By John Varghese 
“Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
— Jalaluddin Rumi
I feel I have been an atheist my entire life even when I was a practicing Christian. Oxymoronic though this statement sounds, it seems a perfectly natural state of being to me!
Growing up at the National Defense Academy (NDA) in Pune, India, I happened to be that child that the village raised. Actually, the whole lot of us “village” kids were! We spent more hours in our friends’ houses than we did in our own. After school, I would rush through my homework just so I could spend the rest of the afternoon on the beat with my buddies; mostly running through the nearby woods, climbing peepal trees, stealing guavas from orchards or chucking stones at beehives.
Some evenings, though, I’d be sitting in on a kirtan at Mohan Deshpande’s; or I’d be accompanying Delnaz Jamshed to the market to bring yogurt so Mrs. Jamshed could make mithoo dahi; at other times I’d be helping out serving at the langar with Jagvir Singh or gulping down the amazing seviyan served hot from Anwar Khan’s kitchen for Eid. Because we were the rare Christian family around, my mom would have to rearrange furniture in our small house to accommodate the heap of buddies who drop in for the traditional sadhya every Easter Sunday.
Only now looking back do I realize my friends made up a demographic of about seven or eight religions — more than 25 Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Zoroastrian (Parsi), Christian, Buddhist, and Jain denominations and not once did we consider our faiths as an aspect of our friendship. The plurality of our religions was never a diminishing or differentiating factor in how we related to each other. Rather, in some way, it actually bonded us through the commonality of the grumbling we did in observing tedious rituals of our respective religions.
I do consider us lucky. The NDA was a training wing of the Indian Armed Forces and the army had this way of syncretizing a population. In the ’80s, this was a good thing. Nationalism beat communalism, sectarianism, or “religionism” hands down! It was like supervillains battling it out in the end game — the isms vying for the spoils of a fledgling democracy. India was coming into its own as a nation, one the British left behind in the chaos of divisive communalism. While the echoes of atrocities that Hindu and Muslim mobs committed on each other during the partitioning of India and Pakistan continued to ring softly within segregated towns deep in the hinterlands of India, the cosmopolitanism of cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune was fueling the economy, helping a secular India charge into the future.
My religious indoctrination happened more as a cultural immersion than scriptural training. Among friends, we accepted each other’s backgrounds as we would our different clothes, skin colors, and cuisines. Nothing to do with “You are different so boo on you!” but more like “Hey I’m coming to your house for that religious feast.” We didn’t bother considering the wrongness or rightness within our personal religion much less the rightness or wrongness of other religions and cultures. We were too busy having fun to care for the theology.
Mind you, we understood it and marveled at the irrational dichotomy a plurality of almighties presented but it was never articulated. We thought it to be beyond our understanding and there must be some kind of reconciliation that might be happening at some higher social or spiritual level that someday we might eventually grasp. Did any of my religious interactions promote divisiveness, intolerance, selfishness, violence, or unkindness to any other? No! The whole zeitgeist was one of social cohesiveness through an inclusive secularity. All we kids cared about was being together, having fun, and the goodies we got for religious festivals!
We weren’t foreign to the idea that religion caused incredible violence. Every so often, we heard on radio broadcasts or read in newspapers, the strange news of people rioting and attacking public property and each other as a response to some religious slight somewhere. More often than not, we recognized this to be an expression of insecurity at the basic level of human needs — food, jobs, land, or opportunity rather than outright religious divide. It took vote-gathering political vultures a lot of work to incite enough hatred to cause such tensions. But it did make us notice how susceptible to divisive violence religion causes its adherents to be.
Among the kids, however, we couldn’t see such aberrance as part of our world of comradeship and respect toward our elders. I personally never took to the rites and rituals built around my religion seriously. My friends didn’t either. We saw religion something akin to wearing clothes — originally designed to protect us from the elements but which graduated to being a measure of our identity in a diverse society. As the global village drew out the secular human within each one of us, we realized that working together under new social contracts of mutual respect works for everybody.
But we were children of our culture. We couldn’t see past the joys that came with religious celebration that wove itself into the fabric of society. When Hindu kids meet elders, they bend and touch their feet as an act of seeking blessings. We Christians didn’t do it as part of our culture but it felt right to me. I invariably performed this genuflection without thinking when meeting Hindu elders. I was the loudest to yell out “Ganpati bappa…” and the crowds responded with “…morya”) into the microphone as I sat atop a tractor hauling a large clay sculpture of the elephant god Ganesh for its annual dunking in the river. My parents castigated me for my precarious position on the wheelbase of the tractor rather than for participating in idol worship.
