7. Reform of Hinduism in the 19th–20th centuries. Religious syncretism

Lecture

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faces; and the symbolic or actual gift of a cow. If the funeral was accompanied by cremation, there follows the ceremony of gathering the bones, which will subsequently be cast into a sacred river.

Preparations, more or less carefully carried out depending on the ritual status and financial position of those performing the funerary rite, immediately send the deceased on a new journey. At the same time, these samskaras proper, or shraddhas, as they are called, set into motion the entire funerary ritual as a whole and thereby transfer all subsequent actions into a new, important dimension of Hindu life and thought.

If we sum up and reflect on what we have learned in studying the individual life cycle as it is understood in Hinduism, several important points emerge that help us see this tradition as a whole. For example, we may observe correspondences between cosmic time and individual time, as well as a correspondence between generations of ancestors and their descendants. The seed of the individual is ritually cast into the field-womb, where it ripens over the course of ten lunar months («days»). After the individual's death, his worn-out body is ritually given over to fire or earth to be consumed, and a new temporary body is ritually generated, which likewise «ripens» on the tenth day and serves so that the deceased may join, within it, the company of the ancestors. In this light, the gathering of all the other rituals around the points of birth and death-rebirth becomes most comprehensible.

All these rituals are pervaded by strong connections to the most ancient layers of Hinduism. It is probably the samskaras and rites connected with ancestor worship that best preserve the memory of their ancient Vedic origin. The principal samskaras have retained their essential character through many centuries of change in practice and doctrinal teaching. They have proven to be the pan-Indian model, the unifying pattern that has been able to withstand local divergences and popular innovations that inevitably arose across the whole subcontinent. Of course, by no means does every householder today perform the full set of samskaras, but everyone knows the system, everyone practices the most significant of them, and tries – even if their order is abbreviated or several different rituals are combined into a single ceremony – to perform as many of them as possible over the eldest of his male children. Among other things, we see here also a ritually expressed need for the continuation of the lineage, for the living to serve as a link between departed ancestors and as-yet-unborn descendants – a link whose principal bearer, according to ancient tradition, is held to be the male who begets. And, as has already been repeatedly noted, in these rituals lies the deep spiritual foundation of the psychology of Hinduism.

Finally, an individual person, by himself, is incapable either of coming into being or of remaining whole, pure, or unharmed. This requires ritual prescriptions that guide the lifelong process of nurturing and cultivation. This process unfolds within the framework of the individual's family, at its sacred hearth. Household deities may also be involved in it or mentioned within it, yet none of them is credited with performing the spiritual transformations through which a person passes on his life path. The visible performer of this process is a man – the head of the family, or an invited priest from among the brahmins – but the success of all their actions aimed at the improvement, formation, and cultivation of the continuously advancing individual is owed to the ritual «work» itself, which alone is capable of placing a person on the next step of the path leading to complete liberation.

7. Reform of Hinduism in the 19th–20th centuries. Religious syncretism in India

Two imposing figures in the mid-nineteenth century left the most notable mark. Each of these two men was the founder of a society

(samaj), which saw its task as adapting Hinduism to the demands of the new age; each was convinced that it was precisely the Vedas that could become the foundation of a revived faith, and each sought to expand his reforming activity to an all-Indian scale. Yet their life experiences and the questions that occupied them differed considerably.

Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) – a Bengali intellectual who came from a brahmin background, founder of the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) in 1828 – traveled to England, was in his youth strongly influenced by Islamic and Christian missionaries, and considered that the traditions of Hinduism were excessively burdened by the cult of sacred images, polytheistic myths, popular festivals, tangled rules of caste conduct, and conservative doctrines such as the conception of samsara. In other words, all the features of Hinduism that strike the imagination of the Western observer began to seem to Rammohan Roy alien to genuine Hindu faith. Having already translated the Sanskrit Upanishads into English and Bengali, he regarded them as the quintessence of the wisdom of the Vedas and a rational, humanistic foundation for religious renewal. The gatherings of the society he founded closely resembled Protestant services, at which sermons were delivered built on texts from the Upanishads, which had become a kind of scripture; hymns were sung, and prayers offered, addressed to a single supreme God whose nature was disclosed in the Upanishads. Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), father of the Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, and Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–1884), later led the activity of this society and one of its offshoots. However, the regional narrowness and elitist character of the society, represented by intellectuals from the upper classes of Bengal, made untenable its far-from-modest claims to refute the traditional Hindu worldview, which by that time was already twenty-five centuries old.

