Agnostic Khushwant Read online

  The Maulana also quoted the Quran in support of all creation being attributed to God. His argument was much the same as that of the French Enlightenment writer-historian François-Marie Arouet (popularly known as Voltaire): ‘We can scarcely believe that there can be a watch without a watch maker.’ What neither Voltaire nor the Maulana – nor for that matter anyone else who believes that every effect must have a cause – has been able to substantiate is that if God is the cause and the world the effect, who created God in the first place? It is the primary cause, the causa causans, about which we know nothing.

  Instead of entering into a pointless debate on whether or not God exists, it is more important to bear in mind that belief in the existence of God has little bearing on making a person a good or a bad citizen. One can be a saintly person without believing in God and a detestable villain believing in Him. In my personalized religion, there is no God.

  Founders of Religions

  In every religion, the founder is more revered than God. This can be ascribed to the simple reason that we know more about the founders of our faiths – be they described as prophets, messiahs, messengers, avtaars or gurus – than we know about God. They were human beings gifted with superhuman powers, which enabled them to sway the masses. With the passage of years, so many legends grew around them that they ceased to be human and became incarnations of God, His progeny, His specially chosen messengers with direct access to Him.

  The classic instance of giving the messenger a higher status than God Himself is found in present-day Islam. You may make jokes about Allah, but woe betide anyone who makes the slightest insinuation against His messenger, the Prophet Mohammed: Ba Khudaa diwaanaa Basho, ba Mohammed hoshiaar! (Say what you like about God, but against Mohammed, beware!) This attitude explains the fate of Salman Rushdie for having written The Satanic Verses; the rumpus created against the eminent US economist and one-time ambassador to India, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, when it became known that he had given his pet cat one of the names by which Prophet Mohammed was known, Ahmed; and the burning down of the offices of The Deccan Herald in Bangalore because it had published a short story entitled ‘Mohammed the Idiot’. The story had nothing whatsoever to do with the Prophet but was about a demented man bearing the same name.

  The truth of the matter is that we have hardly any reliable historical evidence on what the founders of different religions were really like. By deifying them we have done them grave injustice. We have made them incomparably good and beyond human striving. In my personalized religion, I would give prophets, avtaars and the like their due respect as important historical personages who did good to humanity. But nothing more.

  Scriptures

  All scriptures are held in awe either as words of God or divinely inspired utterances. I have read them in translation many times and am astonished by the emotional fervour they arouse. The most fervent are those who never bother about the meanings of the words they chant or recite by rote. I am sure that if they bothered to read them after being translated into a language they understood, a good bit of their enthusiasm would get diluted. Without exception, their contents are unscientific – one can’t blame their authors as, in their times, science was hardly advanced. In addition to being contrary to science, they are repetitive and tediously boring. Those which enshrine codes of conduct and ethics undoubtedly serve a useful purpose in providing stability to society. Some passages in most of them are also of a high literary quality. I often quote the Bible, the Quran, the Upanishads, the Gita and the Granth Sahib to buttress my arguments. But as works of literature, they do not compare with the great classics of Kalidas, Hafiz (Khwajeh Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz-e-Shirazi), Saadi Shirazi, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Mirza Ghalib, Rabindranath Tagore, Mohammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz or even some lesser poets.

  Mine is a personal reaction not shared by anyone else I have met. Most people are moved by their scriptures. They recite or chant them, swaying their heads in ecstasy as they do so, and claim to get peace of mind as a result. So who am I to tell them that their responses are conditioned by constant indoctrination and are a form of self-hypnosis? However, surely they cannot fault me when I maintain that the scriptures, for whatever they are worth, should be read and understood and not worshipped. This is what Guru Nanak had to say about people who recite prayers without understanding them:

  Sudh na budh na akal sar

  Akkhar ka bheyo na lahant

  Nanak say nar asl khar

  je bin gun garabh karant

  (They have no comprehension, no brains in their heads

  Who do not bother with the meaning of words

  O Nanak! Such are real donkeys

  Who vaunt their pride without having done any good.)

  It is ironic that it should be the followers of Nanak, who proclaimed God to be nirankar (formless) and forbade the worship of idols, who treat the compilation of his and their Gurus’ writing as an idol worthy of worship. They drape the Granth Sahib in silk and brocade, rouse it in the mornings and put it to rest in the evenings, take it out in processions on holy days, and have it read by professional granthis (priests who read the Granth Sahib) all through the night while they themselves slumber. There are fixed rates for granthis: novices can be hired on cheaper terms than the adept whose pronunciation is clearer.

  Sikhs are not the only ones who indulge in such gross travesty of scriptural sanctity. Hindus have their own non-stop recitations; the Muslims go one step better by distributing portions of the Quran to the congregations, which all of them read at the same time so that the entire Quran is finished in less than an hour.

  Places of Worship

  I believe that the only legitimate place of worship is the home. However, there are religions like Islam, which enjoin congregational namaaz in a public mosque as a religious obligation. Christians also exhort attendance in churches on Sundays and at masses. In Hindu and Sikh temples, keertans and kathaas (sermons) are conducted regularly; without congregations to listen to them, they would lose much of their impact.

