It would be quite understandable for anyone next to my profusely sweating, zoned-out figure to think that I am a devout Catholic, rattling off, ‘And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us’ like a red herring prospectus fine print as if to avoid hellfire. When what I actually do is stave off diarrhoeic devastation by using a string of familiar, formulaic words to take my mind off my bowels.
Do I mind if I come across as a believer of the aforementioned ‘lord’? Not really. It’s no big deal either way. And maybe what I do is a form of belief – using a religious object for secular use. No harm done. No harm meant. And personal harm averted.
Two days after Chandrayaan-3‘s lander Vikram landed safely on the moon — after crossing two crucial stops and having many Lord’s prayers muttered – in a case challenging the use of a designated public venue for Durga Puja, the Calcutta High Court observed that Durga Puja is a secular festival, not a ‘purely religious’ one.
The judgment is worth repeating wholesale: ‘As is public knowledge, the Durga Puja festival is not confined merely to the worship or religious offerings component of the incarnation of feminine power but also a melting pot of different cultures... Hence, there is as much an element of the ceremony, cultural programs, festival, and fanfare involved as religious worship. In such a sense, the [festival] is much more secular in nature than a pure religious performance of a particular community and cannot, thus, be narrowed down to being a mere ‘religious offering’ of a particular community.’ The same way practising Hindus can be found enjoying mulled wine and tropical Santas during ‘Christ’s mass’.
Which brings me to squawks I’ve been hearing since Vikram’s landing site on the moon was named Shiv Shakti Point. I think it’s a lovely, apt name, nicely cosmic, cosmological and cosmopolitan a la Nariman Point meets Dashashwamedh Ghat. It also clicks well with the pop cultural iconography of the crescent moon on Shiv’s head that I’ve seen since calendar art was invented. The squawkers don’t like Shiv Shakti Point because it apparently channels ‘Hindu supremacy‘ – much like my tummy salvation mantra points to ‘Christian supremacy’. The real problem, I suspect, for these folks who’d rather have the spot named Pinkus Floydus or anything ‘more scientificy English’ is with who announced the name, not the name itself. When Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger wrote lucidly about how the lingam in Hindu iconography is wonderfully both symbolic and physical at the same time – quite like Schrodinger’s alive-and-dead cat to illustrate wave-particle duality in physics – the monomeaning-acs went ballistic. Being a ‘foreigner’ made her easy prey. And yet, it was Doniger who pointed out how the history of interpretations of the lingam in India ‘reveals the ways that the actions of the state – in this case, the presence of foreign powers, Muslim and British, who viewed the lingam negatively – have deeply influenced native Hindu perceptions of the body of their own god’.
Restricting a cultural reference to its ‘literal’ religious meaning and purpose — the Lord’s Prayer, Durga puja, Shiv lingam, or naming a lunar site Shiv Shakti Point – is to disempower, indeed disembowel, it. Religion is the ‘opium of the masses’. But as Marx’s earlier line says, it is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.’ And as an atheist who regularly uses the Lord’s Prayer as isabgol, I’ll add, religion is also the delight for the fun-seeker.