Amrit Mahotsava - musings on Indian freedom struggle

In 2016 the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster website was ‘Fascism’. The same year Donald Trump won a four year ‘residency’ in the White House. Need  a Newton moment of a falling apple to divine the correlation ?

That alarm bells for recrudescence of fascism ,buried in 1940s in graves of Hitler and Mussolini, were ringing 70 years later in a two and a quarter century old puissant and vibrant democracy   shocked many.  It was a stark reminder of the vulnerability  of democracies to ensnares  of  charismatic leaders with fascist leanings.  Did not Fuhrer and Il Duce  sow their seeds in democratic fields before bastardizing, dismantling, and finally superseding  it by a political system in which the Supreme leader is the sole fountainhead of power ? What happened next is ghoulish history. 

Dark and dusty soots of the fascist blaze wafted into our freedom struggle as well. If purity of the aryan race was an obsession with Hitler,  revivifying an imagined  ‘race consciousness or spirit’ that had supposedly united and charged vedic aryans became the raison ďetre for RSS.  Hitler's solution of the Jewish minority problem found  resonance with  Golwalkar, 

‘Germany has shown how impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root  to be assimilated into one  united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.’

Golwalkar cooed ,‘RSS inspired by one flag ,one leader, one ideology is lighting the flame of Hindutva in each and every corner of this great land.’ Jinnah went further, after having catapulted ML to power in Pakistan he bluntly  let Lord Mountbatten know who would lead it, ‘In my position it is I who will give the advice and others will act on it’ 

Ambedkar speaking of Savarkar and Jinnah quipped, ‘ both agree, not only agree but insist that there are two nations in India- one the Muslim nation and the other Hindu Nation. They differ only as regards the terms and conditions on which the two nations must live.’

Thus, the kindle wood for a fascist blaze had been piled up- ‘othering’ and ‘us against them’, authoritarianism. Only  ‘charismatic leadership’ played truant.  ML had it in Jinnah, the Hindu right whined, wheezed, made big noises but lacked effective leadership, mass appeal and following. Both lay with the Congress- Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. They had  mesmerized the masses, and held them tightly in their emotional sway, more particularly the Hindu masses. It was nascent India's good fortune that all three were implacable votaries of liberal and secular democracy, envisioning a multi-national, multi-cultural, pluralistic secular society and polity for India. In the 1945 elections  Congress won over 91% of the non- Muslim votes, HMS was wiped out. People had shown the door to Hindu Right. On the other hand, it was Pakistan’s tragedy that Jinnah helmed a nation with outer trappings of democracy and a fascist core. To this day it remains a failed democracy, politically unstable.

Considering the overwhelming mass electoral  support for the Congress, one would have expected that the core values of a democratic, pluralistic social existence would find common acceptance and be imbibed in the national ethos as the nation took its rightful place in the comity of nations. It was not to be. Even after the dust of freedom struggle had settled down, the Hindu conservatives  thought 'a united freedom struggle of all communities and sections nothing but denationalization.' With how much legitimacy ? They continue even now to 'other' minorities.

Our freedom struggle has become a misty haze. The Amrit Mahotsava is a great opportunity to recall and revere its heroes - Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and lacs of others who brought it about. 

It is also an occasion to be mindful of the toxic fumes  that it released and still linger. Fascist tendencies for one never dissipated  and many think are only strengthening. 

Look around, take note and beware.

Book Review : where the crawdads sing

 Where The Crawdads Sing 

Delia Owens 

Published -2018

Pages- 368 

Any cataract surgery convalescent is a contemplative ruminant !  Forced to shed spectacles and ‘Don’ dark sunglasses reading becomes an insufferable agony best avoided. He bides his time  wallowing in self-pity ruing loss of reading time or riffling through reads of the recent past. That’s how  the day found me flipping through this bestseller again.

A highly  acclaimed , phenomenally successful  debut novel that outsold more renowned  contemporary novelists including King and Atwood. 