Another brahmin from Gujarat named Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883) likewise preached the necessity of returning to ancient Vedic knowledge, but he saw the key to reforming Hinduism not in the Upanishads but in the mantras of the «Rigveda.» His interpretation of these mantras was rather idiosyncratic, since he used them to develop ideas about a single supreme God, karma, and samsara. He was equally inventive with regard to what he could not find in the «Rigveda,» supplementing all aspects of the sacrificial ritual in his own way. The Arya Samaj (Society of Aryans), founded by Dayananda in 1875, had its center for several decades in another region of India – the Punjab – before gradually extending its influence over the whole Hindi-speaking north, achieving greater success than the Brahmo Samaj not only in terms of covering new territories but also in penetrating several varnas at once. This new society, in fact, acquired a bad reputation, since it admitted untouchables to the sacred path of spiritual growth. However, like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj also did not

achieve significant results, becoming entangled in the complex questions of social reform and military policy.

Significantly different from these two reformers, each of whom professed an ideology aimed at undermining Puranic Hinduism in favor of universal monotheism, were three other powerful figures – Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo – who became the founders of two religious schools that continue to actively propagate contemporary Hinduism in India and in the West to this day.

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a Bengali brahmin, temple priest, and inspired mystic whose spiritual path – through yoga, Tantrism, Vedanta, Vaishnava monotheism, Christianity, and Islam – never led him far from faith in the energy of the feminine creative principle (shakti), which he worshipped as the Goddess Kali.

His closest disciple was Vivekananda (1863–1902), founder of the Ramakrishna Mission and the order of its adherents, who at present are in greater accord with the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta than with Ramakrishna's eclectic mysticism. Today every schoolchild in India knows of an event that is the pride of the entire Indian nation: in 1893, at the World's Parliament of Religions held in Chicago, Vivekananda «astonished the West,» demonstrating the philosophical depth of Hinduism. The result of this event was the appearance of Vedanta societies in New York, San Francisco, and other major centers. The Ramakrishna Mission still represents an influential force in large and small Indian cities, pursuing chiefly charitable and educational aims and operating «through hospitals, dispensaries, publishing houses, and its own mathas, where it conducts religious discussions. The remarkable combination of Ramakrishna's spiritual insight as a saintly mystic and Vivekananda's abilities as a missionary-orator did more to establish Hinduism among the world religions than any other movement that existed in India before Gandhi began his activity.

Aurobindo (1872–1950) was another inspired prophet of self-realization and inner harmony, well educated and widely traveled, versed in the entire corpus of the Vedas and other classical Sanskrit texts, experienced, like Ramakrishna, in the practice of Tantric yoga, and a deep believer in the divine power of shakti. His three-volume work, entitled «The Life Divine,» became a classic of the modern era, proclaiming an optimistic program of advancement along the path from the very lowest stage of material existence to perfect being, higher consciousness, and bliss. He spent most of his adult life in Pondicherry, a French colony on the coast of southern India; the house in which he lived gradually turned into an ashram for his disciples and eventually became an international center of spiritual transformation. After Aurobindo's death, the administration of the ashram and its followers was taken over by Mirra Richard, a thirty-year-old Frenchwoman, Aurobindo's associate, known to the other members of the ashram as the Mother. These modern figures – Rammohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, and many others like them – may be called reforming traditionalists or traditional reformers. Many of them were Bengalis; most were educated in British academies and spoke and wrote in English. Each had his own conception of the further path of development of Hinduism and his own opinion as to which of its components should be upheld and which excluded from the developing experience of religious life.

