How can such a religion lend itself to fundamentalism? That devotees of this essentially tolerant faith have desecrated a shrine and assaulted Muslims in its name is a source of shame and sorrow. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken from each — language, art, food, learning — and grown with all of them. To be Indian is to be part of an elusive dream we all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors from many sources that we cannot easily identify. Muslim invaders may indeed have destroyed Hindu temples, putting mosques in their place, but this did not — could not — destroy the Indian dream. Nor did Hinduism suffer a fatal blow. Large, eclectic, agglomerative, the Hinduism that I know understands that faith is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. “Build Ram in your heart,” the Hindu is enjoined; and if Ram is in your heart, it will little matter where else he is, or is not.
But the twentieth-century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture’s confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. Indians have been made more conscious than ever before of what divides us.
Two years before the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the country had suffered through the divisive trauma of the Mandal affair. In 1990 the minority Janata government of the famously incorruptible V. P. Singh approved the long-neglected report of the Mandal Commission, which had recommended that 27 percent of all government jobs be reserved for the politically influential “backward castes,” in addition to the 22.5 percent already reserved for the “scheduled castes and tribes” (the former outcasts of Indian society). The Mandal recommendation had been ignored by previous governments because it would have brought the percentage of jobs “reserved” for specific quotas to nearly half the total, but the “backwards” were the backbone of Singh’s electoral support, and he decided to implement the Mandal report. The upper and middle castes erupted in protest across northern India, with students immolating themselves at the prospect of the further shrinking of their employment horizons; twelve died, consumed quite literally in the flames of their outrage. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) withdrew its support to Singh’s Janata government and instead launched into the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation that led eventually to the destruction of the mosque and the rioting that followed.
Of course there is a reactionary element to the Mandal protests, the privileged defending generations of privilege; but Mandal posed ethical dilemmas even to the Indian liberal. This was not simply a case of affording opportunities to the underprivileged. The notion that government employment is an end in itself, unrelated to educational attainment or ability, is troubling for two reasons. First, because efficient and effective administration are seen as less important than granting access to the levers of government to some admittedly underrepresented communities: one “backward caste” friend acidly told me, “after all, if efficiency is more important than representation, we should never have asked the British to leave.” Second, because it perpetuates a culture of overbureaucratized governance, where government jobs are seen as a means of wielding power in a state, and a society, where the government already intrudes in far too many areas of economic activity. Most troubling of all to me, however, is that when Mandal and Masjid elevate sectarianism to the level of public policy, we are defined by that which divides us, and it becomes more important to be a Muslim, a (tribal) Bodo, or a (“backward”) Yadav than to be an Indian. Our politics have created a discourse in which the clamor goes up for Assam for the Assamese, Jharkhand for the Jharkhandis, Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians — but who, my father would ask, believes in an India for Indians?
Identities thus formed are asserted, sometimes through violence. I am prepared to concede that Hindu fanaticism — which ought to be a contradiction in terms, since we have no dogmas to be fanatical about — is partly a reaction to other chauvinisms. I am not among the Indian secularists whose opposition to the Babri Masjid agitation is based on a meticulously researched rejection of the historicity of their claim that the mosque stood on the site of the birth of the Hindu god-king Ram — because to me what matters is what most people believe, for their beliefs offer a sounder basis for public policy than the historians’ footnotes. (Instead of saying to impassioned Hindus, “You are wrong, there is no proof this was Ram’s birthplace, there is no proof that the temple Babur demolished to build this mosque was a temple to Ram, go away and leave the mosque in place,” how much more effective might it have been to say, “You may be right, let us assume for a moment that there was a Ram Janmabhoomi temple here that was destroyed to make room for this mosque four hundred seventy years ago; does that mean we should behave in that way today? If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1990s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?”)
