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. 

Early Man, Early Beliefs

I don’t know what made me do an internet search on Talmud the first thing this morning and when I traced an authentic translation on http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t01/t0104.htmI, one of the first sentences that danced before my eyes was this:  Kal Hat'haloth Kashoth [‘All beginnings are difficult’]. It was so overwhelmingly, bizarrely appropriate to what I was setting out to do that I felt moved, humbled and encouraged.

So, like Maria in The Sound of Music let me too attempt to start at the very beginning [Let’s start at the very beginning/A very good place to start/ When we read, we begin with a,b,c/When we sing, we begin with do,re,mi...]

A book on the history of science that I read about a decade back drew a word scene that has remained with me. It said imagine Early Man at night standing in a clearing with nothing stretching in front of him but acres and acres of land and nothing above him but the overarching skies. What do you think must have run in his mind? Great scene, great question. Scientist Carl Sagan mentions this somewhere in Cosmos too.

Early Man must have been as overwhelmed by the scene as I was just ten minutes back when the wisdom of one of mankind’s oldest books warmly reassured me that ‘all beginnings are difficult’.  Even when roaming in the forests, Early Man who sought safety from wild animals on tree tops [orang-utans even now build their nests on trees] at night might have looked up to be overawed by the night sky. The darkness of night has remained to this day [notwithstanding the zillion-watt artificial lighting] a mildly frightening, uncomfortable presence. The lack of natural light and sunny warmth leaves us cold and threatened to this day. And the seed for that must have been sown when Early Man scanned the  night sky anxiously for signs of the coming of dawn.

 

As time passed, Man settled, learning to bring some energies under harness – fire, light – and learning to cope with others – protecting himself from the weather with clothes and shelter. This was the beginning of human thought, when man learnt to take control of his life.

About 10000 years back, early thinking man must have slowly learnt to discriminate between what he could control and what he could not. Discrimination must have led him to wonder at a power over which he had no control. Remember, he himself had tasted some power by then and knew how heady it was!

So early thinking settled man made up stories to explain the elements of nature and the powers that he had no control over. In Sophie’s World, Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder says that man’s first reaction to his world was through myth-making.

He first spun stories to answer questions like ‘What are those things up there in the sky? What do they mean to me? What do they do to me? What is rain and snow? What makes the sun shine and the wind blow?’ From what to why and how must have been a short leap, and then must have come the connection of everything to  ‘me’.

Hundreds of creation myths abound in the world and while some seem pretty crude today, there are those that even today surprise us by their sophistication. The American Indian Rainbow Crow story  is one of my favourites: http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/09/rainbow_crow.html [The Creator here has just to ‘think’ and what He thinks comes into existence – now that myth, to me, is verging on philosophy]. Look up also some of the Dreamtime Stores of the Australian indigenous peoples.

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 think of all the gods of Greek mythology, of Roman, Egyptian and Nordic mythology – these being the mythology I love – and I think of all the Vedic gods [Agni, Surya, Indra, Vayu, Varuna – except surya, not one is propitiated today].

But they died – these early gods died when more sophisticated religious systems came into being. The more sophisticated systems that replaced them were the two Abrahamic religions in the west– Jewism and Christianity [and later Islam]. The only religion that has a continuous history in one form or the other for the last 4000 years is ours, Hinduism. [And of course, Jewism, about which I know nothing – so I will refrain from talking about it.]

So what made these other religions more sophisticated than the early ones? And was it the same thing that gave Hindusim the robustness and vitality that has led to its survival in one way or the other till today?

My guess is these new religions replaced those older ones because they introduced an undercurrent of moral philosophy. These new religions codified certain standards of ethical conduct for communal living, defined certain desirable human qualities and values, and refined notions of the Unknown and the Powerful. In effect, we had moved on from each one seeking the grace of the unknown to promote us and ours, to a higher level of understanding which recognised that the individual needs to feel, think and work not only for his gain but also for the society to which he belonged.

