ATTACK ON HINDUISM - PART 2

There had been any number of attacks on the religion followed by majority in the country in past three to four thousand years. First there was Budhism and later Jainism both of which were offshoots of the majority religion in the country. Though the religions were started by deeply religious people of Hindu faith, they propagated religions which were more towards salvation through the path of bakthi and self realisation than through the route of rituals which was becoming more and more pronounced in the years following the the great war of Mahabharatha.  It took the caliber and intelligence of a person like Adhi Shankara to lift the religion from the abysmal low it had fallen and remove the cob-webs associated with the religion.  Though he started spreading the concept of Advaitha (non duality) during his early years, in his later years (of the total 32 years he remained in the mortal body) he sang to spread the Bakthi path to salvation.  This is amply illustrated in his immortal song Baja Govindam.  However, this write up is not about the renaissance of Hindu religion during the times of Adhi Shankara or his greatness.

The Christians reportedly came to India along with the first disciple of Jesus Christ and landed in the western shores of the country in the present day Kerala.  They were accommodated by the local king who gave them place to practice their religion. But as is their wont, they started spreading their religion by converting the local people.  They started off with their upper echelons in the social order by targeting the Brahmins who were well respected and whose words were taken as true by the rulers and the masses.  They spread the tentacles onto other people lower in the social order by using the neo converts for their work.

The Mughals who came to India attracted by the richness of the land and the people started converting the people through violence and threats. The fear of loss of family honour made many to embrace Islam and for the next few centuries it continued to flourish and the number of people following the faith of marauding Islamic sultans started increasing.  The temples of worship of Hindus were razed down to build their mosques which were doubling as places of worship and study.

The modern day Christians use the money power to coerce the people in the lower strata of the social order to convert with promise of money, education and jobs. This continued and still being practiced especially along the coastal areas of the peninsula.  Huge churches started coming up along the coast.  Some of the village temples were either razed down or converted to churches. 

When the Chrisitians found that there was a serious opposition to their efforts to converting people to Christianity. they started adopting many practices that are being used in the temples in HIndu faith.  The churches started sporting a tall flag pole in the churches and the practice of having a car festival has become an annual event in many churches.  The practice of retaining the HIndu names and still working for the Church has been in the vogue for quite some time. This not only confuses the common illiterate masses but gives an opportunity to those neo converts to  get them to the church easily. 

After exhausting all their attempts in copying the practices of Hindu faith to hoodwink the gullible illiterate or semi-literate masses, the church has embarked on a new tool.  Using the popular singers of Carnatic music to sing songs on Jesus Christ.  The songs that were composed by the people like Thyagayya, Shyama Shastri and Muthusami Deekshithar etc. are being plagiarised replacing the names of Rama and other Hindu Gods in the songs with that of Jesus and Mary.  The popular carnatic singers who fell into the trap are being used to sing these songs in some of the most popular ragas in which those compositions by the musical trinity were originally rendered.  

It has taken many eons for the faith of Sanathana Dharma to evolve and it is hardly two thousand years for Chrisitianity and even less for Islam.  Both the religions are still evolving and it may take a few more thousand years before the practitioners realise their folly of trying to convert people to their faith.  There is an element of sadness in this from the religious leaders of the Hindu faith also. Instead of embracing all and providing education, self esteem, a standard source of income to all in the faith, they are seen to be spending their time only with the well heeled and high and mighty in the social order.  Their discourses also are not easily  understandable or reachable to the lower strata of society.  All these are being exploited by the Abrahmic religious practitioners to the hilt.