25 TOLERATING AND NOT TOLERATING

The Muslim emperor Akbar regularly engaged with adherents of other faiths. In this late-sixteenth-century painting he is in discussions with Jesuit missionaries.

Our Lady of Glory in Mumbai is a tall, brick Roman Catholic church built in the best mid-nineteenth-century English Gothic style. As you stand on its steps, you can see on the other side of the road a bright-green mosque, whose walls in turn butt up against the orange and yellow of a temple to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. A few hundred yards to the left is a synagogue, while the same distance in the other direction stands a Zoroastrian fire temple. Just a little further on are a Jain sanctuary and a Buddhist temple.

It may sound like a theme park for world religions, but this is the real Mumbai, the cosmopolitan commercial capital of modern India. It is a multi-lingual, multi-racial and multi-faith metropolis built up over the last 300 years by Christians and Hindus, Parsis and Jews, Muslims and Jains, all living cheek by jowl in what has been, for most of that period, harmonious co-existence.

The previous chapter examined how a single shared religion can define and strengthen a state, setting it apart from its neighbours. In India, the world’s major faiths are practised side by side in greater numbers than anywhere else in the world. But many would argue that this state too is held together by a single shared belief – a civic faith in a pluralist society. This is not only the result of a long habit of tolerance: it is a positive belief in a very Indian form of secularism. Where much European secularism is essentially anti-clerical, often the result of long struggles against the political power of the Catholic church (Chapters 26 and 28), the Indian version is not grounded in hostility towards the institutions of religion. For the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen this secularism is based rather on the principle of ‘equidistance’:

All religions have to be tolerated and treated with respect. So secularism in the Indian form means not ‘no religion in government matters’, but ‘no favouritism of any religion over any other’.

It is perhaps the only way that so large a country with so many religions can be peacefully governed.

The death of Bhishma: a Hindu tale illustrated in 1598 for the Muslim emperor Akbar

It is an idea with a long history, as you can see from a manuscript illumination in the British Museum. Painted in bright watercolours in 1598, it shows a scene from the Hindu epic poem the Mahabharata. In the centre, dying from his wounds and surrounded by kneeling attendants, is Bhishma, a heroic warrior renowned for his virtue. He is saying his last words to the god Krishna, while warriors and horsemen stand behind, dismayed, in a fantasy rocky landscape.

This illustration of a Hindu tale was made not, however, for a Hindu patron, but for the Muslim emperor, Akbar, a rough contemporary of Elizabeth I, whose huge empire included most of the sub-continent north of the River Godavari. Whereas Elizabeth’s English state was forged through the adoption of an exclusive Protestantism, Akbar’s political priority was to foster an informed religious pluralism. In 1574 he set up a special office of state to translate the most important Hindu scriptures and poems into Persian, the language of Mughal court administration, specifically so that Muslims would be able to understand better the wisdom in Hindu religion. Our beautiful painting is a small but telling part of Akbar’s pluralist project.

Akbar’s tolerance ran deep – and wide. His son Jahangir (whose own openness in matters of religion later amazed English visitors) reported that under his father’s reign ‘The road to altercation was closed. Sunnis and Shias met in one mosque, and Christians and Jews in one church, and observed their form of worship.’ It is the last part of that sentence which is perhaps the most significant. Nobody abandoned their own beliefs: they practised them peaceably side by side, in a way then unthinkable in Christian Europe. And it seemed to many that Akbar’s commitment to understanding other faiths was driven not only by political calculation. Abdul-Qadir Bada’uni, a court historian, claimed that the emperor operated out of a ‘conviction in his heart that there were sensible men in all religions…If some true knowledge was thus everywhere to be found, why should truth be confined to one religion?’

Akbar’s prudent refusal (mostly) to try to impose his own Muslim faith on his subjects, like his equidistant respect for all the other religions practised in his realms, was nothing new in India. It had first been articulated, and widely promulgated, in the edicts carved in stone by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, who had ruled most of northern India 1,800 years earlier, in the third century BCE, and who could claim, truthfully, that ‘I have honoured all religious sects with various offerings.’

This capacious approach to the government of India was duly followed even by the devoutly Christian Queen Victoria. In 1858, eighteen years before she was declared Empress of India, the proclamation of British rule insisted that there was to be no ‘interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects’. Missionary activity (Chapter 4) might be tolerated, but it was certainly not to be endorsed or encouraged by the state. After independence in 1947, this ancient principle of the secular, equidistant state was enshrined in the constitution of the Republic of India.

