Love All, Serve All — But Don’t Fall: Hindu Unreciprocated Universalism and the Carnatic Music Appropriation Controversy

Four words in English, sharp and black, four times now I have bowed before them since 2011. LOVE ALL — SERVE ALL. That is what you approach now in Prashanthi Nilayam, just as you once approached a being you called Swami and then never stopped calling again. Love All-Serve All. Stand-ins now for His Lotus Feet, for a pat on the back, or a palm of blessing on the head. The only tactile moment now is when your forehead and palms rest briefly on the cool white marble that is as close as you get to what you knew once so sweetly, so kindly, like the feet and hands of the sweetest mother, father, or grandparent you could think of. You rise quickly from your turn at the samadhi and make way for the long lines behind, accepting a flower as prasaadam as you leave. You walk past the microcosm of skin, smell, sound and form that is the Sai world, past the Africans and Asians, South Americans and Russians, Punjabis and Tamils, Sri Lankans and Telugus, Bengalis and Malayalis, young and old, so many, so different, and yet…

There is nothing more than Love All-Serve All.

After dwelling deeply in a certain set of beliefs about divinity for more than half my life now, I suddenly feel simply humanly proud of Baba’s tangibly “human” contribution to the planet in the terms of these four words. He really meant it, every word of it, and gave us the strength to learn from it, follow it, and live up to it, in whatever small ways we could.

I might add that I believe in it so much (and in the spirit of the Sai symbol you see above this article) that I can only share a small anecdotal example of how much it has shaped my sense of self. When I joined Facebook in 2010 and it asked for my “religion,” I somehow could not be so mundane as to state a demographic category. Instead, I wrote, “Everything is Everything” (a nod to a beautiful song by Peter Sinfield, the lyricist of King Crimson and ELP).

And of course, since that time, I have written perhaps a hundred or so opeds and articles and one book read ardently by thousands of people. All this writing has been inspired by the same philosophy deep inside but has been written under the promise, power and mandate of a very specific name, and one chosen very carefully after much study and realization. My books, my writing, are now not about a generic “everything is everything” but specifically and explicitly for that name, and that name is Hindu. I will live it, fight for it, and stand by it because it is my Love All Serve All word. I cannot be one without the other.

But I have had to write so much about this tension between a universal yearning and a particular reality, and I have to write about this again now and invite your attention into these many, many words that follow. I have to state at the outset that I wish I could just rest with the contentment of my Love All Serve All moments at my Guru’s sacred home and not have to explain, argue, or defend anything more. I wish I could just say the world is like our Sai world too, where we all have our diverse traditions and can remain Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and so on, but focus on universal divine love and that’s that. But the world is unequal in its treatment of goodness and goodheartedness and our pursuit of the same. I therefore have to say more.

Hindu Unreciprocated Universalism

There are some simple questions that Hindus, and indeed anyone else who, like Hindus, believes that universal love is all there is to religion regardless of the specificity of each particular religion’s stated and lived practices, have to face up to: How long can we be the only ones saying things like Love All- Serve All if a sizable bunch of this “all” category doesn’t reciprocate? Worse, no longer do some in this “all” not only fail to reciprocate our gesture of according them validity and respect, but also actively pursue the mockery, marginalization, and eradication of our own philosophy and culture. Should we continue to indulge their exclusivity if they keep insisting that we replace our “love all” with their narrow “love only the chosen one and his chosen few”? And should we keep silent about how misguided it is when someone who believes in “love all” naively, suicidally, falls for the notion sold cunningly to him by vested interests that loving all implies anything is okay so you might as well convert to the opposite of the love all ideal?

These are relevant and urgent historical, political, ethical, and most of all, existential questions for Hindus and others who believe in a universal ideal of God (God is one, but different religions call Him/Her by different names sort). Inside the Sai world, I will admit that it might never have troubled us that much, as we sang Brahma Mazda Tu Yahovah Shakti Tu and Yesu Pita Prabhu Tu, and many other names by which humanity has adored its greatest ideals. In the global Sai movement with all its diversity, after all it isn’t just Hindus worshipping Baba, but others too, and we all respect each other’s right to our own paths. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, all raised their voices together. No big deal at all. The social pluralism of the place and the tradition seemed like a natural expression of the inner richness of love we felt from its source.

