Hinduism: A Religion to Live By

by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

This now-classic book provides a description and interpretation of Hinduism, focusing particularly on the religious psychology and behavior of Hindus. Rejecting familiar assumptions about early Hinduism, Chaudhuri provides illuminating insights into its formative influences and examines temple
and image worship as well as the three major cults of Siva, Krishna, and the Mother Goddess.

Genres: Hinduism, Religion

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চন্দ্র চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) was a Bengali−English writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India.

He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.

In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.

A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reviewer’s Apology: I decided to write a teensy four line review and get done with this monstrous tome. However, that would have been an injustice to all future readers of this vaunted monstrosity. Hence, bear with me, dear reader.

Introduction: This book has exclusively been designed to determine that the religion of the Hindus is derived from the religious beliefs and practices of the Indo-European peoples of ancient ages but has become corrupt in the course of its evolution through time.

Page after page, Chaudhuri goes on with his fantastical bouquet of claims and allegations.

Detailed analysis: To begin with, according to Chaudhuri, the Indo-European character of Hinduism can be established on the basis of the following three facts:

1) Words used in the Hindu religious vocabulary either go back to proto- Indo-European languages or have analogues in them;

2) Certain notions and concepts in Hinduism could not have originated in the geographical environment which India provides but could have come only from some cold region; and

3) Certain rituals and beliefs in Hinduism show a clear similarity with those of the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans and Scandinavians.

And now comes the bombshell of a claim --

The worship of light and worship of fire are the two notable features of Hinduism which have come only from a cold region. ; the Yajna in Hinduism is akin to the sacrificuum in Roman religion; and the primitive Indo-European notion notion of a divine order is perhaps the idea of the bright sky as a non-anthropomorphic deity which is embodied in the Greek Zeus Pater, the Latin Jupiter and the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitt.

And, there were neither temples nor images in the earliest manifestations of Hinduism and in this respect the Hindus were like the Germans who gave locations on earth to their gods and rites. Both the earliest Hindus and Germans worshipped in sanctified places.

The Romans and the Greeks shared their feelings, but they had learnt temple and image worship from the Egyptians and the peoples of Asia even when they sanctified nature in a lively way.

Chaudhuri points out that the whole process of change from the non-anthropomorphic mode of worship to the anthropomorphic was similar in Hinduism, Roman religion and Greek religion. During this process of change the deified sky was transformed into the sky god and was endowed with a special relationship with the earth as mother-goddess.

The process was extended to form an anthropomorphic pantheon in the aforesaid religions. The completed process is to be seen among all the Indo-European groups, namely, the Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Scandinavians, all of whom have analogous pantheons.

The anthropomorphic gods, irrespective of the pantheon to which they belong, are endowed with common human characteristics. As with the Greeks and Romans, so with the Hindus, their gods and goddesses are heroic men and women. They have all the virtues and failings, especially amorousness, of the heroic age. They are intoxicated with power and become domineering, jealous, combative and sensual in conduct. These traits are to be found in the leading characters of the Mahabharata as well as of the Iliad.

Chaudhuri goes on to say that the earliest religion of the Aryans underwent drastic changes from their first settlement in India down to the Muslim conquest.

[I mean, seriously?]

The Aryans are thought to have followed the Vedic religion when they came to India, but the Vedic religion is only a theoretical construction from the four Vedic Samhitas and the Brahamanas which cannot be treated as a coherent religion practised at any particular period of time.

The Rig-Veda mentions different types of beliefs and rituals which are not identical with those mentioned in the Brahamanas. But the first conspicuous change that crept into Hinduism after the Aryan settlement in India was polymorphous monotheism.

The following cults, which were not known in the Rig-Veda period, came into being.

I. The Cult of Siva
II. The Vishnu-Krishna Cult
III. The Mother Goddess (Durga or Kali) Cult
IV. The Cult of the Rivers
V. The Cow-Worship Cult

Chaudhuri holds that with the emergence of the first three cults, the image worship in temples, which was hitherto unknown in Hinduism, came into existence.

But the invasion of Alexander brought the Greeks to the north-western region of India, and exposed the life and culture of the Hindus to Hellenic influences in many things. After the adoption of temples and images, the next important change that came in Hinduism was the introduction of a wholly new feeling for the monotheistic gods. This was called the way of love (Bhakti Marga) which meant disinterested surrender of self.to a personal god of love.

Chaudhuri contends that Hinduism had attained its full development before the Muslim invasion of India at the end of the 12th century.

[Truth be told, Hinduism had attained its full development at least 5 thousand years prior to that!!]

With the Muslim invasion Hinduism had to pass through decadence, and many new religious movements came into being in order to revive it. But it survived all stresses and storms and continued to flow like the great rivers of the northern region of India, the Ganges and the Jamuna, which change their courses to overcome obstacles.

In fact, Hinduism is not limited to any founder prophet, holy book, or fixed dogma or doctrine. Its unity lies in the Hindu's unlimited capacity for faith and not in the oneness of the object of his faith. Under these circumstances Hinduism can neither be defined nor obliterated.

