Why Hinduism Survives

MY WIFE DANCES and teaches Bharatanatyam, and my daughter learns from her. Observing my loved ones—both born and raised in the US—embody sacred figures from mythology while thousands of miles away from India, I got to thinking about the antiquity of this dance form. A little historical investigation revealed that the dance form was not as ‘classical’ as I thought—it is best described as a neoclassical dance form. Most interestingly, its history revealed a larger pattern within the history of modern Hinduism itself.

Bharatanatyam is actually a clever acronym, invented as recently as 1930. The dance form, restricted to temples, was originally called Sadir Attam. Bhava, rasa, and talam combined to signal the ancient Sanskrit word for the Indian subcontinent. This was deliberate, a bit of nationalist defiance to the British Empire. After all, British missionaries and officials had agitated against Indian dance forms beginning in the 1890s, claiming that the dancers doubled as prostitutes; eventually the British outlawed the dance form entirely. Tamil dancers revived the art as Bharatanatyam.

That ‘revival’ was really a reconstruction and reformation of Sadir Attam. The original form, like so much of Hindu poetry and architecture before the arrival of imperial monotheism, had no squeamishness about eroticism in divine art. Jayadeva’s poetry, Khajuraho’s sculptures, and the Shiva lingam are all exuberant depictions and sublimations of the sex instinct. Neither Turkic warlords nor Victorian missionaries could understand the combination of the physical and metaphysical that underwrote Hindu art in these eras. This incomprehension may have prompted the claim that temple dance was no different than the nautch in a typical (that is, British-government-run) brothel of the time. Notice the contradictory accusations: the British claimed that restricted-entry temples were overly fixated on ritual purity, yet they also claimed that temples sold sex to the public. (“Sacred prostitution” was the same reason early Christians in Constantine’s Roman Empire gave when they set about defunding and demolishing pagan temples; the playbook has not changed.) In any case, Sadir Attam had to be purged of eroticism to survive.

The reformer who transformed Sadir Attam into Bharatanatyam was Rukmini Devi Arundale. She expanded the dance with poses mimicked from ancient statuary and cited the 3rd-century Natya Shastra for her innovations—‘Bharata’ was also the name of this shastra’s author. This harking back to distant antiquity, going forward by looking back, is one of the common signs of neoclassical art: European artists kept their sculptures marble-white to mimic the (originally painted) Greek and Roman statues bleached by centuries; a Modernist like TS Eliot sought out and championed poetry from hundreds of years earlier, like Dante and John Donne. Arundale concocted a dance form that was acceptable to the British authorities—while still preserving the ancient stories and religious figures, as well as the living networks of musicians, dancers, tailors, and instrument-makers of diverse castes. Herself from a Tamil Brahmin family, she elevated the status of dancers so that middle and upper-caste women could be proud to take part in it; and most importantly, she took Bharatanatyam out of the temples and onto the public stage.

This story turns out to reveal a lot about modern Hinduism. The key lies in Arnold Toynbee’s theory of civilisations in his multi-volume A Study of History. Toynbee rejected the claim, popularised by Oswald Spengler, that every civilisation has a life cycle, passing from youth to senescence to death, just like an individual. Toynbee attributed the differing life spans of civilisations to a question of challenge and response. Internal or external challenges arise from time to time; the civilisa­tion either adapts and survives, or fails to adapt and dies out. Sometimes, the challenge can be overwhelming: Amerindian, European, and most recently sub-Saharan religious traditions could not respond to the asymmetrically well-organised, well-armed, and well-funded challenge of Christianity. North African Christianity, with the exception of Egypt’s Coptic sect, could not adapt to the challenge of expansionist Islam. Persian Zoroastrianism survived, for a time, by fleeing to Hindu India; Hindu India survived thanks to its oceanic numbers, stubbornly insular sense of caste, and its astonishing readiness to adapt and change.

In Bharatanatyam’s case, the challenge came first from defamation followed by the governmental ban. The response involved a rapid evolution: the name change; the de-emphasis of the erotic; and an end of exclusivity regarding access, involvement, and performance. It went from a hermetic, Tamil temple art form to a public classical dance with national, pan- Hindu, and eventually international aspirations.

