Saakhi: Sanatana Dharma on Caste, Dissent and Democracy
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
Two thousand years later, during the Mahabharata wars, Ved Vyas was witness to a drastic change in familial and feudal systems. At the time when brother was killing brother, he invoked Dharma as the structure holding peoples following various religions. Dharma stands as the socio-political scene upside down when embodied as a god. He sends a pompous Brahmin to learn the essence of real Dharma from a lowly seller of dog meat. The Dharma that supports the state and must be supported, in turn, by the state if it wishes to survive, he said.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In democratic India, the structure is built upon the same concept of Dharma as laws codified. When we, the citizens, gave ourselves a constitution, it was that Dharma we swore by. As a symbol, we used Ashoka’s lion pillar, and for the laws, we copiously used the Ashokan code, accepting practices for governance that include regular interaction: Yatras by the ruler and his officials to meet with people of all faiths for exchange of any new ideas on Dhamma: जानपदसा च जनसा दसनी धमनुसथि स धम…
Under this interpretation, the argumentative Indians spoke and doubted together and held civil, military, and intra-religious discourses that threw up various branches of Dhamma and also routinely created dissenting sects.
Such an acceptance of other religions and regular grafting of other kinds of thoughts and cultures onto the tree of religion, while lopping off dead wood, is the only Dharma by which a multi cultural India can survive. It is best described by poet critic Rajshekhar as Sweekaran or ingestion of the other’s ideas and their recreation. The grammarian Panini has supported this cross fertilisation by mandating: After those who know better have spoken, listen to them (इतिवर्णविद: परहूर्निपुणं तम् न्यबोधत). The Aitareya Brahmin text too emphasises travel and exchange as necessary to keep alive Dhrama मह्यम् चरते भवन्तु. Let’s keep moving!
Suddenly, we have stopped moving it seems. And we no longer have multilateral conversations with our leaders and among ourselves! No, don’t blame the cell phone or the social media. From the latest stance taken by the ruling party against the Southern criticism of the Sanatana Dharma, it seems that the party assumes peoples’ Dharma is synonymous with Sanatan Dharma. But they overlooked the fact that the prefix Sanatana to Dharma actually came up north from the south with Adi Shankaracharya and Ramanujacharya around 8-10th century. By the time the four Mutts were established and Vaishnava and Shaivite sects unified and handed to the laity as Sanatana Dharma, much water had flown down the holy rivers.
The once elastic caste system (originally designated as a badge of identity for large number of tribes that came into India to settle) was well on its way to becoming an ironclad hierarchy under the code of Manu. The priestly class, led often by the four Shankaracharyas, now placed Brahmins on top followed by the Kshatriyas and then the trading community (Vaishyas). Under this remodeling of Sanatan Hindu Dharma India horribly mistreated the rest and stamped them as Shudra or untouchables forcing them for centuries to live on the peripheries of society, frankly accepted in public by the head of the RSS Mohan Bhagwat.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
So why such outrage over remarks made by some leaders whose parties in any case have never subscribed to the Manuvadi variety of Sanatan Dharma?
Sanatan, as the scholar Vidya Niwas Mishra has also explained, does not mean a static set of laws, but any constantly flowing system of thought that renews itself as times change. Look at the heroes from the Vedic Sramana lit to the epics, great religious leadrs like the Buddha, Mahavira, Guru Gorakhnath, they were wanderers meeting people and getting to know them personally to modify Dharma and purge it of the poisonous substances it may have accumulated along the flow. It is this history from Vedic Shramanas to Gandhi that had created the need for meeting places for the laity and the seekers, modifiers of Dharma that sustains the state and is sustained by it in turn.
Neither scientists nor religious men and women live in a free-floating bubble. In the age of AI and digitisation, we face AI and new tech as our ancestors faced Buddha’s Dhamma or Gandhi’s Satyagraha, on their own terms. This Santana Hindutva for which many in the BJP armies are willing to wage a Mahabharat may at best be one of the small tributaries of a vast and perpetually self-renewing legacy of a mighty cultural flow of Hindu religion in India.
Even the great Vedic scholar Shankaracharya we must remind ourselves propounded the abstract philosophy of Advaita for ascetics like himself. The Sanatan Dharma overloaded with rituals and many historically incorrect details is far removed from its form created for the householders as Smarta. For ease of holding on to basics of Vedic, Vaishnavite and Shaiv traditions Shankara mixed the various pantheons and laid down the norms of Panchayatan Pooja (worship of gods Shiv, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Surya from all three camps). Also remarkable that he himself lived as a celibate monk and never called himself Jagadguru. This was a title his successors occupying the four Mutts he created at some point invented for themselves.
As we face great anxieties and displacements both within the country and in the wider world, we must counter our fragmented history so full of forgetting. Of drifting inside dreams to escape the dis-logic of inequalities, of a ruined ecology, of ghost villages, of parents left alone to age surrounded by the latest gadgets they scarcely use or understand or need. Who we are not. At this point, old questions from our past become relevant once again. Nachiketa facing Yama and asking: Koham? Kutoaayatah? Ka me Mata? Ko Pita ? (Who am I really? Where from? Who is my mother? My father?)
The Sanatan Dharma the regime and its supporters propagate today is largely incapable of satisfying all Hindus. This is the greatest weakness both physical and psychological against which the southern republics are raising their voice. They need to be heard with respect and patience. A version of Sanatan Dharma, which on grounds of caste and gender, treats women, minorities, and the Dalits with scorn bordering on contempt can not be acceptable to a great democracy with multiple religions. Today, a sense of victory and the euphoria marks our capital which is all aglow now with a thousand multicoloured lights. This Delhi is feverish, its movers and shakers spinning in SUVs, shaking hands with dignitaries are unable to go around, meet its citizenry and reflect on what it is that the dissenters are saying.
There must be noble intentions and lofty ideals behind this great civilisational exhibition of the world’s largest Democracy as a nation under one great leader, one ancient Dharma. But the real Dharma spelt out by our constitution, meeting your people, listening to them and also those who dissent, including the Janata of you Janpad in all decisions, that lies neglected and broken. The people see the carved lions, elephants and a gigantic dancing Natraja in front of a Mandapam, a Kartavya Path only on TV screens. The roads leading to them are currently closed to the citizens.
In the stifling heat, an overcrowded city full of slums must live indoors and hidden behind coloured tin sheets. In such an atmosphere symbols of sublime ideals like the three lions atop the new parliament, the golden sceptre Sengol, installed in the parliament amid an elaborate ritual performed by priests, the water fountains spouting water they are severely deprived of, everything begins to look if not like a caricature, a hollow relic from some hallowed past fast evaporating in a mist of non-communication and suspicion.
After the summit is over, as a matter of reflex and custom millions of citizens may go on repeating their usual daily routines and rituals. They may even plan to go on pilgrimages chanting slogans in praise of The Mother for Navratri. But even they are not unaware by now how this massive build up for ritualistic Sanatana Hindutva is ruining its holiest shrines set in ecologically sensitive areas.
Each time we emerge out of these increasingly feverish religious festivities and global events, reality feels more and more like the pinch of ill-fitting shoes. On morning walks, in office rooms, the Pan shops, we look uncomfortably in each other’s eyes when we meet each other. We shy away from conversations even about the change of climate. At that point, we stop being true to our real Dharma legacy; a legacy carved in stone on the portals of the old parliament, “Truth alone wins,” “Let’s move together, sit together, talk together.” The whole world is our family, Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam!
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
https://thewire.in/religion/saakhi-the-santana-dharma-on-caste-dissent-and-democracy
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:33
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