India’s Unending Journey

But here I have to be careful. When I was discussing this chapter with another Sanskrit scholar, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, he said, ‘I don’t really agree with your concept of Hinduism’s suspicion of certainty. Hindus are often very certain they are right and others are wrong. What they do say, however, is that their certainty is not necessarily the only certainty. Although, of course, even then, with the variety of Hindusim, there are some who would insist that their certainty is a better explanation than any other.’

I replied, ‘But saying yours is not the only certainty is so far removed from the certainty of the Semitic religions, from the “Jesus is the only way” form of Christianity I was taught, that it seems to me to be – if not a suspicion of certainty – a denial of it.’

‘Well, I can see your argument,’ Ram conceded, ‘and I can certainly see where you are coming from. However, I’d be more cautious than you are when you talk of Hindu suspicion of certainty. But I agree that Hindu pluralism does require a degree of humility and that is one of the themes of your book.’

Hinduism doesn’t have a monopoly on pluralism. It is part of the general Indian tradition of questioning, discussion, dissent and indeed scepticism that Amartya Sen describes in his book The Argumentative Indian. Pluralism is a characteristic of all the major religions born in India, but it was through my interest in Mahatma Gandhi, and through reading Radhakrishnan’s work, that I first came to be aware of it. Since then, Hinduism has been the Indian religion I have read and talked most about. Without wanting to venture into arguments about what exactly constitutes Hinduism or to what extent the foundational culture of India is Hindu, because eighty per cent of the people living in India today are classified as Hindus, and culturally it is the dominant religion in India today, India’s Unending Journey is inevitably a book in which Hinduism takes centre stage.

To my mind, pluralism involves humility. It means acknowledging that you don’t have the complete or final answer, that what you know may seem right, but there are other points of view. That is where the controversial word ‘compromise’ comes in. I was taught to believe that compromise was a dirty word, smacking of cowardice, but that was not Mahatma Gandhi’s point of view. While I was making a radio programme about the Mahatma in South Africa, more than one South African told me with pride, ‘Indians say we gave you Gandhi, and we say we gave you back a Mahatma.’ When Gandhi arrived in South Africa he was an unsuccessful lawyer. When he left twenty-one years later, the prominent South African Boer politician Jan Christian Smuts said: ‘The saint has left our shores. I sincerely hope forever.’

Gandhi’s road to sainthood started with his first case in South Africa, which was resolved by a compromise. From then on Gandhi came to believe that the purpose of a lawyer was not to defeat an opponent, not to score a victory, but to make peace between two factions at war with each other. He later said, ‘The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of satyagraha [non-violent resistance].’

Early on in my own career I believed I was fighting for principles and didn’t even consider the possibility of compromise. For four happy years I promoted the work of the Abbeyfield Society, which was a new organisation that pioneered housing for old people by integrating them into their neighbourhoods to prevent loneliness. But there was tension between the director of the charity, who wanted the society to expand as fast as possible, and the founder, Richard Carr-Gomm. Richard was afraid that the unique principles he had laid down for Abbeyfield were being sacrificed in the hurry to provide more and more housing. The director complained to the committee that Richard was preventing him running the society in a business-like manner. The committee supported him and sacked Richard. I and the two other regional directors for England resigned in protest. At the time, taking this course of action seemed to me to be a matter of principle. Nowadays I am much more suspicious when people start talking about ‘matters of principle’. Had my colleagues and I been less certain that right was entirely on one side we might have been able to act as brokers and persuade Richard and the director to reach a compromise.

I see my journalistic career as an example of another lesson India has taught me about humility and accepting uncertainty – the importance of acknowledging the role of fate in our lives. I am often told, not asked, in India: ‘You must have always wanted to be a journalist.’ But I have to acknowledge that I never intended to become one. I am also told: ‘You must have come back to India because you wanted to return to the land of your birth’, and I have to admit that I never thought of returning until there seemed no alternative. If, after my experience on the verandah that first day when I returned to the country, I had not somehow stuck to the belief that my destiny lay in India, I might not have had a career at all.

It was fate rather than any deliberate effort on my part that had brought me back to India. I managed to move from the Abbeyfield to the BBC because of a chance vacancy in the personnel department. The tattered remnant of my vocation to the priesthood led me to think that personnel might involve caring for people and would prove to be the career for me. But it soon became clear that the job was more to do with files and application forms and was not the career for me at all. So when the assistant representative in the Delhi office fell ill and had to be flown home, I applied for his post. In spite of my knowledge of Hindi being limited to nursery rhymes, I got the job.

It soon became apparent that yet again my career had gone down a dead end. I found that the job of assistant representative was a non-job. One of my few responsibilities was supervising the office accounts. But they were always prepared for me by Harbans Lal, who had already been working as the office accountant for years and had no need of my help. When my father left Kolkata and joined a company in Britain he would often say, ‘My babus in India did the work of six people here and did it much better!’ Lal Sahib possessed all the qualities that my father had admired in his juniors, and all I had to do was to sign off the paperwork.

