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Reflections of India

Category Archives: Indian History

What of India, Caste and Tantra?

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by opus125 in Indian History, Religion & Spiritualty

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Tags

caste, tantra

shiva.shakti

According to AL Basham in The wonder that was India belittling darker skin natives by Aryan’s began by the time of the poems now in the Rig Veda.  Basham stressed purity of blood led to a lowering of the darker skinned aboriginal populations social status. Even today southern Dravidian movie starts are lighter skinned. Black is not beautiful.

According to Basham the four great social classes of the Rig Veda period means colour and not caste as is commonly translated.

So did the caste stem develop from a form of racism? Not all agree of course. There were four castes, and the untouchables, not just two for people of light and dark skin. However, in every society you will find the rebellion of strictures.

Hathayoga is what is known to the West, and in this form it perhaps does not truly live up to its names as a yug or yoke/union of spirit and body.

Over millennia ago Patanjai placed more emphasis on the body when formerly Brahmin concepts were to still physical consciousness, metal activity and enhance meditation.

According to Mircea Eliade, (Patanjali and yoga)  Hatha yoga links to the 12th century aesthetic Gorakhanath. While, tantra may have opposed Brahmin control of  all things sensual, but claimed in sexual union it is possible to experience the souls union with the divine, developing its own elaborate ritual.

“With liquors, meats, fish, (and aphrodisiac) mudra (beans), and copulation with women, the great Sadhu should worship the Mother of the universe” (from The Tantric Tradition  by Agehananda Bharati).

“The Tantric male sees his partner as a living goddess. During copulation he repeats mantras and maintains his thought on spiritual concepts, finally abandoning his sperm ‘lovingly into the fire of self.”

The Ardhanarishavara at Elephanta

The Ardhanarishavara at Elephanta

Shiva, the god of procreation and life, is symbolized by a phallus or linga rising from a circular stone base symbolizing the vagina or yoni representing the qualities of his consort Parvati, united from of the shakti or life force. 

The Devadasis , well bred, beautiful and skilled in conversation, dress, makeup, garland weaving and preparing the betel nut based pan enjoyed property rights, as a distinct class that later was viewed as a sacred prostitution.

“The dance that evolved to be performed before temple deities became a highly refined a complex art, embracing elements of folk dance but becoming stylized in gait, and also mime that incorporated symbolic gestures both sensual and spiritual” writes John Murray in Reflections of an Indian Diary.

“A devadasi offered both herself and her art to the gods and expressed the yearning of all devotees for absorbtion into the absolute, omnipresent reality. She became Radha as she pined for union with Krishnu, depicting in song and dance the longing of a devotee for a glimpse, a touch from him, for the translucent rapture to felt in the embrace of the divine lover.”

Murray describes the the serene faces of the Konoraks sensual sculptures  “that could also indicate detachment, a contemplation of spiritual concepts that is maintained and not overcome by the indulgence of the senses.”

In Hindu metaphysics of sensuality as a path to realization and sexual union is a symbol of the union of the female and male aspects of Brahmin.

“Could three factors – the stress on the physical and the mystic as well as the natural enjoyment of sex – have led the mind to pursue sexual pleasure as the ultimate harmony of physical or worldly existence?”

Sexuality is part of life. But was the Kama sutra a degeneration of thought that mirrored the period but had lost the purity of thought by simply showing cold hard sex?  I prefer to believe in the metaphysic purity of union with the divine lover, but to the puritan British it seemed Konorak and Khajuraho were viewed as harc core sex.

 

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An Improbable Country called India

21 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by opus125 in Caste & Social position, Indian History

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Indian Independence, Indian War of Independence

 

 

Indian Diversity

Said I one night to a pristine seer
(Who knew the secrets of whittling Time),
Sir, you well perceive, that goodness and faith,
Fidelity and love
Have all departed from this sorry land.
Father and son are at each other’s throat;
Brother fights brother. Unity
and Federation are undermined.
Despite these ominous signs
Why has not the Doomsday come?
Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?
Who holds the reins of Final Catastrophe?

 

Mirta Asadullah Khan Ghalib penned his poem in 1827 after a six month trip from Delhi to Banares. The Mughal Empire was declining and it seemed India was tearing itself apart. Britain was claiming large stretches of the north.

Ghalibs question seemed answered when in 1857. What the British called it the Sepoy Mutiny quickly spread to be what Indians call The First War of Independence.

Ghalib was in Delhi then, where the most violent fighting decimated the city. A cultured Muslim bought up with Mughal  refinement, he also received a stipend from the British.

“He saw more clearly than the British colonist did then or the Hindu nationalist does now, that it was impossible here to distinguish right from wrong, that horrible atrocities were being committed by both sides. Marooned in his home, he wrote a melancholy account of how ‘Hindustan has become the arena of the mighty whirlwind and the blazing fire.’ ‘To what new order can the Indian look with joy?’” (Guha: 11).

