My Hindu self
My Tamil mother put the fear of God in me. When I morally transgressed by, say, slapping my cherubic younger brother around, she told me Sri Venkateshwara was watching. Though a non-Brahmin, she fervently commends the power of homams, and summons Brahmins to her home whenever she believes we - the family - are in a spot of trouble.
A fiercely intelligent polyglot, she is equally at home with the Tulsidas-reading Hindi wallahs and Tamils who chant the Tiruvaymoli. This familiarity extends beyond religious communities: We regularly visited St. Patrick’s cathedral in the city, lit candles and dabbed our foreheads with a little holy water. When we had Hyderabadi Muslim tenants, she always observed a day of fast during the month of Ramadan.
I kind of went on believing in this intercessory, beneficent God-who-comes-in-many-packages until I grew out of my teens, when, like most, I went through a doubting phase. This God who allegedly took care of his devotees had much to answer for in a world wracked with conflict and inexplicable acts of violence.
This is when I discovered the teachings of Advaita, which assert that the God we look to is really illusory, and that beyond our imperfect conceptions of a personal deity lies Brahman, the non-dual absolute, which, to borrow a line from Nietzche, is beyond Good and Evil.
The goal of life is to realize our non-duality, which, like a flash of lightning, shatters the phantom self - the self which craves, which suffers, which rages against death. Those who have had this uniquely liberative experience proclaim the unity of all beings.
The beauty is that within our duality we can certainly accommodate many modes of worship, many images of the divine. And I believe my mother’s inclusivist outlook -not uncommon among Hindus - stems from this philosophical position.
There are also some deficiencies in Advaita: Its proponents have not sufficiently recognized the importance of social service. If all beings are ensnared in the illusory bonds of Maya, then shouldn’t Advaitins work toward alleviating the manifest suffering in the world? The Buddhists did exactly this, and envisioned the bodhisattva, who forsook his own enlightenment for the betterment of his fellow creatures. This ideal animates the socially-progressive engaged Buddhism. Though I frequently criticize Christian institutions, I have ample respect for Liberation Theology, which coupled grassroots political reform with Christian tenets in South America.
Then there is caste. If all beings share the same spiritual nature, then why do Advaita pandits continue to uphold caste hierarchy? Hasn’t the idea of karma, in which our past is to some extent the determinant of our present, the principal religious rationale for poverty and untouchability in India? For the Advaitin, isn’t karma a convenient fiction? After all, if Brahman is the only reality, then what exactly reincarnates?
I still jostle with doubt, but I do recognize the wisdom of uncertainty in a world where the truth is often killed for.
