My relationship with religion has always been stange. Over the span of my fairly short life, it has had its extreme ups and downs. It finally boiled down to me identifying as an atheist at the age of 17. Four years on, and my set of atheist beliefs haven’t budged a bit and I doubt they will anytime soon. I want to share my story of how I became an Atheist in a Hindu family, in the hope of reaching out to anyone going through similar struggles.
At university, nobody bats an eyelid at me being an atheist, despite coming from a country where only 3% out of a population of 1.3 billion identify as having no religion (WIN-Gallup Global Index of Religion and Atheism report, 2012). In India, a melting pot of culture and religion, the societal consequences of being atheist can be (but are not limited to), being told you’ll burn in hell, being shunned and in some extreme cases, being beaten and killed. Even the Hindi word for atheist is harsh sounding and has negative connotations.
Until I was 6 years old, I grew up in New Delhi and I was raised fairly religiously. I had all the Hindu rites done to me as a baby, my grandma regularly took me to the temple as a child (which I loved) and the temple visits continued, even when my family moved and settled in London. We prayed on major Hindu festivals and whenever we were nervous or scared, were told to pray about it, because ‘God would always answer prayers’. Unsurprisingly, in my early teen years I still identified as a Hindu, but it wasn’t until a pilgrimage in Kashmir when I was 16 that I started to doubt everything. I honestly don’t know what clicked in me or what specific moment triggered it, but I began to realise that I didn’t like going on pilgrimages to pay tribute to something that may or may not answer my prayers, or being told by priests that if I didn’t pray so many times a day I’d have a doomed future. I was no longer the little girl blindly praying to a God her parents believed in, I was an older teenager and questioning things for myself.
I was told during exams that I should pray so I’d pass my exams and get into the university I wanted. I didn’t and I still passed and got into my first choice. I got it because I revised hard, not because I prayed. This is the main reason I am atheist today; why should I rely on God for something I can achieve myself?
When I explained to a family member that I wasn’t comfortable with waiting in two-hour long queues at the temple, I was told I’d ‘go to hell for rejecting God’ because that’s where all the atheists go. During my teenage years, I was basically forced to practice Hinduism; something that is ironically regarded as one of the religion’s biggest sins. I started to resent the religious influence in my life. On one occasion, when I hinted to this same family member that I was atheist, I was told that, in our culture, there is no place for apostates because they rejected all logic (because hard scientific facts aren’t logic apparently) and they deserved to burn. I was swiftly told afterwards all my doubts were a test from God, not the result of my own free thinking over the years.
I don’t resent anyone who follows a religion because that’s their own choice. I ended up getting the short end of the stick by choosing to be an apostate and Indian as I am guaranteed to be a social outcast, just because of what culture says. Luckily, university has offered me freedom to express my atheist beliefs in a safe environment.