Being Called A Hindu Is Like An Abuse To Me: Dalit Writer [Filthy Caste System Central To Hinduism]

Being Called A Hindu Is Like An Abuse To Me: Dalit Writer Meenakshi Sinha, TNN, 23 January 2010

JAIPUR: "Being called a Hindu is like a gaali (abuse) to me. I use Valmiki as a surname because having one is almost a necessity these days. If you just say Omprakash, it's not enough. People demand a surname as they come from a certain mindset.

Caste envelops every aspect of life in India," said Omprakash Valmiki, leading Dalit writer in Hindi, at the fifth Jaipur literature festival on Friday.

Valmiki was one of three speakers at the session, Outcasts: The Search for Public Conscience with P Sivakami, Dalit novelist and political activist from Chennai. Kancha Ilaiah, political science professor in Osmania University, Hyderabad and author of the bestseller 'Why I am Not a Hindu', was the third speaker. Ilaiah is an OBC by caste.

Sivakami maintained that upper-caste Hindus only have a caste conscience and no public conscience. "They lack human conscience," she said. Sivakami resigned from civil services after 29 years of service to join the Bahujan Samaj Party in 2008.

Valmiki, author of celebrated autobiography Joothan (1997), maintained that Dalits continue to be shunned in the realms of culture, literature and the arts. "And that is despite 60 years of independence and numerous laws guaranteeing their fundamental rights," he said.

His other works include three collections of poetry: Sadiyon ka santap (The centuries-old anguish, 1989), Bas! bahut ho chuka (Stop it! That's enough, 1997) and Ab aur nahin (Not any more, 2009).

The leaps of logic in your post are of Grand Canyon dimensions. When informed that the Indian President is not popularly elected by the national electorate at large and the fact that only once in a rare moment a so-called untouchable Dalit is appointed by legislative assemblies, you bend reasoning into a pretzel to make the point that this “can be quite powerful” without telling us how this has changed the indelible and entrenched practice of Hindu casteism as practiced by Hindu clerics and the masses at-large.

Your contention that I am resorting to “double-standards” as an excuse for reaching into distant histories of racial prejudice is absurd only because the standards we are using here are not what different societies and sects practiced in the past but what an enlightened society does today. That you reduce this to a caricature by a cartoon depicting a cruel torture from the Inquisition is no more valid that a reproduction of a slave lynching or a hanging from a tree. Indeed, your perceived rebuttals now take the comic form of demanding a “percentage relevance of Sati (Hindu wife burnings) in India”- but whatever this means, it was British rule that brought a swift end to this barbaric ritual. No need for graphic cartoons of this practice on this post.

Hereditary priesthood in ancient Judaism was no more than part of a larger societal acceptance of temporal and religious authority through lineage as did kings and queens and maharajas and maharanis. The reference to the body of Talmudic knowledge being bequeathed from one priestly generation to another was at least a rationale of some merit. This was offered as a sociological explanation not a justification. Not so, with the uniquely religiously affiliated institution of (Hindu) casteism.

Finally you end with irrelevant quotes from the Gita to bolster a puristic form of Hinduism that you contend has since been corrupted and ingrained into modern day Hindu practice and ritual. Perhaps, the sentiments of a former Hindu, an outstanding scholar, a convert to Catholicism, and now Governor of Louisiana may be apt.

Here’s Bobby Jindal in his own words.

My friend’s exhortations did, however, prompt me to investigate my Hindu faith and motivated me to read the Bhagavad-Gita. Although I found the stories fascinating and the writing magnificent, I was uncomfortable when Krishna convinced a reluctant Arjuna to secure his rightful inheritance by making war against his cousins. Though I did not like seeing a deity advocate violence, this feeling was not enough to reject an entire faith. I wanted to examine Hinduism on its own merits and doctrines.

The main tenets of the Hindu faith involve two basic beliefs. The first is that all souls earn their way into nirvana, a state of blessedness, through good deeds. Since this takes many lifetimes, souls are reincarnated until they succeed. One’s material circumstances are based on the past life’s choices; the very worst souls are incorporated into animal bodies...

