Dharmakshetra Kurukshetra

Facing oneself is the biggest challenge.
Who am I, I often ask myself.

Am I this patient quiet mild-mannered, self effacing me that some friends have seen and known for ages? Or am I the stubborn strongly opinionated, ever angry, deeply stirred by social issues woman that I sometimes seem to be? Or the meek, deferent, timid, held back and hesitant conservative caged in bird?

How can one explain the incessant chatter inside the self that remains outwardly a silent spectator? The deafening screaming voices behind the impassive face? The seething anger behind the mild smile.

And yet the mild smile and impassive face are not lies either. They are as genuine as the passions. The self effacing demeanour as honest as the confident person or the cold calculating general, and the self-willed fighter.

How can they all be part of one self? And if they are, strange companions though they be, could stranger things not be true too. This weird self that is made of so many different selves all of which together constitute the I, that is the Observer and Knower of these selves, who is this I that I am and am not?

Who am I? Who is this I?

Who are you - my daughter asked me one day, and suddenly the searchlight was turned inward, focusing light in hidden places, peering into darkness and groping for ever eluding meaning.

And how and how much is this I different from the you, the many you's and the they's......

The body is different, the constituent parts are the same; the constituents of the constituent parts are the same - the flesh, the blood, the skin, the muscles - their constitution is the same. The cells are the same and they are made of the same materials. The difference is merely in the sequence of the genetic matter and they too are made up of the same matter - the same atoms, the same atomic structures, the same sub atomic particles. The same that make up everything else in the world. The same that make up matter, space and everything in between.

And suddenly it makes perfect sense: Jal me kumbh, kumbh me jal hai, bheeter bahar paani.
The pot is in the water, the water in the pot, there is water both in and outside the pot.

Words make meaning, but thoughts not contained in them lead one on.....
Understanding, acceptance, but not yet peace.
There are still miles to go.
Meanwhile the unmelting mountain of ice and the flaming tower of fire stand next to each other - all inside a quiet respectable exterior, which is as true as the inscrutable interior terrain.

Inside me, I find a dharmakshetra where rages the kurukshetra of opposites, of right and wrong, the wild and the tamed, the new and the old, the lofty and the mean, the individual and the universal.....Inside me the Pandavas and the Kauravas take up their positions and around them rally all the kings, princes and armies of the universe, taking sides, taking stands, wearing labels. Inside me, a universe of the unfathomed potential takes seed and yearns for form and meaning.

The form and the meaning that will emerge out of the death-shell of identity, after the clang of the weapons gives way to the echoes of dying groans of hurt soldiers.-, after the last conch is blown and the last war cry dies out. Till then all the I's in me must bide their time.

Reflections on religion

Religion means different things to different people.

To some it is a social and community identity that starts with their first breath and is reflected in everything in their lives – starting with the name they are given.

To some others it is the support and sense of belongingness and rootedness to a cultural community. A comfort zone that reinforces their beliefs and practices.

To others still it is the quest for the meaning and purpose of life, a vehicle to express and explore the many seemingly unanswerable questions and conundrums of life.

To some it is a way of expressing their sense of awe to a superior force that seems to be responsible for all that cannot be simply explained away.

To others it offers a core philosophy of humanism for self-growth and community living.

To some others it is a means to manage their fears and insecurities by providing comfort, hope and positivism. Something to cling to, like a mother. 

Pedestals that are pits

One of the early morning religious discourses on television recently had this gentleman narrating as part of some larger story about womanly virtues, a story of a raja who had to make an important appointment in the country. 

Of the contenders for the post, he chose a certain young man, but his wife, a shrewd woman, saw another young man and detecting in his responses and actions the fire and intelligence required for the task, advises the king to entrust it to that second young man. A trial proves the queen right and the young man is selected, but of the queen, it was said by wise men of the age that she was not a ‘pativrataa.’

And the reason? Her transgression was that she had contradicted her husband, and challenged and refuted his judgement. A wife who went contrary to her husband’s words, it seems, was not a ‘pativrata’, even if her husband were wrong and she, right, and her action and words were for the betterment of others, including her husband.  Although it was her ‘dharma’ as queen to act for the welfare of her people, she had flouted the dharma of a pativrata wife!

