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)

John Milton’s strange Christmas poem

As we look upon the peaceful victory of the nativity, as we celebrate Christmas erected upon the ruins of pagan traditions, we can see those older, darker gods peeking out at the margins of the manger. Apollo in the shadowy northwest, Moloch by the road, Osiris in the shrubs: dreaming that old gods can always be born again, writes Ed Simon, a senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books and an expert on Renaissance literature, in The Paris Review. Read on: 

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people … ”
—Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)

Some eccentric designer should craft a manger scene based on John Milton’s first great poem: 1629’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” There would be many familiar tropes: the “Star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet” who “from far upon the Eastern rode” to bring a “present to the Infant God.” Surrounding Jesus’s crib would be the “Shepherds on the Lawn” gazing upon the infant swaddled by that “wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother.” Of course, there would be the baby Jesus himself, the “Heav’n-born-childe … in smiling infancy” who “meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.” None of those elements would be out of place on the lawn of a suburban church.

But that’s where my hypothetical Miltonic manger would depart from the familiar, because Milton’s Christmas story has an epic metaphysical violence as its theme. For Milton—and Christianity for that matter—Christ was coming to conquer. In Milton’s Advent, Christ vanquished the demonic pagan “gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines.” When the twenty-one-year-old Milton wrote his nativity ode, he was following what Renaissance humanists called the rota Virgilii, the wheel of Virgil. This was the idea that poets should pattern the progression of their work after Virgil’s literary triad, beginning their vocation with a pastoral and concluding with an epic. Milton did, of course: his crowning achievement, three decades later, was Paradise Lost. For the nativity ode, Milton took the theme of an innocent babe born to redeem the world, just as Virgil explored in his pre-Christian poem “Eclogue IV” (which many later thinkers interpreted as a type of prophecy). If Virgil sang of the “great cycle of periods born anew” then Milton wished to do the same.


Barbara Lewalski writes that the nativity ode reflected Milton’s “desire to attempt the highest subject and to take on the role of the bardic Poet-Priest” as Virgil once had. Milton confirmed this intention to his childhood friend Charles Diodati, the son of an exiled Italian Protestant family, and in many ways the great love of the poet’s life. Milton told Diodati that he wrote the poem in its entirety on Christmas Day in 1629. With more than a bit of grandeur, Milton explained to Diodati that “I sing to the peace-bringing God descended from heaven, and the blessed generations covenanted in the sacred books … I sing the starry axis and the singing hosts in the sky, and of the gods suddenly destroyed.” The year 1629 was an auspicious one: England was on the verge of civil war, and Milton would go on to become a propagandist for the parliamentary cause. The civil wars were precipitated by the Puritan’s desire to abolish the superstitious “Romish” practices of the royal Stuarts

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” grapples with how a Christian was to understand those gods—were they mere fictions invented by the credulous, or beings who had an existential reality? And if the latter, how then were we to classify Apollo, Osiris, and Moloch? The obvious interpretation, and one held by early Church fathers like Tertullian and Saint Clement of Alexandria, was that they were demons who had tricked the ancients into worship. Milton concurred, interpreting them as infernal, although the nativity ode evidences a regretful twinge at their defeat. There is, after all, a risk in rejecting the existence of all the deities save for the one true God, for anti-pagan iconoclasm always threatens to morph into more complete atheism. And so like those theologians before him, Milton preserved the gods as real, even if they were entities to be defeated in a mythological battle.

A manger scene built from Milton’s poem would have to include the defeat of the pagan gods: a“voice of weeping” is heard, a “loud lament; / From haunted spring and dale” and the “Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.” A nativity scene that only includes the quiet still of a Judean winter night, but not the wicked pagan gods of old choking on their blood or being expunged from their witchy groves by means of fire, is a nativity scene that is missing out on pyrotechnic possibilities.

