Thursday, August 29, 2013

On Lord Krishna and Hinduism... in response to Taslima Nasreen


While you are entitled to your views, I for one would urge you to go deeper into understanding the true Hindu ideology and religious beliefs, before you make up your opinions and even further put them to expression.

Your understanding is so extremely simplistic and belittling, as watching a star hundred times larger than our Sun, from millions of lights years afar on earth and making sense of it. Even my knowledge of Islam or Latin literature far exceeds your understanding of Hinduism in content, which is not much to compare.

In short, Hinduism is not about Lord Krishna or Lord Ram or even Hanuman, Ravana or Arjun, these are probably all ancient beings, divine or otherwise, that rule Hindu imagination, but these are only a few more popular ones among the whole pantheon of millions of other deities/gods we have... core to our belief is that we consider all life is a part of one supreme source (the formless and omnipresent conscience represented by the sound of Om) and any intelligent being can attain the same state as the God almighty in life and vice versa - god can also manifest itself in millions of avatars in various forms, human or animal... which is why Hinduism is so tolerant and assimilative of all religions - that many Hindus would even take prophets from all over the world including Jesus, Mohammed, Zarathustra to be divine reincarnations and would not hesitate to pray or bow to them if they feel the divinity in a church or mosque or synagogue... we believe in many paths to god, not just one, and definitely not just the one we preach.... some offshoot religions like Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc were similarly assimilated and co-revered by Hindus over time as we did not consider each other mutually threatening and basic principles were the same.

Our issue with Abrahamic religions, is that they seek or give no option to co-exist and seek to denigrate and annihilate hinduism without even understanding it - pure bigotry - only accepting their book and their name for god as sacred. This makes Hindus take an antagonistic stand towards these religions only in self-preservation.

What I have mentioned above is also a very generic belief core to most hindus, and as one of my other friends elaborated in another comment, we have multiple schools of thought and philosophy, each championed by inspiring and charismatic icons in ancient times, leading to Dvaita, Advaita, Sankhya, Karma, Brahmo, Bhakti, Mimamsa, Nastik etc branches of Hinduism, with further subdivisions like Shaivite/Vaishnavite... some are against idol-worship in particular like Abrahamic religions... and while many do practise Idol-worship, it is not the same as in animistic premitive so-called "pagan" tribal ways... it has more profound and reasoned objectives - about which you can read from Abul Fazl in Akbarnama... and I am sure it will open your eyes.

It is another story that over time  the religious practices by ordinary Hindus may have lost this profound foundation, and could look similar to a premitive animalistic tribal form to the uninitiated, and the society has become quagmired in caste system, women supression (despite praising the women form as supreme Goddess Shakti that completes Shiva), sheer idolatory and superstitions. Our orthodoxy and religious leaders haven't done a good job of keeping true Hinduism alive in the masses.

I have no knowledge or opinion on Islam and Christianity worth sharing here, hence my silence on them. I hope I have been able to ignite some curiosity in your mind about my religion and hope this would force you to think how much you know or don’t know about the subject that you have written about in your article.