But what now of the world outside (and this question is for both Sai devotees and others to think about)? Are we really Loving and Serving All if we fail to recognize that our belief is being opposed vehemently by those forces, institutions and individuals who have more narrow, exclusive, definitions of religion? (It is of course true that not all members of those religions may oppose our Love All belief, and we should never Blame All, Hate All; never, never at all). But the reality is what it is. There has been a relentless effort for a thousand years to coerce, shame, persuade and force-fit people into an ideology that only one camp is right, and the rest are wrong, and not just wrong but so horribly wrong they don’t even deserve to live any more. Like dinosaurs maybe.

Rama and Jesus

I raise these troubling issues after first invoking the inspiring memory of Prashanthi Nilayam for a reason. In the past few days, I happened to see several different references to the Sai tradition come up in social media comments about the controversy over the appropriateness of replacing the name of Rama with Jesus in Tyagaraja’s traditional compositions by some famous Carnatic singers. There were three very different comments in different contexts, but what they all reminded me about is the growing gap in understanding of the realities of unequal co-existence in a postcolonial world.

Simply put, I was stunned by the vehemence with which some innocent followers of the “Love All, Serve All” notion seemed to resist the critique of cultural appropriation that is at the heart of this issue. One fellow Sai devotee on Twitter tried to convince me that the singer T.M. Krishna is a Sai devotee and presumably I ought to refrain from asking him a question about how he thinks of a deity when he sings of her or him. Another Sai brother I know from Facebook expressed his fear that he would be prevented from singing from now on because his parents are not Hindus. I tried to clarify the debate but I suspect that the impression has already been created inaccurately in mainstream media discourses that the issue is not one of cultural appropriation by Christian institutions but simply one of intolerant Hindu fundamentalists insisting that only Hindus should sing about Hindus (or some such thing).

I cannot add to this debate from the position of an expert on the philosophy of Carnatic music (though this Twitter thread is most helpful on that point), but it would not be inappropriate perhaps to speak as a devotee who has gained much peace and understanding because of music, both in the Sai tradition and outside. I do think music is universal, beautiful, divine, and all that, and admit that I have had great discussions in my classes on examples as mundane as a song in the movie Mission: Kashmir that celebrates such a spirit (this song, here, if you don’t mind a Bollywood detour). I have had the blessing and privilege of sitting in the great and sacred halls of Prashanthi Nilayam and many other Sai centers and homes and singing the names of not just the Hindu pantheon but others too. I am moved most profoundly of all, when the much treasured Sundaram Bhajan Series Volume One leads into the Sarva Dharma Prayer just before the arati. This, I will treasure, in spirit and in form, forever.

The Problem is Not With Us

But what I will also look in the eye is everything else we have ignored, denied, nervously laughed and put aside, or ridiculously and suicidally defended even all this time. Everyone knows this is what is at stake when we start to feel a bit more uncomfortable and weird than we did than before each time something we thought our own and inviolable goes under the bus of a hoax calling itself “progress” (and a bus driven increasingly by Brown-One-Percenters, or just Zombified Hindus); an American museum display on Rama that totally wipes out Tyagaraja, Tulasidas, all the beauty and wisdom we know, for a sterile tableaux, like a fairy-tale; a plan to replace the holiest of our deities in ancient temples with simulations so the originals can go get gawked at in museums (or “disappeared” to be sold in the international stolen art market); a petition to stop traditional temple ceremonies which harm no one at all; an incessant bombardment of lies about what our gods mean to us in the media and in textbooks; and at the same time, an ever growing “borrowing” (or actually “burrowing”) of our imagery, language, traditions and practices, for an “Only Me” figurehead while the natives, pagans and normal spiritual polyculturalists of the planet go “Me Too” in pain.

The problem is not with us. The problem is not us. We have always been the Love All camp.

And one day, even in the holy heart of it, the reality intruded. In the early years of my visits to Prashanthi I was too amazed by the wondrous nature of the place to notice perhaps (I still am, but I am older and notice real life things too, the way a concerned child would observe a threat to his parents’ well-being). But on this visit, I saw the real world in action even in this holy and peaceful sanctuary. I was standing in line with my father outside a juice kiosk where the salesman had put someone’s drawing of Sai and Christ in the form of the Pieta. Such imagery was not too uncommon in the unofficial Sai devotee culture, and I imagined some foreign Christian devotee had drawn it, picturing Baba as the divine maternal God comforting the brutalized body of the cruelly tortured son of God. It was moving.

