Inter-faith tolerance not the only issue

It is a pity that, in our land where for thousands of years the question of plurality has been debated in metaphysical and ethical terms, the word has been debased to mean a mere tolerance of divergent religious faiths and cultural habits. Discu-ssions on plurality in the context of the ultimate nature of the seen and unseen universe are no longer the order of the day.

Can the diversity of dress codes, sexuality, religious convictions and morals be practised if the finer questions of philosophical plurality are shoved under the carpet? Reducing the larger expanse of plurality to quot;ethnic tolerancequot; or quot;communal harmonyquot; is putting the cart before the horse.

If the deeper springs of religious and societal beliefs are not debated, measures to keep the adherents of these faiths and communities in harmony are not going to succeed. Religious and cultural denominations will then be taken over by chest-beating demagogues who shall proclaim the right to dictate their whims on behalf of vast populations. Their conflicting claims will continue to create recurring flare-ups.

The teaching of Nanak Dev, for instance, provided a fresh method of infusing japa and community service in the nirguna tradition of the medieval bhakti movement. He chose to provide a fresh plurality and thus a new identity for spiritual upliftment and social welfare. But the controversy we witnessed recently on helmets for Sikh women riding on scooter pillions, was hardly an issue of religious diversity. The current imbroglio on the film Fire is another example where, on one hand, violence was used by self-anointed culture-kings to prevent the scr-eening and, on the other, provocation was provided by the upholders of lesbianism under the guise of a right to dissent or rejection of patriarchic oppression. If sexual aberration can be an article of pluralism, without a definition of the prime objectives of sexuality, one can predict a pluralist pandemonium.

The obligations of societies professing pluralism go beyond tolerance. Such societies are obliged to actively undertake a reasonable acquaintance with the articles of divergent faiths and beliefs. But, in the Indian system of formal education, religious and moral education has been kept out of school and college education as a guiding principle of the secular state.

It is presumed that acquainting a Muslim child with Hindu precepts will obstruct his allegiance to his family faith and vice versa. Hence the state shall not teach the precepts of different religions, and specially the majority religion, to children lest it shakes the faith of a child in his parental religion. In other words, it is presumed that knowing about the faith of others, of the majority in special, is detrimental.

As a concession to the minorities, on the other hand, freedom to teach their faith in schools is given as a matter of constitutional right. This theory of education is based on phobia and exclusion and instills a suspicion in the mind of other faiths. Such a kinky pedagogy can only breed the intolerant and ignorant society we have fostered where people can fall prey to any ideology from terrorism to homosexuality promoted from within or abroad.

Older societies had chosen to demarcate social norms for adherents of different faiths in stricter terms. But people were more aware of the fundamentals of each other8217;s religion or sect. A Jain child may not have gone to the same ashram as a Vaishnava or never shared his lunch with a Shaivite, but the pedagogy had a rigorous system of teaching the precepts of other systems even though for the purpose of refutation. But, what is taught today is a namby-pamby nationalism, constantly reeling under the weight of some Western ideology, be it colonialism, socialism or globalism.

In the pre-technocratic cultures spaces of common activities were fewer than now in the age of high mobility and intermixing. With great uniformising through mass production, religion, language, skin-colour bias, marital laws and food are perhaps the few focal points of distinction that pluralise populations. The last two may perhaps take another half a century to homogenise. Therefore, it has become all the more relevant that basic understanding about the operation of the first three is strongly cultivated by one and all. But the emphasis has now to shift from differences between peoples to the deeper unity of humankind.

The task can begin only by locating a common ground between various religious and cultural beliefs. It may be remembered that commonality between beliefs and not their differences are the raison d8217;etre of communication. If communication is to be something more than an exchange of goods or info-commodity, then we may benefit most from turning to the core of vibrant similarity between religious and cultural identities that exists beneath all differences and which, instead of being wiped out by the individual differences, sustains itself and the differences as well.

It is like the consonance between two musical notes, always independent but always capable of generating a mutual resonance by virtue of their common grounding in a given scale. Within our pluralism, we need to explore our common scale.

In fact, all communication rests upon the presumption that differences of identities and expressions are born of a common ground, not by themselves. In other words, the One creates the many, the Scale defines the notes.

Definition of the underlying One may not essentially be theistic, but can be material too as was the case with many ancient philosophies like Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Epicurianism and Stoicism. Identities are meaningful only so long as they interact, as do the musical notes in relation to one another. Cultures are vibrant only when they reveal their consonances. Otherwise, they stagnate or become violent.

The writer is an associate professor of English at Delhi University

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