The storyline is hauntingly poignant and heart wrenching. A wretched preteen girl is abandoned by her own in the middle of nowhere , grows up scrounging for food, battling loneliness, overcoming elemental fears of the wilderness, dodging stalking sexual predators, going through the rites of passage for  coming of age- emotional turmoil, to  finally acquire worldly recognition and live life on her terms and in her chosen surroundings – the swamp that nourished, protected, and finally won her acceptability into civilized society. The girl whose life is a scroll of rejection has the last laugh. 

What really worked for its runaway success and to inveigle its way into my subconsciousness ? Not the book title for one thing. Crawdads do not sing, merely send out trains of grating  ‘cric-cric’ sound pulses. It’s the narrative's elegance and felicity evoking a wide range of moods that enamoured me.  

Four elements  touched a very sympathetic chord . 

First, for a landlubber littoral and maritime settings hold an indefinable draw. In the wilderness of an untouched swampy marshland dotted with cattail green lagoons and girdling a strip of virgin coastline the author arrestingly captures the rhythm and tempo of nature's music in all its spellbinding richness - ‘the ocean sang bass, the gulls sang soprano’ ; ‘minnows darted between sunspots and shadows above the roar of pounding waves’; gull song drifting through the trees from the sea.

Second, Owen’s compelling portraiture of a cruelly wronged ‘marsh girl’, victim of parental delinquency , her desolation, longing for true love, companionship and social acceptance is extremely powerful and heart-rending. It elicited  overwhelming sympathy for her. 

Third, all of us like victims to turn the tables. She does. And gets love, life requite and stature. 

Lastly, nothing gets the heart racing like a courtroom melodrama of fortunes swinging back and forth for the accused in a murder mystery. Dalia Owens quintessentially concocts suspenseful twists and turns in both crime investigation and prosecution.

Introspectively , I think it is these pegs of the plot that forced its instant  recall in my idling hours. A rare,  moving, and emotionally unsettling  story of triumph over gloom, despair, desolation, and love.

Delia Owens leaves us with a soul stirring thought about Kyl :

Did we exclude her because she was different or was she different because we excluded her ?

Book Review : The woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window 

A J Finn 

Published -2018

Pages- 427

A mystery thriller that won’t send your heart racing but one that you will race to finish, not precisely  ‘unputdownable’ but one you will not like to put down. 

In a road accident Dr (Mrs) Ann Fox suffers a severe spinal injury, and is confined to her bungalow in an upper-end neighbourhood in Harlem . The trauma also leaves her with a psychological condition – agoraphobia, a range of anxiety disorders that manifests ,inter alia, in fear of stepping out of home. Bina ,the physiotherapist, weekly visits her for physio sessions, and Dr Fielding, psychologist, administers online consultation to control her agoraphobia. In the basement  lives the tenant, David who is mostly out doing odd jobs. 

She lives alone and whiles time pouring large libations of wine to herself, watching Hitchcockian suspense and mystery movies, offering free online consultancy to psychologically traumatized patients, and ,most importantly for the storyline, espying on neighbours.

From the window of her study Ann espies Jane Russell, wife of Alistair, mother of Ethan, bleeding  with a silver handle embedded in her chest in the living room of house no 207 across the park. She calls the cops. They don’t believe her story. The anti-depressant drugs she was taking has hallucinogenic side effects hence her testimony is not to be relied upon.  And the story takes off with riveting twists and turns between what is real and what imagined. 

The book manages to keep the reader hooked. It has all the ingredients that go into creating the surround of suspense heightened by flawed characters and doling out of clues in driblets. However, at many points I was seized by a sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t I read something similar somewhere and the plot begins to look increasingly like a new filigree woven from familiar episodic strands.  

All in all, a thriller that straddles the line between ‘well’ and ‘swell’, yet  indubitably an engrossing and enjoyable read.

'Cat's Cradle', Kurt Vonnegut

 

Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut 

Pages – 205

Published -1963 

“When I was a younger man – two wives ago, 250000 cigarettes ago, 3000 quarts of booze ago …When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called ‘The Day the World Ended.’ The book was to be factual.”

