The Future of Religion in India

By Prof. V. Sitaramiah, M.A.

THE title is neither grandiose nor frivolous. It is a vital question for us now. We have launched ourselves into freedom and have to shape a new life worthy of a great past–ambitious of a greater future. We might, therefore, start with ‘a full look at the worst’, as they say and proceed to build our destiny. When in bondage the glory of the past was all we could be proud of. The ‘crumbs from others’ tables was almost all the food we could get. We are free now and we should cook all the dishes we liked. For seven hundred years we have not created any new or first-rate thought. Those who do not create do not contribute. Much scholasticism, some spurts of particular thought, consolidations of position, clarification and comment, amendment or refinement have been all the substance of our effort during this time. Positive, fundamental thinking there has not been; even in philosophy, which is known to be our field.

We are known to be a religious people also. Even Roman Catholicism and ritualistic Buddhism and Jainism cannot score points over us. I am not thinking here of them.¹ A fate seems to dog the history of all human institutions which make them rise as pure forces and founts of life with vision and voice of something superlative. They then begin to gather body and momentum; try to stabilise and insulate themselves; gradually lose virtue, decay and become corpses of what once was life and faith! And Religion, which men have built up for their deliverance and salvation, seems to be singularly liable to such a fate. Indeed, no other institution has gathered round it so much mass as to immobilise, so much obscurantism as to cloud and to weaken it. Or, it is developed into a dangerous tyranny fatal to the health of the Spirit. For almost all the fine visions of Godhead and the structures built on them as means of human redemption have ended as exploitations and drugs. Contact with the masses no doubt adds to their influence and power, but that has vulgarised them, attenuated or watered them so thin as to leave nothing which could sustain the spirit or create for it a joyous dwelling on earth. When pure, these are the possession of single individuals–few, select. When they try to flow into and spread over society with intent to fertilize they become encrusted; able to survive only by losing their sattva. This process has been in operation in India as elsewhere, for a long time past. Such a state is oppressive. And there is urgent need to revivify it.

I speak here only of Hinduism. This term is largely unreal but is a convenient designation. In the strictest sense it is a total or general name which, desperately, is given to that loose mass of people who, negatively, are not Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews etc., who dwell in this land; and, positively, to those who believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Dharmasastras and the order of existence approved by these. Even here sects like the Virasaiva, the Buddhist, the Sikh, and, in respects, the Jain, do not believe in all the features of the main religion. But, roughly, their idea of Purusharthas, the paths and discipline, the belief in a similar sort of heaven and hell, the efficacy of Karma, the cycles of birth and reincarnation, the method and training of Yoga, the approval of a Samnyasic order, the Guruparampara, the types of institutions set up and the techniques of worship, the daily routines of life and impulsation to conduct,–in these, they have many common features. To that extent, broadly, they can be classed ‘Hindu’. And,–this also is certain–from crudest Animism to the highest adventure of the Spirit with dreams of being one with the Absolute stretches the extent of the Hindu fold.

Are we religious today? Yes and No. Yes, in an inert, routine sense. No, because our religion is not live and creative. It is often a dull habit, one of unthinking acceptance. If we analysed ourselves or the composition of our population to see how much Religion inspires or vitalises conduct, we feel the show is empty. Hide the truth how much we may, Religion has lost its savour for the intelligentsia.² It has an uncertain hold on the middle classes who can be disturbed by the most trivial circumstance basically. Among the masses it is a blind faith, as always, and it works on them like a dope. With them it is an amalgam of tribal beliefs, traditional practices, mumbo-jumbo and almost animal devotion with the thinnest veneer of Religion. Designating it so is no snobbery. If any faith and acceptance and the sense of anything holy and devotion-like could make a Religion, theirs is religion all right. But this is not what we mean when asking the question: Is there a future for Religion in India? Religion is a faith and a devotion and a life lived in them. It involves a felt affection for the highest recognised as the activating force of all life and movement. But Faith and devotion are irrational and the sense of holiness can pertain to anything in the life of a person or of a community,–to things, places, customs, conventions. Yet there is a difference between the average man’s faith and religion and the positive, progressive, creative faith of a thoughtful person. It is the religion of such a person in India in the Hindu fold that I am speaking.