The second tenet is that all religions are equally valid paths to the same God. This strips one of the right to criticize any set of religious beliefs, including those of cults and other extreme groups. Thus, God is not concerned with having His followers believe in truth. It is sincerity, and not content, that matters. Yet I had had for years a sincere prayer life and still felt a void in my religious faith. Though I was searching for an objectively true faith that would lead me to God, I was beginning to doubt this existed and was ready to accept the “philosophies,” if not the religious beliefs, associated with Hinduism.

The rest of course as we know is history as Gov. Jindal consigned Hinduism to it’s proper place in the pantheon of legendary cults.

Enough said.

Oh, LOL!

Let me just quote your pasta-logic from your previous post, to set a frame of reference. You implied that witch-burnings in Europe were a Pagan practise. Oh, my, who knew that the pagans were a powerful force in 17th-century Europe?

Or for that matter, the Salem Witch Trials. Did pagans swim across the Atlantic to America, too?

Sati was a statistical aberration and not a norm of Hindu society- not a shred of it is even mentioned in the Gita. Likewise with the witch-burnings in Europe. You have repeatedly failed to convince anyone otherwise, your irrelevant ramblings, notwithstanding.

As for the Indian President, let’s look at his own words:

“That the nation has found a consensus for its highest office in someone who has sprung from the grass-roots of our society and grown up in the dust and heat of this sacred land is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centre stage of our social and political life. It is this larger significance of my election rather than any personal sense of honour that makes me rejoice on this occasion.”

- President K. R Narayanan, on his inaugural address, with Chief Justice J. S. Verma in the Central Hall of Parliament.

Your contention that “noble Talmudic knowledge” requires hereditary transmission is laughably silly- stupid, in fact. You merely keep going around in endless loops, instead of validating how hereditary transmission is superior to the non-hereditary kind.

About relative time scales in history, are you implying that were you to be born and living merely 300-400 years ago, you would have criticised Christianity with the same fervour, as you do, a non-organised religion like Hinduism, today? Please detail your answer.

The “graphic cartoon” by the way, was the burning of Joan of Arc. Want an account of the entire event? I didn’t think so.

PS: It wasn’t the pagans that burnt her alive.

As for Bobby Jindal, who has clearly acknowledged the spiritual side of the Gita in your own excerpt, perhaps he escaped reading the Old Testament:

1 Samuel 15:2-3

“Thus saith the LORD of hosts, go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Infant and suckling? For what fault?!

When weakness in intellect confronts hard truths what we have is a nervous LOL!. Perhaps that’s all you could do. Never mind the historical truths that it was the Christian Emperor Charlemagne who outlawed the pagan practice of witch burnings. Nor do we need the Joan of Arc example, as one among many, in pre-Renaissance times. Of course all this, is either to explain away or worse justify an overt and central ritual of a barbaric religious practice of Hindu casteism. So too was wife burning which has its roots in vile Hindu traditions where widows are dragged against their wish onto a lighted pyre.

The first woman known as Sati was the consort of Lord Shiva. She burnt herself in fire as protest against her father who did not give her consort Shiva the respect she thought he deserved, while burning herself she prayed to be reborn again as the new consort of Shiva, which she became and her name in the new incarnation was Parvati.

This is the stuff of Hinduism as conveyed from one generation to another.

As for a Dalit Indian’s President address, this is supposed to float a sea-change in entrenched Hindu rituals by the sheer force of such lofty rhetoric about concerns for the common man. What happened to Robespierre? This would be news to the speakers of the Indian literary panel that formed the subject of this thread.

What keeps you from continually failing to comprehend the point about Jewish clergy being hereditary? You insist that I “validat(e) how hereditary transmission is superior to the non-hereditary kind” This is a straw argument. It was never raised. Go back and check the earlier posts. What was offered was a rationale not a justification? Do you understand the difference between the two? Accusations like “laughable” “stupid” etc gets you nowhere except suggest an infantile mind at work.

