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But I am curious! With respect to Eid, how does Mr. Ally see a Hindu, for whom the cow is sacred and who would in no circumstance contemplate its slaughter, participating/celebrating in this festival in which the common practice, at least in Guyana, seems to be the mandatory slaughter of only cows?
A preferred methodology in the academic study of the religions of the world requires the investigator to virtually enter into the experience of the people whose religion is being studied. If this is the discipline required for a mere academic study of a religion, how much more would it not become incumbent on someone to completely identify with and totally immerse oneself in the experience of a people whose religious festivals one claims to celebrate?
What exactly does it mean to say we celebrate one another’s festivals? Let us take Easter, for example. Are the thousands of people who raise kites during the Easter season and those who congregate in large numbers at the seawalls with their liquor bars, barbeques and music on Easter Monday, celebrating Easter? I find this hard to accept.
Every Christian knows what it means to participate in the liturgy and sacrament of Easter through which it becomes possible to re-discover the character of the “paschal mystery” of Christ’s death and resurrection celebrated in the vigil observed during the night from Saturday to Easter Sunday. If Easter does not involve communion and the experience of the Eucharist believed to be brought about by the blood of Christ then it is anything but Easter.
Similarly, in the case of Deepavali, nothing else will do except for an outsider to celebrate the festival from the perspective of a Hindu. Here, however, the challenge of entering the religious experience of the practitioner will be truly formidable. Hinduism surrounds itself with an almost impenetrable armour of myths, symbols, images, rituals, philosophy, which most outsiders, especially those brought up in exclusivist traditions, will find impossible to negotiate.
It will be difficult, if not impossible, for someone brought up in an exclusivist tradition that claims its god is the only god and explicitly states there is no other god, or who claims to have the only true god versus the other person’s false god, to meaningfully and respectfully engage in any Hindu celebration.
And, it will be no less challenging for a person brought up in a rigidly patriarchal religious tradition where god is only male, where in some cases it is considered blasphemy punishable with death to consider to imagine god as female, to identify with the idea of Lakshmi as the sovereign mother of the universe.
While it is generally believed that Hindus light the diyas to welcome Lakshmi into their homes, it is important to note that the light is an embodiment of Lakhsmi. For the Hindu, nothing can more appropriately express the meaning of Lakshmi as the luminous mother of the universe than the light of the diya.
This light, as an embodiment of Lakshmi, establishes the nexus for the intersection of the divine and the mundane, the deity and the devotee. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their concept of monotheism as the one true god versus false god(s), predicated on the utter otherness of god, and his total separation from humans and the world, or his singular incarnation in a single figure in history, Hinduism postulates no absolute distinction between the divine and the world.
We can better understand and appreciate the importance of Deepavali by looking at the etymology of the word lakshmi. It is derived from the Sanskrit verbal root laksh which provides an insight into the nature and personalities of Lakshmi as she is envisioned by human devotees and even by the devas, or luminous beings, themselves.
The verb form from the root is lakshate translated to mean to perceive, to observe, to recognise, to characterise, to mark, to define, to know, to understand. It also means to aim, as with an arrow at any object. Lakshmi epitomises luminous energy in action.
Whoever thinks that they are participating in Deepavali celebrations must know what it means to Hindus. And, if it is not celebrated with our understanding and perspective, then it is not celebrated. Anything else is a mockery and a caricature, unless, of course it is reduced to witnessing a spectacle or parade as the one Mr. Ally describes. Deepavali is not merely the lighting of diyas, eating ‘seven curry’, or women dressing in saris, however cute or gracious that might be.
If one can’t celebrate and participate in Deepavali, Easter and Eid without understanding and identifying with their inner core and spiritual significance, in what way then can it be said that we are participating in one another’s festivals?
Mr. Ally has given us the answer. By degutting these essentially sacred events and narratives of their true meaning and by a steady process of secularisation of them all, it becomes possible for anyone, regardless of his or her belief or absence thereof, to participate in any one of them. It is only then that Mr. Ally’s assertion that one doesn’t have to be a Hindu to celebrate Deepavali makes any sense at all.
This secularisation that Mr. Ally seems to be advocating must be resisted at all cost by every concerned Hindu. But in fairness to him, he is only giving voice to a process that has been in motion for a long time now. We Hindus have allowed the degradation of Deepavali with each passing year, from Lamaha Street to LBI– with Deepavali queens, melas, jalsas, fairs, and motorcades, all of which have contributed to the suffocation of the spirit and the loss of the sacred. And now, Shri Sukta, that majestic body of Vedic mantras magnifying Lakshmi must give way to the Bollywood mediocrities.
