Faith in transition

Ranjit Hoskote

We are accustomed to speaking of the sacred as an entity intrinsically vaster than life: we regard
it as a transcendental energy of presence that animates the world, a cosmic ordering principle that
helps us makes sense of our experience. The sacred is acknowledged as a mystery both by
reason, which describes it as the numen, and by faith, which venerates it as the Divine. And yet,
paradoxically, the transcendental mystery of the sacred is always approached through specific
icons, archetypal symbols or conceptual devices: whether Shiva or Vishnu, the cross or the
sacred fire, the Shunya or the Kaaba. We have no universal image of the sacred: the sacred must
be conceived and addressed through the particularities of local cultures.
Manoj K. Jain

And it is, therefore, the impact of the forces of

globalisation on local cultures that has brought the sacred
into so extreme a condition of crisis today, across the
world. This edition of Folio takes, as its focus, the
changing role of belief in society, as also the altered place
of the sacred in contemporary culture, in a period of
disruptive, epic-scale economic and social transformation.

The phenomenon of globalisation has drawn diverse geographical regions, social structures and
economic arrangements into a single network of transactions, in which all natural and human
resources are treated as potential commodities or services, and all scales of value reduced to a
calculus of profit and liability. By so doing, globalisation has shattered the specificity of the local
and radically destabilised all prevailing conceptions of collective identity, individual purpose,
ethical obligation and political responsibility. This is especially true in the formerly colonised
and economically weaker countries of the world, which have neither a cultural nor a legal
apparatus of sufficient strength to oppose the decrees of globalisation, which emanate from the
centres of global power in the former First World.
 Ashim Ghosh/Fotomedia Jyotirmoy Banerjee

A Hindu temple, a mosque and a church can

all be seen in this gateway.

This is not an argument for the static preservation of local cultures: there is much in them that is
hierarchical, regressive and oppressive; but there is also much else that is participatory, dynamic
and wise. In any case, the local must have the right to determine its own course of revision and
reform, by the light of universal human principles, without having these changes imposed on it
by a global authority.

AP G. Ramamurthy/Wilderfile

While globalisation may be seen to give (in the form of consumer goods and new technologies,
and the access to a First-World "look" that these options generate), it is surely more important to
assess what it takes away. Not only does it rob countries of control over their resources, their
goods and services, and their autonomy to act as sovereign nation-states, but it also deepens
existing asymmetries within societies by operating through their complicit elites to exploit their
subaltern classes.

With this revisitation of the East India Company syndrome goes the colossal fragmentation of an
experienced totality of the world that has already been placed under strain by the onset of
industrial modernity. In the epoch of globalisation, the conceptual shift from duty to choice, from
consistency to multifariousness, has resulted in the loss of centredness in self and world, the
release of divergent energies towards diverse objects.
 Ajay Lall Ajay Lall

This loss of coherence causes an acute sense of homelessness, which none of the traditional
belief-systems can remedy, unless they adapt themselves greatly to meet the surprises and shocks
of the present. In the process of re-invention that ensues, some religions undergo distortion,
others transfigure themselves; some wane into discreet philosophies, others are revived by
ferocious bigots or rapacious gurus.

Religious practice can degenerate into a supermarket of spiritual options, sustained by celebrity
endorsement like any other consumer product. To employ the marketing jargon so popular in this
age, many religious traditions succumb to the pressure to "reposition themselves," to consolidate
their "brand equity," to "find new recruits", and to "tap new markets". But religious practice can
also transmogrify into the terrorism of doctrinaire belief, revealing that the march towards a
promised Utopia can be a violent project, which destroys all obstacles in its path, plunging the
world into terror and madness. The quest for the Absolute in a world of relativities can, as
Kierkegaard recognised, be a demonic one.
Ajay Lall

We may identify at least six contemporary experiential landscapes that

demonstrate the transitions of faith today, each comprising a specific
historical stimulus and a widespread response to it, and a constituency
that has developed around that response.

First, we have fundamentalism, the securing of the self within a

selectively constructed and interpreted image of tradition. The Taliban
are a prime instance of this tendency: the fanaticism of these Pakhtoon
militants, far from being a basic attribute of Islam, is the product of a
specific and tragic modern history. It is the desperate guarantee of
existential meaning to Afghanistan's lost generation, the young men
who grew up as orphans in Pakistani refugee camps, educated by
fanatical mullahs, isolated from the wider world of sensuous and
intellectual experience that would have given them a more finely textured understanding of life.
Militants created by the criminal war-lust of the USSR, the U.S. and their regional satraps, the
Taliban are hard-wired to promote the anti-ideals of vengeance and unfreedom, which are their
defence against the uncertainties of postmodernity.

Second, we have anomie, when global commerce and technology reduce the individual's human
possibilities to the routines of productive labour and the imperatives of survival; and when the
sociality of traditional religion breaks down. When the community - as ecclesia, sangha,
congregation - fails the individual, when the magisterium of religion is questioned, a loss of self-
worth seeps into the consciousness, and social practice is characterised by a loss of traditional
values. Into this spiritual vacuum rush the demons of a dark imagination, offering an alternative
guidance and sociality: the control-freak gurus of lunatic-fringe cults, figures who imprison their
faithful in nightmarish psychological and physical conditions of submission and isolation.
R. K. Wadhwa/Fotomedia

In his book Underground (2000), the Japanese novelist Haruki

Murakami argues that the March 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo
subway system by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was not an
aberration, but a symptom of the malaise afflicting Japanese society.
He records how competitiveness and spiritual emptiness can drive
"normal" individuals, against their better judgment, to seek solace in
the maniacal doctrines of a cult-guru like Shoko Asahara.

Third, we have a remix religiosity, manufactured and disseminated by spiritual entrepreneurs,

who see a business opportunity in the need of many individuals for spiritual comfort. Religion is
marketed professionally, as a leisure-and-lifestyle option, a group therapy, a stress-management
technique: many of the New Age movements would be classifiable under this rubric. Under the
aegis of New Age remix religiosity, the spiritual traditions - whether Vedic, Upanishadic,
Buddhist, Bhakti, or Sufi - are subverted to serve the interests of consumerism-as-spectacle or
else, are trivialised into personal enhancement devices. Another aspect of this experiential
landscape is the relaying of religious sentiment through the mediatic structures, especially by
televangelists and tele-gurus. The New Age philosophies may well manifest themselves as
sources of hope for the perplexed, but their general incoherence and naivete promotes a "self-
realisation"-type narcissism that is divorced from any progressive or responsible possibility of
social action.
Jyoti Banerjee/Fotomedia

Fourth, we have neo-tribalism: the deployment of

religion as a component in overt political mobilisation,
the politicisation of faith. The Hindutva upsurge is a case
in point, with the Ramjanambhoomi agitation as its key
operation: proceeding from the political desire to
consolidate the domination of the Hindu upper-caste and
upper-class elites, Hindutva has attempted to convert Hinduism into an ideology of group
assertion, a weapon of identity politics aimed at the establishment of a national counter-
modernity governed by majoritarian rather than ecumenical premises.

Such neo-tribalism is best seen in relation to a fifth experiential landscape, that of competitive
expressivity. Here, we note the interplay of group assertions, elite and subaltern, phrased in
terms that conflate the political with the religious. If the Hindutva sympathiser displays a car-
sticker saying "Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain" or pastes up a poster showing a Ravi-Varmaesque
Rama striding towards Ayodhya, the newly politicised cobbler sets up a four-colour image of his
patron-saint, Sant Ravidas, above his stall, while the Dalit activist hallmarks his neighbourhood
with a statue of Dr. Ambedkar, pink-skinned and blue-suited, dermatically and sartorially defiant
of the Brahminical order. Such competitive expressivity is the site of dissensus, rather than
consensus: it is where public space is marked off by group interests, where signals are sent and
territory staked in a ceaseless, fluctuating exchange of messages.
R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile

The sixth and last experiential landscape examined here is

that of cyberspace: the domain of virtual reality, which
questions the conventional certitudes of self and God,
chance and destiny. Cyberspace permits an unprecedented
blurring of the boundaries between factuality and fantasy,
a concealment of motive, a change of identity. The
advocates of cyberspace as the final frontier of human
consciousness ask us a potentially terrifying question: If
the self can be elaborated into a playful masquerade of avatars, and a super-computer can act as
the template of the Overmind, where do we place the hypothesis of God?

These are not the only experiential landscapes in which we may observe the process of faith
undergoing transition. But they point us in the direction of a general conclusion. The
inescapeable fact is that the syndromes and predicaments we have briefly surveyed do indeed
posit alternative modernities, or counter-modernities, which are produced from within some
particular context of religious assumptions. Some of these are presented as Utopias, but may turn
out to be abysses of terror.

At the same time, there are other living traditions, which do not promise Utopia, but insist on the
responsible pursuit of the religious life in the present. These living traditions, which may be
found among most of the world's major religions - including Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism
and Islam - provide the basis for a constructive and wholesome engagement with the challenges
of globalisation. They inspire us to safeguard the environment, to refrain from insulting the earth
and exploiting our fellow sentient beings. They help us to negotiate between the contrasted
realms of faith and inquiry, between the alternatives of sociality and solitude. Through their
techniques of reflection and action, we may find ways of re-locating the sacred: by recognising
of the interconnectedness of all life, by reinstating the sacred in the most intimate and everyday
rituals of living.
Above all, these living traditions oblige us to accept that faith is indeed in transition, that it is
not, and can never be, a changeless talisman of stability: faith is an act of effort, as all the great
teachers have taught us. Our own effort in this edition of Folio, modest as it may be, is to reflect
on a haunting problem of faith at the present time: How can we respond to the spiritual resources
of hope offered by tradition, and connect them with projects that are both personally meaningful
and capable of assuming socially vital forms?

A shrine at the border

Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos (Penguin India and University of California
Press). He is also a columnist for tehelka.com.

The hotel that I was staying at, in Amritsar, was only ten minutes away from the Golden Temple.
I was headed for the border but I decided to stop at the temple first. This was my first time there.
I was visiting at the height of summer. The air had a steely edge to it and everything around me
seemed to conduct heat. The handkerchief I had borrowed from the stall outside the temple was
soon soaked with sweat. In the pond around the Golden Temple, schools of large, dark-scaled
fish gasped at the water's surface, their open mouths closing on the warm air.
Ashim Ghosh/Fotomedia

When I had been in college in the early 1980s, each

morning we would open the newspaper and find news of
the Golden Temple. The guns and then the bloodshed in
the temple precincts had stunned the nation. That memory
of violence is compounded when you visit the temple.
You witness the quiet religiosity of the worshippers;
peace pervades the air. It is possible to imagine the
emotions of hurt and outrage that a full Army assault
must have evoked in the hearts of the devout Sikh and
even Hindus who had regularly worshipped at that shrine.

