Unfortunately today the word “myth” has come to mean something that is untrue. The “Mythbusters”, claiming to unearth misconceptions, is a popular TV series; the phrase “urban myth” has come to mean a story that is widely held to be true but is actually untrue; myths are ripe for “debunking”. Exposed politicians and crooked bankers cry “It’s a myth!” when caught red-handed. A myth, as it was understood from the beginnings of knowledge until the Age of Reason, meant a story that helped explain the inexplicable. A myth by its very nature could not be, did not claim to be, “true”, as a fact is true; a myth only started where facts and emotions could not be explained. As Karl Gustav Jung discovered in his search for the soul, myths have always used deliberately fictitious motifs and like all good fiction have asked those “what-if?” questions that take us beyond what we like to think of as “ourselves” and gives us a glimpse of the Self in all.
Thanks to the work of Jung and Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong and others, the Western world is now re-evaluating the significance of mythology and Varanasi is a fine place to see mythology in action; and as they all point out, it needs to be in action to have any meaning. As Mark Twain and I discovered, mythology is not a psychology that the can be studied in the hope of reaching an intellectual conclusion. It needs doing -and from an early age so that it is just another part of life, a part of life that doesn’t see itself as myth at all. Doing it has advantages for the myth - it keeps it alive and evolving - and for the partakers of myth - it keeps them actively involved in the unexplained world, the very opposite to the fatalism of which the Indians are sometimes so wrongly accused.
I had the advantage of homestaying with an Indian family in Benares and could see all this where it was meant to be seen, in action. In the palace grounds were two temples, a large one to Shiva and a smaller one in the courtyard to Kali.
“Kali wards off the evil spirits,” explains my host Kashi, a 33-year-old Western-educated Bengali.
“A spirit guard dog,” I suggest.
“Yes, and a burglar guard dog too. If a thief enters the house and sees Kali looking at him he will run away. She is not to be upset,” he grins knowingly.
One can see how Kali - and Shiva in the larger temple - fit into family life. Kashi, his wife Bullbullee and two daughters, Kashica, five, and Misti, three, talk to them and about them as family members throughout the day.
“Don’t shout, Kali is resting.”
“Kashica, give some of that to Kali.”
“I’m leaving at three, Kali.”
“Sweep out around Shiva too.”
“We all hate the monsoon, Kali especially. So sweaty.”
“Kashica, light these for Shiva.”
They don’t have to stray far to feel the godly incarnations. The house behind has become a Buddhist[37] meditation and study centre. At the end of the alley is a house where Ganesha, using a broken tusk as a pen, took down dictation from Shiva and gave us the Ramayana. There is a temple to Ganesha outside the house and we see him fully decorated with red paint and yellow garlands, his ten arms arrayed in an arc behind his Buddha-style pot belly. The house where it all happened is right there/probably right there/possibly somewhere near/well, quite close, close enough that every year they have a 48-hour chantalong. There is a relay of two singers and a harmonium and tabla players; shifts change every... well whenever anyone new shows up. The whole neighborhood becomes involved in ferrying supplies back and forth and general encouragement. The lyricist had an easy time of it: the couplet “Sita Rama; Sita Rama” is just repeated over and over again for the two days alternating between the two singers. They have thoughtfully mounted a loudspeaker outside the front door so all around can join in the celebrations. Anywhere else in the world one would call time on the neighbors from hell, file for a restraining order, but here one somehow goes native - and it doesn’t seem to matter much any more.
At night various cows and goats stop by and chomp on discarded garlands. Thank heavens on the second day there is a power cut and I’m sure that, like me, all the neighbors rush to bed to catch up on their sleep with “Sita Rama; Sita Rama” still much on their minds.
Then every morning somewhere around 5.30 the house wakes up to the full hoopla from the communal Shiva temple just behind it. What a fantastic racket: bells of various hues, drums of various beats and chants of various prayers all ring together for ten minutes of early morning chaos; happy chaos - a state in which the worshippers, along with most of India, will spend the rest of the day. The temple has a regular turnover of worshippers throughout the day; most drop in for a few minutes, ring the bell, have a few words with Shiva and continue the day fortified by god-to-god contact.
