Introduction to the Karmic Faiths
By Devdutt Pattanaik
Kalachakra: The cycle of rebirths that is the fundamental metaphysical assumption of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism and Sikhism. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In the 20th century the doctrine of secularism has demanded that faith (or organised faith, i.e., religion) be kept away from politics, economics and identity. This has resulted in a fracture that has contributed to many social problems, including queer-phobia: the explicit and implicit hostility towards LGBTIQ people.
More and more people around the world are realising that the secular cannot afford to deny the value of faith in the lives of people. Faith helps people cope with fear. Faith gives meaning to people’s lives. When faiths affirm the dignity of queer people, they empower them psychologically, which enables them to thrive politically and economically. By promoting inclusiveness and harmony, they also reduce queer-phobic tendencies in neighbourhoods where they live.
In this essay I will try to arrive at an appreciation of faiths that are based on karma. These are the Karmic faiths. These have long been misunderstood as they have been seen through the lens of Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that dominate global discourse on faiths. Karmic faiths approach the idea of queer very differently as it is not based on God’s commandments.
Karmic faiths include Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism. They are based on the idea of rebirth, hence karma. They do not subscribe to the belief that there is only one life followed by an eternal afterlife, or to Abrahamic notions of divine commandments, damnation and salvation.
Having originated in the Indian subcontinent (now increasingly referred to as South Asia), Karmic faiths have spread, mainly via Buddhism, to South East, Central and East Asia. Today, Karmic faiths thrive amongst 20 per cent of the world’s population – mostly communities who live in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many people from these communities have migrated for economic and political reasons to the developed economies of Europe and America. And so we can say Karmic faiths are very much global faiths.
Increasingly, Karmic faiths are being known as Dharmic faiths, though the meaning of the word ‘dharma’ in each of these faiths is very different.1
What Are Karmic Faiths?
Karmic faiths are based on the belief of rebirth: deeds of past life impact the current life and deeds of the current life impact future lives. Every entity is therefore unique, bound by its karmic burden, which accounts for the circumstances that make up its own life. This accounts for the diversity of the world. In this paradigm, there is no one to blame for one’s situation in life. We are our own creations. And the choices we make in this life impact our future.
While Abrahamic faiths see the world as finite, with a start and finish, the Karmic faiths see the world as without beginning (anadi) and without end (ananta). While Abrahamic faiths subscribe to the doctrine of equality – everyone is equal before the eyes of God – Karmic faiths subscribe to the doctrine of diversity – everyone is unique because of the varying karmic burden. While Abrahamic religions actively reject social inequality through acts of charity, Karmic faiths accept social inequality as part of the larger karmic process that humans can only react to with empathy, but cannot actively control. While Abrahamic faiths seek to change society so that it aligns with God’s will, Karmic faiths see society as forever changing, cyclically rising and falling. While Abrahamic faiths yearn for salvation, Karmic faiths yearn for liberation from the cycle of rebirths.
Karmic faiths are often confused with tribal and Oriental faiths. The tribal faiths of India are often clubbed together with Hinduism. This is because India does not have a ‘uniform civil code’. Tribal communities that do not identify themselves as Christian, Muslim or Parsi, which have their own personal laws, are by default assumed to be Hindu and subject to Hindu personal laws. This has been challenged by secular activists. Oriental faiths such as Taoism, Confucianism and Shinto are often confused with Karmic faiths, and bundled as ‘Eastern philosophies’, due to the strong influence of Buddhism in East Asia for the past 2,000 years. But none of them have the concept of rebirth at their core.
What Are the Key Features of Karmic Faiths?
Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism share many common roots.
While Abrahamic faiths place considerable emphasis on ‘equality’, most Karmic faiths recognise ‘diversity’ as more important. According to the former, all humans are equal in the eyes of God. In the karmic scriptures, nature is full of myriad creatures – plants, animals and humans, as well as celestial beings – each one a manifestation of a different karmic burden. Their diversity is emphasised over their equal or unequal status. So while Abrahamic faiths focus on homogeneous alignment to God’s commandment (one God, one book, one set of rules, one way of life, and equality of all humans), Karmic faiths are highly contextual, thrive in fluidity, and are comfortable with heterogeneity.
To an outsider, this may seem to suggest a condoning of inequality. To the insider, this is a comfort with diversity. The point of Karmic faiths is to show by example how to liberate oneself from this diverse, unequal world of accumulating karmic burden.
This liberty from the world may appear to contrast modern notions of liberty, which is liberty to function as an individual in this world. The quest for liberation is also different from the quest for salvation advocated in Abrahamic faiths. Liberation is about breaking free from karmic burdens, often with the help of a teacher. In contrast, salvation is about being rescued from a world of sin with the help of God’s messenger or messiah.
