My Spiritual Journeys

I grew up in a non-religious family. However, I have always been interested in spirituality. This post is about the meaning of spirituality for me and some of my more significant spiritual experiences.

By "spirituality" I mean the ideas about the nature of soul, consciousness and reality. For me, spiritual experiences are usually related to reading, meditating, listening to music, watching stars and being in nature. They induce in me feelings of being connected with others and with the universe, as well as, feelings of peace and joy.

The Spiritual Gurus

The Indic traditions place a lot of emphasis on the role of a Guru, a spiritual teacher. For me, my spiritual teachers are the books and my favourite spiritual readings are the Upanishads of Hinduism.

It was in 1968, when I had first met Mahesh Yogi, during the days when the Beatles were visiting him. Suddenly he had become The Guru for the world's famous. I had liked his smile and his explanations about transcendental meditation.

During the 1970s-80s, I had become very interested in reading the books of Acharya Rajneesh (Osho). 

Finally, during the early 2000s, I had visited the ashram of Sree Sree Ravishanker near Bangalore and then in 2015, I had gone to listen to him when he had visited Guwahati.

However, so far I have had no desire to follow any Guru. Perhaps, it means that I don't need a Guru, or, may be it means that I am not yet ready for a Guru.

Instead, about 40 years ago, I was fortunate to meet Don Silvio Favrin, a Catholic priest from Castel Franco V. in the north-east of Italy. He died earlier this year (April 2022). He was a friend for me, and at the same time, he was a great spiritual being - some of our conversations had a deep influence on me. He had the capacity to share the most profound ideas in simple words, often tinged with irony along with an ability to laugh at himself.

Unexpected Spiritual Interactions

Many of my memorable spiritual interactions with people have been unexpected. For example, during 2014-16, while I lived in Guwahati, I had a couple of spiritual experiences.

The Sadhu in the Forest: The first encounter was in the forest behind the Bashishtha temple, where I had come across a Sadhu, who had built his home beneath a rocky overhang. He told me about his wanderings across India. I asked him why he had chosen that particular place to set up his home and he started talking about the subtle energy that comes out of the earth and how he felt that energy in that rock.

"Put your hand in this place", he pointed to the rock, "then close your eyes and try to feel the energy." I tried but did not feel anything. So, he said that I needed to quieten my mind, then may be I will be able to feel that energy.

He was a simple person but listening to him talk about the universe and our connection with nature was a wonderful experience.

Ambubashi in Kamakhaya: Another intense spiritual experience for me was during the Ambubashi festival at the Kamakhya temple. Kamakhya is a Shaktipeeth, it celebrates the feminine principle of the nature and the Ambubashi festival celebrates the metaphysical mentruation of the mother-godess.

In a courtyard on the hill near the temple, I came across a group of Baul singers. Some of them were smoking cannabis. Others were dancing and singing Baul songs. At a certain point, a thin old man stood up, his eyes closed in an ecstatic trance, a box in the right hand and a bottle of talcum powder in the other, and he started dancing. It was one of the most amazing and emotionally touching spiritual experience that I have ever had.

The Mendicant in Orchha: I was staying with a family in a village just outside Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. A local NGO had organised my stay. One morning, I was walking towards Sundar Mahal, the dargah of a Sufi saint called Sundar Shah, when I met a poor mendicant, who was sitting on the ground.

I stopped to talk to him. He had left home due to some mistreatment by his daughter-in-law and had decided to wander around and to live on charity. We talked about his preivious life, his home and children, and his present life as a wandering mendicant. I felt very sorry about his plight that in his old age, instead of sitting and resting, he was forced to go around, ask for alms and never be sure if he will find a place to rest for the night.

"So, what do you wish for, what do you want now?", I asked him. He smiled and shook his head, "Nothing, I have found everything I need", he answered.

To remember that meeting and his words, can still make me emotional. As you can see, what I think of as "spiritual" experiences can be very different things.

The Spiritual Places & Broken Statues

I have been to a lot of pilgrimage places of different religions in different countries. I am not religious and I do not go anywhere to pray. However, I like to visit the religious places in search of spiritual experiences.

In India, I have travelled widely, from the Vivekanand rock in Kanyakumari to the Kumbh mela in Prayagraj. There have been many beautiful moments and it is always fulfilling to see the beauty in temples, mosques and churches.

Yet, when I think of my unforgettable spiritual moments, they are usually not associated with any of these places. However, I love the Hindu idea of creating statues out of mud for specific festivals and at the end, immerging those statues in the sea or a rivers. The divinity is thus an expression of nature, which goes back to nature. I love the sight of old broken statues left near the rivers.

While travelling in Assam, it was common to find statues of Durga, Kali and Saraswati left near the rivers and invariably, I used to stop to look at them.

One evening, I was walking along the Kolong river in Nagaon and I came across an old broken statue of Saraswati lit by the rays of the setting sun. For a moment, I felt as if the Goddess was speaking to me. That experience was so powerful that for about another 10 minutes or so, as I walked, it seemed as if everything was lit by an internal light.

Music and Spiritual Experiences

One of the most profound spiritual experiences which I can remember was in Mandya in Karnataka, when I was staying with some Catholic nuns in a convent. One early morning, I listened to them gently singing hymns in a small chapel. The rise and fall of their voices was like the tide of an ocean, washing over me like waves, a truly wonderful spiritual experience.

Once, I was visiting a project in West Bank in Palestine and I was staying with some friends. I usually wake up early in the morning. I remember waking up in his guest room, listening to the sound of azaan coming from different mosques. They were not synchronous, the timber of their voices were different and together it created a wonderful spiritual experience.

Another occasion when music touched me deeply was in Bologna in Italy during a dance recital. Alessandra Pizza, the Bharatnatyam teacher, was singing a Ganapati prayer accompanied by the rhythmic beating of a gong on a wooden block. We were sitting in a gallery, under a high dome so that her voice had a little echo. It was so amazing that it brought tears to my eyes.

I also love listening to the singing of Gurubani in the Sikh gurudwaras. Often the Raagi (singers) in the gurudwaras are trained classical singers and their prayers have simple and yet profound words, that I find very moving.

As an adolescent and young man, some of my musical-spiritual experiences were listening to famous classical singers like Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Kumar Gandharv and Kishori Amonkar. For example, even today listening to "Ud jayega hans akela" (The swan alone will fly away) by Kumar Gandharv can touch me deep inside.

Finally, some years ago, during a music concert in Bologna (Italy), Ms. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande sang my favourite bhajan "Ganpati Vighnaharan Gajanan" on my request. The acoustics of that place were wonderful and I felt surrounded by her voice. Just thinking about that experience makes me feel a great joy.

In the End

Writing this blogpost has been a wonderful experience. I wrote it originally for my Italian blog and then decided to translate parts of that into English. When I had started writing it, I had a completely different idea in my mind. However, as I started writing, a lot of forgotten memories came up in my mind and this post has gone in an unexpected direction.

Re-reading it, I can see that it is very much linked with India and Hinduism, which is natural since I grew up surrounded by these ideas. A person growing up in another culture and other religious traditions would have other kinds of spiritual experiences.

I hope that reading it would make you think about the meaning of spirituality for you and remind you of your own spiritual experiences.

***

The Dancing Gods of Thayyem

"Theyyam" is a religious folk dance from the south of India. It is characterised by intricate make-up and beautiful costumes in striking colours with a predominance of orange, red and yellow. A visual kaleidoscope with a profound spiritual connection makes Theyyam a unique experience.

Spiritual Background and Meanings of Theyyam

Hinduism is based on the idea of all pervading universal consciousness known as Brahman, which has no beginning or end. Thus, mountains, trees, animals, birds and humans, everything animate or inanimate are the expression of Brahman and indicate a unity of all life forms.

