A Fictional Conversation

For about a year, I've wanted to share and write about my newfound interest in religion, nature, animals, science, and all sorts of things that never interested me before. I tried the essay format, but so far I haven't quite succeeded in writing anything interesting. It takes time, I guess, to find the appropriate language, words and tone. It's always a work in progress. But here is an initial attempt to discuss religion and science, using two individuals. The two individuals are merely puppets to get some points across; it's very artificial for sure, but still felt better than an essay. Not sure how this is going to read -- but how does one know unless one tries?
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“… but you still believe there is no conflict between religion and science?”

“It’s all about how you interpret it. It just depends on what you call ‘religion’.”

“To me, religion is belief in God, and that’s pretty clear cut.”

“Well, alright, let that be our definition of religion then: belief in God. It’s a problematic definition, but we can work with it.”

“Good. Now tell me how you can reconcile science with religion. To me science is about evidence and cultivating doubt, whereas belief in God is not.”

“Yes, that’s true. Science certainly provides more evidence than religion and also – if the scientists are honest – allows doubts and failures. You turn on the switch on and there is light – that’s proof that science works. The evidence is there in virtually all aspects of life, which we now take for granted…” 

“Whereas religion gets away with unverifiable claims: the presence of a soul, someone was enlightened thousands of years ago, or someone walked on water, or someone lifted a mountain…”

“But you cannot disprove these claims; these things could have happened. It would be unscientific to negate these possibilities outright, even if our current laws of physics suggest otherwise. A more apt way to phrase it would be to say that religious miracles, unlike everyday scientific miracles, cannot be demonstrated on a regular basis. You just take them on faith, which is really a blind faith, rather than saying: It could have happened but I cannot say anything for sure; there is no evidence.”

“Exactly! In science you have the burden of proof, whereas the burden of proof is not there in religion. One promotes skepticism, the other asks for blind belief no matter what. And then exploits that belief to create wars, divisions, ideologies. To me that’s an irreconcilable difference.”

“Well, science, if not practiced well, can also divide, create wars, ideologies and destruction. We humans are the problem, though we like to play the secular/scientific versus religious game. I have a more moderate view on the debate between science and religion. I think of it in terms of degrees of objectivity. In a relative sense, yes, science is more objective than religion, and there is no disputing that. But it would be incorrect to call science the ultimate truth or theory. We can instead call it the most objective truth we have, or what humans have collectively and gradually come up with, using the tools of logic and mathematics.”

“So there is something over and above?”

“I don’t know. Good science represents the limit – and it’s an ever expanding limit – of what humans can think of and explain. Beyond it, who knows what’s there. I simply don’t know. And that’s important: I don’t know – that space of not knowing is very important. Socrates said something about not knowing....” 

“I think he said: I know only that I know nothing…”

“Right. In my view, not knowing is where religion begins. Knowledge often leads to arrogance, but not knowing and being sincere and honest in accepting that you do not know is humility. This is the same humility that most of the world’s religions ask us to cultivate. But in general – and almost no one is immune from this – the more you know the more you think you can control, and you become egocentric and protective of your knowledge. In this aspect, science has a serious downside: the ability to know the laws of nature and exploit the natural world to suit human needs makes us feel supremely confident; we feel can achieve anything. We look only at what we have achieved, and feel tremendously proud as a species, but we ignore what we do not know at all.”

“But our lives are better…”

 “Materially better, yes, for now, but sooner or later, you run into a wall. Reality doesn’t quite function the way humans want. No amount of knowledge can capture the ever changing nature of reality. What the future has in store we have absolutely no idea. The universe and even events in our solar system may have some unpleasant surprises in store for us. Science is the effort to find answers, but no matter how deep you go, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and what not, you always reach a point where you do not know anymore. So you stop for a moment there and acknowledge, ‘Wow, this is too vast, too big and too complex, for my puny mind to understand.’ It’s the Great Unknown.”

“I understand that. But that’s still very different from belief in God…”

“Is it really? That’s why I said it is all in the interpretation. For me, the Great Unknown is what you can label, for the purposes of convenience, as God. I believe in this Great Unknown; I don’t know what it is, but it is there…”

“Well you know, you are sounding very mystical now!”

 “Why not! A scientific pursuit is really a mystical pursuit. I start with the feeling, ‘I want to know’ and you do get to know more, and you are able to explain more. It is a great feeling – you can compare it to the religious joy that a pilgrim or a monk or a yogi might feel. Einstein’s theories of relativity are aesthetically beautiful theories – they say it is the most elegant use of mathematics to show the intertwined nature of space and time. Darwin’s ideas make you feel connected to every living creature in earth – by his thesis, the animals and birds you see around you are your cousins! That promotes a wonderful feeling of unity! At the same time, there still are unanswered questions and new questions, and you realize you can’t know everything. That does not mean you stop – you can be thankful for the knowledge you have and you can keep the search going – but the illusion that you will know all begins to go away.”

 “Alright. Your ‘religion’ -- if you can call it that -- is quite different. Something like a poetic impulse with scientific bits thrown in. I don't have an issue with it. My main issue is with the monotheistic faiths that claim that there is a Creator, or that the world has been intelligently designed. I feel these faiths are quite arrogant – they prescribe that there is only one way and no other way, and in doing so cause all sorts of problems.”

 “Saying that there is only one way and no other way implies that the person who is making that very strong claim has complete knowledge – wouldn’t that be the opposite of humility? Is it possible for someone to claim, with tremendous sincerity and honesty and without a trace of doubt, that there is only one way to God and that all other ways lead to hell? And as for the existence of a Creator, one cannot reject the possibility: no one can disprove something that so far not been seen. But it does not matter anyway. Whether a Creator exists or not is irrelevant; the Creation exists – by that I mean this universe, this earth we live in, the sun, the moon, our senses and our thoughts which allow us to experience the world, they all exist, or at least seem to be vivid and real to us. That’s all that matters, and that itself is a miracle of sorts. This is actually an amazing fact: the Creation is everywhere and all around us, this table here that my eyes allow me to see, this chair whose solidity I can feel, this fruit that I can smell and taste! It makes you ask the question: What is all this? That itself can impart a sense of wonder.”

The year in retrospect

Or what interested me in 2011

1.

This was a fascinating year in many ways. It was certainly the busiest year of my life. I’ve been busy before but only for a few weeks or a month. But this year, the busyness of my schedule was taken to a whole new level. It may sound funny, but I realize now what people mean when they say they “work”. For the first 2 years of my faculty position, I still felt like a graduate student, and as if there were no worries in the world. Work would get done when it had to. This feeling of lightness allowed me to travel repeatedly to Latin America (Mexico, Peru and Bolivia) and write pieces at a pace that I had never managed before. But now that I have my own students – doctoral students who are very committed and work very hard but who understandably require a lot of guidance – the responsibilities are greater.

That’s the main reason I haven’t been able to write much here. But despite all the activities at the university that vied for my energy and attention – the endless emphasis on papers and grants to prove that one is “good” at what one does – this break from writing for the blog did open up time for a free-ranging exploration of many new topics. As always, I am amazed at how much there is that one doesn’t know. More importantly, I am amazed how previously uninteresting clichés and topics suddenly acquire new meaning and relevance because of altered life circumstances.