All of them spoke of «self-realization» and, in this sense, identified with the general propositions of the Upanishads and the traditions of yoga. Each of them, proceeding from the sphere of his own particular interests, made a modest contribution to shaping the Indian thought of his time. However, the world of the Indian village lies so far from the major centers, and is so fragmented, that only a few of these names, and an even smaller number of their ideas, have found a broad response among the society of their time, and the villagers of the next century may forget them altogether.

But the name, face, and figure of one man of the twentieth century is known to all, since he is among the few who are instantly recognized in any corner of the globe. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), known as the Mahatma – «Great Soul» – a lawyer who came from a Vaishya family in western India, was one of the architects of the edifice of Indian independence, a champion of the principles of «self-rule» (swaraj), attained through «adherence to truth» (satyagraha), and of the principle of nonviolent resistance to evil and oppression. The «Bhagavad Gita» and its proclaimed doctrine of action detached from personal interest were his spiritual guides, and a life of purity and contentment with little, to satisfy personal needs (brahmacharya), became his widely publicized mode of existence. But even Gandhi's powerful personality, with his demonstrative adherence to dharma, could not prevent the Hindu-Muslim slaughter that accompanied the achievement of independence in 1947 and the transformation of the subcontinent's territory into the state of India, with an adjoining, twice-divided Pakistan. Gandhi himself fell at the hand of a Hindu extremist. His program of nonviolence (ahimsa), modesty of individual needs, and economic self-sufficiency within a casteless society left behind only faint memories, but its author became a saint in the eyes of all Indians. Any more or less large city in India boasts dozens of statues and busts, painted white or silver, guarding its crossroads like stern spirits and depicting the Mahatma either striding into the distance with his wooden staff, or sitting calmly in a traditional pose, surveying the passing traffic from beneath his divine canopy of snake hoods. Always hung with garlands of fresh flowers tended by unseen hands, he now belongs to a mythological past, a time preceding the events of the bloody partition of mother India, which clouded his sleep and disturbed his peace long before today's mindless terrorism, communal strife, and unchecked population growth began to threaten the well-being of all.

Over half a century of independence, the country has witnessed a process taking an unusual turn, toward a balancing of religious forces. India has undertaken the world's largest democratic attempt to preserve a secular state that grants full freedom to all the country's religious movements. For now, religious minorities such as Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, or Buddhists feel the pressure of the country's dominant orthodox Hindu creed, exercised under conditions in which the surrounding population identifies the concepts of «Indian» and «Hindu.» The Hindu majority, for its part, feels distrust toward a government that seeks to weaken the role of sacred traditions and to replace with constitutional laws the eternal principles of dharma governing such institutions as the caste of untouchables, polygamy, divorce relations, inheritance rights, division of property, the custom of sati (self-immolation of widows), the remarriage of widows, brides' dowries, the maintenance of temples, and state taxes.

Finally, it should be noted that the modern period has witnessed the spread of Hinduism's influence beyond Asia. Unlike Buddhism, which, having arisen in India, began to penetrate the rest of Asia already in the first centuries of its existence, Hinduism was always a «stay-at-home» creed, up until the appearance of medieval trading colonies in Southeast Asia. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries millions of Indians emigrated to every corner of the world. Colonies of laborers, merchants, doctors, engineers, and teachers founded new Hindu communities in England, Canada, the United States, Latin and South America, Southern and Eastern Africa, Southeast Asia, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, for example Fiji. These migrations continued into the 1970s and 1980s, and new Hindu settlements arose in a number of states in the Persian Gulf basin. Although the institution of brahmins and the ordinary caste system in general are absent in many Hindu enclaves located abroad, certain fundamental principles of the creed and of ritual practice remain in force there. The recent active movement to build temples among second- and third-generation Hindu emigrants in several Western communities at once is a sign of the inexhaustible vital forces of this religion.