This unbosoming by the narrator at the very outset metaphorically  foreshadows the tone and tenor of what  follows. A foreboding of doom (end of world) ;  despairing, brooding pessimism about mankind's capacity to foresee and temper possible negative fallouts and unintended consequences of  ‘progressive’ developments ( ice nine that could freeze swamp water to unbreakable ice could freeze oceans too) is scarcely relieved by mordant wit, satire and humour pulsating throughout the narrative. The wish to write a factual account of the day world ended is Vonnegut’s damning condemnation of the manner in which worldly affairs are conducted. It borders perilously close to playfulness, he feels. The sole diversion of Dr Felix Hoenikker , the maker of ‘ice nine’ that brings the curtains down on the world, is making ‘cat’s cradle’ - string figures with his fingers tangled in a loop of string. Vonnegut also has a stab at the malefic use of religion as an opiate for the destitute.

The tiny island of San Lorenzo in the Caribbean sea ruled by a dictator nicknamed ‘Papa’ is a yucky fantasia. The land is as ‘unproductive as an equal area in Sahara or the polar ice cap’. So the masses live in utter destitution. The native religion, Bokononism’  canonizes  'better and better  lies', presumably,  to fatalize  the incurable  mass misery and oppression by the state. It is on this island when the principal characters of the novel are assembled for the public commemoration of ‘Hundred Martyrs for Democracy’ by the ‘Dictator’ Pa that the end of world is triggered. 

The book parades an interesting cast of characters, some bearing a  ring of familiarity with contemporary figures of the 50s - 60s. Pa clones Duvalier; the island's tutelary  sex goddess carries a  whiff of Eva Peron ;  Dr Koenigewald recalls Auschwitz physician Mengele ; Dr Felix Hoenikker, the maker of atomic bomb reminds one of Oppenheimer. 

Characterization is brilliant, each character invested with distinct idiosyncracies and histories as befitting a dystopian conception. The narrative is free flowing, pacy and suspenseful. The  train of events unfold quickly and linearly.  Despite the overarching cloud of gloom and  predestination hovering  over the narrative the reader remains deeply immersed and rooted.

About the author -  Vonnegut is cast in the mould of the counterculture sweeping the USA in 50s-60s. To be a non-conformist was the in thing. Music was not orchestral symphony but Rock. In literary works it erupted  as spontaneous prose. Hippies, peaceniks and other disaffected types particularly took to Vonnegut. The rock band ‘Grateful Dead’ even named its music publishing company ‘Ice Nine’.

The novel’s despondent note is understandable, for it  was written in the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a raging cold war, an ugly scramble for atomic weaponization, and a  looming threat of nuclear proliferation to rouge states and organizations.

The bogey of a nuclear holocaust has drifted away somewhat through a  ‘Balance of Nuclear Terror’, but the world remains poised on a  precipice of ‘dynamic tension’ , inherently an 'unstable equlibrium'. There are other perturbations equally portentious too for an end of world scenario. Vonnegut’s pessimism is, therefore, still not easy to wish away. Old fears may have only transfigured  into new bugbears.

To end, a wry wit to wit, "the people down here are poor enough, scared enough, and ignorant enough to have some common sense!"

A  crispy, queasy, easy, wacky, satire, immensely amusing and thoughtful. Notwithstanding the melancholic theme the novel is anything but tenebrous.

A Walk In The Night

 

A Walk In The Night

The night is getting  inkier and windier, a light drizzle is in the offing. Must take that walk before it's too late. With the stent implanted in the clogged artery had come the surgeon's life-or-death injunction  - daily 40 min brisk walk wherever I be. 

Willy nilly  I mosey out of the tower block to the promenade skirting the housing sprawl- a gated community housed in twenty three high rise tower blocs , 18×8×23 households , a microcosm of an upbeat, bustling, cosmopolitan India. 

The bracing wind  sends a shiver rippling down my spine. All thoughts of looming ‘May-Day’s are pushed further into a corner. Paradoxically, in May this itty-bitty south Indian  soupcon is a  cool haven very unlike my sweltering, steaming, scorching north Indian abode. Unavoidably my sojourn in this haven ends soon. The searing north will reclaim, repossess me. 

