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« on: March 28, 2005, 01:03:20 PM »
“Citizens of a country whose king is weak should not marry and have children. Culture, family life and domestic happiness are impossible under such a king. Wealth, wife and possessions are not safe if there be no proper king ruling over us. We suffer long the sight of other’s sorrow till our turn comes to become victims of the rakshasa” (from Mahabharata by Vyasa).
Vyasa writes of the bane of impotent government. His and Valmiki’s work (Ramayana) must be given to our students. We must save our youth from fascist prejudices constructing stereotypes of Hindus: “Hinduism is his (the Chief Justice) problem. See Parvati Ramdeen, see DLP, UNC and Maha Sabha. Their behaviour is inseparable from Hinduism.”
To understand Hinduism, study the Mahabharata which has no peer in English literature. Its leitmotiv is dharma—righteous living, the vanity of ambition and the inevitable ruin that must follow greed. It is the best poem demonstrating in numerous characters the stupidity of nurturing hatred or cultivating anger.
Hinduism is not a dogma. There is no Hindu pope. A Hindu worldview derived the Ramayana and the Mahabharata is not devoted to money making or getting power by any or amoral means. The Kauravas and Duryodhana, like Ravana, are models of the evil of ambition bereft of a sense of right action (dharma). Every theme in the Bible concerning eschewing vengeance, trusting in divine justice or doing duty according to what pleases God is repeated in the Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata is more than a religious text. It belongs to the world as does the Taj Mahal or the pyramids. It is unsurpassed as an epic poem. The great Greek works or Shakespeare’s unsurprisingly resemble it in many ways. Our Greek-Roman-Hebrew literary heritage has a common cultural antecedent, and evidence is in the Sanskrit language.
We dismiss Ramayana ideas, while Sanskrit roots of our Christian religious words antedate the time when Christianity took over Roman Empire, eg, “arch” (Sanskrit verb) means to worship, from which we get our “archbishop,” and “spirit” comes from the Sanskrit root “sprihi.”
Homer mingled the actions of gods and mortals in the Illiad. Homeric rituals are identifiable in the Mahabharata. Hesiod’s Works and Days describe a pantheon of deities often identical to those found in Vyasa. Nymphs, miracles, curses imposed by Vasishta, Kanva and other rishis, even on gods, do not vitiate the profundity of the work.
The Bible is replete with the same admixture of divine and mortal actors—the Holy Ghost is Jesus’ father, not Joseph. Shakespeare stripped of omens, spirits and divine interventions is trash: read the Tempest; Macbeth starts with obeah—the witches’ prophesy, Hamlet talks with his father’s ghost. The Greek tragedians repeat Vyasa’s techniques, while dealing with current themes as individual freedom and the right of the state—Sophocles’ Antigone, or the cost of pursuing vengeance—Euripedes’ Medea.
The literature of Vyasa is didactic. It instructs the individual to acquire wealth. Prof RH Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism says Protestant Christianity caused the rise of capitalism, Calvinism particularly. It is slanderous to say on radio: “Hinduism is about making money by any means.”
The Bible (Proverbs) instructs us to acquire wealth—it is a man’s protection. Job’s wealth (Bible) was reward for righteousness, as is also told in Psalms. The Foolish Virgins (Bible) are about the profit of investment (talents were coins, money, not skills). The evil of single-minded focus on money is a constant theme in the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
Denis Solomon said that Hindu children make a greater effort to master English than others in Trinidad. They must begin to read English translations of the Mahabharata.
Naipaul’s House for Mr Biswas owes much to his familiarity with Hindu epics. Derek Walcott in his Nobel acceptance speech hinted at his deficiency in familiarity with Hindu literature. We have damaged thousands of children telling them “English is the oppressors’ language,” and imprisoned them in ignorance of Hindu literature.
Margaret Thatcher wanted to import Indians to teach English in the UK. Brides bring a higher dowry if they speak English, the most widely used language in India, where speaking English is not optional. It is a necessity to get a good job.
Eighty per cent of electronically stored information is in English, and 66 per cent of the world’s scientists read it. India exports mathematicians and scientists who were speaking English at primary school, contrary to the ignorance propagated here that everybody in India speaks Hindi.
The massas, bakasuras and rakshasas imposing executive ignorance on our country must lead us to ruin. The Minister of Education uses language only emotively, not scientifically. She cannot tell children destroyed at school of Schopenhauer’s debt to Hindu literature, the beauty of Kalidasa’s Shac**tala or Goethe’s verbal oblation to Kalidasa:
“Willst du den Himmel, die Erde, mit Einem Namen begreifen; Nenn’ ich, Sac**tala, und ist so Alles gesagt—If we should combine the earth and heaven into one name, I name thee, O Shac**tala, and all is said.”
Do not expect any cabinet minister to hint at the dramatic scene (Act V) in King Dushyanta’s court when he disowns Shac**tala, or the seminal insight the scene plays in explaining some social problems of Trinidad regarding domestic violence:
“The world suspects a wife who does not share her husband’s lot; her kinsmen wish her to abide with him, although he love her not ” (Sharngarava, Kanva’s chela). Sharngarava presently abandons Shac**tala, after Dushyanta, made forgetful by a curse, disowns that he made her pregnant:
“You deserve scorn and blame, what will Kanva do with your shame? Obey your husband and endure.”
Hindu literature, like our European canon, is vital to our life and Trinidadian identity.
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