Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the Society and Modi-fying the State 155The Moghal Badshah strode into the Hindu temple and confronted the priests.
"Any reason why this temple, this insult to Allah, should be spared destruc-
tion?" he asked ironically.
Calmly the head-priest said, "Even if you destroy this Jyotirlinga, that would
not mean God's destruction for He is eternal.... But this Jyotirlinga is a living
deity—in its surface you can find the reflection of your next birth...."
"Is it?" Aurangzeb was interested. For a moment he forgot his idol-hatred and
gazed steadily into the crystal-clear surface of the white Jyotirlinga.
For a while absolute silence reigned in the temple. Slowly a vague figure
appeared on the surface of the linga—and Aurangzeb gave an inarticulate cry of
rage It was the figure of a pig.
"Burn down this temple immediately!" he shouted in mad rage and strode out.
The temple was burnt. But the fire did not burn the linga. It was only black-
ened. Since then, the Jyotirlinga of Omkareshwar is black in colour.^29This singular, specific, and linear rendering of the popular memory is
turned into the dominant memory through the careful manipulation of
India's traditional strengths, such as the dramatic narrative and other
social beliefs, practices, and prejudices.
The role of a formal school system in influencing the people's concept of
history and identity is rather limited in India, as almost half of the popu-
lation is not literate. As textbooks and general history books play no cru-
cial role in identity construction among the masses of India, it is quite
meaningless to try to analyze the overall Indian society's political inputs
through the print media. Setting out for a similar "psycho-social discovery
of India," Sudhir Kakar argues that such an exploration "must begin with
the cluster of ideas, historically derived, selected and refined, through
which Hindu culture has traditionally structured the beliefs and behav-
iour of its members." He talks of Hindu philosophy in the sense of "the
prescriptive configuration of ideal purposes, values and beliefs which per-
colate down into the everyday life of the ordinary people and give it form
and meaning." Despite Kakar's complete dismissal of Muslims and other
minorities from his analysis of India and "the psychological terrain of the
Indian inner world," this premise could be adopted here because the focus
of this book is also exclusively on the Hindu domain.^30
This Geertzian view of seeing religion as a cultural system of symbols
informs only little unless we recognize that there are human origins, par-
ticular class interests, and historical and cultural conditionality at work in
religious discourses. Any study of religion may have to rewrite what the
religious may try hard to elide as long as that religion is considered to be a
human product conditioned by the space and time in which the concerned
humans lived.^31 So the religious feelings and values (as much as the "sym-
bol systems"^32 that we might add here) are produced and managed in
the political processes,^33 and the latter do tap into the former for specific
validation and mobilization purposes.