Every passing century has brought refinement in our thinking, and with it, our interpretation of philosophy, religion and the scriptures have also changed. Priorities have changed and focus areas have shifted.  We no longer think of breaking the Sabbath as a sin inviting punishment. Love, forgiveness, compassion and responsibility have become by-words. We Hindus no longer consider natal charts to determine auspicious time and days for doing things or undertaking travel [well, not always anyway!]. Our wedding rites and funeral rites and naming ceremonies have shrunk to adapt to our lifestyles.

Religion no longer dominates communal or social life as it used to in the ancient times. It runs parallel to our professional lives, our family lives, our social lives and our political lives. Our identities have become many-stranded and religion is today just one of the strands and not necessarily the most important one.

We have to recognise these subtle, slow, near imperceptible changes in our identities and beliefs over time because science is now challenging other notions and beliefs deeply ingrained in us by our religions. 

Introducing Kurukshetra

Reading, watching, thinking, observing – the internal processes of the brain are the most exhilarating and addictive of habits to those who open their eyes to their pleasures. I have been fortunate in this respect – being in the company of knowledgeable and enlightened people, and having access to books and other media, I have found myself learning every day. But I am also realising that although learning is exciting and intoxicating, and knowledge heady, it comes with strings attached. Every byte of new knowledge questions, modifies and sometimes even challenges existing knowledge. While some new knowledge folds in smoothly into the brain, others by definition have to dislodge an existing byte in order to settle in. That’s where all the problems start. When existing information is deeply creased in the brain, when it is the product of the conditioning, when it seems vital to your very life breath – they don’t give up without a royal battle.

And it is quite a battle – the battle between faith and reason, religion and science, culture and nature. It questions your notions of time, space and existence, your identity, and indeed your very self. How can one dispute or contend with the evidential knowledge that science presents us with? How does one deal with this ever-growing scientific evidence when it directly clashes with long-held beliefs based on faith? And when I say long-held, I don't mean held as long as one's years of existence. I mean really long-held - held as long as your community has held it , I mean race-memory, after all aren't those the beliefs that are most difficult to give up, because their roots are not just in the folds of the brain but in the very cells of the material of our being?

The battle started long ago, ostensibly with Galileo, who couldn't take the pressure put on him by the Church for declaring that the earth went around the sun. But so do we every day – at least those of us who are ready to face science. But here there is no church to harass or threaten us – here the church is within and it is in our minds that the Kurukshetra wages.

There are those of us who have given up their beliefs and gone on. Good for them. There are those of us who are so rooted in their beliefs that nothing can shake them. The battle hasn’t begun for them. They can rest in peace for some more time. And then there are some of us – like me – in whom the battlefield is ready. The armies face each other, the conch has blown, and the weapons drawn, the soldiers are ready, fierce and cruel. And already the race memory of what such hurt can do is a frightening thought.

And as I face myself, pore over history books and scriptural translations and wade through science journals and movies in an effort to be critical and objective, to reconcile the two, or throw out the one, and renew myself in the light of my new findings, I invite all my readers to join me in my battle by helping me re-define my identity and also by facing their own ready battlefields. It was my husband who pointed out to me that this was a battle raging within, and called upon me to blog on the ‘eternal battle’. Hence the name Kurukshetra.

I again request my readers to participate in this blog with serious comments, thoughts and perspectives that can help all of us define for ourselves what we want ourselves to be and stand for. For those of us who are totally confident that they know what they stand for, I often think the conviction is because we have not recognised that there are two armies within, all armed to the teeth, in battle readiness waiting to launch the offensive, or that we are so much a part of one side that we do not see the other side at all – but it is there, it is there alright, within all of us, manifesting every now and then in feelings, thoughts, words and deeds that contradict our usual ways of being and doing – contradictions that can frustrate and confuse our family and friends even if they are not yet obvious to us.

So let us begin this apocalyptic year by launching this battle to clarify our understanding, trim vestigial baggage and determine our identities. Let’s blow the conch and fire the first salvo, in good faith and conviction that truth alone will triumph.