Tag: ruth vanita

Book Review: What Often Goes Overlooked in ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’

Ruth Vanita’s latest book repeatedly shines a light on those aspects of the two epics that often get lost in their popular, simplified retellings. 

The power of great art is that – to use a cliché – it is a gift that keeps on giving.

Epics, of whichever culture, are great art. Ruth Vanita calls them ‘philosophical poems’. Their constant circulation in high, folk, and popular culture testifies to their endless generosity as far as meaning-giving is concerned.

In Asia, the Ramayana and Mahabharata continue to feed not only a variety of national and regional cultures, but also afford us ways to think through the people we are becoming. Be it through graphic fiction produced by Shibaji Bandopadhyay, novels by Shashi Tharoor or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, animation like Sita Sings the Blues, or indeed films like Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug, these two Sanskrit epics have lent themselves to an infinite number of creative retellings and analyses over many decades.

Many residents of Kolkata will remember the regular lectures delivered by professor P. Lal on the Mahabharata, much like Bengali theatregoers will recall Shaonli Mitra’s Nathbati Anathbat or the six-hour-long performances of Urubhanga. In recent times, Devdutt Patnaik has pointed out how gender and sexuality function in unconventional ways in these epics.

For me, the re-looking at these two epics began 20 years ago when I bought Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Since 2009, I have been discussing extracts of this book as part of one of the courses I teach at the University of Kalyani. My collection of books either authored or translated by Vanita has grown since, including Love’s Rite, Chocolate and Other Stories on Male-Male Desire, and About Me (the latter two being translations from Hindi of the work of Pandey Bechan Sharma). 

Also read: What Explains the Enduring Appeal of ‘Ramayan’ and ‘Mahabharat’?

Sharma makes a cameo appearance in Vanita’s latest book – a careful, sustained engagement with the two Sanskrit epics mentioned above. The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna, and Species looks at the two epics through questions that have always been but are now crucial to the ways in which we see ourselves in the universe, and indeed in society.

Ruth Vanita
The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna, and the Species
Oxford University Press (August 2022)

Comprising 12 chapters, the book engages with questions as diverse and important as the feasibility of absolute non-violence; the nature of the relationship between human beings and other animals; the terms of engagement between the individual and their family on one hand and the individual and the society on the other; and the conflicts therein.

Crucial to contemporary India is the discussion on caste. Should caste be natal or contingent on the individual’s actions? Are men and women irreconcilably different? Of particular relevance is the discussion on whether sex and gender are biological. Questions of sexual consent are dealt with, of immediate import in the wake of the #MeToo movement. The discussion on forgiveness gave this reviewer much to think about, as it doubtless will to any reader because most of us are tempted by the desire for revenge.

Vanita tackles the easy accusation of Sanskrit epics being Brahminical by pointing out that Vyasa was of ‘mixed parenthood’; Valmiki is worshipped as a member of the Valmik community by members of that community; and Raidas belonged to an ‘untouchable’ community too, to name just three authors associated with the Sanskrit epics.

Rather more provocatively, Vanita regards as unsatisfactory the tarring of the epics as patriarchal because “Patriarchy is the air we breathe. Therefore, explaining the meaning of a text as patriarchal is as useful as explaining people’s actions by the fact that they breathe”. This runs the risk of making patriarchy sound biological, which is perhaps not the case.

She also challenges the popular production, reception and circulation of Arjuna as the character whose personality and worldview shape the Mahabharata more than those of any other character, by focusing on Yudhisthira too.

Using the epics, Vanita argues convincingly that while we often believe that we belong to people that we are in whatever relationship with and that those people belong to us, “bhakta poets frequently repeat that parents, spouses, children, and homes do not belong to anyone. These are temporary and ultimately unreal relationships”.

Interestingly, friends are not present in the above quotation. Quite rightly too, because in the epics, friendship, be it between multiple human beings or between human beings and non-human animals, is shown to endure and have a permanence which familial relationships are not shown to have.

Perhaps the most famous of all friendships shown in the Sanskrit epics is that of Krishna and Arjuna. It is worthwhile, therefore, to remember, as Vanita informs us in a footnote, that the bhakta poet Jnaneshwara says on one occasion, “Arjuna is the embodiment of friendship devotion (sakhyachi), the mirror of Krishna’s self, and is like a pativrata, who is praised more than her husband is”.