2.

For reasons difficult to explain, I started thinking seriously about spirituality and religion this year. I was driven to find out what was at the bottom of it all. I was especially interested in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism), because unlike the ritualistic version of Hinduism that I grew up and was dissatisfied with, these traditions prescribed a contemplative and experiential approach that could be applied easily in everyday life.

It became clear to me that understanding how sense perceptions are translated into thought and how thought creates our conscious experience was perhaps the first step in understanding the reality that we face. All philosophical, religious and scientific questions – what is moral and immoral; the nature of suffering and happiness; science’s search for an answer to explain the mysterious workings of the universe – are questions within the realm of human consciousness. Consciousness is the very source that creates these questions and the reality that we experience. But what is this mysterious source and is there a reality that is outside of it? Another, related question that continues to puzzle me is this: What is the "I" in my consciousness that makes me feel as a separate individual -- in other words makes me feel the duality of “I” versus “the rest of the world”?

I became interested in meditation, which seemed like a logical first step in investigating what the mind is all about. I realized through practice that meditation is a fascinating and baffling scientific experiment where you are both the observer and the observed. In other words, it is the “I” in me observing its own behavior – a strange idea, to say the least. Of course, I found no comprehensive answers through meditation – expecting such answers is unrealistic to begin with – but I did begin to understand how thoughts function and how they skew our perception of reality.

I found many benefits from an unstructured form of meditation that I have been practicing for over a year. I arrived at it after experimenting with and rejecting prescribed methods. Unlike what the manuals or the books said, I did not focus my attention on anything but simply let things be and let thoughts wander. I found that to keep one’s attention on a single object is quite unnatural. Our consciousness does not function that way. It is always dynamic, shifting and moving, even when the mind is calm. So my meditation was a simply a session of sitting (15-20 minutes) every night without interfering with the mind’s activities. Somehow, these sittings led to deeply relaxing and still moments. Thoughts slowed down on their own, without any conscious effort on my part. I realized the key role that breathing plays in relaxing the body and why it is emphasized so heavily in the Indian meditation traditions.

I also learned that most thoughts are not created by choice. Thoughts appear and flit across the screen of our consciousness as randomly as clouds in the sky. When there are no thoughts, there is simply an awareness of the body, the breath or sensations within the body, but these too are finer forms of thoughts, or finer perceptions experienced through the veil of thought (the blue of the sky, to stretch the previous analogy). Emotions, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are simply physiological disturbances – a constriction near the chest or stomach, or a pleasant wave of energy – and all emotions, and the thoughts associated with them, are impermanent. That is, they have a temporary life-span within the mind-body system.

3.

The questions about the nature of consciousness lead to other, equally interesting questions in biology and physics. How do other species experience reality? Do they have self-awareness and if so how different is it from what humans have? How do other species deal with suffering and loss? Why do human always feel they are better than all other species, when there is really no objective basis for putting one species above another? And what about the vastness of the universe, the strange fact that time and space are intertwined, and the counterintuitive theories of quantum mechanics?

These lines of enquiry lead me to a number of interesting books – from the essays and speeches of philosopher/mystic Jiddu Krishnamuti; the teachings of Ramana Maharishi; essays by American Buddhists who in my opinion have taken a very practical and very useful approach to Buddhism; and the self-help bestseller, The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

On the science side, I read (or sampled) Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Magic of Reality; Brian Green’s explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in The Elegant Universe; David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure; F. Baumeister’s Willpower; and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I also liked Brian Greene’s documentary, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which explored the nature of space and time.

I did not always agree with or understand the abstract ideas discussed in these books -- whether spiritual or scientific – but they were useful, nevertheless, and revealed new perspectives.

4.

I had almost forgotten, meanwhile, about literary fiction and its ability to capture the interplay of thought, memory and time, and detail the inner life of a person as no other form can. I had not read fiction for more than a year. It was by chance that I stumbled upon Ivan Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk this November. I had bought the slim book a long time ago and it had stayed, untouched, on my bookshelf for years.

It turned out to as good as the other, more famous Turgenev book, Fathers and Sons. Turgenev’s deft characterizations, the fast moving story, the poignant moments when the characters reflect on the crises of their lives, took me back to the time, about ten years ago, when I believed unequivocally that literary fiction was the highest form of writing. That impression has faded a bit in recent years or as I came to rely more and more on non-fiction.

A House of Gentlefolk reminded me of how good fiction is at touching some of the incomprehensible aspects of life – those emotional aspects that cannot be described or quantified easily but are simply felt subjectively. I finished the book within a week, and, like a man in search of an old treasure he himself has buried but has forgotten where, I started looking closely at my shelves for other works of fiction. After starting and abandoning Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I finally settled on Thornton Wilder’s ingeniously simple yet profound play, Our Town, which took only a few hours to finish. Through simple characters and the almost naive, small town setting (in New Hampshire), Wilder was able to demonstrate with great power the meaning of death and changes in perspective that it brings.

But my most dramatic discovery of the year came just a few weeks ago, when in a bookstore in Northampton (not far from Amherst, where I live), I found Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Back in 2007, my friend, the novelist and writer Chandrahas Choudhury, had recommended their translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I took his advice then and had the most sublime few months reading Dostoevsky’s classic work.

I bought the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, but I thought it would be impossible to read an 800-page novel, with the end of the semester approaching. Luckily, I had to make two trips to New York City on back to back weekends, and the long train journeys (Amtrak trains) allowed me to get well into Anna Karenina. But it was not hard at all – in fact, the novel flowed so easily, so seamlessly from one character to another, from one scene to the next, and so clear and concise was the psychological detailing that it never felt like anything was being overdone. In three weeks, I was more than halfway through the book. This amazed me since I am an incredibly slow reader, generally incapable of reading more than 30 pages a day.

Anna Karenina has a very simple storyline. It is most a novel about families and marriage – marriage more than anything else. It is set in the decade following the emancipation of the serfs (the 1860s or the 1870s). Darwin’s ideas of the “animal origin of man” had just reached Russia. Electricity had arrived but was not yet common, travel in trains was common and telegrams had made communication quick and easy. Christianity in Russia was changing too – there were more rapturous, evangelical versions but also many more unbelievers and nihilists who used scientific materialism to reject the structures of religion.

The characters in Anna Karenina are ordinary. By that I mean they aren’t people with special talents, just people with both good and bad in them. At one level, the story is a simple tale of gossip – what is after all so new about an extra marital affair, which is at the heart of the novel? Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov had gruesome murders at their core – and it always felt that there was something serious at stake; the plots were intricate and thrilling.

But the genius of Tolstoy is in providing intimate portraits of the married relationships and affairs of intertwined families, interspersing these personal lives with the social and religious questions of the era.

I couldn’t help feeling that Anna Karenina has tremendous relevance even today. And as often happens while reading a great book, every single observation of mine, about the world and people, is colored by Tolstoy's view. In a year that I began to think seriously about how thoughts create both our expectations and disappointments, Anna Karenina, more than any other non-fiction book I read, was able to accurately portray, through its many characters, the unreliable and constantly changing nature of the individual self – now experiencing moments of transcendence, the next moment in deep grief, disoriented and puzzled, then finding from nowhere the strength to recover and feel happiness.

