Feisty, fragile, fascinating: An interview with Chitra Divakaruni

 The writer paints her protagonists not as the meek and mild queens of traditional mythology, but as intelligent, firebrand women, who protested the wrongs heaped upon them, and took up cudgels on behalf of women around them.

As a child, Dr. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni spent her summer holidays with her maternal grandfather in Bengal, where he regaled her with stories from the epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, along with tales from Bengal.

“My grandfather had a huge influence on my writing,” she says. “The land, the customs, the folktales and fairytales, many of which make their way into my writing, all came from him.” 

As did the epics. Though in the narratives of Divakaruni, they came with a twist. The Palace of Illusions (2008) and The Forest of Enchantments (2019), two of the most ambitious novels she embarked on, were retellings of the epics where Divakaruni gave voice to the innermost thoughts of Draupadi and Sita. 

Growing up in Kolkata, the sense of Sita she got was of a “very meek and mild, obedient wife and daughter-in-law, who did not create any trouble. Elders would bless me and say, may you be like Sita, the epitome of all those qualities. That used to really annoy me! I thought there has to be more to Sita than that.” 

That’s the kind of fallacious thinking that Divakaruni hopes to address through her portrayals of strong heroines. In her books, she paints them not as the meek and mild queens of traditional mythology, but intelligent, firebrand women, who protested the wrongs heaped upon them, and took up cudgels on behalf of women around them. 

Author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Image Credit: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)

In her latest book, The Last Queen, which was just released in the United States, Divakaruni continues to delve into the minds of powerful queens, this time with the story of Maharani Jind Kaur, the youngest and most beloved wife of the Lion of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Sikh empire. 

Why Rani Jindan?

“She is an amazingly strong woman who was just pushed aside in the annals of our history,” says Divakaruni.

History books teach about the Sher-e-Punjab, and his son, Dalip Singh, who was deposed by the British, exiled to England in his childhood, and ultimately made a puppet of the British crown. But in between the father and son ruled Maharani Jind Kaur, as the Queen Regent, an astute young widow fighting to protect Punjab, the legacy of her beloved husband, and the birthright of her son Dalip, from mercenary courtiers and the avaricious British. 

“I thought Rani Jindan had a fascinating life and deserved to be in the limelight. She was very inspiring to me because of the difficulties she went through in a world that was pretty hostile to women who stepped out of their roles; I really wanted to tell her story,” says Divakaruni. 

Readers and critics have called her books, especially the epic retellings, “unputdownable.” 

“I love that word!” Divakaruni exclaims in delight. “I want it to be unputdownable.”

In this regard, The Last Queen doesn’t disappoint. The story has everything a fast-paced novel can be expected to have: royalty, romance, conspiracy, murder and mayhem. Divakaruni’s narrative style is fluid and accessible, with a sprinkling of wit and humor. 

Divakaruni herself is a disarmingly charming conversationalist; her humor belies her towering persona as a multiple award-winning author. Her work has been included in the Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and two Pushcart Prize Anthologies, among others. She is also Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston, a program that is rated among the top creative writing programs in the US. 

A strong advocate for women’s rights, she co-founded the San Francisco Bay Area-based Maitri, a nonprofit that provides support services to South Asian survivors of domestic violence. She is also an Emeritus board member of Pratham, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating illiteracy in India.  

Both Draupadi and Sita were relegated to a corner in the traditional epic narrative, not given much of a say in terms of what they were thinking, feeling or their motives.

As in the Palace of Illusions and The Forest of Enchantments, Divakaruni continues to write The Last Queen in the first-person narrative. Why?

“The first person allowed me direct interiority into the minds of these women, and in these three books, that was important. These are all strong women; their world is important, and therefore their voice.” 

Both Draupadi and Sita, she felt, were relegated to a corner in the traditional epic narrative, not given much of a say in terms of what they were thinking, feeling or their motives, and so Divakaruni addressed them with first-person female perspectives. 

At the same time, she also made both gods and kings disarmingly human with a generous dose of humor. In the Forest of Enchantments, readers are treated to a delightful scene where Lord Ram is teased about his dark skin color by Sita’s friends, and he gives back naughtily in jest by saying that when they unite in love, some of Sita’s fairness might rub off onto him.

“Normally, our popular concept of Ram is not of someone who jokes,” says Divakaruni, “but I found this in the Krittibasi Ramayan [a popular Bengali retelling] and had to put it in.” 

In the Last Queen too, readers also get a sense of Maharaja Ranjit Singh as a person, in all his glory and his failings (with a fondness for both women and drink), who finally found true love in the twilight of his years with an extraordinary woman of very ordinary birth.

Divakaruni’s feminist message, while strong, is also delicately nuanced, and therein lies her appeal to readers across genders. This has earned her a fan following among male readers.

Retelling of epics and historicals can be literary landmines for any author. So, how does Divakaruni tread through those?

“I feel huge amounts of trepidation, and oh, there are a lot of landmines, but what helps is my mission, which is to tell the truth as best as I can see it. I really don’t have any agenda except to bring women to the center of the story.” 

Divakaruni’s feminist message, while strong, is also delicately nuanced, and therein lies her appeal to readers across genders. This has earned her a fan following among male readers, many of whom write to her and engage with her on social media, all of which she finds very gratifying. “Reading across the genders is a very healthy thing, mentally and psychologically, healthy for our communities and ultimately for our societies,” she says. 

Divakaruni also feels keenly about the current world situation, where ideas and opinions are polarized to the extreme, and different interpretations are unwelcome. “I think we are going through a period, all over the world, and also in India, where it seems like there is only one possible interpretation of things, and if you veer from that, then hey, you are a problem. I really feel that that was not in our Indian spirit. Our Indian spirit is very embracive of many different ways of interpreting, of living, of worshiping.”

  

Currently, she is working on her next book, about a family in Bengal caught in the calamity of the Partition, which echoes those very sentiments. “It is at once hugely inspirational and a warning story as well of what happens when people don’t come together. Bengal too felt the violence of partition very keenly, but those events are less documented than the western borders,” she says.

 

Divakaruni’s other enduring love is teaching creative writing. “Every time I critique a student’s work, I learn something new. My students read a lot of contemporary books and they are always recommending things to me to read.” 

Her message for aspiring writers out there: I want you to know that when I started writing, I was a very bad writer. I had to learn how to become a good writer. Sometimes, writers have to be prepared to do that.

