India (58 page)

The progenitor of the transformation was Professor Krishna Kumar, who was asked to head NCERT in 2004 at a time when school textbooks were the subject of constant questions in Parliament. Politicians on the right believed that schoolchildren were being crammed with Marxist propaganda, and those on the left thought there was a risk any revision of their official version of national history might stir up communal tension.

“In the 1950s,” Krishna Kumar told me, “there were different textbooks for teachers to choose from, and it was all done privately. The problem began in the mid-1960s when left historians produced new books. They were never updated. These were commissioned by the education minister, M. C. Chagla, an enlightened and refined Muslim gentleman. He had been told by young scholars like Romila that the old books weren’t good enough. When Bipan’s book went, I can’t say how relieved I was. No more questions in Parliament! So we started again, with a new pedagogy.” So, bizarrely, these much disputed textbooks had stemmed from a decision made by Chagla, who before independence had been a junior in Jinnah’s law chambers in Bombay (and in the 1970s published a memoir called
Roses in December
which emphasized the Quaid-e-Azam’s political misdemeanours and his apparent fondness for pork products).
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Professor Kumar appeared to have side-stepped, or stepped over, the sterile ideological battle. When the BJP-led government was in power before his appointment to NCERT, the dispute had turned vicious, with eminent establishment historians like Romila Thapar being targeted by those on the aggressive outer fringes of the Hindutva movement. Krishna Kumar had sought to change Indian methods of teaching, trying to move away from circular debates, and away from the mass recitation of facts. Part of his difficulty was that state textbook boards determined what would end up in schools.

“We are a moral authority,” he said. “It’s a Nehru-era idea. We have no
mandatory power, because this is a federal country. Most of the states listen to us, but West Bengal, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh don’t listen at all. The Maharashtra textbook bureau is one of the richest businesses in Maharashtra.” This made sense: education was a way of making money, so why take an improved textbook from NCERT when you could sell your own at a good profit? “Bihar is becoming much more progressive now. In some cases, the officials in the state bureaucracy may want to have progress, but politically it can be difficult to do. We want to make textbook learning one of several sources of education, and let children learn in many ways. Since independence, mass education has been neglected by every government. With Nehru, oddly, the talk about education was only rhetoric: he made no concerted effort to modernize our primary education, or to make India into a literate nation. He just sent off letters of guidance to the states.”
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I had noticed stories—countless bizarre, baffling and intense stories—of India’s religious devotion. The fact someone was a “secularist” by no means implied they were a rationalist; Nehru’s sometimes contemptuous dismissal of superstition was not a trait that was shared by many others. To start at the top, the chief minister of Karnataka, B. S. Yeddyurappa, proffered his index finger to an official at the 2009 general election so it could be stained with a line of dye after voting, in accordance with the law. The official was stumped, because the chief minister was holding up his right hand, and everybody knew it was the left index finger that needed to be marked. There was a moment of silence before the official, bowing to power, stained the right (or the wrong) finger. Why did B. S. Yeddyurappa do this? It was an accident, he said, an oversight on his part—but it turned out later in the day that his spiritual guardian had forbidden him to raise or extend his left hand, for astrological reasons.
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In the same state, the tourism minister, G. Janardhana Reddy, donated a diamond-studded gold crown to the famous Tirumala temple. This was to honour Lord Venkateswara, a form of the god Vishnu. The crown had cost Reddy nearly $10m, and the act was partly a display of wealth, partly a form of political assertion and above all a way of propitiating the god. It would be placed on the presiding deity after his weekly sacramental bath. Together with his brothers, Reddy was involved in huge, controversial and possibly illegal iron ore mining on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and was at that moment under grave threat from a central government inquiry into his conduct on forest land.
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It can be assumed his
approach to the god was less about a search for forgiveness as a penitent sinner—since Hinduism lacks a creed—and more about a desire to continue to succeed. Hinduism does not have commandments and does not inspire guilt; with its lack of demands, a person’s relationship with fate is direct and does not anticipate forgiveness or immediate punishment.

