Two titles that begin with the same three words. Why I Am a Hindu, by Shashi Tharoor. Why I Am an Atheist, by Bhagat Singh. One is a book of several hundred pages written by a sitting member of parliament with a library at his elbow. The other is a short essay written in a prison cell by a young man who expected to be hanged, and was writing partly to make sure nobody could say afterwards that he had flinched.
I did not read them together on purpose. I read one, and then found I could not stop answering it with the other. This essay is where that argument has got to.
One rule before I start: everything here comes from the two texts and nothing else.It is a harder rule to keep with these two than it sounds. Both men have become symbols, one of a martyr and one of a certain kind of liberal Indian, and a great deal gets said in their names that neither of these texts says. Bhagat Singh’s essay circulates in several versions whose wording differs slightly from one edition to the next; where I quote it, the words may not match your copy exactly, but the arguments will.
Two defences
The first thing worth noticing is that neither text was written in a vacuum. Both are defences. Somebody questioned the author, and the book is the reply.
Bhagat Singh tells you exactly who. Some of his friends, he writes, had begun to suggest that his atheism was not a conclusion at all but a symptom: that he had grown vainglorious from the attention of his two trials, the Delhi bomb case and the Lahore conspiracy case, and that a young man who had become famous thought himself too big for God. The essay is his answer to the charge of vanity. It is, in a sense, a document about character before it is a document about theology.
Tharoor’s accuser is plural and political. His book is written against two opponents at once. On one side are people who assume that any educated, liberal Indian must have left religion behind, and that a Hinduism worth the name is a bundle of superstitions. On the other side, and much more urgently, are the advocates of Hindutva, who claim to speak for all Hindus and whom Tharoor regards as having taken his religion hostage. He is defending his faith from its detractors and, at greater length, from some of its self-appointed defenders.
That shared defensiveness changes how the two should be read. Neither is a neutral inquiry. Each author already knows his conclusion and is showing his working. The interesting question is whether the working holds.
The unbeliever’s biography
Bhagat Singh’s answer to the charge of vanity is to tell the story of how he got here, and it is a story of losing a belief slowly, not of throwing it away in a single moment of pride.
He was not raised an atheist. He writes that he was brought up under the influence of his grandfather, an orthodox Arya Samajist, and later lived with his father, a firm believer who encouraged him to pray every day. As a schoolboy at the DAV school in Lahore, living in the hostel, he said his morning and evening prayers and recited the Gayatri Mantra “for hours and hours”. At the National College he began to think more freely about religion, but he was still a believer. He had begun to keep his hair long, he says, though he could never bring himself to believe in the mythology and doctrines of Sikhism or of any other religion.
What moved him was the revolutionary movement, and books. The first leader he worked under, he says, could not bring himself to deny the existence of God. Another, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, sang the glory of God from the first page of his prison memoir. The four men hanged for the Kakori conspiracy spent their last days in prayer. Then came the reading: Bakunin’s God and State, something of Marx, much of Lenin and Trotsky, all of them atheists, and later a book called Common Sense by Niralamba Swami. By the end of 1926, he writes, he had become convinced that the theory of an almighty supreme being had no foundation.
Then comes the part of the essay that is really his answer to the vanity charge, and the reason I trust the rest of it. After he was arrested in Lahore in May 1927, he says, police officers began urging him to pray, morning and evening. He was in exactly the position where a man might reach for God. He thought about it seriously and decided he could not make himself believe and pray. “No, I never did.” To start praying in order to be helped, he says elsewhere in the essay, would be the most selfish and degraded act a man could commit.
The best argument Bhagat Singh makes against the charge of vanity is not an argument at all. It is a description of what it cost him to stay consistent.
This is the heart of the essay, and it shaped how I read everything else in it. His case for atheism is not that belief is foolish. It is that he examined belief, found no reason for it, and then refused to take it up again at the one moment when it would have been most useful. Whatever one thinks of his conclusion, that is not how vanity behaves.
Vanity, defined
It is worth pausing on the charge itself, because Bhagat Singh takes it more seriously than his accusers did.
He does not simply deny being vain. He defines the word. Vanity, he writes, “or to be more precise Ahankar, is the excess of undue pride in one’s self.” And he separates it from something that looks like it from outside: “Let me first make it clear that egotism and vanity are two different things.” The sentence that follows is the one I think the whole essay turns on: “Self-reliance is always liable to be interpreted as vanity.”
That is a sharp observation, and not only about atheism. Anyone who declines a comfort that everyone around them relies on will be accused of thinking themselves above it. The person who will not pray at the funeral, the person who will not accept the consoling story, the person who insists on doing without the help that others take for granted: all of them look proud from the outside. Bhagat Singh’s claim is that what looks like pride is a decision to carry one’s own weight.
