Classical heritages: Databases of memory
TRS Sharma
Usually translated as ‘soul’, this everyday yet metaphysical word has a complex and ancient etymology. In terms of possible cognates, we have the Anglo-Saxon aefm meaning ‘breath or soul’; the Old High German aatum and Modern German atem for ‘breath’ and, more generally, the foundational principle of life and sensation. In many Indian languages today, the word atma functions as both an independent term and as a primary or base word that readily lends itself to prefixes and suffixes that make compound words.
As an independent base word, the word atma constitutes an abstract concept yielding several meanings. It is multi-ordinal and can mean any number of things depending upon the context: breath, self and soul, spirit and essence are the main contenders in this respect. Historically, the word atma often appears to shuttle between two prominent schools of thought in ancient Indian metaphysics, namely, the pluralists (the nyaaya vaisheshika school) and the monists (the vedantic school). Its meanings thereby proliferate, enriching the vocabulary and cultures of several Indian languages.
Vedic thought (c. 1500–2000 BCE) often postulated God as one reality without any second, a universal being (sat) or Brahman, an ultimate reality that comprises the atma of the entire universe. The problem, however, is: how is this abstract notion of atma realized? Here both Vedanta and some Buddhist schools agree that the atma can be realized only via the route of negation: ‘not this, nor this’ (neti, neti).
In this somewhat frustrating, if logically sound, context, the Kaṭho Upanishad (iii 3.3) provides us with a vivid metaphor to comprehend the mystery that atma constituted in the Vedic canon. It visualizes the atma or soul as riding in a chariot, the body being the chariot, the intellect the chariot driver, the mind the reins and the senses horses. This famous metaphor presents atma as a human experiencer endowed with body, mind and intellect as well as the senses.
Following this brief excursus into atma as a singular base word, we turn now to the play of affixes. As mooted earlier, atma is an all-weather term, lending itself easily to the use of both prefixes and suffixes. With prefixes, we have already mentioned antaraatman (the soul within); and then there is paramaatman (the supreme soul, usually translated as ‘God’). It is also important to note that such uses are not in the least esoteric but are part of ordinary parlance in many Indian languages. When it comes to suffixes, the base word atma lends itself even more easily to the formation of compound words. A few of these are listed here: aatmajnaanam (self-knowledge), aatmatattvam (the true nature of the soul), aatmadarshana (to behold oneself), aatmanivedanam (offering oneself) and so on (see V. S. Apte for a fuller list of these highly generative compound terms).
References
Apte, V. S. Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidaas, 1970.
Chinmayananda, Swami, ed. Kathopanishad. Madras: Chinmaya Publications, 1976.
Ahimsa (Ahinsā/hinsā/satya/asatya/śānti)
Gangeya Mukherji
This cluster of related concepts forms the spine that holds up an ethical system developed over a long period on the Indian subcontinent. Today, these words are commonplace in the domain of both secular and religious discourse.
To begin with the concepts of ahimsa and satya, these appear on the etymological plane to exist in a manifestive relationship. Of the two, satya (truth) is the more fundamental quality derived from the root sat, which translates to ‘that which exists’ or ‘that which is virtuous’. Accordingly, satya may be defined as ‘that which generates welfare’. The manifestations of satya, by convention, included the virtues of equality or non-discrimination, self-restraint, clarity, equanimity, renunciation, forgiveness, mercy and, prominently, ahimsa. The public concept of satya, currently in common use as truthfulness, or rather fact-based truthfulness, is conveyed in the secondary meaning of vachic satya, meaning uttered truth.
The etymological root of ahimsa derives from the Sanskrit root hims, which refers to physical injury, including of the fatal kind, and thus leads to a more nuanced and accurate interpretation of a-hinsā as physical non-injury. Beginning with the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE), the Brahmanic tradition profusely categorized and explained the pair of words hinsā and ahimsa. Over time, the main sense of this coupled concept came to be defined in Brahmanic, Jain and Buddhist epistemology primarily in terms of killing and non-killing, even though an astonishingly detailed classification and discussion concerning these terms exists in the texts of all three traditions. The range of definitions conveying both the variety of perspective and the philosophical and literary significance associated with the two terms illustrates their profound and continuing significance in the discourse of the time. The Jabaladarshana Upanishad, or instance, describes physical, mental and linguistic hinsā in terms of the actions committed in contravention to Vedic admonition. According to the Jain tradition, hinsā primarily entails hurting the life principle, although any action undertaken without passion and attachment and adhering to scriptural norms is exempt from the sin of hinsā even if it causes bodily hurt or loss of life. Texts in Jainism also regard internal purification, detachment and renunciation as amounting to ahimsa. Buddhist texts in Pali refer to vihimsa (injury) and avihamsa (non-injury), mainly in terms of mental violence, rather than hinsā-ahimsa, whereas the Pali phrase panatipata veramani is used to state the injunction against the killing of living beings.
Śānti, on the other hand, is a mental state. It obeys no explicit injunction to kill or not kill but has, rather, been etymologically described in Sanskrit as the quenching of passion and anger, and the faculty of transcending pain and bliss, and being content with that which one possesses or does not possess. In its later and more current sense of peace, śānti is a quality or condition which facilitates a deep inner calm.
Discussions on the subject of war and violence only further underline the complexity of the question of ahimsa, most crucially regarding its desirability and viability in matters of state. As mentioned above, even avowedly pacifist Jain and Buddhist principles state exceptions to the norm of ahimsa under particular conditions, approximating to the classic position of the Bhagavad Gita in the epic Mahabharata regarding war, and even extending to justification of retributive violence, instantiated, for instance, in the first-century Mahaparinirvana Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, the third-century Uttaradhyayana Sutra and the eighth-century Brihatkalpa Bhasya in the Jain canon.
Non-violence and public truth, notwithstanding their elevated textual position as ethical touchstones, nevertheless, remained quite as elusive as practicable public ideals in Indian history as in the rest of the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, M. K. Gandhi insisted that satya and ahimsa were fundamental to the moral order of society and the only way to individually achieve the highest of human goals: śānti in life and thereafter the liberation of the soul (mokṣha). The substantial debate on ahimsa among theoreticians during the Indian national movement witnessed effective critique, by Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore especially, of the violence of extremism or revolutionary terrorism animatedly presented by thinker-activists such as M. N. Roy. Counter-critiques centred around Gandhi’s allegedly ambivalent attitude towards the relationship of non-violence, religion and state formation, Tagore’s ambiguous position on social change and also the analyses of the innate violence rather than peaceability of the Hindu tradition. In this connection, it is worth noting how strenuously Gandhi rejected the notion of the separation of public and private morality, as he did the notion that the working of politics broadly, and government generally, required an essential element of untruth, highlighted by Kautilya’s Arthashastra in ancient India and in ancient Rome as arcana imperii or the mystery of government. Thus, the Gandhian idea of society and politics has today come to be acknowledged as a particularly Indian achievement.
In modern India, undiminished and even growing public fascination with muscular nationalism and protest has, on the one hand, fostered scant respect for civic law and, on the other, contributed to the acceptability of both Naxalism and majority vigilantism. However, it must be simultaneously noted that the ideals of transparent government and honest democracy have drawn abiding inspiration from the enduring concepts of satya and ahimsa. The robust and long-standing debates around these concepts guided the highest traditions of the Indian freedom movement and the early years of the Indian state and remain values that individuals across units of governance and society can still actively draw on as they work towards justice and reform as well as against the untrammelled exercise of political and legal privilege.
References
Houben, Jan E. M. and Karel R. Van Kooij, eds. Violence Denied: Violence, Non-Violence and the Rationalization of Violence in South Asian Cultural History. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999.
Tahtinen, Unto. Ahimsa: Non-Violence in Indian Tradition. Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1976.
Mohini Mullick
One of the most intriguing concepts in the Indian philosophical arsenal, artha is primarily known as one of the four purusarthas (goals of human life), as defined in the Dharmashastras (texts relating to dharma [duty]).
Interestingly, the word artha forms part of the very word purusartha. In many Indian languages today, it is actually a word the meaning of which is ‘meaning’, a point adumbrated a couple of paragraphs later here. More traditionally, the meaning of artha was suggestive of the fact that all human lives have/ought to have certain purposes, whether or not these purposes are hierarchically arranged. When unpacked, artha in its original sense refers to the entire range of the material purposes of human life – but primarily to the acquisition of wealth and well-being. One might conclude from this that it is near tautological in the Indian tradition to consider the garnering of wealth as the goal of human life. Yet, this is clearly not the case. The author of the canonical Arthashastra may, understandably, demur but most commentators agree that the other goals of kama (love and desire), dharma and mokṣha (liberation) are in fact superior to the goal of material aspiration and aggrandizement. So, it goes to the everlasting credit of ancient Indian thinkers that they refused to shy away from the realities of human psychology.
In popular as well as traditional belief, the social arrangements envisaged in the varnashramadharma (stages of life) give due respect to the householder or provider, who must necessarily pursue artha before he (the unmarked subject here is almost inevitably male) withdraws into a life of contemplation. A king or ruler’s primary purushartha is also artha, since he is responsible for the welfare of his people, which includes their security. In modern parlance, we may say that in the classical notion of artha, economics and politics belong broadly to the same register at the conceptual level. Whether there is perhaps a lesson to take away from this piece of ancient wisdom remains a moot point.
What then is the relation between these two senses, political and economic – not to mention a third to which we will advert below – of artha? Clearly, the common element is the other-directedness of the term, as both goal and as material gain. Indeed, the third and most salient use of artha, as the meaning of a word/any articulation in language, seems to confirm this hypothesis. For an object is indeed the object (goal) of the word. More graphically, one might say that the word takes aim at an object: the word ‘dog’, for example, directs attention to an object outside of oneself. This very connotation of artha as meaning has deep implications for Indian epistemology and, of course, for the philosophy of language today.
The major work in Indian classical literature on the topic is clearly the Arthashastra of Kautilya (c. second century BCE to third century CE). In this work, Kautilya argues for the primacy of artha as a goal of individual life, of the life of the state and of society at large, all of which revolve around the idea of material well-being/welfare. For him, artha is the root of dharma and its fruit is kama. When pursued in the right manner, therefore, the achievement of artha is the foundation of universal success in life or sarvarthasiddhi.
Given modern moral and religious sensibilities in contemporary India and across the world, where it is often appropriate to speak in politically correct terms of shunning material values while pursuing them vigorously in practice, artha may as a concept appear to be relegated to the textbooks of economics or as an ordinary word just meaning ‘meaning’. It is, however, one of the richest notions that Indian thought has produced, insinuating itself not only in the economic and the political realms but also pervading linguistic theory and indeed the very fabric of Indian society.
References
Olivelle, P. and D. R.Davis , eds. The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmasastra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Rangarajan, L. N. Kautilya: The Arthashastra. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.
Lakshmi Subramaniam
The pair words ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ are normally associated with the people and languages of the Indian subcontinent. Since the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit and the Vedas by orientalist scholars like William Jones in the eighteenth century, the categories Aryan and Dravidian have constituted the staple of controversy. Most of these heated debates concern the ‘original homeland’ of the Indo-European-speaking peoples, the ‘peopling’ of the Indian subcontinent and the interactions between language groups and communities.
The label ‘Indo-Aryan’, roughly synonymous with ‘Indo-European’, is a language label that should not be confused with a racial label, according to Romila Thapar. It encompasses the complex historical experience of migration and settlement by Indo-European language groups who deployed the Sanskrit language for the ritual and poetry of the Vedic culture dating to the period approximately between the middle of the second millennium BCE and 600 BCE. Referred to in the Rig Veda as Arya Varna (a self-designating epithet) and Dasa Varna (an ‘other’ designating term, which is sometimes translated as ‘slave colour’ or race and sometimes as ‘original’ inhabitants), thus underline, according to some scholars, a racial interpretation of the term Aryan. As Thapar argues, however, there were elements of mediation in all such encounters: the Indo-Aryan speakers negotiated with local inhabitants and the marks of these negotiations are evident in language practices across the subcontinent. Referring to a linguistic study of Vedic Sanskrit words, where a number of terms associated with agriculture come from proto-Dravidian or Austro-Asiatic words, she expressly rejects the association of race exclusively with language and points out the dangers of overstating the racial distinction between the Aryas (newcomers adhering to Vedic culture) and Dasas (the indigenous peoples).
Thapar’s analysis is largely a response to nineteenth-century European scholarship on race and language as well as a critique of nationalist Indian claims that Aryans were indigenous to the subcontinent. A turning point in this history was that of burgeoning Orientalist scholarship and William Jones’s startling observations on the similarities between Sanskrit and the other classical languages of Europe. This prompted Jones to suggest that there must have been an early proto-group of people, who spoke the ur-languages from which Indo-European languages evolved. For a short time during the eighteenth century, India was envisaged as the original homeland of the Indo-European language peoples and as the cradle of human race. However, following Max Müller, many nineteenth-century scholars argued that the Aryans originated in Central Asia, with one branch migrating to Europe and the other to India. These settlers were the pioneers of the Vedic civilization and poetry. They were perpetually engaged in conflict as they subordinated the original inhabitants through the second millennium BCE and introduced their new Indo-European language(s). Vedic poetic expression in Sanskrit referred to Dasas as Dasyus, counterposing them with Aryas and thereby initiating a preliminary understanding of the occupational division in society that eventually solidified around notions of caste and fixed taboos against intermarriage between the allegedly fair-skinned Aryas and dark-skinned Dasas. Max Mueller often associated language with race but primarily as a device to differentiate Aryans (peoples who spoke Sanskrit and maintained caste rules) from non-Aryans (who spoke a number of different languages). In this pervasive narrative, the latter peoples were seen to inhabit the region south of the Vindhyas, especially the peninsula, and were speakers of languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Kodagu, Toda and so on. Of these ‘Southern’ languages, Tamil was estimated to possess the most extensive literature, to stand out as the most original and, in its ‘pure’ state, as having very little resemblance to Sanskrit.
The Dravidian proof is associated with Madras orientalists like F. W. Ellis and the missionary-linguist Robert Caldwell whose scholarly endeavours with local collaborators established a ‘Dravidian’ family of languages that enjoyed a historical unity and had non-Sanskritic origins. New linguistic analysis suggests that the Dravidian family (consisting of eighty language varieties) is almost 4,500 years old and certainly in evidence before the beginning of the Indo-European/Āryan migrations. Whether or not these speakers were associated with the Indus Valley civilization is hard to establish, however.
References
Thapar, Romila. The Aryan Recasting Constructs. Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2008.
Trautmann, Thomas. Conversations in Colonial South India: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Sanjay Palshikar
Asmita connotes the interrelated ideas of a sense of identity, of pride and the sense of being distinct. A word of Sanskrit origin, and now a recognizable part of the political discourse in some regions – such as, for example, Gujarat – the entry of the word asmita into some of the modern Indian languages seems to have been late. Molesworth’s Marathi-English Dictionary (1857) does not include it, and in Gujarati, asmita was brought into use only by K. M. Munshi in the early twentieth century. In Bengali (or Bangla), the poet Sudhin Datta (1901–1960) used the word to signify ‘the sense of specific existence’, but unlike in present-day Gujarat, the word gained little currency then. The present popularity of the word may have partly to do with its invocation, first by Chimanbhai Patel during his second term as the chief minister of Gujarat and later by Narendra Modi. Though they belonged to different political parties, they both projected Gujarat’s vikas (development) through vigorously pursued mega projects as their declared goal. Within this political rhetoric, whoever opposed these projects was seen as being against the asmita (the pride, the distinctive identity) of Gujarat. In the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, Shiv Sena leaders often speak of the asmita of Maharashtra, though they do not have a monopoly over it.
Asmita, in modern India, is thus prominently used in assertions of regional identity. This is in stark contrast to its ancient Sanskrit usage. In Patanjali’s Yōgasutra, asmita implies a false identification of the self with the body or the bodily senses, leading to suffering. The modern sense of the word, in contrast, is wholly positive even when it is not overtly political as in the case of the well-known women’s organization Asmita, a resource centre for women engaged in women’s issues through research, advocacy and counselling. In this case, asmita underscores a positive women’s identity and has no obvious connotations of glory or pride, as in the case of regional identity. The Asmita theatre group in the north is another example of a usage not related to regional identity. But, whatever the specific meanings and allusions, possessing asmita in its modern sense is supposed to be good.
It should also be pointed out that states other than Maharashtra and Gujarat, where asmita is not used or is used less frequently, are hardly lacking in the politics of regional identity. N. T. Rama Rao routed Congress in the 1983 Assembly Elections in Andhra Pradesh and came to power riding the wave of Telugu atma gauravam or Telugu self-respect. Garva (pride) or gourava (glory) is also not unknown in Bangla, and, as in Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain (‘Say with pride that you are Hindu’), garva has also been part of the Hindu majoritarian aggressiveness. In this sense, both asmita and garva are deployed to express pride in one’s collective identity and often have strong nationalist overtones.
The regional/religious assertiveness expressed through the word asmita was recognized, countered and appropriated by Dalit writers in Maharashtra quite some time ago when they launched the literary magazine called Asmitadarsha (or, reflection of Dalit identity). In Gujarat in 2016, when several Dalit groups marched in protest against atrocities on Dalits by cow vigilante groups, they, too, spoke of asmita. This notion of asmita can be translated as self-respect, unlike the asmita of the Gujarati elite which is all about the glory and pride of Gujarat.
New-age guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has declared that not being one with existence and having a separate identity, recognizing that ‘I am different from others’ is asmita: ‘What [do] people think of me? What do I want from them? How do I take advantage of them? Do they think I am good or bad? All these things about “me, me, I, I” are called asmita.’ Now, such a version of asmita is supposed to ‘eat you up’, causing suffering. But does it? Obviously, India’s political leaders, fired by the idea of asmita, do not seem worried about its consequences even as they confer honours on the guru; the guru, likewise, is probably not addressing his wise counsel to them. We must therefore ask: whose asmita causes suffering to whom? This may be a hard question to come to grips with, but what is not in doubt is the power and generative capacity of the word asmita in contemporary India.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of Probal Dasgupta, Prachi Gurjarpadhye, Tridip Suhrud, Rita Kothari, V. Rajagopal, Velchery, Navin Rao, Rakesh Pande and Vasanth Kannabiran to this entry.
References
Kothari, R. and A. Kothari . K.M. Munshi. Delhi: Penguin-Random House, 2017.
Suhrud, T. ‘Modi and Gujarati “Asmita”’. Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 1 (5 January 2008).
TRS Sharma
Bhava derives from the root ‘bhoo’, which means ‘to be, become, what occurs’. The cognate bhaavana means to ‘become’, but adds up to something along the lines of ‘forming in the mind’, to notions of conception or imagination. This gradually perhaps made way for the concept of emotion to appear and ‘embody’.
Talking about emotions (bhavas), aren’t they known to be notorious in messing up one’s moral life? Can we ever trust them? Besides, emotions haven’t fared well in their conceptual history in the West either. Part of the reason is that the discourse on emotion has always been made within the rhetoric of rationality, and emotion and reason have always been looked upon as opposing forces in man. As if to add more substance to the subversive power of emotions, there is a basic composite concept formulated in Sanskrit called arishadvarga. This concept constitutes six hardcore, inimical emotions – the negative ‘affects’ if you will – such as kama (desire), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (infatuation), māda (arrogance) and maatsarya (jealousy), all of which figure in the great Indian epic narratives and cause a great deal of havoc and cataclysmic changes in the lives of heroic men and women. They are paradigmatic and universal, though the way they manifest in psychosocial life is often culture-specific. However, we need ‘to interpret emotions functionally in the sense of what they do’, not what they are, suggests Owen Lynch.