This marital analogy invoked to describe a friendship burnishes the relationship with a queerness that many scholars working in the field of Queer Studies may find interesting. Arjuna is invoked several times in the book to make important points either about gender or about other matters, such as when Krishna advises him to abduct Subhadra (Krishna believes that abduction is better than purchasing or being gifted a bride!). Arjuna is “both male and female”. We are reminded of the time when he became Arjuni “to enjoy love-play with Krishna”. But the epic also contains expressions of homophobia, as when Shishupala says that Bhishma lives according to tritiya prakriti, a term that used to mean ‘men desiring men’.

Also read: Reimagining the ‘Mahabharata’ From the Shadows

Entirely in keeping with the postcolonial and postmodern celebration of hybridity, the book repeatedly stresses on the unhelpfulness of thinking identity and culture by prising open the notion of purity. The Pandavas and Kauravas “are not ‘pure’ ksatriyas”. Perhaps the chapter on ‘Person and Gender’ may be linked to this question of purity if one asks the question, ‘Is there a pure man?’ or ‘Is there a pure woman?’

Our lazy understanding of ‘purusa’ as ‘male’, and ‘prakriti’ as ‘female’ and the way this erroneous notion feeds our desire to have two distinct sexes is challenged when Vanita writes, “Neither purusa nor prakriti has sex or gender.” In a line that would resonate warmly with the way gender is theorised currently, the book states, “A person (vyakti) is not a stable entity but a constantly changing expression (vyakti) of consciousness …”

Sanjaya and Vidura are not often focused on in popular discussions of the epic. The book highlights them as “shudras teaching dharma”. Vidura is shown as not only practising the dharma of moral courage, but also being an ally to women. Much like in Same-Sex Love in India, Vanita includes Buddhism, albeit in a different context here: to underline the idea that a Brahman is not made by birth, but by spiritual action.

What makes the book accessible to readers who would be otherwise averse to discussions about the epics but are invested in questions regarding marriage, sex, old age, consent, sexual attraction and the like, is the phrasing of the sub-headings of various chapters. Here are a few examples: ‘Must all Women Be Married?’, ‘Can Old Women Be Attractive?’, and also engages with the question of whether those who cannot reproduce can marry. What one has to keep in mind is that an unreproductive – to coin an adjective – marriage need not be an asexual marriage.

The chapter that is of immediate relevance to Indians is the one that includes discussions of who is a good ruler and what one should or not should eat. Noteworthy is the line, “Whether or not to eat or sacrifice animals has to be left to individual choice”. This exists as if in dialogue with the chapter dealing with the treatment of animals. The careful distinction between necessity and cruelty is worth keeping in mind.

Vanita refers to Bhishma when he says that those who “tie up young animals, pierce their noses and make them work go to an infernal world”. Just as this reviewer was moved by Vanita’s mention of the incident of Krishna and Arjuna providing water, rest and succour to their horses even as the battle rages on, he was disturbed by the realisation that Sita could also be accused of animal cruelty because, after all, she desires to capture or kill the golden deer and at one point, has a pet parrot and refuses to let the bird go back into the forest. 

The book is important because it repeatedly shines a light on those aspects of the two epics that often get lost in their popular simplified retellings. Hiding in plain sight in the Sanskrit epics are words and incidents that can provide us much careful guidance in how to shape a more ethical private and public life.

If this reviewer has a quibble with the book it is that sometimes translations are not provided, as on pages 142, 144, 160, and 240. A translation is especially required for the two lines quoted on page 144 where we are told that Bhisma follows Satyavati’s opinions, but are prevented from knowing exactly what the opinion is due to the lack of a translation.

In the concluding chapter, Vanita writes, “…rulers need to work for conditions that are conducive to all beings having the opportunity to strive for liberation”. This reviewer cannot but agree. Rulers of today would benefit from much of the wisdom to be gleaned from the two Sanskrit epics that this country has inherited.

Niladri Chatterjee is a Professor of English at the University of Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal

‘Stray? Or Great?’: Who Is a Queer Poet and What Exactly Is Queer Poetry?