I stood and watched as the lines of worshippers, men and women of all ages, performed kar-
seva. Standing on the burning slabs, they washed the tiled steps and the wide marble courtyards
with water from the pond. I went inside the temple after that. People sat with folded hands
around the Granth Sahib. Priests, with full beards, sang Gurbani verses and their strong voices
carried out into the heat of the afternoon.

I could hear the singing on the streets outside. A few minutes later, I was on my way to Wagah to
see the evening ceremony staged by the Indian and Pakistani armies. The next day, I would go to
Khem-Karan, a few hours away from Amritsar.
Khem-Karan is a hamlet situated at the border that divides the two countries. I had found
mention of the place in Stephen Alter's Amritsar to Lahore. Alter had written: "Situated about a
hundred metres inside Indian territory, near the village of Khem Karan, is the tomb of Baba
Sheikh Braham, a Sufi mystic who was a contemporary of Guru Nanak. His samadhi has been
turned into a shrine that is visited by devotees from both sides of the border. Even during the two
wars in 1965 and 1971, when pitched battles were fought in the region, the Baba's tomb was left
unharmed."

The road from Amritsar leads to Khem-Karan past several gaudily decorated buildings that are
called "marriage palaces". These marriage palaces dotted a landscape that was given over to the
cultivation of wheat. There were signs advertising tractors. The BSF had its offices beside the
road. And then, once we had reached Khem-Karan and turned toward the border, the road gave
way. We had a narrow dirt road and the dust swirled around us as the car inched forward. In the
distance was a high embankment and, buried beneath it at regular intervals, was a long line of
turrets that gunners could hide behind.

The driver stopped the car at the BSF camp, which was located where the dirt road ended. There
was an electric fence on the far side: Pakistan spread out beyond the lines of barbed wire. After I
had showed my press cards, a few guards took me to show the shrine at the border. If I had come
on Thursday, I would have been allowed inside with less hassle. Two metal gates had to be
unlocked - I was asked to leave my camera back - and then I was ushered into a small compound
in which sat a brick edifice painted green.

There were small trees and bushes all around us; this was unusual in a landscape that was
otherwise rather barren. Green flags fluttered on all sides of the edifice. A priest emerged, a
black scarf tied around his head. He led us up the small edifice. High, tiled steps, six of them,
gave way to a small courtyard with the tomb of Baba Braham. The tomb was covered with ornate
green cloth and the driver who had brought me slipped a fifty-rupee note beneath its folds. The
priest went down and, perhaps as a gesture to his visitors, he put on some religious songs on this
rickety-sounding tape player. The machine was attached to an amplifier and the wheezing
melodies suddenly breached the border.

The young priest joined us. We were sitting under one of the trees; a hand-pump stood near us.
The priest, I found out, was a Hindu soldier. His name was Rajesh Kumar, a member of the BSF
Battalion 191. I asked him how he was chosen to be the priest at this mazaar of a Sufi saint. An
older soldier answered for the priest instead. He said, "Yeh achcha ladka hai. Sharaab nahin
peeta hai. Meat nahin khata" (He is a good boy. He does not drink or eat meat). The priest was
from Azamgarh. He had been in Khem-Karan for three years now. He had a degree in Sanskrit as
well as astrology; but, at night, he was still required to go out and do the patrolling on the border.
He might have meant this as a complaint. Then, he added, "Baba ke darbaar mein shanti milti
hai" (There is peace in Baba's darbaar).

There was a soldier there from Bihar and I got talking to him. We knew each other's villages. I
asked him what the mazaar meant for him. He said, "Hum akele duty karte hain. Yeh ehsaas hota
hai ki mere peeche support hai" (I do my duty alone. I feel that I have the Baba's support). I felt,
not without sympathy, the force of faith. But, I couldn't let this go. I turned to the rest of the
jawaans who were standing there. The Pakistanis who pray here, I said, they too enjoy the Baba's
support, do they not?
G.B.Mukherji/Wilderfile

"Yes, yes," they said in Hindi. They pointed out the patch of land on
the other side of a single line of barbed wire where the Pakistanis come
and pray. After the recent war in Kargil, the visitors are not allowed
any further access. There is a crowd here from both sides on
Thursdays, said someone. Another soldier said, "Their officers offer
their namaaz standing right there each evening. They are there for 15-
20 minutes and then they go away." He could have been describing
with awe the place in a forest where tigers or elephants are sighted.
One of the jawaans understood what I was saying. He replied, "Shanti
waali baat hai. Hum log bhaichaare se hee milte hain" (There is peace
here. We meet as brothers).

Peace in the subcontinent seems sometimes like a miracle. As we sat

there, eating the sweets that the priest had put in our palms, one soldier suddenly said, "Yahaan
pagal achche ho gaye hain" (The insane have recovered here). Mentally, I said, Amen.

Later, in my hotel-room in Amritsar, I began thinking of the many plaques and signs that I had
seen at the Golden Temple. They were all memorials to soldiers who had died in India's wars,
most of them from the wars in 1965 and 1971 fought against Pakistan. Sikhs, including soldiers
in the Indian Army, died during Operation Bluestar. It was there, at a shrine that was holy for so
many Sikhs who had served in the Indian forces, that the Army had launched its attack. I raise
this issue in order to make the simple point that places of worship, because of the importance
they assume in the lives of ordinary people, also become a part of this secular world and,
sometimes tragically, also places of war.

To put it in abstract terms, culture is never sacred. It is only a field of conflict. We struggle to
give meaning to places and to keep them that way or to bring about change.

I returned in my mind to the shrine that I had just visited at Khem-Karan. The divided citizens of
warring nations come there praying for a thousand different things: health, wealth, more cattle,
better crops, a job.... When we were on our way back to Amritsar, the car's driver turned to me
and asked whether I could help him travel to the U.S. or Canada. Then, unprompted, he confided
that he had prayed at the shrine for the boon of a life and a job abroad. The driver then asked me
what I had wanted from Sheikh Braham. I told him, "Peace between the two nations that he
touches." The irony struck me later that war comes through the door at places of worship even if
only in the figure of one who is praying for peace.

Responsible living
Daily Meditations
Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most celebrated contemporary masters of the Buddhist tradition.
Ordained into the monastic life at the age of 16 and educated both in his homeland and at the
University of Princeton, U.S., this Vietnamese Buddhist monk has earned an international
reputation as a distinguished writer and scholar, a courageous and responsible social activist and
spiritual guide.
G. Ramamurthy/Wilderfile

During the Vietnam War, Hanh worked indefatigably for

peace and reconciliation between the Communist North
and the U.S.-sponsored South. In 1966, at the age of 40,
he was exiled from his native country: both North and
South saw his peace activism (correctly, as it happens) as
an attempt to dismantle the violence of their attempted
military resolutions to the country's intractable human
problems. Even after peace returned to Vietnam, and that
devastated country was unified, Hanh was not permitted
to return. He now lives in exile in Plum Village, a small
community in south-western France. There, he teaches,
writes, gardens, and extends his compassionate attention and concrete assistance to refugees
across the globe.

Thich Nhat Hanh championed the movement known as "engaged Buddhism", which links
traditional practices of meditation and reflection with non-violent political activism. Among
other endeavours, he has established relief organisations to rebuild destroyed villages, set up the
School of Youth for Social Service, and founded a peace magazine. He has also written more
than 75 books, which include poetry, prose texts and prayers.

We re-print, here, two sequences of verses for daily meditation composed by Thich Nhat Hanh:
"Earth Verses" and "Meal Verses". Intended to be recited quietly as the individual goes through
the small routines and gestures of everyday activity - as s/he awakes, washes, waters the plants,
sits down to eat - these verses re-sensitise the mind and body to their special possibilities, their
place and role in the world, the responsibilities they owe their environment. At the core of these
verses lie the four brahma-viharas, or "divine abodes", the four great modes by which the
Buddhist practitioner reaches out to embrace the world: maitri (loving kindness), karuna
(compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy) and upeksha (equanimity).

EARTHVERSES
first step of turning on washing
the day water hands
The green Water flows Water flows
Earth is a from the high over my
miracle! mountains. hands. May
Walking in Water runs I use them
full deep in the skillfully to
awareness, Earth. preserve
the Miraculously our
wondrous , water comes precious
Dharmakay to us and planet.
a is sustains all
revealed. life.
sweeping walking gardening

As I mindfully The mind Earth

sweep the can go in a brings us
ground of thousand into life and
enlightenment directions. nourishes
, a tree of But on this us.
understanding beautiful Countless
springs from path, I walk as the
the Earth. in peace. grains of
With each sand in the
step, a River
gentle Ganges, all
wind. With births and
each step, a deaths are
flower. present in
each
breath.
 watering watering
recycling
the garden plants

Water and Garbage Dear plant,

sun green becomes rose. do not think
these Rose becomes you are
plants. compost - alone. This
When the Everything is stream of
rain of in water
compassion transformation comes from
falls, even . Even Earth and
the desert permanence is sky. This
becomes an impermanent. water is the
immense, Earth. We
green are together
ocean. for
countless
lives.
planting trees

I entrust myself to Buddha;

Buddha entrusts himself to
me. I entrust myself to Earth;
Earth entrusts herself to me.

MEALVERSES
blessing the filling the seeing the
meal plate full plate
 This food is My plate, In this food,
the gift of the empty now, I see clearly
whole will soon be the
universe - the filled with presence of
earth, the sky, precious the entire
and much food. universe
hard work. supporting
May we live my
in a way that existence.
makes us
worthy to
receive it.
May we
transform our
unskillful
states of
mind,
especially
our greed.
May we take
only foods
that nourish
us and
prevent
illness. We
accept this
food so that
we may
realise the
path of
practice.
sitting before the contemplating
down to eat first bite the food

Sitting here Many This plate of

is like beings are food, so
sitting struggling fragrant and
under the for food appetising,
Bodhi tree. today. I also contains
My body is pray that much
mindfulness they all suffering.
itself, may have
entirely enough to
 free from eat.
distraction.
upon
the first four holding a
finishing
mouthfuls cup of tea
the meal

With the first The plate is This cup of

taste, I empty. My tea in my
promise to hunger is two hands -
offer joy. satisfied. I Mindfulness
With the vow to live is held
second, I for the uprightly!
promise to benefit of My mind
help relieve all beings. and body
the suffering dwell in the
of others. very here
With the and now.
third, I
promise to
see others'
joy as my
own. With the
fourth, I
promise to
learn the way
of non-
attachment
and
equanimity.

