Think back to the start of this year, when the pran pratishtha of the Ram Mandir was to be held in Ayodhya: Every media outlet, whether right-leaning or left-leaning, was flooded with breathless discussions of the history of the Ram Mandir movement, from the appearance of the idols at the site to the history of the court case to the details of the idol installation in the sanctum sanctorum of the newly constructed temple.
Do you notice anything off-putting or otherwise about the above paragraph? Unfortunately, most Bharatiyas and Hindus do not.
Even those that genuinely seek to advance a Bharatiya viewpoint, such as this storied magazine, were ready to use words like ‘idol’ and ‘sanctum sanctorum’. I even saw a piece heralding the revival of ‘a pagan culture’ written by the respected author Amish Tripathi.
Yet, while in India these are simply seen as run-of-the-mill terms, they hold associations and have acquired meanings over time that are rather derogatory, which the words cannot be easily disentangled from. For example, it hardly matters that the word ‘idol’ originally may have had a benign meaning – and it is a rather unintellectual defence to merely use the dictionary definition to defend its usage. The fact is, over centuries (and even today), ‘idol worship’ has been used as a justification for severe religious discrimination, pillaging and religious apartheid. When Hindus use words like ‘idol’ to describe the Divine, it feeds into – and is seen as a self-acceptance of – broader narratives that denigrate our practices by those who do not understand our actual religious beliefs.
Similarly, terms like ‘pagan’ originally came from the Latin word ‘paganus’ that describes a villager or a country bumpkin. However, in Christian times, the meaning of the word mutated to describe the adherents of non-Christian religions in European society, who were looked down upon and discriminated against. It became an epithet to distinguish between the Christian populations of Europe and the non-Christians. Taken most expansively, paganism is located within the specific practices and beliefs of traditional European religions and the link to Hinduism or other Indian religions is weak to say the least.
It is, therefore, mystifying why Indian media that addresses an Indian audience (including media that seeks to present an ‘Indic’ viewpoint) must use imperfect English substitutes for common Indian terms. This is true even for the use of inoffensive terms like sanctum sanctorum, which are such archaic phrases that the average person in an Anglosphere country would be unaware of their meaning, let alone many Indian readers for whom English is a borrowed language.
In many cases, there are very straightforward Indian equivalents that are commonly used, inoffensive and accurate. For example, the word moorti means exactly the same in Tamil as it does in Hindi. Similarly, the word Dharam (or alternately, Dharm/Dharma) is understood in most regions of India and is present in Indian religions from Sikhism to Buddhism. So why not use words like ‘Dharmic’ or ‘Moorti’ in place of an imprecise and often derogatory equivalent?
After all, the English language is replete with borrowed words like renaissance or even shampoo (which has Indian origins) and it has only made the language richer over time. If English speakers, including in India, can put in the effort to learn the meaning and pronunciation of words like boulevard (France), kowtow (China), schadenfreude (Germany) and even pundit (India), then surely the same must apply to crucial Indian words that have no good translation/equivalent in English – and it behooves us to make this change happen.
There are a few criticisms that I can see emerging to this idea.
The first criticism is that this might lead to media from India becoming harder to understand for overseas readers. This would be misplaced, since Indian news media is overwhelmingly consumed by Indians and not foreigners – to use inappropriate terms to pander to an occassional minority of foreign readers would be a mistake. If the choice is between using English equivalents that are inaccurate but easy-to-understand OR using the accurate Indian terms at the cost of them having to put some effort to correctly understand Indian religious beliefs – the answer should be clear.
Second, given the current political dynamic, a lazy criticism would be that this would lead to “Hindi imposition”. Of course, the subtext of this claim is that it is better to have English imposition – yes, the language that reached India through a brutal colonisation – than to accept a term used in another Indian language. This in itself, is an extremely dubious assumption, since I would argue that all Indian languages from Tamil to Hindi, face far more risk from the slow creep of English vocabulary than from each other.
Let’s be clear, this will not lead to Hindi, Kannada or any other type of imposition. For one, this is because our religious terms are strongly shared across different Indian languages. Even where there are differences, we should encourage writers whether they speak Manipuri or Telugu to use their own terms in their articles. If anything, it would allow us to learn more religiously-appropriate, non-derogatory terms instead.
Some might brush this off as mere semantics but it is actually a symptom of a deeper cultural malaise. After all, our culture has normalised the daily use of the phrase that is probably the cornerstone of this obsessive habit of engaging in semantic self-denigration: “Hindu mythology”. Ask many Indians to explain the Mahabharata to a foreigner and most will instinctively describe it as “mythology” or a “story”. Mythology, obviously, is drawn from the word “myth”, which by definition implies that a belief is false and is commonly used to describe the beliefs of religions that no longer exist such as “Greek mythology” or “Norse mythology”. You would, rarely, find individuals of other extant religions such as Christianity or Islam, self-describe their religious beliefs as “mythology” – but it occurs with frightening regularity for followers of Hinduism. This is despite the strong distinction drawn between our religious texts that are termed “itihasa” (or recorded history, of which the Mahabharata is a part) and those that are not (and are meant to be taken more figuratively than literally). Unfortunately, our carefully recorded history has been turned into a myth.
What is the way forward?
Media sources that are serious about their Indian character must lead the way and break the cycle of self-denigration by explicitly demanding the use of the original Indian words, in any Indian language, in their style guides and editorial standards so that these derogatory English terms fade out. It will not change society immediately, but over a longer term, will contribute to the shrinking acceptability of offensive words and phrases like “idol”, “pagan” and “Hindu mythology”. The only myth here is that these words and phrases should be acceptable.
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