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PRE-MUGHAL mystical poet Kabir gave higher grades to truth discerned from personal experience than what he assigned to any wisdom received from the reading of the scriptures. ‘Mai kehta hoon aankhan dekhi, tu kehta hai kaagad lekhi’. (I share with you what my eyes see. You sadly derive your insights from the written word.)
If Kabir is right then we should be in a position to question many religious axioms. And we should of course be able to, for our present purposes, critique the exalted Hindu seer who has quoted from the scriptures to slam the millions of worshippers of Sai Baba of Shirdi as un-Hindu.
Shankaracharya Swaroopanand Saraswati of the Dwarka Muth has reportedly said that the Sai Baba was someone “who used to eat meat and worshipped Allah, [and] a man like that can never be a Hindu god”. But the 19th-century genial mystic is deified hugely by the masses nevertheless, and the more recent Sai Baba of Puttaparthi, identified by his Afro coiffure and orange robe, had claimed to be a reincarnation of the original (now impugned) Sai Baba who died in 1918. The Puttaparthi avatar, who was revered among others by cricket stars Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar and Zaheer Abbas, passed away in 2011.
The current Sai Baba affair has an eerie similarity to events taking place in the volatile Muslim world.
The date for the origin of the institution of the shankaracharya is generally accepted as the late 8th century AD although there are wild swings in calculation by even centuries when the first shankaracharya, the founder of the institution, was born in Kerala. In broad strokes, of the four existing shankaracharyas, the muth of Dwarka in Gujarat is traditionally accorded the highest perch. Hitherto though it was not necessary that all Hindus followed the shankaracharya’s prescriptions.
In his edict announced to a news channel, Swaroopanand Saraswati claimed that the scriptures decreed only five gods as worthy of worship. They were Shiva, his consort Shakti, their elephant-headed son Ganesh, Lord Vishnu (who sustains the world) and the river Ganges. In which case, at least I have wasted crucial days from my youth when I would join throngs of bare-bodied men stretching on baking hot roads doing the paikarma of the Hanuman mandir in remote Aliganj, outside the city perimeters of Lucknow. I have also heard some of the best Carnatic musicians at the malai mandir in Delhi, which is dedicated to Murugan, Ganesh’s lesser advertised brother. Malai mandirs, including at least one in Malaysia, are devoted to the worship of Murugan, who is also known as Kartikeya and Subramanyam.
Legend goes that one day when Ganesh and Murugan were ordered to travel around the world, the latter earnestly sat astride his pet peacock and took off. Wherever the peacock stopped to rest en route, and it usually chose a hill, a malai mandir came into being. Ganesh, whose potbelly is revered as a boon among many Maharashtrians, took a profound short cut by going round his parents’ feet and declaring them to be his world.
It is odd that important icons such Hanuman and Murugan have been left out as worthy of worship by the shankaracharyas. People, however, ignore the restrictions and carry on with their beliefs anyway. I was surprised to know from Hindu scholars that even the mighty Lord Brahma, the creator in the Hindu pantheon, didn’t have a temple where he could be worshipped. One day my mother, a pious Muslim woman, found a Brahma temple in Pushkar near Ajmer and we accompanied her there to see with our own eyes, to quote Kabir, the world as it is. Apparently there is another temple to Brahma near Kanpur though the point remains that the creator was not listed by the shankaracharya of Dwarka among the five deities worthy of worship.
While there have been older disputes among Hindu sects about who to worship and who to leave out, including the Arya Samajis who oppose idol worship altogether, the current stand-off has an eerie similarity to events taking place in the extremely volatile world of Islam. And the shankaracharya’s edict looks eerily close to what a feminist poet from Pakistan had warned us about.
“Tum bhi karoge fatwey jaari kaun hai Hindu, kaun nahi hai?” The line is from Fahmida Riaz’s biting poem she read to thunderous applause in Delhi over a decade ago. It succinctly describes galloping religious sectarianism in India, which according to her follows the example set by reactionary mullahs in Pakistan of the 1950s.
Riaz was referring to the violence within the Islamic fold in her country, which began in the 1950s when orthodox groups declared the Ahmadis as heretics and non-Muslim. Z.A. Bhutto subsequently put the legal imprimatur of parliament on the orthodox rampage.
The sectarian genie was out and it was not going to be easy to put it back in the bottle. Pakistan’s minority Shia Muslims were the next target of the increasingly militant orthodoxy although the diehard extremists didn’t spare the majority Sunnis either, slamming those among them that were inclined towards Sufi mysticism as grave worshippers because they congregated periodically at mausoleums of Sufi icons to celebrate their message, usually with music. Much of this is shunned, to the chagrin of middle roaders like Fahmida Riaz, as un-Islamic by politically influential bigots, and not in Pakistan alone.
The shankaracharya’s edict on un-Hindu worship has a ring to it that has discernible echoes of the narrow-minded mayhem that Iraq and Syria are witnessing. The Sai Baba affair has landed the dispute in a law court, which probably is the most civilised and peaceful way to settle any stand-off. However, there is also a potentially violent edge to the issue with a whole community of militant Naga sadhus threatening to wreak havoc in support of the edict against a mystical icon of Hindus. There are reports that the Congress party supports the shankaracharya, as it once tragically did Sikh militant Bhindranwale.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, July 8th , 2014
