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Assault on tradition: Subhash Kak

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Subhash Kak has presented succinct arguments related to the need for

reforms in the management of hindu temples. The debate was also

joined

last year by Acharya Sabha which held its first meeting coordinated

by

Swami Dayananda Saraswati in Chennai. In the wake of the ongoing

onslaughts on hindu institutions, this serious issue raised by

Subhash

should be deliberated upon intensely and constitution amended to

restore the temples to the hindu communities and out of bureaucratic

controls or control by criminalised polity. Rajeev Srinivasan wrote a

satirical piece that he welcomed the proposal by CPI-M to tax

religious institutions and pointed to a number of items of properties

of christist religious institutions just around Trivandrum. In the

name of secularism, the polity can't have one rule for the hindu and

another for the christist or the islamist. It is now 57 years after

Bharat attained independence. It is time to scrap all the provisions

in the Constitution related to minorities -- linguistic or religious

-- and to introduce a uniform civil code, while taking the government

off the backs of the people. We have the splendid example of local

self-government by local bodies of the 8th century in a Uttaramerur

inscription of the Chola kingdom.

 

Dhanyavaadah. Kalyanaraman

 

The assault on tradition by Subhash Kak 6 Jan. 2005

 

Modernity is associated with the idea of industrialization, a strong

nation-state system and identity, progress, rationality, reason and

objectivity that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century Western

Europe.

All this sounds great, but there is a price to pay. Mechanistic logic

in human affairs results in oppression and regimentation,

objectification of life, and alienation and loss of freedom. From it

arise self-hate and destructive behaviour.

 

The end of the Cold War led some to announce the end of history; in

reality, it only intensified the struggle in different societies

between modernity and tradition. In the US, the right has exploited

the deep unhappiness with the oppressive aspects of modernity by

promoting its economic and social agenda as a palliative, when, in

reality, its policies promote further 'industrialization' of human

affairs. The right's prescriptions may be false; but it is winning

because the left has not come up with a consistent argument to

counter

it.

 

Meanwhile, the 'industrialization' of human affairs marches on,

facilitated by new technologies. This globalization is not only in

the

spread of American pop-culture or control of increasing public space

by the multinational corporations, it is also in the practice of law,

which in traditional society was quite decentralized. Modernity in

the

legal sense is the notion that only the state or the sovereign can

lay

down the body of rules for citizens to follow. Here it draws from the

tradition of the Christian Church with its claim to be the sole

interpreter of law.

 

The resistance of Muslims to westernizing modernization is natural,

given that it sees itself as a revelation that supersedes

Christianity. But the agents of westernization have been surprised by

the claims of other non-Western societies for validity of their

culture and attachment to their own social and legal arrangements.

This explains the puzzlement of the westernized elite at the

continuing affirmation of many for the Hindu tradition.

 

The Matter of Law

 

The modernist is puzzled because he does not understand the Hindu

tradition, a situation getting worse due to the declining knowledge

of

the classical foundations of this tradition. According to Werner

Menski in his path-breaking 'Hindu Law: Beyond Tradition and

Modernity' (Oxford University Press, 2003), "Hindu law today must be

seen as a postmodern phenomenon, displaying its internal dynamism and

perennial capacity for flexibility and realignment." Menski argues

that the modernist reading of the tradition is a caricature,

perpetuated because "studying Hindu law is often seen as regressive

activity." Menski adds:

 

Anything 'Hindu' is quickly denigrated in many ways, not only by many

followers of the monotheistic religions, but also those who imagine

and assert that a modern world, by which is often meant a

Western-inspired world, can do without so-called primitive religion

and cultural traditions. Lawyers (as well as more recently whole

cohorts of diasporic Indian scholars)... have had specific reasons to

argue for modernity. Colonialism added its own ideologies and

arguments to subjugate not only Hindus, but also Hindu law, all in

the

name of universalistic legal constructs.

 

In the complex process of scholarly manipulation, many scholars have

engaged (often unwittingly) in misleading and sometimes simply wrong

representation of Hindu 'tradition'. Prominent amongst these

misrepresentations is the assumption that ancient Hindu texts

'prescribed' certain rules, which even infects the most intricate

subaltern writing.

 

In recent years, arguments such as Menski's (or those of Triloki Nath

Madan and Ashis Nandy before him) have been criticized by the

modernists as being dangerous because they provide support to the

political right. But that is a false argument because the political

right in India has not analyzed civilizational dynamics in terms of

the push and pull between modernity and tradition. Indeed, the

right's

insistence on a common civil law for all Indians is inspired by the

modernist ideology, as are its many policies that promote

centralization. The right has mostly been reactive, fighting at best

for symbolic gains, hoping -- erroneously, as it found to its grief -

-

that these would suffice to ensure victory at the next election.

 

The stakes are very high since they have implications for the manner

in which India will be able to respond to the pressures of

globalization. Menski reminds us:

 

Arguments about the inherent political incorrectness and modern

irrelevance of Hindu law have conveniently forgotten that the

so-called modern traditions have their own roots in specific Western

cultural and religious traditions. So how could Indian be called upon

to 'modernize', if that simply meant, at one level, shedding the

social and cultural concepts that make up the fabric of the various

hybrid Indian identities? How can hundreds of millions of Hindus be

expected, let alone forced, to abandon Hindu law?

