My work place is busy during some parts of the year and incredibly slow at others. Right now it is just slow, bordering on incredibly slow, so I have time to listen to podcasts that I would like to listen to when I am busy. The nature of my work is very hands on, but leans heavily to customer service in the spring and summer and not at other times, so no listening to podcasts when people are around, that said, I have time now.
One of the podcasts I listen to is Ideas, a CBC radio show and so it is free. It was the first of seven radio documentaries on the Myth of Secularism. They were talking about the idea of religion from the European context and the idea of religion in the Indian and Eastern context and I realized, a minor epiphany, that the word "Religion" killed people. Religions kill people all the time, but this was not that, but the word killed them.
Context: religion means something very specific to me as a person born in the West, but it means something completely different to someone from the East, particularly before European Conquest. I can use the word religion because it is a word everyone who uses English understands. English quantifies things and limits them; that is what English does. Tolkien spoke to use from Treebeard's wooden lips, "Hill, such a short word to describe something that has been around since the start of creation and be there till the end of time.". Okay, he did not say that, but he did in a way. Native American languages would describe the hill and put cultural context to it, but we English speakers condense it all into four letters and one syllable, hill. We do this to Religion too.
If one took a census, the podcast said, and asked how many people in Japan follow what religion and compared it to the number of people in Japan, we would find the number of Shinto, Buddhist and other religions would total to be more than the population, millions more. In Japan one can follow more than one religion at the same time. This was the way of all peoples in the East, perhaps of all peoples everywhere at one time, but it changed in Europe at least.
When the British conquered India, they found a people that worshipped a plethora of gods and goddesses with a vast variety of stories, that changed from village to village, valley to valley, place to place. The belief's had a core that stayed the same, all the names changed, and the importance of the deities altered position in the stories depending where you were, but they were all similar, sort of. To this the stiff upper lipped British categorized them as Hindu and with that quick precise word froze and stratified a free flowing idea into solid fact. According to the podcast, Hindu was a new word, or a word that was given a new use. It is said that each god of that faith has an infinite number of names and then they go on to list them, all 108 of them. I am not sure if by saying that there are 108 means that they are infinite, but I would think that it means that there are 108 names plus the other ones that are local.
It does not matter, but what does is that the Brits began to do censuses and to categorize all the people of India. India is huge. I mean it is a big country now but it was even bigger before, it included Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, it may have included Nepal, Butan and Sri Lanka too. You begin to see it was really huge and it was diverse, far more diverse than Europe now and more than Britain. Muslims lived among Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs; they lived in harmony together. More specifically, they lived together within the people. One of the phrases attributed to Gandhi has always bothered me: Hinduism and Atheism are compatible. How could that be? The only way I could allow that idea to exist was to leave religion out of the argument. Hindism could not just be a religion, it could be a philosophy too. But now I understand it better. People in India before British rule picked and chose from the faiths around them. They could pray to Lord Shiva, practice non violence and brotherly love, and fast during Ramadan. Each faith could offer something to each person.
What I write is a gross over simplification, but it gets you into the right frame of mind. If you were from a stratified English upbringing where all Europeans were one of a smattering of Christian faiths, but only one and you were trying to do a census among the mind-boggling complexities of Indian faith, the phrase "Please check one box" seems right, but is at the root of a very horrible chapter in world history.
When you name something that never had a name with a simple word with little meaning, one meaning, the potential of the something is removed. When you do this to a person you limit them, where there was no such limitation before. You are a Hindu, you are a Muslim and you are a Sikh.
My history of India is severely lacking but dividing a people into monolithic faiths seems like the first step in a story that ended with partition and war and general hostilities.
I thought this was going to end differently, but I realized that talking about history of a nation so great, in size and diversity as well as deep in time, was dangerous, especially when this new thought of multi religious faith is so new to me, alluring and repellant. So I will stop.
But imagine a world where faith was not so polarized…
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