In Hinduism, this idea of Brahman is coupled with Gods, one deity for each of the millions of life forms. In Theyyam, the dancer asks a God to come and become manifest in his body. Thus, during the dance-ritual, the dancer becomes an expression of God.

In other parts of India, there are persons who can go into trance and become "a channel of God" to speak and interact with people. For example, in north India they call it "Devi aayi hai" or the "Goddess has come". However, in Theyyam the invocation of God in human body is formalised and accompanied by specific costumes and rituals.

Theyyam Areas in Kerala

Theyyam is widespread in northern parts of Kerala state, especially around the town of Kannur. Each village and temple has its own Theyyam based a specific God or Goddess or local hero.

There are about 450 kinds of Theyyams. Each Theyyam has its own day during the year when its function will be organised in the village. Theyyam dancers are only men, usually from Hindu lower castes. Only one kind of Theyyam dancers are women.

Theyyam Preparation and Ritual

Around three weeks before the Theyyam celebration, the dancers start a period of abstinence to purify their bodies and minds. One day before Theyyam, they carry out a special invocation prayer called Thattam.

On the day of Theyyam, the dancer prepares his make-up using natural colours. During the make-up, their faces will carry complex designs for their specific Theyyam God and they will wear the ritual dress which is created and maintained by the dancer's family. The facial make-up for each Theyyam is also known as "Face-writing". The costumes include an elaborate head-dress and a breast-plate.

After completing the make-up and putting on the costume, the Theyyam dancer is shown his face in a mirror. This ritual is called Mukhadarshanam. It completes the arrival of God in his body. From that moment he ceases to be seen as human and becomes the manifestation of a specific God or Goddess.

During Theyyam, the specific story or the myth associated with that God is re-enacted. It takes place in front of a shrine, usually a sacred groove of trees. There is no stage and the dancer remains surrounded by believers. People play an active role in the enactment of the sacred story. They ask for the blessings of the God and sometimes ask questions to the Theyyam about their personal issues and problems.

Challenges Facing the Theyyam Traditions
Usually Theyyam dancers do it as a part of their family tradition and there is no or little income from it. With increasing modernisation, urbanisation and technology, it is becoming difficult for individuals to maintain complex social traditions like that of Theyyam, even if it has deep roots in the myths and cultures of the local societies.

Traditions like Theyyam are also under attack because some persons look at them as superstitions, or old fashioned backward rituals. They ignore its social roots and relevance, and look at it in isolation.

Theyyam plays a social role in the complex hierarchy of castes among Hindus. For example, in an interview, a Theyyam dancer said that though socially he belongs to a lower caste, when he becomes Theyyam, persons of all castes including Brahmins and upper caste persons must bend before him and ask for his blessing.

Over the past few years, government departments of culture and tourism are supporting to keep alive Theyyam, by including it as a part of cultural programmes and providing some income generation opportunities to the Theyyam dancers. Even if in such programmes, Theyyam is perceived only as an exotic visual experience, it provides an incentive for the dancers to valorise their skills and to continue the tradition in their own local communities.

Theyyam Face Make-up in Kochi Folk-lore Museum

The Folk-lore Museum of Kochi has a collection of wooden heads illustrating the different "Face-Writing" designs made for different Gods and personas used in Theyyam. One of these is shown below.

Visiting Theyyam Dance in Kerala

Theyyam ritual dances are organised in villages in north Kerala during winter - especially between October to April. There is a weekly calendar of Theyyam events happening in different villages around the city of Kannur. You can find out it from different websites - here are two examples - TheyyamCalendar and KannurTravel.

Thus, if you want to observe a Theyyam ritual dance in its local village context, check the calendar and plan your visit to Kannur.

Conclusions

I have only seen Theyyam as a part of cultural programmes, as street art and as museum artifacts. I have used the images from those different encounters with Theyyam in this post. However, I hope one day to visit Kannur and see it as part of the local spiritual-religious tradition.

***

PS: In 2018, I had visited Kunoor and visited the sacred ceremonies of Theyyam in 2 villages. I was accompnaied by a local guide. It was an unforgettable experience, not just for the beautiful and exotic costmes and dances, but for its spirituality. 

A Prayer For India

If you could write just one prayer for India, which prayer would it be? Would it say something about the different religions in India?

This photo-essay is about inter-mixing and co-living of religions in India. It has twenty of my favourite images related to religions from different parts of India.

Let me start with an image - it has a Sadhu, a saffron wearing ascetic. Sadhus wander from place to place, are not bound by caste boundaries and live on alms. A sadhu represents the ancient Indic tradition of spirituality, a personal search for a deeper meaning of life. This picture was clicked at Kamakhaya temple in Guwahati (Assam) in the north-east of India.

Growing up in a multi-religious India

My religious views have been shaped by my growing up in India, where I was exposed to different religions since childhood. My second image represents the two religions which are important in my family today and it is from Kerala at the southern tip of India. It was clicked in a transport van, and has the icons of Madonna and Ganesh on the dashboard.

I grew up in a Delhi, where my mostly atheist parents had many friends of different religions. Our extended family was mainly Hindu, though it had some roots that connected to both Sikhism and Islam. I learned about the different manifestations of religions through my extended family, neighbours and friends.

When I was a child, we moved from one rented house to another. For a time, we lived in a predominantly Muslim area, right in front of a Muslim graveyard. Watching the families visiting the graveyard, dressed in all their fineries during Idd festivals, was one of my favourite past times.

It was the time when in my mind, women wearing black burkas were associated with romantic Bollywood films like ‘Chaudhawi ka Chaand’ and ‘Mere Mehboob’, where Hindu heroes thought nothing of masquerading like elderly Muslim ustaad ji and singing shero-shaiyiri, so that they could enter as teachers in the homes of their beloveds.

In another house, which we shared with our Sikh landlord’s family, our terrace overlooked a Methodist church. All the children, including the Pastor’s son, played together. We woke up early in the morning to drink Kacchi lassi on the days of Gurupurab (Sikh religious festivals) and I became familiar with recitations of their sacred book Guru Granth Saheb.

While I was a little afraid of the stern looking wife of the Pastor, I had no problems devouring her Easter cakes. The pastor’s son and the Sikh boys, they all joined me at Holi in throwing balloons full of coloured water on the unsuspecting persons walking on the road below our house.

In yet another house, our next door neighbours were Muslims. While our families were friends, we children played together and shared Idd and Diwali sweets, I never went to a mosque to do prayers with them. Muslim prayers required a complex mix of specific gestures and words which intimidated me. On the other hand, I did go once to a midnight Christmas mass with a Catholic friend.

This pattern of co-living and inter-mixing with persons of different religions has continued all through my life. It has made me understand that religions and beliefs are accidents, determined by our birth in a family and they are not superior or inferior, they are just different ways of approaching the human need for sacred.

The third image is of a roadside shop from Tezpur in Assam, selling pictures of religious icons. The shop was located close to the cathedral and a Hanuman temple, and thus had both Hindu and Christian icons, along with those of other national figures such as Mahatma Gandhi.

Indic religions

The search for the divine in India is like a tree with roots that go deep into the earth, and with branches going in different directions, pointing to different corners of the sky. Thus, an important part of the sacredness in India is about nature – about the rivers, ponds, trees, animals, birds and the earth.

My fourth image is from Bilaspur district in Chattisgarh in central part of India and has a simple Hindu temple in the middle of a pond. Through sacred ponds and rivers and through rituals like surya namaskar, Indic religions remind me all the time about sacredness of nature.

