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Tag: hinduism
There is a legend about a magic tree, kalpataru, that fulfills all wishes. Indian civilization is this tree of riches and wisdom. Kings and emperors sought to conquer India for its material wealth; the campaign of Alexander, the unceasing attacks of the Turks, the voyage of Columbus, the British empire—these had India as the focus. Indian sages, philosophers and mystics have held out a shining vision that has appealed to the world. Even Alexander took Indian yogis back to Greece with him. Indian thought influenced not only China and Southeast Asia, it may also have provided key impulses to Western thought. We find the Indic people in West Asia in the second millennium BC in the Kassite kingdom of Babylon and the Mitannis of Syria. The father of the famous Queen Kiya of Egypt was the Mitanni king Tushratha (or Dasharatha). The Indic element has been seen in the beginnings of Greek art. It is quite conceivable that the religious traditions of West Asia preserve a remembrance of their Indic past.The modern mind was shaped after adoption by the West of the twin beliefs of living in harmony with nature and search for a scientific basis to reality. In the past 300 years, these ideas of universality and a quest for knowledge have transformed European and American society. Many of the greatest writers and scientists of the past 100 years have taken inspiration from these Indic ideas.
Erwin Schrödinger
Perhaps the most remarkable intellectual achievement of the twentieth century was quantum theory, which is at the basis of our understanding of chemistry, biology, and physics and, consequently, it is at the basis of the century’s astonishing technological advances. One of the two creators of this theory was Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961). In an autobiographical essay, he explains that his discovery of quantum mechanics was an attempt to give form to central ideas of Vedanta which, in this indirect sense, has played a role in the birth of the subject. In 1925, before his revolutionary theory was complete,
Erwin Schrödinger wrote:
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence,but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world.”
Schrödinger’s influential What is Life? (1944) also used Vedic ideas. The book became instantly famous although it was criticized by some for its emphasis on Indian ideas. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA code, credited this book for key insights that led him to his revolutionary discovery. According to his biographer Walter Moore, there is a clear continuity between Schrödinger’s understanding of Vedanta and his research: The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles.
During the next few years, Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One. He became a Vedantist, a Hindu, as a result of his studies in his search for truth. Schrödinger kept a copy of the Hindu scriptures at his bedside. He read books on Vedas, yoga, and Sankhya philosophy and he reworked them into his own words, and ultimately came to believe them. The Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita were his favourite scriptures.
According to his biographer Moore, “His system—or that of the Upanishads— is delightful and consistent: the self and the world are one and they are all. He rejected traditional western religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive.” Schrödinger was a professor at several universities in Europe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. During the Hitler era he was dismissed from his position for his opposition to the Nazi ideas and he fled to England. For some years he was in Ireland, but after the conclusion of the World War II he returned to Vienna where he died in 1961.
Quantum mechanics goes beyond ordinary logic. According to it reality is a superposition of all possibilities which is very different from classical physics. It is quantum mechanics which explains the mysteries of chemical reactions and of
life. In recent years, it has been suggested that the secrets of consciousness have a quantum basis. In a famous essay on determinism and free will, Schrödinger expressed very clearly the sense that consciousness is a unity, arguing that this
“insight is not new From the early great Upanishads the recognition Atman = Brahman (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.”
He thought the idea of pluralization of consciousness and the notion of many souls to be naive. He considered the notion of plurality to be a result of deception (maya): “the same illusion is produced by a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt. Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.”
Schrödinger was a very complex person. But he had a sense of humor and paradox. He called his dog Atman. Perhaps he did this to honour Yudhishthira whose own dog, an incarnation of cosmic justice (Dharma), accompanied him on his last march to the Himalayas. More likely, he was calling attention to the unity that pervades the web of life.
Erwin Schrödinger Quotes
‘The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on super imposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One’
‘Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.’
‘Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge.. It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further – when man dies his karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.’
‘There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction….The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad.’
‘The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West.’
‘After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.’
“Some blood transfusion from the East to the West” to save Western science from spiritual anemia.”
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Categories
Masters of Language
The events of September 11 remind us how words can convert ordinary people into mass murderers. But there are good words and bad words. Here we speak of three people whose words have done a lot of good for more than two thousand years. One could even say that these three people transformed the world.
Although most ancient narrative is as myth, a code language intermixing history, psychology, astronomy and metaphysics, three ancient sages wrote about language with great directness. Euclid (c 300 BC) in his Elements describes the language of mathematical ideas, Panini (c 450 BC) in his Ashtadhyayi describes the language of universal grammar, and Bharata Muni (c 450 BC) writes about the languages of gesture, dance and music in his Natya Shastra. Of these three we are reasonably certain of the dates of Panini and Euclid but much less of Bharata.
Euclid, educated in Plato’s academy, did his work in Alexandria. He presented Greek mathematics and geometry in terms of axioms and theorems. His approach was so elegant that his book remained the textbook of elementary geometry and logic up to the early twentieth century. Its formal method became the standard to be emulated for every new discipline. The idea of a short constitution to which all pay allegiance may ultimately be traced to Euclid’s framework.
Panini described the grammar of Sanskrit algebraically in complete detail, an achievement that has not been matched for any other language until today. Panini’s grammar is as intricate in its structure as the most powerful computing machine. The scope of his achievement qualifies Panini as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. Not only did he influence attitudes in the East for centuries, his ideas led to the development of the subject of philology in the West.
Sadly, good ideas can be used for evil deeds. Philology became the underpinning of a racist attitude to history that was used to justify European colonialism, leading ultimately to Nazism. This racist attitude persists today in many departments of Sanskrit and Indian studies. It was embraced by the left in India, where it remains an ugly underside of the political discourse. Arcane philological controversies can garner headlines in the left’s political magazines in India.
Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra not only presents the language of creative expression, it is the world’s first book on stagecraft. It is so comprehensive that it lists 108 different postures that can be combined to give the various movements of dance. Bharata’s ideas are the key to an understanding of Indian arts, music and sculpture. They provide an insight into how different Indian arts are expressions of a celebratory attitude to the universe.
Five of the thirty-six chapters of the Natya Shastra are devoted to music. Bharata speaks of the 22 shrutis of the octave, the seven notes and the number of shrutis in each of them. He explains how the vina is to be tuned. He also describes the dhruvapada songs that were part of musical performances.
The concept of rasa, enduring sentiment, lies behind the aesthetics of the Natya Shastra. There are eight rasas: heroism, fury, wonder, love, mirth, compassion, disgust and terror. Bharata lists another 33 less permanent sentiments. The artist, through movement, voice, music or any other creative act, attempts to evoke them in the listener and the spectator. This evocation helps to plumb the depths of the soul, thereby facilitating self-knowledge.
Euclid and Panini are well known to scholars and the general public. Euclid’s formal system became the exemplar for European science. Panini’s algorithmic approach to knowledge was the model for scientific theories in the Indic world, extending from India to the east and Southeast Asia. The ideas of the Natya Shastra make intelligible the sculpture, temple architecture, performance, dance and story telling of the culture of east and Southeast Asia.
But Bharata’s great text lay forgotten in India for almost a thousand years, his ideas remembered mainly through secondary sources. This is surprising considering this work has a sweep broader than that of Euclid or Panini. It is easy to understand success in devising a method of geometrical reasoning or finding the algebra of grammar as they are inherently structured. But imagine the audacity of creating a language for gesture, dance and music! Also, Euclid and Panini wrote for the scholar, whereas Bharata’s work influenced millions directly or indirectly. For these reasons alone, the Natya Shastra is one of the most important books ever written.
To appreciate the pervasive influence of the Natya Shastra, just consider music. Bharata’s work helps us see that ancient Greek music was similar to Indian music. The comprehensiveness of the Natya Shastra forged a tradition of tremendous pride and resilience that survived the westward movement of Indian musical imagination through the agency of itinerant musicians. Several thousand Indian musicians were invited by the fifth century Persian king Behram Gaur. Turkish armies used Indians as professional musicians.
The large Roma exodus from north India as a consequence of the Ghaznavid invasions gives us a clearer link between Indian music and the West. The Roma in Europe, living as tinkers, craftsmen, horse traders and entertainers — a despised minority in the fringes of society — were able to maintain cultural continuity, especially in music.
Their devotion to their ways earned them grudging respect for exemplifying ‘freedom’ which by the late 18th century had caught the imagination of Europe fighting the suffocation of the Church. Slowly, the Roma (Gypsy) singers began to enjoy the patronage of the middle-class and the aristocracy.
According to Linda Burman-Hall: “Gypsy bands… travelled from village to village accompanying the ‘strong’ dancing of soldiers who recruited continuously for Nicolas the Magnificent’s military operations. The style of this verbunkos (the so-called ‘recruiting’ music), — a deliberate fusion of earlier Gypsy music (such as the 16th century works preserved in organ tablature) and elements of the western European tradition, — influenced Haydn and other classical composers because it was favored by public taste. As a national fashion this style remained popular through the 19th century with composers such as Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert, Brahms, von Weber, Doppler and especially Liszt writing in a ‘style Hongrois’ influenced by the jagged rhythms and fantastic cadences of the verbunkos style.”
Bharata stresses the transformative power of creative art. He says, “It teaches duty to those who have no sense of duty, love to those who are eager for its fulfillment, and it chastises those who are ill-bred or unruly, promotes self-restraint in those who are disciplined, gives courage to cowards, energy to heroic persons, enlightens men of poor intellect and gives wisdom to the learned.”
Our life is spent learning one language or another. Words in themselves are not enough, we must learn the languages of relationships, ideas, music, games, business, power, and nature. There are some languages that one wishes did not exist, like that of evil. But evil, resulting from ignorance that makes one act like an animal, is a part of nature and it is best to recognize it so that one knows how to confront it. Creative art show us a way to transcend evil because of its ability to transform. This is why religious fanatics hate art.
Modern inquiry began as a search for the language of inanimate nature. Science slowly expanded into living systems and now with investigations into behavior and cognition it has come close to the ancient meaning of the term. The languages of cognition and music may be seen as the pinnacle of this journey of science. Bharata Muni’s text is a most useful guide to the weary traveler on this path.
by Professor Subhash Kak
Resources: To understand the milieu in which Panini and Bharata Muni arose, read G. Feuerstein, S. Kak, D. Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India. (Quest Books, 2001)
The best translation of the Natya Shastra is by Manomohan Ghosh (Manisha Granthalaya, Calcutta, 1967). Unfortunately, it is out of print. I am hoping this column will inspire some reader to arrange for its reprint.
Subhash Kak is an Indian American computer scientist. He is Regents Professor and Head of Computer Science Department at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater who has made contributions to cryptography, neural networks, and quantum information
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As Christianity expanded leaving in its trail genocides,pillage and the destruction of indigenous pagan traditions it couldn’t always break the spirit of the common people it persecuted who still prayed to the old gods and celebrated them in most cases secretly. So the church had another method of destroying the ancient traditions by Christianizing the traditional pagan festivals and legends.For example Easter and Christmas are really old pagan festivals but now Christianized . This was the art of inculturation which still continues and Hinduism being its biggest target.
When India came under the British Empire the native Indians had to be colonised and made subservient to that empire.So the colonial education programme was started and at the forefront of this were educationists who were also christian missionaries who applied the art of inculturation.To keep up with European colonial race theories Indians were divided under the fictional (north) Aryan and (south) Dravidian races.Unfortunately many of these educationists instead of being exposed for what they really were are celebrated for their love of Hindu Culture.There’s probably more proof to that proving the world is flat and if you sail to end of the ocean you fall of the planet.The following is an exposure by writer Thamizhchelvan showing how Tamil language and society came under the manipulation of the art of inculturation…
Misinformation campaigners project missionaries such as G.U. Pope, Constantine Joseph Beschi, Robert Caldwell, Barthalomaus Ziegenbalg, Francis Whyte Ellis and Dr. Samuel Green et al as great champions of Tamil and magnificent contributors to its development, including the introduction of “prose” writing. Of these, Francis Whyte Ellis or ‘Ellis Durai’ in Tamil, was a Madras-based civil servant in the British government and Samuel Green a doctor in Sri Lanka; both supported missionaries in evangelical causes.
All the above mentioned missionaries landed in Tamil Nadu with one “holy” aim of converting Tamil Hindus and christianising Tamil Nadu. Ironically, the writer Dr. K. Meenakshisundaram termed the era of these evangelists as the “Golden Period” of Tamil in his book, The Contribution of European scholars to Tamil, originally presented as the author’s thesis at the University of Madras, 1966. So it is all the more imperative for us to demolish this myth of Christian contribution to the development of Tamil and bring out the truth.
Missionaries and their Mission
After landing in Tamil Nadu, the padris understood the need to learn the local language to converse with the populace for effective evangelization. They soon realized that the local populace, rooted in a centuries-old civilization, was culturally and religiously strong; hence they focused on Tamil literature to understand the cultural heritage and religious traditions, so they could devise different strategies for conversion. It needs to be understood clearly that these priests learnt Tamil language and literature with an agenda and not out of love or passion or with an intention of contributing to the growth of the language.
Moreover, it would not have been enough if these padris alone understood the cultural heritage and religious tradition of India; it had to be understood by the Church establishments which sent these missionaries on “holy” assignments. Only then could the masters realise the extent of manpower, money power and political power needed to destroy the 5000 year old culture and convert a spiritually strong India. That was why the priests learnt Tamil and translated the main literatures and wrote similar Christian works.
Abrahamic religions are political in nature; they are intrinsically political concepts more than religions, and aim to bring the entire world under their rule. They gain political power, capture territories and convert people. This was also the agenda of the Christian missionaries and the motive for them to learn our languages and literatures.
