‘In Hinduism, no matter how much you try to regiment, there are still elements of fluidity’

Manu Pillai tells his audience how a Bala Murugan temple deity in Kerala’s Alappuzha district acquired the rather catchy moniker, “Munch Murugan.”

When a small boy in the region fell ill, his parents took him to this Murugan temple to pray for his recovery. “The child had a Munch chocolate in his hand,” says the writer and historian to Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief and Vice-President, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India, who he was in conversation with at the 13th edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival.

The little boy, as the story goes, put his Munch chocolate bar in front of the deity and miraculously recovered. “Since then, the deity is called Munch Murugan, and everybody who goes to the temple places, not just any chocolate, but Munch in front of this deity,” he says.

Pillai says it is modernity and colonisation that truly kickstarted the process of creating Hinduism’s sense of self.
| Photo Credit:
ROOP_DEY

Inherent fluidity

Pillai, who was responding to Subramaniam’s question on whether the inherent fluidity of Hinduism was lost when the religion began to define itself, uses this anecdote to drive a pertinent point.“Some of these stories may be apocryphal, but these are recent stories, which means that the tendency to change… to retain that fluidity still remains,” says the historian and writer, whose latest book Gods, Guns & Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity, examines the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other and how these encounters contributed to the birth of an aggressive, more immutable form of Hinduism. “In Hinduism, no matter how much you try to regiment it, there are still elements of fluidity and change within it.”

In his session, Pillai discusses the evolution of Hinduism, its encounter with Christianity, and the impact of colonisation and reform on it. He also shares his apprehensions about taking on a subject that could be construed as controversial, admitting that he was constantly worried about being cancelled by both the left and the right as he wrote the book. “Would you rather be cancelled by the left or the right,” asks Subramaniam, rather cheekily, to which Pillai cautiously responds. “I think I would not be beaten up if I was cancelled by the left. The chances of getting beaten up are probably higher with the right.”

The creation of legends as Hinduism evolved, says Pillai, was a creative way of knitting together different ideas without denying them, referring to the religion as a sort of tapestry that’s been constantly woven and expanding in different directions.
| Photo Credit:
NIHARIKA KULKARNI

Keeping the faith

Hinduism, according to Pillai, is a composite framework, something very clear in the Puranas, which “is a way of connecting the local with the pan-Indian and universalising that with the local.” He points out that when the Vedic religion came in contact with a whole set of other cultures “a bit of co-option” happened, a marriage of sorts where “each retains much of its original flavour but is also slightly modified to become part of a larger framework…what I would define as Hinduism.” There was a conscious effort, at least on the part of Brahmins, to connect everything into that framework, he says, adding that this was often done through stories.

This creation of legends as Hinduism evolved, says Pillai, was a creative way of knitting together different ideas without denying them, referring to the religion as a sort of tapestry that’s been constantly woven and has been expanding in different directions. “It doesn’t have an outer border,” he says. In his opinion, the impulse to stitch up an outer border only happened because of external pressures. “In some ways, you do see evidence of this in the Islamic period,” he says. “Islam is a big part of the culture of how Hinduism eventually responds and develops a sense of self.”

But it was modernity and colonisation that truly catalysed the process of creating Hinduism’s sense of self. “When you’re faced with pressure from the outside… that’s when you must figure out how you define yourself,” explains Pillai. “I think that rigidity does appear in Hinduism’s political manifestation because the political assertion of identity is built on people coming together and asserting a certain muscle.”

Missionaries and more

By most accounts, the arrival of the first missionaries to India did not seem to have threatened Indians in the beginning. “Why were they so unthreatened by the idea of these missionaries, and at what point did they feel threatened?” asks Subramaniam.

In his response, Pillai offers insights into early Europeans’ perception of Hindu society, which was shaped by their own cultural history as a country that had once been pagan, even though Christianity was now deeply entrenched in it. While Europeans had worshipped trees, sacrificed animals and had deities and idols throughout much of antiquity, by the time they began arriving in India, a deep fear of idols had seeped into their collective imagination. “There was a sense that gods worshipped in images were representatives of Satan. There was only one god, and the path to that god was through the Bible,” he says.

They couldn’t help but see them as demonic forces since “they came out of a certain world view and applied their cultural lenses to make sense of what they were seeing,” believes Pillai
| Photo Credit:
SANDEEP SAXENA

Another worldview

In India, the Europeans were in for a rude shock as they were confronted with fierce gods like Narasimha and Kali, often depicted as somewhat bloodthirsty. They couldn’t help but see them as demonic forces since “they came out of a certain world view and applied their cultural lenses to make sense of what they were seeing,” believes Pillai. According to him, these early European missionaries had arrived convinced that they would bring the light of the Bible and everyone would wake up. “But that did not happen. The Hindus seem to be perfectly happy to continue with their so-called demonic gods.”