I feel that “religion” is an inadequate term to talk about Hinduism. It includes people who identify the God in the nature – in rocks, mountains, trees, rivers, ponds, animals and birds. It includes people who worship a wide variety of Gods – from human forms of Ram, Krishen, Shiv, Durga, Kali, and Brahma, to human-animal forms of Ganesh, Hanuman, Garud and Sheshnaag. It includes people who believe in a different sacred book, sometimes in many books and sometimes in none of them. It also includes people who believe in fire worship (yagna), as well as those who believe in nirankar (formless) all-pervading Paramatma. That is why I prefer to see Hinduism, not as a religion, but as a Sahasradhara, a river of thousand streams.

The next three pictures illustrate three streams of Hinduism. The first is from Karnataka, showing a procession when the deities are carried out of the temple to visit the village, accompanied by characters from the sacred epics of Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagwat Puran, which are widely known and even today continue to influence Indian society.

The second image about Hinduism is from the sun temple in Konark in Odisha on the eastern coast of India, where spirituality is explored through the sexual union on the temple walls. Hinduism recognises different approaches to the sacred including the path of worship, prayers and meditation but also the paths of work (Karmayoga), knowledge (Gyanyoga) and sex (Tantrism).

The third image is of Ghatotkach icons at Dushhera fair in Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, which represent mountain deities. There are thousands of such local deities in India, whose stories have been woven with the more prevalent figures of Ram, Krishan, Shiv, Durga, Lakshmi, Kali and Saraswati. Thus, the thousand streams of Hinduism keep on coming together and branching out in diverse directions through the inter-mixing of sacred stories and ancient myths in different parts of the country.

India is also home to hundreds of tribal communities. Nature worship is a central part of religious practices in the tribal communities. They also have many local deities, different from the more prevalent Hindu deities. Some of the tribal deities are part of the “enemies” in the Hindu mythological stories such as the figures of Ravan, Meghnath and Mahishasur. These stories point to a diversity in the way a wide variety of religious beliefs come under the different streams of Hinduism.

Often outsiders, when they read Indic epics and myths, think of these figures as “villains”, similar to the figures of devil or Satan. However, Indic way of thinking looks at them in more complex ways, recognising their positive attributes and often linking their stories to their different reincarnations. For example, during the enactments of Ramayan during the festival of Dusshera, people are sometimes surprised when they discover the Brahmins praying to the effigy of Ravan before it is burned.

Often while talking to friends from western countries, I feel that they look at Hinduism in a narrow way, focusing on a few figures such as those of the sacred Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) and the sub-divisions of people into castes according to the Varna system. They ignore the thousand streams of Hinduism and their traditions of debate and arguments. They also tend to believe that the only social reforms and movements for greater social justice towards the marginalised Hindu caste groups in India came from the colonial powers and outsiders.

In a different way, some of the more shrill, conservative or radical Hindu groups echo similar kinds of thinking. They are afraid of the diversity of religious ideas of different streams of Hinduism. They ask repeatedly of following the examples of Abrahamic religions with one sacred book, one religious story and one religious leader.

Indic reformers and other Indic religions

Two millenniums ago, social and religious reformers like Gautam Buddha and Bhagwan Mahavir, infused new ideas in the Indic religions. Over the past centuries, other reformers like Basvanappa, Akka Mahadevi, Shrimanta Shankar Dev, Chetanya Mahaprabhu, Meerabai, Sant Gyaneshwar, Sant Ravidas, Baba Nanak and Sant Kabir, have promoted a diversity of religious ideas touching on social harmony and justice in the Indic religions. This movement of social reform continues through more recent spiritual gurus including Swami Vivekanand and Dayanand Saraswati.

Some of these Indic spiritual figures and social reformers are considered as prophets of specific religions including Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Western way of thinking believes in categorising and emphasising the differences between religions and sects. Indic view of religions, because of the dynamic nature of inter-mixing between them, tends to look at them as different streams flowing in the same direction.

The next six images are about these Indic spiritual and social reformers. The first image is from a street in Gangtok in Sikkim in Himalaya mountains of a Sleeping Buddha and a Buddhist monk. Buddhism continues to be an important religious force in India, especially through its adoption by Dalit caste groups, who see in it as an escape from the caste-oppression.

The second image has a giant statue of the Jain icon Bahubali from Shravan Belagola in Karnataka. Jainism is characterised by the principles of non-violence and vegetarianism.

The third image is of a giant statue of Basvanappa, a medieval social reformer and a poet-saint from Bidar district in northern Karnataka. He continues to be a revered figure to millions of persons and promoted a casteless society.

The fourth image has Gayan-Bayan singers from a Sattriya in Majuli island of Assam. The reformist movement of Namghars and Sattriyas in Assam was launched by a fifteenth century social reformer, Shrimanta Shankar Dev, who had also promoted a casteless society. Like Basvanappa in Karnataka, the ideas and teachings of Shankar Dev continue to have an enormous influence in Assam.

The fifth image of this group is from Jhira saheb Sikh Gurudwara in Karnataka, where a Sikh granthi distributes the water from a sacred spring to persons of different religions. The Sikh religion emphasises the value of Karmayoga or prayer through action.

The sixth and last image in this group is that of Swami Vivekananda, whose teachings about revitalising Hinduism had a strong impact in India of the twentieth century.

These images of spiritual and social reformers of India, are just a tiny example of the wide variety of Indic spiritual beliefs. Some like Basvanappa and Shrimanta Shankar Dev have millions of followers, though they are not considered as separate religions. Others like Buddha, Mahavir and Nanak are considered as prophets of specific religions. In many Indian homes, often you can find icons and statues of many of them.

Religious ideas from other parts of the world

From ancient times, India has been the land of mixing and assimilation of religions, beliefs and cultures.

Over the centuries persecuted people from around the world, such as Jews, Armenians, Parsi (followers of Zarathustra) and Baha’i (followers of Bahai’ullah), came to settle in India, conserving their religious identities and ideas, even while exchanging some ideas with the Indic ideas of sacred.

Wandering mystics, explorers and conquering armies have brought other religious ideas to India including those of Islam and Christianity. Like other arrivals before them, India promotes both conservation of identities and ideas, as well as their inter-mixing with Indic ideas of sacred, thus giving birth to new identities and ideas.

The first ideas of Christianity came to southern coast of India with St. Thomas, more than two thousand years ago, even before there was a Vatican. Colonialism and globalisation in the past centuries have brought different streams of Christianity to India. Thus, while Christians constitute only 2% of Indian population, they are a majority in some states of India and have a strong influence in society through their schools, hospitals and programmes of social development.

I am presenting four of my images about Christianity in India. The first image is of a church in Bidar district in Karnataka. While the priests have a saffron shawl on their shoulders (saffron is traditionally the colour of Hindu ascetics in India), and sit on the floor, the church wall carries symbols of all the different religions.

The next picture is again from Karnataka in south India, and has a statue of Mother Theresa. She is widely revered by persons of different religions in India.

The third image is from the Catholic cathedral in Guwahati, which shows two symbols of Shrimanta Shankardev behind the altar – the traditional Assamese head-gear and the cymbols, adapted as Christian symbols.

The last image about Christianity in India has a Methodist church of the Sumi tribe in Nagaland. As tribes have different languages, even if they belong to the same religion, they can have separate churches. For example, near the church shown in the picture, Chakhesang tribe has their own Methodist church.

Islam first arrived in India around one thousand years ago and since then has expanded in different parts of India. After Indonesia, India is home to largest number of Muslims in the world.

One important icon of Hindu-Muslim inter-mixing is Bhakt Rahim from 16th century India, who was a minister in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar and at the same time, a writer fluent in Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit and Braj bhasha. Thus while he translated Babarnama, the autobiography of Mughal emperor Babar, from Turkish to Persian, he is also considered a part of Indic social reformers for his devotional dohas (couplets) in Braj bhasha. In these prayers, he used Hindu religious imagery to express himself. For example, look at following doha of Rahim where is uses the word "Hari" to talk about God:

Rahiman gali hai sakri, dujo nahi thaharai
Apu aahai to Hari nahi, Hari to aapun nahin

(Rahim, the street is narrow and two persons can’t pass it together; if I will go inside God cannot, if God enters it, I cannot).

