INDIA AND ITS PEOPLE
This land is a constant challenge to mind and body, a
glorious shock to the system. It is no place for the faint-hearted.
India is exhilarating, exhausting, and infuriating — a land where,
you’ll find, the practicalities of daily life overlay the mysteries
that popular myth attaches to India. In place of the much-publicized,
and much-misunderstood, mysticism of its ancient religions, India in
reality has quite another miracle to offer in the sheer profusion of
its peoples and landscapes.
India comprises a diamond-shaped subcontinent that stretches
over 3,000 km (1,800 miles) from the Kashmir mountains in the north
right down to Kanyakumari, or Cape Comorin, on the Indian Ocean. From
east to west India also covers about 3,000 km, from Arunachal Pradesh
and Assam on the border with its neighbors China and Burma to the
Gujarat coast on the Arabian Sea. Only in more recent post-colonial
times did its natural geography exclude the countries of Pakistan and
Bangladesh. Even there, for all the hostilities, there’s an undeniable
cultural affinity with India — feuding brothers rather than unrelated
strangers. In fact, when you look at its 4,000 years of history — or
any of today’s newspapers, for that matter — its countless feuds seem
to be a perpetual but necessary dynamic of Indian civilization.
India is a massive family, with a lot of different and
inevitably conflicting regional and sectarian interests. Rupee
banknotes are printed in India’s 15 official languages: Hindi, Urdu,
Sanskrit, Sindhi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujurati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese,
Kashmiri, and Malayalam, as well as Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. A count
of the languages spoken all over India, leaving out the dialects, comes
to 1,652, written in 13 different alphabets.
The national language of Hindi is spoken by less than the
majority, and English, for which the government has a permanent program
of modernization, is spoken by just 3 percent of the people, mostly in
the largest cities. Everybody “speaks” cricket, though, with its
innings, wickets, and boundaries present in every dialect.
One of the first impressions you’ll get at the airport in
Delhi or Mumbai (Bombay) is the diversity of ethnic types. From
blue-eyed and sometimes red-haired Kashmiris and the Chinese-Tibetans
from Sikkim or Darjeeling, through all the shades of coffee of the
heartland, right down to dark-skinned, often curly-haired, Dravidians
from southern India, you soon realize there’s no such thing as a
“typical” Indian.
India’s prehistoric settlers were probably what
anthropologists call Proto-Australoids. They’ve since been joined by
Mongols, Aryans, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Afghans, while
Dutch, British, Portuguese, and French have also left their traces.
The landscape is alternately rich and arid, lush and
desolate. The majestic Himalayas in the north make an appropriate home
for Shiva, one of the most-revered Hindu gods. Kashmir is a serenely
beautiful and coveted land of green forest, alpine meadows, and lakes,
while the Punjab in the northwest is the fertile center of the
country’s Green Revolution, supporting the nation’s self-sufficiency in
wheat, barley, and millet. On the doorstep of this wealth, the Thar
Desert of noble Rajasthan heralds the vast Deccan plateau of parched,
ruddy granite that dominates the peninsula of southern India.
Delhi stands at the western end of the Ganga (Ganges) river
basin in which India grows much of its rice. Flanked with patches of
forest leading up into the foothills of the Himalayas, the flat plain
stretches right across to the Bay of Bengal 1,600 km (1,000 miles)
away, but some areas are kept as nature reserves for the country’s
wildlife, notably its tigers, leopards, and elephants. Bengal’s
greenery is the threshold to the tea plantations of Darjeeling and
Assam.
The rugged southern peninsula is hemmed in by low-lying
mountains — the Vindhya and Satpura to the north and the Western and
Eastern Ghats running parallel to the coasts. The forested Malabar
coast in the west is sown with crops of coconut, betel-nut, pepper,
rubber, and cashew nut, which today still tempt ships across the
Arabian Sea. Some of the palm trees in the area provide shade for beach
resorts in Goa and Kerala.