Therefore, Pillai claims, the missionary also had to reinvent himself in interesting ways. Soon, a certain Hinduisation of Christianity happened, with missionaries, including the Italian Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who even began eating and dressing like an Indian, having to study the former to engage in philosophical discussions and debates with the Hindus of that time, who didn’t take them very seriously.

For starters, Indians, too, had their perceptions of white people, including a belief they were cannibals who liked to fry their children in butter and eat them. And yes, many Indians, including the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, appear to have been disgusted that white people did not use water to clean themselves after using the toilet. “That sentiment still prevails,” laughs Subramaniam. Additionally, “Europeans didn’t rule here yet except in pockets like Goa where there has been violence by now,” says Pillai. “So the Hindus are amused by these white people trying to destabilise their sense of god.”

The inherent pluralism of the Hindu faith with “so many forms…a conglomerate…a composite of so many traditions” meant that though many people were willing to accept that Christianity was a way to God and even recognised the value of the Bible, they refused to accept that it was “the only way to God,” says Pillai, referring to a rather amusing analogy used at that time. “Just as a trader brings different customers to his shop by having multiple products on his counter, God has also created multiple options for humankind.”

A view of the Parthasarathy temple situated at Triplicane in Chennai.
| Photo Credit:
K_V_SRINIVASAN

Effect of colonisation

Colonisation, however, seems to have significantly impacted how the faith evolved. “The conflict begins when the power equation changes,” says Pillai. As the British Raj became more dominant and began directly ruling over different parts of the country, “pressure starts building up home in Europe,” with the prevailing feedback being this: “Your job is not to promote Brahmins, support temples and take Hindu deities on processions. Your job is to support the missionary enterprise.”

As the power dynamics changed, people started becoming more and more nervous about their encounters with European powers since “it’s no longer a debate between the equals. Now you feel that the white man is in government… sweeping up all these territories… controlling the temples…paying the salaries of the Brahmins,” says Pillai. “So suddenly, the white man, in his religion, is a very conscious, serious person.”

Raja Ram Mohan Roy
| Photo Credit:
THE HINDU ARCHIVES

Ways of rebellion

Pillai also talks about how Hindus often came up with stories to explain this advent of Christianity and rebelled against it in different ways: dressing up the effigy of Ravana in the clothes of British administrators, for instance, during Ramlila performances. “At this point, these debates become very negative… very polemic,” says Pillai. Reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy contributed to these debates. “Even as he promotes Advaita Vedanta and this esoteric idea of a metaphysical, formless kind of God and a pure Hindu monotheism, in some ways, he’s borrowing the Western structure,” says Pillai.

Just like how in the West, the prevailing narrative was that Catholicism corrupted Christianity, and the Protestant Reformation was about restoring pure Christianity, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the founder of the Brahmo Samaj, believed that there was pure Hinduism, which got corrupted into the Puranic form. “So you’re essentially taking that Western framework and applying it to Hinduism to develop a kind of Renaissance,” believes Pillai. “The Western gaze sort of comes into play, and how we define Hinduism is also afflicted by this.”

This eventually became a more rigid Hindu identity and was later taken up by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and then Vinayak Savarkar, says Pillai. Despite this and repeated attempts at homogenisation of the faith, Pillai believes that Hindu culture is inherently pluralistic, with an innate capacity to accept, incorporate and move on. “This is also a form of evolution. We may not like it, but maybe this is how it’s evolving at this juncture,” he says.

Am I Hindu?

The session ends with Subramaniam asking another “cancellable” question: does Pillai identify as a Hindu? “I would say yes, but not in the conventional way where I think firstly that there is a god out there for us,” he says, admitting that he does often go to a Shiva temple in Kerala that his family has been connected to for almost a thousand years. “I don’t necessarily go there and look at the lingam and think, ‘Oh, this is God’,” he says.

Instead, what draws him to this tradition is the continuity of culture, the fact that so many people from the agrarian community he has descended from have looked at that same object for a millennium. “Frankly, our lives on the earth are like cockroaches… we are here, we die, and I don’t think there’s further meaning to it,” he says. “But by stepping into any sacred space that’s been around for long enough time, I think we’re able to somehow transcend the limits of this place and see something that people before us have seen.”

Published – December 19, 2024 09:00 am IST

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