The British Brahmacharani

The British Brahmacharani

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Jawhar Sircar’s review of Margot: Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda

By Reba Som

(Published in "Biblio : A Review of Books", Ocober-December, 2017 Issue)

{Reba Som, Margot: Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda, Penguin Random House, India, Gurgaon, India, 2007, 291 pages, Rs.599, ISBN 9780670088799}

               Reba Som has done it again. She came out with a book on Tagore (Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song, 2009) just before his 150^th birth anniversary and now when Sister Nivedita’s turn has come, she has produced a comprehensive biography on her. It is packed with facts and references, many of which are from the humongous volume of letters that Nivedita wrote, that reveal her innermost feelings. Som makes a valiant attempt to rescue the real Nivedita from the prim official image that Indian national history has constructed and to pull her out of the overwhelming shadow of Vivekananda, whose towering personality dominates the landscape, belittling however inadvertently, those so close to him. But the subtle subtitle Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda conveys only a part of her story for though she had left home and hearth to be with him and serve his people, she remained quite an independent person all her life. Vivekananda was clear, maybe not without his own traumas, that she should be alifelong celibate like him. Thus, within two months of her setting foot on Indian soil  in January 1898, he himself ordained Margaret Noble (endearingly called Margot) as Sister Nivedita, a brahmacharini, aHindu nun. So inspired was she by his talks in London in 1895-96 that she joined his restless mission to galvanise Indians, but it is clear from her several upheavals that her interface and expectations were far more complex. Reba Som does well to take us through the evolution of Nivedita’s relationship with the person she had called her ‘king’, then her ‘master’ and how he finally appeared as her ‘father’.

        This book will fill in a gap in the knowledge of modern Indians who hardly ever recall the path-breaking contribution that this visionary Irish woman made to the cause of India’s self respect and freedom: and lit a solitary lamp quite boldly during the nation’s darkest hour. Like Swamiji, she exhorted upon a thoroughly demoralised lot of Indians to be proud of their motherland and to stand up to the most repressive phase of British imperialism. Her involvement with Indian revolutionaries in their fight against the mighty but unjust British empire was so strong and genuine that Vivekananda’s own Ramkrishna Mission had to distance itself from her, soon after her master’s death. As Som’s penetrative narrative reveals, Nivedita remained the perennial outsider as not many Indians could accept her fiery zeal, while her own people viewed her as an embarrassment and considered her a rebellious trouble maker. The author goes through the tumultuous life of this British lady with the empathy of a woman and notices details that previous biographers may have missed. She reads between the lines from the numerous letters she relies upon “to reveal a flesh-and-blood Nivedita” and does not shy away from the oft repeated question as to whether it was Vivekananda or his cause that attracted her.

                 We get glimpses into the life of Swamiji and his mercurial style of functioning for he was a man in a hurry: he had, after all, prophesied that he would not live long. “From the moment of her landing, Margaret sensed that the personality of her Master was caught in fruitless torture and struggle, like a lion trapped in a net” (p.15). He warned her about her impetuous nature and her tenacity to argue too much, but this mellowed her not too much. His firmness and injunctions could be quite harsh, as Nivedita found to her dismay. “It goes to Nivedita's credit that she withstood Vivekananda’s harsh discipline, although she did have emotional breakdowns from time to time, when she was comforted” by her friends (p.23). 

 It was, however, the same Swamiji who spent endless hours explaining patiently to her what India stood for, her forgotten glories and how to extricate this great country and her people from the quicksands that were pulling them down so mercilessly. The author mentions about the terrible plague that attacked Calcutta in May 1898 and how Nivedita plunged headlong into the rescue of the city miserable masses. But she omits to mention that she had literally shamed many of the monks of the new Ramakrishna Mission, who had assumed that their lives were to be spent mainly in prayer, by getting them to follow her to the streets and slums in the service of humanity. This was, indeed, a turning point in the Mission’s history and it was the first ever recorded large scale cleanliness mission that predates Gandhi’s drive by decades and the current Swachch Bharat initiative by more than a century.

The author recounts in some detail of how Vivekananda went to Almora in the Kumaon Hills with a large band of followers including three white women and mentions how “during their stay…when the tussles went beyond control, making the suffering of Nivedita unbearable, the two older women….. often interceded with the Swami, bringing him to his senses”. (p.25). But the episodes and clashes are missing and we thus miss some of the most sensitive parts of the intricate relationship between the Master and his disciple. Som makes a passing reference later: “Nivedita confessed that even after ‘that awful time at Almora, when I thought he had put me out of his life contemptuously….I have grown more personal in my love”(p. 59) .The Almora phase has been examined by others and Som could have done a better job in interpreting from a woman's point of view the volcano of pent up feelings, not necessarily of love, that were bared during the heady ride up the scenic hills towards the Himalayas. Its eternal serenity only only exacerbated the emotional storms. 

