Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Opposition and the Left

The Opposition and the Left
The first Left-led government in an Indian State, the Communist Government elected to power in 1957 in Kerala, was also the first to show the Indian people that there was an alternative to the Congress.
E.M.S. NAMBOODIRIPAD
IT is characteristic of Mahatma Gandhi that his was the first voice of dissent in post-Independence India: he refused to join the festivities on August 15, 1947. Again, in January 1948 he declared openly that he was not satisfied with the type of independence that India had won. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the Father of the Nation, almost alone, acted as the first Leader of the Opposition in Congress-ruled India.
What was the root of his dissatisfaction? Was it that India was cut in twain, forming two enemy states out of a formerly united India? He had declared earlier that "the vivisection of India is like the vivisection of my own body."
THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY After the assassination.
Mahatma Gandhi, however, was far more concerned that the socio-cultural consequences of two hostile communal states being formed was that communal passions were roused - in the Indian Union against Muslims and in Pakistan against Hindus and Sikhs. The result was the most widespread communal riots in both countries. This was contrary to the ideal of communal unity that was part of his philosophy of action. He had to see people who had lived as brothers and sisters for centuries being made enemies of one another.
He was still more pained that the colleagues and followers who followed him in the decades of the freedom struggle had, on becoming members of the ruling party in the communally carved out Indian Union, renounced all the ideals that had inspired them in the days of the freedom struggle. He went to the extent of suggesting that since the main objective of the freedom movement - the attainment of independence for the country - had been achieved, the Congress should cease to function as a political party that contested elections and competed with other political parties and communal organisations.
COURTESY: NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY
"The light has gone out of our lives..." Jawaharlal Nehru announces Gandhi's death.
Mahatma Gandhi's perception on the nature and consequences of the independence that was won on August 15, 1947 was subsequently shared - for reasons other than those of Mahatma Gandhi - by the then united Communist Party of India. After a few weeks of euphoria, the party came to realise that the political independence that was won on August 15, 1947 was independence for the bourgeois-landlord classes and not for the common people. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi, who advised the disbandment of the Congress and the formation of a non-political Lok Sevak Sangh, the Communist Party at its Second Congress (held in February-March 1948) decided that on the agenda was the political mobilisation of the working people on revolutionary lines against the Congress rulers. The party called for organised mass struggle against the new (Congress) rulers, in which the working people were to be rallied under the leadership of the Indian working class.
After some time, when the party played with the idea of extending the Telengana armed warfare to the whole country, the party's protracted internal discussions led it to the conclusion that the path of advance for post-Independence India is the combination of militant mass actions and united struggle in the parliamentary arena. In the first general elections in free India (1951), the electorate gave a clear verdict that the Communist Party was the major force through which mass discontent against Congress rule could be mobilised.
Since then the party has organised struggles in the electoral arena without giving up the Marxist-Leninist line of joining and leading militant mass actions. The party steered clear of the two deviations of social democratic parliamentarism and "Left"-Communist sectarian contempt for parliamentary work.
COURTESY: PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT, KERALA The Ministry led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1957.
This is how, in the second general elections of 1957, the Communist Party was voted into ministerial office in the small State of Kerala. During the 28 months of its existence, that Government showed the people of Kerala and other States in India that there was an alternative to the Congress. Although not powerful enough to replace the Congress at the Centre, the party was strong enough in one State to show that land reforms, educational reforms, the decentralisation of power to panchayats and so on - formal objectives of the Congress that were later sabotaged - could be implemented by a non-Congress government headed by the Communist Party. The Congress thus saw a challenge to its continuing rule; the first elected Communist government in a State of India was dismissed by the Central authority.
However, the message sent out by the first Left-led non-Congress government caught the imagination of people throughout the country. Together with the Socialists and Left democrats the Communists succeeded in slowly developing democratic movements that could challenge the authority of the Congress Government at the Centre. That process ultimately led to the formation of another Left-led Government, in West Bengal, together with non-Left-led non-Congress governments in half a dozen other States. The CPI(M) adopted the policy of extending support to, but not joining, the State governments formed by non-Left but non-Congress parties. Broad democratic unity was thus being forged against the Congress.
MINATI CHOWDHURY Jyoti Basu at a rally in Calcutta after taking over as Chief Minister in the Left Front Government in 1977.
This emerging unity in the Opposition, together with the internal developments in the ruling Congress party itself, led in 1977 to the replacement at the Centre of the Congress by the Janata Party Government headed by Morarji Desai. While extending support to that Central Government, however, the CPI(M) refrained from joining it and, besides, fought the reactionary and communal forces like the Jan Sangh which were integral parts of the Janata Party and its Government. The CPI(M) joined other Left and secular democratic forces in bringing the Janata Government down and fighting the Jan Sangh and other communal forces.
Thus began two trends in the non-Congress Opposition: first, the unity of Left, right and communal forces against the Congress; secondly, unity of Left and secular democratic forces against the Congress on the one hand and reactionary communal forces on the other. The Marxist-Leninists on the Left adopted a consistent stand of fighting the Congress monopoly of power, without making any concession to right reactionary and communal forces.
It was this consistent line of fighting the Congress on the one hand and reactionary communal organisations on the other that led to the formation of the V. P. Singh Government at the Centre in 1989. After some time, when the Congress came back to power again, Left and secular democratic forces came to a joint front which subsequently led to the formation of the Janata Dal-led United Front and its Government in 1996.
By this time, however, the Congress had ceased to be a cohesive political party. The final loss of power initiated the process of the Congress ceasing to be a national political party.
While fighting this political battle against the Congress monopoly of power and against right reactionary and communal forces, Marxist-Leninists were conscious that political-electoral struggle alone would not be enough to replace the Congress on the one hand and reactionary communal forces on the other. In fact, this political struggle on the parliamentary arena should be supplemented by militant struggles of industrial and agricultural workers, working peasants, middle class employees and intellectuals and all other sections of the people who are interested in national unity, the protection of national independence and sovereignty and in going forward to a socialist society.
The Left, democratic, secular and regional parties are all interested in the struggle against the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In developing the unity of these forces, however, it is necessary that Marxist-Leninists and their Left allies maintain their independent identity and come out against the anti-national and anti-people policies pursued by certain allies in the U.F. itself. That is why the Marxist-Leninists, while extending full support to the U.F. Government, are at the same time demarcating themselves from the World Bank-IMF-dictated economic policies pursued by the Deve Gowda Government earlier and by the Gujral Government today. The line adopted by Marxist-Leninists in today's India is: jointly strike against the Congress, the BJP and other reactionary communal forces, while at the same time act independently in protecting the interests of the working people.

A letter to my friend Michael Foot

A letter to my friend Michael Foot
MULK RAJ ANAND
DEAR Michael Foot,
Greetings!
You might recall that you asked me, during your last visit to India for a seminar, what I thought had been achieved in free India after the British left.
It is difficult to answer such a question about a country that is physically as big as Europe without Russia, with an amalgam of peoples of different ethnic origins, that emerged into freedom to rule itself after centuries of alien rule that had drained its wealth and maintained one of the biggest armies in the world to fight wars and police the empire. And yet one can indicate the trends of development.
I recall that soon after the 'Tryst with destiny' speech of Jawaharlal Nehru, when the Union Jack came down and the Indian Tricolour went up, while flag-hoisting ceremonies were going on in New Delhi and Karachi, Muslims and Hindus were fighting in eastern India.
There is no doubt that although the Imperial Government had sown the seeds of disruption by its divide et impera policies, there were also other animosities between Hindus and Muslims. But Churchillian incitements of Partition, even against the then Viceroy's wishes for one India, brought, soon after their respective flags were hoisted in the two states, murders, lootings and misery that left a million or more dead.
And Gandhi, who had wanted, until the last days of the negotiations, to avoid a partition - he was for adjustments, not division - was nearly murdered while pacifying mobs in eastern India. He survived the fratricide of Partition, but was shot by a young Hindu chauvinist terrorist, Godse, just as he was going to sing his prayers.
In India, secular democracy did emerge both at the Centre and in the States. In Pakistan, however, not long after the death of Jinnah, the military assumed power. The generals extended Pakistan's Muslim theocracy by occupying Kashmir with unconcealed aggression, and this was followed by three wars between the two states. That a British general directed the first assault in 1947 is indicative of a continuation, among the conservatives of the U.K., of their concealed will to keep the states to which they conceded power at odds with each other. And when the British ultimately decided not to interfere, the U.S. involved Pakistan in its attempts to stall Soviet interests in Asia. Hostility has raged on to the north of the subcontinent for 50 years through fundamentalist terrorists aided by the notorious ISI of the Pakistan Army. This has been a drain on India's finances; money sorely needed for development has been spent on defence.
Our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Fabian Socialist, had from the very beginning of self-rule devised planned economic development through a Planning Commission that he had envisaged even before freedom. And there is no doubt that whatever achievements have been made in producing sufficient food for the hungry millions were made possible by the initial development of dams for water and power conceived by Nehru.
Industrial development through the public and private sectors has been possible through planning and community development. Schemes in villages for family planning, growing food crops, small-scale industrial development and the revival of crafts have, in spite of some failures, been positive initiatives. If our private sector has not been able to compete effectively with the capitalists of the West, it is partially because of the Nehruite policy of 'licence-permit' raj practised by the bureaucracy at the Centre.
Altogether, however, it is obvious that most of the modernisation that we see in India is the outcome of Nehruite planning.
Our biggest gain has been the sustained working of a parliamentary democracy both at the Centre and in the States.
As in socio-economic development, in foreign policy too Jawaharlal Nehru acted with foresighted vision; he offered Panch Sheel, the five principles of political and cultural relations. These were mainly based on a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other states and collaboration in economic, social and cultural exchanges. This initiative did keep several Asian and African states away from U.S.-Soviet hostility. India's calls for world nuclear disarmament have not yet achieved results.
As in other directions, it was Nehru's prompting and positive initiatives that set the pace of development. And though a high percentage of politicians have been interested only in themselves, there is no doubt that parliamentary democracy through elections has come to stay.
