Are Hindus in need of a spiritual, cultural, religious reawakening? Have India’s over 120 crore Hindus ‘lost their way’? And, is the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya the only way to save their souls?
Every day lakhs of Indians visit the Balaji temple at Tirupati. Lakhs trek up to Vaishno Devi temple near Jammu. Lakhs flock to Guwahati’s famous Kamakhya temple, to the Jagannath temple in Puri, to the Vithoba temple in Pandharpur. There are, literally, thousands of temples across India – big, small, ancient, recent – dedicated to scores of Indian gods and goddesses, and crores of devout Hindus go to these temples every day.
Are these the crores of Hindus who have allegedly lost their way? No.
Crores of Hindu shopkeepers dedicate a little alcove to their preferred deity even in the tiniest of shops, and the day’s work begins with a prayer and the ritual tinkling of a bell. Crores of Hindus have ‘mandirs’ in their homes – some modest, some grand – and there too, the average Hindu family performs regular ‘aarti’ and ‘puja’.
Are these the Hindus who have lost touch with their religion? No.
Sorry, Hindus have not ‘lost’ their way
Crores of Hindus follow the rituals laid down for key moments of a Hindu’s life, such as the birth and naming of a child, marriage, the entry into a new home, and death, every day.
Are these not practising, god-fearing Hindus? Yes, they most certainly are.
So then, where are the ‘lost’ Hindus that need ‘re-awakening’ and ‘de-colonising’?
The Ram Mandir in Ayodhya has been a well-executed, well-milked political project. The idea being to harvest votes from a sense of ‘resurgent’ Hindu pride, derived from the construction of a grand Ram Mandir, allowing all the credit to accrue to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hoping it translates into a win in the General Election.
The only problem is, the whole narrative of ‘lost’ Hindus and ‘hurt’ pride is a false construct. Simply put, India’s Hindus are neither ‘lost’ nor ‘hurt’. Their pride and their faith is pretty intact too. Every political party and its ideologues and its intellectual supporters may put a ‘deeper’ spin on any political gimmick they roll out. But they should not start believing their own spin.
Ram Mandir hype is ‘pseudo-religosity’
In the past, the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, and Trinamool Congress were accused of practising ‘minority-appeasement’ politics and labelled ‘pseudo-secular.’ Today, it’s the BJP’s ‘majority appeasement’ that has culminated in the Ram Mandir, accompanied by hyped-up ‘pseudo-religiosity’ and ‘pseudo-spiritual-reawakening’.
The devout are welcome to jet into Ayodhya, stay at a swanky hotel, and get a ‘darshan’ at the grand mandir. But just as intrinsically Hindu is the long trek to the Amarnath cave or Kedarnath or Gangotri Dham, or to the Vaishno Devi mandir, and then getting darshan of the ‘deity’.
It’s the arduous nature of the journey that makes it a test of the pilgrim’s ‘faith’, and crores of Indians have been passing this test for centuries.
They may well add the new Ayodhya Ram Mandir to their bucket list, but it won’t make them any more Hindu, or any more aware of their Hindu identity, than they already are.
Ram temple in Ayodhya. Photo: Screenshot from DD News broadcast.
Also read: Modi Government’s Campaign Around Ram Mandir Negates Everything That India Stands For
To see how Hinduism thrives, come to the Kumbh Mela
Let’s also briefly discuss the Kumbh Mela. On February 4, 2019, over 24 crore people attended the Ardh Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj, marking the highest attendance ever on a single day.
The Kumbh Mela stands as a breathtaking testament to mass faith in practice, spanning centuries. Its roots extend back to ancient times, with mentions in the Rig Veda (1500 BCE) and early Puranas. In 644 CE, the Buddhist Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang, during his visit to King Harsha’s Prayag, provided an account of the Kumbh Mela. Abul Fazl’s ‘Ain-i-Akbari,’ written in 1590, also details the Kumbha or Magha Mela, as it was commonly referred to then. Munshi Sujan Rai’s Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh, written in 1695, chronicles multiple Kumbh Melas at Haridwar, Trimbak (near Nashik, at the source of the Godavari River), and Prayag.
