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Thank you, Shaheda and Captsunshine.
Shaheda, as far as I am concerned, the law will work only to a certain extent – in a country like India where there is huge corruption in law enforcement agencies, and even the courts are compromised in favour of the privileged. (For example, Uttar Pradesh has just enacted a law which effectively criminalises interfaith marriage between Muslim boys and Hindu girls, and people are getting arrested.) The slow climb will start with the building of awareness – educating people what it means to be “Indian” (not Hindu or Muslim).
The Britishers, then the Congress and now the BJP exploit the divisions within the society, making one group hate the other, based on false narratives. We need to remove these false divisions and make people see reality. In India, the only division is between the privileged and the underprivileged.
I would suggest that the leftists (the genuine ones, not the career communists) start doing ground-level activism at the rock bottom. Now, that area has been usurped by the Maoists who encourage armed revolution- a sure recipe to disaster. Instead, the onus must be on providing basic services to the poor and education.
At the level of the middle class, youngsters must be apprised of the false narratives they are consuming from their parents, peers and politicians. If possible, non-politicised discussion forums must be created wherever possible. And the advantages of a scientific mindset should be disseminated to all and sundry, to get India out of the morass of superstition it is wallowing in.
My take on what ails India, and where liberals go wrong. Caste comes into it.
I am writing a blog post on the subject. I will articulate my ideas there and link it here.
Stephen and Shaheda,
The difference between the Indian caste system and other such systems is that caste the identity on which India is built. Dismantle it: and the country and the culture disappear.
Like all left-wing liberals, Nehru was anti-caste and at the same time, tolerant towards religion. This does not help. To rid India of caste, one will have to jettison a huge part of the mythos that makes the country tick.
It will be like an operation which would remove the tumour and kill the patient.
We need to find a different way.
Nandu.
CaptSunshine,
My argument is even more basic than that. Of late, I have come to the conclusion that Hinduism itself is a fictitious construct. What we have is a hotch-potch of beliefs: pagan, monotheistic, atheistic and whatnot.
I find each of these beliefs fascinating. However, Campbell’s assertion of an overarching philosophy for the whole is erroneous. It is based on the Enlightenment Era fiction of the “Vedic Civilisation”.
While we should study the Upanishads, Campbell makes the mistake of marking it as the heart of Indian philosophy. I would say it is only a part of an impossibly varied whole.
So what you call as “opposition” to the standard is opposition only if one accepts the other as standard. I do not.
India had a pluralistic society at odds with itself. The so-called “tolerance” was never there. Each group was intolerant of others.
And the poisonous caste-system is what still defines our society. And this is not directly related to the four Varnas, as correctly said by Thapar. But untouchability and caste hierarchy is undoubtedly the product the Vedic appropriation of the subcontinent’s culture.
We need to dismantle, deconstruct, destruct and rebuild.
Robert, James and Stephen,
I am terribly busy this week teaching a web course. So I don’t have time to write the really long response I’d like to, but just so that you won’t think I have disappeared, here are a few quick points.
1. If I understand correctly, Campbell considers both the Jungian concept of universal symbols and the historical dispersion of mythology across the globe as equally important – and I agree. However, in India, I consider a third process has been at work – bottom-up integration. We had a very diverse pagan mythology scattered across the subcontinent. Most of it is rife with beautiful and frightening symbolism, especially of the mother Goddess and the snake. What the Vedic religion has done is to integrate and subsume all this under their pantheon – make a universal myth, at the same time keeping the regional diversity. So it would be hard-put to find a central theme in our mythical landscape.
The beautiful philosophy of the Upanishads, IMO, is a much later development. Visionary seers delved among all these patently absurd but impossibly beautiful metaphors, to find how it can all be tied together at the level of the human psyche. Tat Twam Asi – Thou Art That – was the result. And I do consider that a valid concept, even though I lean more towards the Buddha’s philosophy nowadays.
2. Most of Indian myth, due its unbroken historical lineage, has elements of the creative and the political elements intertwined. For examples, Asuras (demons) can be considered the unfulfilled parts of the psyche in a Jungian reading: at the same time, they can be considered the demonised enemies of the myth-makers’ Vedic religion. (The Book of Demons by Nanditha Krishna is a good primer on Indian demons, BTW.) I find this dichotomy fascinating, and have come to believe that most myths have multiple origins, and they have become too intertwined to separated out. However, this makes them ripe for political use – something which, in unscrupulous hands, is deadly.