These verses by Thich Nhat Hanh appear in Dharma Rain

Songs from a broken past

Nancy Adajania

The author is an art critic and documentary film-maker based in Mumbai. She is currently
Editor, Art India.

"Why do we perform gondhal?" asks Tanaji Thite rhetorically, and answers his own question:
"To control the chaos of the world."
 R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile

Tanaji has inherited the folk tradition of gondhal (which

literally means "confusion" in Marathi) from his
forefathers, and as we lurch in an auto-rickshaw towards
one of his performances, in Mumbai's eastern suburb of
Ghatkopar, he elaborates on the paradox of controlling
chaos with chaos. "First the gods created the rakshasas.
But the rakshasas became so powerful that they
challenged the gods themselves. So the gods took the
form of Adimaya (the Great Mother) to destroy them and
put an end to their gondhal," he says. "Adimaya's shakti kills all the obstacles created by evil
forces, whether they occur at birth or in a marriage - so every auspicious occasion is flagged off
with a gondhal performance."

We arrive at Nityanand Nagar, the shantytown where Tanaji is to perform a gondhal at a

wedding. The bride and the bridegroom sit facing the sugarcane mandir in which Ambamata sits,
her pot-and-coconut form having stolen some of the sky's silver. A coconut is put into the mouth
of the goddess, and stalks of sugarcane cross each other to form a cordon around her. On the sari
blouses placed before her in offering, rice and wheat grains are arranged like stars in the sky, as
though to mark a gentle re-ordering of day, the beginning of night.

Tanaji, his father and two brothers, begin the Ganesha-stuti, the prayer to Ganesha, remover of
obstacles. With the first beat of the sambhal, the night shakes like a coal-black backdrop. A fast
train zooms along the tracks behind the performers. The groom's drunken father interrupts the
Adimaya bhajan with disconnected slurs.

Tanaji punctuates the bhajan with jokes like "bayko sodayla, gondhal karto" (We perform
gondhal so that the groom leaves his wife). His brother Shivaji, playing the tuntuni, cuffs him
playfully on the head and sets the record straight by singing Adimaya's virtues. A strong halogen
light shines down like a midnight sun on the pandal. The performers sweat profusely in the
strong light, their heads hit the overhead mike as they dance gracefully with small torches in
their hands. I wonder why a halogen light is needed in such a small performance area, and the
monster amplifier that ruptures the songs with its electronic thunderings. "The bridegroom's
family has spent a lot of money on these arrangements," laments Tanaji, "so we have to use these
things to preserve their status."

The night is divided between a gondhal and a murali performance. A lethargic child trails a
parrot-green sari over the heads of the audience. Tanaji's uncle wears the sari over his kurta-
pyjama and bows his head like a shy murali. "When a couple don't have a child, they pray to
Khandoba and promise the god their first-born," says Tanaji in explanation. "If it's a girl she's
called Murali, if it's a boy he's called Vaghya. Both vaghya and murali devote themselves to
Khandoba. Some muralis also end up as devadasis."

But why does a woman not play the role of the murali in their performance? Tanaji grumbles
that women do not inform them when they attain puberty, and continue to perform to earn some
money. I can scarcely be comfortable with his insistence on maintaining the age-old taboo
concerning menstruation, but the gondhali is adamant: "We don't want to commit a sin, so men
in our family perform the role of the muralis." The question of economics emerges again and
Tanaji explains that his father combined the two performances so that people could get two
entertainments for the price of one. Besides, a man dressed as a woman is always guaranteed to
raise a laugh.

The murali-katha is narrated with robust folk wisdom. The daughter of Indra, king of the gods,
had been cursed that she would only get married on earth. So the gods put the girl in a box and
flung her down from the heavens. The box fell among the dhangar (shepherd) community of
Chandanpur, who named the child Banu. Having grown up, Banu worshipped the saint Kanifnath
of the Navnath pantheon and asked him, "Where will I see my husband?" Kanifnath replied,
"Your husband lives in Jejuri."

Now Khandoba, the lord of Jejuri, started dreaming of the beautiful Banu. Obsessed with her
beauty, he took the form of a dhangar and left for Chandanpur. Banu set her suitor a difficult
task: "Take these goats to graze, and don't return without giving them a good bath." When
Khandoba tried to do so, the goats kicked him in the shins. In his confusion, he looked across the
river and saw the dhobis washing their clothes, rhythmically dipping the clothes in the water and
then beating them on the stone. Taking a cue from them, Khandoba dipped the goats in the water
and beat them against the stone, then threw them on the bank to dry.

In the afternoon, when Banu brought Khandoba his meal, she saw him resting under a tree.
When she asked about the animals, he pointed to the scattered flesh and bones of the "washed"
goats. "You will have to bring them back to life," she cried, "otherwise the dhangars will throw a
fit." Khandoba promised to revive the animals, provided that she married him as soon as he did.
Opening his tiger-skin pouch, he sprinkled turmeric on the goats, which began to bleat again.
Thus the gondhal over Banu's husband and the dead goats was resolved.

But Tanaji's story was interrupted many times by calls from the audience, before it could reach
this climactic stage. People would dangle two-, five-, and ten-rupee notes before the performers.
Tanaji and Shivaji bent over several times to take the money and announce the denomination
before pinning the notes on the sugarcane mandir.

Such folk performances are like the dhangar's goats today, brutally beaten on the stones of time.
What we confront are pieces of flesh and bone, which sing the songs of a broken past. With each
new audience, these shreds of stories and songs are beaten into new shapes. "The story does not
interest this urban audience," laments Tanaji. "What they want is song and dance." Overhead, an
aeroplane that has just taken off from Santa Cruz Airport casts its shadow on the dispersing
audience.

Tanaji and Shivaji are dancing like the wind now. Both brothers are pot-bellied, but once they
pick up the storyteller's torch, their bodies become light and ductile. Behind me, a man slams
open the window of his milk booth - it's morning. The performance ends abruptly in the middle
of a song.
On the train back to Victoria Terminus, Tanaji says ruefully, "You should not have seen this
performance in the slums. Generally we take dakshina only once during the performance, but
here we were constantly interrupted. It's different in the villages, people don't have this kind of
money and they watch the whole performance seriously. I did this for my old father, he's come
all the way from Pimpripendhar in Pune."

It seems like such a long journey. I first met Tanaji in my office at the National Centre for the
Performing Arts in Mumbai: it was my first job, and as I sat at my desk planning a national
symposium on the crafts, in he walked, with a garland of bulbs around his neck. Before I could
make sense of the apparition, he explained that he was there to replace a faulty wire. The next
time he came, he brought an album of photographs with him. In it, I found the picture of a man
posing in a traditional nine-yard sari, his hair tied in a tight bun. Staring at the photograph, I
wondered who this end-of-the-century Bal Gandharva could be.

"I sometimes go shopping with my wife, dressed in a sari," laughed Tanaji. Only after I saw the
performance at Nityanand Nagar that night did I realise that, since he was performing the
murali's role, he could cross the borders of sexuality with ease and transform himself into a
woman at will. He enjoyed this role-playing and was very proud of his ability to change gender
both in performance and, seemingly, in reality.

But the Tanaji I see before my eyes now is a man with a puffed-up face and glazed eyes. His
crinkly hair, which always blazes like a black fire, hangs limp with sweat. Tanaji gets off the
train and disappears into the crowd at VT station. He will put in "overtime" at the Centre to earn
some extra money. And then his proud words, from an earlier conversation, come back to me, no
longer convincing: "Oh, now that we have jobs in the city, we are no longer wandering beggars
with tuntunis."

Has the condition of the gondhalis really changed? What position do they occupy in the
metropolis? Have Adimaya's bards been reduced to entertainers by an audience that no longer
cares for its old gods? Perhaps Adimaya's shakti is an old make of weapon now, ineffective
against the dollar-bolt of Mumbadevi, this city's patron goddess. And perhaps Tanaji, too, has
learnt a new prayer from Mumbadevi: a prayer that marks the end of living, the beginning of
survival.

The faith to come

Baiju Parthan

The writer, who lives in Nalla Sopara, near Mumbai, is an artist who works with conventional
media as well as interactive new media. He also writes on art, and on technology-related issues.

If faith is the fundamental expression of one's relationship with the energies that animate and
bring order and direction to life and the world we live in, along with the belief in a possible
transcending of the earthbound existence, then we are in the process of experiencing a radical
shift in its expression in the current phase of the Information Age.
 Prabhu K./Wilderfile

Today one can, from the comfort of one's home or from any
cyber-cafe, fire up a web browser and log on to
www.siddhivinayak.org to get a darshan of Lord Ganesha at the
venerated Siddhivinayak temple kilometres (or thousands of
kilometres) away in Mumbai and participate in the aarti
performed. No need to wait in long queues or jostle for the best
spot among the throngs of devotees. That is information
technology shifting and shaping your traditional spiritual life.

It has become evident that cyberspace is much more than a

breakthrough in computer interface design. With the arrival of
virtual reality, simulated worlds and intelligent agents, it is
emerging as a tool for examining our very sense of the real. Our
understanding of what amounts to reality is gradually being
stretched to the limits, posing questions about the existential
nature of "real" versus "virtual presence".

Ontologists define technology as the extension of human potentials and capabilities, a sentiment
echoed by the prophet of the Information Age, Marshal McLuhan, when he declared that
network technology is the extension of the human nervous system and that "the medium is the
message". Though the hypnotic fascination that we have for technology is akin to aesthetic
fascination, it actually goes much beyond that. Our love affair with technology, especially with
the computer and cyber worlds runs deeper than the play of senses and sense gratification. The
allure of information technology is evident in the way we are reaching out towards a marriage
between information machines and the human body, suggesting the beginnings of a future
symbiotic relationship.

In many ways, this hypnotic fascination for digital high technology that seeks to meld the human
organism with intelligent machines borders almost on the
erotic. After all, Eros was defined by the ancient Greek
philosophers as the drive for completion and fulfillment,
but which, according to modern-day psychoanalysis, is
actually a self-preservative instinct.
Laurent de Gaulle

In the technologically mediated and augmented reality

that is being actualised into the present, human existence,
especially the human body, is being increasingly
evaluated as a long list of inadequacies. This is a sea
change from such pre-modern notions of the human form
as perfection embodied, or as the mirror image of
Godhead, or as the site for redeeming accumulated
karma. Logically, on the other hand, there is no reason why our average lifespan should not be
200 instead of 60 or 70 years, as we usually assume it should be. As our ideas about the human
body change, so do our definitions of life and the body's location in the world, relative to the
implied presences and energies we recognise as God or Spirit.

