moment, think of the object that is most precious to you. Maybe it is
a ball or an old gramophone, a pen, a clock, a wicker basket, or a
skipping rope. All of these objects, indeed any of them, can be
worshipped by you as God. For any object can be, as long as the
belief is strong and resilient, equally valid as a representative form of
the divine. There is absolutely nothing that, if held in great affection
and reverence, cannot be considered as a form of the Almighty to be
worshipped.
There is no form, no shape, no size, and no color that is
considered unworthy as long as it is revered by the worshipper.
Notice how the main thing here is not what the representative item is
but the reverence of the worshipper. It is the reverence—indeed the
meditative reverie—of the believer that constitutes the sanctity of the
sacred, not the object per se. As Alan Watts wrote, “If you ask me to
show god, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say
‘You mean, then, god is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other
things?’ I shall have to say that you have missed the point
entirely.”[35]
When I was a child in Calcutta, the festival of Durga Puja came
upon us with the weather. The searing heat of Calcutta, languorous
and all abuzz in flames at the same time, dissipated to a carefree
autumn during this time. Durga Puja was my favorite festival. The
celebrations continued—and they do today—for ten long days. The
air is fresh and fragrant and the mood exuberant. Durga Puja
celebrates the victory of good over evil but it is actually more
complicated than that. It holds within it an emblem of the power of
Indian feminist thought—the goddess destroying the arrogance of an
all-powerful man, a man so intellectually strong and devoted that he
has been blessed by the gods. The man in question, Mahishasura,
prays ardently to the gods for a very long time and wins the right to
ask for a boon. What does he ask for? He asks for immortality. But
that is one thing that the gods cannot give—for to be immortal is to
be a god. It is not possible for man to get that virtue. So instead,
Mahishasura wins the boon that he cannot be killed by any man. The
all-powerful warrior does not believe that any woman can kill him.
Once he wins the boon, he is able to defeat all the gods who then
pool together their powers into the form of a goddess who battles
Mahishasura. When I was a child, we were taught how the warrior is
defeated by the goddess and killed not because he is not a great
warrior or because he is evil. He isn’t. But above all his wonderful
qualities, he has one critical flaw. He is arrogant. Given the powers
of near immortality, he is unable to use them for good.
My mother used to take the opportunity of Durga Puja to drill
into my head that I should not be “overconfident.” Overconfidence
was a great sin in our little world. We were taught to be cautious—
diligent but not too brazen. There was philosophy in this teaching.
My parents believed, as they often said, in the philosophical lesson
of the Vedanta—that one must act in the righteous way without
expecting reward. And even though their lives had very few material
comforts, it is a concept that they held dear. It was curious for me to
see this while growing up because the festival of Durga Puja was so
irretrievably tied to the material aspects of life—the purchase of new
clothes, the eating of vast feasts, the endless partying, the massive
pandals made of wood and heavily decorated to hold the giant idols
of the goddess during the days of the Puja. Yet, we were taught to
see through all that and focus on the subliminal message—do not be
greedy, do not be arrogant. This focus on the cerebral over the
material gave us the aesthetic and ethical mooring to enjoy a festival
of excess. There was a sense, I always felt, of looking beyond the
obvious and trying to understand the ideas that lay behind the
immediate raucousness. Even as we shopped and ate and drank,
the prayers every morning were solemn, and often required the
discipline of a short morning fast before the ceremony—one was
allowed to eat only after the prayers were over. It helped that the
priests who conducted the ceremonies were often from villages near
Calcutta and mostly men of extremely modest financial means. They
added the grace of austerity to the ceremonies.
During Durga Puja, one of the seminal ceremonies is the pran
pratishtha, the prayer to put life in the idol of the mother goddess. As
a child, I found it fascinating to watch the priest lovingly pray to bring
the goddess to life with mantras and the final touch, the painting of
the eyes. It took me years, in fact decades, to truly appreciate what I
was seeing.
Step back and think. In this one act of pran pratishtha, man
imbibes the divinity within to bring God to life. What could be a more
powerful and potent symbol of the unified inner divinity of the
universe? Man at his worshipful best reaches a point in prayer
wherein he or she is able to invest in the idol the divinity of life. And
man is able to do this because there is no difference in the pure
consciousness between man and God; both man and God are
manifestations of basic oneness.
That’s why Hinduism has devas and asuras—manifestations of
devotion, mischief, good, and evil. Man, says Hinduism, has the
potential to go higher or lower in this chain of divinity. Man can make
the journey from nar (human) to narayan (a god-like manifestation),
or could turn to baser instincts. Even asuras (demigods) are not
“evil” per se but merely less evolved manifestations of divinity. For
instance, Ravan is not just a “demon” as many Western writers put it,
but a scholar of the Vedic texts, enormously learned and capable of
astonishing feats of worship and penance. It is Ravan who has the
capability, in the legend, to build a stairway to heaven, but distracted
by his whims and baser instincts, he fails to complete it. That’s why
avatars are but manifestations, divinity in different forms. We are all
manifestations of the same divinity, says Hinduism, but avatars are
the highest and most evolved form of that manifestation.
In one sense, Christianity and Hinduism believe in the same
thing—that there are men and women who define the spiritual
destiny of mankind and bring forth a new age of man’s deeper
engagement with divinity, both within and without. Both faiths believe
in divine incarnation. The difference between the two is this:
Christianity believes that that there is only one true incarnation, “the
only begotten son of God” and does not accept any other
incarnations within Christian history or outside.
Hinduism or sanatana dharma accepts both Christ and the
Buddha as divine incarnations. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad
Gita, “sambhavami yuge yuge” (I incarnate age after age). Why, asks
the Hindu, can’t God incarnate more than once? In fact, there is no
Hindu quarrel even with prophets like Moses and Muhammad, who
are next to incarnates in divinity. All of these forms are accepted as
part of mankind’s search for the eternal truth. There is no conflict
with many forms because the core Vedanta teaching is that the soul
was never born and never dies. It is only the body that changes, is
born, and dies. Vivekananda described it is as a book being turned
over. It is the book that turns, he said, not the man turning it.
In the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjun,
said to be the greatest archer of all times, dithers on arriving at the
battlefield. He laments, Why should I fight my own cousins? Why
should I kill my own family? It is then that the god Krishna explains to
him the concept of dharma (the closest, though inadequate,
translation is duty). It is his duty as a warrior, Krishna tells Arjun, to
defend what is good and fight what is wrong. This dialogue is known
as the Bhagavad Gita. It is equally a philosophical treatise as a
spiritual one. In this Krishna also tells Arjun, “Mahatmanastu mam
Partha daivin prakrtimasritah; Bhajantyananya manaso jnatva
bhutadimavyayam.”[36] It translates as: The mahatmas or the noble
ones, Partha (the other name of Arjun), endowed with divine
qualities, worship me with single-minded devotion, for they know me
as the imperishable source of all beings.
The idea that man can invoke divinity in clay to make it God and
then worship it is, to me, the most sublime idea of the potential in
each of us; the idea that not one of us is condemned. Not one of us
needs saving or an external aid. All that we seek, all that we will ever
need and could ever need, lies within us.
The Hindu believes that no one is a heathen. No one is an
infidel. Not one of us is an unbeliever, for how can you be an
unbeliever in yourself? There are no false gods because how can
that which lies within you, which you worship, be false to you? How
can you be false to yourself?
You and I, we are manifestations of God. We are God; we just
don’t know it yet. That is why the sages said, “Tum jano ya na jano,
mano ya na mano, tum hi Ram.” This means: Whether you know it or
not, whether you realize it or not, whether you accept it or not, you
are the divine.
You and I, we are not sinners. We are the divine. We just don’t
know it yet.
1. R. C. Majumdar, The Vedic Age: The History and Culture of the
Indian People, vol. 1 (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1951), 38.
2. Lakshmidhar Mishra, Human Bondage: Tracing its Roots in India
(New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2011), 253.
3. David Frawley, Hinduism: The Eternal Tradition (New Delhi: Voice
of India, 1995), 9.
4. Amaresh Datta, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, vol. 2
(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005), 150.
5. Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of
Ethics (New Delhi: Atlantic Books, 2014), 81.
6. Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 81.
7. Sampooran Singh and Kanwaljit Kaur, Symbiosis of Science and
Spirituality: Generation of Innovation In Science for Human Survival
(New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2006), 235.
8. Ken Wilber, ed., Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the
World’s Greatest Physicists (Boston: Shambhala Publications,
2001), 98.
9. Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 173.
10. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Flamingo), 2nd ed. (London:
HarperCollins, 1983).
11. Capra, The Tao of Physics, 100.
12. Capra, The Tao of Physics, 141.
13. Capra, The Tao of Physics, 141.
14. Mandukya Upanishad, chapter 11, verse 2.29.
15. Alfred I. Tauber, ed., Science and the Quest for Reality (London:
Macmillan, 1997), 128.
16. Interview with Ankur Barua.
17. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 5.
18. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 7.
19. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 8.
20. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 8.
21. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 8.
22. Wilber, Quantum Questions, 8.
23. John Horgan, “World’s Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can’t
Crack Consciousness: String Theorist Edward Witten Ways
Consciousness ‘Will Remain a Mystery,’” Scientific American (August
18, 2016).
24. Michel Danino, Indian Culture and India’s Future (New Delhi: DK
Printworld, 2011), 133.
25. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna
Math, 1997), 80.
26. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 80.
27. C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the
Individual in Modern Society (New York City: Penguin Books USA,
2006), 23.
28. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 24.
29. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 24.
30. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 24.
31. Roberto Calasso, Ardor (London: Penguin Books UK, 2013), 27.
32. [Link]
nirvana-shatakam/Isha Foundation.
33. J. Moussaieff Masson, The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of
Religious Sentiment in Ancient India (Dordrecht: D. Reidel
Publishing Company, 1980), 44.
34. Jessica Orwig, “Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘Most Astounding Fact
About The Universe’ Will Bring You To Tears,” Business Insider
(November 5, 2014).
35. Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (New York City:
Pantheon Books, 1951), 54.
36. Bhagavad Gita, chapter 9, verse 13.
[Link]
 Chapter 4
Who Is the One True God?
For a moment think about this. In the history of theology, one
question reigns supreme amid the bloodshed—which is the one true
God?
Empires rose and fell to defend the one true God, to spread his
word (you will notice that “one true God” is usually male) or to
destroy the realms of the infidel or the unbeliever and cleanse
places, kingdoms, and nations for the rule and supremacy of the only
messiah. Even today, thousands of years after the death of the last
major messiahs, the bloodshed to establish the reign of the true God
continues.
But what if the Hindu point of view was better understood in our
world? What if the fundamental premise of Vedanta philosophy
seeped into our ethics? What if the very heart of the Hindu argument
was better understood?
And what is that core?
Hindus fundamentally believe that there is no one true God.
There is, therefore, no false God. Naturally, if you don’t have one
true God, it is tough to have a false God. And if you don’t have one
true God or a false God, then there are no unbelievers. For an
unbeliever to exist, there must be a static, defined idea of what the
manifestation of the Almighty looks like. In its absence, it is very
difficult to point fingers at the heretic. Without the finality of the
messenger of God—and his words being the final message—how
can there be an unchanging idea of the infidel?
Those then are the main questions Hinduism answers with
certitude. It says that every manifestation (indeed messenger) of the
Almighty has equal validity to propagate its version of the divine
truth. In a sense, the Hinduism argument is the opposite of the
monotheistic faiths. It says every messenger (or prophet) is to be
held true until proved false.
The Hindu path, as Vivekananda famously declared, has no
sinners. In this, it takes a position diametrically opposite, for
instance, to Christianity. In Hinduism, there are no souls to save and
man is born without original sin.
 This is why Vivekananda declared at the World’s Parliament of
Religions in 1893, “The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a
Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each
must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his
individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. . . . The
Parliament of Religions . . . has proved . . . that holiness, purity and
charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world.”
In fact, Hinduism argues for the other extreme. It says, to quote
Vivekananda again, “each soul is potentially divine.”[1] We must now
ask what it means and how my life (or yours) changes with the
knowledge that each soul is potentially divine.
I can only explain how I have understood it and how it has
worked for me. Once you start to think about this idea that each and
every soul—yours included—is potentially divine, you start to get a
little nervous. Why? Because it takes away our emotional and
psychological crutches. When you realize that, in reality, you have
nothing to fall back upon but yourself, it breaches the most secure
barriers and fortresses in the mind, those we usually keep protected
by the idea of God.
I look at the sonorous statement that each soul is potentially
divine as being a bit like the swimming teacher who pushes a
trusting child into the deep end just at the moment when the pupil is
trying hardest to clutch on to the teacher to avoid swimming alone.
The teacher knows that there will be flailing of arms and much water
swallowed, but finally the student will learn how to swim. The teacher
is there to ensure that his ward does not drown, but beyond that the
student is on his own.
In her now famous TED Talk, researcher Brené Brown explains
how the word courage comes from the Latin word cor, which means
heart. It derives from the ability and psychological ability to open
your heart and be vulnerable. The root of Hindu philosophy is, to me,
like that. It forces you to be on your own, and it pushes you down a
personal path explaining that while the truth is one, every journey to
reach it must be unique. The path to discover divinity inside you is a
path of extreme vulnerability. It is a path fraught with accepting your
deepest insecurities and facing your most frightening demons. You
cannot, naturally, hope to discover your inherent divine nature until
you face your most challenging anxieties.
What happens when you start to realize that behind all that you
see as separate aspects of life or manifestations—other people,
animals, plants, and everything living—there is in reality one,
unbroken, uniform oneness of consciousness?
Perhaps it might be useful here, just for simplification, to use the
word “soul” instead of pure consciousness or consciousness. What if
you were to begin to see everyone around you not as who they
appear to be—not their body type, nationality, skin color, speech
distinctions, and character distinctions—but just simply as other
souls exactly like yours, for these are part of the universal soul?
Think about what that does to our numerous constructs of
division on the basis of color, class, wealth, education, and even
physical abilities. It is, I think, impossible to instantaneously
comprehend the importance of this. This understanding of a
fundamental commonness that goes indefinitely beyond political
correctness or ideology opens the canvas of our mind infinitely and
allows us to recreate an identity step by step with increasing
awareness.
What this does or has the potential to do to centuries of
historical strife is almost incomprehensible. Where would crusades
be, for instance, if everyone accepted that there was no one true
God? How many millions could and would be saved if the concept of
the infidel were wiped out? What if we were all to agree that there
are no unbelievers? Would that not be the single greatest act of
conflict resolution in the history of the world?
Here in my mind is the unique position of the Hindu argument: a
Hindu does not recognize the concept of infidels or unbelievers for
he or she does not believe that there is only one path, one
messenger, or one book to God.
At this point, let us make a further distinction as explained by the
Hindu thinker Rajiv Malhotra. He makes the distinction between
tolerance and mutual respect, arguing, “It is fashionable in interfaith
discussions to advocate ‘tolerance’ for other faiths. But we would find
it patronizing, even downright insulting, to be ‘tolerated’ at
someone’s dinner table. No spouse would appreciate being told that
his or her presence at home was being ‘tolerated.’ No self-respecting
worker accepts mere tolerance from colleagues. We tolerate those
we consider inferior. In religious circles, tolerance, at best, is what
the pious extend towards people they regard as heathens, idol
worshippers or infidels. It is time we did away with tolerance and
replaced it with ‘mutual respect.’”[2]
Hinduism argues for a world of mutual respect, where none
would think their path is greater than any other. What this also
means is that Hindus realize (or at least ought to) that for true peace
to be achieved, this mutual respect must be the starting point. Mere
tolerance is only a Band-Aid, a temporary truce that breaks often and
violently. A Hindu recognizes that the tolerance allows the sotto voce
demonization of “the other.” To tolerate is to, at best, adjust but rarely
ever to integrate. The Hindu approach is different and aimed at
supreme integration.
What if you realized, almost like in a science fiction movie, that it
is the same life force that seamlessly leaves one body and takes the
form of another, and the sum total of that one universal life force
never alters or changes?
What may happen as you start to understand this is that you
become aware of how much of what you do every day—how much
of how you react, respond, and accept or reject—is based on social
conditioning. Much is preprogrammed reflex action based on what
we have been taught, what we have seen, and what we think we
know but often we are acting according to someone else’s thoughts
and not quite our own.
In a small way, what I have come to understand is that the first
step of recognizing Hindu thought is the self-awareness that I could
be wrong. What I am thinking or the way I am responding might not
really be my response or might not really be what I myself think or
feel; I might just be reacting in a way that I am expected to react. To
reach beyond the multiple layers of my experiential conditioning—
through the joys that I hold dear and the sorrows I have never
entirely let go—to respond from my innermost consciousness,
leaving aside the ego as far as possible, is one of the toughest
things to do. But that journey starts by recognizing that all
differences are man-made. The first step of that journey is melting
the distinctions by liberating ourselves from the idea that there is a
believer who is better and more worthy of praise and survival than an
unbeliever.
The Hindu philosophical point of view is actually, in a sense, the
opposite of that of monotheistic faiths. This comparison is not to
suggest one is better than “the other” but just to explain the variation
in worldviews. The whole business of this faith or that faith being
better than another is and must be abhorrent to Hindus because if
there is constantly a message of unity in all things and beings, how
can there be simultaneously a competition to be superior?
Faith is just about different ways of looking at human existence
and why, or whether, a sense of God is necessary. In Christianity, the
starting point for all human beings is sin. Because of the original sin
of Adam and Eve, every human being is assumed to be born a
sinner, and salvation lies in embracing the loving message of Jesus
Christ, the savior who rescues mankind from sin.
Islam believes that anything that goes against the word of Allah
as revealed by the Prophet Muhammad is sin. Both these beliefs are
unidirectional. In it, human beings are saved by the infinite
compassion and love of the Almighty. Human beings are lost and
shown the path. There is no doubt that both faiths have unique
strengths—the message of the mercy of Christ and that of charity
from Muhammad—but the general sense is that the human being is
separate from the Almighty who rescues man.
Hinduism approaches the question of sin from exactly the other
end. It begins with the idea of the perfection of man, begins with the
assumption that actually there is no difference between man and
God, the human and the divine, and asks how can man become
even more perfect, how one can rise from nar to narayan or from
merely human to divine? It says that every human has the potential
to understand their own divinity and how it unites them with the
universe, but usually one never discovers it. The conversation
begins without a trace of the burden of sin and then goes on to place
the entire onus of righteous behavior on humans.
To me, it has always seemed that sanatana dharma is telling us
to stand up and take some responsibility and not leave everything to
(or blame everything on) God. The karmic cycle is not about letting
go and being defeatist but about taking responsibility for your
actions, realizing that while you do have a karmic cycle, you can with
exemplary action change that karma. You are, after all, divinity itself.
The responsibility of the way your life shapes up lies finally in your
hands. Not in the lines of your hand, but in your action. Your action
shall determine your destiny and how close you get to realizing your
divinity.
Reading the Vedanta always makes me remember the lines
from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney,
“The soul exceeds its circumstances.” Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim . . . In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this.[3]