Read that way, his atheism is less a metaphysical position than a moral one. The argument against God comes later in the essay. What comes first is the argument for standing on one’s own feet, and the atheism is where that argument ends up.
The believer’s Hinduism
Tharoor’s book begins in a similar place: with himself. The first part is called “My Hinduism”, and in it he describes the faith he grew up in and why he is proud of it: chiefly, as he puts it, because it does not claim to be the only true path.
But what he believes in is not quite what Bhagat Singh rejected, and this took me a while to see.
The Hinduism Tharoor describes has no single founder, no single holy book and no church. There is no pope, no creed to recite, and no central authority entitled to declare someone a heretic. It is a family of traditions spread across the Vedas and the Upanishads, the epics and the Gita, the great philosophers from Adi Shankara onward, and the devotional movements. He leans heavily on a line from the Rig Veda that he returns to more than once: truth is one, and the wise call it by many names.Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti. It functions in the book almost as a thesis statement. Everything Tharoor says about pluralism flows out of it. And he describes a religion with many paths to the divine, knowledge and devotion and action among them, and leaves the choice of path to the Hindu.
He places great weight on Swami Vivekananda, and on his address to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, where Vivekananda presented Hinduism as a religion that did not merely tolerate other faiths but accepted them as true paths. It is a distinction Tharoor keeps returning to: tolerance implies putting up with something you think is wrong, acceptance implies you think it may be right.
So when Tharoor says “why I am a Hindu”, he is not really saying “why I believe what Bhagat Singh stopped believing”. He is saying something closer to “why I belong to a tradition large enough to hold people who disagree about almost everything, including God”.
The hymn that doubts itself
The most surprising thing in Tharoor’s book, for anyone who comes to it straight from Bhagat Singh, is how much doubt it contains.
Tharoor quotes the Creation Hymn from the Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta. It asks how the universe began and then declines to answer. Who really knows, it asks, and who can declare where this creation came from? The gods themselves came later than the creation. Perhaps the one who oversees it from the highest heaven knows. Or perhaps he does not know.
That last line could have been written by Bhagat Singh. It is the same question he puts to believers, asked in one of the oldest texts of the religion he left, and left unanswered on purpose.
Tharoor goes further. He argues that a Hindu can be astika or nastika, a believer or a denier; that one can reject the authority of the Vedas, the existence of the soul and belief in God, and still be Hindu. He is not arguing in the abstract. He describes a period of his own life in which he called himself first an atheist and then an agnostic, without ever feeling he had left the faith he was born into. It is one of the book’s boldest claims, and it has a strange consequence for my pair of books.
There is something generous about a religion that says to the man who has rejected it: you are still one of us, and your doubt is part of our tradition. There is also something slippery about it. Bhagat Singh wrote his essay precisely to make his rejection unambiguous. A faith that can absorb its own apostates has made itself very hard to argue with, and a position that cannot be argued with is, from Bhagat Singh’s side of the table, not a strength. It is a way of avoiding the question.
I go back and forth on this. On generous days I think Tharoor has found the most humane answer any religion has given to unbelief. On less generous days I think he has changed the subject.
The question Tharoor doesn’t need to answer
The core of Bhagat Singh’s essay is an old argument made with young impatience. If God is almighty, all-knowing and good, why does the world contain so much suffering? Why does He permit it? If He created the world, why did He create it like this? He does not accept that the suffering is a test, or a lesson, or a mystery beyond human understanding. He wants a straight answer and suspects there isn’t one.
He puts the point with a comparison I have never been able to forget. Nero, he writes, burned one Rome and killed a limited number of people, and history has showered every venomous epithet on him for it. “Then, how are you going to justify your almighty, eternal Nero, who has been, and is still causing numberless tragedies every day, every hour and every minute?” If God made the world for his own pleasure, he asks, “where, then, is the difference between him and Nero?”
It is a young man’s argument, and it has a young man’s force. It does not bother with the philosophers’ answers about free will or the greater good. It simply refuses to give the creator a moral standard lower than the one we apply to an emperor.
He then turns on the theory of karma, and this is where the essay is sharpest. Suppose, he says, the suffering of this life is punishment for sins in a previous one. What kind of punishment is it? A punishment is supposed to reform the person punished. But if a man is reborn as a cow or a cat or a tree for his sins, what reformation can take place? The animal does not know what it did wrong. It cannot learn. So the punishment is not reformative, only retributive, and retribution for its own sake is exactly what civilised people are supposed to have moved beyond. And why, if God can punish sins after they happen, does He not prevent them before they happen?