A separate aspect of Hinduism in the West may be considered the communities and various institutions that grew out of the activity of the Vedanta societies that appeared there in the early twentieth century, giving rise to such movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the «Hare Krishna» movement), the Transcendental Meditation Society, the ashrams of Rajneesh, Swami Rama, Meher Baba, the Divine Light Mission, and others.

8. Sociopolitical orientations of Hindu organizations under contemporary conditions

Eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar, a resident of the village of Deorala, Rajasthan state, was seated among the wood of her husband's funeral pyre on September 4, 1987, and burned alive. The practice of sati – the self-immolation of widows – is a very ancient custom of northern India, although sanctioned by no Sanskrit text. Condemned by nineteenth-century reformers such as Rammohan Roy, and prohibited by a series of decrees beginning in 1829, it survived and periodically made itself known over the course of the last two centuries, showing how India and Hinduism adapt to new times.

The disputes that unfolded across the entire country over the sati in Deorala are highly instructive for anyone wishing to understand the fate of Hinduism on the threshold of the twenty-first century. The Indian government, representing the interests of a secular modern state governed by constitutional laws, reacted quickly and severely, issuing a law threatening life imprisonment or the death penalty for incitement to commit sati. Articles appeared in the press condemning this anachronism and its supporters, who cited in its defense ancient texts glorifying a wife's fidelity to her husband, up to and including self-sacrifice. However, in the heat of the debate almost nothing was said about the thousands of shrines actively functioning throughout the subcontinent that commemorate cases of sati that occurred in the past. Some well-known leaders of Hindu sects even came out in support of «voluntary sati» and «sati dharma.» As one of their arguments they advanced the fact that the ideal of feminine devotion, glorified by the entire corpus of Hindu mythology, by collections of folk tales, and by ritual and symbolic systems, is matched by only very few women, just as the ideal of renunciation of the world is in reality followed by very few sannyasins.

A few weeks after the death of Roop Kanwar, who, according to witnesses' testimony, was forcibly compelled to the act of self-immolation by her deceased husband's relatives, a survey was conducted in thirty-two towns and villages of fourteen districts of Rajasthan. Most of those surveyed (63%) were women. The results showed the following: 86.6% of all respondents knew of the existence of the cult of sati, 80.7% knew of Roop Kanwar's death, and 63.4% approved of her act. Only 3.65% of respondents were aware that the young woman had been forced to commit sati. A certain number of respondents stated that she had become a Goddess (Sati Devi).

The heated debates over this single case and Rajasthani public opinion remind us that hasty generalizations should not be made about contemporary Hinduism. From the windows of an apartment in some high-rise residential complex in Bombay, Kanpur, or Hyderabad

one may see no temples, no traditional costumes, no festive rites, no outward signs of belonging to a particular caste. On the other hand, at the crossroads of any town or village there may stand two or three temples and half a dozen shrines and statues; there one may see a procession in honor of the local Goddess, the colored robes of sadhus or traditional beggars making their daily round of houses, as well as an abundance of caste markers in people's clothing, occupations, and behavior. Yet the degree of religiosity and participation in ritual practice, of «belonging to Hinduism,» often cannot be correctly determined from outward signs. It would be a mistake to suppose that modernization and other evidence of Western influence, so obvious in major Indian cities, have completely erased all traces of the most important Hindu traditions. Personal and family worship, participation in the activity of temples, mathas, and other religious institutions, visits to places of pilgrimage and shrines erected in honor of ancestors – though often modified and curtailed by the demands of modern urban life – continue to be observed just as they are in villages and traditional towns.