The last three images of this photo-essay are about Islam. The first image shows a group of Hindu labourers working in Char Minar, a Muslim building in Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. Built by Mohammed Qutb Shah in 1591 to commemorate the end of plague, the ground floor of this building hosts both a mosque and a temple. Similarly, for many Hindu festivals, traditionally the icons are made by Muslim craftsmen.

The second image of this group has a Baul singer from the north-east of India. The Baul tradition includes both Hindus and Muslims, and is about devotional music sung by wandering mistrels, who travel in the countryside ignoring the religious boundaries.

The last image of this group is from the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, that hosts the tomb of a Muslim sufi saint, widely revered by persons of different religions.

Parsi and Baha’i, the followers of Zarathustra and Bahai’ullah, who came to India from Persia/Iran, are less numerous, but equally important. For example, Delhi hosts the lotus shaped Baha’i temple, the biggest temple of the followers of Bahai’ullah in the world.

Valuing Inter-mixing of Religions in India

A closer look into religious beliefs in India, shows that often, the inter-mixing and blurred boundaries between the religions are more important than the perceived differences. By promoting inter-mixing, we promote understanding and love between people of different religions.

The world today is full of examples of religious hate and misunderstandings. To overcome these divisions, the approach chosen by many countries and persons is that of "respect and tolerance" along with political correctness. The basic idea of this approach is that the religions are different and we should avoid hurting the religious sentiments of others. Therefore, these countries propose to not to put up Christmas trees so as to not offend the non-Christians; they suggest to use words like "Seasons greetings" rather than "Idd greetings", so as to not to offend non-Muslims.

I personally feel that such an approach makes all of us poorer. I prefer the Indian way where we all celebrate all the festivals of all the religions, where we can pray in each other’s praying places, without losing our own cultural and religious identities.

People who believe in the separateness of their religions, they are afraid of such an approach of inter-mixing. India shows that you can still be a Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Sikh, even if you share the religious and sacred ideas, foods and festivals of others.

For this reason, I believe that in India we must learn to value our inter-mixing approach. One way to do it will be by recognising those of us who are mixtures of linguistic, regional, castes and religious identities. For example, I feel that the national census in India should collect information about the different ways we intermix and the number of mixed families in the country.

Religious fundamentalists oppose inter-mixing of religions, Indian approach teaches us to promote it. Children of the mixed families who will have the freedom to choose their religions, will be the ambassadors of inter-religious peace.

Another way to support inter-mixing of religions in India can be by recognising as valuable all those celebrities who are widely known and admired and who are part of inter-religious or inter-caste marriages. For example, Bollywood stars with their multi-religious families, from Sunil Dutt-Nargis and Kishore Kumar-Madhubala, to Shahrukh-Gauri and Saif-Kareena, are examples of religious inter-mixing and joyful co-living not only for India but for the whole world. In a deeply divided world, they are our icons of unity, without losing our individual religious and cultural identities.

Your prayer for India

So to come back to my original question - if you could write just one prayer for India, which kind of prayer would it be?

Will it have different Gods including Ishwar and Allah? Will it be about different prophets such as Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Nanak, Mahavir, Zaruthustra and Bahai’ullah? Will it be about different paths leading to one Parmeshwar?

I hope that you will answer yes. I hope you will ask for the one life-force that underlies everything organic and inorganic in the cosmos. I hope that it will be a prayer that will promote peace, love and harmony.

***

Religions For The New Millennium

Do we really need a religion? If yes, what kind of future religions are being shaped by our societies? If we can study the birth and development of religions in the past, can that help in understanding what kind of religions will come in future?

These are the questions I often ask my self, while thinking of the situation of religions today. On one hand, today we have more inter-religous dialogue and harmony among persons of different religions than ever before in history of mankind, and on the other hand, radicalized and exclusionist religious groups seem to be getting stronger, who insist, often with violence, that their way is the only acceptable way.

Is it feasible to think of possible future developments of religions? Let us start by going back in time to see what do we know about the development of religions in the human history.

Religions of the prehistorical humans

Our earliest progenitor, Homo habilis, who used stone tools, came out more than 2 million years ago, but modern humans developed only around 50 thousand years ago. One of the earliest records of those first humans are the rock paintings, like the ones in El Castillo in Spain that are 40 thousand years old.

The El Castillo rock paintings mainly show animals on the cave walls. This was the Paleolithic (initial stone age) phase of human development. Thus at that time human beings were using simple stone tools, they did not have writing, yet they had good drawing abilities and had some spiritual understanding of their world.

Caves from Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are between 15 to 10 thousand years old, from the early bronze period of human development. These also show mainly animal figures and tracings of human hands. Any human figures in these images are mostly schematic, that means stick like figures, different from the more natural looking animal figures.

More recent cave paintings, around 3 to 8 thousand years old, showing animals and hunting scenes are found in many different parts of the world such as the San cave paintings in South Africa.

All these rock paintings point towards the religious or spiritual ideas of humans who lived as hunter-gatherers. They lived in small groups and travelled from one place to another. Usually men were hunters, while women specialized in gathering seeds and plants.

Animal rock paintings have been linked to influencing the spirits of animals, to facilitate their hunting. Thus, early humans thought of spirits in all the living things. It is also thought that lack of proper human figures in rock paintings is linked to taboos around drawing of human spirits.

Earliest evidence of agriculture, that means, domestication of plants and animals, comes from around 10 thousand years ago, from the neolithic period (new stone age), when better stone tools for agricultural and hunting use were made.

Another evidence of religious significance from the early humans are the Venus figurines showing female bodies. Some of these are more than 35 thousand years old. These statues are thought to be linked to spiritual view of nurturing role of mother nature and fertility rites.

Writing developed only 4 thousand years ago, around the time when the first cities were coming up. The earliest surviving tombs such as stone vaults (Hypogeums) and megalithic tombs are 4-5 thousand years old.

The prehistoric small human groups of hunter-gatherers were in competition with each other for survival. Not till the farming communities came up and then over the next thousands of years, first cities were established, there were incentives for human beings to collaborate and work together with other groups of human beings. Thus the initial 40-45 thousand years of human beings must have been marked by fights and wars between different groups.

Though the hunter-gatherers in different parts of the world had similar religious ideas about spirits of living beings, they probably identified with different animal totems as their protectors or symbols of their groups.

The different social roles of men and women were established during this long dawn of humanity lasting for 40-45 thousand years. Thus women mainly engaged in gathering plants and seeds, household work, and needed protection during pregnancy and growing years of their children. On the other hand, men engaged in hunting and wars. Violence, killing and rape of enemy groups' women as acceptable behaviour of the war, probably shaped the societies in this phase.

I think that though human socities have changed completely in the past few hundreds of years, our male and female social roles are still largely shaped by thousands of years of this early conditioning of human societies.

Religions at the beginning of historical era

The beginning of historical era, started around 4 to 5 thousand b.c. (6 to 7 thousand years ago), as the first cities and civilizations came up in different parts of the world including Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and Greece.

At the beginning of historical era, majority of world population was engaged in agriculture and/or animal rearing. Some people continued to be hunter-gatherers but gradually they were becoming the minority. All the different world cultures at that time had started building specific praying places and all of them included a pantheon of gods.

How did the change from animal figures of cave paintings of early humans to the pantheon of gods of early historical period come about?

