"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.
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.
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.
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.
Wanted to share this with you: "'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man's thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship."
ReplyDeleteThe last few lines especially resonated with your quest to understand the burden of rituals and the weight of traditions.