(Source: India Currents) 

Geography of god

With this, one gets the feeling that Hindu gods privilege the Gangetic plain, writes Devdutt Pattanaik. Read on: 

In north India, as per politicians, three major pilgrimage sites are important. The first is Ayodhya, where Ram was born and the kingdom of Ram was established. The second is Mathura where Krishna was born. The third is Kashi, with which Shiva is associated. Ram, Krishna and Shiva form the foundations of modern Hindu practices. With this, one gets the feeling that Hindu gods privilege the Gangetic plain.  

The early Hindu scriptures were restricted to North India. There is reference to Punjab and Haryana in the Rigveda. The Upanishads refer to the wider Gangetic plain. The Mahabharata refers to Bengal and Odisha. Ramayana  speaks of a more southern movement. By the Puranic period, we get more familiar with river systems, like the Narmada and Godavari, indicating a southward movement. Tamil scriptures, of course, talk of Kaveri. The Himalayan region gets increasingly connected with Shiva and many forms of Shakti whose shrines are found atop mountains and in caves.

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

When the Parshuram mythology emerges, the western coast of India becomes more and more prominent. Very few people know about the connection of Anga, Vanga and Kalinga (modern-day Bihar, Odisha and Bengal) with the sage Dhirgatamas of the Mahabharata. The Godavari region is connected to the rishi, Gautama and his wife, Ahalya. Most southern rivers are considered to be extensions of the Ganga itself, brought from the north to the south by rishis. In the same way the southern mountains are considered Dakshina Kailasa, brought from the north to the south by rishis, like Agastya.

In a recent lecture, a guruji kept insisting that they have been able to date the Ramayana and Mahabharata, using astronomical data found in the scriptures. He was asked by a student whether this happened before the exodus of Moses or after? This irritated the guru. He retorted that he was not concerned about what happened in other countries. The student then countered this reasoning by saying that he thought god belonged to all countries, not just to India. The guruji had no answer to it, especially since he prided himself on getting white men from Europe and America to take part in Hindu rituals. 

This indicates how god is provincialised in religions. Even religions that claim to be universal such as Christianity and Islam are anchored in a holy land located in the Middle East, which seems odd to people, say, in the Artic circles who wonder why prophets are always in the land of sand, not snow.

As Buddhism spread to China, a new idea emerged. That there are many Buddhas with many Buddha heavens located in infinite worlds. This allowed Buddha to be located anywhere, not just India. So Buddhas were seen manifesting in Tibet, Japan, China and even Korea. Mormons did the same thing for America, by stating that hundreds of years ago prophets escaped from Babylon and took God’s word to America and this was rediscovered in the 19th century by Joseph Smith. While some religions stay anchored to geography, some choose to break the fetter, and others invent new stories to link geography to God.

Devdutt Pattanaik writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times.

(Source: Mid Day)

Mythology of maternal uncles

Ravana has close relations with his maternal uncles, Marichi and Subahu, who help him abduct Sita, writes Devdutt Pattanaik. Read on:

The maternal uncle plays a very important role in Hindu scriptures. He is called the ‘Maama’. He is the brother who visits his sister’s house during the rakhi festival. She visits his house during Bhai Dooj, the final day of Diwali. He watches over her welfare. It is an acknowledged phenomenon in Hindu families. In Purana, mountains are considered brothers of rivers. Many stories in the great Indian epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata involve maternal uncles. 

Ram’s maternal uncle is Kausalya’s brother. In some versions of the tale, it is said that Dashrata, king of Varanasi, fought the king of Kosala, and to make peace and merge the two kingdoms, he married Kausalya, the princess of Kosala. Nothing much is known about Ram’s maternal uncle though. We do know that Bharat is raised in the house of his maternal uncle, sometimes called Yudhajit. Ravana has close relations with his maternal uncles, Marichi and Subahu, who help him abduct Sita.

In the Mahabharata, we hear of Shakuni and Vasudev. Shakuni is the maternal uncle of the Kauravas, and Vasudev is the maternal uncle of the Pandavas. Kansa is the maternal uncle of Krishna. Each has a different character making us wonder what kind of maternal uncle we want in our life. 

There is Kansa mama, the one who wants to kill the nephew and is eventually killed by the nephew. This is a rare case in Indian mythology where the younger generation strikes against the older generation. Then there is Shakuni who is allegedly supporting the Kauravas, but his advice eventually caused the downfall of the Kauravas. Finally, there is Vasudeva who doesn’t play a direct role in the life of Pandavas but does lend his support through his son, Krishna. 

The Mahabharata war can be seen as a battle between two maternal uncles—Shakuni of the Kauravas and Vasudeva of the Pandavas.

Other significant maternal uncles include Shalya, the king of Madra, whose nephews are the twins Nakul and Sahadeva. He is shown as unable to decide on whose side he should fight, the Pandavas or the Kauravas. He is made charioteer of Karna but demotivates Karna by praising the Pandavas. Eventually, he becomes the commander of the Kaurava army and is killed by Yudhishtira. 

In Krishna lore, Krishna has a strained relationship with Rukmini’s brother Rukmi who opposes their wedding. But later they reconcile. Rukmi’s daughter even marries Rukmini’s son Pradyumna. This is a case of cousin marriage, common in South India, but not in North India. In some versions, we hear of a gambling match between Rukmi and Krishna’s brother Balaram which turns violent and Balarama kills Rukmi. 

Even though Krishna is the maternal uncle of Abhimanyu, he is unable to save his nephew during the Mahabharata war. Later Abhimanyu’s son, Parikshit, is the only surviving heir of the Pandavas and inherits Kurukshetra. This story is significant for it means a descendent of Krishna ends up ruling the kingdom of Hastinapur. Long ago, Krishna’s ancestor Yadu who was the crown prince of Hastinapur was stripped of his crown by his own father and the crown was given to his youngest brother Puru. Puru’s descendants Pandavas and Kauravas fight a terrible war that destroys each other, but thanks to Yadu’s descendent Krishna, whose sister Subhadra elopes with Arjuna, a child is born who inherits what was denied to an ancestor.    

(Source: Mid Day)

Dalit Veda Vyasa was India’s first nation builder. He was the child of an inter-caste union

 In ‘Makers of Modern Dalit History’, Sudarshan Ramabadran and Guru Prakash Paswan write Veda Vyasa’s achievements show how Dalit communities have helped Hinduism revolutionise and reform.

