vagyakartha

I was thrilled to hear that the supreme court of our land, at the behest of my state government, finally gave our venerated traditions and invaluable heritage the respect they deserve. They have been ignored for so long that I had given up all hope. I may now look forward, albeit diffidently, to the today when all our ancient traditions will be so respected and honoured.

For millennia (not centuries as was argued by learned counsel in the citadel of jurisprudence), we Indians have nourished a humane attitude toward all animals, the hoofed variety in particular. We have granted them their right to fulfill their dharma by serving us. We have enabled them to break free of the birth-and-death cycle in which we are ourselves enchained by permitting them to sacrifice themselves in our great yagas. We have even catered to their need for fun and frolic by letting them chase us. Just watching these hoofed creatures jump with sheer joy as they do so and are hugged by superior beings brings tears to my eyes.

Some self-proclaimed animal lovers wanted to put an end to all this. What audacity! They deserved to be summarily dismissed and I am so glad that our great jurists did so, while ensuring that in their exuberance, these fun loving hoofers do not hurt any of the same superior beings.

But, one swallow doesn’t a summer make. We have a crying need for many more such rulings and laws.

Yes, our leaders have made a few feeble attempts to preserve and protect our valuable heritage, but they are woefully inconsistent. Let me point out a few of their inconsistencies.

A couple of decades ago, I was equally thrilled when a now departed leader passed a law enshrining our ancient practices concerning wives, ex-wives to be accurate. Then too, inconsistency reigned; he restricted himself to just one religious community. We followers of the majority religion had spent millennia following the teachings of that great ethicist Manu and perfected our treatment of wives and widows. Then came a so-called reformist from Bengal, with rather strange notions. (Why is it that Bengal keeps throwing up people with odd notions of how society ought to be governed?) With the help of Victorian imperialists, he managed to put an end to sati. Since then, widows have been denied their rightful path to moksha. Fortunately, we have managed to hold on to some of our other venerated ways of treating widows, no thanks to our political leaders. Where is the courageous counselor who will argue for the time-honoured right of widows to attain moksha by willingly embracing Lord Agni?

Prohibiting untouchability is another one. Our leaders have never understood this heritage. Even our Mahatma thought that it was an inhumane practice inflicted by the dvijanya (twice born) castes on the eka janya aneka mruthya (once born, killed many times) castes. I can’t for the life of me understand what made that great soul think that the EJAM’s wanted any contact whatsoever with DJ’s. I find it even more puzzling that as brilliant a scholar as Dr. Ambedkar missed this point. So, we now have laws that inflict contact with DJ’s on the EJAM’s. Thousands of years of harmonious co-existence have been vitiated.

There are many more such inconsistencies, but I will restrict myself to just one more. Education. From the time some of the descendants of six Ethiopian women settled along the Indus, we have practiced the enlightened educational system of gurukulam, which ensured that only a few male DJ’s were burdened with mastering some odd looking squiggles we put on paper. We relieved our women and the EJAM’s of this pointless and tedious burden. We continued this wise practice right until a few centuries ago. Even the greatest Mughal, Akbar, chose not to be burdened by literacy. Those nasty imperialists put an end to this practice as well, solely because they needed some clerical help. Our DJ’s fell for this ploy and set up numerous schools and the framers of our constitution, with the aforementioned Ambedkar again playing a leading role, went a step further and let education intrude into our constitution. The result is that we now have hundreds of millions of people who are too well educated for what they used to do and not well enough for what they need to do to lead a reasonable life. If only we had stuck to our ancient heritage.

I must admit that I have no real hope that our leaders and our jurists will see the light. All I can do is wait for next year’s Pongal to enjoy at least one aspect of our wonderful heritage that has been preserved.

Labels: India, Indian heritage

# posted by Vagyakartha : 11:11 PM  0 Comments