India’s Social Culture: Its Use and Abuse

India’s Social Culture:
Its Use and Abuse

Manoj Das

About two thousand and four hundred years ago there took place a significant dialogue between the great Greek savant, Socrates, and an Indian who had travelled to Athens. “What is the scope of your philosophy?” the Indian traveller asked Socrates. And Socrates replied, “An inquiry into the phenomenon that is man”.

The Indian traveller laughed and to a puzzled Socrates, said, “How can you know man without knowing God?”

This account left by Aristoxenus, a disciple of Aristotle, indeed contains a vital clue to the understanding of the Indian psyche. The laughing traveller’s mind must have been steeped in the Upanishadic doctrine of the Brahma knowing which alone one knows everything. Our life will continue to be a mystery, an enigma, as long as we try to understand it from the surface. A seeker must go to the source and know the One there in order to understand the many here on the surface.

This is the concept that once moulded the Indian’s basic atti­tude to all matters. Should we call this attitude religious? We may if we please, but we have to be clear about the concept of religion as it prevailed in a remote past – a concept that is far removed from what we understand by religion today. It was a quest for truth, free in spirits, uninhibited by dogmas and taboos. If ceremonies were there, they were not mechanical rituals, but functions performed in full awareness of their symbolism.

Needless to say, the term Hindu or Hinduism developed much later.

How broad was the scope of this quest for truth? We know today that there cannot be any progress without freedom. From all available evidence it is clear that this freedom to pursue one’s line of quest was absolute in the society. We find a staggeringly large number of schools of thought and systems of philosophy grow­ing simultaneously. A testimony to this freedom is to be found in the fact that even the agnostics and nihilists were given the status of sages. In fact, the world’s first known complete agnostics, who developed their own systems of logic, were to be found in India, in the persons of Jabala and Charvaka.

The founding fathers of the Indian society believed that each individual was unique and hence each individual, depending on his or her comprehension, intellectual or emotional constitution and psychic growth, had the right to approach God in his or her way. The tiny stone under the village banyan tree could be the divine source of solace for the illiterate villager as much as the concept of Sat Chit and Ananda for the sophisticated seeker. Such was the social culture that nobody was denied an access to the ultimate reality. Every road that led to a transcendence of our human limi­tations had the sanction of the sages.

Closely linked to this ideal was the tradition of festivals as well as customs and family rituals. All the festivals were linked with deities or epic events of the past. The founding fathers did not expect every individual to be a conscious spiritual seeker. At the same time they did not wish the masses to–remain totally obli­vious of the spiritual values, of the great forces that mould our life. While the festivals were occasions for happy emotional exer­cises, they also put us in touch with the higher powers – the god­heads. Whether one believed in the divinities of the deities or not, or whether one believed in the very existence of the deities or not, no one could deny the fact that they represented qualities and com­passions that every human being, be he a believer or a non-believer, aspired to acquire. Similarly, festivals related to epic events were meant to expand the horizons of our outlook. Our life may not be marked by significant events, but when we celebrate the Diwali which either commemorates Rama’s return to Ayodhya or Krishna’s triumph over Narakasura, we transcend the humdrum and limita­tions of our life by association with a great episode, a triumph of the just over the unjust.

Rituals too had a psychological profundity about them. The annual funeral or Shraddha ceremony was not so much meant for the particular soul of the dear departed – for the soul in question might have already taken another birth – as much for the performer himself, to remind him of the life hereafter. Besides, it was an occasion to express gratitude to the ancestors and, as is well-known, no other emotion is as ennobling, as purifying, as the sense of gratitude.

We find astoundingly progressive instances of the philosophy of education. One rainy night Guru Dhaumya sends his disciple Aruni to see if the crop in the field owned by the Ashram was safe. Arum goes and sees water overflowing the lake and flooding the crop. He tries to repair the breach in the embankment, but fails. Hence he lies down against the gap and stops the flow. He is in a swoon by the time the Guru discovers him in the morning. Months before the incident Aruni had already proved himself accomplished in all the branches of learning. But it was on that day that the Guru told him that his education had been completed. The episode esta­blishes that it was not academic excellence alone but the develop­ment of an innate humility, a capacity for self-obliteration, that entitled one to be called educated.

Probably the origin of caste system can be traced to the Gurukul or the Ashram schools of ancient times where the Guru, after a study of the aptitude and capacity of the disciple, trained him for the walk of life that suited him. Even after caste had become hereditory for practical reasons, it was not a rigid system but a tradition. The young Satyakama meets Sage Gautama and expresses a desire to be enrolled as his student. The Guru enquires about his father’s caste. The boy asks his mother and reports that it was not possible to ascertain it as his mother had worked under duress for years in the course of which she had been the wife of an unknown man. The Guru at once declares that the boy was eligible to learn the scriptures, consequently to be called a Brahmin, for if one could remain truthful even when his truthfulness went against his interest, one had the making of a sage. Thus it was not heredity that necessarily determined the caste, but quality of the individual.

How and when did such sound social arrangements become perverted? Unfortunately history has been a long record of most ideal institutions gradually forfeiting the truth of their content to false claims and pretensions. The greater the truth, the greater is its abuse. Ego and arrogance are the two formidable wings on which falsehood wreaks havoc. When I say that my religion is greater than yours, what I really meant to say is, I am greater than you. I forgot that religion is essentially a means for cultivating my inner relationship with God and it is none of my business how somebody else is cultivating it. Similarly with the caste system. To feel superior by virtue of birth is the easiest form of self-decep­tion which frees one from the obligation to really achieve some­thing worthwhile.

Humanity pays very higher price for such deteriorations which it allows to take place and India, at the moment, is the stark example of the inevitable nemesis in operation. The price we pay is in proportion to our awareness of the mischief we have tolerated, if not activily encouraged.

However, abuse of truth does not nullify the truth itself. Truth’s relation to shadow can be compared to light’s relation to shadow. “A shadow depends on light for its existence, but light docs not depend for its existence on shadow”. It is historically undeniable that it was India that had first recognised the spiritual freedom of man, a freedom which alone can make him transcend his ignorance and fulfil his destiny in evolution. If ignorance has cast a shadow on his life today, the only sensible thing to do is to become conscious of it and to dispel it. Freedom of the spirit is still the clue to our future. As Sri Aurobindo says in The Foundations of Indian Culture, “India has the key to the know­ledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light, illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and further application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny”.