My boss, Mark Dodd, encouraged me to fill my time by learning about broadcasting and to make my first broadcast. It was a radio feature on the annual vintage car rally in Delhi. The feature included a champagne breakfast with the Maharaja of Bharatpur – which was probably what sold it to the audience. The Maharajas have always fascinated Indians and Westerners. From then on, I gradually expanded my broadcasting activities and moved into journalism.

Accepting the role of fate in life can, of course, lead to fatalism, and needs to be balanced by accepting the role of free will as well. I was not encouraged to find that balance by the competitive, individualistic culture I was brought up in. Maintaining that balance also requires an understanding of the importance of experience, something I was not taught to develop by my rationalist education.

The importance of experience was brought home to me by Radhakrishnan, who wrote: ‘In Hinduism, intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inner reality.’ Radhakrishnan’s stress on experience sent me back to the Christian theologian Harry Williams, who taught me at Cambridge. I re-read his collection of sermons, The True Wilderness, in which he said he could only preach what he had experienced and warned that ‘Christian truth must be in the blood as well as the brain’. In the first sermon, Harry Williams describes two sorts of truth, an outer truth and an inner truth. The outer truth is ‘all that knowledge we acquire, our intellectual capital. It’s our property over which we have complete control’. The inner truth ‘has a life of its own and can therefore sweep in upon us in ways we can not control’. Harry Williams gave an example of the difference between the two.

Take for instance something of superlative beauty – music, painting or what you will. We can indeed study and master its outside truth – how it is constructed - how it is related to what has gone before and so forth. But its reality eludes us altogether unless it penetrates us and evokes from us a response we can’t help giving.

For me the most superlative beauty has always been the beauty of nature. The awesome Himalayas; even in bustling, worldly Mumbai, the sight of the sun setting over the Arabian sea; the wild moorland country of Yorkshire – all sometimes overpower me. Their magnificence makes me feel infinitely small. Such beauty diminishes all human achievement, yet at the same time it affords me a sense of being part of something very real, though way beyond my comprehension. At times I feel certain it’s the grandeur of God that has overcome me.

I have talked to many other people who have been overcome at one time or another by the magnificence of nature. All have felt profoundly humbled by the experience. Of course, by no means do all of them believe they are experiencing the grandeur of God, and some say I only believe that because I want to have my faith in God confirmed. That may be true, but unlike some modern theologians I don’t think wanting to believe in God necessarily means God is merely a figment of my imagination. All I can say is that these experiences stay with me and confirm my belief in someone or something that I can only describe as God. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a keen observer of nature. These first lines of his poem ‘The Grandeur of God’ indicate that nature inspired in him if not necessarily an experience of God’s glory, certainly a sense of it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like the shining of shook foil.

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Hopkins goes on to speak of the damage that men have inflicted on nature by not ‘recking God’s rod’, by not respecting Him and nature. He ends with the confident assertion that for all this damage ‘nature is never spent’. And why?

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Sacred buildings saturated with the devotion – with the worship, the prayers, and petitions – of centuries also bring me a sense of the presence of God. I have felt that presence in Britain’s great cathedrals, with what a priest once described to me as ‘their prayer-soaked walls’, and in sacred buildings of other religions in India.

To me, the most evocative sacred place in India is the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikh’s holy city. I experience a particular serenity there, with the singing of Sikh hymns floating across the lake in which the Golden Temple stands, the steady stream of pilgrims flowing around the marble pavement that surrounds the lake, the elderly Sikh priests, with their long white beards, reading the Sikh scriptures, and the shining white marble of the Akal Takht, the shrine opposite the Golden Temple. Pilgrims form an orderly queue – a rare occurrence in India – to cross the causeway to the Golden Temple itself. Inside, there is none of the pushing, shoving and incessant chatter that are a common feature of many other Indian shrines.

I was therefore appalled by what I saw as a member of the first press party to be escorted into the Golden Temple after ‘Operation Blue Star’ in the summer of 1984. The Indian army had stormed the shrine’s precincts and killed the Sikh separatist leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had taken control of all the buildings and turned the Akal Takht into a fortress. The hymn singing had been silenced and there wasn’t a Sikh priest or a pilgrim in sight. Instead, the whole complex was in the hands of the army. There were blood stains on the marble pavements, and the white walls were peppered with bullet holes. The library, containing invaluable manuscripts including copies of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, handwritten by some of the Gurus themselves, was a charred ruin. But most shocking of all was the state of the Akal Takht. The army had brought tanks into the precincts, crushing the marble pavement and pounding the shrine with squash-head shells. The whole frontage of the building had been blasted; every room seemed to be blackened by fire; and marble inlay and other precious decorations had been destroyed. The army hadn’t even cleared away the empty shells that carpeted the rooms where Bhindranwale and his colleagues had put up their last stand. Only the Golden Temple itself seemed to have been saved from the devastation. But India has a great capacity for absorbing catastrophe, and the Golden Temple has since regained its sanctity, as any sensitive visitor will discover.

