A paradox of modernity is that religious dogmatism has deepened worldwide even as belief in the supernatural has waned. Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of politics, where radical parties claiming to represent particular religious communities have risen to prominence in the past three decades. At their most extreme, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Yugoslav National Army in Serbia have sought to establish mono-religious nations by attacking or expelling minorities.
Less radical groups like the National Rally in France and the Five Star movement in Italy settle for legislative discrimination and culture wars. Whatever their differences, these movements are united in their ignorance of the theological traditions they speak of and in their violation of the religious principles they claim to uphold. Religion, for them, is simply a cover for the modern political ideologies of racism and fascism.
How might religion and spirituality be recuperated in a world where claims to the divine have been weaponized? This question has spurred Ranjit Hoskote over a three-decade career that spans poetry, art criticism, political commentary, and curation.
In that time, he has worked tirelessly to recover the Indian subcontinent’s manifold traditions of egalitarian spirituality from the hegemony of Hindutva (or Hindu supremacism), an ideology upheld by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) which seeks to purge India of all “non-Hindu” elements.
This has been a tricky line to hold, requiring Hoskote to vigorously oppose, on ethical and political grounds, the BJP’s attacks on religious minorities while also unmasking its claims to spiritual piety. For example, he has labeled the destruction in 1992 of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindutva criminals as a violation of the “creative pluralism of the Hindu imagination, reducing the Transcendent to a question of real estate.”
Hoskote was born in 1969 in Mumbai into an upper-middle-class Saraswat Brahmin family. Having excelled in literature, art, and music from a young age, his talent was spotted early. Midway through obtaining his bachelor of arts degree, he was appointed the chief art critic at the Times of India and he published a volume of English poems soon after.
From the start, his writing was marked by a heterodox mix of influences:
“I was attempting to reconcile the anarchist and Marxian traditions with everything that I had assimilated in the course of an unusual upbringing whose varied elements included Kashmir Śaivite philosophy, Vaiśnava devotionalism, Buddhist reading, Sufi stories.”
“I was attempting to reconcile the anarchist and Marxian traditions with everything that I had assimilated in the course of an unusual upbringing whose varied elements included Kashmir Śaivite philosophy, Vaiśnava devotionalism, Buddhist reading, Sufi stories.”
These sources flowed into each other to create a poetry which spans many registers—Western and Eastern, political and spiritual, modern and ancient—often within the space of a few lines. Such is seen in “Assassination of an Artist,” written in memory of Safdar Hashmi, a left-wing theater activist murdered by Congress party thugs in 1989:
They got him, the first hard crack
of the coconut head.
. . .
Smeared with permanent red,
revelers with their offering,
they laughed the laugh of angels
unleashed behind the tacit face
of God; put away their swords,
stuck flags to their axes,
and wheeling in a manic dance
of spring, celebrated
Republic Day.
Since the late 1980s, Hoskote has published a steady stream of art criticism—monographs on painters Atul Dodiya, Anand Patwardhan, Bhupen Khakhar, among others—while also addressing politics and culture more broadly. In 1996, he launched a spirituality column in the Times of India titled “The Speaking Tree.”
Seeking an alternative to the violent dogmas of Hindutva, Hoskote turned to the medieval South Asian past, writing about the heterodox saints—such as Tukaram in Maharashtra and Kabir in North India—who preached a more humble, personal, and tolerant faith. In 2011, he published I, Lalla (Penguin Classics, 2013), a collection of over 140 vākhs or brief poems by Lal Děd, a fourteenth-century Kashmiri female mystic whose work is equally informed by Sanskrit and Perso-Arab traditions and who is today revered by Muslims and Hindus alike. Recalling A.K. Mehrotra’s modern renditions of Kabir, Hoskote’s translations combine a plainspoken address with sage wisdom:
One shrine to the next, the hermit can’t stop for breath.
Soul, get this! You should have looked in the mirror.
Going on a pilgrimage is like falling in love
with the greenness of faraway grass.
While deeply situated in the subcontinental context, Hoskote has always been a cosmopolitan thinker, addressing subjects as varied as ancient Greek history, Christian iconography, and Southeast Asian religious traditions. At a deeper level, he has strived to reveal the deep historical links that bind cultures—religious, ethnic, national—which are today imagined to be disparate and so often at odds with one another.
In the background of all his writing, Hoskote brings this theme to the fore in Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (Yoda Press, 2012), coauthored with the Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow. This singular text offers a rich, guided tour through world history, from the rise of the great monotheistic religions to the present, dwelling on “interactions” between Eastern and Western, both creative and destructive.
Drawing connections between Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Thousand and One Nights, Dante’s Commedia, and Ibn Al-Arabi’s al-Miraj (about the Prophet Mohammad’s ascent to heaven), Hoskote and Trojanow mount a polemic against those who spread the myth of cultural purity. They are especially moving on the “syncretism” that lies at the origins of all religions, noting for instance that, “The halo worn by the Risen Christ, and all the saints, was first used by Persian artists to distinguish divine and regal figures from mere mortals” (Hoskote and Trojanow 2012, 17).
“When a Christian looks at an image of his Savior, he sees a visual echo, an afterimage shaped by many images drawn from other religions and cultures that have gone before” (Hoskote and Trojanow 2012, 17).
Revisiting these buried connections can help us cross the artificial barriers put up by authoritarian leaders who demean the religions they claim represent—and help us to better recognize and live out our common humanity.
“When a Christian looks at an image of his Savior, he sees a visual echo, an afterimage shaped by many images drawn from other religions and cultures that have gone before.”
By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024