Frozen numbers, fluid faiths

Pew survey on religious attitudes

The US-based Pew Research Centre’s recent report, titled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, which is being touted as the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration to date on the attitudes of Indians to questions of religion and society in India, has expectedly generated a rich debate. A variety of inferences are being drawn, depending upon one’s location, political ideology and methodological sensibilities.

My concerns and apprehensions are rather discursive, historically rooted, and informed by the overall South Asian experiences on religious diversity. The moment is reminiscent of the horrors of numbers that the entire colonial project of census unleashed on the people of the subcontinent, especially as related to their religious identities, in the second half of the 19th century.

At the centre of the controversy then had been the set of questions offered to the respondents while being made to almost blind pick their religious identity out of a box containing numbered choices. A large number of faith groups and their experiences were simply and summarily pigeonholed into the boxes that were readymade for them, thereby virtually putting the entire history of those communities under erasure. Those questions, in terms of both formulations and articulations, were ill-conceived then; they remain shabbily conceptualised even now. They do not just end up consolidating boundaries, they belittle human experiences and histories by reducing them to lifeless numbers.

The critical concern in casting various religious traditions in the subcontinent is the very constitutive logic of the group formation, which is cultural, local and bound by micro-histories of the region. The census, surveys and similar number-crunching exercises are grossly ill-equipped in dealing with these multi-layered spaces and suffer from “world-religions”-syndrome, an obsession towards macro-formations and monoliths, which is predatory, obnoxiously hierarchical and patronising.

The two things that make any such exercise dealing in/with numbers most uncomfortable, and nervous, are: Fluidity and liminality. India’s, and indeed the subcontinent’s, religious landscape offers these two in abundance. Let me share a few anecdotes from my research in Punjab. A few years ago, I was in Banaras (Varanasi) to attend Guru Ravidas Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Guru Ravidas, the medieval Bhakti poet and Sant, who was born in Banaras. A group of the Sant’s followers, under the umbrella of a Dera in Jalandhar, Punjab, had been trying to develop his birthplace as a mega pilgrimage centre. The anniversary has, over the years, become a major pilgrimage event in the city’s calendar. However, despite its remarkable success so far, the movement could not create a homogenised, all-inclusive, pan-Indian sense of a Ravidassia community. The local Ravidassia groups from Uttar Pradesh, while taking pride in the way their Punjabi counterparts, largely NRIs, have metamorphosed this place, carry a religious sensibility that is quite in contrast to the former.

After the day-long wandering and soaking in the festivity around the Janamasthan, while returning in the evening, I took a rickshaw to my guesthouse in BHU. Throughout the journey, the rickshaw-puller talked about his Ravidassia identity and how proud he felt after the temple was made. But just as we were about to reach the guesthouse, he yawned, probably out of exhaustion, with a loud intonation of “Jaane Baba Mahadev”, that is, “Only Lord Mahadev would know”, a routine cultural utterance in the city. This was, however, clearly not in line with the Dera’s effort towards autonomy and for the creation of a monolithic community of Ravidassias with a separate religious identity.

Punjab’s dominant nirguni-nirakaar sacred canopy, for example, informs Ravidassia Dera’s worldview, which stands quite in contrast to the Banarasi Ravidassias’ largely saguni outlook and natural cultural propensity towards Hinduism. In a majorly Sikh village in Punjab, known for the ponds of the Pandavas from the Mahabharata period, people from all religions almost boastfully take pride in the village’s ancientness and its connection with the Hindu epic period. The same village has a co-religious shrine called Baba Nagarkheda, on whose annual day of commemoration, people of all faiths congregate and organise Langar, while the shop near the shrine sells calendars of Machhli bale Baba or Jhule Lal, Goga Pir baba, Baba Baalak Nath and Baba Farid.

Religions of the subcontinent culturally overlap and are locally rooted within the broad and deep substratum of syncretism. Their emotional ties go deep in the shared ancient past and defy any time frame. The presence of Jhule Lal as Machhli bale baba, for example, predominantly part of a Sindhi pantheon, remains alive in this village due to Punjab’s Sindh connection in a not-so-distant past. In people’s memory, Jhule Lal and its legends survived the vagaries of time, distance and politics of the subcontinent.

Those who are genuinely interested in understanding India’s religious landscape and people beyond their official tags should travel, wander, live with the people and their experiences. The way, for instance, Guru Nanak did in his famous Udassiyan or long travels across the length and breadth of the subcontinent with his Saagirds, Bhai Mardana and Bhai Bala. In the subcontinent, religions are cultural and emotional. And emotions cannot be frozen in numbers.

The same village in Punjab with the ponds of the Pandavas has a temple called Baba Farid-Sheetala Mata Mandir, which is maintained and worshipped by the Valmikis, one of the Dalit castes, of the village. How does one make sense of it? To understand this terrain, one needs an empathetic reading of history and patient following of the genealogies of life experiences of communities. For that is where the divinity of the subcontinent is most likely to be found— at the cusp, in the liminal zones— beyond the facile certainty of mundane numbers and their boundedness.

Pew Research’s findings are understandably strewn with contradictions and puzzled messages. It invests rather too much in amplified morphological differences among the religious groups via their ordinarily expressed respective in-group insecurities and inflated egos. Before the Pew researchers revealed to the world recently that the Ganga is considered holy and purifying by even people of other faiths, there lived, not so long ago, a famous Shehanai player in the city of Banaras by the name of Ustaad Bismillah Khan. Ustaad’s day, the old city residents would know, always began with a bath in the Ganga at Assi ghat, followed by prayer— without fail every day till he breathed his last.

During one of his overseas visits, it is said, the Ustaad was offered by his wealthy hosts an invitation to settle there permanently. Ustaad paused, smiled and then said, to the utter bewilderment of his hosts: Can you bring my Mother Ganga here? Ustaad died in penury, but never left the city of Baba Vishwanath, another name for Mahadev (that he often invoked so lovingly in his everyday conversations) for greener pastures.

Number-centric surveys are good for selling washing machines and mapping consumer behaviour, perhaps. Let legends, stories and travelogues map the religious landscape.

(The writer is a Chandigarh-based sociologist and commentator)