How I Returned to My Ancestral Religion

Many years ago in Delhi, a colleague’s mother, who belongs to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect influenced by Christianity, said to me in lugubrious tones, “Our people are so backward that they worship stones.” Taken aback, I was unable to respond. Later, I thought I should have said that Hindus worship images as symbols of the divine.

This was not always my view. I am Indian, and I grew up in Delhi, where my family belonged to a small, dissenting, quietist Protestant sect similar to the Plymouth Brethren. We had services four times a week and read the Bible at home at least twice a day, once as a family and once individually. By the time I was 18, I had read it through scores of times.

I was a believer but from early childhood, I was troubled about my friends, neighbours, and teachers, who were all Hindus and therefore, according to Christian theology, would seem to be bound for hell. Praying for them to convert seemed both unrealistic and unfair – what about everyone else in the world? I wonder if early Christians in Europe, when they were a minority surrounded by non-Christians, had similar worries. St Augustine’s mother’s anxiety on his behalf suggests that some of them did.

Different branches of my family had been converted to Christianity two to three generations earlier. I recently discovered that my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather was an eight-year-old orphan handed over to missionaries during a famine. He was later trained as a Methodist minister. I am now researching this story and will write about it. My paternal grandfather defiantly decided to convert after his father abandoned him and his mother.

My immediate family had a fraught relationship with Hindu culture and thought. They had close friends who were Christians but also close friends who were Hindus. We did not eat cows, and no particular reason was given for this. My mother would participate in Diwali festivities (but not worship) at my best friend’s house – lighting oil lamps, playing with fireworks, eating sweets, and walking around the neighborhood to observe the display of lights in other homes.

My mother noticed that the God Ganesh popped up in her life several times. As a college student, she found a small image of him in her bicycle basket. Late in life, she was given another small image of him as part of a gift from a store. Interestingly, she did not want to keep these in the house for their ornamental value nor did she did not want to give them away because that would encourage idolatry nor could she bring herself to throw them in the trash. They seemed to carry some sort of a charge that she would not acknowledge and could not explain.

During my brief Marxist phase in college, I gave up on Christian doctrine because its tenets – Christ dying to wash out the original sin of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and also for the sins of everyone who would be saved from hell only if they believed in this sacrificial act, became increasingly unacceptable to me, intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. However, I never went so far as to call myself an atheist. That category seemed simplistic. Indian languages have no word for “atheist.” The word now used as the equivalent of “atheist” actually has a different meaning and history. I have written about this elsewhere.

As a 21-year-old, I co-founded Manushi, India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, and volunteered on it for the next 13 years while teaching at a Delhi University women’s college to earn my living. By my late 20s, I found myself moving closer to Hinduism. We brought out a special tenth-anniversary issue of Manushi on medieval women Hindu devotional poets. These poets are widely studied in school and college, and devotees frequently sing their songs, so I was already acquainted with them. Now I read them in more depth and translated some of their works. Many of these women rejected marriage to a man because they considered themselves married to a particular God – to Krishna or to Shiva. Here is a poem by the sixteenth-century princess Meerabai, which I translated:

No-one can stop you - Meera set out in ecstasy.

Modesty, shame, family honour - all these I threw off my head.

Flinging away praise and blame, I took the narrow path of knowledge.

Tall the towers, red the windows - a formless bed is spread,

Auspicious the five coloured necklace, made of flowers and buds,

Beautiful armlets and bracelets, vermilion in my hair parting,

The tray of remembrance in my hand - a beauty more true.

Meera sleeps on the bed of happiness - auspicious the hour today.

Rana [her husband], you go to your house - you and I cannot pull on together.

No-one can stop you - Meera set out in ecstasy.

Meera was a mystic and she left her family to join a community of devotees. There were many women and men like her, from all sectors of society, who reiterated and expressed a devotion grounded in Hindu philosophy.

Gods and Goddesses were a living presence all around me. Hindu worship is home-based but it also spills out into nature. You will see people worshipping trees by tying red bands around them, worshipping the sun and feeding ants early in the morning, feeding dogs, cows and crows later in the day, and worshipping the rivers. Since everything that exists is a manifestation, more or less evolved, of divine consciousness, Hindus worship not only Gods and Goddesses in human or animal forms, but also people (parents, teachers, spouses, children, siblings, poets, mystics, artists), animals, birds, reptiles, mountains, trees, rivers, the elements (especially fire but also water, earth), the planets, and the instruments of creativity, including books, musical instruments, and computers. All are viewed as manifestations to different degrees of universal divine consciousness that is both in the universe and beyond it. When some Gods become less popular, they may be less worshipped but none is ever discarded.

Hinduism, like Judaism, is not a conversion religion, and therefore it has no equivalent to baptism. I experienced the change in me not as a conversion but as a gradual return to the practices of my ancestors. I found Hindu rituals, with their combination of incense, fire, colour, food, and flowers, deeply appealing.

By my early thirties, I had turned vegetarian and had begun to light incense before a stone image of Saraswati, Goddess of knowledge and of the arts, in my house. For another special issue of Manushi that focused on Goddesses, I researched Goddess traditions and was amazed by their dazzling variety as well as their similarities to ancient Greek Goddess traditions. There is a Goddess of prosperity and wealth, whose special day is Diwali that starts the new business year, there are fierce Goddesses worshipped before a just war, and there are nine days in the year when people worship every girl child as a Goddess.

