Right and Wrong

In the Ramayana, after the battle has been won and Ravana vanquished, the epic instead of winding down to a happy ending throws up a dilemma. Should Rama allow the words of one of his subjects to influence his life with Sita? Should he, as king, listen to his people who believed that Sita's chastity had been compromised due to her abduction, or should he, as husband, stand by her. Especially since she had put herself through a trial by fire at his request! Finally he chose his kingly duties over that of a husband and would-be father, and banished Sita to the forest.

The choices that stared at Rama were the choices society was grappling with at the time. Who is a good king? Should kings be answerable to their people more than they are to their families? And what makes the perfect man? Myths, epics and other literature of the time explored these issues in myriad ways and, in a way, helped communities deal with questions that had no straight answers.

Different people offered different perspectives. The concept of perfect man, for instance, was the concern of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. While the Ramayana offered a template for perfection, the Mahabharata seemed to say there was no such thing. Wendy Doniger explains (The Hindus: An Alternative History; Penguin/Viking) that The Ramayana says, "There is a perfect man and his name is Rama," and the Mahabharata says, "Not really; dharma is so subtle that even Yudhisthira cannot always fulfill it." Dharma was an invigorating, but extremely complex concept. It meant making choices, taking stands and adopting behaviour patterns that were at times difficult to reconcile with other societal constructs such as family, love and loyalty. The epics reflected the quandary of the people over the concept of dharma: some believed that it had to be firmly defined while others imbued it with shades of grey.

The Occident was similarly preoccupied with the concept of justice. Homer grappled with it in Iliad and Odyssey as did Aeschylus in Orestia. The concept of revenge as a form of justice was explored in great detail in Orestia. Agamemnon was murdered by his wife. As per societal norms, he had to be avenged by Orestes, his son. Orestes was faced with a dilemma: not avenging his father's killing would be a crime as would be killing his mother. The code of ethics or morality that prevailed at the time said that a son had to act on behalf of his father but Aeschylus's plays sought a new form of justice, one that freed society from the cycle of revenge and retribution. Both Homer and Aeschylus were trying to offer an understanding of justice that looked beyond the immediate concerns of the family and tribe; one that was not tethered to the ancient Greek concept of 'miasma'. Miasma is envisioned as a cloud of pollution. It was believed that miasma hovered around evil deeds and stuck to one involved in an act of crime and to anyone who happened to be around the scene at the time. This was built on the philosophy that bad things do happen to good people and the only way to explain this is through miasma. By getting their heroes and other characters to deliberate and debate different ideas around revenge and fairness, the Greek epics helped build a more nuanced understanding of justice.

The epics - Indian as well as Greek - were also burdened with the task of defining what it meant to be a good woman. A woman's dignity, her position in society and her rights were issues that were dealt with through characters such as Kunti, Sita, Draupadi, Helen and Penelope. In the Mahabharata, the disrobing of Draupadi in a court full of people was meant to evoke anger as well as to fuel debate. Among the many questions that the scene raised were: what right did her husband have to wager her on the dice board? Are women the property of their fathers and then of their husbands? Did Draupadi have the right to be offended? While the Mahabharata was unequivocal in its condemnation of the act and understood her anger and desire for vengeance, it was less definitive about the culpability of the men who allowed this under their watch. Bhishma, when questioned by Draupadi, pointed out the difficulty of adhering to dharma at all times.

Interestingly, we live in times where the concepts of justice, role of women and a host of other issues are in a state of flux, yet again. It is not just India but people in several parts of the world are being forced to confront the knotty and tangled web of choices that circle these problems. Gordon Brown, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, put it most eloquently in a lecture to students at Edinburgh when he said, "We need to underpin the development of our new society by a global ethic that makes sense of our responsibilities to each other."

It may be time for communities across the globe to go back to the treasure chest of questions raised in our myths and epics.

(This article was first published in Business Standard Weekend) http://goo.gl/lkVvC8 

Gods of War

It is the season for festivals. A week ago, the festival of nine nights or Navaratri wound down to a close and the festival of lights, Diwali, will soon be upon us. Within these larger circles of celebration, numerous small ones too will make their place as different communities welcome different gods and goddesses. In a country with proverbially 13 festivals in 12 months, the September-December period is more crowded than usual. And, interestingly, most of these festivals are in honour of great warriors.