To define a ‘pativrata’ as one who did not look at a second male was bad enough and tied women down to their homes and hearths even if these were unloving or even downright oppressive. No such impossible standards were set for men. They were not bound by any 'one woman' rules.

But to interpret the word ‘pativrata’ as a woman who toed the husband’s line in all matters, right and wrong, seems to me to be a bit too much. It seems to me to be society’s spiteful revenge on women who threatened male position by the clarity of their vision, their intelligence, and their intellectual integrity.

Instead of placing women on illusory pedestals that are no more than gilded pits covered by thin ice, and painting haloes around women who play by these ridiculous rules, it is time we gave up these silly standards and definitions and accepted that women are no inferior to men in matters of the mind and intellect. Let us accept and realize that by suppressing women over millennia and denying their rights to everything from their own sexuality to world knowledge we have not only denied half the population of basic rights, but denied society itself the opportunity to rise to its fullest potential. 

Approaching truth

A young friend recently declared on Facebook that she was an atheist. Wonderful, I thought. Why don’t more of us speak our minds? Even those of us who follow every ritual copybook style mostly do so without conviction. Many a time, it is out of deference to the elders in the family that we keep up the traditions, not out of any sense of belief. And difficult it is to sustain beliefs in a world where knowledge is growing faster than anything else and challenging every existing notion.

Let us take for example, the Hindu way of observing the eclipse.  The whole debate of the need to observe ritual cleansing springs to my mind. The ritual head bath at weird hours of the night – what purpose does it serve? The injunction not to eat anything not only for the entire period of the eclipse but for hours prior to it – what purpose does it serve? If no other community in the world practice these except Hindus, and that too, primarily Brahmins, then does that make everyone else a fool? Or are we the fools?

Last eclipse frustrated as I was I began looking up internet sites to find out if there were any scientific basis for all the eclipse rituals. There were many websites, naturally, with rather quaint and sometimes, obscurantist explanations. The usual story about Rahu eating up the moon was there.

But this interestingly caught my eye:

http://www.swaminarayan.org/faq/eclips.htm

Here is this religious cult justifying an ancient ritual practice by calling it scientific. This is not a new attitude. Most of us must have heard this refrain some time or the other – that our ancient religious practices were built on sound scientific principles. To me, this meant an admission by religion that it needed to be authenticated by science in order to remain in circulation.

It is more than a tacit admission that more people had lost faith in faith and found science to be a more reliable fallback.

Today, at least among the educated classes, there are more doubters than believers. My young friend had gone a step further and rejected faith completely. She found no use for it. In actual numbers, the number of believers must still outstrip those of the doubters and non-believers by more than a mile. But in the small subset of educated thinking people, the pattern no longer holds true.

This brings me to the whole idea of different approaches to religion.

There are the believers and the non-believers and there are those in between, the doubting thomases.

The believers are the pious and the devout who conform because they have not thought of an alternative.

The agnostics, the doubting thomases, may or may not follow religious practices, but they are no longer entirely convinced. They don’t believe entirely but they have not given up either.

And then there are the non-believers – those who have rejected religion entirely.

And there are shades in between.

There are the followers: the zealots, who assiduously maintain traditions. For them, religion is largely a matter of identity and uncompromising acceptance.

And there are the seekers. These are people who seek an answer to those universal questions. What is life? How did it start? Where did the universe come from? Will it continue indefinitely? Where do we go after we die? What is death?

A lot of the seekers are atheists or non-believers – many distinguished scientists belong to this category - Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens...the list is long, the names distinguished. Dawkins and Hitchens indeed have declared war on religion. A massive attack.

Stephen Hawking’s approach is different, so was Carl Sagan’s.Watch this video for Hawking’s and Sagan’s views on God and everything else: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/god-universe-everything-else/

Look out specially for their attitudes to religion. Note the difference: the deep sympathetic humaneness of Sagan’s approach and the uncompromising and detached intellectual integrity that Hawking brings to the table. It is interesting to see those subtle differences in personality, temperaments, approaches and attitudes.

