On Hinduism, Hitler, and the mosaic of truth

I lived in New Delhi for half a year, where I was lucky to find a good and interesting friend. When one day we met over coffee, he showed me a beautiful sentence:

“… the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader.”

I nodded in agreement. I sipped at my White Chocolate Mocha and we chatted in English about topics other than the vast historical and global processes that had enabled the meeting of us two individuals at this point in time and space. If we regard it as a perfect example of acculturation that, on the face of it, we might have been in any city in Europe or the United States, there were some curiosities to the picture. Our conversational topic was Hinduism and between our Starbucks mugs lay a copy of Mein Kampf.

My friend had bought the book, which is widely available in India, after I had told him that it was forbidden in many European countries. A fascinating chance indeed to discover what lies beyond the apparently finite realm of Europe’s celebration of freedom of speech.

The quote my friend had shown me was lovely and it was terrifying. Terrifying because it was written by Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was a madman, a dictator, and a mass murderer. It is easy to dismiss any of his ideas as irrational. But that is dangerous, too. The facts that his beliefs and ideas had disastrous consequences and were followed by many only underline the necessity to understand where they came from, no matter how much we disagree.

I guess this is the job of what Karl Mannheim called the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’: socially unattached negotiators between multiple perspectives. Hypothetical or not, it is a position all the more important in today’s world, where because of interconnections, differences meet.

Colorful India is the epitome of plurality. The British economist Joan Robinson famously observed: “Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.” One thing you always find in any traveler’s account is something along the lines that the country is so diverse and complex that it can’t be visited or understood in a lifetime. What can be said of Hinduism also goes for India: both are so many-faced that they cannot be defined or categorized – and aptly, this analogy is misleading too, because India cannot be equated with Hinduism.

In India, you will in this context typically hear someone uttering the Hindu belief that “truth is one, but the learned refer to it with different names.” It’s a quote from the text Rig Veda, which might date back to as far as 1500 before Christ, making Hinduism possibly the oldest still existing religion.

Interestingly, one of the youngest of world religions, Bahai’sm, proclaims the same thing: there is one truth, but there are different ways to reach it. And if you dive in a little deeper, you will find that the spiritual traditions of all religions agree. In Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, one teaching says: “When we are face to face with truth, the point of view of Krishna, Buddha, Christ, or any other Prophet, is the same. When we look at life from the top of the mountain, there is no limitation; there is the same immensity.”

Every religion can offer small pieces for the mosaic that Adolf Hitler described, building up a general world-picture, an aspiration for truth.

In the streets of India one encounters the swastika and the six-pointed star brotherly next to each other – they are both Hindu symbols. May they remind us that we all come from the same place and are on our way to the same place, just following different routes.

_{The picture at the top of this article is the book Mein Kampf in Hindi, sold besides Shakespeare at a book market in Old Delhi. Photo taken by me.}