WHO ARE WE IN BHARATAVARSHA TODAY
QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR OWN IDENTITY AND SELF- UNDERSTANDINGPaulos Mar GregoriosDear Friends, I am especially glad to be with you.
For a man of my age (74), few other things are as inspiring as being among a
group of intelligent young people. Especially, if they are a set of vibrant,
choice, cultured, and creative young people such as I know you to be. Thank
you for this opportunity. I wish today to reflect with you on
the question of our identity and self-understanding as so-called Indians.
That self-perception always plays a decisive role in our life choices. I have preferred to use the term Bharatavarsha rather than These names originated in the Our words are Jambudvipa
and Bharatavarsha. The word “dvipa” did not then mean island, but only
“inhabited territory”. The Tibetans still refer to our land as Jambudvipa. Bharatavarsha, owes its name to the legendary King Bharata.
As the Vishnupurana (2:3:1) puts it: Uttaram yat samudrasya
- Himadreischaiva dakshinam Varsham tad Bharatam nama - Bharati yatra santati We need to keep in mind that most Brahmanical accounts, including the Puranas,
originating in the North show but scant awareness of what lies south of the
Thousand-peaked vindhyas, the Dakshin-avarta,
or Dakshinapatha, including Andhra, Vidarbha, Chola, Chera and Pandyan Kingdoms, the
last three collectively called Tamizhaka, or Damiraka in western accounts. When we speak today of Bharatavarsha, we are making a concession to our Northern
brothers and sisters who often thought of Bharatavarsha
as identical with the Indo-Gangetic Aryavarta or the Land of the Noble. Part of our identity
today is in recreating awareness of the fact that the fundamentals of Indian
religion and culture were formed and fostered more in the South than in the
Indo-Gangetic plains. So, for us it is Bharatavarsha,
not just Aryavarta, but also Dakshinavarta,
equally important and decisive for our identity today. Dakshinavarta,
which was later westernized to be Few people are aware that the concept
“Hinduism” was a 19th century creation of Western scholarship, in an attempt
to club together under one heading the various sampradayas
practiced in Bharatavarsha as the Westerners looked
at it. Neither “Hinduism’ nor even “Sanatana
Dharma” was used by our tradition before the 19th century as a collective
name for all the native-born religious practices of India other than Buddha
Dharma and Jaina dharma. Let me speak to you of two Southern
documents which show us that Shaivism in Medieval
times was not regarded as part of “Hinduism”. The two documents, not so
widely known are (a) the eleventh century document Soma-Sambhu
Paddhati, also known as Karmakanda-Kramavali;
and (b) Acharyahrdayam, (13th/14th century) by Alakiya Manavala Perumal Nayanar, brother of the
well known Pillai Lokacharya
of the Soma-Sambhu-paddhati is a manual of Saivite
rituals applicable to all orthodox sampradayas of Saivism, and actually practiced for centuries. It was
first published at Devakkottai in 1931, by K. M. Subramania Sastri, with notes
based on the commentary of Aghora Sivacharya. Its main content is sets of rituals for
accepting the non-Saivite into the Saivite Community, which is superior to all other
religions and sampradayas, including the various sampradayas of Hinduism as we regard them today. Every
other sampradaya creates a particular mark in its
practitioner, a mark which the manual calls Linga,
which not only does not take you to Moksha, but
acts as an obstacle. This linga of other sampradayas has to be lifted from its practitioner (the
ritual for this is called Lingoddhara) so that he
or she can take the true path of Shaivite practice
and attain to salvation. All the Saivite Agamas and
Upagamas lead to this initiation or diksha into the true Saivite
path of perfection and divine grace. It is a very sophisticated doctrine, but
the important thing for us is to recognize that this 11th century Saivite Manual does not regard Saivism
as a part of Hindu religion as we regard it today, but on the contrary
condemns all other sampradayas of what we now know
as Hinduism as inferior and incapable of leading to Moksha.