India’s landscape also features man-made architectural
treasures, bearing witness to the many great religions and
civilizations which have enriched the country — monuments now, after
centuries of neglect, preserved by the restoration program started by
the Archaeological Survey of India. The sights are endless: the Hindu
gopuram tower-gates of the south, the temples of Varanasi (Benares),
the cave monasteries of Ajanta and Ellora, the beautiful and erotic
sculptures of Khajuraho, the splendid marble palaces, fortresses, and
mausoleums of the emperors and maharajas in Delhi, Agra, and Rajasthan,
the colonial government buildings in New Delhi, or the unusual style of
the Gothic-Oriental railway station in Mumbai (known until 1995 as
Bombay).
The cities’ shanty-town districts are often directly in the
shadow of the shining skyscrapers, built by the shanty-town residents
themselves. Here women carry bricks on their heads as gracefully as a
pitcher of water. The women are also responsible for one other
characteristic of Indian “architecture” — cow-dung patties which are
preserved and kept for fuel and artfully shaped into mounds with shapes
that differ from region to region, some of them resembling a Buddhist
stupa, a Hindu gopuram, or even a Moslem minaret.
The only constant in this huge landscape is the people
themselves. Even in the vast open spaces of the Rajasthan desert or the
Deccan plateau of central India, people appear everywhere, a tribesman
on camel-back or lone woman holding her headdress in her teeth to keep
out the dust as she carries a huge pitcher of water or a bundle of
firewood on her head. If, as the road stretches before you empty and
clear right up to the horizon, and you can see only one tree, it’s a
pretty safe bet you’ll find at least one sadhu (holy man) resting in
its shade.
The teeming millions living in Calcutta and Mumbai have
become legendary. They crowd each other into the roadway, bulge out of
tiny auto-rickshaws, and perch on top of buses and trains; a family of
four or five clings onto a motor-scooter, and a whole school class on
one bullock-cart. It’s hazardous; buses do topple over, rooftop
passengers on trains do occasionally get swept off the top by an
overhanging steel rod, but they accept the risk for the free
ride — rooftoppers aren’t in the habit of buying tickets.
It’s important to remember not to apply Western values to
everything you see here. The poverty, for instance, does not create the
sense of shame as it does for people who live in Western countries. In
India poverty is borne with considerable dignity and even with a
cheerfulness that some may find difficult to understand. The same form
applies to jostling, which is a whole way of life in this country.
Everyone makes way for the cow, sacred to the Hindus. The
cow has right of way everywhere, whether walking nonchalantly through
the center of a city, or reclining across a new expressway. After a
while you may begin to detect something a bit uncanny in the way a cow
seems to look around and beyond her immediate surroundings — it’s as if
she knows that she’s sacred.
You can’t get around it: India is a country where religion
is ever-present. Although the constitution of today describes India as
a secular State, religion still plays a vital part in everyday
life — in its streets as well as in the architecture, sculpture, and
painting of its great monuments. A little background information on the
major forms of faith may help.
Religions of India
Hinduism
If Hinduism is more or less India’s national belief system,
this may be because it offers something for everyone: mysticism and
metaphysics for scholars, ceremony for ordinary people, austerity,
sensuality, tranquillity, and frenzy.
Building on the ancient cults and Vedic teachings of the
Indo-Aryans dating from 1300 b.c. , Hinduism began to take its present
form in the fourth century a.d. , under considerable pressure for a
more “accessible” religion. Popular devotional worship, with its appeal
to the common people, replaced the sacrifices practiced exclusively by
the Brahmins.
It is said there are 330 million gods in the Hindu
pantheon, but they might be seen as 330 million facets of a single
divinity. The three most important manifestations of the Brahman, or
godhead, are Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva, which are often presented to
Westerners as a trinity, though this is not really comparable to the
Christian concept.
The “big three” are by no means accorded equal status.
Vishnu, the preserver, is regarded by his worshippers as a god from
whose navel a lotus grew bearing Brahma whose task it was to create the
world. Vishnu, a four-armed god with mace, conch, discus, and lotus,
has many incarnations, of which the most famous is Krishna, who appears
as conquering hero, flute-playing lover, or mischievous baby. Vishnu’s
wife Lakshmi is goddess of good fortune.