The reassessment of the human body and how it can be reconstructed and extended in the
technologically augmented reality began with Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian media artist who, in
1997, implanted a micro-chip that could beam an unalterable signal composed of his identity to a
database in the United States through the Internet. As an artist, he was making a statement about
the way we sacrifice our freedom and privacy to runaway technology.

The very opposite attitude was demonstrated during the recent chip implant on a 44-year-old
professor of cybernetics, Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, Britain. Warwick's
implanted chip switched on his computer, made his office welcome him in the morning, switched
on the lights in the corridor, opened doors and even helped his secretary track him. Just a hint of
the possibilities offered by this breakthrough technology.
Ajay Lall
Of sense and (in)sensibility.

At a personal and subjective level, the esteemed professor felt an

intimate and comforting sense of connectedness with the
machines around him, which he sadly lost when the implant was
finally removed from his body. Whatever might be the positive
outcome of such endeavours, the issue that has always been a
thorn in the flesh for those who abhor the idea of digital implants
is whether we are losing our human qualities through our over-
dependence on machine (artificial) intelligence. But, as Professor
Warwick points out, within a decade or so almost all our
activities will be within a machine-augmented world - and the
only way we can fully participate in such a reality will be
through developing a symbiotic relationship with machines,
through implants and wearable prostheses.

The advances in genetics, such as cloning and the mapping of the

human genome by the Human Genome Project, as well as
developments in nano-technology, which aspires to fabricate microscopic robots capable of
repairing faulty genes within the human body itself, all clearly point to a not-so-distant future
when we will be able to crack the gene responsible for ageing and engineer it to expand our life-
spans indefinitely.

The attitude is that there is no compelling reason to accept things as they are. For instance, there
is no reason to accept our vision as being confined to the visible spectrum: why not expand
vision further, and into other parts of the spectrum, such as the infra-red? This can be applied to
hearing, physical strength, speed, intelligence and many other aspects of human existence. The
catalyst that is accelerating this change is, of course, the ubiquitous computer, a personal
assistant augmenting the individual by enhancing his/her capabilities. This change in stature of
the machine, as an active collaborator in human existence rather than a passive tool, is what leads
to the possibilities that are suggested by "post-humanism", which is an ideology and philosophy
woven around the evolutionary model of Charles Darwin.

According to post-human thinkers, we are on the verge of evolving beyond the human organism
and technology is the catalyst that is ushering in this evolutionary shift. And the most important
element that would mark the post-human stage in our evolution will be techno-transcendence, or
the use of technology to overcome our physical and mental limits. As machines continue their
rapid evolution, and as we increasingly tinker with our bodies and brains to repair and improve
them, this will become more and more feasible.
Ajay Lall
The writing on the wall advertises a "Mahan Tantrik" with the
dish antennae in the background.

The other feature of the post-human stage will be the attempt to link the
brain directly into computers. Such brain-computer interfaces could
amplify the processes that constitute the human mind to unimaginable
levels. The computers could be small enough to be implanted within
the body of the user. By far the most ambitious project of this kind is
"migration through silicon" or "uploading", which involves putting the
mind into a machine, the machine being a computer designed specially
for this purpose.

Science, over the 20th Century, has come to be based largely on what is
invisible to the human retinal vision: it offers us a world of forces and
fields and their relationships. And today, in the early 21st Century, our
everyday visible reality, when pitted against this picture of forces and fields, becomes a phantom
reality maintained through consensual devices like semiotic stability, cultural continuity and
uniformity of dogma, to name only a few. The machines that confront us today belong to the
invisible world of fields and forces, with operational limits defined through phenomena like
quantum tunneling, which are beyond the scope of human sensory experience.

Writers like William Gibson foresee a future beyond the black shadows of decadence, of high
technology reshaping our cultural and religious experiences and the hope for a better life, a sort
of transcendence. A transcendence that is accomplished through cybernetic prosthetics or
through an escape to off-planet life or living in virtual worlds. In these visions of our future,
technology intrudes into the hitherto sacred space of the human body and morphs into an agent
that brings in transformation and transcendence. The future is not out there in the world, where
life is full of pain and all-too-human suffering, but the hope of it lies inward, towards the nerves
guided by the supreme all-knowing machines. In this sense, technology's newest venture is
intrinsically similar to the one that has always been the domain of faith and religion.

Entering the landscape of a saint-poet

Ranjit Hoskote
What impels us to go on a pilgrimage, even when we know that the outer journey is only an
analogue of the more important journey through strange psychological realms that we must
undertake, to come to terms with ourselves? For the devout, pilgrimages begin in faith. But for
those of us who are not blessed with uncritical devotion, they begin in conversation, in curiosity,
in the need to test the limits of our strength and our scepticism.
D.V. Jainer/Telepress Features

That, more or less, is how I set out for Dehu on an April

day in 1994, on the trail of Tukaram, the celebrated saint-
poet of the bhagvat sampradaya, who lived in this village
near Pune in the 17th Century. Our little expedition was
led by Dilip Chitre, and no one could have wished for a
more authoritative guide: poet, translator and film-maker,
Chitre has been bringing Tukaram's abhangas over from
Marathi into English since 1956.

Like many other villages that have grown unwittingly into

small towns, Dehu is afflicted by the blare of Hindi film
music, the raw seductions of the video parlour and the
dish antenna. Tukaram's world has exploded like a
supernova, but its light still reaches us faintly, across the
traffic, the smell of the sewer-poisoned river, the ripeness
of sugarcane fields that suck the water from the earth.

But Tukaram is more than a saint-poet in Dehu. He is a climatic condition, his signature endorses
the locale. Or else the turmeric-yellow pagoda would be a mere steeple, not the commandment
that it is. Remember, it says, this is where Vishnu's solar eagle swooped down on the snaking
Indrayani river to spirit Tukaram away.

Then the last zinc-roofed sheds are behind us, and the scrubland opens out, offering no relief
until the Bhandara hill rears up to fill the windscreen. The cave where Tukaram retreated to
meditate and compose his poems is halfway up its steep slope, and the best - if riskiest - way to
reach it is by getting to the top and clambering down.

We negotiate the slope, seeking purchase from leap to leap. Great shadows of clouds swim
across the acid plain below; the way back is barred by a fusillade of wild grasses, and a
chameleon streaks across the rocks to the scrawny shade of the oleanders. A dog that has been
sleeping at the entrance to the cave wakes up, and a prickle along the spine tells us that we have
stepped into a sanctuary.

When Tukaram came here - dunned by creditors, his land sequestered, his children hungry - he
had given himself over to an absorption in Vithoba. "Vruksha-vali amha soyari vanachare":
trees, creepers and forest animals kept him company, he says in one of his abhangas, as he
ignored the rain's blitzkrieg and the scorn of neighbours to bear witness to the healing presence
of the blue god.
 The deity at the Pandharpur Vitthal Temple, where Tukaram worshipped.

Like Tukaram, we are cocooned beyond radar range of communal pieties

and factional hostilities here, and Chitre begins to recite an abhanga in
honour of the moment. The cadence is picked up immediately and the
abhanga completed by a voice within the cave. It is a factory worker who
spends his lunch hour meditating in the cave. A human archive, this varkari
has effortlessly zeroed in on one poem from the more than 4,000 Tukaram
compositions preserved in the oral tradition. No search engine could have
performed better or faster; no CD-ROM could possibly replace his pithy
wisdom, besides.

Back in Dehu, standing at the water's edge where Tukaram sank his poems and fasted till the
river goddess dredged them up, I ask myself what we had hoped to find here. Had this been a
field trip, or an attempt to reopen lines of transmission that have been jammed over the years?

What the pilgrimage does, perhaps, is to slip into your bloodstream an awareness of possibilities
that you would never find in the crusted beehive of words. On the pilgrimage, you test yourself
and are subtly transformed in the testing. You risk the self you were before you started, move
closer to a light that destroys even as it regenerates. The pilgrimage is a teertha, a crossing, and
the bridge can be as sharp as a razor's edge.

Parchment was an expensive commodity in the 17th Century, and the lines of careful black and
red script are packed tightly together on the age-browned manuscript. But the text has been
stained by more than age, and the visible evidence suggests that it has clearly spent a stretch of
time under water at some point in its history.

We shade our eyes against the afternoon glare and look, with renewed excitement, at the
manuscript through the glass in which it is now encased. The scene is not a white-walled,
centrally air-conditioned museum in Washington DC or Berlin, but the temple of Vithoba in
Dehu; on this early summer day, we are surrounded, not by suave curators and gawking tourists,
but by turbanned varkaris pursuing their traditional pilgrimage routes across Maharashtra in a
spirit of serene devotion.

A page from Tukaram's manuscript of abhangas, engraved in stone.

Unlike the icon or folio that has been transplanted from its vibrant natural
and cultural ethos into the antiseptic environment of a museum, this
manuscript carries a deeper resonance by virtue of having remained in the
physical context of its origin. For that reason, it prompts the visitor into a
vivid awareness of events past, events incised into the landscape around the
temple. If these 300-year-old pages record the exaltations and revelations
that their writer experienced, they also tell a sad tale of the jealousy and
fear that he aroused among those who held power in his society.
For this is the bhijki vahi, the legendary "immersed book" of Tukaram - the transcript of his
abhangas, which the saint-poet was forced to sink in the Indrayani at the behest of a Brahmin
orthodoxy terrified by his direct approach to the Divine, his defiance of the ritual-maker's
monopoly on mediating between the gods and their human supplicants. As Mahipati tells the tale
in his Bhakti-lilamrita, Tukaram sat by the bank of the Indrayani, fasting and praying for 13 days
until the manuscript was miraculously restored to him from the depths.

Standing at the river's edge as Tukaram must have done several centuries ago, looking out across
the tarnished silver surface of the water, we are reminded of the various miracles associated with
this compelling figure. The restoration of the "immersed book" was not the only marvellous
event to have taken place in Tukaram's life. It is believed that he once lost a harvest that he was
supposed to have been minding, because he had been absorbed in a trance while the birds made
away with the ripening corn - but Vithoba came to his rescue, multiplying the yield at harvest-
time.

