‘The old stories are so complex and coded that often, there’s a huge gap between our lived reality of faith and what a commentator says from outside about our intense inner world. It does not touch us,’ said the child’s father. ‘I read many critical things, too, but they seem like shadows and they lead me nowhere. In fact, I come back with my allegiance to the gods renewed.’
‘Well, that’s what most of us seem to have done down the centuries in the face of hostility, we’ve only grown even more attached to the gods. It’s a staunch and stubborn love. I think it’s worth having. The Jews have a similar love. The Old Testament says that when the Red Sea parted to let the slave Jews escape the Pharaoh of Egypt, one young woman actually took her lyre with her. She was so sure god would take her safely across. What does that say about having total faith? It’s deeply moving.
‘Think of how Vasudeva set his trembling feet with total faith in the roaring waters of the Yamuna when she parted during that torrential downpour to let him cross with his precious burden. Our abiding love is what we should keep in mind as the larger picture or deeper reality. People, with or without scholarship, have always said things. But our religion itself exists because somebody or the other within it kept asking questions,’ said the guru.
‘Our religion is unique in several ways. One such point is that we do not have just one holy book. We have a library. Two, doubts and questions were allowed right from the earliest text, the Rig Veda. The Upanishads are full of people who asked questions—Nachiketas, Janaka, Gargi, Bhrigu—and they all got answers. Yajnavalkya’s answer to Janaka and Gargi are absolutely epic. We find them in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.’
‘Valmiki asked Narada about a perfect man and we got the Srimad Ramayanam. Draupadi asked questions about the law in the Kaurava court that ring in our ears even today. Arjuna asked Krishna questions and we got the Bhagavad Gita. Dhritarashtra asked Sanjay what was going on in Kurukshetra and we got the story of the battle. He also asked questions of Vidura and got the Sanat Sujatiyam. The yaksha by the pond asked Yudhishtira questions and we got the famous Yaksha Prashna. Yudhishtira asked Bhishma on his bed of arrows about God and got the Vishnu Sahasra Namam. He asked questions about good governance, too, and was duly answered. Vyasa asked Narada why he felt depressed after composing the Mahabharata and because of Narada’s reply that Vyasa had not written much about Krishna in the Mahabharata, Vyasa set to work again and composed the Srimad Bhagavatam.’
‘Vyasa taught it only to his son Shuka. But when King Parikshit, who had but a week to live, asked Shuka Brahmam for the story, we got the Srimad Bhagavatam, too. The Bhagavatam is called “the ripe fruit of the Vedas made available by Shuka for all to relish its nectar”:
nigama-kalpa-taror galitaṁ phalaṁ
śuka-mukhād amṛta-drava-saṁyutam
pibata bhāgavataṁ rasam ālayaṁ
muhur aho rasikā bhuvi bhavukāḥ’
‘Can you imagine not knowing about Dhruva, Prahlad and Gajendra? Can you imagine not knowing about Rama and Krishna? Speaking for myself, life would be a howling wilderness for me without them. So I think our holiest and truest symbol, more than even the swastika or Om, is the prashneeyam—the question mark.’
‘Questions come from intentions, don’t they?’ said the grandfather.
‘I take your point. The intention matters. You can see it in the tone of the writing and in the way the content is presented. Our religion certainly teaches us not to flinch from the truth. That gives us an open door to reform. However, a critique of the gods, though scholarly or well-written, does not automatically become “truth”. So there’s that side as well to being “open minded”,’ said the guru.
‘A good case in point is the nineteenth-century epic poem Meghnad Badh Kavya by Michael Madhusudan Dutt. It has nine cantos. My Bengali friends assure me that it’s a brilliant poem. But in it, Dutt valorizes Ravana’s son Meghnath, also known as Indrajit, and negatively portrays Rama and Lakshmana.’
‘Why did Dutt do that? The fact is that our religion was not doing well in the nineteenth century. Many terrible social practices had taken root over time and ghastly superstitions harmed the people. We mustn’t defend the indefensible but look to reform. The horror is still not entirely over, alas. It continues to haunt our society despite the sincere efforts of so many to change for the better. But change it will. It’s an irreversible process.’
