A note before you read: This essay was originally written in Marathi in April 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in India, and published on Medium shortly after. What follows is an English translation, faithful to the original. I’ve kept the date stamp from when it was first written, because the moment it was written in matters as much as the words themselves.
Let me tell you a story from when I was in ninth grade.
I was watching Krantiveer on television — the 1994 film directed by Mehul Kumar, with the formidable trio of Nana Patekar, Dimple Kapadia, and Paresh Rawal in the lead. There is a scene about Hindus and Muslims, where Nana — playing Pratap — sits with his Muslim friend Ismail and explains what does and does not actually separate them as human beings. Dimple — playing Megha — picks up the thread and shows how our political leaders profit from setting us against each other.
I was a student who spent more time outside school than inside it, and I didn’t read much back then, so I didn’t fully understand the scene. Until that point in my life, I had no concrete sense that Hindus and Muslims could carry that much hatred, that much contempt for each other. It hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility. The other reason it didn’t land was that all I really knew was this: Hindus go to temples to pray to Ram and celebrate Gudi Padwa, and Muslims go to mosques to offer prayers to Allah and celebrate Ramzan Eid. Beyond that, I knew almost nothing. But watching that scene, one small thing did land — that no matter which religion or caste a person belongs to, the blood flowing inside them is red.
In the first year of my diploma, my Chemistry paper went badly. The bargains I struck with God in the days that followed — the promises, the bribes I dropped into temple donation boxes — make me laugh now when I think about them. Even after all of that, I failed the subject that semester.
But that was the version of me back then. Whenever anything went wrong, I would go and tell God, and He would fix it. If you asked Him for something with real faith, He would give it to you with both hands. And yet, in this case — and many others — I felt cheated. God had let me down.
I assumed I must be doing something wrong in the way I prayed, or in the way I expressed my devotion. So I decided to read. As much as I could — the books, the puranas, the scriptures — and see what would happen.
Most of my school friends had surnames like Joshi, Kulkarni, Kshemkalyani, Gaidhani — Hindu Brahmin families — so getting hold of religious texts was easy. I set aside my Chemistry, set aside every other subject, and read. For four or five months straight, I read.
By the end of it, I had read enough that I could have officiated a Satyanarayan puja after a wedding, or sat through the ten-day Garud Puran readings after a death and conducted the tenth-day and thirteenth-day ceremonies. In the process, I turned several temples upside-down with my questions. I peppered priests with one question after another until they were exhausted. But the God I had set out to find — I could not locate him anywhere. The answers I was getting did not satisfy me. So I kept asking. I have never stopped asking, because one of my teachers had taught me not to.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” — Albert Einstein
This whole episode turned me 180 degrees. I stopped going to temples. I stopped clapping during aarti. I stopped eating prasad. I stopped folding my hands in front of the family shrine. All of it — gone.
Because I had effectively declared rebellion against God, there were fierce arguments at home. People in my family, in my neighborhood, my close friends — they all looked at me with disgust. I didn’t care. I was firm in my own thinking.
From society’s vantage point, I was no longer a believer. I had become a non-believer.
“You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.” — Swami Vivekananda
My trust in myself had grown. The many lenses — the chashmas — that family, society, and friends had placed on my face since childhood had begun to fall away. I stopped looking at the world like a person with eyes who could not see. I stopped measuring people, breaking them, fitting them into pre-fabricated boxes. What caste is this one? What religion is that one? — I moved past those questions, and started seeing the person in front of me, clearly, as a human being.
“A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.” — Mahatma Gandhi
If four or five months of reading could change me that much, what else was possible? I began to develop a real appetite for every other subject too. My natural curiosity, my willingness to keep asking questions, my willingness to go into the heart of a topic and accept whatever truth was there — these things began to enrich both my thinking and me.
Vachal tar vachal — “If you read, you will live.” It’s the Marathi maxim I had seen written on school blackboards a hundred times. I finally understood what it meant.