It is believed, also, that a celestial craft, a chariot of light descended to earth to conduct Tukaram
to heaven at the end of his life. The faithful also hold that every year, at a certain moment on the
day celebrated as Tukaram-bij, the imposing tree which marks the site of the saint-poet's
departure shakes as though it had been seized up by a great wind.
Ashay Chitre
Fragment of an original Tukaram manuscript at Dehu.

And so we find ourselves wondering about the place of

the miracle in our mental lives. Such things simply do not
happen, we say to ourselves; they were probably invented
by fabulists who came on the scene years after the event.
Or perhaps it was the saint-poet's followers who set these
tales in circulation, to add a further degree of lustre to the
nimbus around his memory. Is the miracle to be dismissed
as a collective hallucination? Or can we find reasons to
explain the miracle as a tear in the fabric of space, time
and logic?

Whatever the answers to these questions, the real miracle

to which a symbol like the bhijki vahi bears testimony is
the endurance of a questor's faith even in the face of the
most adverse circumstances. While it speaks,
conceptually, of a faith that survived social sanction and
doctrinal proscription, its material form dramatises the dialectic between the transient and the
eternal, between that which is subject to decay and that which is beyond the defilement of time.

To visionaries like Tukaram, the world was a maze of forms arising from the contest between
kshara and akshara, the perishable and the imperishable. And the way out of the maze is the way
of piety and grace, along which the questor is guided by the akshara made manifest in such a
luminous image as that of Vithoba.
Taking his place in this contest of principles, the saint-poet bore witness to the enduring and the
imperishable even as he negotiated with the perishable ephemera of life. Not for nothing is
akshara the Sanskrit word for "letter" or "syllable": for language is the continuing echo of the
first sound, the sound of the primal explosion with which the universe came into being. As we
join the unending procession of varkaris marking the stations of their journey through the sacred
landscape, we pay homage to the real miracle - which, on the evidence of Tukaram's bhijki vahi,
is that the word, carrying the charge of its distant origin, survives its oppressors.

The wandering minstrel

Guy Deleury

The author, who lives in Paris, is a distinguished scholar of Indian religious culture and social
thought, known for his authoritative studies of the Bhakti tradition of Maharashtra, a subject he
first addressed more than four decades ago. His latest book, L'Inde, Continent Rebelle, was
published in 2000.

I discovered India through Tukaram; fifty years later, I am relying on Namdev to guide my slow
deciphering of the rich popular culture of the sub-continent, which has remained until to-day, to
a large extent, unknown to the French and even to the international public. I have followed a
similar path in my taking possession of my own French culture, beginning with Ronsard, the
poet of my native region and, moving backwards singer by singer, to Fran‡ois Villon, Cl‚ment
Marot and the 13th Century poet Rutebeuf (1230-1285), a near contemporary of Namdev (1270-
1350): a pilgrimage journey to the fountainhead which makes possible some understanding of
the waters in which I am able to quench the fires of my questioning body.
Ajay Lall

Though my first book, published in 1956, was a French translation of

some one hundred poems by Tukaram, and though in the year 2001 I
am preparing a translation of some one hundred poems by Namdev, I
do not consider myself to be a specialist of the Marathi language. I
often regret that I am not greatly gifted for languages, and that I
practise poorly those languages that I do know. But I have borne
patiently with this personal failing without undue remorse, since it
has enabled me to approach my favorite authors in the capacity of a
delighted amateur and if I may say so, of a poet.

In keeping with the Russian Formalist school of the 1920s, I consider poems as indivisible
wholes, as abhangs, to use precisely the name that the Marathi poets give them: the metre,
sounds and rhythm are for me inseparable from the meaning. I prefer to listen to a poem than to
read it, and to sing it to myself for my own hearing, even if my pronunciation is atrocious. It is in
this way, at any rate, that certain poets become close friends and indispensible companions to
me, however great the temporal and spatial distance that separates them from me. Namdev
speaks to me then, as if he were present at my side, in the same way as he was present in the
midst of his fellow pilgrims, seven centuries ago.

From Maharashtra to the Punjab, Namdev flooded the entire North-West of India with his
hymns, which the pilgrims, his companions and disciples down the centuries, have transmitted to
the hearts of the pilgrims of the 21st Century; vernaculars were closely related, coming from the
same prakrits, and devotional music was understood by all. However, it is less important to
dwell in the capacity of a historian on the anecdotes of Namdev's biography, be they legendary
or factual, than to plunge into his poetic creations in the capacity of a seeker of eternal truths.
Namdev speaks to me personally through the sounds of his songs.

He would sing out his love for and total faith in the ever-active presence of an avatar of his God,
whom he addressed as Viththal or Vithoba. But what was an avatar for him? Not an abstract
concept inherited from any traditional theology, but a reality experienced by innumerable
lineages of poet-saints, born in every conceivable kind of family in his native region of origin.
Two abhangs in particular reveal to us the depths of his faith in the avatar who inspired his love.
In the edition of the Gathas published in 1970 by the Government of Maharashtra, they bear the
numbers 287 and 289. I will begin with the latter.

Namdev, of course, is not responsible for this numbering. Did he even know how to write, not
being a brahmin, but of the tailor caste? Others around him would gather together his
compositions, and down the ages, various professional singers, in order to preserve them from
oblivion, transcribed them into a written form and assembled them in collections called Gathas.
In North India, they were arranged according to the musical mode or raga in which they were
composed or ought to be sung. In Maharashtra, a thematic presentation was preferred. Poems
nos: 287 and 289 appear in the Government edition of 1970 under the heading "Krishna's games"
or krishnalila. In the edition by Sakhre (republished in 1990), they appear further down at the
numbers 2246 and 2250 under the theme "Child's play" or kheliya. The pilgrims' prayer book
known as Olice Abhang, edited by Satarkar in 1938, does not include them at all, nor does the
little hymn book compiled by Vinoba Bhave in 1946. It is as if therecuperation of Namdev and
the Pilgrims' movement by the brahmins of the 20th and 21st Centuries made necessary the
elimination of those poems that were not quite to the taste of the latter.

In the book by R. D. Ranade entitled Mysticism in Maharashtra, which appeared in 1923 and is
considered a classic, the learned author, a brahmin, devotes 139 pages to Jnandev, and only 13
pages to Namdev! This is explained under the pretext that "Jnandeva and Namdeva represent the
intellectual and the emotional sides of spiritual life" (p.187). A more objective listening to the
abhangs of Namdev clearly shows, on the contrary, the depth of the philosophical thinking of the
humble tailor whose caste, in fact, did not put an exceptional intellectual audacity out of his
reach at all.

Namdev was a free person who refused to bow down to the authority of the brahmins. The only
avatar that he acknowledged as truly divine, was Krishna under his Maharashtrian incarnation of
Vithoba, or his Kannarese incarnation of Viththal. And he makes fun of the series of avatars
established by the brahmanical tradition which, according to him, had only been invented to
instil fear into the ordinary Indian, and to force the people into docile submission to their
brahmin masters. With a devastating irony, he qualifies these avatars as scarecrows or bagul.

It would be very instructive, though beyond the scope of this article, to analyse each of the ten
avatars in which Namdev points out scarecrow characteristics. We will limit ourselves to a few
examples:

Verses from Namdev feature extensively in the Guru Granth Sahib.

The first scarecrow, they say, is called the Fish;

He killed the demon Shankha and salvaged the four Vedas.
But the ever-serene Krishna, I will not call him a scarecrow.

The cards are all on the table, right from the outset; the Fish kills in order to save the Vedas from
the Deluge. Who claims this to be so? The brahmins who alone are dependent on mantras for
carrying out their rituals. But it is unacceptable to the tailor Namdev, who has no use for the
Vedas. How could his "ever-serene" God be obliged to kill, albeit a demon, in order to reveal
Himself to humankind? If the avatars are all killers, as the brahmins affirm them to be, then
Krishna is not of their lineage. Thus Namdev wonders about and questions the common
(brahmanical) conception of his time. Was the first avatar, in the form of a Fish, indeed an
Incarnation, whose only goal was to retrieve the Vedas from destruction ? The ovi relating to this
in the second abhang (no: 247) gives us the answer:

In the first avatar, you revealed the techniques of singing,

thereby destroying, O ocean of compassion, the demon of doubt.

To the stultifying speculations of the brahmins on the divine ordination of the dharma of the
castes which, according to them, is embodied in the Vedas, Namdev opposes the mystical
experience of the poet-saints, most of whom were non-brahmins, or brahmins who had been
repudiated by their brahmin caste, as was the case with Jnandev, one of the early companions of
Namdev, along with Chokhamela the outcast, Janabai the housemaid or Gora the potter. Every
individual, whatever his/her caste may be, can partake of the presence of the divine and be the
singing messenger of universal "compassion". In consequence, for Namdev, the initial step of
divine revelation, in the first true avatar, cannot but be that of the knowledge of poetical
techniques, that is, in his particular case, the techniques of the abhangs.
The abhang is indeed a path of initiation that abolishes all frontiers (a-bhang): between man and
God, as well as between man and man due to distinctions of birth, sex, philosophical schools,
religious oppositions or even separations between continents. In the same way as do music,
rhythmic expressions and dance. Seeing a pilgrim dance soon involves the beholder in his steps,
if only he is receptive to the singing message of the pilgrim's body. This is true of the practice of
bhakti, or of Sufism, or of shamanistic rituals, or of negro-spirituals. As also, in all probability, it
was of the practice of the Rigveda.
Manoj K. Jain

The condemnation of the Vedas that reappears like a leitmotif in

all the compositions of the Bhakti poets, from Namdev to Kabr, to
Guru Nanak or Tukaram, right down to our days, is in no way
levelled against the poets of the hymns (or rig), but rather against
their being chopped up into mantras by the brahmins for use in
their sacrificial rituals. Namdev, and his friends and successors,
consider themselves as the true inheritors of the very first poets
who were inspired by the first avatar. The only veritable mantra,
according to them all, is the repetition of the divine name, the
name that your heart sings, be it Ram, Krishna, Hari, Viththal,
Allah or Jesus.

Isn't Namdev, by his very name, "the one whose name is God"?
Interestingly, when he reaches, in the two abhangs quoted above,
the ninth avatar, the avatar of the Buddha, equally construed by
the brahmins as a scarecrow, the humble, mystical tailor claims to
be part of his descendence:

The ninth scarecrow, they say, is called the Buddha;

his era is not over, it is the era of awakening.

And the second abhang (no: 287) clarifies Namdev's thinking on this issue:

The ninth avatar, the Buddha, will only terminate at the end of all time;
and the tenth, Kalkin, will be the avatar of the poet-saints.