I also accept the reproach of those Hindus who see a double standard at work here. Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, and Hindus say they are proud to be . . . secular. It is easy to see why this sequence should provoke the scorn of those Hindus who declaim, Garv se kahon hum Hindu hain: “Say with pride that we are Hindus.” But in what precisely are we to take pride? Hinduism is no monolith; its strength is found within each Hindu, not in the collectivity. As a Hindu, I take no pride in destroying other people’s symbols, in hitting others on the head because of the cut of their beard or the cuts of their foreskins. I am proud of my Hinduism: I take pride in its diversity, in its openness, in religious freedom. Defining a “Hindu” cause may partly be a political reaction to the definition of non-Hindu causes, but it is a foolish one for all that. The rage of the Hindu mobs is the rage of those who feel themselves supplanted in this competition of identities, who think that they are taking their country back from usurpers of long ago. They want revenge against history, but they do not realize that history is its own revenge.
* * *
Om maha Ganapathe namaha,
sarva vignoba shantaye,
om Ganeshaya namaha. . . .
Every morning, for longer than I can remember, I have begun my day with that prayer. I learned it without being fully aware of what all the Sanskrit words meant, knowing only that I was invoking, like millions of Hindus around the world, the name of the great elephant-headed god to bless all my endeavors to come.
Ganesh, or Ganapathi as we prefer to call him in the south, sits impassively on my bedroom shelf, in multiple forms of statuary, stone, metal, and papier-mâché. There is nothing incongruous about this; he is used to worse, appearing as he does on innumerable calendars, posters, trademarks, and wedding invitation cards. Paunchy, full-bodied, long-trunked (though with one broken tusk), attired in whatever costume the artist fancies (from ascetic to astronaut), Ganesh, riding his way across Indian hearts on a rat, is arguably Hinduism’s most popular divine figure.
Few auspicious occasions are embarked upon without first seeking Ganesh’s blessing. His principal attribute in Hindu mythology — a quality that flows from both his wisdom and his strength — is as a remover of obstacles to the fulfillment of desires. No wonder everyone wants Ganesh on his side before launching any important project, from starting a factory to acquiring a wife. My own courtship violated time-honored Indian rules about caste, language, region, age, and parental approval; but when we got married, my wife and I had an embossed red Ganesh adorning the front of our wedding invitations.
I have
since developed an even more personal connection to Ganesh. The great two-thousand-year-old epic called the Mahabharata was supposedly dictated by the sage Vedavyasa to Ganesh himself; since then, many a writer has found it helpful to invoke Ganesh in his epigraph. When I recast the characters and episodes of the Mahabharata into a political satire on twentieth-century Indian history, The Great Indian Novel, I had it dictated by a retired nationalist, Ved Vyas, to a secretary named Ganapathi, with a big nose and shrewd, intelligent eyes, who enters with elephantine tread, dragging an enormous trunk behind him. Such are the secular uses of Hindu divinity.
For in my Hinduism the godhead is not some remote and forbidding entity in the distant heavens. God is immediately accessible all around us, and he takes many forms for those who need to imagine him in a more personalized fashion. The Hindu pantheon includes thousands of such figures, great and small. Ganesh is the chief of the ganas, or what some scholars call the “inferior deities.” He is not part of the trinity of Brahma (the Creator), Shiva (the Destroyer), and Vishnu (the Preserver), who are the principal Hindu gods, the three facets of the Ultimate First Cause. But he is the son of Shiva, or at least of Shiva’s wife, Parvati (one theory is that she shaped him from the scurf of her own body, without paternal involvement).
As a writer I have always been interested in the kinds of stories a society tells about itself. So part of the appeal of Ganesh for me lies in the plethora of stories about how this most unflappable of deities lost his (original) head and acquired his unconventional appearance.
The most widely held version is the one my grandmother told me when I was little — about the time that Parvati went to take a bath and asked her son to guard the door. Shiva arrived and wished to enter, but Ganesh was firm in his refusal. Enraged by this effrontery, Shiva cut off the boy’s head. Parvati, horrified, asked him to replace it, and Shiva obliged with the head of the first creature he could find, an elephant.