I think one of the tasks of Indian intellectuals today is to look at our myths dispassionately, and separate out the strands of the experience of the numinous from the purely sociological elements. This will teach the people how to integrate myth into their lives while keeping it apart from the political arena – a separation of the Church and the State at the Jungian level. I am planning a blog post on this.
James and Stephen –
I have gone through your comments, and I feel that I have not made myself as clear as I would like to.
Firstly – what Joe Campbell, and other Westerners thought of a “Indian” philosophy, was largely a manufactured one, gathered from various sources. The monolithic Vedic civilisation actually didn’t exist. Dorothy M. Figueira, in her book Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity, talks about how a largely mythical India had been constructed by the Enlightenment intellectuals as a reaction to Christian fundamentalism. (You can read my review of the book here.) This is not to deny that the Upanishads existed – just to point out that these thoughts applied most probably to a very small portion of the society, while the majority lived ignorant (and largely miserable) lives, believing blindly in the karma of their previous births as the reason for their current station in life. (It made a remarkably stable system. Even now, the caste lines are being shamelessly exploited by politicians. Here is an example of the social function of myth resisting all attempts at democratic reform!)
Secondly – all the symbols, I feel, are highly personal. We approach myth through the filters of our own personas. They are remarkably similar, but all said and done, it’s just a way of firing one’s imagination. I subscribe to the concept of the Anatman, the non-soul, that the Buddha propounded – more in tune with the modern concept of self-awareness than the Brahman of the Upanishads.
Thirdly – I find the manufactured Vedic myth being used more and more by the Hindu right, in frightening similarity to what Hitler did with the Teutonic myth – and it’s very easy with a population which is extremely relgious. Unless the concept of Indian religiosity is rescued from the Vedic straightjacket and taken back to its scattered pagan roots, I am afraid we may seem something very like Nazi Germany in India in the future.
I have just glanced through your replies, James and Stephen. I will give detailed replies later, after going through them at leisure. 😊
Rather late to the party, and commenting without reading the other comments in detail – so please, I may be repeating a point which someone else may have raised.
One: I have come to the conclusion that the caste system is endemic to India. It’s not an aberration; it’s what defines society. And it’s spread across all religions – a Dalit is a Dalit, whether Hindu, Christian or Muslim.
Two: Manusmriti is a law book. It’s connection to myth is very tenuous, just the mention of the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda at the beginning. It’s a toxic, casteist and misogynist document, which often contradicts itself. It’s also horrendously boring. (I read the whole thing in the original Sanskrit. My Sanskrit is pretty rusty, so it took me six months.)
However, I seriously doubt whether castes delineated in the document were ever seriously practised. The permutations and combinations are too numerous. What it does is, lay down the laws for the four castes – it talks about outcasts only incidentally.
Three: Even more than the Manusmriti, it is the moral justification given to caste in the Bhagavad Gita which is more revealing. Unlike the Manusmriti, this text is considered as revealed scripture by most Hindus, and it reinforces the caste model of Manusmriti (especially Chapter 12). However, the Gita is very uneven in its structure – lofty philosophy and evocative poetry mixed with didactic preaching – that one feels justified in thinking it has been bowdlerised at some point of time.
I am reading all your replies, guys… not replying because I am still mulling the question over. Seems to me there is something, some meaning, hidden in what we in the industry call the “man-machine interface”. It has changed a lot from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times assembly line behemoth to a stage where we are hard-put to define where man ends and where machine begins. I have to think on it, or let it go. Maybe the insight will come by itself.
Thanks, Stephen! As for how I read the book so fast… well, after some time I tried to stop analysing and went ahead with the flow: had I tried to “understand” what the author had written, I guess I would have been stuck.
It is like watching Kathakali, classical stylised drama in Kerala. If I want to understand the meanings of all the gestures and facial expressions, I would run out of the auditorium. With myth, you go with the experience, and that is what I did with this book.
I will return to it at later dates, I am sure, to dig up more meanings.
Cheers
Nandu.
Yes, Stephen, I found out that he has done it for India too. Goes on my TBR right away!