On that day though, there was a distraction to the experience of Love All Serve All we all sought to practice there. I noticed two customers, perhaps non-devotees, maybe just curious explorers, or concerned defenders of their faith, whoever they were, glaring angrily at that picture and pointing at it. In the serene world of the Sai ashram, their body language and tone stood out shrill and cold. I saw one of them tell the other man, in Spanish, I think, a word that sounded like “Blasphemy.” In another century, they would have done to us what the conquistadors did to Montezuma’s people for that perceived offence. Whether that century is only a thing of the past though is something I am not sure about at all. As I said, in this context, I am only like a child who has grown up just enough to feel protective enough about even his parents who gave him his life, learning and everything. I am not bigger than my tradition, Sai or Sanathana Dharma, but I will not shirk from my duty to name what I see and fear.

We are living in a non-Love-All world. That is why we seek our Avatars, and our Avatars, they come, again and again. I am glad they do. But they are not our servitors are they? It is naïve and presumptuous of us to attempt to elevate those who mock, violate and desecrate all that is sacred to the stature of some divine universalists who had a different context for their universal teachings and exhortations. Speaking of naïve, it may be worth recalling that the portal Scroll, for which T.M. Krishna writes regularly, once published a ludicrous article which argued that the innocently pluralistic Sai bhajan tradition of praising Jesus in addition to Hindu deities is an attempt to appropriate Jesus by the Sai cult! Talk about crying “reverse racism.” That is the reality innocent devotees seem unaware of; what you think is your generous religiosity of universal love is being slandered as theft while the forces which historically stole everything from every corner of the once free planet (and continue to steal to this day) get defended by you!

I am reminded here of the famous story of what Sri Ramakrishna said to his two devotees when they reported, on different occasions, that they had overheard people criticize their master. Sri Ramakrishna scolded one devotee for being timid and not saying anything, and the other for being aggressive and picking a fight with them. Innocent Hindus outraging on the basis of low information and propaganda-fed “facts” seem more and more like the first category (and for “Woke Hindus,” yes, Ramakrishna’s other advice applies to you too and you will win far more by speaking softly than you sometimes do now).

Just Say No

The Rama is not Jesus controversy, in my view, is different and more far-reaching than any previous debate about appropriation and the moral (il)legitimacy of commercially driven “conversion” as theology and practice, notwithstanding its present constitutional sanction in India. It has been analyzed with a very sharp eye by Sandeep Balakrishna recently in a widely appreciated essay, and I urge you to read it carefully too.

I should add that it is important that despite all the stony debris that flies from his delusion-shredder of a pen, Sandeep also acknowledges that many singers really have no issue singing about different gods. I think that’s okay, and it’s cool too, if a Christian devotee enjoys SP Balasubramaniam singing for Jesus the way I admire Yesudas singing Namma Udupi Sri Krishna. The mere act of spreading love and joy thus is not the problem at all.

But what is less nonchalant is the project, the deliberate machinery and motivation, that seems to surround the twin moves of cultural evisceration and demonization on one hand, and appropriation on the other, that is going on in the larger culture today. As Sandeep puts it, this project is in its essence “premised on offering a superior alternative to and a more powerful and compassionate God as opposed to the native Hindu deities.” I do not know how much our singers trained in the footsteps of Tyagaraja can innocently pretend that this supremacist impulse does not exist and they are all living in some transcendental alternate universe of free and fair inter-religious exchange.

I therefore ask that that those of us who really believe in the spirit of Love All Serve All should recognize that naively indulging those forces which do not believe there is a universal “all” worthy of love (unless you sign on the dotted line that you will reject Rama, Krishna, etc and accept only X or Y as sole savior to be even considered human) are actually collaborating with the destruction of this lofty ideal’s own promise. I submit therefore that while always looking up to and striving to Love All Serve All, we should also not turn away from realities until such time in the future that our love and service have truly made an equalizing and harmonious impact on those who don’t share our loving views.

It is my belief that the spirit and mission of Love All, Serve All will succeed only when we also practice a bit of Don’t Fall in the face of concerted con jobs that prey on our innocence and faith.

Having said this, I will repeat again, Love All- Serve All.