The Great Illusion

‘The pastoral, patriarchal invaders had become by the early first millennium, dark, glittering princes, adept at diplomacy and intrigue, sitting cross-legged on their divans:

"All decked in fragrant garlands

With bright gems in their ears.”

John Bowle, ‘Man through the Ages.’

If a word, a name is repeated often enough, it acquires the charge of electricity, what you may call sacredness; it becomes a mantra. A corpse is carried past in the street, and the men accompanying it cry out the refrain, ‘Ram ka naam satya hai….;’ every second person in India may be named with some version of the name Rama: Ram, Ramu, Rambharose, Ramachandra, Raman, Sundaraman, Sitaram; women are lovingly named Rampyari or Ramdulari … there was a boy who lived in the same building as my family, and every evening his mother or sister would call him home in loud tones, ‘Ram, Ram..’ then we have the searing “Hai Ram” that Gandhi uttered at the moment of being shot, which every child in India hears about, at some time or the other.

I would try repeating the word in the same spirit as my father did every morning, close my eyes and say ramaramaramaramaramarama, in front of the lighted lamp in the puja room, or gaze at the picture my mother lovingly decorated with kumkum and a small garland of flowers, but I would soon be overcome by self-consciousness or just distracted by the expressions on the faces of the secondary characters in the picture. Thyagaraja the musician-composer was depicted singing his heroes into existence. Hanuman and Lakshmana were there as well and they seemed the more interesting, more accessible; I found Sita and Rama in their attitudes of benediction bland and irritating though I did not articulate it to myself then. I could not understand what made them so worthy of worship, of that unresisting giving away of oneself. What really makes a virtuous man or woman and why do we feel this strange urge to set someone up as a god or goddess? However often I read the Ramayana, I ended up dissatisfied. Too much was left unexplained, there were too many silences in the story. Almost each of those ‘minor’ characters could have told the Ramayana from his or her point of view and then we would have had this whole Ayodhya epic shaken up, whirled around like those tiny glass pieces in a kaleidoscope.

These primitive races at one time spread all over India. But they had to yield to the superior forces of the Dravidians, who gradually occupied some of their lands. The same process was repeated when large tracts of the country were conquered at a later time by the Aryans….

R.C. Majumdar, An Advanced History of India.

When I think of that picture now, I realise, there were too many people left out of that final victorious portrait. There is a whole army of silent, faceless people who brought Rama and Sita to that final transcendant moment. If we are looking at beginnings, how far back should we go? To the beginnings of the Ikshavaku dynasty? To the incident where Dasaratha was cursed by the parents of the young hunter he had killed in the forest? Perhaps take a look at the special ‘kheer’ which brought instant fertility to the three queens, after years of childlessness?

Kausalya the oldest had a daughter according to one account, but of course a daughter could not rule; so who fathered Rama and Bharatha and Lakshmana and Shatrughna? It is like the mystery of the Pandavas’ births in the Mahabharata, by magic mantra, they would have us believe. And Sita we are told, was found in a furrow as a baby, and adopted by Janaka of Mithila. Whose child was she? Why would a king adopt a stray child left in an open field? There is even one theory that she was Ravana of Lanka’s child, sent away because it was foretold that she would cause his death.

Whatever maybe said to the contrary, Hindu women are naturally chaste….I would even go so far as to say that Hindu women are more virtuous than the women of many other more civilized countries.

.Abbe J. A. Dubois. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies.

One account mentions that Rama used to tease Manthara as a young and mischievous boy, prod the hump on her back, perhaps even throw stones, thus earning her malice…. That does not fit in with the image of the righteous even self-righteous prince fixated on dharma, always doing the right thing by some strange ancestral code of behaviour…How was it possible for a crown prince to be exiled because of the mischievous intrigue of Manthara a servant woman? Why did riots not break out, considering how much the people loved Rama? Where was the ‘dhobi’ or his equivalent, whose acid remark later in the story exiled a queen? Were Lakshmana and his wife estranged that he did not bother to consult her about his long exile? What if the story were told from the viewpoint of Soorpanakha or Mandodari? Who would the heroes and heroines be? What happened to Manthara after Rama was banished?

It is nothing short of a miracle that Hindu society and Hindu Dharma have survived so long in spite of repeated aggressions. The secret of our continued existence lies in the fact that our culture has the requisite vitality to influence and absorb outside elements.

Address to the RSS at Nagpur ,Oct.9th2000 by V.Shankar, Private Secretary to Sardar Patel.