For now, my mood is cheery. The promenade is really wide, at places exceeding twenty feet. Few roads in towns I lived in fifty years ago were as wide-bodied. It is now  astir with walkers- the elderly ambling along ; the not so young strolling, walking the talk to iron out creases in their pacy lives, away from the confines of home, in the relative obscurity of the walkway; the fitness freaks cantering feverishly ; many walking their dogs or pushing  their kiddies in perambulators. Some walks seem atonements for sins of past or continuing gourmandizing , many others in dread of a like fate . 

A boy whooshes by in a  'Lance Armstrong' bike.  Looking around I see many like him furiously peddling away. I  get sucked into a whirl of nostalgia about  my youthful days. Back then the bicycle and its three-wheeler variant, the rickshaw, were the ubiquitous and most utilitarian mode of 'aam aadmi’ transport. I had got my only bicycle on admission to a post graduate college in Patna. It served me well. I half rode,  oft waded with it through the flooded city in 1975  just for the heck of it. Ignoring parental admonitions not to enter the contaminated floodwaters my recce of submerged areas lasted  several days. The floods, I remember, had stayed long.  I had nothing much to do. And I was young and immune and impervious to elderly dictats.  Luckily, nuts and bolts of the bike and its rider suffered no damage. After I got a job the bicycle in full working condition  was gifted away to our domestic help. I couldn't remain loyal to it. The present is built on ruins of the past, it is said. How true !  Bicycles and rickshaws have all but disappeared, becoming instruments of physical exercise rather than of conveyance. 

A voice snaps me out of my sterile reverie. 

‘Aren’t both their children in New Jersey ?’, a not so elderly couple pose to each other within my earshot. Something clicks within me. Fifty years ago when my maternal uncle found a US bound groom for his daughter his family instantly rose a notch higher in social esteem. A son-in-law in US , what a catch ! Another fifty years behind , not accolade but social opprobrium was heaped upon anyone daring to cross the ‘seven seas’.  Even the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore was not spared, excommunicated and ostracized  from the brahmin fold for stepping beyond the Indian shores. How things have changed ! Were all our expatriates to  return home and the same penalty  inflicted , the cast outs  would far outnumber the scheduled outcasts. Almost every fourth household in my own neighbourhood has a close relative living abroad. India has spread wide  its tentacles in the  global village. 

Outdated taboos have become do-dos. And there are many more Jersey cows in India than Indians in New Jersey. Global ‘trafficking’ is multi-dimensional.

I plod along, a slow-footed parody of the brisk walk advisory. Only when a young lady in leggie, slim-fit shirt and Adidas looking sports shoes strides past me in a jiffy do I become aware of my medical transgression. I speed up a bit, little hope though of ever catching up with her. Time honours trots  not plods. 

But the sureness, the spring in her strides, and ,above all, the confidence with which she carries herself fascinates me. My gaze stalks her. There she is, rounding a tower. Involuntarily I raise my  head, the tower seems  to be in a surreal blaze, its coruscating brilliance streaming out of windows and passageways. Little of it lights the walkways. The lamp posts on ground looking like stunted children glow vainly. Its light is easily devoured by the ambient greens. So while the towers are dazzingly aglow , the promenade is dim-lit in stark contrast. The lady in the leggie has melted into its unrelieved darkness. 

I  have some more minutes of my walkathon to get through. The sky is now pitch dark, the moon having chosen to shed its reflected glory in other parts of the earth.  Promenaders are still rounding the curves and a drizzle seems unlikely. I ease up in my walk. 

A young couple animatedly swaying heads and jerking arms saunters past. I hear the female  plainly , unmistakably  saying, ‘chutia hai sala....’ and  more in the same vein. Quite inexplicably I feel a surge of inscrutable reassurance. Deep underneath the encrustation of opulence, social atomization and  sophistication  man's  survival instinct is as intense, as crude ,and as cut-throat as in his hunter-gatherer, nomadic days.  

Men will ever be men. It's comforting to know they will  never be automatons.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken kesey

 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'

Ken Kesey 

Half a century late, remiss of hundreds of screaming intertextual references and dozens of raving reviews by Senior Reading Raccoons, Ken Kesey ‘s  ‘One that flew over the Cuckoo's Nest’ finally found me.

Had it not, I would have remained an illiterate reader ,a fledgling Raccoon ! That's how overawed have I been reading the book.