These tales of ministers in Karnataka were both about ambition. People who were successful in “scientific” fields would often, conversely, also have an inner devotion to religion. It did not seem unusual in India that K. Radhakrishnan, the new head of the Indian Space Research Organisation, learned of his appointment while stripped to the waist, performing rituals as a pilgrim at a temple in Kerala. Nor did it seem unusual that K. Radhakrishnan was a noted Kathakali dancer (he liked to play the deity Hanuman) and a singer of Carnatic music.
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Religion and science never went their separate ways in India in the way they did in Europe in the eighteenth century. There was no intellectual division, because Hinduism was too amorphous to be challenged or threatened by any new scientific discovery. If anything, advances in human understanding of the laws of nature might chime with the abstraction of Hindu philosophy, in which time has no beginning and no end.

Then there were priests who used their position to gain favours they would not otherwise have received, a common enough practice in any of the world’s religions. One “godman” in Karnataka made the mistake of obliging his followers to sign a document absolving him of guilt if he was compelled to involve them in “close physical proximity and intimacy.” When he pushed the limits, a victim inevitably leaked the terms of the supposed contract.
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A priest in Kanchipuram, a major pilgrimage town, filmed sexual encounters between himself and women pilgrims in the sanctum sanctorum of his temple, a place only certain male priests are supposed to enter. When his mobile phone was being repaired, a technician noticed and copied clips of film, put them on DVD and made a good trade selling them around the temple town.
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As India became more prosperous, devotion to religion did not seem to be declining. An engineer might go to a Hindu healer who would blow water over affected parts of the body to cure ailments, a trick—or a talent—that he had learned from Muslim healers. In Tamil Nadu, despite its reputation for efficiency, there was an instance of a young man being forced to marry a dog as a punishment by his community for killing two dogs, and a case of a Dalit girl having to marry a frog, for reasons no one could establish.
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Many of the more famous shrines and pilgrimage sites reported far
larger attendances now than in the 1990s, when religion was perceived as a stronger political force. This may have been in part because pilgrims now had more time and money to travel.

In India, people adjusted their religious practice according to the apparent rewards. Rakesh had a job procuring equipment for a large industrial firm. It was a temptation; he took illegal commissions, and was placed under investigation by an internal vigilance team. For two months they probed his invoices, and after one interrogation he was advised by a colleague to pray to Shirdi Sai Baba. After that, the investigation mysteriously disappeared. Now Rakesh was a Sai Baba devotee who, together with his wife, spent many of his waking hours promoting the guru and coercing his extended family to attend prayer and hymn events in praise of Sai Baba. Not long after the investigation, he lost his job over another matter, and this only increased his faith.

Kumar, a cook in a house in Delhi, telephoned his cousin, a driver on the other side of town, to tell him Ravan has been discovered alive and well and living near Chennai. (Ravan is a mythological figure from the Ramayana.) They discussed in detail why it had happened, and why Ravan chose to reappear in Chennai rather than somewhere further north. A television channel reported that unidentified objects had been found on Mars. They turned out to be “encrypted messages in the universe”—representations or icons of Hindu deities. An otherwise conventional businessman who wore tight amulets on his upper arms stopped and went off into a trance for ten minutes at a time without warning. Religion was never separated from ordinary life. Outside a market in Kolkata, the pavement contained a busy shrine, incorporating a strangely gnarled and ancient tree, and a rock that had been worn smooth by veneration. At a nearby temple, workmen made statues that seemed greater than themselves, the ego sublimated into the tradition and the veneration of the divine that was contained in the statues.