For thousands of years, crores of Hindus have actively participated in the Kumbh Melas. This tradition did not halt or stutter even during the years of Mughal rule and the British Raj.
Also read: A Lesson on Temples From Swami Vivekananda
Ram Mandir inauguration, a political event
The Ram Mandir campaign, the build up on social media, the intertwining of it with the Modi cult, the raucous nature of it, the merchandising of it, the face-paint, the flags, the roping in of Bollywood celebs as amplifiers of the event – made it far more similar to a jamboree like the Indian Premier League. A new mandir does not need the build-up that comes before a major Bollywood film. So why were we subjected to all the hype? Because, the inauguration of the Ram Mandir was a political event. It was the culmination of a political campaign that had to be seriously played up. And it was.
On the other hand, my quick uttering of the Gayatri Mantra at home, my visit to the neighbourhood mandir, my trip to Haridwar with the ashes of my grandparent, even mass events like the Kumbh, or the daily churn of the faithful that we see on the ghats of Varanasi – all these are deeply personal spiritual acts and journeys, for all practicing Hindus. It does not require hype to urge me or any other Hindu to do any of this.
Let’s also examine the argument about how the Ram Mandir will ‘decolonise’ the Hindu mind.
We have already described how Hindus have steadily practiced their faith over the centuries, irrespective of the medieval despot who ran their lives at any given time, some kind, some cruel, some self-serving, Hindu, Christian and Muslim alike. For most Hindus, when it came to the practice of their religion, they didn’t need any decolonising when India achieved independence in 1947. There was no sense of ‘religious inferiority’ to shrug off.
Gandhi’s Satyagraha ‘decolonised’ the Indian mind
What was needed was mass political emancipation, and in the 30 years preceding 1947, that push came from Gandhi. His unique mobilisation of crores of Indians to participate in non-violent protest and resistance made each of them a stakeholder in India’s freedom. In doing so, he facilitated a mass shedding of India’s colonial mindset. Thousands of freedom fighters went to jail, hundreds were beaten in lathi charges, and hundreds were killed – an unprecedented number of Indians were invested in India’s freedom, and they remained invested even after August 1947.
To my mind, that’s why our fledgling democracy did not unravel like that of many countries that emerged from colonialism. A young nation would not have grown from strength to strength as a democracy if it had not decisively broken away from its colonial past.
What the BJP wants to break away from is not India’s ‘colonial’ past, but its post-colonial ‘Nehruvian’ past. The aversion to Nehru, and a more discreet aversion to Gandhi, is present simply because Hindutva ideologues need to ‘clear the shelf’ of the earlier icons and make room for their own. But they can’t do that without attacking them and their contributions and accusing them of failing to rid India of its ‘colonial mindset.’ India did shed its British past on August 15, 1947, in mind, spirit, and action.
Also read: Ayodhya: Once There Was a Mosque
India’s ‘superpower’ moment came before the Ram Mandir
Finally, even at the risk of sounding a bit simplistically ra-ra-ish, let’s ask: Did India wait for a Ram Mandir before becoming a nuclear power complete with warheads? Did India need a Ram Mandir to motivate it to become a leader in space exploration or to have one of the world’s largest defence forces? Did a Ram Mandir propel India to become the fifth largest economy in the world? For decades, India’s massive ‘soft’ power has grown organically (unlike the heavily ‘marketed’ soft power of the US), thanks to its diaspora, its cinema, its cricket, its food, its music, and more.
Today, India does not need to shake off any imaginary vestiges of any imaginary colonial hangover. It was all done and dusted decades ago.
So, let’s call out the ‘pseudo-religious’ nature of the Ram Mandir political campaign and understand it for what it really was.
Rohit Khanna is a journalist and video storyteller. He has been managing editor of The Quint, and is a two-time Ramnath Goenka Award winner.