The Establishments
Starting from the 16th century, Christian aggression slowly spread to many parts of India. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, German and British establishments landed in places such as Goa, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and the North-East, etc., in the guise of trade and missions, and started encroaching fast and armed invasions followed suit. The Portuguese Inquisition in Goa was a bloody and terrible chapter in Indian history and the British oppression started with the advent of East India Company.
After capturing power and establishing Crown rule in 1858, the British government gifted vast stretches of lands to the churches and supported them with other infrastructures. They knew that the combined onslaught of political and religious power would produce quick results. It is pertinent to note that Indians have not woken up to this threat even after Independence, hence the government is being run by an Italian Catholic via a puppet prime minister, and many policy decisions are being taken in deference to the US administration.
Journalist Subbu in Dravidian Maya (Tamil) says that the Christian priests who landed in Tamil Nadu from foreign lands laid the foundation for Dravidianisation in Tamil Nadu as they knew Indians could not be subjugated as long as Hindu Dharma prevails. Speaking about the beginning of Christian encroachment, Subbu says, “The Dutch established their trade centres in Pulicat (Pazhaverkaadu) in 1609, Sadras (Sadurangapattinam) in 1647, Nagapattinam in 1660; the British set up shops in Masulipatnam in 1622, Madras in 1639, Cuddalore in 1683 and also in Calcutta; the French got Pondicherry in 1674 and the Danish settled in Tranquebar (Tharangampaadi) in 1620.”
He adds, “On one hand the Padires straight away indulged in conversions and on the other hand they started creating rift among the Hindus to divide them.” In the chapter “Caldwell’s Cousins”, he explains vividly the various methods of conversion used by the Padires and how they divided Hindu society (Dravida Maayai, Trisakthi Publications, Chennai, 2010; pp. 20-28).
As part of the agenda of grabbing political power and converting the population, the Christian missionaries, to destroy the native culture, also indulged in “Inculturation”.
- ‘Inculturation’ – A danger to communal amity! http://www.newstodaynet.com/col.php?section=20&catid=29&id=8512)
Roman Brahmin!
The man who laid the foundation of inculturation was the Italian priest Robert de Nobili (1577-1656). He learnt Sanskrit and Tamil, wore saffron robes, sacred thread (attached with a small Cross!), sandal mark on forehead and called himself a ‘Roman Brahmin’. He set up an “ashram” in Madurai, became a vegetarian and used “Pathukas” (wooden footwear). He claimed the Bible was the “Lost Veda”, the “Jesuit Veda” revealed by God, and was considerably successful in harvesting souls. Fortunately for Tamil Nadu, his European masters were not happy with his inculturation methods and subjected him to an enquiry which forced him to shift to other places like Trichy and Salem. Finally he settled in a small house in Santhome, Madras, and died in 1656. (The Portuguese in India, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1990, & Christianity in India: A critical study, Vivekananda Kendra Prakasham).
De Nobili is supposed to have written some 15 books apart from preparing a Portuguese-Tamil dictionary. He is credited with the insertion of many biblical terms in Tamil and no wonder Christianity was developed rather than the Tamil language!
Approving untouchability, he said in 1650, “A person need not disown his caste, creed and culture to become a Christian. Those who say that these would get spoilt if one becomes a Christian are ‘Saathaans’. This teaching is the main obstacle in spreading Christianity”. [A. Sivasubramanian, Kiruththvamum Saathiyum (Christianity and Caste), Kaalachuvadu Publishers; cited in Dravida Maayai, p. 19).
Italian Munivar!
The next Italian missionary, Constantine Joseph Beschi (1680-1746), called himself Veeramaamunivar (Veer-Maha-Munivar) to pretend he was a great lover of Tamil. Outwardly conducting himself like a Hindu sanyasi, he took care of the conversion business in the districts of Madurai and Thanjavur. His work on a biography of St. Joseph, Thembaavani, was hyped as a great work and projected as equivalent to Kambar’s Ramayana!
Even now it is propagated that impressed with the beauty and richness of Kamba Ramayana, Beschi wanted to create a similar Christian work and hence came out with Thembaavani. It benefitted Christianity by establishing St. Joseph in Tamil Nadu. But it contributed nothing to the development of the Tamil language. How could the biography of a Christian saint help the growth of Tamil? He then came out with another work ,Paramartha Guruvum avarin Seedarkalum (Paramartha Guru and his Disciples), to ridicule our centuries old guru-sishya parampara This “munivar”, who denigrated our guru-sishya parampara, was honoured by Dravidian racists who installed a statue of him on Marina Beach.
German Iyer!
In the same period, a German missionary Barthalomaus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719) also worked in Tamil Nadu and called himself Ziegenbalg Iyer. This Protestant priest landed in Tranquebar (Tharangampaadi) in 1706 and worked with a Danish company which was the first to bring German printing machines to Tamil Nadu. He printed the first Tamil Bible (New Testament). Even while indulging in conversions, he often quarrelled with the Danish authorities who put him in jail for some time. He was the first to stoke anti-Brahmanism by creating a hatred for Brahmins among other communities. As he fell sick often, he died at the age of 36 in 1719, leaving behind two churches, a training institute for converted Indian priests, and 250 converts in Tranquebar.
When the Lutheran Church, which grew in size over the years, celebrated the 300th anniversary of his arrival in Chennai in July 2006, Tamil Nadu Governor Surijit Singh Barnala eulogized Ziegenbalg for his “services” to the Tamil language and Tamil people. A commemorative stamp was also released.
Ironically, even the British government didn’t bother to celebrate the second century of his arrival in 1906! It is truly unfortunate that a constitutional head of an Indian state eulogised a person who was instrumental in creating caste animosities among the natives in order to convert them and destroy the native culture.
The critical question is, did Tamil grow because of his Tamil Bible and other Tamil Christian works? Of course not! Only Christianity grew.
Italian Iyer and Thiruvaachakam distortion
Next in the list of Christian Priests who “served” the cause of Tamil was another ‘Iyer’ – G.U. Pope (1820-1907) or “Pope Iyer.” He translated a few Tamil literary works such as Thiruvaachakam, Thirukkural and Naaladiyaar, and said he could find the teachings of Apostle St. Paul and St. Francis of Assisi in Sri Maanickavaachakar’s Thiruvaachakam; innocent Tamil scholars felt elated at his “graciousness”.
Even some Tamil Saivite Mutts felt proud at G.U. Pope’s statement. Tamil scholar Muthukumaraswamy, who has in-depth knowledge on Saiva Siddhanta, demolishes this myth, citing Pope’s own statement, “In the whole legendary history of this sage … there stands out a real historical character, which seems to be a mixture of that of St. Paul and of St. Francis of Assisi. Under other circumstances what an apostle of the East might have become,” as evidence of Pope’s sarcasm and disdain. He exposes the mindset of G.U. Pope who states that a religious guru from the East would not have attained a spiritual level beyond this in order to undermine the spiritual greatness of Sage Maanickavaachakar.
Supporters and admirers of G.U. Pope in general and the Dravidian-Christian combo in particular have spread the following story for years: “G.U. Pope has the habit of beginning with a Thiruvaachakam hymn every time he writes a letter to his acquaintances in Tamil Nadu. One such time, he was so moved by the sacred hymn that the tears rolling down from his eyes fell down and erased a few words. As he thought that the tears (due to the sanctity of the hymn) too were sacred, he decided not to rewrite those words and sent the letter without adding them.”
The story was circulated to show that Pope was a lover of Thiruvaachakam, and a great admirer of Tamil savant Sri Maanickavaachakar.
Dr. Muthukumaraswamy asks, “Who was the recipient of that letter? Which hymn was written in that letter? What happened to that letter? Is there any record of either Pope or the recipient or the recipient’s relatives and friends mentioning about that letter? Had this been a true story G.U. Pope would have certainly included it in the reprints of his translation. But why he had not done so? Even well-known Tamil scholar ‘Thiruvaachakamani’ K.M. Balasubramaniam, who has great admiration for G.U. Pope, has not recorded that story in any of his works. Why?”
‘Thiruvaachakamani’ K.M. Balasubramaniam says, “… the genuine and gigantic efforts of Dr. Pope in uttering ‘Open Sesame’ to throw open the doors of the treasure-cave of Thiruvachakam to the cultured savants of the West stung the Tamils of their callousness and startled them into an awakening and appreciation of their past”. What more need be said about the innocence (or ignorance?) of Tamil Hindu scholars? Balasubramaniam has translated Thiruvaachakam in English!
In the course of an article in www.tamilhindu.com, demolishing the myth about G.U. Pope, Dr. Muthukumaraswamy exposes how Pope deliberately distorted the hymns titled Neeththal Vinnappam (Praying for Mukti), which becomes an insult to Sage Maanickavaachakar. He explains: “Bhagwan Shiva presents himself before Sage Maanickavaachakar in the Temple at Thruthuraipoondi, blesses him and tells, “You embark on a yatra and finally come to my abode Kailash. Wherever you go, I will present myself before you as your guru”. The Sage embarks on his yatra and one day reaches the temple at Uttarakosamangai near Ramanathapuram. As he didn’t get the darshan of Bhagwan Shiva, he feels let down and unable to bear this parting, with mounting sorrow and emotion sings a hymn earnestly praying for Bhagwan’s appearance.”
Explaining the above context, G.U. Pope infers, “The serene and beautiful environment prevailing in Uttarakosamangai Temple was too ‘testing’ for Maanickavaachakar to continue his sanyas. He also remembers his family life in Madurai married to a beautiful woman, and the patronage which he got from the Pandya King. His retrospection of married life leads him to keep contact with the Deva Dasis serving the Temple. As he lost his control and crashed down from the higher level of sanyas, he developed a sort of complex, which created a guilty consciousness forcing him to sing this hymn.”
To quote Pope, “From the evidence of these verses, we conclude that there were two things from which he suffered. One of these was the allurements of the female attendants who in bands pertained to the temple. We have noticed this elsewhere, Hindu commentators will often find mystic meaning, which are harmless, if unfounded. Again and again in this and other poems he deplores the way in which he has been led to violate his vow. The other difficulty often referred to was the way in which mere ceremonial acts had to be performed, affording no relief to his conscience.” By giving such a blasphemous introduction to this divine hymn, G.U. Pope not only insulted Sage Maanickavaachakar and denigrated Thiruvaachakam, but shocked the Hindu majority and hurt their religious sentiments.
Dr. Muthukumaraswamy explains: “It is a norm in Bhakti literature for the authors to take the sins committed by the people upon themselves… Maanickavaachakar takes upon himself all the sins continuously committed by the people without making any attempts to seek mukti, and sings the said hymn praying for Bhagwan’s appearance and His blessings for mukti. Does the distortion made by G.U. Pope add any value to the beauty and sanctity of Thiruvaachakam? Does it add value to the greatness of Sage Maanickavaachakar? Has it helped the development of Tamil? Will any self-respecting Tamil Hindu appreciate and eulogise G.U. Pope and thereby insult Maanickavaachakar?”
It is also a norm in Bhakti literature for poets to talk about ‘sitrinbam’ (kama) and later surrender at the lotus feet of Bhagwan praying for ‘paerinbam’ (mukti). Many poets have written such poems considering the presiding deity as their ‘nayaka’ or ‘nayaki’. The poets employ the entire range of Nava Rasas in order to create a Kaavya.
In this case, Sage Maanickavaachakar’s hymn was not a confession, but a prayer for mukti by taking upon himself all the sins committed by the people. He ultimately surrenders to Bhagwan requesting Him to liberate him from this maya called prapancha and bless him with mukti. Pope’s interpretation is a nothing but an expression of Christian fundamentalism.
Dr. Muthukumaraswamy quotes another instance where G.U. Pope ridicules murti worship or vigraha aradana: “G.U. Pope says that a person who attains a higher level of spiritualism also indulges in murti worship and rustic rituals, which go totally against his level of spiritualism.” To quote Pope’s own words, “There is in them a strange combination of lofty feeling and spirituality with what we must pronounce to be the grossest idolatry. And this leads to the thought that in Saiva system of today two things that would appear to be mutually destructive are found to flourish, and even to strengthen one another. The more philosophical and refined the Saivite becomes the more enthusiastic does he often appears to be in the performance of the incongruous rites of the popular worship.
“Pope exhibits the typical Christian hatred for murti puja by terming it an act of stupidity. Dr. Muthukumaraswamy rightly asks, “When Thiruvaachakam is full of Guru Stuti – Invoking the Guru – how come G.U. Pope ridicules murti worship? Was it fair on his part to criticize such a divine act of Bhakti?”
Dr. Muthukumaraswamy cites another instance where Pope deliberately insults Maanickavaachakar: “All must be aware of the specific incidence (mentioned in Thiruvilaiyaadal Puranam – Purana on Bhagwan’s Plays) that Bhagwan Shiva takes the blows from Pandya king’s flog for the sake of Maanickavaachakar, after which the King realizes the sage’s greatness and appeals for pardon and later allows Maanickavaachakar to leave Madurai for Thiiruthuraippoondi. But G.U. Pope distorts this incident as follows:
“As there was a conflict between Madurai and Chidambaram temples, Maanickavaachakar left Madurai for Chidambaram and never returned to Madurai. He was afraid of going back to the Pandya king, who had not pardoned him for misappropriating the money given by the king for the purchase of horses. So, he never got back to Madurai.”
To quote Pope, “It does not appear indeed, that Maanickavaachakar ever revisited Madura after his formal renunciation of his position there. It may almost be inferred that he was never heartily forgiven by the king for the misappropriation of the cost of horses.” So much for G.U. Pope’s love for Thiruvaachakam!
