Cultivating a secular spirit
Sheel
The school as we know it today is a structured way of learning about the world, in which many of our traditional ways of life and cultural values, particularly those that carry a stamp of religion, are sidelined. India is a secular country, the word secular here implying rising above religion rather than a lack of religiousness. Our children learn about their own religion as well as those of others largely at home and/or in the street, and this can have tragic consequences in the absence of a tempering influence, for they run the risk of becoming bigoted and fermenting religious disharmony as well as communal strife as they grow older. School is one place where the challenge to initiate the development of a secular mindset should be taken up – but we only do this in a cursory manner in our schools, shying away from the real issues.
Whence religious strife? A historical perspective
In the contemporary context, religion is perceived as a divisive force in India – ‘communal tension’ is a familiar phrase. This, to my mind, is one of the repercussions from the ‘divide and rule’ policy followed by the British, who sowed the seeds of division by partitioning Bengal in 1905, and established clearly defined separate electorates in 1919 in the territories they occupied across the subcontinent; earlier, right after the revolt of 1857, various sections of society such as Rajputs, Hindus, and upper-class Muslims had been banned from their armies. Religion was politicized, and has grown more so over the decades.
The event that in a toxic sense solemnizes the split along the lines of religion for the generations born after independence is the creation of Pakistan, with the specific nomenclature of “Islamic nation”, through the Partition of 1947. It is assumed by some sections of society that India, the larger nation-state that came into being at the same time, ought to be declared a Hindu nation, Hindustan – an appellation that is quite popular. But despite being a Hindu majority country, the India that was created in 1947 retained the original multi-religious nature of the subcontinent: while many Muslim families moved to Pakistan in the aftermath of the Partition, many also stayed back, and from the new nation-state of Pakistan, there was a movement of populations from many different religious hues into the new India. It was a nation made up of a large number of small kingdoms in which multiple religions were practiced, along with their own customs and festivals. And crucially, in independent India, each of them could freely continue to do so; however, every individual was expected to put the country above themselves and maintain its secular identity.
A still older dimension to religious strife exists, nevertheless: the caste system that existed in medieval India, with its problematic demarcation of untouchables caused much strife in colonial India, with terms like ‘Dalit’ (Jyotiba Phule), ‘Depressed Classes’ (Ambedkar) and ‘Harijans’ (Gandhi) being used, and later, ‘Scheduled Castes’, a term that is recognized by our Constitution. Another grouping that has come into being after 1947 is ‘Religious Minority’ – which includes Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, Buddhists and Jains. Such categorization, instituted originally to avoid discrimination and protect the rights of these sections of society, has today become something of a bane as more strident demands for reservations and more benefits are heard on the one hand, and on the other, there is a decline in the morale of those who are genuinely meritorious but lose out in the race for good education, employment, and so on.
Thinking about religion in school
One significant aspect of the majority-minority divide is that institutions of religious learning can be separately established with the aim of maintaining a discrete religious identity: Vedic schools, madrasas, convents and so on – and in these schools, the history of the specific religions may be taught along with its philosophy and culture, many a time along with other subjects. The school textbooks which government and private schools largely use, however, refer to religions only in a general manner: various religions are named, a few of the important festivals and costumes spoken about briefly, and the underlying philosophy, if discussed, set down in a paragraph or two – and this is understandable, given the vastness of the subject. Often, however, they end up like other lessons, simply being memorized and disgorged at the time of exams, while the shadow of communalism falls on the former type of schools. There are few classrooms in any kind of school in which religion actually gets discussed in a way that connects it to community life in a contemporary nation state.
But religion can include strong cultural differences, both in terms of other religions, within a single religion, in terms of language, ethnicity, culture and economic position. These differences need to be spoken of and discussed in a more than cursory manner in our classrooms, if we are to arrest or even prevent the development of a communal or zealous bent of mind. The question is, how can we achieve this? (For a start, teachers can begin to understand their role by reading the NCERT Position Paper on Education for Peace!)
What we can do
Romila Thapar, the eminent historian, points out that secularism is “deeply tied to the question of the kind of society that we want,” and if we really want a secular, democratic society, we “have to stop identifying ourselves primarily by religion, caste or language, and start thinking of ourselves primarily as equal citizens of one nation, both in theory and in practice.”* To stop the primary identification by religion in particular, it is essential for us to demystify the basis of religion itself for ourselves and others as well as to look at our collective history.