A revolutionary reformer, a path-breaking poet, a writer par excellence, a brilliant editor, an inspirational sage who institutionalized teaching with passion and an institution unto himself, Veda Vyasa is one of the central names in Indian spiritual tradition. He can be referred to as ‘the first nation builder’ for his creation of the teertha-yatra pilgrimages, for ‘chitta-shuddhi’ (cleansing of the mind), that prepared the ground for national unity and as someone who changed the face of a nation that is known for its spiritual philosophies and practices even in contemporary times.

Veda Vyasa’s extraordinary achievements are evidence that those who came from the Dalit and lower-caste communities have helped Hinduism revolutionize, reorganize and reform. Krishna Dvaipayana Veda Vyasa was a product of one of ancient India’s first inter-caste unions, born to a sage, Maharishi Parashara, and a fisherwoman, Satyavati. No one would have thought that this son of unequal parents would go on to represent Hinduism and its tenets. Every year, Vyasa’s birth anniversary is observed as Vyasa Purnima (full-moon day), also known as Guru Purnima in the month of Ashada (July–August) of the Hindu calendar. The day is dedicated to gurus or teachers. 

Representational image | The battle of Kurukshetra in Mahabharata | Commons

The apple does not fall far from the tree, and Veda Vyasa’s father, too, was a sage recognized for his immense knowledge and self-realisation. He worked tirelessly to bring order and cooperation between the different sections of society by travelling extensively and setting up ashrams to impart positive values at a time when there was a lot of discord in society and little respect between communities and castes. 

Right from the time he was a child, Vyasa had a strong urge to transcend the limited and the meaningless, and venture into the unknown realms of infinitude armed with a universal outlook. He set out to present the ancient wisdom of the past in a way that it could be appreciated and absorbed by all. During his young years, there was no one equal to Vyasa. He was intelligent, with a high grasping power, learning and absorbing what his father, his guru, taught him.

Vyasa was deeply committed to the service of mankind and wanted to disseminate knowledge among people. Due to his relentless contribution to Hinduism in which he outlined that knowledge was vital for self unfoldment, the positive impact of which is felt even today, Vyasa can be considered one of the most daring religious revolutionaries to have appeared in Hindu cultural history. His work has had a tremendous impact on scholars, thinkers and seekers from across the globe. In the words of German Indologist Paul Deussen: 

‘Love your neighbour like you love yourself’: Why should I do that? The answer is not found in the Bible, but in the Vedas, namely in the great formula ‘Tat Twam Asi’, which in three words, communicates the underlying metaphysics: You should love your neighbour like yourself, because you yourself are your neighbour, whereas to see him as different is mere illusion. 

It was Vyasa, equipped with an incomparably astute intellect, who decided to give humanity the categorized and documented version of the Vedas, India’s immense book of knowledge that had, until then, had only been shared orally. To compile and document that was an onerous task. His mission was not an ordinary one. He had perhaps realized that there was a definite need to pen down the treatise amid forgotten traditions and calamities, such as famines, as it would prove beneficial for the generations to come. The visionary sage not only compiled the Vedas but segregated it into the four parts that it is known to have today, namely the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda. 

However, the systematic thinker in Vyasa was apparently not satisfied with merely classifying the entire wealth of Vedic knowledge into four volumes; in each volume he also brought about a harmonious rhythm, both in the arrangement and the classification of the contents. He divided each of the four volumes roughly into four sections: Mantras (chants or hymns), Brahmanas (rituals and rules of conduct), Aranyakas (methods of subjective worship) and Upanishads (philosophical revelations). 

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German scholar who was widely read before the Second World War and discussed in public newspapers and magazines, saw in the Upanishads the ‘fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom’ and in their introduction into the Western world ‘the greatest gift of the century’. In his writings, Schopenhauer confessed that reading the Upanishads had been the joy of his life and later the consolation at the hour of his death. According to him, this was such a great legacy to mankind because its study purified the mind like nothing else could.

Vyasa was an original thinker with astounding faculties of insight and foresight. In the words of Swami Chinmayananda, one of the first spiritual teachers to expound the knowledge of the Upanishads in English, ‘Vyasa was one of the sages who had a vast vision of the past and the great imagination to see the future, both of which he brought forth in order to tackle the problems of decadence in his immediate present.’

Was Vyasa reaching out to the people in a way they could understand? To explain how the subject should be understood, he brought to the fore the Brahmasutras, an analysis based on the essential thoughts contained in the Upanishads. While the Upanishads tell us who we are, the Brahmasutras analyse and clarify, shining a light on this most vital knowledge. The Brahmasutras are the substratum for the ancient Indian philosophy; Advaita Vedanta, which states that the divinity in one is the divinity in all. To Vyasa’s credit, the Brahmasutras form the umbrella of Vedantic knowledge and studies. 

Vyasa’s quest to present knowledge in simplified and easily comprehensible forms was both refreshing and relentless. He seemed to be of the belief that there could always be more creative ways to reach out to people. And to accomplish that, he perhaps decided to travel extensively, engage with and speak to various sages, cutting across the length and breadth of the nation, to write the Puranas (mystic stories based on ancient India). Vyasa compiled and wrote all of the eighteen puranas. In Vyasa’s work, one can find a unique harmony of technique, plot development, character portrayal, description of nature and cultural connections. In other words, he was the greatest producer of potboilers of the time! 

David Frawley, author, teacher and founder of the American Institute of Vedic Studies, has said, ‘As such, Veda Vyasa developed the foundation for Hindu dharma as it endures to the present day, with its main deity forms, philosophies and yogic paths. Yet Veda Vyasa stayed in the background and never made himself into an object of worship.’ 

One of Vyasa’s most applauded works is the Mahabharata. Along with the Ramayana, this epic poem is one of Hinduism’s most eminent works. The duo lies at the core of Indian national identity and culture, spanning millennia. 

Set against the backdrop of the Mahabharata, Vyasa also produced one of India’s ‘FAQ’ handbooks—the Bhagavad Gita—which teaches human beings how to practically live the subtle philosophies of everyday life. The Bhagavad Gita occurs in the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata, comprising eighteen chapters. It is Veda Vyasa’s sheer brilliance that he translated subtle Vedic maxims in his unique way, against the intricacies of politics and the edginess of a family feud. 

Vyasa’s accomplishments show that birth and background do not dictate a person’s accomplishments. 

