The Awakening

One of the extraordinary, but often little remarked, aspects of the Mahabharata is that the epic reaches us after having percolated through the minds of various narrators. In the first indexical chapter called ‘Anukramanika’ which provides a bird’s eye view of what is to follow, we—along with the sages who lived in the Naimisha forest—hear the epic from Ugrashava, who tells us that he had heard the epic when Vaishampayana narrated it at King Janmejaya’s snake sacrifice, who in turn had learnt it from Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, the editor-author of the epic. But in turn Ugrashava tells that Vyasa had also taught the epic to his son Shuka, who in turn had sung it to the Gandharvas and the Asuras, leaving open the idea that other versions of the great epic of the Bharatas are out there. Before long, what one realises is that the Mahabharata, like a postmodern text, throbs with self-awareness about its own origins, the narrative multiplicities contained within, the various modes of transmissions involved and the possibility that other recensions may tell the story differently. In all of this, the reliance on ‘memory’ as the means to instantiate a particular telling of the epic remains vital. To this end, the ability to recall—which we call, quite blandly, ‘memory’—has acquired an extraordinary number of valences during the course of Indian history.

From the simple act of remembering an event or thing, to thinking of memory as a cure for psychological states (such as when a depressed Hanuman is told his origin story to awaken him), to recalling that which was forgotten due to Fate or a clever dramatist (as in, when Dushyanta remembers Shakuntala in Kalidasa’s Abhijñana Sakuntalam), to models in Nyaya philosophy wherein memory (smriti) fuses with sustained awareness (pratyabhijña) to constitute imagination (bhavana), to an omniscient recollection of previous and futures lives (what the Jainas call ‘kevalin’), memory has had more valences in our cultural past than we realise in our secularised present. In our times, memory is deemed pregnant with the possibility of supervening the political status quo—a possibility that the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera summarises as ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.

Perhaps nowhere is the interplay between memory and forgetfulness mined more fruitfully in the Indian tradition than in the Ramayana. Here memory and forgetfulness sometimes appear in the same character. Hanuman, who famously remembers Rama for all eternity, is often mysteriously forgetful as well. To the amusement of children for centuries, in the ‘Yuddha Kanda’ of the Ramayana Hanuman goes in search of a cure for the wounds that Ravana’s son Indrajit had inflicted on Lakshmana. But despite the guidance and instructions of Sushena, an aged physician-ape in Sugriva’s simian army, to look for the sanjivani herbs upon arriving at the Gandhamadana Hills, Hanuman forgets what it is that he is looking for. ‘I have forgotten the very thing for which I have come here,’ says Hanuman in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Later in the epic, after the War of Lanka, Hanuman is instructed by Rama to head to Ayodhya, scope out the nature of his brother Bharata’s intention—Was he amenable to his elder brother’s return? Did he have mala fide intentions? And so on—and return to report the status. But, once more, Hanuman forgets to follow through and, instead, ends up bonding deeply with Bharata. More strikingly, even Rama himself every so often ‘forgets’ who he truly is. In turn, he is prompted by others who emerge onto the scene and remind him of his true nature, which is that he is an avatar of Vishnu tasked with ridding the world of Ravana, who embodies choas and cruelty despite all his learning. In essence, even Rama who is according to Hindu tradition the embodiment of Dharma, of righteousness codified by procedure and precedent, every so often needs a prompt and reminder of what truly matters.

Unlike texts where the author can devise the means to remind characters and readers of the narrative needs of the plot, cultures and civilisations arrive at other ways to institutionalise memory. Among these, solutions devised by early Hindu and Buddhist traditions to ameliorate this problem of forgetfulness—be it of our reliance on and sustenance of the gods or the debt we owe to our ancestors—the most prominent has been to construct architectural assemblages in the privacy of homes as aedicules for worship or in public in the form of monuments. In both cases, the act of remembering the past and the gods is married to physical edifices that can withstand the elements. So strong is this commingling of stone structures and ideas of the hereafter that even to this day in Tamil Nadu, funerals are still sometimes referred to as kal-eduppu (awakening or erecting the stone). Over time, these structures—some of them were hypaethrals and others were closed-roof structures—acquired and accreted upon themselves other meanings, including the idea that within these structures were housed the gods. A vast litany of terms and their cognates—mandira, sthana, griha in Sanskrit; podiyil, manram, kottam, koyil, madom in Tamil; vihara, palli in Jainism-Buddhism-inflected usage—has been used over the last three millennia to accommodate what is, ultimately, a public space for that most private of acts: communion with oneself and the unseen that thrives amid us.

In our own lifetimes, perhaps the most widely watched and eagerly anticipated structure is the creation of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. But this structure comes up at a time when we have largely forgotten what temples have often meant to societies—and simply insist on thinking of these as places of worship. It is a testament to the aetiolation in our thinking and the inability to think past colonial readings or the lack of vocabulary in our republic’s secular discourse which insists on reading the temple as merely a Hindu church or a Hindu mosque. It has not helped that over the past 40-odd years, the legal quagmires and violent discontents with which the Ram Janmabhoomi movement has often been aligned with has uniformly traduced our understanding of the temple as the byproduct, or the end goal, of a property dispute and a political project. To this end, the result has been a curious desiccation of our understanding of the role temples have played in India’s collective imagination and, more importantly, a failure to ask what particular role the Ayodhya temple will play in the future of India. Those who litigate in the public square on the proposed Ram temple in the name of ‘secularism’ often forget that temples have rarely existed outside the social environs in which they are part of. The consequence is that temples accrete norms, find means for new negotiations between their devotees and their needs and ultimately acquire a bivalent character—which, on the one hand, is steeped in ritual and procedure, and, on the other, acquires the all-too-real functions that any thriving institution needs. Temples, in this sense, are texts built out of stone—where the reader and the author are in perpetual tension on the question of interpretation.