How we look at ourselves, our place in the world, has much to do with how we remember our past. If we as a nation, cannot rid ourselves of historic resentments, we shall be doomed to an unnatural stasis. There are so many versions and interpretations of history, which shall we make our own ? How should history be taught to make it truly meaningful? Most young people find the rote-learning of dates and dynasties distasteful and irrelevant to their lives. But if the subaltern point of view were stressed, the tides of human experience, the enormous achievements of science and philosophy, of the enormous struggle of humanity as a whole rather than as partisan groups, would there be a radical change in perception?

Should not children be taught to look at the past through the personal histories of their parents, then grandparents, the social and cultural histories of their own times, how they come to eat the food they do, who were the outsiders in their families, what did they bring to the general culture pool, was there one particularly beautiful woman around whom legends and scandals were woven, were there cooks, poets, warriors, traders, pirates, priests in family lore? How far back do the stories go? Are there photographs, diaries, old letters, recipes, land deeds that may throw light on the lives that were lived? What kind of clothes did their immediate ancestors wear, were their grandmothers and great-grandmothers literate, did they sing or paint, what languages did they speak, what did their homes and kitchens and toilets look like?

“…it is my ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it…” Sir William Jones. (letter to Lord Althorp, 1787)

Civilisation is such a loaded word… Every society believes itself in an advanced state of social development; ‘to civilise’ says the dictionary, ‘is to bring out of barbarism, to enlighten, refine…’ I cannot help thinking, at this point, of Mr. James Baker, one-time Secretary of State, in another Bush administration. At an important press conference in Paris, he spoke in an infuriatingly languid drawl, “We of the civilized world…” he began, with such an assumption of superior essence. Much as Mr. Silvio Berlusconi was reported to have aimed some verbal arrows at Islam, recently, before he was forced to make a politically correct apology. “Ours is better than yours.”

Civilisation/Barbarism. The usual polarities. West/East. Nature/Nurture. Man/Woman.

Although one might suppose that Christianity was foreign to India, in fact it is of greater antiquity than in any other place other than Palestine. It is sometimes believed that Christ himself assigned the teaching of the Gospels to the Apostle Thomas, who according to tradition, reached India in 52 A.D., eventually settling in Malabar, where he had many converts and founded churches before expanding his missionary activities as far as China. He is thought to have been martyred by Brahmins at Mylapore near Madras when he returned to India in 72 A.D.

INDIA ART AND CULTURE: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.

I believe it was C.L.R. James who said that there was no idea that was not thought of first in India. We have had a long time to do it in. Five thousand years, more or less to develop the arts and sciences of civilization. Which is why it is such a pity that we have become so impoverished of ideas in the last fifty years. We like to think of ourselves as a vibrant young democracy as well as an ancient civilization with wisdom enough for the whole world to learn from. But how does one even begin to separate the different strands of human ideas and knowledge that have so inextricably merged in our consciousness? If Herodotus wrote about the teeming plains of India, and the practice of sati so many millennia ago, the movement of peoples both within and from without must have been common; trade and intermarriage between communities would have carried families, perhaps whole communities from one continent to another.

One of Chandragupta Maurya’s wives was a Greek woman, daughter of Seleukos Nikator who was one of Alexander’s satraps; marriage carries a merging of custom and ritual however disparate….would her attendants have also married Hindus? Did they have any children? Which gods did she worship? After Chandragupta relinquished his throne and became a Jain monk, what happened to all his wives?

His grandson Ashoka whose great moment of revelation has so imposed itself on the Indian psyche, adopted Buddhist tenets of dharma and righteous living for all his peoples from Kashmir to Mysore. His son and daughter, Mahendra and Sanghamitra would have been accompanied by other nuns and monks who would have stayed back in the new countries where the proseletysation took place. Ashoka also sent Buddhist missionaries to West Asia, northern Africa and south-eastern Europe; culture and civilization usually follow trade and commerce.

In his last exhortation to his disciples, just on the eve of his death, the Buddha said, “Decay is inherent in all component things. Work out your salvation with diligence.”

More than a thousand years ago, the great wonders of the world, Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were conceived and built perhaps by the Hindu-ised Khmers who were more or less animist before the advent of prosperous Hindu traders to Suvarnabhoomi; it is likely that these traders were followed by dispossessed Kshatriya princes seeking their fortunes. Again intermarriage with the local peoples would have brought a merging, an intertwining of custom and ritual. Siva and Vishnu were worshipped together with the Buddhist tradition. Trade and commerce, religion and the colonizing of the Indo-China, the Malay peninsula, Cambodia, Annam as well as the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo resulted in the sites of many great kingdoms from the second to the fifth centuries A.D. Fusion between races in Champa and Kambhoja resulted in the fusion of the two races and the names of the kings associated with the building of those magnificent temples and cities at Angkor were Suryavarman, Vishnuvarman, Jayavarma.