It even rejects the cardinal doctrine of Karma as belonging to the world of maya and therefore having no reality. Clearly at least in
the eleventh century, there is no such thing as Hinduism, and Saivism does not regard itself as Hindu. The other document I mentioned was Acaryahrdaya written in Manipravalam
Tamil (ie. mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil) in the
thirteenth century. The author is Manavala Mamuni, the brother of the well known Pillai
Lokacharya of the Acaryahrdayam is an open universalistic religious programme which seeks to radically restructure the
traditional Srivaishnava movement and purge it of
all Northern or Vedic elements. The frontal attack is on the doctrine of
Karma which has come down from the North and is totally rejected as
superfluous, along with all Vedic rituals, throwing out the doctrine of Varnasramadharma as well as the exalted place of Brahma
himself. The central role of Karma is then
given to the doctrine of Kainkarya, which is an
aspect of the nature of human beings--the inner vocation of every man and
woman, to whatever religion he/she belongs, to adore and serve God and realise Moksha and fulfillment
by sheer Bhakti. This, according to Manavala Mamuni is true
religion and it has nothing to do with the so-called Hindu doctrines and
rituals. This is what we see in Nammalvar’s Tiruvaymoli which is a southern Veda, just as
authoritative in the South as Rg, Sama, Yajur or Adharva. Even Sri. Ramanuja’s Brahmasutrabhashya
was composed on the basis of the Southern Veda of Tiruvaymoli
which is a real Sastra superior to the northern Sastras. I have briefly cited these two
Medieval texts to advance the thesis that both Saivism
and Vaishnavitism as they later came to be called
are not originally part of so-called Hinduism. They were independent Southern
religions or spiritualities more than 2000 years old, which the North
assimilated into its pantheon, and the so-called Vedas themselves were
radically affected by this Southern spirituality of Saivism
and Srivaishnavitism. I shall once again make my point. Our
consciousness of our own religious past is almost incorrigibly distorted.
Since the 19th century we have created a false image of an amalgam called
Hinduism, which never existed before the 19th century. In redrawing the map
of Indian spirituality, we will have to look for the basics in South Indian
spiritual movements which later spread to the North, got Sanskritised
and got adopted into the Vedic-Brahmanic Pantheon
of the North. I will make one more attempt to
elaborate this point. It is quite customary, even for the Constitution of
India, to regard Buddhism and Jainism (as well as Sikhism) as aspects or
versions of Hinduism. The fact of the matter is that The Sramana
tradition in Another distortion of Indian history
is the impression some historians give that most of THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT
There are many educated people in our
country who have not even heard about the European Enlightenment of the 17th
and 18th centuries, or if they have heard about it, have but a very vague
idea of what it was and how it affects questions about Indian identity today.
And yet all those of us who have had a modicumn of
western education have already come under its influence. In the words of Owen Barfield
(Romanticism Comes of Age, Wesleyan Univ. Press, Middletown, Conn 1966) the European Enlightenment was “a state of
mind which descended on intellectual Europe in the course of the 17th and
18th centuries” and which according to Carlyle was one of the deeper causes
of the French Revolution. But it was more than just a state of mind. Nor was
it confined to the intellectuals alone. It was more of a spiritual fever,
with serious social, economic and political consequences, that spread like an
epidemic in 17th century The European Enlightenment was the
direct fruit of this economic, political and social upheaval in Let us ask that question: “What is
the Enlightenment” to the most prominent Founding Father of the European
Enlightenment-- Immanuel Kant (1724-) . His answer
(Published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift
- December 1784) is the most revealing definition of Enlightenment:
In other words, the European
Enlightenment was the act of the newly rich, newly healthy, newly educated
white humanity of And in My humble contention is neither the
White Man’s identity nor our own identity awareness will
be on a secure basis until we have disentangled the identity stains that have
got all tangled up in the last three centuries. The West has already started
that process through their de-Constructionism and
Post-Modernism. We will help them along further if we sort out our own
relation to the European Enlightenment. The western internal critique of the
European Enlightenment has been going on for some time. Nietzsche was among
the first to call in question the rationalism and historicism of the European
Enlightenment, but he was branded a madman by the European Establishment and
practically rejected wholesale, though his influence comes to light in almost
all the protest movements of the West. The next important self-criticism of
the EE came from the Frankfort School of Social Research, especially in The
Dialectics of the Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno. They called the Enlightenment totalitarian, in
that it laid out a method of gaining knowledge, and ruled out everything
which did not come that way as meaningless. The Romantic Movement in the West was
also a sort of protest against the enthronement of Reason by the
Enlightenment. Words like creativity and imagination, being subjective
elements were taboo in the early Rationalist approach which was after the
‘objective truth’ in which we know ‘things as they are’. It was Romanticism
which legitimised imagination and creativity as
inescapable in the search for knowledge. In more recent times it has been the
task of Deconstructionism and Post-Modernism to
shatter the remnants of Reason’s exclusive claims on knowledge. There has
been a consistent devaluation, not only of propositional
truth which modern science was seeking to capture, but also of the written
language as little more than squiggles of ink on paper, far removed from the
truth. Post-Modernism is also a repudiation of the exclusive dependence of
the Modern period on human reason. They would with Nietzsche and Horkheimer hold that the Will and Imagination as well as
Creativity are essential aspects of coming to terms with Reality.