Durga slays the powerful Asura king, Mahisha, who had begun to wreak destruction on the three worlds. Backed by a formidable army and a power to change form at will, he remained unvanquished. Helpless, the gods turned to the divine trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Durga, according to common lore, was born out of their collective anger. She sprang into being, fully clad in armour and battle-ready, like Athene of the Greek pantheon.

(Image: Rajrishi Singhal)

Durga was created to kill Mahishasura and hence her name, Mahishasurmardini. Although her male counterparts assist her with weapons and protective gear, she was a one-woman army and led the battle into the Asura kingdom. Many scholars believe that she was worshipped as a powerful and mighty warrior in a timeless time. But with the emergence of a paternalistic social structure, the Durga-Mahishasur myth had to be incorporated within the Vedic framework where the divine trinity was supreme and goddesses were defined by their relationship to the three gods. According to E W Hopkins (Epic Mythology), "Durga is a late adoption of Visnuism; originally a goddess worshipped by savages (Savaras, Barbaras, Pulindas)." Whatever the story of her origin and her position in the pantheon, there is no dispute that Durga is a fierce goddess and was feared by her male counterparts. "Durga is a warrior goddess, unapproachable by suitors and invincible in battle." (World Mythology, edited by Roy Willis, Simon & Schuster, UK) And just as Athene became daughter of Zeus when the male gods became dominant in all societies, Durga became Shiva's wife.

Sekhmet and Anat are similar warrior goddesses in Egyptian mythology. Anat - imported into the Egyptian pantheon from Syria and Palestine - is shown carrying a shield, a spear and an axe. Sekhmet is a terrifying lioness goddess and is often depicted with a lion's head in sculptures. She was deputed by sun god Ra to quell his rebellious human subjects. The lion is Durga's vahana too. Another Egyptian war goddess, Qudshu, is depicted in paintings and sculptures as a naked woman standing on a lion's back. The lion is a common symbol among war deities and is believed to stand in for the sun. (The Dictionary of Symbols, J E Cirlot, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London)

Warrior goddesses were common to many ancient civilisations and their worship perhaps predates that of male warriors. These goddesses were ferocious, a far cry from the fecund profile of a mother goddess, also a powerful mythical-religious figure. According to scholar Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, these goddesses are not compassionate; "they are generally a pretty bloodthirsty lot." (http://goo.gl/DEMMBY). When goddesses took to battle, the lines between good and bad were blurred and often had to be reined in (Kali, Sekhmet are examples) to save humanity from complete annihilation.

The narrative changes when it comes to the male warrior gods. Indra, for instance, fights Vritra the demon for the good of man. Vritra assumed control over water and refused to release it for the gods and humans; Indra slays him with his thunderbolt and cuts a channel for the rivers to flow.

Another thing about recent male warrior gods - they are presaged to deliver mankind from evil. Rama, who will be worshipped during the upcoming Diwali celebrations, fights a moral battle and is worshipped as an ideal man rather than an inspiring warrior. He goes into battle, not because he seeks the blood of his enemy but because his hand is forced when Ravana kidnaps his wife. Ravana's death has been destined at Rama's hands. When the gods had approached Brahma for deliverance from Ravana, he tells them that Rama will be born to vanquish Ravana.

The era of male warrior gods is far from over. The last of Vishnu's ten incarnations is Kalki, the horse-warrior who is yet to grace this world with his presence and is preordained to restore order to a chaotic modern world. 

(This was published in Business Standard Weekend, 25 October 2013)

Speaking in many tongues

(My article in Business Standard on 17 August 2013)

Language is a deposit of thought, said Max Muller, without which the human species would be incapacitated in its quest for survival and modern-day nation states in their hunt for supremacy. By that rationale India is perhaps one of the richest countries in the world. According to the recently conducted linguistic survey of India, the country speaks in 780 languages and writes with 60 scripts. Few other nations and, perhaps even continents, have such a large basket of languages at their disposal.

The survey, which has taken 18 years and 3,000 people, is the first attempt in 100 years to map the country's linguistic diversity. Ganesh Devy, the force behind the 68-volume set of The People's Linguistic Survey of India (English publisher: Orient Black Swan) said at the launch of the Maharashtra survey, "The aim was to reveal the treasure we have. We have a forest of languages."

Creating a language takes centuries and it is the hallmark of great civilisations. Its characteristics cannot be described in a single statement and, in a way, it defies being defined. David Crystal, accomplished linguist and author, says even when we use short and functional sentences, there is a lot that is going on. (How Language Works, David Crystal; Penguin Books, UK) We use vocabulary, grammar, phonology, semantics and several other things to convey sense and relevance to what we speak and write.