Kesey had a big say in shaping the sui generis literary mould of counterculture resonating in the  psychedelic sixties in the USA. Its informal mode of expression freely embracing  the popular, the vernacular, the conversational idiom made for facile, fluid, fervent and familiar reading. 

The plot is simple. A ward in a mental asylum in Oregon under the hawk eye and iron clad discipline of the Big Nurse, Ratchet, in this sombre ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ of hers where patients cower as affrighted ‘rabbits’, flies in a ‘bull goose loony’  R P McMurphy. Flaunting ways of the ‘wild west’,  not amenable to  regimentation, he provokes and eggs on the patients to manoeuvre for a freer, less oppressive existence. The grim, sterile,   humourless, drilled to precision routine is upset. Laughter, not just snicker, gets heard after years.  The anarchist, the street smart  disrupter looms as a serious threat to the power and absolute control wielded by the Big Nurse.  Thenceforth a fascinating, gripping  psychological ‘joust’ ensues-  the disrupter hell-bent on making ‘men’ of ‘rabbits’ ,and the Big Nurse -cold ,calculating, patient- manipulating things to protect her turf, reassert her authority,  and restore the staus quo. This cat and mouse game of one-upmanship is exquisitely curated and  jocosely related. It keeps the reader irresistibly hooked. 

Throughout, the narrative has strong sexual overtones. Playful ribaldry, bawdy jokes and titillating  double entendre lighten the otherwise despairing melancholia of an insufferable, dehumanizing asylum.

At the  literal level,  the book debunks contemporary treatment protocols of the mentally flawed as devices to assert power and control , and forcing an inhumane  segregation of  the mad from mainstream society. Not curing  them. 

The narrative emphasizes fuzziness of the  boundary between sanity and insanity. When Mr Taber wants to know what tablets are being given to him, the query is ignored. Instead, he is ‘straightened’ by lobotomy ( surgically short-circuiting of pathways to nerves in a brain lobe). Brain burnt, he ends up a vegetable. Who then was the madder? Was Hitler sane ? 

In its allegorical import, the asylum encapsulates contemporary  societal imperatives of control and  conformism to an ideal conceived by power structures, Kesey calls it the ’Combine’. Concomitantly, repression of individuality and deviant thought followed in its train. The looming spectre of McCarthism, doom presaged by the Cold War and a post war societal churn mirrored in the beat movement fed into these impulses.

Kesey’s characterization of the loonies is convincingly plausible (I hope so for I haven’t been mad enough to experience it first hand) . And the portrayal of ice-berg  Big Nurse wielding an illimitable 'power of insinuation' behind the façade of her glued plastic smile is a marvel. So too the description of disoriention, fragmentary recall of the past, mental and vision fogginess after an electric shock therapy session. The narrative climaxes in the last part of the book but  leaves behind a lingering sense of business ‘unfinished’. 

More humane and efficacious treatments for mental disorders have now evolved. Also, the dark mood of stifling  control in the Cold War era has dissipated. Yet, in very many subtle and overt ways freedom to choose, assertion of individuality and free expression of thought and sexuality is suppressed. Increasingly, media houses and echo chambers of social media subconsciously influence  choices, socio-politico  narratives, even art and culture - all converging towards an uniformity dictated by the  ‘Combine’. As Herbert Marcuse bemoaned, man is becoming inexorably ‘one-dimensional’. 

The instruments of  control and conformism have changed from those in the 60s, but not our date with control itself. Kesey  is ,therefore, as readable in the twenty first century too. 

He has whetted my appetite . I wanna  beat around the sweet beat Lit a bit more. ‘On the Road’ with Jack Kerouac is my next reading beat. 

Benares as I see it

 

Benares as I see it

Has the Election Commission of India  lately become fond of obsequies? In a morbidly spot on symbolism the final phase of this round of polling ends in Benares, the city where all  Hindus aspire to be to end beingness forever. It alone holds promise of death begetting instantaneous deliverance from recurrent cycles  of  samskaras, numbering an onerous sixteen in a single earthly sojourn.  Benares is the final journey- mortal remains to the elements and the atma dissolved in parmatma. 

