I rarely go to a cinema hall to see a film, but made an exception for PK. On the last day of 2014, my wife and I went to a nearby PVR and saw the new Aamir Khan release, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The film is an unabashed satire on the ritualism, superstitions and prejudices that proliferate under the awning of religion. It also makes a hard hitting attack on religious charlatans, the so-called mullahs, sadhvis, sants, gurus and mahants who make a living feeding off the insecurities and fear of ordinary people. The film does not attack religion per se. In fact, it pays deep respect to religion in a spiritual sense where the journey is a personal and direct one between the devotee and the Almighty. Its attack is focused on the false intermediaries who obtain much ill-begotten wealth in their ungodly misuse of religion.
As I left the hall, I asked myself why this film made the cadres of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad so angry. For days they went on a vandalising streak, breaking public and private property and burning posters of the film. At one level, I understood the real reason for their hysterical anger. Religion is a powerful instrument of control. In its name, people have shed their own blood and that of others. In its name, people have perpetuated the greatest cruelties and acts of discrimination. In its name, riots have taken place and even genocides.
The Bajrang Dal and the VHP, along with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its other affiliates, believe in using religion to whip up hatred in order to ignite religious divides between people. Their aim is to further religious polarisation for short-term electoral dividends. They arrogate to themselves the pedestal to speak for all Hindus, but not for altruistic reasons. Their goal is to use Hinduism to severe bridges of brotherhood, love and community with those of other faiths. In other words, for them Hinduism is an instrument of control. PK questions the raison d’etre of those who seek to control religion; it questions the basis of self-professed intermediaries; it questions the very need of such middlemen who use religion for their self-interest. It is but natural, therefore, that the Bajrang Dal and VHP are very annoyed by PK’s message.
But the real problem is also that the protesters are exceptionally ignorant about the phenomenal grandeur of thought of Hinduism. At the philosophical level, Hindu metaphysics sees the Almighty as the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, indivisible Brahman, which is beyond physical form, and indeed, beyond definition because any definition would circumscribe the absolutism of this attribute-less entity (neti, neti, not this, not this). The powerful Nirguna and Advaita traditions of Hindu philosophy have espoused this unqualified non-duality of godhood for centuries. If the Almighty itself is beyond form and definition, who are these people who claim to speak on its behalf for their own selfish reasons?
At another level, Hinduism has always sustained within itself a tradition of self-critique, of corrosive honesty and candour which has allowed it to reinvent itself time and again. The most evocative and influential votary of this tradition was Shankaracharya himself, who in the 8th century was responsible for the revival of Hinduism after it had gone into decline as a result of a surfeit of ritual and superstition and the (consequent) appeal of Buddhism. In the Bhaja Govindam, Shankaracharya has this telling shloka: Jatuli mundi, lunchchit keshah, kashayambar bahu krit veshah, pashyanappi na pashyati mudho, hayudar nimitam bahu krit vesha: “Matted locks, shaven head or hair set loose, saffron robes are very deceptive, frauds they are unable to see, fools, they become monks to make a living”. In the Nirvana Shatakam, Shankaracharya again hits out at blind ritualism:
Na punyam, na paapam, na saukhyam na dukhkham, na mantro na teertham, na vedo na yagna: “No virtues, no sin, no happiness no sorrow, no mantra, no pilgrimage, no Vedas no sacrifice”. The important point is that Hinduism allows for this critique. Unlike the Semitic religions, Hinduism has no one God, no one text, no one Church and no one Pope. It allows its followers the freedom to dissent while being within the larger tradition of sanatan dharma. That is why Hinduism can include even the Carvaka school which argues that God need not exist, and also accommodate the unorthodox Tantric tradition.
But even in Islam the Sufi tradition has done a good job of lampooning the superstitions and rituals of the mullahs. Ghalib, who internalised Sufi mysticism best, writes famously: Kahan maikhane ka darwaza Ghalib, aur kahan vaiyaz, Bas itna jaante thhe kal woh jaata tha jab hum nikle: “The tavern door and the preacher are truly poles apart; All I know is I saw him enter as I left to depart!” What is satire at one plane became the reiteration of a transcendent vision of the absolute at another, and no one could state it so beautifully than Ghalib: Hum muvahid hain, humara kesh hai tark-e-rasoom; millatein jab mit gayeen, azza-e-iman ho gayeen: “God is one, that is our faith; all rituals we abjure; it is only when the symbols vanish that faith is pure”. This innate suspicion of the orthodox religious establishment was the leitmotif of the powerful Bhakti movement too. Guru Nanak, Kabir, Tuka Ram, Meera — and many more — shunned the hypocrisy of organised religion and advocated the ecstasy of a direct communion with the Almighty.
The vandalising crew of the Bajrang Dal and the VHP, the foot soldiers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the RSS venting their ire on PK, thus represent the half-literate, lumpen evangelism of those who do not know their own religion and are bent on imposing their limited thinking on the intrinsic grandeur of Hinduism. The worry is that they are actually acting upon a cynically crafted plan to foment religious hatred to divide the country for the sake of votes. The entire nation must be vigilant against their designs.
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma is a Rajya Sabha member