How Do We Distinguish between Individual Karmic Faiths?
Though they all believe in rebirth, hence karma, individual Karmic faiths are very different from each other.
Amongst the Karmic faiths, Hinduism is the least institutionalised and Sikhism is the most. Hinduism has myriad holy books; however, it is not a ‘faith of the book’ in the manner of Abrahamic faiths. Here, experience generally matters over text. That is why oral discourse of the guru is more important than the written word. By contrast, Sikhism does locate itself in a holy book, the Granth Sahib, which is not so much a set of instructions as it is a set of hymns to be contemplated upon. Buddhism can be traced to one leader, Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago, and Sikhism can be located to ten gurus, who lived in the past 500 years. The Jain sage Mahavira, who is seen as a contemporary of the Buddha, is not the founder of Jainism but considered the last of twenty-four great teachers (Jinas) of this era. There have been infinite eras before that, each with its own set of twenty-four great gurus. This notion of eternal paths (sanatana dharma) forms the foundation of later Buddhism, and of Sikhism.
The primary conflict in Karmic faiths is between the world-affirming householder and the world-renouncing hermit: should we engage in an unequal world created by karmic burden, or do we break free from the world itself? The tilt is towards the hermit in Buddhism and Jainism and towards the householder in Sikhism. Hinduism has all sorts of permutations and combinations in the numerous communities that constitute it.
Buddhism does not believe in the idea of God or soul. It values meditation that will help us come to terms with the impermanence of all things, including identity that entraps us in the cycle of rebirth.
Jainism believes in soul, but not God. It values purification through non-violence, so as to liberate the soul from karmic burden and help it rise towards wisdom. The word ‘soul’ here is translated as ‘atman’. Unlike the Christian soul which gets contaminated and falls from grace, the soul in Karmic religions is forever pure, though its view is obscured by ignorance and pollution.
Sikhism believes in God and soul, but sees the soul as distinct from God. It values devotion and service as the means to earn God’s grace and break free from the wheel of rebirths. Sikhism actively believes in the equality of all human beings.
Hinduism believes in God and soul, and sees them as essentially the same thing, the separation resulting from ignorance. It values meditation, purification, devotion, service and ritual worship. While the soul establishes the equality of all living beings, karmic burden establishes heterogeneity of capability and communities (varna/jati/caste). Having said this, Hinduism also has a thriving corpus of atheistic writings, such as the Carvaka and Mimamsa schools of thought.
| Buddhism | Jainism | Sikhism | Hinduism | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soul | Does not exist | Exists | Exists | Exists (Soul is God) |
| God | Does not exist | Does not exist | God is without and formless | God is without and within, with form and formless |
| Existence of third gender | Yes | Yes | No information | Yes |
| Monastic order (Hermit life) |
Superior | Superior | Inferior | Another way |
| Householder way | Inferior | Inferior | Superior | Another way |
| Karma | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dharma | The Buddhist doctrine | The principle of movement | Religion, or the righteous path | Governance that overturns jungle law |
| Rebirth | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Liberation | Meditation | Austerity | Devotion | Veneration |
| History | Timeless, oldest identifiable teacher, Sakyamuni Gautama Buddha, lived 2,500 years ago | Timeless, oldest identifiable teacher, Parsva, lived 2,800 years ago | Timeless but organised 500 years ago | Timeless, oldest scripture, Vedas, is 4,000 years old at least |
What Is the History of Karmic Faiths?
A brief journey through history will help us get a better sense of these Karmic faiths. For easy understanding, timelines have been simplified and comparison made with events that have shaped Abrahamic faiths. Please note that the ancient history of South Asia is highly politicised and so there are many who challenge the dating and sequence of events listed below.
Five thousand years ago, when Semitic tribes were still in and around the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and had not yet migrated to ancient Egypt, an urban civilisation thrived in South Asia in the Indus, and the now-dry Saraswati, valleys. Whether the idea of karma prevailed in its highly organised brick cities is open to speculation as the Indus Valley script is yet to be deciphered. The cities of this civilisation ceased to exist following climatic changes and shifting agricultural patterns from around 4,000 years ago. They were not destroyed by invading Aryan armies, a very popular fantasy that was created by 19th century European Orientalists who went on to support the Nazi ideology.
Three thousand years ago, as Semitic tribes gradually established the kingdom of Israel after their exodus out of Egypt, Brahmins were chanting and transmitting Vedic hymns, attached to fire rituals known as yagna, along the Gangetic river valleys in a language called Sanskrit. An earlier form of this language (proto-Indo-European) came to India centuries earlier from Eurasia with a people who had tamed the horse. A similar migration took place westward towards Europe, which explains why there are many linguistic similarities between Indian and European languages. It is in the Vedic hymns that we come across the word ‘karma’ for the first time. In the early texts (Brahmanas), ‘karma’ refers to ritual action. In later texts (Upanishads), it refers to both action and reaction.