Unlike a particular church or mosque, contrary to how it is often portrayed, a temple is a more elastic and capacious site of social renegotiations. In parts this capaciousness is born out of the understanding of how the gods emerge into a particular space. In most common forms of Christianity and Islam, it is the community of worshippers that transforms space into a formal church or a mosque. In both cases, the space or geography itself has little codified meaning and all meaning arrives through the presence of devotees. In contrast, in most Hindu traditions, the very process of transfiguring space into a temple involves the act of inviting the gods who are out there and placing them into an enclosed space. Elaborate rituals are devised to house the gods, who aren’t often amenable to human entreaties and efforts to situate them. In exchange for taking away the gods’ freedom to meander and make playthings out of our lives, humans offer to worship the gods to sustain their prowess. Intimately tied to this metaphysics of space and consecration are questions like who can do the invitation, how does one speak to the gods, what is the signification of worship, what kind of gods are acceptable, what is the relationship among them? The different answers to these questions have led to an efflorescence of religious expressions and social functions. Three relatively less common examples should help us see the diversity of interplay between the temple and the societies in which it finds itself.

At the Udayagiri caves, near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, over the past century, archaeologists have patiently worked to shed light on inscriptions that speak of the tenure of Chandragupta II and Kumaragupta I in the 4th-5th centuries CE. What makes Udayagiri fascinating is the coming together of ritual, kingship and religion. Here, we learn of Chandragupta II’s rajasuya yajna, which consecrated him as chakravartin (the emperor), by describing himself as paramabhagavata, the most prominent of devotees of Vishnu. To this end, in Cave 8, there are verses recorded in the anustubh metre that describes the consecration of a cave into a shrine and Chandragupta II’s blessedness courtesy the worship of Narasimha. This place of worship was crucial in the construction and legitimation of a sovereign, who governed over diverse principalities which had agreed to the legitimacy of Chandragupta II’s powers. This is a roundabout way of saying that right from the Gupta era—to say nothing of Ashoka nearly a millennium earlier—there were ideologically coherent claims of state formation that was linked to the creation of formal places of worship.

On the other end, in Tamil Nadu’s South Arcot district is a temple of Draupadi Amman—the heroine of the Mahabharata as the Mother Goddess—outside which are smaller temples to other deities who are guardians of the place. One of these deities is the figure of Muttaal Ravuttan—a godhead with a belly, who demands meat and toddy as offering. And there is one other detail: Muttaal Ravuttan is a Muslim warlord who is the descendant of north Indian horseriders who had arrived into Tamil country. In some versions of his origin story, Ravuttan agrees to abandon Islam in order to serve Draupadi after she appears in his dream and prevents him from killing his sister. In this case, the temple of Draupadi Amman becomes a site of complex social negotiations over generations where historical chronology of belief formation is largely irrelevant.

For much of the colonial period, the Maha Bodhi temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar—which was then controlled by Naga Sadhus, not Buddhists—the primary object of veneration and prayer for Hindus was the Bodhi tree. The idol inside the temple—a Buddha with a Vaishnaivite mark on his forehead—was secondary. Later when the questions of temple ownership rose to the fore, the mahant transformed the Buddha from a Vaishnavite avatar into a Shaivite manifestation of Rudra by smearing his forehead with vermillion and describing him as Shiva’s dreaded form of Mahakala Bhairava. In his wonderful biography of Anagarika Dharmapala, the great Sri Lankan reformer-radical, the author Steven Kemper quotes an anonymous author who had complained about this transformation of a deity into a shapeshifting being.

As the temple at Ayodhya slowly awakens into form, two things are clear. One, the politics of how the temple came to be will slowly erode and only ideologically convenient summaries will remain. Two, the more interesting aspect is not the politics of the temple’s history, but rather how Hindus deal with the creation of a longheld collective aspiration. What kinds of eclecticism, esotericisms and engagements from across India will accrete upon this temple? Will its practices and presence resemble the relatively homogenous temples of the Swaminarayan sects or will it resemble the swirling chaos of the ghats of Varanasi where traditions have stained and coloured the space over millennia? Will the leaders of the temple’s administration find it within themselves to be innovative by transcending caste or geography as Adi Sankara did millennia ago when he created traditions wherein Veerashaiva men from Karnataka became priests at the temples in Kedarnath, Namboodiri Brahmins from Kerala at Badrinath or priests from Nepal and Maharashtra at Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu. The Ayodhya temple, which has come at great human cost—in blood and time—ought to be seen as an opportunity that allows for the diversity of worship of Rama across India and beyond to burble up into public view. The temple now offers itself as a site for a new generation to think for themselves about this wave of history and faith that has washed in, sweeping away a great amount of historical angst and refuse. In turn, it has produced a clearing, an opening, a new cloistered ground unto which much ritual and ceremony will be poured freely. All the while, man will anxiously ask that oldest of questions he has asked himself since the dawn of religious consciousness: will the gods accept this offering?

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