5.

And finally, a note on the one other thing that inspired me to no end this year. Even as a child I had always been drawn to animals and nature. It is an instinctive feeling that most of us share. But my interest then had been only in specific wildlife settings – such as wildebeest migrations in the plains of the Serengeti – and not much else. Birds or insects or beavers or trees or the complex interactions in nature which make life tick never interested me much.

That changed this year. Perhaps the biologist Edward Wilson’s remarkable experiments and study of the social behavior of ants, seeded my curiosity about nature as a whole. Further, it seemed almost impossible not to think of nature when dealing with spiritual and religious questions. I often find it puzzling that many organized religions, so engrossed in their own dogmas and rituals, pay very little attention to nature. Miraculous things already happen in nature, yet we remain interested only in unverifiable myths and legends.

In March, with the snow still covering most of the woods and the ponds still frozen, I started walking the trails that surround Amherst. I began to observe birds, beavers, raccoons, foxes, chipmunks, skunks, ants on the pavement, struggling spiders in my bathtub, and much else. When you do this on a regular basis, the human-centered or self-centered view that dominates our lives begins to break down momentarily. It never goes away completely – the ego is much too strong – but a different perspective begins to open up. Humans tend to be incredibly self-congratulatory: all our religious and scientific institutions always stress how special humans are, how evolved we are compared to other species and so on. But the fact is that humans, whatever our abilities, are no more or no less important than any other species on earth.

In parallel, I watched many documentaries on PBS Nature (PBS refers to American public television). These documentaries are available free online. I was interested most in the difficulties of surviving in the wild, and how animals cope with physical pain, suffering and loss. A recurring example was the high mortality of offspring in the early days or months, when they are most vulnerable and unable to fend for themselves. The mother puts an enormous effort and is yet, in many cases, unable to save her offspring. In some species – elephants, lemurs, hawks – the pain of the loss lasted visibly for days.

I was moved by these stories. The arbitrariness of life was now an inescapable fact for me. Yet the same arbitrariness also implied that one could approach life in an open ended, less burdensome way, with fewer illusions.

The best of all the documentaries I watched was My Life as a Turkey, which premiered in November this year. It is a reenactment of Florida farmer Joe Hutto’s attempt at imprinting – in plain terms, the attempt be a mother, despite being of a different species, to wild turkey chicks (wild turkey are different from the turkeys that are consumed as food). Hutto begins by incubating eggs and mimicking sounds that a mother Turkey might take. The pivotal moment is when the chicks emerge and see him before they see anything else. Some sort of bond is formed and the wild turkeys follow Joe Hutto for the next year or so. Hutto is totally responsible for their welfare and makes a full time commitment. This means he will live in the forest, cut off from other humans, for as long as it takes to raise the chicks.

The premise of the documentary – based on Hutto's book Illumination in the Flatwoods – may not sound exciting, but I invite you to give it a try. It is superbly edited, well narrated and has stunning visuals of the forests of Florida. My Life as a Turkey is interesting both as a scientific experiment and for its philosophical content. Joe Hutto’s sentences from the book, which are used in the reenactment, are thoughtful. The curiosity of the growing turkeys; the intelligence they are born with about the natural world (“humans do not have a privileged access to reality”); their ability to live in the moment which we can only envy – all of this made it one of the best documentaries that I have ever watched.

A very happy new year to everyone!

Travels in Cuzco

In December last year, I took a flight from Lima, Peru’s coastal capital, to Cuzco, the once splendid high altitude capital of the Incas. Cuzco, now a booming and rampantly commercial tourist town, is the starting point of a trip to the famous Machu Picchu. The journey by bus, a steep uphill climb into the mountains, takes over twenty hours, but by flight it is a pleasant hour and a half. The Andes slice through the nations of western South America – Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile – to leave remarkably different terrains. In Peru, to the west of the Andes is a thin coastal strip that is mostly dry desert; this is where Lima is. To the east – surprisingly for the uninitiated visitor – is the dense jungle of the Amazon and the border with Brazil. The Andes themselves are not monolithic; the succession of mountains, rivers and high valleys gives way in the south of Peru to a high plateau called the Altiplano, where the surreally blue waters of Lake Titicaca are to be found, along the border with Bolivia.

Like the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East, which saw the early rise of complex societies, western South America too has for millennia seen a series of kingdoms and empires. The largest, best known and last of these empires was the Incan one, which stretched for few thousand miles along the length of the Andes, from Columbia to Chile. The Incas’ was an unabashedly high-altitude culture: Cuzco, their grand capital, is at an elevation of 12,000 feet. The mountains were an artery through the empire. Roads, suspension bridges, supplies along the routes, and a system of runners who ran the length of mountain range at breakneck speeds to relay messages: all this kept the empire well connected.

From the air, Cuzco revealed itself as an extended sprawl in a high valley. The houses were closely spaced, and had sloping, red-tile roofs. In atmosphere and style – the high setting, the medieval look, the predominance of tourists and their revelry, the narrow streets of stone rather than asphalt, the dark American Indian faces of the locals – it reminded me of San Cristobal de las Casas, the southern and Mayan part of Mexico. A tall, young taxi driver who spoke fluent English took me to my hostel. He was savvy, knew a few Hindi words, and after much fumbling with the CD player, finally managed to play a popular Punjabi song. He was one of many young men I met during my travels who had smartly aligned themselves to make an impression on tourists.

My hostel was at the steep upper end of what was called the Choquechaca Street, away from the bustle and noise or the Plaza de Armas (the main square). It was run by Peruvians in their early twenties. Like their traveling guests, they too had the air of vagabonds. They worked irregular shifts, partied hard, and never gave the impression of permanence. There was Jose, who had a family in one of Lima’s shantytowns; Christina, also from Lima, who had abandoned her degree and now was attached to a bearded, dreamy Australian wanderer in Cuzco; and Luigi, a short, frail man, from the town of Iquitos, at the remote eastern end of Peru, reachable only by air or water. Luigi’s flirtatious way with women, the slightness of his physique and even his classically American Indian features – high slanted cheekbones, dark-red complexion – bore an uncanny resemblance to my roommate in college, from Mirzapur in North India.

The nations of the Americas fall into two broad categories. In some, American Indians have been marginalized and their numbers have reduced to an extent that they remain largely invisible. The United States, Argentina, and the Caribbean Islands fall in this category. And then there are countries, like Mexico (southern Mexico especially), Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia where indigenous populations form a significant majority.

In the Andean highland cities of Peru, the Quechuas, whose ancestors built the Incan empire, are the largest group. And it was the Quechuas that I saw in large numbers in the main square of Cuzco. I had arrived the day before Christmas. It was cold even though it wasn’t winter in Peru. The high altitude, which I hadn’t adjusted to, made the short walk to the main square strenuous. The square was abuzz with preparations. Indigenous women, their children in tow, had come to sell their wares in what was going to be a huge market. The older women had plaited hair and their attire was distinct: bowler hats and skirts; and many layers of clothing to protect against the cold, which made them look stocky. There was a long queue on one side of the square. Food and soup were being distributed in ladles to the poor, especially children: the largesse of Christmas.