Around 2,500 years ago, in the centuries that witnessed the Babylonian Exile and building of the Second Jewish temple, monasticism rose in India in the form of Buddhism and Jainism. These saw desire as the cause of suffering and karmic burden, shunned the yagna rituals, and propagated world-rejecting lifestyles. They spoke of liberation from suffering, ignorance and worldly life, with words like nirvana, kaivalya and moksha. Buddhist monks travelled across South Asia, to Central Asia, South East Asia and East Asia, taking their monastic ideals and karma with them.
The monastic ideal was countered by the rise of a new kind of Hinduism chronicled in Sanskrit texts known as Puranas from around 2,000 years ago. This period saw (and it has been proven now by genetic studies) the rise of a social order called the caste (jati) system by which members of the same profession formed guilds and did not share daughters or food. Eventually, these communities became closed, relatively isolated units. A hierarchy emerged based not just on political and economic realities, but also the notion of ritual ‘purity’, with Brahmins at the top of the pyramid. While this was happening in South Asia, Christianity rose in West Asia, and spread to the Mediterranean region, transforming the pagan and increasingly fragile Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire.
While the Roman Empire faced attacks from Vikings and other barbarian tribes, Buddhism spread from India via merchant ships to South East Asia including Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. It also spread along the silk route and other trading routes to Central Asia, Tibet, China and Japan. It mingled and merged with Shintoism in Japan, Confucianism and Taoism in China, with Bon religions of Tibet, and with the local faiths of South East Asia. Many Hindu gods travelled with Buddhism to these regions. It must be kept in mind that in those days this strict division between Buddhism and Hinduism did not exist and they were seen as part of the same continuum of Karmic faiths. Chinese and Sri Lankan monks travelled to India to visit Bodh Gaya, and to Buddhist monasteries and universities, but this stopped after the arrival of Islam.
Islam rose 1,400 years ago and its influence reached India via merchant ships in the south and marauding armies in the north. With its arrival, Hinduism saw the rise of its own monastic orders, which started writing commentaries such as Vedanta on the nature of divinity, and there was an increasing divide between puritanical Brahminism and sensuous temple traditions. They wrote increasingly of one God and one Truth, underlying the diversity of myriad forms, one of the many themes found in the Vedas. God was seen as with form (saguna) and without form (nirguna). Poet-saints like Mira and Kabir sang of a personal God, devotion to whom reduced karmic burden. This was the Bhakti movement. It paralleled the rise of the Sufi movement that spread from the Middle East to India. Amidst this shift in thinking was born Sikhism over 500 years ago, on the interface between Hinduism and Islam. Like Islam, Sikhism had a holy book and spoke of one formless God, before whom all are equal.
In the age that witnessed the Crusades, the Renaissance and the Reformation in Europe, Buddhism disappeared from much of South Asia except Sri Lanka and the Himalayan regions. Hindu monastic orders became dominant, which saw all things feminine and sensuous as polluting. The female form was associated with the river of materiality (samsara) and the male form with culture as well as monastic orders (dharma). The queer form (napunsaka, kliba, pandaka, kinnara) was seen as lower still, as it did not produce life and simply existed as an object of pleasure tempting non-queers and, worse, as a perennial pleasure-seeking creature. This rejection of the feminine, the queer, the erotic and the sensual was tempered by the use of sensual and queer language in Bhakti and Tantra traditions, but this suffered a mortal blow when the Europeans arrived with the civilising power of ‘Victorian values’ and their disdain for ‘effeminacy’.
Five hundred years ago, the Europeans came by sea to South Asia as traders of finished goods. Following the Industrial Revolution in Europe a few centuries later, they turned into colonisers who sought to make India the source of raw materials. Colonisation destroyed the village economy, and changed the political and economic landscape dramatically. Karmic faiths were studied and organised by European Indologists, and Indians became increasingly defensive, seeking to reform Hinduism along Abrahamic lines. The world wars ended colonisation and gave rise to the Indian nation state that saw itself as secular and sought very hard to keep religion out of politics and economics but failed to provide Indians with a common civil code. The new secular Constitution accepted the ‘unnatural’ status of queer people by adopting the sodomy laws (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) of the British Empire.
Over the past few years, Section 377 of the IPC has been overturned by the Delhi High Court, but reinstated by the Supreme Court of India, which is now reconsidering its decision. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court has declared that transgenders are the third gender and need to be given full rights. Extremist right-wing Hindu movements are on the rise and, like extremist religious movements around the world, assume that homophobia and patriarchy are the right moral implications of their religious doctrine. Hinduism, where temples celebrate the marriage of god and goddess, is being increasingly dominated by self-appointed leaders of the faith, who are often male and glorify celibacy. In the West, the media has popularised Hinduism’s association with yoga and naked ascetics on the one hand, and the violence of caste on the other, thus earning accusations of Hinduphobia.