Above all, there is the figure of Arundale. That is not a Tamil last name; she married, at 16, a 42-year-old white British theoso­phist, to the horror of her family. She trained in ballet. The re­former understood, intimately, the British people and culture that governed her society; she knew what they expected from a dance form, and what elements would revolt them. Their censorious gaze shaped the final form of Bharatanatyam.

How does this relate to Hinduism itself? The way this dance form adapted and surged over a few decades, the reli­gion itself has been adapting and surging in the face of chal­lenge after challenge, over centuries. The Bhakti movement is said to have begun in Tamil Nadu with the poems of Andal. In North India, directly facing the challenge of militant Islam, this movement transformed a ritualistic, temple-based Hinduism into direct, effusively emotional, decentralised worship. Vallabhacharya’s parents fled a projected Muslim invasion of Varanasi, leading to his birth in a forest; he went on to found a sect that focused on the adoration of Krishna. The same love quickened the bhajans of Mirabai—whose husband died in battle against a sultan of Delhi, and whose father and father-in-law died in battle against the founder of the Mughal Empire. Tulsidas, according to a legend, began to write the Hanuman Chalisa while imprisoned by the Emperor Akbar. These musical and devotional resurgences defied the imperial projects of their day.

BRITISH CHRISTIAN challenges prompted other re­sponses. The Raj, a merchant empire, actually outlawed proselytisation after the 1857 rebellion to keep the peace, but evangelical activity proceeded anyway, often under the guise of scholarship—Oxford’s Boden professorship of Sanskrit, for example, was founded with the openly stated intention of converting India’s Hindus. Throughout the 19th century, the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj sought areas of overlap between Vedanta and Protestant theology. Often these hybridised, congregational groups doubled as social reform­ers. Stung into self-awareness and self-criticism by colonial critiques, they sought to break down long-ossified caste divisions; Gandhi is only the most famous example.

Vivisection is violence; in several ways, Christian pens attacked Hindus with a more powerful challenge than Islamic hammers. The very word ‘Hinduism’ is an English one, as the suffix proves. Many Indians have seized on the still unproven theory that India was subject to a prehistoric invasion by a white race of Aryans. A transparent attempt to de-legitimise the native or indigenous religion, it remains unproven. In any case, the main features of the contemporary religion originated centuries after the supposed invasion, like the worship of Mirabai’s dark-skinned Krishna, and are based in the geog­raphy itself, like the reverence for the Ganga. Yet the politics of Tamil Nadu—the birthplace of Sadir At­tam and Bharatanatyam alike—is pervaded by Dravidian ideology. ‘Dravidian’, too, is a word that a Christian missionary coined.

The imperialists also altered Hindu notions of themselves. How many notions of ancient Hindu so­ciety derive from the Law-Book of Manu, which was never the actual legal code of any Hindu kingdom? It happened to be the dharma shas­tra that a local Brahmin, asked about Hindu codes of conduct, offered to a British official. There are over 80 such shastras in existence; they are all smritis, that is, ‘remembered’ texts that have a relatively minor status in the vast and contradictory corpus of books on religious matters. Similarly, British scholars looked about for Hinduism’s Bible. They settled on the Vedas, even though, unlike the Bible or Quran, few Hindus actually read these ritual-centred, human-authored poems. Hinduism, however considered, was and is a religion with several sacred books, some sacred to some Hindus but not to others. The term ‘scripture’, with its implications of infallibility and revelation, does not mean the same thing in the Hindu tradition as it does in the Abrahamic ones. Yet modern Hindus cite chapter and verse, in a lingering mimicry; their ancestral rishis appealed not to textual authority but to transcendent experience.

Like Arundale’s dance form, at once old and new, modern Hinduism is a retrospectively constructed, neoclassical version of itself. It goes forward by looking backward—yet it shapes it­self to the gaze of the outsider, altering itself to bear the features a ‘religion’ is expected to have. Many thriving modern sects of Hinduism have adopted a model more similar to the Christian one. In the traditional Hindu temple, the priest performed rites while facing the sacred murti. He did not turn outward to face the congregation and give religious instruction, much less a daily or weekly sermon directed to all attendees. The Vedic ceremony surrounds a mandala with a sacred fire; the chants are directed towards, and addressed to, the blazing divinity, not the onlookers. Religious discourse took place, of course; sometimes this was restricted to a caste or group dedicated to study, taking place in a tapovan or other context. Many of the Upanishads are not dialogues so much as question-and-answer sessions (the Prasna Upanishad, for example, literally means ‘The Question Upanishad’)—and they involved a small num­ber of thinkers, many of whom had renounced the world and gone off to the “great forest” (Brihadaranyaka).