Britain won and Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. The previous ad hoc administration was now run by the elite Indian Civil Service. The building of a massive rail network moved soldiers efficiently to quell trouble and sped up communication. This was also enhanced by active attempts to cause discord between India’s diverse communities.

It seems to me that India’s ancient polytheistic expression of the one God allowed a soft and fluid acceptance of diversity. India’s polytheism of the soul allowed for the shadow sides of our personality to be expressed openly, in symbolic form of odd and bad. I suggest that the rise of nationalism, which in the modern form developed from the French Revolution, has narrowed a terser view.

Ghalib’s question is for me personal since, although I now view India as home, my ancestors arrived from Australia in 1829 as part of the Britain’s 40th regiment. At first many British so loved India’s exotica that ‘to stop soldiers going ‘Native’ government attitudes hardened.

British India Hindoostan

By 1888 Britain was so entrenched few ever envisaged Independence in 60 years. That year, Sir John Strachey who became a member of the Governor Generals council l pointed out India was more diverse than the competing nations within Europe.

India was “a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries’ he said. The differences were hard for Europeans to grasp. “”Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like Punjab.” However, by the definition at the time, these were not nations. They lacked a group with a distinct political or social identity.

“There is not and never was in India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious” he said in lectures delivered at Cambridge.

While it was “conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian counties” but “that they should ever extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab Bengal, the North-Western Provinces, and Madras, should eve feel that they belong to one nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.”

That Independent India does exist extends from the vision of an elite debating club of Gokhali, Tilak and later Gandhi who sought to bridge divisions of culture, territory, religion and language in pursuit of a greater say for native Indians in their affairs.

British opinions divided. A prime mover of Congress was Scottish born O. A Hume. In contrast, when author Rudyard Kipling was asked in Australia of Indian Independence in 1891,  he replied “Oh No! They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there and give it to them and we will give it them straight.”

The idea of an Independent India was “not only fantastical in itself but criminally mischevious in its effects” claimed Winston Churchill in the 1930’s. Churchill was a lone voice warning against the rise of Germany, and thought Congress dominated by Brahmins. If Britain left “an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany,  will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’ he said. “To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence.” (Guha: XV)

There were many who feared disaster.

As one tea planter explained “chaos would result if we were to ever be foolish to leave the natives to run their own show. Ye gods! What a salad of confusion, of bungle, of mismanagement, and far worse, would be an instant result.”

The barbarism of Partition seemed to show him to be right. Deprivation did ensue. But Germans did not come even though a few Indians thought Japan may help India gain Independence in World War II.

That “India could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable wrote political commentator Robert Dahl. “It lacks all the favourable conditions.” “India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations” wrote another American noting ‘grounds for scepticism of the viability of Democracy in India” (Guhu: xvi).

Perhaps this is where the naysayers were seeing only the surface appearance of things.

Indian politics is like its traffic. It looks chaotic and incomprehensible, but once you know the rules (and yes they are there, in a pecking order descending down from buses, then trucks down to pedestrians) you get around. It can be chokingly slow, but once the Indian juggernaut picked up speed it became a largely successful, as the world’s largest democracy.

Few realise that India cannot be characterised on her religious history alone.  As extensive as her religious literature is, her heterodox dialectic extends back millennia facing the difficult questions with religious, agnostic, and atheistic debate. Do not assume India is a land of unquestioned practices and  uncritical faiths.  Indian science and mathematics flowered in the 5th century BCE.

While tribalism does at times flare up, even the Hindatva call for a Hindu India for ‘sons of the soil’ has had limited success. What is chaos to others is India’s vibrant argument with life.

True, after 1857 Britain realised that to keep the subcontinent it had to turn Hindu and Muslim against each other. Exploiting division made Partition a reality and left distrust that can surface even today.

Here is the problem as I see it: With almost erotic intensity nationalism promotes ”my tribe ahead of yours”. The media, and its incessant argument add to this of course. Fear easily grips the heart, sends us into a short term spin, without little time to calmly consider the facts. With the fast changing news scape even experienced reporters have little time for  reflection. It is now harder for India, balancing a rapidly changing economy with her vast inequalities.  Yet call a return to traditional values will only become oppressive if forced from without. The spiritual dimension, that the subcontinent once cherished, included deep meditative reflection of our polytheistic’ psyches. The many truly beautiful spiritual people were not driven by social pressure to perform a ritual,  but were more like the poet Ghalib. Hardship and service taught them to know the hardship of others and to learn there humanity. However, enforced national, caste or religious prejudices divide. They tell us to condemn first, so we will not look into the yes of the other.

Yet, with all its potential for division India survives.

GreeJayDeep

GreeJayDeep

Will India survive?