James A. Michener in his book "The source" (1965) traces the development of different religions in middle east, from the beginning of the historical era till today. In a fictionalized form, he explains the transformation from hunter-gatherer human societies to farming human societies:

.. for the first fifteen years of their married life, Ur's wife went out of the cave in all seasons trying fruitlessly to tame the wild wheat, but each year it was killed either by drought or flood or too much winter or by wild boars rampaging through the field ... Ur's son discovered that the springtime planting of wheat need not be left to the chance scatter of autumn grains. By holding back some of the harvest and keeping it dry in a pouch of deerskin, the grains could be planted purposefully in the spring and the wheat could be made to grow exactly where and when it was needed, and with this discovery the family of Ur moved to a self-sufficient society. They did not know it but if a food supply can be insured, the speed of change would be unbelievable: within a few thousand years cities would be feasible, civilizations too. Men would be able to plan ahead and allocate specialized jobs to each other. They would find it profitable to construct roads to speed the movement of food and to devise a money system for convenient payments.

Thus, farming societies were completely different from the earlier hunter-gatherer societies. Farming communities living in the villages were much more vulnerable to nature's forces such as rains, lightening, thunder storms and fires. These farming humans developed religions with pantheon of gods - a different god for each of the nature's forces that affected their lives. Thus in the pantheon of gods, those who controlled rain, fire and the thunder storms were more important for the farmers.

These gods were seen as temperamental beings who, if happy could give food, prosperity and security, and if angry, they could destroy everything, putting human survival into danger. Therefore, all the different cultures developed systems of prayers and sacrifices for "keeping the gods happy".

For example, India's first sacred book Rigveda, written around 1500 BC, puts into writing the oral traditions of religious prayers that had developed in this early historical period. The most powerful gods of Rigveda, to whom maximum number of prayer-hymns are devoted, are Indra, the god of rain, and Agni, the god of fire.

As human beings developed greater understanding and control of agriculture and they developed new technologies such as boats for sea-travel, new gods became more important and older gods were forgotten.

The mythical Indian story of fight between rain-god Indra and pastor-god Krishna, where Indra brought incessant rains and Krishna protected the pastors by raising up the Govardhan mountain on his hand, is one such example of changing religious ideas as small cities came up and needs of protection from gods changed.

Another Indian example of changes in preferences of gods is about worship of Sheetla mata, the goddess who is supposed to protect children from diseases like small pox and chicken pox. You can still find temples of Sheetla mata in poor slum areas where diseases like chicken pox and measles continue to be a life-threatening problem for poor children, but such temples are rare in urban and more developed areas of India.

The rise of monotheistic thought

The ideas of pantheon of gods who controlled different aspects of life on the earth and to whom prayers and sacrifices must be offered were in conflict with earlier ideas of common spirit underlying all the nature. Slow development of technology such as control of fire and shift from caves to man-made dwellings, also conflicted with ideas of powers of individuals gods.

Building of praying places and offering prayers, gifts and sacrifices also gave rise to development of priest classes, with possibilities of conflict between followers of different gods, and between priests and others. For example there is the story of Ikhnaton, the "heretic king" in ancient Egypt, who revolted against the domination of priests of Amon and decided to pray to the Aton (sun god), is one such example of religious conflicts.

In situations of conflict, religious reformers appeared in different parts of the world. Some of them proposed the vision of "one God", a supreme force that controlled life. The period around 500 BC to 500 AD was particularly fertile for these spiritual reformers, especially in two specific geographical areas of the world - the western part of middle-east and northern-part of Indian subcontinent. Those reformers were responsible for most of the religious ideas that dominate the world today.

The middle-east saw figures like Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, who expounded on ideas of the "one God". The stories of Moses are told in the Old Testament, and are linked to Judaism. The stories of Jesus are part of new testament, the sacred book of Christianity. The voice of Mohammed is in Koran, the sacred book of Islam.

In the Indian subcontinent, apart from figures of Mahavira and Buddha, that led to philosophies of Jainism and Buddhism, there were many other philosophers whose ideas formed the Upanishads of Hinduism. These also tend towards ideas of monotheism, though in a different way from the monotheistic ideas that developed in the middle east.

For example, the initial sholka (prayer) of Isavasya upanishad is an example of one common unifying cosmic consciousness that moves away from ideas of pantheon of gods:

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते!
(Om purnamadah puranamidam purnatpurnamudachyate)
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते॥
(Purnasya purnmaday purnamevavashishyate)

(It means: The whole is all that. The whole is all this. The whole was born of the whole. Taking the whole from the whole, what remains is the whole.) 

In each of these religious traditions, a cycle of periodic rise of new religious reformers started that continues till today. Sometimes, the reformers resulted in groups breaking off from the parent religions and becoming separate religions in their own right. Thus all the world religions are actually divided into different sub-groups. Some of the sub-groups, have developed into spearate religions including Baha'i and Sikhs.

At the same time, all over the world there continue to be small or large groups of persons who believe in older religious ideas of early farmers and pastors, such as fire-worshipers (Zoroastrians), nature worshipers, believers of the spirit worlds.

In terms of social roles of men and women, many of these religions have codified recommendations. Most of the time, these recommendations on different social roles of men and women, follow the earlier social roles of human groups from hunter-getherer period of humanity. This means, men are seen as superior, who make decisions and are the owners of the families. On the other hand, women are seen as home-makers and mothers, who need to protected, especially from other men.

The crisis of the religions

Humanity started changing around 4-5 hundred years ago at a greater pace, as cities became bigger and the technological innovations increased. Invention of printing press, colonization, slave trade, large scale immigration towards the "new world", scientific progress and industrial revolution gradually started challenging the existing religious ideas.

For example, in Europe, different developments such as discovery of fossils, Darwin's theory of evolution, Galileo's ideas of earth and planets circling the Sun, challenged some of the beliefs proposed by Christian theologians. These challenges resulted in ferocious religious backlash by Christian conservatives in Europe including centuries of brutal inquisition and religious crusades.

One of the most important change that is challenging traditional ideas of religions is the shift from rural to urban communities. This shift challenges the hold of religious, community and family leaders on individuals. Thus, in urbanized countries, earlier religious ideas and socially acceptable behaviours about everything including marriage, having children, sex (including same sex relationships), dresses and worship, have been overturned. The recommendations of the religious leaders are mostly ignored by large number of faithfuls, especially by younger generations.

Though this transition of old into new communities started in Europe more than 5 hundred years ago, it is still far from over. For example, Michael S. Kimmel discusses the challenges for men to understand the new roles of gender equity in his paper:

Indeed, the women’s movement is one of the great success stories of the twentieth century, perhaps of any century. It is the story of a monumental, revolutionary transformation of the lives of more than half the population. But what about the other half? Today, this movement for women’s equality remains stymied, stalled. Women continue to experience discrimination in the public sphere. They bump their heads on glass ceilings in the workplace, experience harassment and less-than fully welcoming environments in every institution in the public sphere, still must fight to control their own bodies, and to end their victimization through rape, domestic violence, and trafficking in women.

I believe the reason the movement for women’s equality remains only a partial victory has to do with men. In every arena—in politics, the military, the workplace, professions and education—the single greatest obstacle to women’s equality is the behaviors and attitudes of men. I believe that changes among men represent the next phase of the movement for women’s equality—that changes among men are vital if women are to achieve full equality. Men must come to see that gender equality is in their interest—as men.

If that is the situation in the developed world in Europe and America, what is happening in the rest of the world? The changes have become faster and even more radical over the past century, spreading over to all the different parts of the world. Improvements in health care and birth control, women going out of homes to work, access to education, international travel, globalization, information technology are some of these changes that lead to mixing of populations and ideas. These changes are challenging traditional ideas of different religions and the social roles of men and women.

Like the backlash of conservative christianity in Europe some centuries ago, these challenges to traditional ideas of other religions in different parts of the world have led to backlash of other conservative groups, sometimes equally ferocious and brutal in trying to repress these challenges. The rise of Wahabi Islam is one such example of religious backlash, but Islam is not alone in this - all religions are facing similar crisis.

