Let Them Call It 'Idol' Worship, We Will Continue Worshipping Our Gods

'Idol' worship is one of the greatest taboos of the monopolistic faiths and destruction of idols is considered a sacred act by them. The trend continues right into ‘secularized’ or ‘enlightened’ Europe and through colonialism, the aversion for idols – particularly other cultures’ idols, have infested other human civilizations as well.

Today, even in secular vocabulary, an 'iconoclast' is a hero. Destruction of idols is synonymous with destruction of false heroes and wrong beliefs.

This has a direct impact on Hindus. They have seen their ‘idols’ destroyed by invaders who wanted to eradicate the nation of idol worship. Hindus sacrificed themselves in large numbers to protect their ‘idols’. They suffered hardships and faced torture.

After the age of invaders came the age of colonizers.

Colonization wore the cloak of civilizing mission. They declared idol worship an abomination and related it to all the ills that exist in Indian society – from caste inequalities to untouchability to every obscene manifestation of social stagnation. Social stagnation itself had been caused by colossal impoverishing effected by colonialism. But the very same colonialism blamed it ultimately on idol worship.

Today we blame the Taliban for the destruction of the idols of Buddha. But read the following:

When thus the converted fanatic mobs burnt down the temples built by their own ancestors, the missionaries also saved an idol or two and sent them as trophies to their headquarters.

What one should note from the above passages is the way the missionaries worked in the princely state of Travancore. They did not touch the major temples in prominent towns. Instead, they started destroying the village temples. They also started making the distinction between ‘Brahminism’ and ‘demonism’. The former would be ascribed to the ‘Aryan’/’Brahmin’ and the latter to the ‘aborigines’ / Dravidians.

This intentionally fallacious argument was accepted by many Indians as well. ‘Idol’ worship became a later invention of the priestcraft or it became an abomination from non-Aryan barbarians – depending upon the situation.

A great success of colonialism and evangelism was to turn the people against their own heritage by creating both the narratives of victimhood as well as a sense of guilt and blaming it all on the religion of their ancestors. Even after the British Raj had ceased to be, this framework survived, and that too in ‘secular’ academic institutions.

In the ‘Sanskritization’ thesis of M.N.Srinivas, one can see the continuation of the evangelical theses of ‘Brahminism’-aboriginal ‘demonism’ categories.

'Idol-worship', which in evangelical vocabulary is the way of Satan and demons, becomes for the colonised sociologist the way of social oppression and exploitation.

Though two of the major Hindu revival movements of the colonial period, the ‘Brahmo Samaj’ and the ‘Arya Samaj’ internalised the colonial-Christian critique of ‘idol’ worship, traditional Hindu Dharma soon re-asserted its importance and centrality to the spiritual development of any individual and society.

It was an illiterate pujari of a Kali temple in Bengal who would start it all. He showed to the Hindu society around him the essential significance of worshipping the divine in traditional sacred images.

The term ‘vigraha', considered the sanctified living space of the God or Goddess, which gets translated to idol or images, began to reassert its importance. Sri Ramakrishna became a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of human spiritual heritage. The much despised ‘image worship’ was the base and springboard of his elated, expanded, altered states of consciousness and non-dualist ecstasies with the Divine.

Mahendranath Gupta, the chronicler of the sayings and activities of Sri Ramakrishna, records a conversation he had with Sri Ramakrishna.

Should not the people who worship the image of God in clay be told that that it was not God, and that, while worshipping it, they should have God in view and not the clay image? Sri Ramakrishna snapped back.

Then came Swami Vivekananda, for whom Sri Ramakrishna was a spiritual source. He countered the anti-idol worship propaganda head on.

When one reads the following words of Vivekananda, one needs to remember that the poverty, suffering and perceived lack of moral values in the ‘Hindoos’ were attributed both by missionaries and mercenary reformers to ‘idol worship’. Vivekananda said:

Then came Mahatma Gandhi. To Gandhi, the liberation of India also meant liberation from the slavish mindset and he wanted to liberate India as much as he wanted to civilize the West.

He pointed out the fundamental fallacy of condemning the Hindu way of worship as 'idol worship'. He turned the tables and came up with a critique of the anti-idol worship propaganda. This should be considered an integral part of his political philosophy.

He wrote:

The worship of ‘idols’ is then to Gandhiji a universal principle – a condition for human existence. Viewed from that point of view, what Gandhi suggests is that in Hindu Dharma, this fundamental trait of human nature has been carefully taken and used as a vehicle for the expansion of consciousness through divine experience.

That the so-called ‘idol’ worship, in all its diversity, has blossomed in India – is indeed a panacea for the disease of fundamentalism and hatred.