During July and August I spent five weeks in India. I visited New Delhi, Varanasi, Chennai, Madurai, and Mumbai, none unfamiliar to me, though I’d not been to Varanasi (Banares, the holy city) in forty years. There was no single compelling reason for the trip, neither a major conference nor a commitment to teach, nor urgent research related to current work. I did in fact pick up some books — about fifteen — and in the course of the five weeks accepted kind invitations to give no fewer than seventeen lectures and presentations of various kinds. I met with scholars to discuss a current translation project of mine, seeking the advice of native Tamil speakers.
Two reasons pushed me to visit. First, it was simply time for me to be in India again. I had been in Hyderabad, Chennai, and Madurai in 2018, and in Kerala for a very brief visit in 2019, but then Covid interrupted our lives, and its complications made travel there impossible until this summer. It was time to connect with old friends and colleagues and also meet younger scholars, Hindu and Christian. Second, 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of my landing in India on July 6, 1973, on my way to Nepal, where I taught at St. Xavier’s School from 1973 to 1975. (See my earlier blogs at this site, here and here).
In any case, I had my eyes and ears wide open during the five weeks. I am neither a journalist nor a social scientist, and was not ambitioning any systematic reporting, but everywhere I went I got into discussions with old friends and new acquaintances on “then (1973) and now (2023)”. People were curious as to what I thought about today’s India.
I most often said that I was struck first of all by the growing prosperity of the country, and by the confidence of India today, seventy-five years after Independence. It seems now to have surpassed China in population, and has a relatively young population. The economy is now ranked by many measures in the top ten on earth, perhaps the top five, and it is soon to rank ahead of Germany, I am told. Construction is taking evident everywhere. Airports continue to be very up to date and smooth-running, often better than those here in the USA. New highways are connecting cities and facilitating fast travel within cities that previously could not accommodate the flood of new cars jamming every road. Uber and Ola make getting around easier — for those who can afford it. Great cities like Mumbai and Chennai are major construction sites, as new elevated trains and subways are being built. All over Chennai, one city-posted sign stood out: “Inconvenience Today for Better Tomorrow”. This really is a theme for India today as a country and a culture.
Quickly let me admit: not all "inconvenience" is minor. Terrible poverty still plagues people all over the country, though the number of the desperately poor seems to be decreasing. I saw green buses in several cities, promising little or no lethal emissions. Sadly, we still hear news about instances of inexcusable violence, most often against minorities and oppressed communities, sometimes sudden eruptions but sometimes too as parts of campaigns of intimidation. The political life of India is robust and elections matter greatly, even if the democratic common good is stressed, as is freedom of the press. Political, cultural, and moral “inconvenience” is very far from a joking matter, and I do not wish to make light of it. But still, it seems to me that India is deep into a new era of change and progress, surely with growing pains, but with hope and optimism too, intent on recovering its rightful place on the world stage.
I was impressed that there a massive effort to come to terms with the colonial past and move beyond it. The unwelcome and unasked-for burden of invasion and control by foreign powers is still more deeply and pervasively being thrown off, and the past subjected to critical review. I was invited on two historical tours in Mumbai, and while there was respect for the contributions of the Portuguese and British early on, the tour guides were very honest about the crasser aspects of colonialism, the greed and cold profit motives, the religious violence, and the ruthless British determination to keep control of the country, mainly to amass enormous profits. I had not known, for instance, how the British promoted the production of opium in India, since it could then be exported to China via Bombay, be used to increase addiction in China, putting the country into debt and opening its markets to the West. Who among us would not be bitter at this kind of colonial exploitation?
There are also concerted efforts to retrieve, preserve and make use of the vast treasures of Indian cultural history. In Chennai, for instance, I was happy to visit the new Central Institute of Classical Tamil, and to see the amazing work being done in preserving old books electronically, and digitalizing palm leaf manuscripts. I spent two days at the Adyar Library also in Chennai, at a seminar was convened by the very able Dr. Radha Raghunathan, Director of the Adyar Library and Research Centre. The theme of the seminar was an exploration of the status of Sanskrit and Tamil learning in the 20th-21st centuries. I was also a participant in Chennai in a forward-looking conference at the Vishnu Mohan Foundation, which flourishes under the guidance of Swami Hariprasad, on the Hindu theologian Ramanuja (traditionally, 1017-1137), early on in the second millennium of his legacy. In both contexts, I had a sense that Indian scholars are serious both about knowing the past, and rethinking it for the future. At Loyola College' Institute for the Dialogue of Cultures and Religions, Fr Maria Arul Raja, Director, kindly hosted a discussion of my recent little book, St. Joseph in South India, which reflects on the famous epic poem Tempavani (The Unfading Garland) by the brilliant 18th century Jesuit, Joseph Constantine Beschi. Three excellent respondents offered substantive historical and Indological comments on the book - nicely reminding me of how much more there is to write about Beschi and his epic - but thankfully the theological substance of the book - on why a Jesuit write this particular epic - remained unscathed. While in Chennai, I was the guest of the community at Satya Nilayam, a national Jesuit center for philosophy studies, and happy to reconnect with both faculty and young Jesuits from all over India. The quest to integrate Western and indigenous philosophical traditions in a truly Indian philosophy remains an ongoing quest, and I can only hope that young Jesuits will continue the work of thinking deeply in and for Indians of all traditions today.
