Tag: hinduism

History and Mythology

Yesterday, on yet another reasonably routine visit to the Shankara MaTha in Shankarpuram (where else?), I happened to notice this series of illustrations which sought to tell the story of Adi Shankaracharya’s life. The story starts out with Hinduism being in trouble in the 8th and 9th century AD, which leads to a bunch of Gods and Angels to lead a delegation to Shiva asking him to “do something” about it.

Since I was in the rather calm precincts of the temple, I prevented myself from laughing loudly, but this whole idea of mixing mythology with history intrigued me. The story got even more interesting later, since there was a panel that depicted Shankaracharya getting lessons from Veda Vyasa (the author of the Mahabharata, for the uninitiated). “Was he still alive in the 9th century”, the wife thought aloud politely. I made some random comments about not remembering if he was one of the Chiranjeevis.

A long time back, maybe when I was in school, my grandmother had wanted to see this movie on Shirdi Sai Baba (*ing Shashikumar). There again, there was a mixture of history and mythology, with one of the Gods (Shiva, I think) planting himself in some mango lady’s womb (not sure of the accuracy of this, close to 20 years since I watched it). In that case, however, it being a part of a popular movie, I thought there was enough poetic license to do that. But as part of the panels inside a temple, which is supposed to give out the authentic story? I’m not sure providing entertainment is a stated objective of that temple.

Now I begin to wonder how devout some of the devout could be, if they could actually believe that in the 9th century AD, there was a delegation of Gods who appealed to Shiva to rescue the religion! There are also other implications of this. One, that the Gods closely watch over what was happening on earth (well, I guess the omniscient model of God does permit this). Two, the admission that there might be religions apart from the Sanatana Dharma – which is something that is not made in any of our ancient texts. The Vedas, Upanishads and other texts were all written in India so long ago that no other organized religion existed back then. If you look at the myths, you will observe that all characters are religious, and they all worship parts or the whole of the Hindu pantheon.

My guess is that the series of illustrations in the Shankara MaTha and the associated commentary are the results of the efforts of some particularly over-zealous “devotee”, and the rest of the managing committee hasn’t had the heart or mind to call out this absurdity and get rid of the ambiguous illustrations. Or maybe the entire maTha has lost it, and actually believes that there was a delegation of gods only 1100 years back.

The Bharadwajs

I’m married to a Bharadwaj. To put it another way, I’ve “bailed out” a Bharadwaj. Let me explain.

There is a concept of “gotras” among “Caste Hindus”. Each person is supposed to have a paternal ancestral line to a rishi, and that rishi’s name is your gotra. For example, I’m supposed to be a descendant of the sage Haritsa (such an obscure rishi he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page). And so my gotra is “haritsa”. Knowledge of your own gotra is important when you go to a temple to get “archane” (where you pay 10 rupees, give some vital stats and get sugar candy in return) done. It is also important when you are going to get married.

So Hindus have a weird way of defining cousins, especially for the purpose of marriage. Only male ancestry matters, and male brotherhood also. If you examine this further, everyone who has the same gotra as you (and hence are related to you by a paternal line) are your cousins. Sisters and mothers don’t particularly matter in this definition of cousins, hence the widespread incest, especially in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. There is one important exception of course – your mother’s sister’s siblings are also your cousins, though no one bothers keeping track of such relationships over more than a generation.

Like in any other good religion, Hinduism doesn’t allow you to marry your cousins. And due to the weird definition of cousin, you effectively can’t marry someone from your gotra. That is supposed to be incestuous. If you have any doubts about this, please travel to Haryana and ask any of the khap panchayats there.

So among Brahmins (due to lack of sufficient data points, I’ll restrict my discourse to Brahmins), the most “popular” gotra is Bharadwaja. It is either the Rishi Bharadwaja himself, or some of his descendants, or all of them collectively, who did a “Genghiz Khan”. Rather, one should say that Genghiz Khan did a Rishi Bharadwaja. Because of this, Bharadwajas constitute a really large proportion of Brahmins. I’m not sure of exact statistics here, but they are easily the largest Brahmin Gotra.