This sort of Religion exists at least at two levels: the individual and the community. The former is likely to be, qualitatively finer than the latter. The sum of good things that may flow into the community from the latter may be larger. But it can be at the cost of the Spirit. Any technology can confer such a good and create an attitude of faith and gratitude to it. But the pure flame of Religion can burn only in the heart of the chosen, of those few who form ‘the light and leading’ among a people. The Master, the first seer, glimpses the Truth, thrills to it, develops it as the operative principle of his being. He knows its vital essence, its moods, its contour and limbs and what distinctively animates it. He can see all its implications and compulsions. It is a fluid condition of his soul, a continuous function in his mind, under every chance of fortune, while he communicates it or reacts to other forces from without. The next disciple usually fails to get into its heart for, he is, after all, an outsider. His grasp is, likely, gross; likely, literal. It was given to him, he takes it from a master on authority: therefore, second-hand. When it goes beyond to the many it, naturally, loses its uniqueness and all the exquisiteness of its personality. This, perhaps, cannot be helped, for it seems next to impossible ³ that all can at all stages of development be educated into sensitivity and be made equal in understanding or in the range and depth of perception so as be able to get into its heart. The world of Religion is a world of essence and function at a point beyond the stars or in the invisible depths of the human soul radiating light and wisdom, quickening all that is and moves, approachable on its own terms and grace. It is above the scientific and the metaphysical, not accessible to sense, nor to the intellect; but to a faculty ‘higher’ and intuitive than either or both of them. Neither in aspiration nor reference is it primarily secular. It touches the secular zone, if at all, by an inward or a superior sanction, totally different from the normal.

What is the condition of the finest people in India with regard to such aspiration and reference today? The best of them do not seem to be minded religiously at all. One aspect of it which sought single salvation away from society does not appeal to them. If they could promote social weal any other way they would withdraw from the orthodoxies and take ‘a holiday from’ religion. There is, in many among them, a divided personality which is almost a malady of all civilised mankind today. Many have conflicting loyalties and idealisms; doubts about the validity of ancient practices–doctrinal, institutional–which hurt and impede movement. The new ones are as wanting as the old in the power to guide, to assure, to convince. An atmosphere of coarseness, strife, activism and violence unsettles them.

Old voices were at least integral, with a solid ring and assurance. With the going of that assurance has gone the positiveness and the courage of tone and feeling. Other particular inflexions and accents attract and open out fields of tangible benefit, while a total map of the intellectual and the spiritual is found difficult to draw. For one thing, the fields of study and specialisation are today so vast that without knowledge of the established facts therein even philosophical generalisation goes wrong. What was deemed inscrutable or divine has become explicable in some matters, or, is being cut into every day by observation and study and by the discoveries of mental or other analysis. Against all its weak defence is ranged the artillery of science and secularism. Authoritarian cults are demanding suffrage. Unreason stalks the field. The whole, therefore, is a sight of disintegration and danger.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” (W. B. Yeats.)

This stage has been partly passed through elsewhere. We are passing through it here. This mental situation must be understood and faced. Else self-delusion and break of heart will result.

To take only one aspect of the Indian scene: The Vedas, the Upanishads, etc., are being studied closely in a modern way, critically, comparatively, historically. The mere sanctity attaching to them has been lost; their awesomeness, if any, continues only among the ignorant and the sentimental. Both as philosophy and loyalty in behaviour their teaching is found diverse, leading through many Darsanas to conflicting stresses and directions. Their philosophical implications are not clearly or fully understood by those born and bred to them. Any growth, therefore, or live sensing of value based on them is not in the picture. If they were, they do not seem to have relevance in the mental climate of the age. The situation of the Dharma-Sastras, is, again, as perilous. With the loosening of the Caste system and the discredit it has drawn on itself, obedience to their injunctions is wholly undermined. Their place is being taken by Civil Law made in the Legislature, moulded by discussion and public opinion, based on current needs, influenced by imitation, and the needs of adjustment to a current and changing environment. The claim that they were sacred and should not be meddled with because of a divine sanction–is gone, and with this has fallen the whole edifice of Vidhi and Nishedha and the penalties enumerated in them. Kings who were to have been the champions and protectors of the Varnasrama Dharma either have ceased to be that or are themselves on the scrap-heap. The Varna concept with its confused origins in birth, profession, quality of soul, colour or samskara–half sociological, half religious–is no longer a cohesive force but has caused grave social inequities. Its discriminations are resented. The Asrama ideal with its samskaras and growth of individual worthiness is more than ever a fiction. The Ithihasas–like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata–have ceased to be binding forces in our religious and social life except loosely. They are just studied as works in literature or as social documents. Anyone who sees a Bhajana party or witnesses a car-festival or procession on a city street could see how unreal and how uncomfortably it shows against the surroundings or in the glare of the midday sun. The two do not agree; nor strike as spiritual. Centuries of Santipatha, daily Parayana and expositions of the Bhagavad Gita etc., have brought people no nearer humanity nor helped to cleanse private and public life. What godliness can then sprout out of them or thrive? Are men educable at all fundamentally? Can human impulses be cleansed, the way we are going?

