Subject: [world-vedic] Longing and Despair by Subhash Kak
Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 02:19:47 +0000
From: Subhash Kak
Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com
To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com

From: "Ashwini Kumar"
Subject: Longing and Despair by Subhash Kak
Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2002 22:10:21 -0400


Longing and Despair by Subhash Kak

Having lived in America for twenty years, I no longer have first-hand 
knowledge of the current culture wars in India. I hear that some 
material is being kept out of history books out of fear that it will 
make the youth chauvinistic. In textbooks in Bengal, the material 
prior to the arrival of the English has been severely abridged, the 
guiding principle being that, as we remould ourselves in the modern 
image, we should not be burdened by the uncomfortable past. The 
implicit message is: Forget what is gone! Not surprising then is the 
lack of mention of the British-made Bengal famine of the 40s which 
took several million lives; this omission is a silent tribute by our 
historians to Macaulay's idea that English education in India will 
make us identify with the English in all things but our color!

I grew up in simpler times. In the fifties and sixties, in small 
country schools in Jammu and Kashmir, we were taught Indian history 
the old-fashioned way, and in Hindi too. As a young boy, I was 
thrilled when I read the ringing declaration of emperor Ashoka at the 
conclusion of his first rock edict:

esahi vidhi ya iyam: dhammena palana, dhammena vidhane,
dhammena sukhiyana, dhammena gotiti.

The word dhamma or dharma is usually translated ``law'' although it 
could also mean ``tradition'' or ``truth''. If we choose the common 
meaning, Ashoka's declaration becomes:

For this is my rule: government by the law, of the law;
prosperity by the law, protection by the law.

Imagine my surprise when later at high school, as I was discovering 
America, to came across the similar-sounding concluding invocation in 
Lincoln's Gettysburg address: ``government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people.'' Still later, I found that Lincoln 
himself was only echoing Daniel Webster's 33-year old speech in the 
Senate where he spoke of the ``people's government, made for the 
people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.''

Webster said his words before Ashoka's edict had been deciphered, so 
he couldn't have plagiarized. If this is a coincidence, it is a result 
of the structured way in which the mind operates. And if there can be 
parallels in the thinking of the Mauryan emperor and an American 
senator, imagine the repetitions across ages in the behavior of 
Indians.

Which brings me to the main point of this little piece. Indians have 
been accused, not totally unjustly based on Sanskrit texts, of a 
preoccupation with imagined worlds. It is unusual to find historical 
narrative, autobiography, nature poetry, straight talk. The one 
exception is erotics, where Indians have excelled all other nations. 
Indian writing is suffused with the mystical, magical and 
philosophical. The best example of such writing are the Puranas. 
Encyclopaedic, they are a rich tapestry of intertextual narrative 
which links stories across time, space, myth, history and fantasy. 
They are the first novels and they are magnificent although it is a 
pity that not many young Indians have read them.

Actually, the criticism is quite wrong. There are other texts, mostly 
in Prakrit languages, which are very realistic but they have generally 
not been translated into English and so are unknown to the new 
generation of Indo-Anglian writers. You have 2000-year old gems by 
Hala such as:

Scornfully
the great lady
gave the poor traveler
straw
to sleep on
at daybreak she
gathers it up
crying.

Could the longing and despair of a proud and lonely woman on parting 
from a stranger, after knowing him for just one night, be expressed 
any better? The Prakrit and other oral traditions were replete with 
powerful, minimalist descriptions, which shouldn't surprise us if we 
remember Zen originated in India. The poetry of Hala in his 
``Satasai'' seems to prefigure Japanese haiku.

It appears that the tradition of direct expression is alive in the 
modern Indian writing. I have read some absolutely magnificent pieces 
in Hindi; and I'm sure the situation is about the same in other 
languages. The trouble is that Indian publishing is yet to come of age 
and modern classics are published in print runs of 1,000, which in a 
nation of one billion, that does not have a good system of libraries, 
means these books do not register in the consciousness of the public. 
Indians who read only English are naturally not aware of all this 
marvelous stuff. For them India is defined by textbook stereotypes.

Berated for the Puranic style for 200 years by colonial historians and 
critics, you'd expect Indo-Anglian writers to be busy with the epical 
events of modern India: partition killings, Bangladesh war, emergency, 
Ayodhya, revolt in Punjab and Kashmir. But no, the actual themes are: 
a man falls out of an airplane and travels backwards and forwards in 
time, a man refuses to get down from a tree, a person bites a snake, 
and so on! If anything could be less Puranic, at least in style, show 
me. Some titles are taken straight from medieval books. ``Ocean of 
Story'' is a thousand-year old Sanskrit book of tales. Nevertheless, 
there is a difference between the original Puranas with their 
over-arching structure and the nihilistic, lack of focus of their 
modern imitations.

Is it biology, culture, class dynamics or a combination of the three?

Physics informs us that opposites lurk near each other. This holds the 
secret to the Indian mind, in ways more than the balancing of the 
opposites of Puranic myth and the raw edge of daily life. Indians, of 
all religious persuasion, appear to be obsessed with spirituality; in 
truth they worry mostly about wealth and status, perhaps more than 
most other people. Even full-time spiritualists work hard at the 
endowments for their personal ashrams.

A narrow view driven by greed and envy was behind the Indian theory 
that the enemy of one's enemy is one's friend. Indian generals were 
receptive to bribes to open the trapdoors to the forts during the 
medieval wars with the Turks. India has produced few Rana Prataps and 
Shivajis and many more Jaichands and Mir Jafars.

Indians work with great tenacity to get ahead of their cousins. One 
book that has captured these Indian traits with total success is V.S. 
Naipaul's ``A House for Mr Biswas.'' As at home so at politics. 
Indians would rather get a ``goongi gudiyaa'' rule them than have 
someone they think is their equal do the job.

All the same there is an indescribable charm to the rhythms of India. 
Maybe it is that they remind us of the past as well as the dark 
secrets in our own souls. The Indians that we have recreated in the 
West do not quite measure up. Their music somehow appears hollow. That 
is our despair.