The soul exceeds its circumstances. Or at least it can exceed its

circumstances if we set it free from the endless roll call of the
immediate senses. The Hindu believes that there might or might not
be a God above who is looking after us and to whom we can turn to
in our darkest moments, but what we certainly, irrevocably have is
ourselves. Hindu philosophy says we are the ones who have the
right to not grant history the last word or the first claim. Our karma, or
our history if you will, shall not voice our destiny unless we so will it.
It shall not have the final say, for only we can allow it control on the
voice of our life, and this is fascinating because it allows us choice
without any external aid. There is no one “out there” to help us. A
Hindu believes we have as much control as we want and seek, and
also as much as we perhaps deserve through our actions.
I first read these lines from Heaney soon after I started writing
this book. He is one of my favorite poets. How can one not admire a
man who was a fierce nationalist who, to protest against being
added to an anthology of British poetry wrote, “Be advised my
passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the
Queen”?[4]
 It was then prophetic to me that I chanced upon Heaney talking
about restoring one’s own history by willing the “staying powers” one
further mile, another great stride; to convert the “webbed wrists” to
“silver birches.” What could be a more poetic way of describing the
process of discovering the best within you?
There is a moral code of the universe, says Hinduism, the
sanatana dharma, by which the entire universe lives and works, and
it is the choice of man either to learn, appreciate, and play by it or
not. Finally, there is no sin at birth, only a choice of action, the
application of karma. The entire cycle of action and consequences is
in the hands of man. The laws of sanatana dharma work not just for
Hindus but for every living element in the universe. The universe
itself, says Hinduism, has always worked on sanatana dharma or the
harmonious code of balance that keeps everything functioning, and it
always will. It is up to man to traverse that journey.
In this, I feel that the founding philosophy of sanatana dharma
tends not to judge. It does not question what image you choose in
your journey. It does not define sin, suggesting only that every action
has a reaction in the wheel of time and karma of any nature always
brings forth its reactions and results.
In a sense then, Hindu philosophy tries to push you into
realizing that you can attain any and every physiological and
psychological depth through any manner or form that you choose.
What determines your success and spiritual elevation is your
determination, your devotion to your chosen path. It chooses neither
to tell you how to live or worship, nor suggests that any path you
take is necessarily good or bad. It asks only that you be self-aware
and responsible for your actions. In your actions, it suggests, lies
your liberation.
“We do not say that ours is the only way to salvation,”[5] said
Vivekananda. “Perfection can be had by everybody, and what is the
proof? Because we see the holiest of men in all countries, good men
and women everywhere, whether born in our faith or not. Therefore it
cannot be held that ours is the only way to salvation.”
One of Hinduism’s greatest achievements is this recognition that
our way is not the only way. This lack of theological arrogance must
be the bedrock of any modern thinking about the place of God in our
lives. The Vedanta philosophy is “perfectly impersonal,” said
Vivekananda. “It does not build itself around one man. Yet, it has
nothing to say against philosophies that do; there is no fight and no
antagonism.”[6]
“We have no theory of evil. We call it ignorance,”[7] said
Vivekananda.
This nonjudgmental, nondiscriminating approach is also
incredibly important in an age when we are less sure than ever about
ourselves, about where we can find love (if at all), and whether we
can, possibly, be happy. These are the pivotal inner questions—as
opposed to outer questions like climate change—of our time.
And we are asking those questions, aren’t we? Even when we
think we are not. Even when we think we are otherwise occupied,
when we imagine that they do not matter, or when they are not
practical, not commonsensical, not relevant, we are asking. The
search for relevance, the need to evaluate every conversation and
interaction and gauge the return on investment in each emotion—are
these keeping us away from honestly answering the questions that
emanate from us?
Notice that the phrases “stop to think” or “stop to ask a question”
both start with the word “stop.” It is only by ceasing our relentless
daily pursuits, even with regard to language and conversation, that
we can hope to get close to finding answers about who we are. It is
when we stop filling silences with meaningless, escapist action that
the answers start to emerge. That is the lesson of the Vedanta. This
search is universal. You do not need to be a believer in sanatana
dharma or call yourself a Hindu to recognize this search. You and I
already know that there is something. Perhaps we sometimes
struggle to define what we are seeking, yet silence eludes us. Little
wonder, then, that when I entered the phrase “search for silence” on
Google, it generated nearly eight million responses in less than forty
seconds.
Dayanand Saraswati, the great yogic master and ascetic, spoke
about the silent self, a state of consciousness wherein you realize
that you are not the thoughts you have. It is because we do not
understand this, said Saraswati, that we are chained to our thoughts.
We are happy when our thoughts are happy, aggrieved when they
are sad. This is why we rise so effortlessly to anger and give in so
soon to jealousy. If the mind is restless, we are restless. The mind
will always change. That is its nature, says Saraswati. But our goal is
to see ourselves, not without our thoughts, but beyond or in spite of
our thoughts. This, he said, was his definition of meditation. “What is
the unchanging ‘I’ that is to be seen in spite of thoughts?” asks
Saraswati. “That ‘I’ is silence. That ‘I’ is happiness. That ‘I’ is
fullness. That ‘I’ is freedom. It lacks nothing. It is always free, the
free, silent self.”[8]
The American writer George Prochnik, who pondered his
cherished moments at an ashram, called urgently for “a moment of
silence in memory of silence”[9] in his book In Pursuit of Silence:
Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. We have to rediscover
“why quiet is distinguished, or there will be no distinction between
noise and signal left.”
For years, my personal quarrel with the commonly seen mass
version of Hinduism has been how bereft of silence it is. I live in the
city of Delhi where, inevitably, someone or other organizes a jagran
(a raucous all-night devotional singing program almost always
broadcast on loudspeakers) in the neighborhood. For an evening the
night sky fills with, usually, the most tuneless singing of praises to
Sherawali Maa, a form of goddess Durga worship. Used to the grave
morning aarti incantation of Durga Puja, the ten-day goddess-
worship festivities of Bengal, I have found it impossible to reconcile
to these, which to my ear sound burlesque, especially since many of
the tunes of the songs or hymns, if you will, have been lifted from
Bollywood chartbusters with only the words changed. (The lyrics to
one recent song that I heard while I was writing this book were “Kal
raat mata ka mujhe email aaya hai. Mata ne mujhko Facebook pe
bulaya hai” which means “Last night I got an email from the Mother.
She has invited me to Facebook.” I couldn’t figure out if it was a
parody of a parody.) Researchers at the World Health Organization
(WHO) are increasingly worried about the sound pollution people are
exposed to all the time—especially with the prevalence of high-
decibel headphones—and they recommend that people listen to
music for only about one hour a day. Promptly after this WHO
announcement, a music critic in England lashed out saying it was
impossible to listen to only one hour of music a day and that the real
problem was the volume and not the number of hours. Silence,
clearly, will not come easily to any of us.
With time, however, I have come to realize that in the true spirit
of Hinduism, I must learn to admire jagran singers for the passion
they bring to their search, as uneven and brusque as it seems to me.
But I still haven’t stopped wondering why Hindus have so often
forgotten the need for quiet, the lesson of silence. Why have we lost
the quietude symbolic of the rishis (ascetics), the sages, and monks
who were the repositories of sanatana dharma? In my small, private
hunt for silence, I gave up watching television entirely, even selling
off the TV set in my room and convincing my parents to give away
the two other TV sets at home, within a month of leaving my job in
news television seven years ago. As a reporter, interview show host,
and news anchor for approximately six years, I felt obliged to carry
two mobile phones (what if the battery of one were to die suddenly?)
that often rang simultaneously. I woke up every other morning with a
call from the assignment desk at the TV station where I worked, and
I finally felt that I needed to take a break from what professor Henry
Higgins in Pygmalion would call “humanity’s mad inhuman noise.”[10]
At the time, I was not the only one feeling the urge to find some
silence. Around me, more friends than ever were choosing to leave
every few months for ten-day Vipassana courses, meditating for at
least ten hours a day, eating barely a meal a day at Vipassana
retreats without any reading, talking to anyone, watching or listening
to any media, or using their mobile phones. In 2014, when
Vipassana guru Satya Narayan Goenka died, it made headline
news.
By 2015, the concept of “mindfulness” was on its way to
becoming one of the world’s biggest “trends” and an industry in its
own right, with mindfulness conferences—including one organized at
the Google offices in Dublin called Wisdom 2.0—and books like
Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Insomnia, Mindfulness Coloring
Book, and, of course, An Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness. So big is
mindfulness that there is already a backlash against it, suggesting
that it is a fad, just another cool thing to have—like an iPhone—and
an escapist route for those who do not want to really face the issues
in their lives. This may or may not be true, but what is undeniable is
that some very deep-seated need of ours is not being met or fulfilled
by the lives we lead, no matter where we live in the world. The
growing crisis of the mind might have been dismissed as “problems
of the rich” or “issues of the 1 percent” if it weren’t for how
widespread and diverse it is. It is certainly not confined to the 1
percent. More and more people around the world are realizing what
Vedanta has long acknowledged—above all else, one must seek and
find a sense of silent centeredness. Without that, the cacophony of
living can drive you mad and often literally does. The WHO says
depression is a global crisis. Loneliness is one of the most dreaded
diseases of our times. It is as fearsome a health problem as smoking
fifteen cigarettes a day and twice as deadly as obesity. Social
isolation and the emptiness within is killing us. More people than
ever claim that their closest companion is the TV set (or the mobile
phone). Even the super rich are terribly unhappy. One study of
people with an average net worth of $78 million reported high rates
of anxiety, loneliness, and mental misery. On an average, the
respondents said they needed 25 percent more money to be happy.
This is why, at the University of Washington, professor David Levy
has spent years on a teaching mission to bring what he calls the
spirit of calligraphy to the digital age. Levy—who organizes
conferences with titles such as “Information, Silence, and Sanctuary”
and “Mindful Work and Technology”—argues that our constant
multitasking “is a dangerous trend for society if it becomes our
dominant way of living our daily lives. There’s nothing wrong with
split-focus for periods of time, but when we’re not giving our full
attention to anything, it reduces our humanity and our
effectiveness.”[11]
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,”
said the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “‘yet
it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”[12] The travel writer Pico Iyer
who, as mentioned earlier, today preaches the joy of sitting quietly in
one place, is fond of pointing out that it was Pascal who taught that
“all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room
alone.”[13] Iyer also points out that the celebrated French products
designer Philippe Starck does not read the papers, watches no
television, and stays at a remote location as far away as possible
from everyday noise. This, Starck has said, helps to keep his work
original and consistently cutting-edge. To be alone, for Starck, is not
to be lonely. This, then, is perhaps the greatest challenge of our
time. We are never alone—isn’t that the Facebook promise?—but at
the same time, we are so utterly, heartbreakingly lonely much of the
time. Social media created the FOMO syndrome or the incessant
fear of missing out. Now there is also its brother mania, MOMO, the
mystery of missing out. This, supposedly, is the anxiety caused when
someone suddenly disappears from social media and creates within
us the paranoid feeling that they may be out somewhere, having a
better time than we are. In the aggressive world of instant solutions
and acronyms, there’s even a four-letter acronym to counter such
angst—JOMO, that is, the joy of missing out. That there is reverse
snobbery, even in the presence of what has been described as a
global “loneliness epidemic,” makes the dystopia complete.
American psychologist Sherry Turkle’s work represents 360
degrees of this alone-lonely journey. In 1996, she appeared on the
cover of Wired magazine as the pioneering author of the book Life
on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Turkle also spoke
at the TED conference that year on the brave and exciting world of
the Internet which, it was thought, would help people to delve deeper
into who they really are using unprecedented technology, the likes of
which would have been indistinguishable from magic only a
generation ago. In 2012, she was back at TED with a very different
message. Her talk entitled “Connected, But Alone?” summed up how
technology and our increasing separation from the truths about our
emotions and our minds (and souls) has placed us at a unique
crossroads.
Technology, she argues, changes not only what we do but “who
we are.” In her view, it is changing not just the way we connect with
each other but also how we connect with ourselves. It finally boils
down to control, says Turkle. We now have the power to “clean up
the richness and messiness”[14] of human relationships and to
constantly control how we reveal ourselves. A conversation, points
out Turkle, happens in real time. But we don’t seem to like real time
anymore. We can’t control real time. We are lonely because our
need for control denies us that one thing that makes life what it is—
vulnerability. To live is to be vulnerable. Denied of vulnerability, our
lives remain unanchored, bereft of centeredness. In her talk, a young
boy tells Turkle wistfully, “One day I would like to learn how to have a
conversation.”[15] The psychologist points out that the boy says “one
day,” not today.
The words of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, one of the pioneers in
the psychoanalytic study of loneliness, haunt us. Loneliness, she
said, is “such a painful, frightening experience that people will do
practically everything to avoid it.”[16] The doctor wrote in her book
Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, which has become a seminal
text in “loneliness studies,” that every study of the loneliness of
others “touches upon our own possibility of loneliness.”[17] She
wrote, “We evade it and feel guilty.”[18]
In one of her most famous cases, Fromm-Reichmann asked a
young woman, who had fallen almost entirely silent, about how
lonely she was. The patient lifted her hand with just the thumb
stretched out and the four fingers folded close. “That lonely?”[19]
asked the doctor softly, and slowly the patient’s fingers opened.
As we jab away on our screens with our thumbs or one finger,
this is what we seem to be telling ourselves and the world, “This is
me; this is how lonely I am.” It is an enduring image in a world that is
plagued with fears of extreme religious polarization—ever more
paranoid by the rise of ISIS—where, as The Independent’s Robert
Fisk explained with dark mirth, “The Saudis are bombing Yemen
because they fear the Shia Houthis are working for the Iranians. The
Saudis are also bombing Isis in Iraq and the Isis in Syria. So are the
United Arab Emirates. The Syrian government is bombing its
enemies in Syria and the Iraqi government is also bombing its
enemies in Iraq. America, France, Britain, Denmark, Holland,
Australia and—believe it or not—Canada are bombing Isis in Syria
and Isis in Iraq, partly on behalf of the Iraqi government (for which
read Shia militias) but absolutely not on behalf of the Syrian
government.”[20]
And so the paradox of our world is that it is simultaneously
lonelier and more discriminatory, more interconnected and
interwoven than ever. Perhaps never before has it been more vital to
discover who we truly are and how that relates to everyone around
us. We are in search of a theory that connects the innermost
recesses of our minds with the web of society in which we are
trapped. We constantly question where we fit into all of this and what
it makes of us.
To borrow from science, we are looking for the “Theory of
Everything” of the mind, even as physicists try to discover the
“Theory of Everything” of the universe. We are hunting for one idea
that flows through everything—our fears, doubts, experiences,
apprehensions, needs, wants, and every human interaction. As the
Mundaka Upanishad says, “What is that by [the] knowing [of] which
everything in this universe is known?”[21] That is the answer that
Hindu philosophy seeks to provide.
Hinduism argues that the first step towards finding a cohesive
answer must begin with breaking away from discrimination. It says
that the search for God is really the search for ourselves; we are
what we are looking for. It explains that our loneliness comes from a
fundamental disconnect even with ourselves, and that is why we are
failing to connect with the people around us. As we “shortchange”[22]
(to use Sherry Turkle’s word) ourselves of meaningful conversations,
we are also willing to “dispense with people altogether.”[23] And in the
process, we are also dispensing with the most essential part of
ourselves. Hinduism teaches that the universe is you, us. So, if you
cannot converse with yourself, how can you hope to converse with
the universe?
Therefore, the search for meaningful conversation within and
without, the search for God and the search for our true selves, must
start by dispensing with external differences. Indeed, this search is
an act of peeling off layer after layer of differences. The first among
them, surely, would be between people who are searching for the
same thing (otherwise known as God).
Hinduism’s differentiating quality, as it were, is that it starts the
journey not with answers but with questions. This questioning has its
roots at the very foundation of Hindu philosophy, in the Rig Veda, the
first of the ancient texts.
 Compare, for instance, the chapter of Genesis in the Bible and
the Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda. Both talk about how our world,
the world of man, was created. Genesis says:

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness
was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided
the light from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called
Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which
were under the firmament from the waters which were
above the firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening
and the morning were the second day.
9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be
gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land
appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering
together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it
was good.
11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb
yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind,
whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed
after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in
itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the
heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for
signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to
give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the
day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars
also.
17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give
light upon the earth,
18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide
the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above
the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. And God created great whales, and every living creature
that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly,
after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and
God saw that it was good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
24. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature
after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the
earth after his kind: and it was so.
25. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and
cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon
the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth.
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them.
28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
 the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth.
29. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing
seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree,
in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall
be for meat.
30. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air,
and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein
there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it
was so.
31. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it
was very good. And the evening and the morning were the
sixth day.[24]

Rig Veda, “Nasadiya Sukta,” The Hymn of Creation (translated

by A. A. Macdonell) says:

1. Non-being then existed not nor being:

There was no air, nor sky that is beyond it.
What was concealed? Wherein? In whose protection?
And was there deep unfathomable water?
2. Death then existed not nor life immortal;
Of neither night nor day was any token.
By its inherent force the One breathed windless:
No other thing than that beyond existed.
3. Darkness there was at first by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water.
That which, becoming, by the void was covered,
That One by force of heat came into being.
4. Desire entered the One in the beginning:
It was the earliest seed, of thought the product.
The sages searching in their hearts with wisdom,
Found out the bond of being in non-being.
5. Their ray extended light across the darkness:
But was the One above or was it under?
Creative force was there, and fertile power:
Below was energy, above was impulse.
 6. Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, and whence came this creation?
The gods were born after this world’s creation:
Then who can know from whence it has arisen?
7. None knoweth whence creation has arisen;
And whether he has or has not produced it;
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He only knows, or haply he may know not.[25]

Read the two side by side and you cannot miss the difference in
tone and tenor. Genesis has answers. It is certain and doubtless. It
has a sense of finality. It harbors no doubts. It is not to be
challenged. It does not give a sense that there could be or might be
further thought on the matter. The “Nasadiya Sukta” has more
questions than answers. It leaves infinite space for future
discoveries. It places those questions even ahead of the gods (“The
gods were born after this world’s creation”).[26]
The “Nasadiya Sukta” triggers a sense of need for exploration,
for discovery. It leaves the reader with a sense of anticipation that he
or she alone can fulfill. Genesis, in a sense, is about the end, when
humankind knows when the world began; the “Nasadiya Sukta” is
about the beginning, when humankind is only starting to peel off the
first layer of understanding of how the world began.
What, then, is the core difference between these two creation
“myths”? Uncertainty. One embraces and revels in uncertainty, and
the other structures a “truth,” One sees knowledge as a journey, the
other as a destination. In fact, in his celebrated book The Wisdom of
Insecurity, theologian and philosopher Alan Watts says even Christ’s
message spoke of embracing uncertainty, but the message has
never percolated as strongly through the ages. “This principle (of
embracing uncertainty),” writes Watts, “had not been unknown to
Christians, for it was implicit in the whole story and teaching of
Christ. His life was from the beginning a complete acceptance and
embracing of insecurity.”[27]
The Vedanta celebrates this not-knowingness. This acceptance
that there are always further truths to be revealed—that the truth too
is a process, not a solution—is fundamental to the understanding of
the Hindu view of life.
As the irascible scholar Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote,
“Hinduism differs fundamentally from Christianity in this, that for its
followers it is not an alternative to the world, but primarily the means
of supporting and improving their existence in it. . . . Therefore in
Hindu society every worldly activity is under the control of religion,
and everything religious is involved in the world.”[28] This is why the
European definition of secularism is irrelevant to the Hindu. There is
no singular Church to separate the State from. Chaudhuri again:
“What is called for . . . is an explanation of the mingling of religion
and worldly matters. Before the coming of European ideas no Hindu
perceived that the two were separate things. . . . The Europeans . . .
cut up life into fragments, because their method was analytical,
whereas the Hindus preferred synthesis.”[29]
It is because of this deeply interwoven, holistic point of view of
synthesis that even atheism, a completely materialistic view of life, is
part of Hindu philosophy. The Cārvāka school of philosophy in
Hinduism embraces and rejoices in the material world, rejects all
spirituality, and holds only that which can be experienced
immediately—like reason, honesty, and action—as the basis of
existence. One of the most quoted moments of Hindu spiritual
encounter is a nineteenth-century conversation between
Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Vivekananda—one of the first
between them—which is often passed down as folklore. The young
Vivekananda asks the mystic very skeptically, “Have you seen God?”
Says Paramhansa, “Of course I have.”
The young man is bewildered by the emphatic reply. “Where
have you seen God?” he asks. “Everywhere,” says the mystic. “Just
the way I now see you, I see him.”
“Can you show me?” asks Vivekananda.
“But of course,” says Paramhansa, and with that straightforward
questioning their journey begins. It is an integral part of the lesson
today in the Ramakrishna Mission, the monastic order Vivekananda
founded in the name of his master and whose erudite monks are
known to win national awards in mathematics, that to begin the
journey one must question. This act of seeing God is of seminal
importance to Hindus. As Diana Eck has explained, Hindus go to the
temple not to worship in a Western sense but for darshan—the act of
beholding the sight of God and to be in the presence of the Almighty.
“For Hindus, therefore,” Eck has written, “the image is not an object
at which one’s vision halts, but rather a lens through which one’s
vision is directed. From one perspective it is perceived that there are
more gods, or faces of God, than we can count . . . from another
perspective, it is obvious that there is One. The fact that there may
be many gods does not diminish their power or significance. Each
one of the great gods may serve as a lens through which the whole
may be clearly seen.”[30]
The act of “seeing” or the “faculty of omniscience,”[31] explained
M. M. Gopinath Kaviraj, the legendary librarian and principal of the
Sanskrit College in Varansi, is conveyed in the word pratibha, which
appears many times in the Mahabharata. It is the faculty through
which one is able to see the entire universe and its truth clearly. In
chapter 11, verse 8, of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna awakens this
“eye” in Arjun with the words,

na tu mam sakyase drastum

anenaiva sva-caksusa
divyam dadami te caksuh
pasya me yogam aisvaram
For you cannot see me with the eyes that you possess,
And so I give to you divine sight,
So that you can see my inconceivable power.

Arjun, then, was able to see the entire universe in the immortal
body of Krishna. But what did that vision show him? As Diana Eck
perceived it, it showed him the oneness in many,

