Hinduism Articles

Hinduism is patriarchal like most other religions. However, it is also feminist, unlike most other religions. Please note: many Muslim women insist that the Quran for its time gives women unprecedented agency and rights, though social practice of Islam, led by conservative male maulvis, tends to be patriarchal. Likewise, Hinduism contains many feminist ideas that are often ignored, often deliberately, especially by male Hindu leaders and activists who are generally uncomfortable with religion, Hinduism in particular. Broadly, there are two types of feminism. Equality feminism believes that men and women are equal. Liberation feminism believes that women, like all humans, have a right to make decisions about their bodies, and their lives. Hinduism aligns more to “liberation” feminism than to “equality” feminism. In fact, equality as an ideology has its roots in Christian mythology that rejected the notion of social hierarchy and saw all men (not women) as equal in the eyes of ...

Sport, as we know it today, comes from ancient Greece where games were part of the funeral rituals to honour dead heroes and leaders. India also has a long history of sport. In Harappa, one finds seals that suggest that the people of Harappa were familiar with bull fighting or bull leaping, a common agricultural sport, similar to Jallikattu in Tamil Nadu. Amongst Harappan toys, we find dice. In the Vedas, we find reference to chariot racing and gambling with dice, popular outdoor and indoor sports respectively. In Ramayana and Mahabharata, the warrior princes are shown as being proficient in archery, mace-warfare, fencing, wrestling, and similar military sports. Thus, we can safely say that sport in India began in both agricultural communities as well as martial communities. In early Buddhist art, we find images of Surya on a chariot flanked by female archers, indicating that women, like men, enjoyed archery and often took part in hunting expeditions. In the Mahabharata, we hear ...

Published on 30th January, 2018, in The Economic Times In the Ramayana, how did Bharat demonstrate to the people that he had rejected his mother’s ideology of capturing the throne through cunning, and how he wanted Ram to be king and spend his life serving as Ram’s regent? He did so by placing Ram’s footwear on the throne. He did it by choosing to live as a hermit outside the city of Ayodhya. As a member of the royal family, he knew demonstration was key to communicate with the public. People see more than they hear. Darshan is far more effective than shruti. Likewise, in Islam, it is important to repeatedly say that ‘God is Great and there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is his last and final prophet.’ And it is important to demonstrate your daily allegiance to God by praying to him in a particular choreographed way facing a particular direction. And it is important to reaffirm this annually by fasting during the month of Ramzan and by participating in the Hajj pilgri...

Published on 16th December, 2017, on www.dailyo.in This question is rooted in Abrahamic myth that frowns upon God being given any form, and the Biblical condemnation of idolatry as indicative of a false religion. In the 19th century, as the British became masters of India, Hindus were pressurised to defend the practice of idol worship. And so many Hindu reformers went to the extent of saying that “true” Hinduism, in its pristine form (by which they meant Vedas), had no idols. That idol worship is a later-day corruption. However, many Hindu traditionalists rejected this idea. The tension between giving God form and stripping God of any form is an ancient one. Before the British, it was the Muslim rulers of India who frowned upon idol worship. Their raid on temples, which was mainly for political reasons and economic loot (temples were repositories of great wealth), was justified by stating it was an exercise against infidel idolatry. This influence of Islam led many Hindus to ...

Don’t Blame The God Particle | Published on 21st December, 2017, in Outlook | Devdutt Pattanaik It is an old trick of a new religion. Discredit old religions. That is what followers of atheism and rationality (terms often used synonymously) do, although they would be furious at the suggestion that they follow a religion. And so you often hear them say, ‘God, hence religion, is the cause of most wars in the world. Rem­ove God and you will have peace.’ When you point out that the World Wars of the 20th century were not based on religion, they will promp­tly tell you to shut up. God as an idea is a relatively recent one in human history. Especially as a unitary idea. It became popular around the Mediterranean when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity 1,700 years ago, and Islam rose in Arabia 1,400 years ago. Before that, the idea of one God was restricted to the tribes of Israel, who did not exert much influence in global affairs. Of course, one can argue that t...

Listening to the Buddha’s hands | Published on 31st December, 2017, in Mid-day | Devdutt Pattanaik In the early days of Buddhism, Buddha was represented by a symbol: a footprint or a wheel or a pot or a tree. Later, less than 2,000 years ago, we see the earliest images of the Buddha in the Gandhara region (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan) as a Greek god. Simultaneously, Buddha images started appearing in the Gangetic plains around Mathura, where red stone was used. Unlike the Gandharan Buddha, where the shoulders were covered with cloth, in Mathura, the upper garment was draped only over the left shoulder, suggesting the influence of the Brahmin thread that hung over the left shoulder. In Mathura, Buddha was made to sit on a lotus, with a serpent behind him. Since then, Buddha images have been crafted around the world, from Central Asia to China, to South East Asia. While, to the untrained eye, all Buddha images look similar, with languid eyes and long ears, a sensitive eye w...