So now, “rules” dictate that you should marry within your caste, but outside of your gotra. And this puts the Bharadwajas at a great disadvantage, for so many other Brahmins are Bharadwajas, that the sample space from which to look for a spouse is severely restricted indeed. I know of a cousin (mother’s father’s sister’s son’s daughter) who is a Bharadwaja, and who spent a really long time in the arranged marriage market. As I told you, restricted sample space. That way, people like me who belong to obscure gotras should consider ourselves lucky, I guess.

So if you are a Brahmin, and not a Bharadwaja, please help out a needy fellow-Brahmin, who may otherwise have to spend a really long time in the marriage market (arranged or otherwise) only because one of their ancestors happened to be particularly prolific. And this is one thing in which I can proudly claim to lead by example.

PS: The proportion of Bharadwajs among Brahmins might be overstated due to the sheer number of them who put the name of their Gotra as their surname. I don’t think putting gotra as surname is common among any other Brahmin gotra.

Abou Ben Adhem

I’m a big fan of Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase). I don’t particularly consider myself religious but I like his philosophy (as described in the poem) about being a lover of fellow-men (no pun intended) being superior to a lover of god. I get extremely irritated by people who cause inconvenience to others by way of their religious acts.

Recently I happed to read this excellent (in my opinion) article in Open by Manu Joseph (Udupa, who referred the article to me, thinks it was written in my style. I would take that as a major compliment (to me, of course). It’s been ages since I’ve made arguments like those). The article is about Islam and cricket betting but Joseph makes some important points about religion itself. To quote my favourite part of the essay,

A religious person, having done his pilgrimage, having done his prayers and fasts, has no further motivation to be good in a way that is more useful to the rest of humanity.

I think on similar lines every time I’m invited for some pooja-cum-lunch where the lunch gets delayed beyond reasonable time because the hosts (who are also doing the pooja) are taking too long with the pooja; giving too much attention to God at the cost of the felllow-men and women who they have invited. There are several such examples you come across in daily life.

Thinking more about it, I wonder if this statement (from Joseph’s article) actually applies to a religion such as Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma, to be technically correct), given it’s Karma concept. The beauty of the Karma concept is that you accumulate points in God’s books (all well tabulated by the excellent Chitragupta) by being nice to your fellow men.

Now, with the Karma concept being around, and the efficient Chitragupta watching you, I’m not sure you need to “relax” and stop bothering to be nice just because you’ve said your prayers and generally been nice to God.

In this context, it surprises me further that supposedly deeply religious Hindus are nice to god at the cost of being nice to fellow men and women. Probably they just do some “religious things” blindly without really understanding what they are doing; mug up their prayers without understanding them properly. I think there’s a black swan risk in what they are doing!

In other news, during the Ganesha pooje today I tried my best to put my limited knowledge of Sanskrit to good use and actually understand the mantras that were being chanted while I was going through the motions. I’ll probably write in detail about that in another post.

Godmen and religion

The motivation for this post comes from this news item I read in today’s paper about Pramod Muthalik’s meeting with Paramahamsa Nithyananda. The item claimed that Muthalik told Nithyananda that the sex-video scam was driven by “a Christian lobby” and assured Nithyananda of the Sri Ram Sene’s full support.

I read something similar in this excellent article in the Caravan about the Sai Baba of Puttaparthi. Somewhere in the article it is mentioned that someone from the Sai Baba camp mentioned to another person from the camp that there were “red flags” about Vishal Arora (author of this wonderful article) because he is Christian.

What irritates me the most about these self-professed Godmen is that they try to portray themselves as representatives of the Sanatana Dharma, and what is worse, you have Hindu organizations supporting and rallying behind them (I remember some BJP ministers also mention that the Nithyananda sting organization was an “attack on Hinduism”). I think the acceptance and active backing for such loonies will ultimately hurt the credibility of the Hindutva movement

I fail to understand why the BJP and other Hindu Conservative organizations had to come out in support of godmen such as Nithyananda, and attach disgrace to their own names. I think it would be so much better for these mainstream conservative voices to denounce these loonies as destroying the fair name of Hindutva, and to condemn their activities.