Moksha !

‘Charbi’ and ‘Garmi’ melt in glassfuls of the city’s ‘thundai’ without the intercession of a Yogi. And minds get unlocked if one  elects to ‘khai ke paan Banaras wala, khul jayee band akal ka tala…’. Draped in a sparkling Banarasi sari, the  city oozes an esoteric feminine grace, godliness and a rhythm of carefree, cavalier life, one that is getting increasingly ravaged by the elements and inexorable creep of ‘vikas’. 

Till it lasts, one should  let oneself go with  ‘chillum’ in one hand to ‘dam maro dam…’, a glass of ‘thundai’ in the other, and a plateful of rabri to ‘raise’ one’s inebriated consciousness higher. Above that of the city itself poised on the spokes of Shiva’s trident in a niche in space- unsullied by earth’s touch and within sight the shores of immortality. Sins are not worrisome here for all are Shiva indemnified, salvation assured. The city also has the dubious renown for ‘thugee’ or charlatanism. The wily Banarasi thug once had  nothing to fear or lose in the city of liberation. 

Even a visitor to this divinely consecrated upland makes a two way gain- as a pilgrim and a tourist. And to boot, branded a Banarasi Babu. 

Long, long ago Kashiraj performed the ashwamedha yagna on the Ganga river front  sacrificing ten horses to hallow the spot as Dashashwamedh ghat. That rite consecrated victory and power of a ‘Chakravartin’. Not far away lies the Harish Chandra Ghat, the cremation ground where death is the ultimate victor. 

As voters queue up in this city and dusk falls some political aspirants would have been despatched to the Dashashwamedh ghat, some forced to trudge to Harish Chandra ghat and denied, uncharacteristically, the ‘taraka mantra’, the for-all  Shiva’s whisper of deliverance from existential shackles. No liberation for losers, they will have to ‘rebirth’ to have another go. The winner, on the other hand, will claim to have attained a higher state of political  ‘being’ - powers, temporal and spiritual fused . That’s what Banarasi Babus too will hope for in the minimum. 

Eclipse and Halo, the dialectics of power pursuit in play!

Veering off tangentially, one last thought. Benares is perfumed or more appropriately drenched in Hindu religiosity. Its streets, lanes, narrow bylanes and galis are like the capillaries feeding piety and sacredness into every Hindu home. More than that, the city is a repository  of Hindu rites, rituals and traditions from the dawn of civilization. 

However, time takes its toll irreversibly. The Varana and Assi rivers that bound the city are dead streams now. Ganga is like a woman dazzingly painted masking an ugly interior - glistening river front and swacch ghats but the  waters within its confines as impure as pure is its anointed  holiness.The once  symbiotic Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb is now just for the quotes. The talk is to dress it up into a Kyoto, a  smart heritage city with all  the glitter and razzmatazz of modernity. The Kashi Vishwanath corridor, demolishing the  catacomb of mini temples and structures that garlanded the Vishwanath temple, kick-started the process.  

It is a cruel paradox that the new can only rise on the ashes of the old, a process Schumpeter in another context termed ‘creative destruction’. 

But what is being obliterated? 

For a Hindu, pilgrimage is a duality- Asceticism and Darshan. The journey itself is a purificatory rite. Our most hallowed devasthanas require the devotee  to trek through difficult and dangerous terrain. In such circumstances observance of strict dietary control and celibacy  comes easy. The consciousness of the divine is ever present and repeatedly invoked to ensure safe passage to the destination. The devotee turns into an ascetic for the duration of the pilgrimage, at least. 

In the shimmer and glimmer of advancing ‘Kyotoization’ Benares risks losing its bewilderingly charming spidery web of narrow lanes and bylanes throbbing with sacredness and pulsing with chants of ‘Om Namah Shivay’ of the bohemian god ,and the sombre reality check of ‘Ram Naam Satya Hai’. Will this survive the onslaught of creative destruction ?  What happens to the gay abandon and 'masti' of the Banarasi Babu for whom even Yama holds no terror? Yama's domain falls outside the furthest parikrama of the city. Benares is fast  shedding  its unfathomable mystique and inscrutable  joie de vivre. Its unique cultural concoction of commingled  ‘bhukti and mukti’, its soul and the pre-eminent cultural ethos,  is threatened with extinction as consumerism and materialism squelch spiritualism.