In the remaining parts of the world, the transformation from rural to urban communities has started but would continue for the next fifty-hundred years. As the example of Europe shows, the change in mentalities may take centuries, and we can expect many more ferocious battles and backlashes from traditional religious and social leaders, who will fight to safeguard their powers and interests.

At the same time, there are already large groups of thinkers and activists in different parts of the world who agree with the need to challenge the status quo about the domination of socio-religious ideas and understand the need to define new rules to govern our social and public lives. Can we create national and trans-national communities that can make this trasition smoother and less conflictual? This is an issue that we need to address.

Religions for the future

Shall we really need religions in the future? I personally feel that as long as people will go through cycles of life and death, the questions such as what is life, what is death, is there an afterlife, are going to accompany us, and this will continue to create the space for religions.

There are many persons who do not believe in a spirit or a cosmic consciousness, who define themselves as atheists, but often even they have some doubts in explaining the godless accidental origin of life from a biochemical primordial soup.

Those of us who live in societies where technical progress safeguards us from the worst of nature's forces, people do not need to seek the protection of gods for their survival. Still illness, accidents, stresses of modern life, and relative poverty create fertile grous for prayers and religions.

Unless technological progress will lead to some kind of environmental disaster that may turn back the clock of human development, the change from rural farming and nomadic pastor communities to urban technological communities can not be reversed. This, in the medium and long term, will lead to new and different religious ideas.

Individuals living in resource and technology rich environments already often have religious ideas that have been called "New Age". An explanation of the "new age" philosophy is as follows:

To understand New Age philosophy it’s important to understand that the contemporary Cosmic Humanist movement has its roots in the Romantic poets of the 1800s, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. These men rejected the God of the Bible, instead writing at length about a transcendent quality of spirituality experienced purely through personal introspection. These ideas did not attract a broad audience until the 1960s, when popular recording artists, movie stars, and Eastern gurus began trumpeting their New Age views across the nation. More recently, well-known recording artists such as Madonna and Alanis Morissette have identified themselves with Hinduism, while popular personalities such as Tiger Woods, Phil Jackson, and Richard Gere openly embrace Zen Buddhism. Other luminaries, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, express a belief in scientology. 

We don't know if future religions will be shaped by these "New Age" ideas or other different ideas. However, to be acceptable to majority of people, religions will have to take into account the needs of persons living in urban spaces as singles or as nuclear families. Thus the ancient ideas of women's and men's roles will have to change.

For example, in my opinion, religions asking for covering of women's bodies or not letting them go out to work or with rigid ideas about what kind of sexual lives people should lead, will not be accepted in future as socities will change and get used to living in urban spaces.

Personally, I also believe that future religions that do not take into account the principles of universal declaration of human rights, will be refused by majority of world population. Such conservative religious groups and sects may continue to flourish in small minority communities, but they will not become mainstream.

***

Colonization of minds

These days, I am reading Diana Eke's book "India - a sacred geography". Last night I was reading the part about the ideas of world-geography in the Indian sacred books. These books describe beliefs about the creation of the world and its geography. Different world civilizations have their own myths about the creation of the world and their own place in it.

Thus I discovered some Indian myths and stories that I had not heard about before. For example, ancient Indians believed that a mountain called Meru was the centre of the world. This Meru or golden mountain has eternal light and is connected to the polar star. It is un upside down mountain, narrow at the base and wide at the top. At its top are homes of the gods, especially the homes of Brahma and Shiva. The celestial Ganga river falls from the heavens on top of Meru and then divides into four rivers and goes in four directions, including Alaknanda going towards India. All the four Ganga rivers are equally holy. There are 4 continents, shaped are like four petals of a lotus flower around the Meru mountain and the southern petal is Jambudwip or Bharatavarsha (India).

Diana Eke explains in great detail these ancient beliefs and describes how this conception of the world was completely different from the world conception of other ancient civilizations:

Since Meru is king of the mountains in a confluence of mountain ranges that is the most awesome on earth, it is all the more arresting that Hindus do not derive their symbolic image of Meru from the great granite and ice peaks of Himalayas. Rather it comes from the living, organic world of flowers. Meru is the "seed cup" (Karnika) of the lotus of the world." ...

Bharata is the southernmost land of this lotus world. India's imaginative world map does not place India directly in the centre of the world as did Anaximander when he drew the first world map with Greece in the centre, or the medieval cartographers when they placed Jerusalem and the holy Land in the centre, with continents spreading forth like petals. Rather Bharata is but one of of the petal continents. In many ways it is the least glorious. Far from the usual ethnocentrism in which one's own world is described as civilized, while the surrounding lands, vaguely known, are thought to be less so, even barbarian, the Indian visionaries who described the world actually idealized the other petals of the world ...

Why don't the Indian school books say anything about ancient Indian traditions?

While I was reading this part, I was thinking that I am close to sixty years and this is the first time that I am reading about the worldview of the ancient Indians and about India's place in its geography. I felt a little cheated that our schools or colleges did not talk of these myths of ancient Indians and how these could have shaped our present world views and our ways of thinking?

I am not saying that we have to teach to school children that this is the geography of the world or that we should not teach them about modern geography. Conservative Christian groups in USA or conservative Islamists in different parts of the world or even Hindutva groups in India have those kind of ideas where they want that school children be taught what is written in ancient religious books, and not what the modern science has taught us. I do not agree with those ideas.

Rather, I am thinking that while we learn the modern geography and science, we should also learn about the ancient Indians myths and stories. Not as blind beliefs, but we should learn to look at them critically. This is needed to understand how these beliefs were different or similar from the beliefs of other ancient cultures, and how these could have shaped the development of Indian society.

A cultural understanding of societies

I think that societies have a cultural understanding of who they are and how to came to be the way they are. These cultural understandings are different for different cultures. In my view, ignoring or forgetting these cultural understandings is ignoring an important aspect of ourselves. We need to look at these cultural understandings in a critical way, to appreciate them, to value them, to recognise how they have contributed to the development of our societies.

This does not mean that we have to take them as the absolute truth, but it also means that they should not be devalued and forgotten. I am arguing for a middle way between the extremes of strident Hindutva and the denying-the-religions kind of secularism?

I agree that these ancient beliefs are Brahmanic beliefs. For centuries these beliefs have excluded large sections of Indian society, especially those who are considered "low castes" and tribal groups. Thus I am not saying that these are the "only" beliefs of ancient Indians. Yet given their pervasiveness in significant parts of Indians, these can not be wished away.

I also believe that parts of these ancient beliefs need to be changed. For example, Hindu scriptures propose a particular role for women and girls and they espouse a particular role for those they call as "low castes" and ask for their exclusion and exploitation. I don't think that respecting our myths and ancient stories means accepting these aspects of our culture as right. Rather, I believe that we need to change with times and look critically at how we deal with issues like dignity of individuals and dignity of labour and change our societies. But to criticise aspects of scriptures or to ask for change, does not mean that we hide or ignore parts of our history and traditions.

In a way, I feel that persons asking for Hindutva are actually blind to Hinduism's pluralistic traditions and tend to look at religion and culture through linear-rational way of thinking where they dream of homogenizing Hinduism, like a parody of monotheistic religions. Thus while they talk of saving Hinduism, in reality they work for destroying it.

Western "linear-rational" and Indian "non-linear, apparently contradictory" ways of thinking

The past few centuries have seen the rise and domination of western way of thinking that is linear-rational way of thinking. It has brought great progress in the world including science, technology and even the modern ideas of human rights and equality of human beings. This western way of linear-rational thinking is important for all of us as part of our education, science, industry, etc.