About the sixth century B.C. to the 4th century A.D., perhaps around the same time that the Ramayana was being written, a blind poet thousands of miles away was singing of another abducted princess over whom a great war was fought and a golden city burnt down. Mere coincidence perhaps?

The Bamiyan Buddhas bore clear traces of the merging of Indo-Greek influences. Arab sailors from the seventh century onwards, carried not just our pearls and muslin and spices to Greece and Rome but our mathematics and medicine and philosophy. Greek and Roman astronomy were known in India. Where does civilization begin, where does it end?

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.

Edward Said. Orientalism---Western Conception of the Orient.

All roads led to Ayodhya at the time. Beginning from a small settlement on the banks of the Sarayu, it had grown to become the resplendant centre of an expansionist empire. Then as it is now, it was the political game-playing that rewrote history or myth or as it is in this country, the skilful interweaving of the two. The Brahmins were in complete control, respected for their learning and their knowledge of the world, and the ways of men. The king generally did more or less what he was advised. Religion, politics and sex dominated people’s lives, as they do even now. Marriage allied the king with other ambitious rulers, and political diplomacy kept the strong at bay.

Vast sums of money were spent in keeping the army happy, trade with distant countries brought prosperity and spies brought information. The king, it was said, had only his people’s interests at heart. But how do you keep a vast populace happy? Tree-lined streets, beautiful temples and palaces, religious rituals and festivals that coincided with the seasons, a generous food distribution system, a tax system that was not a scourge, a government that was seemingly benign.



People need to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. Outside the city-state, life was harsh and precarious. Hostile cannibal chieftains inhabited the forests, and harassed the ashram-dwellers. Far away to the South, a magnificent Rakshasa king grew more powerful. Ayodhya was like a golden bubble that could burst at any time.

The way Indian women live is the way the majority of women in the world spend their lives…It is Americans who are peculiar. Rather than going to the periphery, I had come to the centre.

Elizabeth Bumillar: May You Be The Mother Of A Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women Of India.

Dasharatha was ageing, and he had no sons. The three queens maintained a precarious balance of civility on the surface but deep-rooted jealousies had entwined themselves around all their lives. Kausalya was almost as old as the king; when she married him, she became his playmate and friend; they shared a lot of memories. Sumitra was the princess of another nearby kingdom, younger by several years, good-humoured, and not a rival in any real sense. But when Dasharatha brought Kaikeyi as his prize after a long campaign in the North-West, the older two queens knew they had lost him. It was possible she came from Bactria. She was beautiful, exotic, temperamental, and most importantly, much younger than her husband. She did not speak the same language and did not bother to learn the rules they lived by. The other women functioned by the rigid Kshatriya codes; but the king was besotted, her sexual slave. Kausalya had the status of the Eldest Queen, she even had a daughter by Dasharatha, she was the one chosen to decapitate the horse that was the centre of the Ashvamedha yagna, that great royal ceremony, which established the king as the supreme ruler. But under the resplendent exterior, it was all hollow…..

The Empire is itself the strangest of all political anomalies…that we should govern a territory ten thousand miles from us, a territory larger and more populous than France, Spain, Italy and Germany put together… a territory inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, morals, religion; these are prodigies to which the world has seen nothing similar. Reason is confounded.

Macaulay’s ‘Minute.’ 1835.

Ayodhya is still a factor in people’s calculations; Rama or someone’s idea of Rama still imposes itself in our consciousness; whether we like it or not; “too much blood blots out the sun/ too much history shrouds this earth…/” The ruins of temples and mosques litter the landscape of this huge country in all their mocking ambivalence.

Three beautiful domes that were shaped like women’s breasts taunt us by their absence. Do we have still more battles to fight, still more nightmares to endure? Must we mangle ourselves trying to cancel what is past and gone? Have all those human tides that have come and gone left us too exhausted to fit into this modern world where one’s genetic blueprint bears the almost infinite plaiting and interweaving of history?

Who would we be if could name ourselves? Dravidian, Aryan, Persian, Greek, Saka, Kushan, Scythian, Bactrian, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Portguese, Dutch, French, British? How pure is our bloodline? How do we even begin to name the elusive, slippery enigma we term the self?

Datta. Dayadhvam.Damyata.

Shantih Shantih Shantih

T.S. Eliot ‘The Wasteland.’