It was there, in the fading light of the day, that the strangeness of where I was struck me. All around, in the higher elevations of the surrounding mountains, were the outer settlements of Cuzco. The city was much larger that I had thought. The square itself had once had been surrounded by palaces of the Inca rulers; in their place now stood imposing ocher-colored cathedrals and churches. Church imposed over a Pre-Columbian place of significance: the trend repeats over and over again in Latin America. But here, high in the Andes, with the indigenous Quechua filling the square on the eve of Christmas, the violence of that 16th century clash felt especially real.

The Spanish arrived in Peru in 1533, twelve years after conquering the Aztec empire in Mexico. They took Cuzco fairly easily in the beginning, but then the Incas fought back ferociously. From various vantage points the Inca army hurled red hot stones onto the roofs of houses, setting them on fire. The whole of Cuzco burned and for a while, it must have seemed, as the Inca army slowly circled in, that the outnumbered Spaniards would lose the city. They didn’t. They survived narrowly and fought back. The cathedrals in the main square of Cuzco are testament to the eventual victory of the Spanish.

In a side street, I had seen intact examples of Inca walls: large and smooth interlocking blocks of stone, without mortar and which fit like a puzzle. Their minimalism, their lack of adornment, only elevated their beauty. They hinted at another sensibility, much of which had been lost.

But the Quechuas I met insisted that it wasn’t a simple case of one culture dominating the other. Catholicism merely provided the outer shell beneath which the animist ways of the past still carried on. Even in the cathedrals, there are subtle but unequivocal hints of indigenous influence: a rendition of the Last Supper has a guinea pig, an Andean delicacy, as the main dish and not lamb; the virgins are cleverly portrayed in the shape of Andean mountains since the Quechua worship the mountains. But at a more mundane, day to day level, I had no sense – and no time to explore – how the two ways were being reconciled. And I often got the sense that the question was moot, that enough time had passed since the conquest for a kind of unselfconscious synthesis to emerge.

It was dark now and on one of the high hills surrounding Cuzco was a luminescent statue of Jesus – Cristo Blanco, or White Christ. I was struck by it: it was as if the light was coming from within, as if the statue itself were a fluorescent piece.

Two days later, I made the ascent up the steep hill that led to Cristo Blanco. The hill was immediately adjacent to my hostel. The path took me through haphazardly set one story houses along the slope. On the way a drunk, unhappy man helped with directions; another man asked if I was interested in riding a horse; and a woman could be seen beating up and shouting at her husband for having cheated. A little later I met Doggy, the large stray that for some reason unfailingly retired at the hostel for the night (though no one there “owned” him), but during the day roamed the corners of Cuzco, with a total lack of fear of other dogs. I saw him a few days later in a completely different part of the city. He seemed to possess some of the conquistadorial spirit of the 16th Spanish invaders of the Americas, who time and again rushed headlong into conflicts and toppled empires despite being hopelessly outnumbered. Doggy in fact was at that moment fighting an equally spunky dog. It took the stones of passersby to separate the two.

A hundred odd feet below Cristo Blanco is Saqsayhuaman, the remains of an Inca fortress. Unlike the smooth walls I had seen in the center of Cuzco, these were much larger, coarser structures, but no less impressive. They were ideal fortifications. They seemed like arbitrary and natural agglomerations of boulders until you noticed how carefully they had been assembled. Yet again there was no mortar holding the different pieces together. The Inca army, in an effort to recapture Cuzco from the Spaniards, had used Saqsayhuaman as their base. In fact, if John Hemming’s meticulously researched The Conquest of the Incas is to be believed, their attack had followed the same steep path I had taken from my hostel.

It was a short ascent from Saqsayhuaman to the large white statue of Christ. Most of Cuzco, which sits in a valley, could be seen from here, the various shades of the red of the roofs and the white of the walls mingling together, as if a carpet of those colors blanketed the valley. Christ is portrayed as he is other parts of the world. His arms were raised in a gesture of welcome. This positive image contrasted with slumped posture of a hooded man who sat at the base. His face was not visible; he did not move for the entire duration of my visit. Nearby there were large crosses wrapped in fine cloth, with designs woven onto them. At night, a powerful set of lamps on the platform shone white light onto the statue, and this gave the impression of luminescence I had been so struck by.

Our relationship to the natural world: Some initial thoughts

1.

Our relationship to the natural world is ambiguous. On the one hand, we are drawn to landscapes. We love to visit national parks; we like to build lakefront homes surrounded by woods; and even an overwhelmingly urban space such as New York needs Central Park. The biologist Edward Wilson has a term for this: biophilia.

What is behind the instinct? One possible explanation – Wilson’s, not mine – is that humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, were inextricably part of the natural world: it is where we evolved. Our survival demanded an intimate and practical knowledge of the flora and fauna around us. We probably developed our innate fear of snakes, aggressive carnivores and heights then; these reactions are still hard wired in us. We developed also an appreciation for the environment. That too is still with us; that is why excessive development at the expense of forests and the wilderness provokes a reaction.

But even as hunter gatherers, we were always constantly tinkering with our habitats, trying to figure out ways to use it more effectively: controlled burning, deliberately dispersing certain seeds, slow attempts to tame certain animals. Around ten thousand years ago – and this seems to have happened independently within a few millennia in different parts of the world – we developed or “chanced upon” agriculture.

Agriculture fundamentally changed our relationship with the natural world. We no longer needed to be jointly involved in the process of creating food. The farmers were there to do that. We could follow other passions – the arts, the sciences. The time we gained for these pursuits has brought “progress”, to where we are today. But we still are very much part of the natural world. It is just that we don’t look at it that way. We feel the environment is something on the outside, to be enjoyed during walks or excursions.

2.

Cultures interact in distinct ways with the environments they inhabit. The United States is famous for its stunning national parks. The dedicated rangers, caretakers of these parks, are passionate about their work. They convey their wonder of the natural world, but their curiosity is mainly scientific. The ranger will likely be excited about the park's geology, botany and details of what might have happened during the Paleolithic era.

Then there are the trekkers, the mountain climbers, the campers. Their motivation comes from the need to experience nature up close or to get away from the world of work and stress, or the thrill of a daring feat.

In this sense, the American relationship to the natural world is “secular”. Religion resides not in nature but in the church, synagogue or mosque and their associated communities. That is understandable: Christianity is after all a Middle Eastern religion; and the Middle East is where all the holy places are.

Contrast this with how American Indians looked at the land. For them, the connection was much deeper, inextricable. I don’t mean this in a shallow, “hippie” way; neither do I think there was something consciously “environmental” about it. Rather, the land was part of their origins as a people. The mountains, rock formations, rivers, the birds, the animals, waterfalls and natural landmarks were sacred. Stories about them were relayed across generations through oral tradition.

This aspect is not unique to American Indians of course. Plenty of cultures where the religion is homegrown and old have it too. But India is perhaps – to me at least – the most illustrative modern example. Hinduism is about as homegrown and diverse as any religion can be; and it is intimately connected to the land. While traveling through Tamil Nadu last year, I was struck by how temples were used to commemorate natural landmarks – be it the Cauvery River, or a cave, or a hilltop.