He brings the argument home, as he brings everything home, to politics. Why, he asks, does God not simply put a feeling into the minds of the British that would make them liberate India? And he answers himself: British rule is in India “not because God wills it, but because they possess power and we do not dare to oppose them.” God, in other words, explains nothing about the empire that guns and rifles do not explain better.
Reading Tharoor with this in my head, I kept waiting for the reply, and I did not find one that would have satisfied Bhagat Singh. I do not think this is an oversight. Tharoor is not trying to prove that God exists or that God is good. His Hinduism does not stand or fall on a personal creator who could have stopped the British and chose not to. A religion whose central philosophical tradition speaks of an impersonal ultimate reality, and in which each soul is at root identical with it, is not obviously committed to the God Bhagat Singh was attacking.
So in one sense the two books talk past each other. Bhagat Singh demolished a particular idea of God: personal, omnipotent, benevolent and interventionist. Tharoor defends a tradition in which that idea is one option among several. Each could claim a victory and neither would have landed a blow.
But in another sense the karma argument does land, because karma is not optional in the way a personal God is. It is part of the moral architecture of the tradition Tharoor describes, and I have not been able to shake Bhagat Singh’s point about the cow. He asks what reformative effect such a punishment could possibly have: a creature reborn as a cow or a cat or a tree cannot know what it is being punished for. A system of justice in which the punished cannot understand their sentence is a strange kind of justice. On this point, as a matter of argument, I think the prisoner is right.
He adds a second objection that I think is even stronger. On the karmic view, he says, poverty itself becomes a sin and a punishment. And then he asks what we would think of a criminologist, a jurist or a legislator who proposed punishments that “shall inevitably force men to commit more offences.” Poverty breeds desperation, desperation breeds wrongdoing, and wrongdoing earns a worse birth next time. A justice system that manufactures its own criminals is not a justice system. It is a trap with a theology attached.
Where God comes from
For a man writing against God, Bhagat Singh is surprisingly gentle about why people believe.
His account of the origin of the idea is not a conspiracy. It is a description of need. God, he writes, “was brought into imaginary existence to encourage man to face boldly all the trying circumstances”. He was to be “a father, mother, sister and brother, friend and helper”, someone to turn to when a person is in great distress and has nowhere else to go. God also served, he says, as a deterrent, a watcher who keeps people from doing wrong when no one else is looking. None of this is contemptuous. It is almost tender. He understands exactly why the idea exists; he simply thinks a grown person should be able to do without it.
Tharoor’s account of where the divine comes from is different in kind. In his Hinduism the idea of God is not mainly a refuge for the frightened. It is the object of a very long inquiry, carried on by philosophers who argued about whether the self and the ultimate reality are one, whether the gods themselves were created, and whether anything can be known about the beginning at all. The Creation Hymn is not the prayer of a frightened man. It is the note of a curious one.
Put side by side, the two accounts do not contradict each other so much as describe two different people. Bhagat Singh describes the believer who needs God. Tharoor describes the believer who wonders about God. Both exist. The mistake is to think that either one is the only kind, and I think each author, in the end, makes that mistake about the other.
What religion does in the hands of power
This is where the two books, which disagree about nearly everything, agree most strongly.
Bhagat Singh is careful here, more careful than his reputation. He explicitly declines to say that exploiters invented God; unlike “certain of the radicals”, he writes, he would not attribute belief to their ingenuity. But he agrees with those radicals on the essential point: that all faiths and creeds “became in turn the mere supporters of the tyrannical and exploiting institutions”. The poor are told their poverty is the fruit of their past lives and that their reward will come after death, and so they do not revolt in this one. He quotes Upton Sinclair to the effect that if you make a man believe in immortality you can rob him of everything he has, and he will help you do it.
Tharoor would reject that as an account of religion in general. But a large part of his book is a case study of something very close to it. He traces the idea of Hindutva from V. D. Savarkar, who coined the term, through M. S. Golwalkar and the RSS, and he is scathing about where it has led: a political movement that treats Hinduism as a badge of national belonging rather than a spiritual path, that defines who counts as a true Indian by religion, and that has made violence respectable. He writes about the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and about the lynchings of Muslims by self-appointed protectors of the cow. He argues that these people are not defending Hinduism at all. They are using it.
Put that beside Bhagat Singh and the convergence is striking. The atheist says religion, whatever its origins, has become a tool of the powerful. The believer spends a good part of his book showing, in detail and with real anger, the powerful using his religion to decide who belongs. They disagree about whether this is the essence of religion or its corruption. They agree completely about what it looks like.
