I am a Bengali. Born and brought up in the bustling city of Kolkata. I have grown up in a joint family (its important to mention it at the outset).
I have grown up watching my grandfather not talk during his meals. He used to conduct a small puja session (sandhya annik), before he used to touch his food. I have also seen my father and my uncles have beef and come back to the house in the middle of the night, sometimes half drunk.
My grandfather could be defined as an astute example of a Bengali Brahmin. Someone who had been conscious of following all the rituals he had grown up with. After all, they had left modern-day Bangladesh as their love for the religion was worth more than their lives. So, they left East Pakistan back then and emigrated to India (who accepted them with open arms).
So, to me, my grandfather was the epitome of what a Brahmin should be. Some one who used to conduct sandhya annik before his meals, who never spoke during his meals, but someone who definitely used to eat fish (this part is important).
Now, my grandfather died when I was young (around 13 years old), so the idea of who a perfect Brahmin should be had been indelibly etched in my mind at a young age.
Many years passed and I shifted to Hyderabad for my job. One fine day, one of my colleagues saw me having a fish fry during lunch. She did not say anything then, but later came up to me and said, “I thought you were a Brahmin. I saw you having fish the other day, you know Brahmins don’t eat fish, you are supposed to be vegetarians.”
Now this directly contradicted what I had known throughout my life. Why the hell should Brahmins be vegetarian? As it turns out, Brahmins in the southern part of India, specifically in Andhra Pradesh, were vegetarian. This came as a surprise. How come Brahmins separated by merely 1500 kilometres developed so differently that our food habits, acceptable norms and customs were all so different?
Apparently, the answer to that question lay in the question itself. The fact that we were separated by 1500 kilometres, was the clue.
If you know anything about India, you know that we have never really been a continuous stretch of land ruled by a single ruler, but a cacophony of multiple kings spread over a vast area. Different kinds of kings, different religions and different geographical conditions meant that all the people developed separately.
So someone from the north, who considers the cow to be the goddess would be very different from a person in Kerala (or even the north east) who would enjoy parotta and beef curry.
Non-vegetarianism might be a sacrilege to Brahmins from the south, but for Brahmins in the east, fish is just a way of life. Heck, Brahmins were paid with fish, for their services of performing prayers in ancient Bengal.
When I visited Pondicherry, people could only speak either Tamil or French. This seemed like a very ludicrous combination to me, as I could not communicate in either. Again, the only reason I used to be excited about going to weddings in Kolkata, was that there would be a high possibility of mutton being served. As Bengali weddings happen at night, I could starve myself throughout the day to gobble up atleast a kilogram of mutton without any shame.
So, when one of my Telugu friends got married and invited me for the wedding, I got visibly excited, only to realize that the wedding was in the morning and the entire menu was vegetarian. Imagine my horror!
As i discovered not through books, but by experience that India truly is diverse. This led me to find parallels between my country and my family. I had seen my incredibly religious grandfather follow all the rules and principles which had been written down in the guidebook of a “shuddh” Brahmin life. My grandfather would never touch chicken, onions or even garlic, as it was forbidden for Brahmins, so his only source of animal protein was mutton. But then again, I saw my maternal grandfather (also a Brahmin) gobble up chicken as red meat was not good for his health.
My grandparents never used to touch alcohol, but I have seen both my father and my uncles return home visibly drunk from a parties they attended. And my dad used to enjoy a peg of his favorite whiskey, almost every Saturday evening while gazing at the stars.
So rules were liable to be bent under certain circumstances and situations. My uncle, the son of a very religious man, my dad, and now that I think about it, pretty much everyone in my family other than my grandparents used to regularly indulge in eating beef as if it was not an issue at all. Only to think that people in India are still lynched in the suspicion of having beef in their freezer.
Do these actions make us non-Brahmins, do these make us any less of a Bengali? Probably not. This is exactly the situation of India.
We are a cacophony of different kinds of people who have been brought up in different environments and situations which have affected the way we live and conduct our lives. Thus, there can be no one template of being the ideal Indian who follows all rules and laws.
Hinduism specifically prevents us from creating a single template and getting congealed into a single glob of monotheistic thought, as that is exactly what it is not. Hinduism believes in polytheistic thought as it believes that there can never be one truth to life.
So when a few political parties in order to gain a few votes and come into power for the next five years tries to harm this, its dangerous. But the sad part is the opposition pulls the country in the other direction and polarizing the majority by indulging in appeasement for the minority.
The left in India, appeases the minority and pisses off the majority, which then votes for the right (they see the right providing protection from the left) as they come up and provide an alternative to that by providing majority appeasement. Then, when the right comes up with templates of an ideal Hindu, the country swings back to the opposition.
The ideal scenario would be total non-involvement of political parties from the political structure, but that is asking for a lot. Bengal tried it with the communists, but then the communists themselves became the religion and took the state back a few decades. So is it pretty much hopeless for us rationalists?
No. We have our differences to look forward to. We should not tolerate our differences, but enjoy them. We should not fear our differences, but play Holi, celebrate Diwali and Durga puja with the same fervour.
Just like in a joint family, you opinion is not muzzled, its encouraged. We are allowed to, and more importantly can be atheists, agnostics, believers, but must remain essentially inquisitive. The inquisitiveness is essential to our Hindu lifestyle. That is central to who we are.
If you stop questioning then you cease to be a mindful human, and the pressure valve is risked. As without the freedom to question, the pressure builds up inside waiting and wishing and conflating, just expectant of the right time, before it explodes and causes a mess of the mutton you were trying to cook.
It’s important to let go of the pressure, to release it from time to time, so that the steam can regain and cook the mutton beautifully. This pressure in the context of our country is dissent. If you do not let dissent make its way out of the pressure cooker, its going to explode, and when it does it will spoil the mutton, and the whole damn country with it.