This was a salutary lesson in the perils of excessive obedience to your parents, though I don’t think my grandmother intended me to take it that way. My mother, who always tried unsuccessfully to resist the temptation to boast about her children, had another version: a vain Parvati asked Shani (Saturn) to look at her perfect son, forgetting that Shani’s gaze would reduce the boy’s head to ashes. Once again, an elephant’s was the head that came to hand.
Growing up in an India where loyalty seems all too often on sale to the highest bidder, I could not but be impressed by Ganesh’s rare quality of stubborn devotion to duty. However he may have lost his head, it was Ganesh’s obduracy as a guard that, in my grandmother’s telling, cost him a tusk. “The powerful avatar Parasurama,” she recounted, as we little ones gathered round her at dusk, “possessor of many a boon from Shiva, came to call on the Great Destroyer at his abode of Mount Kailash. Once again, Ganesh was at the door, and he refused to let the visitor disturb the sleeping Shiva. Parasurama, furious, tried to force his way in, but found Ganesh a determined opponent.” (My eyes widened in excitement at this part.) “Ganesh picked Parasurama up with his long trunk, swung him round and round till he was dizzy and helpless, and threw him to the ground. When his head cleared, Parasurama flung his ax at the obstinate Ganesh. Now, Ganesh could have avoided the ax easily, but he recognized the weapon as one of Shiva’s. He could not insult his father by resisting his weapon. So he took the ax humbly upon his tusk.” Ever since, Ganesh has been depicted with only one tusk.
The thrill of that story did not diminish for me when I learned the more prosaic version, which says that Ganesh wore down one tusk to a stub by using it to write down the epic verse of the Mahabharata. For this reason, the missing tusk signifies knowledge. As I grew older, I learned of more such symbols associated with Ganesh. Scholars of Hinduism tell us that Ganesh’s fat body represents the hugeness of the cosmos, its combination of man and pachyderm signifying the unity of the microcosm (man) with the macrocosm (depicted as an elephant). Some suggest it has the less esoteric purpose of demonstrating that appearances mean little, and that an outwardly unattractive form can hide internal spiritual beauty. (In any case, his looks do not prevent Ganesh, in most popular depictions, from being surrounded by beautiful women, including his twin wives, Siddhi and Buddhi.) Further, Ganesh’s trunk can be curled into the symbol for Om, the primal sound; and the snake found coiled around his waist represents the force of cosmic energy.
“But, Ammamma,” I would ask my grandmother, “why does Ganesh ride a rat?” For in most of the pictures in our prayer room, the deity is shown on this unusual mount. At the simplest level, the sight of an elephantine god on a tiny mouse visually equates the importance of the greatest and smallest of God’s creatures. And, as my grandmother explained, each animal is a symbol of Ganesh’s capacities: “Like an elephant he can crash through the jungle, uprooting every impediment in his path, while like the rat he can burrow his way through the tightest of defenses.” A god who thus combines the attributes of elephant, mouse, and man can remove any obstacle confronting those who propitiate him. No wonder that many worship him as their principal deity, despite his formally more modest standing in the pantheon.
And what is the secret of his appeal to a late-twentieth-century urbanite like me? As his unblinking gaze and broad brow suggest, Ganesh is an extremely intelligent god. When I was very young, I heard the story of how Parvati asked her two sons, Ganesh and Kartikeya, to go around the world in a race. Kartikeya, the more vigorous and martial-minded of the two, set off at once, confident he would encircle the globe faster than his corpulent brother. Ganesh, after resting awhile, took a few steps around his mother and sat down again. Parvati reminded him of her challenge. “But you are my world,” Ganesh replied disarmingly, “and I have gone around you.” Needless to say, he won the race — and my unqualified admiration.
So it is no surprise that Ganesh is worshiped in India with not just reverence but enthusiasm. Sometimes this can be carried to extremes, as when Ganesh devotees in western India in the 1890s allowed the bubonic plague to take many lives rather than cooperate with a British campaign to exterminate the rats that carried it (for the rats were also, after all, Ganesh’s mounts).
