The Temple
At the famous Sri Brahma Temple in Pushkar, Rajasthan, it is hard for anyone to miss noticing the numerous plaques that commemorate lives gone by.
These imprints and engravings on marble, left behind by the devout, convey their messages in very diverse scripts- yet are very similar in their content and underlying sentiment. Collectively, they make up a heartwarming spectacle of the unifying power of faith. At another level, they perhaps also showcase something typically Indian in the approach towards religion.
The memorials announce names from different areas of the subcontinent, brought together under the roof of one temple by shared reverence - after the lives they represent finished playing out in their respective worlds, in good likelihood relatively insulated from each other. It is a display that accords a semblance of unity across Hindu communities that is absent in many other facets of their collective existence. After all, the Hindu label indeed papers over the cracks of a fragmented mosaic, a multitude of microscopic caste and linguistic groups that can often be blissfully unaware of each other.
A plaque in Bengali script commemorates one Majumdar from Bikrampur near Dhaka. Now tucked away in Bangladesh and largely faded from collective Indian memory, Bikrampur was once teeming with noted Hindu families. A small oasis of concentrated talent that once gave India stalwarts like PC Mahalanobis, JC Bose and CR Das, it seems a world away from the rocky and sandy desert environs of Pushkar.
A plaque in Sindhi in Arabic script commemorates one from the family of Ramchand Nandiram from Shahdadpur, Sindh. It is a place that has played out the story of Bikrampur in a much earlier era, considering that in the immediate vicinity of Shahdadpur rest the ruins of Brahmanabad, a long extinguished power centre of pre-Islamic Sindh's last Hindu dynasty. It was from those ordinary looking ruins that unsuspecting archaeologists had once pulled out the oldest known chess set found anywhere, and the current format of the popular game is attributed by different ancient chroniclers to a prince of the same dynasty that once lorded over the place. A gap of 14 centuries and the divide of another international border makes all that seem no less remote from Pushkar, even though the plaque itself is from much more recent times.
The memorials in Roman script are mostly installed by devotees from the Southern part of the subcontinent. In the nascent years of independent India, an overzealous encouragement of Hindi by the local administration in parts of South India had proven counterproductive. It was alleged that the leaders in favour of Hindi were acting at the behest of the supposedly alien North, and strident opposition to their efforts had ironically translated into an eager embrace of the Roman script from much farther away Europe. I wonder if the plaques in English reflected a distant fall out of those events, or if Pushkar had merely been unable to supply stone carvers proficient in Tamil or Kannada.
Devanagari is expectedly the predominant choice among the plaques left behind by pilgrims from North and Central India. Consistent with a tiny sprinkling of turbaned visitors at the temple, I spot a couple plaques bearing presumably Sikh names too. The family left behind by one Baba Kharak Singh of Lahore curiously chose to remember him in Devanagari instead of Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi- the preferred scripts of the Punjab.
The Reflection
To each his own- for freedom of religion must not remain just about what faith one chooses to follow, but ought also to extend to how one chooses to pursue it, without fear of being labeled a heretic or apostate. The thought plays out as I finish paying respects to a famous Sufi saint at a shrine at the nearby town of Ajmer, a day after the Pushkar visit.
Like every other, Hindu religious culture too carries its own signature elements of ossification, rigidity and questionable practices. However, its tradition of letting people customise religion all the way down to an individual's level and to a much broader degree than most organised religions, perhaps deserves more recognition and appreciation in the contemporary world wracked by religion-based conflicts. It is a tradition that facilitates much freedom of religious thought, helping selectively pick what one finds best from diverse religious traditions. It's not hard to trace this freedom to the Hindu religious culture's insistence on "multiple paths to the same truth". It is a conscious encouragement of pluralism that has translated quite naturally into a cornucopia of religious philosophies and practices- continuously spawning new sects, new ways and forms of perceiving the divine, and whole new religions through the course of history.
At the same time, restrictions and taboos have kept emerging within Hindu society itself to impose a plethora of constraints on human behaviour. The freedom to interpret religion as you wish, minus any rights to impose it on others, indeed provides a worthy standard for religious rights everywhere. It enables the rejection of package deals where bad can often ride piggyback on the good.
Not surprisingly, such freedom of defining one's own faith encounters stiff opposition from puritans wedded to more inflexible ideologies, who frown upon syncretism not just for its potential to disrupt the comfort of their well-defined ideas and methods, but also for its threat of diluting their follower strength. Across much of the world, attempts to perceive and present faith differently from the mainstream frequently invites the wrath of supremacists and the opposition of ostracism. It is a travesty whenever each such attempt ends up like the fate suffered by Baha'ullah, the founder the Baha'i faith in 19th century Iran, and others like him who get exterminated by intolerance in the society around them.
Those who labeled this approach towards religion as "Hinduism", have done much injustice to it. It was perhaps the result of non-Indian scholars subconsciously choosing a yardstick better suited for more well-defined Abrahamic faiths. This is much more than an "ism", as testified by the sheer range of Hindu sects today that stretch from those believing in one God, to those following millions of Gods, and the many different religions that have emerged from the same culture.
In this multitude of humanity, everyone must remain welcome to add yet another sect or claim a new religion by preaching one's own interpretation of the path to the truth, and remain free to even prescribe sacred rituals to go with that without inviting punishments of blasphemy or apostasy. The freedom to create or expound pluralism of religious perspective ought to be an inviolable human right that transcends geography and cultures, and it should be limited only the barriers of indecency, violence or the willful disparaging of other religious groups.
The room for alternate perspectives comes indeed more easily under the grand umbrella of Dharma, within the traditional Indian approach of religion, or for a serious want of a better term, within "Hinduism". It just might help the world no end to acknowledge the merits of such freedom and let it flourish more widely. After all, one reason why multiple religions exist is that each has probably something good to offer to this planet.