The next question that arises is: do any of these raw emotions occur in its pristine form? It is most unlikely for each raw emotion gets laced with elements from other emotions – say, anger gets mixed with jealousy, or with greed, which when thwarted, explodes. Can we, then, ever experience each of these emotions in its pristine purity, unmixed with traces of other emotions so that we can objectify it, evaluate it? Yes, we can, says Bharata’s Natyashastra: each emotion can be recreated on the stage so that the audience can experience its singular, nascent purity as rasa (aesthetic flavour or essence) through abhinaya. Abhinaya develops a new vocabulary and syntax through body language (gestures through eye and fingers, bearing and postures), drawing vastly on the ‘corporeal semantics’ peculiar to a culture and its semiotics.
Recent cognitive studies, however, offer a different perspective altogether and suggest that emotions can also act as moral sensors and reinforce one’s ethical values. The classic example that one can cite is the exemplary dialogues between Arjuna and Krishna in the Mahabharata war as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna is not convinced that a cosmic design is at work in the war he is obliged to fight. He sees only specific things, his own kinsmen ready to kill and be killed. While he is convinced of the just cause of war, he is horrified at its consequences. He develops a sudden revulsion for the war, for the horrendous killing involved, even though he is raised as a warrior. His svabhaava (inner nature/impulse) which believes in human values is at war with his svadharma (his duty as a warrior), which will not baulk at killing his own kinsmen when at war. The complex emotive state that Arjuna undergoes is an aporetic event in the epic and is characterized by great ethical disturbance.
References
Lynch, Owen. Divine Passions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Sharma, T. R.S. Toward an Alternative Critical Discourse. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000.
TRS Sharma
The term bhakti derives from the root word bhaj, which means ‘to share, adore, worship’. It assumes a specific form as devotion to a personal god, a Shiva or Krishna, mythical figures perhaps, and acquires additional meaning as ‘partaking of god’. In a broader perspective, the term signified a form of religion which absorbs the spiritual notions of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and grew rapidly as a popular movement in South India. The idea of devotion to a personal god showed great potential for an upsurge, initiating poetry, songs and even classical music. This movement first occurs in Tamilakam (Tamil macro region comprising modern-day Tamil Nadu and Kerala), say, in the sixth century CE, and spreads in the adjoining territories soon after.
The loving hymns that the saints sang to a Shiva or Krishna construct situations wherein a personal relationship develops with the chosen god, the saint eventually longing for a physical union. The iconic and sensory details in these hymns/poems are often charged with incandescent sexuality, which sublimates in rapture leading to mystic experience. Here is Andal (of eighth-century Tamilakam) pleading with the passing clouds to tell Krishna to stay with her ‘for one day / enter me / so as to wipe away / the saffron paste / adorning my breasts’. And, in what is today Karnataka, there is Akka Mahadevi (twelfth century), unique in many ways among the female saints, whose passionate pleadings with Shiva stand out: ‘Look at / love’s marvelous / ways: / if you shoot an arrow / plant it / till no feather shows; / if you hug / a body, bones / must crunch and crumble; / weld, / the welding must vanish. / Love is then / our lord’s love’ (trans. A. K. Ramanujan, 142).
Like the metaphysical poet George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins of nineteenth-century England, the Indian saint-poet often gets into an argumentative mode with his or her personal god but much more cantankerously than his or her British counterparts. The example of Sundarar, the eighth-century Tamil saint, stands out unique among such saint-poets of India. He has two wives to support and gets into a querulous debate with his intimate god Shiva: ‘you have a woman as half yourself; / the Lady Ganga lives on your spreading matted hair; / you know well the problems / of supporting two good women’ (trans. Indira Peterson). This is in one sense ‘confessional’ poetry and in another sense an apodictic theatre in its totality – an internal theatre wherein Shiva hypostatizes into a character with whom the devotee engages in a constant apostrophization. There are of course saint-poets of North India, such as Kabir, Meera and the blind poet Surdas, but none of them could be as demanding, as querulous and as argumentative as Sundarar! But then this kind of devotion to a god has its own risks: bhakti for the saint is both agony and ecstasy, more agony perhaps – it is internal theatre wherein she or he is the chief actor.
The principal rasa (emotion in its essence) evoked in the context of bhakti is quite often shrngaara, which is one among the eight rasas mentioned by Bharata. But, this form of shrngaara comes with many faces, subsidiaries: it can be naayaka-naayikaa bhava, that is, hero–heroine relation, or daasya bhava, that is, the devotee as serving the master. It is even argued, as by Rupa Goswami, the Bengali saint-poet, that shrngaara is the one basic rasa which subsumes all other rasas as its subsidiaries, because the devotee in her or his dialogic relationship with god experiences almost all the rasas as auxiliaries to the main shrngaara.
Bhakti, in short, is a Tamil innovation developed within a Tamil context – an innovation on what Tamil had taken from Sanskrit and for which no Sanskrit parallel movement existed during this time or earlier. It was a movement in a civilizational process which flourished for nearly ten centuries, spreading, say, into neighbouring Karnataka by the twelfth century, and then moving on to Maharashtra and Gujarat, and, in the East to Odisha, Bengal and Assam, eventually encompassing the entire subcontinent by the sixteenth century.
References
Peterson, Indira, trans. Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.
Ramanujan, A. K., trans. Speaking of Shiva. London: Penguin Books, 1973.
Surinder S. Jodhka
Caste is almost universally viewed as a peculiar system of social hierarchy and inequality, practised by the Hindus, who mostly live in India or South Asia or have their origin in the subcontinent. Implicit in this view is the assumption that caste has its origin in the religious faith of the Hindus, a part and parcel of their belief system. Further, its spatial aspect is also closely intertwined in this view. Though not all Indians are Hindus, this dominant view would assert, implicitly or explicitly, that the foundational values of Indian culture are quintessentially drawn from Hindu religious philosophy. The Muslims, the Christians, the Sikhs or even the Buddhists and Jains of Indian origin have either converted out of Hinduism (such as the Indian Muslims or the Indian Christians) or their faith systems are branches and varieties of the broader Hindu family. The presence of caste-like hierarchical divisions among the non-Hindu communities of India or those of other faith systems of Indian origin is thus cited as an obvious evidence of their Hindu ancestry. Drawn mostly from orientalist and colonial writings on India’s past and enthusiastically endorsed and accepted by native ‘reformers’, including some of the mainstream nationalist leaders, this framing of Indian tradition with caste and Hinduism at its centre has come to acquire the status of common sense and is widely accepted as an obvious fact. However, this view has also been seriously contested by a wide range of scholarship.
Paradoxically, the word ‘caste’ does not belong to any of the Indian languages. Nor does it have a literal equivalent in any of the Indian languages. It is presumed to have its etymological origin in the Latin word castus, which literally means ‘chaste’ or ‘pure’. The Portuguese seafarers, who arrived on the west coast of India for trade in the fifteenth century, were the first to use it in the Indian context. Drawing its meaning closely from Latin, for the Portuguese also the word casta meant ‘race’ or ‘lineage’, which they presumably used for rigid divisions in their own society. The term would have perhaps compared well with the segregated community life of the local people they encountered on the coast.
The British colonizers, who soon followed the Portuguese, took the idea of caste very seriously, and as they expanded their interests and presence in the region, they developed elaborate accounts of Indian society and culture. Drawing actively from Indological and orientalist writing emanating from different parts of Europe, they too came to believe that Indians were obsessed with religion, which was primarily Hinduism.
Given this presumed centrality of religion in the life of the ‘native’, Hindu religious texts were to provide the foundational logic for all social and cultural practices in the region. Colonial anthropology also worked with the assumption that despite diversities of language and habits, Hinduism provided a sense of unity to the entire region. Another critical assumption of this theorization of India was of its being stuck in time, in its tradition, never capable of changing on its own. The textually constructed framing of caste began to acquire a life of its own when the colonial census, introduced in 1872, used it for enumerating groups and communities and assign them concrete status in the presumed hierarchical system.
The canonical text that provided the normative codifications of caste was the Manusmriti, presumably authored by Manu in ancient times. Following the textual dictum enunciated by Manu, caste was a neatly segregated system of social divisions where social groups were assigned occupational monopolies in an order of hierarchy. This order of hierarchy was largely based on an assigned degree of purity to a given occupation. The dialectics of purity and pollution produced a unique system of inequality which was inherently legitimate, embedded in local culture and remained unchanged. Given that the everyday practice of caste was reproduced through a neat hierarchy of occupations and a mutually exclusive division of social groups, the mundane materiality of occupational (economic) life was reducible to religious belief.
This framing soon became hegemonic and over a period of time, a social anthropology of caste evolved. The terms that were to translate caste into local lexicon were those of varna and jati. While varna provided a normative model of hierarchy, jatis were concrete groupings, which divided each varna into innumerable social units. The idea of varna as spelt out in the Manusmriti divided the Hindus into four mutually exclusive categories – the Brahmin (priest), the Kshatriya (warrior), the Vaishya (trader) and the Shudra (peasant/artisan/labourer). Beyond the four varnas was the achhoot (the untouchable). These four or five categories occupied specific positions in the status hierarchy, with the Brahmins at the top, followed by the other three varnas in the same order as mentioned above and the achhoots occupying a position at the very bottom. The jatis were groupings of kinship communities that maintained their symbolic border by strictly following rules of exogamy and endogamy in marriage practices. They were further divided into subgroups, which had localized names and systems of classifications. Jatis and their subunits numbered in the hundreds in every linguistic region and in the thousands across the entire subcontinent. Besides occupational divisions and hierarchies of ritual status, the caste system also had other features. Even when different caste groups lived together in a village, their localities were clearly segregated and those at the bottom, the untouchables, were forced to stay away from the main settlement of the village. Caste collectives also had clearly codified rules regarding sharing of food and social interaction and avoidance in everyday social life.
Notions of ascriptive hierarchy, social segregation and the practice of untouchability had indeed been a reality of life in most (though not all) regions of India from much before the Portuguese and British colonizers arrived. These notions were also supported by local religious and traditional belief systems. The term caste, defined as status and ascriptive hierarchies, also captures these differences and inequalities quite adequately. However, to reduce it to a singular pan-Indian reality that emanates exclusively from religious ideology is simply wrong and is not supported by any evidence.
Also, caste was not codified uniformly everywhere. Every region in the subcontinent has had a different set of caste-like communities. Even when notions of hierarchy and pollution have been common, the normative systems guiding social interactions among individuals and groups have varied across regions. For example, the four- or fivefold notion of varna has not even been a fact of life everywhere. Most of the southern regions did not have Kshatriya and/or Vaishya varnas. Similarly, even though hierarchy and untouchability existed, the Brahmins did not enjoy any kind of privilege or high status in the Punjab.
Viewed from this perspective, caste would inevitably appear as an evolving system, actively intersecting with regional ecologies, the dynamics of local economic process and the regimes of power. Thus, to assume that the process of modernization/urbanization or the introduction of a democratic political system that ought to erase caste is founded on simplistic notions and flawed assumptions. Such assumptions also inhibit us from exploring the contemporary realities of caste. It is only through the alternative perspective suggested above that we can make sense of the persistence of caste even when its traditional ‘eco-system’ is significantly weakened or altered. Caste survives as a resource, positive and/or negative, a kind of social capital that reproduces inequalities in different spheres of life in contemporary India.
References
Dirks, N. B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Jodhka, S. S. Caste in Contemporary India, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Routledge, 2018.
Ulka Anjaria
Colonialism, the political and economic rule of a foreign power over a people different from them, has existed in many forms throughout human history. But, when placed in tension with the concept of postcolonialism, the term takes on a particular meaning, namely colonialism as understood through the lens of postcolonial theory. From this perspective, colonialism is not only political and economic domination but also ideological domination, founded in the collection of knowledge, a form of colonialism that was epitomized by British rule over India in the nineteenth century. This specific form of colonialism uses new developments in modern science, technology and disciplinary regimes, which together constitute a new discourse, to cast the colony as a space of backwardness, in need of political rule, as needing to catch up to modernity. Here, colonial rule penetrates to all aspects of society, including religion, architecture, literature, sports and even personal self-care. The elite classes of the colonized society are invited to participate in the project of remaking their own society in the model of the colonizer in order to usher their people into modernity. The political and economic aspects of colonialism are thus understood as part of a larger imperative to instil modern values in the minds of the colonized.
This ideological project is premised on the philosophical concept of the binary and of historicism; both of which structure thought and produce an irreducible ‘Other’ on the one hand and an idea of progress through empty homogeneous time on the other. The binary is a means of understanding the world based on what it is not. So, while Britain imagines itself as great, civilized, modern, historical, rational, masculine and ethical, it necessarily imagines the colonized as lowly, barbaric, backward, fantastical, irrational, feminine and violent. Nineteenth-century evolutionism combined with social science suggested that the colonized could one day attain the characteristics of British civilization, but that would require significant pedagogical investment on the part of the colonizer. Once colonialism is articulated this way – in Britain represented by the Anglicist view as opposed to the Orientalist one – its value becomes self-evident.
Postcolonialism, then, without the hyphen, is not a temporal indicator of a time after colonialism but an optics that renders visible the role of colonial discourse in colonial rule. Postcolonialism exposes projects such as cricket in India, the reform of the vernaculars, the rise of the novel and even the birth of nationalism as individual parts of the larger process of rule by discourse, even when they espoused an anti-colonial politics. It works by denaturalizing precisely what had become accepted or intuitive about colonial rule, by showing how colonial rule did not transform an India that already existed but created an India to be transformed through the power of representation in consolidating power. For instance, the British instituted a census in India that claimed to be merely recording the diversity of religions but in fact created religions as discrete categories in ways that had never really existed. Likewise, in their valorization of literary realism, they denigrated Indian literature as being fantastical and irrational and thus encouraged the invention of new literary modes that would better subscribe to the idea of modern literature. In these examples, the act of classifying becomes not an innocent or ideologically free enterprise but an act of world-making, creating a world that then becomes susceptible to colonial rule.
Moreover, postcolonialism highlights the continuity of the colonial and post-independence periods by showing how the nation-state was largely continuous with colonialism. In India, this is apparent not only in the continuity of laws between colonial and post-independence times (laws in favour of the strict division between private and public space, for instance) but also in the way the nation quickly formed its own discourse in which some people were considered outsiders or Others to the national project. The nation rules by rendering its various others – Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, women, queer people and so on – as outside of the nationalist project. The nation-state inherits colonial classifications to describe and differentiate these groups in order to rule them.
Some forms of postcolonial thought have been influenced by poststructuralist theory, especially in the writings of the influential scholars Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, pioneers in the field who broke away from Edward Said’s idea, advanced in Orientalism, of colonial discourse as all-powerful. Both these critics emphasized postcolonial theory as a deconstructive practice, which unravelled the very assumptions of colonial discourse, showing it to be not universal but based in a very specific set of circumstances that were highly contingent and precarious. This approach advances colonialism as a fundamentally weak discourse, whose constant assertions of its own authority might be read as indices of its own precariousness, even in the eyes of the colonizers themselves. Resistance, then, is not so much in powerful counter-assertions or in the misplaced idealism of the nationalist movement, but in attending to the weakness in colonial discourse itself, and indeed in noting the precarity of all linguistic assertions. This version of postcolonial theory focuses on moments of stuttering, word repetition or insistence as indices of language’s inability to communicate effectively, of language’s fundamentally indexical or self-referential quality.
Gender critique is also an important component of postcolonial theory, as it points to the way in which women served both colonial and nationalist discourses, leaving the actual agency of women outside of both discourses. Beginning with the British intent to adjudicate on the religious validity of the practice of sati, all the way to contemporary conversations on ‘love jihad’ and the role of women in public space, postcolonial theory shows how women become the bodies on which colonial and national regimes inscribe their validity. A postcolonial critique is thus necessarily gendered, not only recentering women as agents in oppositional histories but also showing how gender can unravel the entire discourse of colonialism or nationalism.
These versions of postcolonial theory have been influential in the academe. They have compelled many English departments to see literary study as potentially bearing the traces of colonial history and open it to its postcolonial Other. It has compelled anthropologists to question the power dynamics with which the anthropologist goes into the field as well as what counts as valid knowledge. In history, postcolonial theory has led scholars away from a simple valorization of nationalism to the margins of the nation, to those groups doubly othered, both by colonial rule and by nationalist rule. While the impact of postcolonial theory is less felt in the sciences and in the harder social sciences, such as economics, it has been one of the most influential interventions in the academe in the last forty years.
With economic liberalization, the rise of a new middle class and the power of global capital and technology in India in the first decades of the 2000s, it is possible to say that postcolonialism has entered a new phase, which we might variously call neoliberalism, or neocolonialism, or simply the contemporary. While the spectres of colonial rule continue in forms such as the persistent silence around Partition and the continuing crisis of secularism, they are supplemented by new concerns and aspirations, a new pragmatism around the use of English (rather than English only as a colonial legacy), a scepticism around cosmopolitanism and new forms of desire unleashed by the consumer economy – new concerns that cannot quite be accounted for through a postcolonial lens. While the continuing validity of the term will remain a matter of scholarly contention, the impact of the term in rethinking Indian modernity in a range of fields cannot be denied.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Sanjit Chakraborty
Darshana, in the sense of true philosophical knowledge is first quoted in the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra (first century CE) to mean the perfect vision of everything. Etymologically, darshana evolves from the Sanskrit term Dṛś, that is, vision. The contemporary use of the term darshana finds its new dimension in the writings of Haribhardra (eighteenth century CE), who considers different philosophical schools in the cord of darshana in his text Ṣaḍ-darśana-samuccaya. Later, eminent Vedāntin Mādhava in fourteenth century CE popularized and expatiated the meaning of darshana in Sarvadarśana Saṅgraha. The purport of the term darshana is imbedded in the notion of Indianness that caters to an influential uniqueness in Hinduism, Jainism (Samyak darshana or liberation consists in right vision) and Mahayana Buddhism (Nagarjuna’s dictum tattva-darśana, that is, the true reality, and Vasubandhu’s use of darshana marga, that is, the conduit of seeing).
Darshanas or the schools of Indian philosophy are orthodox (Āstika) and heterodox (Nāstika). The Āstikas (Mīmāṁsa and Vedānta) have their direct cradles in the Vedic texts. Sāṅkhya, Yōga, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika quest for the non-reliant ground; these schools have faith in the doctrine of humanistic thought that celebrates reasoning and experience. Nāstikas (Cārvāka, Buddhism and Jainism) defy the authority of the Vedas and are the non-believers of God.