Of course, our democracy remains mainly a middle section phenomenon. Panchayat democracy at the village level, which was urged by Mahatma Gandhi, has not yet been promoted uniformly in all States of India. Democracy at the grassroots level, which has been implemented in the States of Karnataka, West Bengal and Kerala under social democratic and Communist leaderships, offers examples that will have to be followed in the bulk of our country.
There is a vast backlog in respect of development work, owing to the growth in population, now nearing one billion, and the need to satisfy its needs. In the midst of much darkness our political intelligentsia is currently active in the struggle to keep religious fundamentalism at bay, both at home and among our neighbours.
The emergence at the Centre of a coalition government of 14 different political parties augurs well for the emphasis of the government on attending to the problems of primary education, health and technology, as also food for millions, to bring up new generations. These may cope with the challenges of renewal and regeneration of our land, which has been handicapped by centuries of retardation under foreign and feudal rule.
As a well-wisher of India over your entire political career, you will see from this letter that we are still together in our awareness of the human condition.
Yours sincerely,
Mulk Raj Anand

India and world literature

India and world literature
On the map of world literature, India has been undersized for too long; that age of obscurity is coming to an end.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I ONCE gave a reading to a gathering of university students in Delhi and when I'd finished a young woman put up her hand. "Mr. Rushdie, I read through your novel, Midnight's Children," she said. "It is a very long book, but never mind, I read it through. And the question I want to ask you is this: fundamentally, what's your point?"
Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again. "Oh, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that the whole effort - from cover to cover - that is the point of the exercise. Isn't that what you were going to say?"
"Something like that, perhaps..." I got out.
She snorted. "It won't do."
"Please," I begged, "do I have to have just one point?"
"Fundamentally," she said, with impressive firmness, "yes."
SO here, once again, is a very long book; and though it is not a novel, but an anthology selected from the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country's Independence, still one could easily say of the work contained in the next 600-odd pages that the whole collective effort, from cover to cover, is the point of the exercise. Fifty years of work, by four generations of writers, is impossible to summarise, especially when it hails from that huge crowd of a country (close to a billion people at the last count), that vast, metamorphic, continent-sized culture that feels, to Indians and visitors alike, like a non-stop assault on the senses, the emotions, the imagination and the spirit. Put India in the Atlantic Ocean and it would reach from Europe to America; put India and China together and you've got almost half the population of the world. It's high time Indian literature got itself noticed, and it's started happening. New writers seem to emerge every few weeks. Their work is as multiform as the place, and readers who care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices saying something they want to hear. However, my Delhi interrogator may be pleased to hear that this large and various survey turns out to be making, fundamentally, just one - perhaps rather surprising - point.
This is it: the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 "official languages" of India, the so-called "vernacular languages", during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, "Indo-Anglian" literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.
It is a large claim, and while it may be easy for Western readers to accept it (after all, few non-English-language Indian writers, other than the Nobel laureate Tagore, have ever made much of an impact on world literature), it runs counter to much of the received critical wisdom within India itself. It is also not a claim which, when we set out on the enormous and rewarding task of doing the reading for this book, we ever expected to make. The task we set ourselves was simply to make the best possible selection from what is presently available in the English language, including, obviously, work in translation. To our considerable astonishment, only one translated text - S. H. Manto's masterpiece, the short story "Toba Tek Singh" - made the final cut.
Two qualifications should be made at once. First, there has long been a genuine problem of translation in India - not only into English but between the vernacular languages - and it is possible that good writers have been excluded by reason of their translators' inadequacies rather than their own. Nowadays, however, such bodies as the Indian Sahitya Akademi and UNESCO have been putting their resources into the creation of better translations, and the problem, while not eradicated, is certainly much diminished. And second: while it was impossible, for reasons of space, to include a representative selection of modern Indian poetry, it was evident to us that the rich poetic traditions of India continued to flourish in many of the sub-continent's languages, whereas the English-language poets, with a few distinguished exceptions (Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, to name just three), did not match the quality of their counterparts in prose.
Those who wish to argue with the conclusion we have drawn may suspect that we did not read enough. But we have read as widely and deeply as we could. Others may feel that, as one of the editors is English and the other a practising English-language writer of Indian origin, we are simply betraying our own cultural and linguistic prejudices, or defending our turf or - even worse - gracelessly blowing our own trumpet. It is of course true that any anthology worth its salt will reflect the judgments and tastes of its editors. I can only say that our tastes are pretty catholic and our minds, I hope, have been open. We have made our choices, and stand by them.
(As to the inclusion here of work by one S. Rushdie, the decision was taken with some unease; but Midnight's Children is undeniably a part of the story of these 50 years, and we decided, in the end, that leaving it out would be a weirder decision than putting it in. After its publication, I learned that the idea of a long saga-novel about a child born at the exact moment of Independence - midnight, August 14-15, 1947, had occurred to other writers, too. A Goan poet showed me the first chapter of an abandoned novel in which the "midnight child" was born not in Bombay, but in Goa. And as I travelled round India, I heard of at least two other aborted projects, one in Bengali, the other in Kannada, with pretty similar themes. I just had the good fortune to finish my book first.)
The lack of first-rate writing in translation can only be a matter for regret. However, to speak more positively, it is a delight to be able to showcase the quality of a growing collective oeuvre whose status has long been argued over, but which has, in the last 20 years or so, begun to merit a place alongside the most flourishing literatures in the world.
For some, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic. "Indo-Anglian" literature evokes, in these critics, the kind of prejudiced reaction shown by some Indians towards the country's community of "Anglo-Indians" - that is, Eurasians.
In the half-century since Jawaharlal Nehru spoke, in English, the great "freedom at midnight" speech that marked the moment of Independence, the role of English itself has often been disputed in India. Attempts in India's continental shelf of languages to coin medical, scientific, technological and everyday neologisms to replace the commonly-used English words sometimes succeeded, but more often comically failed. And when the Marxist Government of West Bengal announced in the mid-1980s that the supposedly elitist, colonialist teaching of English would be discontinued in government-run primary schools, many on the Left denounced the decision itself as elitist, as it would deprive the masses of the many economic and social advantages of speaking the world's language; only the affluent private-school elite would henceforth have that privilege. A well-known Calcutta graffito complained, My son won't learn English. Your son won't learn English. But Jyoti Basu (the Chief Minister) will send his son abroad to learn English. One man's ghetto of privilege is another's road to freedom.
Like the Greek god Dionysos, who was dismembered and afterwards reassembled - and who, according to the myths, was one of India's earliest conquerors - Indian writing in English has been called "twice-born" (by the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee) to suggest its double parentage. While I am, I must admit, attracted by the Dionysian resonances of this supposedly double birth, it seems to me to rest on the false premise that English, having arrived from outside India, is and must necessarily remain an alien there. But my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country's earlier Muslim conquerors, became a naturalised sub-continental language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay.
(In many parts of South India, people will prefer to converse with visiting North Indians in English rather than Hindi, which feels, ironically, more like a colonial language to speakers of Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam than does English, which has acquired, in the South, an aura of lingua franca cultural neutrality. The new Silicon Valley-style boom in computer technology that is transforming the economies of Bangalore and Madras has made English, in those cities, an even more important language than before.)
Indian English, sometimes unattractively called "Hinglish", is not "English" English, to be sure, any more than Irish or American or Caribbean English is. And it is a part of the achievement of the writers in this volume to have found literary voices as distinctively Indian, and also as suitable for any and all of the purposes of art, as those other Englishes forged in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies and the United States.
However, Indian critical assaults on this new literature continue. Its practitioners are denigrated for being too upper-middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choice of themes and techniques; for being less popular in India than outside India; for possessing inflated reputations on account of the international power of the English language, and of the ability of Western critics and publishers to impose their cultural standards on the East; for living, in many cases, outside India; for being deracinated to the point that their work lacks the spiritual dimension essential for a "true" understanding of the soul of India; for being insufficiently grounded in the ancient literary traditions of India; for being the literary equivalent of MTV culture, of globalising Coca-Colonisation; even, I'm sorry to report, for suffering from a condition that one sprightly recent commentator, Pankaj Mishra, calls "Rushdie-itis ... (a) condition that has claimed Rushdie himself in his later works."
It is interesting that so few of these criticisms are literary in the pure sense of the word. For the most part they do not deal with language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagination or talent. Rather, they are about class, power and belief. There is a whiff of political correctness about them: the ironical proposition that India's best writing since Independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear. It ought not to be true, and so must not be permitted to be true. (That many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English-speaking elite is a further irony.)
Let us quickly concede what must be conceded. It is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still bedevilled by high illiteracy levels, how could it be otherwise? It does not follow, however - unless one holds to a rigid, class-war view of the world - that writers with the privilege of a good education will automatically write novels that seek only to portray the lives of the bourgeoisie. It is true that there tends to be a bias towards metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction, but, as this volume will demonstrate, there has been, during this half-century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as well as urban, sacred as well as profane. This is also, let us remember, a young literature. It is still pushing out the frontiers of the possible.
The point about the power of the English language, and of the Western publishing and critical fraternities, also contains some truth. Perhaps it does seem, to some "home" commentators, that a canon is being foisted on them from outside. The perspective from the West is rather different. Here, what seems to be the case is that Western publishers and critics have been growing gradually more and more excited by the voices emerging from India; in England at least, British writers are often chastised by reviewers for their lack of Indian-style ambition and verve. It feels as if the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around. And, yes, English is the most powerful medium of communication in the world; should we not then rejoice at these artists' mastery of it, and their growing influence? To criticise writers for their success at "breaking out" is no more than parochialism (and parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures). One important dimension of literature is that it is a means of holding a conversation with the world. These writers are ensuring that India, or rather, Indian voices (for they are too good to fall into the trap of writing nationalistically), will henceforth be confident, indispensable participants in that literary conversation.