Language is a complex machine. It is also one of the most distinctive features of the human race and has been used by civilisations to capture their myths and philosophies and weave them into literature, art and science. Scholars who have studied language and mythology have pointed out that myths were used to amplify the meaning of a word and to transform concepts into stories. Max Muller believed that mythology was the disease of language implying in a way that neither can do without the other.

Myths help layer words with multiple meanings. For instance, take the word zero. In India there are different kinds of zeroes. Ganesh Devy says, "We have the word 'kha' which is a zero that includes everything and which diminishes and grows with the things within it, we have 'shunya' in which there is nothing and we have 'purna' which has everything but it neither diminishes nor grows." The nuances that transform a complex mathematical construct into an equally complicated unit of language are unique to the culture that created the concept. If we lose the language, we lose the layers and the unique worldview of a civilisation.

Similarly language helps create myths that are rooted in the cultural context of a people. For instance, 'Uloopi', the water princess in Mahabharata who marries Arjuna, derives her name from the word uloopin which means dolphin. (E W Hopkins, Epic Mythology, Indological Book House, Varanasi 1968) The word is hardly used but as a character of a popular epic, it lives on. Another word with a forgotten past is Welsh. About 1,500 years ago, Germanic tribes invading Britain coined the term "welus", which meant slaves and outsiders, for the resident Celts of the region - the term lives on as "Welsh".

While losing a language may be in the natural order of things, it often means losing a bit of our past and for India, a wealth of literary compositions. The Bhils have four mahakavyas (epics), and the Sawra tribe, whose language is spoken by a small group of people, has plays, stories and songs. Given the utilitarian times we live in, the death of a language may not seem such a great tragedy. The logic is, if a language had any use, it would be used. But languages are not meant only to communicate (though that is a vital function), it has helped understand the world and create new languages. The binary system that our computers run on was derived from the metric compositions used by ancient poets and singers.

The word is more powerful than we can imagine. That is why most civilisations gave it a divine status. In India, Vac is the goddess of speech and the mother of the Vedas. The Irish god Ogma is said to have invented the Ogham alphabet. Hermes was regarded as the god of language, alongside Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) by the Greeks. According to mythologist and linguist Ernst Cassirer, "Word in fact becomes a sort of a primary force in which all being and doing originate. In all mythical cosmogonies, as far back as they can be traced, this supreme position of the word is found." (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, Translated by Susanne K Langer, Dover Publications, 1946) He finds a direct parallel between what the Uitoto Indians believed - that in the beginning the word gave the Father his origin - and the opening passage of John's gospel: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." (Bible, John 1:1; King James version). Perhaps, all those who count themselves as masters of the word, may want to take another call on who really serves whom.

Divine Protectors

The column appeared in Business Standard on 27 April 2013. 
The Supreme Court, in a recent verdict on bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa, said the hills could be mined only if Vedanta Aluminium's exploration activities did not violate the local tribes' right to worship Niyam Raja. The Kondh community, indigenous to the region, believes that Niyam Raja is a permanent resident of the Niyamgiri Hills and he is their creator and protector god.

In mythologies across boundaries, the riches of the earth were seen as powerful forces. Humans were not strong enough to be entrusted with their care; these forces needed supernatural guardians. Thus, the mountains, the ocean and the rivers acquired the status of gods. For instance, the Lepchas, a hill tribe indigenous to India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet, believe thatKangchenjunga is a great lord created for their protection. Around him are other great lords, each with specific duties to fulfil. One such lord is Pun Yang Chyu who, it is believed, "holds within it a rich treasure of seeds which no mortal can ever find. When our world is destroyed by too many evil deeds, thoughts and actions, Pun Yang Chyu will release seeds to regenerate the world". (Lepcha, My Vanishing Tribe by A R Foning, Sterling Publishers)

Many protector deities were creators of the cosmos or, at least, principal actors in the creation process. The cosmic snake in Indian and African mythology is a case in point. In India, three aspects of the snake are worshipped - "as a dreaded enemy, as the protector of home and treasure and as the accompaniment and attribute of wisdom." (The Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India by W Crooke, Government Press, North Western Provinces and Oudh in Allahabad). The serpent as a minder of treasures is a common motif and provides an interesting angle to the recent discoveries of gold and precious gems in the underground vaults of the Padmanabha temple in Trivandrum. The temple has an 18-foot long idol of Vishnu, reclining on the coiled serpent Ananta Naga with a lotus rising from his navel on which sits Brahma, the creator god. According to some versions of its origins, the temple was built on the site of serpent worship.

