Dailyo

Published on 1st February, 2018, on www.dailyo.in . Hinduism is patriarchal like most other religions. However, it is also feminist, unlike most other religions. Please note: many Muslim women insist that the Quran for its time gives women unprecedented agency and rights, though social practice of Islam, led by conservative male maulvis, tends to be patriarchal. Likewise, Hinduism contains many feminist ideas that are often ignored, often deliberately, especially by male Hindu leaders and activists who are generally uncomfortable with religion, Hinduism in particular. Broadly, there are two types of feminism. Equality feminism believes that men and women are equal. Liberation feminism believes that women, ..

Published on 5th January, 2018, on www.dailyo.in The casteism, as we know it today with strict rules of purity prohibiting inter-caste marriages, started 1,900 years ago, became common 1,500 years ago and rigid 1,000 years ago. We know this because of recent genetic studies. Note: the word caste is a European word for clan that is used for the Indian system of jati. The word jati, in turn, is confused with the Vedic system of varna. Vedas speak of a theoretical four-fold structure (chatur-varna). In reality, India has thousands of jatis that are crudely mapped to these four varnas, leading to much chaos and confusion. ..

Published on 16th December, 2017, on www.dailyo.in. This question is rooted in Abrahamic myth that frowns upon God being given any form, and the Biblical condemnation of idolatry as indicative of a false religion. In the 19th century, as the British became masters of India, Hindus were pressurised to defend the practice of idol worship. And so many Hindu reformers went to the extent of saying that "true" Hinduism, in its pristine form (by which they meant Vedas), had no idols. That idol worship is a later-day corruption. However, many Hindu traditionalists rejected this idea. The tension between giving God form and stripping God of ..

Published on 30th November, 2017, on www.dailyo.in . The word guru traditionally meant "one with gravitas". In recent times, a neo-etymology has become popular where guru is one who takes one from darkness (gu) to light (ru). Different people in different contexts use the word guru differently to refer to different kinds of people. In the Bhagavat Puran, Krishna reveals to Uddhava the twenty-four gurus of the detached ascetic (avadhuta). Here he includes various elements, plants, animals and life-experiences that give the ascetic insight. Thus, guru is the one who provokes insight. But in Skanda Purana, we find the Guru Gita where Shiva tells Parvati ..

Published on 15th November, 2017, on

Published on 3rd November, 2017, on www.dailyo.in . Halloween is a festival popular in America where people dress up as ghosts at night of October 31 to drive away the ghosts who visit earth. It is traced to an old Celtic festival that saw this day, at the cusp between autumn and winter, as the day when the land of the dead comes closest to the land of the living. It is closely related to All Souls Day when Christians pray for the souls of the dead who are in purgatory, waiting for the Second Coming of Christ and Judgement Day. All cultures have days ..

Published on 18th October, 2017, in www.dailyo.in . It is curious that the practice of lighting lamps seems integral to Hinduism today, but it was not a dominant one in Vedic times, when the fire-altar of the yagna took centre stage. Perhaps its entry as a ritual owes much to non-Vedic Hinduism – a subject on which we have little information. Lamps slip into the Hindu ritual landscape subtly as Hinduism changes from invoking Vedic gods to venerating Puranic deities. The earliest indicator of this shift is the Bhagavad Gita verse 9.26, where Krishna says he accepts from his devotee a fruit, a flower, a ..

Published on 3rd October, 2017, on www.dailyo.in . Devil is not a Hindu concept. It's a Christian concept. The Hindi word for devil - shaitan - is actually an Urdu word rooted in Persian thought. We often assume that all religions are the same and every mythology must have the devil. Hindu mythology does not have the concept of devil because Hinduism does not have the concept of evil. Devil is the embodiment of evil in Christian mythology. Evil is a concept used by religious folk in the West to explain negative events that have no root cause. God is good and kind and so ..

Published on 1st September, 2017, on www.dailyo.in . The Naradasmriti dharmashastra (XII 97), a Hindu law book, states: "When her husband is lost, or dead, becomes an ascetic, is impotent, or is expelled from caste, in these five conditions, a woman may remarry." Katyayana adds that if the husband turns out to be of another caste, or the same gotra, or if he is guilty of foul acts, the wife may remarry. Can we take these verses to suggest that divorce was allowed in Hinduism at some point of time? In many cultures, marriage is a contract. Divorce is the breaking of the contract. Some, ..