In the shadows near our hypothetical suburban church’s shrubs, there could be “Apollo from his shrine,” evicted with “hollow shriek the steep of Delphos.” Imagine a plaster model of beautiful, hard-bodied, blond Apollo, with his crown of sunrays, cowering in fear as he looks yonder to the mewling infant. A little to the left of that there could be a group of Roman gods and death spirits who “moan with midnight plaint … A drear, and dying sound.” Even more exciting, there would be the bestial creatures commonly worshiped on the Mediterranean’s southern shore. Our Egyptian favorites would be to the southwest of the manger, maybe near the road in front of my imagined church, so that motorists could make out the display of green-skinned Osiris in “Memphian Grove” alongside “Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis.” What Christmas couldn’t be improved by the inclusion of the jackal-faced god of the dead?

And of course there would be those ancient Canaanite gods like Baalim and “mooned Ashtaroth” with her lunar crown, the ram-headed Hammon, and the perennially resurrected Phoenician fertility and agriculture god Thammuz. Where would our manger be without that most grotesque of deities, the bull-headed Moloch whose “burning Idol all of blackest hue” once immolated children in pagan sacrifice from Carthage to the Levant? I envision a smaller (though still impressive) version of the mechanical models of Moloch the Carthaginians designed—they contained a mechanism so that their own children “rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.” Appropriate, since one of the points of the nativity is that no more infants need be sacrificed to false gods, once this infant God’s birth had ensured the defeat of this demonic pantheon.

I do take a perverse joy in the thought of some pageant featuring Anubis being violently expelled from his Nile temples, but my purpose is more serious than my rhetoric. The nativity ode is more than just Milton’s first great lyric in English (he’d written accomplished Latin verse before), and it’s more than just a precursor to Paradise Lost. Rather, what Milton presents is a strange meditation on the paradox of the implicit violence at the center of Advent. Milton makes the defeated deities of yore his muses, seeing a profundity in their eclipse. It’s not just the downfall of polytheism that attracts him, but Christmas’s intrinsically apocalyptic gloss: the rising of a new Son is signaled by the fading embers of the dying sun. Plutarch recorded that the sailor Thamus heard the cry “The great god Pan is dead!” echo across the water; as a Christian Milton hears that as a cry of victory, but as a classicist he hears it as mourning.

There is an ironic melancholy in this victory, a guilty and anxious sadness at the deaths of these old gods. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is homophonic with “mourning,” for committed Puritan though he may be, Milton is also a humanist, and he grieves the passing of the classical world. The poem reminds me of our generation’s Miltonic fantasy: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. In Gaiman’s novel, the character Shadow laments that “the old gods are ignored … Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete.” But as with the nativity ode, this isn’t quite right. The form itself shows that the old gods can never truly be forgotten. Milton’s biographer Anna Beer writes that “the excluded pagan gods remain within the poem, with a question mark over their complete obliteration from Milton’s poetic imagination.”

The bard may have written that “the oracles are dumm,” but he of all people suspected that, if you strained your ears, you might still be able to hear an echo of that old prophecy. After all, the early Christians built their shrines atop pagan groves, used their symbols, and commandeered their narratives. Reformation tried to expunge such details, as during the years of Interregnum when the Puritans would ban Christmas because of its Saturnalian associations, when they rejected the compromises of Interpretatio Christiana that had allowed those old gods to hide in the yule log and the Christmas tree, in our folk customs, in the very names of the week. For if the gods are real, then their erasure from paganism to Christianity, or from Catholicism to Protestantism, can never be totally accomplished. The poet, and perhaps the infant’s, victory is partial—at least for now.

The critic James Simpson writes that even as Milton “destroys the idols of foreign gods … he is haunted by the possibility that he is himself encouraging idolatry.” That is always the tragic paradox of iconoclasm: in destroying those old shrines we admit their enchanted power. And the dramatic irony of the nativity ode is such that even as the “Virgin blest, / Hath laid her Babe to rest” maybe those old gods are also simply sleeping, waiting to be awakened at some future solstice. As we look upon the peaceful victory of the nativity, as we celebrate Christmas erected upon the ruins of pagan traditions, we can see those older, darker gods peeking out at the margins of the manger. Apollo in the shadowy northwest, Moloch by the road, Osiris in the shrubs: dreaming that old gods can always be born again.