In many cultures, these divinities began their life as demonic beings. The rationale, perhaps, was that the guardians had to be even more fearful and awe-inspiring than the forces they controlled. They held the power to create and destroy. In Himachal Pradesh, for example, Hidim and Hidimba were rakshasas and are still worshipped as protectors of the forest. In Egypt, Geb was the god of the earth, and earthquakes were thought to be his laughter. And as a god of mines and caves, he is believed to have gifted the people with minerals and precious stones found in the earth. Bonbibi of the Sunderbans in West Bengal has the forests under her charge. She is worshipped by Muslims and Hindus and protects her followers from the wrath of Dokkhin Rai - the tiger in human form. Daughter of a Muslim trader, local lore says Bonbibi saved an orphan boy, Dukhu, from the jaws of Dokkhin Rai and even today one cannot go into the forest to collect honey or timber or set out to fish in distant waters without her blessings.

The worshippers believed that these gods were responsible for fire, flood, earthquakes and drought. They controlled the forests and seas and a few chosen ones among them maintained order in the universe. One such is Niyam Raja. He sets down the rules of life for the Kondhs by ensuring that the water they drink, the spaces they inhabit and the food they eat is pure and nurturing. In return, he expects to be worshipped and cared for.

As the gods guard nature's treasures from plunder, so do they keep the people of a city or a nation safe. Athena is the patron goddess of Athens. Mumbai takes its name from Mumbadevi (although there are many who dispute the etymological connection between the city and the goddess).

Myths helped people understand why nature behaved the way it did or how human character was shaped. The worship of Niyam Raja therefore is more than a ritual followed by a small tribe. It exemplifies the abiding belief in the power of protector gods and provides an insight into how ancient cultures engaged with nature. Bereft of security for hire, ancient civilisations depended on gods for safety; it's a sign of changing times when industrialists today get the CRPF to protect them and their wealth.

Shiva and Dionysus: Two sides of the same coin?

Richard Seaford, professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter, England addressed a small group in Mumbai last week to talk about his ongoing research on two figures -- one from ancient Greece and another from ancient India -- Dionysus and Shiva. Both he said were part of henotheistic cultures. Most of us are familiar with monotheism where there is one Divine and polytheism where there are many gods. Henotheism lies between the two extremes. It describes a civilisation where people don't deny the existence of many deities but believe that one is more important than the other. Ancient India was probably a sum of many henotheistic tribes where some believed Shiva was the supreme deity, others felt it was Vishnu or one of his 'avataras' and so on. 

Shiva and Dionysus represent the unity of opposites which leads to a dissolution of boundaries between binaries such as male-female (Ardhanarishwara), human-animal (Shiva and Dionysus are mentioned as having taken the form of a bull in the ancient texts) and life-death. Shiva is creator-destroyer, an imagery we are familiar with and Dionysus, Professor Seaford said, has been compared with Hades (the Greek god of the underworld) in the ancient texts. 

Binaries according to Claude Levi Strauss convey how the human mind operates. A recent course that I did with University of Pennsylvania (via www.coursera.org) had some excellent lectures on the subject where Peter Struck, Associate Professor of Classical Studies with University of Pennsylvania said Strauss showed us how the human mind is structured in pairs of opposites. "All the other more complex forms of understanding that we have are the result of extra binaries layered on top of binaries. So for example, some folks will say, well not everything is black and white. There are lots of shades of grey. But every single shade of grey is made up of certain amounts of black and certain amounts of white." Binary language he said can code a lot of information. 

Binaries help us partially decode the thought and understand the culture which spawned the myth. Let us for a moment stick with the human-animal binary. Dionysus also known as Bacchus was originally a Thracian god. According to Bertrand Russel (A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russel: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984) Thracians were agriculturists and they had fertility cults and a god who promoted fertility who was known as Bacchus. Bacchus had the shape of a man or a bull -- it was never clear if it was one or either or both.  

