Ushering India back to a vedic future

Modi is a modern techie, but is he a moderniser? He cannot be as long as he and his govt propagate back-to-the-scriptures science

Shekhar Gupta  November 20, 2014 | UPDATED 14:01 IST

 

Is Narendra Modi a moderniser or a traditionalist? Is he forward-looking or trapped in the past, however glorious? Does he aspire to lead India into a brilliant new future, or bring back "Sone ki Chidiya" (the golden sparrow) fantasy? I know the answer to all three questions from his many followers: he is a forward-looking moderniser who wants to lead India into a great future. He loves technology, he celebrates science. He took the cue on using social media for political campaigning from Obama and improved on it greatly. He takes selfies with fellow heads of state (Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in this case) and tweets them, and when a glamorous, star struck Bollywood leading lady, towering a foot over him, bends over his shoulder to take a selfie he looks back in debonair style to ask, "Got it?" In more ways than one he comes across as India's most modern prime minister since Rajiv Gandhi. At which point, we need to ask yet another question. Will his government reflect his own modernism or RSS nostalgia?
The two cannot go together. Modern thinking is about science, technology, curiosity to discover what hasn't been discovered yet and humility to accept that the human race has to reach new frontiers, that what we may know yet is a fraction of what we don't. The traditionalist RSS view, on the other hand, is that whatever mankind may be hoping to imagine, discover or design in the future had already been perfected in Vedic times. All you need to do in that case is a close but open-minded reading of the Vedas, Puranas and Upanishads. We had lost it because the Hindu empire and heritage suffered with the decline of the Gupta and Mauryan dynasties and with the arrival of invaders from the west, leading to subjugation by Muslims and then Christians. Modi's rise, therefore, is India's first chance in a millennium to leapfrog backwards and connect with that past. Or, to put it more rudely, set the clock and calendar back.
This is a serious issue to raise at a point when the new government seems to be settling down. A crucial Parliament session is beginning. It needs to be raised because it is a key mainstream issue and not a mere distraction from the entertaining fringe of true believers with degrees from Dina Nath Batra Vidyapeeth.
'We are a country steeped in superstition. Our missile scientists perform pujas and break coconuts before test-firing a new Agni. Our space scientists take a model of Mangalyaan to Tirupati.'It will be delusional to dismiss Dina Nath Batra as a lone maverick and merely the slayer of Wendy Doniger's scholarship. He represents a new force in our political and intellectual discourse even if it is a force of old think. His power over the BJP's HRD ministry is now evident. This week a new precedent was set in New Delhi as German Ambassador Michael Steiner called on Batra, reasoning with him to calm down on his opposition to German language classes in schools. But you can see Sanskrit winning, in spite of all his diplomatic charm. At a moment like this, a gentle intervention was needed from a modernising prime minister. Something like, why should it be Sanskrit versus German? Sanskrit is a wonderful classical language and should be made attractive to all (and liberated from its pandit ji stereotype), and why just German, Indians must have a choice of many important foreign languages, French, Spanish and even Mandarin included. This is a globalised world, a globalising India and Modi is our most outgoing prime minister since Nehru. This is no time to go back to the depths of the old trenches of cultural and linguistic insecurities. This young India wants to go out and embrace the world, just as Modi does with his global peers. (Note meanwhile that the government of Haryana has already decided to seek Batra's advice on "modernising" its education system.)
This argument is not about an individual, but about a state of mind. Where you confuse rationality with tradition, curiosity with scripture. It gets more complicated. In 2001 I was among the many senior journalists on Atal Bihari Vajpayee's entourage to Iran. And it was every bit worthwhile, particularly as we all reached Persepolis, the ancient city wrecked by Alexander the Great. As we surveyed the ruins, an eminent RSS intellectual in the group started "educating" all of us on "history". He said, see, what a terrible man Alexander was. This is precisely what he wanted to do to India. But he was defeated by a minor Hindu king, Porus, whose real name was Paurush (manhood). He was fleeing India in fright, his army disintegrated, and died a forlorn man. At which point I tried to intervene saying that history was quite different, but was ignored. My much wiser friend, and strategic affairs pundit, C. Raja Mohan tapped me on the shoulder and said, don't argue with them, they confuse history with faith. His words come back to me often these days.