How Do Karmic Faiths Look at Nature?
In Biblical traditions, the Book of Genesis begins with the idea that God created the world out of nothing. Multiple interpretations notwithstanding, in this view, there is a Creator who precedes creation. Man, created in the image of God, has been given authority over the rest of creation.
In contrast, Karmic faiths all agree that the world has always existed. There is no beginning or end. Karma is responsible for the transformation of the world. Human life is but one of the many life forms and but one of many transformations.
The ‘river of materiality’ is the foundation of Karmic faiths. This is most explicitly stated in Jainism, where the world has six essentials (dravya): space (akash), time (kala), matter (mudgala), soul (jiva), motion (dharma) and stillness (adharma). Notice that soul here simply refers to that which makes the inanimate animate. Also notice that here dharma refers to the natural principle of motion. Here, there is no concept of God, creator or creation.
The Buddha, the enlightened teacher who founded Buddhism, did not bother with concepts such as creator or creation and focused instead on the root cause of suffering. He identified desire as the cause of suffering or dissatisfaction, resulting in continuous entrapment in the world. Desire makes us create categories of things we want or like or do not want or like. Desire makes us create our own sense of identity and, hence, the notion of the ‘other’. Desire makes us identify, categorise, compare, judge, yearn, possess and fight. Buddha spoke about achieving nirvana: blowing out the flame of identity through meditation that makes us aware of our desires and enables us to outgrow the categories they create.
Buddhism did not believe that there was anything permanent in the world. But Jains believed all dravyas are permanent. The purpose of life is for the jiva to cleanse itself of all pollutants and realise the truth of the world. Jivas who do so reside in Siddha-loka. These are the Tirthankaras, or ford-finders, who are not swept away by the river of materiality.
Karmic texts recognise that the world is made of animate creatures and inanimate objects. What distinguishes them is hunger. Plants feed on inanimate objects. Animals feed on animate creatures. Thus the world is made up of that which is eaten (food) and that which eats (eaters). Feeding is violent. It threatens the existence of animate creatures, who therefore reproduce. Thus, from the desire to stay alive comes desire for food, which results in violence, which in turn results in sex. Sex and violence are intimately connected with the survival instinct. From sex and violence comes karma that binds us to the natural world (prakriti). In nature, we find the food chain and the pecking order and the natural instinct to be territorial and dominating to ensure food supply. This is ‘matsya nyaya’ or ‘justice of the fishes’, which means the natural way where the mighty feed on the meek.
Humans are the only creatures who are blessed with a mind (manas) that enables them to reject the natural ‘matsya nyaya’ or the law of the jungle. In fact, the essential truth of humanity is to reverse the natural chain: fear of death, hunger for life, hunger for food, violence, sex, territoriality and domination. This reversal of the natural process is what is achieved through Buddhist meditation and Jain austerities. This is the path of the hermits or shramana marga or nivritti marga. The inward gaze.
The world of karma is the world of materiality (samsara), and the world of materiality is the world of gender, and all Karmic faiths refer to three genders: male, female and queer. The words for queer are many: napunsaka and kliba in Sanskrit, pandaka in Buddhist Pali literature, pedi in Tamil Sangam literature, and words like hijra, kinnara and kothi in contemporary times. This third gender has been translated in various ways: from being hermaphrodite to being infertile, impotent, effeminate, transgender or homosexual. Today, we use the word ‘queer’ for this.
The existence of the queer is explained in Ayurveda, an ancient medical practice originating in the Indian subcontinent, which sees queer realities as physiological and gender as occurring on a fluid spectrum. For instance, it explains that a man is conceived when the white male seed has more power than the red female seed. The queer is born when the white male seed is of equal power as the red female seed. The female is born when the white male seed has less power than the red female seed.
The existence of queer is also explained in texts that deal with jyotisha, a traditional astrological practice that maps the stars corresponding to the karmic routes that humans are bound by. In fact, the planet Mercury or ‘Budh’, one of the nine celestial bodies, is described variously as eunuch, hermaphrodite and transgender – all essentially queer – and visually imagined as sometimes male, sometimes female, riding a composite beast that is neither lion nor elephant.2
How Do Karmic Faiths Look at Culture?
Culture (sanskriti) is created by domesticating nature (prakriti). It is natural for humans to establish cultures. Culture rises and falls over time. In Hindu Puranas, the creation of the world is visualised as the waking up of a sleeping God, Narayana. The world before that exists in a fluid state. The world after that takes form, until it is time to dissolve, for it is time for Narayana to sleep once again. This evolving and dissolving world connected with Narayana’s awakening and sleep is not nature, but culture.
