Comparative perspectives, need of the hour

October 31, 2014 12:37 am | Updated May 23, 2016 04:11 pm IST - CHENNAI:

The remarks of former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott — more famously known for his marathon talks on the nuclear issue with Jaswant Singh under the earlier Vajpayee regime — during his visit to The Hindu on Wednesday, that a fuller understanding of a diverse country like India requires studies from more than one location, seems to have a key, unstated logical derivative to it.

In an increasingly inter-dependent world, wherein a range of world-views compete as much as technologies do, comparative perspectives on religions have become all the more important now to preserve cultural pluralism and human freedoms at large.

It is often said that Philosophy is an ivory-tower exercise with no practical relevance to our day-to-living. This has fostered a cynicism among youth, particularly in developing countries where the demographic dividends and mounting aspirations give sure-fire recipes an ideological edge. However, as multiplicities of ‘life-worlds’, to borrow a phrase from Husserl, stare at us amid rising prospects of violence, a robust space for dispassionate comparative reflections on religions needs to permeate everyday language, given religion or its denial is part of any framework.

At the turn of the last century for the Indian intelligentsia, when largely Missionaries-run schools and colleges played a pivotal role in opening up our cultural limits to a modern, scientific world, the challenges in the Humanities in particular was daunting.

Thinkers such as the late philosopher-statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, at least initially, had to counter the “truth hegemony” of the West until Oriental scholars from there unabashedly affirmed the commonalities shared by diverse religious traditions. No wonder, some schools of Buddhism, Shankara’s ‘Advaita Vedanta’, “Yoga’, and later Ramanuja’s ‘Vishistadwaita’, provided a matrix for articulating comparative religious perspectives, bracketing theological issues. Swami Vivekananda’s address at the first Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, in driving home the ‘universality of human consciousness’ as gleaned from the ‘Upanishads,’ was clearly a historic forerunner to such efforts. It had nothing to do with any foundational doctrine like ‘Hindutva,’ as some would like to see it now.

But already a decade behind us in the 21st century, the challenges are of a different order. Modern and pre-modern exemplars of religious harmony and understanding, particularly in the Indian context, from Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and other religions need to be enriched upon, without the trappings of an elaborate academic discourse. The life and times of Mahatma Gandhi himself is a standing testimony of such an unfolding.

Even in the 1970s in many of our schools in Tamil Nadu, for example, there was no difficulty when morning prayers and basic reads for students happily blended a range of vignettes: from select Sanskrit ‘slokas’, Tamil Saivaite and Vaishnavite poems, The Lord’s Prayer, couplets from the ‘Thirukukural’, to among others, selections from the Tamil Muslim poet Umaru Pulavar who chronicled the life of Prophet Mohammed.

Those were really the first lessons in comparative religious perspectives, in shaping young minds towards a composite outlook as no singular ‘truth-claim’ of a particular sect or religion is the final word. Such an active inter-play with a philosophical touch not only minimizes intolerance, but ensures continuity and dialogue in a pluralistic setting.

As Nancy M. Martin, a historian of religion who recently co-edited a book on comparative perspectives, says in her introduction, ‘Inter-Religious Understanding,’ “We can learn much from the Indian case, for the inter-religious encounter there has not been abstract but personal and immediate,” adding, “In the global twenty-first century, inter-religious understanding is not an optional or idle intellectual pursuit.”

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