Granted, many of these writers do have homes outside India. Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, Henry James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark, were or are wanderers, too. Muriel Spark, accepting the British Literature Prize for a lifetime's achievement in March 1997, went so far as to say that travel to other countries was essential for all writers. Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address.
The question of religious faith, both as a subject and an approach to a subject, is clearly important when we speak of a country as bursting with devotions as India; but it is surely excessive to use it, as does one leading academic, the redoubtable Professor C. D. Narasimhaiah, as a touchstone, so that Mulk Raj Anand is praised for his "daring" merely because, as a leftist writer, he allows a character to be moved by deep faith, while Arun Kolatkar's poetry is denigrated for "throwing away tradition and creating a vacuum" and so "losing relevance", because in Jejuri, a cycle of poems about a visit to a temple town, he sceptically likens the stone gods in the temples to the stones on the hillsides nearby ("and every other stone/is god or his cousin"). I hope readers of this anthology will agree that many of the writers gathered here have profound knowledge of the "soul of India"; many have deeply spiritual concerns, while others are radically secular, but the need to engage with, to make a reckoning with, India's religious self is everywhere to be found.
In the end, the writing gathered here will either justify, or fail to justify, our claims for it. What is unquestionable is that the cheapening of artistic response implied by the allegations of deracination and Westernisation is notably absent from these writers' work. As to the claims of excessive Rushdie-itis, I can't deny that I've on occasion felt something of the sort myself. On the whole, however, it seems to be a short-lived virus, and those whom it affects soon shake it off and find their own, true voices.
In my own case, and I suspected in the case of every writer in this volume as well, knowing and loving the Indian languages in which I was raised has remained of vital importance. As an individual, Hindi-Urdu, the "Hindustani" of North India, remains an essential aspect of my sense of self: as a writer, I have been partly formed by the presence, in my head, of that other music, the rhythms, patterns and habits of thought and metaphor of my Indian tongues. What I am saying is that there is not, need not be, should not be, an adversarial relationship between English-language literature and the other literatures of India. We drink from the same well. India, that inexhaustible horn of plenty, nourishes us all.
IRONICALLY, the century before Independence contains many vernacular language writers who would merit a place in any anthology: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (the author of Pather Panchali, on which Satyajit Ray based his celebrated Apu Trilogy of films), and Premchand, the prolific (and therefore rather variable) Hindi author of, among many others, the famous novel of rural life Godaan, or The Gift of a Cow. Those who wish to seek out their leading present-day successors should try, for example, O. V. Vijayan (Malayalam), Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (Hindi), Nirmal Verma (Hindi), U. R. Ananthamurthy (Kannada), Suresh Joshi (Gujarati), Amrita Pritam (Punjabi), Qurratulain Haider (Urdu) or Ismat Chughtai (Urdu), and make their own assessments.
The first Indian novel in English was a dud. Rajmohan's Wife (1864) is a poor melodramatic thing. The writer, Bankim, reverted to Bengali and immediately achieved great renown. For 70 years or so there was no English-language fiction of any quality. It was the generation of Independence, "midnight's parents", one might call them, who were the true architects of this new tradition (Jawaharlal Nehru himself was a fine writer.) Of these, Mulk Raj Anand was influenced by both Joyce and Marx but most of all, perhaps, by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanskritist, wrote determinedly of the need to make an Indian English for himself, but even his much-praised portrait of village life, Kanthapura, seems dated, its approach at once grandiloquent and archaic. The autobiographer Nirad C. Chaudhuri has been, throughout his long life, an erudite, contrary and mischievous presence. His view, if I may paraphrase and summarise it, is that India has no culture of its own, and that whatever we now call Indian culture was brought in from outside by the successive waves of conquerors. This view, polemically and brilliantly expressed, has not endeared him to many of his fellow-Indians. That he has always swum so strongly against the current has not, however, prevented The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian from being recognised as the masterpiece it is.
The most significant writers of this first generation, R. K. Narayan and G. V. Desani, have had opposite careers. Narayan's books fill a good-sized shelf; Desani is the author of a single work of fiction, All About H. Hatterr, and that singleton volume is already fifty years old. Desani is almost unknown, while R. K. Narayan is, of course, a figure of world stature, for his creation of the imaginary town of Malgudi, so lovingly made that it has become more vividly real to us than most real places. (But Narayan's realism is leavened by touches of legend; the river Sarayu, on whose shores the town sits, is one of the great rivers of Hindu mythology. It is as if William Faulkner had set his Yoknapatawpha County on the banks of the Styx.)
Narayan shows us, over and over again, the quarrel between traditional, static India on the one hand, and modernity and progress, on the other; represented, in many of his stories and novels, by a confrontation between a "wimp" and a "bully" - The Painter of Signs and his aggressive beloved with her birth control campaign; The Vendor of Sweets and the emancipated American daughter-in-law with the absurd "novel writing machine"; the mild-mannered printer and the extrovert taxidermist in The Man-Eater of Malgudi. In his gentle, lightly funny art, he goes to the heart of the Indian condition, and beyond it, into the human condition itself.
The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G. V. Desani, has fallen so far from favour that the extraordinary All About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India's Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, "fifty-fifty of the species", the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind many of the texts in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.
The beauty of Nayantara Sahgal's memoir Prison and Chocolate Cake is paralleled by the liveliness and grace of her fiction; while Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve is a justly renowned study of village life.
Ved Mehta is represented here by a part of Vedi, his memoir of a blind boyhood that describes cruelties and kindnesses with equal dispassion and great effect. (More recently, Firdaus Kanga, in his autobiographical fiction, has also transcended physical affliction with high style and genuine comic brio.)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written so many fine short stories that it has been hard to choose just one. As a writer, she is sometimes under-rated in India because, I think, the voice of the rootless intellectual (so quintessentially her voice) is such an unfamiliar one in that country where people's self-definitions are so rooted in their regional identities. That Ruth Jhabvala has a second career as an award-winning screenwriter is well known. But not many people realise that India's greatest film director, the late Satyajit Ray, was also an accomplished author of short stories. His father edited a famous Bengali children's magazine, Sandesh, and Ray's biting little fables, such as our selection, "Big Bill", are made more potent by their childlike charm.
Anita Desai is one of India's major living authors. Her novel In Custody, perhaps her best to date, finely uses English to depict the decay of another language, Urdu, and the high literary culture which lived in it. Here the poet, the last, boozing, decrepit custodian of the dying tradition, is (in a reversal of Narayan) the "bully"; and the novel's central character, the poet's young admirer Deven, is the "wimp". The dying past, the old world, Desai tells us, can be as much of a burden as the awkward, sometimes wrong-headed present. Her story in this anthology, Games at Twilight, is, like the Ved Mehta memoir, exceptional for the acuteness, poignancy and unsentimental humour with which the world of childhood is entered, and revealed.
One of the most important voices in the story of modern literature, V. S. Naipaul, is regrettably absent from this book, not by our choice, but by his own. His three non-fiction books on India, An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilisation and India: A Million Mutinies Now are key texts, and not only because of the hackles they have raised. Many Indian critics have taken issue with the harshness of his responses. Some have fair-mindedly conceded that he does attack things worth attacking. "I'm anti-Naipaul when I visit the West," one leading South Indian novelist told me, "but I'm often pro-Naipaul back home."
Some of Naipaul's targets, like - this is from A Wounded Civilisation - the intermediate-technology institute that invents "reaping boots" (with blades attached) for Indian peasants to use to harvest grain, merit the full weight of his scorn. At other times he appears merely supercilious. India, his migrant ancestors' lost paradise, cannot stop disappointing him. By the third volume of the series, however, he seems more cheerful about the country's condition. He speaks approvingly of the emergence of "a central will, a central intellect, a national idea", and disarmingly, even movingly, confesses to the atavistic edginess of mood in which he had made his first trip almost 30 years earlier: "The India of my fantasy and heart was something lost and irrecoverable... On that first journey, I was a fearful traveller."
In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul's comments on Indian writers elicit in this reader a characteristic mixture of agreement and dissent. When he writes,
... the feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian "language" writers. This is possible; what I read of them in translation did not encourage me to read more. Premchand... turned out to be a minor fabulist... Other writers quickly fatigued me with their assertions that poverty was sad, that death was sad... many of the "modern" short stories were only refurbished folk tales...
then he is expressing, in his emphatic, unafraid way, what I have also felt. (Though I think more highly of Premchand than he.) When he goes on to say,
The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India, thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls "the basic human hunger for the unseen." It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels,
then I can go only some of the way with him. It is true that many learned Indians go in for a sonorously impenetrable form of critico-mysticism. I once heard an Indian writer of some renown, and much interest in India's ancient wisdoms, expounding his theory of what one might call Motionism. "Consider Water," he advised us. "Water without Motion is - what? Is a lake. Very well. Now, Water plus Motion is - what? Is a river. You see? The Water is still the same Water. Only Motion has been added. By the same token," he continued, making a breathtaking intellectual leap, "Language is Silence, to which Motion has been added."
(A fine Indian poet, who was sitting beside me in the great man's audience, murmured in my ear: "Bowel without Motion is - what? Is constipation! Bowel plus Motion is - what? Is shit!")
So I agree with Naipaul that mysticism is bad for novelists. But in the India I know, for every obfuscating Motionist, there is a debunking Bowelist whispering in one's ear. For every unworldly seeker for the ancient wisdoms of the East, there is a clear-eyed witness responding to the here and now in precisely that fashion which Naipaul inaccurately calls uniquely Western. And when Naipaul concludes by saying that in the aftermath of the "abortive" Indo-British encounter, India is little more than a very Naipaulian community of mimic men - that the country's artistic life has stagnated, "the creative urge" has "failed" - that "Shiva has ceased to dance" - then I fear we part company altogether. An Area of Darkness was written as long ago as 1964, a mere 17 years after Independence, and a little early for an obituary notice. The growing quality of Indian writing in English may yet change his mind.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the flow of that good writing has become a flood. Bapsi Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, but this anthology has no need of Partitions, particularly as Sidhwa's novel Ice-Candy Man, extracted here, in one of the finest responses to the horror of the division of the subcontinent. Gita Mehta's A River Sutra is an important attempt by a thoroughly modern Indian to make her reckoning with the Hindu culture from which she emerged. Padma Perera, Anjana Appachana and Githa Hariharan, less well-known than Sidhwa and Mehta, confirm the quality of contemporary writing by Indian women.