One of the sub-continent’s many achievements in religious tolerance can be seen on a more intimate scale in a circular silver temple token, three centimetres in diameter, struck in 1898. One side bears an inscription in Punjabi:

There is but one God. True is his name, creative his personality and immortal his form. He is without fear, without enmity, unborn and self-illuminated. By the Guru’s grace, he is obtained.

Silver token from the Golden Temple at Amritsar: Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh faith, sits between Hindu and Muslim friends

The Guru whose grace might help us to reach this one God is Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, who lived and taught around 1500. And these words are the opening lines of Sikhism’s most important text, the Guru Granth Sahib, which guides the thinking of the faithful. On the other side of the token is a scene familiar to all Sikhs: we see Guru Nanak himself, with a crown and a halo, seated between his two close friends on a carpet under a tree. On the left, Mardana, a Muslim musician, sits playing an instrument like a lute with a very long neck, a gift from Guru Nanak. On the right is Bala Sindhu, a Hindu, holding a fly whisk. As well as listening to music, they are clearly conversing.

This single image takes us to the heart of Guru Nanak’s teachings. After experiencing a religious vision at the age of about thirty, he is said to have exclaimed: ‘There is no Hindu, no Muslim’ – taken to mean that true faith transcends the different traditions and wisdoms of any particular religion. He sits here, literally equidistant from both his friends, setting out his central ideas of generosity to the less fortunate, service to others, and the equality of all before the one God.

Temple tokens like these would be handed out to pilgrims visiting the centre of the Sikh faith: the Sri Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple, in Amritsar, in India’s north-western state of Punjab, a serene masterpiece of symbolic religious architecture. The main building stands surrounded by water: in Sikh tradition this pool is the nectar of immortality. Unlike most religious structures, which stand high so that you have to climb up to them, here the faithful must go down steps as a sign of their humility in the face of the divine. The Sri Harmandir Sahib itself is a temple of the word. No images are worshipped here. Instead, every day at dawn, the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, which Sikhs regard as a living Guru, is carried into the temple, where (in a manner not unlike the Torah or the Qur’an, see Chapter 20) it is revered, its verses read and chanted until dusk, and broadcast around the whole temple precinct. Instead of one main entrance, there are four, open to all points of the compass, welcoming the whole of humanity, all who choose to enter. And very large numbers do enter: not far from the Golden Temple stands the Langar, a huge dining hall that offers free food to everybody with no distinction of caste or race and sometimes serves as many as 100,000 people a day. This holy place strikes the visitor as a tranquil tribute to the values of Guru Nanak in particular, and the Indian tradition of pluralism more broadly: openness, generosity, tolerance, oneness.

Professor Gurharpal Singh, of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, explains the precinct’s significance for pilgrims:

The Golden Temple is the main place of worship for Sikhs, but it’s much more. It symbolizes the faith, the beginnings of the Sikh community and its emergence as a powerful force in northern India. The Golden Temple is the holiest of holies. But it is also a complex that embodies the cultural, spiritual and physical dimensions of the community’s history over the last 400 years.

A significant, painful chapter of that history was written here in 1984, when a bloody pitched battle took place between the Indian army and militant champions of a Sikh national homeland. Under British colonial rule in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, India’s supple religious diversity hardened into interest groups competing for government recognition and favours, or into potential voting blocs as the British embarked on limited experiments with democracy. Leaders on all sides, not least the British, advanced the (very European) notion that communities of faith might be reflected in political groupings, might indeed require particular political, even territorial, guarantees: ‘Pakistan’ for the sub-continent’s Muslims, or ‘Khalistan’ for the Sikhs – both names meaning ‘land of the pure’, in Urdu and Punjabi respectively.