Sāṅkhya is the oldest philosophy school in India. The sage Kapila propounded this school by maintaining the dynamic uniformity of the manifold world and objects that are unconscious. Sāṅkhya’s aesthetic mode brings about the ultimate subtle material cause of the world as Prakriti which remains uncaused (an unwarranted regressus ad infinitum) and productive. The evolution of Prakriti is a manifestation, where the imbalance of the substratum (gunas – sattva, rajas and tamas) transmits conscious mind to unconscious objects and in the whole process Purusa, the second transcendental reality, stands as an inactive cum inert perceiver. Sāṅkhya believes in the unity of Purusa and Prakriti, which leads to the creation as well as liberation of the empirical self (Jīva). The apparent conjecture of Purusa and Prakriti is annihilated through transmigration for the sake of the emancipation of self.
Yōga, the theistic Sāṅkhya, engrafts God as the efficient cause of the world, while the material cause is doubtlessly Prakriti. Patānjali, the author of Yōga Sūtra, synthesizes Mokshya (salvation) as attainable through practicing meditation or yōga. Vyāsa’s Yōga-Bhāsya (400 CE), a commentary, defines yōga as a method of knowing oneself and obtaining a kind of discriminative knowledge that can flatten even the potentiality of all afflictions. The eight limbs of Yōga in its fourfold stage (Samadhi, Sadhana, Vibhuti and Kaivalya padas) do not only restrain the mind of the yogi but also provide an abiding devotion to the transcendental consciousness (Vivakjn᷈ānya).
Vaiśeṣika, the second oldest philosophy, upholds a theoretical understanding of the universe as a search for true knowledge of reality instead of the transcendental self and so on. Vaiśeṣika doctrine considers atoms as undying and consistent particles of the world, and all worldly events have their own natural evolution maintained by the science of categories (padārtha). Kaṇāda’s Vaiśeṣika Sūtra and Praśastapāda’s commentary (600 CE) are the foremost classical texts suggesting that the cause lies in the material effects, while knowledge of particularity (Viśeṣa) demarcates one eternal substance from the other. Liberation means understanding the true knowledge of reality and an accomplishment of happiness (pravṛtti) and cessation of the negative action (nivṛtti).
Nyāya epistemologically refers to the methodology of argumentation. Gautama (200 BCE), the profounder of this darshana, was concerned about two different doctrines – logic and ontology safeguarded by Vaiśeṣika’s epistemology in Nyāya Sūtra. Nyāya amplifies the nature of valid knowledge (pramā) through the instruments of valid knowledge (pramāna), such as perception, inference, comparison and testimony. Nyāya believes in the substantial mode of self as the intrinsic cause of cognition. The pre-existence and transmigration processes endorse the self that can attain liberation when the law of karma and false knowledge are nullified.
Mīmāṁsa, also known as Pūrva Mīmāṁsa or Karma Mīmāṁsa, enshrines the prior analysis of the Vedic knowledge from the aspects of action, rituals, ceremonies (yajṅa) and critical reflection. In Jaimini’s Mīmāṁsa Sūtra, the Vedas are regarded as external, authorless and infallible knowledge and the attainment of the ‘highest good’ is possible through dharma (virtue or duties) and dharmin (the categories that possessed dharma) as prescribed by Vedas that give value to the human acts, an intense rationalistic appeal in conjunction with performing yajṅa and duties or non-duties. The continuation of ethical activities and understanding the Vedic verdicts are a theme in philosophy of language, which involves learning the exact meaning of dharma and proper way of conducing yajṅa.
Vedānta literarily means the zenith of Vedas and depends on the Prasthānatrayi, which are the Upanisads (Śruti prasthāna or wisdom), the Bhagavad Gita (Smr̥ti prasthāna or practice) and the Brahma Su᷈tras (Nyāya prasthāna or logic). All the major schools of Vedānta advocate that Brahma is the supreme and static material cause of the world. The metaphysical stance of Vedānta centres rounds the triangular structure of the world (Jagat), self (Jivātman) and ultimate reality (Brahma). Advaita defines Brahma as Sat-cit-ānanda, that is, existence, consciousness and bliss constitute the non-dualistic essence (svarūpa) of Brahma instead of his attributes (gunas); whereas other schools of Vedānta preserve Sat-cit-ānanda as Svarūpa and gunas together executing the concept of Brahmasvarūpa-Svagata-bheda. According to Advaita, liberation consists in purest realization where knowledge (jn᷈āna) of absolute identity between the self and the ultimate Brahma is attainable, while other schools of Vedānta regards devotion (bhakti) and action (karma) manifested by knowledge as ways to achieve salvation.
Buddhism, the founder of this non-theistic creed is Gautama Buddha (sixth century BCE), whose philosophy later becomes a religious text Tripiṭakas. The essence of Buddhism lies in its Four Noble Truths (catyāri ārya satyāni), an anti-speculative outlook that directs an individual towards enlightenment through the paths of suffering and its causes and the way of its cessation or ultimate liberation (nirvaṇa) is made possible through aṣtāṅgika mārga. Buddha’s ethical philosophy rests on conditional-based existent objects (pratītyasamutpāda), the law of karma, momentariness (kṣaṇika-vāda) and the non-existence of the soul (nairātmavāda) that are concerned about the metaphysical cum epistemological basis of philosophical quests.
Jainism, propounded by Mahāvīra (500 BCE), is derived from the word Jina, a conqueror who subdues passions to attain liberation by practicing the tenets of non-violence, asceticism, veganism, meditation and liberation. This doctrine rests on three tenets: common-sense realism, the relativity of judgements (syādvāda) and pluralism or many-sided realities (anekāntavāda). Liberation in Jainism is made possible through Ratnatraya, that is, Samyak darshana (right faith/view), Samyak jn᷈āna (right knowledge) and Samyak charitra (right conduct).
Cārvāka is a cāru-vāka or sweet-speech materialistic doctrine that professes perception as the only pramana. They are also called Bhutacaitanyavadin, that is, consciousness is merely a by-product of the four material elements (earth, water, fire and air) from which the world is formed; whereas, the soul is a myth like God, an unnecessary creator. The ethical values of the Vedas or other schools have been despised by Cārvāka. Liberation takes place with physical death, and the logical upshot of Cārvāka metaphysics and epistemology persuades them to enjoy all material pleasures in life since the possibility of rebirth is absurd and illogical.
References
Chatterjee, Satischandra and DhirendramohanDatta , An Introduction to Indian Philosophy. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1984.
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Charles A.Moore A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Bijoy Boruah
Dharma is a term that has no direct English translation, because it is an all-embracing concept and is perhaps unique to Indian thought. The term is diffused in having different shades of meaning in a variety of respects: cosmological, sociological, religious, ethical, legal and also the functional essence of things. Etymologically, the term is derived from the Sanskrit root dhṛ, meaning ‘to uphold, support, maintain, sustain, or to hold together’.
The cosmic connotation of dharma is fundamental to its nature, and it is in this sense that this concept provides a broad metaphysical grounding to various other senses of it. The cosmological-metaphysical meaning of dharma can be found in the Vedic texts, especially Rig Veda, according to which, that which upholds the created universe, supports and sustains it, without which the universe falls apart, is dharma. Dharma, as it is used to refer to the functional essence of things or the essential nature of things (e.g. the nature of the Sun is to emit sunshine, of fire to produce heat and so on), would seem to make the concept purely descriptive. But as soon as the essential nature of a human individual or society, the dharma of an individual or a community, is under consideration, the term takes a normative turn in implying a variety of imperatives, injunctions and other principles of human action.
Indeed, the normative connotation of dharma is overwhelming, so much so that in all the ancient Indian traditions – Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism – it is meant to be an embodiment of the ethics of life. Jaimini’s Mimamsa Sutra defines dharma as codana lakshana, that is, as a set of imperatives, or injunctive sentences of the Vedas, which command the human agent to act. Kanada’s Vaisheshika Sutra characterizes dharma as that from which results prosperity and the highest good. In Mahayana Buddhism, dharma refers to both the teachings of the Buddha – the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold path – and the realization of enlightenment. For all the traditions of Indian thought, there is a list of virtues that is more or less common to the various formulations of dharma. This list includes non-injury, truthfulness, honesty, cleanliness, control of the senses, charity, self-restraint, love, forbearance, fortitude, modesty, forgiving disposition, serenity and meditative temper. What we have here is more a theory of virtue rather than a mere ethics of imperatives.
In the theory of the goals of human pursuit known as purushartha, which mentions the fourfold classification of the goals of life, dharma (righteousness or moral values) figures as one of these goals, the other goals being artha (pursuit of wealth, economic prosperity), kama (desire fulfilment) and moksha (ultimate liberation). It is obvious that the pursuit of wealth for livelihood and the fulfilment of physical desires are basic to human existence. But what makes the human life of desire and wealth distinctively human is the way these two basic pursuits are regulated by righteous behaviour and moral values. That regulative principle of life is dharma, which plays its vital role in preventing the life of material prosperity and pleasure from turning into individual deterioration and social chaos and leads to a balanced mode of life conducive to true happiness. It is in this sense that dharma is said to be the foremost of the four categories in the scheme of life. In this respect, dharma parallels Hegel’s idea of sittlichkeit or the actual ethical order that regulates human conduct at the levels of the individual, family, civil life and the state.
The relation between dharma and moksha is rather problematic. Is dharma necessary for attaining moksha? While on the one hand dharma is advanced as a means to moksha, on the other hand dharma is also considered to be a hindrance to moksha. Moksha is somewhat of an outsider in the fourfold categorial scheme, because ultimate liberation is supposedly other-worldly (requiring renunciation of the life of artha and kama) whereas the life of dharma refers to worldly human existence. It is usually said that dharma helps one in getting svarga (heaven) but not moksha. Dharma as well as a-dharma are equally the causes of bondage and rebirth, whereas ultimate liberation requires going beyond the cycle of birth altogether. However, the idea of ‘action with renunciation of desire for the fruit of action’ (nishkama karma) or ‘craving free, dharma-driven action’ is proposed as a compromise between the two conflicting concepts. Ultimate liberation may come unsolicited if one lives the life of anasakti or action with detachment.
References
Olivelle, P. and D. R. Davis , eds. The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmasastra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Srivastava, D. C. and B. H. Boruah , eds. Dharma and Ethics: The Indian Ideal of Human Perfection. New Delhi: Decent Books, 2010.
Bijoy Boruah
Dhyana as a concept and a practice originated in the Vedic and Upanishadic era. In Hinduism, it refers to self-directed yogic awareness, by which the yogi realizes the atma (self) and finally oneness with the ultimate reality (brahman). Etymologically, the concept dhyaana is derived from its root dhi, which in the early Vedic text refers to ‘imaginative vision’. However, the general meaning of the concept is contemplative and concentrated meditation, coupled with the metaphysical and soteriological implication of aiming at ultimate self-knowledge and self-liberation.
The unique meaning of this concept in Indian thought is best grasped by reference to its place and role in the philosophy and practice of yoga, which is distinctively Indian. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra provides the context and comprehensive background of the essential nature of dhyaana. Given the pervasive Indian belief that ignorance, born of attachment, is the cause of suffering in the life cycle of action and reaction (samsara), the core project of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is to outline the process of attaining freedom from attachment and ignorance. The second chapter of the Sutra features the eight limbs of yoga, which are the means of achieving discriminative discernment: yama (abstention), niyama (observance), asana (posture), pranayama (breath control), pratyahara (disengagement of the sense), dhaaranaa (concentration), dhyaana (meditation) and samaadhi (absorption). Thus, the concept of dhyaana, the seventh limb of the eightfold path of yoga, is best understood as part of the soteriology and praxis of yoga philosophy enunciated in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. It is to be properly understood as a state organically connected with a complete process of enlightenment.
This process of consecutive stages of internalization can be divided into two categories. While the first five limbs are ways of outer practices, that is, of internalizing attention away from external and bodily influences, the last three are inner practices, that is, purely mental and internal in orientation. The first five limbs constitute ‘external yoga’, whereas the triad of the last three limbs constitute ‘internal yoga’. Understanding the nature of the triad of dhaaranaa-dhyaana-samaadhi is important to articulate the meaning of dhyaana. All the three are directly related to meditation. Indeed, they are meditation. Dhaaranaa involves fixing the mind in one place. However, the concentration here is not fixed on a single spot as an object of meditation. It is the ‘one-pointedness’ of the mind on one image, a singular attention on a single object of meditation, in an unbroken flow of consciousness free from any distraction that characterizes dhyaana. So the process of ‘internalization’ is progressively more concentrated and focused, with the mental flow as uninterrupted as it can be, in this state. Naturally, the occurrence of a state of uninterrupted mental flow singularly fixed on a single object or image is prone to culminate in samaadhi, the ultimate goal of a true yogi. The mind is so fully absorbed in the object of meditation that there is no self-consciousness at all, no reflective attitude. Dhyaana is therefore the penultimate stage in a very intensely concentrated continuum of contemplative process, which is initiated in full earnestness at the stage of dhaaranaa.
References
Iyengar, B. K. S. Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. London: HarperCollins, 2002.
Srivastava, D. C. and B. H. Boruah , eds. Dharma and Ethics: The Indian Ideal of Human Perfection. New Delhi: Decent Books, 2010.
Ronki Ram
The Golden Temple at Amritsar, originally called Harimandir Sahib (Temple of God) and Darbar Sahib, is a revered site for millions of people, irrespective of caste, creed or even race, across the Indian subcontinent and the Indian diaspora. It is the only temple of nirankar (non-anthropomorphic god), which is accessible from all four directions: east, west, north and south. The temple is symbolic of equality among members of the four varnas. It is built at a level lower than the surrounding land (unlike European churches) to further emphasize the values of egalitarianism and humility. An enthralling three-storeyed structure surrounded by various historic buildings, of which the four-storeyed Akal Takht (supreme religious authority of Sikhism) is especially noteworthy. On an average, over one hundred thousand people visit the Golden Temple daily.
The city of Amritsar was envisioned by Guru Amar Das and benefitted from contributions by both Guru Ram Das and Guru Arjan Dev. Amritsar is to the Sikhs what Benares is to the Hindus and Mecca is to the Muslims. As desired by Guru Amar Das, the city was established by Bhai Jetha (later on Guru Ram Das, the fourth Nanak) and Baba Budha in 1570 CE on land which was acquired by the earlier gurus on grant or payment from the zamindars (prominent landlords) of the surrounding villages. Originally, Amritsar was known as Chak Guru/Guru Ka Chak/Chak Ram Das/Ram Das Pura. After his accession to gurgaddi (seat of guru), Guru Ram Das shifted to Guru Ka Chak along with his family. To make this newly established religious town socially inclusive and financially self-sustainable, Guru Ram Das invited fifty-two types of artisans and professionals, irrespective of faith, to settle there thus creating the microcosm of an urban township. To further meet the daily needs of this growing township, a market (Guru Bazaar) was then added. In 1577 CE, Guru Ram Das was instrumental in the creations of two holy sarovars (tanks or pools), which eventually become known as Santokh Sar (Pool of Contentment) and Amrit Sar or Amrit Sarovar (Pool of Nectar). It was only after the completion of the temple and the filling of its sarovar with water that the city was named Amrit Sar.
Hazrat Sai Mian Mir, a famous Sufi pir of Lahore, laid the foundation stone of Harimandir Sahib in 1588 CE at the request of Guru Arjan Dev who designed the architecture of the temple as well as supervised its construction. After the completion of the Harimandir Sahib, Guru Arjan Dev took on the mammoth task of compiling the writings of his predecessors, his own as well as those of venerated spiritual figures from other faiths; critically, the latter category included those from the ‘untouchable’ castes. The purpose was to emphasize the oneness of God as well as equality among all. He completed this task in August 1604 CE with the assistance of Bhai Gurdas as scribe. The Sri Guru Granth Sahib is written in the same language, commonly spoken by the people of that region. Further, it has the distinct and unique status of retaining its original wording and prose structure till this very day.
Harimandir Sahib came to be known popularly as the Golden Temple during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1799–1839) after he granted rupees 5 lakhs (half a million) for gold plating it. During the British rule, between 1883 and the 1920s, the temple became a centre of the Singh Sabha Movement. When control of the Harimandir Sahib was regained from the British government–Mahant combine, M. K. Gandhi sent a complimentary telegram to the Sikhs at Amritsar: ‘First battle of India’s freedom won. Congratulations.’ In the early 1980s, the temple once again entered a phase of conflict between the Indian government led by the late Indira Gandhi, some Sikh groups and a militant movement spearheaded by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In 1984, the Indian Army entered the precincts of the Golden Temple damaging several historic buildings and the library, a repository for thousands of rare and original manuscripts.
The Golden Temple is not only spiritually the most significant shrine in Sikhism but has also evolved to become a rallying centre of the Sikhs and gives direction to the Sikh panth (society). The enchanting words of Guru Arjan Dev capture the eternal celestial beauty of the Golden Temple: Dithe sab thav nahi tudh jehia (‘I have seen all places, there is not another like thee’ (Sri Guru Granth Sahib, p. 1362)).
References
Kaur, Manjit. ‘The Harimindir’. In The City of Amritsar: An Introduction, edited by Fauja Singh , 25–41. Patiala: Punjabi University, 2000.
Shan, Harnam Singh. So Said Guru Arjan Dev. Chandigarh: Government of Punjab, 2006.
Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs, Vol. 1: 1469–1839, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sanjit Chakraborty
The conception of the word guru in Indian cultures goes back to the Upanishadic era, especially in the Mundakopanishad, where Brahma (the creator of the world) taught the Brahma Vidya (the foundation of all knowledge or the speculative discussion about ultimate reality) to his eldest son, Atharvan. Later, Artharvan transmitted the Brahma Vidya to Angiras who shared the absolute knowledge with Satyavaha, a successor of Sage Bharadwaja. Satyavaha narrated to Bharadwaja, who finally imparted the knowledge (both the higher and lower levels) to Angiras. A significance that one could find here is the use of the Upanishadic term paraparam (Mundakopanishad, 1.2). The term not only indicates that the foundation of all knowledge has two different folds – para (transcendent) and apar (mundane) – but also that the term paraparam tinges to the transmission progression of the knowledge from guru (enlightened master) to his shisya (dedicated disciple). The proper way of learning Brahma Vidya depends on the gurupasadana, that is, only guru can condescend to expose wisdom to the devoted disciples.
The criterion of a guru is clearly mentioned by Upanishads which say that a guru must be an enlightened person (jnani) who learned the Vedas carefully and dedicated himself to the contemplation of Brahman. The guru would be a man of wisdom who has not only seen the truth but also has the capability to teach in an appropriate way to his disciples. The guru possesses wisdom, equanimity, self-control, empathy and a desire to help others, who strive for the complete recasting of the oneness as versed in the shruti (canonical, unquestionable) and smr̥ti (supplementary, liable to change) texts.
A shisya (adhikarin) must have the proclivity to know the absolute knowledge and have a reverent interest in learning the truth, channelized by self-control, thought, intellectual apprehension and reasoning. Both, the guru and the shisya, need to tread the inner path guided by sravana (hearing), manana (contemplation) and niddidhyasana (meditation). Our mind is a curvature line of the harvest field (wisdom), which could be controlled by the consort of spiritual life, faith in Brahma, knowledge about Brahma and finally self-realization. These procedures ought to be guided by the gurus, the most fortunate seekers who attained the illumination of Brahma Vidya by guru parampara (uninterrupted succession).