Why Westerners (including Mark Twain) failed to understand the multiplicity of idols in India

The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu images springs from the deep-rooted Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all, writes Diana L Eck in the Scroll. Read on: 

It is visibly apparent to anyone who visits India or who sees something of India through the medium of film that this is a culture in which the mythic imagination has been very generative. The images and myths of the Hindu imagination constitute a basic cultural vocabulary and a common idiom of discourse. Since India has “written” prolifically in its images, learning to read its mythology and iconography is a primary task for the student of Hinduism. In learning about Hinduism, it might be argued that perhaps it makes more sense to begin with Ganesa, the elephant-headed god who sits at the thresholds of space and time and who blesses all beginnings, and then proceed through the deities of the Hindu pantheon, rather than to begin with the Indus Valley civilization and proceed through the ages of Hindu history. Certainly for a student who wishes to visit India, the development of a basic iconographic vocabulary is essential, for deities such as the monkey Hanuman or the fierce Kali confront one at every turn.

When the first European traders and travelers visited India, they were astonished at the multitude of images of the various deities they saw there. They called them “idols” and described them with combined fascination and repugnance. For example, Ralph Fitch, who traveled as a merchant through North India in the 1500s writes of the images of deities in Banaras: “Their chiefe idols bee blacke and evill favoured, their mouths monstrous, their eares gilded and full of jewels, their teeth and eyes of gold, silver and glasse, some having one thing in their hands and some another.”

Fitch had no interpretive categories, save those of a very general Western Christian background, with which to make sense of what he saw. Three hundred years did little to aid interpretation. When M. A. Sherring lived in Banaras in the mid-1800s he could still write, after studying the city for a long time, of “the worship of uncouth idols, of monsters, of the linga and other indecent figures, and of a multitude of grotesque, ill-shapen, and hideous objects.” When Mark Twain traveled through India in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he brought a certain imaginative humor to the array of “idols” in Banaras, but he remained without what Rudolf Arnheim would call “manageable models” for placing the visible data of India in a recognizable context. Of the “idols” he wrote, “And what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols – and all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one’s dreams at night, a wild mob of nightmares.”

Without some interpretation, some visual hermeneutic, icons and images can be alienating rather than enlightening. Instead of being keys to understanding, they can kindle xenophobia and pose barriers to understanding by appearing as a “wild mob of nightmares,” utterly foreign to and unassimilable by our minds. To understand India, we need to raise our eyes from the book to the image, but we also need some means of interpreting and comprehending the images we see.

The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu images springs from the deep-rooted Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all. The Hebraic hostility to “graven images” expressed in the Commandments is echoed repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

The Hebraic resistance to imaging the divine has combined with a certain distrust of the senses in the Greek tradition as well. While the Greeks were famous for their anthropomorphic images of the gods, the prevalent suspicion in the philosophies of classical Greece was that “what the eyes reported was not true.” Like those of dim vision in Plato’s cave, it was thought that people generally accept the mere shadows of reality as “true.” Nevertheless, if dim vision described human perception of the ordinary world, the Greeks continued to use the notion of true vision to describe wisdom, that which is seen directly in the full light of day rather than obliquely in the shadowy light of the cave. Arnheim writes, “The Greeks learned to distrust the senses, but they never forgot that direct vision is the first and final source of wisdom. They refined the techniques of reasoning, but they also believed that, in the words of Aristotle, ‘the soul never thinks without an image.’”

On the whole, it would be fair to say that the Western traditions, especially the religious traditions of the “Book” – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have trusted the Word more than the Image as a mediator of the divine truth. The Qur’an and the Hebrew Bible are filled with injunctions to “proclaim” and to “hear” the word. The ears were somehow more trustworthy than the eyes. In the Christian tradition this suspicion of the eyes and the image has been a particularly Protestant position.