It is vital to understand the fact that religion is a cultural system. While it often relates humanity to the transcendental or cosmic order of existence, sometimes with a Creator figure that could be male or female, what’s more important on an everyday basis is that it establishes specific ways of tackling the challenges of life that provide cohesion to a community or group. Often, it is a person with great wisdom who develops these ways. Certain truths about the human condition are recognized, and these ways are developed in response to the challenges of the human situation, the purpose being to achieve self-realization, or at the very least, social harmony. Over time, these are interpreted, reinterpreted, and become codified as religious law, tradition, ritual and so on.
However, underlying these, the key values enshrined in religions still remain the same. These are invariably ethical principles linked to ways of thinking and being, to human conduct. It is up to us as teachers to reflect upon and educate our students for peace, to enable them to understand that religion is not a homogeneous entity, but a layered understanding of the world underneath which there is a common basis for all religions. This would set the ball rolling to unify them and build a secular mindset. (Some resources that a teacher could use are listed at the end of this article.) We know, for instance, that Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, like Hinduism, have emerged from the same culture, and so it must be true that if we go back in time, at some point, there must not have been such a distinction at all! While Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam did not originate in India, it is believed that St. Thomas, an apostle of Christ, came to India about 2000 years ago, and Zoroastrianism and Islam in India are at least as old as the 8th century! For more than a millennium, we have lived together, surely there must be common features that have kept us together!
Restoring human dignity
Another aspect that teachers can introspect upon is how, in the name of religion, our very humanness is at times cast away, and animal instinct takes over. We can discuss the importance of looking clearly at our feelings and emotions wherever differences crop up, and voicing them in order to find a solution, instead of letting them fester within. It is equally important to separate opinion from fact, particularly in the matter of religion, and focussing instead on our common humanity.
Through such effort, one can avoid blaming and shaming others, and this sets the tone for a happier world. We might also look profitably upon the value we place on things like money and work, having time to share and have fun, and simply to enjoy ourselves. Respecting our humanness and celebrating diversity is essential to restoring human dignity.
Resources
1. http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/education_for_peace.pdf
2. http://listverse.com/2007/07/31/top-10-organized-religions-and-their-corebeliefs/
3. https://integralchurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/15-great-principles-sharedby-all-religions/
4. https://prajnyaforpeace.wordpress.com/tag/teaching/
5. http://www.postcardsforpeace.org/
What keeps us together?
Historically, the Indo-Gangetic plains have been lands of plenty. Waves upon waves of people have moved to this land across centuries, only to be accepted and assimilated into the populace. This does not mean that there have been no differences; only that it appears that it has been easy to receive with open arms, and to give with love and compassion – qualities that are the building blocks of a strong and resilient community.
In socio-religious terms, the sense of the connectedness of all life is paramount. One prominent belief in India has been that the goal of the human was to merge with the Divine, and an individual reincarnated in different forms until he or she found his/her way to that final communion: life was a medium through which the way to merge was learned. At the same time, divinity was omnipresent, and multiple forms of divinity could be conceptualized. The sense of time was not limited to a single lifetime.
This has contributed to the general philosophic approach to life that persists in India even today. Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gifteconomy, points out that villagers seem to have an entirely different mental model from the selfish modern-day middle and upper-class individual: “the multiplication of wants is replaced by the basic fulfillment of human needs. When you are no longer preoccupied with asking for more and more stuff; then you just take what is given and give what is taken.”# There is little space for selfishness.
It is perhaps this generosity, this culture of sharing what we have as well as our joys and sorrows, that is at the core of the resilience of the common populace to drastic changes around them, and which enables them to stand together as one community in the face of upheavals of all kinds. Can we bring that sense of togetherness to ourselves and our children?
#http://www.dailygood.org/story/236/pathsare-made-by-walking-nipun-mehta/
* Ali Asghar Engineer Memorial Lecture at Jamia Millia Islamia on August 19, 2015. Transcript available at https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/10/secularism-inindia-romila-thapar/
The author is a writer, researcher and editor. She can be reached at sheel.sheel@gmail.com.
