Today is the world-famous Car Festival day. Nearly the whole world is celebrating this event for its exciting and colourful rituals.
The innumerable faiths and religions founded by different thinkers, philosophers and spiritual reformists preach and promote the same essence: All human beings are the same and cannot be governed on the basis of manmade religious practices.
The term ‘Hindu' is a geographic expression. Any community living on the land through which the river Sindhu flows is a Hindu. For that matter, the river in question flows through Pakistan and the Pakistanis are logically to be considered Hindus. The Hindus of today follow a faith actually known as ‘Sanatana Dharma', which not even the purest of practitioners of Hinduism use as they are essentially degenerate Hindus without fundamental clarity of the basic tenets.
The Jagannath Temple at Puri has been projected as the most inclusive among all that promote and popularise typical tenets of human faiths only to indicate clearly that God is one and all humans have to trust only one Lord as the Creator of everything animate and inanimate.
Thus, the temple inspires universal brotherhood and peaceful coexistence of all species, human and beast. The 12th-century temple inspires incredible awe even among the rabidly hardcore rationalists who laugh off deities seated at shrines.
Evidently, Lord Jagannath inspires absolute ‘universal brotherhood’ by carrying symbols of all known faiths and cults. The most significant of all symbols is the ‘formlessness of god’. The deities in question are essentially stumps of Neem wood with only painted eyes, not carved.
The Jagannath shrine is the most happening one as the rituals teach, inspire and promote healthy, peaceful coexistence in simplest possible ways. In no ancient Hindu scripture, there is any mention of idolatry or disapproval of rituals and rites of other faiths.
Most importantly, there is no mention of even ‘beef ban'. There is ample evidence of popular beef eating by even sages.
The founding monarchs of the Jagannath cult did take extreme care to make the pilgrim-devotees feel great while visiting the magnificent temple. They had put in place nearly seventy-five categories of servitors who perform chores as if the deities were disciplined, ethical human individuals.
Later, when monarchy was gone, the State Government took over the management of the huge temple because the monarchs without power of money lost control over the servitors.
Pilgrims growingly felt hurt and dwindled in number as time rolled by. Much later in the twentieth century, ISKCON founder Prabhupada revived the Jagannath cult by popularising the fact that Lord Jagannath is the incarnation of Lord Krishna with the best human face. Prabhupada, an extremely intelligent ‘Sanatana' preacher chose to make popular the Car Festival across the world.
That’s how the festival is the most popular Hindu event today and the non-Hindu now Hindu converts are anytime much more devout and sincere about the core rituals than most born Hindus of India. Ironically, the white-skin ISKCON devotees, who are any time more ‘Hindu’ than the most India-born Hindus, are not allowed into the Jagannath Temple whereas Bangladeshi Muslims can enter and devour the divine food offerings. Local Muslims and Christians too are not disallowed for they look like any other Hindu of India.
The servitors of the temple, particularly the touch-not deity categories, are plain blasphemous. They eat fish and fowl with alcohol and run such businesses including shops, hotels and manufacturing units and more.
Their number has grown way beyond the original seventy-five or currently one hundred nineteen categories. A Hindu Union Minister, put the car festival on the national television live and all hell has broken loose ever since then. Television turned many peripheral servitors big in the eyes of the masses as the core ones never got any footage when the deities made public appearance between the Snana Yatra and the Car Festival, all so horribly hyped now that the TV channels are bee-lining on location to capture moving pictures and make raise enormous ad revenue without sharing a penny with the deities on record.
Fortunately, good administrators have been on the job for quite some time. They routinely ensure that the sincere, devoted servitors do not feel threatened or depressed due to want of a decent enough earning.
The servitor communities have become unruly and greedy so much that they have garnered courage to threaten and arm-twist the government authorities to extract more wages than due to them. Unfortunately, some superstitious State officials have been succumbing to these rogues in the recent years and, believing that pacifying these crooks can prevent untoward events during the Car Festival, some very high officials and politicians have resorted to bribing the ‘one-month servitors' called the ‘Daitas'.
The Daitas who are not even Brahmins and cause pollution to the deities on touching accidentally on regular days have come centre-stage only because they become visible on television. In the event of an accidental touch, the deities are forced to bathe again to become sanctified. They are responsible only for nursing, guarding and cleaning-up jobs, not one more.
So, whoever put up the cautioning note saying, 'Only Orthodox Hindus Allowed' did not study Hinduism well or was a non-Hindu hater, which is antithetical to the basic tenets of true Sanatana faith. Incidentally, nearly all famous Hindu shrines of India welcome anyone who states only that he believes in Hinduism.
Much of true Hindu practices are not known to the so-called researchers and philosophers. After the fourth century BC when the practice of vegetarianism spread throughout India among Buddhists, Jains and Hindus, many Hindus continued to eat beef. In the time of the oldest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BC), cow meat was consumed. According to these texts, the cow is food. Swati Thiagarajan, an eminent columnist wrote once: ‘So I am a beef-eating Hindu Brahmin, married to a South African of no religious affiliation. I am a trained Bharat Natyam dancer and I also love hip-hop, belly-dancing and jazz ballet. I studied Sanskrit and Tamil as second languages along with Hindi which I still struggle to speak with correct grammar and pronunciation, making English my first language. Tamil is my mother tongue. I love yoga, I love chanting Sanskrit Shlokas but, over and above all of that, I am a woman and an Indian. My culture - and I mean mine personally - is one of lovely contradictions.
No one can tell me I am not Hindu. No text can tell me how exactly to be one. No, the Ramayana is a story, not the ‘Word' like the Bible or the Quran. In fact, I prefer the Mahabharata any day. My mother is a pure vegetarian, my father is not. He taught me that the sunrise, a little bird song, a tall tree are all God. He taught me if we do not see ourselves in others then there is no beauty to being human. So when dangerous nitwits try and circumscribe me into narrow boxes with their filtered jingoistic take on Hinduism, it makes me wonder what kind of people they are, and do they even see India the way I do? Let me say that I am not going to romanticise my view of India. I see the poverty, the helplessness, the garbage, the corruption, the violence. I wake up to stories of an old Muslim man killed by a mob on the suspicion he was eating beef. His younger son was also beaten badly.”
Swati only laments because some Indian Hindus have turned fundamentalists, sometimes with State sponsorship when the regime is non-secular in spirit.
It is high time the lawmakers, the judiciary and the executive came together to gather the basic principles of Hinduism, assimilate the spirit and internalise the same so as to be able to turn India into a truly safe, secular state.