                  An interesting facet of Vivekananda that comes out in the book is his incapacity to tolerate any of Nivedita friendships with other prominent men like Tagore or Okakura, the charismatic Japanese scholar, or even a ship’s captain. The author leaves us to surmise whether this was due to his sense of duty to protect an utterly frank and partly gullible foreign lady who had left all she had at his word or whether they reveal human feelings or failings. She recounts many a snide remark from Swamiji that prove that even Vivekananda could not be a perfectly detached monk. When Okakura left India and Nivedita's doting company in 1902, Swamiji’s wrote to a confidant “Was (India) not sublime enough for Mr Okakura? Or Japanese do not like sublimity at all? How is Margot? Is she still there? Or gone away with Mr Okakura?” (p. 100). This was just a month before his death Vivekananda never hid his feelings of dislike for Rabindranath Tagore’s “effeminate writings” that stood in his path to make Indians more manly and both great personalities avoided each other. Nivedita's independent nature cones out so clearly when despite Swamiji’s views she met Tagore repeatedly and enjoyed his company. The poet heartily reciprocated and wanted more time with her, but could never understand how she was so strongly an orthodox Hindu, why she hated the West so fiercely and what she saw in Vivekananda’s mission and philosophy.

                      Nivedita's Celtic spirit was at its best in the face of challenges and in combating injustice. She set up the first girls school of its type in the heart of conservative Calcutta that was against it. She went from door to door to the utter amazement of orthodox housewives, who had never imagined that a white lady, a white Hindu, could care so much for India and Indians. She galvanised Calcutta against Curzon’s Partition of Bengal and exposed the  haughty India-baiting Viceroy as a petty liar. She stood beside Acharya JC Bose in his darkest hour and chastised her countrymen for their pettiness, racialism and unfairness. She encouraged the Indian style of art and encouraged artists like Nandalal Bose, who would all become iconic figures, to rediscover their past glory through this medium. We thank Som for rekindling interest in Nivedita. It was long overdue. She narrates other details from the nine years that Nivedita lived after Vivekananda’s death in 1902 and sums up her lasting legacy rather well.

                      Reba Som is, however, a better chronicler than a story teller. She retains the historian’s obsession with dates and references but has not, mercifully, written one more academic tome that only scholars would understand. We admire her command over facts but wish at times that she were a trifle more gossipy, without compromising on truth. Her work strives to cover that middle ground between the demands of regimented historians and the hunger of the general reader for a lucid tale.

Where Prasar Bharati failed

By Jawhar Sircar (Published in The Telegraph on 29.11.2017)