On this, both are right, and I find it the most useful thing either book taught me. You do not have to decide whether God exists to recognise the moment when faith is being turned into a weapon. The signs are the same from both sides: when religion is used to decide who belongs, who may be punished, and who must stay in their place.
Caste
This is the subject on which the two books come closest to a direct confrontation, and it is the one I expected Tharoor to handle worst.
Tharoor does not defend caste. His argument is that the rigid, hereditary hierarchy is a corruption of the older idea of varna as described in the Gita, where Krishna says the fourfold order was made according to qualities and actions, not birth. On this reading the religion does not require caste, and a Hinduism true to its own texts would be free of it. His critics have said this is too easy, that inequality by birth runs through scripture, ritual and law too deeply to be explained away as a later distortion, and I think they have a point.
Bhagat Singh meets the question head on, and inside his argument about karma. What, he asks, of a child born into a poor and illiterate family of “a chamar or a sweeper”? He is poor, so he cannot study; he is shunned by people who think themselves his superiors because they were born into a higher caste; and then he is told his condition is the fruit of his own past deeds. What about those who were deliberately kept ignorant by “the haughty and egotist Brahmans”? His verdict is one of the sharpest sentences in the essay: “These theories are the inventions of the privileged ones! They justify their usurped power, riches and superiority by the help of these theories.”
This is where I think Tharoor is right in his conclusion and weaker in his argument. He is right that a Hinduism without caste is possible, and his own book shows that the tradition has the resources for it. But the defence that caste is a corruption rather than a feature has a limit, and Bhagat Singh finds it. When the doctrine of karma is the very thing used to explain why the sweeper deserves to be a sweeper, the corruption and the doctrine have become hard to pull apart. On caste, I read Tharoor as having made the better case for the future and Bhagat Singh as having made the better case about the past.
Consolation
Bhagat Singh concedes one thing to the believer, and it is a large concession. He admits that “the idea of God is helpful to man in distress”. A man who believes in God can hand his troubles over. A man facing death who believes in another life has something to look forward to. He, on the other hand, is trying, as he puts it, to stand like a man with an erect head to the last, even on the gallows. When a friend told him he would start believing in his last days, he replied that it would not happen, and that it would be an act of degradation and demoralisation on his part.
He does not argue that belief brings no comfort. He argues that comfort is not a reason to believe something. His standard is harder: a man should stand on his own feet, face reality as it is, and do his duty without the promise of reward. He describes himself as a realist, and he sets out his principle in a sentence I have not been able to forget:
Criticism and independent thinking are the two indispensable qualities of a revolutionary.
He goes on to say that anyone who stands for progress has to criticise, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith.
Tharoor’s book is, among other things, an answer to this in practice. His Hinduism is full of questioning, and he is proud of it: the hymn that doubts creation, the argumentative traditions of the philosophers, the absence of anyone entitled to shut an argument down. For Tharoor, faith and criticism are not opposites. He is a believer because of the kind of inquiry his tradition allows, not in spite of it.
I think both of them are right, which is not the evasion it sounds like. Bhagat Singh is right that consolation is not evidence, and that a belief held because it is comforting is not really a belief, only a sedative. Tharoor is right that a tradition can contain real inquiry, and that belonging to one does not mean surrendering one’s judgement. Where they differ is in what they think inquiry is for. For Bhagat Singh it is a tool for tearing down what is false. For Tharoor it is a way of living inside a very old conversation. You need both, at different times.
Two kinds of sacrifice
There is one passage in Bhagat Singh’s essay that I think is the most moving thing in either book, and it is about reward.
“A God-believing Hindu might be expecting to be reborn as a king,” he writes, “a Muslim or a Christian might dream of the luxuries to be enjoyed in paradise and the reward he is to get for his suffering and sacrifices. But, what am I to expect?” He knows the answer: when the rope is fitted round his neck and the rafters are removed from under his feet, “that will be the final moment”. Nothing further. And so: “With no selfish motive or desire to be awarded here or hereafter, quite disinterestedly, have I devoted my life to the cause of independence.”
The argument is subtle and I think it is right. A sacrifice made in expectation of reward is still, in part, a transaction. The believer who dies for his country and expects paradise has made a very good bargain. The unbeliever who dies for it expects nothing, and so his sacrifice is, in the strictest sense, a gift. Bhagat Singh is not claiming to be braver than the believers who went to the gallows before him. He is claiming that his account of why he is going is cleaner.