‘Dutt was clearly a learned, sensitive person. He had an English education in Calcutta and rebelled against stagnant old ways. But he did not take to fighting. This was done by so many bold, sincere Hindu reformers across society.’
‘Not just the great and famous reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rabindranath Tagore but thousands of ordinary, unknown, unsung Hindus in family after family who made brave personal choices to set an example, to fight their own orthodoxy, to stand up courageously against the wrath of their own elders and the paralysing fear of “what will people say” and “who will marry your sisters”. They did that from within society, often at great personal cost.’
‘If it were not for all those people before us who valiantly tried to change our society with true Shiva tattva in their heart, we would not be sitting together so comfortably today or have whatever freedoms we now have. So it would be churlish and ungrateful to kick the ladder we climbed.’
‘But this was not a choice that Dutt made. Instead, he took what may look like a shortcut or an escape route to us, though to him it may have seemed the only available path to personal modernity those days. He became a Christian, left Calcutta to move to Madras, married an Indo-Briton out there and wrote furiously.’
‘In his new identity, he spurned Rama as a foundational figure of our faith although it was not the God’s fault but man’s that our society had grown unbearable in the way it treated its own people. So yes, the author’s intention, or “where he’s coming from” is a factor. But one cannot dislike Dutt for it given that our ways had become so cruel and stifling.’
‘Dutt wrote reams in English and wanted to live in England. He desperately wanted to be English. He sent poem after poem in English to literary magazines in England but they refused to publish them and he had to publish his own work in Madras. Finally, it was in his mother tongue, Bengali, and by writing about the Ramayana, that he became famous. Interesting, is it not? Epic grace obviously touched him.’
‘The Rama we look up to is found in the mool or root epic, Srimad Ramayanam by Valmiki. In fact, even the scope for later poets to portray Meghnath or Ravana according to their creative fancy is found right there in the Srimad Ramayanam itself, for it is so full of texture and shades. It’s not a flat, “goody-goody” story at all. That is Valmiki’s genius. That is the Rama whom we cannot bear to be parted from, of whom Tulsidas said in the sixteenth century, “Janani, main na jiyoon bin Ram (Mother, I cannot live without Ram)”. Why do you think Rama has outlasted all critics in the hearts of millions of ordinary people although he’s had so much criticism since the nineteenth century? That’s because at the end of the debate, if debate we must, we have the emotional right to Rama just as we have the right to Shiva and Shakti. And we keep that right despite everything that’s gone on—or goes on now.’
‘It’s not an easy place for us,’ said the grandfather grimly as the child came in after changing out of her school clothes and drinking a glass of milk. Her mother brought in a tray with small bowls of cut fruit and the child’s father got up to take the tray from her.
After tea, biscuits and fruit, the family settled down to hear the day’s story.
‘What will you tell us about Shiva today, Teacher?’ said the child, innocently unaware of the darkness that always marched with light.
4
Gajanan
‘Can you guess who our cuddliest god is?’ said the guru to the child.
‘Baby Krishna,’ said the child at once.
‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed the grandfather as everybody laughed in a
ppreciation.
The guru smiled broadly. ‘You’re right,’ he told the child, and to the grown-ups, he said, ‘sometimes we have to learn from our children, like Shiva learnt an important thing from his younger son, Kumar.’
‘Let me put it differently,’ he smiled at the child. ‘Who is Shiva’s eldest son?’
‘Ganapati,’ said the child promptly.
‘Can you describe him?’
The child looked at her mother, who nodded.
The child put her hands together in namaste and recited:
‘Mushika vahana modaka hasta
Chamara karna vilambita sutra
Vamana rupa Maheshvara putra
Vighna Vinayaka pada Namaste’
‘Very good,’ murmured the guru. ‘Do you know the meaning as well?’
‘Would you like to show it in dance with your hands while I recite it for you?’ said the mother gently, to encourage the child to express herself.
The child’s eyes lit up even as she nodded a little shyly, and she stood on the carpet to demonstrate the prayer through the mudras she had recently learnt in dance class.
They applauded when she finished with a namaste.
