In Bengal, landscape and mind seem to meet naturally in a state of contemplation. This is not an epic country. South of Darjeeling, there are no dramatic peaks and falls, no mist-swathed hills, not even the romance of the desert. But the flat plain has an expansiveness and an imaginative tinge to it that one might miss in the north German plateau or the East Anglian fens. The land is still occupied, in a full sense, and the occupants are waiting always, for the transformations brought by the weather that sweeps across the plain, the grand and yet subtle sequence of the Bengali calendar's six seasons.
In consequence the country's literature seems also to have a lyric, contemplative quality. Pather Panchali (1929) is celebrated as the greatest Bengali novel of the past century not for plot, complex psychology or social critique, but for its rootedness in a child's vivid experience of his place in the world, defined by personal relationships of course, but also by space and the power of imagination. For Opu, the horizon of his knowledge and vision is tinged with a vague wonder, a sense of imagined distance that appears at dusk in the illumined beauty of the tops of the palm trees standing furthest away from his house, in the bewitched, nervous sense of strangeness as he passes the buildings of an old, deserted British indigo plantation on a walk with his father at the outskirts of the village, or in the inconceivable excitement of the railway line which his sister takes him to see (one of the most memorable scenes in Ray's celebrated film adaptation). Naturally Opu is "imaginative" in the conventionally childlike way too - he loves swashbuckling stories from the old epics, and the jatra, the travelling village theatre - but that Bibhutibashan gives him this more numinous, more immanent vision of the wonder of his surroundings seems to me not just poetizing wishfulness, but an understanding of the freshness of a child's perceptions, of how exactly scenes in one's life become meaningful, memorable.
And despite his majestic adult appearance, Tagore too could see with the eyes of a child. Among the prose works of his that I have read, the ones that appeal the strongest to me (and to many other commentators also) are not the big social-issue novels, but the slim memoirs of his early life - My Reminiscences and Boyhood Days. His early childhood was more confined than Opu's: from the dark family house in Jorasanko in north Calcutta, only his gaze and his fancy could go out roaming. They did not immediately scramble in search of stories. Young Rabi was a patient observer, willing to dwell, like a Dutch old master, on homely details of life on the streets, courtyards and rooftops of the town. As he wrote in a letter of 1930:
"A greater part of my early years was spent in observing the world of nature. It gave me intense joy to watch things. I would sit quietly by the window, or climb on a packing-box to peep over the wall of our balcony to feast my eyes upon a host of things - the early morning sun touching the top of a row of coconut palms, the drove of ducks diving in and out of the water of the tank, the deep blue grandeur of the rain-laden clouds rising suddenly from behind the balcony, the walls of varied sizes of a neighbouring house, across the lane looking mysterious in moonlight, the low sheds where lived the milkmen with their cattle beyond the walls of the inner apartments, the sun glistening on a shallow pool of water where the buffaloes bathed, the deep green of an avenue of trees that stood atop a long line of roofs of assorted heights to the east - all of them seemed to fascinate me. The first idea that came the instant I left my bed was that there was no end of things to see..."
In the last years of life - when Tagore began to paint - his visions became more symbolically charged. He wanted to find a meaning or even a moral in what he saw; as in the description of a train ride (from Calcutta to Madras) from the same letter –
"My mind is content with the thought that I had taken in all there was to see. The train moves on fast and I cannot go over the once reconnoitred ground. Those who counsel giving up the world because nothing in it lasts, should take a lesson from the man in the moving train... As I look out of the compartment and observe a thing of indescribable beauty on this sunbathed noon of early spring - I realise at this very instant that this will not last, that this will vanish out of my line of vision. And yet...is my present experience an illusion? I am not prepared to accept this to be so. This picture that I see this instant is not merely a source of joy to me personally, as to an unrelated individual. My response does not depend on my flitting fancy...it is an experience I share with my fellow man, as part of humanity... The joy that Kalidasa poured into his verses, on seeing the beauty of the earth bathed in the deep shadows of the early monsoon clouds, will live... It is a cumulative joy to which all of us contribute our share."
