A quirky collection of legends and myths. Unlike the "fairy tales" we are accustomed to, these have no proper structure: many do not even have a storyA quirky collection of legends and myths. Unlike the "fairy tales" we are accustomed to, these have no proper structure: many do not even have a story arc. The tale starts somewhere and ends somewhere else.
That said, they have the raw beauty of stories which have not been doctored to meet modern sensibilities. These legends have been collected and presented without any window-dressing by the author, in 1912 - and going through them, we get the picture of a wild country inhabited by a hardy folk who existed in tune with nature. They lived, loved and quarrelled in an idyllic landscape untouched by time, before the white man arrived with his "civilising" mission.
A world worth aspiring to return to - even though it may be only be a pipe dream....more
I had heard great things about Devdutt Pattanaik as a mythologist, but I had not got around to reading anything by him so far. So I decided to give itI had heard great things about Devdutt Pattanaik as a mythologist, but I had not got around to reading anything by him so far. So I decided to give it a go with this book. And I must regretfully tell you that this will be the last book by him that I will read. I don't have time to waste.
I love myth, in all its variety from across space and time, and its various interpretations. (Joseph Campbell is the one single great influence in my life.) However, one expects some kind of erudition and in-depth analysis in a book which claims to be "the decoding of Hindu mythology". This book has nothing of the sort. It is basically the author's subjective interpretation of Indian mythic images: which is perfectly okay, provided the author presents it like that. But to claim authority ("decoding"!) is a bit too much to stomach.
First, the positives:
1. Pattanaik writes beautifully. His language is simple, elegant and readable. And like the storytellers of old, he spins a beautiful yarn.
2. The author sees myth as metaphor, and does not go for literalism. By putting out his own interpretation of fantastic stories, both psychological and cultural, he gives the reader plenty of food for thought, and trigger's one's imagination.
Now, the negatives:
1. Devdutt Pattanaik peddles the discredited narrative of a monolithic Hinduism, with the Vedas as the base. This is patently wrong. Indian culture is syncretic in nature. Vedic religion is only a small part of it. The "Hinduism" we refer to today came about through centuries of assimilation and adaptation: to look for a common thread in it is a futile exercise.
2. The author has created his own framework for Hinduism; and cherry-picks stories and interprets them in his own idiosyncratic fashion, to fit into it. His division of Hinduism into three streams - the "Circle of Brahma and Saraswati" which deals with the universe and the natural world, the "Square of Vishnu and Lakshmi" which deals with human society and culture, and the "Point of Shiva and Shakti" which deals with inner journey of the soul - is his own individual creation. It is a refreshing new look at Indian myth, but it carries no authority.
3. Pattanaik presents Hinduism as a highly philosophical religion, expounded by learned sages, where even the common man is aware of the great cosmic mysteries. This is Enlightenment gobbledygook and has no footing in reality. It is true that India had an ancient philosophical tradition: but it had no impact on life on the ground. Our country was a non-egalitarian cesspit, where the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy lived a life of unalloyed misery.
So, my verdict is - this book is worth reading to get a refreshing take on Indian mythology, which is in no way authoritative.
PS: You can find a lot of Hindu right-wingers trashing this book because the author went against their literalist views on Hinduism. I would just take this opportunity to say that I find his views to be more enlightening and interesting than the crap dished out by the Hindutva apologists....more
What can one write about a book which defies all definition? For Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is such a book. It could be callWhat can one write about a book which defies all definition? For Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is such a book. It could be called a treatise on Greek mythology; a creative retelling of the Greek myths; and I think it has also been pigeonholed as a novel. It is all of these, and it is none of these. Whatever you call these approximately four hundred densely-packed pages of amazing prose, you can be sure of one thing: it is sometimes translucent and uplifting, sometimes opaque and frustrating: but always, always, it is irresistibly enchanting - like the Greek myths themselves.
Calasso has taken on the Herculean task of trying to capture the essence of the whole of the Greek civilisation, including its culture, its language, its philosophy and its history, in a rambling tour across time and space. In this, he has thrown his road maps to the winds. Calasso jumps from myth to myth with a suddenness resembling jump cuts in an avant-garde movie, while he talks about mythology, linguistics, local customs, and philosophy often in the same breath. It is as though Joseph Campbell is talking to you, using the techniques of William Faulkner.
To be truthful - this is not a book for the newbie. Unless you are up-to-date on your mythology, you are going to be confused (a person like me who is relatively well-read in the Greek myths, was lost many a time). However, if you are a myth junkie, this book will pull you in and hold you spellbound, though even then, it won't be smooth sailing all the way.
The unique thing about the Greek Pantheon is that the Gods are all very near to mankind. They are just superior beings, that is all. There is absolutely no morality - the stories are full of rape, incest, sodomy, ritual mutilation, dismemberment and even necrophilia. Zeus, the supreme god, himself is the chief abductor and rapist. Throughout the book, the author stresses these themes as they are repeated across the tales, time and again; breaking and melding, splitting and reforming, as one story becomes many and many become one.
No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.
All the favourite gods are here - the intellectual Apollo and the passionate Dionysus; Athena, the eternal virgin and Aphrodite, lust personified; Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Hades... all ruled over by Zeus and Hera. So also are the heroes, who by slaying monsters, assimilate them; Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, Achilles and the wily Odysseus. They play out their eternal drama in the heavens, as well as on the earth in the form of rituals. Because in Greece, the gods are always nearby.
But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed.