Exactly 20 years ago, when Inder Kumar Gujral, then prime minister, set free the two arms of the State-controlled media, All India Radio and Doordarshan, he had sincerely hoped to insulate them from government control. He knew radio and television as he had been India's information minister 22 years earlier till he was evicted by Indira Gandhi. In this interval, every political party had sworn to liberate the two State media but they reneged once they captured power. These were just too powerful as tools to be sacrificed for some past ideological commitment. It was finally Chandra Sekhar who managed to pass the Prasar Bharati Act in 1990, to take these two organs out of the State's reach. The bureaucracy had, however, inserted two sections into the law to ensure that its control was perpetuated. The next prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, sent this act into cold storage until the Supreme Court intervened in 1995 and directed that broadcasting be delinked from the government. Even after the court ordered that radio and television be placed under an autonomous body, the information ministry filibustered for two more years. Gujral, however, put his foot down and implemented the Prasar Bharati Act in 1997. But what followed thereafter is a classic case study of what the bureaucracy can do and can undo. As soon as Gujral's short regime ended, the ministry's bureaucrats threw out his handpicked CEO of Prasar Bharati. He was their own former boss and secretary, but such sentiments hardly mattered because he had committed the cardinal offence of taking his 'autonomy' too seriously. And, what was worse, he had defied the information ministry. It was a do or die situation because if Prasar Bharati really became free, the ministry would hardly have any job left other than organizing second-rate film award ceremonies and stamping registration numbers on applications for new newspapers and magazines. Powers were thus withdrawn from Prasar Bharati; its finances were tightly controlled and the CEO's keys were given to the ministry's own additional secretaries. The latter were not inefficient but they could never dare to talk of autonomy or even dream of the BBC model. The time-tested model under which DD's serials like Mahabharat, Ramayan, Buniyaad or Hum Log had become iconic and had also contributed to DD's revenues was peremptorily replaced by the babus. They decided that their cohorts in DD and not producers like Ramanand Sagar or Yash Chopra would decide which serials would be best. Profits were, therefore , replaced with losses as DD's serials that were selected under the new 'patronage raj' could not stand up to private television. Corruption and sleaze increased but the ever-increasing budgetary deficits ensured that Prasar Bharati remained crippled and had to cringe before the ministry for funds. Overnight, some 48,000 employees of AIR and DD who were recruited by the ministry in the good old socialist era were transferred to Prasar Bharati, creating thereby a millstone around its neck. The salaries of this huge army were (and are) the responsibility of the government, but it was passed on to Prasar Bharati. This was repaid by the ministry, but every minister was told that Prasar Bharati was his white elephant and CEOs and DGs of AIR and DD were thus pulled up by irate ministers. The ministry controlled every recruitment rule and hounded every professional who was taken on contract by Prasar Bharati to inject contemporary techniques. It choked the promotion of senior officials and thousands retired demoralized without a single elevation in 25 years. Morale and professionalism suffered and such 'forest fires' ensured that senior officers in Prasar Bharati could do nothing productive. As revealed by Sam Pitroda's committee, while Japan's broadcaster spends 75 per cent of its budget on creating good programmes and BBC spends 71 per cent, India's Prasar Bharati can barely afford to spend just 13 per cent on content. Public broadcasters do not garner revenue and their programmes are usually free of advertising, but Prasar Bharati has to earn half its operational cost from 'ads'. There is no professional for this task from the open market, as insiders have stymied all attempts to get any. But then, the conservative 'government servants' of AIR and DD can hardly compete in this cut-throat world of media marketing. Hegemony has ensured that the party in power always dominated AIR and DD, perhaps not as brazenly as now. But quality and credibility have suffered. Many of India's finest radio and TV professionals had enriched Prasar Bharati but constant control by Indian Administrative Service officers who hardly understood media has ensured debilitating obsolescence. It may really be more appropriate now to discard this hypocritical charade and declare AIR and DD to be wings of the government, once again. Everyone would surely be happier. (Please Click Here to read article on The Telegraph Website)

How Buddhist Records Helped Recreate The History of India

How Buddhist Records Helped Recreate The History of India

Jawhar Sircar

Thimphu, Bhutan, 20^th November, 2017

Distinguished Visitors Programme of the India Bhutan Foundation

       

           I thank the India Bhutan Foundation for having invited me to deliver a talk on a subject that is so close to my heart. For the last two decades I chose a rather unusual combination of subjects for my research, namely, History and Religion, and it feels satisfying to see some positive results emanating out of this combination. This is not the first occasion when I have expressed India’s indebtedness to Buddhist records for reconstructing Indian history in the last two centuries. Those who are familiar with this issue would be aware of the basic problem of deciphering history as an empirical discipline from materials that were never meant to serve as historical records or documents. I refer to Indian texts, more specifically the genre of sacred texts. We must remember that in ancient India which covers the period from 3500 BC to 1200 AD, i.e, more than four-fifth of India’s recorded history, the chronicling of events was primarily the task of what we call the Brahmanical intelligentsia that was also the keeper of religious traditions.

               For various reasons, history was not their focus and though we get large volumes of literature, primarily sacred, from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sutras, the Puranas and numerous commentaries thereof, we hardly get any historical narratives. The Puranas do recite genealogies and some parts are substantiated by facts, but they mix up a lot of fiction and religion and cannot, therefore, qualify as historical texts. They have, of course, been treated as source materials of history, but with a lot of caution and very selectively. Where India’s secular side is concerned, India was not known to have produced histories except rare ones like Kalhana’s Rajatangini in the 12^th century that chronicles the dynasties of Kashmir and some others. With the arrival of Muslim rulers, the emphasis changed and political records were kept quite rigorously and it is needless to say that during the colonial period, this was obsessive but one needs to be extremely careful about imperial bias and other failings.

