Does He Know a Mother's Heart? Arun Shourie on the suffering of innocents

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

In his many roles – as economist, politician, author and newspaper editor – Arun Shourie has been a high-profile figure for decades, but one important aspect of his life has been comparatively shielded from the public gaze. For thirty-four years, Shourie and his wife Anita have been parents to a child suffering from cerebral palsy. Their son Aditya cannot stand or use his right arm; his vision is impaired and he speaks haltingly; he has the mind of a child. Looking after him has been a major preoccupation of Shourie’s life, and the passage of time has not been kind: new complications – including Anita Shourie’s own painful bout with Parkinson’s disease – have continually arisen over the years.

Now in his 70th year, and faced with such questions as “Who will lift Adit out of bed as I weaken with age?” and “Who will look after him when we are gone?”, Shourie has written arguably his most personal book – an attempt to understand and deal with the phenomenon of suffering by examining religious texts as well as modern knowledge. Long-winded and repetitive but also candid and moving, Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? is a difficult book to review; it evokes admiration, sympathy and exasperation in almost equal measure.

When he (briefly) recounts Aditya’s life and struggles, Shourie’s writing is so raw and vulnerable that you almost want to look away. I was particularly affected by his remark that his son’s condition helps him keep his own life in perspective. “I am dismissed from The Indian Express? But he hasn’t had and isn’t going to have a job at all. Another award? A new post? Another book published? That none of these is of the slightest significance to Adit keeps the head from swelling.”

The prose here – unstructured, with half-sentences and ellipses – reflects the inner state of a tormented father. It reads like the transcription of an impromptu, hesitant talk Shourie is making to a small group of acquaintances; the need to tell the story, as directly and honestly as possible, supersedes the need to be “writerly”. (The sub-head for the section where he describes meeting his wife and the early years of their marriage is simply “Anita Comes”. The next section, about the birth of their child, is sub-headed “Adit Comes”.)

But soon the book moves into the terrain of laborious scriptural analysis, with Shourie quoting entire passages from the books of the Abrahamic religions – the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran. He analyses the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of Lot and his unfortunate daughters, of the resurrected Lazarus, and points out numerous contradictions and logical fallacies. He comments on the most readily identifiable traits of the Biblical Creator: vindictive jealousy and insecurity (the biggest “sin” of all being the worship of any other God). And he discusses the many casuistries and self-deceptions of the religious stance, such as hailing the survivor of a natural calamity as “God-blessed” when, by exactly the same reasoning, God has whimsically murdered hundreds of others.

Like other sceptical readers before him, Shourie is essentially noting that entire chunks of these “revealed” books read exactly like things that would be written by self-serving men when they want to exercise power through fear. (It seems to have worked well enough if you consider the countless examples of religious hegemony and persecution throughout recorded history.)

But then, the texts of the monotheistic religions are soft targets anyway: only the most blinkered fundamentalist would deny the existence of numerous passages that are embarrassing when read in the light of our modern ideas about (for example) individual freedoms or gender equality. Things get a little more interesting when Shourie turns his gaze on Hinduism, a religion that doesn’t have a book of rigid “fundamentals”. But here too, he reminds us, there are concepts – like karma and divine chastisement – that can create a fatalistic apathy to suffering and prevent people from dealing with the here and now.

A quote from Mahatma Gandhi opens this section. On being told that the shastras endorsed Untouchability (a horrific practice that he fought all his life), Gandhi replied that a shastra contrary to reason ought to be burnt. “I have so much faith in the correctness of the position I have taken up that, if my taking up that position results in weakening Hinduism, I cannot help it and I must not care.”

These are wise words, worthy of one of the great men of his age (and they were given even more lucid form, decades later, by the Dalai Lama’s observation that “if the new discoveries of science contradict what some ancient scripture says, the scripture must make way”). But some of Gandhi’s other pronouncements on the subject of divinity show how religion can muddy the minds of even clear-sighted and well-intentioned people. When an earthquake devastated Bihar in 1934, he famously attributed the disaster to divine punishment for Untouchability. Later, he maintained the ludicrous position that if the Jews of Europe showed faith in non-violence – and placed themselves completely in the hands of God – it would eventually lead to the melting of Hitler’s heart. (And if this didn’t immediately happen and they ended up in the gas chambers, well, it would eventually happen and the benefits would be borne by subsequent generations.)

As Shourie rightly points out, Gandhi’s absolute faith in non-violence (even in a context where it would certainly not have worked) rested on his religious faith that God would eventually come to the aid of the pure-hearted. This roundabout line of reasoning has the effect of placing responsibility on the victims of injustice: if you’re suffering, it can only mean you did something to deserve it. Perhaps the sins of a previous life are still being accounted for, or perhaps your prayers aren’t strong enough yet. God is always fair and just – He has to be – so the problem must be with you.

By this point, Shourie has made a case for religion’s inability to meaningfully deal with the suffering of innocents, but the analysis continues. He explores the teachings of such mystics as Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Raman Maharshi. He turns to a more general discussion of rationalist thought – such as what neuroscience reveals about the complex workings of the human brain – and suggests prescriptive “exercises” that don’t rely on the props of inerrant scriptures and godmen. And finally, he returns to his stricken son as the ultimate teacher, who has taught him more about life’s challenges than any book could have.

If all this makes Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? sound like a meandering, episodic work, it is. It tries to be too many things at once – personal epiphany, theological history, philosophical treatise – and achieves some success in each of these areas, but at the cost of conciseness. Shourie often makes the same points over and over again, and his relating of old stories – such as the parable of Gautami and the snake – is unnecessarily stretched out. As a reviewer trying to be attentive to economy of expression, I can’t unreservedly endorse this book. But there’s no question that Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? is also a transparently honest and probing work, with much food for thought for anyone who wants to grapple with the big questions of existence. For all its unevenness, it contains more practical wisdom, compassion – and a lot more humility – than some of those old bestsellers that have been marketed for centuries with the daunting blurb “This is the Word of God.”

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P.S. Reading Shourie’s meticulous analyses of passages from the Old Testament and other old texts, I was reminded of a popular wisecrack: “The people who take religion most seriously are atheists.”

That sounds flippant or even arrogant, but it’s worth thinking about. In essence, it can mean this: believers don’t have to be closely familiar with the books of their (much less anyone else’s) religion; all that’s really needed is for them to cling to the things that were put in their heads in childhood, by people whose every word they were taught to respect. (Note: I’m not suggesting that ALL religious people are like this.) But to be an atheist in a world dominated by religious faith (and I’m talking here about a serious atheist, not someone who adopts the position just to look radical or "cool"), you must by definition have the questioning spirit, the willingness to read and think about various arguments and positions, and come to your own conclusions.

In any case it’s widely held that one of the “virtues” of Faith – and its biggest demonstration – is that you don’t ask too many questions. And so, the conscientious sceptic can spend a lifetime grappling with the many conundrums of existence (e.g. how is the suffering of innocents compatible with a benevolent and all-powerful God?), but the truly religious mind doesn’t have to worry about any of this at all: any question, no matter how reasonable or incisive, can be dismissed with a simple “God’s ways are inscrutable” or “Our minds aren’t evolved enough to understand His higher purpose” or “All will be made clear at the End of Days”. It’s a win-win position; little wonder the majority of humankind clings to it.

[A few old posts on related subjects: "Down with atheist values"; "Our common mortality..." and Tales from the crematorium. Also see this post by Great Bong, and the comments discussion]