KP Ramanunni - ‘Hindus have to come out and say: not in our religion’s name’
Some weeks ago, this
year’s Sahitya Akademi winner and Malayalam novelist KP Ramanunni said he
intended to atone for the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in a temple
in Kathua, Jammu. This, he said, was his response as a Hindu and a believer. He
said he was following the Gandhian tradition of personal atonement for a public
evil. He said he would do a shayana pradakshinam (circumambulation of the
sanctum sanctorum by rolling on the ground) along with others at the
Sreekrishna Temple in Kadalayi, Kannur. In an appeal, he stated the reasons for
his penance:
“The Hindus have a responsibility to show an example of resistance
from their own platform of faith against the forces of evil. Because, the
fundamental dharma of Hinduism is to pray for the well-being of all the world
and stand with truth,” he wrote. He found support from the Kerala Samskrita
Sanghom, an organisation of Left-leaning Sanskrit lovers, and a section of
intellectuals, including poet and scholar K Satchidanandan.
But when Ramanunni and
two others, including a Hindu monk, declared that they would undertake the
penance on June 7, many Hindutva bodies opposed the decision. On the designated
day, the writer, accompanied by a large posse of police, activists and
believers against and in support of the act, undertook the penance by following
all the rituals and traditions of the temple.
Ramanunni’s act of
atonement has raised a slew of questions. The Hindu right saw it as an anti-BJP
political protest. Some felt it was a vacuous spectacle. A few felt secular
politics ought not to enter temple spaces or engage with rituals, since that
would lead to a validation of Hindu right-wing politics. Even the claim of the
circumambulation being a Gandhian act of atonement has been questioned: Can
such a singular, individualistic act revive the Gandhian political tradition in
a state where the tradition has been marginalised? How different is it from the
instrumentalist use of religion by politicians? There are no easy or simple
answers to these questions.
For the 63-year-old
Kozhikode based writer, this was one way to engage with other Hindus and
believers. It was very much in line with the religious syncretism that
underlines his fiction, from the much-celebrated Sufi Paranja Katha (A Tale
Told By a Sufi, 1995) to his last work, Deivathinte Pustakam (The Book of God,
2017). A recent paper by the Left thinker, B Rajeevan, Sarva Dharma
Samabhavana, which called for reclaiming religion from bigots by combining the
thoughts of Gandhi, Ambedkar, Sree Narayana Guru and Marx and positing its
subaltern self against communalism, inspired him. In this interview, Ramanunni
speaks about his attempt to wrest back religious thought from hate. Excerpts:
What made you
undertake the act of penance at the Kannur temple?
Every religion, I
believe, is getting more and more radicalised and places of worship are
increasingly turning into centres of crime. How does one address this issue? I
don’t think a purely rationalist approach that excludes religious thought can
provide any solution. There are democratic spaces and revolutionary strands
within the religious sphere that could help resist communalism. I see Mahatma Gandhi as
a practitioner of this sort of a politics. He called himself a sanatani Hindu
and revolutionised Hinduism. The fraternal feelings he espoused for Muslims
were part of his revolutionary understanding of religion. It was also a
carefully thought-out moral and political strategy. The idea was to repair the
communal divide the British had created in India. But this strand of political
activism ended with him, there was no continuity. It also allowed Hinduism to
become reactionary and communal. We need to revive the Hinduism of Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Sree Narayana Guru, Gandhiji and so on.
Many Muslim groups
openly declare that what organisations like the Islamic State preach and do is
not Islam. Hindus, too, have to come out and say what is being done today in
the name of Hinduism is not Hinduism.. read more:
