Chandan Gowda: Seeking a dharma for these times
During the months that the Covid virus ensured that just about every Indian lost someone they knew, many religious institutions across the country stepped in to help: they organised hospital beds and vaccine camps, distributed food, clothes and masks, and on a rare occasion, offered to look after the educational needs of children orphaned by the deadly virus. A few weeks ago, when Hindu right-wing outfits threatened to disrupt a namaz gathering in Gurgaon, two Gurudwaras offered their premises to the Muslims to pray. Indeed, religious institutions do charitable work during ordinary times too, such as running free or low-cost schools, colleges, hostels, marriage halls and health centres, among others.
During the months that
the Covid virus ensured that just about every Indian lost someone they knew,
many religious institutions across the country stepped in to help: they
organised hospital beds and vaccine camps, distributed food, clothes and masks,
and on a rare occasion, offered to look after the educational needs of children
orphaned by the deadly virus. A few weeks ago, when Hindu right-wing outfits
threatened to disrupt a namaz gathering in Gurgaon, two Gurudwaras
offered their premises to the Muslims to pray. Indeed, religious institutions
do charitable work during ordinary times too, such as running free or low-cost
schools, colleges, hostels, marriage halls and health centres, among others.
While religious
institutions are variously engaged in society in the present, it is unclear,
however, what the contemporary world means for their religious philosophies,
whose origins go way back in time to radically different, non-modern contexts.
In a generic sense, the moral appeal of kindness, compassion, honesty and
non-violence, to name a few values affirmed across various religious
philosophies, continues undiminished through time, but these values are part of
complex metaphysical systems with richly varying senses of the universe, God,
nature, humans, animals and the relations between them.
If religious
metaphysical systems prescribe ways in which humans and communities can evolve
a meaningful relationship with their social milieu, what is to happen to them
when fundamentally new understandings of the social milieu emerge? Religious
thought is, of course, in a dynamic relation with its social circumstances,
with religious leaders making their texts speak to their time, to the changed social
circumstances, allowing at times for the emergence of new sects or breakaway
new religions. However, the current ecological crisis poses a different order
of challenge to theology.
If human civilisation
will not endure forever at current levels of human misbehaviour with the earth,
religious leaders are confronting a world radically different than anything
their predecessors imagined. Really, they owe it to themselves and their
community to explore whether their theological heritage offers meaningful responses
to the new existential predicament. Are there moral ideas and symbols inside
that can reorient current life practices, that can bring a less hurtful
relation with the earth? Can the tradition sustain itself by allowing for moral
innovations in the present?
Barring a rare
exception like Pope Francis, religious leaders do not seem to be theologically
preoccupied with the ecological catastrophe. As they don’t seem to be with the
ever-present threat, since a few decades, of the nuclear annihilation of the
world. In his Theology for a Nuclear Age (Westminster Press, 1985),
which argues for a fundamental recasting of Christian theology in the light of
the nuclear threat, Gordon Kaufman, an American theologian, asked whether it
made any sense to see God as sovereign when the whole world could perish at the
touch of a button. In a comparative spirit, what does the absence of a
sovereign conception of an all-knowing, infallible God in several religious
traditions of India mean for reimagining the place of God in relation to the
climate crisis?
When it became clear
that the UN Climate Change conference last month was mostly a token event,
religious leaders in India didn’t have anything to say by way of a response. As
a new year makes its way, let us hope that this tragic state of affairs will
give way.
The indifference to
the new moral challenges on the part of the custodians of religious faiths in
the country has been unfortunate: not only has ecological recklessness had a
free run, the amoral pursuit of political power has become legitimate and the
violence against religious minorities, tribals and Dalits a casual fact. An
engagement with contemporary evil, with all the moral resources and experiences
that the religious traditions offer, is what we will need to see. That might
generate fresh ethical conversations and offer new ways of humanising
ourselves. That might open up new sources of hope.
https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/opinion/seeking-a-dharma-for-these-times-1062343.html
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THE DELHI DECLARATION OF JANUARY 18, 1948
Another time, another mosque: Gandhi’s Last
Fast: January 13-18, 1948