Tatray kastham jagat krtsnam pravibhaktam anekadha

Apasyad devadevasya sarire pandavas tada
And so it was that Arjun saw the entire universe
Divided in so many ways, but united as One,
And as One in everything,
In the body of Krishna, God of the Gods.
 The idea of seeing means a lot to me. In my small world, I
especially appreciate the interaction between Paramhansa and
Vivekananda. It was what my mother spoke about when at the age
of fourteen, I took diksha, a solemn process of pledging respect and
honor to the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. She
admired the reflective, questioning attitude of this order of monks.
Taking diksha means receiving a small mantra to use to meditate
and focus the mind every day, preferably twice a day. After a few
years of chanting , however, without any decided motive, I just
stopped.
I have never been sure why. My mother tried to coax me to
continue the practice because, she said, it was holy and not to be
trifled with, but she knew that the impetus had to come from within;
without that inner pull, the practice would be empty of meaning.
Even the idea of chanting, I realized somewhere instinctively, is
robbed of its meaning unless it adds to the search. A mantra or a
chant is but a method to cleanse your mind of its myriad distractions
in an attempt to focus it, center it. I saw many people, including my
mother, chant mantras and spend hours at temples. Peaceful when
they were engrossed in that activity, they lost their calm soon
afterwards, returning to the imbalance of their daily lives. Even the
search for the truth, or for God, it seemed to me, had become like a
fix. Once the trance was over, the meditation completed, the
chanting over, the external life took over only too quickly, sometimes
with increased intensity since one had taken a small break from it.
But could peace be a daily fix? Can God realization come and
go via “injections” of solitude and ritual? This did not seem correct.
Surely the path must continually advance us to an increasingly more
centered existence? But what if the mantra itself, the process of
chanting by its very nature, becomes escapist?
The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti questioned this too: “What
is meditation? Is it to escape from the noise of the world? To have a
silent mind, a quiet mind, a peaceful mind? And you practice
systems, methods, to become aware and keep your thoughts under
control. You sit cross-legged and repeat some mantra. I am told that
the etymological meaning of that word ‘mantra’ is ‘ponder over not-
becoming.’ That is one of the meanings. And it also means ‘absolve,
put aside all self-centered activity.’ That is the real, root meaning of
mantra. But we repeat, repeat, repeat, and carry on with our self-
interest, our egoistic ways, and so mantra has lost its meaning. So
what is meditation?”[32]
I gave up the chanting of the mantra of my diksha in part
because I felt, at that time especially, that I hardly knew what I was
looking for. So, what would the mantras, the chanting, center my
thoughts on? The entire process of accessing the mantra, the focus
on doing a round every morning and evening, and the idea that
some of my relatives tried to drill in me—that this chanting would
help my school-leaving board results—seemed shallow. Surely, I
reasoned with the limited understanding of spirituality I had in my
teens, the purpose of the search for God should not be something as
immediate as high school exams, and the idea that more chanting
would equal better results sounded too simplistic. I knew why I was
so terrible at mathematics. It was because I had never had the right
teachers for mathematics, and, therefore, I had never managed to
develop an interest or aptitude for it. Frankly, I hated mathematics,
and unless I practiced seriously and incessantly, it was unlikely that
chanting would help me score higher marks.
There was also another thought that bothered and even irritated
me. Some of my elderly relatives tried to frighten me into keeping up
the chanting of the diksha mantra. This to me seemed stupendously
silly, even as a teenager when I had just started reading
Vivekananda. How could God, at once so vast and all
encompassing, at the same time be so utterly petulant as to sulk at
one infinitesimally small me not chanting some mantras? That made
no sense.
At that time, I chanced upon a small description of Vivekananda
talking about his experience with the grammar of the Vedas. “To my
surprise,” he writes, “I found that the best part of the Vedic grammar
consists only of exceptions to rules. . . . So you see what an amount
of liberty there is for anybody to write anything.”[33] When I read that,
it occurred to me that an order created by a man so effortlessly
analytical and questioning would hardly bind me to a chant I did not
feel connected to. I gave it up.
 But my thoughts and questions about why I am Hindu and
whether God means anything to me never went away. I never
stopped seeking that knowledge, and it is only that journey and the
process of trying to discover some of those answers that propelled
me to write this book. In a sense, I had not been an ideal believer. I
had taken up, on a whim perhaps, and then given up a practice of
significance. Perhaps my mind could not be held at a place through
a mantra, some chanting. My mind was meant to follow the path of
asking questions. My doubts became my mantra, their resonant,
ricocheting chant in my brain gave fuel to my explorations, and I
often wondered if all of this could be reconciled.
In his essay “The Relation of Science and Religion,” Nobel
Prize–winning American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman
reasoned why he thought it was difficult for the scientist to reconcile
with the religious believer. He postulated that a student of science
has a problem of reconciling with the idea of faith in God because it
usually comes with absolutism. And, said Fenyman, “it is imperative
in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in
science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner
nature.”[34]
Without this doubt, this constant questioning, the scientific
temperament cannot exist. That’s why Feynman says that even
scientists who believe in God, he thinks, have an inherently different
attitude to the issue compared to other believers. “If they are
consistent with their science, I think they say something like this to
themselves: I am almost certain there is a God. The doubt is very
small. That is quite different from saying ‘I know that there is a
God.’”[35]
Feynman is also worried about what he calls the “tyranny of
ideas”[36] —the absolutism of religion (which he also sees in
Communism)—which he argues is far away from the scientific
temperament. But Feynman is clear that his reference point is only
Christianity, and even in that, he admits that as far as the moral or
ethical part of religion is concerned, that is largely undisputed by
science because in this, as he puts it, the question is:
“Should I do this?”
 And the answer in science as in the purest form of theological
ethics is, “Try it and see.”[37]
Feynman does not consider it, but far away from the threat of
hell fire and the condemnation of the soul, Hinduism stands on a
foundation of “try-it-and-see.” The path here is relentlessly personal
and steadfastly analytical. This is not to say that layers and layers of
rituals have not been built on the philosophical edifice of Hinduism
over thousands of years but that, at its core, within its collective
institutional memory, the idea that anything can be reexamined and
reimagined is a unique freedom.
This is why it is so difficult to find a unified “Hindu voice” even in
India, where 80 percent of the population is in accordance with the
nomenclature Hindu. The diversity of the faith is its undisputed
theological strength and gives it the tensile power to absorb
thousands of years of attack, invasion, occupation, and assimilation.
The Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik tells a wonderful story
of the world-conquering Macedonian prince Alexander on the banks
of the Indus river, his gaze firmly set on his final prize—India.
There, Alexander meets a naked mendicant meditating on the
banks of the river. Alexander asks the ascetic, “What are you doing?”
The ascetic says, “I am experiencing nothingness.”
Now the monk asks Alexander, “What are you doing?” The
prince says, “I am conquering the world!”[38]
They both laugh at the futility of each other’s ventures. Pattanaik
uses this story to illustrate the difference between the mythologies of
the East and the West. He compares the stories that Alexander and
the monk would have heard. Alexander has heard about the great
Greek heroes like Hercules and Theseus. He has been told that you
live but once and if you live like a hero, if you win, if you conquer,
then when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. If you have
lived like a hero, you will be welcomed into Elysium, the heaven
where heroes go.
The mendicant would have heard a different story. He would
have heard of the great Bharata who also conquered the world and
then climbed the great mountain Meru, hoping to be the first to put
his flag on top of it. But when he reached the top, he saw it was full
of flags of other conquerors—each of them believed that they would
be the first there. The mendicant’s view of time, or the Hindu view of
time, is that of an endless loop, it is a bit like what Albert Einstein
once wrote about the death of a friend, “In quitting this strange world
he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn’t mean
anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past,
present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” The
biggest difference between Hinduism and the Abrahamic faiths is
perhaps in the way the two traditions look at time. For the Hindus,
time is a perpetual cycle in which the present life is but a blip—and
the ultimate aim is to escape from the infinite repetition of this cycle.
For faiths like Islam and Christianity, time seems to be more linear—
and with a definitive end in heaven or hell. This difference in the
attitude towards time seems to be at the heart of structural
questions, for instance, is proselytizing necessary and useful? The
Hindu does not believe it is—for is it not fundamental to try and attain
mukti or liberation from even the cycle of morality? The Muslim or
Christian would perhaps say—well, if one knows and sees that
people need introduction toward the “right path to god” it therefore
must stand to reason that it is one’s moral duty to introduce them to
the correct way. There lies the difference.
The moral of the story, says Pattanaik, is that the West sees
even its myths as a linear narrative, whereas the Indian viewpoint is
that of an endless cycle without beginning or end. And that’s what
keeps our ideas of God plural, assimilatory, and ever-so-questioning
and deeply individual. That’s why, he points out, even the
Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not two separate adventures of
two different heroes but two different avatars and lifetimes of the
same god, Vishnu.
But isn’t there a Hindu word of God then? Couldn’t there be
one? Even the idea of the word of God is an individual journey,
writes Indic scholar David Frawley in his foreword to pioneering
researcher Ram Swarup’s The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods.
“The word of God can never be identified (in Hindu thought) with any
single book or the utterance of any particular prophet, however
great. It is a state of consciousness, not a written text that must be
subject to misinterpretation. It is the word of truth inscribed into the
heart that transcends all formulations. To discover that divine word
requires individual sadhana or spiritual practice. It cannot come from
another, from the outside, from a book, though such things can help
catalyze its internal manifestation if they are approached with
humility and understanding.”[39]
The Hindu mind sees the inherent seamless unity in all things
and, therefore, does not seek to separate the strands and distance
them from one another, but rather to revel in the oneness.
1. [Link]
2. Rajiv Malhotra, “Tolerance Isn’t Good Enough: The Need for
Mutual Respect In Interfaith Relations,” Huffington Post (December
9, 2010).
3. Seamus Heaney, “Seamus Heaney: His 10 Best Poems” (“The
Tollund Man in Springtime”), The Telegraph (March 17, 2015).
4. Seamus Heaney, “Seamus Heaney: His 10 Best Poems”
(“Untitled”), The Telegraph (March 17, 2017).
5. Beth Wright, A Study Companion to Introduction to World
Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 52.
6. Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta: Voice of Freedom, ed. Swami
Chetanananda (Belur Math: Advaita Ashram, 1987), 57, 61.
7. Vivekananda, Vedanta: Voice of Freedom, 57, 61.
8. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, “Silence In Spite of Thoughts,”
[Link]
9. [Link]
reviews/excerpts/view/19808/in-pursuit-of-silence.
10. “I’m An Ordinary Man,” My Fair Lady soundtrack, lyrics by Alan
Jay Lerner, [Link]
[Link]
11. David Bollier, “On the Need for Silence and Solitude,” blog,
[Link] (April 1, 2012).
12. Pico Iyer, “The Joy of Quiet,” New York Times (December 29,
2011).
13. Iyer, “The Joy of Quiet.”
14. Sherry Turkle, “Connected, But Alone?” TED (Technology,
Entertainment, Design) Talk,
[Link] (February
2012).
15. Judith Shulevitz, “The Lethality of Loneliness: We Now Know
How It Can Ravage Your Body and Mind,” New Republic (May 13,
2013).
16. Frieda Fromme-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive
Psychotherapy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
17. Fromme-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy.
18. Fromme-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy.
19. Fromme-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy.
20. Robert Fisk, “Who Is Bombing Who in the Middle East?” The
Independent (May 5, 2015).
21. Haridas Bhattacharya, The Cultural Heritage of India, vol. 1
(Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, 2001), 350.
22. Turkle, “Connected, But Alone?”
23. Turkle, “Connected, But Alone?”
24. King James Bible, Book of Genesis 1:1–31, accessed at
[Link]
25. A. A. Macdonell, trans., The Creation in Rig Veda, 10:129
(1922), accessed at [Link]
indian-creation/rigveda-10-129-indian-creation-5-macdonell-
[Link].
26. Macdonell, The Creation in Rig Veda.
27. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of
Anxiety (New York City: Vintage Books, 2011), 26.
28. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, et al., “Hinduism: A Religion to Live By,” in
The Hinduism Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India,
2003), 10.
29. Chaudhuri, et al., The Hinduism Omnibus, 10.
30. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin India,
1992), 20.
31. M. M. Gopinath Kaviraj, Selected Writings of M. M. Gopinath
Kaviraj, 2nd ed. (Varanasi: Indica Books, 2006), 44–45.
32. [Link]
quote/[Link]?t=Meditation.
33. Swami Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora (Belur
Math: Advaita Ashrama, 2005), 240.
34. Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (London:
Penguin Books UK, 1999), 247–248.
35. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 249.
36. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 251–252.
37. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 255.
38. Devdutt Pattanaik, “East vs. West: The Myths that Mystify,” TED
Talk (India, 2009).
39. David Frawley, foreword, in The Word as Revelation: Names of
Gods, by Ram Swarup (New Delhi: Voice of India, 2001), 14.
[Link]
 Chapter 5
Is God Afraid of Science?
While writing this book, Harvard-trained agricultural
entrepreneur and cosmology enthusiast Ishira Mehta recommended
that I consider the work of MIT scientist and theologist Alan
Lightman. Lightman is the only professor ever to receive
simultaneous appointments in humanities and sciences at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In short, he is one of those
rare people who straddle the world of science and religion.
He is also among a very small number of people who both
agree and disagree with the gene scientist and noted God skeptic,
Richard Dawkins. In the last decade, as the world has seen more
and more strife in the name of God, the voice of rational atheism has
been raised with much more vigor. To read Dawkins (The God
Delusion) or the late polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens (God
is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) is to read some of
the most powerful critiques of organized religion in the twenty-first
century. But they have little to offer that Hinduism’s fundamental
philosophies have not already addressed.
Since we have referred to scientists so much in this book, let us
take another example from science. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the
most well-known gene biologist alive, in his now-popular book The
God Delusion, mentions Hinduism only twice—only two times in a
460-page book.
The first time, he makes the observation that the polytheism of
Hinduism is “monotheism in disguise.”[1] This seems to indicate a
fundamental and conceptual lack of understanding of Hindu
theology. The terms polytheistic and monotheistic are Western
constructs that arise from viewing the world through a divided lens,
but the concept of monotheism in Hinduism is different than the
Western interpretation of what it means to believe in one God. Hindu
monotheism is a belief in one reality that accommodates all
manifestations of that reality and does not seek to demarcate.
The second reference is merely factual. It refers to the Hindu-
Muslim strife during India’s partition in 1947. Basically, Dawkins’s
primary complaint about religion, that faith divides, is aimed at the
great monotheistic faiths—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—since
those faiths have clear boundaries between believers and
unbelievers. For all his intellectual prowess, Dawkins does not
understand that there is an alternative. He does not understand that
Vedic polytheism is unique; in most polytheistic religions “the gods
worshipped retain their proper and well-defined places.”[2] In Vedic
culture, however, “a god worshipped as the supreme deity pales into
insignificance when another is adored as the highest.”[3] This is the
concept of the ishta devata by which ancient Hindus chose a
manifestation of God that appealed most to them and worked to
reach the highest truth through this form or image. Max Müller, the
German philologist and Orientalist, called this henotheism (worship
of one God while accepting the existence of others) or
kathenotheism (the worship of one god at a time). It is probably
neither. The best explanation comes from Surendranath Dasgupta—
author of the five-volume A History of Indian Philosophy—who says
it is neither, and that it represents an intermediary state that derives
qualities from both polytheism and monotheism, yet retains a unique
individualistic fluidity.
Lightman understands this. He grasps that this debate does not
need to be so polarized, at least at a philosophical level. Lightman
agrees wholeheartedly with Dawkins on the gene biologist’s rebuttal
of the theory of “intelligent design” which suggests that there might
be a supernatural hand in the creation of the universe. But he
disagrees with Dawkins’s absolute rejection of all faith systems.
Here’s the interesting thing. Dawkins came to his absolutist
position as a result of those two planes crashing into the World
Trade Center on 9/11. “Many of us,” Dawkins has said, “saw religion
as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence
but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s
the harm? September 11 changed all that.”[4]
Dawkins’s reaction has come from the extreme positions taken
in one religion, which have become overarching, rigid critique. The
Hindu position actually resonates with Lightman’s point of view in
this debate. Lightman argues that while there is absolutely no reason
to support an unscientific fact or theory about anything that can or
ought to be proved scientifically, there are also, in our world, many
things that science cannot prove.
Dawkins, objects Lightman, “seems to label people of faith as
non-thinkers.” “Consider the verses of the Gitanjali, the Messiah, the
mosque of Alhambra, the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. Should we take to task Tagore and Handel, Sultan Yusuf
and Michelangelo for not thinking?” asks Lightman.
“Should we label as non-thinkers Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma
Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela because of their religious beliefs,
because of their faith in some things that cannot be proved?”[5]
Lightman concludes that faith is not just about believing in God
or negating scientific evidence, but about “the willingness to give
ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand.”[6]
Any close reading of Hindu texts would agree with this. It is
difficult for a Hindu to understand any inherent conflict with science.
After all, the Renaissance in India was led by reformed Hindus
(including several members of the family of Rabindranath Tagore,
the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) who
fought against the worst dogmatic rituals of Hinduism.
Hinduism’s lack of textual rigidity has meant that its ritualistic
practice can and has been constantly challenged, and its
decentralized form of worship has prevented corrupt clergy or those
with politically vested interests from declaring what is “true” Hinduism
and what is “false.” There is no parallel in Hinduism, for instance, to
the inquisition of Galileo Galilei—no denial of a proper burial in
consecrated ground for saying that the earth rotated around the sun
and no prohibition of books such as his Dialogues faced for more
than two hundred years. When I was in school in the late 1990s, we
used to sing a song on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution
during chapel service. It went like this: “Did Charlie make a monkey
out of you? / Do you think you could live in a zoo?” This was curious
because we studied the theory of evolution in our science lessons,
but inside the chapel, in the balmy Calcutta of the 1990s, a bit of
Darwin denialism was still alive. It seemed like brainwashing
propaganda, spread through the popular cultural medium of nursery
rhymes for children.
 But when I once asked my father about what Hindus thought
about Darwin, he said without a pause, “What’s the problem? Aren’t
there monkeys who are like men in the Ramayana? See? We have
no problem with Darwin.”
It was a joke, but the message was that Hindu philosophy had
never been intimidated by science. Vivekananda, an admirer of
Nikola Tesla and Darwin, even said there was a scientific approach
to religion: “All science has its particular methods; so has the science
of religion. It has more methods also, because it has more material
to work upon. The human mind is not homogeneous like the external
world . . . one person will see most, another will hear most—so there
is a predominant mental sense; and through this gate must each
reach his own mind. Yet through all minds runs a unity, and there is a
science which may be applied to all. This science of religion is based
on the analysis of the human soul. It has no creed.”[7] He also
emphatically said: “Is religion to justify itself by the discoveries of
reason, through which every other science justifies itself? Are the
same methods of investigation, which we apply to sciences and
knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of religion? In my
opinion this must be so, and I am of the opinion that sooner it is done
the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was
then all the time useless superstitions, and the sooner it goes the
better.”[8] In fact, Vivekananda argues that the scientific approach to
religion that the Vedanta follows ensures that it cannot be trapped in
advocating a singular path.
Vivekananda felt that religion was something personal and
unique to every person. He emphasized that “The end and aim of all
religions is to realise God. The greatest of all training is to worship
God alone. If each man chose his own ideal and stuck to it, all
religious controversy would vanish.”[9]
The message I grew up with was that, in the end, anything that
stifled individuality and forced comformity could not be good or
sustainable, and that science was not the enemy. Here’s
Vivekananda embracing the theory of evolution, for instance, “If we
have a soul, so have they [animals], and if they have none, neither
have we. It is absurd to say that man alone has a soul and the
animals none. I have seen men worse than animals. The human soul
has sojourned in lower or higher forms, migrating from one to
another.”[10]
Vivekananda was not alone in understanding this. C.
Rajagopalachari, one of India’s foremost thinkers, saw the Vedanta
as “a philosophy of evolution.” He saw that the Vedanta
fundamentally understood that “the destiny of all things is change—
never for an instant does anything in nature stand still.” So much so
that Vedanta philosophy even stretches the idea to the
metamorphoses of the human soul. “The philosophy of life for the
individual soul is to march from good to better by conscious
effort,”[11] Rajagopalachari wrote.
But the philosophy did not deny science. It embraced the idea
that, even in spiritual evolution, free will played a vital role “without
which there can be no moral responsibility.”[12]
In fact, it is this embrace, indeed furthering the cause of science
and providing a bridge between science and spirituality, that is a
consistent theme in Vivekananda’s life and work. This is what has
inspired people from Romain Rolland (who won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1915) to Harvard philosopher William James (who
referred to Swami Vivekananda’s teachings in his work, including the
seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience) to Leo Tolstoy,
among many others—all of whom were influenced by the teachings
of the Swami and by the life of Ramakrishna. Not long before his
death, Tolstoy wrote, “It is doubtful if in this age man has ever risen
above this selfless, spiritual meditation.”[13]
In fact, Hindu philosophy has a long and elaborate history of
engaging and imaging facts about life, which modern science has
validated. The most well-known among these contributions is the
decimal place value system—one of the seminal discoveries in the
history of mathematics. The oldest dated document (594 CE) that
has a number written in the place-value form was found in
Sankheda, close to the modern western Indian city of Baroda in
Gujarat.
It was the Hindu scientist Aryabhata, born in 476 CE, who gave
the first approximate value of “pi” correct to four decimals
(62,832/20,000 = 3.1416). Indian mathematics—both in the ancient
and classical period—surpassed Greek and Roman achievements,
noted B. V. Subbarayappa, the first non-Westerner to be elected
president of the History of Science division of the International Union
of History and Philosophy of Science. Aryabhata “knew the rules for
the extraction of square and cube roots, areas of triangles and
trapezium, circles, volumes of sphere and pyramid, arithmetic
progression and summation of series, fractions.”[14]
Subbarayappa writes about other ancient texts, “The Yajurveda
Samhita has names of numbers up to even 10 to the power of 12
and the Pancavimsa Brahmana gives an account of numbers in
ascending order decimal scale (from 10 to the power of 1 to 10 to the
power of 12). . . . In the Classical Period, the Indians had developed
terminology to express numbers as large as 10 to the power of 24
and 10 to the power of 53.”[15]
The seventh-century mathematician Brahmagupta devised a
formula “for the sum of n terms of the Arithmetic Progression of
which the first term is unity and the common difference is unity.”[16]
With this, Brahmagupta was able to accurately devise the rules to
measure the volume of a prism, the area of a cyclic quadrilateral,
and the formula for the length of two diagonals of a cyclic
quadrilateral. Needless to say, these are rules that are being used
even today.
The other Brahmagupta discovery very commonly used today is
the theory of continued fractions and the general solution in integers
of indeterminate equations of the first degree. He also worked out
the indeterminate equation of the second degree: Ny + 1 = x2.[17]
“Brahmagupta . . . formulated a thousand years before the great
Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783 CE) a theorem
based on indeterminate equations.”[18]
Kim Plofker, an American expert on Indian mathematics, has
listed some key achievements of which most Indians are either
unaware or have forgotten. Apart from the decimal system, she
writes that Vedic priests were using Pythagoras’s theorem to build
their fire altars in 800 BCE, noting that “the differential equation for
the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian
mathematician-astronomers in the 5th century CE, and the Gregory’s
number series pi/4 = 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 . . . was proven using the power
series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used
to accurately compute pi in southwest India in the 14th century.”[19]
The first startling achievements of ancient Indian mathematics,
especially in geometry, are recorded in the Sulvasutras (about
seventh or eighth century BCE) or the “rules of the thread or
measuring line.” The oldest among these texts, the Baudhayana
Sulvasutra, first mentions the Pythagorean theorem—for any right
triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the
sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides (a2 + b2 =
c2).
Mathematician David Mumford has said that the Pythagorean
theorem “might be arguably called ‘Baudhayana theorem.’”[20]
Hindu mathematicians also knew what is now known as
Pascal’s triangle long before European mathematicians, and called it
meru prastara. The mathematician Pingala (third century BCE) dealt
with this in detail in his Chandas-sutra.
Pingala and Panini (fifth century BCE) are the other pillars of
ancient Indian mathematics—apart from the likes of Aryabhata,
Bhaskara, and Brahmagupta. Astonishingly, Panini’s immortal fame
is not even as a mathematician but as the definitive Sanskrit
grammarian. But he also “introduced abstract symbols to denote
various subsets of letters and words that would be treated in some
common way in some rules; and he produced rewrite rules that were
to be applied recursively in a precise order.”[21]
Mumford says, “One could say without exaggeration that he
anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer science.”[22]
Bhaskara II, in his famous Siddhantasiromani, gave the correct
assessment of the division of a finite number by zero. Many of his
discoveries were later rediscovered, as it were, by European
mathematicians like Fermat, Euler, and Lagrange.[23]
Another mathematician Sridhara wrote the Ganitatilaka where
he outlined a method for solving quadratic equations. Mahavira, in
his Ganitasarasangraha, details how to work with the various uses of
zero and the “summation of n terms of a Geometrical
Progression.”[24]
 In India, numbers also have a philosophical meaning—as Michel
Danino has pointed out—and the names of numbers suggest those
deeper implications. Shunya or zero was also called akasha (space,
emptiness), ambara (sky), ananta (infinite), or purna (complete/full),
while eka or one was also called atman or brahman to convey the
understanding of unity or indivisibility. Number 10, for instance, was
dasha or state, after the ten avatars or dashas of Vishnu; number 3
was tri, as in trisula, the trident—Shiva’s main weapon; and number
9 was nava, as in Navratri, the nine-day festivities of worshipping
Durga and the nine planets. (Brahma–the Creator, Vishnu–the
Preserver, and Shiva–the Destroyer make up the Hindu trinity.)[25]
The Hindu obsession with large numbers and mathematical
prowess stretches to far-reaching assessments about space and
time by the ancients. Cosmologist Carl Sagan, a student of the
Vedanta for a large part of his life, understood that “The Hindu
religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the
idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an
infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which
the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of
modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day
and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long.
Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time
since the Big Bang.”[26]
But how was this number arrived at? According to the astrology
of Aryabhata, a mahayuga of 4,320,000 years had four yugas
(1,080,000 years each). A day of Brahma, or the age of the universe
so to speak, equals 1,000 mahayugas or 4.32 billion years. Add to
that the nights, and it comes up to 8.64 billion.
In medicine, ancient India gave us the Sushruta Samhita
(probably sixth century BCE), which had some of the earliest and
most detailed advisories on illnesses and surgery known to man.
Sushruta, the medical practitioner sometimes referred to as the
father of Indian medicine, described 101 types of blunt surgical
instruments and twenty kinds of sharp instruments, including
“forceps, tongs, scalpels, catheters, bougies, trocare, syringes,
speculums, needles, saws, scissors, lances, hooks and probes.”[27]
 Indian physicians of that age knew delicate procedures like
laparotomy and lithotomy. They knew surgical procedures to remove
cataracts from the eyes, and to perform craniotomy and anal fistula
operations. “Another feat,” writes Subbarayappa, “related to the
joining of the lips of the wound by causing them to be bitten by ants
and then cutting off the body of the ants, leaving behind the
mandibles which would clamp the wound.”[28]
The Encyclopaedia Britannica (2008) notes that the Samhita
was the world’s first medical document to identify and record leprosy
as a disease. Also, Ayurveda, ever more fashionable today, is based
on a simple concept which we are currently reinventing with our love
for organic food and sustainable agriculture—we are what we eat.
Everything from the rise of veganism to the focus on vegetarianism
and the contribution of cattle consumption to global warming comes
from this line of thought.
In chemistry, from dyes to alcohol to the use of mercury, one
needs only to look at the writings of renowned chemist Prafulla
Chandra Ray and his History of Hindu Chemistry or those of British
scientist and historian Joseph Needham to get a sense of the
breadth of early chemical knowledge in India. Ray’s work on a water-
soluble mercurous nitrate was hailed around the world, including
publication in Nature in 1912 and subsequently in the Journal of the
Chemical Society. Ray, apart from writing more than one hundred
scientific papers, founded the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical
Works, and—inspired by famous French chemist Marcellin
Berthelot’s voluminous Les origines de l’alchimie (1885)—published
his magnum opus, the two-volume History of Hindu Chemistry in
1902 and 1908 (one volume each in those years). Instantly hailed as
a breakthrough publication, the books were praised by Berthelot
himself in a review.
Needham was the first living person to hold three titles
simultaneously—Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British
Academy, and the Order of the Companions of Honour. Needham’s
seminal work defines why the East, specifically China, once had a
seemingly insurmountable lead in invention and technology over the
West, and why it fell behind. His work on India is equally significant,
especially in revealing details about the early Indian prowess in the
field of distilling alcohol.
The magic of Indian knowledge of chemistry lives on even today
in the six-ton, 24-inch Iron Pillar of Delhi, which is made of 99.72
percent wrought iron and yet shows no sign of rusting after around
1,500 years. Danino has also pointed out that scholar K. V. Sarma
has listed 3,473 texts of scientific discoveries from 12,244 science
manuscripts that have been found in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Only 7
percent, Sharma noted, are still in print. All understanding of India’s
contribution to science comes from this 7 percent.[29] Imagine if one
day the entire wealth of Hindu science were discovered. What do
you think it would show us?
But for all the glory of ancient Hindu expertise in science, there
is much to ponder about today for the modern Hindu. While it is
perfectly legitimate to be proud of this rich and diverse heritage of
scientific thought, how do twenty-first-century Hindus fare in the
scientific field? India might be sending the cheapest-ever Mars
Mission (and many of the scientists behind the project are no doubt
Hindu), but Hindu society’s everyday life looks dismal.
In 2015, Hindus, who constitute about 80 percent of the Indian
population still tolerate (and commit) some of the highest rates of
female infanticide and feticide in the world. Each year, India loses
around 3 million girls to female infanticide. In Delhi (in Delhi, no
less), the gender ratio is around 866 females to 1,000 males. As the
Guardian has reported, “While census data shows that India’s overall
gender ratio is improving, its child gender ratio is on the decline:
between 1991 and 2011, the country’s female-male gender ratio rose
from 927:1,000 to 940:1,000, but its child gender ratio fell from
945:1,000 to 914:1,000.”[30] Nearly 17 million children in India are
married. Of these, nearly 13 million are underage girls. Six million of
these are mothers. In spite of numerous governments and prime
ministers publicly and constantly berating the public about this, isn’t it
worth thinking about and asking, what is it about our society—
specifically Hindu society since that’s the focus of this book and also
represents most of the population—which allows such utterly vile
practices to continue?
 How is it that the inheritors of one of the world’s greatest
traditions of scientific thought cannot comprehend, many of them,
that it is torturous for children to be married?
That’s not all. Let us consider another statistic. In 2012, 119
women were killed across Indian states because they were branded
as “witches.” Between 2008 and 2014, more than 760 women have
been murdered for being “witches.”[31] What kind of civilizational
values allow this to continue? Why is it that even cities of ancient
pre-Vedic India like Mohenjodaro and Harappa had neat sewage
systems but today 80 percent of all sewage in India goes untreated
into water sources? Why is it that, depending upon whose statistics
you are reading, there are still between 100,000 and 300,000
manual scavengers in India who carry excreta with their bare hands?
[32]

Why is it that ancient Hindus hymned asatoma sadhgamaya,

tamasoma jyotirgamaya, mrityoma amritangamaya (from untruth
lead us to the truth, from darkness take us to light, from the fear of
death lead us to the eternal knowledge of immortality) and yet
millions of Indians have never seen electricity and India remains one
of the most viscerally corrupt countries in the world?
This, to me, is the greatest challenge for modern Hindus.
Understanding and appreciating the knowledge we have lost is
merely step one. We must also realize how to utilize, adapt, and
accommodate this near-infinite reserve of knowledge into our daily
lives. The easiest thing would be to gain this knowledge in the way
we usually wear Indian clothes, as occasional costumes with no
relevance to our day-to-day lives. But this knowledge must not
remain an occasional indulgence, to be dragged out and dusted off
for some annual chest-thumping. That would keep it where it has
been for centuries, at the level of vacuous rituals performed without
understanding, if with gusto. The idea that dharma is the guiding
principle of Hindu life, and in turn the soul of India’s civilizational
ethos, is not something distant and whimsically esoteric. It ought to
become an everyday, lived reality.
Vivekananda wanted the Vedanta to be lived, not merely
worshipped. But, the Hindu escape route to our own philosophy is
what I call the “avatar syndrome.” You can see this in every aspect of
our national existence. The avatar syndrome begins by defining
every problem as someone else’s problem and then waiting for
someone else to come along and fix it, preferably magically and
without any effort from us—that’s why we keep looking for one-
person solutions. An avatar, we believe subliminally, will always
appear at the moment of our worst crisis, and we will be saved
through that manifestation of the godhead.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the hymn of ethics that is revealed to the
warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of the Kurukshetra in the
Mahabharata, the god Krishna promises,

Yada yada hi dharmasya Glanirva bhavathi Bharatha,

Abhyuthanam adharmaysya Tadatmanam srijami aham.
Praritranaya sadhunam Vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharamasansthapnaya Sambhavami yuge-yuge.[33]