For the last three hours there has been another party with what sounds like a mariachi band. Lots of bells and chanting; weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth this ain’t. I pop round to have a look-see. Twin four-year-old Brahmin boys are having their heads shaved, one of their rites of passage. They are all from Bombay but the uncle works in Delhi for Coca-Cola; “headquarters in Atlanta,” he says with pride. “My brother, their father, works for Electrolux in Mysore.” And they’ve come here to this Shiva temple hundreds of miles away for the birthday? “Yes, this is a special Shiva temple for Brahmins. And it’s not actually the boys’ birthday but the day nearest it which is astrologically auspicious, you see.”
All around the temple all day long is a market selling bits of bright cotton and string and scarves, bells, straw mats, coconut shells, incense and rice for the temple guests to buy as offerings. Worshipping - still not really the right word but pointing in the right direction - is lighthearted and joyful. By making the gods happy they are making themselves happy, for after all, are they not the same? Fun is the right word; and after a week of total immersion in Hinduism I would say above all the practice of it is fun, fun for family, fun for the nation, which brings us back to why they are not all at each others’ throats.
***
Time, methinks, to join in the fun. Accepting that the adult Western mind will never understand the theory of Hinduism it seems the best way forward is to join in the practice, to do the myth. My host Kashi leads me by the nose.
“You are a writer, isn’t it?” he asks.
“It’s kind of you to say so.”
“No, I mean that’s what you do. If I was a writer I would become friends with the goddess Saraswati.”
“Saraswati?”
“Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge. And writers. And learning. At primary school in Bengal we used to start each day with incantations to Saraswati. In Bengal we also see her as Ganesha’s half brother. In Buddhism she is a guardian angel.”
“But I thought you said earlier that Ganesha was the god of writers.”
“No, he’s the god of writing not writers. Ganesha is a scribe.”
“Like a secretary?
“Yes, Saraswati is the creative force. She invented words.”
“And how will I know her?”
“That’s easy. She is white skinned and wears white clothes. She sits on a white water lily and besides her is always her vehicle, a white swan.”
“A vision in whiteness?”
“Yes. That’s also one of the reasons Hindu widows wear white, not black as yours do. They want wisdom in their older years. Normally she has four arms, one hand for a book of palm leaves for learning, another hand for a string of pearls or a vase for the love of giving wisdom. The other two hands are for a sitar. Sometimes each hand is for a Veda. That’s when she has eight arms. She is the goddess of all the arts.”
“And her consort?”
“Her consort is Brahma, the creator.”
“So she was consorted well?”
“Very well!”
A few moments later we are at a nearby temple to Saraswati. On the way over Kashi explained th
e rules of puja, the Hindu ritual in the temple. It wasn’t a long lecture; there are no rules. In fact you don’t even have to be in a temple. Sometimes you can talk to the Absolute through Saraswati directly, sometimes you may prefer to use a temple Brahmin. You can stay in the temple for one minute or sixty or all day. You can offer her gifts or keep your hands in your metaphorical pockets. You can talk to her, with her would be more accurate, silently or in a mumble or right out loud.
What is common practice though is to ring a bell suspended near the door as you enter the temple. This is to take the mind off the external sounds and help it turn inwards; like a sort of instant mantra. Kashi now lights some incense and waves it in front of the gilt-framed image of the goddess. The frame has copious amounts of garlands of marigolds draped over it. Around it lie random petals, rice grains, coconut shell shards, old incense sticks, camphor butts, orange slices, an unopened apple, boiled sweets (unwrapped) and a dozen lit candles.
Kashi says - and I repeat: “O goddess, O Saraswati, consort of creation, knower of the Vedas and fountain of knowledge, show us the powers we share, show us wisdom and true knowledge of the Absolute, find it in me and I will find it in you, we are as one with the One, unlimited, beyond conception. I will write as you will write, with creation and truth and love. Bless us together as one, O goddess, O Saraswati.”