Apart from further alienating the centrist liberals, this support of loony controversial godmen costs the Hindutva brigade the support of another important constituency – the followers of other (equally, or more, loony) godmen who don’t get along with the controversial godman who is in trouble (usually followers of different godmen are mutually exclusive, and followers of a particular godmen tend to hate followers of other competing godmen – it’s something like football club loyalties).

Or could it be that by “bailing out” the godman who is in trouble, the mainstream right-wing organizations are sending out a message to other godmen and their followers that they will stand by them in case of any trouble? I don’t really know, but the BJP and other right-wing organizations have lost some of my respect because of their support for loony controversial godmen.

If you have any ideas as to why these organizations are behaving this way, let me know.

Avatars

This is regarding the Avatars of Vishnu.  It is quite fascinating how Buddha managed to enter the list (he is number 9 on the list). Apparently a number of communities give that spot to Balarama (Krishna’s brother), notably Iyengars and other Vaishnavite communities. I have also seen this in a few temples (don’t know which “denomination” (if such a thing exists in Hinduism) these temples belong to) which have Balarama as #9.

The most popular explanation (which I have no reason to disagree with) about the Buddha’s entry into the list is that it was a clever ploy to prevent the spread of Buddhism, which threatened to become the largest religion in the subcontinent in the few centuries before and after christ. By including Buddha in the Hindu Pantheon, and by declaring him to be an avatar of Vishnu, an attempt was made to describe Buddhism as just a branch of Hinduism. Looking at the way Buddhism has developed after that in the subcontinent, I have reason to believe that the ploy was successful.

Regarding the construction of the list, there are again two possibilities. One view says that it was constructed not more than two millenia ago, and it was constructed only as a response to Buddhism. That it was something like “Ok here is the Buddha. He threatens us. So let’s make him one of ours. Let us declare him to be an Avatar of Vishnu. But then, we need more avatars to make this look credible. Let us include evolution into this and put in a few animals, etc. and have a nice list. But we have only 9, and there is no logical person who can finish this list. So let’s assume that he will happen sometime in the future, when the world ends. So here is The List”.

The other possibility is that one such list already existed, and the Buddha was included in the list. Though 8 is not an inauspicious number, it is unlikley that there were originally 8 avatars. Which means that there were originally 10, including possibly Kalki, and the Buddha replaced one of these 10. Looking at the other popular version of the Dashavatara, it is likely that the Buddha replaced Balarama in the list.

This raises a couple of interesting questions:

  • What avatarish thing did Balarama achieve in order to be an avatar? Which demon did he kill? I only recall him being mentioned fleetingly in the early stages of the Mahabharata, and he walked away from the war later on. So what message did he carry?
  • Balarama being an avatar, and his being a brother of another avatar Krishna, means that two avatars coexisted. In fact, someone on the list pointed out that Parashurama is a Chiranjeevi, so he has coexisted with all avatars following him. So we need to dissociate the avatar concept from the concept of rebirth and reincarnation. In any case, fascinating stuff
  • It is remarkable that Hinduism was flexible and nimble enough to turn the Buddha into an avatar when they saw him threaten them. The presence of mind of the people who thought of this workaround is commendable. I wonder where Hinduism lost its flexibility after that.
  • I also wonder how this was implemented. Hinduism has no supreme leader. And in the days when the Buddha was included into the list, there wasn’t even a Postal system, leave alone conference call facilities. How did this idea spread and gain enough credence to become the norm, then? Where did this idea of making the Buddha an avatar originate? How did t hey disseminate it? Who was the powerful set of people who were instrumental in the design, development and distribution of this idea?

It’s all fascinating stuff. And if any of you have any theories regarding the points I’ve raised here, please leave a comment.