The late
Ram Swarup (1920-98), definitely the most important Hindu philosopher of
independent India's first half-century, liked to
point out that other cultures had traditions similar to Hinduism before
Christianity or Islam wiped them out. As he put it in his path‑breaking study
of polytheism, The Word as Revelation (1980):
"There was a time when the old Pagan Gods were pretty fulfilling and they
inspired the best of men and women to acts of greatness, love, nobility,
sacrifice and heroism. It is, therefore, a good thing to turn to them in
thought and pay them our homage. We know pilgrimage, as ordinarily understood,
as wayfaring to visit a shrine or a holy place. But there can also be a
pilgrimage in time and we can journey back and make our offerings of the heart
to those Names and Forms and Forces which once incarnated and expressed man's
higher life. (...) The peoples of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Germany and the Scandinavian countries
are no less ancient than the peoples of India; but they lost their Gods, and
therefore they lost their sense of historical continuity and identity. (...)
What is true of Europe is also true of Africa and South America. The countries of these continents have recently
gained political freedom of a sort, but (...) if they wish to rise in a deeper
sense, they must recover their soul, their Gods (...) If they do enough
self-churning, then their own Gods will put forth new meanings in response to
their new needs. (...) If there is sufficient aspiration, invoking and
soliciting, there is no doubt that even Gods apparently lost could come back
again. They are there all the time." (p.131-133)
The cultural process of self-rediscovery after centuries of Christianity is
already in full swing in many parts of Europe and North America (I have only little information
about other continents and will leave them outside the scope of this article).
In Europe, two organizations try to unite
the various national groups: the England based 'Pagan Federation' and the Lithuania based 'World Congress of Ethnic
Religions'. Both have made a brief acquaintalce with Hinduism. Leading Pagan
thinker Prudence Jones had a correspondence with Ram Swarup, whose articles on
polytheism have also been published in other Pagan media, e.g. in the
California based Church of All Worlds' magazine 'Green Egg'. The opening
conference of the WCER (Vilnius 1998 was attended by three NRI Hindus; one of
them was present again this year, and a delegation from India itself was on its
way but couldn't make it because of Lithuania's slowness in handling the visa
applications. The WCER's leading ideologues Jonas Trinkunas (Lithuania) and
Denis Dornoy (French, living in Denmark) also sent a message to the Dharma
Sansad, the "religious parliament", in February 1999:
To the delegates at the Dharma Sansad, Ahmedabad, 5-8 February 1999:
Respectful greetings,
As workers for the revival of the religion of our ancestors, and as convenors
of the World Congress of Ethnic Religions, we are happy and honoured to
communicate with the representatives of the world's largest surviving ancient
religion, the Sanatana Dharma. We want to pay our respect to the people who
have kept alight the Vedic fire for thousands of years, even when besieged by
hostile forces, and who are currently guiding Hindu society through the
challenges of the modern age.
We wish to draw the attention of the Hindu leaders to the efforts currently
made to maintain the ancestral religions of the Native Americans, Africans, and
other "Pagan" peoples in the face of the subversion of their cultures
and aggression against their dharmic practices by agents of self-righteous
missionary religions. We support the peaceful efforts of all nations to
safeguard their cultural and spiritual heritage against subversion and
destruction. We also wish to draw your attention to the efforts to revive or
reconstruct the ancestral religions of those nations who were overwhelmed by
Christianization or Islamization in the past. By common origin or simply by a
common inspiration, these ancient religions share a lot with the Sanatana
Dharma, in both its tribal and its Sanskritic manifestations. We therefore wish
to express our hope and intention of establishing a friendly cooperation."