Now let me come to the interesting part: all seekers may not be atheists.  Seekers of the truth come in many colours – scientists are one of them, poets, saints and philosophers, artists are others. The approach to Truth may be many. Saint and poet-seekers may draw their inspiration from religion and so might artists and sculptors. The scientific approach has the advantage of being an evidence-based inquiry, making the truths they unravel more easily comprehensible to more people. The approach through art and poetry and philosophy may lead their votaries to a fleeting subjective epiphanic experience, but in order for others to understand it, it will have to be personally felt or experienced by them. The non-scientific approach to seeking is therefore a very fulfilling experience for creators but is not so easily comprehensible to others.

Coming to the next logical point: are all atheists seekers then? No, I think. Many turn Marxists almost as a natural corollary. But I’m also sure many of those who have rejected religion have not found a well spring of personal philosophy to fill the vacuum. To them, atheism itself becomes a religion – a sort of a religion based on what they don’t believe in. It becomes a stand, even a stance, something frozen and frigid based on a conclusion that that there is no God.

A conclusion that is not yet justified. Scientists even today honestly admit to not having answers to many questions. They are only confident that whatever happened, it was not God-caused. But their hypothesis is not yet put to the test. Till such time as we have answers to all life’s big questions from science, it is presumptuous to reach any conclusion. 

The only valid approach then is the approach of the seeker. To freeze into an attitude is intellectual hara-kiri. Even as science delves deeper and deeper in its search for the essential core, we the doubters, non-believers and even the believers must need develop the objectivity and ability to question, seek, probe beyond the surface and seek the truth as presented by science and in the hallowed pages of our scriptures. To be able to read the two together, reconcile the differences and extricate it from the grist that has accumulated down the centuries. 

Echoes from a pagan past

"We gave our Peruvian housemaid some sarkarai pongal today and I explained it to her as a winter harvest festival related sweet...and she said apparently they have a similar sweet (with rice) that they make in Peru at around spring," wrote my brother Sriram responding to my earlier posting.

Not surprising at all.

There are many versions of flood myths, and creation myths and harvest festivals, and sacrifices and initiation ceremonies, fertility rites and funeral rites, ritual cleansing and celebration of coming of age in the world even today. Many of them seem to echo from a distant past, a common past when we shared the vision of the rest of the world - shared fears, hopes, dreams...

Their stranglehold on our lives goes back a long, long way. Anthropologists have discovered burial sites and burial urns that are about 100000 years old. Religious beliefs are as old as Neanderthal Man. May be older.
They were born out of fear, desire and wonder. And in spite of all our material progress, these primordial rituals have remained with us, deeply entrenched in our race memory.

They have been adopted by our religions as a means to reinforce and propagate new belief systems and ideologies. In one crude sense, religions are a new packaging for old rituals. In another, religion plugs in older rituals into its scheme of things and slaps a moral or ethical code around it to make itself more acceptable to people.

So actually, our major rituals pre-date our religions.

And Pongal is as much a Hindu festival as tonsuring is a Christian practice.

Perhaps it is this primordial nature of these rituals and rites that makes them so difficult to shake off, although ever-growing knowledge and fast changing circumstances have rendered them meaningless or at least, redundant. From convinced ritualists we have morphed into confused ritualists, but ritualists we remain. In a sense then, we were pagans first and Hindus later. Let us occasionally spare a thought for that part of our past when we were not tagged Hindus at all. Much of our Hindu tradition even today derives from that unlabelled past.

Between that unlabelled past and today lies a vast ocean of space and time on which waves of peoples from different places, time, races, languages and belief systems incessantly rose and fell, leading to a co-mingling of blood and dna that leaves all of us Indians [Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others] phenomenally global in our biological make-up.

Our national identity as Indians goes back as mere 200 hundred years, our religious identities date back between 1000 and 4000 years depending on what religion we follow, but our identity as human beings date back all of 4 million years.

The Indian population of today might then be surmised to have been put together by many ebbs and flows of people over time and across the huge Eurasian continent.