              While it is not difficult to produce the history of India from the 12^th century onwards, there were considerable problems in delineating a linear history of India from the earliest historical period. India had completely forgotten even the grandeur of Harappan civilisation and its large cities on the Indus and its tributaries and distributaries like Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Lothal that were built as early as 3500 BC and flourished for almost two millennia. The Vedic period has left behind almost no such direct material civilisation but archeology has been able to retrieve remains of pottery, metals, small towns and other evidence. The next major phase, that is personified by the great Gangetic kingdoms, the Mahajanapadas and the Mauryas have considerable material artefacts and architecture but much of the Buddhist glory was sadly forgotten in the land of its birth. In fact, the first two major discoveries of British archeology, i.e, the Amravati stupa, that Col. Colin Mackenzie had stumbled upon first in 1798, and the Ajanta caves that were discovered accidentally by a team of soldiers in 1819 are two of the grandest evidence of the efflorescence of Buddhist art and culture that had lapsed from human memory. Mackenzie returned to Amravati in 1816 as the Surveyor General of India as he knew that his earlier visit was quite superficial and spent four years in documenting the find and sketching the ruins. He made a presentation on Amravati before the Asiatic Society in Kolkata in 1819 with 85 illustrations, but he made the mistake of mistaking the site to be one of Deccan Jainism rather than of Buddhism. Ever after it was discovered, it took both the British and Indians several decades to understand the uniqueness of the art of Ajanta and hence, it was not incorporated into India’s historical timeline till the end of the 19^th century. That journey is another interesting story in itself.

         Both Ajanta’s discovery and Amaravati’s presentation were in the year 1819. This means that even two hundred years ago, 1817, there was no proper linearity in Indian history and there was, for instance, no idea of the glory of the Mauryas, the greatness of Ashoka and the magnificence of the Buddhist phase. Almost all the architectural grandeur of pre-Islamic India is represented by the mighty stupas at Sarnath and Sanchi and the ancient universities of Taxila and Nalanda. In 1817, their existence was not known or visible as they had been lying in ruins from centuries of neglect. They had become highly avoidable ruins that were dreaded because of snakes and ghosts. Buddhism had survived and prospered outside its homeland, but in its cradle and nursery its existence was forgotten. Today, we shall briefly touch upon the fascinating process though which India rediscovered her past in the next hundred years, bit by bit, and how Buddhist memory helped the process.

Let us quickly recapitulate some of the other major Buddhist monuments that were discovered during this exciting phase. The next significant discovery after Amaravati and Ajanta was in 1830, General Ventura uncovered the Manikyala Stupa at Taxila. This very ancient city, was said to be the capital of Parikshit, the grand-son of Arjuna of Mahabharata, and it had been an important Buddhist centre that the Jataka tales describe in great details.  Taxila had seen Darius of Persia and Alexander the Great. Taxila carried valuable evidence of several periods, pre-Mauryan, Indo-Greek and Kushan. This ancient centre of India’s first university had been destroyed by the Huns in the 5^th century AD and it lay in ruins for 1400 years. But how did the British find out what Indians had forgotten? One was their boundless curiosity and the other was their scorn for Indian concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, as well as for ghosts and evil spirits that prohibited Indians from venturing into ruins. Cobras, and other dangerous creatures that inhabited these ruins did not deter them either.

  More interesting is the fact that British scholars and archaeologists utilised Indian or Chinese texts, mainly Buddhist, to provide them with valuable clues to many historical sites. After all, James Rennell had used the writings of foreigners, i.e, classical European geographers like Pliny and Ptolemy to identify Pataliputra with modern Patna in his 1783 Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan. But, Alexander Cunningham, who later became the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India depended a lot on the testimony of Chinese pilgrims and their travel accounts of the Buddhist sacred places in India. By using the bearings and distances mentioned by travellers like Fa Xian and Xuan Zang, Cunningham succeeded in fixing the locations of many of the famous sites mentioned in ancient Indian texts and thus rediscovering them. These records, of course, had their own limitations which resulted in all kinds of controversies as, for instance, the identification of Kapilavastu. Here, for instance, the field of speculation was very wide because the bearings in the accounts of Chinese pilgrims were not consistent. While Nepal has claimed Tilaurakot as ancient Kapilavastu, we in India have identified it with Piprahwa-Ganwaria in Uttar Pradesh. And while it is true that freely occurring monastic seals of the first-second centuries CE which mention the Kapilavastu Sangha have been found at Piprahwah-Ganwaria, at Tailaurakot too, a terracotta sealing with 'Sa-ka-na-sya' ('of the Sakyas') in the Brahmi script has been reported. So, where exactly was Kapilavastu located is a question that neither archaeology nor literature can still answer to everyone’s satisfaction.