Finally, you quote from Samuel 1 :15:2-3 as a riposte to Gov. Bobby Jindal view of Hindu deity violence. This is a classic case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Interpretation of scripture is not like reading a book for kindergartners. In Jewish tradition, the Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews and this passage you cite as been the subject of intense discussion and interpretation from Maimonides down to present times.

All in all, you must concede that Hinduism encompasses a system of beliefs and rituals that are anathema to civil society and cannot withstand the rigors of serious intellectual inquiry and human experientce which explains why it is thankfully confined to a geographical swath of millions of illiterates and their clerics, otherwise known as Hindu India.

Weakness in intellect? ROFLMAO! Do you detect nervousness in this as well? Good.

Your bicycle-chain circular-logic illogic is laughably visible in all your replies to me. Let us now delve into the details, shall we? Here goes:

Joan of Arc. Well, what do you think was the estimates for the numbers of “witches” that were toasted in Europe, in times far, far since the pagans were relegated to a fringe minority? For a period between 1400 to 1700, the estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000. Want citations?

There is nothing in the Bhagavad-Gita that condones or supports either the burnings or murder. At least, not nearly as explicitly as similar categories of violence is condoned in the Old Testament. Please note that in spite of your oft-repeated and frequently abused phrase, “Hindu roots”, you have absolutely and flatly failed to prove any substantial links making the practices more endemic to Hinduism, than was slavery, torture and murder endemic to pre-Reforms Christianity.

The Bhagavad-Gita, does not condone any of this nonsense. Prove otherwise, and you would have contributed something to the discussion, instead of maintaining polar orbits around your circular illogic-based false philosophy.

As for Parvati, aside from the hilarity of it, now you quote mythology as actual practice? What sort of translation did you apply, to decipher that for Parvati to transform from her previous form, she had to undergo physical immolation? After all, you are the one prancing all over about my “misunderstanding” of Old Testament violence, due to my “poor Hebrew translation” skills. All this, leaving alone the main FACT that the Bhagavad-Gita has this to say about mythologies and rituals:

“For not by Vedas cometh this, nor sacrifice, nor alms,
Nor works well-done, nor penance long, nor prayers nor chaunted psalms,
That mortal eyes should bear to view the Immortal Soul unclad.”

- Bhagavad-Gita, Ch:XI lines 313-317.

News to the speakers of the Indian “literary panel”, of the like of Kancha Illaiah, you mean, who is none other than a race-pandering racist, advocating that Catholic missionaries are responsible for sustaining discrimination in India, as shown in my past post to you.

You have not given any valid explanation for the necessity of hereditary priesthood in Judaism. All you did was make silly excuses using vague nonsense such as “psychologically proven”, “noble task of transmission” etcetera. Go back to the same yourself, and provide an objective, convincing, holistic, scientific reason for the benefits of hereditary transmission of priesthood in Judaism, instead of making laughable attempts at dusting off this contentious issue under the carpet, as if to convince yourself that I am going tire from your circular arguments and let you off. Strawman argument, it is not. I am explicitly declaring that it is not, and the onus is on you, to show otherwise.

1 Samuel 2-3 is a quote that better men than either of us have discussed about, and failed to arrive at a consensus. What makes you think that your utterly idiotic explanations involving excuses like “poor translation” and “misunderstanding” is going to persuade anyone who has been following this debate, otherwise? The verse is plain and simple. There cannot be any ambiguity in it, when the protagonist speaks of slaughtering infants and toddlers, enemy or not. It is plain, uncivilised barbarity right there, and there is no other way to look at it. Go ahead, give your best shot, and explain it away.

So far, your poor logic, poor attempts at explanation, pathetic circular reasoning littering almost all of your replies here, and a penchant for not being able to objectively criticise, together with the tendency to divert into obscure tangents, has utterly devastated even the most earnest of your arguments.

