When was the last time you read or saw a positive and inspiring story about a Hindu pandit (priest)? Probably hard to recall. The mainstream media rarely portrays Hindu Gurus and Pandits in a positive light. One routinely comes across stories of “fraud gurus” and “greedy pandits”. Hindu religious leaders, if at all portrayed by the mainstream media, are covered for their alleged wrongdoings. Bollywood movies also mostly portray Hindu gurus and pandits as corrupt figures, fit for lampooning.
How many Bollywood movies and TV serials do you remember when Panditjee is shown as a greedy and scheming fellow minting money from his followers on the pretext of “Kundali dosh” and this and that? The popular culture industry has demonized Hindu pandits or priests to such an extent that many Hindus regard one of the most foundational and selfless services of Hindu Dharma offered by the Pandits as superstitious, devious, manipulative, and calculative.
During the coronavirus, one saw many stories reporting the funerals of Bharatiyas who lost their lives to the pandemic. Both Bharatiya media and the international media lost all their journalistic sense of decency and restraint by literally shoving cameras into the sites of funeral pyres, sensationalizing something as sad as the deaths of people.
Along with sensational footage of cremation grounds being over-crowded with dead bodies, one also saw the media covering stories of the supposed corruption of Hindu pandits during the coronavirus. There were many media reports claiming that the pandits were minting money during the coronavius tragedy and exploiting the misery of people by overcharging for cremation services. These kinds of stories supposedly exposing the corruption of Pandits during COVID-19 were covered by both Bharatiya and international media.
The stories painted a rather mean picture of Hindu pandits. Anybody unfamiliar with the Bharatiya ethos reading these stories would think Pandits in Bharat are an extremely affluent bunch of powerful individuals who are scheming and plotting all the time. But alas, truth always hurts. In reality, Hindu pandits and pujaris are some of the most marginalized of Bharatiyas, many of them leading a life of abject penury. Temple pujaris in Bharat are the worst sufferers; they do not have any support from the state in the form of a monthly salary or stipend. With most Hindu temples under state control, the hapless pujaris somehow scrap a living by performing pujas at the homes of Yajmans (private hosts).
These opportunities too are nowadays hard to come by as the “secularization” of Hindu Dharma has invariably led to a number of Hindus shunning Hindu customs and rituals. For many Hindus, Diwali is synonymous with wearing expensive clothes, lighting designer diyas, clicking beautiful pictures, and then having a fancy Diwali party. They couldn’t care less about the rituals associated with Diwali. Similarly, Holi has become synonymous with partying, boozing, and generally chilling out. If a huge number of Hindus have no clue about rituals associated with festivals like Holi and Diwali, how can you expect them to know anything about numerous other festivals and rituals on the Hindu calendar?
The resultant effect is it’s increasingly becoming difficult for pandits to sustain themselves. Those with a regular clientele base for a long time somehow manage, but even they have to do some other business on the side to earn a livelihood. The harsh truth is it’s virtually impossible for a Brahmin to sustain themselves solely on the basis of Panditaee (Hindu priesthood). With the constant secularization of Hindu Dharma and the demonization of the Brahmin community, the young generation of the families of traditional pandits is simply uninterested in taking up the profession of their forefathers. Even parents themselves wouldn’t want their child to risk their livelihood doing panditaee when could start a business or get a high-paying white-collar job.
The harsh truth is that with the changing times and due to the lack of any government incentive, Panditaee has simply become impractical and unsustainable. This might sound dystopian but if steps are not soon taken to support this noble and selfless pursuit forming the core of Hindu Dharma, Pandits will become an extinct species soon, and with that, we will also lose a vast treasure trove of knowledge base associated with Hindu customs, traditions, and rituals passed orally from one generation of pandits to others. With most Hindus having little clue about the Shastras, pandits have always been the much-needed link between Hindus and Shastras, helping them observe various customs and rituals.
While it’s all good to say Hindus should themselves read the Vedas and the Upanishads and have knowledge about conducting rituals, pandits have played an important role of selflessly imparting religious knowledge to yajmaans (hosts) for centuries. The relationship between the pandit and the yajman is not a mere financial transactional. It’s a deeply emotional and spiritual relationship in which the yajman grows in knowledge and wisdom as they develop a life-long association with their family pandit.
In my own family, we’ve had the same Panditjee coming to our home to perform various puja rituals during my childhood. My father performs a lot of regular puja rituals himself but we still call Panditjee for special occasions. When he is not available, my father prefers to do the rituals himself rather than call someone else. This example is just to show the kind of bond that develops between the pandit and the yajman. Just like a guru, the family pandit also acts as a source of wisdom and foundational knowledge of the Hindu Dharma for the whole family. But currently, the way Brahmins are being demonized and modern-day Hindus are constantly being brainwashed into abandoning their customs and rituals because these are apparently exploitative, that day is not far when the tradition of Panditaee and the enduring bond between the Pandit and the Yajman will become a thing of the past to be showcased in a museum.
During the time of coronavirus, when as I mentioned earlier, a lot of media was busy portraying pandits as some kind of thugs and imposters overcharging the public for funerals, Hindupost did a story talking about how Hindu priests were struggling to make ends meet during the lockdown period. “A community that provides a fundamental spiritual service and prays for the welfare of society is finding it difficult to even sustain itself. Many Brahmin priestly families are facing an economic crisis but are unable to express this to anybody. This is that section of society that is reviled in popular discourse for alleged historical sins, despite the poverty many live in today. This holds true all over the country. While clerics and pastors of ‘minority’ religions are showered with monthly stipends by the secular state, the same secular state which controls most large Hindu temples has no money to give to poor Hindu priests”, says the article.
This aptly depicts the heavy price Hindus in Bharat are paying for the “secularization” of Hindu dharma. The harsh reality is that Hindu pandits and pujaris are leading a hapless existence on the margins of society with the government totally oblivious to their plight.
The government has taken an excellent initiative in branding Hindu Dharma and enhancing its global appeal. The promotion of Dharmic tourism is indeed a step in the right direction. But the government must also add the project of revival of the art and science of Panditaee to this list. To begin with, the government must launch a nationwide scheme announcing a monthly stipend for Hindu temple priests, no matter how modest the amount is. Next, the government should also have a pension scheme for financial support of elderly pandits who can no longer perform pujas as they used to due to factors associated with old age. Thirdly, the government should set up a database of pandits throughout the country. This should be in the form of a web portal where Hindu pandits and register themselves. The portal would then connect pandits with yajmans (hosts) in need of puja services. The matching of pandits and yajmans would happen obviously in accordance with availability in their respective local areas. But nowadays with pandits offering puja services online as well, they could also be connected with remote hosts.
It certainly is an ambitious project and might be a bit challenging to implement but it will undoubtedly create a professional ecosystem for Hindu priests and enable future generations to consider taking up panditaee. Fourthly, the government should consider launching courses in “Panditaee” or the skill of imparting Hindu religious knowledge and conducting rituals so that this oral form of knowledge can get consolidated as an academic discipline and become an exciting area of research, encourage the youth to take up constructive and dharmic research on Hindu Dharma and culture, as opposed to the current wave of Hinduphobic research being conducted within global academia.