Cunningham unravelled the mighty Dhameka Stupa at Sarnath in 1835, which was cylindrical and quite unlike other hemi-spherical stupas. It marked the spot of the ‘Deer Park’, where Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining his enlightenment. The holiest of Buddhist sacred texts like the Vinaya Sutras and the Dhamma-Chakka-Pavattana Sutta contain the Lord’s message of the four noble truths that were delivered at this very spot. But it was James Prinsep’s remarkable decipherment of the Brahmi script two years later in 1837 that really shook history. The earliest messages of the Buddha and Buddhism were transmitted orally but when they were first recorded the script used to convey the Pali language was ancient or archaic Brahmi that was completely forgotten. For centuries, Indians had come across strange epigraphs or carvings on rocks and metal that none understood. What is more regrettable is that even the Maurya, the first emperors of India and Ashoka the great were almost gone and existed more in fables and legends rather that in written texts.

  The mystery was unraveled by epigraphist and scholar of numismatics, James Prinsep of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata.  As editor of the Society’s journal, he received all types of coins and copies of inscriptions from all over India for decipherment, translation and publication. He was intrigued by the strange unknown alphabets on the rock engravings of Allahabad and Delhi that lay in front of him. From the middle of the 1830s, he embarked on a serious mission to make sense of them. With extreme patience and his extraordinary command over other foreign scripts, he managed finally to decipher the words ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’. This was the term by which Ashoka was addressed in the sacred texts and translated as “Beloved of the Gods of Gracious Mein”. Prinsep managed thereafter to decipher the Brahmi script in which most Ashokan rock edicts were inscribed and he produced the most solid form of historical evidence to establish that emperor Ashoka was truly a historical character. He had been mentioned in the Buddhist chronicles of Sri Lanka by the same epithet, but he could now be fixed with historical accuracy: after a few hiccups. Prinsep assumed first that this Ashoka was a Sri Lankan king who used the same epithet. It was only when George Turnour, who had considerable knowledge of Lankan Buddhism, sent him correct evidence from Pali sacred literature did Prinsep  rectify his error and declare this monarch as Ashoka the great of Indian legends. 

After so many years of speculation, Ashoka Maurya was finally demystified and firmly established on the throne of Buddhism and India. This helped in joining the dots of the missing grandeur of India’s real heritage, for none personifies the plural soul of India more than him. If the Buddhist texts had not been there as a back up there are grave doubts as to how well we would have succeeded in establishing a credible history of ancient India. Cunningham’s subsequent discovery of Sanchi Stupa in 1851 that had been lost in our memory was the most educative of all our stupa sites. The restored stupa brings out the characters from the Jataka Tales that embellish the gateways. In 1854, Cunningham published the Bhilsa Topes which attempted to establish the history of Buddhism based on whatever architecture and archaeology evidence was available. Himanshu Prabha Ray mentions Sanchi with special emphasis in her significant work ‘The Return of the Buddha: Ancient Symbols for a New Nation’.

Cunningham’s doggedness led him to rediscover and re-excavate Bodh Gaya in 1861 that Hamilton Buchanan had reported half a century ago as a place covered by a thick forest.Cunningham’s further discoveries in 1862-63 were as important in the treatment of historical amnesia. He, identified Ramnagar as the ancient ‘Ahich-chatra’; Kosam as the great ‘Kausambi’ and Sahet Mahet as the historic ‘Sravasti’.  British archaeologists could retrieve these jewels from our past mainly on the basis of Buddhist textual evidence.  The indefatigable Cunningham then moved to the Bharhut Stupa and physically uprooted large number of stone carvings from this site, in true imperial style, and transported them to Calcutta’s Indian Museum. They served there as a ‘classroom’ and exhibition of the excellence of Buddhist art and architecture. Succeeding generations of art historians, archaeologists, museologists and connoisseurs derived their education from these eloquent stones in Kolkata. Thus, within just eight decades, Buddhist architecture was suddenly brought back into our memory and served to stoke a strong sense of pride among Indians who were throughly demoralised by the systematic campaign of British rulers to belittle their past. These structures and sculptures of Buddhism compensated somewhat for the apparent lack of outstanding tangible cultural heritage that stared  at us where ancient Indian history was concerned, except the few temples like those of the Pallavas and Cholas, Vijayanagar and Jagannath.