The ‘world’ can mean either nature or culture. And this often leads to confusion in understanding. But it is the Goddess (nature) that is seen as Supreme, or at best an equal and parallel force of God (mind/consciousness/soul). She is the mother as well as daughter. As mother she is nature, wild and untamed, like the forest, the Goddess Kali. As daughter she is culture, demure and domestic, like the field, the Goddess Gauri. It is the relationship with this ‘daughter’ that helps us understand the attitude of Karmic faiths towards culture. This is best explained in stories from the Hindu Puranas, which are world-affirming, much more than Buddhism and Jainism that are more monastic, hence world-denying.
Hindu Puranas speak of three forms of God: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
Every human being seeks wealth and power (artha) and sensual pleasures (kama) and liberation from karmic burdens (moksha), but what binds humans to others is dharma, that is the cornerstone of relationships. All Hindu rituals – be it the Vedic yagna or the Puranic puja – is grounded in the idea of nurturing relationships. Both involve inviting the deity into the house, bathing, clothing, feeding and adoring them, before they are asked to offer grace. This ‘giving in order to get’ shapes the Hindu worldview. It is ‘give and get’, not ‘give and take’ or ‘take and give’.
A key concept is the idea of debt (rinn). When we repay our debt to others (relatives, strangers, the world at large), we are liberated from karmic burden. We repay our debt by being socially responsible. Monasticism without completing social responsibilities like taking care of the family, raising children and looking after elders is frowned upon and seen as escape.
But while Hinduism valued world affirmation over world negation, it also affirmed the caste hierarchy. In its most fundamental form, dharma in Hinduism manifests as ‘varna-ashrama-dharma’, which means respecting your station in society (varna) and your stage of life (ashrama). This means you spend all your life following the profession of your father in four stages: first as student, then as householder who takes responsibility for wife, children, parents, siblings and extended community, then as retired folk who teach the next generation and then prepare for the last and final stage of renunciation. Your caste (jati) was based on the profession you followed.
The queer is therefore obliged to marry and produce children (ashrama-dharma). The only way queers can break free is by creating a caste of their own, the hijra community that functions very much like monastic orders (Buddhist viharas, Hindu mathas) with a leader and followers. But in the varna/jati hierarchy, it is far from the mainstream, below all varnas, as the only professions available to them are singing, dancing and prostitution, which resulted in their being seen as polluted by the village, and their vilification as ‘criminal communities’ during British rule. British laws had a hugely negative impact on the hijra and other traditional transgender communities.3
In pre-modern societies, people who did not fit into their family and caste structures often moved out of the community in two ways.
Both claimed divine forces of either a god or a spirit. Both orders, monastic or queer, followed a strict hierarchy, with submission to a leader who was known as guru. Neither was allowed to be part of the family mainstream. Both had to beg for alms and were invited during festivals and special occasions. But while monks achieved ‘spiritually pure’ status, the hijras were feared and seen as contamination. Their best-case scenario was being summoned to ward off the ‘evil eye’ through their song and dance. The hijras have evolved a language of their own based on Hindi and Farsi (the court language of medieval times based on Persian) and they tend to avoid religious association, castrating themselves in the name of a Hindu goddess but also respecting Islamic faith by taking on a Muslim name.4
Urbanisation, education and changes in the political and economic environment have transformed the old dharma structure based on varna and ashrama. New professions are being chosen and no one feels obliged to follow the family profession. Young people are choosing to stay single or divorced. The obligation to take care of old parents is now being seen as a choice. The global discourse is based on the ‘equality’ paradigm, with women and queers asking for equal rights as men. The secular Indian nation state has given some but not all rights to women, and is ambiguous about queers as it gives full rights to transgenders but criminalises ‘unnatural’ sex.
The threat to tradition by modernity has resulted in the rise of radical religious voices seeking to restore the ‘good old’ ways. But these old ways are based on imagination rather than facts. They imagine a hetero-normative, affluent Vedic past where there was no such thing as inequality or oppression. This fantasy land, popular in right-wing circles, especially amongst the Hindu diaspora, denies the existence of all things queer, despite evidence to the contrary in scriptures, stories, song and temple walls.
A Note on the Castes5 of India
Caste is a South Asian phenomenon, observed not just by Hindus but also by Christians, Muslims, Jains and Buddhists of the region. There are more than 3,000 castes (jati)and 25,000 sub-castes in India, which are traditionally and rather superficially mapped to the four-tier caste category system (varna) found in the Vedic scriptures.
The key features of the caste system are as follows:
The British had divided India on the basis of religion, creating the two states of India and Pakistan. After Independence, India preferred the linguistic division of its states. But traditionally, all South Asians had been classified on the basis of their jati. The Europeans used the word ‘caste’ for it.