The person who had been worshipping a stone idol began to see God in human beings. The God I had been searching for had revealed himself to me — through the people around me.
I had found God.
As I write this, I am twenty-six years old. In the years since that turning point, I have read across many subjects, and one wrongly-fitted chashma after another has fallen off. But while trying to understand how those lenses got there in the first place, one thing became very clear: my family — particularly my parents — and my close friends had played the largest role.
They had taught me many things from childhood. Many of them were not useful in the present, or had simply become outdated. Their thinking was not as updated as I wished it were. But my own thinking — that is in my hands. And once you have enriched your own thinking, you can plant those updated ideas in the minds of your family and the people closest to you.
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our thinking, our religion — these must change with time. I am still firm in that conviction. It will involve struggle. But without struggle, how does anyone find truth, or move forward? To free yourself from other people’s thinking, you have to take off the wrong and outdated lenses you have been wearing.
India has been independent for seventy-two years. And it still pains me, deeply, to see the hatred and contempt between Hindus and Muslims. That is the reason I am writing this. I am putting my view in front of all of you.
If you want to understand Hindu, Hindutva, the Hindu Rashtra, the Hindu Swarajya — there is a vast body of writing you can read. The Bhagavad Gita. The Vedas. The Upanishads. Swami Vivekananda. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Mahatma Gandhi. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Samarth Ramdas Swami. Sant Dnyaneshwar. Sant Tukaram. Read them.
If your idea of being Hindu is celebrating Shiv Jayanti according to date and tithi, then tying a saffron flag to your motorcycle and kicking up dust through the city and the village to prove it — please, stop that first. If you are abusing or attacking Muslims while taking Ram’s name on your lips, what kind of Hindu does that make you?
“Asindhu sindhu paryanta, yasya bharata-bhumika | Pitrubhuh punyabhushchaiva sa vai Hindu-riti smritah ||”
Savarkar’s definition: A Hindu is one for whom this land — Hindusthan, the territory stretching from the Sindhu river to the Sindhu (sea) — is not only the land of his ancestors (pitrubhumi) but also his holy land (punyabhumi). Whoever sees this land as both the land of their forefathers and their sacred land — they are a Hindu. Regardless of which caste or religion they happen to belong to.
At its root, Hindu is not merely a religion. It is a way of life. The word Hindu Dharma is not the exclusive label of any single sect or doctrine. It is the collective term for the many religions and sects whose pitrubhumi and punyabhumi both happen to be this same Indian soil.
For those who want to understand Islam — and the true meaning of jihad — there is also a vast body of writing. The Quran Sharif. Rumi. Saadat Hasan Manto. Sahir Ludhianvi. Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Kaifi Azmi. John Elia. Chiragh Ali. Muhammad Iqbal. Shibli Nomani. Syed Ahmad Khan. Syed Ameer Ali. Wahiduddin Khan. Read them.
When innocent people — Hindu and Muslim alike — are killed in the name of jihad by cruel men who barely deserve the name human, how exactly will Allah forgive them? How exactly will paradise be granted to them?
“Jihad — as defined by the true Islam of Prophet Muhammad and the Koran — means a struggle for self-reformation, education, and protection of universal religious freedom. Muslims should not censor themselves on a distortion of the true meaning of the word. Instead, Muslims and non-Muslims alike should stand united to emphasize the correct meaning of jihad and take this narrative away from extremists and Islamophobes. We have a long road ahead, but whatever your jihad, make it a true jihad of peace, education, and protection of people of all faiths — and no faith.”
Once you have read about each other’s religions and each other’s God, some things in your own tradition may strike you as wrong, or outdated. If you still believe in your religion — and that is your right — then update it for the present age, in ways that are good for the whole of humanity, and learn to respect each other’s faith and each other’s God.
And after all of that, one request: read The Constitution of India. Every Indian citizen should read it. Your rights, your duties, the foundational protections of your life as a citizen — all of it is in there. The disputes I have watched flare up in recent days have a single root cause: the ignorance of Indians about their own Constitution.
“Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.” — Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
If the Government of India has told you something and you disagree with it, you can — respectfully — express your disagreement. You can. That is your right. But the answer is not to start murderous riots, not to attack each other across caste and religious lines, not to destroy public property. That is not how a citizen disagrees.
During the sensitive moment of COVID-19, when the Prime Minister asked everyone to clap from their balconies or bang steel plates together to mark a collective gesture, or to turn off the lights and light an oil lamp — none of that meant we should all flood into the streets and turn it into a frenzied spectacle. That was plainly wrong. Equally — in the same sensitive moment — for large numbers of Muslims to gather in the capital for a religious congregation, and then quietly disperse to their hometowns across the country without informing the authorities, was wrong. With temples and mosques officially closed under government order, going to temples for darshan, or to mosques for Friday namaz — all of that, in the middle of a pandemic, when these acts can be done from home, was wrong. The question we should be asking ourselves is simple: how appropriate is it to step outside for something I could perfectly well do inside?
We are playing with our own lives, and the lives of the people around us. We too are citizens of this country. We have to feel the weight of that. In a moment this sensitive, what we all owe each other is gravity, and shared responsibility.
WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens —
JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation;
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this 26th day of November 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.
Because Hindus have put on saffron lenses, every Muslim they see looks anti-Hindu. Because Muslims have put on green lenses, every Hindu looks anti-Muslim.
When are we going to take those lenses off and start seeing the person in front of us as a human being — with the eyes of basic humanity? Ask yourself that question.
Our math is off. The definition of dharma is moving in exactly the opposite direction from where it should be moving. The more I read, the more I study, the more I am convinced of this: every religion was made by humans, for humans, for the protection of humanity. And yet today we see the inverse. Humans protecting religion. Humans protecting God. Does religion really need our help to protect it? Does God? With two hands, and your head bowed as a third offering — He is content. Respect the person in front of you and respect their faith. If we manage even that much, the hatred and contempt between us begins to shrink, and eventually disappear.
Misinformation, manufactured panic, the deliberate provocation of communities — social media and India’s degraded journalism carry a huge share of the responsibility for this. So pay attention to what you are reading, where you are reading it from, and how much of it is true. Verify before you believe. That is the request.
A word about the Tiranga — India’s tricolor flag — because, as it happens, both saffron and green are in there too.
At the top is deep saffron. It signifies sacrifice and courage.
In the middle is white. It signifies light, the path of truth, peace, and purity.
At the bottom is deep green. It signifies our connection to the land, to nature, to faithfulness and prosperity.
The blue Ashoka Chakra — like the sea, vast, signifying the endless wheel of time and the world that turns with it. Life should move. Indians should move forward in peace. The wheel itself comes from the Dhammachakra — the wheel of dharma — central to a Buddhism that carried a message of universal peace. Indian art, Indian philosophy, Indian history, Indian culture — all of them flow together in that single emblem. Dhammachakra Pravartanaya — “for the turning of the wheel of dharma” — is inscribed at the head of the Speaker’s chair in the Indian Parliament.
We have to honor our tricolor. That is on us.
“We are Indians, firstly and lastly.” — Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
I made a vow, and I made it long ago — and I still hold it. I have a dream of an Akhand Bharat, an undivided India. To realize it, and to make India a global power in the time to come, we will have to come together. We will have to take off these dust-smeared, old, ill-fitting lenses, and walk forward.
My struggle continues. I am inviting you to join it.
Ignorance can be defeated by knowledge. Darkness can be answered with light. Superstition can be answered with faith. Hatred can be answered with love. Falsehood can be answered with truth.
Begin the change with yourself. Begin it in your own home. Look at every person with respect. Treat them with respect. Learn to see them through the eyes of humanity — and through the eyes of an Indian.
Jai Hind! Satyamev Jayate!
— Abhishek Katyare 07 / 04 / 2020 Nashik
Originally published in Marathi on Medium on April 7, 2020. Read the original here.