Pakistan was eventually born in the murderous violence of Partition in 1947, which split the Sikh heartlands of the Punjab in two. Sikh calls for their own Khalistan went unanswered. Yet the Sikh separatist movement did not die out. Over the following decades, rival Sikh religious parties squabbled, while the government in Delhi appeared indecisive and inconsistent. By June 1984 a militant Sikh leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, previously supported by the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, but now actively opposed to her and by her, was calling for the establishment of a separate Sikh state, and, with seeming impunity, had defiantly taken up residence inside the Golden Temple. As the government, alarmed by separatist claims, finally turned against him, Bhindranwale began preparing the Golden Temple against possible military attack. Mark Tully, a journalist and broadcaster who has lived much of his life in India, was a witness to what happened next:

Journalists could see Bhindranwale’s fortification of the Golden Temple taking place. People were terrified of him by this point, and so the Sikh clergy, particularly the clergy of the temple, allowed this to happen. When the Indian army arrived to put a stop to it, they mistakenly thought that when Bhindranwale saw them coming, he would collapse and surrender. But he resisted, and eventually the army had to bring in tanks, firing at the Akal Takht, the second most sacred building in the compound.

Indian troops preparing for the assault on the Golden Temple, June 1984

In the conflict that ensued, Bhindranwale and hundreds of his supporters were killed, along with Indian army soldiers and Sikh pilgrims who were visiting at the time of the attack. The traces of the battle are still very evident in the precinct today. There is an impressive memorial to those Sikhs who died in the fighting. On the walls of the Golden Temple are bullet holes, now framed with metal discs. On nearby buildings you can see the damage inflicted by the tanks.

The Golden Temple was eventually taken by the army, and peace returned. Talk of ‘Khalistan’ died down. But the events of Operation Blue Star, as the government’s offensive against Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple was known, left a bitter legacy. Both sides were accused of desecrating this holy place. A few months afterwards, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. A frenzy of anti-Sikh violence erupted across Delhi, and by the time order was belatedly restored, thousands of Sikhs had been killed, and tens of thousands more had fled Delhi for the relative safety of Punjab.

Indira Gandhi’s assassination, 31 October 1984: scroll-painting for an itinerant Bengali story-teller

In the very fabric of the Golden Temple you can see what happened when the humane ideals of Guru Nanak were overwhelmed by the politics of religious identity. The contrast between the serene and peaceful scene depicted on the Temple token, and the scars still visible on the Temple’s walls, speaks of the tensions that arise when the strong sense of belonging which comes from shared beliefs is redirected to a political end – and when the central state feels compelled to intervene.

If the Sikhs have been caught up in politically driven violence, so also have the two other faiths represented on our silver temple token. The image there of Guru Nanak with Mardana and Bala Sindhu shows an ideal of peaceful Hindu–Muslim co-existence, which, in spite of Partition, constant tension and even war between India and Pakistan, was never entirely lost in India after independence. In recent years, however, it has come under growing strain, nowhere more so than in the city of Ayodhya, a few hundred miles south-east of Delhi. According to Hindu scriptures, Ayodhya is where God was made man. Many devoutly believe that the great god Vishnu there became incarnate as Lord Ram (the protagonist of the epic poem the Ramayana), thus making it a supremely holy place for Hindus, and one which should house a major temple in his honour.

As Amartya Sen argues, the situation is, however, more complex, and texts like the Ramayana should be read with caution:

There is very little evidence as to whether historically there ever was a person called Ram exactly as described in the epic Ramayana, or where he was born. The connection with modern Ayodhya is very tenuous.

Until the early 1990s Ayodhya’s most celebrated building was a majestic domed mosque, the Babri Masjid, said on somewhat flimsy evidence to have been built by Babur, grandfather of Emperor Akbar. But today there is no mosque, just a heap of rubble standing on some of the most contested ground in India. The mosque of ‘Babur’ was built on the site of an earlier, presumably Hindu, temple (although archaeologists are unable to say with certainty which god was worshipped there), which had probably been demolished for the purpose.

After the mosque was built, the local Hindu population continued worshipping in its grounds, and the site was increasingly venerated as the birthplace of Ram. Tension between the Muslim and Hindu communities simmered for centuries, occasionally flaring, and leading the British authorities in 1859 to impose a compromise under which Muslims continued to worship in the mosque, while Hindus venerated Ram’s birthplace in a fenced-off area within the precinct. But the conflict persisted, and in 1949 the local state government closed the entire complex to both Muslims and Hindus. Three decades later, after much political manoeuvring, the mosque was reopened for worship. It, and the ground around it, quickly became the focus of ever more violent clashes, until on 6 December 1992 Hindu activists stormed the site.