A guru seeks the eternal knowledge in the immutable absolute being by attaining consciousness of the difference between all non-eternal appearances and the absolute Being. Besides, a dedicated disciple for the sake of knowledge of the absolute Being needs to approach a spiritual preceptor who is rooted in the consciousness of Brahma. The radiance of absolute knowledge is a quest where the guru is regarded as one part (purvarūpam) and other complement part (uttararūpam) is rigidly the shisya; and their union (sandhi) escorts towards the production of knowledge through the recitation of the Vedas. The seeker must be a son/daughter or a worthy pupil.
This Sanskrit term guru that originated from the Vedas has an overall Indian root and its use is not bounded only by Hinduism but also has linkages to Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Baul and so on. These different religions infuse guru–shishya parampara, where knowledge is passed through successors, through either one’s heirs or pupils. In neo-Indian tradition of the Bauls of Northern India, the guru, or the Arabic murshid, is the person who shows the sahaj (simple) way to segregate worldly turmoil and teach the seeker (baul) to merge his or her mind to his or her inner mind, where the eternal and all-pervading Truth resides.
Archaeological and epigraphical evidence point out that in ancient and medieval India, pupils studied and practiced the śāstras in the gurukul (the house or the teaching place of gurus), which was considered an auspicious place.
Most cultures, such as the English, French, German, Polish, Russian, Portuguese and Spanish, are habituated to the use the word guru in the sense of sage and spiritual leader. However, in contemporary India, the etymological meaning of the term guru transmits to different concepts, such as a teacher of tantra (esoteric traditions), yōga, music, game, arts, etc. It has no significant connection with the term guru as promoted in the Hindu śāstras. Most of them never practiced the sacred knowledge of the Vedas and are falsely considered as an authority on God or a direct incarnation or prophet of God. They demean the revered term guru whom the Upanishads placed as high as God. These fraud gurus and their followers engage in mundane rejoices. Now in Indian languages, such as Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu and Malayalam, the term guru ironically indicates an extremely sly personality who can manage anything for her or his self-interest.
References
Aurobindo, Sri. The Upanishads, Part One. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1981.
Tagore, Rabindranath. The Religion of Man. Visva-Bharati: Visva-Bharati University Press, 1931.
Maidul Islam
Haj or hajj (visitation of the holy places of Mecca) is generally regarded as one of the five fundamental pillars or central tenets of Islam. The others being iman (the confession of faith by belief in Allah as the sole God and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah), ṣalat (the five daily prayers), ṣawm (fasting in the month of Ramadan) and zakat (stipulated alms-giving). It is an annual pilgrimage to Mecca during the Islamic lunar calendar month of Dhu al-Hijjah. The focus of haj is not the city of Mecca but the Great Mosque where the holiest shrine of Islam, the Ka’bah (house of Allah, originally rebuilt by Prophet Ibrahim) is situated. In this respect, it is the only tenet of Islam that cannot be accomplished in the comfort of one’s own home. It is obligatory for all adult Muslims to perform haj at least once in their lifetime, if they are physically and financially able. Also, the hajis (haj pilgrims) must be able to financially support their dependants while they are away for the pilgrimage. Muslim women are allowed to take part in haj, provided she is accompanied by a male chaperon (mahram) with whom she is legally unable to marry. For unmarried women, either her father or brother and for married and older women, either their husbands or sons generally accompany them during the pilgrimage. According to the new rules of 2014, a woman over the age of forty five may travel without a Mahram with an organized group by submitting a ‘no objection letter’ from her husband, son or brother. India has followed this rule from 2018. Haj symbolizes the unity of the ummah (community of Islamic believers) as it provides a shared space where Muslim pilgrims come in contact with each other – overcoming differences in class, gender, age, language, nationality, culture and race.
The haj pilgrimage started with Prophet Muhammad’s first and only haj in March 632 CE, the last time he visited Mecca before going back to Medina. This ‘farewell pilgrimage’, according to the Islamic tradition, is important for two reasons. First, it laid down the performative act of haj along with establishing the key rites and rituals that Muslims have been following for centuries. Second, Muhammad’s sermon at the end of that haj summarized his teachings that Muslims often cite. Haj comprises of several rituals including the core ritual of tawf, which involves circling of the Ka’bah seven times in the anti-clockwise direction, attempts to touch or kiss the ‘black stone’ in the wall of the shrine, drink water from the Zamzam stream that flows through the basement of the Great Mosque, passing seven times between the nearby peaks of as-Safa and Marwa, quoting passages from the Qur’an (the obligatory ritual of sa’yee), the mass procession to Mount Arafat on the ninth day of Dhu al-Hijjah and the sacrifice of an animal (generally sheep, camel or other cattle) on Mount Mina on the tenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah. Finally, the haj ends with throwing seven stones for each of the three pillars symbolizing Satan (the ritual of ramyee), which the pilgrims pass on their way back to Mecca.
Men who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca generally adopt an honourific title of haji (hajjah for women) to precede their name. Muslims believe that the proper performance of haj with sincere intention (niyah) absolves the pilgrim from all previous sins. In North India, there is an interesting anecdotal perspective on the word, which is colloquially used in everyday humour: Sau chuhe khake billi chali haj ko (‘After eating 100 rats the cat now goes to the pilgrimage’). The appropriate metaphorical expression of such a literal translation is that ‘after committing all the sins one goes for pious salvation’.
The Saudi Arabian government, headed by the Saudi royal family, currently oversees haj. Indians constitute the second largest national group performing the haj after Saudi Arabia; in 2019, two lakh Indian Muslims have performed haj.
References
Horrie, Chris and Chippindale, Peter. What Is Islam? A Comprehensive Introduction (1990), Revised and Updated Edition. London: Virgin Books, 2007.
Sardar, Ziauddin. Mecca: The Sacred City. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
A. G. K. Menon
The diversity of heritage sites in India reflects the country’s diverse social and cultural history. Many still evoke a sense of ownership among its contemporary legatees and are technically defined as ‘living’ heritage sites. ‘Heritage site’ is a contested term, often used to define and assert present-day identities of its stakeholders and often to settle old historical scores. Thus, heritage sites in India are defined both by their tangible and intangible associational values, and it is difficult to define their cultural significance or deal with them in a standardized manner.
The continued cultural relevance of heritage sites creates problems for modern-day governance. Indian heritage protection laws are derived from colonial sensibilities, which have since the Second World War morphed into universal guidelines adopted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and their counterparts in the states, which are the ‘official’ guardians of heritage sites in India. The problematic genealogy of their conservation practices is further reinforced by their aspirational intent to modernize and remain in conformity with international norms.
Many anomalies arise from these circumstances. For one, colonial exigencies restricted the contemporary definition of ‘official’ heritage sites to only about ten thousand all over the country. This has meant that the hundreds of thousands of remnants of a fecund cultural past are left outside the official purview and have been either lost through attrition or have become victims of contemporary development priorities. Many, however, are cared for by its present-day users, who continue to practice indigenous systems of repair and rebuilding, guided by traditional craftsmen, but these systems of repair are often at variance with international norms that dominate the official imagination and practice.
Another anomaly is that the ‘official’ focus has been on individual buildings and not on heritage sites comprising culturally identifiable neighbourhoods, historical cities and even the larger cultural landscape which continues to evoke equally strong emotional affinities among different sections of society. In terms of conservation, the coalescing of the temporal characteristics of cultural heritage with its ethno-geography presents undefined challenges to protecting heritage sites in India: its authenticity is circumscribed both by the history and the geography of the site. It resurrects the relevance of the cyclical view of time in the definitions of heritage and introduces the concept of jeernodharan (renovation) in the lexicon of Indian conservation practice.
Thus, two approaches of dealing with heritage sites coexist in India, one modern and aligned to precepts of conservation promoted by universal knowledge systems and the other rooted in indigenous sensibilities but also dealing with modern circumstances. Seen in this light, the issue of conserving heritage sites in India includes its development to meet the needs of its contemporary stakeholders. These questions are being foregrounded because government policymakers are recognizing the economic potential of heritage sites as tourist destinations. These initiatives have in the past largely been directed towards attracting foreign tourists and the needs of high-end tourism infrastructure. But the fact is that, in India, pilgrimage tourism and even domestic tourism for recreation is by far the larger component of the tourism pie and has therefore shifted the focus towards upgrading urban infrastructure and urban environment within which many of the heritage sites exist and thereby improve the quality of life in cities and towns. This offers fertile ground to examine the unfolding discourse on the nature of appropriate urban development and heritage conservation strategies for the country: to what extent should the baggage of tradition be respected or discarded?
References
Mallik A., S. Chaudhury , T. B. Dinesh and Chaluvaraju. ‘An Intellectual Journey in History: Preserving Indian Cultural Heritage’. In New Trends in Image Analysis and Processing – ICIAP 2013. ICIAP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8158, edited by A. Petrosino , L. Maddalena and P. Pala . Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013.
Shashi Tharoor
The name ‘Hindu’ itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages, French and Persian among them, the word for ‘Indian’ is ‘Hindu’. Originally, Hindu simply meant the people beyond the River Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan, and to make matters worse, the word ‘Hindu’ did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition. In other words, Hindus call themselves by a label that they didn’t invent in any of their own languages but adopted cheerfully when others began to refer to them by that word. (Of course, many prefer a different term altogether, Sanatana Dharma [eternal faith].) ‘Hinduism’ is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But, none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu. The religion has no compulsory dogmas.
Hinduism is predicated on the idea that the eternal wisdom of the ages and of divinity cannot be confined to a single sacred book; we have many, and we can delve into each to find our own truth (or truths). Hindus can claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs one is free to reject, a religion that does not oblige the adherent to demonstrate her or his faith by any visible sign, by subsuming her or his identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. (There is no Hindu pope, no Hindu Vatican, no Hindu catechism, not even a Hindu Sunday.) Hinduism offers a veritable smorgasbord of options to the worshipper – of divinities to adore and to pray to, of rituals to observe (or not), of customs and practices to honour (or not), of fasts to keep (or not). Hinduism allows each believer to stretch her or his imagination to a personal notion of the creative godhead. The Hindu texts uniquely operate from a platform of scepticism, not the springboard of certitude. Indeed, not even what one might think of as the most basic tenet of any religion – a belief in the existence of God – is a prerequisite in Hinduism: agnosticism is a key principle of more than one major school of Hindu philosophy.
Most faiths prioritize one identity, one narrative and one holy book. Hinduism recognizes that everyone has multiple identities, accepts diverse narratives and respects several sacred books, as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan notes. Hinduism, in other words, incorporates almost all forms of belief and worship within it; there is no need to choose some or reject others.
If Hinduism as a set of spiritual ideas is unusually liberal, undogmatic and flexible, Hindu society has not always lived up to the freedom enshrined in the faith. The prevalence of the caste system, with social hierarchies linked to occupation and widespread discrimination against ‘lower’ castes, has provoked reformers for centuries; most of its worst practices, such as denial of temple entry to outcastes, were outlawed in the twentieth century. Constitutionally mandated affirmative-action programmes are dramatically reversing many caste-imposed disabilities once and for all. But this is not a new phenomenon; Hinduism has been reforming and reinventing itself for millennia, starting with the challenges posed to it by Buddhism and Jainism with their emphasis on ethics over rituals, then by Islam with its egalitarianism and iconoclasm and finally by colonial Christianity with its association with modernity. Hinduism responded through repeated reinvention of itself and absorption of ideas from its critics as well as through a typically Hindu proliferation of forms of the faith. The early idea of a formless God (nirguna brahman) and the complications of too abstruse a philosophy gave way to that of the saguna brahman with millions of manifestations of the divine, including as a woman with eight arms riding a tiger, a pot-bellied figure with an elephant’s head and a muscular figure with a monkey’s head and tail, all reflective of different aspects of the godhead and embodying wonderful stories about themselves. A period of stagnation led to the vigorous philosophical preaching of Adi Shankara at the cusp of the ninth century and his propagation of the faith through the establishment of religious centres across the subcontinent; its popularization by Ramanuja and dozens of sages who brought worship from priestly Sanskrit into the vernacular; its spreading through verse and song in the mystic Bhakti movement; the rejection of idolatry by sects like the Brahmo Samāja and the Arya Samāja; and the flourishing of gurus and ‘godmen’ to guide some believers to the Absolute. All changed the manner in which Hinduism was practiced and all are valid ways of being Hindu.
In the twenty-first century, Hinduism has many of the attributes of a universal religion – a religion that is personal and individualistic, privileges the individual and does not subordinate one to a collectivity; a religion that grants and respects complete freedom to the believer to find her or his own answers to the true meaning of life; a religion that offers a wide range of choices in religious practice, even with regard to the nature and form of the formless god; a religion that places great emphasis on one’s mind and values one’s capacity for reflection, intellectual enquiry and self-study; a religion that distances itself from dogma and holy writ that is minimally prescriptive and yet offers an abundance of options, spiritual and philosophical texts and social and cultural practices to choose from. Each Hindu must seek and find her or his own truth.
In a world where resistance to authority is growing, Hinduism imposes no authorities; in a world of networked individuals, Hinduism proposes no institutional hierarchies; in a world of open-source information sharing, Hinduism accepts all paths as equally valid; in a world of rapid transformations and accelerating change, Hinduism is adaptable and flexible – which is why it has survived for nearly four thousand years.
References
Radhakrishnan, S. The Hindu View of Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927.
Tharoor, S. Why I Am a Hindu. New Delhi: Aleph Books, 2018.
Sanjay Chaturvedi
In India’s world view and deeper layers of socio-spatial consciousness, one finds the enduring vision/self-image as Bharatavarsha, located on the southern petal of Jambudvipa, described in sacred Indian texts as a four-petalled lotus floating at the centre of seven concentric oceans separating six regions (varshas), each endowed with its own mountains and river systems. Bharatvarsha has the Himalayas, mighty rivers and seas surrounding its triangular shape. The maritime facet of India’s sacred geographies of pilgrimage is graphically revealed at places like triveni of Kanyakumari (the virgin Goddess) at the southernmost tip of India (duplication of the riverine triveni at Prayag but with a difference) with waves coming in from the Arabian Sea to the west, the Bay of Bengal to the east and the Indian Ocean to the south.
The Indian Ocean (Hind Mahasagar) – the only ocean on the planet named after a country – is an embayed ocean covering approximately 74 million square kilometres, nearly 20 per cent of the world’s total ocean area with almost 70,000 kilometres of coastline, and inhabited by close to 40 per cent of humanity. Endowed with 7,500 km of coastline, 1,200 islands and 2.4 million square kilometres of exclusive economic zones (EEZs), India has a major stake in a cooperative and peaceful maritime regional order. Contrary to the Atlantic and the Pacific as ‘open’ oceans, the Indian Ocean can only be accessed through several ‘choke points’, including the Straits of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca. As the fastest-growing economy in the world, critically dependent on maritime trade, India no doubt has a major stake in securing these sea lines of communication (SLOCs), but interconnectedness between the Indian Ocean as a ‘space of flows’ and the Indian civilization is much deeper and older.
Before the Vasco da Gama period (i.e. before 1497–8), the Indian Ocean acted as a ‘crucible’ for what John Hobson has termed as ‘oriental globalization’, involving Chinese, South Asian and Middle Eastern trade. What Fernand Braudel would call longue durée, or the long-term rhythms of long-distance maritime trade, facilitated the diffusion of religious and cultural systems such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam across the Indian subcontinent. It was during the rule of the Pallava dynasty in South India, from the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth centuries, that trade between India and Southeast Asia brought the Bay of Bengal littorals in a closer embrace. The period that witnessed the rise and fall of the Chola empire in South India (ninth to thirteenth centuries) also saw the zenith of premodern commerce in the Bay of Bengal, which would be known as ‘Chola Sea’ or ‘Chola Lake’. Whereas in the Arabian Sea, a seaborne network of commercial, social and cultural relationships in the seventeenth century – connecting the ‘trade on the coast’ with the ‘trade in the interior’ – connected India to the Middle East and East Africa. Such recollections, memories and imaginaries serve as a critical resource for India’s cultural and economic diplomacy today and facilitate India’s Look East policy.
Deploying geohistorical perspectives, the Indian Ocean could be imaginatively approached as a critical social science laboratory by those interested in a non-Eurocentric international relations and critical geopolitics to expose the limits of the ‘area studies’ approach. Narrow state-centric understandings of ‘maritime order’ could be tempered with the realization that the history of human mobility – ably assisted by regularly reversing monsoon winds – in the Indian Ocean is much older than that of Westphalian territoriality. Sugata Bose would rather describe Indian Ocean historically as ‘interregional arena’ with fuzzy inside–outside distinction. Whereas Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sherman have persuasively demonstrated how, historically, in highly ‘heterogeneous Indian Ocean International System’, polity diversity proved constitutive rather than subversive of ‘order’.
No longer neglected, the Indian Ocean today is central to Indian statecraft, foreign policy and diplomacy, as recently articulated through the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region). The numerous challenges faced by India and others in the Indian Ocean region today (e.g. maritime security and safety, ecological unsustainability, climate change, migration) will continue to demand proactive policy engagement, international cooperation and critical theoretical reflection.
References
Barendse, R. J. The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century. New Delhi: Vision Books, 2002.
Chaturvedi, Sanjay. ‘Mapping the Maritime Order from International Relations’ Theoretical Perspectives’. In Whither Indian Ocean Maritime Order? Contributions to a Seminar on Narendra Modi’s SAGAR Speech, edited by Yogendra Kumar , 33–70. New Delhi: Knowledge World, 2017.
Sibesh Bhattacharya
Several terms that generally signified accounts of the past were current in ancient India. Gatha, narasamsi, akhyana (variant Akhyayika), itihasa, puraṇa, vamsa, carita, vamsanucarita and itivritta are some of the more frequently occurring ones. Among all of them, itihasa, either singly or in association with puraṇa, was the most prominent and one of the oldest. In fact, the term occurs as early as in the Atharva Veda. Kautilya makes itihasa a compulsory subject of study for a prince training for kingship. The Buddhist work Milindapanha counted itihasa as an important branch of knowledge. There was an itihasika school of interpreting the Vedas. Although itihasa compositions did not fully conform to the present-day notions of history, in their intent and purpose if not in methodology, they did serve as history. In a general sense, they can thus be regarded as ‘historical compositions’.
Itihasa obviously has family resemblance with history, for it was thought of as an account of the past. Itihasa, however, is a far older concept than history. A primary point of difference between itihasa and history is that the former is more explicitly didactic; it teaches by example. Itihasa’s interest is only in what is exemplary and of didactic value and not in the whole past. Etymologically, itihasa means ‘this is what it was’. The word itihasa invokes the past more imaginatively than history. The word ‘history’ originally (Greek historia) meant ‘investigation’. The term history, to begin with, thus had no direct association with the past; investigation could be of many other things. By picking up the word historia for the title of his construction of the past, Herodotus underlined right at the birth of the discipline its empirical methodology. The seeds of difference in outlook between itihasa and history and the divergent paths they took lie here.
The term itihasa gained wide penetration, popularity and longevity. On that score too, it can rival history. Practically in all modern Indian languages, east, west, north, south, itihasa is used as the equivalent of history. Notable exceptions are Tamil and Malayalam. Both use caritra or its variations; Malayalam also uses puravritta. These terms have been derived from the ancient carita, itivritta and so on. In modern Indian languages, however, the term itihasa has lost much of its ancient character; today, it connotes the Western idea of history.