In Chaudhuri's view, priesthood is an important institution in Hinduism. The Brahmin caste belongs to its priestly order. The Brahmins conduct the rituals of Hinduism, but they are not only ignorant of the mantras they chant but also indifferent to the moral and spiritual well being of those for whom they conduct the rituals.

Unlike the Christian priests, they are neither professionally trained nor charitably disposed. In fact, they are an arrogant, greedy and depraved lot. [Can you beat that? The Indian priestly class is an untrained lot!! Perchance Chaudhuri did not care to read into the history of Indian priesthood]

[And his rants continue ………]

Chaudhuri thinks Hinduism is a chase, not of beatitude, but of power. The Hindus got all the opportunities for asserting power, on the one hand, and, on the other, protection and a sense of security, from their adherence to their religion. Thus all religious rites and observances had a protective orientation.

And then he says, “In actual fact, Hinduism is a means of living in the world with the help of supernatural agencies and not a gateway to spiritual salvation…”

[All my intentions of countering this text was half-dead by now. How do you counter an imbecile? A learned one at that?]

Of course, Hinduism, too, like every other religion, admits of belief in another world, in life after death, and in other supra-mundane matters, but the worldly aims of Hinduism outweigh the otherworldly aims. Therefore in Hindu society every worldly activity is under the control of religion, and everything religious is involved in the world. The Hindus worship gods and goddesses for gaining riches and success in worldly affairs.

[So what he’s basically saying is that we are daydreamers, enjoying an eternal siesta!!]

This absorption in the world has made the belief in rebirth as the most attractive of all beliefs for them. They so love the world that they make the possibility of leaving it even after many cycles of rebirth as remote and difficult as possible. Besides, they treat their gods on a commercial basis; they believe that the gods can be placated by offering money and sacrifices or by having a dip in a holy river. Consequently Hinduism has become a stagnant lagoon of religious beliefs and practices in which the Hindus live like its fauna.

[And what is the general conclusion that we reach at?]

Chaudhuri unacceptably dismisses Hinduism as an utterly worldly religion without any savour of spiritualism in it. He considers Hinduism inferior to Christianity on account of its worldliness and its lack of charity. He looks upon Hinduism as a corrupt offshoot of Indo-European religions.

[So what do we finally have boys and girls? We are inferior.]

But there is a small little trouble with this tome. The timeline is all murky, misty, flawed and unscientific.

And that great hoax called AIT is a hoax afterall.

And even if we were to accept the existence of some hypothetical Aryan migrants to India, they did not call themselves Hindus nor named their religion as Hinduism. They regarded themselves as members of the human species and their religious beliefs and practices were intended to promote the material as well as the spiritual welfare of humanity as a whole.

Chaudhuri himself admits that the word 'Hindu' simply means an inhabitant of the geographical region known as India (The Continent of Circe, op. cit., p. 30), that the natives of India have no other name for the whole complex of their religious beliefs and practices except the phrase Sanatan Dharma, and that the Western Orientalists have coined the word Hinduism to describe the religion of the natives of India.

When Chaudhuri says that Christianity is a more spiritual religion than Hinduism, he ignores the fact that the followers of Christianity enslaved, conducted reasoned and pre-planned genocides and subjugated innumerable nations of Africa and Asia for their material power and affluence for several centuries in the past.

In doing so he shows himself to be a methodically biased and reckless detractor of a religion which is not only nameless but also humanitarian. And a religion which has survived countless onslaughts and only got stronger by the day.

A young critic says it best: Chaudhuri observes with the jaundiced eye as a recluse. He has pointed out the fallacies and myths more than he has emphasized the qualities and virtues. In this sense he is a sheer fraud because he has betrayed his own country in writing on the international level.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one seems able to explain Hinduism to me. It is not a religion like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

Although the author's views on Hinduism might be classed as controversial, this is the only book that has explained this religion to me in a way that I can begin to understand.

Although I read the book, I must confess that I am still quite mystified about this fascinating religion.

[AngshumanM93 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Karthik Subbiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, albeit slightly dry, introduction to Hinduism. It's a great read for anyone who wants to understand the historical origins and development of Hinduism. It's also a good introduction to Hinduism from a Western lens.

[Bean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was useful to me as a complete ignoramus on Hinduism. That being said, it did leave me with a lot of unanswered questions, which I think is natural for a thought-provoking book and especially naturally for Hinduism. Particularly through this book I gained an appreciation for the mind-boggling diversity within Hinduism.

Chaudhuri is an endlessly witty and engaging writer. I came away with a couple of deliciously quotable citations.

With that being said, he engages in some strange, fallacious reasoning at various points throughout the book. Despite having excellent arguments regarding the speciousness of historical dating of religious texts (often construed to be far more "ancient" than they can actually be proven to be), he has rather flimsy arguments for other cultural phenomena, and at times his justifications are as bad as basically 'it just couldn't possibly be otherwise, I can't accept it'. This argumentation is just incredibly weak and disappointing coming from a neutral, secular standpoint, as it is coming from a religious one.

Most useful were his personal observations on customs he had observed as an Indian, as a resident of Bengal.