If the Grand Canyon had, by some accident of geology, been in India, it would have been a national park, yes, but it would also be a sacred place, where millions of pilgrims might visit a certain time of the year.

Perhaps, in the beginning, all human religions were necessarily religions connected to the earth. Agriculture led to an increase in societal complexity, and paved the way for the more social religions: the world conquering monotheisms of the Middle East. And in recent centuries, economic ideologies and science have created their own worldviews. We seem, in the process, to have lost the instinctive spiritual connection we once had with the earth. Now, the environmental conservation and biodiversity movement is trying, using the framework of science, to make us aware of what we are losing. That may be the correct way in this time and age. But who knows; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Tiwanaku and Evo Morales

Most of us have heard of the Incas, but they were only the last of a line of empires that rose in western South America. Before them, in the high and mostly dry plateau of the Andes, called the Altiplano, the Tiwanaku flourished. The indigenous Aymara of modern day Bolivia consider themselves descendants of the Tiwanaku. In January 2006, a day before he assumed presidential office, Evo Morales, an Aymara himself, attended a ceremony at the principal archaeological site of of this ancient culture, two hours from La Paz.

The Spanish colonized this part of the world with much brutality in the 16th century; Bolivia became independent in the 19th century but it was a sham independence: the Spanish descended elites still held power. Evo Morales’s remarkable ascension to the highest office in Bolivia in 2006 – he had been a Coca farmer once – was a truly historic moment. Hence the coronation at Tiwanaku. Like the blacks of South Africa, the majority Aymara too were denied for a long time. Evo Morales may be viewed skeptically in the West because he is socialist, but it is from the perspective of indigenous empowerment that his rise is significant. In 2009, a month before I visited La Paz, he was reelected with an even stronger majority.



Above, you'll find some pictures of relics from the Tiwanaku site. The Spanish missionaries of the sixteenth century couldn’t let them be. They "exorcised" the spirit of the second relic by scraping a cross on the right shoulder. No doubt, this nasty bit of sabotage stemmed from a deep insecurity. If the God of Christianity was indeed the only worthy and true God, then why did that fact have to be imposed in a coercive manner?

Travels in Tamil Nadu: Kumbakonam

Pardon the typos...

1.

The south Indian city of Kumbakonam lives up to its epithet. Temples are everywhere: their elaborate gopurams (towers) rise dramatically along its crowded, narrow streets, and in the villages and towns around the city, a varied pantheon finds representation. The city’s large Mahamanam tank is said to collect India’s holy rivers in miniature, imparting this local and insignificant seeming landmark a grander, pan-Indian connection. Bathing in the tank on the day of the Mahamanam Festival – Tamil Nadu’s own Kumbh Mela – is akin to washing one’s sins in such rivers as the Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, and Cauvery (see rare picture from 1905 below of the festival and the tank; picture credit here).

2.

I grew up with little interest in temples and deities. As characters in stories and epics, the gods with their quirks and foibles were fascinating, but as idols to be worshipped in a temple, they were invariably boring. Kumbakonam has the usual – Shiva, Vishnu, Murugan; there’s also a rare Brahma temple. But the majority of the holy places around town pivot on a fascinating theme -- the deification of celestial bodies: the sun, the moon, the planets, better known as navagraha. It made sense to me that these mysterious entities, markers of time, direction and the recurrence of seasons – and, in the case of the sun, indispensable – should be worshipped.

In the temples I visited as a child, the navagraha were personified as black figurines, their details faint; they were typically arranged on a raised platform in three rows. Though I was always instructed to circle them devoutly, they were never the main attraction. In Kumbakonam, there is a temple for each graha. Though they consist of five planets, the grahas generally refer to celestial landmarks – the sun (Suryan), the moon (Chandran), Mars (Chevai), Mercury (Budhan), Jupiter (Guru), Venus (Shukram or Velli) and Saturn (Sani). The remaining two, Raagu and Ketu, are not actual bodies but nodes: “they are the two points of intersection of the paths of the Sun and the Moon as they move on the celestial sphere”[source].

3.

The Gurukovil (or Guru Temple) is in Alangodi; it has the most garish gopuram (tower) I have ever seen. Though striking, I personally prefer the understated elegance of older temples, such as the Brihadishwara. The difference is in the degree of detail: the newer temples tend to exaggerate (dilated eyes, fiery moustaches, tusks and teeth), while the older temples prefer abstraction and are yet noticeably sensuous.

The cool inner sanctum of the Gurukovil hosts a lingam with a Nandi facing it. Guru himself is to the left of the sanctum, almost an afterthought, reached only by walking halfway around. But he receives plenty of attention from worshippers. I caught a glimpse of him right after an abhishekam, bejeweled, garlanded, slits that were eyes marked out from his otherwise ash-covered form. It was also at this temple that I noticed four Muslim women in black chadors lighting candles for him (I mentioned this in an earlier post).

4.

That same evening, I went to the Suryanar Kovil (Sun Temple). Guru was here too, facing a large idol of the Suryan: the heavyweights of the solar system, Jupiter and the Sun, enjoying a tete-a-tete.

The rest of the temple hosted the other seven grahas, each housed in a smaller enclosure, aptly around the sanctum for the Sun. At one of them, an archaka (a priest) was conducting an abhishekam for a large family. This meant stripping the black stone idol that represented the deity, bathing it in water, milk, a mash of chopped bananas, honey, jaggery and dates, washing it again with water, and finally dressing it in new cloth and adorning with flowers -- all this while prayers with a distinctive cadence were chanted.

The priest was stocky, pot-bellied and wore earrings and a sullied sacred thread; his veshti (a white wrap-around) was worn in a complicated, many-layered fashion and sat tight over his wide waist. He did his work earnestly. But the lady of the family – who was clearly in charge – was not satisfied with the material aspects of the abhishekam.

“Why aren’t you adorning more? Shouldn’t you be using more fresh flowers? What about the clothes for the grahas? I paid a lot for this; and I specifically asked for something elaborate.”

The priest was immediately on the defensive.

“Amma, what use is it telling me? I have no control over these things. You should have been more specific when you paid for the abhishekam; you should have told the people there. What use is it coming and telling the Iyer [Brahmin priest] here?”

It was a comical tussle about money and service quality in the middle of a somber religious ritual. As the priest moved from one graha to another (from Raagu to Chandran to Budhan), the lady kept insisting that it wasn’t enough. And the priest kept defending himself in his distinctive Brahmin-accented Tamil. At the end, the lady gave money to the priest as was customary, but he refused it, leaving the family bewildered and dissatisfied (though some of the younger members snickered).

There is a subtler issue at work here and it has to do with political control of temple revenue. The government of Tamil Nadu – currently led by the avowedly anti-Hindu Karunanidhi – has increasingly taken control of many temples. You pay for services, such as an abhishekam, to the temple officials and it is they who decide what you get. I am speculating here, but this probably puts priests at odds with the officials: the former who once had more control now have less say.

