Flying back into JFK on Feb 24th after three weeks in India,
I became aware of how geography affects our lives. As we await the vernal
equinox in New York and the sun climbs higher to melt the ice and thaw life’s temporary
stasis, I reflect upon my recent travels.
Already hot, India is celebrating Holi, a carnivalesque festival of colors,
against the backdrop of debates about its contradictions. India is at once old
and young, prudish and relaxed, patriarchal yet Goddess worshipping, violent
yet full of the ideal of ahimsa, mind-bogglingly diverse yet bound by a mythic
unity. Musafir means guest in Romanian and traveler in
Arabic, Persian and Hindi/Urdu. It
perfectly captures my guest status as an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) and
the gypsy/Romani nature of my wanderings in my birthplace.
Indian Spring or Vasant was just around the corner when we
reached Kolkata. On Vasant Panchami, the fifth day of Magh, according to the
lunar calendar, we worship Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, by offering her
our books and musical instruments. My mother,
sister and I went to Kalighat that day and bowed to a dark Kali and a white
Saraswati, a sort of dance between night and day, and a kind of balancing interior
equinox so to speak. A few days later
when Indian courts endorsed the pulping of a book deemed controversial, I was revolted;
after all, as children if our feet accidentally touched any piece of paper, we
would automatically put it to our foreheads in deference to Saraswati. I still
do this in the US where such actions seem irrational to my children, but where the
freedom of expression is almost taken for granted.
It is not my intention to add to the barrage of writing
about Wendy Doniger. By her own account,
she is a ‘recovering orientalist’ who also accepts reincarnation, loves Shiva
and Durga, and when faced with her father’s death, she found: “The Hindu
understanding of death was a greater comfort to me then, more than any
Christian or Jewish texts had ever been.” I am pleased with the perspective of
Devdutt Puttnaik on this issue. His books on Indian traditions are a breath of
fresh air in the colonized world of Hindu Studies both by so called “insiders”
and “outsiders”. In a Facebook post, he wrote, “Been referring to Wendy's works
forever. A scholar whose views can make the uninitiated squirm and the
initiated smile.” See Devdutt’s interview here-
http://devdutt.com/articles/myth-theory/my-interview-with-wendy-doniger.html
After travelling through the eastern and southern most
reaches of India, including Devdutt’s Orissa, I want to evoke the cover image
of Wendy’s book, Krishna riding on a horse made of women, as a metaphor for
women’s journeys, interior and exterior. This scares people like Mr. Batra who
sued Wendy, but it is one of the favorite themes of Orissa painters! Try
imagining a vehicle both made of and full of women that set forth to see the
land that Doniger describes as a ‘cultural masterpiece.’ I describe India as
fundamentally “Gynocentric”, a Devi saturated land. In another post Puttnaik asks: “Funny, how
Shinto, Confucius, Tao, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism have to fit into structures
established by Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”
Many people protesting Wendy have been doing just that. Many
English educated Indians of my generation unconsciously embraced colonial
ideologies. Under its legacy of
impoverishment very few have studied India’s enormous intellectual and spiritual
traditions; by necessity the emphasis was mainly on vocational training. Orientalist
or not, British, European and later American scholars did so with the
dedication and rigor that makes you wonder if they were reincarnated desi souls.
As India achieves relative prosperity and true decolonization takes place, some
of our children have begun serious scholarship on India. “Objective” or not, someday,
like Simon Schama’s Story of the Jews,
we may see a magnum opus written by an “insider.” For now, we need to learn to
engage with a Jewish woman’s some time convoluted but breathtakingly wide and
funny reading of India without defensive posturing.
If you strolled through the Kolkata Book Fair unable to
extricate yourself from leafing through countless volumes, whether pulp fiction or learned
commentaries on Sanskrit texts, the irony of ‘hurt sentiments’ leading to pulping would make you want to
laugh out loud. Moreover, in the
National Museum gorgeous sculptures of women are magnificently free. 3rd Century BCE Bharhut panels and
other collections depict yakshis, goddesses, yoginis and lay women in perfect
harmony with male figures, divine or not. One cannot help wondering whether the
notion of progress inherent in linear time is some kind of delusion.
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| Bharhut panel |
It’s not an accident that Euro-American scholars of religion
throng to India; where else can one find every kind of religiosity in the world,
including variations of monotheisms along with innumerable manifestations of
dharmas? After Kali’s Kolkata and its bustling Book Fair, we flew to Agartala
in Tripura. The name Agartala can mean both under the fragrance of agar(a
perfumed tree), or a storehouse of agar. Tripura is a scented state in more
ways than one; pardon my bias for the state of my birth. Recently it has become
the most literate state in India and received accolades for governance; some of
my close relatives have been active in that transformation. Thanks to my
nephew’s magnanimity, we got to see the Tripureswari temple in Udaipur, about
an hour away from Agartala, bordering Bangladesh.
I see this temple in my mind’s eye as I remember our car(t) meandering
through Tripura’s lush forests and driven by a musical young policeman. I was
struck by the tombs of the turtles in the courtyard of this Shakta pitha, and
later as I read Haraprasad Shastri’s Bengali book Bouddhabidda, I wondered about the turtle connection with Buddhist
Bengal. Goddess Tripurasundari is one of
the ten tantric deities in the pantheon of Dasamahavidyas, and she is at the
center of Sri Vidya tradition of the South. What is she doing in this hill
state so far away from the Sri Chakra worshipping South? My journey from here
to Bhagavati Lokambika temple in Kerala attests to India’s mythic unity via the
body of the Great Goddess.