  In a country like India, which has few diversions that the poor can afford such as clubs, pubs and cinema houses, places of worship provide free, harmless entertainment in the company of like-minded people. In recent years, however, places of worship have been turned into arenas of contention and misused to propagate ideas other than those strictly religious. Some years back the most sacred site in Islam, the Kaaba, in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, was the scene of a pitched battle. In India there have been prolonged litigations over the control of mosques and temples and waqf (an endowment as per Islamic law) funds and trusts. In the early 1980s, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, notably the Akal Takht, was under the control of young gun-toting men spouting hate rather than spreading the message of love that their Gurus preached. In early June 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi authorized the Indian Army to evict them, thereby deeply hurting the Sikh psyche. (This was known as Operation Bluestar.) And who can forget the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya (in Uttar Pradesh) on 6 December 1992 by Hindu fanatics, leading to large-scale riots across the country?

  I am convinced that the time has come for the government to forbid the building of any more places of worship – we have more than enough of them already – and to refuse permission to use public places for religious gatherings. And whenever a place of worship becomes a bone of contention or is misused for non-religious purposes by undesirable elements, its control and management must be taken over by the government. Places of worship have created vested interests for priests, pandas (Hindu priests well versed in genealogy), granthis, imams (those who lead the prayers in a mosque) and raagis whose livelihood depends on exploiting them. This must be put an end to. My sentiments regarding places of worship are summed up in a beautiful little couplet by Bulleh Shah, a Punjabi Sufi poet:

  Masjid ddhaa dey, Mandar ddhaa dey

  Ddhaa dey jo kuchh ddhenda.

  Ik kise
y da dil na ddhavein

  Rabb dilaan vicch rehndaa

  (Break down the mosque, break down the temple

  Break down whatever there is besides;

  But never break a human heart

  That is where God Himself resides.)

  Prayer and Meditation

  It can scarcely be disputed that we Indians, be we Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or Parsis, spend more time in performing religious rituals than any other people in the world. The Hindi adage saat vaar aur aath tyohaar – there are only seven days in a week but there are eight religious festivals – is by no means an overstatement. Count the number of religious holidays, national and sectional, then add up the number of hours people spend every day in saying their prayers and visiting temples, mosques, churches and gurudwaras, the days spent in pilgrimage to holy places, the hours taken up by satsangs (religious gatherings), pravachans (religious discourses), keertans, bhajans, jagratas (all-night singing of devotional songs), and so on. It will come to a staggering total. Then ask yourself whether a poor developing country like ours can afford to lose so many millions of man hours in pursuits that produce no material benefits? Also ask yourself whether strict adherence to a routine of prayer, ritual or telling the beads of a rosary makes a person into a better human being? Is it not true that even dacoits pray for success of their nefarious missions before they embark on them? And aren’t the worst tax evaders and black marketeers often devoutly religious?

  On rare occasions when I visited a gurudwara or a temple, I made it a point to watch people making obeisance before the Granth Sahib or their favourite God. Those who took the longest time to rub their noses on the ground were usually those who more than others craved forgiveness for having lied, stolen, fornicated and made illicit money. There is an amusing doggerel about the Potthohaaree (or Pothwari) trading community from Rawalpindi and Campbellpur districts (now in Pakistan), known for its business acumen as well as its religiosity:

  Koor vee aseen mareney aan,

  Ghat vee aseen toleyney aan,

  Par sacchey patshaah

  Aseen naam vee teyra lainey aan.

  (Lies we often tell,

  Short we do often measure,

  But true Lord,

  Your name we also take.)

  I concede that it is entirely up to any individual how he or she decides to spend his or her time. If they get peace of mind through prayer and performance of ritual, they have every right to pray as long as they want to and wave candelabras of incense and tinkle bells to their hearts’ content. But what they, or anyone else, have no right to do is to impose their religiosity on other people. We as a people do this without consideration for the feelings and comforts of our fellow citizens. An instance of this total lack of concern for others is the use of loudspeakers calling for prayers (azaan from mosques) or blasting forth keertans, bhajans and pravachans. The craziest examples are all-night jaagraans that disturb the sleep of entire localities. Children are unable to concentrate on their studies, the sick unable to get rest, and if there has been a death in some household, the family members are unable to mourn in silence.

  Another instance of imposing one’s religious practices on others is the custom of taking out processions through crowded streets which, it cannot be denied, upsets civic life. Christians and Muslims rarely take out processions. Catholics occasionally take idols of the Madonna or Saints around the streets and Shia Muslims take out tazias during Moharram. But Hindus and Sikhs indulge in them as a sacred birthright. Hindu Gods and Goddesses must be periodically taken out for airing; Goddesses Kali and Durga must be taken round the streets before they are immersed in rivers; so must Ganapaty, accompanied by loud shouts of ‘Ganapaty Bapa Maurya’. The mammoth procession taken out annually at Jagannath Puri brings all other activity in the city to a fullstop. Sikhs must take out processions on the birthdays and martyrdom anniversaries of their Gurus, no matter what Hindus or Muslims feel about them. It should be remembered that the most common cause of Hindu–Muslim riots are Hindu processions passing by mosques when Muslims are at prayer.