Could that be ours?

The Kaaba
GUARDING THE CENTRE, GENERATING THE CIRCUMFERENCE

H. Masud Taj
The author is a poet, architect and architecture critic, raised in Ooty and Mumbai and now
resident in Ottawa.

We are all born with six fundamental orientations: front and back, left and right, up and down.
They are the three pairs that make up the three dimensions that we can tell with our eyes closed.
Which is why we have three semi-circular canals in our inner ear, which are responsible for our
sense of balance, and we move our heads along the same three planes. These planes are arranged
at right angles to each other along the x-, y- and z-coordinate axes that we studied in school.
Ajay Lall

There is something else we were taught in school:

that there are only five possible symmetrical
solids in the universe. A symmetrical solid is one
that is made up of similar faces that meet each
other at the same angle: in the whole Universe,
there are only five ways of doing that! Plato
discussed them in the Timaeus and hence they are
also called Platonic bodies. The Greeks named
them after the number of faces (or hedrons) they
had. Hence they ranged from the minimal four-
faced tetrahedron to the 12-faced dodecahedron.

Because there is no solid beyond the dodecahedron, it was regarded by astronomer al-Biruni as a
symbol of the universe. Midway in the Platonic series occurs what the Greeks called the
hexahedron (the six-faced solid), which in English we call the cube and in Arabic, the Kaaba. Of
the fundamental five Platonic solids, it is only the cube that has six faces which face the same
three pairs of orientations that are intrinsic to us: front and back; left and right; up and down.
Hence at the centre of the fundamental solids that make up the universe, we have one that is
uncannily anthropomorphic.

And it is the cube that the patriarch of the Jews, the exemplar to Christians and the prophet of
Islam is asked to repair: "va'ahidna ilaa ibrahima wa isma'eela an ttaheera bayti littaaaeefeena
wal'akeefeena warukka'issujjud" - ". . . and we commanded Abraham and Ishmael: Purify My
House (the Kaaba) for those who circumambulate, those who contemplate and those who bow
down and prostrate themselves (in prayer)" Qur'an 2:125 (part).

Let us visit the historical cube in Mecca to conduct a thought-experiment: Imagine you are
suspended in space in a satellite directly above the cube in Mecca. Presume also that it is night
and all the lights in the world have been switched off. Now switch on the lights that shine on the
courtyard of the Great Mosque of Mecca in which the cube is located and also switch on the
lights of all the mosques of the world.

This is what you will see: directly below you will be the black square of the Kaaba at the centre
of a vast concentric system of white circles that emanate from it like ripples. The innermost
circles are in constant motion around it, and they are packed close together. White wheels within
wheels unceasing in their motion. They are encircled by white circles that have a space between
each other. These do not move around the cube but they do sway towards and away from it.
Radiating away are unmoving white dots that make up bigger and bigger circles at greater
distances from each other.
Hemant Mehta

What are these three sets of ripples that emanate from the cube and
what have they got to do with God asking Abraham to repair the
cube?

The three sets of circles we saw while being suspended in space

above the Kaaba were gatherings of people in different acts of
worship (the word "ecclesiastical" which means "of the church" is
from the Greek word ekklesia which means an assembly or
gathering of people). Closest to the cube, the Kaaba, are the
pilgrims dressed in the stipulated white unstitched garments, akin to
their shrouds, circumambulating; walking seven times around the
cube chanting to God, "Labaik, allahumma labaik" -"I am here, for
You, I am here". They form the first set of moving concentric
circles.

The next set of circles are pilgrims in concentric rows: standing,

bowing and prostrating to God in the prescribed prayer. If the first set of circles move along the
circumference then this set of circle moves along the radius, where each worshipper, while going
from the standing, bowing and prostrating mode, is moving radially towards the centre of the
cube and then receding. From your vantage viewpoint up in the night sky, this second set of
circles would appear as white rings that pulsate: expanding in width and contracting. Finally, you
have the distant circles that are made up of white dots that are the mosques of the world:
segments of great circles (were you to light up all the graves of Muslims in the world, they too
would lie in concentric ripples emanating from the Kaaba).

Thus, the mosque is defined as a segment of a circle whose centre is the Kaaba. For instance a
mosque in New York would be a segment of the circle that passes through Canada, and crosses
the Arctic to Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Singapore, and then crosses Antarctica, Peru,
Colombia and Cuba, before re-entering the United States. The circle is made up by connecting
the mosques, the white dots you saw from outer space that make the circle whose centre is the
cube in Mecca.

This global concentric system made up by all the mosques in the world oriented to a single
centre is a geometrical analogue of Tawhid - a doctrine of the Oneness of God and the unity of
all existence. Tawhid is the foundation of Islam. Hence the cube is an ordering device; it is a
marker that locates the centre of the concentric system. In it, all the axes of our horizontal plane
of material existence converge and connect to the vertical axis mundi.
It is as an ordering device that the second, and less known, meaning of the word Kaaba comes
into play. Kaaba, in Arabic, means the "cube" and also "a shape that emerges", i.e. both the form
and the emergence of form. If the form is the cube, then what form remains to emerge?
Hemant Mehta

As an ordering device, the Kaaba is not the modest cube in Mecca

but a monumental project that has, for over a millennium now,
been redefining the world in its own image. It has been
constructing its circumferences (without which the centre is a point
without identity). Each time a group of Muslims gather in prayer or
build a mosque, each time Muslims follow the Prophet's practice of
sleeping on the right side with their faces towards the Kaaba, each
time a Muslim dies and is buried in a grave that is always oriented
towards the Kaaba, in each instance a fragment of a circumference
is being put into place. Prayer-halls, beds and graves are all
rectangles with their larger side facing the Kaaba; all chords of its
circumnavigating circles. With the global consolidation of a sacred
centre, the faithful barely perceive that with their bricks and their
bodies, they construct and constitute an international installation,
the mother of all Monumental Art.

Ottawa, 30 June 2001.

(This essay is based on the author's talk, "Mosque as Metaphor", delivered at The Hall of
Philosophy, Chautauquan Institution, New York, on July 27, 2000.)

Dichotomy or dialectic
TEN SUTRAS ON THE FAITH-REASON DILEMMA

Rudolf C. Heredia

The author is a Jesuit and a sociologist. He is currently Director of the Social Science Centre,
St. Xavier's College, Mumbai.

The dilemma

In an age characterised globally by secularism, there is an as-yet-creeping religious revivalism, a

fundamentalism that is leaching across countries and even continents, like an ink blot on the
global map. This has sharpened the dilemma between faith and reason. Our age needs a more
insightful understanding of "reason" than the "Age of Reason" gave us, a more incisive
comprehension of "faith" than that of the "New Age" movements today. Hence our query: what
does being "reasonable" mean to faith, and again what does being "faithful" to reason require?
 Ashwini kumar

Typically in Western thought, a binary opposition between faith

and reason readily leads to an unbridgeable divide between
fideism and rationalism, which all too easily deteriorates into a
schizophrenia between religious intolerance and rationalist
dogmatism! Eastern thought more generally, however, implies a
more inclusive understanding as expressed in our first sutra: faith
and reason are complementary, not contradictory ways of seeking
the truth.

Faith and Reason

More conventionally, faith is understood as giving one's assent to

a truth on the testimony of another. Its credibility rests on the
trustworthiness of the testifier, and not on the content of the belief
itself. Hence our second sutra: what we believe depends on whom
we trust.

Oftentimes claims of divine inspiration are made for the authority of religious testimony, or at
times the testifier claims divinity itself. However, even a revelation of the divine to humans must
inevitably involve human filters. Indeed, the very immediacy of a mystical experience
necessarily involves the mediation of thought and language in its very first articulation to
oneself, and more so in its later communication to others, if the experience is to be
comprehensible to humans.

Now a reasoned assent to truth is not dependent on extrinsic testimony, but on verifiable
evidence, based on intrinsic criteria. This rational method leads not to "belief" but to
"knowledge". However, in practice, much of what we accept as "reasoned knowledge", scientific
or otherwise, is largely on the authority of someone who "knows better". For every bit of
information in our lives cannot be verified before being accepted. It is not just a practical
impossibility; theoretically it would lead to an infinite regress, because the very methodology of
any rational knowledge rests on basic premises, like the reality and intelligibility of the world we
live in, which cannot be logically proven, but must be existentially experienced.

Hence we need to distinguish between the content of "reasoned knowledge" and the rational
method by which it is arrived at. For in accepting the validity of this
methodology we must also acknowledge its limitations. And so our
third sutra: a rational methodology transgressing its inherent
limitations can never yield "rightly reasoned" knowledge.
Manoj K.Jain

The sociology of knowledge has drawn attention to, and has

convincingly demonstrated, how the underlying presumptions, which
inevitably are socially derived, prejudice our presumed objectivity. For these presumptions and
pre-judgements are beyond the investigative methodology of such reasoning itself. Indeed, they
are not subject to reason so much as to the vested interests and established status, the
"unconscious ideologies" and fundamental options of those involved. Consequently our fourth
sutra: where we position ourselves influences how we reason.

Moreover, when non-empirical/ experimental sources of knowing are involved, other methods of
ascertaining truth are required. Hermeneutics and deconstruction have today demonstrated the
limits of the old Enlightenment rationalism and have offered alternative investigative
approaches.

Faith as humanising

As with content and method in reasoned knowledge, so too with regard to faith, we need to
distinguish faith as content, that is belief, and faith as act, that is fidelity. Why in fact do we
accept the testimony of others? What makes such belief possible? Certainly without an act of
faith in others it would be impossible to live our necessarily interdependent lives. Moreover, if
we grant that we are not the ground of our own being, then this "faith" must transcend and reach
beyond the horizons of the human. But if all truth is to be restricted to the empirical and all
knowledge to be derived from logic, then clearly in such an empirical-rationalist frame of
reference, there is no room for faith, for "what ultimately concerns man" (Paul Tillich). Hence
our fifth sutra: whether or not we believe depends on our self-understanding.
Ajay Lall

In this sense faith becomes a "constitutive element of

human existence" (Raimon Panikkar). The content of
faith must fulfil this human dimension, i.e., to make the
believer more human, or else it cannot be "good faith".
And so our sixth sutra: if to believe is human, then what
we believe must make us more human, not less!