Shiva is the dancing destroyer-god, wearing a garland of
skulls and snakes around both neck and arms. As the god of time and
ascetics, he decides the fate of the world. As Lord of beasts and king
of dance, Shiva is as passionate as Vishnu is serene. Just in case you
think you have got it all clear in your mind, remember that Vishnu
destroys by not preserving and Shiva preserves through the renewal
arising from destruction.
Hindu ethics say that the path to salvation has three
principles: righteousness, prosperity honestly achieved, and, not
least, pleasure. At the center of the confrontation with the harsh
reality of daily life is the concept of karma; that is “work” or
“deed,” and the implication that the sum total of one’s acts in a
previous life will determine one’s present station in life. A better
reincarnation is promised those whose deeds and actions are good in
this station. The ultimate goal is spiritual salvation, or moksha, a
freeing from the cycle of rebirth.
While this teaching has served to sustain the rigid
hierarchy of the caste system, it is not so “fatalistic” as some would
have it. The Hindus say we cannot escape our karma, but that with good
judgment and foresight we can use it to our advantage.
By the 19th century, reformers such as the Bengali Brahman
Ram Mohan Roy tried to rid Hinduism of primitive idolatry. The
self-immolation of widows, known as sati — a widow becomes sati, a
“virtuous woman,” by climbing onto her husband’s funeral pyre — has
disappeared, but the monkey-god Hanuman and elephant-headed Ganesh are
still idolized, and nobody will dare to deny the sanctity of the cow
and all her products: milk, curd, butter, and dung, the last of which
is used for fuel.
More than 83 percent of the population embraces Hinduism,
which is more a way of life than a religion; its sacred rituals and
observances are only a small part of what good Hindus believe makes
them good Hindus. Much more than the mystical elements which fascinate
and draw so many Westerners here, Hinduism is concerned with the basics
of everyday life: birth, work, health, relationships, and death, all of
this helped along by regular consultations with a local astrologer.
Even today, the intricate Hindu caste system can play a
role in the Indians’ choice of job, spouse, and political party,
despite the numerous anti-discrimination statutes passed since
Independence. Brahmins, the priestly caste, fill many of the top posts
in the universities and administration; many Indian Army officers can
trace their ancestry to the proud Kshatriya warrior caste; business is
dominated by the merchant or Vaishya caste; and Shudras till the land.
The so-called Untouchables have greater opportunities now to rise on
the social scale, a few of them becoming captains of industry or
cabinet ministers, but it’s still their brethren who sweep the
streets.
Most marriages in India are still arranged traditionally
with carefully negotiated dowries. While ever more matrimonial
advertisements in the weekend editions of The Times of India and other
newspapers mention “caste no bar,” just as many specify the required
caste or insist on a “fair-complexioned” bride while touting a
university diploma or an American work permit.
Islam
Following a conflict in India almost as old as Islam
itself, a peaceful coexistence between Hinduism and Islam seems hard to
achieve. It’s hard to imagine a faith more hostile to all idolatry,
fierce in its uncompromising monotheism, and opposed to the caste
system as Islam When sufi mystics or the emperor Akbar tried to create
a synthesis between the two faiths, the orthodox on both sides
resisted.
Hindu conversions to Islamic faith were more often
performed out of hope of social advancement under a Muslim government
than out of conviction. Muslims in India today, as fervent as their
brethren in Pakistan or the Middle East, are mostly descendants of
those converts.
Over 80 million Muslims form the second-largest religious
group in India — almost as many as the population of Pakistan — most of
them descendants from Hindu converts of the Mughals’ empire, who bore
the brunt of Hindu retaliation for long years full of subjection and an
often unfair identification with British rule. Left behind by the
exodus to Pakistan at the 1947 partition, they make up the peasantry in
the north. While they mostly keep a low profile, you may hear of
“communal incidents” in the cities between the Hindus and Muslims.