The rest of us, shall meanwhile, rejoice in the ‘little’ triumphs of a progressive people.

It might help this discussion if you first cure yourself of the diarrhea of adjectives and metaphors (”bicycle-chain circular-logic illogic”) you deploy to obscure a hopeless failure to explain away the evil of casteism; filthy rituals (mandatory feces-ridden baths in the Ganges); and the barbarism of Sati that have been embedded as core beliefs of Hinduism that are practiced to this day, albeit some to a lesser extent than others.

Your central defense is that the pure Gita forbids such practices despite several explicit tracts that justify deity-mandated violence. Your defense: 1 Samuel 2-3. Conveniently, the New Covenant of the New Testament and its relation to the Old Testament is conveniently overlooked.

As to Sati (widowed wife burning) you must hearken to practices of witchcraft found in the corners of the Dark Ages to expiate the guilt of Hindu practices that were endemic until the British put a stop to it and brought a measure of civilization to these Hindu savages to say nothing of the English Criminal Code that restored a measure of western law to the colonies.

As for the Gita itself, this is nothing more than a fictional piece of literature taking the form of a poem that recites a dialogue between two main characters Prince Arjuna and Vishnu cast as a Supreme God, incarnated as Krishna, and wearing the disguise of a charioteer. Enjoy the play.

Although I must confess, I’ll take Shakespeare’s Hamlet any day!

Thank you very much for the “diagnosis”, but while you were busy prescribing:

Steelfish: “…deity-mandated violence…”, “…mandatory rituals…”, “…noble rationale…”, “…psychologically proven…”, etc.

Physician, heal thyself!

Now about 1 Samuel 2-3:

The argument that the clear and distinct order to kill and maim infants of another tribe, is justified because of a “new covenant ” in the “new testament” is ridiculously silly because the Jews don’t subscribe to any “new testament”. If the New Testament ties links of bondage to the Old, then it is the former that suffers the liabilities, and not the latter. For the millennia during which the Old was the sole arbiter, there is no excuse for the violent barbarity. As for Witch Burning, you assume that the period between 1400 AD and 1700 AD, which consumed innocent lives with religious sanction, of estimates going up to 100,000 women, seats itself in the Dark Ages? Do you know to count?

British rule in India was largely through the mode of the Princely States, where religious law was not the purview of the Criminal Code (for example, did the British criminalise Muslim polygamy? I didn't think so, either). When the same came into force in the period licking at the early 20th century, it did not bring any cataclysmic change in Indian society, for it to have affected religious practices as significantly as you falsely portray it to have been. And this, you emphasise for an issue that did not even make for more than a statistical aberration, compared to the tolls from the Witch Burnings. When Macaulay drafted the Code, it was in consultation with the religious leaders of the time, and not in their absence.

About the Gita being part of another body of literature, mnemonic devices have been a commonly utilised aid to facilitate oral transmission of teachings, in the period when writing was yet to be invented.

For you to consider it fictitious, is neither surprising, nor shocking, for it merely throws light on your abject failure to understand what constitutes belief. To elaborate, the Jews consider Christianity to be an illegitimate corruption of their faith. Among Christians themselves, the Protestants hold Catholics to be ritualistic idolaters (the habit passed off as "veneration" or "canonisation" while worshipping dead body parts, vials of dried blood, dead people and statues) and Romanists, probably for good reason:

Feast of Cocullo (Saint Domenico)

Protestants are in turn, labelled “heretics” and ridiculed, and the counter-charge appears in the form of comparisons of the fate and status of Catholic-dominated hell-holes in the Western Hemisphere, almost all of them susceptible to violent dictatorships, compared to free Protestant bastions of progress and civilization, such as the United States. It took, by the way, Protestant Reforms to cleanse Christianity of the evils of the corrupt papal office, which in the past, participated in such crimes as commissioning sinful behaviour through the sale of "indulgences", trading foreign lands and carving empires, and the like.

"Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires."

- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814.

"Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?"

- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821.