Essentially this means, whenever righteousness is threatened

and the truth is in danger, I am reborn in every age to destroy evil
and defend righteousness.
From Vivekananda to Mahatma Gandhi (the father of the
modern Indian nation), this was read as a call to action to discover
the righteousness within to battle the evil inside and outside. But
most of us seem to have taken this as the ultimate philosophical and
theological escape route—to the extent that we now wait for the right
prime minister, as we once waited for avatars, to miraculously fix our
problems.
As British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, “At this supremely
dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for
mankind is the Indian way—Emperor Ashok’s and Mahatma
Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence and Sri Ramakrishna’s testimony
to the harmony of religions. Here we have an attitude and spirit that
can make it possible for the human race to grow together into a
single family—and in the Atomic age this is the only alternative to
destroying ourselves.”[34]
We will only truly value Hinduism’s great legacy of original
thought if we understand that the rebirth of the Bhagavad Gita is the
rebirth within. We are the ones we have been waiting for—waiting for
a messiah goes against the very essence of the philosophy of
Hinduism.
1. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press,
2006), 53
2. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 53.
3. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 53.
4. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 295.
5. Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought
You Knew (New York: Vintage, 2013), 50–51.
6. Lightman, The Accidental Universe, 50–51.
7. Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda,
vol. 6 (Belur Math: Advaita Ashram, 2001), 1559.
8. Vivekananda, Complete Works, vol. 6, 367.
9. Vivekananda, Complete Works, vol. 6, 1559.
10. Vivekananda, Vedanta: The Voice of Freedom, ed. Swami
Chetanananda (Belur Math: Advaita Ashram, 1987), 255.
11. C. Rajagopalachari, Hinduism: Doctrine and Way of Life (New
Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1959), 62.
12. Rajagopalachari, Hinduism: Doctrine and Way of Life, 62.
13. Ann Louise Bardach, “How Yoga Won the West,” The New York
Times (October 1, 2011).
14. B. V. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture: India’s Contributions to the History of Science (Chennai:
Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan Trust, 1970), 49.
15. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 49–50.
16. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 50.
17. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 51.
18. Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson, and Michael York, eds.,
Encyclopedia of Hinduism (New York: Routledge, 2007), 313.
19. Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), reviewed by David Mumford, AMS
Mathematical Society (March 2010).
20. Plofker, Mathematics in India, Mumford review.
21. Plofker, Mathematics in India, Mumford review.
22. Plofker, Mathematics in India, Mumford review.
23. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 51.
24. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 51.
25. Michel Danino, Indian Culture and India’s Future (New Delhi: DK
Printworld, 2011), 28, 29.
26. Sangeetha Menon, “Hinduism and Science,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary
Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press UK, 2006), 14.
27. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 58.
28. Subbarayappa, India’s Contribution to World Thought and
Culture, 58.
29. Danino, Indian Culture and India’s Future, 66.
30. KumKum Dasgupta, “India’s Missing Girls: Fears Grow Over
Rising Levels of Foeticide,” The Guardian (April 9, 2014).
31. Calculations made using data from the National Crime Records
Bureau.
32. Text of 2016 Ramon Magsaysay award winner Bezwada Wilson,
[Link]
prodigious-skill-in-movement-to-eradicate-manual-scavenging-in-
india.
33. Madhusudana Sarasvati Bhagavad Gita, Swami
Gambhirananda, trans. (Mayavati: Advaita Ashram, 2007), 277-278.
34. K. D. Gangrade, Moral Lessons from Gandhi’s Autobiography
and Other Essays (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2004), 78.
[Link]
 Chapter 6
How Do Hindu Books Portray
God?
If you were to write one of the most elaborate and path-breaking
books on grammar ever, what would you call it?
Panini, as mentioned earlier in this book, was a mathematician
of considerable agility. Author of one of the greatest texts on
language ever written, called his masterpiece on Sanskrit grammar
Asthadhyayi, which simply means “eight chapters.”
Behind that coy name, mentioning only the number of chapters,
the work was (and is) a landmark achievement in the history of
literature. As the Indologist and historian A. L. Basham wrote,
“Panini’s grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of
any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar
composed before the 19th century in any part of the world.”[1]
Sanskrit, largely forgotten in India today and championed in
Germany—with fourteen universities teaching it—is the crowning
glory of the literary achievements of Hindu civilization. It is, believed
the ancient Hindus, the language of the gods (though crafted and
perfected by man).
Dean Brown, American physicist and translator of the
Upanishads, has talked in detail about how the origins of Sanskrit
and many of the Western languages, including English and Greek,
come from the common base that is known as the proto-Indo-
European language. Linguistically, he argues, Sanskrit is closer to
the West than the East (China and Japan). There is a debate about
whether this almost mythical PIE (as the proto-Indo-European
language is often called) originated in India or elsewhere. This
debate links to the old Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), and therefore,
has never been conclusively resolved. The Aryan Invasion Theory,
now largely discredited through modern genetics, suggested that all
of ancient India’s philosophies and texts were brought by white-
skinned, horse-riding Aryans who invaded India and wiped out an
older culture. This theory was popular especially with the British
colonialists because it showed a continuity of white supremacy in
India. Most archeologists and genetic experts today believe that no
such invasion took place, and any change in population was through
many slow and gradual processes of cross-migration and
assimilation.
What is known is that the vast riches of Sanskrit traveled from
India to China, across Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia, and the
stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata seeped into the cultural
roots of Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, and many
other parts of Asia.
It was Sanskrit literature and philosophy that charmed the West
when men like William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society whom
we met earlier in this book, exulted “that Pythagoras and Plato
derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages
of India.”[2]
When presented with a translation of Kalidasa’s play Abhijñāna­‐
shākuntala (The Sign of Shakuntala), the German litterateur Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe was moved to write, “Wouldst thou the earth
and heaven itself in one name combine? I name thee, O Shakuntala!
and all at once is said.”[3]
One of the most powerful examples of our collective memory
lapse in our own literary heritage lies in Kashmir. Does anyone think
about, or are we taught in schools, the fact that between the first and
the seventeenth century, Kashmir was one of the great centers of
Sanskrit literature, producing numerous books and treatises on
philosophy, religion, and language—so much so that Kashmir in
ancient India was known as the land of Saraswati, the goddess of
learning?
In economic treatises, India gave the world the definitive
Arthashastra. The importance of Indian thought in economics is its
focus on dharma—the concept that binds all that is needed for
nature to function smoothly. Hinduism itself, as we have discussed,
is the exploration of the eternal functioning of dharma and therefore,
sanatana dharma. Thomas Trautmann, professor emeritus of history
and anthropology at the University of Michigan, has detailed that the
Arthashastra was clear that the king, for instance, did not own all the
land.
 The king only had a share, usually one-sixth of the produce of
the land, and there was a clear division between the king’s land and
individual property. Economic thinker Gurcharan Das explains in his
introduction to Trautmann’s translation of the Arthashastra that the
most common misunderstanding about the text is a misreading of
the designation “king” or pati/swami to mean owner of the kingdom,
whereas in Indic or more appropriately, dharmic tradition, it simply
means protector.
“Ancient India, as it emerges from the normative dharma texts,
seems thus to present a world quite different from that of ‘Oriental
Despotism,’ a term that the ancient Greeks used contemptuously to
refer to the states in Asia and the Middle East . . . where the king
owned all and everyone was his slave,”[4] writes Das.
The Arthashastra, philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has shown, was
also a powerful contributor to the use of reason in Indian philosophy.
One of the key purposes of the Arthashastra was to teach anviksiki,
the discipline of critical inquiry. Kautilya, the ascetic author of the
Arthashastra, separated critical inquiry from mere ritualistic practice
and gave it an independent standing, saying “the study of critical
inquiry confers benefit on people, keeps their mind steady in
adversity and in prosperity, and produces adeptness of
understanding, speech and action.”[5]
Ganeri compares Kautilya’s idea of rationality with what the
philosopher Bertrand Russell (much, much later) said about reason,
that is, reason “signifies the choice of the right means to an end that
you wish to achieve. It has nothing to do with the choice of ends.”[6]
Ganeri says Kautilya, who wrote the Arthashastra to teach young
princes statecraft, has a similar “goal-oriented and instrumental”[7]
approach. “The interest is in the reasoned way to achieve some
goal, whatever that goal may be. The use of reason does not tell us
for which goals one should strive for, but only how to rationally strive
for them,”[8] writes Ganeri.
India’s greatest contribution is perhaps its philosophical thought,
and though it is impossible to do justice to the vastness of Hindu
philosophy in a few pages, it is critical at this point to give a sense of
its unique diversity even in the age of the Upanishads. Surendranath
Dasgupta, who wrote the seminal five-volume A History of Indian
Philosophy, considered it “the most important achievement of Indian
thought” because “it indicated the point of unity amidst all the
apparent diversities which the complex growth of culture over a vast
area inhabited by different peoples produced.”[9]
Dasgupta makes the point Diana Eck would later argue, with her
idea of India and its geography being crafted by the footsteps of
pilgrims, when he says that the unity of India is not to be found in
“the history of foreign invasions, in the rise of independent kingdoms
at different times, in the empires of this or that great monarch.”[10]
This is a unique sense of nationalism and nationhood that most
of the West finds difficult to comprehend, but perhaps it is the only
way a country as linguistically and culturally diverse as India (with
twenty-two official languages and different cultures in all its twenty-
nine states) can bind itself together. Here it is important to
understand the point Eck is making. Nationalism got a bad name in
Europe because of the fascist movement—and rightfully so. The fear
of extreme nationalism still haunts Europe today. But the ancient
Hindus understood nationalism differently and modern India draws
many lessons from this. Nationalism in India could not, and cannot,
derive its basis from uniformity of language or culture. It cannot
source its glue from commonality of region, habits, or even faith. It
has been multitudinous in every way for a very long time. So it
accesses its national identity through a sense of spirituality which is
very difficult for most of the world to understand, especially the West
where interest in religion is waning and where, due to incessant
religious conflict, a religious identity is often suspect. But India has
always embraced religion as its founding glue. The ancient Hindus
gave this sense of plurality because their philosophies were
inherently open-ended and multifarious—this does not mean that
Hinduism has not had conflicts with Islam and a few recent
skirmishes with Christianity in India, but what it does overwhelmingly
show is that without the diverse, questioning base that Hindu
philosophy gives India, the country would have experienced far
greater bloodshed and an endless history of internecine warfare
instead of the interwoven tapestry of culture and history that it
possesses today.
 So what keeps India together? Dasgupta opines that its unity
comes from “spiritual aspirations and obedience to the law of the
spirit, which were regarded as superior to everything else, and it has
outlived all the political changes through which India passed.”[11]
Even in this, it is worth recognizing the diversity in Hindu
thought. There is the championing of critical inquiry but also an
underlying acceptance that some truths must be experienced and
not merely analyzed, for it is only the experiencing that adds a
further step to the journey.
For instance, for every mention of ritual—including sacrifice—
there are also the teachings of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
which preaches meditation in its place. The Mundaka Upanishad
declares rituals and ceremonies to be useless and unequivocally
calls those trapped in rituals to be “fools dwelling in darkness.”[12] By
the time we arrive at the Svetasvatara Upanishad, the mood is more
conciliatory, and the talk is that of synthesis between different
approaches. The Upanishads ask “What is reality?” and then—
largely—answer that it is nondualism (that is, the soul of man and
God are one, merged into one universal consciousness). But that’s
not the only answer (even though it is the one most often
referenced). There is dualism, too, with portions that distinguish
between God, matter, and soul. Even that is not all. There is
something called “qualified nondualism” as well, which argues that it
isn’t this (nondualism) or that (dualism), but actually a middle path or
a position in the middle of dualism and nondualism.
Now all of these sound bewildering but consider this—not one of
these positions is absolutist. These are just paths, records, and
journeys encountered by past seekers of the Truth with nuances and
philosophies that are available to any seeker. But to finally arrive at
the Truth, each seeker’s journey is unique and the answer each one
finds is equally valid.
The idea here is again a focus on the individual experience in
the philosophy. The urge is to focus on the uniqueness of the
individual experience since, in the end, all the varied experiences
lead to the same truth, though experienced differently. In the end,
each newness is itself an ever-repeating cycle of the same truth.
 As the Taittiriya Upanishad says, “Having created it out of
Himself, He entered into it.” Or consider the Mundaka Upanishad
which says that from the Brahman the universe has emerged and to
it, it shall return.
At the core of Hindu philosophy is the celebration of this
personal experience. Without the personal, the impersonal is seen
as incomplete or at least not easily attainable. Hindu philosophy is
bewilderingly diverse because what ancient seers did was paint the
myriad experiences without force-fitting uniformity as they realized
what made the philosophical unity—the final truth as it were—more
magical was the countless diverse processes and paths one could
take to reach it.
The only thing that remains consistent is the ultimate truth of life,
the Brahman. It changes form and has many manifestations, but it
alone remains the same.
There are even multiple views about the goal of life. That varies
according to the two concepts of the Brahman—transcendent (that
which is above and beyond) or immanent (that which is inherent or
within). What is the difference? Once again, the difference is in the
journey.
The final destination is identification or unity of the Atman, the
individual soul, with the ultimate truth, the Brahman. But this union
can happen after death—the Chandogya Upanishad teaches us to
pray for unity with the Brahman after death. Or as the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad suggests, it can happen through the
course of human life, for it is merely a rediscovery of man’s essential
self.
How does one get to the truth? Even in this, naturally, there is
no one answer. The early Upanishads advise reflection and
meditation, but the Isha Upanishad, like the Bhagavad Gita,
preaches action and focuses on the role of karma, along with
meditation.
What does all this multiplicity really mean then to a Hindu
today? Should it only confuse us? Are we to gather that we are
impossibly disunited in thought?
Not quite. The philosophical multiplicity of Hindu thought actually
only further promotes the idea of accommodation, questioning, and
individual processes and methodologies. It is not an excuse for being
frozen in inactivity. “Fight and reason and argue, and when you have
established it in your mind that this and this alone can be the truth
and nothing else, do not argue anymore. The truth is now to be
meditated upon,”[13] said Vivekananda.
One of the biggest questions that I grappled with for a long time
was the question of action. How is it, I wondered, that there is such a
strong suggestion in Hinduism that the purpose of life is to discover
one’s self while there is simultaneously a call to action in the
Bhagavad Gita? Was I supposed to spend my time reflecting or
working energetically?
One of the distinctions and explanations helped me try to
resolve this. Think of it as four paths. Vivekananda spoke of jnana
(knowledge) yoga, bhakti (devotion) yoga, raja (meditation) yoga,
and karma (action) yoga—four distinct paths to attain, of course, the
same spiritual truth. Basically, the whole search for a greater truth
comes from two fundamental questions: Is all this (our lives as we
know and lead them) for real? What happens when we die? The
answer(s), no matter which way you go, is (are) always (and already)
within you. You are the answer. But how do you get to the answer
inside you or within you?
Jnana or knowledge is one way. Through this, you essentially
gather greater and greater knowledge about the experiences that are
merely a by-product of your senses—including all pleasure and pain
—and the experiences that go deeper and free us from the ego of
putting the “I” in everything we do and feel. For instance, one of the
critical ways of recognizing this, which I try to follow during moments
of intense emotion or sensation—whether anger, grief, happiness, or
anything else—is to step back for a moment and understand what it
is that I am really feeling.
It is not an easy thing to do, and I would be lying if I said I
succeed a lot at this, but once you start doing this, you will realize
that it is a matter of practice. And in a really startling sort of way, it
sets you free.
It is a moment when you realize what the Vedic texts talk about;
you can “see” yourself undergoing a sensation or reacting to a
situation. It is a bit of an out-of-body experience, but it isn’t quite as
weird as that sounds. It is just a sense, at the very basic level, that a
lot of what we do or how we react is based on deep-rooted
conditioning. Most of our reactions are knee-jerk to the extent that
they could almost be mechanized. We are just, as a reflex action,
behaving the way we have been told to behave or taught to behave
or have seen others behave in the past.
At some point, you may realize that it’s not what you really feel.
You are reacting the way you are almost as if you are playing a part,
a role. That’s when you start to comprehend how fake a lot of our
existence is, with much of it driven by social expectations, pressure,
and conditioning. A lot of what you are doing every day, from your
job to the way you react to everyone around you, is fulfilling an
expected role. It often has little to do with what you really feel.
We are all just basically faking it all the time. And faking it, the
Vedanta seems to be telling us, is the worst thing we can do to
ourselves. “If there is a god, we must see him. If there is a soul, we
must perceive it. Otherwise it is better not to believe. It is better to be
an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite,”[14] taught Vivekananda.
Jnana yoga to me is a compelling argument to try to understand
what we really feel, to seek, as Vivekananda said, “the real . . . in the
midst of this eternally changing and evanescent world.” To find what
the Rig Veda describes in a hymn to the God of Fire at a funeral
pyre: “Carry him, O Fire, in your arms gently . . . carry him where the
fathers live, where there is no more sorrow, where there is no more
death.”[15]
The major idea of jnana yoga is to gain greater knowledge of
who you really are. What does that mean? Take the first two steps of
jnana yoga—shama and dama. They talk about training the mind to
internalize and the sensory organs to “center” themselves so that
they can determine what one truly feels or is experiencing. The next
natural step in this process is called uparati, which is the practice of
not thinking about the senses and going deeper into the
consciousness. This is followed by titiksha, which, if you think about
it, would follow from not being a slave to your senses; it is the idea
that no matter whether faced with happiness or sorrow, adulation or
insult, one accepts and embraces it without reaction. The mind is
consistently calm as if nothing happened. Then comes shraddha or
faith, followed by samadhana or the exercise to constantly focus the
mind on divinity and finally mumukshutva, the desire to be free from
the ties of the world.
In all of this, the critical message is: discover your true self
above the bonds of ego and the senses.
Bhakti yoga is almost simpler (but not quite). It talks about one
approach to the truth—love God. Just the overwhelming power of
loving God, as displayed for instance by the unlettered devotion of
Ramakrishna Paramhansa, is a way in itself to the divine.
Raja yoga is the art of absolute and complete meditation. For
raja yoga, “no faith or belief is necessary. Believe nothing until you
find out for yourself.”[16] It is the ultimate mental practice to seek out
the innermost recesses of the mind and conscious. It is the final
method of concentration.
All of these can give rise to the following questions: so what
about work? Is the deepest Hindu practice about pacific, sedentary
behavior? Where does a sense of physical movement and work
come from? Does it come at all? And indeed, where does all this
solemn meditation and love fit into the message of action delivered
on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Bhagavad Gita?
The answer lies in karma yoga. It teaches us not to give up the
world. Live in the world, it instructs, do your level best in everything
that you do, but do everything without ego and without attachment.
But then, comes the question, how can high-quality work happen
without ego, without the desire to do better? Isn’t a sense of ego the
propeller of greater achievements? No, says the philosophy of karma
yoga, and gives the example of the functions of the body. The body
sees, but does the action of seeing, which happens effortlessly, have
ego? The body digests, but is there any determined ego working
behind the digestive process? When artists immerse themselves in
their art, ego is lost, and often the greatest works emerge from this
process.
So, karma yoga says detached action that completely absorbs
the person conducting that action is the highest method or process
to reach the truth. As Krishna teaches—do the work but never bother
about the result. The result is not in your hands.
 As a final blow to the ego, karma yoga also teaches that the
notion that through good action we are helping the world is mistaken.
In reality, we are only helping ourselves with our good karma. “The
world does not require our help at all,” wrote Vivekananda. “This
world was not made that you and I should come and help it.”[17] On
the contrary, what we help through our actions is ourselves and not
the world. Even while giving alms, teaches karma yoga, it is the giver
who should be thankful that there is someone to receive his or her
philanthropy, for it is the giver who earns karmic brownie points, so
to speak, and not the receiver.
The world does not need our help at all. Only we, ourselves,
need our help. The most powerful illustration of this thought, to me,
is in the difference in the reform movements in Christianity and
Islam, and Hinduism. After all, reformation is but a faith trying to aid
or assist its own world towards a better future. The idea of reform
also weighs heavily on me as I write this book, as demands for
reform in Islam grow more cacophonous around the world as ISIS
atrocities and Boko Haram barbarism grows, and as the Taliban
returns to its extreme bombing ways.
One of the most convincing arguments I have read against a
knee-jerk call for reform in Islam was written by the British journalist
Mehdi Hasan. Hasan is a critic of the Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali
who, having suffered many tortures and indignities in her home
country from an orthodox clerical order, has called again and again
for reform within Islam, asking for the faith to shed its most extreme
views, including those that seem to legitimize, according to her,
severe bloodshed.
Hasan, in a piece visibly seething, responds by reminding us,
first, what reformation was in Christianity. He details, in case anyone
has forgotten, that Martin Luther—the fourteenth-century German
cleric who was the Father of Reformation—not only broke the Bible
free from Latin upper class domination by translating it into
vernacular languages, but also wrote On the Jews and Their Lies
(1543). In this, Luther referred to the Jews as “the devil’s people and
called for the destruction of Jewish homes and synagogues.”[18] The
book is one of the seminal texts of German anti-Semitism, and later
the Holocaust. Hasan quotes the American sociologist and
Holocaust researcher Ronald Berger as saying that, for all of
Luther’s admirable challenges to the orthodoxy and financial
impropriety of the Catholic Church, it was this German friar who
“helped establish anti-Semitism as a key element of German culture
and national identity.”[19]
Hasan correctly asks if this is the sort of reform that Islam
needs. The answer, naturally, is no. After all, it is not just Catholicism
that had a troubled reform history. The Protestant Reformation was
equally blood-soaked. It is easy to forget today that whether it is the
English civil war or the French wars of religion or the thirty-year-long
German war that killed 40 percent of the population of that country, it
was all in the name of religious reformation.
Islam, too, says Hasan, has had reform. The most successful
“reformist” is, even today, stamping his thought around the world. His
name is Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the father of the ultra-
orthodox Wahhabism according to which Saudi Arabia is governed
and which is at the core of the most fanatical Sunni-led violence
around the world. It was Wahhab, the eighteenth-century purist, who
bitterly critiqued the relative liberalism of Sufism and described both
Jews and Christians as devil worshippers. The punishment for devil
worshippers, said Wahhab, was the sword. He showed some
writings of the Prophet Muhammad to justify this.
Suffice it to say that almost every Islamic extremist has drawn
inspiration, in some way or the other, from Wahhab’s teachings. Let
us now look at the Indian example. It is not as if Islam has not had its
reformist scholars in India. The most prominent, though barely
mentioned these days, was Dara Shukoh. The tale of Dara is one of
the most poignant in Indian history. Usually, to bring to light the
synthesis that took place between Hinduism and Islam in India
during the Mughal rule, the example of Akbar is considered. He was
an emperor who began as a hardliner but increasingly grew more
tolerant towards various faiths and even tried to bridge some of the
divisions with the creation of a comprehensive spiritual ideology
called Din-i Ilahi. But Akbar had the Mughal crown on his head and
near infinite powers in his vast empire. The ability to bring radical
reform was easier for the emperor whose arrival proclamation
declared him as the “shadow of god on earth.”[20] Shukoh, his great
grandson, is a more interesting character. To understand the depth
of Shukoh’s grand idea, let us turn for a moment to the theologian
and philosopher Jonardon Ganeri’s The Lost Age of Reason. Ganeri
chooses 1656 as a seminal year for the flowering of a culture of
syncretism in India.
“In India, this was the year in which a long-running process of
religious isomorphism, pioneered by Akbar’s chronicler Abu-i-Fazl
and orchestrated around the idea of Ibn al-Arabi, the Sufi mystic and
philosopher, of ‘unity in being’ (wahdat al-wujud), reached fulfillment
in Dara Shukoh’s grand project to translate 52 Upanishads in
Persian,”[21] writes Ganeri, professor of philosophy at New York
University.
What was happening to Dara Shukoh in the year 1656? In that
year, Dara Shukoh, the chosen heir to the throne of Shah Jahan—
the builder of the Taj Mahal, the owner of the Peacock Throne and
the Kohinoor diamond, the great Mughal who lorded over the
treasures of India—began a unique experiment. He was not
emperor, not even close, but he was certainly the favorite among the
four sons of Shah Jahan, says the historian Jadunath Sarkar, author
of the definitive four-volume The Fall of the Mughal Empire.[22] Dara,
influenced by Sufism, had read the Talmud, the New Testament and
the Vedanta. He had been a pupil under the Muslim fakir Sarmad
and the Hindu yogi Laldas.
Then, he embarked on his greatest project, for which he
gathered at Kashi (Benaras) a vast troupe of bilingual scholars. This
for its time was unprecedented. He was forty-one years old, and his
father, Shah Jahan, was sixty-six and already growing weaker, with
no definite heir to the throne in sight. The emperor had to make a
decision soon, and it would not have been an easy decision. Though
his four sons were from the same mother—rare in the world of the
sprawling harems of Mughal emperors—there was little love
between them. The two strongest contenders to the throne were
Dara Shukoh and the puritanical Aurangzeb. Such was the hatred
between Dara and Aurangzeb that the emperor had to keep them
away from one another to keep the peace.
Aurangzeb was, thus, kept far away in the south of India,
fighting wars for his father and the Mughal crown, while Dara Shukoh
was always by the emperor’s side. The year 1656 was eventful for
Aurangzeb, too. This was the year he invaded Golconda, home to
some of the greatest diamond mines the world has ever known. In
this battle, which Aurangzeb finally had to desert, censured by his
father, Dara Shukoh took the side of the local ruler and got his father
to accept a peace treaty and the payment of an indemnity. By the
end of the year, while Dara was busy with his grand translation
project, Aurangzeb invaded Bijapur. But again as victory seemed so
close, the ruler used influence in Delhi through Dara and thwarted
his plans through another stern message from the emperor.
By the end of 1657, Shah Jahan was already ill. This was when
Dara Shukoh pushed his plural agenda. He knew, of course, that his
greatest rival, his brother Aurangzeb, was known as a puritanical
Islamist. He also knew that even though he was no apostate and
“never discarded the essential dogmas of Islam,” his “coquetry with
Hindu philosophy made it impossible for him, even if he had the
inclination, to pose as the champion of orthodox and exclusive Islam,
or to summon all Muslims to his banners by proclaiming a holy
war.”[23] This he certainly would have recognized could well be the
fatal chink in his armor against any potential rival, especially
Aurangzeb.
But Dara Shukoh still continued his work of immense daring—
daring because he suggested several things that few, if any, before
him had suggested from the position of such influence in Islam. He
brought about the idea that the Upanishads are hermeneutically
continuous with the Quran, and that the Upanishads “are first of all
heavenly books . . . in conformity with the holy Quran” and that the
Upanishads are “actually mentioned in the Quran and designated as
scriptural texts.”[24]
Dara Shukoh’s great book comparing Islam, as seen by the
Sufis, the version that appealed to him, and the Vedanta, specifically
the Upanishads, is the Majma al-bahrayn or “the meeting place of
the two oceans.”
Ganeri writes, “after knowing the truth of truths and ascertaining
the secrets and subtleties of the true religion of the Sufis and having
been endowed with this great gift, he thirsted to know the tenets of
the religion of the Indian monotheists; and having had repeated
intercourse and discussion with the doctors and perfect divines of
this religion, who had attained the highest pitch of perfection in
religious exercises, comprehension, intelligence and insight . . . did
not find any difference, except verbal, in the way they sought and
comprehended Truth.”[25]
What did Dara Shukoh get for his troubles? His discoveries
added disastrously to his downfall. Defeated in battle, it was easier
for Aurangzeb to get rid of him since he could be accused of heresy.
He was executed in 1659. It has been suggested that had it not been
for the accusation of heresy against Islam, which could not have held
if Dara had not been so pluralist, it would not have been easy for
Aurangzeb to murder him. And so it came to pass that perhaps the
most peaceful imperial reformist of Islam in India finally died a violent
death.
Compare this with Hindu reform movements and reformists.
Look for instance at the Brahmo Samaj (the nineteenth-century
reformist movement in Calcutta) and its founding lights, like Raja
Ram Mohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Pandit Ramchandra
Vidyabagish, and Dwarkanath Tagore. Look at men such as Ishwar
Chandra Vidyasagar and Akshay Kumar Datta. One of their key
achievements was to end a form of ritual violence within Hinduism—
namely, that of sati, wherein women in some parts of India were
compelled to end their lives on the funeral pyres of their husbands.
The suicidal pact probably first started with women preferring death
to dishonor before the marauding armies that killed their husbands. It
had, by the nineteenth century, become a vicious ritual used in many
cases by families to deprive women of their inheritance in the name
of faith. In some cases, women were heavily drugged before being
literally flung onto the pyre. Such cases were well known enough to
have popped up in English adventure stories of the late nineteenth
century. In Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873),
the imperturbable Phileas Fogg saves the beautiful Aouda, who is
drugged and about to be sati-ed.
Campaigning fervently with the British government, the Brahmo
Samaj and reform-minded Hindu religious leaders, such as
Sahajanand Swami, the founder of the Swaminarayan sect (today
often described as the wealthiest Hindu group in the world), got sati
banned through William Bentinck, the Governor-General of Bengal,
in 1829.
Another, even more notable example is that of B. R. Ambedkar
who fiercely denounced the orthodox Hindu caste system which kept
many people of the lower castes trapped near slavery. Ambedkar,
born into a lower-caste family, rose to become an ardent scholar and
eventually authored the constitution of modern India. He argued
acerbically with even Mahatma Gandhi regarding caste (and was
often more realistic about the discrimination on the ground than
Gandhi was); he used the power of the pen all his life to campaign
against the caste system. As a final blow against caste, barely
weeks before his death, he held a mass conversion ceremony of
nearly 500,000 lower-caste Hindus to Buddhism. He had by then
converted to Buddhism himself and, by the time of his death, had
also completed the masterly The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957).
What is striking in these examples is the lack of violence in the
major reform initiatives within Hinduism. Vivekananda’s idea that it is
not the world but we ourselves who need assistance resonates in
Hindu reform movements as their trajectory is inward-facing, and
perhaps that is one of the reasons why they have never turned to
major violence.
As we saw, even in the four kinds of yoga there is no one way to
reach the same truth. That’s because the goal is always the same—
to discover for yourself tat tvam asi (you are that).
Surely, the idea that you already have “the word of God” in you,
that you were born with it and merely have to rediscover it within
yourself is an incredibly powerful and liberating one.
By the way, before we end this chapter on words and God and
the intermingling of the two, let us not forget that not all words and
texts that came from Hindu civilization are solemn or philosophical.
Sometimes, instead of seeking the highest elevations of the mind,
they seek the unabashed pleasures of the body.
An interesting thing that is rarely mentioned with regard to the
Kamasutra is that it was actually one among many such books
written at a unique time when Hindu society was lush with sexual
advice notes, and was probably presented in the form that we know
today sometime in the second century. Apart from the Kamasutra,
there was the Ratirahasya (or “the secrets of love”), the Ratimanjari
(or “the garland of love”), the Rasmanjari (or “the sprout of love”),
and the Panchasakya (“the five arrows”), among others. Books like
these were usually written by poets. The man who wrote
Panchasakya is Jyotirisha, not only a great poet but also one of the
finest teachers of music. Ratirahasya was written by a poet called
Kukkoka.
For a moment, let’s imagine the time when the Kamasutra as we
know it today is being put together. As the Pax Romana is ending in
Europe, the last of the five good emperors is dead with the passing
of Marcus Aurelius; Indian civilization is flourishing and prosperous,
so much so that books like the Kamasutra, devoted to the
celebration of the senses, are being written—books that are neatly
categorizing men based on the size of their penis as “hare man,”
“bull man,” and “horse man,” and women based on the depth of their
vagina as “female deer,” “mare,” or “female elephant.”
What is the kind of devotion to sensuality in a civilization that it
can come up with and describe in detail and with care not one or two
but sixty-four positions of copulation? But a variety of positions is not
the only thing that is so interesting about the Kamasutra, though, of
course, that is the most discussed. It is a text that has the emotional
intelligence enough to understand and define four kinds of love.
There is love acquired by continual habit, love driven by the
imagination, love resulting from belief, and love that is caused from
the perception of external objects. The most insightful thing here is
that it distinguishes the love that comes from regular interaction, like
the intimacy born of regular sexual intercourse, from the love “from
belief” which it says is mutual and comes from a feeling that the two
people “belong to one another.”
It is this intricacy of emotional detail, this unraveling of the
psyche that defines most Hindu civilizational texts and makes them
relevant and enjoyable even today. This perhaps has helped to
maintain their longevity. How sublime that they were able to, even
then, put some soul into the carnal.
1. A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New Delhi: Picador
India, 2004), 390.
2. Jadunath Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib (Hyderabad: Orient
Blackswan, 2009), 36–37.
3. Subrata Dasgupta, Awakening: The Story of the Bengal
Renaissance (New Delhi: Random House India, 2010), 31, 34.
4. Thomas Trautmann, Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth (New
Delhi: Penguin India, 2012), 14–15.
5. Jonardon Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work
of Reason (New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 2009), 8–9.
6. Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India, 8–9.
7. Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India, 8–9.
8. Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India, 8–9.
9. Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (New
Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1975), 1.
10. Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early
Modern India 1450–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
14, 25–26.
11. Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, 1.
12. Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (Washington, D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 74.
13. Amar Nath Prasad, Indian Writing in English: Critical Appraisals
(New Delhi: Lotus Press, 2006), 32.
14. Mahendra Kulasrestha, ed., Learn Rajayoga from Vivekananda
(New Delhi: Lotus Press, 2006), 32.
15. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami
Vivekananda, vol. 2 (Mayavati: Advaita Ashram, 2007), 72.
16. Amiya P. Sen, The Indispensable Vivekananda: An Anthology for
Our Times (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 220.
17. Satya P. Agarwal, The Social Role of the Gita: How and Why
(New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1997), 70.
18. Mehdi Hasan, “Why Islam Doesn’t Need a Reformation,” The
Guardian (May 17, 2015).
19. Hasan, “Why Islam Doesn’t Need a Reformation.”
20. Grace Morley and Arputha Rani Sengupta, God and King: The
Devaraja Cult in South Asian Art and Architecture, The National
Museum Institute Series (New Delhi: Regency, 2005), 23.
21. Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, 14, 25–26.
22. Jadunath Sarkar, The Fall of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan, 2013).
23. Sarkar, A Short History of Aurangzib, 36–37.
24. Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, 25–26.
25. Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, 25–26.
[Link]
 Chapter 7
Are All Hindus Vegetarians?
Are all Hindus meant to be vegetarians? This is a question that
often crops up, usually in the context of eating or not eating beef. Is
Hinduism a religion of vegetarians?
For all the controversy, there are actually simple answers to this
question.
What constitutes our search for God? If you don’t want to call it
God, call it what you will, but what makes up that search?
Vivekananda says that, in that search, Hindus often forget the
main lesson of their own faith—the unity and divinity in all things and
the search for truth within—and instead, persistently focus on the
absurdly peripheral. Interestingly, Swami Vivekananda, the greatest
modern monk of the faith, was not a vegetarian. As we shall see,
that is not even the main point.
In fact, rarely has a seer been as harsh in exposing the inanities
of meaningless Hindu rituals as Vivekananda. Here, speaking to
citizens of Shivaganga and Manamadurai, he says, “Give up all
those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless,
which are nonsensical in their very nature.”[1]
This sets the tone for what is to come. Remember, this is a
monk speaking to an essentially orthodox populace in nineteenth-
century, British-ruled India, a people dogged by centuries of
ritualism. He is speaking to Hindus less than seventy years after sati
has been banned. To them, an ascetic in his thirties is saying, “Think
of the last six hundred or seven hundred years of degradation when
grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether
we should drink a glass of water with the right hand or the left,
whether the hand should be washed three times or four times,
whether we should gargle five or six times. What can you expect
from men who pass their lives in discussing such momentous
questions as these and writing most learned philosophies on them?
There is a danger of our religion getting into the kitchen. We are
neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics, nor Tantrics. We
are just ‘Don’t touchists.’ Our religion is the kitchen. Our god is the
cooking pot, and our religion is, ‘Don’t touch me, I am holy.’ If this
goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic
asylum.”[2]
Search carefully the annals of theology and rarely will you come
across a more stark and uncompromising strike at mindless
orthodoxy. Vivekananda is, for this, the ultimate modernist in
Hinduism. He not so much pushed but dragged Hinduism into the
future and forced it to face its deepest, most resonant lessons,
brutally tearing apart the lulling façade of endless ritualism.
Why only Vivekananda? Read Gandhi, perhaps the greatest
supporter of cow protection and the most powerful voice against cow
slaughter, on vegetarianism. What is Gandhi saying? “Unfortunately
today Hinduism seems to consist merely in eating and not eating.
Hinduism is in danger of losing its substance if it resolves itself into a
matter of elaborate rules as to what and with whom to eat.
Abstemiousness from intoxicating drinks and drugs, and from all
kinds of foods, especially meat, is undoubtedly a great aid to the
evolution of the spirit, but it is by no means an end in itself. Many a
man eating meat . . . but living in the fear of god is nearer his
freedom than a man religiously abstaining from meat . . . but
blaspheming god in every one of his acts.”[3]
The argument that the Hindu mind is enfeebled by centuries of
shallow routines resonates even today. The point is not, per se, what
we eat, or wear, or how many times we go to the temple or on which
day of which week we fast; none of this is relevant. These rituals
might be useful for someone as the first access points to spirituality,
but they are not core in any way. They are not core to the
philosophical search of Hinduism. They do not add any intrinsic
value to the spiritual journey of the soul and at best, might be useful
tools or entry-point crutches. They are not relevant or illuminating in
the greater scheme of things. They are, if we remain enmeshed only
in them, as Vivekananda said, “a sure sign of softening of the brain
when the mind cannot grasp the higher problems of life.”[4]
To think of the theological debate on Hinduism as an argument
for or against cow slaughter is facile and redundant. The heart of the
Vedanta does not lie in cattle.
How then should we look at cow slaughter? Perhaps the
reasonable thing to do is to see it for what it is. First, accept that in
the early part of our ancient history there were instances of eating
the meat of buffaloes (and perhaps sometimes cows). As
Vivekananda writes, “There was a time in this very India when,
without eating beef, no Brahmin could remain a Brahmin.”[5]
Vivekananda was clear about this. He explained that a
distinction needs to be made between the timeless philosophies of
the Vedas and other rules or laws based on the local customs of an
era, or what he termed Smritis, which change with the times—“other
Smritis will come.”[6] This is what makes Hinduism ever
contemporary. Without this flexibility, the faith would become rigid
and collapse. The practical idea that seems to have evolved from
that point in history is that meat, more than anything else—food that
produces heat in the body—is perhaps best avoided for the mind
and the body to remain cool and calm. Also, the sedentary,
meditative existence of the Vedantist, steadfastly sitting and focusing
on the innermost recesses of the mind and soul, is not quite the right
lifestyle for calorific, heavy meat eating.
The point here is that food is just that. While it is important for
the body, it has only that much of a role in the spiritual path. Also, as
Vivekananda mentions, the arrival of the Buddha and his teaching of
nonviolence further moved public consciousness away from cow
slaughter. There was also a realization, according to the Swami, that
“we were an agricultural race . . . therefore the practice was stopped,
and a voice was raised against the killing of cows.”
Vivekananda makes a clear distinction between two things in
religion—one which is eternal and another which has a time-bound,
limited purpose. Of Vivekananda’s teachings, this is one point that
has been, and ought to be, ever pertinent. It talks about the
existential challenge of Hindu civilization, the raison d’être of India,
that intricate and delicate balance between timeless lessons and
everyday nuances, wisdom and information, the vast and the
infinitesimal, customs and God realization. “Various are the customs
all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake is that
ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of
our religion,”[7] said Vivekananda.
A custom then is merely a methodology, a thought that is a path
to the truth but cannot be seen as separate from the truth. And once
the higher levels of intellect are achieved, customs metamorphose
and are even shed.
Think of the conversation between the Hindu mystic Ramana
Maharshi and a Jesuit priest.

Priest: I come from God. Isn’t God distinct from me?