Dr. Muthukumaraswamy says, “G.U. Pope wrote the translation of major portion of Thiruvaachakam staying in a town called Lugano in Italy, wherein he used to regularly visit the St. Maria degili Angioli Church to have the needed diversion, relaxation and a sort of rejuvenation by seeing the paintings of Bernardinao Luini. He has also recorded that he always used to feel the presence of Sage Maanickavaachakar beside him kneeling down and praying to Jesus. Pope avers that the Sage must have been a follower of Jesus until the time of his (Jesus) going to Heaven, which must be the only reason behind the feeling of great devotion found in his work. He also says that, he believed Maanickavaachakar, Mylapore’s Handloom worker (Thiruvalluvar) who wrote Thirukkural and the Nomad Gnanis (Jain Sages) who wrote Naaladiyar and others who have freed themselves from the flesh must have certainly visited this Church and realized themselves through the history of Jesus and Christian thoughts.”
There is another concocted story about G.U. Pope in Tamil Nadu which says that Pope wanted the statement, “Ingu oru Thamizh Maanavan urangukiraan” (A Tamil student is sleeping here) sculpted on his grave stone and that the statement is still present there on his grave. But those who have gone to the cemetery have confirmed that there was no such statement written on his grave except the ones from the Bible. G.U. Pope’s grave can be seen in this link:
Motivated lies on Thiruvaluvar and Thirukkural
G.U. Pope translated and published Sage Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural in 1886. There is an ancient folklore that Thiruvalluvar was friends with a captain of a ship and used to meet him often at the beaches of Mylapore. G.U. Pope accepted this as a true story. As a true Christian, he also believed the myth of St. Thomas and relied on the concoction that Thomas converted a large number of families in and around Mylapore. He then gave an introduction to the Thirukkural as follows:
“Thiruvalluvar worked hard to acquire knowledge by all means. Whenever a ship anchors in Mylapore coast, Valluvar’s ‘Captain’ friend would send him message about the arrival of new visitors including foreigners. Many foreigners could have travelled in his friend’s vessel and landed in Mylapore via Sri Lanka. Within me I see the picture of Thiruvalluvar talking with the Christians gathering information and knowledge. He has gathered a lot of Christian theories in general and the minute details of Alexandrian principles in particular and incorporated them in his Thirukkural. The philosophy of Christian theories from the church situated near Valluvar’s place is present clearly in Thirukkural. Thiruvalluvar lived between 800 AD and 1000 AD. The Christian biblical works were certainly an evidence for Valluvar’s Thirukkural. He was certainly inspired by the Bible.” (Dr. T.N. Ramachandran, Thamizhaga Andhanar Varalaaru, (History of Tamil Brahmins), Vol. II, LKM Publications, Chennai, 2nd pub. 2005, pp. 641 to 643).
This sordid introduction to his translated work shows G.U. Pope’s fanatic mindset and the ulterior motive behind his “love” for Tamil language and literature! Dravidian racists have installed a statue of this Christian missionary on Marina Beach, an inexplicable honour for a man who denigrated the sacred hymns of Thiruvaachakam and insulted Sage Maanickavaachakar and Sage Thiruvalluvar.
No wonder they blithely ignore Saivite and Vaisnavite literary works, the great Nayanmars and Alwars, and sing paeans on Christian missionaries during the so-called Classical Tamil Conference!!! The irony is that Thiruvalluvar’s picture was the emblem of the conference!
Caldwell the Racist!
Another missionary who inflicted massive damage on Tamil Hindus was the Scot Robert Caldwell (1814-1891) who, along with his wife Elissa Mault, resided in Tirunelvelli and made huge conversions. While he focused on the male population, she converted the womenfolk.
He sowed the poisonous seed called Dravidian Racism. He fully utilised the Aryan-Dravidian theories concocted by German linguist Max Mueller and imposed them on Tamil Hindus as true history. He abused the word “Dravida” to the hilt and projected Tamil Hindus as a separate Dravidian Race. His book, Dravida Mozhikalin Oppilakkanam (“A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages”, Harrison: London, 1856), which gave him the reputation of a great champion of Tamil, spewed venom on Brahmins and accused them of spreading lies. If Ziegenbalg was the founder of anti-Brahmanism, Robert Caldwell was responsible for spreading it throughout the region, giving a stimulus to the radicalization of the Non-Brahmin movement.
Ironically, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages cannot be termed his own work as he allegedly took lots of passages from Francis Whyte Ellis, who wrote Dravidian Language Hypotheses.. To understand why Caldwell resorted to “research” South Indian languages, one should read Dr. K. Muthaia’s article, Caldwell Oppilakkanaththin Arasiyal Pinnani (“The Politics Behind Caldwell’s Comparative Grammar”), published in the April 1997 issue of the Tamil monthly magazine Kanaiyaazhi.
Muthaia states, “Many research conclusions found in Caldwell’s book on comparative grammar of Dravidian languages have political reasons and undertones. The motive behind his arrival was to convert the South Indians and christianise the southern region. He was also considerably successful in his religious mission… A detailed and in-depth study of his work would make us understand that he had had Sanskrit hatred, anti-Brahminism and denigration of Hinduism as objectives, but not establishing the antiquity of Tamil and the individuality of Tamil people…. Knowing pretty well that he would not be able to spread Christianity among Tamil people unless their mindset on Hindu culture and Sanskrit language was changed, he indulged in creating hatred for North Indians in the minds of the Tamil Hindus. As a first step in that direction, he created the concept of ‘Dravidian Language Family’ ” (Dravida Maayai, Subbu, op. cit., pp. 26-28).
Caldwell’s infamous book Tinnevelly Shanars proved to be his nemesis. Though his focus for conversion was mainly on Shanars (Nadars), the dominant community in Tirunelvelli, he literally denigrated them and their lifestyle in the said book. The outraged and agitated community allegedly decided to punish him which forced him to shift base from Tirunelvelli to Ootacamund, where he breathed his last.
Robert Caldwell was instrumental in creating anti-Brahmin, anti-North, anti-Sanskrit and anti-Hindu feelings among the Tamil people and dividing them through Aryan-Dravidian racial theories. His activities laid the foundation for Tamil separatism, which badly affected the national integration. His Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages also played an ugly role in creating racial differences between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, for he argued in that book that “there was no direct affinity between the Sinhalese and Tamil languages”. There is not even an iota of truth in the propaganda that he was a lover of Tamil and helped the development of Tamil. That is a misinformation campaign floated by the Church and supported by Dravidian racist parties.
At a seminar on the last day of the recent Classical Tamil Conference, Prof. Parveen Sultana said, “Protecting our mother tongue is very important. We have come across many instances in world history where nations are conquered by capturing and dominating their languages. For example, a famous quote doing rounds in Africa says, ‘When they came here, they had the Bible and we had our lands. Now we have the Bible and they have our lands!’ This has happened wherever Christianity has landed”.
That she spoke this truth in a conference where the likes of Caldwell were eulogised shows her courage! Delving into the great culture of this land, the learned professor spoke about the construction of temples and their greatness. Parveen Sultana’s speech was one of the rare highlights of the conference which was otherwise dominated by Christianity, Dravidian racism and eulogies for Kalaignar Karunanidhi.
More on Padires’ love for Tamil!
The history of Tamil Nadu has many more evidences of the “divide and dominate” policy of the White Church. During the reign of Kizhavan Sethupathi in the kingdom of Ramanathapuram, a Portuguese Padire by name John De Britto indulged in heavy harvesting of souls. He even converted the close kin of Sethupathi Raja, but was finally punished by the King. V. Gopalan has written a detailed essay on this missionary and his activities:
Sri Thyagaraja Chettiar was a great exponent of Tamil literature and had great love for the language. Once a European missionary who claimed to have mastered Tamil grammar came and showed some changes he had made to a few verses of Thirukkural. Outraged by the audacity of the Padire to change verses of such a great work, adored as a Tamil Veda, Sri Thyagaraja Chettiar scolded him and literally drove him away. This incident is mentioned in Dr. Vu. Ve. Swaminatah Iyer Urainadai Noolkal (Dr. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer’s Prose Works, Vol.-3, pp. 520-523).
Sri Pandithurai Thevar of Madurai, another great exponent of Tamil language and literary works, learned that a British missionary had made changes to the very first verse of Thirukkural and printed the same. He immediately purchased the entire lot and burnt them! (Dravida Maayai, op. cit., pp. 21-22).
Baptising Thiruvalluvar and Blaspheming Thirukkural
Christians who had the temerity to lay their hands on Thirukkural then, have now gone to the extent of baptising Thiruvalluvar! Taking a cue from G.U. Pope’s atrocious introduction to Thirukkural, a fanatical evangelist called Deivanayagam, supported by the Madras Catholic Diocese, has been on a relentless campaign that, “Thiruvalluvar was a disciple of St. Thomas and most of the teachings in Thirukkural have been either taken from Bible or from the preaching of St. Thomas.”
The Roman Catholic Dioceses of Kerala and Tamil Nadu had announced in 2008 that they would be producing a film on the life and times of St. Thomas, wherein they would depict Thiruvalluvar as a disciple of St. Thomas.
Later, as confirmation of the unholy Christian-Dravidian nexus, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi graced the occasion of the said film’s inaugural function as chief guest. Though himself an expert on the Thirukkural, the Chief Minister chose to participate in the inauguration of a film falsely portraying Thiruvalluvar as a disciple of St. Thomas, a complete concoction and an audacious expression of extremist evangelism.
- http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1221 and
- http://www.newstodaynet.com/col.php?section=20&catid=29&id=8961
Tamil prose and Christian farce!
An oft repeated propaganda is that Christian missionaries introduced “prose” writing in Tamil. A blatant lie! When Tamil Hindus have been adept at art, literature, music, architecture and theatre, wouldn’t they have been good in prose too? Is it not outrageous and insulting to say that people from Europe came and introduced prose writing to Tamil Hindus?
Tamil as a language is at the least 2000 years old. Starting from the Sangam Era, Tamil tradition has been a literate tradition with written records, preserved down the centuries by late classical and early medieval Tamil Brahmin and Saivite Hindu scholars. It was not an “oral” legacy as alleged by Christians and Dravidian racists.
We have had commentaries on almost all ancient literary works, Sangam and post-Sangam, in prose, by learned scholars such as Ilampooranaar, Senavaraayar, Peraasiriyar, Parimelazhagar, Nachinaarkkiniyaar and Deivachchilaiyaar. Saivite Hindu Adheenams have helped preserve the classical Tamil literary tradition down the centuries. The important fact to be noted is that the continuance and preservation of written Tamil literary heritage happened despite repeated invasions and unsettled political conditions.
The rich tradition continued in more modern times by devout Hindus such as U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, Ramachandra Dikshidhar, Neelakanda Shastri, P. Narayanaswami Iyer and Raghava Iyengar, etc., in Tamil Nadu and staunch Hindu activists such as Arumuka Navalar, C.W. Thamotharam Pillai and Swami Vipulananda in Sri Lanka.
The so-called contribution of Christian missionaries comes nowhere near the contribution of these devout Hindus to Tamil scholarship in recent times. That is mainly because these devout Hindus had Bhakti, involvement in the growth of Tamil language, passion towards the culture of the soil and the mind to sacrifice everything for the development of the language, continuance of the culture and preservation of the tradition.
The missionaries focused destructively on the christianisation of the native culture. They had ulterior motives unlinked to the Tamil language – consolidation of European rule in India and conversion of the natives to the religion of Europe.
The Lexicon story!
The website www.cathnewsindia.com says, “The task of setting down on paper the alphabet, grammar, rules and vocabulary of the Tamil lexicon began in Christian schools, towards the end of the 19th century. It was pioneered by Father Swamy Gnanapragasam, who transcribed hundreds of ancient scripts into print. A statue in his honor can be seen in Jaffna city. His work was continued by Father Hyacinth Singarayer David, a master in Indo-Aryan languages and doctor in linguistics, who published six volumes of the lexicon….”
This is an inappropriate claim – the alphabet, vocabulary and rules of Tamil lexicon by far precede the Christian colonial missionary era. It seems Tamil Scholars in Sri Lanka are divided over the acceptance of Father Gnanapragasam as a scholar and historian. Some say he had made claims on history and linguistics that were not backed by historical evidences. For example, he said Tamil was the mother of all languages in the world! They also say that none of his works were peer reviewed by well known academics on the subject or published in reputed journals of history; he lacked post-graduate training in the historical method and was hardly a scholar of note.
Long before the arrival of Christian missionaries we had “Nigandus” or dictionaries. Tamil scholar/poet Dandapani Desikar’s direct student Sri Maniyan, who had written lexicons for many ancient Tamil literary works, says, “Nigandus were in the form of poetic verses, which made the students, teachers and research scholars to remember them easily. These Nigandus have been there since 11 century CE. But, the dictionary of alphabetical order was introduced by Foreigners”. (Interview in Rasanai monthly magazine, July 2010, Chennai) To claim that “prose” writing was introduced by Christian missionaries and only because of their contribution Tamil got a second life in the 18th century and survived is outrageous.
Padires; Proselytisers; Printers!
The fact of the matter is that the white Christians imported printing machines from their countries and introduced printing technology here. What for? To help them in proselytisation works and to speed up the process of conversion!
Before the introduction of paper and printing, valuable books in Tamil language were written on both sides of palm leaves and committed to memory. Writing on the palm leaf, a common practice in those days, was a difficult work which only a trained person could do (so also writing on stone, copper plates etc). Several written leaves were bound together with wooden or brass boards at each end and tied up into a book. For referring to anything in a book, it had to be untied, the relevant page spotted, and the matter read. This laborious process was quite easy for Tamil Hindus.
But the missionary found it extremely difficult. So he transported the printing machine, the paper and the techniques, from his native west. Another great handicap with the palm leaf was that only one copy could be written at a time; it could be duplicated only by hand copying one at a time. Every pupil under a teacher copied his own book in manuscript. But for the proselytizing missionary, many copies had to be taken at a time for distribution among prospective converts. Hence the printing machine was essential for them.