Here is the irony, and I think Tharoor would enjoy it. The ideal Bhagat Singh describes, doing one’s duty with no desire for its fruits, is the ideal of the Gita, the text Tharoor leans on to argue that caste was meant to follow qualities and actions rather than birth. The atheist in his cell, refusing the reward of heaven, is living the Gita’s teaching more strictly than the believers he describes, who are counting on theirs. Bhagat Singh would not have thanked anyone for pointing this out. But it suggests that the line between the two books runs less between belief and unbelief than between those who do their duty for a reward and those who do it for nothing.
The atheist in his cell, refusing the reward of heaven, is living the Gita’s teaching more strictly than the believers he describes.
Can a republic stand on a religion?
The last part of Tharoor’s book is called “Taking Back Hinduism”, and its argument is political. India’s secular democracy, he contends, is not something imposed on Hinduism from outside. It grows out of Hinduism’s own diversity and its acceptance of many paths. A religion that never needed one book, one prophet or one church is, on this view, the natural soil for a republic that does not need one faith.
It is an attractive argument and a strategically clever one. If secularism is presented as an alien import, it is easy for Hindutva to attack it as a betrayal of the majority. If it is presented as the majority’s own inheritance, the attack becomes much harder.
Bhagat Singh would have seen the danger in it straight away. A freedom that rests on the generosity of the majority’s religion is only as secure as the majority’s reading of that religion. Tharoor’s own book shows how quickly that reading can change: the second part is a long account of a political movement persuading millions of Hindus that their faith requires something quite different from acceptance. If the republic’s floor is made of Hinduism’s tolerance, then whoever wins the argument about Hinduism gets to decide how solid the floor is.
Bhagat Singh’s alternative is to build the floor out of something else: criticism, independent thinking, and the refusal to let any belief, however old, go unexamined. That foundation cannot be captured by winning an argument about scripture, because it does not depend on scripture.
But it has its own weakness, and Tharoor’s approach is the answer to it. A republic founded on reason alone, and seen by the majority as hostile to their faith, will not keep the majority’s loyalty for long. People do not defend institutions they believe despise them.
I have come to think the two arguments need each other. A secular state needs a floor that does not depend on anyone’s theology, which is Bhagat Singh’s point. And it needs the majority to feel that the floor belongs to them too, which is Tharoor’s. The first without the second is brittle. The second without the first is a gift that can be withdrawn.
Where each of them goes wrong
It would be too neat to leave it there, and both books have a blind spot that the other makes visible.
Bhagat Singh’s is in his contempt for prayer. He calls praying for help the most selfish and degraded thing a man can do, and he means all prayer. But Tharoor’s book, and the tradition it describes, is full of devotion that asks for nothing: the bhakti poets, the philosopher who spends his life on the nature of reality, the hymn that asks whether even the creator knows how creation began. Bhagat Singh was right about the prayer that bargains. He had no room for the prayer that only wonders, and the Creation Hymn is that kind of prayer.
Tharoor’s blind spot is the mirror image. He spends much of the book distinguishing true Hinduism, tolerant, plural and accepting, from the Hindutva that he says has hijacked it. I agree with nearly everything he says about Hindutva. But the move itself, declaring that the real religion is the one I recognise and the people I disagree with are not really practising it, is exactly the move he objects to when Hindutva makes it. A religion with no pope, as he rightly says, has nobody to decide who the real Hindus are. That cuts both ways.
The mistakes have the same shape. Each man looks at a religion that has been many things to many people over thousands of years, and chooses the version that suits his argument. Bhagat Singh sees the religion of the privileged and of the bargain. Tharoor sees the religion of the sages and of acceptance. Both versions are real. Neither is the whole thing.
What I kept
I did not end up where either of them did, which is probably the point of reading them together.
From Bhagat Singh I have kept a test. When I notice that I believe something, I ask whether I would still believe it if it stopped being comfortable, and whether I would still hold it in the one situation where giving it up would make my life easier. He applied that test to God in a police lock-up in 1927 and did not blink. Most of my beliefs have never been tested half that hard.
From Tharoor I have kept the Creation Hymn, and the idea behind it. It seems to me the most honest thing ever written about the origin of things: a text at the root of a religious tradition that asks the biggest question it can and then admits that perhaps even the one who knows does not know. If that is where a faith begins, it has at least begun in the right place.
And from the two of them together I have kept the thing they agree on, which is the thing I trust most because they agree on it from opposite sides. Whatever you believe about God, watch what people do with the belief. When it is used to decide who belongs, who deserves to suffer, and who should stay where they are, it has stopped being about God, and both the believer and the unbeliever should say so.
Both books begin with the same three words. I have come to think that “why I am” is not a question you answer once. It is one you have to keep answering, and a good answer is one that still holds up when someone as honest as a prisoner, or as well-read as a politician, asks you again.