India is the Land of Spiritual Seekers

India is one of the world’s oldest civilisations; but as a nation-state it is relatively very new, and its nationalism can still appear weak and unresolved, as became freshly clear in August, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party expelled its veteran leader Jaswant Singh. Singh had dared to praise, in a new book about the partition of India, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Indian nationalists, of both the hardline Hindu and soft-secular kind, see Jinnah as the Muslim fanatic primarily responsible for the vivisection of their “Mother India” in 1947. But Singh chose to blame the partition on allegedly power-hungry Hindu freedom fighters, rather than Jinnah, who he claimed had stood for a united India.

Explaining his motivations, Singh referred back to his origins in Sindh (the province famous for its syncretistic and tolerant Hindu-Muslim culture) and suggested that he could only mourn the subsequent division of pluralist communities on the basis of abstract and singular religious identities. “In Jaisalmer,” he said, “Muslims don’t eat beef, Rajputs don’t eat pork.” Singh went on to speak wistfully of a famous shrine in Indian Sindh that is revered by both Muslims and Hindus.

Singh is not being a romantic. Hindus and Muslims commonly worship at each other’s sites across the subcontinent. One of my most intense childhood memories is of being immersed, by my Hindu Brahmin parents, into the great crowd at the dargah (shrine) of the Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer. I felt a similar sense of wonder earlier this year at another dargah in Pakistan, standing amid ecstatic dancers at a spring festival in Lahore that celebrates the friendship, apparently homoerotic, of a Muslim and a Brahmin boy in the 16th century.

Such paganism remains a fact of daily religious practice even in Pakistan, a state ethnically cleansed of its religious minorities more than 60 years ago, and now allegedly vulnerable to the Taliban. This older cultural syncretism of the subcontinent, and its everyday defiance of modern political identities, is one of the subjects of William Dalrymple’s new book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, an account of the spiritual life in contemporary South Asia. Dalrymple visits the Pakistani town of Sehwan, which, he writes, “was once a major cult centre of the great Hindu god Lord Shiva” and where “one of the sajjada nasheens, or hereditary tomb guardians, is still a Hindu.” The Sufi dance called dhammal, Dalrymple explains, is said to derive from the damru, or drum, of the Hindu god Shiva. Nearby, the director of a new fundamentalist madrasa confesses to Dalrymple that he is struggling – and failing – to attract the local population away from what he sees as heresy. “The illiterate Muslims here,” he complains, “became infected with Hindu practices. All over Pakistan this is the case, but Sindh is much the worst.”

Early in its millennia-long presence in the subcontinent, Islam lost its Arabian austerity, mingling with local religious traditions to become something that Wahhabis would abhor. Incredibly, much of the subcontinent’s “composite culture” has survived both the divide-and-rule strategies of British colonialism and the rivalry between the nation-states of India and Pakistan, which has produced three major wars since 1947. This enduring pluralism is rooted in the traditional diversity of religious practice across the subcontinent – marking a contrast to the more recent state-guaranteed multiculturalism of Europe and America. Here the pluralism preceded the establishment of the modern state, and it is often at odds with the state’s insistence on singular identities for its citizens.

To some extent this pluralist tradition comes from within Hinduism, which has ingested and modified innumerable folk religions since its origins in the Vedic religion of North India’s Aryan settlers, and absorbed the founders of Buddhism and Jainism – the Buddha is now part of the Hindu pantheon – in addition to diluting the monotheistic core of Islam and Christianity. A general consensus about not eating beef and the centrality of the Bhagavad Gita (among the Vedas, Upanishads and many other scriptures) has defined modern Hinduism since the 19th century. But despite the frantic attempts by Hindu nationalists to “modernise” Hinduism, this religion still lacks a single dominant church, creed or clear founder; it possesses a variety of gods and goddesses, and prescribes several modes of devotion and salvation, “high” as well as “low”.

Religious piety in India continues to grow, even as religion, along with caste and language, has assumed an aggressive and divisive new role in mass electoral politics, carrying the pain of deprivation and injustice. But while the politics of religion becomes more vicious, bringing forth hard-edged identities, and claiming the attention of scholars and writers, a vast majority of the subcontinent’s population quietly go on with their personal and syncretic religious practice.