Hindu activists storming the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992

Once again, Mark Tully was there:

The whole thing climaxed when large numbers of people gathered in Ayodhya for a Hindu religious ceremony. The situation got out of control, and huge crowds swarmed towards the mosque, breaking through the police barriers. The police initially did very little to prevent it, and then just disappeared altogether. I was watching when the security broke down. I left to telephone a report. When I returned I found a scene of utter chaos, people shouting obscene slogans against Muslims – clearly an act designed to provoke Muslims and also to provoke Hindus to appear angry about Muslims. People had started to pull the mosque down, while others were beating up journalists.

In less than twenty-four hours, the crowd, using sticks, pikes and pickaxes, demolished the mosque completely. Almost nothing remains.

Visiting the site today is a disconcerting experience. The whole area is fenced off with three distinct barriers, one behind the other, punctuated by watchtowers – a combination disturbingly reminiscent of the old frontier between West and East Germany. Visitors have to leave behind watches, mobile phones and any other electronic equipment, and pass through two metal detectors and three separate body searches before entering a caged walkway flanked on either side by soldiers, which twists and turns until it reaches the site of the demolished mosque. There, in a temporary structure, effectively a large tent, is a shrine of Ram, marking the supposed place of his birth. The pilgrims in the caged walkway can pause briefly for darshan – a direct view of a modern statue of the god – and make an offering. As they leave this militarized shrine, visitors are given holy water and prasad, an offering of temple sweets. At no point would anybody know that there had ever been a mosque here.

The continuing and increasingly bitter dispute in Ayodhya – to which group should the site belong? – has become one of national importance, running all the way to the Supreme Court in Delhi. After more than twenty years of litigation, that question is still not definitively settled, but in 2017 local politicians campaigned – and won great support – for building a Hindu temple on the site of the mosque. The future is uncertain, but few things could better demonstrate how difficult it is for modern nation states to manage conflicting religious beliefs when they become markers of communal identity, articulated with ever fiercer conviction. It is a phenomenon growing in intensity all around the world.

Many are concerned that India’s ideals of respectful co-existence, a beacon of enlightened thinking that long predates any European Enlightenment, are not being upheld with the commitment which the Constitution requires. Gurharpal Singh sets out his worries:

I think we are going through a very difficult time, where the relationship of the state with societal religious pluralism is very problematic. There is a concerted effort to impose a particular kind of identity on Indians through the power of the state and this sits very oddly with the religious pluralism and diversity that make up India. It remains to be seen which force will be triumphant. The only hope is, Mahatma Gandhi said, in the religious pluralism and diversity of India itself.

Ram and Sita on golden thrones in front of the Ayodhya imagined by a painter around 1800

For Amartya Sen, one of the factors behind the Ayodhya episode is a confusion of myth with historic fact, a willingness to take poetic texts like the Ramayana as literally true. It is perhaps the Hindu equivalent of the growing trend towards literalist readings of holy texts that was discussed in a Jewish and Muslim context in Chapter 20. Amartya Sen:

What is very important is to recognize that we should not take the richness of Indian literature – poetry with stories in it – as history. And the Ram story is part of Indian culture, not just of Hindu culture: it’s a story which has also had an enormous impact in India among Buddhists, among Sikhs and also among Christians and Jews who read the story.

The Indian historian Sunil Khilnani of King’s College, London, sees a similar danger, and also worries that as a consequence the ancient traditions of Ashoka and Akbar are being undermined:

I think what you have seen in recent years in India is the territorialization of the imagination, the attempt to pin it down to specific places. It began of course with the drawing of borders, the partition of India, and suddenly language belonged to one or another religion. That became the motivating factor in thinking about religion for some people. The Ayodhya dispute is, I think, very closely linked to the creation of the modern nation state on the European model. That’s to say, a land or a territory belongs to a culture or a language or a religion, and therefore one group has the priority in defining what gets built where. The model that India tried to build was a very different model of the nation state, in many ways a unique model. I think it’s much more based on a deeper history of the relationship between political power and belief in India, which extends much further back than the nation state.

At the beginning of this chapter, we compared Elizabethan England with Akbar’s India. Western Europe has now, after centuries of conflict, almost entirely abandoned the notion of a state being defined by one shared faith, and has, since the eighteenth century, moved steadily towards Ashoka’s inclusive principles. It would be a bitter irony if at this moment India were to move in the opposite direction.