Kalidasa, the great Sanskrit poet whose work "The Cloud Messenger" (Meghadutam) Tagore had in mind in writing this, also described, in that greatest of his poems, a journey across the Indian landscape – not by a train but by a drifting monsoon cloud. It is an extended and yet entirely contemplative poem, the likes of which one will scarcely find in ancient European literature ( – just as, conversely, ancient Indian literature contains no tragedies). For the Sanskrit aestheticians, literature and the arts were vehicles of the rasas, aesthetic emotions which should be "tasted" and dwelt upon rather than cathartically discharged in shocks. The connection when one's eyes and mind are held by an image, the essential timelessness of that moment of appreciation, are what the artist aims to engender. Hence why a single north Indian raga can be "developed" for an hour or more (and here one should best understand that word in something like the sense of the "development" of a photographic image, a gradual emergence into clarity); or why south Indian forms of dance-drama such as Kathakali will dwell on a single tableau or gesture for lengths of time that in the Western theatre would seem absurd. As teachers will sometimes express it, a raga is like the remembered image of a beautiful face; what you play must outline and manifest this inner vision, not distort it.
Tagore's opening "preamble" to My Reminiscences suggests a similarity to the writer's task in dealing with his memories. Chronology is merely external: the rasa is in the images laid down under the flow of time.
"I do not know who has painted the pictures of my life imprinted on my memory. But whoever he is, he is an artist. He does not take up his brush simply to copy everything that happens; he retains or omits things just as he fancies; he makes many a big thing small and small thing big; he does not hesitate to exchange things in the foreground with things in the background. In short, his task is to paint pictures, not to write history. The flow of events forms our external life, while within us a series of pictures is painted. The two correspond, but are not identical."
To "make many a big thing small and small thing big" - a procedure that might work for more than just reminiscence. Other writers of the period in Europe believed in it - Joseph Roth was one, as I've written on this blog, Proust (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) another. It carries on in Bengali literature, for me most convincingly in the work of Amit Chaudhuri. The first of his novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, was autobiographical. Here is an especially beautiful passage, in the course of which Chaudhuri describes his own view of fiction and its “stories”:
“...why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story — till the reader would shout ‘Come to the point!’—and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.”
Many scenes in Chaudhuri’s books dwell on "memory pictures", episodes, impulses, or routines, quite insignificant from a narrative point of view – the rituals and inconveniences of Indian household life, the homesickness of the young Indian student in England, the middle-class housewife's modest determination to take music lessons. They are not there to give “body” or a sense of location to a story, a story in terms of which people’s lives take on meaning. It is rather as if the characters are waiting for a story to shape itself (for the housewife to realize her dreams as a successful singer, perhaps). And when time flows on and that still does not happen, it is these “images” from their life which, redeeming their quiet disappointment, absorb the meaning instead, gently soaking up the rasa of passed time.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Monday, 22 March 2010
Is the guru always right?
Well, to answer the question right off, no, surely not. No-one can be a perfect authority 100% of the time, even on a single subject, much less on the philosophy of life as well. But the thing is, in India teachers do tend to be treated as if they really knew it all, and I'm interested here in exploring a little why that's so - or perhaps equally, why I have a problem with it.
In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.
Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.
Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.
The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.
It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.
Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.
Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -
"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")
These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).
So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.
In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.
Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.
Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.
The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.
It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.
Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.
Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -
"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")
These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).
So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
An undevoted pilgrim
Prompted by a recent trip to Varanasi and Bodhgaya - respectively the holiest places in the world for Hindus and Buddhists
Touring this part of India, in my case for the second time, the realization is unavoidable: tourism here is to an uncomfortable degree pervaded with religious voyeurism. If one wants to criticize "orientalist" attitudes, ways in which the West caricatures the East, then the reduction of India to a stereotype of excessive religious devotion is a prime case in point. Staring at sadhus is fun for everyone! - the more ash-smeared and wild-eyed the more photogenic... And it's not as if one could easily choose a more secular itinerary: the fact is, touring India is traditionally - even for Indians - a matter of ticking off temples. The problem is in one's gaze - try as one might to concentrate on the aesthetics of architectural detail, one must inevitably feel the force of the human waves lapping round these compact ancient shrines. Here there are rarely places, as in the dark, accomodating space of a cathedral, where one can undisturbedly lose one's thoughts in visual contemplation. Close in around any Hindu or Buddhist shrine one is surrounded, jostled, sometimes physically pestered, and always occupied with questions of propriety ("rite and wrong"...apologies). What if you forget to remove your shoes? Should you accept a flower garland? What then should you do with it? How much money are you supposed to give and to whom? Should you prostrate yourself, or perform a quietly reverent bow and namaste, or can you just swagger in and snap a photo? And is it really possible to maintain any consistent bearing in such a place when one is not fully of its religion?
