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St. Stephen's College, Founders' Day Address: December 7, 2002
Almost sixty years ago, on the veranda of the principal's bungalow, the then Principal Mukarji's son Anand was married to Shirin.
Years later, in 1975 to be precise, I came to India to work for the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies in Hyderabad. Shirin, newly-widowed, lived there and took me in as a paying guest. But that term does not do justice to our relationship: I came to call her Masi ('auntie') but, in truth, Ummi ('mummy') would have been better, for she was a mother to me. Through her I became involved in a web of relationships. She introduced me to her children, who are as close to me as any brother or sisters could be. And because of her bigheartedness, I made friends with her friends. The sense of loneliness and isolation that I felt as a young, 23 years old Englishman in another country vanished in the sunshine of her kindness and endless generosity. Of course, as with all mothers and sons, we had our moments of misunderstanding, manipulation and hurt. But, as I often reminded myself, if we were nothing to each other, we would not have got into these difficulties. They were indications that our relationship was close and that it mattered. She died last year: may she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Shirin enabled me to take India into my life and my heart. Another elderly friend once said to me: 'India will always be a part of you'. He was right. But I could not have done it in my own power. I owe it to many people but most of all to Shirin that I came to terms with and to love the people, sights, smells, food and many other facets of the fascinating land of India. She even taught me some Urdu, though I was a poor student.
Shirin was an Indian Christian. Her family came to include people of Hindu and Muslim origin, and she took it in her stride. India has always had the capacity to stir and shake religions into an interesting and enriching cocktail. When the Muslims came, many were entranced by Hindu diversity and tolerance, and learned from those whom, for a while, they ruled. And the other way round, too. Even the British, an insular people, have not been immune to India's diversity and traditions of tolerance. When I dream of a city, it is usually of Hyderabad: my city, and a fascinating example of religious acceptance and broadmindedness. Not long ago it had a ruling elite of people who were culturally Muslim but religiously Hindu.
But religious tolerance has not always been part of India's landscape. For an Akbar there is an Aurangzeb, and for a mahatma there is someone of his own faith who wishes him dead. Religion produces: tolerance, saintliness, generosity, good faith; but also communalism, bigotry, niggardliness and bad faith: in India, as elsewhere.
In a moment, I will suggest that we need to make choices about the kind of religion we need and should believe in.
But first we should face up to the question: do we need religion at all? Should we not have outgrown it? Will it help us get on in the world, or just get in the way? Many people turn from religion in sorrow or anger. Who can blame them when we look at that part of its history which is narrow-minded, vengeful, paranoid and destructive.
Yet there are two good reasons for taking religion seriously enough to engage in it with all one's being. The first is that it is an enduring and ineradicable part of human experience. Traces of a religious approach to life go back to pre-historic times, with the staining of bones in burial grounds by Neanderthal men and women, probably for ritual purposes, about 150,000 years ago. When I was growing up, there was much talk of the death of God. But human awe in the face of a Transcendent dimension to life that cannot be apprehended by sight and touch and taste: this never goes away. Particular forms of being religious die or else are transformed into some new way of faith but, to rephrase a Zen image, the moon endures even if the signs that point to it change.
The second reason is that, enduring as it does, religion may tell us not only of human need but of divine truth. I get exasperated with students who notify me that religion offers them hope, purpose or whatever. I want to say to them: 'But is it true; or just a feel-good thing?'. Yet even if their comments are naïve, sentimental and selfish, as they often are, they point up one important thing: religious truth is not just a proposition to be considered but emerges out of and is lit up by lives lived. If religion does not offer hope and purpose, then it will fade and die, and will deserve to. As humans grapple with the idea that their lives are open to Transcendent goodness and grace, and seek to live in its presence, however incompletely, then some find that its truth becomes translucently clear.
So it would be unwise to dismiss religion as passé and defunct. But it would certainly be foolish to defend it uncritically. We need to make choices from it. As the inspired Moses told his people as they were to enter the promised land, they had to choose life: for others, as well as themselves. Religion is caring for the stranger, and seeking his or her good. How ironic that, in that land of Israel and Palestine, settlers occupying territory to which they have no just claim should face suicide bombers, both groups turning to religion as a justification for their evil and fanatical actions.
Well, it is easy to point the finger at others. In fact religious violence can scar all our lives for, whoever and wherever we are, religion can have a malevolent impact upon us. Shirin's family came from Lahore, now part of another country but at the time of her marriage in undivided India. Upon independence in 1947, it became part of Pakistan, a land created in the name of religion. Shirin left that most beautiful city in those dark and violent days, never to return. Religion split people and families asunder. When I went to Lahore exactly thirty years later, she sent me to see her family members still in Pakistan, to the bookshop her father had managed, to wander among her cherished memories and report back to her about them.
One person who did return to Lahore after independence was the great Canadian scholar of religious studies, Wilfred Smith. In the early 1940s he had worked in the Henry Martyn Institute (where I later toiled), which was then in Lahore but now in Hyderabad, India. Upon his return in 1948, he stood in the ruins of the city, amid fractured friendships, the smell of death and a country's amputation performed in the name of religion. He described the events whose entail he witnessed as a 'terrifying upheaval of hatred and violence, when ten million persons were uprooted and perhaps one million were massacred', and says that the anguish he felt then was 'burnt into his consciousness'. Smith vowed to dedicate his life to taking religion seriously as a force that could transform people for good and not for evil, for life instead of death. He helped change the discipline of religious studies into a humane field of study.