  The government must take the lead in curbing unnecessary exhibitions of religious fervour. It is committed through the Constitution to inculcate a scientific outlook on life. Instead of doing that, it allows official media like All India Radio and Doordarshan to propagate religions through the broadcast of celebrations and hymn singing. Religious broadcasts take up most of the time of some TV channels.

  The worst is part that the juggernaut of religion rolls on, getting full media coverage. Preaching religion over official media is against the spirit of secularism; protests against it are ignored like the yapping of agnostic dogs. A long time back I saw an hour-long programme on Doordarshan on the birthday of a Nirankari guru. I have absolutely nothing against Nirankaris;* on the contrary, I have defended their right to propagate their beliefs despite hukumnamas (decrees) issued from the Akal Takht. What I found very hard to stomach were the paeans of praise showered on their young guru. There were a few sad looking foreign young ladies constipated with virtue who read their pieces; they were followed by a succession of second-rate poets reading qaseedas (paeans) as they would sehras at a wedding. No doubt they were paid according to their skill at tukbandi (rhyming). Far from being impressed, I found the entire exercise vastly amusing and laughable. If religion is to have any meaning in present-day life, it has to be treated more seriously than chanting hallelujahs to godmen or godwomen.

  All this also reminds me of my visits to Canada or the States. Whenever there, I always looked forward to Sunday mornings when many TV channels were taken over by evangelists preaching love, morality and singing praises of the Almighty. I relished those programmes for a very perverse reason: I found them hilariously comic and laughed more than I would while watching a slapstick comedy. I saw very soulful-looking men and pretty damsels dressed in virginal white turning their eyes skywards to God (who is believed to live above the clouds) and singing hosannas with full-throated fervour. The greatest ‘comedians’ of those god-plays used to be Reverends Jimmy Lee Swaggart and Jim Bakker. Unfortunately, both men who preached sexual morality and martial fidelity were caught pants down consorting with prostitutes.

  A modern fad, which has gained widespread acceptance amongst the educated and semi-educated who wish to appear secular, is the practice of meditation. They proclaim with an air of smug superiority: ‘Main mandir-vandir nahin jaata, bas meditate karta hoon.’ (I don’t go to temples or other such places, I only meditate.) The exercise involves sitting in the lotus pose (padmasana), regulating one’s breathing and emptying the mind to prevent it from ‘jumping about like a monkey’ from one (thought) branch to another. This intense concentration apparently awakens the kundalini (the serpent coiled at the base of the spine), which then travels upwards through chakras (circles) till it reaches its destination in the cranium. Then the kundalini is fully jaagrit (roused) and the person is assumed to have reached his or her goal.

  What does meditation achieve? The usual answer is ‘peace of mind’. If you further ask ‘and what does peace of mind achieve?’ you will get no answer because there is none. Peace of mind is a sterile concept, which produces nothing. The exercise may be justified as therapy for those with disturbed minds or those suffering from hypertension, but there is no evidence to prove that it enhances creativity. On the contrary, it can be established by statistical data that all the great works of art, literature, science and music were works of highly agitated minds, at times on the verge of collapse. Allama Iqbal’s short prayer is pertinent:

  Khuda tujhey kisee toofan say aashna kar dey

  Key terey beher kee maujon mein iztiraab naheen

  (May God bring a storm in your life,

  There is no agitation in the waves of your life’s ocean.)

  A word that constantly appears in the Allama’s writings is talaatum, restlessness of the mind, as the sine qua non of creativity.

  I would like to sum up all I have said about prayer, ri
tual and meditation in a slogan I have coined as a motto for modern India:

  Work is worship,

  but worship is not work.

  My new religion for India would be primarily based on the work ethic. We have an apt motto, which needs to be put into effect: aaraam haraam hai (rest is forbidden). However, leisure time to recoup energy to resume work, which yields material benefits, ought to be provided. We must not waste time because time is precious. There is a Hadith (sayings of Prophet Mohammed) in which he is said to have exhorted (which loosely translated means): Do not waste time; time is God. We must reject the concepts of sanyas (retirement) and vanaprastha (taking to the woods; i.e., renouncing everything) and continue to labour till we are physically able to do so. Leading idle lives on inherited or unearned incomes is as bad as being a beggar. Laws must be passed to limit the right to leave property to descendants and begging must be outlawed. Guru Nanak emphasized the work ethic in three commandments:

  Kirt karo,

  naam japo,

  vand chako

  (work,

  worship

  and give in charity)

  Note the order of priorities. In another hymn he wrote:

  Khat ghaal

  kicch hatthon dey,

  Nanak raah pacchaney sey

  (He who earns,

  and gives some of it away,

  O Nanak, he has found the right way.)

  He or she who does not contribute materially to society has no right to claim any benefits from it.