Tempest in a teapot: A
rebuttal to Reza Aslan’s critics from someone who’s lived with
Aghoris
Vikram Zutshi
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If the remaining episodes of Aslan’s
mini-series ‘Believer’ are as provocative as the first one, they
should not be missed.
Several years ago, wandering through Varanasi
late at night, I came across a group of ash-smeared sadhus sitting
around a bonfire near the banks of the River Ganga which runs
through the ancient city. I had gone there after spending several
months in a Buddhist monastery in Pokhara, Nepal.
One of the sadhus beckoned me to join them,
patting the spot beside him. They were passing around a chillum, a
clay pipe, packed with a potent mixture of charas (hand rubbed
hashish) and tobacco. They sang a folk tune, accompanied by
percussive tapping on a tabla. The smoking, singing and drumming
under the stars made for a heady brew. I pulled out a bottle of
whiskey from my backpack and offered it to my companions. Each took
a swig and passed it on – it was out after one round of the circle.
Soon I was singing and jumping animatedly around the fire along
with a couple of clapping sadhus.
Over the next few weeks I attended a number of
similar gatherings at locations around Varanasi. It was a radical
and refreshing departure from the austere and sedate environs of
the Buddhist monastery and most of the ashrams I had stayed at over
the course of my extended pilgrimage.
One evening, a group of tourists from Delhi
passing by, stopped and walked toward us. On seeing the intoxicated
revelry, one of them, in a fit of moral outrage, ordered us to put
our chillums away or he would call the police. The threat did not
go down well with the holy men. Tolaram, a tall sadhu clad in black
with red-rimmed eyes and a mop of wild dreadlocks, rose up and let
loose a stream of invectives in Hindi which effectively meant this:
Get lost or I’ll stuff a chillum up a very painful place. The other
sadhus scooped handfuls of red-hot coal and flung them at the
tourists. The bunch scurried away – never to be seen again. All of
us laughed uproariously at the spectacle.
My friends were members of Aghor, a sect of
renegades who proudly reject the trappings of social propriety,
sectarian labels and the world of appearances. Their secretive
lifestyle, which includes ritual consecration and consumption of
human flesh, and even sexual rites amidst burning pyres, is
designed to shock the perceptual framework so as to break the
barriers between what is considered sacred and profane, the holy
and unholy – all rigid dichotomies that dominate the bourgeois
middle class.
In Tolaram’s view, most Hindus worshipped
Shiva and Kali as a cultivated social requirement, but what the
deities actually demand from their followers is not acceptable to
the vast majority. Aghors are the only ones willing to please Kali,
by “ripping the veil off reality and jumping straight into the
abyss”, with no thought to self-preservation or the laws that
govern polite society.
The Aghors I fell in with emphatically
rejected Vedic notions of ritual purity, scriptural dogma and
priestly mediation between the world of the mundane, the so-called
impure and the divine. They seek to cultivate a state of
consciousness, known as Aghor, in which one transmutes and
ultimately transcends base sensations like fear, hatred, disgust or
discrimination. On attaining this state one does not view the world
in dualistic terms of good and evil, sacred and profane, pure and
impure – instead relating to all of manifested reality as
attributes of the Great Mother, MA.
Given all this, I was not surprised at the
outrage from sections of the Hindu-American community (and their
self-appointed representatives) following the debut of Believer, a
CNN mini-series on the fringe and fascinating religious sects
around the world. The show’s inaugural episode was filmed in
Varanasi, and half of it is devoted to Iranian-American religious
scholar Reza Aslan being immersed with a group of Aghors engaging
in various shocking acts, including eating cooked human brains and
ingesting faeces.
It is clear quite quickly that the show’s
producers are out to find sensational, or at the very least
dramatic, footage and the sadhus are only too happy to oblige,
prone as they are to playing to the gallery. One of them can be
heard yelling at Aslan to “shut the f**k up or he would cut his
head off”. During my stay with Aghors, I had heard them say much
worse things to middle class Indian and western tourists, often in
jest and feigned anger, embellished with flailing arms and a fiery
gaze for greater effect.
Since the first snatches of the episode came
out, Aslan has been accused of everything from Hinduphobia and
bigotry to being an agent of “Abrahamic crusaders” attempting to
undermine Hinduism. His critics feel that by depicting the Aghors,
Aslan has somehow emasculated Hinduism.
The Hindus most offended by the CNN segment
are exemplars of the class who like to portray a homogenous,
sanitised and sparkly version of their faith. They either forget or
paper over the fact that the Aghors, Naths and other heterodox
Tantric sects pay scant regard to the institutionalised hierarchies
and lifestyles propagated by bourgeois Hindus, the ones most
offended by unconventional approaches to the divine.
When I asked Tolaram about his opinion on
Hindu canonical texts, he related the story of a priest from the
hallowed Kashi Vishwanath temple who had once gifted him a copy of
the Bhagwad Gita. Not knowing Sanskrit, and not being remotely
interested, he used the dry pages to kindle his bonfire. When I
remarked that he may have been incarcerated as a blasphemer for his
actions in some Islamic states (and possibly in the prevailing
climate in India), he turned his eyes skywards saying,
“1-2-3-All-India-Free” and guffawed loudly, presumably at the rank
idiocy of the world of men.
As Professor Debashish Banerji, a scholar of
Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, observes,
“With the expansion of the middle class in India and its mass
mobilization, along with the upper classes by the right-wing ruling
party, modern Hinduism has developed into an identity construct, a
national orthodoxy of social and religious norms. This threatens to
erase the unauthorized culture of spiritual seeking, with
innumerable variant and hybrid methods, customs, practices and
social attitudes, that forms the millennia old history of religion
in India.”
