The Hindu Confusion
Hindus consider their epics to be deific contemporaries with the potential to trace a magnificent heritage…and that’s only the beginning! From digging for time honoured baby names in them to paying homage to places that get a mention in their narratives to marking their calendars and letting culture-bound norms run in unscientific directions, the impact these texts have on them, is immense.
However, this is not an attempt to say otherwise, rather it is one to inspect the progression of these wonderful texts through the eyes of a mere reader who fancies them for their very creative storylines…
The journey of the archetypal hero or heroes is a theme widely used in ancient epic poems. If it is Pandavas in Mahabharata, it is Ram in Ramayana and Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey , but these texts aren’t the word of God. Although their journeys show a deeper implication of people and their decisions, in the end, they are stories which are weaved into other stories that talk about wars, feuds, trickery, deceit, love, forgiveness, brotherhood, broken ambitions and sweet and sour victories. From movies and books to other works of art, these poems have been resonating across centuries. However, when Illiad and Odyssey remain compositions of high literary value, Mahabharata and Ramayana transcended their limits to shape Indian Hindu consciousness. Today, the cosmic scale of these two epics is immeasurable and hence it is not surprising that all of their tales and characters remain a metric to the Hindu psyche.
Drawing parallels with scriptures is never easy, even when we are fed with buttressed views that are reinforced with exaggerations from a very young age itself. For instance the Hindu paradigms of ‘dharma’,’karma’ and ‘moksha’ are really tricky. They almost always cancel out each other, and that thin line of balance is nearly impossible to achieve. And they aren’t the only abstractions out there, there are others like ‘swarg’, ‘narak’, ‘shrap’, ‘vardhan’ and many more. They exist in scriptures and is confusing in real life, but they still are very capable of indirectly creeping into the minds of scores of people who live by these texts. ‘Varnas’ for instance is one such. Ekalavya’s story is disturbing even when you tell them to a kid, but then it is what it is, and even for a tall tale like Mahabharata, it can be very trying and hard to defend! Times surely have changed, but we can still see people hanging onto the signature of their births, can’t we?
Make no mistake, Mahabharata and Ramayana are undoubtedly two of the best written texts in the world. They have stood the test of time, and have been and forever will be eternal jewels in Indian literature. There’s only that issue of how hypocritically we interpret their messages. Again, to each his own! While it’s completely acceptable to take in the essence of what you read about, hear about or was schooled on to apply into your life, it beats the purpose if in the end all we do is conditionally manipulate what’s there in them just to tailor to our needs and justify our actions when we need some ethical backing. Shouldn’t it be more universal, especially when we build our ethos on the morals from these texts? While the Bhagavad Gita does wield the power to make even the worst of men better, insisting on literalism flattens out the richness of the text and its multiple endowments. The truth remains that the Gita is still a dialogue restricted to the God and his devotee. It is intimate just like how faith should be, because what’s mine can never be yours!
Now the Hindu’s confusion begins with trying to decode these narratives with all the preconceptions and dogmatic interpretations which have been doing rounds for a really long time. For instance, when I was young, I was told Draupadi was the polyandrous wife of the Pandavas, whose laugh caused the calamitous Kurukshetra war. This image stuck with me for a long time until I got much older and read Chitra Divakaruni’s ’Palace of Illusions’, which viewed Draupadi in a totally different plane that even when I tried, I couldn’t equate her with the old depiction of hers anymore. Same was the case with Bhima in M T Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Randamoozham’! And ironically enough, given a chance this would be true for all characters and their many stories, because these accounts ultimately aren’t meant to be decrypted for others, they are meant to take their own form in the minds of their readers.
Often we miss out on the elements that make these characters and ideologies more relatable because they are often modified too much to fit into a fabric that is untainted and holy. But truth be told, the more we try to glorify them, the less valid they become, especially in an age where we push the children of today to have a scientific fervour and prompt them to ask more questions. At the end of the day, Mahabharata and Ramayana are allegories, which are deftly written and as their stories progress, the many utopian overtones and realistic undertones to the various instances and threads become more visible, even if enthusiasts choose not to see them. As it is, fact remains that everyone’s rights and wrongs have the privilege of being expedient. Your beliefs may never let you down, but the limits of those are confined just to you.
If all that sounds like it’s confusing, then perhaps it is! Not every reader is willing to delve into the rhetorics and indicative possibilities that can validate expressions of their faith today. For good or bad, impressions aren’t imbibed, but made.