At Benares Hindu University, that venerable institution of learning in one of India’s holiest cities, my hosts wanted me on one day to talk about the study of the Tamil saints of south India — a topic not well studied in the north, and on another day, to talk about the study of philosophy, religion, and theology in the West today. How are we thinking about “religion” and “philosophy” and the like? They were eager to hear something new and challenging, not to replace their own disciplines, but to enhance them. Both lectures were followed by vigorous Q & A that in each case ran well overtime.
I had come to Varanasi with a young Jesuit professor, Anil D’Almeida, SJ, a professor at the Vidyajyoti seminary in New Delhi. He had been my student when writing his STD thesis at Boston College. His topic was a theological engagement between Christian theology and piety and the vastly popular Ramayana tradition of north India — Ramcaritmanas of the 16th century Tulsidas. It is a re-telling of the famed story of Rama and Sita in Avadhi, a language akin to Hindi. We were able to visit sites by the river where even today students learn the Manas by heart, repeating verses after a teacher and in unison. We visited also the ashram venerated as the site where the provocative poet-saint Kabir composed his works, and met a young reciter there, Umesh Kabir — blessed with a beautiful singing voice and ability too to explain what he was singing.
On my last full day in Varanasi, I shared in an interfaith conversation at Maitri Bhavan, a Catholic center. Dialogue in Varanasi has been rejuvenated today, in no small part due to the efforts of Yann Vagneux, a young French priest and member of the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris (MEP). He has been living now for many years in Varanasi, balancing his own contemplative studies with an extraordinary ability to know a real cross-section of the people of the city. Our interfaith discussion began with my opening remarks on my perceptions fifty years into my learning from Hinduism, but then we had a wider-reaching discussion, together trying to understand where India is religiously today. What needs to be done if religious communities in dialogue are to play their needed role in defining India religiously, over against those who seek a pure, monoreligious India?
In Mumbai, I was graciously hosted by Akhilesh Gupta, a longtime friend of HDS (from the time he was a fellow in Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative) and author of the recent Bridges Across Humanity: Different Religions, Similar Teachings, and by Vibhu and Ajit Nagral, likewise staunch friends of HDS and initiators of our visiting Hindu monastics program. During my brief Mumbai visit, I was honored to speak at the 100-year-old Ramakrishna Math in Khar, on what I have learned from Ramakrishna, that great 19th mystic teacher. It was wonderful too to spend a night in that quiet, spiritual setting.
I was also invited by Fr. Keith D'Souza, Rector, to give a lecture at St. Xavier’s College on what it might mean to say that India is, can be, a Vishwa Guru, teacher of wisdom for the whole world. I had been thinking about this topic for a long time, and indeed in 1998 actually published a little book entitled Hindu Wisdom for All God’s Children. I am now a quarter-century older and perhaps myself a little wiser, and I over the years I have had to face many times, most often in the West, questions such as “Is there a single Hindu wisdom? Whose wisdom? Which Hindus?” These questions interrogating authority and voice are important, but I still think we can affirm that Hindu traditions have very much to offer the world by way of religion and philosophy, and also by way of a wide range of the arts and sciences.
I added, with some measure of gentle insistence, that the wisdom of India is a multifaith wisdom, inclusive of the heritage of Buddhist, Jaina, and Parsee faiths, of old Jewish communities, of Muslim sufis, and of the many Christian communities that have deep and old roots in India. My sense — based on my limited experience on this trip – is that the vast majority of Indians want India to celebrate its large Hindu majority heritage without neglecting or being hostile toward the many other faiths that have flourished here.
I was happy to meet many Harvard alumni/alumnae, most connected with Harvard Business School, at functions generously arranged in New Delhi and Mumbai. I was impressed that these very successful, prominent women and men were so interested in what I had to say, how I have tried over a lifetime to integrate Christian and Jesuit commitments with learning from Hindu traditions of India. In both cases, the conversations ran overtime, as we explored the present and future prospects for religious learning and interfaith harmony in today’s world.
I cannot refrain from mentioning an unexpected topic for discussion: many Indians asked me, with some alarm, what is going on in the United States today. They know about American gun violence, that epidemic proliferating at a level unknown anywhere else in the world. They are quite aware of America’s continuing exploitation of the environment, even as we piously urge poorer countries to be more ecologically responsible than we’ve ever been. And most interestingly, many Indians were puzzled by the seeming decay of our moral and spiritual vigor. People told me that the United States seems to be more and more secular in a reductive sense, increasingly bereft of the spiritual values that sustain community, and hence increasingly paralyzed politically, unable to work for the common good with any sense of common values. Seen from the West, India is sometimes criticized for its imperfections, but Indians are fairly clear that the West offers no ideal alternative. It is no longer the case that people see the United States as a best model for the world. Indians believe they can do better.
All in all, a great summer, exhausting to be sure, and too often too hot and humid. But it was a perfect way to mark the “first” fifty years of my engagement with India and its religious cultures, especially the Hindu.
“Inconvenience now for better tomorrow” speaks, with hope, to the India of today and most importantly to the new India that is emerging. That future is out of my hands, of course, but as long as I live I will be watching to see how India finds its way and helps create our global future.