Because history has been a political and ideological football in India for long, you can probably understand why RSS intellectuals now want to get even with those of the Left, who reigned all these decades and brought in their own loaded, secular distortions. History can still survive robust disagreements and debate, even if it is often as irrational as arguing that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple. But a much bigger challenge arises when not just history, but even science is confused with faith. Which is the provocation for this week's National Interest.
Last week Home Minister Rajnath Singh nearly stole the headlines from Modi in Australia with his statement (in a speech on Hindi Divas) that physicist Werner Heisenberg had learnt his famed Uncertainty Principle from the Vedas. (It is a different matter that some over-enthusiastic spin-master in his ministry had not heard of Heisenberg and issued a press release calling it Eisenhower's Uncertainty Principle instead.) This is a tricky pattern of thinking.
It fits in with the larger, enduring mythology that anything being discovered by the Western world now had been developed in Vedic times already. Lord Ram returned with Sita and Lakshman in Pushpak Viman from Lanka to Ayodhya, so see, we had airplanes then. You talk about ICBMs with multiple warheads, Patriots which intercept incoming missiles, Strategic Defence Initiative, what were the "Shakti-bans" that Ram and Ravan traded routinely in the battle for Lanka? Or Arjun with his awful Kaurav cousins? Ramanand Sagar worked so hard to remind you of this "heritage" in his endless tele-serials. Never mind that today we can't even put together a reliable assault rifle for our troops.
Nobody is denying that our scriptures (Vedas, Upanishads) and epics (Ramayana, Mahabharata) are truly ancient, and also brilliantly capacious in their imagination and wisdom. It is likely that we imagined mechanised flight much earlier while our intellectual rivals, the Greeks and Romans, were still fitting giant bird wings to human forms, from Icarus to Phoenix. Of course Aryabhata and disciples visualised, debated and documented many astronomical facts and ideas for which wise Europeans were burnt at the stake or poisoned hundreds of years later. Possibly, someone even imagined plastic surgery, animal to human organ transplants, stem cell research, surrogate motherhood. But to say we already "had" all of these is not just funny, it is dangerous. We are a country steeped in tradition and superstition. Our missile scientists perform pujas and break coconuts before test-firing a new Agni. Our space scientists take a model of Mangalyaan to Tirupati to be blessed by Lord Balaji before the launch. If you also tell them they are simply replicating, if not reverse-engineering, what we already had millennia ago, it will be dangerous. Because many of them may not even contest it.
This is Modi's big challenge going ahead. He does have a modern, even a techie mind. But he and the ideological/cultural juggernaut propelling him also have delusions of ancient grandeur. The two, scriptural mythology and quest for modern new discovery, cannot co-exist. If there is one leaf Modi needs to take from Nehru's book, it is scientific rationalism.
MEANWHILE in Pune, at the feet of Aryabhata: I had the privilege last week to spend a few hours with Prof Jayant Narlikar, by far the most eminent Indian astrophysicist today and co-author of the Hoyle-Narlikar theory questioning Big Bang. He had built the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune University and his central garden has large statues of the greatest of all times: Newton, Einstein, Galileo and, most certainly, Aryabhata.
Narlikar is also among India's bravest and most thick-skinned rationalists. Even at 76, his eyes light up when you mention superstition and ancient beliefs. Nothing irritates him more than people confusing his science with astrology. The Pune phone book usually lists IUCAA as a centre for astrology.
To make a point, he says, he collected a couple of hundred horoscopes of the most brilliant student achievers and mentally-challenged children and gave them to India's most eminent astrologers. None was able to pick the right ones.
Narlikar says astrology is bunkum and that to call it Vedic is a travesty. In Vedic tradition, he says, there was no astrology, no Mangal ruining marriages, no Brahaspati spreading beneficence and no Shani messing it all up unless you presented the tribute of mustard oil and cash every Saturday. All of this, he says, came from Greece. Alexander had also brought along many "wise" men with his army, some stayed back and spread astrology, to which our ancestors, Hindu or not, Porus or Paurush, took so warmly. So whatever else, let's at least not blame our Vedas for the faults in our stars.
Follow the writer on Twitter @ShekharGupta