That the sacred and smart can be reconciled into a whole is a battle that lies ahead for the victors of the battle of the ballot box today.

Voter's Woe

 Voter's  Woe 

My wishes ever on mute, 

Suitors all the while unmute. 

Wishes unable to say, 

They unable to hear.

Wed my wishes to my vote, I pray 

Pray and pray, hoping they heed my say.

Book Review: INDIANS by Namit Arora

 

INDIANS

by Namit Arora 

Pages- 250+

Year Published -2020 

A captivating reconstruction of India’s civilization since the faint stirrings of history to present times penned with the keen avidity and exuberance of an explorer - one awestruck and magically charmed by the immensity and magnificence of grandeur revealed by ruins of lost cities. 

The writer, Namit Arora, is curious, what caused ancient cities, lampposts of world civilisation, to be lost to antiquity. In pursuit of this yen he goes globetrotting till the wanderlust brings him to India and culminates in this excellent book - ‘Indians : a brief history of a civilisation’. 

History is a much travelled highway. And as present dissolves into past the highway keeps getting longer, the traffic denser. Many wannabe historians take to it. Their freewheeling approach unencumbered by structured thought processes of the subject discipline has its own allure, a whiff of freshness, rendering the storytelling immensely readable, appealing and  likely to have a broader outreach.  

It is important, he writes, to understand ‘What happened in the past and why did it end’. Contemporary India is reappraising its ‘ place in the new world in new ways’. And ‘how we see our past is increasingly shaping our idea of India and where we want to go as a society.’ He is therefore impelled almost as a bounden duty to ferret out  ‘continuity and dead ends between India’s past and its contemporary society.’ 

He journeys to Dholavira, a Harappan site in the Rann of Kucch with an extensive water management system ; Nagarjunasagar lake under which is submerged the ruins of Vijayapuri, the Ikshvaku capital, host to  a melange of religions, the only Indians to raise memorial pillars for prominent people; Nalanda, the Buddhist university with an active outreach to foreign lands; Khajuraho , famous for explicit erotica as decorative carvings in temples  ; Hampi, the glittering capital of  Vijayanagar empire, ‘the best provided city in the contemporary world’ according to the Portuguese traveller, Domingo Paes; Varanasi, the cultural legatee of ancient Kashi.

While others are truly lost cities , modern Varanasi isn’t. It, however, the writer feels is far adrift from the sparkle and splendour of the syncretic cultural ethos of Kashi scripted in our annals of history. Thomas Babington Macaulay - the one credited with proposing a cadre of Brown Sahibs - found the city in 1830s ‘ a labyrinth of lofty alleys rich with shrines and minarets and balconies and carved oriels to which the sacred apes cling by hundred .The trader could scarcely make his way through the press of mendicants not less holy bulls! Along the river lay great fleet of vessels laden with rich merchandise. From the looms of Benares went forth the most delicate silks that adorned the bells of St James and Versailles.’ Varanasi has not only  moved immeasurably beyond ancient ‘Kashi’, it has even lost its socio-economic moorings of 1830s ; in essence it is as lost a city as the other five. 

Distilling a civilizational span of  5000 years into 250 odd pages, a span in which the very identity of the land transitioned from Meluhha to Aryavarta to Hind to Hindustan and finally to India with concomitant transformations in character and breadth of its cultural milieu is a hell of a lot of things to condense ! Namit Arora’s improvisation is to flit from summit to summit -six lost cities separated in historical time and space that were high watermarks of civilization and bedazzled rest of India by the glimmer of their cultural opulence. That leaves him with sufficient space to vividly flesh out  the elegant richness and grandeur of civilizational efflorescence. With facile eloquence he breathes life into dead ruins, even manages to evoke nostalgia for bygone eras. I, with just a passing acquaintance with history, remained hooked and fully immersed in the story unfolding. 

