Ideas of Hinduism

Book review: Hinduism in India

Hinduism in India

The Early Period 

Greg Bailey (Ed)

Sage Publication

215 pages; Rs 620

It is difficult, even impossible, to delineate the real meanings or fundamentals of the Hindu religion not only because of its great inner diversity and plurality but also because Hindus do not have one sacred book that can be considered the sole authoritative source of the religion’s essential doctrines. Greg Bailey, the editor of this volume, has referred to the specificity of Hinduism by observing that “the emergence of term ‘Hinduism’ around the beginning of the nineteenth century resulted in the quest to find some unity in the plurality of religious practices. This quest was embedded in the context of colonial rule…”. 

The reference to the colonial construct is important because each of the essays shows that the source material for the construction of ideas about Hinduism is to be found in multiple texts, rituals and religious practices. The focus of the volume is to demonstrate “the extraordinary richness of what is now called Hinduism, its religious and cultural diversity, including rituals, asceticism, and forms of devotion that have survived and been readapted to meet new challenges that have emerged throughout a very long history of over two millennia”. 

The authors have relied on textual and non-textual Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic sources and foundational epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana and Bhagwad Gita to make their point. Recognising that the “…the term Hinduism is an ill-defined, somewhat amorphous concept about which there is no agreement,” Professor Bailey, nevertheless, attempts a broad definition. “I propose, as a working definition, that Hinduism, as both religious and cultural systems, recognized by its practitioners, be considered as representing the cultural and religious conditions, enabling the co-existence and interaction of three behavioural and ideational complexes centered on ritual, asceticism and devotion”.  This is the best summary of Hinduism because it combines its essentials with flexibility in practice. 

Appropriately, an early chapter in this volume examines the role, status and place of the Brahmans. The Brahman class, Professor Bailey writes, “defined a comprehensive vision of society where they occupied the highest position,” and, with changing context, “the Brahmans became the theoreticians who tied together all these movements and practices into a kind of loose whole that successfully provided an overarching framework while enabling the individual components to remain”. 

The foundational epics like the Mahabharata, Ramayana or the complex phenomenon of Puranic Hinduism and the dharamsastras and modes of puja associated with pan-Indian gods such as Visnu, Siva and later Ganesa became the essential ideological references of Hinduism, which came to be presided over by official interpreters known as Brahmans. Thus, the supremacy of Brahmans as communicators of Hindu religious ideology is an important characteristic of the religion.

A popular perception about Hinduism is that its believers and practitioners have attached great importance to the performance of rituals from birth to death. Examining this notion, Axel Michael writes that “…ritual traditions preserved in normative texts from Vedic times until the present” is one part of the story; the other is that rituals have a great variety of local and regional practices”. Hindu ritual handbooks, Vedic and the sacred Sanskrit language texts are not the only source of rituals because practitioners of rituals and Brahmans and priests have also played a role in the origin and development of a whole baggage of rituals among Hindu religious believers. “The significance of rituals lies in the fact that they often create an autartik sphere or arena of timelessness and immortality, at least in religious or semi-religious texts,” the author says. 

In the chapter on the Mahabharata and Dharma, Adam Bowles has ably summed up the main ideas in the epic and the meaning of Dharma, which is critical to understanding the multiple nuances and complexities of Hinduism. Yudisthira is central to the idea of Dharma: “Not merely is Yudisthira Dharma’s son but he is also a portion of a god Dharma, born on the Earth to continue the heavenly battle of the gods and demons”. 

Dharma, writes Mr Bowles, denotes a specific form of normative behaviour that pertains to a person’s social class. The Mahabharata asserts that “the king makes the age” and, thus, the Yuga theory is born. The Mahabharata is placed in the Kaliyuga, which is one of heightened volatility in which gods and demons fight and the “sons of Dhritarastra and Pandu who will fight over the Earth, in the process destroying almost its entire population of warriors”. Dharma is the contested term and Yudisthira shows ambivalence but he is a king who must perform his duties. But as Mr Bowles observes “one might surmise, too, that the outstanding authority on Dharma as the Mahabharata would have it is Krsna”. 

Mythology has played a great role in the lives of Hindu believers and Professor Bailey brings to our notice that “Mythologies, mythological narratives and mythological imagery pervade all societies but perhaps not so much as in India, where they see through every aspect of the culture”. He points out that it is not only Brahmanical literature, there also are Sanskrit and Tamil versions of Siva-Parvati-related myths. The multiple influences of Buddhism, Jainism and many other indigenous movements on the material manifestations of Hinduism are highlighted in chapters VII and VIII, which deal with Hindu theology and art. 

The objective research-based scholarship of this volume presents the multiple ideas of Hinduism that are at variance with the superficial monolithic interpretations of V D Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Their Sanskritic-Brahmanical, north-India-centric Hinduism does not exist outside the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.