The Questions Young Hindus Ask Are Older Than They Look

The question changed before the practice did

Something has shifted in how younger Hindus talk about their tradition — in Pune and Coimbatore as much as in Leicester, Edison, Nairobi or Auckland. The change is easy to misread. It is not that the lamp goes unlit, and not that it is lit more fervently than before. It is that the sentence "we have always done it this way" no longer closes a conversation. It opens one.

A grandmother waters the tulsi — holy basil, kept in a pot by the door — before her morning tea, every day for sixty years, without once being asked to account for it. Her granddaughter waters it too, and halfway through wonders what exactly she is doing. Is this devotion, or a habit shaped like devotion? Does the plant matter, or the attention? The watering may continue unchanged. The relationship to it has not.

That gap, between the act and the account of the act, is where a great deal of young Hindu life is currently being lived.

Asking is not a foreign import

There is a worry, voiced sincerely by many elders, that the questioning is something borrowed: a foreign habit of demanding justification, applied where reverence belongs. The tradition's own literature does not support that worry.

The Katha Upanishad opens with a boy watching his father give away cattle too old to give milk, in a sacrifice meant to earn merit, and pressing him with an uncomfortable question — then to whom will you give me? (Katha Upanishad 1.1.1-4). The Prashna Upanishad is named for its questions; six students arrive with six of them and are told to live a year in discipline before they get answers. The Rig Veda's hymn on creation ends not with a doctrine but with remarkable honesty: the one who surveys it from the highest heaven knows how it began — or perhaps does not know (Rig Veda 10.129).

The Bhagavad Gita is, structurally, an argument. Arjuna does not begin in submission. He begins confused about dharma — the right way of acting — and says so, asking to be told decisively what is better (Gita 2.7). Krishna's own method includes inquiry: knowledge is to be sought through humility, questioning and service (Gita 4.34). And at the end of eighteen chapters he does not compel. Having laid it all out, he tells Arjuna to reflect on it fully and then act as he chooses (Gita 18.63).

A tradition whose central dialogue ends with now think it over has not been ambushed by young people who want reasons.

But reasons are not the only thing on offer

The wish for reasons has a limit, and young people often find it themselves.

Some inherited practice has no discursive justification and is not diminished by that. A form for grief. A form for gratitude. Something to do with the hands on the day a person dies, when nothing can be said. When an elder answers "just do it," she may be evading — sometimes she is — but she may also be reporting accurately that the meaning lives in the doing and does not survive extraction.

The reverse is also true and less often admitted: sometimes the elders do not know. A practice was kept because it was kept. Claiming a reason that was never there costs more than saying, "I don't know why. My mother did it. I found I didn't want to stop."

Household weather

Most of this gets negotiated at home, in low registers.

A young man performs the annual rites for his grandfather without believing what he was told they accomplish, because his mother would be hurt, and he decides her hurt is real and his metaphysics is not urgent. A young woman asks why her brother performs those rites and she does not, and finds the answer about custom insufficient. A couple marrying across caste, or across sampradaya — a lineage of teaching — spends a decade quietly working out whose household calendar the family will keep.

And, against the tidy story of decline, a good number of young people are more observant than their parents. Families that set ritual aside in a modernising generation now have children learning Sanskrit recitation, keeping the Ekadashi fast on the eleventh lunar day, going to temple on their own initiative. Those parents are as puzzled by this as other parents are by drift. Neither direction is the trend. Both are happening in the same extended family, at the same table.

The Gita says it is better to follow one's own dharma imperfectly than another's dharma well (Gita 3.35) — and even that verse is read variously, some commentators tying svadharma to inherited social role, others to the duty proper to one's own nature and situation. The verse does not settle the argument. It does dignify the fact that the argument is being had.

Being asked to speak for everyone

The other pressure comes from outside, and it falls hardest on the young.

In the diaspora, a teenager becomes the designated explainer the week the world religions unit reaches Hinduism. The questions arrive fast: why so many gods, what about caste, what about cows. The temptation is a slogan that holds up in ten seconds — "all the gods are really one God" — which is a serious position held by some schools, and a flattening of others. The opposite temptation is to apologise for everything and defend nothing. Neither leaves room to say the true thing, which is usually longer.

In India the pressure differs in kind. The tradition is not a minority to be explained; it is a public and political fact, and to speak about it at all is to risk being sorted into a camp one did not choose. Many respond by discussing their practice only with people they trust, which is a quiet loss for everyone else.

No single answer to give

The honest reply to "what do Hindus believe about X" is often another question: which teacher, which text, which region, which century.

Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each wrote commentaries on the Gita and disagreed sharply about what it teaches. Read Gita 18.66, on taking refuge, through Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita eyes and you get three different accounts of what the self is and what surrender means. Navaratri is Durga Puja in Bengal, garba in Gujarat, an arrangement of dolls in Tamil homes. Diwali is Rama's return in much of the north, Kali Puja in Bengal, the new year in Gujarat. Rama's story exists as Valmiki's Sanskrit epic, traditionally counted at some twenty-four thousand verses, as Kamban's Tamil, as Tulsidas's Awadhi, as Krittibas's Bengali — and these are full tellings, not corrupted copies of one another.

To someone raised expecting a catechism, this looks like a defect. It is closer to the opposite. Much of the freedom young Hindus are asking for is freedom the tradition has already been exercising, at length and out loud, for a very long time.

Asked directly, the grandmother might say she waters the tulsi because it is morning. That is not a lesser answer than the ones her granddaughter is after. It is a different one, and there is room for both in the same house.