I personally find it comforting to sense the presence of God in sacred places such as the Golden Temple, or in the awesome beauty of nature. But Harry Williams makes it clear that this presence is not necessarily comforting. Opening ourselves up to the experience of God can involve confronting unsettling elements of ourselves or, as Harry Williams phrased it, make ‘me meet sides of myself I prefer to ignore’. The experience can also make demands on us that we don’t readily want to accept. In the Christian tradition, Jesus did not want to be crucified; he wasn’t a sort of superman for whom even that terrible form of punishment held no fear. During one period of my life, I resolutely refused to meet sides of myself I preferred to ignore, or to meet demands I knew I should meet. But those experiences of God still occurred and kept the embers of my faith glowing.

But I have to be careful not to let my own belief in the importance of personally experiencing God run away with me. I don’t want to give the impression that mystical experience is all that counts and that reason has no relevance to religion. I feel it is important to be able to offer some rational arguments to counter the widespread belief that religion is irrational and therefore incredible, that it should be able to stand up to scientific scrutiny but that it cannot.

Mind you, I have often found that those using such arguments forget that science itself does not make discoveries purely by means of scientists exercising their powers of reasoning. Science makes progress through uncertain steps; it doesn’t proceed from certainty to certainty but out of hypotheses that spring from intuition and which are then explored through experiments. (And even when those experiments appear to confirm the original hypotheses, this by no means necessarily means that definite conclusions can be drawn from them.) Einstein once wrote: ‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Of course, Einstein was not denying the importance of reason, and nor would I suggest that reason was unimportant to him, but it would appear that for him there was more to the workings of science than pure reason. Although I hesitate to interpret Einstein’s thought, to my mind he seems to be acknowledging that we can all experience the mysterious, that which is beyond reason.

Reason is not only an important tool that enables religious people to have discussions with non-believers; we should also be prepared to use reason as a test of the continuing validity of religious traditions. Doctrine has to develop in the light of new knowledge and the changing norms of society. If it flies in the face of reason it deteriorates into obscurantism, and nothing gives religion more of a bad name than that. Perhaps one way to put it would be to say there has to be a balance between reason and revelation. We have to accept the limitations of both by saying, ‘Neti, neti’.

It is not always easy to find that balance. I once gave a talk in Hereford Cathedral about the need to examine our certainties. In it, I suggested that the Church needed to examine the exclusive claims it has made for its revelation and for the certainties of its moral code. After my talk, the Bishop of Hereford indicated that he would like to ask a question and I thought, ‘I’m going to get a roasting now!’ But the Bishop said, ‘I agree with a great deal of what you have said. But if I were to say as much, I would be accused by the press of lacking resolution, of watering down Christianity and of being a woolly-minded liberal.’

As if to prove his point, a woman stood up at the back of the cathedral and asked me in an aggressive tone, ‘So, Mr Tully, what have you got to say about Jesus’ words “I am the way, the truth and the light”?’ I didn’t know what to say that would resonate with her and I also didn’t know what I could say to the Bishop, who had to minister to people who – in complete sincerity – held such absolute views as that.

It is a common tendency among followers of Semitic religions to believe that all doctrine is set in stone. They therefore see no need to balance reason and revelation, because, in their opinion, the one is a human activity while the other is a gift of God and as such cannot be challenged by us humans. Biblical fundamentalism is one of the manifestations of this mind set. Keith Ward, formerly the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, is a born-again Christian and is able to remember the exact day Christ entered his life. While many born-again Christians tend to resist reasoned arguments and learning from new knowledge, in his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward says that: ‘Discussion, debate, reflection and exploration should be an essential part of church life, always looking for new disclosures of the unfailing love of God in new contexts, and looking to the Bible as a model and inspiration for such creative exploration, rather than as an unchangeable barrier to any new thought.’ And for Keith Ward, science should be one of the sources of that new thought. He believes that ‘the anthropomorphic imagery which the Bible often – not always – seems to suggest needs to be sublated by a greater knowledge of the extent and diversity of the universe, which only post-sixteenth century science could give’. By ‘sublated’ Keith Ward means ‘cancelling an obvious or literal meaning by discovering a deeper spiritual meaning that can be seen to be the fulfilment to which the literal meaning points’.