Latter-day Hindu sects have moved towards a different model. Today’s most thriving sects, such as ISKCON or BAPS, offer religious instruction in the temple itself, and they take care to indoctrinate the congregation as a whole, from childhood onwards. The late Pandurang Athavale’s Swadhyaya movement gathers itsfollowers for a weekly recorded sermon and engages in widespread social initiatives. These new Hindu sects are also profoundly post-caste; ISKCON was founded specifically to bring non-Indians to Krishna worship, and BAPS was founded by a ‘shudra’ saint. Less than a hundred years ago, reform movements in India were agitating for universal temple entry in some parts of India, including Tamil Nadu. The democratisation of Hinduism has come a long way. Many reformers would say it has come full circle, honouring the earliest Vedantic idea of the divine atman or self being the same in all people, and the Vedic Purusha Sukta’s image of all castes being indispens­able parts of the same body.

BHARATANATYAM’S TRANSFORMATION took place in the context of political stress. This stress, it must be emphasised, was just weak enough; it banned, defamed, and limited, but did not destroy, the temples and the temple art.

Contemporary Hinduism transforms under similar conditions in the modern Republic of India. In Bangladesh, over the coming decades, the religion will likely suffer the same fate as it has in Pakistan, where the challenge has been eradicationist in spirit and practice. Yet in India, the suppression and injustice may be just weak enough, and the defamation just irksome enough, to trigger transformation and resurgence. The asymmetries, petty or egregious, that India inflicts on its Hindus—temple control and taxation in several states, the absence of any Hindu equivalent of a Waqf Board, limitations on Hindu religious education, countless Orwellian alterations of Hindu history to suit the needs of social harmony, and so on—irritate the religious without actually stomping out the religion.

This dovetails with Hinduism’s tendency to take on the characteristics of its challengers. Egalitarianism increases fellow-feeling. More and more, Hinduism is starting to think like an Abrahamic religion, nursing a sense of collective persecution and victimhood, as well as a rapidly growing awareness of other religious groups as separate and potentially hostile. These attitudes are commonplace among religions with a sense of the heathen or kafir, but the Hindu tradition, because of its extreme antiquity, never accounted for the usurping imperial faiths which it has encountered very late in its history. India’s democratic political arena has forced a sense of “us versus them”, at least in some regions of India.

This has led to another mimetic behaviour: collective political organisation and action. A hundred years ago, Gandhian pluralism diverted Hindu political energy to the Indian National Congress. The Hindu Mahasabha and related parties were sidelined as this vision of India’s history and future governed the freedom struggle—until that vision was defeated by a rival faith’s separatist party, the All-India Muslim League, resulting in the 1947 Partition.

Today, the Hindus of India have started to mirror, weakly and fitfully, their monotheistic rivals. Though chronically incapable of mustering the same degree of unity as India’s Muslims or Christians, particularly in the regions where political squabbling occurs along caste lines, even the hint of Hindu asabiyah has caused the religion’s enemies to panic. This may well be the only working definition of the much-demonised Hindutva: Hindu mimesis of its historical oppressors. It remains the bogeyman of sundry academics and activists, despite its manifest inability to undo the structural disadvantages already in place. The fear of it betrays a guilty historical conscience—and an awareness of its potential power, if it ever carries out its transformation to the end.

Regardless of its future in India or overseas, these rapid evolutions of Hinduism are, above all, a sign of life. Dead reli­gions, like dead languages, do not add or delete anything to or from themselves. Just as linguistic drift is not a betrayal of the language but the natural motion of the language through time, even so, Hinduism’s transformations from antiquity to the present show the religion moving naturally through history. Just as Bharatanatyam was the rebirth of the dance that came before it, continuous with it and different from it, the Hinduism of the future will be continuous with and different from the Hinduism of today or yesterday. To that familiar but as yet unseen religion, that eternal and ever-evolving Dharma, contemporary believers should apply themselves. It is in our power to re-envision it and reform it, each of us a Rukmini Devi Arundale, holding fast to the old while introducing the best of the new, going forward while looking back.

BharatanatyamDevadasisHinduismRukmini Devi ArundaleSadir Attamsurvival