We may note that printing for the first time in India was in the Tamil language. Printing machines were imported by Jesuit priests and the first books in Tamil Nadu were printed in Tirunelvelli. The books printed through German collaboration for Danish Protestant missionaries were in vogue in the east coast around Tranquebar in Thanjavur district. (We have already seen that the German Protestant Padire Barthalomaus Ziegenbalg printed the Tamil Bible through a German machine owned by Danish Church in Tranquebar).
Similarly, the British established a printing press at Vepery in Madras for their own missionaries. The East India Company had a law which prohibited natives from opening any printing press or from printing any book. Only foreigners and missionaries (including native Christians) were permitted printing. The admirers among native Christians say the missionaries did great service to Tamil by introducing printing. But, it was done with an ulterior motive. In the matter of printing, only missionaries were encouraged by the Company. Printing in local languages helped the missionaries in their conversion work and the Company wanted proselytisation. The history of printing in India, as of any other progressive enterprise like education, shipping or even medicine, is the history of suppression of Indian activities.
Ellis, who was a civilian, and Munroe, who was governor of Madras, both took great trouble to get the Press Law annulled, but this was done only in 1835. But for this ban, printing of Tamil books by eminent Tamil Hindu scholars of the day would have commenced even in the 18th century, and a great volume of classical Tamil literature could have been preserved through print.
The Company positively helped only in the loss of a vast literary wealth in the whole of India. The loss is said to be the greatest in Tamil, because Tamil had the largest heritage of ancient classical literature in the whole of India, barring perhaps Sanskrit (“History of Early Printing” in Christianity in India – A Critical Study by Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan).
This being the truth, the claim by Christians and Dravidian racists that Christian missionaries helped the development of the Tamil language is outrageous, atrocious, and simply fallacious. It is evident that the Christian establishment in fact destroyed the Tamil language and culture to a great extent by not allowing natives to own printing presses and print books by promulgating a law to this end. Ergo, this is the “great Christian service” to Tamil!
According to the website www.cathnewsindia.com “It was Father Xavier Stanislaus Thaninayagam who founded the International Association of Tamil Research (IATR) and called the first International Conference of Tamil Studies in 1965. That event ultimately led to this year’s highly prestigious conference”.
While one can agree that Father Thaninayagam founded the IATR, one can only say that the claim of his IATR leading to the just-concluded First World Classical Tamil Conference is dubious. In fact, the Christian website should have had the courage to say IATR refused to conduct the World Tamil Conference this year despite a request from Karunanidhi.
Yet it attempts to take credit for the event even though Karunanidhi ignored IATR and went ahead with the First World Classical Tamil Conference, wherein he announced the setting up of World Tolkappiyar Classical Tamil Sangam (WTCTS) to the utter shock of IATR.
Depending on the political climate, both may merge tomorrow, for the Church is capable of going any lengths to establish its “love” for Tamil. The IATR has conducted 8 conferences in the last 45 years, of which one was a DMK conference (Madras, 1968, when Annadurai was CM), two were AIADMK conferences (Madurai 1981, by MGR and Thanjavur 1995, by Jayalalithaa); the remaining five (Kuala Lumpur 1966, Paris 1970, Jaffna 1974, Kuala Lumpur 1987, Mauritius 1989) were relatively lacklustre.
And what did the Tamil language, literature, archaeology or culture receive from these eight conferences – NOTHING! Undeniably, the just concluded Classical Tamil Conference was also a DMK jamboree. Television channels clearly confirmed this through their live telecasts. And Christian domination was also quite visible in this conference, which again underlined the Christian-Dravidian nexus.
Rev. Thamil Nesan, in his article on Rev. Thaninayagam in the Christian website www.transcurrents.com says, “At this memorable occasion (Tamil Meet at Coimbatore), it is very much appropriate to remember gratefully Rev. Prof. Thaninayagam (1913–1980) who toiled hard and dedicated his entire life to make Tamil Language, Tamil Literature and Tamil Culture better known and appreciated in the world…. The name, having served so well this Catholic ambassador of Tamil culture, now stands immortalised in the history of the Tamil people and Tamil studies…. Since he was well versed in many European Languages and their literatures, he was able to blaze a trail in the comparative study of Tamil Literature with the literature of European Languages”.
A question arises, what is Tamil culture or rather, what do these Christians define as Tamil culture? Is there such a thing as Hindi culture, Telugu culture, Marathi culture, Gujarati culture, Bengali culture, when all the Bharatiya language communities are united by a single civilisational inheritance, that is, the Hindu in inspiration? That is the culture of this Hindu Bhumi! There may be minor differences in customs and rituals, but the culture and tradition are one and the same. Though the spoken languages are diverse, the Gods and Goddesses, festivals and way of living are all the same for ages. In the Hindu way, Unity is not at odds with Diversity; indeed, Diversity flows from Unity.
In the above mentioned article Father Thamil Nesan says, “Tamil festivals are celebrated in many parts. All this was possible, thanks to the strenuous efforts by one individual: Xavier S. Thaninayagam, a Catholic Priest from Jaffna.” He does not list the so-called Tamil Festivals. If we ask the Dravidian racists who changed the traditional Tamil New Year to list out the Tamil festivals, they would come out with only one – Pongal, also claimed as Thamizhar Thirunaal. Yet this is none other than the Makara Sankranti celebrated throughout India. But what about other festivals celebrated by Tamils? The Dravidian racists have not included them as they are Hindu festivals.
So why did Father Thamil Nesan use the word “Tamil Festivals”? Here is the answer! In course of his article Thamil Nesan says, “Fr. Thaninayagam has made a tremendous contribution towards internationalising Tamil Studies. He was a Catholic priest who championed Tamil Culture”. As Tamils world over celebrate each and every festival with great fanfare, would it not have added respect and pride to Father Thaninayagam had the Christians addressed him as a “Champion of Hindu culture”? They wouldn’t have, because they wanted to remove the Hindu identity of the Tamils! They have not said “Indian culture” either. Destroying “Hindu” identity and establishing “Tamil” identity would be possible only by hijacking the language, literature and culture. That is why all Christian missionaries have been projected as champions of Tamil, Tamil literature and Tamil culture.
Thamil Nesan literally confesses: “ … Fr. Thaninayagam, an ardent advocate and zealous Apostle of Tamil language of the 20th century… From his younger days, he was quite conscious of the linguistic and literary talents that God had given him and he cultivated them well in order to use them in the service of God and men. As a priest he made a deep study of the Tamil language and literature in order to equip himself better for his ministry among the Tamil speaking people of South India and Sri Lanka.… Fr. Thaninayagam has made a tremendous contribution towards internationalising Tamil Studies. He was a Catholic priest who championed Tamil Culture. Catholic Christianity is an international religion and it seemed to have helped him a great deal in his lifetime task of internationalising Tamil Studies…. In the midst of all his international activities for the acknowledgement of the antiquity, richness and beauty of the Tamil language and literature, he remained always a devoted priest of God.”
Thamil Nesan quotes Prof. C.R. Boxer, University of London, UK, as saying, “He (Thaninayagam) was in the best sense a ‘Citizen of the World’ widely travelled in four continents and on seven seas, he was always alert and receptive to new ideas, people and places; but he was never deflected by them from his vocation as a Roman Catholic Priest.”
A section of Tamil scholars, unconvinced about Thaninayagam’s ‘contribution’, ask, “what precise contribution did Thaninayagam make to the Tamil language in terms of publications in reputed journals of history, in the study of Tamil linguistics as peer reviewed by accredited academics or the study of Tamil history? Did he add to the store on knowledge?” They aver, “no doubt, his organizational skills were excellent in spearheading the IATR. But let’s not forget that the IATR was a joint endeavour with several others participating in it to make it a success. One cannot confine the credit to just one individual”.
Compare that to U.V. Swaminatha Iyer who did yeoman service in first publishing the Sangam era Tamil classics for posterity. His contribution to the preservation of Tamil classics was phenomenal. Or to the role of Hindu savant Arumuka Naavalar in Sri Lanka who was the first to use the modern printing press to publish early Tamil classics.
As for Vaiyapuri Pillai, noted Tamil lexicographer, he remains the only scholar who critically evaluated the dates of Tamil literature by addressing issues of syntax, vocabulary and literary cross references. He was the only academic schooled in the science of textual criticism. His dating of Tamil literary works would demolish the subsequent exaggerated claims by Dravidian parties in general and DMK in particular on Tamil literature, an exaggeration aided and abetted by the Christian missionary effort.
Conclusion
All Christian missionaries from Robert De Nobili to Robert Caldwell, all Christian priests like Thaninayagam and evangelists like Deivanayagam, worked and are working for the same agenda of hijacking Tamil language, erasing its Hindu identity, destroying the native culture, converting the natives and ultimately forming a Tamil Christian Nation comprising Tamil Nadu and North and East of Sri Lanka.
Dravidian racists, lacking in pride, passion and patriotism, have joined hands with the Church and Christian establishments to alienate the Tamil region from the national mainstream. The situation is ominous, and we need to defeat the nefarious designs of vested interests at any cost. The present political climate in both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka is not encouraging and the political establishments are of no help in both regions. The onus lies on Tamils living in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. They must re-Hinduise their identity and reiterate themselves with pride, passion and perseverance. They must understand that their language, music, art and architecture are all part and parcel of the great Hindu culture inherited from the Vedic civilisation, which evolved along the sacred rivers Sindhu and Saraswati.
Tamil identity is linked to the broader Hindu identity. We witness this in Carnatic music, the Bharatanatyam dance form, temple architecture, sculpture, classical literature, politics and overseas trade. The Sangam era literature may not have been explicitly religious in theme, but whenever the early poems referred to religious practice, one discerns Hindu observance as in the worship of Mayon or Vishnu, Seyon or Murugan, Kotravai or Durga, Venthan or Indra, and Varuna.
Immediate post-Sangam works like Tirukkural, Silapadhikaram and Manimekalairesonate even more with the broader Indic philosophic currents. The subsequent era of the Thevaram and Naalaayira Dhivya Prabandham or Hindu devotional classics sponsored the growth of Tamil imperial power and the political consolidation of the land which in turn facilitated overseas trade and prosperity. Agriculture and irrigation grew in no small measure. The origins of the Tamil language and its development were linked throughout history with the broader Indic world. Let’s never forget that!
This explains why the Thiruvaachakam is sung at the coronation of the Thai king, why the traditional Tamil New Year in April is the New Year observed in Cambodia and Burma, and the Tamil influence in the Hindu religious iconography of Indonesia. The Hindu identity is connected even to New Zealand. The bronze temple bell presumably gifted by the Maoris (tribals of what later became New Zealand) to Protestant missionary William Colenso (around 1836) contained Tamil inscriptions!
Tamil is Hindu; Tamil culture is Hindu culture; Tamil tradition is Hindu tradition; Tamil heritage is a continuity with the Vedic civilisation which evolved on the banks of Sindhu-Saraswati and flows down to Kanyakumari.
by Thamizhchelvan
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The Mystery of Curry
What is curry? Today, the word describes a bewildering number of spicy vegetable and meat stews from places as far-flung as the Indian subcontinent, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean Islands. There is little agreement about what actually constitutes a curry. And, until recently, how and when curry first appeared was a culinary mystery as well.
The term likely derives from kari, the word for sauce in Tamil, a South-Indian language. Perplexed by that region’s wide variety of savory dishes, 17th-century British traders lumped them all under the term curry. A curry, as the Brits defined it, might be a mélange of onion, ginger, turmeric, garlic, pepper, chilies, coriander, cumin, and other spices cooked with shellfish, meat, or vegetables.
Those curries, like the curries we know today, were the byproduct of more than a millennium of trade between the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia, which provided new ingredients to spice up traditional Indian stews. After the year 1000, Muslims brought their own cooking traditions from the west, including heavy use of meat, while Indian traders carried home new and exotic spices like cloves from Southeast Asia. And when the Portuguese built up their trading centers on the west coast of India in the 16th century, they threw chilies from the New World into the pot. (Your spicy vindaloo may sound like Hindi, but actually the word derives from the Portuguese terms for its original central ingredients: wine and garlic.)
But the original curry predates Europeans’ presence in India by about 4,000 years. Villagers living at the height of the Indus civilization used three key curry ingredients—ginger, garlic, and turmeric—in their cooking. This proto-curry, in fact, was eaten long before Arab, Chinese, Indian, and European traders plied the oceans in the past thousand years.You may be wondering how on earth anyone can know what people were cooking 4,500 years ago. While the ancients left behind plenty of broken pots and mud-brick house foundations, they generally didn’t leave us their recipes. And foodstuffs, unlike pots, rapidly decay.
But thanks to technological advances, scientists can identify minute quantities of plant remains left behind by meals cooked thousands of years ago. It is no easy task; researchers must gather crumbling skeletons and find ancient dirty dishes before using powerful laboratory microscopes to pinpoint the ingredients of ancient meals. But the effort is paying off, in the form of evidence that curry may be far, far older than previously thought.
The Indus society began to flourish around the same time that the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids and Mesopotamians constructed the first great cities in today’s Iraq. Though less well known than its more famous cousins to the West, the Indus civilization boasted a half-dozen large and carefully planned urban centers with sophisticated water and sewage systems unmatched until Roman times. During its peak, between 2500 B.C. and 1800 B.C., the Indus dominated a land area larger than either ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, covering much of today’s Pakistan and most of western India, as far west as the Iranian coast, as far north as Afghanistan, and as far east as the suburbs of New Delhi. But unlike the hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes, the strange symbols left behind by their Indus counterparts has not yet been deciphered by today’s scholars. Deciphering their food traditions has, until recently, been equally challenging.