Editors of a new anthology from South Asia aspire to a wide definition of ‘queer’ and ‘queer poetry’.

When the Supreme Court in January 2014 refused to review its decision upholding the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, poet and novelist Vikram Seth sent his poem ‘Through Love’s Great Power’ to the editors of NDTV in an act of protest. The colonial era law criminalising consensual non-heteronormative love had been declared “unconstitutional” by the Delhi high court in 2009; its constitutionality was upheld by the SC in December 2013. Seth, who has never concealed his sexuality, has been for long one of the leading queer poets of the country.

The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia 
Ed. Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal
Harpercollins (July 2020)

But, who is a queer poet – and what exactly is queer poetry? This, along with several other questions, confronted Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal, the editors of The World That Belongs To Us (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2020) – the first major anthology of queer poetry to be published in the country since the SC decriminalised consensual non-heteronormative love in 2018. “Is a queer poem written by a queer-identified person about ‘queer’ themes, whatever those maybe? Can a queer person not address those themes as well, in a persuasive manner?” write Angiras and Katyal – both are my friends – in the Preface to their book. A little later they declare: “Mostly, we have erred on the side of being catholic in our choices, of including rather than excluding.”

The result of their decision is reflected in the anthology that refuses to be collared into common classifications of fame, style, subject or even language. So, while we have Vikram Seth, Ruth Vanita, Hoshang Merchant, Minal Harjatwala and Fatimah Asghar, there are many newer poets, and even some who have never written poetry before. There are some who identify as a man or a woman, others who use “they” as a preferred pronoun. A few who write in English – others in Bengali or Urdu or Gujarati or Malayalam, or maybe a mixture of languages.

This democratisation of space and gender is a refusal to conform, a leap towards eschewing – to borrow from Seth’s poem ‘Dubious’ that inspires my headline – “the strict ranks of gay and straight”. And, isn’t that a perfect definition of “queer” – a celebration of newly found space and identity?

Some of the poems also attempt to answer the question. ‘Queer as in’ by New Delhi-based Riddhi Dastidar negotiates with desires:

Queer as in only at parties, as in only when drunk,
as in only that one time at that party when drunk—
she has a boyfriend in real life, you know.
You know, queer as in not in real life.

Photographer Raqeeb Raza, also based out of Delhi, demands in his eponymous poem: ‘What Does It Take to Belong?’

Men who love men
are Pakistani. The untouchables,
refusing to clean them, are Pakistani

And Abhyuday Gupta, in ‘Bildungsroman’, worries about growing up:

When I was a child my greatest worry
about growing up was chest hair

I was scared that they would dance
Like unruly monsters
and threaten to out me
as a man.

Gupta, his biography says, identifies to be agender/non-binary.

Beyond the poems, however, one of the greatest pleasures of reading this book are the biographies attached with each poet or translator. One reads: “Shals Mahajan is a writer, activist, layabout, part feline, somewhat hooman, genderqueer queer feminist fellow who lives in Bombay but mainly in their head.” For the famous Urdu poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri, the editors provide an interesting biographical note: “In a 1936 essay, Firaq rebuked a contemporary critic irked by boy-love in ghazals by saying, ‘are you aware of Socrates’s autobiography, and his relationship with Alcibiades… Are you aware of Shakespeare’s sonnets … Have you heard Sappho’s name?’”

While the publication of this book is a moment to celebrate, there is also a sobering thought with which it ends. The last poem in the book is ‘Rooms to sleep in’ by Ramchandra Srinivas Siras, who was professor of Marathi in Aligarh Muslim University. After being discovered in bed with a man, he was ostracised and harassed till he died, under mysterious circumstances, in April 2010. His life inspired the 2015 film Aligarh. This book is a testimony to the sufferings of every professor Siras, the bravery of everyone who dared to love even when it was a crime to do so.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published earlier this year. He teaches journalism at OP Jindal Global University.

Interpreting Erotic Sculptures in Ancient Temples the ‘Liberal’ Way

A response to Saikat Majumdar’s ‘Dreaming of a Hindu Left’.

