On the morning of Thursday, 21 September 1995, a miracle took place in a Delhi temple. The image of elephant-headed Ganesha drank up the milk offered to him in worship. News of this event spread throughout India and was reported world-wide the next day. Hindus in every continent, in temples and in homes reported that their Ganesha too was drinking the milk offered to him. A barrister reported from Malaysia that the plastic Ganesha on his car dashboard had exhibited the same thirst. The London Guardian of 23 September reported it as ‘probably the first example of global religious fervour propagated by mass telecommunications’.
This world-wide Hinduism was counterbalanced by the modernity of the national press in India which generally declared it to be no miracle, to be indeed a waste of time and milk – under such headlines as ‘Ganesh Hysteria Peters Out’, ‘Have the Gods had their Fill?’ and ‘Temples Deserted, Rationalists Prove Capillary Action Works Always’. The usual editorial line was that such superstitious credulity was incompatible with the secular and scientific orientation of independent India. Among English-language publications it was left to the Hawaii-published Hinduism Today to lament that ‘in India, which has taught mankind so much about religious tolerance, it is a surprise to see such an antiHindu bias. Years of British “divide and rule” policy, Christian missionary attacks and Marxist influence have created this atmosphere of bias. Lord Ganesha, Guardian of Dharma and Remover of Obstacles, has now revealed this anomalous situation to the entire world.’ That is, Ganesha had deliberately exposed the anti-Hindu bias of the Indian press. Here we see at once the global scope of Hinduism today, the strength of traditional belief, the rational scepticism of the Indian press, and the embattled attitude of the new fundamentalism.
Ganesha became the first god to span the world instantaneously. What occurred was not simply world-wide reporting of a miracle, but the instantaneous world-wide occurrence of multiple instances of the same miracle. This miracle contrasts with the popular myth wherein the chubby Ganesha opts out of the hassle of circumnavigating the globe: when Shiva offers his two sons a mango as prize for the first to race round the world, six-headed Skanda dashes off on his peacock, while Ganesha merely ambles round his parents to claim the mango, explaining that they are the universe in themselves.
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Like six-headed Skanda, modernity encircles the globe. Ganesha, with his elephant trunk, pot belly, and plate of sweets, most bizarre of gods to Western eyes, sums up in himself the chaotic variety of Hinduism. Shiva got his sons to run a race. I venture to set Hinduism against modernity: I propose a consideration of Hinduism and modernity by means of which each will cast light on the other. Skanda, of course, is no less profoundly Hindu than Ganesha, an ‘ejaculation’ of Shiva’s semen while Ganesha is made from a fold of Parvati’s sari; Skanda’s origins lie deep in south India. But the rivalry of the two brothers justifies for the moment my metaphor.
Both Hinduism and modernity are somewhat arbitrary intellectual constructs. Modernity is not a word used in ordinary speech. Modernity is not simply the modern world or modern times; it is the theorization of the modern world. Hinduism too, though an older term than modernity, began as an extraneous, external term for the indigenous religions of India other than the reform movements that became separate, clearly self-identified, religions: Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Hinduism comprises Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, themselves refracted in turn into more distinct groupings. Both terms – Hinduism and modernity – constitute theorizations.
Our point of focus is not India and the West today, though that combination is the background of our investigation, the theatre in which this performance proceeds, the stage that Hinduism and modernity tread. Hinduism is the religion of 80 per cent of Indians, but it has only recently been sharply defined. Modernity is the time in which we all live, but here it is used in the sense of a coherent body of doctrine, a kind of sociological theology, a reified entity. Hinduism as a unit is set out in a stream of mainly Western books; it is mainly Western scholarship that has set out for inspection Hinduism as a ‘world religion’. Modernity is conjoined with endless subjects in hundreds of book titles; its hard core is provided by studies of such authors as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. The world has become disenchanted, art has lost its aura. For Weber the peculiar conditions of the modern world were to be explained by the uniqueness of Europe; for Benjamin, messianic materialist, modernity is the landscape of the metropolis. For Weber, modern bureaucracy has created an iron cage for mankind; for Benjamin, mankind is seduced by the bright lights of arcades of shops in the big city. These two cult figures for current definers of modernity serve to delimit our view of modernity.
~~Hinduism and Modernity -by- David Smith
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