A number of different styles of work are evolving: the Stendhalian realism of a writer like Rohinton Mistry, the equally naturalistic but lighter, more readily charming prose of Vikram Seth (there is, admittedly, a kind of perversity in invoking lightness in the context of a book boasting as much sheer avoirdupois as A Suitable Boy), and the elegant social observation of Upamanyu Chatterjee can be set against the more flamboyant manner of Vikram Chandra, the linguistic play of Allan Sealy and Shashi Tharoor and the touches of fabulism in Mukul Kesavan. Amitav Ghosh's most impressive achievement to date is the non-fiction study of India and Egypt, In an Antique Land. It may be (or it may not) that his greatest strength will turn out to be as an essayist of this sort. Sara Suleri, whose memoir Meatless Days is, like Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man, a visitor from across the Pakistani frontier, is a non-fiction writer of immense originality and grace. And Amit Chaudhuri's languorous, elliptic, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all.
Most encouragingly, yet another talented generation has begun to emerge. The Keralan writer Arundhati Roy has arrived to the accompaniment of a loud fanfare. Her novel, The God of Small Things, is full of ambition and sparkle, and written in a highly-wrought and utterly personal style. Equally impressive are the debuts of two other first novelists. Ardashir Vakil's Beach Boy and Kiran Desai's Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard are, in their very unalike ways, highly original books. The Vakil book is sharp, funny and fast; the Kiran Desai, lush and intensely imagined. Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita: her arrival establishes the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction. But she is very much her own writer, the newest of all these voices, and welcome proof that India's encounter with the English language, far from proving abortive, continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts.
THE map of the world, in the standard Mercator projection, is not kind to India, making it look substantially smaller than, say, Greenland. On the map of world literature, too, India has been undersized for too long. This anthology celebrates the writers who are ensuring that, 50 years after India's Independence, that age of obscurity is coming to an end.
© Salman Rushdie, March 1997
This is the text of Salman Rushdie's Introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997, edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, Vintage, London, 1997.

Was Vande Mataram written by Bankim?


Thursday, November 30, 2006
Was Vande Matram Written By Bankim At All, Another Controversy
Was Vande Matram Written By Bankim at All, Anothre ControversyPalash Biswas(Pl Publish and send a copy. PalashcBiswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gostokanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, Phone: 91-33-25659551)
The people all over in this subcontinent is well aware about the controversy involving Vandemataram, Ananda Matha, the novel and the Sahitya Samrat Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya. A writer like Sukomal sen traces the history of Hindu Nationality in Vandemataram and Bankim Chandra. Latest controversy began with the declaration of centenary celebration of Vandemataram. But a new controversy is created by the most circulated Bengali daily from Kolkata, Ananda Bazar patrika which published an edit article by a prominent critic and Bankim specialist, Amitra Sudan Bandopadhyaya with the title Vandemataram ki Bankim Chandreri Lekha on 7 th November, 2006. Amitra Babu has based his logic on this fact that the sanskrit six lines are published in the novel under qutation marks which makes it doubtful whether Bankim wrote the controversial song at all.The article was not unnoticed and the pandora`s box was open. Eminent economist Dr Ashok Sen joined the issue. While Ashok Babu noticed the difference of language in the song as its first six lines are written in sanskrita and remaing part in Bengali. He raises the question whethere anyone else might have written those original lines. Secondly, he emphasises to go in depth in the circumstances in which Congress leaders and Rabindra Nath Tagore made it a national song. Dr sen wonders why saptakoti santan and dwisapta koti bahu phrases in the poem were changed as trinshkoti Santan and dwisapta koti bahu to make the worshipped devi as Bharatmata.Amitra Sudan raises the difference in language point but he he emphasises on this point that being published in Anandmath in 1882, how the song became so popular within two years for its consideration as a national song in 1885 while hardly only two thousand copies of the novel were published in different editions in between.
Musically speaking it seems that Indians will never forget this lyric even after another 125 years. This is clearly seen with the new compositions and renderings. From R N Tagore to A R Rahman and beyond, numerous tunes have been composed and no other song in Independent India has received so much attention. This is probably because we Indians do not consider this as the national song or Anthem. We treat it as the song of our culture, a ?Prateek? or living symbol. In Hindu culture, the mother is considered a God, and worshipping the mother through songs is an age-old tradition. Vande Mataram is one such song, which describes the motherland. The secretary of Nahati sahitya Parishad, Abhaya Charan De also wrote a letter along with dr sen which were published in Ananda Bazar on 22nd November,2006. De edfended thet only Bankim has written the song quoting differnt sources. He wrote as Bankim used poetry in his novels in qutation marks though always written by him,this question is irrelevent.
On 23 rd November ,some other letters were also published in the paper. One of the writer claimed that originally the first six lines were composed by Bhudev Bandopadhyay of chinsura in pure sanskrita and bankim got a copy of the script from his house .Later Bankim modified the poem with his original Bengali lines and publeshed it.
It was doubted from the beginning that the song was origianlly written by some Sannyasee Vidrohee in sanskrita as the Novel Anandmath deals with the historical plot of Sadhus and Fakir`s revolt in Bengal in 1765 around and the Bengal feminine of 1770 around. It should be noted that that the hindu sadhus and fakirs were fighting against East India company together. Majnu Sah, a muslim fakir was the most prominent leader of the revolt who csurvived the crush and led peasants`s revolts in Bihar and Bengal following. While Bankim deals with mainly the Hindu leaders like Bhavanand, Bhavanee Thakur and Devi Chaudhurani. Bankimalso wrote in favour of Bengali muslims in his mag Banga Darshan, in which Anandamath was published as a serial. The peasants of Bengal have been mostly dalits and muslims. Again he wrote an article as a review on a work by Meer Musharraf Hussain and emphasised on the languge based nationality movement of Hindus and Muslims. As we know it happend with Bhasha andolan and later with the creation of independent Bangladesh.
Here , the mendatory question arises who transformed Bankim, the spokesman of Bangla nationality into the origin of Hindu nationality in India? As it is alleged that the controversy involving the national song of congress party alienated the muslims from the struggle for freedom and later it inspired the two nation theory and partition of India. If Bankim has not written at all the poem , what remains?
Anandbazar published a letter written by Dr dinesh chandra singha, a former deputy registrar of Calcutta University on 23 rd November. Dr Singha wrote that the Tagores were involved in Hindu mela. as the original song Vandemataram was written much before Anandamath and sung by Tagore ladies in the Hindu Mela, its popularity should not be doudeted.
As a simple student of literature of the subcontinent I see the Indian nationality hypothesis first in Bharat Tirth poem written by Rabindra Nath Tagore and included in Geetanjali. It is also noteworthy that in the Calcutta convention of Congress the leaders first declined to allow the song Vande Mataram to be sung as some parts of the poem deals with idol worshipping and objectionable to other communities. Then as song was sung which was written by a prominent poet of the time Hem Chandra Bandopadhyaya. The Sanskrit first six lines were included in this song.
For me, I am not an expert on literature at all. But I have been always a committed reader and I read all prominent Bankim works including Anandmath in my childhood. I had chances to meet some freedom fighters , too. I noted that the indian nationlity is identified with the slogan only, not with the entire song as sangh Parivar emphasises on. It is why the muslim revolutionaries also sacrificed their lives saying vande Mataram.
It is my personal experience that a prominent leader no less than the three times Chief minister of united UP, the present chief minister of Uttarakhand and the former finance minister of India , Narayan Dutta Tiwari begins and ends his speech with Vande Mataram always. It shows the congress culture which is essentially a caste hindu party from the beginning. I have no doubt that Congress used Bankim and his Vandemataram to creat a hindu nationality. Contrarily, Rabindra Nath was much more interested in Indian nationality. He defined and detailed the merger of different nationalitities in single Indian nationality in his poem Bharat Tirth which he begins with a first striking line with phrases like manav mahasagar. He desribed how many currents merged with the oceon and evry nationality, indigineous or foriegn Arya , Anarya, Dravid, Mongol, Pathan, Shaka ,Hun, Kushan all merged in a single body. Tagore is the man who converted the Bangamata into Bharat mata. Yes, Bankim meant Bangamata as there was no concept of Bharat mata and he meant greater Bengal consisting of Bristish Bengal Presidency while he wrote.
Tagore was a philospher with western knowledge with indian spritualinputs. He noted the rise of different nationalities in the west. Thus, he created his bharat tirtha and trasnformed sapta koti into trinshkoti, Dwisaptakoti into dwitrishkoti in vandemataram and played a key role to make Vande Matram a ntional song. Pdt jawahar lal Nehru and Rabindranath agrred that muslims were against idol worshipping part of the poem. Thus, they edited the poem with surgical precision to make it national song. what happened later, is a complete history, as castehindu party Congress used the song to raise Hindu Nationality which has been captuered by sangha Parivar with Ramjanma bhoomi movement and destruction of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
It should be remembered that Pandit Nehru of course gave the final verdict. In a meeting of the Constitution Committee held on 24th January 1950, President Dr Rajendra Prasad announced that Jana Gana Mana would be the National Anthem of independent India and Vande Mataram would be the National song with same status as the Anthem. With this decision, all efforts at providing new tunes ended and the recordings made up to that time have now become important documents and part of our cultural heritage. It is clear wshat ND tiwari does with the Bengali audiances in Uttarakhand to strenghten vote abnk, congerss and Sangh leaders have been doing in India, and on the other hand the muslim leaders encashed the circumstances of the windfall and whirlwind following. even the globalisation has made vandemataram a commercial package. Due to the massive success of this album, the same group launched another album Vande Mataram - 2 in 1999, with a music score by Ranjit Barot, son of yesteryear's famous dancer Sitaradevi. This album includes a reissued version of Lata Mangeshkar?s Vande Mataram from the 1952 film Anandmath. The lyricist Mehboob wrote another lyric for Lata Mangeshkar (for the leading line, "Sujjalam, Suffalam, Malayyaj Sheetalam, Sasyya Shyyamalam Maataram") words easily borrowed - or marrowed? - from the sacred song of national pride. The remainder of the lyric, as before, is different and Lataji has sung wonderfully to the same old Anandmath tune for "Maa Tujhe Salam, Maa Tujhe Pranam." The lyricist appears to have conjoined the words "Salam" and "Pranam," though there is a world of difference between the two. In the same album Shubha Mudgal has sung the familiar Vande Mataram in a pop idiom, whereas Kausiki Chakravarty sings it like a lullaby.
