BHARATA BHARATI

In recent years, another trend has gained ground: secularising Sanatana culture and traditions. In this backdrop, US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ post on ‘X’ is quite revealing. She writes, “Tonight, we join more than 1 billion people across America and around the world lighting diyas and celebrating the fight for good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, and light over darkness. Happy Diwali to everyone celebrating the Festival of Lights!”

On the face of it, what Harris says appears to be a good, progressive step. But, in reality, it is a more sophisticated, sinister version of the first trend: The first one, after all, could easily be called out for only picking out Hindu festivals in the name of gender, environmental, and socio-economic issues while extolling other religions for similar acts. This toolkit to tarnish Sanatana traditions specifically backfires in the era of social media, where secular, Left-‘liberal’ censorship never goes unchallenged. During the recently concluded Karwa Chauth, in which wives keep fast for the well-being of husbands, one Delhi-based newspaper, for instance, came up with a newspaper report saying how such fasts weren’t good for health. Soon, the hoax was called as the same newspaper had published a report during the holy month of Ramzan, saying fasts were good for health!

The attempt to secularise Hindu festivals is, thus, a disturbing phenomenon. The fact of the matter is that Diwali is much more than just being “the Festival of Lights”, unlike what Kamala Harris wants us to believe. Diwali is about light, laughter, sweets, and of course crackers. But at the core of it are dharmic rituals and celebrations spanning days, if not weeks, before and after Diwali. It is when this sacred core is pushed under the carpet, deliberately or otherwise, that one finds attempts being made at turning this Sanatana festival into a “Jashn-e-Roshni”!

The problem with the “Festival of Lights” narrative is that it attempts to secularise Diwali by divorcing it from its religio-cultural milieu, besides distorting the Indic notion of the sacred festivity that cherishes diversity with strong civilisational core binding them all together. So, if the festival celebrates the return of Rama to Ayodhya from his 14-year exile into the jungle, it also is the celebration of the killing of Naraskasura by Krishna in the South and Kali subduing demons in the East, especially Bengal.

Then, of course, there’s a Tamil version of Diwali. The Tamils get up well before dawn and apply sesame oil to their heads and bodies before having a bath. It is believed that Goddess Lakshmi is present in sesame oil. Likewise, the water used for bathing transforms into the waters of Ganga. “Ganga snanam aacha?” (Have you had your holy dip in the River Ganga?): This is a customary greeting exchanged on Diwali, referring to the ceremonial oil bath. Invoking Ganga manifests a strong sense of civilisational unity in the Sanatana Dharma.

This tendency to divorce the sacred from Sanatana traditions isn’t just confined to Hindu festivals. One can look at the way Hindu texts and also Sanskrit, the sacred language, are being looked at. The interest in Sanskrit has revived, especially in the West, but there has been a conscious attempt to divorce it from its Indic identity—just the same way Diwali is being secularised today. Rajiv Malhotra, in his book The Battle for Sanskrit, provides a fascinating account of Sheldon Pollock, a prominent American Sanskrit scholar, whose idea of Sanskrit’s revival was “the reinvigorated study of Sanskrit as if it were the embalmed, mummified remnant of a dead culture”. Pollock wanted to see the revival of Sanskrit studies, and not the Sanskrit language or culture! He adored the Sanskrit superstructure but had deep distrust for the sacred Sanatana spirit behind that body.

Pollock’s disregard, if not distaste, for Sanskrit culture has been so deep-seated that he has even partly blamed “Brahmin elitism” for shaping the ideologies of British colonialism and German Nazism. At another place, he accuses Sanskrit of offering “at one and the same time a record of civilisation and a record of barbarism, of extraordinary inequality and other social poisons”. His uneasiness with Sanskrit’s Sanatana roots is such that he even regards the Ramayana as a weapon for inflicting violence by Hindus against Muslims. No doubt, he is the secular, Left-‘liberal’ champion of Sanskrit in the West.

In the long term, Pollock’s assault on Sanskrit would be far deeper and graver than those who invoke the Sanskrit-Prakrit or Sanskrit-Pali divide, calling the former an elite, Brahminical language. It’s easy to fight an enemy who comes across with a straightforward agenda. It’s far more difficult with the one who has disguised himself as a well-wisher and an ally. Those who are secularising Diwali, and other Hindu festivals, belong to the same dubious group. They are the adversaries of the Sanatana Dharma. – News18, 1 Novemeber 2024

› Utpal Kumar is the opinion editer for Firstpost and News18.