“To despise other people’s Gods is to despise other people, for they and their Gods are adapted to each other.” - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
I was twelve years old when I started believing I heard the devil's voice at night.
In the nineteen-eighties, we lived on a tiny cul-de-sac in the city of West Covina. If you stare hard enough at some of our old family photos, I swear you can feel the SoCal sun hitting your skin. Next door lived a Muslim couple who would become second parents to me and my sister. Down the hill was a community center where we learned karate and did arts & crafts. At the end of the street lived the drug dealers and gangbangers the real estate agent neglected to mention during the house tour.
Nevertheless, this was a triumphant moment for the family, a key accomplishment in the Recent Immigrant Edition of Real Life Snakes and Ladders. The West Covina house would be our third residence and the second one we owned. We were halfway up the board now, and the next ladder, in 1990, would take us to an upper-middle-class suburb.
This house was full of big ladder features: a long driveway, an amazing view, and my personal favorite, a swimming pool we lived in during the summers (mom bought floating plates so that we could even eat meals while in the water). But there were also a few snakes: a fast-food business that failed disastrously, a dicey neighborhood, a terrible school district.
Indian parents don't fuck around when it comes to education. Mine scraped together the $317 each month it took to send us to private school (we knew how much it cost, because the exact price of things was one of our parents' favorite things to yell out when they were mad 😂).
A private school should have been a ladder, but it came with a snake none of us really understood at the time: it was a Christian, specifically Baptist, establishment. These days, religious schools seem to be generally loose with the whole religion thing, at least where I live (in the woke capital of the world known as the Bay Area). South Hills Academy didn’t play around like that; indoctrination was at the center of everything they did.
Our teachers spent their weekends blocking abortion clinics and then used the first few hours of class on Monday morning to recount their adventures in detail. There were daily Bible classes, which mainly meant memorizing and reciting verses (over the course of the nine years I was there, I must have memorized over a thousand verses) in preparation for our weekly chapel or holiday events. Uniforms were strict. Dancing was forbidden. Physical punishment included a wooden paddle dotted with painful holes. Teachers who rebelled against the system were reprimanded in front of students - and fired if they did not fall in line.
When I was in fifth grade, the principal of South Hills Academy, Reverend Wilcox, called me out of class to meet with him in his office. My fear level hit 100 immediately: this is where the wooden paddle with the holes lived. I took the long way from my classroom to his office and opened the door slowly, desperate to see the paddle still hanging from its spot on the wall.
Thankfully, it wasn’t in Reverend Wilcox’s hands. I sat down across from him in the adult-sized swivel chair. He had a kind smile on his face, and my demeanor softened; I was definitely not going to get paddled! What I failed to understand was that he was planning something much longer-lasting than the sting of a paddle - something that would infect the brain of this fifth-grader, ensuring that, for years to come, existential dread would compete successfully with thoughts of girls and videogames and sports.
Reverend Wilcox smiled again. He asked a few questions about how my family was doing. What did we do for fun over the weekend? Did we do anything religious? I told him what little I understood about havans: there was a fire, lots of chanting, and we all stood for aarti at the end, which was when we got to eat a sweet dessert called halwa.
Sandeep, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
Yea, definitely…of course (I had been answering this question affirmatively since I was a 1st grader, without ever telling my parents).
Then how can you worship at a pagan temple?
I turned a bit in the chair. His smile was gone.
Do you understand what we tell you in Bible class? About what the Bible says about non-believers burning in hell for eternity? Do you understand how long eternity lasts? Have you ever gotten a burn from a stove or a campfire? Can you imagine what that would feel like all over your body? For eternity?
Sandeep, the devil is coming for you and your family. I’m just a friend who is trying to save you from eternal damnation.
The Hindu View of Life
“The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it. My pride as a Hindu, roused by the enterprise and eloquence of Swami Vivekananda, was deeply hurt."
Unlike contemporaries like Nehru or Gandhi, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan didn't get politically involved in the Indian resistance movement. His revolution would be fought in the library, and he saw his religious scholarship as an intellectual line of defense against uninformed Western criticism.
Radhakrishnan grew up poor, in a Telegu-speaking family in Andhra Pradesh. When he was 17, he got a scholarship to study at the Madras Christian College. A cousin had just graduated from the same school, and since Radhakrishnan couldn’t afford his own books, he took whatever his cousin had…which thankfully for us, just happened to be philosophy textbooks.
Like his contemporaries, Radhakrishnan’s brilliance took him to England. There, he became a well-respected scholar, and in 1929, he published his seminal work, “An Idealist View of Life”. The first books that Europeans and Americans interested in Vedanta read in the early 1900s were most likely written by Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan.
He would go on to become India's second President.
In "The Hindu View of Life" (initially recommended by my friend Vishal Ganesan - I recommend subscribing to his Substack about Hinduism in America, Hindoo History), Radhakrishnan describes one of the philosophical pillars that has made Hinduism resilient to centuries of conquest and missionary zeal:
"The world would be a much poorer thing if one creed absorbed the rest. God wills a rich harmony and not a colourless uniformity. The comprehensive and synthetic spirit of Hinduism has made it a mighty forest with a thousand waving arms each fulfilling its function and all directed by the spirit of God."