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| Turtle samadhi |
A cozy 4 hour train journey brought us to Dharmanagar where
I was born but never lived. My father returned to his homeland from UP and stayed
there until his death in 2009. Sitting on the steps of his Kali temple, I
wondered about our marvelous journeys through time and space, life and death.
Having enjoyed the warm hospitality of cousins in Tripura, we were now ready to
go on a pilgrimage to Orissa. My mother had expressed her wish to visit
Jagannath Dham, and I was pleased to discover that a young niece, a nursing
student in Bhubaneswar, would accompany us on this visit especially since my
sister had to return to work in Canada.
In Bhubaneswar we saw a magnificent Lingaraja temple that is
more than a thousand years old. Here Shiva is worshipped as Harihara, a
combined form of Shiva and Vishnu. A Swayambhu Linga resides in this temple; I
could only imagine the splendor of the temple during the upcoming Shivaratri
festivals. We also faced the infamous tyranny of the pandas (pilgrim’s priests)
both here and at Sakshigopal temple on our way to Puri. Fortunately the story
of Krishna bearing witness to a boy’s love warmed our hearts. Raja panda who
was accompanying us on the trip made up for the momentary nuisance of other
pandas. Raja is evidence that innocuous looking men have extraordinary
knowledge of the tradition and are both enlightened and erudite behind their
customary pilgrim herding masks.
Raja gently held my octogenarian mom’s hands as he led us
through the intricate rituals at this most famous and ancient tirtha about
Darubramha (wood as ultimate reality) where gods are essentially tree stumps!
Krishna resides here with his brother and sister and is also the Buddha.
English speaking people unconsciously invoke him when using the word
Juggernaut. Thanks to my friend Frederique Apffel-Marglin’s work in Orissa, I
knew of this temple’s sophisticated traditions; Raja’s account attested to the
temple’s tantric primacy. Eating delicious Bengali food at Bhajahari Manna’s while
listening to the sound of waves at nearby Puri beach was a delightful prelude
to heading out to Konark on the shores of Chandrabhaga.
A stony eloquence envelopes this magnificent Kalachakra artefact
about time’s relentless circularity. Built as a chariot, the Sun temple of
Konark like Khajuraho embarrasses modern Hindus. Like Krishna’s feminized horse, most
intricately carved women on its walls signify a different relationship to the human
body in the Indic imagination. Our guide told us that the erotica is meant to remind
the pilgrim to leave his fantasies outside as one enters the sanctum sanctorum. He also gave other
many layered interpretations including efforts of nudging people towards a
worldly life during Buddhist era’s tendency toward monasticism.
For practical purposes, Konark was the black pagoda and
Jagannath Puri the white pagoda as landmarks for European sailors, markers of
yin/yang complementarity. On our way back to Bhubaneswar, we stopped at Dhauli
where Emperor Ashoka renounced violence and embraced the Buddha after the
devastating Kalinga war. The stupa or
the peace pagoda there was built by Nichiren Buddhists of Japan who predict the
return of Buddhism to India. Serene
images of Shakyamuni there comforted our travel weary souls as we prepared for
our next flight. We were returning to
Bangalore, the bustling and the most technophile city in India, where we had
lived for two years.
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| Buddha at Dhauli |
An array of old friends and relatives delighted us there. After
leaving my mom at my aunt’s place when I waited alone at the train station to
go to Trissur, I felt primeval India’s grand magnetism. The next morning around 5, as I was being
driven silently by a Malayalam speaking man, I recalled when I had first
visited Kerala. Driving down the narrow streets
toward Kanyakumari on Dec 31st, 1983, I had imagined flowing down India’s
rivers toward the ocean; the root of the word Hindu is a river after all. Waking from my reverie, I soon reached the
town of Kodungallur where my guru Khepababa Kulavadhuta Satpurananda was presiding
over Shakta debates and investigating Buddhist tantric roots of a Bhadrakali
temple.
Legend has it that Elango Adigal wrote his Shilappadikaram in this town, and one
can see images of Kannagi on its walls.
I saw the turtle pillars in the temple courtyard and connected the
turtle samadhis in the Tripursundari temple far to the north and east. I stood
in front of the temple lake full of lotuses and I felt India’s most ancient
pulse. I sat at the meditation session led by Khepababa and once again realized
how the mystery and expansion of interior life that radically changes one’s
outlook on mortality is a gift of the Mother. Vajrayana Buddhist texts and Kali
centered Shakta ways teach that she is experienced as Shunya, emptiness of the
womb, in deep meditation. She bestows
that radical non-duality that suffuses lived life and our fragile bodies with a
transcendental grandeur that no patriarchal ideology can ever take away from
women.
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| Lotus Lake |
It was time to return home in the US where a different
reality coexists with pervasive Indian Yoga and increasingly popular meditation
practices. In a global world of exchange, I, an accidental student of religions,
find inhospitality to foreign scholars reprehensible, however complex the
politics of scholarship may be. Young Indians are vibrant and vocal about all
issues and are searching for alternatives to their country’s corruption ridden
ways. My journey assured me of the relevance of its age old visions.
As people throw color at each other this Holi and reenact
Radha and Krishna’s love, may they remember with renewed energy India’s
colorful diversity. Wendy might have written an alternative history of “the
Hindus” but the land has always been home to all shapes and hues of religions
protected by the Mother who shelters all.
May the new generation remember that the Goddess has always been both
Shakti (Hindu) active principle and Prajna (Buddhist), receptive wisdom. If we
forget her compassion, we may endanger the culture in ways that no colonial
encounter has ever been able to do.