Jati means a community or a kinship group. Jati is inherited from one’s father and traditionally it determined one’s vocation. One had to marry within the jati. Inter-jati marriage was prohibited, as was sharing a meal with other jatis. This ensured jatis existed in relative isolation even when they shared the same space in villages. Even when people convert to Islam or Christianity, the jati system persists, as it plays a key role in social group formation and hierarchy.
Endogamy, or marriage only among members of the same jati, became rigid 2,000 years ago, but the idea that society is composed of several categories of humans has been found in Vedic hymns that are over 3,000 years old. The word used in Vedas is ‘varna’ and probably refers to aptitudes, skill, competence or to social hierarchies found in most ancient societies.
The hierarchy between jatis was based on economic and political realities, similar to hierarchies seen in most multi-cultural societies. However, there is one idea that makes jati a very unique social structure. It is the idea of ‘purity’, with some jatis being seen as ‘untouchables’ as their vocation involves contact with pollutants like dead bodies, excrement, dirt and other waste matter. This aspect of the jati system has brought it great infamy. The ‘higher’ jatis live in the centre of a village, the ‘lower’ jatis live towards the periphery, with ‘untouchables’ on the outer edges, and the ‘tribals’ outside the village in the forest.
A hymn from the Rig Veda describes society as an organism whose body parts are made up of four categories (varna) of people. Based on this hymn, priests associated with rituals and philosophy of the Veda classified the thousands of jatis into four varnas, and located themselves in the topmost varna of Brahmins. They placed the ruling class and landowning communities in the second varna of Kshatriyas. They located the trading communities in the third varna of Vaishyas. Everyone else – the service providers – was placed in the varna of Shudras. This fourth group eventually split, with the ‘untouchables’ and ‘tribals’ being cast out of the four-tiered (chatur-varna) system. The various dharmasutra texts, composed at the same time as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, reveal this tendency to reduce the thousands of jatis into four varnas, with the explicit intention to give privileged position to the Brahmins and the land-controlling jatis. It also reinforced the idea of purity and pollution, contributing to the practice of ‘untouchability’.
While many sages and philosophers spoke against this social structure, most rulers of the land respected jati as it helped legitimise their rule, and it enabled them to collect taxes with relative ease from communities, rather than individuals, who controlled the land (Kshatriya) and the markets (Vaishya). Many used Brahmins to establish new villages, and collect taxes on their behalf, thus making Brahmins the powerful agents of God and the God-king. Kings who gave importance to Buddhist and Jain monks more than Brahmins were seen as anti-Vedic, even though they did not actually interfere with the four-tiered social structure. Muslim rulers, too, in order to ensure stability, used Brahmins as bureaucrats and tax collectors, and so effectively let the four-tiered social model persist. They used the word ‘kaum’ or ‘kabila’ for jati.
When the Portuguese came to India, they used the word ‘caste’ for jati. They saw it as similar to the European system of clans that valued purity of blood. The British eventually documented castes for administrative convenience, and converted this rather fluid social system into a rigid and documented categorisation, even giving castes to people who really had no castes, and giving them a social status in a standardised national hierarchy, ignoring the fact that the hierarchies of the jati system functioned locally with numerous regional variations. Based on caste, the British assigned jobs in the military. Based on caste, they divided cities. Later, they switched from caste to religion, ignoring the caste divides in Indian Christians and Indian Muslims, and amplifying the caste divide in Hindus, insisting that caste was an essential condition of all Hindus, based on books such as the Manusmriti, which had originally only documented caste as social practice, not recommended or prescribed it.
Hindus who moved to the Caribbean islands as indentured labour in the 19th century, after slavery was abolished in Europe and America, retained their Hindu identity, but not any caste identity, as the socio-economic conditions there did not have need for caste. British administrators did not bother to document the caste of labourers or classify them as such. But in India, where caste was strongly mapped to socio-economic realities, and where British administrators documented caste and made it an essential category while recruiting for the army (only military castes were allowed) and for the bureaucracy (Brahmin and the landed gentry were preferred), caste not only thrived but was institutionalised. The documentation process also created the religion we now call Hinduism.
When India acquired Independence, the government realised that the caste hierarchy reinforced economic and political hierarchies. To create a more egalitarian society, and to facilitate social mobility, the government decided to introduce reservation in education and jobs for members of ‘lower’ castes and tribes. For better or worse, the government equated caste with class, and saw the ‘upper’ castes as the haves and the ‘lower’ castes as the have-nots, a division that is arguably rather simplistic. Further, it introduced a new category of ‘backward’ castes who were also provided with reservations. This reaffirmation of caste by Indian governments, along with vote-bank politics, has ensured that the jati system thrives even today.