Note the unique susceptibility of Catholicism-dominated countries, to dictatorships: France (De Gaulle), Spain (Franco), Italy (Mussolini), Argentina (Pinochet), etcetera, before attacking the views of the two aforementioned Founding Fathers.

It was also interesting, by the way, that you could not really attack the contents of the Gita, and that forced you to resort to attacking its legitimacy as a religious text.

Additionally, you seem to ignore that Bobby Jindal, before he began to adopt the Catholic faith (at the "early" age of what, 20?), was still more or less an upright citizen, holding to his Hindu beliefs. So too, were his parents. What's your explanation for all of the three not turning into vicious savages, Inquisitors or witch-burners as you accuse Hindus of being?

So, besides your circular logic until now, the whole argument would begin to see some progress on your behalf if you could answer, for starters:

1. Why the hereditary priesthood in Judaism is justified (I'm not asking for a rationale, but an explanation).

2. How you would account for the barbaric violence of the Old Testament, for the period that it was held valid, according to you.

In his book “Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar”, Paul Griffiths refers to “enclosure by sequestration” where atomized pieces of knowledge are manipulated, controlled and used out of context and where facts, theories, ideas,, and all the elements of intellectual life become delicious morsels carefully trimmed off from truth as a whole. And this is exactly what you do.

You push a line of witch burning as having Christian origins when history is replete with such practices in non-Christian and pagan cultures as well. But why does this have any connection to the central tenet of the main thread that the evils of casteism are a part of the systemic belief and practice of Hindu clerics and Hindu India? Your method of defense is to point to ancient practices or summon up an indignant defense that the Gita, in its “pure form” eschews such vile beliefs and rituals. The first is irrelevant and the second (as Gov. Bobby Jindal has lucidly pointed out) is untrue because the Gita in its “pure form” explicitly validates Deity-sanctioned mass murder.

With respect to British rule in India, they left intact customary local laws as relating to marriage and inheritance but not at the expense of public order. Sati- was Hindu sanctioned murder by arson, and this barbaric rituals was outlawed.

Finally, in typical Griffithian “enclosure by sequestration” the distinction between Catholic “worship” ; “adoration”; and “veneration”; appears to have lost on you. As if to reinforce this method of shallow discourse, you pluck contra-Catholic doctrine quotes from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to work a tangent in buttressing your explanations of why filthy Hindu rituals from Sati to casteism and beliefs in deities whose prowess is conveyed in animal incarnations befitting the full spectrum of a modern day zoo including avatar-like aliens with elephantine trunks and gods with octopus-like limbs are deserving of serious intellectual inquiry. This is outside the realm of serious scholarship.

Nor have you understood the relation of the New Convenant (Douay-Rheims Bible: “But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you”) to the Old Testament (Matthew 9:17: Douay-Rheims Bible:” Neither do they put new wine into old bottles. Otherwise the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish. But new wine they put into new bottles: and both are preserved”)

It would have been much simpler had you at the outset readily acknowledged that these evil offshoots of casteism and Sati were regrettable extensions of a mytholgy that has long run its course and hold on illiterate masses of what constitutes Hindu India. While India may have missed out on the Period of Enlightenment and the Post-Renaissance era and blanked out on the forceful intellectual inquiries of Aquinas and Augustine, it is, as the saying goes, never too late. But an honest admission of this much is apparently too much to expect. Hinduism and Islam are two side of the same coin with differing emphases of worship that clash at the gates of modern civilization and are intrinsically incompatibles with the norms of the west. An observation worth more than My Two Copper Coins.

“And this is exactly what you do.”

You mean, like when you mentioned Jindal mentioning “deity-sanctioned murder”, it has to be taken without exception, whereas the 1 Samuel 15:2-3 reference (”...spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”) must be taken in isolation.

Right.

Fit this “wine” in any bottle you want, and explain.

Witch-burning was not conducted on Pagan justifications, between 1400 AD to 1700 AD. To imply the same, is devious, at best. Try again.