Meanwhile, the study of Science and Technology has opened up new vistas of knowledge. While enlarging and enriching vision this has cut at the roots of superstition and prejudice. These are able to deliver goods. Their ways are open their theory measurable, verifiable. They are able to spread benefits of a kind which, for human purposes, were beyond the dreams of the past centuries. So that humane persons are being more easily persuaded to throw in their lot with their cultivation and promotion. What if religious men call it at best an ethical idealism or mere humanitarianism? The jibe has no edge and passes by, un-harming. With the aid of science and technical organisation we could take up the work of social amelioration for large masses of men and women sunk now in ignorance, disease, debt and squalor. The needs of competitive existence in economic, political, military and technical fields have made nations direct energies to redeeming the secular situation everywhere,–thus drawing attention away from Religion. Even the spiritual must yield results either in the type of men created or in the good that these men create.

All this while the Biological sciences, Sociology, Ethnology and Psychology in their turn, have cut away mainly tracts of territory from the preserves of Religion. And day-light has rushed into many a dark room in its mansions.

A study of the components of religious experience and comparative Religion has exposed cobwebs seeming sacred. So many items which looked like solid facts establishing a divine dispensation or origin are shown as grounded in illusion, projections of universal tribal fancy, enlarged inductions or mere dreams of desire. The religious, therefore, is made to shrink in stature from being an all-embracing, all-ordaining force into just one type of Phenomenology like the aesthetic, the epistemological, the sociological or the technical or the merely mental. The religious as distinct from these with its concepts of glory, hierarchies, of wisdom and validity, worship, heaven and hell, acts of creation, sin piety, and grace have lost importance, at least their overriding sanction. These are today considered doctrines and creeds just as tenable theory or dogma as any other: more real to some, less tenable than their own to others. The plight of the religious men and women themselves with their Achara, Upavasa, etc., not being any the better than others in chasteness, stability or largeness of life, the condition of the priest class, and the practices in the temples and Matthas show nothing to admire or inspire in them.

This is not a happy or healthy sign for a people who once saw clearly and spoke directly with an authority that was born of realisation. India’s is a pristine vision of the spiritual unity of all life. Its concept of godhead and wisdom is metaphysically one of the soundest; its description of the paths and processes and stages of realisation one of the most precise and concrete. With its doctrine of peace and maitri, its hatelessness born of discipline and strength, its tolerance and inclusiveness of view, it inspired imagination. Whether one looked at it as a wisdom of divine ascent or descent, a doctrine of emanation or advent of grace, it looked at all life as sacred. It accepted Lokasangraha–service–as obligatory on all who strive for Moksha; Lokakalyana, as the purpose of all endeavour; Lokakarunya, as applicable to plant, bird, beast and man. Its citizenship is one of all the three worlds, freed from narrow national loyalties. What a far cry from the suffocations and the darkness which now prevail in the human situation!

For how many does such a vision–ethical if you like, spiritual if you prefer–call to action? How many feel its live urgency? How would they shape the terms and the instruments of modern existence to translate such vision into reality? This surely can, again, be the faith of a free India. But the half-gods must die, they say, before any real gods emerge.

Religion deals with God, with man’s relation to God and to the rest of creation, and with the modes of realising Godhead. The concept of God has undergone a change in modern philosophy and with this change has come a radical need to reinterpret life in terms of it. Bosanquet once said that it takes the whole Mind to call the whole of Reality. As truly, it needs all Faith to accept the integrity of all Being and Becoming. Religion in this sense asks for perpetual faith and perpetual endeavour here and how, hereafter and ever, till the last bondage snaps for the last created thing and total ripeness and fulfillment so satisfies God that He might end this and take up another experiment to divert Himself with. A modern Indian could be content with nothing less without cramping his style.

