In the autumn of 2017, Bengal, as usual, was abuzz with the seasonal cacophony of the pre- Durga Puja media blitzkrieg. There were advertisements pasted across streets and the media canvassed everything.One particular advertisement irked the born-again Rightwingers, who, in this province at least, seemed to have sprung from the woodwork. It concerned a leading salon chain headed by a Muslim entrepreneur. Its sweet, cheeky advertisement depicted the entourage of Durga and her wards making a quick visit to the said parlour to get a fashionable make-over before they headed to earth. The copy was apt, the illustration piquant and the effect comic and heartwarming. But Rightwing chest-thumping forced the company to quickly withdraw the advertisement and the owner to duly apologise before there was any physical harm done to his manyproperties spread across Bengal. Naturally, there was need to protest. I wrote a longish piece on an opinion-only digital platform citing several examples from Bengali popular culture of how the goddess and her children have, at least since the early 20th century, been portrayed in the regular or caricatured image of an average Bengali householder. A vacationing Durga, a Durga playing the guitar at a neighbourhood function, a Durga in jeans and top, a Durga at home sitting with a group of leisurely, reclining wonnen — these are familiar manifestations of the so-called divine. Not to speak of the countless mutations to her form and figure in puja pandals and tableaux. Intact, there is hardly any memorable way in which the goddess Durga has been imagined as a holy talisman. She is ubiquitous and moulded, fabricated, formalised and domesticated every autumn.

What I perhaps could not forcefully argue is that there is nothing unique about the manner in which the goddess Durga is domesticated in Bengal. This practice is widespread, and historically, was the most dominant way in which the divine had been understood, as humans proceeded from the paleolithic to the neolithic period. In other words, the divine, before the rise of Judaism and Christianity, had never been anything else but utterly human — in both form and function. This is the primary message of Reza Aslan’s new book God: A Human History . In fact, Aslan’s most startling claim in the book is that it is not agriculture which had stopped the hunter-gatherer ‘paleoliths’ in their tracks and forced them to find stasis around the site of their produce. It was the birth of religion as an organised set of practices and the building of large temple complexes like the Göbekli Tepe in Turkey which forced them to organise their life around a place and abdicate their nomadic character. Göbekli Tepe’s antiquity, traceable back to a whopping 13,000 years, to the fag-end of the last Ice-Age, has only increased the historical life of pre-Semitic religions of the world. In other words, the sweeping practice of polytheism that included the Sumerians and their successors the Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks and Indo-Europeans, and which the Christians had made pariah as Paganism, has a history of almost 10,000 years. This is five times the period of monotheism, that precedes the Common Era by just 500 years, at the time of the Babylonian conquest of Israel by Nebuchadnezzar II. In eastern religions, polytheism is not just widely and dominantly practiced but seems to be at ease with its pantheon of hundreds of gods — all having human traits and human weaknesses and corruptibility, just as it was till about 2500 years ago, everywhere in the known world.

Even if settling down for the sake of the practice of religion seems a radical claim, Aslan’s ground is neither unknown nor unexpected. After all, it is not a new discovery that there is no form of the divine in the wide ‘historical’ period which looks unlike the human or has very effective and identifiable non-human traits. Even Christianity — the world’s most populous monotheistic religion — had to appoint (or rather manufacture) a human to act as god’s son on earth, with traits that are significantly and disturbingly removed from the site of origin of the ‘messiah’. In fact, no one asks why Jesus of Nazareth is fair, blonde and blue-eyed when he is otherwise from the hot, dry and inhospitable terrains of the Middle-east, with carpentry as his trade. As long as he resembled humans of an ideal form — most likely the Crete template, since devout early Christians were Greek-speaking and the four early Gospels were in Greek — he was to be accepted across the world regardless of the local preference for the colour of skin and length and texture of hair. The last part of the observation is partially drawn from Aslan’s last book Zealot: The Life and Times of the Jesus o Nazareth (Random House, 2013). There, he had made a riveting attempt at historicising the Christ figure, slowly and laboriously separating crumbs of historical fact from an avalanche of sources and scriptural texts that were configured for mythification. If not entirely, he was to a large extent successful. After reading Zealot, even if one did not know who exactly the historicalJesus was, one certainly knew who he wasn’t. And that is not a mean feat.

Like in his last book, here too, Aslan deals with very significant historical questions. For him (as much as for us) the question is not i/ the humans had first imagined and then devised the divine in the form of their own. The question is why! And why did it become necessary in the global west to move towards monotheism as a radical break from the As syrian, Egyptian and Hellenic traditions? This is a sort of inquiry that needs to be constantly substantiated with illustrations and archaeological findings from across belief-systems in ancient provinces. Like in Zealot, Aslan never falls short of that primary requirement. He keeps the historian’s craft close to his chest. At the same time, he never lets his sweeping subject to be overwhelmed by the scholarship that already exists. For sure, Aslan is not the first scholar of religion and neither is he the most formidable. But he has a gift for storytelling, which manages to keep the narrative free from being constantly obstructed and belted by the need for historical substantiation. He neatly divides the book, almost in half, between the actual story of god on earth and the detailed notes and references. This way, one reads not a tome of dry historical inquiry but essentially the epic story of man (and woman) or at least the set of beliefs, customs and practices which were once a tool of self-reflection. It is through a long historical process of conquest, power and hegemony, that those same innocent systems of belief took a vile form.

To come back to the ‘why’ of it, Aslan’s arguments move towards a convincing answer, even to the issue of monotheism and emergence of religion as a set of inviolable practices aimed at placating a powerful, conceited god. He writes:

When we organised ourselves in small, wandering packs of hunter- gatherers united in blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the Lord of Beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease. When we settled down in small villages and began growing our food instead of hunting for it, the Lord of Beasts surrendered to Mother Earth, and the celestial realm was reimagined as a place ruled bya host of fertility gods who maintained an eternal harvest. When those small villages expanded into independent city-states, each with its own tribal deity, in perpetual conflict with each other, the heavens made room for a pantheon of distinct martial deities, each a divine protector of its respective city back on earth. And when those city- states merged into massive empires ruled by all-powerful kings, the gods were rearranged into hierarchies reflecting the new political order on earth. (pp 101-102)

If we need any proof of how gods, otherwise projected with a set of superpowers, are in essence actually human, we need not go very far. We can just walk into the temple at Sabarimala in Kerala and be assured of it.

God – A Human History | Reza Aslan | Bantam Press/ Penguin Random House India | 2017 | 298 pp