Before concluding, we need also to appreciate that though Buddhism disappeared from large parts of India by the middle of the first millennium,  the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal established their kingdom as late as the 8^th century and ruled till the 11^th century. It created the ‘Pala School of Sculptural Art’ and constructed massive architectural structures at Vikramshila Odantapuri and elsewhere. In fact, the Buddhist Vihara of Somapura in Paharpur, Bangladesh, that the Palas erected is considered to be the largest such structure in the Indian sub-continent and is now a “World Heritage Site”. What is interesting is that once Buddhism was rediscovered, however, several Indians of all religions came forward to celebrate its glory. In fact, Buddhism was proudly declared as an inseparable part of India and the Hindu cultural sphere, forgetting the centuries of persecution that Brahmanism had unleashed upon that religion — that managed to wipe off its grandeur and memory so effectively that they had to be rediscovered with tremendous effort.

The revival of Buddhism in the 20^th century was also due to great social reformers like Jyotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Even Rabindranath Tagore’s creative genius drew inspiration from Buddha’s teachings on social equality and to him Buddha was the greatest human being. The poet laureate chose to prostrate himself before the image of the Buddha at Bodh Gaya which is the only time in his life that he ever did so. Tagore made a profound observation on the 8^th May, 1935, the Buddha Purnima Day: “Materials of different shades of Indian thought and culture are confined in Buddhist literature and due to the lack of intimacy with them, the entire history of India remains unfulfilled. Being convinced of it, cannot a few youths of our country dedicate themselves for the restoration of the Buddhist heritage and make it a mission in life?” Since then, a lot of research into the greatness of Indian Buddhism has been undertaken and the departments of Archelology, Numismatics, Ancient Indian History, Pali, Buddhist Studies and the like of many universities and both the central and state governments have re-discovered a lot. But we are yet to come up and declare in broad terms the debt that the discipline of Ancient Indian history and India as a nation owes to Buddhism in enriching our legacy with magnificent architecture, especially when Hinduism has so little of it between the third century BCE and the twelfth century in the Current Era. One cannot imagine India without Ashoka and had it not been for Buddhist records, he would have remained lost for ever.

Why the BJP Feels It Has to Appropriate Sardar Patel

Why the BJP Feels It Has to Appropriate Sardar Patel

By Jawhar Sircar

(Published in The Wire on 7.11.2017)

It is amazing how the University Grants Commission could  issue an order to all vice chancellors which is beyond its powers. This order of 27th October directed them to observe Sardar Patel’s birthday on the 31st and to send a compliance report with photographic evidence like untrustworthy schoolboys. With just three day’s notice, all higher educational institutions in India were to organise “Unity Runs”, inter college competitions, dramas, songs, essays; design T shirts and invite freedom fighters. This absurd “order” signed by a bureaucrat in the UGC was so far fetched that it was obviously meant to  provoke a hue and cry from the academics and liberals, who could then be branded as ‘anti nationals’. An earlier one had actually directed all institutions to place TV screens to hear Modi pay homage to Deendayal Upadhyaya, who was his former party boss, not any national leader. This is strange, because Prakash Javadekar has a college degree unlike his predecessor in the HRD Ministry, Smriti Irani, and is expected to have more respect for the autonomy of educational institutions. I know him as a  reasonable minister and therefore one concludes that the pressure on him must be too much to refuse. 

           We need, therefore, to understand why the BJP is so desperate to prove that it alone cares for Sardar Patel. This is exactly what PM said on the  31^st, PM: that all previous governments had ignored Patel. He forgot that this includes Vajpayee’s three governments as well, Modi must win back the estranged Patel or Patidar community of Gujarat by using India’s most iconic Patel, Sardar Vallabhai. Apart from the crude ham-handed manner in which this regime approaches every issue, whether it be the flag and patriotism and the mandatory Aadhar card or demonisation and the GST, this reveals something more and that is   ‘panic’. After all, Hardik Patel’s dramatic agitation  has weakened the BJP’s traditional hold over the Patidar-Patel community. The Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti’s North Gujarat convener Narendra Patel, claimed on 22^nd October that he was offered a crore of rupees to join the BJP and said he had proof from his “sting operation”. We do not know the facts in this case, but we do know that it was Sardar Patel who took the strongest steps to check communal forces, represented by the BJP’s forerunners and mentors, the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, and their Muslim counterparts.

