My Spiritual Goddess

R K Narayan in his My Dateless Diary remarks that, “Religion is not a thing one can openly avow- it’s like one’s underwear.” I have always thought that the statement was so profound and deep especially at a time of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and institutionalized religion that dictates not only the rights and wrongs for its followers but also enjoy much political power. The purpose of religion, historically might have been to unify people into communities, to establish social order and the like and even as a protestation against the then existing social and political realities as is in the case of Christianity and Buddhism. Perhaps the dogmas, the institutionalized power plays and it’s instrumentalization as an apparatus for State power and ideology came only later.

I remember a few years ago when the V.S. Achuthanandan’s government was in power in Kerala, a chapter in the seventh standard textbook became the reason for much controversy with the political right and the religious orders severely attacking the government for apparently propagating “communist beliefs” in the minds of young children. This chapter titled ‘Jeevan without Religion’ in the social studies textbook was merely about a boy named Jeevan whose inter-religious parents, on the admission form, refuses to add any religion to their son, asking the principal to either keep the column blank or write non-religious. It will be, they assert, completely up to Jeevan to decide whether he wish to follow any religion at all when he grows up. This at the time sparked off intense debates with the religious and political right untitedly demanding the chapter be taken away from the syllabus. In this entire hullabaloo one realizes the delicate nature of religion and its interconnectedness with various social elements. If it is one's right to follow any religion he/she chooses, it is also equally one's right not to follow any.  

The chapter from the Seventh Standard Social Studies textbook titled 'Matamillatha Jeevan' or 'Jeevan without Religion'

Whatever is the case and whatever be the necessary values that religion imparts, I think Narayan intends to say that religious belief is much personal and intimate to the person who practices it and becomes indecent the moment you advertise it. Perhaps that is the difference between religiosity and spirituality. The former is more socially constructed, the latter being more personal concentrating on your spiritual and moral growth. I must confess I am not a religious person. I am only as ‘Hindu’ as on some official records. I take part in religious rituals and festivals not because of faith but because of its cultural history and significance. This brings me to the concept of spirituality. And I think it means different for different people. The ‘spiritual but not religious’ variety has been in the growth since the epidemic of globalization, data tells you. But I am not talking about the God denouncing yet ‘guru’ seeking kind of spirituality where you seek for more sensory pleasure for attaining revelation. I am merely talking about certain things, it could be anything really, that connects with you so much that you feel so much at peace because of it. It makes you think and feel and contemplate and all of that. It could be in other words a deep connection with nature that makes you feel so intensely. It is the Romantic and later the American transcendentalist variety of spirituality where in Henry David Thoreau’s own words a walk in the woods would make you come out having become (only metaphorically of course) “taller than the trees”.

For me this sense of spirituality has always been associated with a childhood memory of my grandmother. As a child she would take me to the nearby kavu (sacred grove) which was situated easily some four kilometers away from our home and yet we would walk till there. Along the way she would tell me the most fascinating stories about everything I would ask her to. There was on the way a big pond full of water lilies and on our way back my grandmother would pluck one and make a garland out of it. I would wear it with pride, showing it to my younger cousins, eating the grain out of it later. That pond full of water lilies just remains in my memories now. It has now been converted to land with houses been built upon it. The Kavu, replete with greenery was a haven for all sorts of plant life that it had an aura of being so intimately close to nature and hence for me almost sacred even. But that was never the best thing about that place. It was always the presence of my grandmother. With her I always felt so safe, and she has, since then, stood for all the innocence and purity that I wanted to recline towards from the loud and corrupt world outside. Now, much older, when I go to Kerala on vacations I make it a habit to visit temples with her. My mother, not able to understand the relationship between my self-confessed atheism and temple visits would jokingly comment upon it. But what she doesn’t know is that it is my grandmother who has always been my spiritual goddess. 

Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte?

In his letter to Joseph Twichell, Mark Twain criticizes Jane Austen thus, “Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”. Perhaps Twain is being rather unreasonably harsh on Austen but her works have always received mixed reviews pertaining its social and political implications. Often celebrated as a social realist, her fiction reveals and subtly mocks the class nature and power hierarchy of English middle and upper class society. A social satire, it represents the lives of women in the then English society as the perceived inferior, second class citizens. Beginning in the 1980s a lot of feminist and Marxist criticism has emerged that deals with these particular aspects in Austen’s work.

In popular culture too Jane Austen reigns as the unrivaled storyteller with over hundreds of film and TV adaptations of her novels. I, personally, was an ardent admirer of Austen’s works as a teenager having read almost all her works from Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion. There was a magic element in all her fiction, the soothing feeling of the countryside, the calm and composed ladies who defied restrictions subtly. And there was Mr Darcy, like Captain Wentworth, who became the quintessential romantic heroes, chivalrous and ideal, the epitome of all ‘masculine’ virtues. But that was when you were seventeen or eighteen years old and the older you get the less you seem to be in sync with Austen’s world or agree with Austen’s construction of the idealized woman. In fact I find Austen’s works to be fantasies that are more like the classic and hundred times better versions of the Mills and Boon series.

Born a little later than Austen, yet included in the same category of English women writers, is Charlotte Bronte who perhaps offered the most acute criticism of the existing social institutions and the radical portrayal of womanhood through her 1847 novel Jane Eyre. The novel is a bildungsroman or ‘coming-of-age’ narrative of the titular female protagonist Jane Eyre, who as an orphan, poor, female and plain had to stand up to the challenges in her life. When it was first published the novel received such harsh criticism for its rebellious, unfeminine titular character and the apparent unchristian values she aspired. Elizabeth Gaskell in her book The Life of Charlotte Bronte, writes about an incident that Bronte shared with her sisters (who were writers themselves), “She once told her sisters that they were wrong - even morally wrong in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.’