And yet the visible image has not been without some force in the religious thinking of the West. The verbal icon of God as “Father” or “King” has had considerable power in shaping the Judeo-Christian religious imagination. The Orthodox Christian traditions, after much debate in the eighth and ninth centuries, granted an important place to the honoring of icons as those “windows” through which one might look toward God. They were careful, however, to say that the icon should not be “realistic” and should be only two-dimensional. In the Catholic tradition as well, the art and iconography, especially of Mary and the saints, has had a long and rich history. And all three traditions of the “Book” have developed the art of embellishing the word into a virtual icon in the elaboration of calligraphic and decorative arts. Finally, it should be said that there is a great diversity within each of these traditions. The Mexican villager who comes on his knees to the Virgin of Guadalupe, leaves a bundle of beans, and lights a candle would no doubt feel more at home in a Hindu temple than in a stark, white New England Protestant church. Similarly, the Moroccan Muslim woman who visits the shrines of Muslim saints would find India less foreign than did the eleventh-century Muslim scholar Alberuni, who wrote that “the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect.”

Worshipping as God those “things” that are not God has been despised in the Western traditions as “idolatry,” a mere bowing down to “sticks and stones.” The difficulty with such a view of idolatry, however, is that anyone who bows down to such things clearly does not understand them to be sticks and stones. No people would identify themselves as “idolaters,” by faith. Thus idolatry can be only an outsider’s term for the symbols and visual images of some other culture. Theodore Roszak, writing in Where the Wasteland Ends, locates the “sin of idolatry” precisely where it belongs: in the eye of the beholder.

In beginning to understand the consciousness of the Hindu worshipper who bows to “sticks and stones,” an anecdote of the Indian novelist U. R. Anantha Murthy is provocative. He tells of an artist friend who was studying folk art in rural North India. Looking into one hut, he saw a stone daubed with red kunkum powder, and he asked the villager if he might bring the stone outside to photograph it. The villager agreed, and after the artist had photographed the stone he realized that he might have polluted this sacred object by moving it outside. Horrified, he apologized to the villager, who replied, “It doesn’t matter. I will have to bring another stone and anoint kunkum on it.” Anantha Murthy comments, “Any piece of stone on which he put kunkum became God for the peasant. What mattered was his faith, not the stone.”8We might add that, of course, the stone matters too. If it did not, the peasant would not bother with a stone at all.

Unlike the zealous Protestant missionaries of a century ago, we are not much given to the use of the term “idolatry” to condemn what “other people” do. Yet those who misunderstood have still left us with the task of understanding, and they have raised an important and subtle issue in the comparative study of religion: What is the nature of the divine image? Is it considered to be intrinsically sacred? Is it a symbol of the sacred? A mediator of the sacred? How are images made, consecrated, and used, and what does this tell us about the way they are understood? But still another question remains to be addressed before we take up these topics. That is the question of the multitude of images. Why are there so many gods?

Goddess Durga has starred in Bengali ads for years – so why is Jawed Habib in hot water now?

During Durga Puja, the goddess’ image is evoked to sell everything from restaurant menus to plywood, writes Deepanjan Ghosh on the Scroll. Read on: 

A newspaper advertisement featuring the Hindu goddess Durga at a Jawed Habib salon, in which she appears to be preparing for the impending Durga Puja festivities in Bengal, has landed hair stylist Jawed Habib in trouble. Habib, owner of the Jawed Habib multi-city salon chain, has been accused of hurting religious sentiments and mocking Hindu deities.

95 Pally Puja Committee Ad

The outrage appears to be somewhat misplaced because Habib’s intended audience – Bengalis and more specifically Kolkatans, who are preparing for Durga Puja – is far from offended. The people who called out the advertisement on social media appear mainly to be from outside Bengal. Shortly after the advertisement appeared on Twitter, a complaint was lodged against Habib in Hyderabad, and a Jawed Habib salon was vandalised in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh.

In Kolkata, as people prepare for madness on the streets with a Durga Puja pandal in every lane and confusing traffic diversions, the biggest controversy in recent times has been caused by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee referring to government servants as dogs.

An advertisement for Sylvan Plywood.

Personal gods
In a recent article Catch News, Ashis Nandy writes about how India once had a robust tradition of Isht Devtas or personal gods. These were not distant and formal deities but ones who were batting for the devotee, caring for his special concerns, doing little things for him. This is the sort of relationship that Bengalis have always shared with Durga – in Bengal, Durga is more than a goddess, she is the daughter of the house. She is Uma, the reincarnation of Sati, married to Lord Shiva. Every year, when she returns to her paternal abode with her children for a period of five days, the feeling in the air is rather like when a beloved aunt or a married elder sister comes home for a visit.