Followers of Islam in India are divided into two primary
groups: Sunnis (adherents of the Sunna law expounded by Mohammed’s own
words and deeds) and Shiites (followers of those interpretations
proposed by Mohammed’s cousin Ali). Every day, the devout face Mecca,
bow their foreheads to the ground, and proclaim: “There is no god but
Allah; and Mohammed is His Prophet. ”
Sikhs
The one attempt to merge the principles of Hinduism and
Islam is that of the Sikhs (“disciples”). Nanak, their guru (teacher),
was born a Hindu in 1469 and reared on the egalitarian principles of
Islam. He opposed idolatry and the caste system (which was subsequently
too strong to resist). From Islam he took the idea of one God, but
refused any such specific conception as Allah. He saw God’s
manifestation, like Hinduism, as being everywhere in the world He
created. Nanak’s teachings were written in the Adi Granth, which
acquired for Sikhs the sanctity of the Koran. According to this faith,
alcohol and tobacco are forbidden.
The militancy of the Sikhs came about only as Nanak’s
successors got embroiled in politics — with dire results for the
Sikhs — when their leaders challenged the Mughals. After the execution
of Guru Tegh Bahadur, his son, Guru Gobind Singh, exalted the faithful
to be ever ready for armed defense. They all took the surname Singh,
meaning “Lion” (all Sikhs are named Singh, but not all Singhs are
Sikhs), and wore a turban and kept the five K’s: kesha (uncut hair and
beard), kanga (comb for their hair), kara (steel bracelet), kachha
(soldier’s shorts), and kirpan (dagger). Their distinctive appearance
made them highly visible and so inspired an unflinching courage.
Sikhs make up just 2 percent of the population. With the
consistent militant need to defend their faith, they make up a fiercely
competent élite in the Indian Army, but they are also skilled farmers
at the spearhead of the Green Revolution in the Punjab, where most of
them live. Their rights have been the source of conflicts in the
central government.
Buddhism
Bu ddhism was founded over 2,500 years ago in reaction to
Brahmanic orthodoxy, but it practically vanished as an organized
religion from the Indian scene by persecution and absorption into the
Hindu mainstream. It continues, however, to exert influence on India’s
spiritual and artistic life to the present day.
Buddha’s own life explains his teachings, but the truth is
buried in both legend and historical fact. He was born Siddhartha
Gautama in a grove of sal trees at Lumbini (just across the Nepalese
border) around the year 566 b.c. His mother, who was queen of the
Sakyas, is said to have conceived him after dreaming that a magnificent
white elephant holding a lotus flower in his trunk had entered her
side.
Siddhartha grew up in princely luxury, but when he was
taken out one day to the edge of the royal parks, he saw the poor, the
sick, and the aged. Then he saw a religious beggar who seemed serene,
and he realized the path his life must take.
Abandoning his riches, Siddhartha went off into the
kingdoms of the Ganga valley. For six years he begged for his food,
learned to meditate, and practiced severe self-mortification, but still
felt no nearer to understanding life’s suffering. Then, aged 35,
sitting under a tree at the place now known as Bodh Gaya (south of
Patna), he vowed to stay there until his goal was achieved.
For 49 days he resisted demons and temptresses, and became
truly Enlightened — Buddha as he is called today. He preached his new
wisdom at Sarnath (near Varanasi) and with ever more disciples went out
to spread his word. Buddha himself converted ruthless bandits and whole
armies from the path of violence. In Kushinagar, between Bodh Gaya and
his birthplace, he died at age 80 of dysentery, it is said, from eating
pork.
Preaching that suffering came from the pursuit of personal
desire, Buddha had advocated the Middle Way of the Eightfold Path:
right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right
livelihood, right effort, right recollection, and right meditation.
Only thus could the enlightenment of Nirvana be achieved.
This original doctrine, without any sense of Buddha’s
divinity, was embraced by the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) school which
spread to Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, as well as Cambodia and Laos.
The Mahayana (Great Vehicle) school added the concept of Bodhisattva as
divine savior, and was then the most dominant form of Buddhism,
spreading to China and Japan.
After centuries of almost total eclipse, Buddhism today has
been able to achieve a revival in India, in part by offering its
egalitarian philosophy to Hindu Untouchables as an escape from
discrimination. There are now more than 5 million Buddhists in India,
many of them in Maharashtra.