Archaeologists have long known how to spot some ancient leftovers. The biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s, when excavators began to drop soil from their sites—particularly from places where food likely was prepared—onto mesh screens. The scientists then washed the earth away with water, leaving behind little bits of stone, animal bones, and tiny seeds of wheat, barley, millets, and beans. This flotation method allowed scientists to piece together a rough picture of an ancient diet. “But spices are absent in macro-botanical record,” says archaeologist Arunima Kashyap at Washington State University Vancouver, who, along with Steve Weber, made the recent proto-curry discovery.*
Working with other Indian and American archaeologists, the two applied new methods for pinpointing the elusive remains of spices that don’t show up in flotation tanks. Instead of analyzing dirt from Indus kitchens, they collected cooking pots from the ancient town of Farmana, a modest settlement that prospered in the late third millennium B.C. (Today, it’s a two-hour drive west of Delhi.) They also obtained human teeth from the nearby cemetery from the same era.
Back in their lab, Kashyap used what is known as starch grain analysis. Starch is the main way that plants store energy, and tiny amounts of it can remain long after the plant itself has deteriorated. If a plant was heated—cooked in one of the tandoori-style ovens often found at Indus sites, for example—then its tiny microscopic remains can be identified, since each plant species leaves its own specific molecular signature. To a layperson peering through a microscope, those remains look like random blobs. But to a careful researcher, they tell the story of what a cook dropped into the dinner pot 4,500 years ago.
Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, Kashyap spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical curry. This marked the first time researchers had found unmistakable traces of the spices in the Indus civilization. Wanting to be sure, she and Weber took to their kitchens in Vancouver, Washington. “We got traditional recipes, cooked dishes, then examined the residues to see how the structures broke down,” Weber recalls. The results matched what they had unearthed in the field. “Then we knew we had the oldest record of ginger and turmeric.” Dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C., the finds are the first time either spice has been identified in the Indus. They also found a carbonized clove of garlic, a plant that was used in this era by cooks from Egypt to China.
They found additional supporting evidence of ginger and turmeric use on ancient cow teeth unearthed in Harappa, one of the largest Indus cities, located in Pakistan west of the border with India. Why would cattle be eating curry-style dishes? Weber notes that in the region today, people often place leftovers outside their homes for wandering cows to munch on. There are numerous ancient Indus images of cattle on terra-cotta seals, suggesting that during Indus times, people may have regarded cows as sacred, as Hindus do today. The Harappan ruins also contain evidence of domesticated chickens, which were likely cooked in those tandoori-style ovens and eaten.
And what would a proto-curry be without a side of rice? Many archaeologists once thought that Indus peoples were restricted to a few grains like wheat and barley. But Cambridge University archaeologist Jennifer Bates, part of a joint Indian-U.K. team, has been examining the relative abundance of various crops at two village sites near today’s Masudpur, also west of Delhi. She found that villagers cultivated a wide array of crops, including rice, lentils, and mung beans. Finding significant quantities of rice was a particular surprise, since the grain was long thought to have arrived only at the end of the Indus civilization. In fact, inhabitants of one village appear to have preferred rice to wheat and barley (though millet was their favorite crop).
What does this mean for how we think about South Asian cuisine today? Thanks to Kashyap and Weber, we know that curry is not only among the world’s most popular dishes; it also may be the oldest continuously prepared cuisine on the planet. Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist at Pune University in India who directs the dig at Farmana, is delighted with the discovery. He says the find demonstrates that the Indus civilization pioneered not just good plumbing and well-planned cities, but one of the world’s most loved cuisines. “I have been arguing for a long time that the [Indus people] are responsible for introducing most of the traditions in south Asia,” he says, “and that includes tandoori chicken.”
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[box_light]In classical Indian thought, Yoga in the general sense refers to a particular way of spiritual practice and as such has been taken up by most of the spiritual traditions in India, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain . In this regard, Yoga suggests to us characteristic practices of asana, mantra, pranayama and meditation.[/box_light]
Yoga in this broader sense as spiritual practice has five basic types.
1) Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge, using meditation for Self-realization
2) Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of Devotion, seeking union with God as the Divine Father or Divine Mother
3) Karma Yoga, the Yoga of Service, emphasizing ritual worship of the Divine and service to living beings
4) Raja Yoga, the Royal Yoga of higher techniques and methods, mainly of mantra and meditation.
5) Hatha Yoga, the Yoga of Effort or of lower techniques and methods, mainly asana and pranayama.
All schools of Indian spiritual thought, orthodox and unorthodox, employ one or more of these approaches of Yoga, which they may define in different ways or use relative to different philosophical backgrounds. Many groups employ an integral approach using aspects of all five of these.
Yogic methods can be found in all branches of Indian spiritual and religious literature, whether the Vedas, Epics, Puranas, Agamas and Tantras, as well as in many special Yogic texts or Yoga Shastras. The integrative approach of Yoga pervades the culture of India as well, including its literature, drama, music, dance, science, medicine, and even grammar. It is this broader approach to the meaning of Yoga that we find in Vedic teachings going back to the Rigveda, not simply Yoga as asana as in modern parlance.
However, besides this general meaning and not to be confused with it, Yoga in a specific sense refers to one of the six classical schools of Vedic thought, those philosophies that accept the authority of the Vedas. This is the Yoga school or Yoga Darshana, which is also called ‘Samkhya-Yoga’ owing to its connection with the Samkhya school of Vedic thought, with which it is intimately associated. Unfortunately many people, particularly in the West, confuse Yoga as a general term with Yoga as one of the six Vedic schools, which breeds many distortions. They tend to see Yoga Darshana, particularly the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali as the basis of all Yoga, when it is more accurately the main text of one important branch of Yoga, but not the entire field of Yoga. There are Shaivite, Vaishnava and other Yogas as well, which have their own primary Yoga texts and teachings.
Yoga and the Vedas: Vedic Mantra Yoga
It is difficult to think of the Vedas without thinking about Yoga, as the Vedas promote spiritual knowledge born of meditation, the way to achieve which is the practice of Yoga. Yoga is a term that is first found in the Vedas, where the root for Yoga, ‘yuj’, meaning to unite, yoke or harness is common, not only relative to horses and chariots, but also relative to the mind and senses. Even the yoking of the Vedic chariot (ratha) is symbolic of deeper Yoga practices of controlling the mind.
Sometimes people today fail to see the yogic nature of the Rigveda because we are approaching Yoga with a recent modern idea of Yoga as mainly asana or physical postures. Asanas do not have a major role either in the Vedas or in classical yogic texts, including the Yoga Sutras, which only devotes two of two hundred sutras to them.
The Vedas do address with Yoga in an obvious but different way. The Vedas as mantras begin with Mantra Yoga. This is not uncharacteristic of Yoga as a whole as even the Yoga Sutras emphasizes Pranava or the Divine Word as a prime principle of Yoga practice, implying importance to Mantra Yoga The Vedas are themselves mantras and reciting them is itself a path of Mantra Yoga.[i] Even later Mantra Yoga continues to use Vedic mantras like Gayatri as well as resting upon the Sanskrit language, the origin of which is in the Vedas.
Yet mantra has an application in action, which is ritual or karma. Vedic Mantra Yoga has its corresponding Karma Yoga. The Vedas outline the original rituals behind the practice of Karma Yoga, which in India today still extensively employs Vedic fire offerings. Mantra is meant to teach Dharma or the laws of life. As such, the Vedas encourage sacrifice, giving and helping others that is the basis of Seva or service, another important aspect of Karma Yoga.
Ritual can be defined as a way of sacred action in which we use name and form to approach the nameless and the formless. The implements, substances and materials used in the ritual are not employed for their literal or practical value, though there are correlations. The Vedic fire offerings are not done to produce heat or cook food but to carry messages to the higher worlds. The consecrated Vedic fire is not simply a fire. The substances offered into it are not used merely as fuel for the fire. They indicate movements and offers of the heart. Ritual is way of bringing the sacred or Brahman into action. When that ritual action is turned within, it becomes Yoga.
Yet this Vedic ritual is not only outward but also inward. The inner sacrifice involves the offering of speech, prana and mind to the deity within the heart. Yoga can be traced to this inner sacrifice (antaryaga) that includes mantra, pranayama and meditation, a point already noted.
Just as the Vedas imply Yoga, so does Yoga imply the Vedas. The science of Yoga arose in a Vedic context and employs a Vedic terminology like the Purusha and the use of OM, the great Vedic mantra. Most of the great Yoga teachers who have come to the West have been steeped in Vedic teachings as well. Many have been Swamis in Vedantic orders.
The term Yoga arises in the Rigveda itself and is first explained in more obvious terms in s early Upanishads like the Svetashvatara and Katha, which are said to be Yoga Shastras or Yoga texts. Many great Vedic Rishis were regarded as great Yogis including Vasishta, the most famous among them. Hiranyagarbha, the reputed founder of the Yoga tradition, is a Rigvedic deity often connected to Savitar, the Vedic Sun god, with Vasishta as his main disciple
Some modern scholars – generally not trained in the inner meaning of the Vedas – have tried to separate Yoga from the Vedas because Yoga as a specific term is not common in the Rigveda. They fail to note that many other synonyms of Yoga practice do occur in the Rigveda, including karma, yajna, mantra, tapas, svadhyaya, and dhyana.[ii] The Vedic rishi or seer is also a Yogi who has higher powers of consciousness, can commune with the deities, and becomes a deity as well.
The Vedic Yoga and Other Yoga Texts and Teachings
Yoga is a common topic in all Hindu teachings whether the Tantras, Puranas, Mahabharata or Vedas. The Mahabharata, which includes the Bhagavad Gita, has long sections on Yoga. The Upanishads teach the main principles of Vedantic philosophy and Samkhya that the Yoga system uses. The Upanishads deal with the themes of Yoga as Om, mantra, meditation, control of the mind, knowledge of the Purusha, and so on that are of value in Yoga. Many Upanishadic sages like Yajnavalkya (who represents the solar line of Vedic thought) were regarded as great yogis as well. In addition there is a whole set of Yoga Upanishads that arose at a later period.
The Vedic Yoga is arguably the origin and seed of the other Yogas. The Rigveda with its thousand hymns is one of the longest Yogic texts and reflects the teaching of the greatest number of rishis and Yogis. Many yogic and Vedantic teachings, starting with the Upanishads, look back to Vedic teachings or paraphrase them. Others recast Vedic teachings but in a new language. Yet for others Vedic principles are there, like Agni and Soma, which are common in Tantras that do not explain specifically their Vedic connections.
The Mahabharata, the great epic in which the Bhagavad Gita, occurs has many explanations of Vedic teachings in its Moksha Dharma section, which like the Gita deals with the highest Self-realization. The Gita is filled with allusions to the Vedic Yoga, but largely recast in a later language around the figure of Lord Krishna. Krishna says that he taught the original Yoga to Vivasvan, who in turn taught it to Manu. This specifically identifies Krishna’s Yoga with the Vedic Yoga. Among the seers, Krishna says he is Ushanas, who is the foremost among the Bhrigus.
Shaivite Yoga goes back to Shiva, along with Rudra and the Maruts in the Vedic language. Rudra is said to be the personification of the Vedic sacrifice, as in the famous Rudram chant of the Krishna Yajur Veda. Shaivite Yoga was earlier called the Pashupati Yoga in the Mahabharata, from Shiva as Pashupati or the lord of the wild animals.
Vedic Yoga and the Yoga Sutras
Yamas and Niyamas
Among the most obvious connections of the Vedic Yoga with classical Yoga can be found in the Yamas and Niyamas, the yogic principles and life-style practices that constitute the first two of the eight limbs of Yoga, and the three aspects of Kriya Yoga. The Vedas are first of all an attempt to embody and teach dharma. Classical Yoga, as a Vedic tradition, rests upon the dharmic foundation of the Yamas and Niyamas, the Yogic principles of right living.
The Yamas and Niyamas of Yoga are nothing new but a summation or essence of Vedic Dharmic principles found throughout older Vedic texts.[iii]The Yamas and Niyamas reflect the Vedic idea that one must have a dharmic foundation in daily life in order to truly approach the spiritual path.
Kriya Yoga of the Yoga Sutras consists of the three principles of Tapas, Svadhyaya and Ishvara Pranidhana, which form the foundation of the Niyamas. Tapas is perhaps the key principle of Vedic practice, relating specifically to Agni, the basis of the Vedic Yoga and is often identified with the Yajna or the Vedic sacrifice. The Rigveda states that it is through Tapas that the universe is created.[iv] Agni gives us the power of tapas, self-discipline, aspiration, will-power, and inner heat. Agni is connected with Tapo Loka or the realm of Tapas, in Puranic thought. Tapas is the first word of the second section of the Yoga Sutras.
Svadhyaya commonly means study of the Vedas in Vedic texts, including the Upanishads.[v] It does not simply refer to Self-study in a general sense but to the study of those specific Vedic teachings that were part of one’s family background or given by one’s guru. Its fruit in the Yoga Sutras is the vision of the Ishta Devata,[vi] or chosen form of the Divine that one worshipped in traditional India. These were the prime Hindu Gods and Goddesses of Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Surya, Ganesha, and the many complimentary forms of the Goddess or Divine Mother.
Yet perhaps the most obvious connection between Patanjali Yoga with the Vedic Yoga is the emphasis on Ishvara Pranidhana. Ishvara pranidhana involves surrender to the Divine as the supreme inner power, which is reflected in the Vedic Bhakti or Namas Yoga that involves surrender to the deity in the form of the Vedic Ishta Devatas. Ishvara, or the Lord, is a synonym for Indra, the ruler of the Vedic Gods. Ishvara-pranidhana is primarily Indra-pranidhana in Vedic terms.