        Let us recall what Patel said and did after Gandhiji’s assassination on 30th January 1948. As Deputy PM and Home Minister, he banned the RSS immediately and on the 6th of February, he reassured Nehru that he was taking the sternest of steps and even keeping sharp watch on the RSS open air Gita Classes to know what was being said. On the 27th of that month, he told Nehru that even“government servants in Delhi have already been arrested for RSS activities”. Patel felt, however, that “it was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that hatched the (assassination) conspiracy and saw it through”. He was clear that “the RSS has undoubtedly other sins to answer for, but not this one”. He records that Gandhiji’s killing “was welcomed by those of the RSS and the Mahasabha who were strongly opposed to....his policy”. In a letter to Shyamaprasad on the 18th of July, he declared that “the activities of the RSS constitute a clear threat to the existence of government...(and that) the RSS circles are becoming increasingly more defiant and are indulging in subversive activities throughout India”. The RSS supremo, Golwalkar, repeatedly pleaded with Patel to lift the ban but he remained firm for one and a half years. Sardar Patel lifted the ban in July 1949 only after the RSS pledged to abjure violence and secret activities and, what is more important, it finally professed"loyalty to the Constitution of India and the National Flag" that it had been opposing. Now we understand why an excess of patriotism is being enforced and why the national flag is being bandied everywhere, including movie halls. They need to make up now. Will these facts about the national hero that it wishes to appropriate be publicised by the BJP or will it stomach everything because the Patels constitute a solid 20 percent of Gujarat’s voting population?

      This new game of snatching national leaders from the Congress pantheon has been necessitated also because the political right wing is obviously starved of national leaders. The founder of the RSS, KB Hedgewar, had deliberately decided not to join Gandhi and the Congress in momentous movements like Quit India. In fact, Home Ministry records give the impression that the RSS was quite loyal to British masters and caused no problems for them. The other stream of the BJP’s ancestry, the Hindu Mahasabha, had a mercurial leader like Veer Savarkar who initially took some part in the freedom struggle but when he was imprisoned in the Andamans’ Cellular Jail, he begged for mercy many times. And the NDA government decided to ignore hundreds of other prisoners who suffered detention and died in the Andamans, the vast majority of which was from Bengal, and name Port Blair  airport after Savarkar and also single him out for other honours like the son et lumiere show. The second reason why rightists do not have any tall leader is because even after Independence they remained quite self centred and did not participate in great political upheavals except during Emergency. Besides, they did not have too many years in power, even in coalitions. Vajpayee obviously stands the tallest but then his angst with Modi over the Gujarat riots is public knowledge. Shyama Prasad is a distant figure but he is from a peripheral state and cannot excite voters either in the Hindi belt or in Gujarat. Vivekananda is often hijacked by those who see only his saffron robe but have no idea how strongly he despised communal fanatics. So the hunt to appropriate leaders goes on relentlessly. Lal Bahadur Shastri is invoked and the “raw deal” he got from the Gandhi family is agitated. But what have stalwarts like Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi or even Yashwant or Shourie got from Modi? The rightist Swarajya daily recently discovered UN Brahmachari of Kalazar fame and instantly declared him to be a “saint” that Bengal has ignored. Another acolyte from the Hindi belt recently brought out a cut and paste biography of Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay and ticked off Bengalis for forgetting him. More such strategies will surely come before the Bengal elections but let us now return to what Patel said on 17th December 1948. This government that is so fond of Patel and also of slogans could use his immortal words as a banner:  “India is a secular country and it will be nothing else.”

(Please Click Here to read article on 'The Wire' website)

Chhatt Puja Is Outside Brahmanism

Chhatt Puja Is Outside Brahmanism

By Jawhar Sircar

              (English translation of Bangla original of ABP 26 Oct 2017)

             Year after year, people in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and major cities wonder what exactly is Chhatt Puja when they witness so many lakhs and lakhs of men and women from Bihar out on the streets, heading towards the river or the sea. They see them push cartloads of bananas and other fruits or carry them on their heads, but few outsiders  understand anything more. The main festival is just six days after Diwali, which explains why it goes by the colloquial name for the ‘sixth’, chhatt, that is also called Surya-shasthi Interestingly, it was and remains essentially a very vibrant folk festival that has no role for the priest and no need for temples. Since it yielded no grants to priests or to temples, Brahmans usually stayed away from this economically unviable festival. As a consequence, it was not ‘mainstreamed’ by Brahmans by linking it with some convenient legend taken from the vast repertoire of the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata or Ramayana. It remains a bit of an odd man out: hence outsiders know so little. There is a weak link, however, that not many are aware of and the story goes that Draupadi was advised by the sage, Dhaumya to perform Chhatt puja to Suryadev, to help the Pandavas. There is another legend that Rama and Sita also offered this puja to the sun god during this period of the year when they returned from exile to Ayodhya. Though the vast majority of Rama worshippers does not perform this puja, Rama may will have listened to his wife, like all of us do. Besides, we must remember that Sita’s origins were in Janakpur of Mithila, and this Mithila is the epicentre of this worship. The tradition is, however observed in Bihar-Jharkhand and adjoining regions, the Madhesh tract of Nepal, as well as in far off Fiji, West Indies and Mauritius: wherever Biharis went. Nowadays, however, hordes of priests have started occupying vantage points in the water and worshippers have, willy nilly, to shell out some dakshina for compulsory mantras and short courses in sanskritisation. After all, despite tall promises, gainful employment is nowhere in sight.