Throughout the whole of its history Hinduism has possessed a limitless capacity to subordinate any events to its symbolic systems, and it continues to do so in the modern period. Plaster busts of Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, assassinated in Delhi in October 1984, can now be seen in every village and every town. Like some Goddess, she usually stands at crossroads, adorned with garlands of flowers, with a freshly applied red mark on her forehead. A large part of India's illiterate population worships her, believing that her bust possesses a power that can be seen, touched, and drawn upon. It is not yet known for certain whether a new cult of the Goddess Indira will arise, but the process of mythologization is already under way, translating the events of secularized political life into the language of hagiography, creating a new sacred biography, and demonstrating Hinduism's unceasing striving for self-renewal.

Scholars have given the name «Sanskritization» to one of the indicators of the vitality and experimental character of Hinduism – the process by which Brahmanical faith and ritual practice, together with Sanskrit texts, become increasingly significant among the non-brahmin strata of Indian society. This process was, of course, already recorded in the early Vedic period, and traces of it have been preserved at every phase of the historical development of Hinduism. The brahmins, once a learned and teaching elite, preserved the Sanskrit language, the Vedas, and the shastras, and restricted access to the law codes, the great temples, the tirthas, and the monastic institutions. In modern India the foundations of their former power are being eroded by the laws of the secular state, by the mobility of caste groups striving to occupy a higher position in society, and by political institutions. Education is open to all who desire it. «Untouchables,» tribal peoples, the «lower classes,» and the «weakest parties» have been granted special privileges and status, secured by effective programs. Temples are no longer places inaccessible to «untouchables»; some Vedic schools and even central temples are administered by state officials, and the Vedas and religious Sanskrit slokas are recited for the public to hear in public bathing establishments, at fairs, and at festivals. The network of radio and television broadcasting has considerably democratized the faith. Mantras are recorded onto tape in women's voices, and the epic «Ramayana» has been filmed and turned into a television serial shown every Sunday morning. The skills of brahmin reciters go unneeded when classical Sanskrit texts have become accessible via the home videocassette recorder.

Along with the decline of brahmin hegemony and the growth of universal education, there is a gradual increase in the means available to members of the middle and lower classes of society to enrich their spiritual life: travel to sacred sites and regional fairs; the development of new, more refined rituals; religious instruction in mathas and communities; charitable support of shrines and temples; pious devotion to «God-men» and living Goddesses; and the acquisition of religious books, tracts, and posters.

Another process now under way in contemporary Hinduism might be called «acharya-ization.» It is expressed in the tendency of the educated urban classes to simplify the teaching of Hinduism, reducing it to selected sayings of a few great teachers (acharyas) and purging it of all other communal, local, village, sectarian, and «superfluous» aspects. At the head of the standard list of acharyas one might place such medieval figures, who synthesized the traditions of Hinduism, as Shankara and Ramanuja, then jump straight to the recent reformers – Rammohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda or Aurobindo. A grander list might also include such figures as Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Guru Nanak, and Gandhi, while lists taking account of local swamis and gurus who have gained national and international fame might mention Sathya Sai Baba, Ramana Maharshi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or Rajneesh, who died in India in 1990 under the name «Osho» after his expulsion from the United States. One curious point should be noted in comparing the processes of «Sanskritization» and «acharya-ization»: whereas Raju wears images of four Goddesses (together with images of Shiva and Ganesha) and daily worships several more female deities, the usual list of venerated acharyas is represented only by men.

Like «Sanskritization,» this phenomenon, which places the sayings of the acharyas at its center, correlates with the processes of the democratization of faith at the expense of the brahmin elite, as well as with the growing importance of Western values, the expansion of educational opportunities, and the spread of modern mass media (which, as in the United States, can turn a religious figure into a nationally known personality in the shortest possible time). At the root of this eclectic and often dogmatic direction within Hinduism lies a striving toward modernization, a desire to demonstrate that the dominant creed of India still retains its significance not only within South Asia but for the whole of humanity – that it is a universal teaching, eternal and foundational for any manifestation of human spirituality.