This excerpt from ‘Makers of Modern Dalit History’ by Sudarshan Ramabadran and Guru Prakash Paswan has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

(Source: The Print)

Indian mythology has a problem with disability

 Our epics teach us to discriminate against disabled people by portraying them negatively and telling us their condition is because of sins committed in past lives.

It is said that one can find every aspect of life in the Mahabharata and if one doesn’t find what one want’s there, then there is little chance that one will find it elsewhere. But while it is true that the Mahabharata contains elements of philosophy, life, war, intellect, passion, jealousy and treachery, one element is not discussed as it should have been – disability. The character associated with it is Dhritarashtra, who is negatively portrayed throughout the text. In fact, many believe that he is to blame for the epic battle between the cousins (Pandavas and Kauravas) because he adamantly insisted that his son, Duryodhana, should be king after him, instead of the more worthy Yudhisthira.

Since very few people in India have actually read the Mahabharata, the don’t know about the character of Dhritarashtra before he became king – an aspect that has been cautiously kept hidden. Both Dhritarashtra and his step-brother Pandu had a very cordial relationship. Pandu, being the younger brother, held Dhritarashtra in very high-esteem – and the feeling was reciprocated.

Both were disciples of the great Bhishma, their uncle who was also looking after the administration of the kingdom since there was no king on the throne at the time. Bhishma himself couldn’t take the throne because of a vow he had made earlier in his life. Since Dhritarashtra was older, he was trained to be a king, while the younger brother, Pandu, was trained as a warrior and lead the army and became the senapati. Bhishma trained the brothers so the kingdom could go into safe hands.

Sanjaya meets Dhritarashtra as his envoy for peace negotiations. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Bhishma’s idea was sage, because Dhritarashtra was visually impaired from birth and thus couldn’t fight wars. He was trained in administration, management, decision-making, delivering justice – all very important aspects of being a king, while the aspect of war was left to Pandu, who could militarily assist his older brother. As a team, they could have achieved wonders.

But when Dhritarashtra was being crowned, Vidur, the young prime minister, who was also taught by Bhishma, objected to him becoming king. How can a blind man sit on the throne of a king, he had argued. How could the kingdom be a great empire if the king is blind? How could important decisions be made on the battlefield if the king is sitting safe in the capital?

Nobody said anything to Vidur’s questions because a king with a disability was unprecedented. As a result, Dhritarashtra had to step down; his disability was taken as his inability. Denied his rightful place, this became a turning point for Dhritarashtra and guided the person he was to become.

After a short period of time though, Dhritarashtra was made the king because Pandu left his throne and eventually died. It was only out of compulsion that Dhritarashtra was accepted as king. Had he been made king the first time around, he wouldn’t have been made as conscious about his ‘disability’. Now, he was a ‘sloppy second’, someone’s ‘reject’ and he knew this very clearly. Now the question is, when Dhritarashtra sat on the throne, was the Kaurava empire anything short of a mighty empire? Was the administration poor, were people unhappy, was justice not delivered? The answer is no, because Dhritarashtra had people like Bhishma around him, along with Vidur, who took care of the intricacies of administration.

All the wrongs began to emerge later, when his son Duryodhana was born. Dhirtarastra wanted him to be king after him, even though Duryodhana was unworthy, simply because he wanted to ‘undo’ the injustice done to him. He wanted to ensure that his son wouldn’t be a ‘sloppy second’ like him and that’s why his son was raised believing the throne was his birthright.

Nobody is born bad but it’s society which ‘makes’ or ‘breaks’ an individual. Our society just saw the bad person Dhritarashtra became, but turned a blind eye to what led him there. Since he was disabled, people who have historically discriminated against differently-abled people were further encouraged to justify their attitude towards differently-abled people.

One may wonder what mythology has to do in this context. Indian society is deeply affected by our mythology and its characters. The illiterate know about these stories. The impact of our mythology is such that people identify with the characters and inculcate values drawn from them into their own lives. The depiction and characterisation of disabled people in Indian mythology is extremely negative and people have used the stories to justify their discriminatory attitude against differently-abled people.

The case of Dhritarashtra is not just about a disabled person who has been depicted in poor light. If one looks at the Ramayana, the character of Manthara has also been demonised to a great extent. In fact, she has largely been blamed for sending Rama into exile for 14 years. Manthara was the maid of the queen, Kaikeyi, and is seen as instrumental in convincing the queen to ask Dasharatha to grant her the two boons that he had promised her a long time ago. Under Manthara’s influence, Kaikeyi asked the king to make his son Bharat the next king of Ayodhaya instead of Rama. 

However, some folktales point out how Manthara didn’t have anything to gain by sending Ram to exile. Instead, she suffered heavy public scrutiny that linked her character to her orthopaedic disability, because of which she couldn’t stand erect.

Mostly, our mythological texts have shown disabled people either as powerful, cunning and mischievous characters or as beggars in a state of extreme pain and poverty. Also, disability and mocking disability is justified in the name of sins carried from their previous births. Rarely does one come across portrayals of disabled characters in a positive light. One such character was Ashtavakra, who was physically disabled since birth. Born in a Brahmin family, he mastered the Vedas and other holy scriptures at an early age. He was mocked by the intellectuals in King Janaka’s court on account of his disability, where he had gone to participate in a shastrartha (philosophical debate).

Ultimately, he defeated his mockers and earned a lot of praise from everyone. But this story from the Chandogya Upanishad sets a dangerous precedent, if observed carefully. The subtext is that if you are intellectually capable, your physical disability doesn’t matter.  The moral seems to be that a disabled person has to be extraordinary to earn basic respect, a phenomenon that continues today.

The time has come to ask tough questions, to point out the wrong messages which have been disseminated by these texts and to re-interpret these texts in the light of the present day so that differently-abled people are not judged by the wrong morals of our mythological texts that relegate disability and disabled people to the margins.

(Source: The Wire)

Different strokes: Women in the Tamil Mahabharatas

 A compressed version of the lecture retired JNU scholar, professor Vijaya Ramaswamy, was to deliver in Chennai recently. According to media reports, the event was cancelled in the wake of objections from rightwing activists.  

This is a condensed version of the lecture by professor Vijaya Ramaswamy, titled Reluctant Brides, Deviant Wives and Cunning Witches: Women in Tamil Mahabharatas, focusing on Draupadi, Alli and Aravalli-Suravall.

The event was scheduled to be held at the C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Institute of Indological Research, in Chennai, on January 4, 2020.     