This is precisely the test of "good faith" and it here that

we must seek the reasonableness of our faith. Whereas
with "blind faith" the act of faith becomes compulsive
rather than free, and cathects on a content that promises
security and perhaps even grandiosity, rather than one that
expresses trust and dependency. Hence sutra seven: faith
that is "blind" is never truly humanising; faith that is not
humanising is, to that extent "bad faith".

Often, reason is used to investigate and even rubbish the

content of faith, by applying a rational-empirical
methodology. But this is precisely to misunderstand the
language of faith, which communicates at the various
levels of meaning, from the literal and the direct, to the symbolic and the metaphoric, and
constitutes a distinctly different discourse. For an experimental methodology with its objective
emphasis is quite inadequate to such a subjective act of faith. This demands a more self-reflexive
and experiential methodology, which, while being subjective, is neither arbitrary nor irrational,
but focuses on "meaning" and "meaningfulness", rather than merely measuring quantities and
determining cause and effect. Thus our eighth sutra: only a self-reflexive, experiential
methodology is meaningful to the discourse of faith; a rationalist, empirical one is alien to it.

Dilemmas and dialectics

Now if truth must have "meaning" and value must be "meaningful" at the level of lived praxis,
then the crucial emphasis in matters of faith must be, not so much on belief, as on a commitment
to authentic human life. So too, with reason, the critical stress must not be so much on a
rationalist logic as on a sensitivity to the real boundaries of its discourse. Indeed, this dialectic
between faith and reason can be very fruitful. For it is reason that must critique faith for its
fidelity in humanising our life, rather than for its belief-content; just as it is faith that must
commit reason to make it serve this same humanising enterprise, not merely by affirming its
validity but also by constraining it within the domain of its own discourse.
G.B.Mukherjee/Wilderfile

This precisely becomes the basis for an enriching inter-

religious dialogue. For, unlike the content, which may
vary across various cultural and religious traditions, the
act of faith, because it is constitutively human, will
necessarily have a common religious basis across
varying cultures and traditions. This is our ninth sutra.

A healing wholeness

Today religious revivalism justifies the unreasonable and

even the irrational in the name of faith, while a rationalist
secularism dismisses all religious beliefs as irrational and
unscientific. This merely turns the dilemma between faith
and reason into an irresolvable dichotomy not an
enriching dialectic. And so our tenth and last sutra: an
inclusive humanism must embrace both "meaningful
faith", as well as "sensitised reason". For it is only thus
that we will be able to bring a healing wholeness to the
"broken totality" of our modern world, in Iris Murdoch's
unforgettable phrase.

Homo religiosus vs homo economicus

Vivek Pinto
The writer, who is based in Tokyo, is a scholar and activist whose work has engaged with such
key figures in contemporary religious and political discussions as Mahatma Gandhi and Thomas
Merton.

"Religion . . . is not simply a means for understanding one's self, or even of contemplating the
nature of the universe, or existence, or of anything else. A religion is, at its heart, a way of
denying the authority of the rest of the world; it is a way of saying to fellow human beings and to
the state those fellow humans have erected, 'No, I will not accede to your will.' This is a radically
destabilising proposition ..."

- Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief,1993, p.19.

Every age throws up challenges to life, and the new millennium is no different. The "remarkable
changes" that have occurred during our life-span can, probably, be traced from "the invention of
the transistor, more than fifty years ago, to the microprocessor, computer, satellites, and the
joining of laser and fiber-optic technologies". These and other important inventions in their
applied forms undoubtedly facilitate not only the process of communication, both in terms of
speed and cost, not to forget the admirable advances in the quality of technology itself, but they
also enhance the very quality of life. At the same they also pose challenges in the manner in
which these technologies enter our lives and what they do to us as human beings.

Hashmat Singh/Fotomedia Christine Pemberton/Fotomedia

Two goddesses; one territory . . .

Many of these inventions are now readily available, for all those who can afford them, in
differing forms, both in the countries of the North and South, through the ubiquitous "market."
This is the principal mechanism through which these technologies enter our lives. Their pathway
has been uncritically facilitated by what is popularly called as "globalisation" and by the State.
Today, whether we like it or not, we are all participants in a global economy. Some learned
economists and informed politicians unceasingly tell us that we necessarily need to participate in
such an economy, if we are to better our lives. The persuasive argument put forward is that by
participating in such an economy the millions who are unemployed will not only have jobs and
employment, but there will be a rise in incomes and standards of living for all, especially for
those who have talents and marketable skills. This may be true to some extent, but what is also
equally valid (though most insidiously unsaid) is that an economy which assures jobs and
measures of security depends on over-production for over-consumption, very often geared to the
global market.
Michael Isaac/Fotomedia

This attitude of mindless consumption or pleonexia (a

passion for more, as described by John Haughey, the
author of Virtue and Affluence) fostered by the "market"
can be characterised in the telling Hinglish jingle "ye dil
mange more" or its English variant, "shop till you drop."
What needs to be asked is: Ye dil mange more kiske liye
aur kiske sir pe? Or: Why do you shop and who pays the
real price? Allan Durning writes (in a perceptive article
entitled "Asking How Much is Enough", in the State of
the World, 1991) on the insatiable thirst for more material goods among Indians. He comments,
"In India the emergence of a middle class with perhaps 100 (this estimate has since rapidly
increased) million members, along with liberalisation of the consumer market and the
introduction of buying on credit, has led to explosive growth in sales of everything from
automobiles to televisions and frozen dinners. The Wall Street Journal gloats: "The traditional
conservative Indian who believes in modesty and savings is gradually giving way to a new
generation that thinks as freely as it spends."

These mindsets are advanced, in the form of so-called elaborate market strategies, mostly by
selfish advertising agencies and daily newspapers (which thrive and survive on vast revenues
from glossy ads at the cost of real news). As such, these mindsets are unambiguous moral and
ethical challenges to those who are adherents of a religion or draw deep sustenance from an
ethical code and/or beliefs. The dilemma faced by these faith-based individuals, groups, and
communities is principally in the area of the conflict between God and Mammon.

Most religions call upon their congregations to eschew the snares of Mammon and to lead lives
which cultivate the virtues of faith, hope and charity. Some religions even explicitly call upon
the faithful to strictly adhere to the ways of God and denounce Mammon. If Mammon is the
force that draws us away from God and Her/His creation and works, then the market certainly
falls in the category of Mammon's effective tool. That the market and its forces are not neutral is
a well-known fact. That it divides us amongst ourselves in the form of rich and poor, while
creating bitter enmity between those who have money to buy goods and services and those who
don't, is also common knowledge.
Ashim Ghosh/Fotomedia
What is less known is that, in this age of globalisation and instant gratification, the market
allocates scarce and precious resources to the production of goods and the provision of services
to those few who can afford them and which these few really do not need. This latter
characteristic is defined as over-consumption, which is so conspicuous in India's large
metropolitan centres and now even in its major towns. Like the market, it too is all-pervasive. As
a consequence, many put their faith in the market, hope that it will soar, enhance their material
pursuits and give charity when it doesn't hurt the purse in the least.

Our wants may be infinite and, like Pavlovian primates, we will be conditioned and salivate
before Madison Avenue's effective "sale" stratagems, but do we need these baubles to live
simple lives in love and harmony with God's creation and each other, irrespective of our
individual faiths? It is here that Stephen L. Carter's valuable insights into the role that religion
can play in our lives, as evidenced in the quotation at the outset of this article, come into
effective use. Religion is for many, if not most, a source of identity and meaning in life. It
provides ethical values to its adherents and a "set of understandings often quite different from the
understandings of the dominant forces in the culture." Few will contest the view that our secular
culture is soaked in money, self-seeking, alcohol, drugs and unbridled lust for goods.

This lifestyle is promoted by the State and its numerous agencies. What can religion and faith
effectively do to help its adherents in the face of this formidable challenge is a question which
many theologians and philosophers are seeking creative responses.
Ajay Lall

The problem to a certain extent is exacerbated, as many who lead

religious congregations are themselves mired and caught in Mammon's
nets. Their unethical lifestyles, values and undemocratic leadership, not
to forget their involvement in sordid communal and divisive politics,
betray their publicly and oft-proclaimed religious ethics and ideals.
Further, their nexus with the State and its agencies shows how deeply
they are compromised: it shows them as individuals for whom faith is
another means of achieving upward mobility and exercising temporal
power. This does shock the faithful when it becomes public knowledge, and it then becomes the
duty of the informed laity to seek and search for solutions independently of the clergy.

Can an informed laity deliver homo religiosus from homo economicus? This is one of the prime
questions of our millennium. The laity which commits itself to the formidable task of seeking
cogent, creative and realistic responses starts with an overwhelming disadvantage, in that the
institutions where it worships are securely in the hands of its religious leaders. Dialogue is
possible, but more often than not, it becomes a subterfuge for re-establishing ecclesiastical
authority. This obstacle has been overcome, in very few cases, by forming Basic Religious
Communities or alternate sites outside the purview of ecclesia and State. In these communities,
charismatic women and men undertake rigorous re-reading of scripture, adhere to democratic
and transparent norms in conducting their religious affairs, and give equal value to the male and
female of the species in decision-making and ministry.
What these communities seek to achieve is practical solidarity in ethically confronting the
problems of life: whether it is the forces of the market which make nonsense of humanity, or
simply getting a water connection for a group of tenants in a slum whose landlord is not
concerned about their welfare and interested only in displacing them at the earliest with the help
of the police and para-military forces, or increasing the already high rent. Over a period of time,
the goal is to transmit and ground religious values of faith, solidarity, co-operation, frugality,
hope, reverence for all life and creation and avowed resistance to Mammon.

To speculate on whether such communities will succeed or whether they will succumb is beyond
the purview of this essay, but what is clear is that human beings the world over have a deep need
to make sense of their lives, to transcend the dynamics of individualism and selfishness that
predominate in a competitive market society and to find a way to place their lives in a context of
meaning and purpose. What is also manifest is that "religions that surrender to the world lose
their souls as they lose the power of prophetic witness. A religion cannot call the world to
account once it has decided that its own traditions are wrong and the world is right."