‘Now who will translate it into words?’ said the guru.
‘Let me try,’ said the child’s father and shut his eyes for a moment to invoke Ganapati’s blessings, before he said:
‘Whose vehicle is the mouse and who holds a sweet in his hand,
Whose large ears are like fans and who wears a long sacred thread,
Who is compact in stature and is the son of Maheswara, Lord Shiva
I bow at the feet of that “Vighna Vinayaka”, the Remover of the Obstacles for us, his devotees.’
‘A good attempt and absolutely correct,’ said the guru. ‘That’s not an easy thing to do at all because Indian poetry, especially from Sanskrit, is very difficult to translate satisfactorily into English. It’s almost impossible to get the rhythm even though you get close to the meaning. But I see that you are all like Ganapati in wanting to know the meaning of things. Your daughter has got this good habit of questioning and finding out from you all.’
‘We’ve taught her to do what our parents did for us,’ smiled the mother. ‘For instance, each time I came across a new word, my father trained me to look it up at once in the Shabda Kosh or the Dictionary. Today we just ask “Googleshvar”, it’s all become so easy with technology!’
‘Does Ganapati also like to learn things?’ asked the child.
‘Oh, yes! He’s very particular about understanding something properly. That’s why we like to see him with an elephant head since we consider the elephant the noblest and wisest of beasts,’ said the guru.
‘I heard a story in school that his father cut his real head off and replaced it with an elephant’s head,’ said the child questioningly.
‘The old myths are strange and strong, like I said when I told you the tale of Kalakuta. They are from so long ago that there are several versions of them. It’s as though people down thousands of years couldn’t resist retelling them, sometimes with extra spice. One version goes that Shiva asked for proof of his son’s love and Ganapati instantly offered his own head, which was then replaced with an elephant’s head. Sacrifice is a big theme in old religious stories, you know, like how Yahweh, the tribal god of the Jews, asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Izak as a proof of love.’
‘Then, for instance, there’s the story that Ganapati broke off a tusk to take dictation; to use it as a stylus on palm leaves to write down the story of the Mahabharata as Vyasa composed it and said it aloud. But another, even more powerful story goes that Ganapati just let his tusk be broken by the angry sage Parshurama, out of respect for his father, since Parshurama had thrown an axe at him that belonged to Shiva. Imagine that level of respect,’ said the guru.
‘I don’t know that story at all, do tell us,’ entreated the mother.
‘I certainly shall. But before that, I would like to clear the ground in general about having different versions to a story. Since Rama was an ardent devotee of Shiva, who was his aradhya or beloved personal deity, let’s take the Ramayana. It is said to have over three hundred and twenty five versions in India alone. There are more versions all over Asia. The Ramayana is “the Epic of Asia” in ways not fully counted yet. There’s even a version in Mongolia in the far north and in Japan in the farthest east.’
‘I, as a believer, like the root Ramayana best, which is Valmiki’s. Also, I stay with Valmiki’s first six books, which end with the hero’s homecoming, coronation, and the phala shruti or list of listener’s benefits. So the Ramayana ends for me with its sixth book, the Yuddha Kandam,’ said the guru.
‘What makes you do that, Teacher?’ said the grandfather, startled.
‘I choose to stick with the root story because I don’t want to be confused, or confuse others. There’s a seventh book to Valmiki’s Ramayana, the Uttara Kandam, which has dubious twists like the killing of a non-kshatriya, Shambuka, and Rama sending pregnant Sita away to the forest, their twin sons, and their terrible last parting. It doesn’t fit Rama’s character as built up in the first six chapters that end with the phala shruti, which always comes at the end. So the seventh chapter seems tacked on later. It does not seem in keeping with Valmiki in some scholarly opinion, which suits me.’
‘Valmiki began the Ramayana by asking Sage Narada, “Kon asmin sampratam loke gunavan? (Which man, in this present world, is the man with the ideal qualities?)” He then lists sixteen ideal qualities, which include dharmagnyascha—of righteous conduct. It was a contemporary account, an itihasa, meaning “as it happened”. Sending Sita away like that simply does not fit. So I find it impossible to accept the Uttara Kandam, although it’s so well-known.’
