‘India’s non-religions’: When faith meant believing in flourishing in this world, not the afterlife

I begin by taking the reader several millennia back to a world and time where what we now call religion and culture were not distinct from each other. Indeed, one might even say that there was no religion but only cults and cultures. Nor was there a clear division between the divine and the natural. The idea of gods and goddesses was around, but they were not objects of belief or faith. They were simply taken for granted. Their presence in the world was self-evident. People were oriented wholly towards the world, to be at home in it, rather than turned away from it.

Take, for example, India of the early Vedic period. The Rigvedic hymns centred around sacrificial rituals (yajnas) were performed for “wealth, rain, cattle, superiority within clan or tribe, good health, living for the proverbial 100 years, and then finding one’s way to heaven” – all constituents of a this-worldly conception of human flourishing. The sacrifice involved a transactional, reciprocal relationship between two classes of elites, the Rajanyas and rich householders and the Brahmins (who alone had the know-how and thereby the authority to perform the yajna). Within the early Vedic worldview, there was no duplication of the world – there was no world other than this one. Nor was there a conception of an afterlife. Each human being was born once and died once. There was no cycle of birth and death, no reincarnation.

To attain all these this-worldly goods, ritual sacrifice needed to be performed and gods propitiated so that they intervene in this world to facilitate self-realisation, conceived entirely in this-worldly terms. These cults and gods evolved over thousands of years and were viewed as eternal. In virtually all cultures of early antiquity, each god performed a function based on his or her cosmic competence. Thus, there were gods of love, war, knowledge, craftsmanship. Likewise, each god embodied an entity of potentially cosmic significance. Hence, gods of fire, rain, earth, time, sun, moon, sea or primal gods who create, destroy, preserve, and so on. The god of rain in one culture could then also acquire the name of the god of rain from another culture. In this way, differences continued to be viewed as irreducible and yet translatable.

One might even call this feature of translatability a theology of recognition. A second strategy widely practised in the ancient world involved the bringing together of two or three gods leading to hyphenated cosmic deities such as Amun-Re in Egypt or, later, Hari-Hara in India. The two gods do not merge. They retain their individuality, but each becomes a crucial aspect of the other. Thus, Hari becomes the cosmic aspect of Hara, and Hara the local cultic aspect of Hari. Each complements the other without subsumption or domination. Ardhanarishvara too exemplifies this. Finally, a strategy even more common in all ancient cultures involved ontological subordination of one god to another. Thus one god becomes the supreme deity of which all other gods are manifestations, as Rama and Krishna become avatars of Vishnu. Or we might have a pantheon of equal gods with very diverse primal functions, and others are but his manifestations or relatives. Each of these strategies permitted free movement across different cultures and religions.

Freedom of conversion is hardly the appropriate term here. Conversion implies one’s permanent departure from the worship of one god to the exclusive worship of another. But this goes against the very point of these strategies of translation, hyphenation and hierarchical assimilation. For instance, if different names refer to the same god or the same god has different cultural backgrounds, then why create a fuss about leaving one and embracing another? Indeed, why not embrace both? Here, a free movement back and forth and indeed the simultaneous commitment to all can exist. This is true both when unity is explicitly claimed (inclusive monotheism) or when it is merely implied as in polytheism. I shall call this phenomenon sanatan sanskriti, centred around this-worldly goods, pleasure and regulatory laws (artha, kaama, and dharma). Strictly speaking, the term religion is inappropriate here. It is best to think of it as non-religion.

This sanatan sanskriti, with close affinity to what Jan Assmann calls primary religion, and which continues to survive in India, is to be distinguished from other forms of faith and worship that emerged from disaffection with early Vedic culture, in the face of problems emanating from both natural and social causes – being at the mercy of wild natural forces, confronting disease, death, separation, violence, and social oppression. Humans developed a yearning to move beyond, to transcend this world of gods and goddesses and the many troubling situations from which they are unable to deliver them.

With a newly developed capacity for transcendence, they learnt to step back and look beyond life as they found it, to holistically examine their world and their own existence within it, to dispassionately see its limitations and aspire to overcome them. To bridge the gap between what they currently were and what, at their best, they could be, they strove for a vision, both personal and collective, in terms of which they could chart a journey of self-development and self-fulfilment. If the prospect of death consumed them, they sought an answer to the question “How can we be saved in the face of death?” in salvation.

One important condition of identifying this vision was to be guided, most likely by a teacher with the requisite brilliance, insight and wisdom, one who was capable of deep influence in shaping one’s character, practice, and perspective on life and the world. People then began to follow the teachings, usually though not always, of a single, great teacher: a guru. They became followers of a path towards self-realisation – of a way (marga) – and soon all those who followed the same path imagined by their common teacher develop a loose sense of community, important for self-cultivation, a practice that demands mutual learning, influence and reinforcement. Since they are primarily an ethic of self-realisation, I treat margas too as non-religion.

Margas grew out of sanatan sanskriti and were critical of them – as Upanishadic teachings were of the early Vedic worldview – but they do not oppose them tooth and nail. The teachings of Buddha also began by negating the sanatan sanskriti or primary religion of the Vedas, but eventually, in the lives of ordinary people, it made peace with them.

Excerpted with permission from Reimagining Indian Secularism, Rajeev Bhargava, Seagull Books.