Creating a universal moral matrix
The book ‘Future of Religious Studies in India’, first published in 2021 by Routledge is an outcome of passionate hard work and engagement of years with theory and empiricism, philosophy and sociology of two Swedish scholars, Professor Ake Sander, Professor Clemens and one Indian expert, Professor Sudha Sitharaman, essentially to draw the point that different religions in plural society, like India, need not to be in competitive mode. If properly introduced in educational institutions, the religious studies can have a complimenting contribution. Since Professor Ake Sander has been a regular visitor to India, especially Varanasi and Pondicherry( now Puducherry), he has been impressed with lived religion of these blending spaces of multiple religious communities. Sander says India has become his second home. With deep scholarship of philosophy, religions and firm convictions of traditional wisdom and of evolved social cultural spaces, he finds all possibilities stored in the Indian repertoires, provided dealt with care and scholarship.
The book vouches for understanding of the unfinished agenda of modernity with fresh episteme. Their central question is that liberal democracy at one hand is facing challenge from conservative nationalist movements, Islamic dreams of new caliphate, and increasingly powerful capitalist-communist Chinese hybrid, while on the other the rapid development in science and technologies with globalization and instant communication have enhanced the mechanisms of deep surveillances to put humankind project at crossroads. At a time, when we are facing war clouds looming large in the horizon, the book has definite insights in understanding how to go with religion in multicultural societies.
Seventy years have gone by; when a piece of us was cut, named a different country. It was experimentation on fragmentation of nativity to bring the different pieces into larger cover on religious doctrine of ’Two Nation Theory’. Since India remained India with its historical credentials intact, its trappings of discourse remained rooted in civilizational journeying. The empirical realities reveal that the experimentation with modernity failed in both the countries with the different trajectories. In Pakistan, cultural suppression, half modernity failed religion to hold the country together, where as in India, the contradiction of the old society and the new state with the process of democratization could not delink politics from religion.
The failure with modernity is apparent that secularization thesis of European origin did not go well with India. There seems to be no remedy to build a multicultural society on religious oneness, so Pakistan shall remain struggling with the process of nation building. India has a possibility that if it invokes its own modernity, which is on hand in its encounters at different points of history in give and take, retention and rejection of traditions to evolve an episteme of mutual understanding and generating moral space for human existence.
The book ‘The future of religious studies in India’ argues, “The spectacular failure of the secularization thesis puts the light on one of the more important questions for this work: should one really try to import European solutions (for example, secular education) to Indian social problems? Is not the cultural milieu, the ideas, the social relationships and organization so different that something more adapted to the context to be proffered? Should not Indian intellectuals develop a particular Indian form of modernity that takes its inspiration from the rich history of the subcontinent instead of glancing and imitation European and American Models”? Would this not be true form of post colonialism, instead of buying into the latest stream of ideas emanating from the prestigious centres of western academia?”
The statement has valid repercussions and has precious significance, when Order Making Project of modernity has collapsed with globalization and multiple migrations. Here comes understanding from civilization-nation-states. Professor T.K. Oommen would refer it, as national states. It is precisely that traditions cannot be taken for granted. It has power. What then is crux of humankind that allows each one to live in dignity? It is not in mythologizing of past that cannot be substantiated, but to live in current with those traditions that have created blending moral spaces. There is no dearth with those traditions to locate whenever we have encountered wit opposite powerful traditions.
With Buddhism encounter, Kashmir produced alternate tradition of Shaivism in 9th century, which rejects futility of this world but believes in linearity of evolution and stresses the unquenched thirst for explorations. Similarly with the encounter of Islam, Kashmir gave us Reshi tradition. It blended both Shaivism and Islamic traditions in a non-formal mode of living. And when we had an encounter with western civilization, through reform movements, we had blending of lived religion, a new doctrine of secularism that has no contradiction with our constitution. It was an enriching moral tradition of interdependence in all spheres of social cultural and spiritual realms.
Therefore, we have scope for Indian modernity to bloom. Possibly, pluralism, if taken as our lived religion, needs transparent religious-moral education at basic level with care and understanding of all religions. Our Madrassas, schools, missionary or religious centres need curriculum of moral education, based on comparative religions. Let recognized reputed scholars from each religion prepare its contents, so that a genuine moral religious course of comparative religions isnot in competition for hierarchy of political agenda, but for strengthening the plural traditions of human project. It has to be interpretative in the beginning years of schooling.
Then in higher classes, the religious texts and commentaries could come to felicitate further research and profound understanding. If attempted this way, it would not be resurgence of religiosity, but understanding of comparative religions in a holistic way. There is need for connecting our lived religion with appreciative comprehensions of different religions. In the current times, it is more concealed form of propagation than transparent mission of human kind. The book significantly clears the smog facing understanding, in its last chapter, “we do not propose a model of comparative studies in which phenomena from different religious traditions are simply collected and compared under different headings, in some variants of the phenomenology of religion. The global comparative dimensions, which is both contemporary and historical has to rest on a discussion of clearly enunciated theoretical and Meta theoretical positions”.
If religious studies with cross cultural practices relating to normative concerns of roles and functions of globalized world with critical assessment of neoliberalism are introduced, it is possible to produce a responsible global citizen with compassion and sensitivity. The book is an insightful reading in this concern with scope and various view points to open the door for such critical understanding in a plural society. It might find a way for Indian modernity, as an alternate to western modernity to move on to the agenda of humankind.
With so much of knowledge and information boom and data loading through AI, the emergence of particular type of animateness, there is need to compliment the moral consciousness to the terrain of roots of power. Perhaps religious bodies of sub-continental understanding are as raw as we find gendered bodies in western contemporary notions. It has to be a common denominator of cultures, where religious animations could be positively understood to save our future generations from catastrophes of violence and wars.
Prof Ashok Kaul, Retired Emeritus Professor at Sociology at Banaras Hindu University
