The end of an ENCHANTED UNIVERSE

In the celebration of pluralist spiritual traditions, lie the roots of resistance against the hate rituals of the Hindutva brigade

Manisha Sethi Delhi

In the 14th century there lived a Kannada poet, Kumaravyasa, who gave up his plans to write yet another telling of the Ramayana because he heard that the combined weight of all the Ramayana poets was crushing the cosmic serpent which holds up the earth. Heeding the serpent's plight, he turned to other literary pursuits. In a delightful and erudite essay, AK Ramanujan, counts hundreds of Ramayana renditions in scores of languages across narrative and performative genres, each being shaped by the cultural context in which it developed, bearing the imprint of regional linguistic conventions and religious beliefs. The result was a remarkable plurality of script and cast: with the submissive, abandoned wife of Valmiki Ramayana substituted by a Ravana-slaying Sita in the Shakta tradition; the tragic figure of Ravana in the Jaina Padma Purana; Thai Ramakien's dashing casanova Hanuman and so on. 

When Ramanujan's ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas' was recently sought to be included in the History syllabus of Delhi University, it evoked a violent reaction from the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student's wing of the RSS/BJP. A cacophony of ‘insult', ‘injury', ‘hurt religious sentiments' was raised. For those who launched their political rise atop a Toyota ‘rath' for the building of a Ram temple at Ayodhya - any allusion to diverse and indeed contesting narratives of the Ram story are repugnant. This multiplicity of voices threatens the purveyors of "one culture, one nation" which can brook no deviation from the iron narrative emanating from Jhandenwalan, where the RSS holds fort in Delhi.

And this was by no means an isolated incident. Are we then turning our backs to a more gentle, pluralist and heterogenous past - one which allowed a single story to be re-told from a multitude of perspectives - towards a homogenous, pre-mixed, instant version of religious and cultural traditions, where differences are erased, and people ‘different' from ‘us' eliminated?

Indeed, there has been a respected and dominant strand within students of Indian history and culture that the bounded religious categories that we see today were a product of, in the first instance, of colonialism and its related institutions. That pre-colonial India was characterised by fuzzy boundaries, a great variety of religious practices shared by peoples whom we would today mark out as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. A time and space inhabited by liminal identities - a virtual ‘secular' paradise, where populations were united by their shared customs and practices. This was when Islam reached Kashmir through the rishi-sufi mystics who expounded Islamic values and contents in a decidedly Shaivite idiom and vocabulary:

Nirguna, manifest Thyself unto me,

thy name (alone) have I been chanting,

Lord help me reach the acme of

my spiritual desires,

I do remember (with gratitude) How kind Thou art

Thou revealed Quran unto him ...

(Mohammad Ishaq Khan, The Rishi Movement as a Social Force in Medieval Kashmir in Lorenzen (ed.) Religious Movements in South Asia)  

Shaikh Nuruddin, founder of the Rishi movement, considered the Shaivite woman mystic, Lal Ded, his spiritual mentor, hailing her as an avtara, and beseeched, "O God, grant me the same spiritual power (as her)".