Maharishi: Who asks this question? God does not. You do. So
find out who you are, and then you may find out whether God is
distinct from you.
Priest: But God is perfect and I am imperfect. How can I ever
know him fully?
Maharishi: God does not say so. It is you who ask the question.
After finding out who you are, you may know what God is.[8]

With regard to vegetarianism or nonvegetarianism, there isn’t

one right way. It is just food. As Vivekananda taught, meat is suitable
especially if the person who is eating it is doing hard, physical labor.
Eating light is better for more sedentary lifestyles. This much is basic
common sense (and is also supported by medical science). It has
little to do with how progressive or regressive Hindus are.
Progressiveness is the ideal and the goal, but it can only be
achieved with respect for traditions. However, those traditions have
to keep evolving, not just in society but also step by step in your
private journey. Perhaps, to start with, you need a temple, an idol,
and daily rituals, but as you move ahead, you might realize that you
don’t need these things. They are but crutches.
Vivekananda—and the Vedanta—do not offer platitudes about
“letting go” of crutches. The message here is more unique. It says
enjoy, even revel in, your crutches, aids, assistances, idols, rituals,
call them what you will. That, too, is part of your journey, and indeed
a crucial part; at least you are searching. But as you do so, take care
to recognize that the magic is not in your method, even though it
might seem magical to you. Even meditation itself can become a
crutch, a respite from engaging with the self and the world, an
escape route.
So, there is a broader societal consensus among most Hindus
that cow slaughter is best avoided, but there is a much bigger point
to be addressed about how Hindus look at nature. Conceptually, this
cannot be confined to mere vegetarianism. This is about how a
civilization approaches the environment and what Hindu traditions
regarding the environment are particularly relevant today.
The sage Manu, who wrote the book of social guidance for
Hindus, the Manusmriti, said “don’t spit in the waters of a river” (or
any other water body for that matter). Today, India’s Central Pollution
Control Board says half of the country’s rivers are officially declared
as polluted. As it happens, the number of polluted rivers in India has
doubled in the last five years, rising from 125 to 275. So unclean is
the Ganga, the holiest river for the Hindus, that it barely deserves
reverence anymore. The Yamuna, the other great holy river, is little
more than a drain these days. After decades of spending millions of
dollars on so-called Clean Ganga (and Yamuna) mission plans, the
present Indian government is making a renewed thrust at cleaning
the river, with a centralized fund of $3 billion. One hundred towns
along the course of the mighty river will be the focus of this cleanup.
The idea is that the waters of the Ganga, even at its most crowded
pilgrimage spots, must seem sparkling and pristine. But is cleaning
the river—as vastly important as it is for India’s ecology and spiritual
harmony—enough?
While writing this book, I spent a few days in Benaras
(Kashi/Varanasi). Deciding to go to Benaras was fixed in my mind. I
was a boy, three, maybe four, when two of my grandparents died
within a fairly short period of time. I remember my father and his
brothers taking the train from Calcutta to Benaras, twice, to immerse
the ashes of my grandparents in the Ganga there. Stuck in a hazy
corner of memory is a relative, I cannot recall who, saying that they
(my grandparents) could not die in Banaras—the second, newer
name for this holiest of holy towns—but that they deserved at least
to have their ashes drowned in the Ganga. I specifically remember
the word “drowned.” It had, even then, seemed ill-fitting to me that it
was used for those who had just died, and died, as it so happened,
not from drowning.
I have memories of my father leaving the Howrah railway station
with the ashes, and of my uncles, their heads shaved clean, wearing
open shirts and trousers for the first time in days (as they had
changed into white unstitched cloth and, shunning shoes, walked
around in rubber slippers immediately following the deaths).
Each time, I was too young to go along, so I stayed back in
Calcutta, at home, unsure about this new idea—death. The whole
notion of setting off to drop ashes in a river seemed vaguely
adventurous. Ever since then, I’ve had a sense of excitable, fearful
anticipation about the place, akin to the feeling you get when you
know you are about to find out something that won’t let you be the
same you. You know that a new awareness is coming. You are even
afraid of it, not because you want to be, but because it is the right
thing to do. That was my memory of Benaras. I had, it would be fair
to say, no memory of Kashi, the ancient Indian name of the holy
town, or its colonial nomenclature Varanasi.
Thirty years later, when I decided to go to Benaras, it called up
underlying memories of my first knowledge about death. I finally
went to the city the year that my father turned seventy and my
mother sixty-five. My grandparents, on either side, had mostly not
made it to this age. Only my mother’s father, my dadu, had lived to
be eighty. I had little recollection of my mother’s parents; I must have
been around ten when they died. What did I know of Benaras, then,
but death? What did I know of Kashi, the spot where creation began,
says the Hindu faith, the city of Shiva himself?
I went to Benaras with Diana Eck’s 1983 classic Banaras: The
City of Life. She had first seen Benaras as a student fifteen years
before she wrote the book. She had studied in the city for a year and
then, enamored of it, returned again and again. In the book, she
“saw” the city through Western eyes and also quoted extensively
from various European travelers who had been both intoxicated and
repelled by its chaos, but she also viewed it through Hindu eyes,
seeing and revealing the construction of the palimpsest. She reads
the Aitareya Brahmana where Indra, king of the gods and “protector
of travelers,” urges a young man, “There is no happiness for him
who does not travel. Therefore, wander!”[9]
Eck sees that Hindus have embraced this wanderlust, often as
pilgrims, and in Benaras, the pilgrims find “everything on earth that is
powerful and auspicious . . . all the gods reside here . . . all of the
eight directions of the compass originated here . . . all of time is
here.”
I tried hard to see all that in Benaras, but it was very difficult.
Uttar Pradesh interrupted me at every step. I saw, to begin with,
what one would expect in one of India’s most dysfunctional states—a
crumbling, corrupt place with 200 million people. The drive from the
airport to the hotel was spine-wracking, the roads broken or absent,
and traffic rules at best whimsical. Benaras town was so crowded
that it felt bitter. Still, there was some leftover anticipation for me—
after all, Benaras was the parliamentary constituency of the new
prime minister. There was much talk of some ghats, the famed
bathing steps of the city, getting cleaned since Narendra Modi had
won the election. Those ghats, my driver told me, had not been
cleaned since the days of Shiva. He laughed sadly. Benaras, said
my driver, could defeat the best-meaning prime minister.
In the middle of the afternoon, I tried going to the Kashi
Vishwanath temple, the most sacred of the Shiva shrines in Benaras.
I had been told that this was a relatively good time to go there. When
I arrived half a kilometer away, beyond which the car could not go
because there were too many people, my driver said this seemed
like a good day, seemed like I might not have to stand too long in a
queue.
Imagine the most crowded place you have ever seen. More
people and more loudspeakers than you have ever seen, and then
imagine ten times that—that’s what the shrine looked like. Policemen
with flailing arms, stained collars, and plastic whistles in their mouths
were pretending to guide the crowds. They had a use. They were
telling everyone who passed them by to be careful of pickpockets.
The loudspeakers, now and again, took a break from the
incomprehensible Bollywood-style devotional songs and warned the
same, that there were pickpockets everywhere. “Be careful. Shiva
won’t protect your wallet.”
To reach the Kashi Vishwanath temple, after passing through
endless streams of people, one enters a lane lined with shops on
either side. What are they selling? Blind faith—overpriced sweets,
greasy floral garlands, a little cane basket to carry it all. Also, there
was a special charge at every shop to keep your shoes safe in little
grubby shelves or iron safes—a package deal where you can buy
offerings for the holiest Shiva in Benaras and keep your shoes, as
well as get a small discount if you bargain hard.
Not one shopkeeper waits for you to approach them. Instead,
they lean into the pathway, one foot inside their stall, and try to wave
you in, or even grab you with the logic that “Your shoes are as safe
here as there, and the tray the same, so why not my shop instead of
his?”
Between the pickpocket warning and the escape-the-
shopkeeper obstacle course, I felt compelled to worry more about
my wallet than to ponder the mysteries of Shiva.
The queue was long but not that long, only half an hour. During
this time, parents carrying bawling children spoke excitedly all
around. The archways were small. The building, encroached upon
by shops and other haphazard construction, was dimly lit, ancient
smelling, and inadequately ventilated for even the lung power of two-
year-olds.
When the queue started moving, it all happened very rapidly. In
the garba griha, the sanctum sanctorum where you can maybe get, if
you are lucky, a five-second glimpse of the Shiva linga and pour milk
on it, you feel like a stampede might start any moment.
As you rush out of the claustrophobic tunnels, with shopkeepers
still doing their snatch-and-grab routine, the overwhelming sense is
of relief. Says the Atharva Veda: “Let there be peace in the heavens,
the earth, the atmosphere, the water, the herbs, the vegetation,
among the divine beings in Brahman, the absolute reality. Let
everything be at peace and in peace. Only then will we find
peace.”[10]
But there is no peace to be found in most Hindu temples. At the
slightly less crowded shrine of the fierce Kal Bhairav, the protector of
Kashi, the sanctum sanctorum had a very fat priest sitting next to the
idol in a flaming red dhoti. Even before I could properly bow before
the idol, he proceeded to tell me the rates of the various pujas—
some to get wealthy, some for conceiving a child—which I could pay
for. When I escaped this “puja à la carte” menu and went to see the
famed Ganga aarti, the salutations with oil lamps to the river in the
evening, there were young priests asking the crowd to wave their
hands and clap with the music in the beautiful ceremony of the
lamps lighting up all of the ghats and the boats in the river. In their
hands, though, the priests held up CDs of the songs of the aarti and
DVDs of the ceremony. Every now and then, there was a quick line
in between the aarti, urging people to buy the CDs and the DVDs.
There was no fleeing commerce in Kashi.
This is something that modern Hindus might want to consider.
Why are our places of worship so often disgracefully dirty and
disturbingly malodorous, with petty cash transactions going on rather
than practices that provide some solace for the soul? Why are
people who profess to live by a faith that consistently talks about the
manifestation of God in nature seemingly unable or unwilling to keep
their holiest places clean?
Think about this: for thousands of years, we have been
worshipping the sun, and yet we have been one of the least
enthusiastic countries with regard to using solar energy to replace
fossil fuels, even though we have been blessed with enormous solar
capacities.
One of the most well-known parts of yoga is the Surya
Namaskar or the sun salutation—but for years no one paid any
attention to the mass use of solar energy in India. (That thankfully
seems to be changing as India has pushed for one of the biggest
solar energy use programs in the world in recent years.)
In every bit of our religious texts, the worship of water and the
reverence for rivers is embedded, and yet India has some of the
dirtiest rivers in the world. We seem only too happy to
simultaneously pollute that which we worship.
How does that even make sense?
The earth is considered the Devi, the bountiful mother goddess,
in the Hindu faith and yet such is our concern for the earth that large
parts of India have some of the most toxically polluted soil in the
world. Soil contamination levels in Punjab, the “food basket” of India,
are such that doctors there now call it the “disease basket.” In almost
every area where food is grown, there is now a groundwater
shortage crisis and a sense that food cultivation is deeply threatened
throughout India.
 Does any of this suggest a civilization whose cornerstone is
respect for nature? It doesn’t. As a Hindu this is, and indeed ought to
be, one of my fundamental questions today.
1. Makarand R. Paranjape, ed., Swami Vivekananda: A
Contemporary Reader (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2015), 80.
2. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 75.
3. Mahatma Gandhi, The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, ed. Homer A.
Jack (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005).
4. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 75.
5. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 82.
6. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 82.
7. Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora, 81.
8. Ramana Maharshi, The Teachings of Ramana Maharishi, ed.
Arthur Osborne (London: Rider Books, 2014), 38.
9. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin India,
1992), 21.
10. [Link]
on-the-environment.
[Link]
 Chapter 8
How Do Hindus Consider Their
Own History?
If everything, I was once asked, is cyclic and repetitive in the
Hindu worldview, then what about history? Why this specific concern
with history? This is because Hindus have had a bit of an issue with
history. Unlike, say, Islam and Christianity, which have meticulously
written down their history as they have seen it through the ages,
Hinduism sometimes relies on collective memory, mythical
references, and parable references to put together historical
timelines. It is not that the Hindus did not write their history—they
did. But because the timeline of Hindu history is so long—and so
much material was destroyed during hundreds of years of Islamic
invasion and Muslim rule, followed by colonialism—sometimes what
is commonly understood as history is not what Hindus wrote. Often it
is what their conquerors wrote.
There are two or three controversial pillars that Hindus need to
address and, in my opinion, we should just face up to them. These
are the history of invasions in India, specifically the nearly 1,000-year
history of Islamic invasions in India, including the Mughal rule from
1526 to 1857; the history of caste discrimination in Hinduism; and, a
more recent debate, the attitude towards homosexuality. The last
one, gay rights, is actually not just an issue among conservative
Hindus but among conservatives in all faiths, but my specific
argument would be that Hindus have the strongest and most liberal
position on gay rights, if only we would embrace it. The same logic
can be extended to the treatment of transgender rights in India.
Let us take the issue of gay and transgender rights first. India
still has a law that colonial British rulers made, Article 377, which
treats homosexuality as an unnatural act punishable as a criminal
offense. Why a modern, democratic nation—where a majority of the
people profess to follow a sublimely liberal faith—still carries the
colonial yoke of such an absurd and primitive law, no one knows. But
there it is. It is even more ridiculous when one considers that Hindu
mythology and cultural iconography is full of all kinds and forms of
sexuality and gender bending.
Contemporary Hindu spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, whose
Art of Living runs centers in more than 150 countries, has been vocal
that homosexuality or transgender identity is neither seen as
unnatural or a crime in Hinduism. He points out that, for instance,
Lord Ayyappa, the Rig Veda deity who presides over the great
Southern Indian shrine of Sabarimala (one of the most revered
temples among Hindus) was born of Hari-Hara or Vishnu and Shiva,
both male manifestations of the divine.
In her masterly work Ardhanarishvara: The Androgyne, the
cultural critic Alka Pande says, “Homosexuality, gender-bending,
cross-dressing and third gender expressions have always had a
place in Indian art and culture.”[1] She quotes the definitive example
of the conceptual embrace of the idea in Hindu culture through the
explanation of Ardhanarishvara, half man–half woman. Here is the
mythological detail of the Ardhanarishvara as explained by Pande:

The Ardhanarishvara has no desire. He is a composite—a

single entity. It was the behest of Brahma’s command that the
Ardhanarishvara separated into the God and Goddess. Shiva
divided himself and let his Shakti, power, be apprehended by
both himself and Brahma. The great body of fire, of which erotic
pleasures were the sparks, was dispersed. Duality was thus
born. The great Goddess sent her glowing ardor, in the form of a
woman, into the world of the gods. It was thus from the origins
of Ardhanarishvara’s self-classification that burst forth the
intricate idea of woman, sex and sensuality.[2]

There is even a god of the third gender, Mother Goddess

Bahuchara, and therefore the idea of discrimination is something we
have to shed now. There has been, without doubt, discrimination,
especially against the third gender in India and a taboo about talking
about gay relationships. But that is clearly ending in the country;
after all it was a Hindu mother who placed the first ever matrimonial
ad for a homosexual in India, and it is time that the law keeps up with
what Hindus increasingly see as absolutely normal.
 This is the newspaper advertisement that Padma Iyer, a so-
called high-caste Brahmin, no less, placed in a newspaper for her
gay rights activist son:

Seeking 25–40, well placed, animal loving, vegetarian groom for

my son 36, 5′11″ who works with an NGO, caste no bar (though
Iyer preferred).