 

Modernity, calling on all 'others' to assimilate to the supposedly

higher, apparently secular and 'modern' value system represented by

the West, amounted to thinly veiled pressure to abandon various

indigenous traditions and convert to the supposedly universal notions

of modernity. In other words, modernity expected and demanded

unidirectional assimilation to alien lego-cultural norms and models,

and a stepping outside of one's own inherited traditions. It demanded

de-Hinduization, abandoning of Hindu customs, habits, and traditions.

While modernity was, at one level, not concerned about religion, it

expected the modern world citizen to be of a secular disposition,

thus

seeking to prescribe one particular religious perspective as

appropriate for modernity.

 

Since the modern university is a vehicle for westernization, with

hardly a representation for those who are schooled in the Indian

classics, there hasn't been a proper debate on identifying the proper

tension between modernity and tradition in the Indian context. This

is

one reason the state has been paralyzed in making legal reforms, and

has ceded decision making in many spheres to the judiciary.

 

Modernity and Temple Administration

 

It is in the relationship between the state and religion that the

lack

of clear thinking becomes most apparent. Observers of recent Indian

history express incredulity at how the Indian state (whether ruled by

the left or the BJP), which professes to be secular, has taken over

the management of most Hindu temples. This has proceeded in the face

of corruption, and diverting of the temple income for non-religious

purposes, or even for the maintenance of religious institutions of

rival religions.

 

Typically, the government creates trusts to run these temples, with

active management entrusted to officers of the Indian Administrative

Service, with the government's representatives sitting on the board

taking decisions regarding where the income is to be banked (gaining

kickbacks from the banks in the process) and how it is to be

invested,

and even the sale of temple properties. Naturally, these bureaucrats

have no interest in any larger vision associated with the temple.

 

In spite of its numerous shortcomings, the medieval temple included

all jatis as stakeholders in a complex system of obligations under

the

yajamani system. But that is not the case with the government

controlled modern temple, where the bureaucrat is the supreme

authority. Operating in a system without appropriate checks and

balances, it is easy for him to succumb to greed. For such an

officer,

who is on a temporary assignment as a temple chief, there is no

incentive to look at the larger role of the temple in the community,

and he, at best, is an instrument of the status quo. Such temples are

not the harbingers of social change that they should be.

 

A few months ago, I heard from one of the government trustees of the

Vaishno Devi temple in Jammu, who was visiting the United States. He

wanted some advice on how to go about recruiting faculty for the

newly

established Mata Vaishno Devi Temple University, of whose existence I

was not aware until that moment. He explained that the government had

decided to create this university with the income of the Vaishno Devi

temple; this university, it had been decided, would focus on

information technology and biotechnology.

 

I asked him why the university, which is being run on the donations

of

the pilgrims, did not include Hindu religious studies on its

curriculum. He said since the university operated within the

parameters of a secular state, it could not teach any subject related

to Hinduism. The bottom line: the donations of the pilgrims support

activities that have nothing to do with the pilgrimage.

 

The control of the Hindu temples by the government, when the mosques

or the churches have not similarly been taken over, is defended on

the

ground that the modern Indian state is the successor also to the

earlier pre-British Indian states where much of the great temple

ritual was around the person of the king. The chief ministers, being

the democratically elected successors to the kings, are within their

rights to continue with this tradition irrespective of what the

Constitution says.

 

Meanwhile, many Hindu groups have begun agitating for the Hindu

temples to be restored to the Hindu communities. If there is need for

a better legal and administrative framework for the running of

temples, they demand that all Hindu communities are made stakeholders

with complete separation between the government and the management

boards, with the judiciary to act as referee in case of dispute.

 

Globalization and Body and Soul

 

The seizing of the temples by the Indian bureaucracy is only a small

part of the larger war for individual freedom. Friedrich Hayek in his

classic The Road to Serfdom (1944) warned that government control

over

production led to totalitarianism. Now the danger is much greater.

 

Technology makes it easy for the state and multinational corporations

or even guilds to assume unprecedented power over not only production

but also distribution. This power is likely to be exercised in

neocolonial control of national economies and natural wealth;

meanwhile, it is being increasingly applied to the last frontiers

before man, the human body and the mind.

 

Western medicine has become a handmaiden to pharmaceutical firms,

resulting in the vast majority of Westerners becoming dependent on

some sort of medication, as documented in John Abramson's Overdosed

America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (HarperCollins,

2003). The philosopher Ivan Illich once said: "Modern medicine is a

negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but

only

itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals."

 

The other force of globalization is the use of media and marketing

theory to sell organized religion and to separate individuals from

their traditions and cultural history.

 

But our age of confusion is also an age of enormous promise. One

hopes

that out of the current conflict will arise better understanding and

compassion and more freedom for people everywhere. But this will be,

at best, a rocky road.

 

http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305983

 

External links:

 

http://www.vivekanandagospel.org/AwakeArise.pdf: Swami

Jyotirmayananda

on Hindu Temples

 

http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GA06Dj01.html: The Naked

Hegemon

--- End forwarded message ---

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