Unlike the modern secular world, which I once heard a priest describe as ‘drunk on change’, Semitic religions usually come down too heavily on the side of tradition. Hinduism, I have often been told, is a process; in the modern jargon, it is ‘on-going’, so in theory it can readily accept change. But the grip that caste still holds on India would appear to contradict this position. I know from experience that many people are obsessed by caste and that this is not a positive obsession as far as Hinduism and, indeed, India are concerned. Every time I talk in Britain about India, no matter what aspect of it – past, present or future, secular or religious, economic or political – when it comes to question time, I am inevitably asked about caste

After I had spoken about what we might learn from Hinduism in the town hall of Marlborough, where I went to school, a man in the audience sprang up and declared, ‘I regard Hinduism as an evil religion! I was in the army and I saw the dreadful fate of untouchables.’ On another occasion, because I had tried to give a balanced description of caste in my book No Full Stops in India, I was subjected to a television inquisition that lasted an entire programme. In it, no matter what I said, the inquisitor came back at me with the accusation, ‘So you defend slavery?’ I repeatedly tried to explain that caste did not imply ownership of one social group by another. I pointed out that I had condemned the excesses of the caste system, and I also attempted to convince my inquisitor that the caste system had some merits. But all to no avail, as before I could finish speaking the allegation was hurled back at me, ‘So you defend slavery!’

Even though I am well aware of the danger that I will be misunderstood, as India’s Unending Journey charts a quest for balance, drawing upon the Indian tradition of reasoned discussion, I can hardly avoid discussing an institution that raises people’s hackles. But first it is important to emphasise that untouchability is roundly condemned by many Hindus too. Dr Karan Singh, a scholar-politician whose father was the last Maharaja of Kashmir, has written in his book Hinduism: ‘There were certain categories beyond the pale of the caste system which were known as the outcastes and whose treatment over the centuries is a standing disgrace to the remarkable achievements of Hinduism.’ By the time I arrived in India, untouchability had become officially unacceptable, and independent India had legislated against the practice. But of course condemnation and legislation do not automatically lead to the complete disappearance of a practice and so I would still read reports in the papers about atrocities committed against Dalits, as the former untouchables like to be known, and hear stories about Dalits who were not being allowed to drink from village wells, sit in tea shops or worship in the same temples as other villagers. Shortly after I settled in Delhi, a female guest asked me, ‘What caste is your cook?’ I didn’t need to ask her why she wanted to know. It was obvious that she wanted to make sure he was not from a caste she would regard as polluting.

Although I have never been asked that question again, when I started investigating Hinduism through Dr Radhakrishnan’s book The Hindu View of Life, I couldn’t see how he could do anything but condemn the entire institution of caste. However, Radhakrishnan maintained that caste had a value because it made society cohesive, with everyone playing their allotted role rather than competing with each other. It represented an organic view of society rather than an individualistic one. This argument led me to think about the British society that I had grown up in. It had not been a very individualistic society. An individualistic society requires social mobility, and it was only in the second part of the twentieth century that British society really opened up, making it no longer rare for people to break free from the circumstances into which they had been born. I am sure I would never have been commissioned in the army if I had not been to a public school that identified me as upper-middle-class, or in other words the officer class. I am not sure I would have got into the BBC without any professional qualifications if I hadn’t followed my army commission by going to Cambridge, where it was still relatively easy for a public school boy to get admission.

Even in today’s much more individualistic Western society, only a free will fundamentalist would deny that a parent’s circumstances – education, job, position in society – all have an impact on his or her child. In a mobile society that impact might well be a strong urge in the child to ‘better’ him- or herself, to achieve a higher social standing or greater prosperity than the parent, and that urge might well be fulfilled. In a society that was not mobile, in which climbing up the social ladder or becoming substantially wealthier was rarely possible, caste held out hope for those who were disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth. The hope was provided by the Hindu belief in reincarnation, according to which those who don’t get off to a good start this time round may, depending on their actions in this life-time, have a better opportunity when they come to be born again. As Radhakrishnan pointed out, ‘However lowly a man may be, he can raise himself sooner or later by the normal process of evolution to the highest level.’ Those lines from the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, which I quoted in Chapter 2, show that Christianity accepted society was static and hierarchical until relatively recently. The Christian hope held out for the disadvantaged in Jesus’ promise that ‘the kingdom of heaven is theirs’ is not necessarily of any greater comfort to them than the Hindu hope of a more privileged reincarnation in the future.

Christians such as Mother Teresa, who see Jesus in the poor, lay themselves open to the criticism that they are sanctifying poverty. This is where suggestions that there is hope for the disadvantaged in God’s kingdom, or in another life on this earth, become dangerous. If they tip the balance in favour of fatalism they allow society to accept inequality. But I believe it would be equally misguided to tip the scales the other way and unquestioningly advocate an equal opportunities society. Seeking to provide equal opportunities for everyone is clearly to be commended, but the danger is that from here it’s only one alltoo-short step to believing that society should be a meritocracy. Meritocracy is a cruel concept because success becomes the goal of life and we can never all be given equal opportunities from birth onwards in order to succeed and become a meritocrat. Those who do not succeed in a meritocracy often suffer mentally because the social ethos implies that it is their fault that they have failed. Put in other words, such societies tend to turn into a rat race, with those who lose being regarded, and regarding themselves, as failures. What we need is a society which, while trying to remove disadvantages, at the same time recognises that we can never all be equal and respects every sort of achievement. That would mean respecting the person who does the least glamorous job as much as the person who does the most glamorous. Today’s Western societies, with their worship of celebrities, do the opposite.