In what way a creative writer should be held responsible? Bankimchandra was among the first batch of graduates from Calcutta University. Soon after he had securred his BA, he was appointed as Deputy Magistrate, and eventually became a Deputy Collector. In his work, he had ready access to old papers and gazettes, and came across the documents related to the mutiny of Sanyasis (saints) in Dhaka, North Bengal, Nepal, Tarai, Dinajpur, Rangpur, and Purniya during the period from 1763 to 1780. He decided to write a novel, Anandmath, based on the heroic deeds of these sanyasis. In his youth, he had witnessed the unsuccessful mutiny of 1857. Around 1870, the British rulers were trying hard to force their anthem, God Save the Queen, on Indians. This made a deep impact on Bankimchandra?s sensitive mind, and he wrote Bande Mataram in one sitting, in a mood that must be called transcendental. He wrote the song as a prayer in which the nation 'Bharat' was described as 'The Mother'. The song was later included in his novel Anandmath, which was published serially in his magazine Bangdarshan during 1880-1882. The song was heavily criticized by his friends, and also by his daughter, for the words were difficult to pronounce, and the song comprised of a mixture of Bengali and Sanskrit words. He argued that he wrote it spontaneously to express his emotions and thoughts without caring for its future. However, like a prophet, he said, "I may not live to see its popularity, but this song will be sung by every Indian like a Ved Mantra." And that is exactly what happened after the partition of Bengal in 1905.
The Vandematarm policy becam exposed once again whent the Union Human Resource Minister Arjun singh requested that all the concerning authorities of the States should be directed to celebrate Vandemataram centenary on September 7, triggering a controversy. Even Congress-ruled states made the singing optional after protests by Muslim groups. Bjp ruled states, however celebrated the false centinary with much more pomp and pride. Sangh Parivar mad an issue of it and further launched a misinformation campaaign making doubtful the muslim integrity and its patriotism. Strange enoough so called U.P. Government led by prominent seculr politician Mulaym singh Yadav, on its behalf, directed the Secretaries of the Departments of Primary, Secondary, Higher, Information and Technical Education to take necessary action in this regard.On the other hand, In a virtual snub to Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, the Congress said on Sunday, 10 th september that it was wrong to say that September 7 was the date when Vande Mataram was accepted as the national song 100 years ago. With the Bharatiya Janata Party attacking Congress chief Sonia Gandhi for not participating in an event to mark the 'centenary' of the song last week, the party said the date chosen for the celebrations was historically incorrect and it did not 'want to make it a historic date'. Congress general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi told reporters that Shashi Bhushan, a former party MP who came up with the idea of commemorating the song's centenary on September 7, had admitted to media that he had made a mistake.
Arjun Singh, while citing the brief history of Vande Mataram, said that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote the song in 1876 and Sri Rabindranath Tagore recited it for the first time during the Congress session at Bombay in 1896. It was during the movement against the Partition of Bengal (Bang Bhang Andolan) in the year 1905 that 'Vande Mataram' became the battle song in the fight against imperialism. It was adopted as a National Song at the Varanasi session of AICC on September 7, 1905.
We all know that Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-94) wrote his famous song Bande Mataram at his residence in Kantalpada, in Naihati village, which is just a few miles away from Calcutta. The song is now 125 years old. It is probably the only Indian song that is still widely popular all over India, and musicians still want to sing it again and again, and keep composing new tunes for it. During this year of celebrations, a book in Marathi, Vande Mataram: Ek Shodh by Mr Milind Sabnis, was published in Pune. This is a carefully researched monograph, which should be translated into Hindi and English soon. This year, an edited Hindi version of Bankimchandra?s novel, Anandmath was published in Mumbai. A few audio/video albums featuring Bande Mataram have been released in the last five years. "The Society of Indian Record Collectors," a Mumbai-based organization, has traced about one hundred different versions of Vande Mataram recorded over the last hundred years. These versions vary from the voices of Rabindranath Tagore to that of A R Rahman. Based on available recordings, an attempt has been made to note the musical aspects of this evergreen song.
The song Vande Mataram is now 125 years old, and has now entered the 21st century. In 1975, while celebrating its centenary, a conference was organized at Banaras in which books, monographs and proceedings devoted to the song were published. In 2000, the Vande Mataram Shatkottar Rajat Jayanti Samiti of Pune published a Marathi book on the song. The Society of Indian Record Collectors found over 100 recorded versions of the song and presented over 20 illustrated listening sessions to audience of various age groups in Maharashtra.
As usual, no political party (including the Indian National Congress) took any note of these activities. Hard-liners with slogans like "Garva Se Kaho...." and/or "Is Desh Men Rahana Hoga To Vande Mataram Kahana Hoga" did not seem to know about this event. Even Bengalis have failed to notice these activities, probably because of the last fifity years of communist rule in Bengal. The Rashtriya Aghadi Government announced the formation of a committee that would attend to issues concerning the song and its future but nothing has come of it since.
Composed by Bankim Chandra, the song Vandemataram appears in the Bengali novel Anand Math. The English translation of Vande Mataram rendered by Shree Aurobindo, is considered to be the "official" and best. According to Bhavan's book, Vande Mataram by Moni Bagchee (pg. 66), "Bankin Chandra composed the song in an inspired moment, Rabindranath sang it by setting a tune to it and it was left to the genius of Aurobindo to interpret the deeper meaning of the song out of which India received the philosophy of new Nationalism."
Here is the entire song. Only first two stanza of this song are considered to be national song. (Did you know that even Jana Gana Mana...is much longer, and that only first two stanzas are recognized as National Anthem) In fact, I find some of the later stanza much more powerful and inspirational. Please note, only translation is by Shree Aurobindo.Entire Text of Vande Mataram Mother, I bow to thee! Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with orchard gleams, Cool with thy winds of delight, Dark fields waving Mother of might, Mother free. Glory of moonlight dreams, Over thy branches and lordly streams, Clad in thy blossoming trees, Mother, giver of ease Laughing low and sweet! Mother I kiss thy feet, Speaker sweet and low! Mother, to thee I bow.
Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Thy dreadful name from shore to shore? With many strengths who art mighty and stored, To thee I call Mother and Lord! Though who savest, arise and save! To her I cry who ever her foeman drove Back from plain and Sea And shook herself free.
Thou art wisdom, thou art law, Thou art heart, our soul, our breath Though art love divine, the awe In our hearts that conquers death. Thine the strength that nervs the arm, Thine the beauty, thine the charm. Every image made divine In our temples is but thine.
Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen, With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen, Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned, And the Muse a hundred-toned, Pure and perfect without peer, Mother lend thine ear, Rich with thy hurrying streams, Bright with thy orchard gleems, Dark of hue O candid-fair
In thy soul, with jewelled hair And thy glorious smile divine, Lovilest of all earthly lands, Showering wealth from well-stored hands! Mother, mother mine! Mother sweet, I bow to thee, Mother great and free!
The inspiration:Historians like Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar and literary critics have generally held that Ananda Math was a product of Bankimchandra?s imagination. The seeds of Bankimchandra?s anti-British sentiments were sown in Berhampore, the district headquarters of Murshidabad district where he was posted as a Deputy Magistrate [he was the first Bengali to be offered a job in the civil service after he graduated with grace marks in Bengali, his examiner having been none other than Iswarchandra Vidyasagar who did not give him pass marks!]. It was the 15th of December 1873 when Bankimchandra was, as usual, crossing the Barrack Square field opposite the Collectorate in his palanquin while some Englishmen were playing cricket. Suddenly one Lt. Colonel Duffin stopped the palanquin with some abusive remarks and insisted that it should be taken out of the field. When Bankim refused to abandon his customary route, Duffin apparently forced him to alight from the palanquin and pushed him violently (as reported in the Amrita Bazar Patrika of 8.1.1974). Witnesses to the incident included the Raja of Lalgola Jogindranarain Roy, Durgashankar Bhattacharji of Berhampur, Judge Bacebridge, Reverend Barlow, Principal Robert Hand and some others. Furious at the insult, Bankimchandra filed a criminal case against the Colonel, with the Lalgola Raja, Durgashankar Bhattacharji and Hand cited as witnesses. Duffin had to get a lawyer from Krishnagar in Nadia district, as no one in Berhampore was willing to appear for him, while all the local lawyers had signed vakalatnamas for Bankimchandra.
On 12th January 1874 the Magistrate, Mr. Winter, summoned Duffin and had just begun to question him when Judge Bacebridge entered and requested a few words in his chamber. After a little while they called in Bankimchandra and Duffin. Apparently they told Bankimchandra that Duffin had not recognized that Bankim was a Deputy Magistrate and regretted the incident. They requested Bankimchandra to withdraw the case. This he was not prepared to do and after much persuasion agreed, provided Duffin offered a formal apology in open court. Reluctantly, Duffin agreed. Winter took his chair in the court thereafter and in his presence, before a packed court, Lt. Col. Duffin offered an unconditional apology to Bankimchandra. The Amrita Bazar Patrika of 15.1.1874 reports: ?It appears that the colonel and the Babu were perfect strangers to each other and he did not know who he was when he affronted him. On being informed afterwards of the position of the Babu, Col. Duffin expressed deep contrition and a desire to apologise. The apology was made in due form in open court where about a thousand spectators, native and Europeans, were assembled.?