Jainism
As old as Buddhism, Jainism has made its mark with its
concept of ahimsa (non-violence) and is much more pacifist than its
name, which means religion of the conquerors.
Vardhamana Mahavira was its founder. He was born in 540
b.c. in Bihar and, like Buddha, was the son of a chief. He, too,
abandoned riches to become an ascetic. But Mahavira (the Great Hero)
pursued self-mortification to the end of his life, stripping off his
clothes to take his word from kingdom to kingdom. He died of
self-inflicted starvation at the age of 72 in Para, near Rajgir. His
followers were later to divide into the Digambaras (“space-clad,” i.e.
, naked) and the Svetambaras (“white-clad”) you see today.
The religion, in which Mahavira is seen as the
manifestation of 24 Tirthankaras (teachers), attributes souls to all
living creatures, as well as other natural objects. Agriculture was
therefore abandoned for its destruction of plant and animal life. The
doctrines survive in vegetarianism, with Jain monks carrying dusters to
sweep insects away from where they tread and wearing a gauze veil over
their mouth to avoid breathing in flies.
Jainism, which never spread beyond India, claims 2 million
followers, including many businessmen in Gujarat and the Deccan, with a
few in Bengal. It had considerable influence on Mahatma Gandhi’s
non-violence movement; he used its fasting-unto-death as a potent moral
and political weapon. The Jains’ non-violent religion excludes them
from agriculture as a profession, but they dominate the electronics
industry in Bangalore.
Parsis, Jews, and Christians
The tiny but powerful community of Parsis brought
Zoroastrianism from Iran, and its people shine in business today. The
Parsis, as their name suggests, originate from ancient Persia and today
form only a minute community in the world of religions, with barely
100,000 living in India, mostly in and around the city of Mumbai. They
have been and are still enormously influential in this country’s
economic life, often serving as all-important go-betweens in the
sometimes immensely difficult relations between Hindus and Muslims, and
between India and Pakistan.
Their religion dates as far back as the seventh century
b.c. , when their prophet Zoroaster contrasted his peaceful and
sedentary People of Righteousness with the polytheistic nomadic People
of Evil. His was an attitude that probably determined not only their
general ethics, but also their occupational destiny as highly
sophisticated businessmen.
The Parsis base their elaborate code of ethics on the
concept of a constant struggle existing between the forces of
creation — that is, light and good — and those of darkness and evil.
Its teachings puts great emphasis on the very purity of the world’s
natural elements, fire, earth, and water. For instance, to avoid
polluting the elements, Parsis do not bury or cremate their dead, but
lay them exposed and naked on their famous Towers of Silence for the
vultures to devour.
India’s Jewish community is ancient indeed. Some texts
claim that the first Jews arrived in India at the time of the
Babylonian exile, in 587 b.c. ; others bring them to Cranganur, on the
Malabar coast, in a.d. 72, about the time that the disciple Thomas is
thought to have brought his Christian mission to India. The oldest
Jewish community still in existence is situated down the coast at
Cochin (see page 182), dating back at least to the fourth century a.d.
Some others, less orthodox, can be found in Mumbai, but most emigrated
to Israel when it was founded in the year 1948.
The earliest Christians other than St. Thomas (see page
197), were the so-called Nestorian “heretics” of the Syrian Orthodox
Church, also living on the Malabar coast since the first centuries of
the Christian era. Modern Indian Christians, some descended from the
Syrians, others from those converted by British and Portuguese
missionaries, number about 19 million. They are mainly Catholics,
living in Goa, and elsewhere you will find all the British variations
on Protestantism, all with a certain Hindu tinge to them.
The new religion of India is of course modernization, and
young, upwardly mobile professionals are everywhere. Growing
involvement in electronics, telecommunications, nuclear power, and
space satellites is intended to take the country, as one official said,
“directly from the 19th into the 21st century. ” To achieve this
transition, the government is cutting through bureaucracy to break with
political corruption and find some kind of peaceful modus vivendi for
communal and regional interests. Former US ambassador John Kenneth
Galbraith called it a “functioning anarchy. ” The miracle of how it
functions is well worth observing.