Rivertree
P. Raghunandan

The night was young, we sat on a rough-hewn stone bench under a small parijatha tree, this
Adept and I, outside a small village shrine. He was a young man, but on whose shoulders rested
the wisdom of seers. The night was brilliant with starlight; the small range of mountains loomed
dark and quiet in the background. Some distance away shone the light from the village electric
street lamp, casting pools of light into a beautiful night. We sat in silence, the Adept in perfect
ease, and I, used to city noises, fidgeting in the silence. We took the silence in for a few minutes
and heard the sounds of the night coming from the jungle nearby. Then in a quiet voice he asked
me, "How are you?" I replied in what I thought was a learned manner, "God's in His Heaven and
All's right with this world". He looked at me, smiled and gently asked, "Where is this Heaven of
His?" This rattled me and I muttered a vague reply hoping to put him off.
Ashok Nath/Fotomedia

"In the Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna 'I am everything and everything
is me'. Meaning that all of the creation is the Lord and the Lord is all of
creation. If that be true, doesn't the Lord reside in you, me and the tree
above us?" "You mean the Lord is also in a lowly worm like me?" I
asked in false modesty. I did not get a reply immediately; he was staring
straight ahead into the middle distance lost in the silence around us.
"Look at it this way", he suggested, slowly turning towards me, "since
the time this whole universe was created, there has been only one
version of you. If He had wanted He could have created a million copies
of you, yet since the Big Bang to the end, He created only one of you. If
that is not a manifestation of the divine, what is?" and fell back into
silence.
The enormity of his suggestion did not immediately sink in; slowly I came to notice my breath
had become quieter and the silence was enjoyable. As I heard the breeze playing through the
fronds of the coconut trees, it slowly came to me - He was part of me and I a part of Him. "It is
not egotistic", he said, as if reading my mind, "to say He is part of me. In fact, it is a very humble
statement to acknowledge that Iswaran is a part of you. Then you become a part of all creation."
I felt so different, I was so special because there was only one of me in several billion years and
yet I was that which made up every thing.

"Modern science says 'Matter is energy and energy is matter' and this energy is everywhere and
in everything. Isn't that what our ancient seers had been saying?" he added, giving my modern
mind something to think about. My mind took a few minutes to digest such radical thinking; I
kept watching the stars as a few bats flitted past catching insects.

The stars, the bats, the insects and I were all part of the same thing? My friend sat in his quite
reverie, plainly comfortable with himself and the whole world. He gave me a drink of water from
his water bottle and said, "You don't take Iswaran from some place else and bring Him in to you.
He is already there, you just have to increase your awareness of His presence within you."

The top of the little shrine near us, seems to shine by itself, as I struggled and came to terms with
this beautiful idea. I became connected all at once with this universal energy and all of creation.
There was a great secure feeling of being one with everything and seeing myself as part of this
universe. I have, like most people, worried about the future and feared about past mistakes
coming to haunt me. Life seemed to be a big burden, whenever I felt so lonely, so small and lost
in this world. In an electric wave of relief, all those nagging worries, fears and doubts fell away
(at least for the moment) and there was only sheer bliss; pure delight in realising that I was a part
of Iswaran and not apart.

"Now tell me," he said, breaking the silence "Where is His Heaven?" My voice came out in a
croak as I barely whispered, "Iswara! You are incredible". The wind rustled through the leaves
above and the night fell silent as if all of creation was in agreement.

Seeing in the dark

Gowri Ramnarayan

"As I watched my child die in the hospital, I couldn't pray or hope for divine intervention. I only
wanted to cry with my arms around the people I love," said my friend. She was a rare exception.
G.Ramamurthy/Wilderfile

Most people turn to their reserves of faith in moments of

distress and stress, expecting some meta-logical cure of
their problems. We know that Dr.Annie Besant, a key
figure in the early phase of the freedom struggle, came to
India because she found a "credible" explanation in the
karma theory for the death of her innocent child. Yes, faith may not work miracles, but it can be
therapeutic in providing consolation and reconciliation.

The ancient Greeks knew that faith is linked to the emotional circuits of our being. However,
their logicians wondered whether it was quite "manly" to latch on to this kind of Unreason. They
settled on Blind Destiny, and on capricious gods who may or may not answer your prayers.

Come to the Middle Ages, and St.Augustine offers a perfect case study, struggling to give up
belief in Self, in favour of belief in God. We know how many of the devout have endured the
dark night of the soul, stumbling from "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods" to "There is
a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow".

Doubt is not the prerogative of saints as we see in this tongue-in-cheek epitaph: "Here lies
Martin Eldinbrode,/ Have mercy on my soul Lord God./ As I would, if I were Lord God,/ And
thou wert Martin Eldinbrodde."

Closer to our times, the Existentialists were convinced that life is an accident stretching from
void to void. If you wanted meaning in life and a protective God, you made the Leap of Faith.
There were consolation prizes for those who couldn't jump: fortitude-resignation, as in King
Sisyphus, condemned forever to push the rock up the mountain, knowing that it would roll back
to the bottom after each attempt. Or compassion in the midst of calamities.

But what IS faith? This Sphinxian riddle haunts the cave painter as much as the computer
animator. Answers zigzag through a mindboggling spectrum of experience - from paltry
specificities and concrete images to metaphysical abstractions. Some conclusions satisfy
individuals, never collective humanity.

In today's standardised world, faith marks our essential separateness. As science accents
universality, philosophy strives for cumulative theorisation, and religion stresses uniformity -
faith remains a matter of the individual spirit.

That is why faith cannot be a simple matter of neurotic outbursts. Or the mass hysteria of
Dionysian rites, serpentine hissings in Delphi, voodoo witchery, human sacrifices at Chichen
Itza, frenzied crusades, savage jehads, and all the carnage that has reddened human civilisation.

In India, when faith manifests itself as bhakti, organised religion is forced to reform, caste-creed-
gender inequalities break down. Mahadeviyakka adopts nudity in her disregard for the flesh,
Meerabai laughs at the guru who shuns women. "How silly, when the only Male is the Godhead
with all human beings for his feminine consorts!"

Faith is iconoclastic. It makes you ignore all decrees that run contrary to that insistent voice
inside you. That was why both women broke every norm of wifely, queenly, womanly behaviour
in their time. Ram and Rahim are one to Nanak, Kabir is amused by ritual fetishes, Ramanuja
and Gnaneshwar denounce class distinctions, Chaitanya dismisses the outer world, Tukaram
declares everyone is equal before the Ultimate Being.
Prabhu K./Wilderfile

The credo of mystics and saint poets the world over has
been one of love - between all living creatures - and the
Omniscient Being which animates them. To meld with the
universal pulse, you have to get rid of that same selfhood
which troubled St.Augustine, no less than a Basavanna or
Purandaradasa.

Remember Emperor Akbar's attempts to establish a

universal faith in Din Ilahi? He invited wise men from all
religions to create the perfect amalgam of all belief systems. He reckoned this would banish
creed wars. The great dream never got above ground. How could it? Faith is not something you
arrive at through deliberation and consensus. For the Mughal monarch the new-crafted religion
was not blinding epiphany, but of expediency. He himself could not bring to it that self
surrender, which made him march to Ajmer on foot, year after year, to the tomb of saint
Moinuddin Chisti, beseeching that he be granted a son and heir.

Faith demands unrelenting strength, unshakeable, stubborn conviction. You hear it in Tyagaraja's
plaints (I don't know the path of devotion, O Rama) in Syama Sastri's pleas (Can't you speak to
me when I call upon you in pain?) Or in the lyrics of the Alwars and Nayanmars who actualised
their personal God with tender devotion. The intensity of human love inflames Jayadeva when he
sublimates it in throbbing metres.

Indian art history shows that all the arts and crafts of this land have evolved within the matrix of
faith. The radiant, sinuous energy of the Nataraja testifies to aesthetic excellence as well as
devotion. From Bhavabhuti to Subramania Bharati, the poet has been as stimulated by faith as by
the creative impulse. Can they flourish in a secular milieu? Of postmodern scepticism?

Perhaps the most fascinating experiences in faith come through the spontaneous expressions of
music.

Sometimes an Indian musician will image the melody in the anthropomorphic form of a divinity.
("Durbari Kanada is a deity - all diamonds and brocades, in a courtly parade".) Another will
transcend imagery to reach the transcendent "light of a thousand suns". ("I saw a yellow blaze
when I heard raag Basant".) To the artistes of the old school, the abstract had to be concretised,
the raag and taal had to be individuated in distinct images. The method demands not only
technical proficiency, but a faith that knew the tangible aspects of ritual and bordered on the
mystic. They needed (and tried to create) the sacred ambience of the temple, of a place of selfless
worship.

This was mandatory in Carnatic music where the compositions are invariably full of devotional
content, where the composer is a supplicant before a personal God. Even songs of erotic intent
tend to focus on some divine being, or on the king who represents God on earth.
Many musicians past and present, see the practice of their art as sacral performance. It may be
pursued as a career, but it is still their surrender and homage to God.

Things may be different today. "I surrender to the aesthetic experience, not some mythical
godhead. My homage is to the spirit of art. The Bhairavi moves me, not the lyric," a young
Carnatic musician once shrugged as we discussed a refulgent composition in that raga. An
agnostic, he believes that classical music must be freed from the devotion quotient to progress
unhampered. Another is looking for songs of secular content for contemporary appeal.

There are listeners though to say, "Her Kalyani made me see the Goddess Kamakshi with eyes
full of compassion." Or "He sings well, but it is lifeless. He has not internalised the musical and
lyrical content." The comments may (and do) come from rasikas who rarely visit temples, and
are themselves indifferent to ritual practices. But they expect the classical arts to fulfil some deep
felt need to get connected to "the beyond". Didn't the scholar-poet Matthew Arnold predict that,
as sterility mounts in our lives, we shall look more and more to the arts to fulfil the functions of
(defunct) religion? So you say (like I do) I am not a theist, I am inspired by Shakespeare and
Sahana, Avvai and Ajanta. Balasaraswati's Bharatanatyam is all the ritual I need, and
Subbulakshmi's voice is my epiphany.

How then do you explain moments out of time? Like this one at a tiny, unknown temple hidden
in the wilderness, when you recognise the Pallava lions in its derelict architecture, haunted by
shadows and kuyil calls? Three or four supplicants have found their way in before you and are
chanting verses you cognise as born of Andal's passion. The bell rings - redolent with flower
fragrance, the image in the sanctum springs to life in a circle of camphor light, spells of an
ancient diction daze you... Suddenly, a song in Saranga resonates in the cloistered space, every
word breathing ardour, surrender, concretising the abstract...Stop world, I want to get off...you
HAVE got off...until the song ends, light dims, forms dissolve, sounds fade...

Finally, take a look at this sci-fi picture of Isaac Asimov. In a future regulated by the colossal
Univac Computer, humans have evolved into globs of consciousness drifting through space.
When even the globs lose their spark, and all life becomes extinct, in the vast silence of the
universe, Univac intones, "Let there be Light!"

A parody? Yes, but can we see it as a parable?