Radhakrishnan was especially gifted at bridging science and religion. He saw religious inquiry as a scientific endeavor. In his view, Hindu sages, Sufi mystics, Christian saints, etc. were all engaged in the same iterative process of religious discovery that had spanned thousands of years and countless civilizations. This acceptance of differing points of views distinguishes Hinduism from the Abrahamic religions:
"Hindu thought believes in the evolution of our knowledge of God. We have to vary continually our notions of God until we pass beyond all notions into the heart of the reality itself, which our ideas endeavour to report. Hinduism does not distinguish ideas of God as true and false, adopting one particular idea as the standard for the whole human race. It accepts the obvious fact that mankind seeks its goal of God at various levels and in various directions, and feels sympathy with every stage of the search."
In my freshman year in college, I had the privilege of taking Religious Studies 1A with the great Huston Smith. The flexibility of the Hindu tradition was one of the first things he covered:
“That Hinduism has shared her land for centuries with Jains, Buddhists, Parsees, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians may help explain a final idea that comes out more clearly through her than through the other great religions; namely, her conviction that the various major religions are alternate paths to the same goal. To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion is like claiming that God can be found in this room but not the next, in this attire but not another. Normally, people will follow the path that rises from the plains of their own civilization; those who circle the mountain, trying to bring others around to their paths, are not climbing.”
Ultimately, what saved the horrified fifth-grader who left Reverend Wilcox’s office in a daze wasn’t choosing one religion over another. What saved him was understanding that his religious tradition didn’t require him, or anyone else, to choose at all.
This intellectual flexibility is also why the Hindu has proven to be so resilient, despite a thousand years of conquest, torched libraries, and forced conversions.
But of course, Christianity isn’t the world’s dominant religion for no reason.
A flexible religious philosophy just requires an equally flexible missionary.
The Italian Brahmin and the Krista Purana
In 1623, the Archbishop of Goa and a group of angry Jesuits met with Pope Gregory XV to complain about one of their missionaries, Roberto De Nobili.
Nobili, whose father had fought against the Turks in the Crusades, ran away from home to become a missionary, arriving in Goa in May of 1605. Once there, he and another missionary, Thomas Stephens, embraced an unconventional strategy for Catholic missionaries: embracing local culture. ⠀
Stephens, quite possibly the first Englishman to set foot in India, learned the Konkani language and published the first printed book on grammar in India: Arte de Lingoa Canarim. Using a mix of Marathi and Konkani, he then published "the Krista Purana", a long poem about the history of the world leading up to the life of Christ, using the lyrical format common in traditional Hindu Puranas.
Nobili took things even further. During his first year, he learned Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. He ditched his Western clothes, shaved his head (keeping the little tuft of hair of a Brahman), and wore a dhoti & wooden sandals. He even wore the traditional three-string thread across his chest, explaining to other Jesuits that for him, the three strings represented the Catholic Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
To the surprise of the Goan Archbishop, Pope Gregory XV decided he approved of Nobili’s tactics. On January 31, 1623, the Church issued the Consitution Romanæ Sedis Antistes, formally approving of the three-stringed thread, the tuft of hair, the sandalwood paste, and other customs.
With the Pope’s decree, Catholic converts in Goa were able to convert while retaining most of their rituals and social mores. This lead to the formation of a curious new caste within Goan and Mangalorean culture: the Bamonn, the Roman Catholic Brahman. ⠀
Don’t be a stranger.
During the past few weeks, I've received messages from a wide swath of folks, including people from my parents' generation and from those much younger than me.
If you have any comments or feedback on my writing, I'd love to hear from you.
Talk soon!
Sandeep
Thank you for this! I've been trying to understand various 'paths up the mountain' for several years now, and Hinduism was riding closer to the top of the list i need to read more about. Would you recommend "The Hindu Way of Life" as accessible to someone with a decent background in several world religions, who has a goal of getting a better understanding of Hinduism?
I've been trying to 'roll my own' system based upon my understandings of physics and computation, and i came up with what sounds like a very similar argument to this:
> " . a mighty forest with a thousand waving arms each fulfilling its function and all directed by the spirit of God.""
Here's some examples of my argument that this makes sense if there is some objective truth, but it's computationally intractable:
from https://apxhard.com/2020/11/27/a-moral-system-from-scientific-rationality/:
> When you think of all the different religions of the world – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, Baháʼí and others – what do you think of? Do you think of a bunch of different ways of being wrong? Or do you see organisms in a mimetic ecosystem, each of which contributes to the diversity of human thinking?
from https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/:
> You will completely accept that the people around you will have different senses of what is Good, and that these differences are a feature, not a bug, because you are part of an ensemble of hundreds of trillions of different lossy models of the Good. You will care much more about the health of the ensemble than about the processor cycles devoted to your own personal model.
Mostly i just wanted to say, thanks for this substack!
Excellent writing!