On the other hand, traditional Indian way of thinking is non-linear, multi-directional and apparently contradictory. In his book "Nine Lives - In search of the sacred in modern India", William Dalrymple has described an interview with a sculptor from Tamil Nadu, where he brings out this non-linear and apparently contradictory way of reasoning:

It seemed to me that Srikanda had mentioned three quite different ways in which an inanimate statue could become a god: via the channelling of divinity via the heart and hands of the sculptor; a ceremony of invocation when the eyes were chipped open; and through the faith of the devotee. I pointed this out to Srikanda, but he saw no contradictions; all that mattered was that at a certain point a miracle took place and the statue he had made became divine.

Sometimes, this non-linear and contradictory way of thinking confuses western students of Hinduism and Indian culture. Such confusion is also apparent in relation to philosophies of other oriental religions including Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc.

For example, I remember some discussions with friends of other religions where they felt that because of multitude of gods and goddesses and because of idol worshiping, Hinduism is in some way inferior to their ideas of one god, or at best, it is is an illogical way of thinking. I think that they look at Hinduism in a linear-rational way of thinking and can not appreciate the Indian non-linear way of understanding the world that feels that "this and its opposite, both can be true".

Should this non-linear and contradictory way of thinking be considered inferior or should be ignored and forgotten?

I also believe that the Indian ways of thinking has its own value. For example in the way we traditionally deal with nature. From ants and mice to owls and peacocks, ancient Indian beliefs look at insects, birds, plants and animals as sacred. This can be seen as superstitious or illogical by the western thought. However, looking at birds or plants as sacred, can also be seen as respecting the world and creating a harmonious relationship between humans and nature.

Breaking out of cultural colonization of minds

I feel that we have a kind of cultural colonization of our minds, where we pretend that only western linear-rational way of thinking exists, and world needs to be understood exclusively according to this logic. The non-linear and apparently contradictory thinking pervades our cultures, but we pretend that it does not merit acknowledgement or understanding.

We need to break free of this cultural colonization and learn to look at our ancient myths, stories and traditions as living paradigms that influence and shape us even today.

For example, I would like to learn about how the ancient Hindu myths were translated in Jain and Buddhist traditions? Did they influence early Christianity when it came to Kerala with St Thomas, two thousand years ago? Did they have an influence on Muslim-Sufi and Sikh philosophies? Did they shape the way Indians look at the world today?

***

Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Issai - Inter-religious Bollywood

Artists don't believe in conventions, everyone knows it. Ordinary mortals are expected to follow the social rules, but for artists we are usually ready to make exceptions. Look at Bollywood. It is common enough to find marriages and relationships that go accross religious lines in Bollywood.

But if film artists can go beyond social conventions in their private lives, they also need to sell the tickets of their films. Do people go to watch films that defy social conventions?

In this three parts article, I will look at - (1) inter-religious families in reel-life Bollywood; (2) inter-religious love in reel-life Bollywood; and, (3) inter-religious stories from real life Bollywood. This first part of the article is about inter-religious families in Bollywood films.

Multi-religious societies & Cinema

I think that among all the different films made in different parts of the world, Bollywood and Indian cinema have touched on the issue of inter-religious issues many more times, compared to all other countries. May be it has something to do with the way Indians perceive themselves?

Almost all the countries of the world today are multi-religious. However, most of them do not think of themselves as multi-religious. Or rather did not think of themselves as multi-religous till recently. On the other hand in India, we think of ourselves as being part of a multi-religious country for a long time. May be it is because of our history. It may be also because many religions started in India.

In India 80% of the population is Hindu, though Hinduism can be interpreted very differently among different groups of people in different parts of India, and remaining 20% is composed of different religions. In US, about 75% of population is Christian (protestants and Catholics), while the remaining 25% belong to different religions, including those who do not believe in any religion. In UK about 70% of the population considers themselves as Christians. In Italy, 80% of the population identifies itself as Catholic. So more or less, all these countries have similar percentages of majority groups and minority groups.

Yet, in my opinion, the awareness about different religions and their beliefs, is much higher in India than any where else. Could that be the reason why Bollywood has been extra-sensitive to the issue of inter-religious relationships?

If I think of films from any other country - USA, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, China ... I can't remember even one film on the subject of inter-religious relationships. Even when their films have characters from other countries/religions, usually they are shown in a way where religious differences are not an issue. However, I have seen some American documentary films on this subject, specially on the issue of inter-religious marriages between Christians and Jews.

If you know of some examples of mainstream films from any country touching on inter-religious relationships, please do let me know.

Persons of different religions in Bollyworld

Bollyworld is the make believe world of Bollywood that exists only inside the cinema halls and DVDs. In Bollyworld, the idea of including persons of different religions is so pervasive that it hardly makes news. For reaching out to people of different religions, often Indian films include persons of different religions, most common being Muslims but also Christians and Sikhs, shown usually as "almost family" like friends.

Films where Muslims, Christians or Sikhs or Parsi are the main protagonists are less common, but there are some examples of these. Muslim socials was distinct category of Bollywood films till 1980s with films like Nikaah, Mere Huzoor and Mere Mehboob. However, this genre of films is less common today. Sikh culture has found greater expression in Punjabi cinema, though there are some examples from mainstream Bollywood such as Singh is King and Jo Bole So Nihaal.

More commonly, Bollywood places its main stories in Hindu famlies, while persons of other religions are shown as friends, or less commonly as villains. There was a time when this practice allowed film makers to introduce specific things like ghazals and shairo-shayari in the narrative. It is hard to think of films which did not have such characters from 1960s and 1970s. From Hrikesh Mukherjee, to Ramanand Sagar, Prakash Mehra, Manmohan Desai and Tarachand Barjatya, all their films had such characters.

Even more recently, some of the big box-office successes of Karan Johar, such as "Kuch kuch hota hai" and "Kabhi Khushi kabhi gham", have continued with this idea of close family-friends kind of relationships with persons of different religions.

I think that the basic idea behind it is to make sure that persons of all religions can relate to the film (and make it a commercial success). At the same time, it does reflect the real-life reality of India, where it would be impossible to find any person who has not interacted with persons of other religions in the neighbourhoods, friends and workplaces.

Mixed Religion families in Bollywood

While the more popular Bollywood films used characters of different religions in close family and friendship relationships, they also maintain clear boundaries between them. Thus, in most of these films, Muslims are always married to Muslims, Christians to Christians and Hindus to Hindus.

However, the idea of mixing up of religions in the Bollyworld families has been touched upon many times. When I think of significant Bollywood films that have touched on theme of inter-religious families I think of four films - Dharamputra, Amar Akbar Anthony, Zakhm and Bombay.

There are other significant films like the recent Kurbaan, but I see them more about inter-religious love stories rather than about inter-religious families. However, I do concede that this division into inter-religious love and inter-religious families is arbitrary and subjective.

Dharamputra (1961): This Yash Chopra film was my introduction to a world united and yet divided because of religions. It was about a Muslim girl (Mala Sinha) who has to give away her son, born before her marriage, to a Hindu couple who are her family friends (Manmohan Krishen and Nirupa Roy). Years later, that son (Shashi Kapoor) grows up into a Hindu fanatic and during the partition riots goes to burn the house of his Muslim mother.

Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977): This Manmohan Desai film is another old favourite about three brothers who get separated when they are young, and grow up in three different families beloning to three different religions - Amar (Vinod Khanna) grows up as Hindu, Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) grows up as a Muslim and Anthony (Amitabh Bacchan) grows up as Christian. One of its most celebrated scene had blood transfusion tubes running from the arms of the three brothers and going into the arm of a blind woman (Nirupa Roy) who is actually their mother, but they don't know it.

The film looked at religious differences as being important for the individuals and yet almost unimportant for the relationships among people. The three brothers growing up with different religions, are shown to be in love with girls from their own religions. They are shown living in the worlds made of persons of their own religions. The film never discusses the impact of religious differences but rather seems to take it for granted that the persons from different religions would love each other "because they are brothers".