Instead of such life-giving faith what do we really see? A new Paganism–gross and animal, a Satyrism, if you please–has crept into our country. It is calling itself freedom and calls alluringly to all. It has all the glamour of modernity. Habits of life in food, dress, shelter, movement, courtesy, grace of manner and speech, arts, crafts, theories and fashions, rush of enthusiasm, group behaviour–all call more and more passionately to the delights of physical living and away from all those gracing; chastening disciplines which used to sustain high levels of conduct.

In every age and land the number of people of fine quality is always limited. The life of the spirit is ever beset with travail because it asks for self-control, self-criticism, and hard striving. But all this could be understood and let be if the general direction at least was sensed and right. Unfortunately our values are getting muddled. Life is once again, desiring to be lived at the roots of animal being: more at the level of the instincts, and passion,–appetitiveness of every kind–than of Intelligence and Reason. Worse. Doctrines which say that pity and grace, love and tolerance are effeminate qualities, that tough races only have the right to rule, that the history of man has gone on wrong tracks during the Christian millennia and that ruthless efforts should be made to make life brutal again, that all means are right to promote ends, are gaining hold of men. Liquidation of difference of opinion is the method and mantra. Or, systems where the State-machinery and its masters occupy the pedestal occupiable only by God are claiming worship and suppress other modes of thought and behaviour. Violence deemed a valid sanction is oppressing spirit and destroying the basis of what was built up with care and loving devotion as culture. In one form or other this philosophy of violence is throwing up radical modes of feeling and action which threaten to overwhelm mankind.

Good people who have seen the injustice of an earlier order are in doubt whether they may not pay the price temporarily to make possible an overhauling of the system so as ‘to remould it nearer to heart’s desire’–with equality and brotherhood for man, perfect justice, a classless society, opportunities open similarly to all, telling that the State will ‘wither away’ as soon as this is wrought. The while that it tightens coils using a voice more and more ominous to hear! Which alternative will influence intelligent and humane men we cannot say. It is a question of temperament, perhaps, but the drift of tendencies fills one’s mind with fear, and it does not encourage a hope. Indian religion will have to take note of this situation as well before it sets to tidy itself and then order a life of its own. Even for this, it must ‘die to live.’ For old ideas and methods are insufficient and old cries have become suspect. They must be transformed to suit new aspiration. People who are unable, for selfishness, ignorance, and passion, to live a life of Reason cannot live the loftier life of the Spirit. For that is more exacting: and Spirit is too great a term to be used lightly. A Pharisee or snob may use it to grind his vanity or vaunt his superiority; but the Grace that saves, the flue that transmutes, and the light that illumines the darkness will have to work again in and through the new milieu; work in each life to redeem each separately. There is no fruitful or immediate future for any other religion in India.

We have been a subject people far too long and have had our wings clipped in every flight. Those who have not been permitted to do things as they like and are forced to obey other bindings lose their power of initiative and creativeness. We have all these days done well or ill the tasks set to us; vied with each other in working out the will of the masters; often believed that as virtue. The English education we received, while it has freed us in many respects, has done its bit to sterilise us. The country has two kinds of the educated: Those who received this education and opened their minds to an international reference and those who kept to the indigenous lore. Neither has understood the other; nor trusted, nor respected. Those who know only the ancient have set and case-hardened at the old level; sotted and begrimed with definition, gloss and polemics, and with defensive and offensive logic directed to win the ever same victories in argument. They have had no access to the knowledge which could have brought new air and light and new accession of riches on other or enlarged premises–which England or some great European language could bring. The stagnation resulting has been deep and deplorable. Even as too much inbreeding is said to produce thinness of blood, this living ever on one’s own spare riches has impoverished us. The English educated have gained some sort of width of outlook, but they know little of their own heritage. This has made them helpless and dependent on others for dear life and for essential movement. Except as they get crutches they cannot move; except as they see with other’s eyes they cannot see. To keep abreast of the thought in the books and journals pouring at the speed of thousands every day–across the Atlantic, across the Pacific–absorbs all their labour and time. This incessant impact of matter of the most diverse kind–this ravage–has been enough to kill independent thinking. Our heritage is, for one thing, in uncurrent and difficult languages–Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Pali, Ardhamagadhi–not easily accessible–and for another, scholastic accretions make it forbidding of approach. If this class of people advanced in thought at all, it was like the orchids or as parasites with no roots in the soil, lacking sustenance from the healthful earth. Free life needs free thought and free modes of spacious living. And when we remember how much leeway has to be made even to catch up with others, we shall realise how responsible and urgent is our task.