Aslan is no stranger to controversy. His last
book, the bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus, miffed a
whole bunch of conservative Christians who took to attacking him on
Fox News.
The NRI Hindus I spoke to were especially
offended by Aslan’s stated revulsion at the thought of taking a
ritual dip in the Ganga. “This is one of the most polluted water
bodies in the world,” he said. “There are millions of litres of
untreated human waste. Yesterday I saw a guy take a shit directly
into the water. It’s basically a giant toilet.” This may sound
harsh and politically incorrect, but it is also the unvarnished and
sad truth. Similar thoughts had crossed my mind during my maiden
visit to Varanasi.
Admittedly, the inaugural episode of Believer
is a mediocre example of documentary filmmaking and Aslan makes
serious blunders, like calling Varanasi the “City of the Dead” (It
is in fact the “City of Light”). Also, a television promo screaming
“Cannibalism” was a cringe-worthy editorial decision by
CNN.
Still, to this writer, reactions to the show
were far more illuminating than the show itself. The rumpus
revealed a lot about the diaspora and nationalist insecurities.
Aslan’s observations on the caste system are fairly accurate and
clearly too close to the bone for some people. There’s no denying
that tasks like cremating the dead and manual scavenging are
reserved for members of the Dalit community, those at the very
lowest rung of the entrenched hierarchy, and have been so for
millennia.
Indeed, caste is a social construct, but one
which cannot be separated from religious or political beliefs of a
billion-plus Hindus. In Aslan’s own words, “I define religion as an
identity, not a set of beliefs and practices. That’s probably
postulate number one for me. People tend to think that, ‘Oh
religion is just something you believe in, right?’ Well, not for
most people, actually. The vast majority of people who raise their
hand and say, ‘I’m Jewish,’ ‘I’m Christian,’ or ‘I’m Muslim’ are
making identity statements much more so than belief statements.” He
added, “So, if religion is a matter of identity, then it
encompasses every aspect of your life. It can’t be divorced from
your politics or your social views or your economic views. It’s all
wrapped up together as one.”
Reform and resistance against the rigidities
of caste and gender are as old as Hinduism itself. Basava
(1106–1167), a progenitor of the Lingayat or Virashaiva sect, was a
prominent member of the Bhakti movement along with iconic social
and spiritual reformers like Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu. The
Bhakti Movement called for a profound shift in the socio-cultural
ethos of Karnataka with its vociferous opposition to the caste
system, rejection of Brahminical supremacy, abhorrence to ritual
sacrifice, and unmediated access to the divine through devotional
worship to the One God Shiva. Social reform has continued into the
19th and 20th centuries with giants like Jyotirao Phule and Bhimrao
Ambedkar leading the way.
Aslan seems to acknowledge this: “In almost
every interview I did about the show I talked at length about the
issue underlying the episode, including the fluidity of the caste
system, the problems inherent amongst the untouchable class, and
how devout Hindus of all stripes are working tirelessly to overcome
both.”
Discussions on politically explosive issues,
be it caste or nationalism, can turn violent quickly. In late
February, a seminar on nationalism at Delhi University was set upon
by a mob – members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the
student wing of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs. Scores of
professors and students were trapped as the mob rained bricks and
stones and as the police stood by as mute spectators.
The NRIs with their knickers in a twist about
Aslan’s show somehow never speak out as vociferously against the
egregious violations of free speech and human rights in their home
country.
The allegation that Aslan’s Varanasi episode
perpetuated negative stereotypes, potentially leading to hate
crimes in the xenophobic climate in the US, has an ironic twist.
The assailant who shot at two Indians recently, killing one, was
under the impression that they were Muslims – he was emboldened by
the Muslim travel ban enacted by Donald Trump, a ban endorsed by a
number of Right-wing Hindus, including Shalabh Kumar and the
Republican Hindu Coalition, who berated CNN for airing the
show.
As Sigal Samuel writes in the
Atlantic:
“Reza Aslan’s new show has come at the best
possible time and the worst possible time. Some say the show makes
various religions seem less foreign, a corrective that Americans
desperately need under Donald Trump. Others say the show exoticizes
religious minorities, a danger we can ill afford under, well,
Donald Trump… Both views are right, to some degree. Oddly, the two
contradictory effects spring from Aslan’s single stated goal: to
show that all religions are, at their core, expressions of the same
faith and the same existential questions. That makes Believer an
interesting object lesson in the risks of trying to make religion
relatable.”
In the second half of the segment, we see
followers of Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ramji tending to the vulnerable
and disenfranchised, including lepers and orphans. In the Aghor
tradition, a sadhaka who has gone through all the stages of Aghor
and then returned to society for the benefit of others is called an
Aghoreshwar – a concept similar to that of the Bodhisattva in
Buddhism. Even though an Aghoreshwar remains above and beyond all
social and material illusions, distinctions and categories, they
can still bring social reforms into effect. They work for the
benefit of all sentient beings, especially those on the margins
like underprivileged women and Dalits.
The outrage over Aslan’s was basically a
tempest in a teapot which shed light on the chasm between the
anodyne Hinduism propagated by sections of the Indian diaspora and
the infinitely more complex and gritty reality on the ground. It’s
time for myopic NRIs and votaries of Hindutva to embrace the
teeming cauldron of contradictions that is India and engage with it
on a visceral level, or risk being frozen in permanent stasis. I
for one look forward to seeing the mini-series in its entirety. If
the remaining episodes are as provocative as the first one, they
should not be missed.