Relative to Ishvara Pranidhana, Patanjali emphasizes the importance of Pranava, the primary Pranava which is OM.[vii] As the Vedas are the development of Pranava, he is thereby referring to not just the chanting of OM but the study of the entire Vedas. This makes sense as Patanjali was also a famous Sanskrit grammarian. Sanskrit grammar is also said to develop from Pranava or Om. It is one of the Vedangas or limbs of the Vedas.
The Yamas are common dharmic principles in Vedic texts. Ahimsa or non-violence is a key principle of Yajna or sacrifice, and is commonly extolled in the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata. Sacrifice or Yajna does not mean harming other creatures. It means offering everything to God. Even the rare animal sacrifices that were performed in Vedic times, like Native American ritual killing of the buffalo, were mainly for people who depended upon animals for food.
Satya or truthfulness is one of the main principles of Vedic thought. In the Rigveda, the Vedic Gods are called satya, particularly Indra. The triune principle of Satyam Rtam Brihat, the truth, the right and the vast is a prime Vedic principle.
Brahmacharya is a key Vedic principle meaning dwelling in Brahman, not simply celibacy but the internal consecration of all one’s energies. It is widely extolled in Vedic texts. Saucha is an important Vedic principle of cleanliness, particularly various forms of ritual bathing that were done on a daily basis. The text Yogi Yajnavalkya goes into great detail into various forms of Snana or bathing as a Yogic practice including the Mantra Snana or using mantra to bathe the mind.
Pranayama and the Other Limbs of Yoga
The dominant deities of the Vedas are those of the Pranic sphere like Indra, Vayu and Vata, Rudra, the Ashwins and the Maruts. Indra as the Supreme Deity of the Vedas is first of all the cosmic and supreme Prana. He is the lord of the air and atmosphere. While we find specific pranayama practices taught in Vedic texts, we do see many hints about them, as well as a frequent extoling of the power of Prana and Vayu. The five Pranas are discussed in detail in the Yajur Veda.[viii]
The Vedas also deal with meditation and particularly with Samadhi. The Rigveda itself speaks of various states of bliss, spiritual intoxication or the flow of Soma. These are not simply drug-based inebriations but a poetic rendition of the Vedic experience of Samadhi that was the goal of all the teachings embodied in the Soma hymns.[ix]
Tantric Yoga and Hatha Yoga
Traditional Tantric Yoga consists of using ritual, mantra, pranayama and meditation, much like the Vedic approach, including recognizing Agni and Soma or the cosmic fire and nectar powers. Agni relates to the Kundalini Shakti and the three lower chakras that are the seat of Agni in Tantric thought. Soma relates to the nectar of immortality or the Moon in the crown chakra and the three higher chakras in general. In this way, Tantric Yoga develops from the Agni-Soma Yoga of the Rigveda, but recasts Agni as the Goddess and Soma as Shiva as its dominant symbolism. The inner Vedic Yoga of Agni and Soma could easily be called Vedic Tantra and supplemented with all the practices of later Tantric Yoga, which may reflect older secret Vedic practices as well. Tantric Yoga rests upon the mysticism of the Sanskrit alphabet whose roots are in the Vedas. It includes the use of many mantras, including a number of Vedic chants like the Gayatri Mantra.
The main different between the Vedic and Tantric Yoga is that the Vedic Yoga rests upon a symbolism of light whereas the Tantric reflects a more anthropomorphic symbolism of male and female energies. This gives Tantra an iconic presentation, whereas the Vedic is naturalistic. But even here there is considerable overlap.
It is actually easy to see the Vedic basis of traditional Hatha Yoga, because Hatha Yoga is first of all a Yoga of the Sun and the Moon, which are Agni and Soma. Hatha Yoga looks at the Sun and the Moon through the solar and lunar nadis or the Ida and the Pingala. It looks at Agni as Kundalini and the digestive fire, and Soma as the crown Chakra.
Primary Practices of the Vedic Yoga
The Vedic Yoga like classical Yoga is a complex and many-sided discipline designed to address the needs of all the different levels and temperaments of human beings. The Vedic Yoga addresses all of life and works with all of nature, like a symphony using many instruments, with many movements, scales, tones and harmonics. Though it has its practical methodology and precise application, the Vedic Yoga cannot be reduced to any simple pattern, formula or method. One could compare it to a great banyan tree, with roots in both the air and on the ground, and many trunks and branches, on which many creatures can live and find nourishment. Its very complexity is daunting as it reflects the teachings of numerous seers over many centuries. Yet we can still access it today, if we learn how to reorient our vision and awareness in the right way.
Vedic deities represent various yogic approaches, principles and values but in a symbolic or hidden form. This is one reason why later Yogas, philosophies and Vedic sciences could find their inspiration in looking at Vedic mantras in different ways. Yet it also caused some later thinkers to hold that the Vedic teaching lacked depth and spirituality and was only ritualistic in nature. To enter into the Vedic Yoga requires an inward turning of the mind and heart, a turning away from our current civilizational boundaries, and an ability to embrace the language and mentality of an earlier humanity.
However, beyond its seemingly immense intricacy and labyrinthine maze of forces, the Vedic Yoga follows a coherent and structured process that unfolds in each human being in a similar way. Though we are all different at one level, at another level, we are all part of the same species, the same life, and the same consciousness, following the same rhythm of action and expression. In our inmost souls, we are all part of the onrush of an imperious Divine Will to reach the Supreme, which power has its own law and follows its own seasons. Once we understand the basic principles of the Vedic Yoga, we can begin to discern how its apparently discrete elements fit together into an integral and organic whole. That is why in the end, whatever Vedic deity is followed, one merges the deity into light, bliss, oneness and transcendence.
Vedic Deity or Devata Yoga
The Vedic is a ‘Deity Yoga’ or Devata Yoga, just as is common in Hindu, Buddhist and Native traditions, including Tantric and Puranic approaches. The Vedic Yoga requires that we awaken the deities within our own minds and hearts and learn to work with them in all the forces of the universe. The Rigveda in particular is the Vedic book of the deities or Devatas, revealing their names, natures and functions. It is through these Divine powers that the Vedic Yoga and Vedic Dharma proceeds.
Mere practice of Vedic mantras or techniques is not enough to constitute a true Vedic Yoga. It is the Vedic deities that are the agents and the instruments of the Vedic Yoga, not we ourselves, our ordinary minds or human personalities. To understand the Vedas, we must understand the meaning the Vedic deities and come to a living experience of their manifold powers.
Each Vedic deity represents an important approach to inner knowledge, energy and delight. It is both a reflection of the Supreme Godhead and a way to its realization. We can experience these Vedic deities like Indra and Agni as vividly as any other Divine form or manifestation. Ultimately, the Vedic Yoga requires that we understand the deities or cosmic powers behind all that we do. This begins with the biological forces behind our body, breath, and senses and extends to the spiritual principles behind the cosmos
Agni, Awakening the Soul’s Search for Divinity through its Many Lives
The first step not only of the Vedic Yoga, but also of most inner development, consists of awakening the soul or the deeper consciousness of immortality within us. Yoga in the inner sense is a process for the soul or our eternal being to unfold. Yoga is not for the profit or entertainment of our transient personality caught in the illusions of this present birth. Yoga’s purpose is to develop the greater potentials of our inner being, of which our outer personality and self-image is but a veil or an impediment. One must first be willing look beyond the ego self, its urges, demands and expectations to even approach Yoga in the classical sense of the term.
In yogic thought, what could be called the soul or inner being is the individual Self, our internal or core consciousness that persists throughout the karmic cycle of birth and death, the Jivatman of Vedantic thought. The soul has many bodies, many lives and many personalities. Yet behind these outer formations, the soul has an inherent sense and sure awareness of its own immortality, its Divine purpose, and its Divine goal. For Yoga to be an authentic spiritual practice, it must be done by the soul. Yoga done by the ego or by the mind is a Yoga done only in the shadows, in the darkness of ignorance, not in the light of higher awareness. Our practice of Yoga should be a practice of the heart beyond any social, commercial, personal or cultural concerns. Yet this Yoga of the heart is not a Yoga of the physical, emotional or psychological heart. It is a Yoga of our immortal essence as an eternal soul, whose true labor in its many lives is Yoga, the search to realize its divine and cosmic potential.
Awakening the soul of Yoga requires bringing our inner fire or soul flame forward as the guide and master of our being. It means awakening to our inner guru and linking up with the inner tradition of truth. This usually requires the light of the outer guru, teaching and tradition, in one form or another, to help us. Lighting our inner fire and keeping it burning through our daily lives and throughout all our states of consciousness as waking, dream and deep sleep is the foundation of all deep Yoga and meditation. This ‘Yoga of the Inner Fire’ or Agni Yoga consists of the cultivation of higher awareness through mantra, inquiry and meditation.
For this there is a wonderful Vedic verse that Sri Aurobindo emphasized:
The mantras love him who remains awake. The harmonies come to him who remains awake. To him who remains awake the Soma says, I am yours and have my home in your close friendship.
The fire remains awake, him the mantras love. The fire remains awake, to him the harmonies come. The fire remains awake, to him the Soma says, I am yours and have my home in your friendship.
Rigveda V.44.14-15
At first, this Agni or sense of God-consciousness is but a spark, a flicker or a small flame hidden deep in the subconscious mind, a mere latent potential. The Vedic Yoga rests upon a surrender to that fire, a cultivation of that fire until it can guide us back to the universal light that is its origin and goal. Yoga consists of various offerings of body, speech, senses, mind and heart into that inner fire. The fire in turn grows with each offering, granting us greater illumination, understanding and well-being.
Eventually that small spark becomes a mighty flame that consumes all impurity – and then expands into a great spiritual Sun within us, full of truth and light, with unlimited powers of illumination. The power of Agni, its tapas-shakti, purifies, heats, ripens, transforms and delivers us from the darkness to the light. We cultivate that fire through right intention, consecration, mantra, inquiry and meditation. This inner fire develops through a higher power of the will, attention, concern, higher values, and a deeper search and inquiry in life.
Through this power, our own spiritual striving, all the other Divine powers have a place to manifest within us, and do so in various ways to different degrees.
Developing Indra, the Master Force of Self-realization
Once the flame of the soul is awakened and has come forth to guide our development, manifesting the Gods or Divine powers, we must soon contact and set in motion the master force, the Divine consciousness in order to achieve the ultimate goal.
The Vedic God Indra represents the cosmic consciousness that descends into the human being as the lightning flash of direct perception that reveals the highest truth. This descent of grace from above links up with the ascending power of our soul fire from below. Indra is the God-consciousness within us that carries the cosmic and supracosmic Divine in seed form. As ascending and descending forces, Agni and Indra complement one another and comprehend the yogic quest.
This Indra consciousness enters through the fontanel and takes its seat in our heart along with Agni. Indra manifests through the perceptive power of the higher or great Prana (Maha Prana), the master life-force behind the universe that is ever seeking greater self-expression, self-mastery and self-realization, ever marching forward to the goal of realizing the entire universe within the mind. These two great powers of Indra and Agni, enlightened Prana from above and awakened will-power from within, overcome all obstacles and manifest all the other Gods or truth principles.
The cultivation of the master force consists of pranayama, discriminating insight, and deep meditation. It involves a revolution at the core of our consciousness itself. This means an inner battle between the powers of light and darkness, a movement from the darkness to the light, in which we can no longer accept anything limited or superficial into our being. Indra is the spiritual warrior who causes us to see the supreme.
Though the Indra force begins to manifest at an early phase of the Vedic Yoga, it is only when the Yoga is complete that his full power can be known. Otherwise that Indra energy must face various obstacles and opposition, the various enemies that he must defeat and conquer along the way.
Developing Surya, the Enlightened Mind
There are many Vedic Sun Gods, called Adityas, which mean ‘powers of unbounded energy and forces of primal intelligence’. The Adityas represent the different powers and principles of the illumined mind and heart. Following a solar symbolism, they are usually said to be seven or twelve in number. The Adityas reflect the principles of Dharma and modes of conduct. Each indicates a teaching that is necessary for our higher realization.
Most important of the Adityas are the pair Varuna and Mitra, who much like Soma and Agni – which they are often identified with – represent the overall cosmic duality. Varuna and Mitra are great Lords of Dharma and instill in us Dharmic values, allowing us to lead a Dharmic life.
In terms of sadhana, Varuna, which means the vastness, represents the discrimination between truth and falsehood, the recognition of karma and the necessity for purification. There is something stern about our meeting with Varuna, who effaces the ego into the higher truth. Yet Varuna protects the Soma principle or cosmic waters, which his grace releases once we have purified ourselves.
Along with Varuna is Mitra, who is the deity of compassion and love, opposite to and complementary to Varuna’s stern judgment. Mitra, which means friend, is the Divine Friend who leads us like a friend and causes us to seek friendship and harmony with all. Mitra connects us to Agni as the principle of light and the inner guide.
Besides these Mitra and Varuna as the third Aditya is Aryaman, the one who holds the power of nobility and refinement (Arya). Aryaman represents law and force in action, the ability to help, mediate and harmonize. Mitra, Varuna and Aryaman govern the three higher luminous heavens (rochanas) beyond the ordinary three realms of earth, Atmosphere and Heaven.
The fourth Aditya is Bhaga, who holds the power of bliss and delight. He is much like a masculine counterpart of the Goddess Lakshmi, granting not only worldly wealth but spiritual abundance and the richness of devotion. Along with Mitra, Varuna and Aryaman, Bhaga forms the four kings or great rulers of Dharma. Bhaga is connected to Savitar, the transformative aspect of solar energy, which represents the ascending Divine will in creation.
