Among the many methods adopted to save Hindus from Hinduism – i.e., polytheistic idolatry that would lead to hellfire – is Roberto de Nobili’s (1577-1656) adopting the outward appearance of a Brahmin, complete with shorn head and shikha, sacred thread and even vegetarian diet, and presenting himself as a Roman Brahmin.
‘Becoming a Hindu to save the Hindus’ has precedent in Christianity; St Paul previously became like a Jew to the Jews, to “win” the Jews (1 Corinthians 9:20), in a method known as “Pauline Dissimulation.”
Could there be a subtler variation of the Pauline Dissimulation?
We get a glimpse of it in the keynote address that Senior Advocate NL Rajah delivered at Chinmayananda Hall for the release of Dr MR Venkatesh’s book, “Discovery and Bharat: Christian Constitution in a Hindu Nation”; he observed that many ideas “originated in India, travelled around the world, and then came back to India.” The event was video-recorded and can be viewed here.
He began with the well-known example of the Hindu/Arabic numerals and the Fibonacci series before diving into more legally and constitutionally pertinent examples and topics.
For instance, while the structure of the government outlined in our Constitution borrows considerably from the (British-authored) Government of India Act 1935, Rajah said that in his view, the soul of the Constitution is better captured in the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy.
Second, fundamental rights in our Constitution, Rajah pointed out, draw considerably from the USA’s Bill of Rights. He argued that the Bill of Rights themselves delink the American State from religion. The Bill of Rights formed part of the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, while the Constitution itself was ratified in 1788. To this, he added that the Treaty of Tripoli (signed Nov 1796) declares that ‘the government of the USA is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion’.
He also examined certain salient features of our Constitution. For this, he cited the Bible (primarily Deuteronomy) and our Puranas (especially Mahabharata) and the Rgveda and Atharva Veda. ‘Democracy’, Rule of Law, Non-arbitrariness and the Directive Principles were the features he elaborated on.
And lastly, he observed that Article 32 (right to Constitutional Remedy) and Article 226 (Writ jurisdiction of courts) resemble the ‘araicchi mani’ (araicchi means analysis/discussion, “mani” means bell. Araicchi mani was a bell kept outside the royal court in earlier times. Any citizen could ring the bell to call upon the authorities to hear their grievance; it was also used by Samaneethi Chozhan, a Tamil King from the Chola (Chozha) dynasty.
It’s rather disarming, isn’t it? An audience with Bharatiya Civilizational Pride would indeed get quite some feel-good vibes from being told that Bharat didn’t take democracy, rule of law or fundamental rights from the Christian West: she already had them even before the West! So you’re reverting to them – just like people revert to Islam, you see?
This is essentially a subtler variant of Pauline Dissimulation: instead of disguising the Preacher or the Messenger in local attire and customs, the Message is made to appear local or indigenous.
But in reality, the Message (a Christian idea, or the Christianized version of an idea) is never the same as a pre-Christian tradition, due to what can be called the ‘Singularity’ of Prophetic Monotheism. To understand this, let’s dig into the example of Fundamental Rights in our Constitution itself. Discovery and Bharat refers to Prof Khushal Talaksi Shah’s Note on Fundamental Rights. I quote from the full text of the Note, available here.
So far as mere theory is concerned, it was therefore not until the establishment and advancement of Christianity that the sacredness of human life and personality began to be theoretically accepted and practically given effect to.
The ‘not until’ here is crucial in that it rejects any recognition of the sacredness of human life and personality prior to Christianity. When recognition of the sacredness of human life is declared to have begun, in theory and in practice, only with Christianity, everything pre-Christian is suspect. This is what I mean by “singularity”. For anything pre-Christian to continue post this singularity, it must first be dissected and analysed, purged of any demonic elements, and re-assembled into this order.
The Ramayana is mother’s milk for India. It should be left to itself and not philosophised. Mother’s milk should not be sent to the chemical analyst!
C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji)
This is a rather poignant quote, one we can instantly relate to, but what is wrong with such a resurrection of old ideas? Adi Shankara, in the Chandogya Upanishad, invokes the Blind Men and the Elephant imagery to explain this: the elephant is more than its trunk, its ears, its limbs, its body and its tail. A ‘modern’ example would be Frankenstein’s Monster, stitched together from the parts of different bodies — an assembly that functions as though living, yet is never the original living whole.
More dispassionately, let’s examine milk itself. We know it has a lot of water, which we can, of course, dry out and add later. The increased temperatures employed for drying also affect the fat and accompanying cholesterol. This can be handled through managing the fat separately: skimming away the fat before drying, and restoring it while reconstituting.
But not just the fat; even heat-sensitive B vitamins are lost at the temperature, leading to reconstituting needing vitamin fortification. Note that this is a different ‘loss’: we don’t “remove” B vitamins before drying and later add them back. That means that reconstituted milk contains ‘destroyed’ (i.e., heat-altered) B vitamins. This, by itself, makes reconstituted milk “different” from fresh milk. And we are, in fact, still adding to our known list of vitamins.
A ‘thorough’ reconstitution would need molecule-by-molecule, atom-by-atom “analysis” of milk. Each atom itself takes different energy states. Then again, there’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle preventing accurate measurement of position and momentum. And then, we’re not even done knowing all the subatomic particles there are.
Therefore, Rajah is right that ideas travel. The difficulty lies in what happens to them on the journey.
When a method of study breaks down a concept or an idea in order to understand it, strips its surrounding context, consciously rejecting – labelling as demonic – any divinity (‘false gods’) the original tradition connected it to, it undergoes irreversible changes.
The same method is visible in the Christianisation of the old Germanic midwinter festival Yule: People were allowed to keep the outward festivity, but under a new name, new meaning, and with the older divinities (or demonry) purged or reassigned to the One True God. Some customs continued, yet the living matrix was replaced.
A bottle of dishwasher liquid may claim the power of a hundred lemons: but one can’t use it to make lemonade.