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Cover page of a low-priced publication telling the myth of warrior queen Alli from the Tamil Mahabharatas, titled ‘Alli Arasani Maalai’. These publications were called ‘Periya Ezhutu’ (large print) as they were mostly read by women who were first generation literates. Photo: Vijaya Ramaswamy

The critical editions of the Mahabharata are authored by men, Brahmanical in outlook, if not in fact, and located squarely within the patriarchal register, or framework. These tend to freeze women within certain descriptive and prescriptive frames contained within the Sanskritic-Brahmanical and patriarchal register.  

Regional variations of the Mahabharata, on the other hand, are much more fluid in their portrayal of the epic characters.  Personalities like Duryodhana and Karna, represented in negative terms as ‘evil’ forces, find a more nuanced and less biased space within the regional versions.  

This is especially true of the women protagonists within the epic like Draupadi, Gandhari and Karna’s wife, Ponnaruvi. 

Ponnaruvi’s name does not figure in the critical edition which talks instead of Vrushali (the daughter of Duryodhana’s charioteer) as Karna’s wife. In contrast to the low social status of Vrushali, in the Tamil rendition of Karna’s life, Ponnaruvi is said to be of royal descent, a Kalinga princess.

The availability of books in the Madras Presidency in the course of the 19th century brought the Mahabharata to the commoners, both men and women.

Cheaply priced popular folklore called ‘gujili’ literature (which refers to Gujarati merchants) entered the market, gaining a new readership, especially among women. Fragments from the Tamil Mahabharatas, with additions and interpolations, or even beyond both, with totally new protagonists, changed the understanding of characters from the Mahabharata, bringing into focus the anti-heroes and the militant, non-conformist women who were either from the margins of the epic or outside it altogether.

It is clear that in the Tamil versions of the many fragmented Mahabharatas, one finds a re-invention of the epic, centre-staging women who sometimes find a place in the critical editions, like Draupadi, and also those who sometimes do not find a place in them, like Alli Arasani, although she probably features in the Sanskrit edition as Chitrangada. 

As Simon de Beauvoir puts it, “women’s folklore researched by women makes the women in such studies ‘truly subjects rather than objects.’ 

This exploration into the Tamil Mahabharatas is an attempt to contextualise the process of transmission and transmutation of narrative fragments from the great epic that may have had their birth in the non-Sanskritic, perhaps, to some extent, matri-local, early Tamil society.  The myths of warrior queens like Alli, Pavzhakkodi, snake princess Ulupi and the Siva devotee Minnoliyal, and their marriage to Arjuna, a leading protagonist of the Mahabharata, break the mega-narrative of a great epic, bringing centre-stage figures who are wholly absent in the mainstream version (Vyasa’s Mahabharata). 

Ballads like Ponnaruvi Masakkai, Karna Moksham and Karnamaharajan Chandai draw attention to the narrative of Karna’s wife Ponnaruvi whose hatred of her so called ‘low-caste’ husband and her unwanted pregnancy, brings into sharp focus issues of both caste and class.

Karna, before his death on the 17th day of the Kurukshetra war, reveals the secret of his birth, turning her repulsion into regret.  These fragmented narratives can therefore be said to constitute significant regional variants of a grand narrative, irrespective of whether they truly constitute counter-narratives or get socialised into the patriarchal mainstream.

It is only among the Tamils that Draupadi is venerated as a goddess and there are around 300 temples dedicated to Draupadi or Panchali Amman all over Tamil Nadu.

In my research into the Tamil Mahabharatas, the portrayal of the characters of Kunti, Gandhari and Draupadi in the critical editions have been juxtaposed against the more fluid representations, especially of Draupadi, in the regional retelling of the Mahabharata such as the celebrated Tamil text, S. Subramanya Bharatiyar’s Panchali Shapatam.

 Equally important in the re-telling of Draupadi’s character and role are performance texts such as Draupadi Kuram or Kuravanji.

It is noteworthy that the deification of Draupadi by Tamil communities has evolved in the course of a few centuries into the Draupadi Amman cult. Similarly, Gandhari is also worshipped as a goddess by many Tamil castes. 

Professor R. Srinvasan, in his introduction to Nallapillai Bharatam, has opined that it is the Draupadi cult which is responsible for the rapid spread of the Mahabharata, especially in the narrative and the performative mode. 

The ritual of fire-walking is practised in the festivals celebrated around both Draupadi and Gandhari Amman among the Tamils, not only in India but wherever the Tamils have settled as a sizeable diasporic community – in areas such as Fiji and Reunion islands. 

Cult of Draupadi: Draupadi is worshipped as a goddess in Tamil Nadu. There are about 300 temples dedicated to Draupadi Amman, also known as Panchali Amman. Photo: Vijaya Ramaswamy

There are three major components of the Draupadi festival celebrated all over the Tamil region and more particularly in its northern part – the Mahabharatam recital every evening by the Bharata Prasangi (artists who present a dramatised narration of the Mahabharata); the folk form of Bharata koothu, also called theru koothu, literally street performance, which are all-night performances based on the epic; and tee midital, or fire walking, as an act of worship dedicated to Draupadi Amman. Very often the Kootandavar festival, which is about the story of Aravan, the son of Ulupi and Arjuna, is conjoined with the Draupadi cult ritual festivities. 

In addition, the texts, Alli Natakam and Alli Arasani Malai, which connect with the Mahabharata, are read both as texts, largely by women, and also performed as theru koothu or villu pattu, a narrative performance accompanied by a huge bow-stringed instrument called ‘villu’.

Alli is said to be the only child of Malayadvaja Pandya, a king who is not located in chronological time. The location of the Alli myth in Madurai, the capital of the Pandyan kingdom, seems deliberate in view of the hagiographical tradition enshrined in the Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam, stating that Madurai was ruled by the three-breasted Meenakshi. 

It is said that Alli’s was a miraculous birth since she was found on an ‘alli’, or flower, at the conclusion of the performance of the ‘putra kameshti yaga’, a sacrifice performed to beget a child. Like the divine ruler Meenakshi, Alli too was trained in the martial arts and went to a ‘gurukula’ (traditional school) to learn the sacred texts as well as the texts of governance. 

Alli began her political career by defeating Neenmugan, the usurper of the Pandyan throne, in battle and was crowned ruler. 

The ballad Alli Kadai says that Alli defied the tyrant and successfully led the army against him, and Madurai itself acquired fame and glory because the valorous Alli destroyed the tyrant Neenmugan. 

She governed with an all-woman establishment. Hence the popular Tamil saying ‘Alli Rajyam’ for a household dominated by women.