Taken aside by a male tour guide who was embarrassed by the famous erotic sculptures on the Sun Temple at Konark, Saikat Majumdar writes in “Dreaming of a Hindu Left”, published in the Hindu on September 1, 2018, that the guide told him in hushed tones, “All those things that are there in Khajuraho, none of it is real. It’s all made up…”

When Majumdar asks him what he meant, the guide explains:

“None of these things — none of those acts,” he swallowed bravely, “ever happened anywhere. They were made up by the sculptors because they were away from home for a long time and were, you know,” his voice hushed again, “were missing their wives.”

Majumdar writes: “What is the modern, liberal, bourgeois urban subject to do in the eerie twilight of ancient temples, before the whispers of the possessed but crafty souls who sculpted these? When he has to listen to someone explaining these away as mere imaginings?” He answers his own question: “Nothing. Just listen to the stories. And if blessed enough by madness, tell a few of one’s own.”

A ‘kama’ scene on the walls of the Sun Temple. Credit: Wikipedia

What are his readers to make of Majumdar’s response? That they must encounter the Sun Temple’s erotica as “modern, liberal, bourgeois urban” subjects? Even if they don’t necessarily identify themselves as such, must they accept that there are no better and worse truth-claims and that they can therefore only make up more mad stories of their own? And that such counter-fictions amount to “doing nothing”?

Answering any of these questions in the affirmative begs further questions of why: why should the normative viewer of such temple erotica be liberal, bourgeois and urban (as for modernity, we could grant at least its chronological and post-colonial reality)? Why should Majumdar suggest that liberalism – a common sense of which is a commitment to individual liberty against the oppressions of religion, community and state – characterises him alone in this situation and not his tour guide, who says nothing to suggest he is opposed to such individual liberty? Is the guide’s embarrassment at the public display of sexuality on the temple not as bourgeois as Majumdar? As for urbanity, nothing in Majumdar’s account suggests the guide wasn’t urban too; or that his attitudes might not be common in Indian cities.

Let us consider another possible answer to Majumdar’s question about what to do when faced “in the eerie twilight of ancient temples” with their erotic sculptures. We could insist, against national and international cultures of anti-intellectualism, that we cannot treat all truth-claims as equal. Indeed, Majumdar hints at this when he calls the guide’s knowledge “amateur scholarship”. But by calling for doing nothing in response except telling stories “of one’s own” Majumdar is choosing to ignore publicly accessible scholarship.

In a series of essays that have been key to a scholarly reassessment (in English and thus accessible to Majumdar) of the arts of kama or pleasure in ancient and late ancient India, Daud Ali has argued that these sculpted temple erotica were intended as illustrations for the devotee of worldly follies to be encountered on the temple’s outer walls and mocked before being progressively abandoned as the devotee entered the sanctum.

In a sense, then, the tour guide was right to say that the sculptors made them up, even if his speculations about their sexual frustration were baseless. It’s admittedly difficult to persuade someone wholly oblivious of any scholarly culture and thus of criteria for truth-claims that Daud Ali is worthier of being taken seriously than the guide’s “amateur scholarship”. But to abandon the attempt altogether in favour of stories of one’s own is to lapse into the very anti-intellectualism that Majumdar’s article goes on to attribute (citing Ruth Vanita) to the Hindu Right and secular Left.

Secularisation and disenchantment

The next section of Majumdar’s article rehearses a narrative of secularisation familiar from the sociologist Max Weber, a narrative Majumdar sums up in his phrase: “modernity is disenchantment”. The narrative runs something like this: the waning of sacrality opens up texts other than religious scripture for scriptural analysis, thus giving rise to the secular discipline of literary criticism; and valorises the idea of a worldly vocation that Calvinists then turned into a worldly asceticism, giving rise to proto-capitalist mercantilism. Weber himself drew the idea from the 18th century German Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller who had argued that the theatre was all that was left of religion. On Majumdar’s reading, then, the rest of the world can only ever retrace Europe’s apparently secularising or disenchanted grasp of reality.

Indeed, Majumdar’s article shows no sign of any awareness of the demographically and politically massive reality of North Indian non-atheist socialism that had its origins in Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s (1889 -1950) Hindi language writings on and activism for Brahman caste reform and then peasant rights.