With my current travelling companion - an atheist philosopher with the full resources of German intellectual irony at his command - I tend to slip into an attitude of discreet, whispered-behind-the-back-of-the-hand mockery (above all when a monk in Bodhgaya started a mobile phone conversation a few yards from the Bodhi tree, overlooked by an official sign directing "complete silence"!). But both of us cannot help being humbled by the seriousness of the faith here, the extent of people's devotion, and often the impressiveness of religious choreography. For in these places it is easy - easier than in all but the most ancient Catholic or Orthodox sites, certainly - for the Westerner to understand why ritual is important to religion.
Whenever a "reformation" occurs then ritual tends to be cut back: as occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century, and with Hinduism in the Bengali reform movements of the nineteenth (principally the Brahmo Samaj, in which the Tagore family was very active). The arguments are always that rituals are external, formal, unnecessary encrustations on the living religious spirit. Expressions of that spirit tend to be cut back to the direct and verbal, sometimes clothed in relatively plain musical form. Much as in a Protestant church, the Wednesday early morning service at Santiniketan's Kaj Mandir consists of a simple alternation of religious readings with hymns (Indian ones, written by Tagore for the Brahmo Samaj). Congregation, singers and readers all wear white kurta pajama. The ceremony is perfectly unpretentious, but can also be lacklustre, especially with sparse attendance or mediocre performances of the music. And why should the Word be considered the primary vehicle for religious expression anyway? Why should not visual images and ritual movement or dance be considered equally appropriate?
What the reformers from Luther to Rammohan Roy justly criticised in earlier practice was the use of ritual and images as replacements for the genuine core of the religion. If one imagines that "merit" is gained, or sins cancelled by the performance of rituals, or that images are real pictures of God, whose worship puts one in privileged contact with the divine, then one is indeed giving way to delusion; if such beliefs are widespread then the religious culture can be branded as corrupt. But the logical response to this state of affairs need not be the abolition of ritual and image. It can also, and perhaps ought to, be a better understanding of their theological status. Karen Armstrong has such an understanding in her recent (misleadingly titled) book The Case for God, surmising that primitive religion treated ritual and imagery as central to the religious experience, with concepts and verbal formulations following after, if at all. She points to shamanic religions, such as those presumably practised in the caves of Lascaux, and the famous Greek Eleusinian Mysteries. Comparisons with ancient Greece occurred to both me and Reinhard, my travelling companion, as we watched the evening Ganga Arthi ceremony at Dasaswamedh Ghat in Varanasi.
This famous and ancient ceremony is today somewhat affected by its status as a tourist attraction: the lighting and tight choreography strike one as being recent, camera-friendly refinements. But the basic materials and movements of the arthi are traditional. Their purpose is neither purely aesthetic - though the costumes, incense and music clearly do appeal to the senses - nor "ritualistic" in the sense of attempting to manipulate or gain favour from the divine (as Hindu animal sacrifices do). It is rather meditative and devotional, trying to bring the worshipper and onlookers into a state which in Hinduism is called bhakti, devotional participation, a concentrated but also communally shared state of love for God. Arthi is often performed alone by the Hindu householder, sometimes in a puja room specially set aside for the purpose. Shopkeepers reopening their business in the afternoon can be seen making characteristic arthi circling gestures with a few sticks of incense in front of a postcard of a deity.
It is no harder, I think, for Westerners to feel sympathy for these quieter, everyday practices than it is for us to practise yoga as it should be done, in the same spirit (- think of the famous sequence of asanas known as the surya namaskar, performed facing the rising sun). The difficulty is in the extreme manifestations of bhakti - the hours of mantras, the endlessly repeated prostrations of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims that we witnessed in Bodhgaya, even the over-enthusiasm of Vaishnava devotees (familiar to Western urbanites as the "Hare Krishnas", their historical roots are actually in West Bengal; the modern organization for the movement is ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness). One has a sneaking suspicion that much of this is actually "for show", or performed out of the misguided belief in automatic "merit". But if it is, then the healthiest response is surely just to ignore it. There are more genuine types of devotion, and even we sceptics ought to hope for a glimpse into their spirit.
