When I hear incidents like the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris or the one in Garland, Texas this week, I am immediately reminded of someone called Periyar E.V. Ramasamy. Periyar, who was born in 1879 in British India to Hindu parents and went up to live until 1973 - which was by then a free India - was an atheist and was the founder of the "Self-Respect" movement and a strong figure in the Dravidian movement that took roots in the southern part of India in the 1920s, especially in the state of Tamil Nadu.
Periyar, through his self-respect movement, fought against what he said was the oppression of "backward" caste people by the "forward" caste people. He claimed that this oppression stemmed directly from the ills of the Hindu religion and said that the northern-aryanic brahmanism, a concept that he said was foreign to the southern dravidian race, introduced countless superstitious beliefs within the Hindu religion that led to people being marginalized and oppressed across caste lines.
Periyar, to whom freedom of speech was not at all foreign, criticized the Hindu religion, its gods and goddesses and its belief system in ways and words that were considered extremely offensive to the millions of Hindus. He called anyone who believed in God a fool and even organized rallies where he broke the statues of Hindu gods and called upon his followers to do the same. He even compared the forward caste man, who is of the priest class in the Hindu society, to a "snake" who surrounds the legs of the oppressed people - where the snake doesn't allow the oppressed people to move (up the economic ladder) and if one still tries to move, the snake bites.
In a society that was vigorously religious, Periyar gained millions of followers. They called themselves "rationalists". Even religious people saw in him a figure that questioned the very faith that they were afraid to question. They saw in him the courage to use his "God-given" intellectual capability that they themselves were afraid to use to question the gods and goddesses.
Periyar might have been very offensive in the ways he questioned Hinduism, but he also put forward "rational" thoughts and begged people to use their "thinking" capability to question everything rather than just blindly accept them. He hated when people called him an atheist, for he believed that that term was misused against anyone who used their thinking prowess and questioned the logic behind an assertion.
Periyar admired Buddha - for he thought that Buddha was a rationalist of his time who questioned the Hindu religion and its practices. He refused to believe that Buddha was any form of divine incarnation and he didn't believe Buddhism was a religion. But he openly advised many oppressed and backward caste people to convert to Buddhism to break out of the "evil" machinations of Hinduism. But when some asked him to convert to Buddhism as a form of solidarity, he refused. And the reason he gave was that that it was easier (and in some ways logical and even ethical) to stay within the bounds of Hinduism to criticize Hinduism.
Out of many millions of his followers, some went out to form political parties. And these parties and its atheist members have repeatedly been elected by the vastly religious society to govern the state of Tamil Nadu in the last five decades. And so was atheism accepted by the religious people of Tamil Nadu. In fact, today people demand that these atheists stay true to their atheism as a form of trust to their rational thinking and leadership.
Periyar's free speech to question the ills of Hinduism was very effective because he stayed within the system to question the system. No one was able to question his freedom to speak against the Hindu religion for he himself belonged to the Hindu society. No one could deny him that right even during the pre-constitutional era. And I wonder if today's free speech against a religion's ills needs people like Periyar, who will not only have the courage to beg the people to question faith, but will also be members within that faith-system to make that very free speech as not just a constitutional right, but rather an intellectual tool that leads to rational thinking and real transformation instead of just a provocation.
No comments:
Post a Comment