Bhagavad Gita as the 'National Book'?

This piece of mine has appeared in CRI. It has been reproduced here with their consent. Not to be reproduced anywhere else without the same.

“The Bhagavad-Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization. – Sri Aurobindo”

Let’s be clear at the very outset that this piece arises from a premise that India/Bharata/Hindustan is an intrinsically a civilization whose roots are in Indic traditions and essentially should be a Rashtra  where its citizens are guided by the essence, ethos and ethics espoused by Indic philosophies.

Sri Krishna himself, in what is among the best creations of a mind ever – the Bhagavad-Gita, eschews from making exclusivist claims about the best path to tread and instead relates the various paths that can be tread to perfect oneself – Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Sankhya Yoga etc.

For me personally, the Sankhya Yoga, especially the part where Sri Krishna obliges Arjuna’s request to narrate the nature of the ‘SthitaPrajna – The Equanimous’, represents the pinnacle of all our civilization and its thought. My father, on the other hand, thinks that the Karma Yoga represents the ideal way to live. Then again, there is an elderly uncle, who thinks the Thirukkural is wisdom extraordinaire, above all else. My erstwhile landlord, an ardent follower of Basavanna, thinks that the Vachanas are a man’s best friend, philosopher and guide through all the crests and troughs of life.

Likewise there are many who would swear by the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata-as-a-whole and many other such creations of exalted minds, as the ultimate. Shakti-worshippers, Shaivites and other such schools of thought would probably subscribe to a different world-view which is also essentially Indic.

If naming the Bhagavad-Gita our ‘National Book’ is a way to show the nation is proud of such a gem, are we not equally proud of other creations of Indic thought?

If having a ‘National Book’ is about having a philosophical benchmark that the citizens and the State have to strive for, then why just the Bhagavad-Gita?

Superficially speaking, one may be able to portray that some of these varied schools of thought are mutually exclusive of, or better than others. The Bhagavad-Gita looks better and representative of our civilization to someone because that suits the conditioning of their mind. Ultimately all these are products of the same civilization and the same higher levels of intense thought. They are intertwined and derive from each other.

The wonder that is called Sanatana Dharma, thrives despite endless efforts from various quarters at finishing it, because it has not been built around a rigid framework of assertions pushed top-down from a central authority. It is a loose framework of schools of thought that have sprung up from a bottomless well of philosophical constructs which, at their core, have maintained the essentially Indic ethos and are not antagonistic or exclusive of each other, despite impassioned claims to that effect. Once we start dishing out the pride of this book or that school of thought over other ones in an institutionalized manner from the top, we are automatically doing a disservice to other branches that are as representative of our civilizational ethos.

How sensible is it to isolate the Bhagavad-Gita from the other strands of philosophy that added to it as well as our national character?

It can be said that the Western mainstream thought, limited in its capabilities of perception has reduced this gigantic banyan tree of Indic philosophies to the concepts of Karma, Re-incarnation and lately, Yoga.

We would be guilty of doing something similar by surrendering to such symbolism as making the Bhagavad-Gita our ‘National Book’ reducing the Indic nation to be represented by only the Bhagavad-Gita, while the reality is that it is one among the many shining jewels in the heavily bejeweled crown that is Bharateeya civilization.

This call to ask for the Bhagavad-Gita to be declared the ‘National Book’, is at best unnecessary as well as ill-informed and at worst harmful.

“Let’s not forget that we weren’t and should never be one-book civilizations.”

Bhyrappa - The Colossus

This piece of mine has appeared in CRI. It has been reproduced here with their consent. Not to be reproduced anywhere else without the same.

Few are the men who render effulgence to an award, rather than the other way round. Santeshivara Lingannaiah Bhyrappa, popularly known as S.L.Bhyrappa needs no introduction as a doyen with that particular ability. He was recently awarded the Saraswati Samman for his novel “Mandra”, in which he delves into the world of music and the lives of musicians through their own eyes.

Here is his excellent speech on receipt of this award. A must read, like all his other works.

If being born in a rural milieu, abject poverty, surviving a plague which takes away two siblings on the same day, losing one’s mother to the same plague later at the age of eleven, having to carry a younger sibling’s body on one’s own shoulders to cremate at the age of 15, later in life, walking all the way to Mumbai, begging for food, working as a coolie, yet completing a PhD, and going on to lead a life that includes trekking in the Alps cannot make a philosopher out of a man, what else can?

Here is a giant who is among the foremost philosophers of our time without resorting to sermons. He deals mostly in fiction, conveying profound philosophical journeys through the dialectics his characters indulge in. The striking factor of most of his writings are an apparent obscurity of the author himself or his opinions in a direct way (with the exception of his autobiography “Bhitti”), although the troughs and crests life threw at him lurk as an intense undercurrent in the experiences his characters undergo.

His constant quest for the truth shines through the intricacies that involve and encapsulate the characters in his novels. Rather than making characters ostentatiously behave in a certain way to achieve a defined goal, he extrapolates them onto a real canvas of relevant times through painstaking research and allows the society to affect the characters’ modalities.

His works usually are woven around macrocosmic and microcosmic dualities. For example, his “Gruhabhanga”, though on one level speaks of a rural woman Nanjamma’s travails in her setting of poverty, people around her and spousal indifference, it also speaks of a larger picture where Indic cultural values have been distorted to suit their own ends by different layers of the society.

He has a PhD in Aesthetics and his writings speak for themselves on the aesthetic front. Anyone who reads “Parva”, which many consider Bhyrappa’s greatest work, will vouch for how he recreates the Mahabharata, it’s characters, and gives new dimensions to them. Anyone who reads “Aavarana” will marvel at how he chooses to bring life to the Mughal era from the eyes of a neo-Islamic-convert-eunuch working at a Mughal noble’s harem, who had unhindered access to the minds of the Mughal women too. The predicaments of his characters and how he maps their thoughts onto the story he is creating makes him a treat to read. For some time there, you may forget someone has written this and begin thinking for the characters.

Bhyrappa has never allowed his own intellectual freedom to be taken away by either what the people ask for, or what other ‘secular intellectuals’ say about him or his work. He is much ahead of his time, in that, so far none has been able to slot him in any one flavor of modern Kannada literature like the Navya, the Bandaya or the Dalita sahitya. He remains free to write what he wants without ever being subservient to –isms and –ologies. Yet he is the best-selling author in Kannada in the last 25 years, the best-selling author in Marathi over the last decade and among the top 5 best-selling authors in Hindi.

Bhyrappa does industrious research about any subject he wishes to touch, and sometimes this research has run upto 5 years. Once he is convinced of something he says it like it is. Political correctness is another thing he abhors. A recommended read for all is his novel “Aavarana”, which has been translated to various languages. He rips the Marxist-distorted politically correct history apart with facts and figures and opines that the communal amity in India, if at all present, is superficial and cannot continue for long because it is not built on the basis of truth.

This, along with his no-nonsense stands and no-holds-barred opinions in favour of Indic cultural values, make Bhyrappa’s story vis-à-vis his peers and the powers that be, akin to the story of a few blind men coming across an elephant. Each blind man draws his own conclusion about the elephant. His sheer range, refusal to be immured by constrictions that ideologies foist on minds, versatility of themes and varied repertoire make him some sort of a litterateur-elephant in a society where lesser-gifted but more pompous and obstreperous ‘intellectuals’ abound. They are blinded by their ideologies and opportunism, and perceive him the way their obsequiousness to ideologies allows or disallows them.

That such elements oppose him, actually adds to his status of being one of the greatest exponents of the written word that Goddess Saraswati smiled upon.