Almost immediately thereafter we find Bankimchandra taking three months leave. After this incident there must have been considerable resentment in the Berhampore Cantonment among the British militia and, apprehending bodily harm, Rao Jogindranarain Roy took Bankimchandra away to stay with him in Lalgola.
In Lalgola the Guru of the raja?s family was Pandit Kali Brahma Bhattacharya who practised tantrik sadhana. Kishanchand Bhakat has obtained an excerpt of seven slokas from a book in the family of Kali Brahma Bhattacharya whose rhythm, sense and even some words bear an uncanny resemblance to Bankim?s song. It is most probable that Bankimchandra took the first few lines of his immortal ?Bande Mataram? (up to ripudalabarining) from here because in the first edition of the novel in Banga Darshan (Chaitra 1287, pp. 555-556), these lines are given within quotation marks and the spelling is most ungrammatically retained as ?matarang?. Bankim faced considerable criticism on this account from Haraprasad Shastri, Rajkrishna Muhopadhyay, and others. In the later editions he removed the quotation marks and changed the spelling to the proper Sanskrit ?mataram?, wiping out all trace of the borrowing.
There is an image of Kali in the Lalgola palace temple that is unique. Its four hands are bereft of any weapon. The two lower hands are folded in front (karabadhha), the palm of one covered by that of the other, just as a prisoner?s hands are shackled. From behind, the image is shackled to the wall with numerous iron chains. Kali is black, of terrifying mien, naked, a serpent between her feet, and Shiva a supine corpse before her. This represented to Bankim what Bhaarat, the Mother, had become:
?The Brahmacharin said, ?Look on the Mother as she now is.?Mohendra said in fear, ?It is Kali.?
?Yes, Kali enveloped in darkness, full of blackness and gloom. She is stripped of all, therefore naked. Today the whole country is a burial ground, therefore is the Mother garlanded with skulls. Her own God she tramples under her feet. Alas my Mother!?? (Sri Aurobindo?s translation, 1909).
It is extremely significant that on either side of this unusual Kali we find Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Kartik and Ganesh, who are never represented with this goddess. It is in this Kali that Bankim envisioned Mother as she will be and that is why he wrote, ?tvam hi durga dashapraharana dharini, Thou, indeed, art Durga, ten-armed, weapon-wielding?. It is this temple that is the source of Bankimchandra?s ?Monastery of Bliss?.
To reach this temple a tunnel existed, whose vestiges are still visible, from another temple that is now in ruins and covered up with jungle. This ruined edifice was the Jagaddhatri temple that Bankim would have seen and described in his novel thus:
?Jagaddhatri, Protrectress of the world, wonderful, perfect, rich with every ornament?the Mother as she was?She trampled under foot the elephant of the forest and all wild beasts, and in the haunt of the wild beasts she erected her lotus throne. She was covered with every ornament, full of laughter and beauty. She was in hue like the young sun, splendid with all opulence and empire?The Brahmacharin then showed him a dark underground passage?In a dark room in the bowels of the earth an insufficient light entered from some unperceived outlet. By that faint light he saw an image of Kali.? (ibid.)
A little to the east is another temple in which the image of goddess Durga was worshipped by Kali Brahma Bhattacharya??Mother as she will be?:
?The ascetic?began to ascend another underground passage?In a wide temple built in stone of marble they saw a beautifully fashioned image of the ten-armed Goddess made in gold, laughing and radiant in the light of the early sun?Her ten arms are extended towards the ten regions and they bear many a force imaged in her manifold weapons; her enemies are trampled under her feet and the lion on which her foot rests is busy destroying the foe?on her right Lakshmi as Prosperity, on her left Speech, giver of learning and science, Kartikeya with her as Strength, Ganesh as Success.?
In the tenth chapter of Ananda Math there is an elaborate description of an extremely opulent building housing a dazzling image of four-armed Vishnu with two huge demons, beheaded, lying in front, Lakshmi garlanded with lotuses on the left with flowing hair, as though terrified, and on the right Sarasvati with book and musical instrument, surrounded with incarnate raga-raginis and on his lap one lovelier than either goddess, more opulent and more majestic: the Mother. The dynastic deity of the Lalgola Raja family was Vishnu and the image was worshipped inside the huge palace. Underground chambers can still be seen here and it is possible that the Kali icon was originally housed in one of these, reached through the tunnels.
A little further on is the ruin of an ancient Buddhist Vihara where the Buddhist goddess Kalkali was worshipped. The stream that flows by is named after her, and is mentioned in the novel. In chapter 5 of the novel he describes this ?great monastery engirt with ruined masses of stones. Archaeologists would tell us that this was formerly a monastic retreat of the Buddhists and afterwards became a Hindu monastery.? This is where Kalyani first sees the noble, white-bodied, white-haired, white-bearded, white-robed ascetic. Is Kali Brahma Bhattacharya the inspiration for this figure?
To the north of the palace, through what was then a dense forest, one reaches the confluence of Kalkali, Padma and Bhairav rivers known as ?Sati-maar thaan (sthaan, place)?. Here, under a massive banyan tree, groups of Bir and Shri sects of violent Tantriks used to meet. Kali Brahma used to tutor them in opposing British rule to free the shackled Mother. One tunnel from the Kali temple goes straight to the Kalkali river, whose banks were dotted with a number of small temples in which these tantriks used to take shelter. It is said that in this Kali temple Bankim witnessed a very old tantrik offering a red hibiscus to the goddess, shouting ?Jaya ma danujdalani, bande bandini matarang?. Is it mere coincidence that if ?bandini? is dropped from this tantrik?s exclamation we get exactly Bankim?s ?bande matarang??
Bhakat hazards a guess that this may have occurred on the full moon night of Maagh, 1280 B.S. (Jan-Feb 1874) when the death anniversary of Rao Ramshankar Roy used to be observed in the Lalgola family. This occasion occurred very soon after the court case in Berhampur and Bankimchandra?s taking leave. On this anniversary, sadhus from Benares used to arrive at this Kali temple. Repeatedly Bankim refers to ?Maghi purnima? in the novel.
The inspiration Bankim received from all this is reflected first in his essay ?Aamaar Durgotsab? (1874).
In the same area we find the Raghunath temple with icons of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman, Radha and Krishna, with 51 Shiva lingas and 34 Saalgraams. It is said that these were kept here from the time of the Sanyasi Revolt of 1772-73. Bhakat points out that near the Lalgola zamindari was the estate of Rani Bhawani of Natore who used to distribute food freely to the ascetics and was therefore renowned as goddess Annapurna herself. Her patronage extended right up to Benares. In 1772-3 Warren Hastings, the Governor General, forfeited a large portion of the Rani?s estate. This lead to stoppage of the supplies to the Sanyasis. The famine that followed in Bengal fanned the flames and the Sanyasis attacked the British. Led by the tantrik Mahant Ramdas of Dinajpur?s Kanchan Mashida monastery, they deposited the icons of their deities with Rao Atmaram Roy, the Lalgola zamindar, and left on their mission.
Bhakat has identified Bankimchandra?s ?Padachinnha? village with Dewan Sarai village which tallies with all the data in the novel: north to south beside Padachinnha the earthern embankment built by the Nawab runs through ?to Murshidabad, Cossimbazar or Calcutta? where Kalyani urges Mohendra to go and also mentions ?town? which could be a reference to ?nagar/Rajnagar? in Birbhum which can also be reached by this embankment. (chapter 1 of Ananda Math). On either side of the embankment there used to be dense forest, and at the confluence, at Basumati (located in Nashipur, now washed into the river was a burning ghat frequented by Bhojpuri Tantriks. All the temples mentioned in the novel are also here, as also the tunnels, the Vishnu temple, Kalkali river. Bhojpuri speaking looters and sepoys feature in the novel who tally with the fact of such people having been brought into Lalgola by the zamindar to act as sepoys and servants. Bhakat himself is a scion of such a family of staff-wielding guards and servants. They used to live in the ?Deshwali? area in the jungle adjacent the palace on the banks of the Kalkali and Padma with surnames like Mishra, Pande, Rai and used to receive initiation in tantric worship from Kali Brahma. The guru was addressed as ?maharaj?.
Bhakat proposes that Satyananda of the novel is none other than Kali Brahma Bhattacharya; that Dhirananda is based on the court-poet and priest of Lalgola, Trailokyanath Smritibhushan; that Bhabananda is based on the character of Raja Jogindranarain Roy (himself a tantric sadhak), who stood by Bankim and helped him get away from the wrath of the British militia; that Jibananda reflects much of Bankim himself. Bankim would have lived in the first floor room that still exists in the Kali temple courtyard. In the ground floor room lived Dr. Parry who had spent nearly Rs.10,000 in 1873 to make a medical library for the Lalgola palace. He is said to have worshipped Kali and could be the original for the physician in the novel who is loyal to the British.
On the basis of these findings, it can now be asserted that Ananda Math was not just a figment of the novelist?s imagination, but was rooted in a personal insult suffered by Bankimchandra and in the experiences he had in Lalgola as a guest of Rao Jogindranarain Roy.
But a fascinating puzzle remains. Before the images of the Mother are shown, there is reference to worshipping the country itself as Mother, quoting the Sanskrit half-sloka, janani janmabhumisca svargadapi gariyasi. Where did Bankim get this from? Considerable research by me has failed to pinpoint where it occurs. Several Tamil and Malayali Sanskritists recite it with aplomb and attribute it to Rama who is supposed to have responded in these words to Lakshmana when requested to stay on in Lanka, the city-of-gold, instead of returning to Ayodhya. Robert Goldman, the translator of the critical text of the epic, informs that it occurs in some version in the Yuddhakanda as follows:
api svarnamayi lanka na me laksmana rocate /janani janmabhumis casvargadapi gariyasi //
Unfortunately, neither the Valmiki Ramayana, nor the Adhyatma and Ananda Ramayanas, nor the version in the Mahabharata feature the sloka. So it remains a puzzle like the panchakanya sloka.