The Alli Arasani Maalai says: 

If you take the name of Alli
Even the bird will not sip water
If you take the name of Alli
The goblins (Ganas) will dance.
If you take the name of Alli
The decapitated head will chatter!

The Alli narrative connects with the Mahabharata epic when Arjuna becomes attracted by Alli and marries her by stealth, resulting in the birth of Pulandiran.

In the critical Sanskrit edition, Alli’s story has a parallel with Chitrangada and her son Babruvahana. From this turn in the Alli story, it gets tamed into a patriarchal narrative when it enters Tamil stage and cinema since the audience was largely a male audience. 

Yet, as a text Alli Kathai was read extensively by women and was seen as a deviant text.

Alli fights Arjuna. The inset is an image of Alli’s all women army. Photo: Vijaya Ramaswamy

Neelambikai Ammaiyar, the daughter of Maraimalai Adigal (co-founder of Tani Tamizh Iyakkam, or the pure Tamil movement, started in 1916), wrote:

“Women should not be permitted to read texts like Alli Arasanikkovai Pavalakkodi Malai, Eni Etram etc., which may lead them into bad ways [emphasis mine]. They do not only read such texts day and night but also read books (Brahmanical Sanskrit texts) like Kaivalya Navaneetam which are false doctrines.”

On the one hand, Neelambikai Ammaiyar’s statement indicates the patriarchal responses to the Alli myth which was regarded as corrupting and subversive.  At the same time, her fears prove that women read these Mahabharata fragments, centred on women, avidly. 

To conclude, the Tamil Mahabharatas, whether as textual fragments or as performances, break caste and gender barriers in significant ways, marking a departure from the Sanskrit Mahabharata epic. In their manifold forms they represent different strokes in the Brahmanical patriarchal narration. 

Author: Professor Vijaya Ramaswamy, formerly at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, is currently Tagore Fellow at the IIAS, Shimla. She can be reached at vijukrishnan@gmail.com.

(Source: The Wire)

Peter Brook brought the 'Mahabharata' to the world

 His Padma Shri is fully deserved but comes too late in his life.

It was April of 1984. I was in bed with bad jaundice. In the newspapers, I had been following the search for a Krishna or Draupadi, for the international production of Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata.

I knew of him only via theatre friends. They always spoke of him with reverence, as the master magician of 20th-century theatre.  The papers reported that he was here for only one of these two characters, and that would be the only Indian in the cast. He was to travel to the usual cities, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore. The then Czarina of culture, Pupul Jayakar, had a list of close to 200 ‘suitable’ actors for auditions. And that script was followed.

Theatre and film director Peter Brook. Photo: YouTube screengrab

One morning, about fifteen days after the news report, I received a telegram from the French cultural attache in Delhi: “Peter Brook and group flying to Ahmedabad tomorrow to see you”. Nothing else! Why, I wondered.

Barely out of bed, yellow and skinny, I met the formidable group the next morning in my apartment. The blue-eyed, balding Peter was accompanied by the scriptwriter, the dashing Jean Claude Carrier, Chloe Obelansky, the designer of the show, and Peter’s assistant Marie Helene. I was shy and had no idea what they wanted to meet me for. Perhaps some small role? In any case, I spoke no French. After chatting for about fifteen minutes, Peter said, “I want you to audition for Draupadi”. I nearly fell off the chair. Draupadi is about the only mythological character I had always admired.

Over the next few weeks, I auditioned, got the part, and in October found myself and my five-week-old son in Paris’ coldest winter that century. Fourteen hour rehearsals, in a cold, old building with no elevator to the eighth floor where we were practising. 

Improvisations. Playing Draupadi as a comic character. Playing Duryodhana. Doing bizarre acting and voice exercises. And being looked at askance by all the professional actors from around the world.

Peter is a follower of Gurdjieff, the Russian thinker who believed that a master must destroy the self of the pupil, and recreate it. I am a believer in the philosophy that all work must be ananda, bliss. There was a clash of wills. I hated the process. Every rehearsal was unhappiness. Peter did not like the fact that I disappeared as soon as rehearsals were over, taking my child with me, rather than hang around for a glass of wine and his gyan (knowledge).

I felt there were misrepresentations of women characters in the script, that the worldview was Anglo Saxon. I was told, “Don’t raise your voice, you sound like a shrew”, to which my response was, “We don’t have shrews in India, we have Shaktis”. He found the episode of Draupadi washing her hair in Dushasana’s blood, and tying it up after years, gruesome and not to be included. I felt it would be a travesty not to have it in. We argued for eight months. On the eve of the grand opening, it was included. The others saw Peter as a guru. I didn’t.

It was a tumultuous relationship. It started changing once it became evident that I brought some special quality to the performance. We became friends. At press conferences, he would insist that I talk about the awful time he gave me, about all the disagreements. We would laugh at all our disagreements.

Mallika Sarabhai as Draupadi in Peter Brook’s ‘The Mahabharata’. Photo: YouTube screengrab

When the five years of performances and the filming came to an end, I realised he had been a catalyst to a new me. That he taught me how to peel a character like an onion, till one came to the essence, which was shunyata (void). That by having me cogently argue every point of the character and the Mahabharata, of having to defend every thought and comment, he had honed my capacity to defend my position on issues. That the accolade I got playing Draupadi gave me the belief that I could reinterpret mythology from a feminist and humanist point of view and be able to reach people. These five years gave me the confidence to bring forth work that might bring derision and ridicule from the press or public.

In retrospect, those were five years that have formed the performer and creator I am today.

And I salute the master. Perhaps no one has done for The Mahabharata and a true understanding of its philosophy than he, for he brought the work not to Indophiles, but to the world. He brought it to those who thought India was little more than rope tricks and starving cows, and made them into Indophiles who went home to study and understand the true meaning of our composite cultures. This Padma Shri is deserved but should have been given thirty years ago.

Author: Mallika Sarabhai is a dancer, actor and activist who played Draupadi in Brook’s The Mahabharata.

(Source: The Wire)

This ambitious history of the British Empire touches on everything from the Mahabharata to Marx

 In ‘Time’s Monster’, author Priya Satia tells many truths long unacknowledged.

Since Niall Ferguson first published Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World almost two decades ago, there has been a remarkable resurgence of jingoistic Empire nostalgia in Britain, a trend that has gained renewed impetus with Brexit and as part of the current so-called “culture-war”.