Going back to caste, the system does have a certain social value. Each of the main divisions of caste is divided into hundreds of jati and these are the key to the social system. Each individual should marry within his or her own jati, and it is the members of a person’s jati who form that person’s biradari or community. That community can form a rudimentary social security system.

For many years I had a Dalit cook, Ram Chandra, or Chandre as he was always known (and, incidentally, even though he was a Dalit no guest ever hesitated to eat his food). Because he had become the head of a household instead of the sweeper, which had been the customary position for a Dalit, he became an important man in the eyes of his own community. Anyone coming to Delhi from his home village would call on him, and he would spend hours sitting outside the kitchen, sharing a hookah with his visitors, discussing the news from home or that he’d heard on his radio.

Chandre always wanted to know about any weddings that might be coming up within the community. When my partner, Gilly, and I went to his own daughter’s wedding in his village, we discovered that members of his biradari had contributed to the wedding expenses. ‘Mind you,’ Chandre reminded us, ‘I have to contribute to their weddings too!’ We watched the contributions being noted down carefully after a lengthy discussion about who had contributed what to other weddings and how much they should therefore contribute to this one. All contributions were officially loans, but sorting out the repayments would have been beyond the ability of any bank manager.

I nevertheless have to admit that sometimes, when I have attempted to explain that caste is not entirely negative, I have failed to acknowledge the pain and suffering it can inflict. Dr Radhakant Nayak, a former senior civil servant and now a member of the Upper House of Parliament in India, is a friend whose opinion I value greatly. R.K. (as he is fondly known) is a Dalit who was converted to Christianity as a young man by a catechist who visited his village in Orissa, one of the poorest states of India. When I showed him the first draft of this chapter he wrote a lengthy critique in which he suggested that I had been too generous to Hinduism and he criticised the caste system ruthlessly. With his direct experience of what it feels like to be discriminated against and to be at the bottom of the social heap, he decried the caste system as:

… the chain of social hierarchy, reflecting an ascending scale of reverence and descending order of contempt that cannot be allowed to be broken in this life. If you are an ‘untouchable’ you are told you should remain so and you are warned that if you deviate and do not discharge the duties of an untouchable and a scavenger you will not get to a higher position after death.

R.K. also maintained that caste had no conscience and compared Christian beliefs about society with the caste system, saying:

The Church teaches that Christ came for the poor. The rich man is made to feel responsible for the poor and is warned that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is going to be for him to go to heaven. In the caste system the rich man’s conscience is not pricked. He tells the poor: ‘What can I do about your problem? You are suffering for your past life.’

When I sent a reply to his critique suggesting that the suffering of the poor might serve to warn the rich that they will pay for their selfishness in their next lives, R.K. replied succinctly, ‘In my experience it doesn’t!’

While I cannot but respect my friend’s position, especially as I have lived a highly privileged life, it seems to me worth noting that protest movements have arisen in Indian society when the caste system has become too rigid. Buddhism was one of these. Within Hinduism there was also the powerful Bhakti, or devotional, movement in the middle ages, which produced the Hindu mystical poets known as saint-singers. The west Indian Bhakti saint Jnanadeva had a group of devotees that included an untouchable. The most prominent north Indian saint was Ramananda, and he opened his sect to all comers. One of his followers, Sant Ravi Das, is still widely revered by Dalits. In the south, Basavanna, a devotee of Shiva, created an influential sect based on a rejection of inequality of every kind. He did something revolutionary for his time by allowing two of his followers, a boy born an untouchable and a girl from a Brahmin family, to marry. The Sikh movement, which opposed caste, emerged in the Punjab in the sixteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the rise to influence of Bengali reformer Ramohan Roy, who was the first of several prominent Hindus who sought to reinvigorate their religion and remove the divisiveness of caste. In the twentieth century, a high caste Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, led a movement against the excesses of the caste system, and another movement was led by Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Unlike Gandhi, Bhim Rao Ambedkar was a Dalit himself, one of the very few who managed to get a good education in those days, becoming a brilliant lawyer and playing a major role in drawing up India’s new constitution after Independence. Today it is Ambedkar who is the hero of the Dalits, not the Mahatma.

The caste system is shifting now, in a typically Indian way. Changes are taking place, although not necessarily fast enough, but there is no talk of revolution, or of a violent swing against this progress. Paradoxically, caste is also enabling Dalits to stand together in the fight for their rights, and as a result they have become a powerful political force. India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, or UP as it’s always known, has had a Dalit Chief Minister who, moreover, is also a woman. She remains one of the most powerful politicians in UP. In eastern UP, in the village of Jakrauli, near the River Ganga beyond Varanasi, I came to know a Dalit called Budh Ram, an agricultural labourer. The British television network Channel Four had commissioned me and the television producer Jonathan Steadall to make a series of television portraits of Indians to mark the fiftieth anniversary of India’s Independence. These portraits ranged from a Maharaja to a Dalit, and that Dalit was Budh Ram.