[See the work of Madhav Gadgil in http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/cesmg/peopling.html

To ask non-Hindus in India to acknowledge their Hindu forefathers is as fair as it is to ask Hindus in India to acknowledge their Bactrian Greek or Huna bloodline. http://gregoryfegel.sulekha.com/blog/post/2011/07/dr-subramanian-swamy-s-controversial-dna-article.htm

John Keay in History of India says it was the Sakas or the later Scythian Greeks who in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD restored Sanskrit to its earlier glory after it lost out to Pali and Prakrit with the rise of Buddhism. Even before the golden period of Sanskrit literature during the times of Chandragupta Vikramaditya.

It is not fair to remember just that part of the past which is politically convenient and expedient for us today. Indeed that exposes us as either hypocritical or colossally ignorant beings.

The Hindu religion, one of the oldest surviving religions in the world, may be about 4000 years old –but 4000 years is a mere bubble in the great space of human history that dates back to 4 million years or earth’s history that dates back to 4.6 billion years.

Needless to say, what is true for Hinduism is true for every other religion and people in the world.

So what did you throw out this Bhogi?

Today we choose to see Pongal as a ‘harvest festival’ because of the newly harvested sugar cane and rice and vegetable that are integral to the celebrations. But it was more than that.

Pongal, I’ve always felt, was a remnant of our pantheistic past. The sugarcane and milk, the earthen pot and the firewood stove – the medium, the container and the content - were all drawn from nature and went to nurture us, beings made of earth stuff.  Pongal speaks of a time when man was tuned in to nature and the earth in rich and meaningful ways.

As Carl Sagan says [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E-_DdX8Ke0] , our ancestors knew the cosmic cycles that rule our lives – the seasons, the motions of the earth and the sun, and the sweep of time-space. 

And Pongal celebrated these. From the pagan celebration of bounty, ripeness, and fertility to the ancestor worshipper’s thankful worshipful offering to souls gone by, to the cosmologist’s recognition of spatial movement and cosmic cycles, Pongal has something for every taste. And truly represents the complexity of the Hindu religion.

A day before Pongal in South India is traditionally celebrated as bhogi – a day when old, broken and wasted things are cast out of our lives by burning. A symbolic understanding that old has to give way for the new, that birth and death go hand in hand, that renewal implies destruction. That an understanding of ‘new’ goes with an understanding of ‘old’. A celebration of life and birth goes with an acceptance of death. That acquiring and getting come after giving up. That new construction builds on the site of destruction. That life at our miniscule individual level only mirrors the cycle at the macro levels – where universes  burst into being and after eons, self-destruct, leaving not a trace. Only to reassemble and appear once again.

I also believe that this ritual act of giving up belongings and possessions that are old and redundant,  is also meant to inculcate a habit and an attitude that will help us forgive others, forgive ourselves, heal hurts, expunge negativity and bad memories, and manage grief and loss.

All rituals are physical acts that are meant to cultivate qualities and attitudes of the mind that make us better, stronger human beings.

The seemingly pagan ritual has deep significance – layers can be read into it.

But as always we manage to reduce a festival to a mere celebration. A mere shell. A clutch of worn out rituals. Bhogi is today a marked by some ritual burning of waste – but with rubber tyres and tubes and plastic being tossed carelessly into the bonfire, Bhogi has become an environmental hazard.  It only shows how far we have travelled from our nature-dependent days, and how the excesses of this deviation can harm a fragile world.

But even this obvious understanding is lost on us. We need a government to legislate on bonfires and artificially-coloured idols.

With the bonfire also out, to us in cities and towns, Bhogi is today marked by a perfunctory cobweb-dusting and changing of curtains. Very few of us take stock of things in our houses and throw away what we do not need.

Perhaps this is because we love piling and accumulating – and maybe have forgotten a good definition of ‘need’. We can no longer discriminate between what we really ‘need’ and what we do not need.  We ‘need’ everything that we have and that we don’t have.  

I sometimes feel we are not ready to celebrate a renewal or a new ‘getting’ if we are not ready for ‘giving up’.  

And if we cannot give up a broken pen, or a patched up footstool, are we ready to forgive hurts and deal with the loss of a dear one?