It gets more interesting. Russel says: "When they (Thracians) discovered how to make beer, they thought intoxication divine and gave honour to Bacchus." Sounds familiar? Apart from the similarities between Shiva and Dionysus-Bacchus, the significance of intoxication and therefore an intoxicant is an intersection point between the Greeks and Indians. 'Soma' was the divine drink and its preparation was elaborate and ritualistic in ancient India where, like the Greeks, the spirit was accorded the status of the divine. Also devotees of Shiva and Dionysus had rituals which involved drunken revelry -- beer and then wine for the Greeks and various forms of weed and bhang in India. I must make it clear here that we are not talking of who influenced whom or whether they were influenced by another source but simply tracing the common thread that runs through civilisations.

To get back to the Shiva-Dionysus comparison, there are many other similarities -- the phallic symbol is important in the worship of both and so is their attraction to women devotees -- which I shall try and list on this blog (soon, I promise) but both represent a period of human development that was exploring the various facets of divinity.

Many cultures, one story...

My piece on death and immortality in Business Standard Weekend today:

Many cultures, one story?

Myths across cultures and continents reveal a preoccupation with similar themes - death, immortality, evil and virtue. Evidently, we are more alike than we are different

Arundhuti Dasgupta /  January 19, 2013, 0:49 IST

Here is a hypothetical exercise. Suppose we are tasked with mapping mythologies of the world on an atlas. Can you guess the outcome? The picture emerging finally is expected to be far more complicated than expected. We would end up with a criss-cross of arrows coursing through multiple continents. It would be as difficult to assign a nationality to these stories as it would be to date their origins. But, what this map could possibly establish without doubt is that the world was a global village way before Google or Facebook tried to stitch it together

Myths bind us in a web of big ideas, common themes and universal truths. Almost every culture, for instance, has stories about death and immortality. In some myths, death has to be vanquished and the heroes are on a quest for immortality. They seek the ultimate elixir, the plant or the root or the drink that will banish death from the land of the living. The theme of immortality is also central to the Kumbh Mela, the grand spectacle that is currently playing out on the banks of the Ganges in Allahabad.

The Economist, which recently reviewed a book on immortality (Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilisation; by Stephen Cave, Crown, 320 pages), had this to say: “…Stephen Cave, a British philosopher, argues that man's various tales of immortality can be boiled down into four basic ‘narratives’. The first is the simplest, in theory at least: do what the medieval alchemists never managed and discover an elixir to simply avoid dying. The second concerns resurrection, or coming back to life after dying, a belief found in all three of the Abrahamic religions. The idea of an immaterial soul that can persist through death dates back, in a formal form, at least to Plato, and forms Mr Cave's third narrative. His fourth narrative deals with immortality through achievement, by becoming so famous that one's name lives on through the ages.”*

The quest of many an Occidental hero, shaped by the philosophy and myths of these cultures, was born out of a need for understanding why we die. In the Orient too, there are similar heroic quests. Garuda, a theriomorph (deities represented in animal form), seeks amrita to free his mother. Gayatri, a popular mantra today but once a metre to which prayers were set to and also a bird, sought an elusive elixir (some myths speak of this as soma and some as amrita) for the gods. Similarly, the story of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh (believed to be the oldest story ever told) describes his search for the plant of immortality. The plant is in the possession of an ageless man called Utnapishtim, the only survivor of the great flood that engulfed the world — remember Noah? — yet another myth that is common to all cultures.

Gilgamesh and Garuda have a lot in common. Garuda obtained the jar ofamrita for the “nagas” but tricked them out of immortality by giving them a set of contrived instructions. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, manages to get the plant but is tricked out of immortality by fate or by the gods because he fails to follow the instructions. The theme of immortality is also central to the story ofamrita manthan, which is the underlying myth of the Kumbh Mela that promises salvation and immortality of the soul.

But the narrative takes an interesting twist at this point. While the older myths record the quest for immortality, later ones tell a different story. Heroes in the Indian epics, for example, don’t seek immortality; they are avatars of the gods who are immortal. They look for deliverance of humanity at large and the defeat of evil (as they see it) in the hands of good. Arjun, Ram, Krishna, Indra, Yudhisthira and Karna are all heroes, all on a quest but not for everlasting life. Similar is the story with Homeric heroes Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon and others — none of them was in the hunt for immortality.

As philosophies across the world engaged with and analysed the concept of death, it was not seen as an end of life but as the means to begin a new one. Or, as a sceptic might say, death became a lost cause. The quest was therefore redefined. Like death, so it is with different aspects of life. The common thread that ties all the stories together creates a complicated, yet human and universal, tapestry. Myths are interesting as much for the fantastical worlds they describe as for what they reveal about humanity: that we are more alike than we are different. Or, at least we all love the same stories.