We learned that Budh Ram’s biradari had decided that they didn’t want to worship in the same temple as the upper castes but wanted to have their own temple in which to pray to their own saint, Sant Ravi Das. The upper castes had put up stiff resistance to this, and also objected to the Dalits’ annual festival celebrating the birthday of Sant Ravi Das. Because the Dalit biradari had stood together and the local legislator had backed them, by the time we arrived to film they had built their temple, and we filmed Budh Ram worshipping in it. The Dalits were less confident about the future of the festival, but later I discovered that it continued to take place each year.

Because the Indian way, as I understand it, is the middle way – a gradual process of balanced progress – I have found that I must strive to change my own way of looking at things accordingly or become out of balance myself. But the search for balance can also be taken too far. It can lead to woolly-mindedness or indifference. Once I came to believe that it was unbalanced to claim that Jesus was the one way, the one truth and the one light, following that way seemed less important and I gradually stopped being a practising Anglican.

In my early fifties I was brought up with a jolt when I nearly died from measles. The period of recovering from a serious illness is often a time of introspection, and for me it also proved to be another of those significant moments in my life in which free will played no part. The British High Commissioner of the time, Sir Robert Wade Gearey, came to visit me and gave me a copy of the Jesuit Gerard Hughes’ book The God of Surprises. I don’t know why he chose that book, because I had never discussed religion with him before, but it proved an inspired choice.

Gerald Priestland, a great religious affairs correspondent of the BBC, had also recommended God of Surprises, saying it might be particularly useful for those ‘who find it hard to forgive themselves: the stumblers and agnostics who hardly dare believe that God is in them’. He was right. At that stage in my life I was little more than an agnostic who had stumbled very often. I found the book more than useful: it made me realise how agnostic I had become and what a loss that was. In the directions Gerard Hughes gave for beginners seeking the God he said was in all of us, he seemed to me to be talking of the God of experience, the God of inner reality that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan has also written about.

But at the same time, the Jesuit also warned against ‘go it alone’ religion, saying, ‘Because we are liable to self-deception and tend to use God and Christ to justify and support our narrow ways of thinking and acting, we need the institutional and the critical elements of the Church as a check to our self-deception.’ I realised that I also needed the Church’s worship, liturgy, and sacraments, which had first awakened in me that sense of the transcendent I believe is latent in all of us. So I returned to the Anglican tradition, and although I have found it difficult to commit myself fully, I believe that if I ever come as close as Gerard Hughes has done to the God within me it will be within the tradition of my Church. I have certainly conceived a love for that Church’s tradition that I never felt before.

That said, it’s impossible to live in India for long without taking an interest in yoga, which is not a normal Anglican practice, although it too is concerned with spiritual awareness. In its many different forms yoga is much more than a mere keep-fit technique or an alternative to the ubiquitous gyms which are one of the latest Western imports to India. Gyms seem to me to be little more than torture chambers and one of the first things my yoga teacher taught me was that you should never torture your body; you should make gradual progress. She told me, ‘You have a saying – “a healthy mind in a healthy body” – and that is what yoga is about. It teaches that the mental and the physical have to be kept in balance.’ Of course, physical exercises are just one part of yoga and even they, properly understood, have a goal beyond physical and mental welfare.

I once made a radio programme about one of the great yoga teachers of our time, B.K.S. Iyengar, whose centres are now found throughout the world. We started the programme with Guruji, as he is known to his followers, talking to me while standing on his head. At the age of eighty he was still amazingly fit and able to do the most advanced yoga exercises, but he stressed that these were not just bodily exercises. ‘Why develop like a racehorse, as is the case with so many wrestlers, athletes, and gymnasts? In time the racehorse becomes a cart horse,’ he said. ‘Instead, realise that the body and the mind have to be integrated and spiritual awareness has to flow with each movement.’

The aim of all forms of yoga is to achieve spiritual fulfilment. But does practising yoga mean that we can dispense with organised religion, as so many in the West seem to think? I had never thought that yoga conflicted with my Anglicanism, but when I decided to write this book I felt I should discuss this issue. So Gilly and I caught the misnamed Mussourie Express from Delhi, travelling overnight at an average speed of about twenty-five miles an hour, to arrive at Haridwar, a historic pilgrimage place on the Ganga, just after dawn. There, we took a taxi up to Rishikesh, another site sacred to Hindus.

When I first visited Rishikesh more than forty years ago, it was a small pilgrimage centre for those who wanted to worship the Ganga as she emerges from the Himalayas to begin her long journey across the north Indian plain. Pilgrimage has now become an essential part of India’s leisure industry, to the extent that one bank of the Ganga is scarred by the ramshackle urban sprawl that is standard throughout Indian towns that have developed too rapidly.