The ancient Indian ‘historical compositions’, though referred to for the first time in the sacred Vedic literature, might have originated as a secular enterprise. While the predominant concern of the Vedic literature is the divine, it is man and not gods that was at the centre of these historical compositions. However, they soon got incorporated into the Vedic ritual tradition and acquired a moral content.
Itihasa and puraṇa were very intimately related; they were frequently spoken together and quite often as a compound. Together, they were given the status of the ‘fifth Veda’ attesting to their prestige and importance. In the beginning, the two terms might have just been synonyms; their themes may have been identical. Later, they seem to have somewhat diverged. Puraṇa became a distinct set of works with five ascribed features, the panchalakshana. Their thematic sweep became truly universal, spanning the ‘creation–dissolution’ dyad of the cosmos in recurring cycles, including the intervening human history in each cycle. Their traditional number was eighteen, all said to have been composed by the redoubtable Veda Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata. However, confusion about the difference between Itihasa and Puraṇa persisted right up to medieval times; Sankaracharya, Medhatithi and Sayanacharya gave diametrically opposite interpretations about their contents. Though not always to the same cosmic proportions, the scope of itihasa too expanded to include all aspects of human life. According to Kautilya, Itihasa came to include episodic narratives (itivritta, akhyayika, udaharana) on the one hand and the societal (dharmasastra, arthasastra) and even the cosmic (puraṇa) on the other. The Mahabharata is a prime example of Itihasa literature, that is what it preferred to call itself. A worthwhile lesson in the scheme of itihasa is the one which guides man in the pursuit of the ends of human lives, the purusarthas. Since what is ephemeral is really not valuable; guided by dharma, man ought to try reaching gradually to what is permanent and changeless. To exemplify that value is the goal of itihasa. It is in this sense that the Mahabharata calls itself itihasa. Itihasa, therefore, is not empirical; it selects and abstracts. The Mahabharata further suggests that the term itihasa was employed in two different ways. First, as narration of a background event to explain the significance of a later event – the way Ganga narrated the itihasa of drowning her newly born babies. Second, and the predominant one, the usage of itihasa was to illustrate a point pertaining to dharma by narrating a story.
From the point of view of itihasa, history’s insistence on minute recording of the past tends to make it preoccupied with the ephemeral. Itihasa would approve Descartes’s opinion that history seems to encourage keeping alive the memory of past injustice and keenness to avenge. Itihasa, on the other hand, places the highest emphasis on justice.
References
Dowson, John. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion. New Delhi: Rupa, fourteenth impression, 2004.
Thapar, Romila. ‘Puranic Lineages and Archaeological Cultures’. In Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations. New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1978.
Rama Kant Agnihotri
Janmapatri or janampatri or patri or tip or teva, or the casting of horoscopes, is central to the lives of substantial sections of the Indian population. While many hold strong views against the ‘superstitious’ stranglehold of this practice, in critical life situations, they often admit to being ‘forced’ by their family or friends to consult an astrologer. ‘What, after all, do you lose?’, they are asked. Nor is this a question voiced by those close to one alone. It is a question that Indian society at large asks of its members: in an uncertain world, why not trust the starry and immutable predictions of a janmapatri?
Words like janmapatri and its cousins across the various regions of India generally refer to a rolled long handwritten document that is taken to a family astrologer on occasions such as birth, marriage, the advent of sickness, job search, examination results, the filing of candidature to elections or making choices among political parties, buying property, making a major investment, starting a business and setting up a factory. There is no aspect of human life and its knotty conundrums that a janmapatri cannot address. This document, the janmapatri, ideally cast at birth, contains the kundali, or horoscope of the individual, and is said to be unique to this person and this person alone since according to the astrologers, it captures the relationship of the individual to the universe in terms of her or his name, rashi (equivalent of the Western moon sign), time and place of birth. At that moment, it is claimed that each of the planets, the sun, the moon and the constellations of the zodiac constitute a particular configuration that enables an astrologer to see the past, present and future of the particular individual. The astrologer claims to map the position of the navgrahas, the nine ‘planets’ (the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well as the two eclipse nodes, Rahu and Ketu) against the background of twelve houses mapped across the 360 degree zodiac, each house being associated with the constellation identifying it. It is on this basis that a horoscope is made, capturing such a mapping of the heavens at the time of birth; an astrologer tries to predict a person’s personality traits and makes major predictions about the life of an individual by correlating the planetary positions at the time of birth. If a prediction has to be made about any crisis points in the life of an individual, it is based on these principles of identifying the houses and the nature of planetary motions, whether forward or retrograde.
Irrespective of the vociferous and long-standing debates about whether astrology is or is not a science, the astrologers who make the janmapatri and the vast populations who regularly consult them believe that the planetary combinations at the moment of birth actually determine what will happen in the life of an individual. It is on account of this compelling and widespread belief system that is woven into the very fabric of social practice in India that the ‘common man’ as well as those who occupy high stations rush to the pundit whose role, in common parlance, often encompasses the role of an astrologer, when they face decision points in their lives.
There is no denying, then, that the janmapatri is central to Indian social life. At the moment of finalizing a matrimonial alliance, for instance, the janmapatri acquires untold significance. Both familial parties in such a case visit their family astrologer to ensure whether a match is suitable or not in terms of the kundalis of the boy and the girl. Many grah (planetary) locations and the predicative and predictive personality features of the two (usually referred to as the boy and girl) must match in order for an astrologer to declare a match suitable. All these associations, partially understood by ordinary people, make the mystique of visiting an astrologer all the more exciting; he is always held in some kind of awe. If you wish to find the auspicious moment to do something, you once again consult a reliable astrologer. For example, to ascertain the suitable date and timing for say marriage, or buying property or even filing political nominations, people regularly visit astrologers to ask for a shubh muhuurat, the most auspicious moment when that particular task must be done. Today, the undying popularity of astrology in India is attested by its move into the digital universe where one may witness any number of online ‘Vedic astrology’ sites on YouTube and elsewhere.
Kama and Kamasutra (Kāma and kāmasūtra)
Gurcharan Das
Kama is a masculine Sanskrit noun, which means both ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’. It can refer to a desire for anything, but like the English word ‘desire’, kama has come to generally refer to erotic desire. In the earliest Vedic texts, kama was conceived as a cosmic and human energy, animating life and holding it in place. Although a primal, biological drive, kama is best understood primarily as a product of culture. Reflecting the erotic and the ascetic aspects of human nature, its history is the story of a struggle between ‘kama optimists’ and ‘kama pessimists’. In the clash between the two, the ‘kama realists’ emerged, who offered a compromise in the dharma texts by confining sex to marriage.
Unlike the Judeo-Christian tradition, where in the beginning was light (when God said ‘Let there be light’ in the Book of Genesis), in the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE) it was kama in the beginning: the cosmos was created from the seed of desire in the mind of the One (10.129). Because kama is a ‘life force’, the source of action, creation and procreation, the ancients elevated it not only to an elegant god, Kama, but also to one of the four aims of human life. In contrast, desire was associated with ‘original sin’, guilt and shame in the former tradition.
We tend to blame the Victorians for today’s prudishness of the Indian middle class, but lurking deep within the Indian psyche is deep pessimism about kama’s prospects. More than 2,500 years ago, in the forests of north India, ancient yogis, renouncers and the Buddha were struck by the unsatisfactory nature of kama. The yogis sought ways to quiet this endless, futile striving. Their goal was chittavrittinirodha, ‘to still the fluctuations in the mind’, says Patanjali, in his classic text on yōga. And the great ascetic god, Shiva, burned the god Kama in frustration when the latter disturbed his thousand-year meditation. Hence, desire exists ananga, ‘bodiless’, in the human mind.
The answer of the Bhagavad Gita to this conundrum involving kama is to learn to act without desire. But how is this possible when ‘man is desire’ according to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the earliest of the Upanishads: ‘You are what your deep, driving desire is. / As you desire is, so is your will / As your will is, so is your deed. / As your deed is, so is your destiny’ (4.4.5). The Mahabharata proclaims that desire is the essence of life. Opposed to the pessimists were kama optimists, who flowered in the courtly culture in the first millennium CE, especially during the Age of the Guptas, culminating in Sanskrit love poetry and the erotic text of manners, the Kāmasūtra, which is not a sex manual but a charming, surprisingly modern guide to the art of living. Addressed to both men and women, it teaches good manners: ‘The best alliance plays the game / so that both sides taste one another’s happiness / and treat one another / as unique individuals’ (Kāmasūtra 3.1.23). The hero of the Kamasutra is the nagaraka, ‘a cultivated man-about-town’, who regards kama as one of the legitimate aims of life in which sexual pleasure exists for its own sake and not only for procreation. Towards the end of the book, it offers the best advice: ‘If you are kissed, / kiss back’.
The optimists focused on līlā (the playfulness of mischievous gods), and one in particular, Krishna danced the raslila with forty thousand women for an entire Brahma night that lasted 4.5 billion human years. Even the devotional love of god took a romantic turn in Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, where Radha, a married woman, longs to unite with Krishna, her divine, adulterous lover.
Kama optimists argued that, in human beings, instinctual desire travels from our senses to our imagination, whence it creates a fantasy around a specific individual. These fantasies are the source of intense pleasure, and despite all the constraints, men and women find a way to communicate their fantasies, and this gives rise to erotic love. Ancient society worried about this charming human inclination and instituted monogamy via marriage for the sake of social harmony. This turning point to ‘kama realism’, from polygamy to monogamy, is narrated vividly in the Mahabharata when Shvetaketu is appalled that his father is not in the least bit concerned that his wife sleeps with a different man every night.
The beguiling world of kama is full of paradoxes, as is inherent in the following sentence: ‘I desire only what I don’t have; once I attain it, kama dies.’ The mythology of god Kama posits five stages of desire from birth to death, represented by five flower arrows that Kama shoots from his bow made of sugar cane and a string made of bees. Kama is a lack of something that I do not possess and lovers long to unite in order to fill this deficiency. The extreme pleasure associated with kama is possibly a recompense for the loneliness of the human condition. But how can something that is missing compensate for loneliness or perish once attained? How can it be a goal of life?
Kama is ubiquitous and indestructible. Kamagita (song of desire), embedded deep inside the Mahabharata, reminds us that when one controls one desire, another pops up (XIV 13.9). If one gives up the desire for wealth and gives away one’s money, a new craving emerges – a desire for reputation; if one renounces the world and becomes an ascetic, one is driven by a desire for heaven (mokṣha), ‘liberation’ from the human condition. One may grow old, but the thirst of kama does not cease, as King Yayati learns in the Mahabharata.
The underlying premise of the four aims of life is that we live for a while and then we die. It matters to us that our lives have meaning. Accordingly, kama is also one of the sources for a meaningful life. We are constantly reminded about dharma, ‘our duty to others’. However, the thought escapes us that kama is a ‘duty to ourselves’ for living a fulfilling life. But how do we nurture desire without harming others or oneself? The dilemma often is whether to betray the other or oneself.
References
Das, Gurcharan. Kama: The Riddle of Desire. Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018.
Iyengar, B. K. S. Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. London: HarperCollins, 2002.
Miller, Barbara Stoler, ed. and trans. Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay
The Mahabharata stubbornly defies every attempt at straight-jacketing. Not only does the picturesque epithet ‘jungle’ fit the Mahabharata perfectly, the colossal work continually escapes forces aiming to tame it. The authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa, the sage. But, internal evidences make it patent that the word ‘author’ – a word usually used as shorthand for some regular ‘organizing principle’ – makes no sense as far the work is concerned. As it is, the Mahabharata was composed over centuries: roughly between fourth century BCE and fourth century CE. Besides carrying inputs from several contributors, the chronicle has within it traces of earlier stories which have faded from public memory due to the intrusion of newer ones. The Mahabharata, as we know it today, is best comparable to a towering edifice which has undergone the tortuous process of being built, partly demolished and being rebuilt over and over again.
It is also next to impossible to specify the genre into which the Mahabharata can be satisfactorily slotted. Even if one accepts the charitable view that the notion of genre is broad enough to signify a cluster of typical features, the Western term ‘epic’ does not quite fit the bill. The difficulty of zeroing in on a single label is further exacerbated by the fact that the Mahabharata on its own describes itself in ways more than one: kavya or ‘poetry’, puraṇa or ‘lore’, akhyana or ‘narrative’, itihasa or ‘thus it was’. Of these, itihasa, which resonates as it does with the word ‘history’, the etymology of which, in Greek can be successively traced back to historia or ‘learning acquired by investigation’, historein or ‘inquire’, histor or the ‘wise’, has a unique significance for the Mahabharata.
The itihasa is itihasa, a compendium of historia, precisely because it presents an ensemble of ‘histors’ of various shades. The wise enquirers of the Indian past are more or less unanimous that the itihasa is both indirectly and directly coloured by the great ideological churning which took place in the eastern Gangetic plains in 500 BCE. Daring to re-evaluate all received values, the stirring challenged age-old Brahmanical practices as well as the apparatus of belief associated with them. Coalescing into a full-blown uprising, known collectively as the Sramana Movement, its message rapidly reached the west, the heartland of hoary Brahmanism, where it succeeded in forcing the priestly class to partly modify some of the Vedic assumptions to which it had steadfastly clung to thus far. The Mahabharata bears the imprints of this massive shake-up – a structural readjustment whose historic relevance is yet to be exhausted. Simultaneously, it speaks of residues that remain unaccounted for by the act of assimilation/absorption/neutralization undertaken by the priestly class under siege. Emanating from the nastika or Veda-denying Sramana sects, such as the Jain, Buddhist and Lokayata, the unprocessed remnants function as irrepressible irritants which resist the smooth running of the moral economy grounded on the postulates of the astika or Veda-espousing camps. And, to make the matter even graver, on occasions, the blockades by themselves constitute the bone of contention. On the whole, these interruptions, minor or major in scale, prevent the Mahabharata’s discursive field from becoming foreclosed or frozen into a self-sufficient wholesome entity.
Containing multitudes and consistent in happily contradicting itself, the Mahabharata raises a host of ethical problems without resolving them to the full. It is this intrinsic incompleteness, the daring to fish out truths entrapped in the mire of falsehoods without getting trapped by false holistic truths, which keeps the Mahabharata alive, perennially contemporary. Over and above this, self-reflexive by temperament, the Mahabharata arrogates to itself the term ‘fifth Veda’. In contra opposition to the four canonical Vedas sealed and reserved for the upper classes, the fifth intends to address everybody. The dual longing to be multi-perspectival as well as all-inclusive is what renders to this itihāsa magical quality. Non-linear in progression, the text faces no trouble in moving in and out of the core narrative whenever or wherever it wills. The main plot does develop at a steady pace; but, with countless subsidiary episodes both criss-crossing and enveloping it, the plot gets increasingly caught up in an intricate pattern of pauses. At best thinly connected with the primary storyline, which anyway is rather convoluted, the overgrowth of secondary tales further complicates the Mahabharata. Not being held by any still Archimedean point, the focus of the text keeps shifting. Its manner of enunciation too enhances the fuzziness stemming from continual deferral and decentring.
The Mahabharata maintains an astonishing degree of rigour while portraying characters. Not one of Mahabharata’s principal protagonists is rounded or a mere cardboard piece. Instead, each of them, be he a good guy or a rotten one, be she docile or rebellious, is a bundle of contradictions. It is well-nigh impossible to psychologize them in terms of any fixed set of parameters.
The difficulties pertaining to the untangling of the knots peculiar to the Mahabharata – some of which have been listed above – are compounded by the different versions of the Sanskrit text doing the rounds along the length and breadth of the country. At the same moment, there exist instances of unified compilations set up by premodern editors upon which they built their commentaries. Of them the most pre-eminent is the seventeenth-century scholar Nilakantha – to arrive at the ‘best’ possible reading of the tome ‘he had compared many copies of the Mahabharata, collected from different parts of India’, as Sukthankar notes.
At the Eleventh International Congress of Orientalists held in Paris in 1897, Maurice Winternitz, the Austrian expert on ancient India, floated the idea of construing an ideal edition of the Mahabharata. Following the founding of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in 1917, the painstaking task of producing the Mahabharata’s critical edition started on a war footing after V. S. Sukthankar assumed charge of overseeing the programme in 1925. Treating the Nilakantha version as the vulgate or the commonly accepted reading, Sukthankar and his associates initiated a search for manuscripts far wider in scope than that of the seventeenth-century compiler. Spreading out in all directions, researchers collected 1,259 manuscripts – some truncated, some nearly complete – in total. Of them about eight hundred were collated. The gathered material was put under two headings: ‘N’ or Northern Recension and ‘S’ or Southern Recension. While the N-manuscripts comprised the Sanskrit text copied in Sarada (or Kashmiri), Nepali, Maithili, Bengali and Devanagari letters; the S-manuscripts did so in those of Telugu, Grantha (or Tamil) and Malayalam. The objective was to compare and contrast the five N-recensions and the three S-recensions between themselves and then to determine to what extent the two sets of recensions mutually corroborated each other. Once this was finished with, they proceeded to select the verses which would feature in the Critical Edition on the basis of the formula N = S. Snipping them away with meticulous care, the Critical Edition succeeded in reducing the total number of ‘official’ verses to around seventy-five thousand from the unwieldy one hundred thousand. Undeniably, it is the most reliable testimony of the manuscript tradition. That, however, does not mean that the Critical Edition had recovered the ‘original’ Vyasa’s Mahabharata transmitted orally over centuries; for, even the oldest of the written parchments belonged to the fifteenth century CE. In spite of the Critical Edition’s Himalayan effort to make sojourns into the mess called the Mahabharata motorable, the itihasa is still as jungle-like, as baffling as it was before.
The main plot of the Mahabharata revolves around animosity between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, which leads to a devastating, all-consuming war. The finale to the eighteen-day war is provided by a calculated terroristic attack. The terror strike spells out a grammar with such precision and breadth that it can, with minimal tinkering, accommodate the daily ferocities we encounter today. Yet, despite depicting blood-curling scenes in graphic details, the Mahabharata does not abide by the codes vital to ‘epics’ in general – it stands apart by not celebrating the winning party or masculine vigour. The glory of the itihasa lies in the fact that it inaugurated a discourse on discursive tussles between champions of war and proponents of peace. The residual excess which distinguishes the Mahabharata is its valorization of non-violence over violence.
Utterly confident of its staying power, the Mahabharata declares, ‘Some bards have already sung this itihasa; and some again are teaching it to others; others will no doubt do the same hereafter on earth.’ All said and done, this may not be an empty boast.
References
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. Three Essays on the Mahābhārata: Exercises in Literary Hermeneutics. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2016, reprint, 2017.
Bhate, Saroja. ‘Methodology of the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata’. In Mahābhārata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay . New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2014.
