I have been curious about religions and the basis of belief and wisdom. Over last five years I have taken my the first steps on this front. I went all the way to Haridwar to collect my set of the Vedas and the Upanishads - none were available in Mumbai or Delhi in Sanskrit with Hindi translation, and I did not want to read them in English. I have yet to make serious progress with this reading, though. Got a copy of the Quar'an from my friend Mufazal, which I read up over the next four months; and a copy of Gideon's Bible from the GM at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, which I am yet to read. Funnily all star hotels in India have a copy of Bible in their rooms, no other 'book'! As a school kid, I had attended elementary Sanskrit classes where the reference material was the Gita, which I have now read a few times. Also my mom had made us kids recite 'shantakaram bhujaga shayanam..' etc and the Gayatri mantra.
This is not to claim that I became pious or even wise.
Forget about becoming wise - I started asking questions. I noted that the Qur'an several times mentions the word 'Islam' and the the word 'Christian' can be easily referred back to Christ, which goes back to 'cross' or 'crucify'. But in no Indian scriptures you find the word 'Hindu'.
The Gita and other Sanskrit scriptures just use the word 'Dharma' as a generic concept of righteousness, rather than naming it anything. It appears to me that the 'Vedic wisdom', as I prefer to call what is genereally referred to as Hinduism, is against any sort of labelling. It is a pluralistic approach to finding the truth.
The life of certain walls in the back streets of Mumbai is quite sad,funny and relevant in this regard. Mumbai's homeless who sleep on roads at night, spit and urinate on these walls. The municipal corporation cleans up and whitewashes the walls and then it paints the symbols of all half a dozen religions - predominantly Hinduism, Islam and Christianity - followed by the Indian street dwellers. And lo and behold, the sanctimonius street sleepers stop defacating against the walls - so long as the pictures do not peel away under the constant sun and the monsoon lashes. And then there is a new life cycle of urinating, painting and a brief period of lull.
The municipal corporation unintentionally follows the pluralistic approach of the Vedas. Director Manmohan Desai did this with his hit Bollywood movie Amar, Akbar, Anthony - three real brothers raised as Hindu, Muslim and Christian. A predominantly Hindu India loves its gods being surrounded by the photos and statues of Christ, Mary, the Kaaba, the lucky number 786, Guru Nanak and so on. Movie starlet Rakhi Sawant continuously swears by Lord Jesus and Lord Ganesha, as if they were partners owning Sony Entertainment Television. Superstar Salman Khan prays in a Ganesha temple. Hindu girls light candles at the Mahim Church to be blessed with a rich husband.
I love it.
This is what exactly Vedas would have taught us and hence they never labelled religion with a name, they just call it Dharma, the duty, the right path. What is right and what is wrong is so well understood by a vast majority of the Indian masses, that they hardly care for the brand, the commandments and the rule book.
The question then is what is 'Hindu'? My limited research says that 'Hindu' is a Persian word and it may not be older than 1000-1100 years. It is most certainly a post-Islamic word coined by the Farsi or Farsi dialect speaking traders and armies that crossed over to India from Central Asia. It is the word that described the rich exotic civilisation that prospered for milleniums on the valley of river Sindhu. 'Sindhu' led to the nomenclature Hind for the land beyond the river and Hindu for the people residing there. 'Hindu' is the title given to us funny god loving (not god fearing)10,000 year old civilisation by Central Asians who were to cross over and then rule rich parts of that land.
'Hindu' was more of a simplistic description for the people who followed a thousand ways to pray to the same one supreme force and dozens of different languages to speak and hundreds of different food habits and recipes and dozens of different physical features, but one thing that was common to all of them - they did not follow any of the three Abrahamaic religions.
And we have come to love this title as our own - similar to our love for the names Bombay (always has been Mumbai to natives, it's not a new name), Calcutta (Kolkata to natives) and Bangalore (Bengaluru to natives).
My questions is, life has moved on...do we still need to be known by this now irrelevant title? Let's go back to our roots and find who we really are and what is our true name.