Humsafar A journey after the Marriage.

"Humsafar" is a Pakistani TV serial with a good script and dialogues aired in Indian
Television channel two years back (2011-2012). The story explores the trials and tribulations
of the married couple. 'Humsafar' which means companion is about their journey after the
marriage.

From Outlookindia

AP

The eternal amorist Mohan Bhagwat at an RSS meet in Bangalore

ESSAY: HINDUTVA

The Morality Tale That The Mahabharata Just Isn’t

Its epic transgressions surely cannot be the underpinning of the Sangh parivar’s Hindutva

SUMANTA BANERJEE

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The new chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research (appointed by the BJP-led government), Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, has promised to push research projects to rewrite ancient history based on the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. According to him, they are truthful accounts of historical events. But he should be careful when choosing the epics.
The stories of the Mahabharata, for instance, are often at odds with the Hindutva that the BJP government and its parent Sangh parivar preach. Although the votaries of Hindutva worship the epic’s heroes and heroines, the messages that most of the latter impart may not be suitable for the present government’s programme to educate our people in the “moral and cultural values” that they want to uphold in the name of Hindutva. In fact, the deities and mortals described in the eighteen volumes of this hefty tome had never once been designated by the term ‘Hindu’. The Mahabharata may turn out to be a rather uncomfortable quarry for the BJP ministers and Sangh parivar historians to dig up models to suit a Hindu-specific Indian ideal of morality and culture.
The just-replaced health minister Harsh Vardhan (a medical practitioner!) played a major role in this effort to create a behavioural pattern based on a supposedly “Indian moral culture”. In an interview to the New York Times, he is reported to have recommended abstinence from “pre-marital and extra-marital sex” as a better means of avoiding aids instead of using condoms, since such abstinence is “a part of Indian culture”. In yet another effort to reform the sartorial preferences of Indian women, a BJP minister of Goa, Sudhir Davalkar, warned: “Scantily dressed girls (do) not fit in our culture.” Plans are also afoot to revive ‘Indian culture’ by RSS institute Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Samiti which has laid down guidelines for writing history from our puranas, to cleanse the current history textbooks of “corrupt Western cultural influences”.

The Mahabharata’s heroines did not conform to the Hindu ideal of female chastity our ministers want our women to follow.

But these views and norms about sexual practices and female behaviour and attire that these venerable gentlemen are propagating and laying down as the one—and only—‘Indian culture’ sanctified by their Hindu religious tradition were flouted by the heroes and heroines of the Mahabharata itself. Most of the heroines did not set much store by the Hindu ideal of female chastity that our ministers would want our women to follow. Going by the explicit description of the beautiful contours of their bodies (quite visible behind their dress) that we find in the epic, they beat hollow the hip-hugging jeans-clad women that the Sangh parivar’s moral guardians are objecting to. As for the heroes of the Mahabharata, they merrily indulged in pre-marital and extra-marital relationships. And let us not forget that they and their children, who were born out of wedlock, were elevated to positions of superheroes.
Birth of the ancestors of Kurus and Pandavas: Without pre-marital and extra-marital sex, which Dr Harsh Vardhan and his party leaders blame as the main cause of our problems, they would not have had their heroes like Veda Vyasa (who wrote the epic), and the sons that he bred through adulterous relationships (Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura), and his grandsons (the five Pandavas). Let us listen for instance to the story of the birth of Veda Vyasa, as described in the Adi Parva of Mahabharata: One day the great sage Parashara, in the course of his pilgrimage, arrived on the shores of the Yamuna river and saw an extraordinarily beautiful woman with a charming smile on her lips, seeing whom he was affected by the excruciating desire of making love to her. The woman happened to be Matsyagandha (her name meaning ‘smelling of fish’, since she was the adopted daughter of a fisherman family), who used to ferry passengers in her boat across the river. When Parashara approached her with his desire, she expressed her inability to immediately satisfy him, drawing his attention to the large number of rishis (sages) waiting on both banks of the river for her to carry them across. Parashara immediately created a fog that immersed the area in darkness—so that the rishis could not see what he planned to do. Although impressed by Par­ashara’s miracle, Matsyagandha pleaded: “But I shall lose my virginity if I satisfy your desire. How can I then go back to my home, and live in society?” Parashara said: “If you satisfy me, I shall give you whatever you pray for...and res­tore your virginity.” Matsyagandha prayed: “Please let my body exude a sweet smell.” Having been granted that req­uest, she agreed to sleep with Parashara—and in due course, gave birth to a son who came to be known as Krishna Dwaipayana (meaning dark-skinned and born on an isl­and). Vyasa left home to be an ascetic, but reassured his mot­her that he would come back to her whenever she needed him.

The chirharan Was putting Draupadi on stakes any lesser sin?

It was through Kshetraja or the practice of producing children through extra-marital recourse that Pandavas were born.