Mantra, tantra, yantra (MANTRA, TANTRA, YANTRA)
Ranjit Nair
Mantra in popular parlance has come to mean a mystic utterance conveyed by a guru to a disciple. The word is a compound of manas, which is mind as an internal organ, with an ending which denotes instrumentality, and the suffix tra, which could be interpreted to mean taking across (tarayati) as well as saving (trayati), making for a polysemy that allows the word mantra to denote sacred text or speech, a prayer or eulogy, a hymn from the Vedas or a votive formula in a ritual setting. Contending interpretations of the meaning of mantras were advanced by Kautsa who held that the mantras were meaningless (anarthakah mantrah) and were elements of rituals, and this view was countered by Yaska in Nirukta, perhaps the earliest work on etymology in any tradition. Mantras appear in the samhitas, brahmanas and aranyakas, which are the ritual sections of the Vedas. The debate between the ritualists and interpreters was important for the ancient grammatical tradition, leading to debates over key questions such as whether meaning was attached to words or sentences, with Yaska championing the former.
Perhaps the most famous of all mantras is the diphthong aum (often written as om), which is regarded as a compound of three vowels interpreted to stand for three states of awareness – waking, sleep and dreamless sleep. The Gayatri Mantra consists of a whole hymn recited in the morning, while facing and addressing the Sun.
An early derivative of mantra was mantri, which meant ‘thinker, adviser, counsellor’ in the Vedas and was also understood to mean ‘one who consents or agrees’. This is what was expected of a minister to a king, to counsel as well as execute. The word mandarin, used across East Asia, is an adaptation of mantrin.
Tantra is also expansively polysemous, applying to ‘a loom, the warp, the leading, principal or essential part, main point, characteristic feature, model, type, system, framework’. Its root signifies stretching or extending, applicable to bodies. Recalling the Cartesian definition of matter as res extensa, the word tantra applies to the body as the word mantra does to the mind. As practiced, tantrik schools taught various methods of bodily control, some of which were abhorrent to traditional thinkers. Shankara’s relentless campaign to purge tantra on account of its fixation on the body bore fruit, although the titillating features of the tantra ensured that it was pursued in secret as well as openly in places where the reformer’s writ did not hold sway.
Yantra, the last of the triad of words noted in this entry, relates to yana (path), making it an instrument to control motion or to direct an object along a path, which could range from the fetters, thongs and reins used by a horseman to surgical instruments in the hands of a surgeon, especially a blunt-edged one. Yantra came to mean instrument or apparatus, machine or engine. Massive masonry-built astronomical observatories, known as jantar mantars, set up by Raja Sawai Mansingh contained various yantra, such as the gnomon and the sundial. Despite the Raja’s efforts, however, the word yantra could not shake off its application to mystical diagrams and amulets allegedly endowed with occult powers.
References
Khanna, Madhu. Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2003.
Pontillo, Tiziana and Maria Piera Candotti . Signless Signification in Ancient India and Beyond. London: Anthem Press, 2014.
Sasheej Hegde
How does the critique of caste appear today? What form(s) does it take, and what concepts underwrite the terms deployed in this work of critique? And, moreover, by no means secondary, what attitude towards both that form and its conceptual repertoire can and should one adopt? This will largely constitute the order of our entry into the keyword ‘Manuvadi’. Unlike, say, other keywords of the Indic sociopolitical landscape, such as praja or sēvā or niti, or even jati, whose meanings are, as it were, adrift, the term Manuvadi remains by and large docked to its conditions of emergence.
Let me therefore begin by gesturing at aspects of its emergence. The term Manuvadi may be contextualized to its North Indian Hindi-speaking landscape of an anti-Brahminism transforming into political non-Brahminism by the early decades of the twentieth century – incidentally, a development not limited to North India but also obtaining across western India and southern India as well and soon thereafter forming the basis of a distinctively Dalit articulation that waxed and waned while resurfacing again in our contemporary times with the Bahujan Samāj Party within the shifting regional configurations of modern India. Consequently, the term Manuvadi, as both noun and adverb, cannot be taken to be exclusive to the Dalit critique of caste. In fact, even as the term did not quite obtain in such a fashion, its concept and referent found expression in the hostility to Brahmins expressed by Dayananda Sarasvati and the entire Arya Samāj network of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North India as well as in the articulations of the Indian socialists of the twentieth century like Acharya Narendra Deva and soon thereafter Rammanohar Lohia.
However, it must be stated that certain things remained constant in B. R. Ambedkar’s thinking about caste throughout his writing life, namely, Brahminism’s centrality to the development of caste relations and the quasi-juridical basis of caste regulation as epitomized by the Manusmriti. In fact, this latter text (whose composition Ambedkar dates to 170–150 BCE and whose public burning in December 1927 he oversaw as part of the extended set of events that was the Mahad Satyagraha in Maharashtra) was taken as the prime symbol of Brahmin domination by various caste radicals of the twentieth century – and thus the association of Manusmriti with Manuvadi as both noun and adverb – with the text’s ban on education for women and untouchables and the prescribed ill treatment of the Shudra castes being repeatedly challenged as symbols of Hindu cruelty and despotism. Indeed, as part of the enlarged space of political non-Brahminism, Manuvadi – not quite the word but the politics it translates into – predates the Dalit critique, without of course changing the meanings of the word (and its associated politics) as taken to signify the interpenetration of caste power with Brahmanical authority.
Now, of course, this challenge to caste power and Brahmanical authority has a longer genealogy than as suggested above – although Manuvadi as a distinctively early-twentieth-century importation cannot be discounted – marking the contours of dissent within ‘Hinduism’ in historical terms. To be sure, practices associated with what may be termed a ‘Brahmanical’ imaginary – specifically for those traditions that accept a special mediating role for ritual experts referred as Brahmins and feature major textual formations in Sanskrit (and by no means limited to the Manusmriti) – are clearly delineated as different from (say) antinomian yogic practices in other Sanskrit sources. This also means that the Brahmanical traditions were diverse and decentralized, hardly taking a centralized institutional form. Indeed, as the religious studies scholar Leela Prasad has eloquently demonstrated, the authoritative texts associated with Brahmanical Hindu tradition obtain in diverse ways, functioning largely as ‘imagined texts’ where ‘injunctions’ and ‘actions’ come together in an imagined representation of the normative that is ‘constructed by each individual – or by a community – commingling memory and experience with learning and teaching’.
Doubtless, there is more to Brahmanical traditions than the fact of caste exclusion. The force of this recognition notwithstanding, it must yet be admitted that there has always obtained, across sociopolitical spaces in India, a salience ascribed to caste; and, what is more, this salience has been institutionalized through cultural mediations of the kind that renders Brahmins as ‘always already’ and ‘distinct pre-possessors’ of social and cultural power. Understanding caste and Hinduism historically, then, requires that we open up to the ‘thresholds and limits’ that attach to Manuvadi (the key integuments of which I have outlined in our foregoing paragraphs).
References
Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Rocher, Ludo. Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmasastras. New York: Anthem Press, 2012.
Mohini Mullick
Maya, it can truly be said, is a uniquely Indian notion. Thus, although it has often been rendered in the English language as ‘illusion’, the gloss just does not begin to approach the complexities of the concept of maya. Maya is associated primarily with the philosophical school of Vedanta, whose main expositor was the Adi Sankara. Maya also plays a role in Buddhism, but for reasons dwelt on below, it takes on somewhat different connotations here. The term Vedanta suggests that the system referred to is not only an interpretation of the truths of the Vedas but also an elucidation of the very goals of all existence that the Vedas only began to reveal. The Upanishads, as part of the larger corpus known as sruti, constituted the disquisitions into the jnanamarg (the way through knowledge), as opposed to the karma marg (the way through action/practice) to the attainment of these goals. The final goal is, of course, mokṣha (broadly, ‘liberation’).
‘Liberation from what?’ one may ask. The answer is as follows: this phenomenal existence which is but a manifestation of maya, an apparent ‘limiting adjunct’ of the Ultimate Reality that is described as Brahman. Unfathomable, inscrutable and variegated (anirvacaniya), it gives rise to the realm of nama-rupa (name and form) which dissolves for each individual at the moment of realization that all is Brahman. Though there is questioning on this subject, there is finally no answer to why the Absolute needs to seemingly create an imperfect world. The closest one gets to an ‘explanation’ is that the cosmic principle of avidya (ignorance) leads to the error of imagining a created world of nature and of all life. In Samkhya, the oldest of the ‘schools’ of Indian thought, prakriti (nature) plays the role of maya. The Bhagavad Gita, based as it is on Samkhya, also refers to prakriti as the field (ksetra) of worldly action.
Advaita writings are replete with images of the ‘seeing’ of silver where only the conch shell exists, recoiling from the ‘snake’ when a rope is all that lies ahead. These metaphors have limited heuristic value however, for, unlike the snake and the silver, maya is neither real (sat) nor unreal (asat).
In Buddhism, maya is linked even more closely to cosmic ignorance which results in the cycle of suffering and rebirth (samsara). To exit this cycle is to attain nirvaṇa (the blowing out of existence). Denying the reality of a Brahman or any Ultimate Reality, there is no positive goal such as mokṣha for the Buddhist life. The realization of the truths of suffering, its causes traceable to ignorance, and also its cure finally set the individual free of maya. As Buddhism has evolved, nirvaṇa has been viewed more as a state of enlightenment in this very world resulting from the recognition of the ephemeral nature of causal relations, of contingency in the interdependence of events. Interestingly, Buddha’s mother was named Maya. Thus, maya also denotes the principle of fecundity, of primeval potentiality which gives birth to the world, samsara.
The notion of maya has been a powerful conceptual force in the historical Indian imagination: it survives today in popular folklore as the jagat (world) of moha (attachment), ichha (desire) and ahamkara (ego). If there is truth in the observation that human life comes at a low premium in India, then surely this is so because of a deep cultural investment in the notion of maya. Vivekananda, Aurobindo and S. Radhakrishnan, to mention only some of the prominent early philosophers of colonial India, were deeply influenced by the prevailing paradigms of Western thought. Even more poignantly, they felt an urgent need to respond to criticism of Indian thought, emanating from the West. Thus, Schelling’s claim of an etymological affinity between maya and magia (magic) in his Philosophy of Mythology demanded rebuttal. In the academia, maya is today explicated in the English language in altered tropes. The image of maya as the realm of nama-rupa gives way to a world described in terms of space-time and causality and as the bearer of only relative existence (as opposed to Absolute Reality) by Vivekananda. Plato, Bradley and Kant are invoked by various academics to lend substance to this construct. More recently, keeping step with the philosophical concerns and locutions of the day, even the godman Rajneesh argued that this phenomenal existence is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Finally, in a silent revolution, religion, a notion unknown to ancient India, becomes the prime instrument for the final renting of maya’s veil.
References
Goudriaan, T. Maya: Divine and Human. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.
Mullick, M. and M. S. Santanam , eds. Classical Indian Thought and the English Language: Perspectives and Problems. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research and D. K. Printworld, 2015.
Moksha/Nirvana (mōkṢa/nirvāṆ a)
Ranjit Nair
Among the four purusharthas (human ends), mokṣha appears last. Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether mokṣha was a later inclusion, with some maintaining that it can be found in the Vedas in the 500–1000 BCE and others noting that its rise to prominence occurred towards the end of the first millennium BCE and the first century CE. Questions have been raised about the possible mapping of the purusharthas onto the four varnashramas, namely brahmacharya, grhastha, vanaprastha and sannyasa. These contentious issues cannot be resolved without detailed scholarship relying on the commentaries that steadily accrete around the key texts.
Mokṣha and mukti are derived from the Sanskrit root muc, meaning ‘to release, to free’. On the other hand, nirvaṇa, which is the term preferred by the Bauddhas and the Jainas, means ‘blowing out’. This is connected to the idea of metempsychosis with the atman (soul), compared to a lamp which can light other lamps, the passage from one birth to another until its final cessation. With the doctrine of the atman so dearly beloved in the Vedanta, being denied by the Bauddhas, it is puzzling that metempsychosis is considered at all. The Buddha was aware of the apparent dissonance between the idea of the ever-changing world, or samsara, and the anatman doctrine. The resolution lies in the recognition of the composite nature of the individual or self and the restitution of the elements to its respective realms. The recognition of impermanence is the root to the final dissolution. As the Madhyamika philosopher Nagarjuna put it some five centuries after the Buddha, ‘Samsara is nirvāṇa’.
Mokṣha is invariably perceived in the literature as the telos of every activity, prompting twentieth-century interpreters to dismiss it as a literary conceit devoid of serious content. This is an instance of a feature of Indian civilization, which looks odd to the outsider. It is patronizing to think that the laity is philosophically untutored and hence prone to bringing into every action of theirs the lofty aim of mokṣha. The idea of nishkama karma (disinterested action) advocated in the Bhagavad Gita, is an instance where mokṣha is applied to all sorts of karmas. The laity had access to the Gita in a variety of forms, textual as well as in performative arts.
There were, inevitably, disagreements about the route to mokṣha and nirvaṇa, as eschatology depended on the ontologies and epistemologies that were adopted. For the Jainas, the soul needs to get rid of its worldly defilements in order to attain mokṣha or nirvaṇa. In the mainstream Vedantic traditions, mokṣha meant enlightenment, getting rid of false notions and being able to see the world as an artifice that stood in the way of comprehending the unity of the self (atman) and the essence of the world (brahman). The Bauddha position on this topic is rather similar, emphasizing the cessation of all desire in the state of nirvaṇa.
The Vivekacudamani (The Crest Jewel of Discrimination) attributed to Shankara avers that among the ingredients for mokṣha the most weighty is bhakti (devotion). The verse goes on to define bhakti as svasvarupanusandhanam (the search for one’s own self). The result of the search is to find that one’s own self was identical to the self of all, as advaita (non-dualism) holds. Mokṣha, like several core concepts of the tradition, was amenable to multiple interpretations. Through Gaudapada, the teacher of Shankara’s own teacher Govinda, the Bauddha and Vedantic conceptions of mokṣha came together, which was of course bitterly resented by his detractors who called him a crypto-Buddhist and much worse.
Folk belief in mokṣha as the final liberation of the self from becoming embodied time and again is widespread among the pious. They get drawn into weird cults resulting in the loss of lives, as reported recently with a family of eleven, who hanged themselves in the wee hours of 1 July 2018 in their home in Burari, a census town in North Delhi, after much careful preparation and for no ostensible reason other than conviction.
References
Bhatt, S. R. ‘The Concept of Moksha – An Analysis’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36, no. 4 (June 1976): 564–570.
Press Trust of India. ‘“Burari Deaths Not Suicide but Accident”: Forensic Lab Report’. [online] NDTV.com, 2019. Available at: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/delhis-burari-deaths-not-suicide-but-an-accident-psychological-autopsy-report-1916739%3famp=1&akamai-rum=off (accessed 26 May 2019).
Taslima Nasrin
The Mussalman or Muslims of the Indian subcontinent live in different situations in each of the countries. They are a majority in Pakistan and Bangladesh and a minority in India. Pakistan is founded on the basis of religion, so the Muslims there tend to be rigid (hardliners). Bangladesh fought a war against Pakistan with the aim of becoming a secular state, but, a few years after Independence in 1971, the process of making Bangladesh a Muslim country was set in motion. In India, Hindu fundamentalism is on the rise. Hindu fundamentalists are very hostile to Muslims. Many claim that fundamentalists are created because of the pollution of politics by Muslims (to get the Muslim vote?). The behaviours of Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists are exactly the same.
India’s Hindutva followers believe that India’s Muslims do not love the country. And that they must therefore have this love beaten into them. Those who are not thieves, dacoits and rioters are harassed in the streets only because they are Muslims. Such feelings of hate are not good for the well-being of any country. Seventeen crores (170 million) India’s citizens are Muslims. Oppressing them, insulting them and lynching them to death because they have eaten beef will not be able to erase such a large population. Policy should not ghettoize Muslims, but rather it should aim at bringing them into the mainstream; it should not confine them to the masjids and madrassas but bring them into modern colleges and universities. Just as there are bad elements in all religions, there are also good ones. Being hated can turn those good into bad. Beating up and chasing Muslims out of India are not going to solve all of India’s problems. India’s greatness lies exactly in the fact of having survived as one country made up of many peoples, religions, languages and cultures.
On the Indian subcontinent, sentiments of distrust and hate between Hindus and Muslims alternate between being dormant and being exhibited monstrously. One cannot forget the great Calcutta killings of 1946, the Noakhali riots of 1946, the Malabar rebellion of 1921, the Nagpur riots of 1927, the Nellie massacre of 1983, the Ranchi-Hatia riots of 1967, the Gujarat riots of 1969, the Bhiwandi riots of 1984, the Meerut riots of 1987, the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, the Hyderabad riots of the 1990s, the Bombay riots of the 1990s, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and, in the last few years, the Canning riots of 2013, the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 and Kaliachak riots of 2016. In all these riots, people from both Hindu and Muslim communities were killed. India was partitioned ostensibly to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims and to avoid riots and deaths. However, when Hindus from one side and Muslims from the other were crossing over in trains, a total of about ten lakh were murdered at each other’s hands. Sometimes it seems that perhaps Hindus and Muslims will never be able to live side by side as friends and relatives. Although there have been no Hindu–Muslim riots in Bangladesh and Pakistan, oppression of the minorities by the majority continues unabated, and fear has led the minorities to emigrate or convert to the majority religion. All minorities are feeling endangered in the subcontinent.
There have been some unprecedented incidents in the midst of all these Hindu–Muslim riots, turbulence and jealousy. There have been incidents where Muslim youths did not hesitate even for a moment to break their religious fasts in order to help Hindus in their hour of need. Similarly, in Bangladesh, Hindu (ISKCON) and Buddhist temples feed the Muslim poor (iftar dinners) during the holy month of Ramadan. If all communities were to practice humanity, friendship between them would prosper. All religions would be known as humanitarian religions. This is what being civilized means. There is no greater religion than the religion of humanity. Once humanity disappears, what remains of religion is merely singing the praises of the Lord to escape from hell or to go to heaven.
References
Nasrin, Taslima. Shame: A Novel (translated from the Bengali novel Lajja). New York: Prometheus Books, 1997.
Nasrin, Taslima. Split: A Life. London: Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2018.
Ulka Anjaria
The origin of the term Orientalism goes back to Western representations of the non-Western world, specifically the Middle East and India. Representations included painting, travel writing and other genres. Orientalism also referred to an academic body of knowledge interested in non-Western cultures and languages. William Jones was perhaps the most well-known Orientalist, who, in the eighteenth century, developed the theory of a common origin to Indo-European languages after extensive study of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages. As British rule was rationalized and bureaucratized in the late nineteenth century, the debate between Anglicists and Orientalists heightened, with the former pointing out India’s backwardness in relation to Western civilization as a justification for colonial rule and the latter suggesting that Indian religion and spirituality had something to teach a disillusioned and secularized Europe.
The publication of Edward Said’s path-breaking Orientalism in 1978 changed the meaning of this term and made it central to what was later called postcolonial theory. Using Foucault’s idea of the episteme or regime of truth, Said argued that Orientalism was not only a branch of learning and a form of representation but also a discourse that included many different forms, genres and even political positions (from Flaubert to Marx). This discourse did not merely describe the non-Western world but also created a non-Western world that would be subject to colonial rule. Representation, in particular seemingly non-ideological forms of representation such as literature, art and travel narrative, was central to this endeavour, precisely because it appeared to be apolitical and to merely represent experiences. But, as Said brilliantly shows, this vast diversity of writings operated on a finite number of tropes, which, in their very reproducibility and translatability across genres, turned the idea of an ‘Orient’ open for British rule into a self-evident reality.