Beginning of the century - The song remained in the novel Anandmath until it was sung by Rabindranath Tagore at Beadon Square in the 1896 convention of the Indian National Congress. It soon became part of a tradition after that, and even today Congress conventions, and sessions of the Loksabha and the Vidhansabha begin with the recitation of the first stanza of Bande Mataram. In 1905, large crowd gathered at a town hall in Calcutta to protest against the partition of Bengal, and someone from the crowd shouted Bande Mataram. It became a very popular slogan

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Interview with Swami Dayananda Saraswathi

interviewThe interview that follows was excerpted from over eighty pages of transcripts documenting a series of dialogues between Swami Dayananda and Andrew Cohen in February 1998. What is Advaita? Andrew Cohen: In the last twenty years or so there has been great interest in Advaita in the West, as you know, and it's my impression that there has also been a lot of confusion about this teaching, that it has been very misunderstood and even abused in some cases. We wanted to speak with you so that we could present an authoritative traditional view. So, to begin, could you please explain what the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta is? Swami Dayananda: The word "advaita" is a very important word. It's a word that negates dvaita, which means "two." The "a" is a negative particle, so the meaning would be "that which is nondual." And it reveals the philosophy that all that is here is One, which means that there is nothing other than that One, nor is it made up of any parts. It's a whole without parts, and That they call "Brahman" [the Absolute], and That you are—because the nondual cannot be different from you, the inquirer. If it is different from you, then it is dual; then you are the subject and it is the object. So it has got to be you. And therefore, if you don't recognize that, you'll miss out on being the Whole. AC: Can you please explain the historical background? SD: The Vedas [sacred Hindu scriptures] are the most ancient body of knowledge we have in humanity. And the tradition looks upon the Vedas as not having been authored by any given person, but given to the ancient rishis [seers] as revealed knowledge. It is considered that the Vedas are traced ultimately to the Lord as the source of all knowledge, and it is this body of knowledge that is the source of Advaita. The Upanishads [the concluding portions of the Vedas] talk about God realization—and they not only talk about it, they methodically teach it. What I am doing today is what is taught in the Upanishads. The Upanishads themselves are a teaching and also a teaching tradition. And it's a communicable tradition—there's nothing mystical about it. But I don't think advaita is only in the Vedas; I think it's everywhere—wherever there is the idea, "You are the Whole." That is advaita, whether it is in Sanskrit, Latin or Hebrew. But the advantage in Vedanta is that it can be taught and it is taught. We have created a teaching tradition, and it has grown. Whereas in America, when suddenly people turn vegetarian, for example, all that they have is tofu and alfalfa and a few other things, because there's no tradition of vegetarian cooking. It takes time. You can't create a tradition overnight! AC: Who are considered to be the foremost exponents of the Advaita teachings? SD: There have been a lot of teachers who have maintained this tradition whose names we don't know. But from the Upanishads down we can say: Vyasa, Gaudapada, Shankara, Suresvara—these are the names we repeat every day. But Shankara occupies a central position because of his written commentary. It is the written commentary that gives you the tradition of teaching and the method of teaching, and the method is very important in this tradition: How do you teach? There are a lot of pitfalls in this process, and one of them is the limitation of the language—the linguistic limitation. But the teaching has to be conveyed through words, which means that you must have a method—a method by which you can be sure that the student understands, because the enlightenment takes place as the teaching takes place and not afterwards. That's the tradition. So Shankara occupies an important place because of his commentaries, because he left written commentaries on palm leaves for us. But I wouldn't say that the other teachers were any less important. AC: Before Shankara there were no written commentaries? SD: There were some. In fact, what I'm teaching every morning now is a commentary on one of the Upanishads, by Shankara's own teacher's teacher, Gaudapada. There are a few others also—Vyasa's sutras. These sutras are analytical works in a style of literature that has very brief statements, one after the other, so that you can memorize them. But these, again, are part of the tradition of teaching, so they are always backed up. You write the sutra and then you teach it to a group of people, and these together are what is handed down. Then, when you recite the sutra, you remember what we call "the Tradition." In fact, the whole of Advaita Vedanta is analyzed in the sutras. The Self is already present in all experience AC: Why is it that you feel the study of the scriptures, rather than spiritual experience, is the most direct means to Self-realization? SD: Self-realization, as I said, is the discovery that "the Self is the whole"—that you are the Lord; in fact, you are God, the cause of everything. Now nobody lacks the experience of advaita, of that which is nondual—there's always advaita. But any experience is only as good as one's ability to interpret it. A doctor examining you interprets your condition in one way, a layperson in another. Therefore, you need interpretation, and your knowledge is only as valid as the means of knowledge you are using for that purpose. As the small self, we have no means of knowledge for the direct understanding of Self-realization, and therefore Vedanta is the means of knowledge that has to be employed for that purpose. No other means of knowledge will work because, for this kind of knowledge, our powers of perception and inference alone are not sufficient. So I find that by itself there is nothing more dumb than experience in this world. In fact, it is experience that has destroyed us. AC: It has been my experience as a teacher that for most human beings, generally speaking, simply hearing the teaching is not enough. Usually they do need to have some kind of experience that makes the meaning of the words obvious in a very direct, experiential way. And then the person says, "Oh, my goodness, now I understand! I've heard this for so many years, but now I recognize the truth of it." SD: Yes, but even that experience is useless without the correct interpretation. Suppose your sense of being a separate individual falls away for a moment or ten minutes or even an hour, and then suddenly that apparent duality seems to come back again. Does that mean the one true Self gets displaced? Of course not! Then why should enlightenment require an experience? Enlightenment doesn't depend upon experiences; it depends upon my shedding my error and ignorance—that is what it depends upon, and nothing else. People say that advaita is eternal, that it is timeless, and at the same time they say that they are going through an experience of it at a particular time and under certain conditions. That's not traditional! But that is what we hear everywhere. The tradition says: "What you see right now is advaita." Suppose a fellow has an experience and then he comes out and says, "I was one hour eternal." No time means timeless, and timeless means eternity. Whether it is one hour eternal or one moment eternal, it is always the same. So confidence in truth cannot depend upon a state of experience. Confidence in truth is in your clarity of what is. Otherwise what will happen is, "I was non dual Brahman for one hour and then I came back and now it's gone." Then every thought becomes a nightmare because when I am not in nirvikalpa samadhi [ecstatic absorption in nondual consciousness], then I cannot even relate to the world; I have to be stoned forever, you know? Whereas enlightenment is just knowing what is. That is called sahaja, which means "natural"; it means just seeing clearly. If people insist on having a particular experience, that simply means that they have not understood the teaching. Even right now, for example, we are interpreting our experiences. For example, you are experiencing me right now. AC: True. SD: And your experience seems to reveal two things: one is the subject, the other is the object. But let us suppose that both of them happen to be one reality. AC: All right. SD: Then you don't have any lack of raw material here. The experience of seeing me or seeing anybody, seeing anything or hearing anything, thinking about anything—inside, outside, whatever—that experience is advaita. And if that is so, then we are not lacking experience, and therefore we need not wait for any experience to come. Whatever experience you encounter within yourself, that experience reveals advaita, reveals nonduality. And if your interpretation of that experience is that there is an object other than yourself, then it is your interpretation itself that is duality. Therefore, it's a problem of cognition, and that problem of cognition is to be solved. AC: Cognition of? SD: Of this nondual! Am I talking about something that is absolutely unknown to me? No. Unknown to anyone? Not at all. Right now, for instance, you see me and you say, "Swami is sitting here." How do you know? You say, "Because I see you, I hear you; therefore you are here." Therefore I am evident to you because you have a means of knowing, you have a means of seeing, you have a means of hearing; therefore Swami is. Swami is because he's evident to you, just as anything is because it's evident to you. Sun is, moon is, star is, space is, time is—all these are evident to you. The same is true of your experience of yourself. Suppose I ask you, "Do you have a physical body?" "Yes," you'll say—because it's evident to you. "Do you have any memory of being in such-and-such a place?" Yes—because it's evident to you. To whom are all these evident? To you! To yourself. That means you are self-evident. When are you not self-evident? Tell me—when? It is because you are self-evident that you don't need to become self-evident at any time. All my experiences are because of my self-evidence. Therefore, the Self is already experienced—that's what I say. Self is experienced as the ultimate content of every experience. I say, in fact, that our very experience is the Self. In all experiences, therefore, what is invariably present is consciousness, and no object is independent of that. And consciousness is not dependent on and has none of the attributes of any particular object. Consciousness is consciousness, and while it is in everything, it transcends everything. That's why I say: this is advaita, this is nondual, this is Brahman, this is limitless; timewise it is limitless, spacewise it is limitless. And therefore it is Brahman, and therefore you are everything already. This is the teaching, and what it means is that I need not wait for any experience because every experience is Brahman, every experience is limitless. AC: But this is a subtle point that is not necessarily easy to grasp without some previous direct experience of the nondual. SD: If the person doesn't see, then that means I have to teach further; or maybe they do see but in spite of that they say, "I still have got some cobwebs here or there." But that is not a problem; they just need to be cleared away. First, you have an insight that is knowing, and then, as difficulties arise, we take care of them. I don't say it is not a matter of experience, but I say that experience is always the very nature of yourself. Consciousness is experience, and every experience reveals the fact of your being Self-evident. And what is Self-evident is, by definition, nondual. So subject and object are already the same. Here is a wave, for instance, that has a human mind. It thinks, "I am a small wave." Then it becomes a big wave, swallowing in the process many other waves, and begins boasting, "I am a big wave." Then it loses its form, and again becomes small—files a "Chapter Thirteen," as you say in America, you know, bankruptcy—and now it wants to somehow get to the shore. But from the shore, other waves are pushing into the ocean, and from the ocean, waves are pushing to the shore, and this poor little wave is caught in between, sandwiched, and begins crying, "What shall I do?" There is another wave around, a wave that seems to be very happy, and so the first wave asks him, "How come you are so happy? You also are small—in fact, you are smaller than me! How come you are so happy?" Then another wave says, "He's an enlightened wave." Now the first wave wants to know, "What is enlightenment? What is this enlightenment?" The happy wave says, "Hey, come on! You should know who you are!" "All right. Who am I?" And the enlightened wave says, "You are the ocean." "What?! Ocean? Did you say that I am the ocean, because of all the water by which I am sustained and to which I will go back? That ocean I am?" "Yes, you are the ocean." And he laughs. "How can I be the ocean? That's like saying I am God. The ocean is almighty, it's all-pervasive, it's everything. How can I be the ocean?" So we can dismiss Vedanta's statement of the non dual reality, or we can ask, "How come? How come I am That?" The nondual teaching is not necessary if our identity is obvious, if what is apparent to us is not a difference but an essential nondifference. Here, there is nondifference. There is no wave without water, and there is no ocean without water. Every other wave, and the whole ocean too, is one water alone.