Sometime later, his mother (now known as Satyavati, her body “sweet-scented” and her “virginity restored”—thanks to Parashar’s blessings) got married to a king called Shantanu. Through him, she gave birth to two sons—Chitrangad and Vichitravirya. After Shantanu’s death, Chitrangad was killed in a battle, and Vichitravirya ascended the throne. He married two sisters—Ambika and Ambalika (both daughters of a king). TheAdi Parva describes how Vichitravirya failed to produce any children, even “after spending seven years with the two queens in continuous vihar (amorous frolic), (following which) he fell victim to tuberculosis in his youth,” and died despite sincere efforts by his friends and doctors. The problem started now. How were the two childless queens expected to carry on the dynasty? Their mother-in-law Satyavati first requested her stepson Bhishma (her late husband Shantanu’s son by his first marriage) to impregnate the two young widows. When he refused, she summoned her own first son Vyasa (who had promised to help her whenever she needed his help)—who was willing to solve the problem. But Vyasa, having followed a rather earthy lifestyle in the forests all these years as an ascetic, looked quite hideous and repelling to the two dainty queens. After being persuaded by Satyavati, her eldest daughter-in-law Ambika agreed to welcome Vyasa to her bed. But then seeing his ferocious countenance from close quarters—dark skin, blood-red eyes and matted hair—she closed her eyes in fear. After completing his required role, Vyasa told his mother Satyavati that although a son would be born endowed with superhuman mental and physical powers, he would be born blind—because Ambika had committed the error of closing her eyes during his conception. That was why Ambika gave birth to the blind Dhritarashtra. In order to correct the effects of the error, Satyavati sought another grandchild in the family who would be perfect this time. She recalled her son Vyasa again, to impregnate the second daughter-in-law Ambalika. But Ambalika again, at one glance at Vyasa’s fearful visage, turned pale—and thus gave birth to Pandu (coloured yellow). Disappointed by getting another imperfect (discoloured) grandson, Satyavati summoned her son Vyasa to again impregnate her first daughter-in-law Ambika. This time, however, Ambika subverted Satyavati’s plans. Refusing to suffer the unwelcome “sight and smells” of the jungle-bred Vyasa, Ambika cheated him by dressing up one of her beautiful slave girls in her own ornaments and sending her to him. Unlike the two queens, this woman, who suffered from no scruples, made love to Vyasa with all abandon, and a happy Vyasa blessed her with the words: “You are henceforth free from slavery, and your son will become extraordinarily wise and extremely pious.” Thus was born Vidura, the most perfect and intelligent of all the three brothers (Adi Parva).

Birth of the Pandavas
The legacy of pre-marital sex, and the practice of producing children through the extra-marital recourse (of requesting or appointing another male to impregnate the wife or widow), known as ‘kshetraja’, continued even after the birth (through such means) of the ancestors of the dynasty that Mahabharata celebrates. It was only thanks to the custom of ‘kshetraja’ that all the later Pandava heroes were born—Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna and the other two inconspicuous brothers (Nakula and Sahadeva)—whom the Sangh parivar worships, and its ideologues are at pains to turn into ‘historical characters’. Let us begin with the story of their mother Kunti. The Mahabharata describes how Kunti, the virgin daughter of a king, satisfied the sage Durvasa when he came to their house as a guest, and obtained from him a blessing that allowed her to summon any god who could impregnate her with their power to produce their respective sons. A young and impulsive Kunti, in order to test the veracity of the blessing, summoned the sun god, who immediately appeared and demanded satisfaction of his desire to sleep with her. Through a cunning combination of persuasion, threat and charm, the sun god seduced a reluctant and fearful Kunti, promising to restore her virginity, and then disappeared in the skies. But Kunti found herself left in the lurch, when she gave birth to a son born of the sun god. Scared of facing social ostracism for her impetuous act, Kunti got rid of her first-born by throwing him into a river. Luckily, a family (belonging to the lower caste of charioteers) picked up the son and brought him up, enabling him to emerge as the powerful warrior Karna (Adi Parva).