Post-Modernism is thus post-Enlightenment, post-Marxist, and post Scientistic. Yet as children of Bharatavarsha in the 20th century we cannot be satisfied
with the Post-Modernist approach as adequate to handle the
intellectual-spiritual crisis in which the West finds itself. In this brief
address I can only hope to indicate the main points on which we differ from
the Post-Modernist approach to reality. With the post-Moderns we can agree that
Reality is in fact unpresentable through Discourse
and even unconceivable in terms of human conceptuality. Even allusion and
metaphor cannot present the Unpresentable. We know
that word and thing do not always fully correlate (Michael Foucault, Les Mots etles Choses,
Enf Tr The Order of
Things Tavistock 1970). The Realm of Language and
the Realm of Being remain essentially disparate. The Nouemenal
and the Phenomenal do not exactly fit each other. The Signified and the
Signifier are not the same. We cannot however agree that the
solution is a kind of libidinal knowledge in which we give free play to
subjectivity and will, and be satisfied with what we can achieve that way. The mistake of cultural Modernity was
the breaking away of Substantive Reason from all reference to the
Transcendent, and trying to domesticate it within three falsely autonomous
regions called Science, Morality and Art. Here we begin to list a few of our
own principal affirmations as people of Bharatavarsha
about the nature of Reality. 1. We hold that Language, Conceptualisation and Proposition are necessary tools for
humans to find their way about Reality, but we stoutly deny that these can
capture, comprehend or present Reality as it is. 2. We hold that Manifest Reality,
open to our senses, is only one aspect of Reality, is dependent on the Unmanifest, and cannot be fully understood without
reference to the Unmanifest. This principle is
diametrically opposed to the Secular position that the Manifest is the only
aspect of Reality to which we have access and that it can be understood in
itself without reference to anything that transcends it. As the Bhagavadgita (ch 8v. 18)
expresses the Sankhya view: Avyaktad vyaktaya sarva: prabhavantyaharagame Ratryagame praliyante tatraiva avyaktasamjnake “From the Unmanifest
all this Manifest happen forth at the beginning of the (Cosmic) Day When the (Cosmic) Night comes, to the
Same Unmanifest they all dissolve back.” This is an essential tradition of Bharatavarsha, that the Manifest, by the very fact that
it is manifest, cannot be the final truth. For all form, without which there
is no manifestation, is finite and therefore temporal, passing. The Manifest,
the finite-temporal cannot exist, except by being contingent upon the Transcendent,
the Unmanifest. This is the principle which the
European Enlightenment has overlooked in trying to assert the finality of
human reason and knowledge. Unless we reinstate this basic principle of our
civilization we cannot in Bharatavarsha be ourselves.
Neither Deconstruction nor the Post-Modern acknowledges this basic principle. 3. Man/Woman in his/her present state
of mind cannot enthrone himself to be the sovereign of the Universe. The
European Enlightenment in its great hurry to overthrow the authority of the
Feudal Nobility, threw out all authority and all
tradition, enthroning the unredeemed human person with his reason as the Lord
of the Universe, subject to no higher authority. This is another thing the Bharatiya tradition stoutly denies. This is the third
point at which we Bharatiyas have to disabuse
ourselves of the mark of the European Enlightenment. What the European
Enlightenment has done is to make the conscious mind of ordinary man the
absolute instrument of knowledge. The Bharatiya Tradition
on the other hand holds that there are two kinds of knowledge-- ordinary
sense-knowledge, and transcendent knowledge which comes only through
overcoming and going beyond ordinary knowledge. It requires a discipline of indriyanigraha, vasanansa,
nidhidhyasa all of which do not come within the
purview of ordinary knowledge. The European Enlightenment refuses to
recognize this category of transcendent knowledge, which requires some
dependence on the authority of a guru or some scriptures. I could cite many other fine points on which the Bharatiya tradition differs from the EE. I have cited three points at which our Indian intellectual culture has unwittingly fallen prey to the mistaken notions of the EE. What we need to do is not merely refuse to accept these canons and norms of the EE. We will need accordingly to revise our understanding and practice of Medicine and Healing first, recognising the role and function of the Transcendent and Unmanifest in both; also devise a new educational system in which the child has the opportunity to be exposed to the depths of the Bharatiya tradition in relation to the understanding of Manifest Reality as contingent upon the Transcendent Unmanifest. We will also need to fundamentally revise our Media systems or systems of gathering and disseminating information, which are now based on a very superficial understanding of what constitutes knowledge. Ultimately our political social and economic institutions themselves will have to be radically revamped. The transition will be from the production and distribution of commodities to the fundamental relations of persons and societies among themselves, on their relation to their true self as well as to the Transcendent Unmanifest. To this end we as Bharatiyas should become well acquainted with our own rich and varied traditions, the Adivasi heritage, the Sankhya and Yoga, the Vedic-Upanishadic, the Buddhist and the Jain, the Saivite and the Vaishnavite, the Bhakti tradition, the Taoist, the Arabic Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Parsee, Sikh and other traditions.
(Lecture delivered at Madras I.I.T., 1996 June 20)
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