This idea not only of Orientalism specifically but also of colonial discourse as the prerequisite for colonial rule radically changed the study of colonialism and might be said to have given impetus to the metropolitan brand of postcolonial theory already anticipated by anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and others. Following Orientalism, the study of colonial discourse became the primary work of postcolonial theory, showing how different texts and forms of representation, from Victorian novels to Linnaean classificatory schemes, to botany, to English literary study itself, were part of this massive discursive formation that made colonial rule not only possible but also desirable. The geographic specificity of Said’s work was expanded to include other Orientalisms, such as American orientalism, Ottoman orientalism, Zionist orientalism and so on.
At the same time, some postcolonial theorists felt that Said’s representation of an all-encompassing discourse that, in Foucauldian terms, had no outside presented colonial rule as more powerful than it actually was. Scholars such as Homi Bhabha pointed to the precarity of colonial rule founded in the precarity of language itself. Other scholars felt that Said did not pay enough attention to resistance to colonial rule, suggesting that not only nationalist leaders but also the nation’s margins, such as women, Muslims, Dalits and others, were able to contest Orientalism from the outside. Others, especially Marxist scholars, argued that in focussing on ideological domination, Said did not pay enough attention to the material basis of empire. Even Said himself retreated from what was taken to be an analysis of colonial power as all-encompassing and unassailable. It is probably fair to say that the strength and the persistence of these critiques has rendered the idea of Orientalism less relevant to contemporary scholarship on colonialism, even though it radically reshaped the field when it was first forwarded.
References
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978.
Said, Edward W. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’. Cultural Critique, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 89–107.
Keki Daruwala
Parsis are a bit of an enigma to the rest of mankind: a harmless comical race to the movie scriptwriter; great patronizers – aapri Ranee (Elizabeth), aapro Ratan (Tata); superb skirmishers when it comes to fighting among themselves; and equally superb litigants – a law court hath no fury like a Parsi plaintiff. To the surprising regret of the rest of mankind, they are also a diminishing race, perched on the precipice of premature extinction. (Parsi love alliteration, incidentally.)
Parsi are Zarthustis, followers of possibly the oldest prophet, Zoroaster, the man who invented monotheism, heaven, hell, the day of judgement and dug an unbridgeable chasm between good and evil. Parsi fled Persia after enduring Muslim/Arab persecution for about two centuries and reached Diu, on India’s western coast, a thousand years ago. A syrupy sentimental story – invented and documented in Qisseh-i-Sanjan (1599), by its author the Parsi priest Behman Kaikobad Sanjana – has it that the incoming Parsi were shown a full pot of milk, denoting that the place was full up and could not accommodate more. The Parsi priest placed jaggery in the milk pot, meaning that the Parsi will live there like sugar in milk. The conditions laid out to them in turn were ‘forsake weapons, adopt the Gujarati language and attire and celebrate weddings after sundown’.
This piece is not about Cyrus the Great or about Herodotus and Queen Tomyris. This is about Parsi from the province ‘Pars’ in Iran, who refused to convert to Islam despite state coercion and torture, sailed to India and found sanctuary in Gujarat, in the tenth century or thereabouts, landing first at Diu where they stayed for nineteen years before shifting to Sanjan, where the first sacred fire was ‘enthroned’. Once the Khiljis conquered Gujarat and the Tughlaks followed, they wiped out Hindu temples and Parsi fire temples. Alaf Khan, a Tughlak general, massacred the Parsi in Sanjan after suffering a reverse the previous day. Parsi fled Sanjan and moved into Navsari, Surat and Udwada. Where the Parsi went so did their sacred fires, housed in Atash Behrams (Big Fire Temples) and their dokhmas (bleak roofless towers), vulture fringed, where they disposed of their dead.
Meanwhile, Parsi had taken to farming and planting orchards. The Dutch arrived in Surat, and many Parsi shifted there. Mughal monetization, the setting up of the Dutch East India Company in Surat in 1602 changed Parsi outlook. It paved the way for seafarers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who traded with the Far East and China in silks, cotton and opium. Parsi who traded with China became known as ‘Merchant princes’ – Banajis, Camas, Readymoneys and Jamshetji Jejeebhoy. (The last named has been dealt with shabbily by an Indian novelist recently.) By 1805, sixteen Parsi firms and two Parsi–China agencies were flourishing. They exchanged cloth and opium for tea, silk, silver and ceramics. They ploughed back much of their money into charities. For instance, Jamshetji’s wife gave away money of rupees 155,800 from her personal wealth in 1841 to build the Mahim Causeway joining Bandra island with Mahim. Jemshetji’s name heads 126 charities, including Sir JJ School of Art, JJ School of Architecture, JJ School of Applied Art, high schools and many dharamshalas for the destitute. He even bought grazing grounds for cattle herders, because the British were charging a grazing tax. And of course Jamshetji Tata put up India’s first steel mill, as also the Taj Hotel.
Before Independence, while most Parsi were pro-British, though they never went as far as appropriating Winston Churchill with an ‘apro bulldog’ attitude, we had our pioneers in Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), who was Congress president in 1886, 1893 and 1906. He was known for his unfavourable views on the British economic policy in India. In his famous book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, he noted that India was being unfairly taxed and the wealth of the country was being drained. Bhikaiji Cama is famous for unfurling the Indian flag in Stuttgart. She was never allowed by the British to come back to India till she was almost on her death bed.
Beside this, the community was backed by a resurgent spirit of enterprise (now absent). The women developed their own Parsi cuisine, of which dhansak (Parsi delicacy; goat meat cooked with lentils and vegetables) is just a miniscule part. Parsi became the advance guard of puppetry, astrology and theatre. The Parsi theatre, with its rumbustious jokes (semi-ribald), was favourite in Gujarat and Bombay and was the inspiration behind the Marathi theatre. Today, they boast of novelists like the brothers Rohinton and Cyrus Mistry and poets like Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawalla and Kersy Katrak. Gieve is also a playwright and painter with his paintings displayed at the Smithsonian. In art they have made a mark, not just with opening the Cawasji Jahangir Gallery but with painters like Jahangir Sabhawala, portrait painter Bhiwandiwala and others. In films, Parsi can unscroll a long list of luminaries, starting from Sohrab Modi and ending with Ronnie Screwwala. Sohrab Modi acted as king Porus in the film Sikander but never got his due from the community because he married the Muslim actress Mehtab. It would also be important to remember Farrokh Bulsara and apro Freddy Mercury.
General Sam Manekshaw who headed the army when the Pakistani forces were defeated, resisted going to war till he and the army were fully prepared, is now a legend. The air force and navy have had Parsi chiefs, some of whom have won the Param Vir Chakra.
One should not forget the Parsi of other countries, Frene Ginwala of the African National Congress (ANC) who drafted South Africa’s Constitution and was the first Speaker, Justice Dorab Patel of Pakistan who gave a dissenting note in the trial of Zulfiqar Bhutto and Jamshed Marker, Pakistan’s ace diplomat.
Today, the community is lacking in enterprise, chutzpah and aspiration. Few Parsi are getting into covenanted services. And the physical diminishing of the population adds to the despair. The population decline in the community has been precipitous, from 114,890 in 1941, to 57,264 in the 2011 census. In 2013, the community recorded 174 births against 756 deaths. Such depressing statistics leave very little hope for the community’s future in India. Ninety-five per cent Parsi live in two states, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Inbreeding, delayed marriage, non-marriage and the falling fertility levels are responsible for the decline. With government help, a Jiyo Parsi scheme was ushered in through a dedicated organization called PARZOR (Parsi Zoroastrian) led by Dr Shernaz Cama.
References
Desai, Ashok V. ‘The Origins of Parsi Enterprise’. The Indian Economic & Social History Review 5, no. 4 (1968): 307–317.
Hinnells, John and Alan Williams , eds. Parsis in India and the Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2007.
S. Imtiaz Hasnain and Masood Ali Beg
Pir is a Persian word which literally means ‘old person’ or ‘elder’, both in terms of age (e.g. pir-o-jawan, ‘old and young’) as well as being wise, knowledgeable and experienced. Pir is also a title used for a Sufi master or spiritual guide. Other equivalent terms include the Persian sarkɑr (lord or master) and the Arabic shaikh or hazrat. In its most general sense, sheikhin also refers to a tribal, religious or organizational leader. As titles, however, pir and sheikh are honourifically conferred on someone who is in possession of spiritual knowledge. In Urdu-Hindi speech contexts, pir is also commonly used as an adjective, for example, pir bɑbɑ or pir sɑhib, to give salutation to a Sufi master or an honoured person.
In Sufism, the pir’s role is to guide and instruct his disciple in the Sufi path. This is done by imparting general lessons known as subahs. Bosworth and Nizami note that, as a religious and spiritual head in the Sufi order called tarīqa’, the pirs are seen as a mediator or connecting link between man and God, as one who ‘has already followed the path [saluk] to God and has acquired spiritual powers [wilɑya]’ and is, thus, ‘qualified to encourage and direct the aspiring novice [murīd] on the Sufi path’ in search of truth. In this sense, murshid, another Arabic word connoting ‘teacher’ or ‘master’ (originating from rashɑd ‘straight road’) is also used precisely in relation to the role of spiritual guide.
While in mystic parlance pir is commonly used for a spiritual guide, its usage in Indo-Muslim context provides a range of creative dimensions, producing a variety of senses when prefixed with different terms. Bosworth and Nizami enlist a typology of usages of pir with clearly identifiable functions.
Since Sufism grew as an integral part of Islamic tradition, it drew its inspiration from the same Holy Qur’an and the practices and preachings of Prophet Muhammad. One aspect of this inspiration is reflected in its attempt to systematically establish sainthood, which can be construed as a parallel to prophethood. Also, in their endeavour to further elaborate ‘distinctively mystical ways of reading and interpreting the Qur’an’, the Sufis struggled to find ‘new ways and venues’ to gather around to learn from Sūīi exegesis. Pir, shaikh and murshid thus emerged as a converging point for learning. These are titles for a senior Sūīi spiritual master who instructs and guides his murīd (‘disciple’) on the Sūfi path and thus wields institutional authority in Sufi order.
The word murīd has its roots in Arabic and means ‘committed one’ or ‘aspirant seeker’. It refers to someone with a strong ‘will power’. As seeker of guidance, he inculcates a Sufi order or tariqa’ (‘spiritual path’) of blind submission to the murshid or ‘inspired guide’ for spiritual realization. The murshid, reputed for the spiritual acumen and wide experience, facilitates in bringing about the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student, murshid–murīd. In Sufi tradition, this relationship is transactional in nature where murīd, with all respect and humility, takes the ‘oath of allegiance’, known as a baī’at or bay’ah, to surrender himself to the supervision of the murshid or pir who takes him under his guardianship to lead and guide him to the path of Sufism. This marks the beginning of an ‘inward’ (bɑtin) journey of the murīd, who is constantly guided to refrain from arrogance and pride, to control his greed, cravings and other weaknesses, to correct his character and achieve purity.
In the musical tradition in the context of dargɑh (shrine built over the grave of a pir), one may also find hierarchical and assumed subservient position between the pir and the qawwals (singers of the Sufi devotional songs known as qawwalis) bounded by sacredness. The power of the pir derives its strength from ‘their closeness to God, demonstrated by their austerity, enactment of miracles and broad learning’, which the qawwals accentuate and eulogize in their songs.
References
Bosworth, C. E. and K. A. Nizami . Pīr in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 8, edited by C. E. Bosworth , E. Van Donzel , W. P. Heinrichs and G. Lecomte . Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.
Kalra, Virinder, S. Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015.
B. N. Patnaik
Puraṇa constitutes an important genre of Sanskrit literature. Ancient Indian scholarship distinguishes between puraṇa and itihasa. Srimad Bhagavata, Vishnu Puraṇa and Vamana Puraṇa are categorized as puranas and Ramayana and Mahabharata are categorized as itihasas. Both puranas and itihasas are long narratives written in verse, and both have a dialogic structure in that there is a narrator who tells a story to a hearer or a group of hearers. The story has a narrative-dramatic structure – the dramatic is embedded in the narrative.
The distinction between a puraṇa and an itihasa is that the former tells of events that are very ancient, whereas the latter tells of happenings in the not-so-distant past. Some of the major vernacular languages of India have a rich repertoire of puranas; the distinction between puranas and itihasas is not maintained here because from the point of view of these compositions, all happenings in the puranas and itihasas are located in the very distant past. The vernacular puranas are not translations of the Sanskrit puranas but retellings. A retelling retains the basic story and even the structure of the original but modifies the details so as to give the story a distinctly local flavour and express the poet’s philosophy of life and of the world.
There are eighteen Sanskrit puranas, which have been organized into three categories: satvik, rajasic and tamasic. Each category contains six puranas. Srimad Bhagavata and Vishnu Puraṇa are among the satvik puranas, Vamana and Brahmanda are among the rajasic puranas and Agni and Shiva are among the tamasic puranas. This categorization may be merely sectarian, reflecting the prevalent power structure at the time of classification, where the Vaishnavas (followers of god Vishnu) had supremacy over the Saivites (followers of god Shiva). From another point of view, those puranas that deal with spiritual concerns rather than material concerns were more highly valued and called satvik. Thus, Srimad Bhagavata is generally rated most highly among the puranas.
There are said to be five major themes that a puraṇa was supposed to deal with: creation of the universe; its dissolution and recreation; genealogy of gods, sages and demons; creation of humans and the rule of the Manus (lord of the epochs); and histories of the kings of the solar and lunar dynasties. But, not all puranas actually deal with these either adequately or systematically. All puranas, however, certainly deal with jaya (victory). Events lead to a terrible, conclusive war, mostly among gods and demons, and the gods win, signifying the victory of good over evil and the restoration of cosmic balance, upset by the dominance of negative forces. In cosmic time and universal space, this engagement goes on, but the victory of the gods over demons in a particular puraṇa brings closure to that narrative. In the war, both gods and demons use trickery and other unethical means; thus, there is no real dharmayuddha (virtuous war) in puranic literature. Victory establishes the supremacy of one culture and belief system over another. A mahapurana (great puraṇa) like Srimad Bhagavata is indeed a major and even the defining cultural narrative of a people.
Puranas bring knowledge and wisdom embodied in the Vedas and the Upanishads to the common man. The Bhagavad Gita presents insights of the Upanishads in an accessible form, but it is not a puraṇa, because a puraṇa must be a story, a narrative. One can surmise that since the dissemination of knowledge took take place in the oral mode, verse became the chosen vehicle for narration. Puranas are didactic compositions, providing instruction about values to be cherished, ethical practices to be followed and knowledge to make sense of one’s world and one’s place in it. They offer to the listener solace, escape from the grim realities of life and spiritual satisfaction. This is the real phala sruti (benefit of reading/chanting rituals).
References
Dowson, John. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion. New Delhi: Rupa, fourteenth impression, 2004.
Mittal, Sushil and Gene Thursby , eds. The Hindu World. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Shivangini Tandon and S. Imtiaz Hasnain
The term kismat is derived from the Arabic root qismɑ, which literally means ‘sharing out, distribution and allotment’. In the early Arabic poetry of the first century AH (i.e. 622 CE–719 CE), it came to mean ‘portion or lot’ and was later specifically used to refer to the share of good or bad happenings in the life of each individual. The Encyclopedia of Islam defines kismat as fate or destiny, and in Persian and Turkish poetry, words like falak and gardun were used to describe this concept of destiny. In Ottoman usage, the variant kismet was also a technical term of the kassdmlik, the official department of state responsible for the division of estates between the various heirs. Though in Quran it is used only in terms of division or apportionment, in terms of the usual usage in Islamic theology and philosophy, it means determinism and predestination. In popular Islamic thought, kismat is seen as the fatalistic acceptance of what God has preordained as one’s lot. What is written (maktub), what is decided (maqdur) and what is my lot (kismat) are part of common discourse that suggests an unquestioning acquiescence of fatalism and a willing denial of freewill.
There are four major types of beliefs about destiny in the Indian subcontinent:
1. ‘Universal’ script: Whatever happens, happens exactly as it should and it couldn’t have been otherwise. In other words, it was predestined to happen this way.
2. ‘Soul Specific’ script: Whatever happens, happens as a result of your ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ (nasib or qismat). That means the journey of your life was written before your birth or at your birth, and you have no choice of changing the same.
3. ‘Accounting’ script: Whatever happens, happens as a result of your past ‘deeds’ (karma). This means, things happen to you depending upon your good or bad deeds in your previous birth or births. Some say that deeds of current life are settled in the current life itself.
4. ‘Happy Ending’ Script: Whatever happens, happens for good (bhagya). There is a ‘higher purpose’ behind every event.
An interesting aspect of kismat is that it brings with it a strange sense of ambivalence. Sometimes, in the hands of the motivated preachers of religion, kismat becomes a convenient tool, quite akin to the proverbial opium of the masses. Kismat here starts acting as a ‘safety valve’ making people believe that whatever abysmally low existence or negative circumstances they are going through are all pre-decided by their fate and so they can do little to change it. Alternatively, kismat is also often used as an excuse by those who oppress the weak. By making the latter believe that their oppression is their fate, the oppressors successfully crush any possibility of revolt on their part. Interestingly, the great poet Allama Iqbal in his Kulliɑt-i-Iqbal has also made use of this discourse of kismat to contextualize the dehumanizing tendencies and the capitalist mindset perpetuated during the period of the Industrial Revolution around the eighteenth century, where he sees fate as dominating over one’s hard work and creative endeavours.
God has complete mastery over all creation, an integral part of Islamic belief. Such belief and usage find prominent mention in songs and stories in Hindi. However, this was not always so, as we have seen in the case of Iqbal.
The word ‘takdir’ stems from the three-letter root qa-da-ra with the basic meaning of ‘to measure’. Takdir basically means to make something according to a measure/standard. When something is given with no consideration of measure, it carries a sense of plenitude. On the other hand, if it is done with careful measuring, it has an implication of shortage and therefore very important in cultural representation. Some derivatives of takdir include miqdɑr (a model, pattern or a standard), jɑza’ qadrahu (‘He transgressed his limits’) and qadrun (measurement in volume, size, weight, etc.). Since, to make something exactly according to a set standard, and specific measurements, one needs the ability, prowess and control, the last word ‘qadrun’ means to have power and be in control. For instance, in the following phrases derivatives of taqdir refer to power in so many different ways: qaddartu ‘alashshai (‘I had the power needed to change the thing according to my standard’), qɑdir (‘One who has power and control’), aqdir (‘One who shapes things according to set standards’) and qadr (value, standard, guiding proportion also, to assess and respect). It is perhaps in this trajectory that the aforementioned usage of taqdir to redeem oneself from ‘one’s lot’ may have arisen.
To conclude, the relentless use of statements terming the cause of events as destiny, etc., is a result of our conditioning and causes hindrance in the growth of our rational, creative thinking and scientific reasoning. It is, therefore, absolutely essential to keep our rational faculties intact along with our belief in kismat/takdir and not reduce them to mere superstitious beliefs or notions.