Swami Nithyananda The ‘obliging’ godmen of the modern era

After having hidden that act of sexual indiscretion, Kunti reappeared on the scene as a princess, ready to choose her husband from among numerous royal candidates, through a custom called swayamvara (which allowed the woman to embrace a spouse of her own choice from an assembly of candidates). Will the present BJP government—which claims to restore the so-called Hindu traditions—dare to re-establish the custom of swayamvara? To come back to Kunti, in the swayamvara assembly, she tied the garland of flowers around the neck of Pandu, thus announcing her choice of him as her husband. They led a happy married life, till one day Pandu, during a hunting spree, interrupted the mating of a pair of deer by shooting at them with his arrows. The deer were actually a human couple. The husband, who was the son of a sage, had decided that day to take on the form of a stag and transform his wife into a deer, to savour the delights of animal sexuality perhaps! Angered by being stopped mid-way in his adventure, the sage’s son cursed Pandu, predicting that he would die if he ever tried to make love to his wife. An anguished Pandu requested Kunti to conceive through other means, in response to which she made use of Parashara’s old blessing—and summoned, one by one, the gods Dharma, Vayu and Indra, sleeping with whom she gave birth respectively to Yudhishthira, Bhima and Arjuna. Requested further by Pandu to help his other wife Madri to conceive, Kunti summoned the twin gods Ashwini Kumars, who impregnated Madri which led to the birth of the other two Pandavas—Nakula and Sahadeva. The above accounts are from the Adi Parva, the first volume of the Mahabharata—which the Sangh parivar ideologues cannot surely dismiss as figments of a Marxist imagination! What follows in the next 17 volumes of this fantastic epic is a cornucopia of romantic stories, secret intrigues and surreptitious love affairs (with which the main narrative of battles and wars are interspersed) that unfold a variety of sexual lifestyles and inter-caste/racial liaisons (which had made possible the birth of Vidura in the past, and the later romance between Bhima and the forest-girl Hidimba, or the marriage of Arjuna with the Manipur princess Chitrangada).

Since RSS ideologues revere Mahabharata’s characters, they should permit the emulation of their liberal lifestyles.

If consenting adults in India today seek to follow a similar pluralistic lifestyle of multifaceted and multi-integrated romantic relationships cutting across caste/racial/religious lines, it invariably invites violent opprobrium from the parivar. In the rural areas, in the name of preserving the purity of the multi-tiered Hindu caste system, its ideology of ‘Indian culture and tradition’ encourages the khap panchayats to lynch any couple daring to follow the example of Bhima and Hidimba, or excommunicate a modern Vidura as ‘illegitimate’! In the urban areas of India, the same ideology encourages a xenophobic, aggressive bias against people from the non-Hindi-speaking northeast—leading to the rape of today’s Chitrangadas of Manipur in the streets of national capital Delhi.
Sangh parivar sants and BJP politicians in the role of gods of the epics: As for the heroes and heroines of Mahabharata, the ideologues of the Sangh parivar may explain away their acts of pre- and extra-marital sex, inter-caste or inter-racial relationships, as blessed and sanctioned by the gods. But since those divine progenitors of the Pandavas—Dharma, Vayu and Indra—have failed to reappear in modern times, the Sangh parivar appears to be creating their human counterparts in the shape of godmen and MPs and mlas. We thus find characters like Asaram Bapu and his son Narayan Sai from north India, and Nithyananda from south India—all close to the parivar—taking on the role of gods to seduce their female devotees with the promise of divine salvation. They are facing criminal charges in the courts. Then, there are the BJP ministers and leaders, like Nihal Chand Meghwal (Union minister of state for chemicals and fertilisers), Kri­shnamurti Bandhi (BJP MLA from Chhattisgarh) and Madhu Chavan (BJP leader from Maharashtra) among many others—who have been accused of rape. They can perhaps be seen by the followers of Sangh parivar as reincarnations of the all-mighty rishis of the past (Parashara, Durvasa and others who could always get their own way by threats or curse), and as a privileged lot like them, can pick up any female of their choice, and—because of their present political clout—can silence their victims and their families with threats of elimination.
Given this reality, the present BJP-led government and its ideologues will have to make up their mind about the Maha­bharata. Since they revere the heroes and heroines of the epic, and want to prove that they were historical characters, they should permit the common citizens to emulate the liberal lifestyle that they led. But then, what happens to the Sangh parivar’s grandiose plan of creating “a morally pure Hindu” society populated by sexually constipated men and women? In order to overcome this embarrassing dilemma, the BJP government and its RSS mentors have two options. One, in obeisance to both the female and male deities and and mortals who are described in the epic as following a rather permissive sex life, they should scrap their own programme of imposing rules and restrictions for the man-woman relationship, ignore cases of pre-marital sex or relationships between consensual partners, and stop branding inter-religious liaisons like a Muslim boy’s love affair with a Hindu girl as ‘love jehad’. The other option is banning the Mahabharata in its original version altogether—so that the public does not have access to the full text. The RSS historians can bring out, instead, sanitised editions of the epic that blot out the explicitly described stories of the promiscuity of their deities and the birth of their heroes and heroines.

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(Sumanta Banerjee is a cultural historian who specialises in research into popular culture, particularly of the colonial period. He is the author of many books, including The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta.)