A walk across the suspension bridge named the Laxman Jhula, or ‘swing of Laxman’, after the god Rama’s brother, leads to the garish temples, the ashrams and the dharamsalas where pilgrims stay. We were headed for an ashram some distance away from the centre of Rishikesh to discuss the relationship between yoga and organised religion with Swami Veda Bharati, one of the leading teachers of yoga meditation. Before setting out I had read his book, which has the bold and some might consider presumptuous title, God. In the book he says:

God, for me, is truth, and truth is that which exists in all times – the past, present and future. It is self-existent; it was never born, so it never dies. It is the fountainhead of light and love … That truth is both within and without, so one can directly attain it by realizing the truth within himself. It is possible to do this.

The truth, Swami Veda Bharati believes, can be experienced through yoga meditation, but he would never suggest this is the only way to experience it.

Swamiji’s master, Swami Rama, was a renowned teacher who had spent long years in the Himalayas learning from the ascetics who lived in caves there. He had many strange experiences, which he recorded in his autobiography. These included witnessing a Swami decide the day he should die – and did die – only to return to life again because he was so disgusted by the Hindus, Muslims and Christians squabbling among themselves over who should perform his last rites. Stories like this are difficult for most of us to accept, but they did nothing to damage Swami Rama’s credibility among his followers.

His own powers, his magnetic personality and his spirituality attracted disciples of all religions and from all parts of the globe; and they were not necessarily unworldly credulous people. They raised the money to buy an old monastery in the United States to convert into a meditation centre, and during the last years of Swami Rama’s life they enabled him to build a large modern hospital and medical school near Rishikesh. I was shown around the hospital by a doctor who had returned from an eminent career in America – so eminent that a kidney complaint was named after him. He wasn’t a man to accept lightly that there could be a return to life after someone had been declared clinically dead, yet it was Swami Rama who had inspired him to give up his career in America and to come to this hospital in a remote part of India.

Before he died, Swami Rama appointed Veda Bharati as his successor. Veda Bharati had already taken the vows of a Swami in a long ceremony during which he had to state that he had risen above the desire ‘for sex and family, for wealth and comfort, for fame and honour’. He was also asked whether he would abandon his ‘previous name, previous life and previous relations’, and performed the ceremony for honouring the memory of the dead as an acknowledgement that ‘everything of I and mine is dead’. After the ceremony, the only possessions Veda Bharati would be allowed were a water vessel, a loin cloth for underwear, upper garments, lower garments and wooden slippers. At the end of the ritual he was presented with robes the colour of ‘the light of the rising sun’ and told: ‘Wherever you walk you bring peace of the morning, of the light of dawn, the light of the rising sun … From now you are a being of light.’

The last time I had met Swami Veda Bharati was at the greatest of all Hindu festivals, the Maha Kumbh Mela, at Allahabad in 2002. On the most auspicious bathing day of the Mela, he had taken part in the procession of one of the Akharas, or Hindu monastic orders, down to the confluence of the sacred rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The procession had been led by naked ascetics dancing, jumping and shouting like children in their excitement. Then came a long line of more sober monks robed in garments the colour of the rising sun. Swami Veda Bharati had been among the few who were enthroned on chariots pulled by a tractor. At one time they might well have ridden on elephants, but elephants had been banned from the Mela for fear that they might run amuck. The chariots were reserved for the men and women who had been awarded the title of Mahamandaleshwar, the most senior honour bestowed by the Akharas on scholars. It had been awarded to Swami Veda Bharati in recognition of his knowledge and his understanding of the Vedas and yogic texts.

However, Swami Veda Bharati’s elevated status has not gone to his head. He remains warm-hearted and welcoming. When I e-mailed him about this book, he immediately suggested that I come to his ashram in Rishikesh. His book God had aroused doubts in me about reconciling yoga with Anglicanism, or indeed any form of organised religion. Swami Veda Bharati said, ‘In yoga one simply practises the methods and waits for the doctrine to emerge out of the experience.’ To my mind, that seemed like putting the cart before the horse, as doctrine had come first in my life. The doctrines of organised religion seemed to be very much a secondary concern in yoga. According to Swamiji: ‘The yogi ministers to people of all faiths, lets them see the ever-present God in their own church, temple, mosque, or pagoda, but first see him in the temple which is the human personality.’ While I wanted to find the God in my human personality, I also wanted to stand in the Anglican tradition as a check to the sort of self-deception Gerard Hughes warned against.

It was a busy time at the ashram because a fifty-day yajna (a Vedic sacrificial rite) was coming to an end, and one of the Shankaracharyas – the holder of an important, historic Hindu office – had come to take part in the final rituals. Gilly and I were allotted a small cottage opposite Swami Veda Bharati’s, but it wasn’t until the evening that he was able to spare us some time.

The Swami is quite small and appears to be almost swamped by his robes, which are the colour of the rising sun. But unlike many Hindu holy men, he has quite neatly cut grey hair and is clean-shaven. He speaks with a slight North American twang.

The Swami travels a great deal in North America and so we talked about the individualism of American culture. When I suggested that America had got this out of balance, he replied, ‘I’ve found that every weakness is a weakening of a strength. American pioneers had two strengths: one was their individualism – you can’t be a pioneer without that. The other was their interdependence: they couldn’t have constructed America without working together. Now their interdependence has weakened.’