The idea of India: An extract from Aatish Taseer's upcoming Temple Goers

The extract, a very entertaining one at that, is here (Aatish Taseer's website is here). The scene described features a writer, Vijailal, a fictionalized version of VS Naipaul, at a dinner with prominent guests in a Delhi home. What’s more, in the conversation, Vijailal takes the familiar Naipaulian -- and supposedly “Hindu-nationalist” – stance: he berates the loss of Hindu-Buddhist India to the ravages of Muslim conquerors.

The interpretation is a vicious flash point: India is yet to come to terms with this part of its history. In Latin America, the Spanish conquest of indigenous empires -- the Aztecs, the Incas and countless smaller groups -- was similarly brutal (the similarity may not be a coincidence: it is important to remember the Spanish fought the Arabs immediately before sailing to the Americas). Yet countries such as Mexico, Peru and Bolivia have reconciled with this painful history. Unlike India, indigenous cultures in these places were trampled and destroyed to such an extent that there is nothing to do but to acknowledge this nadir of history and move on. Strikingly, most Pre-Columbian religious sites of Latin America -- those that survive -- are now archaeological sites. They are secular spaces; they no longer hold the same cultural or religious meaning.

In India, however, the past, though not fully accessible to everyone, has survived despite the invasions of the last millennium; the traditions continue and have even been strengthened, albeit in an altered, modern form; the religious places still remain religious places, they are held in reverence, even if they are archaeological sites. While this continuity is astonishing, the wound inflicted by Islamic invasions still rankles.

Two excerpts from Taseer’s extract, I felt, were striking. In both, Vijailal – the character resembling Naipaul – argues that there did exist such a thing as India: not the modern nation-state of course, but a culture that understood itself through the prism of religion:

“You ask the average Indian, and he would not think of himself as an Indian. He would think of himself as a Gujarati, a Punjabi, a Tamilian, an Assamese. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea of India, ‘the land’.”

The writer [Vijailal] seemed caught between the interruption and Shabby’s raised voice, and what he was going to say next. He lowered his head and muttered, “Not the temple-going Indian, not the temple-going Indian.”

Then raising his head and voice at once, he silenced Shabby. “Not the temple-going Indian. People like you perhaps, but not him. He knows this country backwards. He forever carries an idea of it in his head. For him, it possesses a sacred topography. He knows it through its holy places. He knows it from the mountains in the north where the rivers begin, and from where the rudraksh he wears around his neck come, to the special place from where the right stones for the lingas come. He knows the rivers when they widen and the great temples and temple cities, with their stone steps, that have been set along their banks. He knows the points where those rivers meet other rivers, and their confluence becomes part of the long nationwide pilgrimages he will make several times in his lifetime. In fact, it could be said that there is almost no other country where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as in India; perhaps no country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to Tirupathi in the south or Jagannath in the east. And in this way, the religion itself is like a form of patriotism.”

[...]

“You know,” he began, looking deeply into the room, where illuminated foliage could be seen beyond darkened windows and the orange coils of an electric heater burned steadily, “they say that Benares is a microcosm of India. Today, most people take that to mean that it contains all the horror and filth of India, and also, loath as I am to use these words, the charm, the beauty, the magic. But Benares was once a very different kind of microcosm; it was a very self-conscious microcosm. The streams that watered the groves in its Forest of Bliss were named after all the rivers of India, not unlike the avenues in Washington, DC, being named after the American states. All the princes from around the country had their palaces along the river. And they would come and retire there after they had forsaken the cares of the world. The Indian holy points, the places of the larger pilgrimage, were all represented symbolically in Benares. It was said you could do the whole pilgrimage in miniature in Kashi. And Kashi too was recreated symbolically across the country. It wasn’t a microcosm; it was a kind of cosmic capital.

“And on certain days the moon would appear in the afternoon and the water from those symbolic Indian rivers would run through the groves and flood the Ganga, which at one particular point curls around the city. The ancient Hindus, with their special feeling for these cosmic changes, would gather at high points in the city to watch, like people seeing a fireworks display. That was how people, common people,” he added pointedly, “were brought in touch with the wholeness of the place, in just the same way as someone crossing a street in Manhattan might feel when, looking to one side and seeing the sweep of the avenue, he says, ‘I’m in New York!’ It’s my dream to see that wholeness restored in India.”

___

On a related note, let me quote Sandeep, a popular Bangalore based blogger and columnist – and a vociferous defender of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism). Sandeep has an impassioned piece on how the subcontinent's oldest religion has been the victim of concerted attacks over the last two and a half millennia and has yet managed to adapt. He begins the piece, though, on a less confrontational note, using the example of the recently passed Makar Sankranthi, to show the cultural unity of India:

Today is Makara Sankranti, celebrated across India to both herald the beginning of longer days, and reap the harvest of months of backbreaking work in the fields. But the greater significance of Makara Sankranti like most Hindu festivals, is to highlight another living instance of the amazing cultural unity of India. People in Karnataka exchange a mixture comprising sugarcane blocks–artistically moulded into various forms and figures and shapes of Gods, Goddesses, flowers, fruits, animals–white sesame seeds, jaggery, and a piece of sugarcane. In Andhra Pradesh, sugarcane is replaced by the jujube fruit (Regi Pandulu) and sweets and delicacies are prepared and offered to God. Assamese are more creative: they have on offer at least 10 different varieties of Pitha, a kind of rice cake. Gujaratis wait for this to zestfully fly kites all over and make Undhiyu and Chikkis (sweetmeat made of sesame, jaggery and peanuts). Maharashtra feasts on tilgul (sweetmeat made from sesame) and Gulpolis, and wish each other peace and prosperity. Tamil Nadu gorges on varieties of pongal–thai pongal, mattu pongal and kannum pongal, each variety of pongal as a way of offering gratitude to the Sun, cattle, and friends and relatives. Every state and place–Bundelkhand, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bengal, Goa, Kerala, and Orissa–has its unique way of celebrating Makara Sankranti but contains a subterranean thread that ties all of them with India.

The full essay, with the more accusatory bits, is here. Feel free to discuss and debate the validity of these viewpoints.

What is the nature of the self?

The physician and neuroscientist Vilayannur Ramachandran explores this fundamental, still unsolved philosophical conundrum in the last chapter of his book Phantoms in the Brain (co-written in the late 1990s with Sandra Blakeslee). This is how the chapter begins:

In the first half of the next century science will confront its greatest challenge in trying to answer a question that has been steeped in mysticism and metaphysics for millennia. What is the true nature of self? As someone who was born in Indian and raised in the Hindu tradition, I was taught that the concept of the self – the “I” within me that is aloof from the universe and engages in lofty inspection of the world around me – is an illusion, a veil called maya. The search for enlightenment, I was told, consists of lifting this veil and realizing that you are really “One with the cosmos.” Ironically, after extensive training in Western medicine and more than fifteen years of research on neurological patients and visual illusions, I have come to realize that there is much truth in this view – that the notion of a single unified self “inhabiting” the brain may indeed be an illusion. Everything I have learned from the intensive study of both normal people and patients who have sustained damage to various parts of their brains points to an unsettling notion: that you create your own “reality” from mere fragments of information, that what you “see” is a reliable – but not always accurate – representation of what exists in the world, that you are completely unaware of the vast majority of events going on in your brain. Indeed, most of your actions are carried out by a host of unconscious zombies who exist in peaceful harmony along with you (the “person”) inside your body!