Those of us who read Smith carefully know that there are two blind alleys into which students and scholars of religion often stumble. One reduces religion to personal faith, which you may seek to impose on others or else keep to yourself as a kind of child's security blanket. The other endlessly defines religious terms and offers theories about religion. Both are useful and, indeed, essential activities if handled in an adult and responsible way. But they are of secondary importance, and are often an excuse whereby people stand at an arm's length from the one issue that really matters.
And what is this primary theme? It is: whether religion makes you a better person, or a worse one. Although religion is about many things, it is essentially an intuition that there is more to life than meets the eye. That intuition tells us that this world is porous to transcendent grace and goodness, to those who have: ears to hear; eyes to see; hearts to be inflamed with a zeal for justice, peace, hope and love. Scholars and students of religion who are tone-deaf to this music of the spheres have missed the point of the subject they study.
To act upon the belief that religion is about grace and goodness is not easy in the contemporary world. There is so much choice for many people. True, there are many who live in abject poverty with little or no choice. But, to those who are likely to listen to or read these words, there is often more choice open than was available to their parents and grandparents. Some choice can be trivial: what television program shall I watch tonight, and what shall I eat as I do so? Other choices are momentous and far-reaching. And the choices about religion are of this latter kind.
We often think that religious choices are reducible to two: shall I be religious or not?; and, should I stay in my own family of faith or transfer to another? Not so. These are meaningful issues to those who tease them out, but many more people face other significant religious choices every day. Most important is: how will I show evidence of being Christian or Hindu or Muslim today? Can others detect the Christ-likeness in me, or the divine grace of the god or guru, or my submission to the creator of the worlds?
And other, new issues face us that require careful choices. We fall in love with someone of a different religion and buck the system to marry them. Can we then belong to two religions: our own, and that of our spouse? Would children from such a marriage have hyphenated-religious identity, belonging to more than one faith? People may tell us that this cannot be done. They are wrong. It happens all around us, and we need to develop strategies that enable religions to respond positively to such challenges, not marginalizing but affirming such explorative souls. Our human capacity to embrace multiple identities is not just a religious thing. I remain English to the core of my being, although residency in India, the USA and many other places has shaped who I am, and affects me still.
Indeed, most of us have certain irreducible givens from which we develop into our mature selves. Whether we turn out to be decent human beings depends upon the choices we make, that take us from who we are to a grace-filled life or to a life of small-mindedness and hard-heartedness. As I say: I am English; I am also a Methodist Christian and male. From these particular and (for me) indelible characteristics, I can grow into goodness or into wickedness, or something in between. And for those who are, say, Indian and Hindu and female, exactly the same possibilities lie before them. With what we are given, we must become what we can be: for good, or for evil.
I suppose it is because I am who I am that certain other Englishmen inspire me. The great C.F. Andrews joined the staff of St. Stephen's College in 1904. Although he left ten years later for Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan, its influence upon him was profound. Two years after his arrival, the college appointed S.K. Rudra as its first Indian principal. Andrews' many friendships with people of other faiths, who included Gandhiji as well as Tagore, began because, in this place, he learned to respect, and to work with and under people whose ethnicity and sometimes even religion were different than his. Today, this college has faculty, staff and students of may faiths and none. Will all grow into the inclusive sort of person Charlie Andrews turned out to be? His last will and testament had a codicil, added just before his death in 1940. It stipulated that:
I desire to be buried in the Christian faith as a Christian, near St. Paul's Cathedral, Calcutta, if possible, with the blessing of the Metropolitan whom I have deeply longed to serve as my bishop, as a priest of the Christian Church and a minister of the Christian faith which I hold with all my heart.
Sometimes, Andrews clung to his Christian faith and particularly his priestly ministry by the tips of his fingers. But not when it counted. He lived and died in the faith of Christ, interpreted with a generous and open heart and mind. Would that all of us, whatever our religion, would construe it with a like liberality.
I would like to add a coda to my story of Andrews. I first became interested in the man through a dear friend, Nadir Dinshaw, once a Parsee but now a Christian, a man of kindness and goodness. His Christian faith does not hack away his Parsee roots, but grows from them to produce fruit of justice and hope that inspires his friends. He is another example of a person of an inclusive generosity of spirit.
When we look at the list of old St. Stephanians, we can note people of different faiths who have served their community and country with great distinction. Let us pick out two such people. I have already mentioned Shirin's father-in-law. He was principal from 1926 until his death in 1945. In 1930, he was appointed as one of two Indian members on the Lindsay Commission to look into higher education in Christian Educational Institutions in India. In his time, women were admitted to the college: to postgraduate courses in 1928-29 and to undergraduate ones in 1943. But his best witness is his family, who have served India with distinction. I am proud to know some of them. A second example is the Muslim politician, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad. He was an old Stephanian, and visited the college in 1974 when he was President of India.
If there were time I could go on, remembering distinguished former faculty, staff and students. But my point is made. The ethos of St. Stephen's has contributed to shaping the vision and deeds of many who have passed through its portals. Christian in origin, as its name indicates, but in no narrow way, it offers hope that, in a multi-faith society and world, people can grow into lives of service and even holiness, by their influence transforming others and even institutions for good. As it has been so for others, may it be so for us whom these words touch today.
Martin Forward