It shows a dramatic mindset shift occurring in Hindu society and

one that needs even better articulation and is no longer trapped in a
colonial law. Now, in the two lines of advertisement above, notice
that the mother, having thankfully given up gender and sexuality
biases, would still prefer an Iyer candidate. Such is the subtle and
sometimes vicious existence of the caste bias in India.
There have been endless debates on whether Gandhi and
Vivekananda supported caste—even though in page after page of
their writings, both men denounced untouchability and caste bias.
Here is Gandhi’s reply to Dalit leader (and eminent economist and
author of India’s constitution) B. R. Ambedkar in 1936: “Caste has
nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know
and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger.
But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national
growth.”[3]
In 1920, he wrote, “I consider untouchability to be a heinous
crime against humanity. It is not a sign of self-restraint but an
arrogant assumption of superiority.”[4] Here he is again in 1927:
“Whatever falls from truth should be rejected, no matter wherever it
comes from, and therefore the burden lies on the shoulders of that
person who upholds the practice which is inconsistent with truth, so
that if a man wants to defend, for instance untouchability, he has to
show that is it consistent with truth. Unless he shows that, all the
authorities that he may cite in support of it are to me irrelevant.”[5]
Vivekananda is equally vocal, “The Hindu faith has no hierarchy,
no established authority. There is no persecution, no
excommunication for dissenters within Hinduism. We must not forget
that (the founder of Jainism) Mahavira and Buddha were born
Hindus but chose to deviate from the authority of the Vedas. Modern
degenerative influences have led to social evils like casteism and
untouchability. I regard these tendencies as blots on the Hindu faith,
which is essentially universal and all-encompassing.”[6]
There has been continuous debate on whether people like
Vivekananda and Gandhi, the men who envisioned the modern
Indian nation, sufficiently condemned caste and whether they ought
to have called for the complete destruction of Hinduism. One
suspects that such debates will persist because certainly some of
the argument is politically motivated on both sides.
In the meantime, all evidence suggests that caste structures are
getting ever weaker in India. The primary attack on caste
discrimination has come from twenty-five years of Indian economic
liberalization—the free markets have weakened caste by beating
social discrimination with economic mobility. There is data to prove
this. Half of the Indian GDP (gross domestic product) comes from
what is often called the Indian “informal sector.” Credit Suisse says
90 percent of the Indian workforce is engaged in informal work,
especially in rural areas.[7] The Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development notes that 65 percent of manufacturing
work is done by firms that have fewer than ten employees. Between
1999 and 2009, 75 percent of all new factories were built in rural
India and 70 percent of new manufacturing jobs were created there.
So-called small-scale industries deliver 40 percent of Indian
exports and 45 percent of industrial output. The informal sector has
consistently grown faster than the formal sector for the last two
decades and creates one million new jobs every year.[8]
Who are the beneficiaries of this sector? Let us look at the
handloom industry, for instance. As Oxford economist Devaki Jain
has pointed out, 75 percent of four million handloom workers are
women. In handicrafts—where even in the middle of the global
economic downturn of 2010–2011 exports grew—out of seven
million workers, 48 percent are women. With growing demand in
urban India for natural products, khadi (handspun fabric) now
creates jobs for fourteen million people—a rise from 12.5 million
between 2012–2013 and 2013–2014.[9]
That’s not all. According to India’s National Sample Survey data,
75 percent of informal sector firms are owned by scheduled castes,
scheduled tribes, and other backward castes. These companies also
deliver 71 percent of the manufacturing and 60 percent of the trading
in the informal sector. Two-thirds of the handloom sector workers
belong to underprivileged castes, and most of them work in rural
areas. More than half of the workers in handicrafts are from minority
or underprivileged groups.
There is also an illuminating report studying the impact of
economic freedom on caste by a four-member team of researchers,
comprising Devesh Kapur, the director for the Center for the
Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, Lant
Prichett from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, D. Shyam Babu of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for
Contemporary Studies, and Chandra Bhan Prasad, the foremost
Indian scholar studying economics and caste. This study looked at
all Dalit households (19,087) in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, Bilaria
Ganj in the Azamgarh district in the east, and Khurja from the
Bulandshahar district in the west to compare their lives before and
after about twenty years of Indian economic liberalization from 1990
to 2008.[10]
What they found startled them. There had been a sea change in
the ownership of consumer items such as bicycles, fans, TVs, and
mobile phones. On an average, in both areas, around 50 percent
more people were living in concrete homes in this period of
economic growth, the number of TV set owners grew 33 percent, 45
percent more households had fans, and, of course, mobile phones
were now in almost 35 percent of the households where previously
there had been almost none. The following fact highlights just how
impoverished the regions once were: for the first time, a quarter of
households in both areas had chairs.
There was an even more intimate transformation. Most people
rarely used toothpaste before liberalization, but a combined average
of more than 65 percent use it now. Shampoo, another previously
lacking ingredient in daily life, is currently used by nearly 70 percent.
What impact has this had on the centuries-long tradition of
discrimination against those of lower castes, where upper-caste
members have been forbidden to drink water from a glass touched
by a Dalit or to eat from a plate used by a Dalit? The instances of
upper-caste citizens eating and drinking at Dalit homes, once
impossible to believe, rose more than 70 percent in the east and
nearly 45 percent in the west. The practice that only Dalits clear up
dead animals has almost disappeared.
Refusing to acknowledge caste in our private lives is a personal
step we, each one of us, can adopt. As a country, we push good
economics to bring income and livelihood to the most
underprivileged part of our society. We should also break from caste
discrimination, as has already been done in many parts of India. But
beyond economics, it is pertinent also to recall the complexity of
Indian caste history. One of the greatest warrior kings in the Hindu
galaxy, the Maratha Shivaji from western India, was born into a lower
caste. That has not stopped the faithful from worshipping him as one
of the greatest Hindu heroes. As historian Shabnum Tejani has
written, “Shivaji’s broad appeal came not only from being
acknowledged as a victorious warrior-king but also from the fact all
classes and castes could lay claim to him . . . the strength of the
Maratha polity could be attributed to Shivaji’s Brahman (also spelt as
Brahmin) mentor Ramdas. The wars against Muslim rule, therefore,
could be read as having been fought with the intention to protect
cows and Brahmans. . . . Or Shivaji’s attempt to balance the power
between high and low castes allowed an interpretation of
Maharashtra’s historical and cultural traditions as emphasizing social
harmony and a synthesis between local tradition and classical
Hinduism.”[11]
It might also be worth remembering that Jyotiba Phule, the
father of Indian social reforms and anti-caste fighter, was one of the
greatest champions of the legend of Shivaji. Forgotten also are the
heroics of Raja Sukhdeo (also known as Raja Suheldev), the lower-
caste king whose decimation in 1033 CE in the battle of Bahraich of
an invading army led by Salar Masud, a nephew of Sultan Mahmud
Ghaznavi, halted the Islamic invasion of India by nearly a century.
So, while there is no denying the long history of caste discrimination,
it is impossible to ignore the evidence of lower castes rising
spectacularly to the defense of Hinduism in history.
Now, to an equally conflict-ridden question: how do
contemporary Hindus to look at the history of Islam in India from the
early invasions, Mughal rule, and right up to having a Muslim
president and vice president in today’s India?
There is an understanding among most Hindus that while there
is little doubt that Hindu civilization went through hundreds of years
of plunder, assault, destruction of holy places, and forced
conversions by Muslim invaders, it is also true that during parts of
Mughal rule the interaction between the two cultures—Islamic and
Hindu (Persian and Sanskrit)—brought about many collaborative
treasures in everything from literature, dance, music, food, to
architecture.
Will Durant—celebrated historian, philosopher, and author of the
eleven-volume Story of Civilization, who was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom—encapsulated that
story of plunder in his famous line: “The Islamic conquest of India is
probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its
evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate
complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any
moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or
multiplying within.”[12] Let us take one more illuminating example.
Harvard’s Diana Eck, whom we have referred to earlier as well,
writes in her scholarly book on Benaras about the number of times
the city of Benaras, one of the holiest for the Hindus, faced plunder
and destruction from Islamic invaders. “In 1206, with the
establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, the entire Ganges valley came
under Muslim domination. There were certainly high moments in
these centuries, when Kashi recaptured something of its lost glory.
There were times of ambitious temple construction and stimulating
scholarly activity. But for the most part these were hard centuries.
The religious life of the city was under almost constant threat. At
least six times during these years the temples of Kashi were
destroyed.”[13]
This captures in a paragraph the Hindu perspective to Islamic
rule even today—neither denying the moments that were amicable
and symbiotic between Hinduism and Islam, nor hiding or covering
the gruesome bloodshed. As Eck notes, during the reign of the
Emperor Akbar several temples were protected and some built anew
but his grandson Shah Jahan, the maker of the Taj Mahal, destroyed
as many as seventy-six temples at Benaras alone, and Aurangzeb,
the most fanatical of them all, did the maximum damage—“Some of
the city’s greatest temples, including Vishveshvara, Krittivasa and
Bindu Madhava, were razed during the reign of Aurangzeb, and their
sites were forever sealed from Hindu access by the construction of
mosques. In his zeal for crushing Hindu idolatry, Aurangzeb even
tried to rename the city ‘Muhammadabad,’”[14] writes Eck.
How does an ordinary Hindu today consider this beyond political
debate? Simply by accepting and recognizing the history and
violence in it, and also by embracing the instances of Akbar or Dara
Shukoh, who attempted to bridge the gap between the faiths by
getting the Upanishads translated to Persian, believing that there
was, in reality, no real difference except in terminology between the
Vedic teachings and the Quran. Also consider Wajid Ali Shah, the
last Nawab of Awadh (modern-day Lucknow in north India), who is
responsible for the revival of the Indian classical dance Kathak and
wrote plays on the love between the god Krishna and his consort
Radha.
The modern Hindu is going through a period of assessment and
contemplation with regard to history. In embracing both the dark and
illuminating bits, one hopes to move from truth to reconciliation.
1. Dr. Alka Pande, Ardhanarishvara, The Androgyne: Probing the
Gender Within (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2004), 15.
2. Pande, Ardhanarishvara, The Androgyne, 15.
3. Mahatma Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism, comp. and ed. V. B.
Kher (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 2011), 12.
4. Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism, 122.
5. Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism, 81.
6. J. P. Vaswani, Hinduism: What You Would Like To Know About,
comp. and ed. by Dr. Prabha Sampath and Krishna Kumari (New
Delhi: New Dawn Press, 2003), 25.
7. Dorothee Enskog, “Indian Election Results Shouldn’t Affect
Economy Much,” Credit Suisse report, April 17, 2014.
8. OECD Economic Surveys: India 2014, Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD Publishing, November
2014), 73.
9. Devaki Jain and Smriti Sharma, “A Fresh Template for GDP
Growth,” Gateway House (January 1, 2015).
10. Chandra Bhan Prasad, et al., “Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in
Uttar Pradesh in Market Reform Era,” Economic & Political Weekly
(August 28, 2010).
11. Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual
History, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008),
81.
12. Will Durant, Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage (New
York: Fine Communications, 1997), 459.
13. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin India,
1992), 83.
14. Eck, Banaras: City of Light, 83.
[Link]
 Chapter 9
How Does Hinduism Fit Into the
Internet Age?
If artificial intelligence is the future, and machines will soon be
smarter than human beings, then what in all this happens to our
quest for God?
We are consistently told that our extensive use of technology
and the Internet is changing the way our brains work. It might be
shortening our attention spans, causing a deeper sense of isolation,
and even pushing some towards suicide. Our brains are getting
rewired. Some scientists suggest that as a result of this rewiring, our
ability to learn, deeply understand a subject or a topic, and focus and
absorb deteriorates quite rapidly as we accustom our brains to short
and rapidly changing bursts of stimuli which the Internet is so
proficient at providing. The writer Nicholas Carr complained in
Atlantic magazine in 2008, asking rhetorically, “Is Google making us
stupid?” He wrote, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away
my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now
expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a
swiftly moving stream of particles. Immersing myself in a book or a
lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the
narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling
through long stretches of prose. Now my concentration often starts
to drift after two or three pages. The deep reading that used to come
naturally has become a struggle.”[1]
Not giving up the fight, Carr went on to write a book called The
Shallows, wherein he argued, “If, knowing what we know today
about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium
that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as
possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks
and works a lot like the Internet.”[2]
There are many of us—perhaps most of us—who have felt, at
some point or the other, what Carr is talking about. Once we spoke
about being constantly connected; now we talk about digital detox.
 But, in the meantime, something else is happening. Technology
is moving beyond the realm of just transforming our activities. It is
starting to push us to reimagine how we contemplate, not just how
we see things, but also how we perceive them.
For one, there is this sense of everything being connected to
everything else to complete an unbroken, unbreakable chain or
whole. At any given moment, whether you are renting a room on
Airbnb, hiring a ride on BlaBlaCar, registering to eat a home-cooked
meal at someone’s house, or selling a secondhand camera or laptop
through a mobile app, all that binds it together is trust. “The Future of
the Sharing Economy Depends on Trust” says a Forbes magazine
essay. Who was the man writing the article? Stephen Ufford, the
founder and CEO of Trulioo, which specializes in providing ever-
higher levels of verified identity for the new world of shared business
to survive and thrive.
Trust of course is increasingly tougher to cultivate in a world with
more walls going up and the ease of travel going down.
This new world is based on a growing customer base of
millennials—people who are in their twenties and thirties today—but
this generation of people, says Pew Research, doesn’t really trust
easily. Only 19 percent of millennials believe most people can be
trusted, compared with 35 percent for an older generation.[3]
So, one of the biggest challenges for our technology-driven
world is actually a very, very old question—who can you trust? And
how do you build trust? It is a question we have been asking since
cousins fought each other to death, and Arjun was troubled by the
thought of massacring family members in the battle of Kurukshetra. It
a question we have been asking since Cain fought Abel.
Building trust is also a question mark on another simultaneous
technological advance—singularity. Singularity sees our world
moving steadily in a direction where the difference between man and
machine completely disappears. The human and the machine create
a singular composite by means of genetic transformation,
nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. From this point onward,
the collective machine intelligence will be greater than the collective
human intelligence. The term “singularity” was coined by scientist
and writer Vernor Vinge and made popular by futurist Ray Kurzweil.
 The idea is that slowly, computational technology will reach a
level where it will have the capacities of the human brain. This will
surpass the boundaries of the famous Moore’s Law (named after
cofounder of Intel, Gordon E. Moore), which predicts that capacities
of integrated circuits will grow exponentially but not indefinitely and
infinitely. But Kurzweil says that a new paradigm will leapfrog the
challenges of integrated circuits and keep the exponential growth of
computational capacity. Among the things he believes could provide
that impetus are “nanotubes and nanotube circuitry, molecular
computing, self-assembly in nanotube circuits, biological systems
emulating circuit assembly, computing with DNA, spintronics
(computing with the spin of electrons), computing with light, and
quantum computing.”[4]
These theories are the bedrock of Kurzweil’s famous 2005 book,
The Singularity is Near. But, and this is the most interesting
question, even Kurzweil accepts that there is “no objective test that
can conclusively determine”[5] the presence of consciousness. It is
something we would have to take for granted.
Anyone who reads the Vedanta—or a Vedantin, to use the
common term for a student of the Vedanta—cannot but recognize
these ideas. This idea of a common, integrated approach to
intelligence is the very soul of the Vedanta.
This is also the source of its eternal relevance. If you
simultaneously read the Vedanta and about scientific advances, you
cannot help but come to the conclusion that the theories and ideas
are similar. Science is perhaps moving ever closer to the Vedanta
idea of the universe.
The idea that the intelligence of the universe is one, and that we
have only touched the tip of its individual manifestation, is not new to
the Vedanta. Nor is the notion that without rising above our genetic
selfishness, our Dawkinsian “selfish gene,” we cannot build a new
universe of cooperation and trust. Aatma vikas, the true revelation of
the soul and the unity therein is, as the Mundaka Upanishad says,
sarva vidya pratistha, or the basis of all sciences.
British evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley understood this. In
his lecture “The Evolutionary Vision” he said, “Although it is to his
mind that man owes both his present dominant position in evolution
and any advances he may have made during his tenure of that
position, he is still strangely ignorant, even superstitious about it. The
exploration of the mind has barely begun. It must be one of the main
tasks of the coming era, just as was the exploration of the world’s
surface a few centuries ago. Psychological exploration will doubtless
reveal as many surprises as did geographical exploration and will
make available to our descendents all kinds of new possibilities of
fuller and richer being.”[6]
If you think about it, what creates greater trust between people
than anything else? Isn’t it the understanding that there is, in reality,
very little difference between them?
No matter what you call it, singularity or the trust economy, the
basis of it all is the recognition of the oneness of the universe. It is
this oneness of the consciousness that forms the foundation of our
material search for oneness, whether it is through artificial
intelligence or by building a sharing economy instead of one based
on private ownership.
British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle recognized this. In his 1983
book, The Intelligent Universe, Hoyle says, “The picture of the origin
of the universe, and of the formation of the galaxies and stars, as it
has unfolded in astronomy, is curiously indefinite, like a landscape
seen vaguely in a fog. This indefinite, unsatisfactory state of affairs
contrasts with other parts of astronomy where the picture is bright
and clear. A component has evidently been missing from
cosmological studies. The origin of the universe, like the solution of
the Rubik’s Cube, requires an intelligence.”[7]
When we think about singularity, it is important to remember
Swami Vivekananda’s words, “Science is nothing but the finding of
unity. . . . Through multiplicity and duality, that ultimate unity is
reached. . . . This is the goal of all science. All science is bound to
come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not
creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that
what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be
taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest
conclusions of science.”[8]
I am interested in exploring the nature of sanatana dharma in
the Internet age because for too long, Hinduism has been correlated
—with astonishing inaccuracy—with primitive and unscientific
beliefs. In reality, of course, the more you read the Vedanta, the
more you are convinced not only of the meeting point between
technology and Hindu philosophy but also its future as an integrated
whole.
If you think about it, it is the Vedanta that is seeking the same
ends as the future of science; how do we arrive at unity? And when
we do, where does our consciousness fit into this universe of
technological commonality? There is an understanding that without
comprehending the unity of the consciousness, the unity of
intelligence is incomplete and redundant. For singularity to be
achieved with harmony, the unity of the consciousness must be the
platform on which the unity of intelligence stands.
In this, two arguments made by Fred Hoyle are strikingly
relevant. First, again in The Intelligent Universe, he says, “It is a
strange aspect of science that until now it has kept consciousness
firmly out of any discussions of the material world. Yet it is with our
consciousness that we think and make observations, and it seems
surprising that there should be no interaction between the world of
the mind and matter. Instead of picturing ourselves as external
observers, quantum mechanics seems to imply that we cannot
separate ourselves from the events that we are observing,
sometimes to the extent of actually determining what takes place.”[9]
Think about this: what are we really trying to achieve, for
instance, through singularity? We are trying to reveal that the
universe—as the Vedanta upholds and quantum theory is telling us
with much greater, richer detail—is a union of intelligence that
governs every activity in it that can be achieved.
We are building a network that recognizes that we are
manifestations of the same whole, and therefore, have ever-rising
levels of trust for deeper, richer, more intimate, and more sustainable
relationships that do not seek ownership but only lasting affection.
The recognition that our lives and each of our interactions are in
essence transient, and yet the way to embrace them is by being
completely trusting and totally present in that moment, is the only
way to achieve harmony with the universe.
What is or where is God in all this then?
 Fred Hoyle asks a very relevant question. “So starting from
astronomy and biology with a little physics, we have arrived at
religion. What happens if the situation is inverted, and we look at
science from the religious point of view? How do the two approaches
match up? The answer to this question turns on the form of theology.
In contemporary Western teachings, the points of contact are few,
essentially because god is placed outside the universe and in control
of it. By contrast, in many other religions past and present [like the
Vedanta], deities lie very much within the universe.”[10] This placing
of God “within the universe” is what makes Hinduism even more
relevant in the Internet age.
If you think this view is not mainstream or is too esoteric, then
you are wrong. In 2014, eighty scientists—including professors from
Harvard, Cambridge, Cornell, and Princeton—from around the world,
including one Nobel Prize winner, called for more research into the
study of consciousness.
And if that doesn’t convince you, there’s even an app called
“Collective Consciousness” that explores just this—our innate
connections with each other. It explores how our minds are
connected to our physical reality, which the PEAR (Princeton
Engineering Anomalies Research) lab and the Institute of Noetic
Sciences are also studying. Just so that you don’t think that all this is
too boring, the team that built it, apart from Silicon Valley and
Princeton techies, also includes a man who was the tech go-to-guy
of Lady Gaga.
As I came to the end of this book, I read an essay by historian
Yuval Noah Harari on big data. Harari rose to fame with his
enlightening book Sapiens, a sprawling history of the species. In a
piece published in the Financial Times, he argued that we live in a
world where data analytics is the new unquestionable authority—
quite like the way, in fact, we once thought about God. We are
shifting the decision-making power that makes us human to big data,
allowing it to influence our choices about everything from what books
and clothes we buy to whom we date. “[E]ven if Dataism is wrong
about life, it may still conquer the world. Many previous creeds
gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual
mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not
Dataism? Dataism has especially good prospects, because it is
currently spreading across all scientific disciplines. A unified
scientific paradigm may easily become an unassailable dogma. If
you don’t like this, and you want to stay beyond the reach of the
algorithms, there is probably just one piece of advice to give you, the
oldest in the book: know thyself. In the end, it’s a simple empirical
question. As long as you have greater insight and self-knowledge
than the algorithms, your choices will still be superior and you will
keep at least some authority in your hands. If the algorithms
nevertheless seem poised to take over, it is mainly because most
human beings hardly know themselves at all,” wrote Harari.[11]
As a Hindu, two things immediately occurred to me when I read
this—one, Harari is making the Dawkins mistake. The examples of
authority he provides are Christianity and Communism—both of
which, for the most part, base their tenets on one truth and one
book. That’s not how a Hindu looks at authority.
Second, his advice—know thyself—is the main mantra, the
founding principle of Hinduism. If there is one underlying principle of
Hindu thought it is that there is no answer but to know yourself; only
by knowing yourself is the finding of any answers possible.
It seems Hinduism might have some relevance in the world of
Dataism after all.
1. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic
(July/August 2008).
2. Anna Lena Phillips, “The Shallows,” review of The Shallows: What
the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, American
Scientist (September/October 2010).
3. Stephen Ufford, “The Future of the Sharing Economy Depends on
Trust,” Forbes (February 10, 2015).
4. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Viking, 2005),
112–113.
5. Christof Teuscher, Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker
(Berlin: Springer 2004), 406.
6. Huxley, quoted in Swami Ranganathananda, Practical Vedanta
and the Science of Values (Belur Math: Advaita Ashrama, 2012),
102–103.
7. Hoyle, quoted in Ranganathananda, Practical Vedanta and the
Science of Values, 74–75.
8. Swami Vivekananda, Religion and American Cultures: An
Encyclopedia of Traditions, Diversity, and Popular Expressions, vol.
1, ed. Gary Laderman and Luis León (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,
2003), 798.
9. Swami Ranganathananda, Human Being in Depth: A Scientific
Approach to Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 17.
10. Swami Ranganathananda, The Indian Vision of God as Mother
(Belur Math: Advaita Ashrama, 1992).
11. Yuval Noah Harari, “Big Data, Google and the End of Free Will,”
Financial Times (August 26, 2016).
[Link]
 Chapter 10
A Start-up for the Soul
Why Reexamine the Hindu Way?

One of the last things I read as I finished this book was

American writer Alan Watts’s The Book: On the Taboo Against
Knowing Who You Are. His writing draws from a variety of Eastern
sources of engaging with the divine, from Hinduism to Buddhism and
Jainism, but this particular book is extremely dedicated to applying
the Vedanta in the world that the writer saw around him.
In it, Watts takes the very basic idea of the Vedanta and
constructs a way of life that could be led on that basis. What is that
idea? That idea is that there is no difference between you, or me,
and the rest of the world that we see around us. At the very
fundamental level there is unity, not difference.
Everything that we do ought to raise us to a greater awareness
of this unity. As Seamus Heaney wrote,
Here on earth my labours were
The stepping stones to upper air.
Lives that suffer and come right
Are backlit by immortal light.[1]

But almost everything we do actually does not.

I wrote this book because I have lived my entire adult life in
India, where the question of faith seems to consistently creep into
our public and private existence. It has been deeply present in our
political lives and certainly unavoidable in our social lives. But I could
not, in my readings, find a contemporary record of going through the
many pulls and pressures, the everyday friction of considering God.
Our education system—though it is called a system, it is
perhaps better described as our education anarchy—certainly seems
inadequate to deal with a question that often arises at the most
inopportune moments.
There were gods and goddesses at home and prayers and
hymns at school. The festivals and holidays were full of them.
Names of the Almighty were whispered when one was unwell, was
being tucked into bed, and when people arrived or left home—a
small prayer to wish them safe travel. There was no place where a
bit of religion did not turn up. When one was thrilled or when
something was achieved, one was told to give thanks in His name.
“Jao thakur ke pronam kore esho” (go say a prayer of thanks to
God), my mother would say. One would dutifully take off the rubber
slippers one wore at home, scrape the feet on the coir mat outside
the little puja ghar at one corner of the house, and say a little prayer.
The words of that prayer are what I mutter even today, “Thakur,
bhakti dao, subuddhi dao / Tomate moti dao, gyan dao.” God, please
give me devotion, (good) intelligence / Set my mind on you, grant me
wisdom.
In this prayer, I later realized, lay hidden the deepest desires
and anxieties of my parents and also their most overwhelming
humility and simplicity, for what were they teaching me to ask for?
This was not a prayer that could be found in any book or sermon or
hymn. This was the invention of my parents. This came straight from
the most reticent recesses of their simple hearts.
It took me years to understand this, but the dominant theme in
the life of my parents was fear. They were children of the Partition.
Their parents had left what is now Bangladesh and everything they
owned there, fleeing to India. The stories they heard as children
were, in equal measure, redolent of a fertile past and merciless
slaughter.
My parents had the instinct of loss hardwired in them. They did
not remember the sights, nor recall the smells, but they had been
told stories. Those stories told them that the world was not to be
trusted and one never entirely lets the guard down.
It also taught them another thing. My grandmother used to tell
me, “All you really have lies inside your head.” On summer
afternoons when I lay in bed listening to her stories from her village
in Bangladesh, about the big fishes in the ponds, the meals cooked
every day to feed at least one hundred people and endless rice fields
wherever you looked, I wondered what that meant. How can all that
we have be in our heads? Did I not have the house we lived in? The
clothes? What about my mother’s brass utensils? My father’s old
wrist watch? Our new clothes bought every Durga Puja?
 One day, while saying the little prayer my parents taught to me, I
finally understood what my grandmother meant. It was all hidden in
that prayer. What did my parents ask me to pray for? Devotion,
intelligence, and also wisdom. Curiously, for people who had only
heard stories all their lives from their parents about how much they
had lost during Partition, their plea was not for material well-being,
nor for a roof over their head or food to eat, but for a sound mind. All
you have, they understood, lies in your head.
But in the years when I began to, on rote, repeat this prayer, no
one explained to me what it really meant and why it was of use to
me. No one told me what do to with this thing called God. What did
we have to do with religion? What could we? We stumbled upon
God, as we had stumbled upon so many other things. Where was
the book or the person who would tell us, as Alan Watts realized,
that “true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of
oneself.”[2] But where was that self whose knowledge we needed to
gain? Who would or could guide us to that soul? We had no
answers.
In his book, Alan Watts addresses what he sees as the
fundamental disconnect that many Christians feel from the idea of
God as explained by that faith, and he explains that it has to do with
the monochromatic image of God as the father figure.
“Our Father, who art in heaven”—it all begins from that image,
says Watts.[3] This reflects in the lives of ordinary people too, he
says, where children see the male parent as someone who goes
away each day to earn money that is then spent at home.
“The younger members of our society have for some time been
in growing rebellion against paternal authority and the paternal state.
For one reason, the home in an industrial society is chiefly a
dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that
wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character
who brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to
forget about his job and have fun,” wrote Watts. “All this is further
aggravated by the fact that parents no longer educate their own
children. Thus the child does not grow up with understanding of or
enthusiasm for his father’s work.”[4]
 When I read this, I wondered two things. First, it dawned on me
that I had had no insight or education into the profession that my
father spent all his life involved in—that of a railway civil engineer. I
was proud that he had helped build India’s first metro or tube railway
networks in two cities—Calcutta and Delhi—but I knew nothing else
about his work. What did he do every day when he went to work?
What were his dreams and aspirations? The truth is I did not know,
and even today, do not know as much as I should. What did this lack
of knowledge really mean? It meant that, for me, my father and my
mother remained access points to material and emotional succor. I
knew little about them, and what I did seemed disturbingly
transactional. This also made me think of my understanding of God
and myself. Who was I a supplicant to? What kind of transactions
was I trying to effect with God? Why was I encouraged, like so many
millions of my coreligionists, to quickly barter some blessings from
God every time there was trouble?
How many Hindus really know why they pray? What do the
mantras mean, and why do they mouth them? No one taught us to
understand that the act of prayer is really inward, not outward, and
that in the act of seeking, all you can ever hope to receive is the
understanding of that which lies within you.
We grow up believing that to pray is to reach out to the external,
that which lies outside of us. All the while, in reality, we are seeking
something that lies within us. Our relationship with God, we are led
to believe when we grow older, is irrational hocus pocus. It is not just
embarrassingly naïve but condemnably stupid to be discussing
matters like faith. The opiate of the masses is not for us, for we are,
presumably, not the masses.
Our ideologies are external, as also our notions of home. The
first buds of civilization are often dismissed as maudlin, regressively
sentimental, and precociously brushed away as “conditioning.”
But the idea of God, like the idea of home, never quite goes
away. Especially if you have grown up with that idea popping up
everywhere, from calendar art to holiday feasts. This is why
understanding how you or I feel about it, how we negotiate it, how
we address it, and what it means to us is so important.
 Cultural historian Peter Gay in his ambitious study of modernism
described it as “far easier to exemplify than describe.”[5] The reason
why we need or seek this ephemeral idea called God is also that—
far easier to exemplify than describe. The more I thought about this,
the more I understood that this journey of understanding God, which
is also one’s real self, opens to us our most complicated needs. For
instance, our need to be vulnerable.
What is prayer if not a lesson in the profound power of
vulnerability? Prayer teaches us that to be vulnerable is to be
human, even alive.
But the idea that one prays for external sustenance is not the
basis of the sanatana dharma. Wonderfully, if you contemplate this,
Hinduism teaches that your prayers are truly directed, in a sense, to
yourself. You are praying to yourself. That kind of blows your mind to
begin with, and then there is a trickle of recognition that this is
curiously liberating. It brings a new perspective to what has been
thought of as primitive. You start to recognize that the power of
prayer, for instance, is a process of addressing long-neglected parts
of your psyche. It is the process of truth telling, to yourself. I was
once asked if Hinduism had its own version of the confessional
chamber, where a priest calmly listens to your admission of guilt and
frailty. I pondered that and came to the conclusion that sanatana
dharma did in fact have a sense of disgorging the truths from the
soul, with one difference—the confession here is to oneself. The
speaker and the listener is you.
So, I feel that understanding how we relate to God is far from
futile. Understanding how you relate to the idea which you turn to—
sometimes perhaps almost embarrassingly in your most helpless
moments—can hardly be useless. In fact, it is entirely seminal in our
individual journeys. It is only through this travel that we come to
appreciate that there isn’t one individual journey; it is the
manifestation of the larger path the universe takes. Alan Watts
described the Vedanta’s view on this as the third way.
Apart from both the “sacred individual—the unique personal
ego, separate from both nature and God”[6] (essentially the extreme
capitalist view of man) and (the Communist view) of man as “the cog
in the industrial-collectivist machine, or the mere ‘hand’”[7] (as the
factory worker is often called), the third way is what the Vedanta
prescribes and Watts describes as, the human being “seen . . . as
one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses
itself—as an incarnation of the self, of the godhead, or whatever one
may choose to call it.”[8]
The realization of this is the step-by-step process of
understanding the idea of God and the process of prayer. Why do we
fail to appreciate this? Perhaps it is because we have been led to
believe that searching for anything that even remotely talks about
God is somehow old-fashioned, if not barbaric.
The beauty of Hinduism is that sanatana dharma and its
principles are so fundamentally universal, and so personal, that the
question of them being dated does not arise. How can your search
for yourself become regressive?
Mahatma Gandhi understood this and spent his life trying to
explain it. In 1927, responding to a question, he said, “I accept no
authority or any shashtra (scriptural text) as an infallible guide. I
reject the claim that we should accept the whole if we accept a part.”
He was then asked, “Then would you accept what is convenient and
reject what is inconvenient?”
“That’s a good question,” Gandhi replied. “Hinduism is not a
codified religion. In Hinduism we have got this remarkable foot rule
to measure every shashtra and every rule of conduct, and that is
truth. Let us not deceive ourselves into the belief that everything that
is written in Sanskrit and printed in shashtras has any binding effect
upon us. That which is opposed to the maxims of morality, that which
is opposed to trained reason, cannot be claimed as shashtra no
matter how ancient it may be.”[9]
But what is this truth? Where does it come from? Who builds or
creates these “maxims of morality”? And “trained reason” according
to whom?
In 1940, Gandhi was even more emphatic about where his
morality and trained reason came from, “My reason follows my heart.
Without the latter, it would go astray. Faith is the function of the
heart. It must be reinforced by reason. The two are not antagonistic
as some think. The more intense one’s faith is, the more it whets
one’s reason. I have not put my reason in cold storage. When faith
becomes blind, it dies.”[10]
These are critical questions. As resonant as they were when
Gandhi answered them, they are perhaps even more so today as
modernity asks that we bare ever more intimate parts of ourselves,
dismantling and disintegrating what feels like our very selves. The
Church faces one of the most turbulent times in its history, Islam is
ravaged by bloodshed, and even Buddhism in Myanmar, Sri Lanka,
and some parts of China is witnessing aggressive streaks. We are
told that Hinduism in India is turning ever more hardline. It is,
therefore, more critical than ever to define not just what being Hindu
means but also what it does not mean; that to be Hindu is to be
plural is not enough. We must aggressively proclaim that to be Hindu
is to shun bigotry, to accept diversity, to embrace differences, to
respect gender rights, and to actively adopt new technologies and
sciences.
The irreverent is a valuable part of the Hindu worldview but not
the irrational.
To debate what constitutes a “good Hindu” is futile and
dangerously veers towards the old “good Muslim/bad Muslim” trap. It
is infinitely better to chart out acceptable ideologies in our times. For
instance, discrimination on the basis of birth is unacceptable, no
matter which ritual, faith, or priest says so.
Finally, it is the ethics of the ideology and not the subjective
ethics of the applicant that ought to determine the trajectory of a
religion. Therefore, the idea worth promoting is that any Hindu
seeking to understand his faith ought to turn to its core, its
philosophies, and not its penances. It is on the generosity of
Hinduism that a true Hindu identity can be built.
It is, in short, tougher than ever perhaps to be God, but only if
you see God as a distant, mythical entity. Otherwise, you would have
to argue that it has never been tougher to be you, wouldn’t you?
In the age of start-ups, wherein every aspect of human life is,
once again, being reimagined, and we are being told that everything
will be disrupted, there is now an urgent need to build a new kind of
start-up.
 Why do we need such a start-up? What are we trying to disrupt?
What, to be honest, ought to be disrupted? Maybe our sense of self?
It is worth thinking about, is it not, where we draw our sense of self
from? And how can we renegotiate the lines that give us an identity?
The idea that material possessions—this house, this car, that
dress, and that piece of stone—will not do is so overstated that one
is afraid that it has lost meaning. Even the adamantine refusal of
objectification has, sadly, itself become objectified.
Can we then consider not so much the problem but the
solution? How do we disrupt what we think about our very souls?
What makes it soulful? In our pursuit of happiness, how do we
embrace the pensive?
A start-up that will enable us to see that the pursuit of happiness
is always bound to fail if there is a pursuit. Happiness, like God-
realization, comes from within, but as always, we have externalized
something to be pursued. But what if a new start-up, a new
disruptive way of thinking about our lives, could tell us that anything
we imagine to be outside us that we need to find, hunt down,
conquer, possess, own, capture, put behind lock and key, well, that
thing then, is unlikely to make us happy?
It is like that image so many of us were so enamored with when
we were young—that of a naked Howard Roark standing on a cliff
and laughing, the ultimate Ayn Rand vision presented in The
Fountainhead of a world and nature, conquered by the sheer will of
man.
Why am I quoting Ayn Rand, of all people? Because simplistic
as she is—and sometimes even discredited in many parts of the
world, certainly in mine—Rand was vitally part of a growing-up
experience, a lesson in unfettered raw individualism that seemed so
wild, passionate, and attractive at one point. For me, this was no
doubt because I grew up in a Communist-ruled state in India.
Communists controlled the eastern Indian state of Bengal for more
than thirty years, and during this time, they took a prosperous,
industrial state and turned it into one of the most impoverished,
derelict, and violent in the country. Two generations of Bengalis fled
from jobless, despairing Calcutta, slowly, somnolently falling to
pieces. In such an environment, Rand made sense.
 When I look at politics around the world today, and the most
unbridled passions against, and even for, globalization, I am
constantly reminded of the shadowless philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Such uncompromising certitude, I have grown to believe, hides
either insecurity or ignorance—sometimes both. My personal journey
with my faith, with Hindu philosophy has helped me look at the world
with new eyes, with a confidence that needs neither bluster nor
inexactitude. And it is to explain how different and nuanced my ideas
of life have become through Hinduism that I mention Rand and her
merciless heroes at this point.
Read the following paragraphs carefully. Most likely you have
read them before. But perhaps I could convince you to relook at
them. Try and reanalyze with me their message and its worldview.

Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. . .

. The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in
half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began
and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in
space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the
man on the cliff. . . . His face was like a law of nature—a thing
one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones
over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a
contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth. . . . He looked at the
granite. These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the
drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped,
pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

It is a tantalizingly addictive image, isn’t it? There is something

about the idea of man being in supreme control of his will. But this
kind of control is the antithesis of the supreme divine power of man
that Vivekananda spoke about. Why?
Read the words carefully. Through it all flows the notion of the
supremacy of man over all he surveys, the sense that it all exists to
be conquered by man, while man stands aloof and arrogant from it
all, confident of his hegemony, his ultimate victory in a conflict to
dominate and subjugate all that he surveys. “So that the world
seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored
to the feet of the man on the cliff.”
I used to love this opening mise-en-scène; this sense of haughty
grandeur, this confidence that finally man wins. But at some point, as
I started reading the Vedanta, I began to question—wins against
what? What is man’s victory over? What are we conquering? And to
what end? Where is all our incessant conquest leading us? Is it, as
Alan Watts remarked scornfully, a bit like what the Red Queen said?
Here’s what happens in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass, the follow-up adventures of Alice after Wonderland:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d

generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long
time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it
takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If
you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as
fast as that!”[11]

In science fiction, this is known as the predestination paradox—

caught in an endless loop between two incidents of time travel, you
continue to vacillate between them, seemingly without possibility of
escape.
Is our endless conquest a bit like that? Does it seem that we
need to grow more, dig further and deeper, and exploit more while
taking increasingly dangerous risks, just to stay in the same place
and maintain the equilibrium of power in the world?
Unsurprisingly, the concept of the Red Queen’s race has been
used by at least one Financial Times columnist at the height of the
economic downturn in 2010. The reference was to a speech by
Andrew Haldane, chief economist and executive director of monetary
analysis and statistics at the Bank of England, who wailed about a
progressive rise in banking risk and at the same time, the
governmental safety net getting deeper and wider. The FT columnist
pointed out that this was a Red Queen’s race with “the system
running to stand still with governments racing to make finance safer
and bankers creating more risk.” Our world teaches us to run swiftly
just to remain in the same place but fails to ask: do we really want to
be in that place?
Such questions are not encouraged, are they? They are
dismissed as escapist, irrelevant, impractical and even “loser-like.”
The almost colonial urge to subjugate or the Stalinist desire to force
fit—those are our only options. In this, Rand has chosen her side.
Every description that Rand lined up for her hero was drained of
what she saw as weak-kneed sentimentality. Roark is gaunt-
cheeked, his eyes are cold and his mouth and veneer contemptuous.
One sees what Rand was aiming at. A refugee from the excesses of
Communism, she was painting the heroic individual against the
tyranny of the masses, the superego versus the cog in the wheel;
and in each, the superego wins.
But the world of the Vedantin recognizes the futility of both these
approaches. And it is because these are the choices that the world
mostly throws at us that we need a sense of our relationship with
ourselves, with a mystery that goes deep into our subconscious.
Ours is a world that serves sermons in playbooks for children and in
self-help books for adults. The book we need though ought to do
neither. It merely needs to push us to use that sense of rational
morality that Gandhi preached, of which he said,

I have no hesitation in rejecting scriptural authority of a doubtful

character. . . . Indeed I would reject all scriptural authority if it is
in conflict with sober reason or the dictates of the heart.
Authority sustains and ennobles the weak when it is the hand-
work of reason, but it degrades them when it supplants reason
sanctified by the still small voice within.[12]

We need a new kind of start-up that helps us answer the

questions within because no matter how many questions we address
without, unless the ones within are answered, there cannot be
peace. These answers do not need to be discovered. That is
perhaps the happiest situation. We already know that they exist. We
know where to find them, and we know that they lie in the collective
consciousness of humankind. What we have not yet managed is a
seamless, everyday way for everyone to access the answers, or
even start on the process of accessing the answers.
How do you begin? By understanding that if you are going to
stand naked on a cliff, enjoy the view and remember that it is all part
of you.
1. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London:
Faber and Faber, 2002), 11.
2. Alan Watts, “Who Wants To Be A Philosopher?” in The Book: On
the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (New York: Vintage, 1989).
3. Watts, The Book, 152–153.
4. Watts, The Book, 78.
5. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy—From Baudelaire to
Beckett and Beyond (London: Vintage UK, 2009), 1.
6. Watts, The Book, 78.
7. Watts, The Book, 78.
8. Watts, The Book, 78.
9. Mahatma Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism (Ahmedabad:
Navjivan Trust, 1987), 124.
10. Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism, 123–124.
11. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (Adelaide: University of
Adelaide, 2014).
12. Ajay Singh Almust, Lohia: The Rebel Gandhian (New Delhi:
Mittal Publications, 1998), 5.
[Link]
Notes

[Link]
 Index

A
aarti (chant ritual), 1 , 2
Abrahamic faiths, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Absolute (Brahman), 1 , 2.1-2.2
absolutism, 1
Abu-i-Fazl, 1
action (karma), 1 , 2
Adamson, Peter, 1.1-1.2
Advaita Vedanta, 1 , 2
Agastya, 1
aghoris (monk sect), 1 , 2
Akbar (emperor), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Alexander (prince), 1.1-1.2
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 1
Ambedkar, B. R., 1 , 2.1-2.2
America, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
Ardhanarishvara: The Androgyne (Pande), 1.1-1.2
Arjun (warrior), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
Arthashastra (Kautilya), 1 , 2.1-2.2
Artificial Intelligence, 1.1-1.2
Aryabhata, 1 , 2 , 3
Aryan Invasion Theory, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Aryans, 1.1-1.2
Aslan, Reza, 1.1-1.2
Assemblies of God, 1
Assembly of God Church School, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Atharva Veda, 1
Atman (soul), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Aurangzeb, 1.1-1.2 , 2
avatars, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Ayurveda, 1
B
Babu, D. Shyam, 1.1-1.2
Babur, Muhammad Zahir-ud-din (emperor), 1 , 2
Banaras (Benaras/Kashi/Varanasi), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Banaras: City of Light (Eck), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
banyan seed story, 1.1-1.2
Barua, Ankur, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
Basham, A. L., 1
Baudhayana Sulvasutra, 1.1-1.2
beliefs, 1.1-1.2
Believer series (CNN), 1.1-1.2
Benaras See Banaras
Berger, Ronald, 1
Bhagavad Gita, 1 , 2.1-2.2
See also Krishna
bhakti (devotion) yoga, 1 , 2
Bhandarkar, D. R., 1.1-1.2
Bharat (Bharata), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Bhargava, Manjul, 1
Bhargava, Purshottam Lal, 1
Bhaskara II, 1
Bible See Assembly of God Church School See Genesis
Bohm, David, 1
Brahmagupta, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Brahman (Absolute), 1 , 2.1-2.2
Brahmo Samaj, 1.1-1.2
brain, 1.1-1.2
Briggs, Rick, 1.1-1.2
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Brown, Brené, 1
Brown, Dean, 1.1-1.2
Buddha, 1.1-1.2
Buddhism, 1
Buntain, Huldah, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Buntain, Mark, 1 , 2.1-2.2
C
Calasso, Roberto, 1.1-1.2
Caldwell, Robert, 1
Capra, Fritjof, 1.1-1.2
Carr, Nicholas, 1.1-1.2
Carroll, Lewis, 1.1-1.2
Carvaka, 1
caste, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
discrimination and, 1.1-1.2
economic mobility and, 1.1-1.2
Chakrabarti, D. K., 1 , 2.1-2.2
chanting meditation (diksha), 1.1-1.2
chant ritual (aarti), 1 , 2
Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 1
Chaubey, Gyaneshwar, 1
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 1
chemistry, 1.1-1.2
children, 1.1-1.2
Christ, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Christianity, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
Hinduism compared to, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Jesuit, 1.1-1.2
See also Assemblies of God

“
“Clash of Civilizations” theory, 1.1-1.2

C
Colebrooke, Henry, 1
colonialism, 1.1-1.2
commercialization, 1.1-1.2
communism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
concentration, 1
consciousness, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
science and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Constitution, 1
conversion, 1
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1
cow slaughter, 1 , 2.1-2.2
creation, 1.1-1.2
in Genesis, 1.1-1.2
in “Nasadiya Sukta,” 1.1-1.2
of water, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
cremation, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Cunningham, Alexander, 1.1-1.2
customs, 1.1-1.2

D
Dalai Lama, 1
Dalits, 1.1-1.2
Danino, Michel, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Darwin, Charles, 1.1-1.2
Das, Gurcharan, 1.1-1.2
Dasgupta, Surendranath, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Dataism, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Dawkins, Richard, 1.1-1.2 , 2
death, 1.1-1.2 , 2
rituals for, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Desai, Meghnad, 1
dharma (duty), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
dictator state, 1.1-1.2
diksha (chanting meditation), 1.1-1.2
Diophantus, 1
discrimination, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
divine human beings, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Durant, Will, 1
Durga Puja, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Dutt, Barkha, 1
duty (dharma), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

E
Eck, Diana, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2
on Banaras, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
economic mobility, 1.1-1.2
Eddington, Arthur, 1.1-1.2
Einstein, Albert, 1
environment, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
epics, 1.1-1.2
eternal law (sanatana dharma), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
ethics, 1
Euler, Leonhard, 1
evangelicals See Assembly of God Church School

F
faith (shraddha), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
Abrahamic, 1 , 2.1-2.2
family, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
fathers and, 1.1-1.2
fear related to, 1.1-1.2
prayer from, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
female infanticide, 1
festivals, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Feynman, Richard, 1.1-1.2
Fisk, Robert, 1
Frawley, David, 1
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 1.1-1.2

G
Gabbard, Tulsi, 1.1-1.2
Galileo Galilei, 1
Gandhi, Mahatma, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
on truth, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Ganeri, Jonardon, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Ganges River (Ganga), 1 , 2 , 3
garba griha (temple sanctum sanctorum), 1.1-1.2
Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 1
Gay, Peter, 1

“
“Gayatri Mantra” (hymn), 1

G
gender ratio, 1
Genesis, 1.1-1.2 , 2
genetics, 1.1-1.2
geography, 1.1-1.2
ghats (platforms), 1 , 2
globalization, 1
God, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2
in Genesis, 1.1-1.2 , 2
names of, 1.1-1.2
Ramakrishna on, 1.1-1.2
science related to, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
search for, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Self as, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
sight of, 1.1-1.2
unity of, 1.1-1.2
gods and goddesses, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Godse, Nathuram, 1 , 2
Goenka, Satya Narayan, 1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1

H
Haldane, Andrew, 1
Harari, Yuval Noah, 1.1-1.2
Hasan, Mehdi, 1.1-1.2
Heaney, Seamus, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Heisenberg, Werner, 1
henotheism, 1
Hinduism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
history, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Hitchens, Christopher, 1
homosexuality, 1.1-1.2
Hoyle, Fred, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
human beings, 1.1-1.2
unity and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Huntington, Samuel, 1.1-1.2
Huxley, Julian, 1
hymns, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

I
ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad, 1.1-1.2
idealism, 1.1-1.2
Idealistic Interpretation, 1
identity, 1.1-1.2
idols, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Ikshvakus, 1
illusion (maya), 1.1-1.2
India, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Islam in, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Indian National Congress, 1
Indian Space Research Organisation, 1
Indophobia, 1
Indra (king of gods), 1
Indus Valley civilization, 1
Instrumentalism, 1
intelligence, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Internet, 1.1-1.2
Iron Pillar of Delhi, 1
Isha Upanishad, 1
Isherwood, Christopher, 1
Islam, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
reform movements in, 1.1-1.2
sin in, 1.1-1.2
See also Muslims
Islamofascism, 1
Iyer, Padma, 1.1-1.2
Iyer, Pico, 1 , 2
J
jagran singers, 1
Jahan, Shah, 1.1-1.2
Jain, Devaki, 1
Jainism, 1
Janak (king), 1
Janmashtami, 1
Jeans, James, 1.1-1.2
jnana (knowledge) yoga, 1.1-1.2
Jones, William, 1 , 2
Judaism, 1
Juluri, Vamsee, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Jung, Carl, 1.1-1.2
Jyotirisha, 1

K
Kal Bhairav shrine, 1
Kalidasa, 1
Kamasutra, 1.1-1.2
Kapur, Devesh, 1.1-1.2
karma (action), 1 , 2
karma (action) yoga, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Kashi Vishwanath temple, 1.1-1.2
Kautilya, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Kaviraj, M. M. Gopinath, 1.1-1.2
Krishna, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 1
Kshatriya (warrior caste), 1
Kurzweil, Ray, 1.1-1.2

L
Levy, David, 1
light, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
Lightman, Alan, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
linguistics, 1.1-1.2
loneliness, 1.1-1.2
love, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Luther, Martin, 1

M
Machiavelli, Florentine Niccolo, 1
Mackinder, H. J., 1
Madan, T. N., 1.1-1.2
Mahabharata, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Mahavakyas, 1.1-1.2
Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Malhotra, Rajiv, 1
Malik, Kenan, 1.1-1.2
Manusmriti, 1
Maratha Shivaji, 1.1-1.2
marriage, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
mathematics, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
maya (illusion), 1.1-1.2
Mazumdar, A. K., 1
medicine, 1.1-1.2
meditation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Mehta, Ishira, 1 , 2
Mill, James, 1
Mill, John Stuart, 1
mind, 1
mindfulness, 1.1-1.2
missionaries, 1
See also Assemblies of God
Modi, Narendra, 1
monk sect (aghoris), 1 , 2
monotheism, 1.1-1.2
Mookerji, Radhakumud, 1
Moore, Walter, 1
Moore’s Law, 1
Muhammad (prophet), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Müller, Max, 1
multitasking, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Mumford, David, 1 , 2
Mundaka Upanishad, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
music, 1 , 2
Muslims, 1 , 2
after 9/11, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
myths, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

“
“Nasadiya Sukta” (hymn, Rig Veda), 1.1-1.2

N
Nataraj, 1
nationalism, 1.1-1.2
Needham, Joseph, 1.1-1.2

9
9/11, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

N
Noble, Margaret Elizabeth, 1

P
Pande, Alka, 1.1-1.2
Pandita, Rahul, 1
Panini, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Pargiter, Frederick Eden, 1
Partition, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Pascal, Blaise, 1
patron saints (pir), 1
Pattanaik, Devdutt, 1.1-1.2
Pew Research, 1 , 2 , 3
Phule, Jyotiba, 1
pictures, 1.1-1.2
pilgrimage, 1
Pingala, 1.1-1.2
pir (patron saints), 1
platforms (ghats), 1 , 2
Pliny the Elder, 1
Plofker, Kim, 1
pollution, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
polytheism, 1.1-1.2
popular beliefs, 1.1-1.2
pran pratishtha (prayer), 1.1-1.2
Prasad, Chandra Bhan, 1.1-1.2
prayer, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
from family, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Prichett, Lant, 1.1-1.2
Prochnik, George, 1
proselytizing, 1.1-1.2
pujas, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Pythagoras, 1.1-1.2

Q
quantum physics, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Upanishads and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Quran, 1 , 2

R
Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti, 1
raja (meditation) yoga, 1 , 2
Ramakrishna Math and Mission, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Ramakrishna Paramhansa, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
Ramana Maharshi, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Ramayana, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Rand, Ayn, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Ratirahasya (Kukkoka), 1
Ravan, 1
Ray, Prafulla Chandra, 1.1-1.2
realism, 1.1-1.2 , 2
reality, 1.1-1.2
reform movements, 1.1-1.2
in Islam, 1.1-1.2
religions, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Rig Veda, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
“Nasadiya Sukta” from, 1.1-1.2
rituals, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6
for death, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Russell, Bertrand, 1

S
Sagan, Carl, 1.1-1.2
Sahajanand, Swami, 1
salt water story, 1.1-1.2
sanatana dharma (eternal law), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Sanskrit, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
See also specific books
Sanyal, Sanjeev, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Saraswati, Dayanand, 1
Saraswati River, 1.1-1.2
Sarkar, Jadunath, 1.1-1.2
Sarma, K. V., 1
sati (ritual suicide), 1 , 2
Schama, Simon, 1
Schrödinger, Erwin, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
science, 1.1-1.2
chemistry, 1.1-1.2
consciousness and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
God related to, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
mathematics and, 1.1-1.2
medicine, 1.1-1.2
Vedanta and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Vivekananda on, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
See also quantum physics
secularism, 1
Self, 1 , 2 , 3
conversation with, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
as God, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
self-knowledge, 1 , 2
senses, 1 , 2.1-2.2
sexuality, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2
homosexuality, 1.1-1.2
Shankar, Ravi, 1
Shankaracharya, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Shiva, 1 , 2 , 3
shraddha See faith
Shukoh, Dara, 1.1-1.2
sight
of God, 1.1-1.2
of universe, 1.1-1.2
silence, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
sin, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Singh, Lalji, 1
Smritis, 1 , 2
social conditioning, 1.1-1.2
solar energy, 1.1-1.2
soul (Atman), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
spirituality, 1.1-1.2
Sridhara, 1
Starck, Philippe, 1
stillness See silence
Subbarayappa, 1
Sufism, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Sukhdeo (Suheldev) (raja), 1
Surya Namaskar, 1.1-1.2
Sushruta Samhita, 1.1-1.2
Svetasvatara Upanishad, 1
Swarup, Ram, 1
synthesis, 1.1-1.2

T
taboo subjects, 1
Tagore, Rabindranath, 1
Taittiriya Upanishad, 1
Tejani, Shabnum, 1.1-1.2
temple sanctum sanctorum (garba griha), 1.1-1.2
Teresa, Mother, 1 , 2
Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 1.1-1.2
time, 1.1-1.2
Toynbee, Arnold, 1
traditions, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Trautman, Thomas, 1
trust, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
truth, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
customs related to, 1.1-1.2
Gandhi on, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Turkle, Sherry, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 1.1-1.2

U
Ufford, Stephen, 1
uncertainty, 1.1-1.2
unity, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
of God, 1.1-1.2
human beings and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
in Mahavakyas, 1.1-1.2
trust related to, 1.1-1.2
Upanishads on, 1.1-1.2
universe, 1.1-1.2
untouchability, 1.1-1.2
Upanishads, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Mundaka, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
quantum physics and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Shukoh and, 1 , 2.1-2.2
on unity, 1.1-1.2

V
Vajnavalkya, 1.1-1.2
Vedanta, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
science and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Watts on, 1.1-1.2
Vedantin, 1 , 2
Vedas, 1.1-1.2 , 2
See also Upanishads See also specific books
vegetarianism, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Vivekananda and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra, 1
Vinge, Vernor, 1
violence, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Vishnu Purana, 1
Vivekananda, Swami, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
against caste, 1.1-1.2
on evolution, 1.1-1.2
God and, 1.1-1.2
on karma yoga, 1
on perfection, 1.1-1.2
Ramakrishna and, 1.1-1.2
on science, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
on truth, 1
on Vedas, 1
vegetarianism and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Vivien de Saint Martin, Louis, 1
vulnerability, 1 , 2.1-2.2

W
Wahhabism, 1.1-1.2
Wainaina, Binyavanga, 1.1-1.2
water, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
creation of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Watts, Alan, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
on Vedanta, 1.1-1.2
Wheeler, John, 1
Wilber, Ken, 1.1-1.2
Witten, Edward, 1.1-1.2
women, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

Y
yoga, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
[Link]
 About the Author

Hindol Sengupta is an award-winning writer and journalist. He

is the author of seven books. He is the youngest writer, and the only
Indian, to be short-listed for the Hayek Book Prize given by the
Manhattan Institute in memory of the Nobel laureate economist F. A.
Hayek. He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and
sits on the steering committee of the Australia India Youth Dialogue.
He is a Senior Fellow of the liberal think-tank Centre for Civil Society.
His not-for-profit, the Whypoll Trust, has worked on gender mapping
of cities and women’s safety technology, and its Grin
([Link] initiative is a storytelling platform on social
enterprise which has gathered ideas from fifteen countries.
[Link]