Sa Ham- I am She (2024 series): Not Religion Not even Spirituality

Kala-bou or Banana bride ritual (PC: Utkarsh Speaking Blog)

 (This is the sixth post the 2024 Sa Ham series. To read first post, please click here. To read the second post, please click here. To read third post, please click here. To the read the fourth post, please click here. To read the fifth post, please click here.)

Sa Ham series can easily be interpreted as a “sociology of religion” articles to some academics and others as simply a religious or spiritual or “goddess” blog.

I contend that this is not that.

The printing press period in Europe also saw the discovery of Americas, spread of European empires across Asia and Africa, rise of the machines and Science (as we know today) and it has had an impact on how we have come to perceive our world. Fixed, separating, exploitative, controlling, and needing to predict with more engineering type solution pathways.

This is also the time when there were efforts for a clear distinction between the Institution of Church from the Throne and from matters of social rules and laws. The rise of Christianity in Europe had already driven underground many of the pagan practices. Within European history and social evolution, the term “religion” has a context.

That is not true of the practices in South Asia where across centuries, and even through colonisation, every aspect has continued to be stitched together intricately. There isn’t a thing like “religion” that can be separated from everyday life or social norms. Nor is there a term in native languages that exactly transliterate the word “religion.”

There are no single fundamental institutions in South Asian practices. Although we have Sankracharyas of the various Mutts, a select few visit and the influence is limited. No temple is considered the most important. Every community and in fact every family have their own traditional places of worship and ways of worship.

There are more than three dozen definitions of religion and academics struggle to place South Asian practices in some umbrella. There is a definition which I had liked for my PhD research, that it is a “chain of memory” (Hervieu Léger, 2000; Burgess, 2008). I would add that it is a set of acts through which the chains of memory are invoked, reinscribed and re-formed.

The commonalities that “Hindus” appear to agree on are -- particular Spaces, in the sense of auspicious time, in the rivers, in certain plants, flowers, and light. For example, Varanasi (Kasi) is highly revered. It is the space by the banks of River Ganga that is revered, not some temple in the town. Hindus across India visit Kasi for Kasi, the space. People revere the Ganges. And will gather on the banks wherever it flows. In fact, all rivers have gatherings of some kind. People revere Tulasi plant and bel leaves and Dhurva grass.

Lighting an oil lamp (diya) is common across the diversity of Hindus and so is offering of flowers and food across regions and caste. What kind of flowers or what food is offered depends on the seasons, the geography, local species and continued cultural wisdom.

Every festival in a community has set of plants (flowers, leaves, fruits, seeds), a way of preparing food, a bird/animal associated with it. It also has songs, mantras, stories, and rituals that weave through re-affirming an embroidery across time and ancestry. Each careful performance of the festival keeps some species alive –whether plant or animal/bird. It keeps some of the mythic stories as well as family/community stories alive. The interdependence that makes our world is steeped in the practices. It keeps a way of seeing the world and each other alive.

This is at once expansive across the constellations, and across time, and holding together the separated notions of this-is-family and this-is-religion and this-is-culture and this-is-education and this-is-x.

Each festival is a spontaneous dance and celebration of our ecology, or what keeps our world living.

(May I state here that calling the way of life in this land as Sanatana Dharma also doesn’t help for it becomes another covert way to brand and do the exact same things that religion does. I think if something refuses to be classified and labelled, then it should remain so.)

Family and Continuing Practice

I am not fond of community pandals for many of these emerged as a creative response to political and social crisis in South Asia. They had a purpose when they emerged, but they don’t serve us well anymore.

Here is why—I think family is the fulcrum for intergenerational continuing of practices and traditions. The child in the family will be around elders learning the ways osmotically – whether it is knowing a certain plant or a way of preparing season-conducive food, or songs or chants or ways of doing things.

Within the family, given whatever dynamics there is also an opportunity to blur rules and figure out a way to include in more forms. These practices can change and evolve through the loving hold of a family.

For example, in a community pandal, the male priest usually takes over and the gendered division around who can do what is quite evident. One stays back unless they are part of the organising committee and most people gawk, dress up and eat. We have outsourced worship, we have outsourced the joy of cooking and making things for puja and process becomes commercialised. And there is unnecessary competition between pandals and status show and every other evil that plagues our world.

In a family, this is different. There is more participation and more say on who does what. The gender dynamics maybe more fluid and who does what can shift. I have seen my mom lead many a puja and found ways for me to participate. I dislike keeping house staff away and find ways to include them. I have seen relatives make alpanas and decorate and pick flowers and collects fruits and help making food. In an ongoing unit like family, it is possible, for both a continuity of tradition as well as discontinuity of those practices that no longer align.

What has gone missing in many families in stress and splits of the last few decades is Care. I grew up hating many festivals at home because I would get barked at or shamed or some such. I know many people have difficult relationships and what I propose can be horrifying for them.

I realise this. And I know how as our connections to rest of nature has been spliced away, these difficulties have increased.

I don’t know how else to say this except to say it—we need to return to our lands, our trees and shrubs and birds and insects and to the skies and the fragrances and health and love. As David Abram loving writes in his book The Spell of the Sensuous,

“Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

Unfortunately, we can’t invent anything new for the population. We have to adapt what is present in a way that each adaptation will take place in a contextually meaningful way. That there will be many pockets of evolution co-existing with forces that keep our connection with our ecology alive.

This is not about theism or atheism or some such lost endeavours. This is about our Earth. About our Goddess returning to Earth, one thoughtfully done festival at a time.

Throwing this out is also about losing everything.