Sati, as mentioned innumerable times before, occurred far less often than the Witch Burnings. Whether Britain banned it or not, the action did not shake the underpinnings of Hindu society, because Sati is not, and never was, a central tenet Hinduism. You have not explained why southern India has hardly had any occurrence of Sati, in spite of having a more orthodox following of the religion. This completely hog-washes your facetious excuse of an argument for the same, and that leads you to enter wild tangents, as was noted quite early on, by me.

You must apply your Paul Griffiths-reference advice generously to your future posts, if you really intend to give a winning argument, instead of indulging in blatant obfuscation.

You accuse me of picking tangents from your faith, whilst you wilfully indulge in the same, and that miffs you, no doubt. That is why you frequently resort to cut-copy-pasting your nonsense, almost mechanically. And when you tire of that, you suggest lengthy passages to read, as a cheap and ineffective tactic to buy you time. Pathetic.

All I have as acknowledgement, is nothing you have accused of Hinduism so far, is contained in the Gita. As a logical consequence of the same that I can only wonder why it has escaped you this far, my acknowledgement of the same is tantamount to condemning Sati as abhorrent and an anathema to the core of Hinduism, as presented in the Gita. You need to use more than your two silly coins, if you want to make statements that have any value to add, to your rather empty arguments.

PS: The last two questions on my previous post to you, did you miss them?

From your earlier posts Casteism and “Sati as(sic) abhorrent and an anathema to the core of Hinduism, as presented in the Gita.”

But this is manifestly not true:

What does Krishna tell Arjuna? He asks Arjuna to fight and kill. But Arjuna is hesitating to kill his close relatives who are facing him in the battlefield. Arjuna tells Krishna: “How can I kill my close blood-brothers, cousins, uncles, and grand-uncles and gurus?” For this the god himself [in the Gita (verse 3.8) ] tells Arjuna: “Do thy bounden duty”. He orders to fight and kill, unmindful of the consequences to root out evil and re-establish the dharma.

Thus, how can you deny that the god himself is advocating mass murder?
There are other passages that imply killing as part of the caste duties of Arjuna.

No scholar theological or otherwise considers the Gita as nothing more than pure legend. It’s only reason for survival in part of an illiterate and limited geographical swamp of this world is because the waves of the Enlightened Era did not reach it shores and its belief system was not exposed to the hard rationality of Aristotleian, Aquinian, or Augustinian scrutiny. No small wonder that when scholars of the Bobby Jindal mold do in fact investigate its tenets they just as soon abandon these idols as absurd footprints from a residuary past.

Steelfish, you and I agree on many things.

But on Hinduism and the history of the Vedic writings upon which it is based, you really, really are out of your depth.

Early British and German Indologists purposely obfuscated and lied about the great antiquity of the Vedas, and many later admitted their lies.

The Vedic writings pre-date all other human civilization and many deep thinkers including Christians have derived inspiration and wisdom from them.

Your hatred of Hinduism is based on misunderstanding of what it really is. Often some current popularly understood (or propaganda put out by others) Hindu teachings and practice are not always entirely consistent with history and truth. Or even made up out of whole cloth!

The very word “Hindu” is not in the Vedas, but a word used by Muslim invaders to describe the residents of India who lived on the other side of the Indus River.

I am not going to try to debate fine points with you because you are so immersed in propaganda which originates from people who hate Hinduism and is founded on not only grave misunderstandings, but even untruths that are now widely accepted. But fortunately, many of these untruths are now being revealed - such as the bogus “Aryan invasion” theory which was made up by speculative Indologists whose purpose was to denigrate the great antiquity of Vedic civilization.

Regarding the Battle of Kurukshetra, if you actually read the Mahabharat or some of the Puranas, you would understand the background of the war, which was a war of aggression - but the side Arjuna was fighting against. Overture after overture was made by the Pandavas and Bhagavan Sri Krishna to placate and compromise with the aggressors, to no avail.

Were not bloody wars fought in the Old Testament, according to the will of God?

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