Science fascinated me. Rational open-mindedness thrilled me. It was this drive that led me to study and eventually discard superstition, ergo religion, from my life. And here I pause. I hesitate. As I peel away the detritus of religiosity — some harmless like gratitude, charity, humility; some more pernicious like the concept of hell, misogyny, resignation to fate — I find myself tearing away pieces of what made me me.
I don’t know anything but to say Ram Ram to Mr. Shinde, my gym teacher, as I greet him today; does this make me a hypocrite? I cannot stay away from the joy of meeting and blessing my nominal ‘sisters’ (girls in the neighborhood) who have tied raakhi on my wrist; am I stuck in religious lunacy? Mrs. Desai lovingly feeds me sweet prasad every time I visit her; am I indulging a superstition? Old Mr. Syed wishes me Eid Mubarak and I melt in the warmth of that hug; am I perpetuating a close-minded religious belief system to my kids?
It is difficult to toe the line of North American atheists in their journey toward freedom from religion. I recognize similarities when they have to feel the burn of family disappointment or being the cause of a ‘spiritless’ Christmas meal. But I believe the immersion of cultural motifs within the context of religion has me, an Indian Christian émigré, at a greater disadvantage as I try to shake myself out of irrationality. It is not easy to break the cultural barrier!
Many of my friends with whom I have grown up have had varying epistemological trajectories in formation of their worldviews. Some are devoutly religious, some nominal, some atheists, and some just don’t care. We are still pals and we continue to connect over prasad, seviyan, teas, or issues. So, what gives? Of course, I clearly don’t care for archaic stone-age ideologies masquerading as holy, unchangeable writ, but I do care about tender relationships with people who have known nothing better all their lives and who believe in the goodness that I share with them but which religion has commandeered or hijacked for itself.
I’d still like to light divali lamps for my neighbours who are too old to do it themselves but who, back in the day, used to chase after me for spilling and breaking such lamps! I want to be hugged lovingly by those gnarly hands of the village that raised me — however many religious stains they might be covered in.
Finally, I have settled on the current path, my personal decision: I am going to grandfather my atheistic skeptical worldview. I will indulge the culture even if it reeks of religion for those who cannot see past it. For the strong or the seekers, I will present the rational case, but for those who are nothing but accumulated decades of their religious culture, I will hold back. I anticipate religion and faith dying out over the next few years. I am not going to hold against its victims, my innocent friends, and their folks, the price of its past. This decision sets me at peace within myself and with my loved ones.
Luckily, my children might not have to face this dilemma… will they?
Glossary
Peepal: Large tree, Ficus religiosa
Kirtan: Worship through singing and chanting
Mithoo Dahi: Parsi sweet yogurt, usually served at celebrations like Navroz (Parsi New Year)
Langar: Ritual free meal service offered at Sikh temples (gurudwara) to guests regardless of religion, creed, denominational differences
Seviyan: Semolina vermicelli porridge with cream, raisins, and nuts prepared and distributed usually during the celebration of Eid-ul-Fitr.
Sadhya: Malayalam (Kerala, India) word for “feast,” usually served on plantain leaves
Ganpati Bappa Morya: Part of a Marathi chant “Ganpati Bappa Morya, pudhcha varshi laukar ya” — “Lord Ganesha of Morya (a 14th century devotee), come early next year”
Ram Ram: Common greeting in India; Ram is one of the primary gods in Hindu mythology
Raakhi: A Hindu ritual where sisters tie a string around their brother’s wrists to celebrate the brother-sister bond; rooted in Hindu mythology where Draupadi (one wife of the five Pandav kings) tied a knot on Lord Krishna’s wound
Prasad: Small morsel of a treat after offering to a deity
Eid Mubarak: Happy Eid
Divali: Hindu festival of light
That was a beautiful piece describing secularism in It’s purest form. How children understood the way in which we can all accept one another without judgement. It is a double edged sword of course, atheists need to do the same with theists. Only, it would be helpful if theists in North America would accord us that courtesy.