Ten years ago, I wrote a book inspired by the sight of a great and mighty god left out in the sun, dust, and rain in Hampi for nearly 450 years. That book was titled Rearming Hinduism, a new edition of which you now hold in your hands. And strangely enough, it wasn't just the sight of that great deity towering over the broken walls of the enclosure that inspired the title of this book, but, specifically, that of his missing right hand. My whole life I had seen gods in temples or in my parents' puja room. Here, the gods were always intact, healthy, resplendent, and smiling. But sometimes I also saw gods in museums or in open lands often described as historical sites or ""ruins"". Most of the time, as was the case when I visited Qutub Minar as a child, I did not even notice the gods staring down, half-erased from some old half-broken temple column. Or, when I did notice them, as was the case when we visited museums, they were presented in a different context, as ""sculptures"" rather than as how we normally knew them. That was that, and this was this. Or so I thought. Until a certain point in my life.
In Hampi, it struck me. This great stone sculpture of Narasimha wasn't meant to be glanced at and just put behind us like some background to a selfie. This was a god. He was a god meant to be adored and adorned the same way as Balaji in Tirumala or any other great deity of Bharat. For that was what this ""monument"" was. It was a temple once.
Inside, Narasimha and Lakshmi sat, resplendent in jewels and flowers, and smiled like loving parents at generations of Vijayanagara children who came to worship them and receive their prasad day after day.
Yet, he stood now only as a fragment of his once complete and glorious self. His right arm was chopped off; so were parts of his limbs. And most egregiously, so was his consort, our mother, Goddess Lakshmi, who once rested on his left thigh. Only her hand remained.
A god without a right hand, and a right hand of a goddess. Still, he kept smiling. But what was the nature of that smile? Were there times during childhood when you saw your father smile about some mysterious grown-up thing beyond your understanding and you couldn't understand what it meant? Maybe.
But then, when I began writing Rearming Hinduism, I used to think that Narasimhaswami's expression was actually one of precise and righteous anger. The kind that you feel when you are down and almost defeated but then something gets ignited in you and makes you stand up to fight again.
It was in that kind of mood that I wrote Rearming Hinduism-all in a few days in early 2014, furious about so many things, but about one thing most of all: the collapse of truth in our lives.
As a media professor, I could see the brazen desecration of truth and decency every day in the media's stories about us. Lies about our gods. Lies about our ancestors. Lies about even what our children in American schools were going through.
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