Shrines and places of worship could arise unexpectedly. In Bangalore, a three-temple complex appeared on one of the main city thoroughfares, and an unauthorized shrine was built on a new ring road in response to several hit-and-run accidents. The city engineers knocked it down, but a week later another accident occurred and hundreds of residents from a nearby village arrived to rebuild it. The shrine came in the form of a lurid painted sculpture of a deity who had been adjusted for the purpose: “Highway Anjaneya,” raising his right hand fiercely. When an engineer arrived to demolish the creation, he quickly retreated, fearful that the site’s protectors would beat him.
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In New Delhi, the Irish ambassador bought a Ganesh
sculpture and placed it near the entrance to his office at the Irish embassy. At first it attracted no attention, then he noticed each morning when he came to work that it was being venerated, garlanded, given offerings, and before long people from further up the road were visiting, sometimes in numbers. A quandary developed: he had built a shrine on diplomatic property without the Indian or Irish government’s permission.

As I drove along a sandy road past angled coconut palms from Trivandrum to Kanyakumari, the feeling of religion was everywhere, and it was not exclusive to the Hindu traditions. Kanyakumari is the southernmost point in India, formerly known as Cape Comorin, a place hit hard by 2004’s great tsunami. At a Jain temple, pilgrims were preparing to make their devotions. Outside the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, families waited in a snaking queue in the fierce heat, the women with white jasmine in their hair, the men and boys topless in pressed mundus—a southern version of the dhoti. There was a monument to the communist leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the hammer and sickle garnished with fresh flowers. Further down the sandy road, as the peninsula of India narrowed to its tip, statues of “Child Jesus” were interspersed with billboards showing the Tamil deity Murugan, who in his younger manifestations looked like Child Jesus. References to Murugan can be found in literature before the birth of Christ, so two millennia were intermittently entwined. In Kanyakumari at a confluence of water, I could look left to the Bay of Bengal, straight ahead at the Indian Ocean or right to the Arabian Sea.

Sitaram, a glowing young ascetic from Garhwal in the Himalayas, with a necklace of beads and a red smear with cream edges between his eyes, was raising support and funds for a strictly vegetarian ashram for visiting renouncers who had come to the far south. While we spoke, a naked man was lying on his back on the ground nearby with a structure rising from his face, like a version of the heavy spectacles used by optometrists for tests. His body was smeared with white ash. He came each day and lay in silence.

Every society has its norms. When you are inside, they seem permanent—they seem normal. In Hinduism, there is no clear right and wrong. Christians, Muslims and Jews are brought up on the idea of pairs of opposites, the idea you are either for us or against us, and find it hard to put aside this trained instinct when looking at India. This is why European visitors from the early seventeenth century onwards did their best to taxonomize the territory, to make sense of what was difficult to define in simple terms. Rules did not always apply, and when they did apply they might quickly be contradicted
by new information. Knowledge might hold, for example about the respective positions of certain caste groups, but vary again in neighbouring territory. The culture of India was different and protean: nearly everyone adjusted, talked, depended on the protection of astrology, put a dab of kajal, or kohl, behind the ear of a child to ward off the evil eye. There were common threads, as well as a conceptual mutability, a different way of thinking, so that most certainties could be contradicted. Hinduism has no set book, which means books about Hinduism will often tell you little. The religion is only practice, only what it is, and can be understood only by seeing how it is lived.

Professor T. S. Saravankumar was born in the last years of Nehru’s premiership. He had a familiar Tamil look: oiled hair, a definite moustache, a pair of slacks, a bit of a belly, an olive-coloured corduroy shirt. We sat beneath a fan out on the terrace with the smell of clean plaster and paint; his house had just been built. In 1965, fifteen years after the Constitution came into being, Hindi was set to become the official language of the Indian union, but the protests by Tamils were so intense, with people immolating themselves against this perceived northern dominance, that the plan was abandoned and English continued as a parallel language. The powerful Dravidian political parties of the south came out of this movement. This opposition to a national language was felt not only in Tamil Nadu, but across different parts of the country, in places like Punjab and West Bengal, where a strong feeling remained against the “imposition” of Hindi.