More recently, a new two-tier system of classification of jatis has emerged, with the privileged jatis being termed ‘savarna’, and the unprivileged jatis being termed ‘Dalits’. There is a fight for justice and equality. The aim is to annihilate caste completely based on the writings of B.R. Ambedkar. Religious groups such as the Lingayats, reform movements such as Arya Samaj and social groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh do not support caste. Yet, removing caste consciousness from South Asia continues to be a challenge.
A Note on the Tribes of India6
As per the 2011 census, tribes constitute 8.6 per cent of the Indian population, which is roughly 104 million people. They are scattered across the subcontinent and include, amongst many others, the Abors and Aptanis of Arunachal Pradesh; Badagas of the Niligiri Hills in Tamil Nadu; the Baigas, Gonds, Murias, Dandamis and Kols of Chhattisgarh; Bhils of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra; Santhals of Odisha, Bihar and Bengal; Bhots of Himachal Pradesh; Bhotias of the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of Uttarakhand; Chakmas of Tripura; Mundas, Gonds, Oraons, Hos and Kharias of Jharkhand; and Onges and Jarawas of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
They range from hunter-gatherer communities fully isolated from mainstream society to those who live around the outer edges of mainstream society. Their assimilation with the mainstream has been a point of great political and economic contention.
Each tribe has its own faith system and mythology that is unique to it. They may or may not subscribe to the idea of karma or rebirth. Most follow some kind of belief in animism, with faith in benevolent and malevolent spirits located in sacred mountains, rivers, trees and caves.
Over the centuries, they have been under pressure to assimilate with local Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim populations. In recent times, many have converted to Christianity under the influence of Christian missionaries.7
Tribal attitudes towards alternative sexualities have not been well researched or documented. According to one study, conducted by Citizens Foundation, the Ho tribe of Jharkhand was aware and had a comfortable understanding of male homosexual relationships.8 However, this cannot be regarded as indicative of a pattern among all tribal communities, as there are tribal associations that claim homosexuality does not exist in tribal culture.
How Do Karmic Faiths Look at Scriptures?
Karmic faiths place greater emphasis on ritual practice than scripture or intellectual analysis. They tend to focus on experience (anubhav) rather than understanding (gyana). For the Buddhist, meditating is more important than reading the discourses of the Buddha. For the Jain, performing austerities is more important than reading the writings of the Jain sages. For the Sikh, doing service (seva) and listening to praise of the lord (simran) is more important than analysing the writings and the tales of the gurus. For the Hindu, going to the temple, participating in festivals with fasts and feasts, and hearing stories and songs of gods and goddesses are far more critical than analysing the Vedas and the Upanishads.
That being said, in the 21st century, we have given the highest value to textual analysis and assumed that all religions spring forth from a ‘book’, a phenomenon that’s perhaps an outcome of colonialism. Hinduism has always valued the Veda, but while Western academicians look upon this as a book, Hindus have used it in the sense of an idea, communicated through chants, rituals, symbols, stories, songs, architecture and music. Sikhism, in modelling itself along Abrahamic faiths, chose to create a holy book containing the songs of poet-saints, making it a crowd-sourced, though well-edited, holy book. We must keep this in mind when approaching the scriptures of the Karmic faiths.
While Buddhism does have ‘rules for monks’, scriptures of Karmic faiths have less to do with rules and more to do with ideas related to the architecture of the cosmos and our relationship to it. The general belief is that rules need to be adapted to place (desha), time (kala) and quality of community (guna), for the world is flexible and fluid, going through periods (yuga) that keep shifting. The aim of rules is to facilitate community living (dharma) rather than making people good. This is very different from the notion of commandments revealed by God through angels and prophets found in Abrahamic faiths.
Owing to its proximity with Islam and Sufism, Sikhism separated the theological (piri, from the Persian word ‘pir’ for the sage) from the administrative (miri, from the Persian word ‘emir’ for leader). The holy scriptures are part of the theological world and in them genders are equal, the householder’s life is valourised over the hermit’s, and there is talk of the soul being genderless; and they contain no comment that is hostile to queers. In the administrative realm, the queer is invisible, with laws neither including nor excluding them. Hostility towards homosexuality in Sikhism is more an outcome of general patriarchy in society and personal prejudices than a requirement that can be traced back to the faith.
Colonial Indologists tried to create a ‘Hindu Bible’ using various texts such as the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Manusmriti, and finally settled on the last to create Hindu personal laws in the 19th century. This was a colonial construction based on an obscure Brahmin text, dated to 500 CE, that had no validity in contemporary culture, facilitated by one William Jones. It informed the Indian Penal Code. The laws against homosexuality and transgenders, however, have nothing to do with the scriptures and are based on Victorian laws.
How Do Karmic Faiths Look at the Queer?