Bengali children grow up with stories of Durga slaying Mahishasur, the demon who took the form of a buffalo. Durga’s children are treated more like distant cousins than distant gods – each has a distinct character. Ganesh is the plump, obedient, occasionally mischievous, child who is bullied by others. Kartik is always nattily dressed, and perhaps a little vain. Lakshmi is the naughty one and Saraswati the studious, serious one. If one were to think of gods as family, it would logically follow that one could sometimes josh with them, the way Bengalis are known to do.

Out of context
Times Group’s Bengali publication, Ei Samay, recently quoted artist Gautam Benegal, who grew up in Kolkata, on the controversy surrounding Habib’s advertisement. Benegal said that it would be difficult for anyone who wasn’t Bengali or wasn’t brought up in Bengal, to see the advertisement in its correct context – Bengalis who have read Parashuram (the pen name of author Rajsekhar Basu) and Sukumar Ray, understand humour and satire, and are therefore able to take such cartoons in the right spirit.

Bengal has a long tradition of creating satire and advertisements using Hindu deities. The Anandabazar Patrika Group’s Bengali television channel releases an animated short film called Mahishasur Pala or The Mahishasura Affair every year on the occasion of Durga Puja. The animated skit, which is scripted and voiced by some of Bengal’s best-known comics, contains sarcastic references to current affairs and politics and even hilarious situations such as Durga and Mahishasura temporarily pausing mid-battle so that they can answer their mobile phones.

It is common to see restaurant billboards advertising their Puja special menus with each of Durga’s ten hands holding a different dish. Since this is Bengal, most of the dishes are meat and fish.

An advertisement for Air Costa airlines.

In a surprising coincidence, eight years ago, on September 27, 2009, ABP’s Sunday English supplement Graphiti had published a cartoon that featured Saraswati saying: “We can’t get our hair styled at Habib’s, we have to wear it long and loose for four days.”

So what has everyone so riled up about Habib’s advertisement in 2017?

Tradition of satire
Bengali culture has seen much worse when it comes to mocking the gods. The popular song Menoka Mathae De Lo Ghomta urges Menoka, Uma’s mother, to cover her head in shame because her daughter has chosen Shiva for a husband – and the ash-smeared, chillum-smoking Shiva, known to hang out in cremation ghats, is no ideal son-in-law.

Another folk song, Kalankini Radha, refers to Krishna using the word that was infamously used by Union Minister of State, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, in her election campaign. Veteran actor Kamal Mitra, as Reverend Krishnamohan Bandopadhyay in a scene from the film Vidyasagar (1950), takes Hinduism apart – Bandopadhyay questions the caste system and untouchability, accuses Hindus of persecuting freethinkers and even says that it is no sin to eat beef.

In the celebrated 1977 comedy film Jamalaye Jibanta Manush, the famous Bengali comedian Bhanu Bandopadhyay literally raises hell when he is taken to heaven by mistake, that too while he is still alive. Bandopadhyay starts a revolution in heaven, to fix what he says are outdated rules and norms that Hindu Gods such as Yama, the God of Death, are following. A mention must also be made of Bengal’s famous “Kabi Gaan” tradition, which has many examples of the Gods being mocked and even abused.

Template response
In the week following Habib’s advertisement, everyone who claimed to have been offended or hurt had only one thing to say – “Would [Habib] have dared do this with Prophet Mohammed?” This uncanny similarity raises the suspicion that this may actually be a template response from the online troll armies organised to create communal disharmony, of which there have been multiple examples on social media.

In the film Hirak Rajar Deshey, a political satire craftily disguised as a children’s film, director Satyajit Ray shows a machine used for “mogoj dholai” or brainwashing. Workers, farmers and intellectuals who disagree with the autocratic king are shoved into a chamber and come out reciting rhyming couplets in praise of the king. If the attack on Jawed Habib is not a coordinated hate campaign, then it is a sign that a multitude of such campaigns in the past have had their effect. The people, it seems, have already drunk the Kool-Aid.

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