Aarya is a brilliant celebration of women in ancient India. A retelling of the famous female characters of Indian texts, it enthrals, illuminates, and makes us think. The modern narratives of feminism have reached some unbelievable levels, where today one half of the population is essentially against the other half. The modern reading and the colonial consciousness pervading all around give a warped interpretation of our stories too, causing immense damage to the cultural fabric of India.
In contrast to the “rights-based” characterization of women, Indian culture placed women in harmony with not only men but with the ecology, society, and country. The importance that sages and thinkers gave to women was not about egoistic self-assertion but a realisation of potential. It is the ultimate ideals of a culture that determine the nature of every individual and institution, whether in politics, ecology, the arts, literature, or even the sciences. For India, as scholars have insisted, the ideal has been moksha, and it is an intricate component of the purusharthas (dharma, artha, kama, and moksha). Dharma is the basic framework for acquiring both the pleasures of the external world (artha and kama) as well as the final aim of all life—moksha.
Every route or vocation has potential, and a being of any gender, varna, or vocation has an equal opportunity to reach the final state. It has been the greatest misrepresentation when colonial and subsequent narratives begin their "oppressive and hierarchical" structuring of Indian culture with the "denial" of reading the Vedas. The highest ideal of the nation was moksha, for which reading or learning the Vedas was never a pre-requisite. Veda learning was a matter of duty in perpetuating the culture, which later degenerated into a matter of rights and hierarchy.
In the framework of the Purusharthas, our ancient sages conceived the nature of women in India. As a daughter, wife, mother, and as a talent pursuing the arts, sciences, and philosophies, the focus on women is that of respect and celebration. The Dharmic ideal is firstly based on duties (a desireless activity) rather than rights, and secondly on group harmony rather than the intense individualism of the western world. In the literature, women have been sacred, and the divinity of the feminine, most intense in the tantric practises, remains integral to Indian culture.
However, the superimposition of western feminism on Indian cultures leads to distortions. It is not that everything is great about Indian women; they are subject to discrimination and exploitation, many of which are severe. However, as is typical of modern narratives, the worst of a system comes to represent the whole. In modern narratives focusing on rights, there is now an intense negativity attached to the ideas of motherhood, lactation, and the important role women play in perpetuating the species.
The Importance of Stories in Indian Culture
Stories, a unique Indian way of preserving the past, form the foundation of our socialising process and learning of moral values through a process called mimesis, as Balagangadhara explains in his writings. In western culture, stories may entertain and form a genre of literature, but they do not instruct. The incredible stock of stories present in our culture, where there is a story available for every conceivable situation, works both as theoretical models representing small parts of the world and as practical exemplars that one can emulate. The exemplars, or stories, are generative of new actions in different contexts. This is in severe contrast to western culture, where there are certain context-free moral principles to imbibe and apply for the rest of one’s life.
Secular historians teach us that our stories are merely disguised historiographies, poetic exaggerations, or lies by our ancestors. Yet, there is a specific Indian cultural attitude when we say, “Rama and Krishna may not have existed, but the Ramayana or Mahabharata are always true.” Indians, while growing up, learn that we should treat our stories and epics (Itihasas) as different from the claims of our history, geography, and science lessons. As Balagangadhara says, converting Itihasa into history would destroy our past as the remembered past of a thriving and rich culture.
Martin Farek (India in the Eyes of the Europeans) shows how Christian theology, later secularised, defined the way of European historiography as a linear chronological narrative (beginning of the universe, Christ’s advent, his second coming, and then the end of the world) and played havoc with the understanding of the Indian past. In the secularised form, the framework of universal global history persisted with the linear concept of time directed from a primitive paganism filled with “allegories, falsities, fabrications, myths, or fables” towards a “modernity” involving all of humanity. Unfortunately, historians trapped in religious thinking and Eurocentrism retain this view when they look at our stories.
Either "history proper (or true)" or a "myth (thus false)" does not allow other possibilities for a different way of dealing with the past. Indian traditions deal with the past by mingling stories with the preservation of the names and actions of their ancestors, rulers, and important figures. Thus, in Indian culture, there is no ‘primitive’ past but an ‘ancient’ past with stories relevant across time.
Nobody could have put this better than Ananda Coomaraswamy (The Hindu Tradition: The Myth): Like the Revelation (sruti) itself, we must begin with the Myth (itihâsa), the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection…The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowever and everywhere…The “Myth” is not a “poetic invention” in the sense these words now bear: on the other hand, and just because of its universality, it can be told, and with equal authority, from many different points of view.
He continues: It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “truth” and “original form” of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres: “There is no other origin of philosophy than wonder,” Plato, (Theatetus 1556). And in the same way Aristotle who adds “therefore even a lover of fables is in a way a lover of wisdom, for fables are compounded of wonder” (Metaphysics 982b). Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.
By DR. PINGALI GOPAL
(The content of this article reflects the views of writers and contributors, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
Leave Your Comment