Our Agni, the flame of our inner mind as it develops unfolds the truth principles or dharmic powers represented by the Solar Godheads. They show a progressive development and expansion of the light of truth from the flame to the Sun. They complement the master force and insight of Indra, with various powers of knowledge and illumination. The Yoga of the higher mind (Buddhi) includes meditation on the Adityas and awakening their powers within us. Indra is also present behind the Sun Adityas as their ruling force.
Developing Soma: The Ecstasy of Samadhi
Yoga is a methodology of achieving the state of Samadhi, the level of bliss or Ananda, in which the mind is absorbed in God or in the Self that is its origin. Soma is the Vedic deity of Samadhi, in which all the Vedic deities merge. Soma is lauded as the king of the Gods. All Vedic deities drink the Soma, are energized by the Soma, and are themselves manifestations of the Soma power of bliss. This Soma or bliss is the creator of all but also the goal of all.
Agni is enkindled to prepare the Soma. Indra reaches its fullness of power by the Soma or ecstatic essence of delight that he is the main drinker of. It is his drinking of the Soma that energizes Indra and affords him his master power. The Sun as an enlightenment force exists to take us to the higher bliss of Soma. Soma is the food, milk and lifeblood of all the Vedic deities. It is the unfoldment of the inner Soma that makes one into a rishi or a seer and gives great creative powers. The Vedic Yoga reaches its culmination in the free flowing of Soma that is the highest Samadhi. In Samadhi one learns to drink the immortal Soma that is the consciousness of immortality.
Other Vedic Deities
The many other Vedic deities that we find lauded in the hymns serve mainly supplementary roles, generally relative to the sphere of the main deity that they relate to as Earth, Atmosphere or Heaven, which are the spheres of Agni, Indra and Surya (Aditya).
There are many forms of Surya or the solar force of light and dharma of the world of heaven. We have mentioned several. There is a group of deities the Adityas. There is also Ushas as the Goddess of the Dawn. The solar deities reflect the principles of Dharma or illumined intelligence.
There are many deities of the atmosphere that connect to Indra. These include Rudra and Brihaspati. In addition, there are group deities the Maruts, Rudras and Ashvins. These atmospheric deities reflect Prana and energy.
Agni and Soma do not have so many associated deities but there are some and they have many hymns of their own. With Agni is most commonly the group of deities the Vasus. With Soma are various watery deities and Goddesses.
The Yoga of Light
The Vedic deities are primarily in their natural symbolism forms of light, with four forms being most prominent: Agni or Fire, Soma or Moon (reflected light), Indra or lightning, and Surya or the Sun (illumination). Yet these aspects of light function not only in the outer world but also in the inner world. In the psyche, Agni or Fire is will, Soma or Moon is the reflective aspect of mind and emotion, Indra or lightning is the energetic aspect of the mind as the power of perception, Surya or the Sun is the illuming power of the mind as awareness. There are four related light centers in the subtle body:
| Surya – Sun | Spiritual Heart | Awareness |
| Soma – Moon | Crown chakra | Reflection |
| Indra – Lightning | Third Eye | Perception |
| Agni – Fire | Root | Speech |
Through understanding these four energy centers, we can see how the subtle body and its chakra system was well known to the Vedic seers and integral to the Vedic mantras. The Vedic Devatas or Godheads of light reflect the deepest energies of our own consciousness and their integral unfoldment.
[i] Pranava in Yoga Sutras
[ii] However it is true that classical Yoga came from the late Vedic period and does not always reflect its Vedic roots. Yoga also was employed to some degree by non-Vedic schools like Buddhism and Jainism, but these also employed other Vedic factors like using the mantra Om, Vedic like fire rituals and other Vedic deities and mantras.
[iii] This simple observation seems to be lost on scholars who would like to see Jain or Buddhist influences in the Yamas and Niyamas, rather than common Dharmic values for Dharmic traditions. The Yamas and Niyamas are Vedic principles like tapas and svadhyaya, or related to them like Saucha and Santosha. They do not require any extra Vedic origin.
[iv] Rigveda X.
[v] Note Taittiriya
[vi] Yoga Sutras
[vii] Yoga Sutras Pranava
[viii] Five pranas Yajur Veda
[ix] Note author’s Soma in Yoga and Ayurveda
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After the death of the great king Shivaji in 1680 the nascent Maratha kingdom faced a great challenge. The Moghul Emperor Aurungzeb had been confounded and defeated by the repeated battles with the Marathas and the high spirit of Shivaji. With the forces of fanaticism released throughout South Asia and to sustain himself the aged emperor leaned ever heavier on the clerics and upon religious exclusivism. The king of the Marathas with his slaying of the Afghan war leader, Afzal Khan, the daring attack on Shaista Khan and the escape from the very depths of the Mughal Empire in Delhi were the stuff of legend in the lifetime of Shivaji himself. The deaths of the great Rajput Chiefs, Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh around the same time seemed to open the floodgates of repression and extremism even further. Orders were issued to demolish the Hindu temples and impose the hated poll tax on non-Muslims – the jaziya.
As the empire groaned in its agony resistance began to multiply and grow leading to further repressions. The Bundelas in central India began fighting; the Jats of the Mathura region and the Rajput clans of the Rathores and Sisodiyas in Rajasthan even leading to a son of Aurangzeb named Akbar to join the Rajput’s. In fury the enraged Emperor led the main imperial army to crush his son and his erstwhile rebellion.
Further south the Mughals believed that the Marathas would be unable to repeat their exploits under the son of Shivaji, Shambaji thinking that the sustenance of this new Hindu kingdom rested on one able man alone. Like so many other rebellions in that period, he thought the Maratha movement too must have received its death blow with the passing of its able leader, and by the fact that Shivaji had been succeeded by his brave but incapable son, Sambhaji. Sambhaji had courage, which he indeed demonstrated on various occasions, but also indulged in excesses leading his father on occasion forced to consider a severe punishment for his own son. Sambhaji in his rage left and joined the Moghuls! This was an intensely painful time in Shivaji’s life. Sambhaji left the Moghuls and begged for forgiveness when he witnessed first-hand the atrocities against Hindus.
Shambaji offered refuge to Akbar and in 1682 the lost son of Aurangzeb escorted by the Rajput’s arrived in safety in Maharashtra. Close behind the Emperor entered the Maratha Kingdom in the same year. Few would have guessed that he would never return to the north spending the last 27 years of his life in a futile and eventually failed war with the Hindus.
The war was engaged and raged from this period onwards in a steady ebb and flow in the hills of western India with neither side able to emerge over the other. The steady courage of Shambaji was only matched by his impetuous and rash nature. Only his minister Kavi Kalash was able to exercise any control over the headstrong king. An equal measure of the rage of shamabji was directed towards any perceived rivals or dissenters in his kingdom and he dealt with the same with extreme severity and with all the rage for which he was justly famous.
Blood flowed over the mountains and the land was ruined but the people fought on. The full force of the empire was now borne down on the barren hills and the prime generals and troops of the Mughals now all entered into the fray. For seven years more that war continued with its monotonous tale of attack and counter attack – of determined sieges and equally determined sieges. Of forts falling to the Mughals only to be retaken months later and for the cycle of destruction to continue.
In 1689 however the situation changed. The Maratha king was at Sangameshwar unaware of the nearness of his enemies and with a scant force around him. After a sudden raid under Muqarrab Khan a Mughal force reached the place and after a bitter fight succeeded in capturing Shamabaji and Kavi Kalash.
The next chapter is best described in the words of the : Masir I Alambiri, the official history of Aurangzeb’s reign:
Shamba was brought before the court. The Emperor out of his devotion to Islam ordered that from four miles before the camp Shambha should be made an object of ridicule …..so that the Muslims might be encouraged and the Hindus discouraged by the sight. The night in the morning after which he was brought to the Court …in the joyous expectation of seeing the spectacle, and the day was like the day of Eid because all men, old and young went out to see such a scene of joy and happiness.
The Emperor ordered that man to be removed to the prisons and in that moment Aurangzeb descended from the throne and kneeling down on the carpet of prayer bowed his head to the ground in thanksgiving and raised his hands in prayer to Allah….and drops of marvel(lit tears) fell from his far reaching eyes As the destruction of this wicked infidel in consideration of the harshness and disgrace that he had inflicted by slaying and imprisoning Muslims and plundering Muslims — and by the decision of the Doctors of the Law all were in favour of killing Shamba and thus he was killed with Kavi Kalash.
After two days the Emperor ordered Ruhullah Khan to ask Shamba where he had kept his treasure . In these circumstances that haughty man opened his mouth in defiant and vain words about the Emperor (Aurangzeb) – So the Emperor ordered him to be blinded by driving nails into his two eyes -So it was done. But that proud man from his high spirit gave up taking food from that day onwards and continued to shout defiance to The emperor and the tenents of Islam.
Maratha sources report:
When they were brought face to face with Aurangzeb, the latter offered to let Sambhaji live if he surrendered all the Maratha forts, turned over all his hidden treasures and disclosed the names of all the Mughal officers who had helped him. Sambhaji refused, and instead sang the praises of Mahadev (Lord Shiva). Aurangzeb ordered him and Kavi Kalash to be tortured to death. Sambhaji and Kavi Kalash were brutally tortured for over a fortnight. The torture involved plucking out their eyes and tongue and pulling out their nails. The later part involved removing their skin. On March 11, 1689, Sambhaji was finally killed, reportedly by tearing him apart from the front and back with ‘Wagh Nakhe’ (‘Tiger claws’, a kind of weapon), and was beheaded with an axe. This grievous death was given to him at Vadhu on the banks of the Bhima river, near Pune.
From the Persian history (Fatuhat I Alamgiri) :
“At last the case was reported to the Emperor and by his order Shambaji was taken to the place of execution and his limbs were hacked of one after the other- his severed head was publicly exposed across the Empire and taken to Delhi and hung on the gate of that city”
All accounts refer to days of horrific torture and agony which were borne with astonishing firmness and stoicism by Shambaji and his Brahmin minister Kavi Kalash. Even the purported offers of clemency on the public display of submission and/or an escape from the horror by conversion to Islam had little effect on the unfortunate Maratha king. After being blinded and his tongue cut from his mouth he surprisingly with great difficulty was still able to communicate and to continue to offer defiance to his oppressors.The memory of his inspirational father must have been close to Shambaji in the last days – given just sufficient time to rest between the tortures and removal of limbs after nearly two weeks of horrendous and unthinkable pain the broken and limbless king was executed – His head was cut off and placed in public display around the cities and towns of Maharashtra as a warning. But it did not have the desired effect.
The news of the execution of the son of the much revered and loved king Shivaji send a wave of horror and revulsion throughout the land. His brother Rajaram took the crown and retreated to the great fortress of Jinji to endure a 10 year long siege by the Mughals. The excesses of Shamabji were forgotten – news of the method of his death and more importantly the accounts of the dead king spread like wildfire amongst the Marathas. For his adherence to the Hindu Dharma the people named him ‘Dharamveer’ the warrior of Dharma
In the moment of his apparent triumph Aurangzeb was beset by an even greater tide of enemies. The Marathas under their war bands and leaders took to fight all over the western and southern parts of India from coast to coast. Their soldiers everywhere continually harried and fought the Mughals in an even greater tidal wave of resistance. The harried and worn emperor continued to fight in the face of ever increasing odds. The peoples of the north of India began to rise in rebellions and struggles eventually leading to the destruction of the Mughals. For 27 long years Aurangzeb continued with his fight against the Marathas only to die in despair in 1707.
The son of Shivaji had redeemed the pledge of his father of Hindu Padshahi – His heroic death led to the eventual victory over the forces The Maratha Hindu empire rose on the ruins of the Mughals and a hundred years after the execution of Shambaji a defeated and blinded Mughal Padshah, Shah Alam fell at the feet and mercy of the Maratha warrior and kingmaker Mahadji Sindhia.
The dreams and inspirations of the great Hindu Monarch Shivaji echo through history as a lesson against the forces of fanaticism and prejudice.
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Through his writings, this man breathed a new passion and life into an entire civilisation, particularly his native region of Bengal, which became kindled with religious, nationalistic and artistic fervour after being infused with the powerful visions contained in his writings.
Born on 27 June 1838 in the Kantalpara district of Bengal, the first striking event we have of his life was that he mastered the alphabet as a child in a single sitting. This was an image and prophecy for the rest of his life.
Apart from the breathtaking legacy of his literary works – his life was quite “normal” and not in any way out of the ordinary. He was a man who never clamoured for place or power, but did his work in silence for the love of his work, even as nature does. And just because he had no aim but to give out the best that was in him to his people, he was able to create a language, a literature, a freedom struggle, and steer the course of history.
Bankim was 19 years of age when India’s First War of independence (known in the west as the “Sepoy Mutiny”) was waged. The following year (1858) India had lost the war. Bankim was finishing his studies at the time, and in that same year graduated from the University of Calcutta. The British authorities immediately appointed him to the post of Deputy Magistrate.
Young Bankim had suffered a shock in seeing the failure of India’s War of Independence. He could not rest until he knew why the great movement for liberation ended up being crushed in the manner in which it was, and that too with the help of many Indian’s themselves (most notably the Sikhs). In his effort to discover the causes of that failure he set his sharp intellect to the task of analysing the great problems that India was facing. Influenced and inspired by three great figures of that epoch, Raja Rammohan Roy, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi (the Hindu queen who led her soldiers against the British during the war) – he soon recognised the existence of a number of startling facts.
Foremost among these was that the people of India were fast becoming denationalised by English manners and customs, English fashions, and English whiskies and wines – not to mention the Christian missionaries (who had made Bengal their storm centre). The British government used their educational system to further this agenda (after abolishing and outlawing the traditional Indian education systems). Chatterji’s soul winced when he perceived that the Indian who spoke good English was more honoured by his own people than the man who spoke and wrote their own tongue exquisitely. Wherever he looked, he saw educated Indians jumping frantically on the bandwagon of British culture.