          It is my submission that Chhatt is the first celebration of bright light and the sun, after the blackest night of the year, ie, Kartik amavasya when Indians light billions of lamps to dispel the dark. But Bengalis, who just have to be different, however welcome this amavasya to worship their dark goddess Kali and her ghoulish companions of the night. Chhatt Puja was originally a women’s festival to thank the sun god for all the munificence and the bounty conferred, but it is interesting to note how the menfolk joined later on. They also worship a goddess called Chhatti Maiya, who is equally important and invoked for her boons. She is identified with Usha, the Vedic goddess of dawn though it is well known that those people who brought the Vedas may have taken a thousand years longer to reach Bihar. The unique character of this festival is that it worships both dawn and dusk, the rising sun as well as setting sun. It is actually a four day festival that starts on the fourth lunar day after the dark amavasya of Kartik, namely, Chaturthi, Panchami, Shasthi or Chhatt and finally Saptami. Chhatt Puja is the occasion for the most colourful dresses to come out and there is a lot of folk songs and dancing as well. Even in distant Mauritius, for instance, Chhatt songs and dances are an integral part of the nation’s culture that was brought in by labourers from Bihar. As fasting is mandatory, people take anticipatory steps by consuming a lot of freshly reaped rice, puris, bananas, coconuts and grapefruits before beginning their rituals.

           The first day is actually popular as Nahay Khay and the holy dip in water body is taken on this day, preferably in the river Ganga. Womenfolk, who observe this festival,  take only a single meal on this day and among many this consists of just lau or lauki boiled with rice. They get into the water upto their knees or waist and pray in the direction of the sun. This is followed by an ancient custom for married women to smear each other’s forehead with ochre vermillion, right along the line of the nose to the tip. It is likely that the sindoor khela among the married women of Bengal on Vijaya Dashami may have originated from this. After all, our sarbajanin Durga pujas are just a century old. The second day of Chhatt is called Kharna, on which total fasting is observed without a drop of water, from sunrise to the sunset. Devotees have their food only after offering it first to the sun god at sunset. This is a rich repast consisting of ‘payasam’ or ‘kheer’ made rice and milk, ‘puris,’ hard baked wheat flour cakes called thekuas and bananas, which are distributed to one and all. On the third and main Chhatt day, fasting without water is again observed and the evening offerings or sandhya arghya is an elaborate ritual when oblations are made to the setting sun. Bamboo trays are held in its direction containing the much favoured thekuas, coconuts, bananas and other fruits. This is followed by the ‘Kosi’ ritual in homes when lamps are lit to honour the sun, but are kept under cover of five cane sticks. The fourth day of Chhatt is considered the most auspicious and worshippers gather in large numbers on the banks of rivers with their family and friends for the final morning ritual of offering ‘arghyas’ to the rising sun. The fast is then broken with a bite of ginger with sugar, thus marking the end of the rituals. A volcano of joy, feasting and merriment then bursts all over.

           What benefits does this puja confer? Many believe in it as a fertility rite for both humans and harvests, while other swear by its curative powers. There is also a theory that ancient yogis and rishis obtained energy directly from the sun’s rays by exposing their bodies to the sun, while on fast. When one observes how when other events and pujas damage or  destroy the environment with chemical paints and other poisonous substances, that include firecrackers, Chhatt stands out as a really commendable environment-friendly worship that uses only bio degradable items. The fact is that each region of India had the freedom to develop and nurture its own culture over centuries, in harmony with its environment and its requirements. Each celebrated a dozen or more pan-Indian or local festivals, but each finally gravitated to one major festival or event in the whole year that ultimately distinguished that culture from the rest. All said and done, this ‘Bihari’ festival has retained its unique folk flavour for so many centuries and paid the price by being marginalised by Brahmanism, but it teaches us how beautifully flexible is the real spirit of accommodative, plural Hinduism.