In late September 1995, word spread around the world that statues of Ganesh had begun drinking milk. In some cases, statues of his divine parents, Shiva and Parvati, were also reported to be imbibing these liquid offerings, but Ganesh it was who took the elephant’s share. Early on Thursday, September 21, the rumors started in Delhi that the gods were drinking milk; it was said that an idol of Ganesh in a suburb of the capital had swallowed half a cup. Within hours the frenzy had spread around the globe, as reports came in of temples and private domestic shrines in places as far removed as Long Island and Hong Kong witnessing the same phenomenon. At the Vishwa temple in London’s Indian-dominated Southall district, a fifteen-inch statue was said to be drinking hundreds of spoons of milk offerings; the august London Times reported on its front page that “in 24 hours 10,000 saw it drink.” At the Geeta Bhavan temple in Manchester, prodigious quantities were ingested by a three-inch silver statue of Ganesh. Hard-bitten British tabloid journalists, looking for a fraud to debunk, filmed and photographed the phenomenon and professed themselves flabbergasted. “I gazed in awe,” confessed the man from the Daily Star; his rival from the Sun “gasped in disbelief.”
In India, the rationalists were quick to react. It was, they averred, a matter of simple physics. Molecules on the rough stone and marble surfaces of the statues had created a “capillary action” that sucked in the droplets of milk. These were not really absorbed into the statue, but formed a thin layer of droplets on the surface that would be visible if the statue were dark. A team of government scientists proceeded to demonstrate this on television, placing green powder in the milk and showing a green stain spreading over the face of a white marble statue. Mass hysteria was alleged; Indian priests (who live off the offerings of devotees in the temples) were merely trying to whip up more custom, said some; it was all p
olitics, said others, pointing to the need for the flagging Hindutva movement to attract the credulous to their credo. Delhi’s Pioneer newspaper published a photograph of a spout emerging from the back of a temple from which milk poured into a bucket; the implication was that it was chicanery, not divine ingestion, that accounted for the disappearing milk in the temples.
The rationalists and the believers were probably both right. That is in the nature of faith; scientific faith, no less than religious, tends to confirm itself. I was traveling when the story broke, and when it was reported that the milk-drinking had ceased in most places on Friday afternoon the day after it began, I thought I had missed the miracle altogether. A week later, in Texas, I was told of a house in a Houston suburb where the phenomenon had persisted. Slightly skeptical but decidedly curious, I went to see it for myself, and was driven there in a Mercedes by a worldly Sikh businesswoman who had neither a religious nor a pecuniary interest in seeing the miracle vindicated. We drew up at an ordinary middle-class Indian home; ropes had been strung outside to control the throngs, but there were none on this day, it being the eighth day after the phenomenon had first been reported, and a working day to boot. The lady of the house took us to her little shrine, an unremarkable puja room like so many in Hindu homes around the world. She had a number of statues and portraits, but only one was drinking milk: a tiny terra-cotta statue of Ganesh, no more than two and a half inches high. My Sikh friend, with trembling hand, extended her spoon toward the miniature trunk of the statue, and we both watched the milk disappear into the little Ganesh. It was now my turn; with callous incompetence I held the spoon firm and level, and the milk held steady. “Tilt it a bit,” our hostess urged, and when I did the milk duly disappeared into the statue. It was not as if I had poured the milk out, because then it would have flowed differently; nor was the milk simply spilled, though a couple of drops fell to the floor. Instead there seemed to be a gentle drawing out of the milk by an unknown force, perhaps capillary action. (Om capillary actioneyeh namaha?) The statue, we were told, had been “fed” some 180 times a day for eight days; surely its capillary channels and overall absorptive capacity would have been exhausted by now? As we stood mulling these thoughts, a young Indian woman in T-shirt and jeans, evidently part of the new generation of subcontinental Americans, came to take her turn before the statue. Ganesh drank willingly from her extended spoon.
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