«Acharya-ized» Hinduism ignores or overlooks the obstacles standing in the way of the universal dissemination of this creed. From its point of view, such matters as the distinction drawn by pandits between shruti and smriti, caste hierarchy, the institution of «untouchability,» the distinction between «pure» and «impure,» magic and sorcery, astrology, healing by incantation, such «barbarisms» as sati, the sacrifice of children, ritual possession by the spirits of the dead, walking on coals, or offerings of chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, and buffaloes to local Goddesses, even the excessive number of gods and Goddesses mentioned in the Puranic myths

– all of this must be left out of the program of development of modern Hinduism. The emphasis is placed on self-realization, achieved by following the example of a self-realized teacher. This program usually proclaims strict equality and highlights the pious, meditative aspects of ritual practice, with unfailing moralizing, demonstrating adherence to an explicit monism or to the identity, proclaimed in the Upanishads and the Vedanta, between the self and the divine World Soul. Emphasis is often placed on «modern scientific principles,» used not for the sake of pleasure or the acquisition of material benefits (as happens in the «decadent West»), but for the sake of attaining those spiritual goals which are manifest in the eternally existing dharma and revealed in the spiritual experience of the acharyas.

Rarely encountered in villages and fairly uncommon in traditional towns, Hinduism based on the teachings of the acharyas is widespread in the English-speaking urban areas throughout India and has taken root very successfully in the West, thanks to the activity of various religious movements, ranging from the «Theosophical Society» and the «Ramakrishna Mission» to the younger «Society for Transcendental Meditation» and the «Divine Light Mission». It should be noted that alongside the appearance of gurus supplying the West with yoga techniques and a hybrid, modernized Hinduism, traditional Hindu temples and mathas have firmly established themselves throughout Europe and America. They are built by Indian masons and sculptors, consecrated by the Hindu pujaris and pandits who staff them, and serve large communities of Hindu immigrants. The population of the West now has the opportunity to visit these new religious institutions, where genuine Hindu rites are performed and theological discussions are held that were previously unknown outside India, although even here a general tendency is now emerging to encourage the development of a creed morally and intellectually better suited to Western society and to the Hindus who have joined it.

For most Hindus living in South Asia, however, the adjective «modern» placed before the word «Hinduism» has no meaning whatsoever. Even new, dynamic movements – striking to philosophers studying the long history of this faith – are perceived by believers as forms of expression sanctified by ancient tradition, entirely normative. The sudden appearance of some popular Goddess such as Santoshi Ma, or the broad surge of pilgrimages to the Goddess Vaishno Devi in Northwestern India, are phenomena that fit easily into the traditional current of worship of the classical Goddesses of Hinduism. And when hundreds of thousands of black-clad, inspired young men throughout India, united by the flourishing cult of Ayyappan, board trains and buses, and after arriving at their destination climb on foot to the summit of Sabarimala Hill (state of Kerala), where his shrine is located, they are ultimately regarded as ordinary pilgrims possessing all the standard attributes: vows, pious fervor, fasts, abstinence, and recitations of the divine name. In fact, a curious result of the endless experimentation of the Hindu tradition is that genuine innovations within it are now practically impossible: it turns out that everything under the sun has already occurred at one time or another.

As the world enters the twenty-first century, and India catches up with China in population, becoming the most populous country on earth, South Asia is exhausted by fierce intercommunal clashes – between Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists, and among representatives of various tribal communities. Despite the «Green Revolution» carried out in 1970, half of the population suffers from terrible poverty and malnutrition, with no hope for the future. Two-thirds of the entire population is illiterate, and the democratic institutions of India, Sri Lanka, and the liberal Hindu Kingdom of Nepal are squeezed between the shifting regimes of neighboring states, constantly under the threat of complete anarchy. Yet Hinduism, as the dominant faith of the South Asian region, shows little concern for the latest change of century, economic conditions, or ruling dynasty. Its ancient ways of listening, mythologizing, classifying, returning to the cycle of its existence, and absorbing the Universe allow it to view the world and its afflictions with a detached gaze.