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre, in spite of the situations in her life, is highly passionate, rebellious, fearless, challenging the notions of Victorian femininity and hence fiercely beautiful. She bravely questions and stands up against all those who invariably tries to chain her spirits and unlike the Austen women, demands equality with Mr Rochester, the male counterpart in the novel.  When her school master (who is shown to be cruel and a hypocrite) accuses Jane of being a ‘bad girl’, disobedient and rude and tells her that wicked children when they died went to hell, Jane retorts by saying “I must keep in good health and not die”.  Jane Eyre is no fantasy. Even the love that develops between Jane and Mr Rochester is far from being the fairy tale romance in Austen where the gentleman falls for the modest and lovely heroine. She tells Rochester (who is above her class and also her employer), “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart” and demands to be treated as his equal. She says, “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!” This individualistic and highly spirited character of a female was at the time of its publication not less than revolutionary feet for its author. Jane declares in the novel, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will”.  The very spirit of Jane Eyre is not just that it challenges and thus becomes a counter hegemonic voice to the conservative social institutions in Victorian society but also incorporates into itself the revolutionary vigour of the then ongoing political agitations by the working classes including the right to vote and other labour rights.

Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre in the 2011 movie adaptation of the same.

While all of Austen’s heroines (except Fanny Price) inhabit safe waters, Jane Eyre fearlessly shows us a social reality that is hard and unjust and a girl who morally and virtually withstands it all. While Austen is about romance and marriage, Jane Eyre is about survival and the test of one’s character and principles in the most arduous situations. And while Jane Austen’s women seem to be petite and modest and always composed, emblems of idealized womanhood, Jane Eyre challenges these notions of femininity and rebels against it. Jane asserts, “I am not an angel and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”

Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte? My answer is Charlotte Bronte over and over again. Jane Eyre has all my love and admiration as she is the beacon of rebellious hope in the face of unjust social laws that privileges only those based on class, race and gender.

What Hyderabad Meant...

It rained today. My first rain since being back home again. I sit near the window with my laptop and a cup of tea watching the raindrops fall peevishly on the window pane. The hour is perfect for reminiscence.

Two years have passed by since I first packed my bags and left home to another place for the prospect of further education. Perhaps leaving home marks a definitive aspect in each of our lives, a sort of the ‘coming of age’ narrative, where you leave the nest to encounter the big bad world all on your own. It can be a transformative experience and in my opinion every girl/boy should experience it once in their life, the hostel life, the ‘other city/place’ thing which plays a vital role in the process of your becoming a man/woman. Hyderabad was that place for me, and the way I encountered the place, learned it bit by bit is so unlike any other place I have known or traveled to. It was the place where I grew up, learned a lot of things, to do on my own, about life, people, the good and the bad, and above everything else it taught me who I really am and how I wish to live my life. And hence I have a certain emotional attachment to this place like no other!

The University, or more importantly Hostel can be compared to the situation in William Golding’s Lord Of the Flies, where a bunch of adolescents, in this case young adults, run wild without the threat of adult supervision or the control of the ‘State’. This is the place where everything you have ever known is turned upside down, where night becomes day and day becomes night, literally. Authority is challenged, establishments are criticized and there is complete anarchy. This is the place where you encounter the postmodernists in large number. Every other person you meet or talk to is a postmodern individual who mocks at the established notions of morality, values, and social commitments. Do not get me wrong. I like the postmoderns for the sense of anarchy that they spread around which is necessary in some sense. It is just that I do not want to be ‘one of them’ completely. Postmodernity becomes a crucial element in one’s existence as a ‘free thinking’, free feeling individual in today’s campus scenario. It gives you the sense of being radical who attaches no meanings to any establishments in society, who vehemently attacks notions of ‘morality, values, truths’ as social constructs without any social or political commitments or convictions that could possibly uplift society as everything is after all ideologically suspect. We are all socially fragmented individuals and this is an inevitable human condition rather than as the result of a material reality. Let us smoke some weed and celebrate Osho and the epicurean ideals!

It is amidst this chaos that you begin your University life as the totally lost, utterly confused individual who has yet to figure these out and come to terms with what your position is, what your ideals are in relation to these.  But in all of this you discover life and you enjoy it tremendously. You meet people, witness so many different things, create friendships, read and write and question and in all of this you suddenly start evolving into the person you become. I realize two essential things; one that you ought to have certain convictions in life and an open mind. Second, the best things in life are always the most simplest. You begin to appreciate certain values in life and think that morality like some social institutions cannot be completely dispelled with. The friendships you create, the people you let into your life, the books you read, the movies you watch, the ideas that you entertain, everything has a decisive role in what you become as an individual. It is the University life that gifts you all these beautiful lessons that you are going to cherish all your life. It becomes the foundation of your very being. Hostel life is so much more than that, more than what words can convey. From all the humiliations, the quarrels, the fights, the dramas, the dreams and ambitions, the gossips and talks about everything under the sun, from movies to books, music, people, boys, celebrities, writers, friendship, life, love, everything you learn a lot about life. It is here that you create such beautiful relationships, those perfect strangers who become more than family to you and with whom you have shared all of this and more. The wisdom that you have imparted to each other.

My point is that life is truly the ultimate experience one can have if you have the courage for it, if you can open yourself to the winds of change that is going to swoop you into the journey called life. Embrace the new things that happen and yet stay true to yourself and the people who love you the most. Everything that happens in life is temporary. So enjoy it the most and learn from it. I am grateful for this life and everything that has ever happened. And I am grateful for Hyderabad for teaching me so much more!