He quotes tellingly from memoirs of prominent Firangis including  Megasthenes, Alberuni, and Marco Polo who lived a while or travelled through India. They inject the  disinterested outsider perspective on the nature and rhythm of contemporary life. Many vignettes of social life chronicled by them sharply repudiate official versions , or refute bases on which alternate versions of history are peddled by Hindutva forces. For instance, contrary to their assertions sati was in vogue among  Hindu elites much  before muslim rule. Alberuni documented it in 11th century bce itself. The puritan Hindu would be outraged by Abdur Razzaq chronicling the ‘elaborateness of their (Vijayanagar) brothels’, or by Barbosa’s observation that when Vijayanagar goes to war, courtesans accompany warriors ( aka Japanese ‘comfort girl’?). Contrary to Mughal India being dubbed ‘sone ki chidiya’ ,Francois Bernier finds that in Delhi of ‘ two or three who wear decent apparel there are 7/8 poor, ragged, miserable beings’. Some of their observations are however bizarre and fantastical. Herodotus tells that Indian men ‘naturally produce black semen’. Megasthenes saw people with ears of a dog and feet turned backwards. 

The chapter on Khajuraho is especially insightful. It demystifies two historical conundrums. How could a people given to frowning at pleasures of the flesh not only tolerate but also appreciate  the sexually explicit depictions that pass for hard core porn today ? Capt Burt who chanced upon these temples was scandalised enough to coin the phrase ‘ecclesiastical erections’. The other quandary, how did Brahminism morph into the amorphous, pan India faith, Hinduism, one that has the veneer of Vedic religiosity overlaid on myriad substrates of folk rites, rituals and deities. The unraveling of these enigmas is enlightening. 

Much of our past is still with us. The book points to many cultural continuities and dead ends. To name a few, the confluence of many sub-cultures into a unity is a bequest from the past, though the writer feels it under threat. The age of ‘kutuhal shalas’ is no more. Ayodhya in Huang Tsang’s time had many more Buddhist monasteries than temples, now none. 

A  muted refrain ripples through the narrative. Many current re-evaluations of our past, the writer opines, are premised  on dodgy selection of facts intended to make history a handmaiden of political ideologues. They ‘put the cart of interpretation before the horse of facts’.  The writer is in the predicament of sant Kabir, 

Saints, I see the world is mad

If I tell the truth they rush to beat me

If I tell a lie they trust me. 

As I sign off a final thought strikes me- is there a hidden symbolism somewhere ? The narrative opens with Death of our earliest civilization, Dholavira, only to end in the city of Death where the whisper of ‘taraka mantra’ is in the air-Varanasi. Maybe, maybe not ! Over all histories is superimposed the one immutable, universal history of existence— ‘the final oneness -from earth to earth, from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust’.

A refreshing and engagingly told foundational history- one reimagined perceptively and with a touch of wistfulness , empathy and humanity, ; not cerebral but pretty educative. I profited much from it.

Ugly Hindutvawadis: masquerade falls off

 

Kalicharan abuses Gandhi : Blaspheming Hinduism 

'Sant' Kalicharan's vituperative salvo against  Gandhi in a 'Dharma Sansad' brought to my mind this repartee of a German artist. 

As she was addressing the press prior to a scheduled cultural event, her German colleague kept prompting her to touch upon the 'German-ness' of her works. She ignored him, still he persisted. Finally, she took him on and quipped, 

" George, had I been a bird would you have called me a German bird ? "

Is the India of today so blinded by hate that it names its birds differently depending on whether they sport a saffron tinge in their plumage or not ? What could be more odious, and to cap it ,more heinous, for 'dharmic' participants of the sansad to applaud RashtraPita Gandhi being  slandered as 'H.....' Gandhi ?  I shuddered to spell the invective, so I  bowdlerized it.

Did the learned 'sant' experience spiritual elevation to the rupa of a Kali when hurling the opprobrium ? I felt otherwise. My faith, not Gandhiji's, I felt was being bastardized with impunity and, ironically, in a Hindu Dharma Sansad.  

Hinduism is a sublime faith, pandering to the spiritual needs of its adherents, not political Hinduism. And it never was, nor is ,an instrument of hate evangelism. Leave that to the politicians ; sadhus and sants have more profound spheres of life to nurture.