Park Street:

When Jawhar Sircar, the former Prasar Bharati CEO, took the stage at Asiatic Society to deliver the Dr Biman Behari Memorial Lecture on a topic drawn from Indian mythology, it was a deliberate act to lift what he described as the “academic apartheid with gods and demons”.

“The huge area of mythology and folklore is taken as nonsense by academics, thus leaving it to those who are deliberately misusing it to threaten the idea of India,” Sircar said.

Among those who deal in the area, Devdutt Pattanaik, he said, is too text-based in his interpretations. “At times he does refer to context but that pleases rather than disturbs the reader into challenging dangerous fundamentalism.”

Amish Tripathi, he said, builds modern myths on age-old ones that leaves the reader more firmly rooted in the imagined past. “The difference between myth and reality is fast disappearing in India.” Only a few bravehearts like D.D. Kosambi have explained “why colourful tales are needed to sugarcoat religious values”.

Elaborating on his theme ‘ Asuras in Indian tradition’, Sircar said his fascination with asuras was from a desire “to get their side of the story”.

He was using asuras, mentioned in the Mahabharat and the Puranas, as an umbrella under which to put all demonised anti-gods. “They are indigenous forces who stood in opposition to the emerging and dominating Sanskritic narrative.”

“The idea,” he said, “is to try to retrieve bits and pieces of the alternative narrative that was wiped off by priestly officialdom but survived through disjointed tales embedded within the mega narrative.”

Delving into the root of demonology, he pointed out that for ages Man knew certain deities were not benign. “But our binaries do not operate on the same plain (as the God vs Devil construct in the West). We have internalised much of the malevolent pantheon.”

An example of the process, he said, is Shani, who is still treated with suspicion and carries signatures of demonic worship. “You cannot place him indoors. Yet Brahmanism has managed to fit him within the system so that he does not run out of it and become the rallying point of dissonance.”

A difference between gods and demons, he said, is that one has to be worshipped and the other propitiated. Deities were metaphors for ethnic groups. “In pre-legislative times, policy-making depended on whose god one was able to foist upon the others in the pantheon.”

The expulsion or suppression of gods reflects social changes. “Of the ruling three in the Aryan narrative, Brahma was pensioned off to a temple in Pushkar and Indra was banished as a suffix to names. By this time, pastoral economy was on the upswing and Indra was pitted against Krishna.” The Govardhan mountain episode, with Krishna sheltering Vrindavan from the thunder of Indra, is iconic in the Krishna lore.

“Monotheism makes no compromise with the demonic. The devil had to be opposed to God. Christianity and Islam have kept the demon alive on a day-to-day basis as temptation, Sircar said, referring to rituals such as stoning of the devil at Mecca.

But in Hinduism, the asura is already defeated and his memory is celebrated in the burning of Ravan. “Over time, even figures in opposition were deified. Ravan, for example, was shown as a Shiva disciple.

“The story of India lies in this absorption and continuous process of accommodation.”

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Sudeshna Banerjee / July 1oth, 2018