Take for instance the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, which has become an unlikely rallying point for those of a more conservative persuasion. Rhodes’ modern-day supporters insist that was a great man whose memory should be honoured, and that removing his statue would be tantamount to the erasure of history.

Rhodes was furthermore no racist, we are told. Yet such a claim is difficult to reconcile with his deep commitment to white supremacy and lifelong dream of Anglo-Saxon world domination.

“I contend that we are the finest race in the world”, he famously wrote in his “Confession of Faith” while at Oxford, “and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at the present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…”

This was no youthful folly, as has been claimed, but a guiding principle in Rhodes’ racist creed and one that he reasserted time and again throughout his life. In an 1894-speech before the Cape House Parliament, he stated that “if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall be thankful that we have the natives in their proper place”.

Having built a personal fortune in South Africa’s diamond mines, Rhodes set up a private company to extend British control into Matabeleland, which was annexed after a brief but brutal war. The Maxim machine gun was here deployed for the first time and proved so deadly that its inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, used eyewitness accounts as advertisement: “We could see hundreds of niggers mowed down like wheat before a scythe.”

British cavalry charging against Russian forces at Balaclava in 1854. | The Relief of the Light Brigade / Public Domain

When the Ndebele and Shona people later rebelled against Rhodes’ company in 1896, he waged a merciless war against the entire population, using dynamite from his mines to blow up caves where local civilians had taken refuge. One of his men described an instance when “the women and children came out, and awful sights they were. The cave was evidently a small one and they had been thrown against the rocks and were all covered with blood and the dynamite had skinned them or burned the skin off their bodies”.

The indiscriminate violence unleashed by Rhodes’ forces was not so far from that which the Germans resorted to less than a decade later during the first genocide of the 20th century in present-day Namibia.

Even during his own lifetime, Rhodes was a highly controversial figure, and he was obsessed about securing his own legacy, which is precisely why he donated so generously to places like Oxford and established the Rhodes Scholarship. When people today rally to the defence of his statue, they are accordingly doing exactly what Rhodes intended: celebrating him for his philanthropic work, while ignoring his record of racism, brutality and exploitation.

The inevitable argument is, of course, that we should not judge the past according to our modern standards and that despite any shortcomings, Rhodes did much good.

Mahabharata to Marx

Yet the very notion of judging the past, as Priya Satia reminds us in her brilliant new book Time’s Monster, was always part and parcel of how the imperial project legitimised itself. Rather than being a critical endeavour, Satia shows how history as a discipline has, in the past as much as the present, been complicit in the imperial project by “making it ethically thinkable” and, ultimately, by providing a powerfully exculpatory narrative.

Time’s Monster is not only a sweeping account of the British Empire over the past three centuries, but also an ambitious intellectual history, touching on everything from the Mahabharata to Marx, and from Shakespeare to Said.

It begins with the gun-manufacturing Quaker Samuel Galton in the 18th century and ends with anti-Brexit protests in 2019. One of Satia’s key aims is to expose and dissect the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of liberal imperialism and the conceit of British exceptionalism: namely, that the Empire had as its primary function to uplift colonial subjects and spread the blessings of western civilisation to the far-flung corners of the world.

Dichotomies between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’

The racial hierarchies that underpinned the notion of “The White Man’s Burden”, as Kipling described it, made it a moral obligation for the British to civilize those they considered as “savages” – yet at the same time made it inconceivable that those “savages” could ever really “catch up” and be considered as equals, culturally or biologically.

At no point were the British actually going to declare “civilising mission accomplished” and simply hand back control to their colonial subjects. Which is why, when decolonisation eventually did take place, it was the result of anti-colonial resistance, economic concerns and changing global politics.

Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890s. Photo credit: Unattributed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, the brutal and drawn-out conflicts in Kenya, Malaya or Ireland gives the lie to the prevalent myth of Britain’s “peaceful retreat” from Empire. The British ruled through coercion rather than consent, and the truth is that the benign rhetoric of paternalism and reform only ever served to provide a veneer of respectability on what was otherwise outright oppression and exploitation. So how is it that the British Empire can still be considered “overwhelmingly a force for good in the world?” How can someone like Cecil Rhodes still be celebrated as a great man in the 21st century?

The answer, Satia argues, may be found in the particular understanding of history and notion of progress that underpinned Empire. This ethical outlook was rooted in both classical and Enlightenment ideas of time as linear and history as an inherently moral force “moving irresistibly forward”.

Civilisations that failed to evolve were doomed to decay, while people deemed to be without any civilisation at all were simply left behind. This goes some way to explain the 19th-century British obsession with the fall of the Roman Empire, as reflected in Gibbon’s work, which was read as a cautionary tale but in the firm belief that they would succeed where others before them had failed.

This was essentially the idea of the survival of the fittest applied to the realm of human civilisation, and once race science gained prominence, hierarchies of biological difference were indeed easily mapped onto pre-existing dichotomies between “civilised” and “uncivilised”.

For great white men like Rhodes to rule over darker-skinned races was seen as a natural right and the way things were supposed to be. The unfolding of history was, in other words, considered a judgement in itself. At the high-point of Empire, historians in the Whig tradition could thus in teleological fashion argue that Britain was the culmination of civilisation and the measure by which progress was to be defined.

The more insidious implication of this logic was that wars, famines and massacres could be justified simply as “collateral damage”. Tragic yet unavoidable, and in some ways even necessary to ensure the onward march of civilisation. When the pretence of benign imperialism became increasingly unsustainable, the history of Empire was simply rewritten to account for any diversion from the path of progress.

A narrative of redemption thus became central to this history, as abolition was presented as making up for slavery, or the suppression of widow-burning in India cancelling out previous decades of greed and corruption by East India Company officials.

Thus the idea of the civilising mission was born, yet what mattered was the avowal of altruism and good intentions, rather than the actual outcome or practical implications of reformist policies (freed slaves were not simply set free, and widow-burning was a relatively rare occurrence, but one that made headlines etc).

If great men acting as agents of progress had made the Empire, their corollary – the not-so-great men – turned out to be equally important when corruption and massacres were undeniable and scandals unavoidable. Whether it was the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the late 18th century, the trial of Governor Eyre in the 19th, or the condemnation of General Dyer after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, public examples were thus made of individuals who were deemed to have “let the side down” and failed to live up to the moral standards expected of an Englishman.

