Semitic Hinduism

About two weeks back, Karan Thapar wrote a piece entitled 'Who's the real Hindu' in the Hindustan Times. He raised a simple question: Does the VHP have the right to speak for you or I [sic]?  Easy enough to answer that one: No. He offers up some reasons for why not and I have a somewhat different take. Here's mine.

Every major world religion is defined by a codified set of beliefs that every adherent must subscribe to. With the exception of course of Hinduism. It almost appears as if in India, we define Hinduism by subtraction - if you are not Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Jew, Baha'i, Shinto, Taoist or anything else, voila! you are Hindu.

The Middle East was the cradle of three major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam that we now collectively think of as the Semitic Religions. With their shared beliefs in a single, all knowing God the Creator, an identifiable Prophet or series of Prophets and a congregational form of worship, their common roots are hard to miss. And finally their shared belief in offering an exclusive path to redemption denying all but their own adherents access to salvation and heaven. In two of these, Christianity and Islam, there was also a clear emphasis on proselytising to the heathens to the point of making it a sacred duty for followers. The continued organic and inorganic growth of both these religions even in the 21st century is driven by a continued playing out of this powerful force.

Cut back briefly to Hinduism. With no shared belief system, no congregational worship, no conversion route inward, it isn't as if the religion (or whatever) has stopped growing. Not by the longest chalk! India's 2001 Census revealed a Hindu population of 827 million up, hold your breath now, a solid 20% over the previous decade though the decadal growth rate did drop from 22.8% for the 1981-1991 period. Assuming that there is a further drop in the decadal rate by a similar proportion when we next run the Census you should still see a 17.5% growth to 972 million Indian Hindus in India 2011. Short point - this is not a religion in any imminent danger of disappearing.

Strangely, a relatively small band of misguided people believe that the solution to  fighting back the forces that threaten Hinduism (yeah, right, I'm scared already :-/) is, believe it or not,  to turn it into a Semitic Religion, complete with its own prescribed dogma, its own congregational leaders (a Hindu Pope, wow!) and its own proselytising army. So much for originality.

It is a unique civilizational inheritance that we in India enjoy. Because of the utter amorphousness of 'Hinduism' it became the ultimate assimilator. As the Scythians and the Parthians, the Greeks and the Persians, the Moghuls and the Turks kept invading, or otherwise fetching up in this sub-continental land mass south of the Himalayas, they were progressively integrated into the gentle but utterly inexorable ebb and flow of this great stream of human civilization. And all their beliefs and practices were effortlessly assimilated into the shared heritage. (A lot like our culinary traditions developed :-) for instance I've heard that the famous Bengali Prawn dish, Chingri Machcher Malai Kari, has nothing to do with Malai as in Cream but everything with Malay as in Malaysia!).

That is what we Hindus are and who we Hindus are, assimilators, not segregationists.

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