But as anyone familiar with a contemporary Hindu domestic puja shrine would know, calendar or poster print gods and goddesses form the objects of the same rituals of worship as ones made of the traditionally stipulated metal or wood. And as anyone familiar with most post-colonial nationalisms (the Indian one being a case in point) knows, nationalism that is dependent on print and other modern mass media also enchants the territory of the nation, Bankim Chandra’s novel Anandamath being a canonical formulation of the vision of India as a mother goddess.

Are these not massive cases of the enchantment through capitalist technology of spaces and objects that were not enchanted to begin with? It’s this sort of enchantment that forms the topic of Nile Green’s Bombay Islam: the Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (2013). It is also the topic of what the discipline of religious studies now considers a major critique of Weber’s thesis, Jason A. Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), a book whose many revisionist readings of what have been understood as classic formulations of disenchantment includes this statement by Weber

Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact. . . . Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the interests of rational conduct.

Of this Josephson-Storm writes: “Here we can see Weber working to suture magic and rationality.” Neither contemporary Japan – Josephson-Storm’s non-European case – nor Western Europe and North America come off this book looking especially disenchanted. Why, then, rehearse Eurocentric narratives of worldwide secularisation when not even the original European theorists of secularisation were secular in ways Majumdar claims them to be?

The Hindu Left

Majumdar then raises the important question of a Hindu Left, remarking on its absence as he cites Ruth Vanita’s 2002 essay ‘Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left?’. He specifically cites Vanita’s following assertion: “The number of Indian thinkers today who try to integrate religious and leftist thinking can be counted on the fingers of one hand – Ashis Nandy and Ramachandra Gandhi are among the very few who make this attempt with Hinduism.” But none of either man’s books evince a more than an anecdotal engagement with any tradition of thought or practice that identifies itself as Hindu or some philosophical or theological sub-category thereof.

Sculptures at Khajuraho. Credit: Pixabay

Indeed, Majumdar’s article shows no sign of any awareness of the demographically and politically massive reality of North Indian non-atheist socialism that had its origins in Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s (1889 -1950) Hindi language writings on and activism for Brahman caste reform and then peasant rights. (In this sense, Sahajanand was a Hindu equivalent of his Muslim socialist activist contemporaries, the Maulanas Ubaidullah Sindhi and Hasrat Mohani). Described by Gail Omvedt in 1996 as “an ‘organic intellectual’ of one of the most important mass movements of the third world”, Sahajanand and his legacy of peasant activism led to Ram Manohar Lohia’s non-atheistic socialism and its current political expression in the Samajwadi party. Does Majumdar ignore such long-term and large-scale manifestations of Hindu socialism because they express themselves in Hindi instead of English?

Majumdar writes: “Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with religious aesthetic without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religion?” A lot depends on what we understand by “religion” and “religious”. Does a “religious aesthetic” refer to the egalitarian bhakti content of the Tamil and Telugu texts sung in Carnatic performances? Or to the Brahmanised upper caste identities of most of its practitioners? Or to the non-sectarian aesthetics of its performance?

Is Majumdar proposing Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 poem sequence ‘Jejuri’ as a model for how we might relate to what he calls religious aesthetics? If so, it is hard to see how his validation of the tour guide’s incorrect explanation of the temple erotica bears any connection to Kolatkar’s poem since ‘Jejuri’, for all that it directs a modernist de-familiarising gaze at the elements of a bhakti pilgrimage, does not validate irresponsible fictions or ‘alternative facts’ about the past. It is continuous, as Laetitia Zecchini has shown in her book length study – Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014) – with Kolatkar’s own abhang-style Marathi poems in Chirimiri and his decades long musical-textual preoccupation with Tukaram. Indeed, Kolatkar’s ‘Jejuri’, Zecchini points out, takes part in wider efforts by English language poets in India – Dilip Chitre, A.K. Ramanujan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra among them – to appropriate bhakti ethics and aesthetics into English poetic modes, modernist or otherwise.

What such English-language lyric reformulations of bhakti have to do with a Hindu Left seems imponderable without attention to the regional language life-worlds of caste-, class-, religion- and gender-egalitarian aesthetic practices; and without the belief that academically validated truth-claims about this or that matter are not only possible but also more valuable as scholarship than “amateur scholarship”.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian Studies in McGill University, Montreal, and the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark(Routledge, 2016).