Everyday Islam Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia Book

Nobody has been as much a bette noire to the 'bhodrolok' bengali as much as Nirad Babu has been . Never the one to mince words , his powers of observation and his incisive comments would put even those of the most acerbic wit running for cover . Indeed as he has demonstrated amply in his biography , "Thy Hand , Great Anarch" ( sequel to "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian" ) , that perhaps no one can be as reliable as him in describing his ancestral people with as much acuteness and precision that he is able to . Indeed it was his impatience with the many hypocrisies of the Bengali people , hypocrisies that have merely changed form , that rendered him so unpalatable to the Bengali intelligentsia. This was a man who dedicated an entire chapter in his autobiography to Rabindranath Tagore lamenting that the world will never understand his genius and when it does , it will only misunderstand him ( a fact that sadly has come true ) and yet dismissed the poet Najrul Islam as an upstart. This was a man who was a secretary to that legendary revolutionary Sarat Bose and regarded him as perhaps the only man in Bengal ( save perhaps his younger brother , the more famous Subhas ) as a man of unimpeachable integrity and yet never balked from saying that the British Rule was the best thing that has happened to India in spite of its so many failures . In Nirad Babu all these many contradictions sat comfortably in a united whole never once causing any consternation . He was ruthless and unsympathetic in his observation . This was a man to whom England became all the ideals it professed and which he internalised in spite of the Empire never practicing it in reality . This was his Mecca where he finally moved and lived the rest of his life , a thorough English gentleman who was also every inch a Bengali . It is perhaps an ode to the many contradictions that found unity in him that he would name his book ' Hinduism- A Faith to Live By ' in spite of having very few if at all any kind words to say about the faith he was born into . And yet there are those echoes that one can hear , that almost feral admiration of the Hindu genius which was at odds with his English ( and therefore Christian ) values.
Thus we read those self-evidently spurious claims ; claims that shock and sometimes amuse even an amateur reader of history such as where he claims the Bhagvat Gita was derived from Christian contact simply because it was unique or where he babbles the mumbo-jumbo that the wisdom of the Upanishads was due to the neurological phenomenon in the primitive man's brain as he was just learning the faculty of language in the background of his proto-religious animistic life .
And yet he shows that perhaps no one can equal him in his powers of observation and inference when it came to Hinduism as practised in his day and age . He belonged to that generation that grew up in the aura of British benevolence as it was thought by the Indian and most importantly Bengali intellectuals , the British betrayal of that faith and the rise of the demand of Purna Swaraj and then the final fall of the Empire in the final blood bath of the partition . In this entire process he saw the faith from which the culture and society of this country stems as it was before and after British impact after all those miserable years of Mughal rule . Indeed he takes great pains to mention that he is concerned with Hinduism as it was before the Western impact .
And in doing so he so brilliantly exposes the many lies which the Hindus have told themselves repeatedly in their attempt at defending their faith without never having the intellectual capacity for understanding it . Indeed that capacity in the common Hindu had long been decimated by the destructive impact of Islam and those who would protect it , those Brahmins and godmen had fallen to charlatanry and those who retained any integrity had withdrawn to the fortresses of mysticism . The character of this great faith had been moth-eaten by the centuries of ravages and the failure of its followers to defend it . It was this hollowed edifice that manifested itself to him , it was this decadence that he had to describe. Indeed it is often that he seems to conflate the two phases all the while reiterating that Hinduism had changed. But Hinduism as confronts us today as a living faith is but the product of this decadence and the western impact , its long forgotten glory is only for those select few who wish to seek it and understand it as dispassionately as a zoologist would a long lost creature capable of its own language and civilisation .
And he does this with such characteristic brilliance . He exposes the sugar coating that was placed on the sexual aspect of the Krishna cult to make it more palatable to the western audience in a bid to gain acceptance from them : a sexuality that the followers of the cult themselves were never ashamed of for Hinduism has celebrated the sexual union , its pleasure being a metaphor for the union with God . He quotes from the original poems of Kalidasa , of the Rupa Goswami's treatises and amply demonstrates the fake puritanism that Hindus resorted to as if being ashamed of the very thing they were defending , when neither was called for ( stopping just short of accusing a very famous historian of Indian philosophy of outright dishonesty). He demonstrates with that impeccable logic that the North-South distinction in the nature of Hinduism is but a product of Muslim rule as it was that cataclysm that decimated the faith in North India putting to rest all contemporary and future attempts to drive a wedge through the nation in the name of Aryan-Dravidian divide . Thus doing so he ends up inadvertently at one place the essential cultural unity of India though that was hardly his intention .
To say any more would be to ruin the book . But for anyone who wishes to understand as the british found it and as was practised by the Indians at that time , then one has to look no further that this work . Its authenticity is unparalleled. But the uninitiated would do well than not to judge this great banyan tree of acceptance ( his metaphor not mine ) from only its age of decadence . While that is an indispensable necessity to understand the Indian people as we are now especially those glaring follies that cause the most educated of us to feel nothing but shame , it would be a disservice to the history of Hinduism if its age of brilliance was ignored altogether.