‘But then, Valmiki didn’t have Ahalya turn to stone either. Her husband Rishi Gautama merely curses her to become invisible and immovable at home in their ashram until liberated by Rama. He says, “You will remain here unseen, lying on the ashes, with the air as your food. One day, Rama, the son of Dasaratha, will enter this ashram. His presence will make our home blessed again and restore you”.’
‘Rama never put his foot on her. Can you imagine him doing that to a woman? As he went by, it was the dust from the paduka on his feet that flew up and landed on Ahalya where she lay unseen, which brought her back. After setting Ahalya free, when Rama, Lakshmana and Vishvamitra arrive in Mithila, Vishvamitra tells Sita’s father of their adventures. Janaka’s high priest, Sadananda the Rajguru, sheds tears of joy to hear this account for he is Ahalya’s son and overcome with emotion that his mother is back and his parents are together again. So it wasn’t Valmiki at all, but Kalidasa who turned Ahalya into stone in his Raghuvamsha—and others after him did so, too. Valmiki didn’t have a “Lakshman rekha” either. Did you know that it was Tulsidas’s invention?’
‘Incredible!’ said the father, ‘These notions have taken such deep root in the public mind.’
‘Well, I, for one, curl my lip at the “Lakshman rekha” as a literal device that’s medievally prudish and I feel sure that Valmiki would curl his lip, too,’ said the guru, making a rueful face.
‘In the root Ramayana, Ravana drags Sita away by her hair and holds her in his arms. But Tulsi, gallant soul, obviously couldn’t handle the thought in the sixteenth century of Ravana laying hands on Sita and neither could others elsewhere, so they respectfully or prudishly changed it. Therefore, it’s about them, not the epic. Much as I honour and appreciate Tulsi’s concern, it’s another reason why I choose to clinically stick to the original Valmiki.’
‘It’s the Ramayana “as it is” without the little zari curtains and pyjamas,’ smiled the grandmother.
‘Exactly!’ said the guru. ‘But Tulsi had great clarity on the larger picture. He rescued religion with his “people’s Ramayana”, the Ramcharitmanas, composed in Avadhi, the everyday dialect of his region. It simplified matters for the common man. Tulsidas, as noted by Ramayana scholars, observ
ed that the public was prone to be easily impressed and misled by all kinds of fantastical ascetics and their doctrines.’
‘Tulsi disapproved of yogis who grew long nails, bound their hair in dreadlocks, wore strange, frightening ornaments and, so to speak, dressed for the fairground. He said in another work, the Vinay Patrika, that “Bahumat muni bahu panth puranani, jahan-tahan jhagaro”, meaning that seers profess many opinions, there are many old stories about many paths to salvation, and there are quarrels all over the place.’
‘He said that real religion was much less complicated, that it was a direct connection between a soul and God, whom he was personally taught by his guru to see as Rama.’
‘Therefore, Tulsidas’s repeated spiritual advisory for people living out their lives in this particular age, which we called Kalyug, was brief and straightforward: “Kalyug jog na jagya na gnana / Ek aadhar Ram gun gaana (In Kalyug, neither austerity, nor sacrifice nor deep knowledge is required / Singing in praise of Ram is the only path to salvation)”.’
‘The public of the day could not resist the triple impact of the simplicity of Tulsi’s case, the heartbreaking appeal of Valmiki’s story that Tulsi retold with his own twists like the “Lakshman rekha” incident, and Tulsi’s poetry, which seemed simple but was in fact profoundly musical and meaningful. So the history of religion in North India changed forever with the Ramcharitmanas.’
‘Awesome,’ said the father wonderingly while the fascinated elders nodded in recognition of the truth in their guru’s words.
‘But I don’t understand how anyone could write that a very proper person like Rama banished his pregnant wife to the forest. It’s unbearable!’ said the mother.
‘It’s a terrible mystery that’s never stopped tormenting us. If you indeed accept the seventh book, the Uttara Kandam, as Valmiki’s—which, by the way, no traditional religious speaker discourses on—your only acceptable explanation is that given by the Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri.’
Mahadev Page 3