Chennai: Deeper the anxiety of an age, intense is the craving for a new basis of hope of some sort. And today, with the political right on the ascendant in many parts of the world - not just India-, it would not be an exaggeration to say ‘Spirituality’ is the new fashion of the day.
The ‘spiritual’ as a category of thought has become so diffused, so much mixed up with ‘branding’, its ‘avataar’ also takes various manifestations. A mix of mythology and history, a reinterpretation of the great Indian epics, ‘Ramayan’ and ‘Mahabharata’ and fresh insights of ‘human mindfulness’ in a Q and A landscape over existential anxieties are vying with one another to enlarge the room for ‘hope’, which today is no longer necessarily a theological category.
People, having to be largely mobile from village to town, from one town to another, city-to-city, continent-to-content, not to forget the teary-eyed ‘boat people’, with all their angst and uncertainty, need ladders to make sense of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, if not wellsprings to new inspiration. One may even call it rearticulating ‘hope’ in a world that is increasingly paranoid about migrations.
If there is one implied theme that may link the above mentioned five book arrivals, it is this theme. The ‘Saagar maala’ is so thin, yet unmistakable.
Amish or the Amish Tripathy of the famous ‘Shiva Trilogy’ fame, in his latest book, ‘Raavan - Enemy of Aryavarta’, offers this to readers as the third book in his ‘Ram Chandra’ series. If there is a meeting point, in ‘Ram’, Scion of Ikshavaku, ‘Sita’, Warrior of Mithila (the protagonists of the author’s first two books in this series) and in ‘Raavan’- Enemy of Aryavarta-, the author says that dramatic meeting point is in the ‘Kidnapping of Sita’.
Amish with his literary flourish and imaginative leaps, in this volume, appears to have redrawn a Sanskritic lore to unravel the presuppositions of the epic ‘Ramayana’, an extraordinary story blending myth and history, quite different from what children usually hear from their grandmothers.
Raavan already knew Sita, as a child, and he recognizes her as the daughter of Vedavati in a quick moment of recollection of happenings gone by in a Naga tribal village in the backdrop of a trade war between Lanka and Ayodhya that had unfurled- when he comes in his ‘pushpaka vimaan’ to abduct Sita. And we are told it is a power tussle between two great sages, Vashistha and Vishwamitra, that is really behind the Ram-Raavan war.
“The Vayuputras had supported Vashishtha’s decision to recognise Ram as the Vishnu. They too believed that it would be good for India,” writes Amish, seeking to give historical substance to the incarnations of Lord Vishnu. “It doesn’t matter what Raavan wants (he actually does no harm to Sita during her captivity). He’s a mere puppet, He’s not the one who is behind this.” “Then Who is?” ‘Vishwamitra’,” writes the author.
Is then the “animus between Vashistha and Vishwamitra” the primeval trigger of the Epic ‘Ramayan’ itself? Well, we have to await Amish’s next novel in this series. In Amish’s work we see the great epic and its possibility more as a vast, dynamic canvas for unfolding of an ideological struggle of who is the biggest Sage of them all. But earlier generations saw these great epics in a qualitatively different way, essentially as axiological guides, mediating between conflicts of ‘Dharmas’.
The Hyderabad-based software professional H A Padmini’s ‘Mahabharata And The Marvellous Cycle of Boons, Curses and Vows’, comes out as a gripping, realistic exposition of the doctrine of ‘Karma’ in Hinduism. As the author rightly points out the battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has been going on in all ages, not just our ‘Kali Yuga’ which is usually
designated as the age when all values crumble.
The author shows that though as epics, ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’ reflect the documentation of the tussle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as it rolled out in their times of ‘Treta Yuga’ and ‘Dwapara Yuga’ respectively, and ‘Kali Yuga’ by itself does not have an epic of its own, what is far more important is the “lessons to be learnt from the lives of the characters (in these epics)” in our efforts to better human conduct. The perennial relevance of ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’ lies in that affirmative quality, and not as source book of ideological battles/conflicts. Thus in Padmini’s book, rediscovering tradition has a universal, positive ring to it.
The third book in this lot, ‘The Happy Fruit Adventures- A Journey Through the Jungle of Life-’, is an allegorical work by another software professional Hari Ram Narayanan, about two youth undertaking a journey through ‘a jungle called life’ and trying to discover the ‘Happy Fruit’ that would end all their ills. Hari Ram has done a quasi-naturalistic exploration of character-traits from the animal world that helps to draw out positive strengths to travel and achieve in the jungle of life. The focus here is on right attitude that can emerge from a quasi-Darwinian mode! Hari may not call it survival of the fittest, but lessons nature can offer to get at it.
‘Answers From the Heart’ and ‘How To Fight’, energizing insights of Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the best known Zen Buddhist teachers of our times, come as thought healers in the days of religious strife and fundamentalism. His responses to burning questions people face in their day-to-day life, are not just in tune with the universal sweep of compassion and mitigation of suffering that Buddhist thought is known for, but also seeks to break down rigid walls of dogmatic theology between religions.
“It is possible for us to have several spiritual roots. To me, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and all religions belong to the spiritual heritage of humankind. We can profit from all these traditions. We should not confine ourselves to just one tradition. If you love mangoes, you are free to continue to eat mangoes, but no one forbids you to eat pineapples and oranges. You don’t betray your mango when you eat a pineapple. It would be narrow-minded to enjoy only mango, when there are so many different fruits in the world. Spiritual traditions are like spiritual fruits, and you have the right to enjoy them. It is possible to enjoy two traditions, to take the best of two traditions and live with them. That’s what I envision for the future, that we remove the barriers between different spiritual traditions,” says Thich Nhat Hanh, in a profound reflection on need for multiple traditions.
