The Financial Express, 25th March 2007
Review by Sir Mark Tully
Hinduism is too large to be a single religion, assert the Kakars
Sudhir Kakar is a psychologist and Katharina is a scholar of comparative religions. So it’s not surprising that their book is a study of religious psychology. For them Indian-ness, and they are confident that for all the diversity of India there is such a thing, is “about similarities produced by an Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilisation”. What’s more, they maintain “Indic civilisation, as separate from though related to Hinduism as a religion, is the common patrimony of all Indians, irrespective of their professed faith.” That’s a courageous statement with sensitive secularists equating even the mention of Hinduism with communalism, and scholars arguing that there is no such thing as Hinduism because the multitude of beliefs bundled together under its umbrella is far too diverse to represent a single religion or culture. But the Kakars argue the opposite convincingly, quoting Nirad Chaudhuri as an authority for their case but don’t take his dismal view of Hinduism.
This is a book which should be read by all Indian executives. In the first place if there really is such a thing as Indian-ness then managers should think of an Indian style of management. They should not be content to rely on the teaching in American Business Schools, notorious for exalting their so called management science and decrying experience. Managers should pay particular attention to what the Kakars have to say about the ‘Hierarchical Indian’. They suggest that that Indians prefer authoritative leaders. But there is a catch — the leader has to be “strict, demanding, but also caring and nurturing.” But to a modern executive, believing that hiring and firing is the best way to deal with staff, it smacks of hopelessly old fashioned paternalism.
Modern executives tend to dismiss metaphysics as irrelevant but the Kakars accept the commonly held assumption that Indians, including corporate Indians, are inclined to spirituality. One aspect of the Indian spirituality they stress is relevant to all of us in all our lives. They say ‘there is a profound ethical relativism which has become entrenched in the Hindu way of thinking.” This relativism, they maintain “supports tradition and modernity, innovation and conformity”. So Indians should find it possible to resist the modern mania for change without going to the opposite extreme and blindly following tradition. It is alleged that Hindu relativism implies Hinduism has no moral code. The Kakar’s argue that is not so. But they will take the contexts of violations of that code into account. They won’t follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law. In contrast to that, moral relativism is one of modernity’s greatest sins, according to the present Pope.
Inevitably the Kakars have to deal with caste, which they note is not confined to Hinduism in India. They say it is not as harsh in other religions but I wonder whether a Dalit Christian would agree. They don’t judge caste, apart from condemning untouchability outright.
Hindu relativism as described by the Kakars seems to me a course which can be steered between the rock of modernism with all its certainties and the whirlpool of postmodernism with all its uncertainties. It stresses that there are no absolute, and final answers. That’s why the Kakars think the RSS championing of a homogenous Hinduism is in fact contrary to the spirit of the religion it underpins. We can take this relativism to the wider word beyond religion. If there are always uncertainties there can be no final universalism. That surely means we should question the universality of the market capitalism sweeping the world. We should ask questions about market capitalism — see its benefits but not lose sight of traditions which would urge some caution on us.
www.washingtonpost.com
[Journalists regularly contact the OCHS asking advice, checking facts and looking for contacts an prespectives. As an example of this, The Washington Post consulted scholars at the OCHS before printing the following article.]
TIRUCHIRAPALLI, INDIA, March 14, 2007: Balaji, a Hindu priest, stood before the reclining god and offered a plate of coconut and bananas. His chest bare and his face adorned with red and yellow sacred paste, he set the food at the foot of a statue that Hindus regard as an embodiment of Lord Vishnu. Following ancient tradition deep inside one of India’s oldest and holiest temples, he chanted Vishnu’s names 108 times to beseech health, wealth and good fortune - not for himself, but for an Indian emigrant living in London who had purchased the prayer with her credit card on a Hindu Web site. “If you wish to make an offering, God will accept it - even if it’s on the Internet,” said Balaji. The Internet has become a hub of religious worship for millions of people around the world.
Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in “virtual” houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing. Some sites offer rites from baptism to confession to conversion to Judaism. “The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was mainly for nerds and young people and techies,” said Morten Hojsgaard, a Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. “But now it really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for religious seekers. ” Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God, religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search for “sex” on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for “God” yields 396 million.
India, with more than 1.1 billion people and a passion for technology, has become a leader in the practice of religion online, through a very large number of often very small Web sites, a pattern that reflects the decentralization of much of religious life here. Hindus sitting in the United States or Europe watch streaming live video of morning prayers from temples in their home towns. Members of India’s fast-growing middle class have embraced the Internet in ways that startle their parents, many of whom were raised in villages that still barely have telephone service. At many Hindu temples, a priest’s typical day includes time set aside to read e-mails asking for b lessings.
Saranam.com was founded by Mahesh Mohanan and Mervyn Jose, a pair of young computer software engineers in Chennai, the steamy port city formerly known as Madras. It is home both to some of India’s most magnificent old temples and to some of its most cutting-edge technology firms. Mohanan said he hit on the idea shortly after his marriage in 1999, when his new mother-in-law insisted that he and his new bride visit 15 Hindu temples over three days to seek blessings. “It was exhausting,” Mohanan said. “I thought it would be so much easier if I could just do it on the Internet.” With financial backing from a local businessman, Saranam.com was up and running within weeks as a for-profit company. The site now gets about 100,000 visits a year and about 200 orders each month, the company says. Most customers buy pujas to pray for sick relatives, to ease marital or financial problems — or even, in the case of some Indians living in the United States, to help get a green card. According to Mohanan and Jose, Saranam limits its advertising and marketing to avoid offending users who visit the site for serious religious purposes. “We can’t say ‘Winter Sale!’ or things like that, because it would damage our credibility,” Jose said. But it does use a time-honored p romotional technique of posting articles written about it, including a news service account that appeared in The Washington Post. At first, most of the customers came from the 20 million or so Indians who live overseas. But now most are Americans, Europeans and people from the Middle East who have become interested in Hinduism, at least in part because of information available on the Internet.
www.time.com
ALLAHADAD, INDIA, March 9, 2007: Time magazine photographer Prashant Panjiar has documented the recently held Ardh Kumbha Mela in a series of stunning black and white photos. The festival lasts 45 days at the confluence of three rivers, the Ganges, Yamuna and the mystical Saraswati. An estimated 70 million pilgrims gathered for this year’s festival and Panjiar’s photos have captured both the sadhus and the millions of humble pilgrims come to bathe. This is an excellent photo essay and a good resource for teachers.