The key to understanding Karmic faiths is to look at stories, for it is through stories that the common folk understood their faith.
In Hinduism, we find many stories where God transforms into Goddess, indicating gender fluidity, as also men turning into women and women into men. This reveals a greater comfort with transgender identities. Although there are images of male–male and female–female friendship, one is never sure if this love is platonic, romantic or sexual, leaving them open to interpretations. Also, many queer themes in stories are metaphors used to communicate complex metaphysical ideas in narrative form. These are described in greater detail in the chapter on Hinduism.
Hinduism reveals a greater comfort with transgender stories. For example, there are stories that describe Lord Vishnu becoming a damsel and Lord Shiva becoming half a woman. However, homosexuality is not a dominant theme in Hindu mythologies.
In contrast, Greek mythologies are replete with stories of homosexual love, where men love men, and women love women. Apollo falls in love with Hyacinthus, while his sister Artemis drives Callisto away when she lets a man make her pregnant. There are also many descriptions of man–boy love found in Greek tales. So while Greek mythology reveals a comfort with queer sexuality (invisible feelings), Hindu mythology reveals a comfort with queer gender (visible body).
This divide is reflected in modern LGBTIQ politics. The West, influenced by Greek mythology, exhibits greater comfort with the homosexual than with the transgender. Whereas India, influenced by Hindu mythology, reveals greater comfort with the transgender than with the homosexual.
Significantly, no Hindu, Buddhist or Jain scripture has tales like that of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Abrahamic tradition, popularly interpreted as being about divine punishment against queer behaviour.
How Have Karmic Faiths Been Used to
Be Hostile to the Queer?
In hermit traditions of the Karmic faiths, sensuality is seen as causing bondage to the sea of materiality and entrapping man in the endless cycle of rebirths. Sex is seen as polluting and only the celibate man (sanyasi) and the chaste woman (sati) are considered pure and holy. And so an identity based on sexuality draws much criticism. That is why in Vinaya Pitaka,9 the code of conduct for Buddhist monks, it is explicitly stated that the queer pandaka should not be ordained. Rules extend to women who dress like men, or do not behave like women, which we can take to mean lesbians. Jain rejection of homosexuality also stems from its preference for the monastic lifestyle. Anti-queer comments on homosexual behaviour in the Manusmriti are more concerned with caste pollution than the sexual act itself. People involved in non-vaginal (ayoni) sex are told to perform purification rites, such as bathing with clothes on or fasting. More severe purification is recommended for heterosexual adultery and rape.10
Karmic faiths believe that the living owe their life to their ancestors and so have to repay this debt (pitr-rina) by marrying and producing children. This is a key rite of passage (sanskara). This is a major reason for opposing same-sex relationships, which are seen as essentially sterile and non-procreative. Sikhism states nothing against queer genders or sexuality but values marriage and the householder’s life.
How Can Karmic Faiths Be Used to Affirm the Dignity of the Queer?
The following are ideas based on Karmic faiths that can be used to affirm the dignity of queer people:
We must take into account that Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Hinduism are not homogeneous. They comprise numerous sects and communities. Yet the overarching and fundamental wisdom that is common to all Karmic faiths makes ample room to accommodate the queer with innovative solutions.
As far as the state and sexuality are concerned, there is confusion. As mentioned earlier, India has deep and historic comfort with transgenders, although they continue to be on the margins of society. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, openly advocated transgender rights in August 2016.11 Indeed, at a grand festival in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh in June 2016, the government provided transgenders (known locally as kinnara) separate toilets. Contrast this with debates on transgender toilets in the United States and the rise of trans-phobic feminists.
Notably, in Abrahamic religions, God is avowedly masculine and so are most of his prominent prophets. There are tales of homoerotic love, like that between David and Jonathan, son of Saul, and the highlight of the discourse on sexuality dwells on the cities of Sodom and Gommorah destroyed by God for their queer and sensual proclivities.
While the third gender is acknowledged, the rest of the queer spectrum continues to be invisibilised. Thus in India, while transgenders enjoy full civic and human rights, homosexual unions continue to be criminalised under ‘unnatural sex’ laws. This homophobia can be traced to influences of conservative Christian and Islamic frameworks and to Hindu supremacists trying to reframe Hinduism along Abrahamic lines.
Therefore, it is important to emphasise the fundamental liberalism that lies at the core of Karmic faiths and articulate the strains of beliefs that affirm the dignity of queer expressions: Buddhism advocates a deep sense of shared compassion for the queer and encourages a sense of identity that is authentic and liberated from social and illusory constructions. Jainism advocates non-violence and radical scepticism and, as a result, avoids rushing to judgement about queer realities. Sikhism strongly advocates equality among genders and persons. And Hinduism celebrates diversity, which includes the queer in all of its manifestations.