This was quite explicit when Winston Churchill denounced Dyer in 1920, describing the massacre of hundreds of Indian civilians as “a monstruous event which stands in singular and sinister isolation” and as “foreign to the British way of doing things”. Dyer was singled out as a “rotten apple” and the violence explained away as an exception that proved the rule of liberal imperialism.

This focus on the individual has also meant that racism has all too often been presented merely as a personal characteristic, or regretful lapse of character. The real issue, however, is not whether General Dyer, for instance, personally hated Indians, but the indisputable fact that he was not unique in either outlook or action.

The figure of the “rogue officer” nevertheless allowed for the disavowal of violence and racism as incidental and episodic rather than intrinsic to imperialism itself. The ubiquity of racialised violence, from everyday beatings of servants to large-scale massacres, is thus deliberately downplayed or simply erased from the history of the Empire.

If British imperialism was a vehicle for progress, and progress is both inevitable and objectively good, then it follows that the Empire – though it might suffer setbacks or momentarily lose its moral bearings – always remained essentially a force for good. The idea of progress and historical providence sustained the imperial project, providing a powerful moral alibi that has never really lost its grip on the British imagination.

Satia’s engaging exploration of the historical thinking of Empire brings into focus something very important – something all too often lost in the deliberate obfuscation of the confected “culture wars” of today. Current debates about the Empire and its legacies are not actually debates about historical facts or different interpretations of the past, which is after all the bread and butter of the historian’s craft.

Instead, they are the result of radically different, and largely incompatible, historical imaginaries. If you subscribe to the conventional narrative of history as progress, then any critique of the British Empire, or calls for decolonisation, reparations etc, are prima facie invalid. Demands for the return of looted artefacts to former colonies likewise makes no sense if Western museums is where you think they rightfully belong, simply by virtue of having ended up there.

This has, in fact, become a normative historical outlook, which means that critical scholarship exploring, for example, racialised violence, or revealing links to slavery, is all too often dismissed simply as “biased” or “woke” – not because it is factually incorrect, but because it challenges the very worldview that so many take for granted.

Balance-sheet approach

Realising this also helps make sense of the oft-repeated line about railways and the Raj, which is patently nonsensical since the British did not conquer the Indian subcontinent in order to build railways, and the ones they did build were primarily for their own benefit.

The railway-network first established in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising was first and foremost intended for the speedy transportation of troops, that is, for defensive purposes, which is why many train-stations were built as veritable fortifications.

Secondly, the railways were used to extract resources and increase British profits, while also enabling foodstuffs being shipped back to Britain at critical moments while Indians starved. The refrain, “but what about the railways…”, however, does not actually refer to steam-powered locomotion but serves simply as a shorthand for progress and is thus considered self-evidently good.

This line of reasoning, it may be noted, merely regurgitates century-old talking points and with no questioning of who gets to decide what “good” means, or for whom these blessing of western civilisation were supposed to be an unalloyed “good”. The Empire is long gone, but Britain never underwent a process of decolonisation and now all that is left are the phantom-pains of former greatness and an outdated worldview.

The so-called balance-sheet approach is not, and never was, a genuine tool for historical analysis. Instead, it was always intended as a way to deflect critique and redeem the Empire. The flip-side to this narrative, namely the insistence that the Empire was simply “bad” rather than “good”, or that the British today should feel “shame” rather than “pride”, is by the same token not conducive to a deeper historical understanding either.

This critique simply tallies the balance-sheet differently, with imperialism coming up short, but does not ultimately challenge the basic premise of historical judgement. In order to move beyond this conceptual impasse, Satia argues, new ways of looking at history is required.

It is not only that the conventional narrative of great men and historical progress is ill-suited to adequately reflect the nuances and complexities of the past in a meaningful way. It actively hinders the consideration of other potential historical approaches and thus excludes different historical vantage points.

There has always been, as Satia reminds us, religious and philosophical traditions in which time is not considered linear but cyclical, and where man’s own actions, rather than some abstract notion of providence, determines his fate. And as long as there have been apologists of Empire, there have been dissenting voices challenging the moral grounds on which conquest was justified, including radical visionary William Blake and founding member of the Arts and Craft movement, William Morris.

The British anti-imperialist tradition, recently explored in Priyamvada Gopal’s excellent book Insurgent Empire, in fact, remains a powerful antidote to the chest-thumping jingoism we have come to expect from the likes of Kipling & Co.

A counter-narrative

The counter-narratives that emerged as part of the anti-colonial struggle of the 20th century, formulated by Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Frantz Fanon and others, offer yet more historical visions that directly reject western notions of progress and modernity.

The past indeed looks very different once we change our perspective, as global historians have long argued, and take into consideration a wider range of different experiences. Ultimately, Satia makes an impassioned case not to let the very definition of history be written by the victors.

This does not mean dispensing with academic rigour or indulging in some sort of historical relativism. Rather, it entails moving beyond an essentially moral framework embedded within an explicitly Eurocentric perspective.

Time’s Monster will prove uncomfortable reading for those who remain deeply invested in the myth of British exceptionalism embodied in historical figures such as Cecil Rhodes. And their inevitable response will be that he was simply “a man of his time”. Everyone is, of course, a product of their time, including Rhodes’ contemporaries who vociferously denounced him.

“What he called his ideals were the dregs of Darwinism”, the writer GK Chesterton stated, adding that “it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics to spread them”. The people at the receiving end of colonialism, no less a product of their time but usually excluded from this argument, might also be expected to have held radically different views from that of their coloniser.

In 1902, the year of Rhodes’s death, Joseph Conrad’s classic exposé of the brutality of European imperialism in Africa, Heart of Darkness, was first published in book-form. While Rhodes still fantasised about Anglo-Saxon world-domination on his deathbed, Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, argued that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”. In the end, however, Marlow’s courage fails him and instead he lies to Kurtz’s Beloved, thereby preserving her faith in the nobility of the civilising mission.

In Time’s Monster, Satia does what Conrad’s narrator could not – she tells the truth about the Empire and reveal the “redeeming idea” for what it really is. A cruel conceit, that Kurtz himself had to face with his dying words. Skillfully dissecting the narrative of progress that undergirds the case for Empire, Satia nevertheless offers her own path to redemption.

This urgent and compelling book encourages us to listen to different voices, to tell different stories, and ultimately to rethink what it means to be a historian and to engage critically and imaginatively with the past.

The author is a Professor of Global and Imperial History, Queen Mary University of London.

This article first appeared on Kim A Wagner’s blog.

(Source: Scroll)