From the moment he had first learned to think for himself, Bankim realised that there was a titanic struggle ahead to reverse the trend and bring physical and cultural freedom to the sacred motherland. He felt that he had his own divinely ordained effort to make in this veritable battle – which he played silently and humbly. If India was to be uplifted, her children must once again create literature and language dynamic and inspiring to enlighten and inspire the entire people of India.
Soon, the profound effect of Chatterji’s novels and essays, with their compelling beauty, subtle humour and inspiring themes could be seen, firstly in Bengal and then spilling over into greater India. Indians who were nurtured on Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley began to read the works of Kalidas, Bhavabhuti, Chandidas and Vidyapula. They turned eagerly to the Puranas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Whereas before, elite Indians took pride in their knowledge of the Magna Carta strugle, the times of Oliver Cromwell and the tragedy of Charles the First, they began to relish the ballads of Rajasthan and Maharashtra. A new feeling was born. Millions began to hold their heads high once again and talk in terms of “our language”, “our literature”, “our history”, “our country”.
His Literary History
Bankim began his literary career with a desire to write in English, and wrote a novel called Rammohan’s Wife.” He at once realised his mistake with the realisation that the his work was much more natural and powerful in his own mother tongue.
The major novels he wrote were: Chandrashekhar, Kishna Kanta’s Will, Debi Chaudhurani, Sitaram, Indira, Kamal Kanta and Anandamath.
The last of these, Anandamath deserves special mention here. It wasn’t necessarily the best of Bankim Chandra’s works, though still great in its own right. Yet because of its astonishing political consequences, with no other of his works is Bankim so closely identified.
The Anandamath story is set in 18th century India, when a group of warrior sannyasis mounted a guerilla war against Muslim rule (based on a true historical attempt by sannyasis to do precisely this). It was a riveting story line with amazing characters and meaningful dialogues. Yet more importantly, hundreds of thousands of Indians (primarily Hindus) took the story as a metaphor for their own present day situation, understanding it as a call to arms to drive the new tyrants (the British) away from the sacred soil. Indeed, the main revolutionary group in Bengal chose its name as that of the sannyasin group from Anandamath. The most important and widely known section of this book was the poem “Vande Mataram” which means “Hail to the Mother(land)”. The song became the battle cry for India’s freedom struggle. It was set to become India’s National Anthem, but was rejected because a section of Muslims considered the song as idolatrous due to its metaphor comparing India to the tiger-borne Goddess Durga “with instruments of punishment in each of her ten hands”. To placate the Muslims (and Jawahalal Nehru) the constituent assembly rejected it as the National Anthem. Incidentally, Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet whose “Jana Gana” eventually became India’s National Anthem had stated on several occasions that he desired very much that Bankim Chandra’s “Vande Mataram” should become the National Anthem of free India. For example, in 1928, he said in an interview with Mulk Raj Ananda “I share his ideas of inheriting the past – if made relevant for the present! Bankim Chandra is our master in this respect. In our school here, students sing “Bande Mataram” every morning…..I hope it becomes the national anthem of free India!”
Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath demonstrated the most powerful example in modern history of how art can affect real life to a tremendous extent – especially in an artistically orientated civilisation like that of the Hindus.
Towards the end of his life, Bankim Chandra turned his attention to write about spirituality – the very essence of Hindu civilisation. A Life of Krishna and a book on the Essence of Religion, a rendering of the Bhagavad Gita and a commentary on the Vedas were his aims to give to his fellow countrymen. The first two he managed to complete, and the rendering of the Bhagavad Gita was three parts finished, but the commentary on the Vedas, which should have been a priceless possession, never got into the stage of execution. Death, in whose shadow he had so long dwelt, with his ailing health, took the pen from his hand before he could accomplish this feat. Yet his contributions to literature are enough to immortalise his memory.
Vande Mataram!
Vande Mataram is the national song of India. The song was composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
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[box_light]Swami Vivekananda is one of the most famous Hindu saints of the modern age. He is considered by many as a heralder of a new era for Hinduism, being the first person in the modern age to travel to the West and give the message of Vedanta to an international audience. Yoga practitioners in the west recently celebrated the centenary of his first journey to the west as the birth of the international practice of yoga.[/box_light]
Early Life
Vivekananda was born in Calcutta, named Narendra. He was imbued with virtues at a young age, and was a melodious singer, alert student and powerful athlete. His spiritual longing led him to search far and wide for ideas about God, from all religions and teachers. But his scientific nature would not let him believe. Doubts flooded his mind. Yet these doubts far from being a bad thing, actually propelled him on his journey. On the advice of his schoolteacher, Narendra visited Ramakrishna Paramhansa. Narendra was taken aback by the reply he got to his questions about God: “not only have I seen God, but I can show you God if you like.” Narendra was uncertain, but Ramakrishna knew he would be back. “My son I’ve waited my whole life for you,” Ramakrishna cried with emotion. Narendra subsequently made Ramakrishna his Guru, and he both studied the masses of ancient Hindu knowledge both from a scholarly and experiential perspective. Later he attained the name of Swami Vivekananda.
Social Revolutionary
Swamiji traveled extensively around India and was shocked by what he saw. He saw the beauty of the ancient spirituality of the land still intact, but unimaginable poverty, poor health, social ills that rent his heart. He tried to mobilise the affluent classes to come to the aid of their fellow countrymen. He was shocked observing the massive and ruthless conversion campaigns of the Christian missionaries who were flooding India with government support. He warned that India may become a land with barely a memory of its past and true culture, much like Africa of today (which is today dominated by Christianity and Islam, and forgetful and ignorant about any insights and achievements of their ancestors). Many people were impressed with Swami Vivekananda and slowly his following grew. He also set up the Ramakrishna Vedantic Mission.
Travels to the West
Swami Vivekananda journeyed to the West, speaking at the Parliament of Religions at Chicago. He was allocated only 5 minutes, but held the audience in rapture for much longer, drawing large applause. He travelled to many places. For the first time, people realised that there is something unique and different about the culture and religion of the sub-continent of India, that provided a spirituality beyond the cold confines of organised and authoritarian creeds that they were accustomed to. He developed a following, some of whom would provide a mighty service to India’s upliftment, including Margaret Nobles, who later became Sister Nivedita. Swami Vivekananda was also met with bitter hostility and resistance at the hands of some. Stories of slander and scandals would appear in newspapers regularly, to try and stunt his influence. Swamiji later narrated that the more resistance he encountered, the more determined he became.
Restoring India’s Battered Confidence
Understandably, due to being in the midst of the second great colonialisation many thinkers and activists in India had lost faith in their heritage and were on the way to have their minds and hearts totally yearning after an imitation of England and Europe. Swamiji’s life had a deep impact on the Indian elite. A later Prime Minister of India later declared “We were at that time depressed at the state of our country, but Swami Vivekananda returned to us a lost dignity. We realised that while at present we do not have the wealth or power of Britain, we still had the real article, something that they did not have.”
His vision
It was Swamiji’s hope that India would create a new social order and a new civilisation by combining her best spiritual traditions with the latest advancements in science and technology. She would be rich both materially and spiritually. He knew affluence was not enough to make humanity satisfied, and that it was humanity’s place to manifest the will and light of the divine in the world. He wanted India to set an example in this, and be a harbinger in a new age, where the world would be both materially and technologically healthy, but spiritually and culturally advanced also.
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Categories
Mirabai (1540 – 1597)
There are few Hindus who will not have heard of Mirabai, the Rajput princess whose devotional compositions have provided a voice to the spiritual yearning of millions, and have a distinct, even a feminist, emphasis to them. Many stories exist about Mira, and it is difficult to produce a factual account of her life, although she lives perpetually through her songs, famous throughout India. The following is a shortened account about popular folk-lore about Mirabai:
Born in Rajisthan a land of warriors and sages, sadhus and kings, but also instability and sorrow, Mirabai showed great devotion for Lord Krishna in her childhood years. One day, a holy man came to her family’s palace and was carrying a small image of Krishna. Knowing that Mirabai would appreciate it, her mother brings her the little statue of Krishna. As the wandering sage left the palace he took his image of Krishna with him. Mirabai was very upset – in fact for days she lost her appetite and was very sad. But after a few days the sadhu returned. The night before, he explained, Krishna had appeared to him in a dream, telling him to return the image to Mira!
Mira grew up to be a beautiful young lady, and was duly married to the warrior Prince Bhoj, and went to live at his palace. However, despite being a devoted and dutiful wife, devotion to Lord Krishna was always foremost on her mind, which annoyed the family of her husband. Uda, her sister in law was most annoyed at Mira’s ways. They tried to stop her from visiting the temple. Prince Bhoj came to accept his wife’s nature, and thought of her as a great devotee of the Lord. He built her a small Krishna temple within the palace. However, for company with other devotees, Mira still sought to go to the village temple. She became acquainted with the great saint Ravidas, who was a humble shoemaker by profession, and learnt much about aspects of religion that she did not know about through him. She considered Ravidas her spiritual preceptor (Guru). Although her in-laws were becoming enraged with her behaviour, several of them could see their was something very special about her. Ravidas is turn was very impressed and moved by the intensity of her devotion to Krishna. He brought her a sitar with his own meager resources, which she used to compose and play soul stirring devotional songs to all who would listen. Through her songs Mirabai’s fame grew exceedingly, spreading far and wide throughout India. Even the Moghul Emporer Akbar (who was tolerant unlike other fanatical Moghul rulers, even renouncing Islam) came to visit her, and was so moved by her songs that he gave her a precious necklace.
Meanwhile, Prince Bhoj, Mirabai’s husband was killed in battle, against the predatory Moghuls. Bhoj’s cousin seizes the throne, who was one member of the family who had harboured dislike for Mirabai. Finding Akbar’s necklace, he accused Mirabai of being a traitor. He confined her to her room, and ordered her precious image of Krishna to be thrown into the river. She still had her devotion to Krishna, but was distraught at not being able to be amongst her fellow devotees and resented being locked in a confined space. She is believed to have write to Tulsidas, who advised her to attempt to leave, which Mirabai did so. Mira’s sister-in-law, Uda had grown fond of Mira over time and was very saddened by Mira’s departure.
Mira roamed India in devotion to her beloved Lord Krishna. She could see Krishna everywhere and in everything, and her songs describe her rapture in this vision. She grew very famous and loved. This enraged the king, the cousin of Mira’s husband Bhoj’s. He was determined now that Mira should die. Many attempts were subsequently made on Mira’s life, none of which bore fruit, due to her unfathomable love and trust in Krishna.
Selections from Mira bai’s works:
Priceless Gift (pâyo jî)
I have found, yes, I have found the wealth of the Divine Name’s gem.
My true guru gave me a priceless thing. With his grace, I accepted it.
I found the capital of my several births; I have lost the whole rest of the world.
No one can spend it, no one can steal it. Day by day it increases one and a quarter times.
On the boat of truth, the boatman was my true guru. I came across the ocean of existence.
Mira’s Lord is the Mountain-Holder, the suave lover, of whom I merrily, merrily sing.
I Will Dance (citanandana âge nâcûngî)
I will dance before the Consciousness-Charmer.
Having danced and danced, I will please my enjoyer. I will feel my lover.
I will tie on the ankle bells of love and affection. I will wear the dancing-garment of His Face.
Worldly modesty, family honor—I will not care for either of these.
I will go and lie in the bed of my beloved. I, Mira, will dye myself in Hari’s color.
Oh Oh I’m Love-Crazy (he rî maim to prema dîvânî)
Oh oh! I’m love-crazy. No one knows my pain.
My bed is over the gallows. How could I sleep?
My lover’s bed is in heaven’s mandala. How could I get to him?
The one who is wounded knows what a wound means, what it means to be burned.
The jeweler knows what it means to be a jeweler, what it means to have a jewel.
Afflicted by pain, I wander from forest to forest. Can’t get a doctor.
O Lord, Mira’s torment will be wiped out when the doctor is the Dark Lover.
Torn in Shreds (mere to giridhara gupâla)
Mine is Gopal, the Mountain-Holder; there is no one else.
On his head he wears the peacock-crown: He alone is my husband.
Father, mother, brother, relative: I have none to call my own.
I’ve forsaken both God, and the family’s honor: what should I do?
I’ve sat near the holy ones, and I’ve lost shame before the people.
I’ve torn my scarf into shreds; I’m all wrapped up in a blanket.
I took off my finery of pearls and coral, and strung a garland of wildwood flowers.
With my tears, I watered the creeper of love that I planted;
Now the creeper has grown spread all over, and borne the fruit of bliss.
The churner of the milk churned with great love.
When I took out the butter, no need to drink any buttermilk.
I came for the sake of love-devotion; seeing the world, I wept.
Mira is the maidservant of the Mountain-Holder: now with love He takes me across to the further shore.
The Divine Name (râma nâma rasa pîjai)
Drink the nectar of the Divine Name (Rama), O human! Drink the nectar of the Divine Name!
Leave the bad company, always sit among righteous company. Hearken to the mention of God (for your own sake).
Concupiscence, anger, pride, greed, attachment: wash these out of your consciousness.
Mira’s Lord is the Mountain-Holder, the suave lover. Soak yourself in the dye of His color.
Holi Raining Colors of Bhakti (sîla santoSha kî kesara gholî)
The saffron of virtue and contentment
Is dissolved in the water-gun of love and affection.
Pink and red clouds of emotion are flying about,
Limitless colors raining down.
All the covers of the earthen vessel of my body are wide open;
I have thrown away all shame before the world.
Mira’s Lord is the Mountain-Holder, the suave lover.
I sacrifice myself in devotion to His lotus feet.
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