A prayer for all

MAGH, the month of the coldest time of the year, follows Pausa and it is commonly believed that between these two months, our land goes through 40 days of chilla jara (bone-chilling cold). This year, Magh has been uncommonly cold. However, some of us fortunate people have heaters to keep our homes comfortable and quilts to snuggle under at night. One cannot help admiring the fortitude of the farmers sitting outside Delhi’s borders, their passionate opposition to the farm laws undimmed by the bitter cold that nature has sent down to add to the roadblocks and trenches dug by the government.

I am also reminded of the month of Magh spent in Allahabad, where thousands of pilgrims congregate each year to take a dip in the freezing waters of the Ganga to wash away their sins. They are mostly simple peasants, accustomed to hardship and the cruelty of the weather cycles: cold winters and burning hot summers. Yet, so great is their faith that they come and stay for weeks, singing songs and being cheated by the pandas, who divest them of their hard-earned money by promising them absolution. This ritual goes back millennia and has even been recorded by the great Chinese traveller Hieun-Tsang when he came here around the sixth century and observed the great king Harsha at the Kumbh, held every 12 years, give away all his wealth. There is something remarkable about the continuity of this great land and its rituals that have sustained communities and faiths through the centuries, despite the countless invasions and colonisers who have tried their best to convert them into another way of believing.

All this comes back to me as I remember scenes from my childhood in Allahabad. Every morning, a devotee of Mata Anandmayi would pass the road in front of our house that led to the Sangam. His creaky cycle could be heard long before his voice reciting, ‘Om Anandmayi, hey-hey Anandmayi’. That ditty was our morning alarm and my sister would say, ‘Come on, get up! Om Anandmayi has just gone by.’ If he was our morning alarm, the evening hour for returning home after playing with friends was from another familiar religion. ‘Don’t linger with your friends after you hear the azaan,’ were my mother’s instructions. In between, these two markers of our daily life were the Christian prayers we recited in school, the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’, or the beautiful prayer of St Francis of Assisi that began, ‘Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon…’

We grew amid the sounds of these familiar prayers, as well as the conch shells and tinkling bells at our own home as my mother bathed her gods, and the thrilling shlokas we learnt simply by hearing them day after day. I do believe that none of us who grew up in those times needed to be reminded that we were a secular country where all religions were respected and honoured. We were secular in ways that many may find it difficult to believe and I daresay that religious differences became more marked when the state declared that all religions were equal. Simply laying down a law does not mean that it is acceptable and this is as true of religious belief as it is of the farm laws. And yet, we persist in flattening the joyous diversity of this land into a single common denominator. If you reduce each religion to its basics, you run the risk of reducing its variety and breadth. Certain words in English have no exact equivalence in Indic languages, so secularism that is now commonly translated as ‘dharma-nirpekshita’ is nowhere as wide in its embrace as the familiar credo of ‘sarv dharma sambhaav’. I am proud that we grew up in an India where we lived the ‘sarv dharma sambhaav’ philosophy.

Even if I do not always follow the language, it is the serenity of the Gurbani that moves me. Sanskrit is understood by just a few, yet how can one not be moved by the great hymns composed by Adi Shankaracharya, or the metaphysical verses of our Bhakti poets?

Sadly, we have abandoned pride in our cultural traditions and opted to follow the simple monotheistic traditions of religions that can neither match nor outdo the richness of polytheism. The Greeks went into decline after their multiple gods were supplanted by the Christian conquerors and the Holy Roman Empire replaced the pantheism of the Mediterranean civilisations. In our own land, Hinduism pushed the tribal and native beliefs of forest-dwellers and declared them savage. I think the nobility of the tribal communities still lingers in simple lifestyles and community living.

How ironic that every religion believes that it is the custodian of Truth when the truth is that they are all flawed in one way or another. The same is true of modes of government and political ideologies, is it not?