References
Adamec, Ludwig W. Historical Dictionary of Islam, 2nd edn. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
Raghavendra, M. K. Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Paula Richman
Ramayana has been used in two ways. Most specifically, Ramayana is the title of the Sanskrit seven-kanda (book) narrative whose composition is traditionally attributed to Valmiki. Hindu tradition views the title as composed of ‘Rama’ and ‘ayana’ (going), meaning ‘the journey of Rama’. Valmiki’s text is the earliest, extant, full, literary telling of the story of Rama and Sita. Most scholars date Rāmāyaṇa’s middle five kandas to approximately the last centuries BCE. Pious devotees assume that Valmiki composed the whole text, but philologists argue that a later hand composed the first and last kandas, due to the differing styles and representations of Rama and his enemy, Ravana. More generally, ‘The Rāmāyaṇa’ is widely used to refer to all tellings of the story.
Valmiki’s text contains the core story of Rama and Sita summarized here. To uphold the honour of his father, King Dasaratha, Prince Rama agrees to an exile into the forest accompanied by his wife, Sita and brother, Lakshmana. Shurpanakha, a rakshasi (demoness), falls in love with Rama, who spurns her offer of marriage. When she persists, Lakshmana disfigures her, after which she flees to the court of her brother Ravana, king of the rakshasas, and persuades him to desire and abduct Sita, thus revenging his sister’s dishonour. Disguised as a mendicant holy man, Ravana approaches Sita and carries her off to his island kingdom of Lanka. Rama allies with the forest dwellers. The court minister of the forest dwellers, Hanuman, discovers and visits the imprisoned Sita in Ravana’s palace garden. After building a causeway across the sea, Rama’s army attacks Ravana. Valiant warriors on both sides die, and eventually Rama slays Ravana, and Sita is freed. After an ordeal by fire in which Sita proves her purity, the couple returns home, where Rama is crowned and rules wisely. Valmiki’s last kanda portrays Rama banishing a pregnant Sita to the forest, where Valmiki shelters here in his ashram while she raises her two sons. This synopsis does scant justice, however, to the diverse ways that this core story has been reinterpreted and transformed over many centuries in India.
Using ‘Ramayana’ to refer to multiple individual texts leads to confusion since the many individual texts, dramatizations and oral narratives differ from each other in genre, language, region, religious affiliation, usage in humour and proverbs, political comments and contemporizing. Improving on Camille Bulcke’s earlier distinction between ramkatha (the core story) and ‘Ramayaṇa’ (i.e. texts that instantiate the story), in 1991, A. K. Ramanujan argued that each rendition should be termed a ‘telling’ with its own history and social context, rather than viewing Valmiki’s work as the original text and later ones as divergent derivatives (1991). The phrase, ‘the Ramayana tradition’ best describes the capacious diversity of the many tellings and the ways in which the story developed and can be encountered in various genres composed over the centuries on the Indian subcontinent.
Valmiki’s Rāmāyaṇa is an epic composed in Sanskrit that portrays Rama primarily as a valiant hero in battle and a lawful king. However, many post-Valmiki Hindu renditions of the story are devotional texts in regional literary languages of India. Kamban composed one of the earliest of these bhakti texts, the twelfth-century Tamil Irāmāvatāram (The Descent of Rama) which circulated in what today are Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The sixteenth-century Hindi Rāmcaritmānas (The Lake of Deeds of Ram) by Tulsidas is widely recited, read and enacted by devotees across northern and central India. This text also provides the basis for Ram-lilas (dramas that enact and praise the salvific deeds of Rama) that take place in cities as well as villages across northern and central India.
Furthermore, striking diversity occurs in characterization over time. Many orthodox Hindus see Rama as the best of men while some cultural critics today deem him cruel to women. Some have praised Sita (and others have condemned her) for her unwavering devotion to her husband even after he banished her; others have identified her as a pioneering single parent. Commentators have condemned Shurpanakha for her lack of modesty, while activists against assault on women see her as a victim of male violence. Various scholars have interpreted the narrative illustrating the consequences of adhering to and deviating from dharma and most would agree that the story prompts reflection variously on the nature and rewards of virtuous male and female behaviour, the demeritorious consequences of passions and desires and the legitimacy (or not) of the interconnected hierarchic social and political orders.
An egregious misperception of the Indian Ramayana tradition’s diversity is the reductive notion that it consists only of Hindu texts. Dasaratha Jātaka, a story of one of the Buddha’s previous lives, depicts him as Rama learning of his father’s death while in exile and giving a discourse on the impermanence of existence. Prakrit and Kannada poetry include a lineage of Jain tellings in which Lakshmana kills Ravana and Rama becomes a Jain monk. Muslim rulers served as patrons of illustrated renditions of the story, such as the Persian summary-translation under Emperor Akbar. A folksong also circulates among Muslim Mappilas in rural Kerala which portrays Ravana as a sultan and Shurpanakha as a begum. In a different vein, some Tamil atheists (most prominently E. V. Ramasami [1879–1973]) identify Lanka as an ancient Dravidian kingdom and see Ravana as the ancestor of the Tamil people.
Phrases from the Ramayana tradition appear frequently in today’s Indian discourse with a humour and relevance distinctive among national epics. In several Indian languages, a simpleton is described as one who listens to the story of Rama and Sita all night and then asks how Sita is related to Rama. The Tamil saying, ‘He is an ascetic like Ravana’ indicates that a person has taken the disguise of an ascetic for nefarious purposes. The Assamese/Ahomiya proverb, ‘That Rama is no more, that Ayodhya is no more’, expresses a longing for a past golden age.
Some Hindus idealize the era of Rama’s reign as the standard for good Indian governance. In fact, Rama’s rule (Ram rajya) can be defined from two perspectives. On one hand, it is defined as a time when the king ruled dharmically and his subjects adhered to their dharma (codes for conduct prescribed in accord with one’s varna/jati [‘caste’], sex and stage of life), thereby maintaining order and harmony in society. This conservative vision privileges the sociopolitical status quo. On the other hand, during Rama’s reign, no social or natural disasters are said to have occurred: children never die before their parents, no one is robbed or murdered and people live long and prosperous lives. Further, disease, poverty, floods and droughts are absent from the kingdom. This utopian lens depicts Rama as actively righting wrongs to ensure that his subjects suffer no poverty, hunger or disease.
The Ramayana tradition has been invoked by people adhering to a range of ideologies. Some used Rama-rajya as an indigenous notion of governance, as opposed to political notions derived from the West: to promote hand-spun, hand-woven, khadi cloth, M. K. Gandhi invoked a Sita who worked at a golden spinning wheel, C. Rajagopalachari urged Indians to treat government ministers with the same respect rendered to Rama and Swami Karpatri preached restoration of Rama’s reign in opposition to a secular state. In the late twentieth century, the Bharatiya Janata Party used an image of Rama with his bow drawn to symbolize their campaign to gain control over the Babri Masjid (Ramjanmabhoomi) site.
References
Goldman, Robert P., gen. ed. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, 7 vols, Princeton Library of Asian Translations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984–2017.
Lutgendorf, Philip. The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Ramanujan, A. K. ‘Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’. In Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman , 22–49. Berkeley: University of California Press, and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Richman, Paula., comp. and ed. Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Malashri Lal
The originary sources of customary practices such as sati and jauhar reside in myths and folklore. As an easy differential, one can say that sati is an individual act of self-immolation committed by a Hindu woman who burns herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, whereas jauhar refers to mass self-immolation of women, mainly of the Rajput clan in medieval India, who feared a sexually violent captivity by Muslim victors at war with their kingdom. In both cases, the practice alludes to the dread of widowhood and the conviction that death is preferable for a woman than living without her husband and ‘protector’. In this patriarchal practice, women were complicit in the arrangements and even glorified the terms of such self-sacrifice.
Sati has a longer history than jauhar. The word ‘sati’ comes from the Sanskrit word sat (truth) and it is said that the first wife of Shiva, also called Sati, gives the name to this practice. This claim is questionable. Sati is said to have immolated herself in the yagya (sacred fire) at her father’s home as a protest because her husband Shiva had not been invited to the holy ritual. In frenzied anger, Shiva bore the corpse of Sati on his shoulder and threatened to destroy the universe. He could only be stopped when Vishnu’s divine instrument cut Sati’s body into 108 parts which fell to the ground in various places, each being turned into a saktipeeth temple.
Ancient Hindu scriptures make no reference to sati as a funeral practice. According to the historian Anant Sadashiv Altekar, there is no mention of sati in the period of Brahmana literature (c. 1500–700 BCE). The later Grhya Sutras (600–300 BCE) describe a number of rituals but not sati. The Mahabharata mentions a few instances of sati, such as Madri, wife of Pandu, while the Ramayana mentions none. According to John Hawley, the first archaeological evidence in the form of sati stones commemorating performance of sati appear around 700 CE. Accounts of sati as a practice start appearing in the tales of thirteenth-fourteenth-century travellers such as Marco Polo and extend to popular accounts such as those of the seventeenth-century merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and physician Francois Bernier, giving leads to the Mughal period. During British times, anecdotal eyewitness accounts narrate pathetic attempts by women to escape the ordeal, the best known among these being the ones narrated by the social reformer Rammohan Roy, who saw his sister-in-law consumed by the flames in 1811, and Fanny Parkes, wife of a British administrator, who reported an episode in Allahabad in 1828.
Bengal and Rajasthan were the prime areas for sati. Largely through the efforts of Rammohan Roy and the social reformers, sati was banned first in Bengal, then in all jurisdictions of British India on 4 December 1829 by Governor General Lord William Bentinck. Despite this, practice seems to have continued covertly into modern times. Roop Kanwar’s death on the pyre in Rajasthan in 1987 and the adulation from some quarters propelled debates about woman’s volition in committing sati. Taking strong exception to the practice, The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, which ‘prohibits glorification of this action’ in any form, was passed by the Parliament in 1988.
Jauhar is a more localized practice in the history of Rajasthan and is largely related to the period of Turk dominance to which some Ranas (local kings) offered resistance. The origin of the term is shrouded in mystery. According to G. S. L. Devra, the death chamber created for the women was called yamgraha (Yama, being the god of death), which subsequently changed to ‘Jamaghar’ in local dialect and then to ‘Jauhar’. Jauhar is also mentioned in Lieutenant Colonel James Todd’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, compiled in 1829 from eclectic sources (as the narrative traditions in the state were largely oral or scripted in courtly form). The famous jauhar performed by Rani Padmini of Chittor is told through ballads and heroic tales extolling the act. The recent controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film depiction of this jauhar in Padmavat has stirred discussions on historicity, customary practice and oral traditions. Though local inhabitants show the architectural evidence of jauhar in the chambers of Chittor fort, historians question the existence of Padmini who is said to be the literary creation of Malik Muhammed Jayasi in a poem written in 1540, two hundred years after the purported episode. History shows that Ala-ud-Din Khalji attacked Chittor and other forts in the area in 1303 and the custom of jauhar did exist. Several were committed in Rajasthan, prominent among them being in Ranthambhor in 1301, and in Gagron in 1423, when it was overtaken by Sultan Hoshang Shah of Malwa. In all these instances, women refused to yield to the Muslim marauders and plunged into the fire pit. However, it has to be noted that many such women were not Rajputs. In parallel with jauhar is the saka tradition followed by Rajput men who wore saffron clothes, garlanded each other with tulsi and rode bravely into a battlefield of certain death.
Sati and jauhar are now punishable offences under Indian law, but reverence for the women who committed such acts is still seen at sati temples and in jauharkunds.
References
Sharma, A. Sati: Historical and Phenomenological Essays. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988.
Sreenivasan, R. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500–1900. Washington DC: University of Washington Press, 2007.
S. Imtiaz Hasnain and Masood Ali Beg
A Sufi is a person with piety and chastity of heart and mind (ikhlaas or mukhlis), one who is impervious to worldly desires and worldly wealth. According to Adamec, Sufi is ‘a member (nutasawwif) of one of the Sufi orders, a devotee of a mystical “path” (tarīqa’) or discipline that consists of graded esoteric teachings leading through a series of initiations to the status of an adept’. The original Sufis were basically mystics – people who followed a pious form of Islam and who believed that a direct, personal experience of God could be achieved through meditation. A Sufi, therefore, is a member of the mystical, ascetic branch of Islam, abstaining from worldly pleasures, living frugally and concentrating all of your energy on spiritual development. Sufism emphasizes personal experience with the divine rather than focussing on the teachings of human religious scholars.
There has been considerable discussion regarding the origin of the Arabic word suf, which gave rise to Sufi. First, from the word ahl al-suffa, a group of Prophet’s companions who took part in the emigration (hijra) to Medina. Second, from saff, lines where people are standing during a prayer. The first saff in a prayer is an honourable place that will be rewarded by a first place before God in the next world. It is also believed that the Sufis will be rewarded by such an honour, because they are considered God’s lovers in this world. Third, safu (purity), thereby meaning a person who is pure. A Sufi is so called because this term refers to somebody who purifies his heart by way of long and harsh training. Fourth, from the Greek word sophos (wisdom). This designation comes from the fact that a Sufi is known as a person of wisdom (ahl al-hikma). Fifth, from the Arabic word suf meaning ‘wool’, which was commonly used to make Sufi robes. These robes were made of coarse wool and have come to symbolize penitence and renunciation of worldly vanities, a main characteristic of Sufism. Sixth, from Sufah, the name of a tribe of Arabs who in the ‘time of ignorance’ separated themselves from the world and engaged themselves exclusively in the service of Makkah Temple. All of these six different opinions have a plausible connection with the Sufi tradition in the course of history.
A discussion on the origin of the term Sufi cannot be separated from the context of the several stages of Sufi development. This can be seen in the term ahl al-suffa, for instance, which bears an early stage of development in Sufism, characterized by their ascetic life (zuhd). This ahl al-Suffa, according to Arberry, was the first ascetic community in Islamic history, since tasawwuf referred only to Islamic mysticism. Nicholson would rather call them ‘quietist’ and characterize them as a God-fearing people. In this sense, Jullandri describes them as a society based on justice and a sense of responsibility to God and who mirrored a happy fusion between shari’a (Islamic law) and tariqa’. However, they were horrified by a new situation when Mu‘awiya, the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, came to power. In fact, the Umayyad rulers were aristocratic masters of their subjects. Political murder and bribery were frequently practiced. By then, the ideal of creating a just society, for which the Prophet and his companions had worked, had been completely forgotten. As a result, the ensuing political struggle for power between the Umayyad and the parties of the day, such as the Kharijites and Shi‘a, led some people to be despondent and choose for a life of seclusion. They had no courage to fight against the Umayyad rulers and avoided the political drama. Thus, these remaining God-fearing people were among the ascetics (zuhhad) who were later called the Sufis. In the later stages of development, the Sufis were identified by their wearing wool garments. It was possible, then, that the word Sufi actually referred to people who wore such garments. From a linguistic point of view, tasawwuf means ‘wearing of wool’, just as taqammus means ‘wearing a qamis’ (a kind of shirt). In line with this view, Arberry mentions that towards the end of the eighth century CE, pious Muslims who remained faithful through all trials and temptations began to form little groups for mutual encouragement and the pursuit of common aims. They took to wearing wool to proclaim their other-worldliness and were therefore popularly referred to as Sufis.
References
Adamec, Ludwig W. Historical Dictionary of Islam. Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
Arberry, A. J. Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Iwan Pranoto and Ranjit Nair
That India invented nothing was a familiar colonial trope. In a precise sense, this was true. India did invent nothing in the form of an honest to goodness number – śūnya – that represented the idea of nothing.
In the first millennium, people in both India Intra Gangem and India Extra Gangem knew and used the zero. One of the earliest representations of zero as a number can be seen in Kedukan Bukit inscription (seventh century CE), discovered in Palembang, Sumatra, Indonesia. Written in the southern Indian script Pallava, derived from the Tamil-Brahmi, it shows the zero symbol with exactly the same modern base-10 place value system. Similarly, an inscription on a stele that adorned a seventh century temple in Sambor in Cambodia, where the writing is in ancient Khmer, supports the idea that zero was transmitted from India. In India, the Chaturbhuja temple in Gwalior, dated the mid-ninth century CE, also records the zero. Recently, Marcus du Sautoy and his collaborators have claimed to have pushed back the date of the appearance of zero even further to the third or fourth century CE on the Indian subcontinent by carbon-dating a manuscript discovered in 1881 which is with University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. This mss consisted of seventy leaves of birch bark discovered in Bakhshali near Peshawar. Written in the Sarada script, the Sanskrit text has hundreds of zeroes represented by dots.
European scholars, in contrast, came to this number system only after an Italian mathematician, Fibonacci de Pisa (c. 1170–1250), introduced it in the twelfth century. Since then, Western mathematicians and philosophers have been effusive about this foundational Indian contribution. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) wrote thus:
It is India which gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it lent to all computation, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions and we appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more, when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
In our own times, we have Laurent Lafforgue, a Fields Medalist, proclaim: ‘The invention of zero is the most important in the whole history of mathematics. The bulk of literature on mathematics could not have been written without zero.’ This is no exaggeration.
The honours for the gift of zero are not even shared, although often contested. The Sumerians left a blank space, later marked by a couple of parallel wedges, which the successor civilization of the Babylonians took over, but no calculations were enabled thereby, as indeed was the case with the glyph that the Mayan civilization of Central America, circa 345 CE, employed. There were clear indications of the need for a zero, but the mathematical imagination in these two civilizations, widely separated in space and time, did not result in the invention.
It has been suggested that the philosophy of śūnyata was responsible for the evolution of the zero in India. Śūnyavåda or the doctrine of emptiness was advanced by the Mahayana Buddhist school Mādhyamika whose principal exponent was Nāgārjuna. Gautama Buddha’s cryptic statement that all is empty – sarvam śūnyam – could simplistically be construed as nihilism or the philosophy of the void, but ‘emptiness’ for Nāgārjuna referred, rather, to the lack of an absolute essence. Concepts (vikalpa) did not correspond to entities in their own right; they made sense relationally. There could be no better example of this than the number zero, whose value depended on where is it located in the string of symbols that represented a number.
In the mathematical literature that survives, Brahmagupta’s treatise Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE) is the earliest surviving work which sets out the properties of zero as a number within a decimal positioning system. Brahmagupta comments on his illustrious predecessor Âryabhata, who used letters rather than numerals in his work. While the work, Âryabhatiyam’s understanding of the decimal place value system in which zero figured, is implicit, there are no numeral signs employed.
The Paninian linguistic zero ‘lopa’, which appears in the monumental Ashtadhyayi, functions as a drop rule. Pingala, regarded as the younger brother of Panini (or his leading commentator, Patanjali), wrote a work on prosody entitled Chhandasastra, which was nimble-footed in its use of the binary system of arithmetic consisting of 0 and 1, which anticipated the digital era by more than two millennia!
The case of the zero exemplifies the powerful role that ‘soft power diplomacy’ played in the past. Indian and East Asian scholars might take their cue from this in order to shape the knowledge collaborations of the twenty-first century. Yes, India invented nothing and that turned out to be an enormous contribution to world civilization.
References
Joseph, G. G. The Crest of the Peacock; Non-European Roots of Mathematics, 3rd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Sarvanandin, Lokavibhāga 458 CE in Lok Vibhag (1962) Ac. 6785, Digital Library of India.