I studied English literature at Delhi University and same-sex sexuality was never mentioned, not even when we studied Shakespeare’s sonnets from a man to a male beloved or writers like E.M. Forster and W.H. Auden who were known to be gay. I read Sanskrit and other Indian literature for my 2000 book Same-Sex Love in India which contained translated excerpts from works in 15 Indian languages, composed over a period of more than 2000 years. I discovered that homosexuality, termed the crime not to be named among Christians and rendered unspeakable in much of European literature, had been openly discussed, analysed and even celebrated in India for millennia. The fourth-century Kamasutra, the first treatise in the world on eroticism, has a whole chapter on male-male desire, which had been removed from most translations in the twentieth century. I also found fourteenth-century devotional texts in which two co-widows fell in love, had a sexual relationship, and produced a heroic son together, a kind of imagining not found in any other literature of the period worldwide.

In one sense, I returned to Hinduism by an intellectual path, by reading the Upanishads and the Gita. Knowledge is one of the paths that the Gita recommends, although this knowledge must culminate in vision. It was by reading that thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, and Whitman came to appreciate Hinduism. In another sense, I returned through emotions, a sense of connection with my people and my ancestors.

One occasion when I glimpsed the enchantment of the sacred was in 1995, when images of Ganesh in temples were said to drink milk offered by devotees. Thousands of people from different backgrounds, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, flocked to temples to feed Ganesh. Opinion-makers, both right-wing and left-wing, hastened to denounce this as irrational and hysterical superstition. To me, it seemed (and I wrote about this at the time) that the miracle was the desire to feed God, to give rather than only to receive. Krishna and Ganesh are both loved in their playful and mischievous child forms. Through them, devotees love the divine unconditionally, as parents love their children.

Why do I find Hinduism intellectually, emotionally and imaginatively more satisfying than the Christianity into which I was born? First, there is no eternal heaven or hell in mainstream Hinduism so I do not have to worry about anyone being consigned to eternal suffering. There are temporary celestial and infernal worlds, where the jiva (living being) goes after death and before rebirth. Just as bodies are recycled, consciousness too passes through many forms.

The ancient doctrine of rebirth, also believed by philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras, provides infinite opportunities to grow and move at one’s own pace towards liberation from rebirth. Not only individual beings but worlds too are reborn throughout infinity. Therefore, the indigenous term for Hinduism is sanatana dharma (the dharma without beginning and without end).

Hinduism gives everyone options. There are thousands of sacred books and Gods. As a Hindu, one may choose one’s own favourite God, one’s guru (teacher), and one’s favourite scripture, but one never rejects the others. A common metaphor for different paths to liberation is that of different ways to climb a mountain. One may climb straight up, which is more difficult or go round and round in a spiral or zig-zag, or get lost and wander, but sooner or later, all will reach the same place, hence there is no point trying to convert anyone. Hinduism does not advocate meddling in others’ lives or trying to “change the world” which is the modern mantra, although it does advocate helping the underprivileged.

The modern zero-sum debates between religion and atheism have never interested me. Hindu scientists rarely see science and religion as opposed. There are several Hindu creation stories and they are compatible with evolution. The mathematical genius Srinivas Ramanujam said that his family Goddess Namagiri appeared to him in dreams and gave him mathematical formulae. “An equation,” he wrote, “means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.”

It is perfectly possible to be Hindu and not to worship any God or ever visit a temple. Four of the six major schools of Hindu philosophy do not require a God. The only shared fundamental premise is the existence of consciousness. “Om,” the basic sound common to Hinduism and the other three Indic religions that grew out of it (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), means “Yes” – yes to consciousness. Matter is not the only reality. Depending on the school of thought, matter may be a coexistent reality or it may be a reflection of spirit, as a dream is a reflection of waking life. It is real (as a dream or a film projected on to a screen is real) but it is not ultimate reality.

It also matters to me that Hinduism and Jainism have contributed to vegetarian food being the default in India. Even though only about 44% of Indian Hindus are vegetarian, most Hindu and many Christian non-vegetarians eat meat only thrice a week or so (as my family did), and it is just one of the elements of a meal, with lentils and vegetables being the staples. Also, most Hindu non-vegetarian families refrain from meat on particular days and during particular festive seasons.

Before readers bring up the stereotype of Hinduism being all about “caste” (a misleading term invented by Portuguese colonizers), let me point out that there are hundreds of thousands of communities (known as jati) that are mobile, often moving upward with economic and political prosperity, and even the supposedly lower ones are proud of their traditions. The dreadful medieval practice of untouchability is now a criminal offence. Many prosperous people in urban areas are indifferent to their or anyone else’s jati, but for the poor birth community often serves as a social security net. Almost never have I been questioned about my “caste” (I’m a mix of several) nor has the authenticity of my Hinduism been questioned.

Goddess worship traditions have something to do with India having had a woman Prime Minister, women Presidents, and many powerful women chief ministers of states. India has had several never-married or widowed Prime Ministers and Presidents, both male and female, and several vegetarians, including perhaps the most beloved of all the Presidents, Abdul Kalam, who was a Muslim, unmarried, and a vegetarian.

Christianity has enriched me greatly, through its literature, art, and music, especially its Marian traditions, through which popular devotion reclaimed lost Goddess worship. But if someone like my colleague’s mother today lamented Hindus worshipping stones, I would say that stone too is divine, like everything else in the universe. In saying this, I would be following my paternal great-grandmother. When a missionary tried to convert her, he could not communicate with her easily as she knew no English. So he placed an apple and a stone before her, and asked her to choose. She chose the stone.