BTW, see below my review of the book:
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What can one write about a book which defies all definition? For Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is such a book. It could be called a treatise on Greek mythology; a creative retelling of the Greek myths; and I think it has also been pigeonholed as a novel. It is all of these, and it is none of these. Whatever you call these approximately four hundred densely-packed pages of amazing prose, you can be sure of one thing: it is sometimes translucent and uplifting, sometimes opaque and frustrating: but always, always, it is irresistibly enchanting – like the Greek myths themselves.Calasso has taken on the Herculean task of trying to capture the essence of the whole of the Greek civilisation, including its culture, its language, its philosophy and its history, in a rambling tour across time and space. In this, he has thrown his road maps to the winds. Calasso jumps from myth to myth with a suddenness resembling jump cuts in an avant-garde movie, while he talks about mythology, linguistics, local customs, and philosophy often in the same breath. It is as though Joseph Campbell is talking to you, using the techniques of William Faulkner.
To be truthful – this is not a book for the newbie. Unless you are up-to-date on your mythology, you are going to be confused (a person like me who is relatively well-read in the Greek myths, was lost many a time). However, if you are a myth junkie, this book will pull you in and hold you spellbound, though even then, it won’t be smooth sailing all the way.
The unique thing about the Greek Pantheon is that the Gods are all very near to mankind. They are just superior beings, that is all. There is absolutely no morality – the stories are full of rape, incest, sodomy, ritual mutilation, dismemberment and even necrophilia. Zeus, the supreme god, himself is the chief abductor and rapist. Throughout the book, the author stresses these themes as they are repeated across the tales, time and again; breaking and melding, splitting and reforming, as one story becomes many and many become one.
No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.
All the favourite gods are here – the intellectual Apollo and the passionate Dionysus; Athena, the eternal virgin and Aphrodite, lust personified; Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Hades… all ruled over by Zeus and Hera. So also are the heroes, who by slaying monsters, assimilate them; Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, Achilles and the wily Odysseus. They play out their eternal drama in the heavens, as well as on the earth in the form of rituals. Because in Greece, the gods are always nearby.
But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed.
The book begins with Europa being carried off by Zeus in the form of bull; in the last chapter, we find her brother Cadmus in search of her. Instead, he ends up saving Zeus from the monster Typhon – a leftover from the earth religions, before the gods of Mount Olympus took over – by the use of music to distract the monster. As a reward, Zeus promises him Harmony, the love child of Aphrodite and Ares, as wife. However, he is unable to recover Europa, and thus unable to return home as that was the condition he left his country. So Cadmus founds his own city on Thebes.
Why is Cadmus important? Because, according to legend, it was he who brought the alphabet to Greece. And Harmony’s name itself symbolises what she stands for. Therefore even when Cadmus moves out of his country with his wife, a defeated man, he can be gratified about a life well spent.
Cadmus had brought Greece “gifts of the mind”: vowels and consonants yoked together in tiny signs, “etched model of a silence that speaks” – the alphabet. With the alphabet, the Greeks would teach themselves to experience the gods in the silence of the mind, and no longer in the full and normal presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage. He thought of his routed kingdom: of daughters and grandchildren torn to pieces, tearing others to pieces, ulcerated in boiling water, run through with spits, drowned in the sea. And Thebes was a heap of rubble. But no one could erase those small letters, those fly’s feet that Cadmus the Phoenician had scattered across Greece, where the winds had brought him in his quest for Europa carried off by a bull that rose from the sea.
Stephen, I am savouring it slowly – like vintage single malt scotch. Oh, can the man write! I hope someone does it for Indian mythology.
Michael, you have to read it.
I love the way he intertwines all the elements of myth – its relation to language, to rituals, to cosmogony and to history. And you won’t find the joints anywhere when one melds into the other! I found his analysis of Achilles masterly – and I am getting wonderful thoughts on how much he resembles Bheeshma of the Mahabharatha. I might write a blog post on it.
Cheers
Nandu.When we had to come back suddenly from the Middle East in 2016, my wife built a library for me in our house, which serves as my office too, now. Most of the time, I am ensconced here.
Books help me to escape the sense of claustrophobia of being imprisoned; I can travel anywhere, to any time, to past or future, or to worlds and times that never were. So I am relatively comfortable, spending my time reading, writing and thinking.
Cheers
Nandu.
