Any analysis of our country’s politics, culture and history is inseparable from the domain of the religious. It is one of the key ways in which people categorise or identify themselves in Indian society. Religious practice forms the foundation for the worst of marginalisation and exploitation through caste and communal divisions. Yet, it also provides a space of liberation and tolerance from those same shackles. As seen in conversions to Buddhism and the influence of various religious organisations in uplifting care. Religion is an ever present fact of Indian reality.
To understand our contemporary situation we have to ground it in our colonial history. When the East India Company began to administer the territory of Bengal they were looking to understand how to fully exploit the colony. To be able to do this they needed two things. To know the people that are being governed and to know the legal frameworks that were being used to govern them. On the first question they decided that religion would be the basis of understanding India. There would be Muslims and Hindus. When the administrators went out into the countryside they were often baffled by the diversity of practices and relative syncretism that they found in the countryside. For eg. a fisherman in the Sunderbans may be a practising Muslim, yet every day before setting out to fish they might give a prayer to a local deity for protection. This baffled the British. They needed uniformity to be able to construct a colonial state capable of extracting taxes and resources from the population. Yet the population was clearly not uniform. So, they looked for answers in legal and religious texts.
They delved into Mughal court texts on governance and the dharmashastras – the most prominent of which being the Manusmiriti – to gain an understanding of how to rule over the people. Personal laws are formed, in which different communities are subject to different laws based on their religion. These texts favoured the elite ruling class and castes who had education and proximity to British administrators. They were able to influence legal decisions when inevitable contradictions between law and ground realities arose. The fisherman from the Sunderbans and others like him were lumped into homogenous identities that they likely shared little in similarity with. Brahmanism stood out as the most dominant understanding of Hindu practice, thus codifying caste into the colonial state.
In a newly independent India it was no wonder that despite proclaiming that the nation and its constitution would be secular, the state would not try to enforce a separation between the state and religion. As even the ruling liberal elite recognized that it had become such a core part of national identity that it could not remain separate. Especially in the aftermath of a catastrophic partition of 1947 on religious lines. This is why we see the courts intervening in issues of religious law and governance. It is why we see absurdities like the idea of a non-human juristic personality. Where a “god” is brought to court in relation to a legal case. Most famously with “Ram Lala” being proclaimed a legal minor and capable of representation through a friend or guardian in the case of Babri Masjid’s demolition. This clearly bizarre and irrational example led to the pomp and parade that we saw in Ayodhya earlier this year. Indian society has tied itself into a religious knot and the current fascist state and its institutions have no way of getting us out.
In arguably one of their most quoted passages Marx and Engels lay out religion’s role in a capitalist society “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”. It is the illusion that keeps away the harsh realities of brutal economic exploitation. But as we see in the colonial legacy of religion in a semi-feudal country like India, it is also an instrument of exploitation and marginalisation. It is the source of the oppressive caste hierarchy. It is the communal divisions that divide the masses. It is inexorably linked to the way the Indian state rules over the people. In the end it is the instrument by which the upper caste and class hegemony sustains itself. It may have been our past and present but it cannot be allowed to shape our futures. In the next part we will look more closely at the role religion plays in India today looking at contemporary issues and global trends in religion.
