Hinduism Today - II

Continues from Part I
Talking of Yoga, the present day yogi, Swami Ramdev has generated his own share of controversy. His success is attributed to the basic principles of marketing management as taught by C. K. Prahlad, the management guru, namely addressing the bottom of the pyramid. It is evident from his huge and ever increasing popularity in India, that some thing is going right. There are numerous people who claim to have been benefited by the yoga techniques (pranayams) taught by Swami Ramdev. During his recent visit to Bhopal for his training camps, he insisted repeatedly that he or his yoga techniques were not hypothecated to any particular community. However with almost the entire BJP government of Madhya Pradesh attending, with one of its ministers in full RSS dress, it was evident that the ailing hearts and bodies of the local congress leaders and Muslims had to wait for another day to learn yoga. This fear of yoga appears to be spread even abroad.

Yoga is actually an omnibus term for an approach to spirituality. According to Hindu scriptures (Reference: Kevalya Darshan) the Sadhak (the one who seeks), when practicing the pranayams (yoga exercises) under supervision of guru, undergoes a transformation of thinking and starts seeking the God. This has been referred to as Bahirang sadhana - the external practise. This Bahirang Sadhana enables a person to destroy his unholy desires (Kevalya Darshan says - Pashutva nashaya). This makes sense, at least to the extent that only a healthy body can bear a healthy mind. The actual seeking of god starts later, as part of the Antarang Sadhana - the internal practice.

A Hindu is defined as a person who regards the land of 'Bharatvarsh', from the 'Indus' to the Seas as his land is a Hindu. Their panthas (sects) may differ, but their nationality is one. This is the only religion, which does not have any defined religious boundary but is defined by geographical boundary. William Dalrymple in his book "The Last Mughal" portrays an India which had internalized the culture of the mughals, "A pluralistic culture where you find Hindus and Muslims sharing the same poetry, enjoying the same mushairas." as per Dalrymple . In "The White Mughals", the same author says

“The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library,
clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India
were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to
Anglo-Indian children - a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made
it into the history books. It suggests that, 200 years before Zadie Smith made
it on to the telly and multiculturalism became a buzzword politically correct
enough to wake Norman Tebbit and the Tory undead from their coffins at party
conferences, the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more
culturally, racially and religiously mixed place than modern Britain can even
dream of being”

It is evident that India had her own way irrespective of the religion being followed by the person, Hinduism was mostly the way of life the people here followed. However there was eminent shift in this attitude after the defeat in Sepoy Mutiny of India in 1857, in which about 85% hindu army rode to Delhi to fight the British under a Mughal Bahadur Shah Zafar. This defeat somehow brought great self-doubts to the Indians. The general Hindu and Muslim Indian were polarized. The Hindus formed the English culture oriented Arya Samaj, while the muslims in a bid to restore the old glory days of the mughals drifted towards Deoband, a faith which follows shariyat and shuns everything else. Also, after 1857 the prestige attached to Mughal culture disappeared. People were no longer interested in the old Mughal politeness, which was regarded as elaborate nonsense. Once the British won in 1857, suddenly everything about them became attractive. Again referring to William Dalrymple

“And you find that the Mughal culture shrinks in prestige and shrinks in its
attractiveness and more and more people want to go into English language
education. The most crucial thing is that the same year Ghalib dies is the year
when Mahatma Gandhi is born. So you have one world going down and there is this
new English educated, English-speaking world rising up. It’s that world which
wins India’s independence. It isn’t the old feudal elite. It is the products of
Anglicized schools and using, in many ways, the Western political methods,
political parties, protest marches rather than, you know, a mass uprising.”

This difference between Hindus and Muslims had grown so wide by the mid nineteenth century that Sir Mohammad Ali Jinnah, educated in missionary school and graduated from Lickons Court, London in law, brought about a theory known as the “Two Nation Theory”, which is essentially a version of the observations of Al Biruni, a Persian scholar. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, an England educated Right wing Hindu leader, also supported the two-nation theory, albeit with the caveat that the Muslim state should be created somewhere in the Middle-East Asia