Nondual realization and action in the world AC: One of the subjects I'm very interested in is the relationship between the nondual realization that you've been describing and action in the world of time and space. For example, in the empirical world, in empirical reality, even the realized soul who has no doubt about his true nature finds that he still must take a stand—against, in opposition to—the forces of delusion and negativity operating there. SD: We need not impose a rule like should and must—he may take a stand. AC: May take a stand? SD: Yes. Because once he's free, who is to set rules for him? You see, if he is free enough to do, then he is just as free not to do—that is what I say. He will spontaneously do what he has to do. Perhaps he thinks that everybody is all right. In fact, that's what the truth is. Because until you tell me that you have a problem with me, I don't have a problem with you. AC: But let's say, for example, that the realized soul is sitting in a room and then a killer comes in and starts killing people. Some people might say, "Well, it's all one Self and there's no opposition, so there's no need to interfere." But someone else would say, "I have no choice; I have to interfere." SD: Why should he not interfere? Clearly, at that level, there is hurting— AC: Yes. SD: And maybe he is not even killing, maybe he is only using abusive language. Why should this realized soul not say, "Foolish man, change your language. What are you doing?" So he can help him; he can help him to change. And he can do it without creating any big problem for him; he can be angry without causing anger to this fellow, he can talk to that person and make him see that he is abusive because of his background and help him to change. So that's what he will do. But we cannot say that he should correct. For that, who is to set the rule for me? Suppose one is enlightened; who is to set the rule for that person, for the enlightened person? Nobody has to set the rule, because he is above all the rules. AC: He's above the rules? SD: Yes, he's above the rules and not subject to any rule. Nobody can objectify the Self; there is no second person to objectify the Self. And therefore the Self is not subject to hurt nor guilt, and therefore is free from hurt and guilt. In other words, it is neither a subject nor an object, and if that is so, then "should" does not come into the picture—not even into the picture of empirical transaction—because it's just not an issue. The issue is: Here is a person who has a certain problem and therefore he is abusive, and that person can be helped. So of course he will help! AC: Everything that you're saying obviously is completely true because, ultimately, the nondual cannot be affected and has no preferences. But what I am saying is that there is always a profound effect on the human personality of the one who has realized that nondual, and I'm using this extreme example only to make the point that some criterion has to be there. For example, historically, individuals who have deeply realized this nondual Absolute have expressed sattvic nature, have expressed egolessness. So even though I know that enlightenment takes many forms, and the expression of enlightenment is different in different people, still, fundamentally, there is always an expression of selflessness and compassion which allows us to say that if someone was truly a realized person they would not be able to act in a profoundly self-centered manner. Therefore, there are certainly things a person wouldn't do if he or she was an enlightened person. That's my point. SD: So how will you judge an enlightened person? AC: Well, if he was raping and killing people, then we could at least say, "This is not an enlightened person." Correct? SD: But that doesn't come into the picture anyway because in the traditional system he has to have gone through a life of rigorous moral and spiritual training, and only then is he enlightened, and this fellow has not done that, so clearly he still has some problems. There is a statement, though: "It takes a wise man to know a wise man." If you are a wise man, then you don't need another wise man to become wise; if you are otherwise, you need a wise man, but because you are otherwise, you cannot discern him. So you are in a helpless situation. Therefore, the criterion for a wise man, I tell you finally—the way to find out whether he is wise or not—is if he makes you wise. Then he knows. That is the only criterion, and there is none other because the forms his compassion can assume are very varied, and with all our actions we don't always console people. The Mystic and the Vedantin AC: Shankara and Ramana Maharshi are generally considered to be two of the greatest exponents of Advaita teaching and advaita realization. And yet I've always wondered why Shankara's teaching gave rise to a monastic system in which one is encouraged to renounce the world in order to pursue the spiritual life in earnest, while often when people would ask Ramana Maharshi—who was a renunciate himself—"Master, should I give up the world?" he would encourage them to inquire into the nature of who it was that wanted to give up the world, and discourage them from trying to make any external changes in their lives. SD: Shankara is just a link in the tradition, as I said before. He's not the author of any particular system or monastic order. It's true that he himself was a sannyasi, a renunciate—as a young person he renounced everything—but a sannyasi is different from a monastic. A sannyasi doesn't belong to any monastic order. He is simply a noncompetitor in the society. He is a person who has gained a certain maturity, a certain discriminative understanding, which drives him to pursue spiritual knowledge in a dedicated fashion. In Shankara's time, such a person was absolved from all familial, social and religious duties by a ritual in which he said, "All is given up by me. I don't compete. I'm not interested in money or power or security or in anything else here." That is a sannyasi. He is not a member of an organization or order. There is no monastery to protect that fellow. He's "under the sky." But there is still a deeper level of renunciation which this sannyasi, this renunciate, has to gain, and that is the knowledge that "I am not the doer, I am not the enjoyer, I never did any karma, any action, before"—direct knowledge of the nondual Self, which is also actionlessness. Action is always there as long as doership is there. Even "not-doing" is an action. So the freedom from doership that comes in the wake of knowledge of the Self is not an act of giving up. It is: "I know and therefore I am free. And so there is no choice." This is what is called the real sannyas, the true renunciation of all actions at all times, and that is enlightenment. AC: It's not true that Shankara started a monastic tradition? SD: No, he didn't start any monastic tradition. They said so afterwards, but that was because he was such a popular teacher and because he was a sannyasi. His disciples had maths [monasteries] that they had created, but it wasn't a new order. Some of his disciples were perhaps dispatched to different places, but we don't know whether he sent them or they went. My feeling is they went—he didn't send anybody anywhere. That's how I would be, anyway, if I were Shankara; I'd say, "Go wherever you want!" Now if a small person like me would do that, then I don't think Shankara would have done anything else. So that's one perception taken care of. Then there's Ramana. Some people say that Ramana is the highest, the one who in the modern world has accomplished advaita. That's the perception because he's known to some people, but there could be unknown millions we don't know—some may even be householders, people who are at home, some of them just your ordinary housewives. In India, you know, you can't take these people for granted; some of these women are enlightened. They are! And they may be housewives, mothers of ten children. We don't know. India is a different country. There are no criteria to find out whether this person is enlightened or not. And so Ramana is said to be enlightened, but we should ask him, "Are you enlightened?" And he will say, "Why do you want to know? Who are you who wants to know? Find out who you are." He discovered this way of speaking with people that did not require him to answer any questions. One fellow comes and asks, "What is God?" and he answers, "Who are you that is asking this question?" This is a way of answering questions that he adopted as an attempt to turn the person toward himself. Therefore, his attention was not toward any particular style of living. He neither encouraged sannyas nor anything else. He was only telling people: "Understand who you are. That's what is important." AC: In fact, if people would say that they wanted to leave their family and take sannyas, he would discourage that. SD: Every sannyasi will say the same thing, because otherwise all those people would end up in the ashram! Certainly I would say the same thing in this case, because anybody who says, "I want to give up everything," has got a problem. AC: Why? SD: Because he's doubtful! If he were not doubtful he would have left already; he wouldn't have come and asked me. Because the mango fruit, when it is ripe, falls down; it doesn't ask, "Shall I fall down?" Ramana was not dumb; he knew exactly what he had to say. If I were he, do you know what I would have said? I would advise the person, "Hey, come on, you need not change anything. Be where you are; it's a change of vision." Even Shankara would say the same thing. Shankara had only four disciples. He traveled up and down this country on foot, which means he met thousands of people, yet he had only four disciples! That means he was advising everybody, "Stay where you are." AC: Yet at the same time, from what we have heard, both Jesus and the Buddha encouraged people to leave everything and follow them in order to pursue the spiritual life. So this is an intriguing question. SD: They encouraged, they encouraged—I don't know what for. Perhaps they wanted people to spend time with themselves. But the value of a contemplative life has always been there in the Vedic tradition, and a contemplative life can be lived anywhere. And you can be in the midst of all activities in the contemplative life, or you can be alone and not contemplative at all. AC: In one of your books, you make a distinction between a mystic and a Vedantin. When referring, for example, to Ramana Maharshi as a mystic, you seem to be distinguishing him in some way from a Vedantin, and since many people consider him to be the quintessence of Vedanta, I'm curious to know what that distinction is. SD: The only difference here is that a mystic has no means of communication to make you a mystic, an equally great mystic as himself. AC: To clear up empirical confusion—is that what you mean? SD: Yes. Suppose this mystic has got the knowledge of his being always All—that kind of a mystic's experience. So that person is a mystic, but he has no means of communication to share that experience. If he has a means of communication by which to make another person equally a mystic, then there is nothing mystical about what he knows. Therefore, I will not call him a "mystic"; I will call him a "Vedantin." AC: In Ramana's case, everybody said that he communicated through silence. SD: Again, this is an interpretation, because there are a lot of people I know who went to him and then came back saying that he didn't know anything. AC: But there are also many people who said that they had profound experiences in his presence. SD: Each one has to interpret in his own way. But we can only say someone is a Vedantin as long as they teach Vedanta!