"Gita yes, Isa no!"
When the content of one of the oldest religions in the world does not get critical and creative reevaluations, it leaves us incapable of harnessing an age-old Indian institution for human flourishing.
After posting the tweet below, I remembered an essay I had written a few years ago on the Isa Upanishad. I am sharing that essay in this note now.
A Deceptively Simple Question on Religion
Lying interspersed in an article in the news daily, The Indian Express, I found a question about religion posed to the Nobel Laureates, Professors Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who both have deep connections with India. The question reminded me of a brief exchange with an Indian-origin professor almost a decade ago (I will get to this later).
The question on religion was asked by Mr. Vikram Singh Mehta, Chairman and Senior Fellow of Brookings India, a unit of the US-based Brookings Institute, a reputed research outfit with a global reach. And the question was quite simple: Is there a way by which one could study the economic consequences of religion and perhaps design a model to make it an economically productive activity?
The fact that a deceptively simple and obvious question was asked by a person heading one of the most modern Indian institutions for some reasons, not very clear to me yet, I found quite exhilarating. Such curiosity was a sign that Indian minds have started eventually to dive deeper into their social and cultural milieu. If such plunges equip India to ride its religious institutions and harness their ubiquitous presence for human flourishing, it would not just be wonderful; it would be a game-changer for the world—Indians are the one-sixth of the human inhabitants on this planet.
Religion has deep economic consequences. However, the consequences and how perceptibly salient they become largely dependent on the way religion gets framed. The importance of religion can be gleaned from the fact of its continuation over time and space.
If one looks at religion as an institutional response to “our collective acknowledgment of the nature of our ignorance,” then even science can be folded into the concept of religion. If the focus is on the ritualistic and organizational aspects of religion, then many studies can be conducted first to understand the nature of its intertwining with the society, which subsequently can be used to identify the levers of change to make religion more economically productive.
The first step could be to create a databank available to researchers on the locations of all temples, mosques, gurudwara, churches, etc., and a list of facilities and services offered by them. The Cambridge economist, Sriya Iyer, in her magisterial book, The Economics of Religion in India, reports a very intriguing finding: In the aftermath of India’s liberalization in 1991, religious organizations substantially increased their provision of services, compensating for the retreat of the state. Religion, it seems, is being harnessed for the Indian economy, but that aspect of religion remains underappreciated and under-researched by policymakers and analysts.
Economics of Religion
In my own work, it is becoming gradually clear the positive role that religion is playing in India: be it vegetarianism, non-violent anti-corruption agitation empowering fringe political agents, the taboos against addictive substances.
As the skill and cognitive deficit of Indian children going through its modern education system are getting more concretely captured by Pratham’s ASER reports, at times, it feels as if the much-derided Indian gurus might be assisting poor Indians with sense-making that is crucial to wade through the tough life of penury and disempowerment that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, some of these gurus might be exploitative, but what areas of human activities are free of imposters?
Leaving speculation aside, there are concrete examples to flash out the contemporary relevance of religion in India. For instance, the polio eradication; it was only when the Islamic religious institutions came on board that the complete elimination of polio could become a reality in India.[1] Or take the role of Akshaya Patra in addressing nutritional deficiencies; its stellar work is duly recognized, but other similar institutions have not been mobilized and brought on board to start similar initiatives—that is one way religion can be made more productive.
Given the abysmal condition of public and population health in India, it would be interesting to evaluate the role of ‘Akharas’ across India to understand their potential to impact physical fitness--one can, in fact, do randomized control trials with Akharas by equipping them with modern facilities through syncretic modern design with cafe, library, and skill-training.
If Buddha would not have harnessed the Vedas and Upnishads, or Gandhi would not have harnessed the cultural aspects of Hinduism and Jainism, we would have been living in a different India. Just imagine a modern India without Gandhi and Tagore; given where India was in terms of its human capital in the early 20th century, it would have turned out to be a horror story. And if we continue to address Indian challenges half-heartedly with the Australia size population being added to its labor force each year while only 10 percent of them getting employed, the horror story might still get foisted on India.
India is still waiting for its Galilean inflection that the West and other societies have already transitioned through. Just imagine telling people that the Shiv Sutra exhorted that yoga is not possible without curiosity and awe.
Just imagine putting up a telescope on each temple, mosque, church, and other such buildings for people to really see the moon and other planets during their planet-connected prayers and festivals. Or, imagine making accessible microscopes for people to see with their naked eyes how their revered rivers, the Ganges, Yamuna, and other water bodies are being choked off their PRANA--the sacred life force attributed to divinity--by the pollution; imagine how people would respond on learning that the absence of sewage treatment facilities is because they do not pay taxes and their taxes are efficiently deployed.
Imagine the effect on people of such messages imbued with sacredness. Imagine the impact of creating a monopoly sort of game, with Hindu gods and goddesses to convey the way money moves the world of MAYA on people’s understanding of public finance and usage of other public resources.
Gita yes, Isa no.
When I started to delve into Indian scriptures, I could not believe how impressive their contents were. Indian educational curriculum was bereft of such contents. It took me many years to create my own idiosyncratic base to help me make sense of India’s past— read Tagore’s Sadhana or Sven Beckert’s The Empire of Cotton.[3] Feeling that I might be the one who was ignorant about such wonderful and deep insights into the nature of human existence and aspirations, I wrote to a few famous academicians in the US with Indian roots. Just one among them pithily replied to my query about whether they had read the Bhagavad Gita and the Isa Upanishad: Gita yes, Isa no.
I guess that none of the others that I wrote had read both books either. On learning what all really are there in those books, it is not surprising to me that a few liberal intellectuals have developed much comprehension of the passion that is pushing India in a direction that they so deeply feel uncomfortable with, ignoring the age-old dictum that you need to know your opposition to deal with it effectively.
At times, politics (of knowledge) in India feels like two teams from two different kinds of games are being brought in the field together to play—the confusion should not be surprising. Macaulay must be laughing in his grave for the debilitating confusion that his policies have engendered in India!
If an American or European professor tells me that she is clueless about the Bible, I can understand her apathy because the richness of the publicly available data makes it unnecessary to read the sacred book for her to understand her local institutional environment and people’s belief structure; though, I have not met anyone who has told me that they are clueless about the content about the Bible, which guides a large proportion of the masses in her society.
It should not be surprising that one of the first randomized control trials that Professor Esther Duflo alluded to in her response was conducted by a brilliant Yale professor, James Choi, and his coauthors in the Philippines; they showed that the training in religiosity led to the development of grit and better hygiene habits.
My sense is that once Indian academicians would learn about the content of the ancient Indian texts and other sacred books, they would wonder why they did not come to those books earlier. When we all increasingly feel the weight of the unequal world, it strikes as ineffably amazing that the Isa Upanishad (beautifully captured by Tagore’s Sadhana) talks about that in the second shloka itself.
When we wonder about what could have given the human minds the requisite imagination to conceptualize zero—one of the earliest abstract leaps into the sea of unknowns to fish out such a mind-altering concept—we see that the first invocatory shloka from the Isa Upanishad recited without fault at any Hindu cremation ground gives a hint of such predilection by the concept of ‘Purna (Complete).’1
We all are intellectually poorer when the content of one of the oldest religions in the world does not get critical and creative reevaluations and reassessments, leaving us incapable of harnessing one of the longest surviving Indian institutions for human flourishing.
[…TO BE CONTINUED]
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Disclaimer:
Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation, to bring people to talk, discuss, and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn, and I will keep updating this article.
That is full; this also is full. This fullness came from that fulness. Though this fullness comes from that fullness, that fullness remains forever full.