There are no religious fanatics or any speeches about religions in this film. Thus, I see this film as an allegory for the ideal multi-religious India, where each religion can maintain its distinctiveness, its own costumes, and yet be like a family.

Zakhm (1998): This is one of the my favourite films of all times. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, this was an autobiographical film. Against the backdrop of religious riots in Bombay, the film tells the story of an old woman (Pooja Bhatt), who has been burned alive by a Muslim guy. As she struggles for her life in the intensive care unit of a hospital, her younger son, with the help of Hindu hardliners would like to take a revenge on the Muslims. Her elder son (Ajay Devgan) tells the story of their family to his younger borther.

It is the story of a Muslim woman in love with a Hindu film director, who dies in an accident leaving her with two sons. She hides her own faith and brings up her two sons as Hindus, even though she is rejected by her husband's family.

The film had a powerful performance by child actor Kunal Khemu as the elder son, during the parts in flash back, where Ajay tells about his childhood.

In South Asia, the boundaries between religions can often be hazy. Many families carry hidden histories of inter-mixing of different religions. I felt that this film brought out the issue of those hidden histories in a powerful way. It was also a strong voice against the fanatics and the hate-mongers of different hues.

Bombay: This 1995 film by Mani Ratnam is one of those rare films that touched on a vital question in all inter-religious marriages - the question of the religion of their children. The Hindu-Muslim couple in the film opt for a civil marriage and ignore the religions.

However, their two fathers would like that their grandchildren follow the family religion. The couple has twins and thus, the two grandfathers decide that one grandchild can receive Muslim religious knowledge and the other can be Hindu. Only when there are Hindu-Muslim riots that threaten the lives of the two children, it makes them understand the futility of religious fights.

Many mixed-religions couples today are like the couple of this story, who do not feel very religious and who feel that they can continue to follow different faiths. However, the issue of their children's religions is a thorny one, especially when there are family expectations and pressures from the two sides.

The different ways in which families deal with this issue, I think that it needs to be tackled in more films.

Conclusions

Bollyworld often shows persons of different religions, living together as close family friends or relating to each other in positive ways.

In a way it is a reflection of the Indian society and at the same time, I believe that it strengthens knowledge and relationships between people of different religions in India.

The past few decades have been marked by shifting of religions towards more exclusionist and radical positions, not just in India but all over the world. In such a situation, I think that Bollywood's role in promoting a multi-religious society is important.

There are many examples of mixed-religions families in Bollywood cinema. Personally, I believe that in this direction, Bollywood (and Indian cinema in other languages) has been much ahead of all other cinematic traditions in the world.

So if you think of Bollywood films dealing with inter-religious families, are there any films that have impressed you? Are there any such films from other countries, that you know of?

In the next part of this article, I will touch on inter-religious love stories in Bollywood films.

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This article is part of my reflections for an email based research on mixed religious couples and families. This research is called "Mixed Doubles: You, I and our Gods".

If you are or were a part of a mixed religious relationship or if you grew up in a mixed religious family, please consider joining this research by sending me an email at: sunil.deepak(at)gmail.com

You can find more information about this research at the Mixed Doubles Blog.

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Playing dead in a cemetery

I was a little taken aback when Virginia had asked me if I wanted to be part of her special art installation in the antique Certosa cemetery of Bologna (Italy).

I was only needed to play dead in a special picture and then to share my ideas about "what do you think happens when we die?".

I love Certosa (the initial "C" is pronounced like the "ch" in church) cemetery. It has been a burying place for the dead for more than two thousand years. First it was an Etruscan cemetery, and then a Roman cemetery, and then over the past fifteen hundred years, as Bologna changed from a settlement and assumed the form of a city, Certosa has slowly grown bigger.

In the medieval period (1300-1500 DC), people started making there monumental graves with sculptures. Therefore, many areas of Certosa are like an open air museum, with hundreds of statues. The most common theme in this museum, as you can guess, is bereavement, with statues evoking feelings of loss, sadness and crying. However, there are many statues on the tombs of big and famous persons, that are more about power, wealth and vanity.

Surrounded by verdant hills, some parts of the cemetery have lovely views. Over the last two decades, cremation rather than putting the dead persons in graves, has also become more common. They even have an open grassland, where those who do not wish for a grave or an urn, can scatter the ashes.

In today's culture, where emphasis is on enjoying life, normally people do not want to talk or think about death. It was not always like this. For example think of the huge tombs built by Egyptian kings for their own burial, because they were worried about their afterlife, and wanted to make sure that they could continue to live as kings after their death.

Most of us have difficulties in talking about death and bereavement. Amitav Ghosh in a beautiful article about the death of his friend Agha Shahid had written in 2001:

Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the last many
weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did
not know how to respond: his voice was completely at odds with the content
of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled
something innocuous: “No Shahid—of course not. You’ll be fine.” He
cut me short. In a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he
said: “When it happens I hope you’ll write something about me.”
I was shocked into silence and a long moment passed before I could
bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions: “Shahid
you’ll be fine; you have to be strong …”

Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then
that I realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was
entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember
him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but
through the written word. Shahid knew all too well that for those writers
for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an
inbuilt resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my
instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about
his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet; that our friendship
was of recent date; that there were many others who knew him much
better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge.
All this Shahid had guessed and he had decided to shut off those routes
while there was still time.

“You must write about me.”

We have an old dog and often I am worried that one day he will be gone. Also, when you cross fifty, I think that consciously or unconsciously, you begin to ask yourself, how many years you still have to live. So I think about death off and on for some time now.

I had visited Certosa many times and had already expressed my thoughts to my wife that when I die, I would like to be cremated and I would like my ashes to be scattered in the Certosa open grassland area. Therefore when Virginia asked me to be part of her art installation on death, I didn't think twice and immediately agreed. However, some of my friends were not so sure if it was a good idea.

"Won't it be inauspicious to have your picture there while living? It is only dead persons' pictures that are put there?", they worried.

I looked at it differently. "How many of us get a chance to see our pictures as dead? How many of us get to see our pictures displayed in a cemetery? No one. So if I have this opportunity, I don't want to miss it."

Virginia had a special technique for taking pictures, so that it looked as if the person was coming out of darkness. She took pictures both with persons' eyes open and with eyes closed. "I won't take off my glasses", was my only condition. I know that dead don't need eye glasses, but what fun is to play dead, when no one recognises your picture because you are without your glasses?

I also spoke to Virginia about my views about death, influenced mainly by Hinduism, though not in the sense of paradise or hell:

I like the way death is described in Kenopanishad and Kathopanishad. I think that everything in the universe is pervaded by the same consciousness, and when we die, our individual consciousness goes back to all pervading consciousness, like a river goes in to the ocean. That all mountains, plants, animals and humans are inter-connected through this consciousness.

I think that everything in this physical universe is made of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles and these particles are exactly the same in every thing. Thus, all persons, animals, birds, plants, rocks are made of same building blocks, but our level of consciousness energy is different.

I like the understanding coming from quantum physics that at sub-atomic level, a particle can be in many places at the same time and that between the particles there are huge spaces, so much that relatively, the distances between the constantly dancing sub-atomic particles inside each atom that compose us, are like the distances between the planets. Therefore, each particle of our bodies, is like a solar system. I think that this describes the concept of Maya that Upanishads talk about.

Virginia recorded my views in Hindi also.

The art installation was set up an underground hall from 14th century. Along the 700 hundred year old tombs, there were our images on the walls. We were 12 persons representing 12 different religions and cultures. We all spoke our views about death in our languages. People could also read our views.

It was a wonderful sensorial experience. And, there was enormous diversity in our views about death. Virginia says that this multi-media art work was very inspiring for her. Now she is planning to involve even more persons and one day come out with a book about it.

Are you comfortable talking about death? What do you think happens when we die? Do you believe in reincarnation? Would you accept to be part of an exhibition, where you are shown as dead?

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