Nevertheless, many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life – all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves – arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meant inside the skull? The problem of mind and matter, substance and spirit, illusion and reality, has been a major preoccupation of both Western and Eastern philosophy for millennia, but very little of lasting value has emerged. As the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland has said, “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”

__

Why this post suddenly? Because I've been thinking about the idea of "soul", and whether we are more than just an aggregation of the the physical body, the brain and its interior functions. This soul or, less metaphysically, "consciousness" is what marks us out, but how is it linked to the body? Some scientists are beginning to tackle that question, which is what prompted this post.

Streets of Kumbakonam

For those unaware, Kumbakonam is a south-Indian town renowned for its temples. All pictures below are from my July 2009 trip.

A bike stand facing a shop

I've always wondered the effort that must go into painting these checked patterns on trees.

The chariot of one of the temples in town

The tradition of making idols from metals goes well back in history. This picture is of a shop that continues that tradition -- it's likely they use the lost wax method for some of their work.

The temple at Tirvuannamalai and a Kaval Deivam shrine

A little busy with work these days, so I have only pictures to offer. The first is of the gopuram (tower) of the temple in the town of Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu. Notice how the style and color of the gopuram differs from that of the Brihadishwara temple of Thanjavur. Behind the temple is the sacred Arunachala hill which has drawn many saints over the years, the most recent of them, Ramana Maharishi. During the Tamil month of Kartigai (Oct-Nov), a light is lit atop the hill and it is visible for miles around.



The second picture is an informal shrine for kaval deivam -- guardian spirits. I came across it in the countryside between Krishnagiri and Tiruvanamalai. If my understanding is right, these gods are specific to villages in Tamil Nadu -- that is, they are not pan-Indian like say Shiva or Vishnu. More information here and here.

At the Brihadishwara

For non-Indian readers (or non-Tamil readers for that matter), I hope the explanations of unfamiliar terms (or the links provided) are sufficient for a basic understanding.

1.

The Brihadishwara Temple in the south Indian city of Thanjavur is one of India’s most impressive. Built in the 11th century during the reign of the Cholas and dedicated to Lord Shiva, its 66-meter-tall granite gopuram (tower) and the smaller gopurams in its precincts make for a striking view. The temple is an hour’s drive from the village of Thuvakudi, where I was an college student in the late nineties. But I was completely averse to history and religion then, and not once did I visit. What’s more I did not even know that Thanjavur had this famous attraction that drew visitors from far.

A year after college, while a graduate student in the United States -- and now more interested in history -- I saw the temple mentioned in an essay about Marco Polo in the National Geographic magazine. The medieval Italian traveler had apparently visited the Brihadishwara and been impressed – it had been one stop on his grand, continent-spanning itinerary.

I managed to see the temple for the first time in July this year. The day I visited coincided with pradosham, a fortnightly event in the lunar calendar that marks a legend about Shiva. The story goes thus: Once, the devas and asuras (crudely, gods and demons) attempted to churn the ocean of milk using Vaasuki, a serpent, to extract divine nectar. But the effort went awry and Vaasuki’s poison contaminated the ocean. Shiva took it upon himself to consume the poison, which accumulated in his throat and turned it blue – that is why he is called Neelakantan, the blue-throated one.

Pradosham commemorates Shiva’s selfless act. A pradosham that falls on Saturday is called sani pradosham and is even more auspicious. For Saivites (worshippers of Shiva) this is a special day. I come from the Saivite tradition; my father observes the occasion without fail, and so did my paternal grandfather. This usually means a temple visit late in the afternoon during sani pradosham. For that is the time all gods and celestial beings congregate to revere Shiva. To be present is to be guaranteed divine goodwill.

2.

The Brihadishwara was teeming with worshippers when I arrived. It was 5:30 pm; sani pradosham was well underway. I was struck by the singular beige color of the gopurams – no other temples I know have that color. A continuous throng of people stretched from the main entrance well into the interior, up to the raised pavilion where a massive statue of Nandi, Shiva’s bull – the second largest in India, hewn from a single block of stone – was being bathed in milk and water in the prescribed manner. Even from where I was, a quarter of a kilometer away, I could see gallons of fluid splashing off the body of Nandi. It was a surreal sight.


There were perhaps two or three thousand people – that’s a modest estimate – packed within the temple precincts. A high wall, also beige colored, ran along the perimeter and gave the place the feel of a fortress. The densest concentration was around the Nandi pavilion. It was so crowded that I found it impossible to make my way to the main gopuram, the sanctum sanctorum of which houses Shiva. But it seemed – at least from where I was – that cynosure of all was Nandi and not Shiva. In the first picture above you see the main gopuram in background, but notice that people are facing away from it. They are actually looking at Nandi being garlanded by a priest perched on an elevated platform (second picture).

3.

I left at 6:30 along with most other worshippers. Outside, with large numbers of people milling onto the traffic-clogged street, I had difficulty navigating my way and finding an auto. When I did find one, the driver, visibly frustrated with the jam caused by the temple crowd, said: “People are saturated with faith these days!”

The remark suggested this was not always the case. Indeed, the elders I talked to only confirmed the fact: the religiosity on display that day had not existed during their time, twenty or thirty years ago.

What had changed? The explanation might lie in the societal changes brought about by the politics of Tamil Nadu.

In the early and mid 1900s, the upper caste Brahmins made up only 3 percent of the state's population, but they were dominant: they held all key administrative positions and controlled temples. But their hegemony and supremacist outlook irked an increasingly influential group of Tamil middle castes. The allegation was that Brahmins were “agents” of the Aryan, Hindi-speaking north bent on imposing their version of Hinduism on Dravidians of the south. From the Dravidian viewpoint, the primacy of Tamil and Tamil culture – which date back millennia – had to be reestablished and safeguarded. The movement was all about Tamil distinctness and Brahmin-bashing; later, leaders such as Annadurai infused it with an energetic grassroots populism. By the 1960s, the Dravidians had political power, which diminished the control of the Brahmins and gave upward mobility in the next decades to the middle and low castes who come under the OBC (other backward castes) designation (this does not include Dalits of Tamil Nadu -- known also as Adi Dravidars -- whose long due empowerment still remains a major issue in the state).

That upward mobility has in turn contributed to a growing religiosity. This is somewhat paradoxical, since the ideological roots of the Dravidian movement are atheist. The movement's founder, the firebrand atheist EV Ramaswamy Naicker, known more popularly as Periyar, was a smasher of Hindu idols. And the state’s current chief minister, the 85-year old Karunanidhi -- one of the movement's veterans -- is avowedly anti-Hindu. But godlessness as an ideology never ran deep among the masses. As Vaasanthi writes in Cut-Outs, Caste and Cine-Stars, the “people of Tamil Nadu…never took Periyar’s atheism very seriously. They took just what they wanted. They realized that his focus was more on demolishing the Brahmin’s hegemony over society and politics than demolishing the gods.”

