My Spiritual Goddess

R K Narayan in his My Dateless Diary remarks that, “Religion is not a thing one can openly avow- it’s like one’s underwear.” I have always thought that the statement was so profound and deep especially at a time of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and institutionalized religion that dictates not only the rights and wrongs for its followers but also enjoy much political power. The purpose of religion, historically might have been to unify people into communities, to establish social order and the like and even as a protestation against the then existing social and political realities as is in the case of Christianity and Buddhism. Perhaps the dogmas, the institutionalized power plays and it’s instrumentalization as an apparatus for State power and ideology came only later.

I remember a few years ago when the V.S. Achuthanandan’s government was in power in Kerala, a chapter in the seventh standard textbook became the reason for much controversy with the political right and the religious orders severely attacking the government for apparently propagating “communist beliefs” in the minds of young children. This chapter titled ‘Jeevan without Religion’ in the social studies textbook was merely about a boy named Jeevan whose inter-religious parents, on the admission form, refuses to add any religion to their son, asking the principal to either keep the column blank or write non-religious. It will be, they assert, completely up to Jeevan to decide whether he wish to follow any religion at all when he grows up. This at the time sparked off intense debates with the religious and political right untitedly demanding the chapter be taken away from the syllabus. In this entire hullabaloo one realizes the delicate nature of religion and its interconnectedness with various social elements. If it is one's right to follow any religion he/she chooses, it is also equally one's right not to follow any.  

The chapter from the Seventh Standard Social Studies textbook titled 'Matamillatha Jeevan' or 'Jeevan without Religion'

Whatever is the case and whatever be the necessary values that religion imparts, I think Narayan intends to say that religious belief is much personal and intimate to the person who practices it and becomes indecent the moment you advertise it. Perhaps that is the difference between religiosity and spirituality. The former is more socially constructed, the latter being more personal concentrating on your spiritual and moral growth. I must confess I am not a religious person. I am only as ‘Hindu’ as on some official records. I take part in religious rituals and festivals not because of faith but because of its cultural history and significance. This brings me to the concept of spirituality. And I think it means different for different people. The ‘spiritual but not religious’ variety has been in the growth since the epidemic of globalization, data tells you. But I am not talking about the God denouncing yet ‘guru’ seeking kind of spirituality where you seek for more sensory pleasure for attaining revelation. I am merely talking about certain things, it could be anything really, that connects with you so much that you feel so much at peace because of it. It makes you think and feel and contemplate and all of that. It could be in other words a deep connection with nature that makes you feel so intensely. It is the Romantic and later the American transcendentalist variety of spirituality where in Henry David Thoreau’s own words a walk in the woods would make you come out having become (only metaphorically of course) “taller than the trees”.

For me this sense of spirituality has always been associated with a childhood memory of my grandmother. As a child she would take me to the nearby kavu (sacred grove) which was situated easily some four kilometers away from our home and yet we would walk till there. Along the way she would tell me the most fascinating stories about everything I would ask her to. There was on the way a big pond full of water lilies and on our way back my grandmother would pluck one and make a garland out of it. I would wear it with pride, showing it to my younger cousins, eating the grain out of it later. That pond full of water lilies just remains in my memories now. It has now been converted to land with houses been built upon it. The Kavu, replete with greenery was a haven for all sorts of plant life that it had an aura of being so intimately close to nature and hence for me almost sacred even. But that was never the best thing about that place. It was always the presence of my grandmother. With her I always felt so safe, and she has, since then, stood for all the innocence and purity that I wanted to recline towards from the loud and corrupt world outside. Now, much older, when I go to Kerala on vacations I make it a habit to visit temples with her. My mother, not able to understand the relationship between my self-confessed atheism and temple visits would jokingly comment upon it. But what she doesn’t know is that it is my grandmother who has always been my spiritual goddess.