A land which was in the vanguard of progress in Philosophy and other branches of thought is pitifully panting behind every new prophet–still ‘rag-picking at other people’s dust bins.’ This description is as true in the social and other mental sciences, The first thing to do, therefore, is to gather the live part of our heritage to build on it; to clear the dead wood and the jungle; what is wanting in our equipment, approach, and substance, should be earned and added to stock and a new careering started on the uncharted seas full of adventure and cheer.

What of Religion in this enterprise? Religion has roughly two roles to play anywhere, a private, and a public. When India is declared a secular State, it will have no State Religion to which the rest of the people must conform.⁴ All religions will have equal rights in the body politic to exist and to pursue an even course so long as they do menace each other or disturb the peace and security of the State. They will be safeguarded by the law of the land. Their usefulness will have to be in strict conformity with public law. No religion can claim prerogatives and immunities which are not granted also to others. Freedom may be enjoyed within their organisation in so far as their followers accept them privately by free and full consent. Like, the individual’s right to private freedom, the rights of each religion will be private. So will its validates and jurisdictions be. Like corporation, like a municipal or local body, like a University, they will enjoy a specific, autonomous but limited public status.

And it is best that this be so. For in the highest sense Religion is an intimate private relation between a man and his God. ⁵ Qualitative refinements of personality or prayers to and enjoyment of Grace and communion will be more a reality that way than as public shows and flourishes. A Religion’s will then be a lawful and good influence than when it asks to permeate all aspects of social being, to the exclusion of other similar claims–claiming rigid conformity to its pattern on pain of penalty or ostracism. “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God” is, in its kind, a wholesome maxim. But conflicts between the two will have to be resolved in the normal way. Not by the State enforcing party decrees on religious matters unless referred to it; nor by Religion arrogating to itself in secular references a superiority which it cannot digest or claim.

This means that Religion’s domination as institutional Religion will grow less and less. Sectarianism, ritual, the choking pieties, the prerogatives and demands, will shrink in value. Already much of its territory it has had to yield to specialist studies and to the other departments of doing and being to which they more legitimately belong. Much of the superstition it has clouded the world with and the gullibility which it has exploited it must learn to do without. It must be content to be a more modest claimant to obedience and loyalty. Knowing its limits and that it can work only through impulses to good and godly conduct, it must inform life and conduct in its unique way, sweetening, strengthening, cleansing and gracing all along.

Anything like Religion’s old overwhelming importance in social and secular life seems, therefore, impossible hereafter and wrong. What influence it can exercise will have to be used to promote good life continually in terms of the contemporary environment. Else it will wither or be cleared away. Or, if it gets loyalty–it will be in defiance of the State–when it is subject to penalty–or, as weak and hypocritical shows. Or, Religion becomes a more particular absorption of those only who have a metier for it, who then withdraw from the world into the fastness of their soul to seek particular types of deliverance and wisdom and for communion with their particular description of God. Saivism and Vaishnavism, Saktism and Jainism–all have put forth their logical possibilities of expression by now. They have to suit themselves to the new need if they aspire to function for public good, take their place with the rest of the ordering of things, and pursue their special ways without dividing men setting them at strife with one another. Or, they will have to seek cloister and solitude esoterically to minister to minds which yield to their singular beatitudes. However that be, it must not be beneath their dignity to work for the common good, each in its individual way; along with the sciences, the arts, the technologies, the philosophical systems and the many other agencies which gird up for such task.

¹ Though, when we talk of Religion in India, all religions practised here should come into review.
² In itself this may be neither gain nor loss. One might say it is even natural. But we can overdo the attitude.
³ Though this is the purpose of education and all cultural endeavour.
⁴ There will at least be no such grotesquerie hereafter as a non-votable Church of England charge on the public revenues of India.
⁵ The training of the Free man and the full man is a cherished goal of all endeavour, and when one such being rises it is a great day in the history of Religion and of mankind.