The Culture Iceberg Part 2: The Hindu Worldview and its Revival

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) defined “worldview” as that which is inseparably integrated into the ‘ethos’ of the people, that which sets “the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and toward their world that life reflects”. The Hindu worldview is broadly, “a complex, multifaceted cultural style that characterizes Hindu life as experienced through particular Indic sets of beliefs and habits.” (Frazier, 2017) The belief is that the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm, and therefore must accordingly be reflected as such. To structure one’s life, society and cosmos in the dhārmic way is the only way to bring order to a chaotic world, and to manage our volatile relationship with the surroundings. To live is to construct a purposive life tethered to the puruṣārtha and one’s prescribed dharma, which is simultaneously well-established in intellectual thought as well as built up through embodied experience. As asserted by Jessica Frazier in her book Hindu Worldview, “structures of ritual and ethics give a normative shape to this complex cosmos, while narratives often explore the more subversive and ambiguous paths of human agency.” The Hindu precept therefore, optimizes the human condition by incorporating both the most fundamental and the most elevated of human desires arising from the depths of consciousness (similar to the theoretical basis of Maslow’s Pyramid).

Philosopher J. N. Mohanty divides Indian cultural practices into “high-level” and “low-level, while Frazier’s notion of cultural paradigms are those which she classifies as “explicit” and “implicit’ theory. The ‘explicit’ is a system of formal knowledge, whether oral or textual, that is organized as a systematic exposition and explanation of knowledge itself. It is characterized by consolidation of knowledge, along with its continual evolution, and includes metaphysical considerations, philosophy, and the knowledge of self. The implicit consists of broader frameworks that are in conformance with the explicit, “as part of the underlying rationale of an idea”.

She elaborates on the postulation as follows:

“The former explicit kind of theory is more likely to derive from educational cultures, and so from intellectual elites and upper classes; as such, it represents traditions of reasoning “and social identities associated with the cultivation of that specific activity. Philosophers the ‘intelligentsia’ in some form, educators and critics may all be producers of explicit theory that holds to the importance of specific ways of thinking, supported by shared reasons and reasoning. But the implicit kind of theory is more likely to arise in the culture at large, within a discourse that may be unattached to systematic disciplines of knowledge. Implicit theory that lies beyond the range of classical text has become important for scholars studying cultures that have not cultivated explicit traditions, but which preserve ways of understanding, analysing and communally applying good thinking through other forms of tradition.”

In the case of Hindu cultures, the content of the Saṃskṛtika or śāstrika texts are reflected in other sources of theory such as cosmological narratives, practical sciences, vernacular songs and regional practices such as pūjās, vratas, etc. Theoretical ideas are “encoded and transmitted in ritual and liturgy, songs and recitation, cosmologies and lived geographies, as well as in the grammars and terminologies that are used on a regular basis throughout any given community.” Implicit theory, therefore, represents the marginal (relative to the explicit), and reflects a wider range of influence.

If this distinction, described variously by different scholars is considered valid, then we arrive at the conclusion that neither is a monolith, but rather, a mixed bag, with syncretism and pluralism characterizing interactions. There are both practical and theoretical considerations at both higher and lower levels, in the implicit and the explicit. Both levels are intertwined, just as actions and their meanings and ritual and symbolism are, and therein lies the key to the survival of a culture.

There is an alarming, directly observable loss of the collective sense of culture, which is, in the case of Bhārata, the fading of the belief in the Hindu worldview, and all its forms of expression. This has led to the eclipsing of its surficial manifestations, like the erosion of topsoil in the absence of roots. As more and more of society is alienated from its deep culture, the outcome is that surface cultural elements such as language, ritual, festivals etc., are affected, either replaced by foreign popular culture(s) or secularized or lost altogether.

One concrete way to inject a revival of culture appears to be through a conscious augmenting of the relevant cultural context, through the reinstitution of knowledge systems to their rightful place. Conscious efforts at the individual level may only go so far, and must take place in addition to, and not as a replacement for institutional change. The incorporation of Indian knowledge systems — and indirectly, culture and its foundations — into education policy has the immense potential to shape our world and our future to reflect our ethos. The method of influencing culture in substantive yet subliminal ways is not to directly thrust the culture itself, and pray it sticks, but to project an awareness of the knowledge systems upon which it is founded, in the hope that it organically manifests as culture. The phenomenology of culture and all of its explicit manifestations are, after all, dynamic rather than static, and inextricably linked to knowledge, the very basis of our civilization. We can begin by rediscovering all our myriad storytelling traditions, reviving our languages, rituals and festivals and paying close attention to the knowledge, practices and responsibility conferred by our lineages, the devotion and loyalty carried through our sāmpradāyas, and the wisdom of our ancestors.

References:

Cardon, P. W. (2008). A Critique of Hall’s Contexting Model: A Meta-Analysis of Literature on Intercultural Business and Technical Communication. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 22(4), 399–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651908320361

Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. Anchor, 1976.

Frazier, Jessica. Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Reality. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Mohanty, J. N. “Epilogue: Culture Theory and Practice: A Framework for Inter-Cultural Discourse.” In Cultural Otherness and Beyond, pp. 229-241. Brill, 1998.

Authored by Sai Priya Chodavarapu. Published by Brhat