With my current travelling companion - an atheist philosopher with the full resources of German intellectual irony at his command - I tend to slip into an attitude of discreet, whispered-behind-the-back-of-the-hand mockery (above all when a monk in Bodhgaya started a mobile phone conversation a few yards from the Bodhi tree, overlooked by an official sign directing "complete silence"!). But both of us cannot help being humbled by the seriousness of the faith here, the extent of people's devotion, and often the impressiveness of religious choreography. For in these places it is easy - easier than in all but the most ancient Catholic or Orthodox sites, certainly - for the Westerner to understand why ritual is important to religion.
Whenever a "reformation" occurs then ritual tends to be cut back: as occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century, and with Hinduism in the Bengali reform movements of the nineteenth (principally the Brahmo Samaj, in which the Tagore family was very active). The arguments are always that rituals are external, formal, unnecessary encrustations on the living religious spirit. Expressions of that spirit tend to be cut back to the direct and verbal, sometimes clothed in relatively plain musical form. Much as in a Protestant church, the Wednesday early morning service at Santiniketan's Kaj Mandir consists of a simple alternation of religious readings with hymns (Indian ones, written by Tagore for the Brahmo Samaj). Congregation, singers and readers all wear white kurta pajama. The ceremony is perfectly unpretentious, but can also be lacklustre, especially with sparse attendance or mediocre performances of the music. And why should the Word be considered the primary vehicle for religious expression anyway? Why should not visual images and ritual movement or dance be considered equally appropriate?
What the reformers from Luther to Rammohan Roy justly criticised in earlier practice was the use of ritual and images as replacements for the genuine core of the religion. If one imagines that "merit" is gained, or sins cancelled by the performance of rituals, or that images are real pictures of God, whose worship puts one in privileged contact with the divine, then one is indeed giving way to delusion; if such beliefs are widespread then the religious culture can be branded as corrupt. But the logical response to this state of affairs need not be the abolition of ritual and image. It can also, and perhaps ought to, be a better understanding of their theological status. Karen Armstrong has such an understanding in her recent (misleadingly titled) book The Case for God, surmising that primitive religion treated ritual and imagery as central to the religious experience, with concepts and verbal formulations following after, if at all. She points to shamanic religions, such as those presumably practised in the caves of Lascaux, and the famous Greek Eleusinian Mysteries. Comparisons with ancient Greece occurred to both me and Reinhard, my travelling companion, as we watched the evening Ganga Arthi ceremony at Dasaswamedh Ghat in Varanasi.
This famous and ancient ceremony is today somewhat affected by its status as a tourist attraction: the lighting and tight choreography strike one as being recent, camera-friendly refinements. But the basic materials and movements of the arthi are traditional. Their purpose is neither purely aesthetic - though the costumes, incense and music clearly do appeal to the senses - nor "ritualistic" in the sense of attempting to manipulate or gain favour from the divine (as Hindu animal sacrifices do). It is rather meditative and devotional, trying to bring the worshipper and onlookers into a state which in Hinduism is called bhakti, devotional participation, a concentrated but also communally shared state of love for God. Arthi is often performed alone by the Hindu householder, sometimes in a puja room specially set aside for the purpose. Shopkeepers reopening their business in the afternoon can be seen making characteristic arthi circling gestures with a few sticks of incense in front of a postcard of a deity.
It is no harder, I think, for Westerners to feel sympathy for these quieter, everyday practices than it is for us to practise yoga as it should be done, in the same spirit (- think of the famous sequence of asanas known as the surya namaskar, performed facing the rising sun). The difficulty is in the extreme manifestations of bhakti - the hours of mantras, the endlessly repeated prostrations of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims that we witnessed in Bodhgaya, even the over-enthusiasm of Vaishnava devotees (familiar to Western urbanites as the "Hare Krishnas", their historical roots are actually in West Bengal; the modern organization for the movement is ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness). One has a sneaking suspicion that much of this is actually "for show", or performed out of the misguided belief in automatic "merit". But if it is, then the healthiest response is surely just to ignore it. There are more genuine types of devotion, and even we sceptics ought to hope for a glimpse into their spirit.
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