We discussed the lack of a religious sensitivity in the West today and the lack of humility in a culture that exalts itself above nature. Eventually coming to the subject that had brought me to Rishikesh, I said to Swami Veda Bharati, ‘I get the impression from your book God that yoga doesn’t have much time for religious traditions, their scriptures, liturgies, rituals and teachings.’

Swami Veda Bharati smiled. ‘Surely I must have some time for organised religion or why would I be a member of an order of Hindu monks and why would I have accepted the title of Mahamandaleshwar?’

‘But how do you reconcile your practice of orthodox Hinduism with your belief that personal experience must come first?’ I wondered.

‘There are two parts to everything, from outside in and inside out,’ he said. ‘The great prophets and founders of religion – did they have any doctrine to develop their religion from? No, they had their experience and they translated that into language. For a large number of people, however, religion is the path to God. It’s only the other way round with the ground-breakers: God gives them the religion.’

‘Well, I’m certainly not a ground-breaker,’ I admitted. ‘It was my love of liturgy and worship which formed my path to God, and I still seem to have a long way to go before I get there!’

The Swami laughed. ‘Well, you really must come here for a longer time and learn to meditate. But seriously – we are not too far apart. I enjoy all the liturgies, but if it stops there and doesn’t give a person the aspiration to personally experience God then it becomes dogma.’

To reinforce his point, Swami Veda Bharati went on to maintain that religions are based on the experience of their founders. ‘The scriptures point you towards God by telling you what Jesus experienced or what the Buddha experienced,’ he said. ‘Their experiences were so powerful, so peaceful, so life-changing that those around them had no option but to believe, and their belief became a religion.’

‘It was Swami Rama who told me I must verify the scriptures I read by experience gained through yoga meditation. I find many Roman Catholics who have verified their scriptures through yoga meditation, experience a deep meaning in their religion for the first time. Even those who are absolutely atheistic discover there is something beyond “physical being” and some go on to join churches or other religious organisations.’

The next day I witnessed the Swami’s commitment to his religious tradition with my own eyes. Two ceremonies ended the fifty-day Vedic sacrifice. The first was a final Yajna in the ashram’s temple. The ritual was celebrated by more than twenty Brahmin priests. Swami Veda Bharati and the Shankaracharya sat cross-legged in front of the sacred fire. The Brahmins invoked Agni, the god of fire who carries the offerings and messages of us humans to the other deities and brings back their messages. The flames crackled as tins of ghee, or clarified butter, were poured on them. They rose so high that Swamiji had to stand back and hold a long hollow bamboo through which one of the Brahmins poured more ghee onto the fire. The Brahmins also threw handfuls of samagree, a mixture of more than thirty barks, roots, herbs, and leaves, onto the fire. Each time they chanted words to the effect of: ‘Not mine, not mine – I offer all the claims of my ego as an offering of worshipful surrender. I burn all my desires and claims in the fire.’

In the second ceremony, Swami Veda Bharati sat in front of a line of nine young girls and one young boy, while texts glorifying the Divine Mother were recited and sacred mantras repeated time and time again. The Swami then prostrated himself before the children, washed their feet and made offerings to them. He explained to me later, ‘I find great fulfilment in feeling that I know myself to be smaller than a little girl and prostrate myself before the deity in their form. Having invoked the presence of the divinity, the girl becomes a manifestation of the divine presence.’ Swami Veda Bharati told me that the experience he had gained through meditation had verified the rituals he performed and given them a deeper meaning.

My experiences in India forced me to think again about the faith I had been taught because I felt that I couldn’t just ignore what was right before my eyes: the existence of many ways to God. I did get lost, but my gradual acceptance of these many ways enabled me to return to my tradition with my faith strengthened. When I came to understand that, for thousands of years, in changing historical circumstances, in different countries and cultures and climates, people had experienced the existence of what appears to be the same reality, although describing that reality differently, I saw that a universal God made far more sense rationally than one who limited his activities to Christians.

The descriptions of the divine may be different, but the experience seems to me to be fundamentally the same, and this has strengthened my conviction that God or the Ultimate Reality does exist. Of course, many will argue that this experience is merely an illusion and a response to the desire to believe that life has a purpose and doesn’t end with death. If that is so, it is an extraordinarily powerful, persistent, and prevalent illusion. Maybe it’s the arrogance that can accompany rationalism that prevents many people from acknowledging that there could be a God, or a reality, far more powerful than we mortals and our powers of reasoning can comprehend. It is the arrogance that can accompany religious certainty that prevents many from acknowledging the validity of other experiences of God than their own. My feeling is that we have to be humble enough about our religion to recognise that it will never be certain; there has to be an element of questioning and doubt. But Tennyson’s Ancient Sage was surely right when he advised us to ‘cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt’.

DELHI: AN INDIAN UNDERSTANDING