Maybe that is one of the reasons why incidents of depression, violence, mental sicknesses of different kinds, and aggression have grown in our culture. They are symptoms of an imbalance in ourselves that arise out of an inability to tune in to nature’s frequency. There is so much of a disconnect between the individual and the universe that we no longer are sensitive to its movements and vibrations.

I sometimes think this is not only unnatural, it is also anti-natural. It goes against the principles governing the universe [ the principle of cyclical birth and death, coming into existence and going out of existence] and therefore cannot be good for us.

In cities and towns, we can no longer think of going back to firewood stoves and earthen pots. But need we reduce the significance of Pongal to a colourful kolam made of powdered stone and a mash of rice and jaggery? How can we re-invent the celebration to add meaning to our lives and bring back the joy of community living that we have forgotten along the way? 

Bhogi and Pongal are just examples of a deeper malaise in our community: our lack of will to face the fact that our lives are out of snyc with our religious practices. That we have reduced our religions to a rubbish heap of meaningless rituals. Shorn of its soul or its core symbolic understanding, religion is not only a meaningless shell, but a shell that is hard and sharp and can actually harm and hurt us. 

So what does religion mean to us? Do we need it at all? What part of our beliefs and faith do we need to cast off and what do we need to renew? Can we redefine our ceremonies and celebrations to make them relevant and significant for us today? 

If we don't address these questions soon, it is quite likely that in our lifetime, we will see the core wisdom of Hindu dharma ebbing away from memory. 

Nearly two millennia back, there lived in our sub-continent great kings like Kanishka and Harshavardhana who organized huge religious assemblies where scholars and sages discussed and argued principles and interpretations of religion. There were conscious attempts to organize reflection and thought. Why, then, is this sub-continent not capable of honestly facing itself today, of identifying the weed from the seed, the chaff from the grain and courageously taking steps to restore health and harmony?

The God Need

When I went back to read my last post tonight, these sentences struck me:

From the stories came inexplicable characters who had powers that man did not. Like the creator in the rainbow crow story. So from myth-making we move to religion, which organizes and places our Gods in time and space, gives them attributes we know of, give them powers over us that we fear, and craves their grace, which we recognise as necessary for our existence.

I realized that in describing man’s progress from myth-making to religion I had already distanced myself from the faith enough to study it. Only a bystander or an observer can study something; a participant would be too close, too much ‘in’ it to study it. It is an aching thought but honesty requires that I face it: though not a non-believer, I am also not a devotee, or even a serious practitioner of the faith. To say that first man made stories, and from stories to religion was just a leap – is saying that man made god.

 In other words, I was adopting the mind and words of historians [who study the progress of man over time] and scientists [who make the progress happen] and speaking like one who was gliding further and further into the ocean and watching the shores recede.

So what makes the shores seem remote today?

For one, as I said in my last posting, our lives and identities have become many-stranded.

For another, the triggers that led to the founding of religions may just have gone dormant. Death, natural disasters, darkness, fear of wild animals, pain, disease, fear of the unknown and wonder at the mysterious ways of the world – these must have been early man’s responses to his environment and these must have led to religion.

Today both these feelings – fear and wonder – have receded from our lives. Longer life expectancy has pushed death to a remote future.  The progress of health sciences, medicine and the promise of anti-ageing and death-defying therapies and technologies have pushed even that remote possibility to some numbed part of our brains. Our active seeking of material progress has more immediate appeal to us than the looming of death in some distant future. With fear receding, the need for God has receded.

Nature too is no longer a presence in our lives. The skyline is cluttered with highrises and the darkness of night shattered by the glare of lighting. We shut the sun and wind out with glass frontages and  we control temperatures. Our shoe-clad feet rarely leave naked footprints in pliant mud or grainy sand. We are no longer ‘connected’ to the earth as our ancestors were.

Nor indeed do natural disasters threaten our lives quite so much as they earlier did. We predict earthquakes and warn against tsunamis and prepare for storms and hurricanes. Of course, in spite of all these, the odd disaster still does leave us devastated, but they only have us seeking better ways of prediction, preparation and prevention. No more do we go down on our knees in supplication facing the skies.

 Let’s face it: the God need has receded. There's evidence for it - as I have been observing at every festival these last few years.