The book begins with Europa being carried off by Zeus in the form of bull; in the last chapter, we find her brother Cadmus in search of her. Instead, he ends up saving Zeus from the monster Typhon - a leftover from the earth religions, before the gods of Mount Olympus took over - by the use of music to distract the monster. As a reward, Zeus promises him Harmony, the love child of Aphrodite and Ares, as wife. However, he is unable to recover Europa, and thus unable to return home as that was the condition he left his country. So Cadmus founds his own city on Thebes.
Why is Cadmus important? Because, according to legend, it was he who brought the alphabet to Greece. And Harmony's name itself symbolises what she stands for. Therefore even when Cadmus moves out of his country with his wife, a defeated man, he can be gratified about a life well spent.
Cadmus had brought Greece "gifts of the mind": vowels and consonants yoked together in tiny signs, "etched model of a silence that speaks" - the alphabet. With the alphabet, the Greeks would teach themselves to experience the gods in the silence of the mind, and no longer in the full and normal presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage. He thought of his routed kingdom: of daughters and grandchildren torn to pieces, tearing others to pieces, ulcerated in boiling water, run through with spits, drowned in the sea. And Thebes was a heap of rubble. But no one could erase those small letters, those fly's feet that Cadmus the Phoenician had scattered across Greece, where the winds had brought him in his quest for Europa carried off by a bull that rose from the sea.
"The Ramayana does not belong to any one moment in history for it has its own history which lies embedded in the many versions which were woven around
"The Ramayana does not belong to any one moment in history for it has its own history which lies embedded in the many versions which were woven around the theme at different times and places." - Romila Thapar
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the great epics of India. Of these the Ramayana, though smaller, is the older one – and surprisingly widespread not only in India but across Asia right up to Japan. It boasts of astonishing regional varieties in the narrative, while keeping the core tale intact – a sure sign that it has spread as an oral narrative, and is a composite of various myths; some universal, some local.
Dr. Azeez Tharuvana, a native of the hilly Wayanad region of northern Kerala in India has done his doctoral research in tribal studies. A part of it was about the astonishing varieties of the Ramayana myth, popular among the tribes of the region. This book is a compendium of those tales in part; it also explores the spread of Ramayana across India and Asia.
There would be hardly an Indian who does not know the epic – about the hero Rama and his wife Sita, who is kidnapped by the demon king of Sri Lanka, Ravana. Rama along with his brother Lakshmana and the monkey army led by Hanuman reach Lanka by building a bund across the sea. In a fierce battle, Rama kills Ravana and his kin and rescues Sita.
In a devastating sequel to the epic, Rama abandons Sita because doubts are raised about her chastity while in Ravana’s captivity. Left in the forest to die, she is rescued by the sage Valmiki (the author of the epic, incidentally) and gives birth to twins in his ashram. Later on, Rama with his army confronts the children without knowing they are his; they defeat him when all is revealed. Rama apologises to Sita and asks her to return to the palace. She refuses and the ground opens up and swallows her.
In the tribal retellings, this whole story is superimposed on Wayanad, with Rama, Sita and Ravana all being converted into local tribals: the locations are in and around the area (for example, Ayodhya is in Irippu near Kodagu and Valmiki’s ashram is in Ashramam Kolli in Wayanad itself). There are also interesting bits of local colour, such as a lake in Ponkuzhi being created out of Sita’s tears and Jatayatta Kavu being the exact place where Sita disappeared into the earth. (The place name, literally translated, means “the grove where the hair became detached”. It is believed that as Sita went down, Rama tried to hold on to her hair which came off in his hand – again, not part of Valmiki’s epic.)
We also find tribal gods participating in the story. In many sub-narratives, they work as intercessors and are awarded special privileges by the Vedic gods (this may be a later attempt to legitimise or subsume the local religion). Even the origin myths of the tribes are mishmashed into the corpus of the Vedic myths. In one interesting myth, the origin of the slave status of the Adiya tribe is described to be handiwork of three “devious lords”, who cheated their king into parting with his land and then frightened them all into submission – this seems too much like history! (I have a very good guess on who those “devious lords” are.)
Dr. Azeez’s version of the historical origin of these myths is that they were imposed by the Aryan settlers who moved into this area. This, I don’t subscribe to fully. In my opinion, it was a bit of give and take between the settlers and the original inhabitants. Ramayana is a composite made up of myths from all over – and not necessarily only India, as the second part of the book (where the Ramayana tradition across India and Asia is explored) demonstrates.
And what a kaleidoscopic view it is! From Buddhist Ramayanas where Rama is the incarnation of the Bodhisattva; to Jain versions where he is a Tirthankara; to Islamic tellings where he is a sultan of sorts (in one Kerala Muslim version, all the characters speak Malabar Muslim lingo!): and from Tibet to China to Malaysia to Thailand and all the way across to Japan – the tale of this prince and his consort continues to entertain generation after generation.
Postscript: Currently efforts are on in India by Hindu fundamentalists to freeze this story in time and space, reinforce the image of Rama as an incarnation of Vishnu, and change myth into dogma – rather like what happened with Jesus. Sad....more
Kuttikrishna Marar takes many of the characters and episodes of the great epic and analyses them in their literary cGreat analysis of the Mahabharata.
Kuttikrishna Marar takes many of the characters and episodes of the great epic and analyses them in their literary context. This type of analysis, where no external factors are brought into play other than the clues provided in the text itself, enthralled me when I first read it in my early twenties. I don't remember much to give a detailed review here - which shows it is high time for a re-read....more
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