Today, Brahmins are a non-issue in Tamil Nadu. But the newly empowered middle castes have adopted the mores of the upper castes. A new hierarchy, with echoes of the old, has developed -- and it has been strengthened, as elsewhere in India, by caste-driven electoral politics. The late sociologist MN Srinivas calls the phenomenon Sanskritisation. Being pious and following certain customs are ways of projecting one’s elevated caste status. This has resulted in a resurgence of local gods and goddesses -- Adi Parasakthi for example. And feature stories in Tamil weeklies are often about film stars and prominent personages visiting their villages to worship their family deities.

Cultural trends are too complex to be explained away by elegant-sounding theories; and faith is too multifaceted a sentiment to be tied merely to caste or status. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder: Was Sanskritisation largely the reason for the crowds at the Brihadishwara during Sani Pradosham that day?

Digital Confession to an Ayatollah

In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the author Hooman Majd visits Qom, the religious center for Shia learning. He tries to talk to the Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Mohammad Fazel Lankarani but is dismissed rather brusquely. Instead, Majd is taken to the “library and nerve center of his Web operation”. This is what he finds:

At a nicely air-conditioned building, a pleasant and self-taught computer-literate young man gave me a tour of the library and explained how Lankarani’s website [Google says visiting it is "dangerous" for software reasons, so proceed at own risk] operated in seventeen languages, including Swahili and Burmese, for all of his followers. It was updated daily with the Ayatollah’s proclamations, fatwas, or religious commands, if he’d issued any recently, and general information, but, most important, it was a place to ask questions: e-mails poured in every day in all seventeen languages and were carefully printed out, one by one, and arranged according to language in mailboxes for Lankarani’s Iranian and foreign talibs (Arabic for “students”, and where the word “Taliban” comes from) to translate, so that they could be answered by one of his senior staff, such as his son, but always reviewed by the Ayatollah himself. I was shown e-mails in English, translated into Farsi, where the Ayatollah had crossed out an answer and written his own, to be retranslated and transmitted back electronically. Most of the questions in the emails I saw related to sex; for example, a sixteen-year-old boy from England had written about his friend who had had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old boy and was worried that his prayers would be nullified and that he might be punished by God. The Ayatollah’s answer was refreshingly short and simple: repent and don’t do it again. No mention of homosexuality, no judgments -- who said the conservative Ayatollahs weren’t compassionate? I read the same thing, “repent”, page after page, for almost without exception the questioner had committed some kind of sin, or at least thought he had, or claimed to have a “friend” who had. I looked around at the banks of computers and the dark, highly polished wooden mail slots filled with printed emails: Digital confession, I thought. The Vatican should get into this.

Conversions, and the Virgin of Guadalupe

Conversions of the religious kind have always been controversial. Even in India – a country where you would think Hinduism is secure because of its sheer strength in numbers – the efforts of Christian missionaries cause a lot of consternation. But go to Mexico and the Indian complaint will seem a whine. Mexico in the early sixteenth century was bursting with its own beliefs but with the arrival of the Spaniards, it became the proselytizer’s paradise. Unlike India, which demonstrates an astonishing continuity in religious tradition dating back millennia, Mexico lost its old faiths and gave in to Catholicism.

It wasn’t easy in the beginning. The Spanish defeated the Aztecs in 1521, but the tipping point came only ten years later, when the brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared to Juan Diego. Diego was Indian, and he saw the virgin on the slopes of the Hill of Tepeyac in Mexico City. News of the miracle spread rapidly and resulted in mass conversions.

But the story isn't that simple. Tepeyac is believed to have been the worship site for the pre-Columbian, Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin. So what seems Catholic actually has indigenous roots; indeed, that must have been part of the appeal. Today, the Virgin is the preeminent religious figure and icon in Mexico.

(Picture from my Dec 2008 trip.)

In December last year, I visited Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City -- probably the second most visited Catholic shrine in the world. The church is at the summit of Tepeyac Hill, the same place Juan Diego saw Guadalupe. The principal attraction is an image of the Virgin at the lower end of a massive gold cross. Draped below is the flag of Mexico: at its center is the aggressive image of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus; a serpent wriggles in the clamp of its beak.

At first glance, the cross and the virgin suggest a common Christian theme. But when you learn that the virgin is not Mary but Guadalupe, and that the depiction on the flag captures the vision that inspired the “pagan” Aztecs to build the surreal lake city of Tenochtitlan – which the Spanish destroyed comprehensively and renamed as Mexico City – you realize that there is more to Mexico’s mass conversion than meets the eye.

When the majority feel they are the minority

Read this recent piece by Robert Kaplan on Sri Lanka. I don't agree with all of his points -- the closing bit about the historically inclusive nature of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the lesson it holds for the the country's current politicians seemed a little forced, a little pat -- but I liked the essay overall. Kaplan makes two main points. The first is that Buddhism, despite its remarkable worldwide appeal as a religion of peace, is just as likely as any other faith to be distorted by its followers:

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.

Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

The second point is that "there is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority". Kaplan is referring to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. And this is why they feel that way:

The Sinhalese...see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.

The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.

The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.

Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.

I have not read much about Sri Lanka, so I won't comment on whether this is a correct assessment. Readers are welcome to share their views. But the majority feeling like a minority -- that's a striking thought, isn't it? We see the same sentiment in other countries and regions.

Syādvāda: The Jain concept of relativity of knowledge

Chandradhar Sharma writes in A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy about a central concept in Jainism, Syādvāda:

Syādvāda is the theory of Relativity of knowledge. Reality has infinite aspects which are all relative and we can know only some of these aspects. All our judgments, therefore, are necessarily relative, conditional and limited.

The Jainas are fond of quoting the old story of the six blind men and the elephant. The blind men put their hands on the different parts of the elephant and each tried to describe the whole animal from the part touched by him. Thus the man who caught the ear said the elephant was like a country-made fan; the person touching the led said the elephant was like a pillar; the holder of the trunk said it was like a python; the feeler of the tail said it was like a rope; the person who touched it on the side said the animal was like a wall; and man who touched the forehead said the elephant was like the breast. And all the six quarreled among themselves, each one asserting that his description alone was correct. But he who can see the whole elephant can easily know that each blind man feels only a part of the elephant which he mistakes to be the whole animal. Almost all philosophical, ideological and religious differences and disputes are mainly due to mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth. Our judgments represent different aspects of the manysided reality and can claim only partial truth. This view makes Jainism catholic, broad-minded and tolerant. It teaches respect for others’ point of view.

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Why, you may wonder, this noticeable increase in posts to do with religion? Because I have never understood religion in any substantive way. The time has now come to fill that gap. And what better place to begin than with ancient Indian schools of thought. I grew up in the Hindu tradition but never was I told that there was more to practicing religion than rituals and boring visits to temples. I knew about Shankaracharya, but it was only last month that I learned that there is such a thing as Advaita Vedanta, which he preached; I was told Hinduism was polytheistic but only now am I beginning to learn that it is polytheistic only in manifestation, and that the Upanishads actually suggest the unity of all life, of everything in fact.

But let me not get carried away with details: all I wanted to say was that I need to catch up with reading of a different kind, and that there will be more posts to come on similar themes.