After monitoring decades of elections British journalist Don Taylor wrote in the Evening Standard of 1969 that while India had stayed united “the hey question remains can India remain in one piece-or will it fragment?”

With all her diverse languages, cultures and religions “it seems incredible that one nation could emerge.”

“It is difficult to even encompass in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, and green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like anyone country. And yet there is a resilience about India, which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.”

The future of the region depends on it.

I agree with Taylor’s  conclusion “I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.”

Let us hope that the legacy engendered by Britain’s post 1857 policy of ‘divide and rule’ will not be allowed to slash apart the good nature of India’s diverse family .

When murderous anti Sikh rioters pillaged after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, few imagined the non aligned but Socialist India would have outlasted the Soviet Union.

India survives because it defies Western definitions of unity. India will survive if it retains its polytheism of the soul.

References

Anyone interested in Indian modern history will find Ramachandra Guhu’s India after Gandhi (2007, Macmillan, London) a magisterial reference.

A great resource of Indian issues is also Amartya Sen The Argumentative Indian- writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (2005, Penguin Books, London).

The Evening  Standard article by Don Taylor was published 21 August 1969 ‘The New  Surprising Strength of Mrs Gandhi’ from Guhu p xvi, xvii.

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What is a tribe anyway?

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by opus125 in Caste & Social position, India, Indian History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

colonialism, modernism, tribalism

www.indexoncensorship.org/

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/

Growing up in the sixties the sense of pervasive change of a movement filled my mind the like the rush of a river. As I aged I realised life has many counter currents. It is not just one all embracing movement..

The buzz word now is tribe or community. Seth Goden wants us to market to our tribe. Pickup artists imagine a man with his harem of doting females. An ashram,  Mosque or Church may seem somewhat static, locked in the past. For they too want to preserve an image of their community.

What of the Adivasi of India or Australian Aboriginee? Tribal peoples see the world more organic, like rhizomes and trees fostered from the earth.

Politically, a Cold War sense of power is still there – us versus them. Colonizer versus colonized, liberated and past oppressor.  Colonial times? … And what is that? There is as much colonialism today in the diplomacy of trade.

The science of culture and society has remade itself out of loose concepts. These great metaphors may suit  certain cultures but hand on the thin air of popular consent. Culture is no longer primordial. The self versus other is now called by other words

We want to see ourselves as moderate. We avoid ideas of  the radical other, the primitive or uncivilised or barbaric.

Perhaps they remind us to much of our own societies shadow.  So we avoid our social periphery, use nice words and don’t want to be seen as ethnocentric.

Perhaps in trying to avoid the over emphasis of difference  and by rejecting an apocalyptic view of a disintegrating worldview, we are refusing to face our truth. We don’t want to admit we have dismantled the hunter gatherer, or that we are risking our own cultures sustainability.

Modernism needs to be critiqued – but its worshippers simply attack the other and want more of the same.

Why not ask how we can be both modern and do better?

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Lower caste men don’t admire the body of a Princess!

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by opus125 in Caste & Social position, Indian Clothing, Indian History

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

burqa, palanquin, palki

the_bride_in_the_palanquin_di57 (1)

In the past. heavily curtained palkis were a status symbol of Afghans, Persians, Turkey and Moghals. To spare them from walking, Hindu ladies of noble birth only ever ventured outside of the home carried on a palanquin.

In the hot climate it was considered perfectly proper for woman to dress scantily in the presence of family.

However it was improper for lower caste men admire a princess body. In the hot climate it was common for the ladies to be near nude behind the heavy curtain of the palkis. Why wear heavy public clothing behind a curtain?

Purdah means curtain, a word that in modern media is associated mainly with Islam.    It refers to public behaviour.  Muslim women are enjoined to draw the “curtain of modesty.”

Historian Samina Quraeshi (Legacy of the Indus – A Discovery of Pakistan: 113) quotes an aging lady to her grandniece “Guard your eyes. When visitors come, smile your eyes of welcome to them; but drop your eyes immediately afterward, so that your smile may not be construed as an unchaste invitations.”

 While the Burqa has made news in recent decades – I suggest elsewhere because of the rise of Nationalism expressed in some lands through woman’s dress – it is not the dress of the majority of Muslim women, where “figure-molding looseness” is not unflattering . Quraeshi describes the burqa as a device of anonymity and not modesty.

The burqa “is not the ‘purda’ of modesty enjoined on women.”

 So where did the burqa come from? Not from the African yashmaq but rather from princess in palkis.  To  remain in a palkis could be awkward so women carried  their own head to ankle palanquin.  The design soon spread to courtiers and scribes.

Now modern wealth mostly discard it, the burqa continues with some in the middle class.

Western critics of the Burqa often fail to realize that todaythe burqa is a political act against perceived political discrimination from the West. In both East and West, women’s bodies have been dressed (or undressed) by the politics of men.

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