***
I will leave it to readers to decide if Saraswati and I are working well together as future chapters unfold. We three musketeers are off to Calcutta in a couple of days and I will seek out a Saraswati temple and repeat the incantation; and also in Darjeeling after that. I just liked being brought out of “my” self, to make place for the “other”.
The last word - for now - on the “other” should rest with Albert Einstein: “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious.”
***
Before leaving Benares Mark Twain had an important engagement, arranged with some difficulty by the Rev. Parker: they were to meet one of India’s most renowned gurus of the time, Swami Sri Bhaskarananda Saraswati, as Twain said “a living god”. He held court in a small park now known as Anand Bagh, near Assi Ghat. The old ashram where they met still stands, now as a large, open-fronted, wooden and fluted columned shelter along the north side of the park. People use it to rest and enjoy the shade.
Twain was impressed:
Then Sri Saraswati came, and I saw him - that object of the worship of millions. We got along very well together, and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. Meeting him was a strange sensation, and thrilling. I wish I could feel it stream through my veins again.
He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean-cut and conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He looked many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar, could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives, of whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a concession to Mr. Parker’s European prejudices, no doubt.
He has attained what among the Hindoos is called the “state of perfection”. It is a state which other Hindoos reach by being born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation after another - a tiresome long job covering centuries and decades of centuries. But in reaching perfection, he has escaped all that. He is no longer a part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peace forever. Throughout the long course he was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon the sacred books. He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that now.
This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly build it. Rank is nothing to him, he being a god. To him all men are alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other times he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However, he does not receive many of either class. He has to husband his time for his meditations.
They exchanged signed copies of their books. “I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he looked tired, and I knew that if it didn’t do him any good it wouldn’t do him any harm.”[38]
***
Actually Mark Twain would have been somewhat familiar with Vedanta philosophy due to his knowledge of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on the Bhagavad-Gita and the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson wrote that:
What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell.
The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness that is everywhere.
***
On the train to Calcutta I ask Sita about another aspect of Hinduism that doesn’t immediately make sense, Hindu extremism.
She looks rather blank and Gillian mentions the word “oxymoron”.
“I know,” I say, “like Calvinistic licentiousness or Catholic austerity.”
“Or Islamic broadmindedness or Judaic self-doubt,” she suggests.
I remind Sita that, as far as I know, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist.[39]
“We learned at school he was an extremist who happened to be a Hindu - of sorts - rather than a Hindu extremist. You can’t be a Hindu extremist. Have you heard of Hindutva?”
“No.”
“It’s a kind of Indian fascism but instead of being political it is religious. It’s a Brahmin thing. They think they are a race apart and want to le
galize the caste system and make everyone speak Sanskrit.”
“And are there many of them?” asks Gillian.
“No, I’ve never seen any,” says Sita. “They are in the papers but who isn’t? Like the Saffron Terror.”
The idea of Saffron Terror has been much in the news in India recently as it is mentioned in WikiLeaks. In July 2009 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was hosting a lunch for Hilary Clinton and the US Ambassador Timothy Roemer. Clinton was told that “there may be a counter threat (to Pakistani-backed terrorism) from radicalized Hindu groups”. Somehow the term Saffron Terror crept into the conversation but as far as anyone knows it has crept no further.
“I never think about it,” says Sita, “but there are a billion plus people out there. Bound to be some scallies.”
21 Designed by Sir William Emerson of Victoria Memorial fame - more in Calcutta.
22 He would only have heard the uprising called the Indian Mutiny or Great Mutiny.
23 The Bombay Presidency’s Army saw only minor disturbances and the one from Madras (now Chennai) none at all.
24 A light two-person, one-horse carriage, often self-driven, from the Hindi taga - not to be confused with the nippier Victoria which was for one person and one horse - what we would call a sulky.
25 From “The Ballad of East and West”, written one year before Mark Twain’s visit.
26 A British foot soldier, so called from having to march in a squad around the parade ground.
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