Colonel William H.Sleeman (1809 - 1856 A.D.) served as the government tax collector at Jabalpur (in present day Madhya Pradesh). Among his diaries is a graphic account of a Sati ritual suicide. ‘I received word that one Umed Singh Upadhyaya had passed away in the village of Gopalpur and his wife wanted to go Sati. So I travelled seven miles by horse to Beraghat and then walked three more miles to reach Gopalpur. The widow was sixty years old and wanted to die on the funeral pyre of her husband.
By this time, the practice of Sati was banned by the British and she had to obtain permission to commit suicide, which so far had been denied. She had refused to consume even water and would not move from the place of cremation. She declared to me that her decision to immolate herself was final. She had discarded her jewellery and was holding a coconut in her hands. She was wearing red. She had gathered some flowers, rice in a basket as if to go somewhere.
She then said to me: “My husband has reached the Sun God (Surya) now. I have died with him in my past three lives; it is impossible for us to be separate.
He is right now waiting for me at the wedding altar in heaven.” I noticed irregularity in her pulse and gave her permission. Upon this, her joy knew no bounds. She asked for betel juice and made her lips red. She dedicated flowers to the pyre and jumped into the fire apologizing: “I am sorry that these men have kept me away from you for three days.” She turned into ash in no time.’ Add that to the debate about assisted suicide?
An enduring and erotic image of India comes from the sacred Temple town of Madurai in Tamil Nadu.
It is the earthly home of Meenakshi (or Parvati), the Shakti (power) of Lord Shiva (known in Tamil Nadu as Sundareswar) and dramatically a temple where you are left in no doubt about the superiority of the feminine. In all the awesome, age-old rituals she is always honoured before her spouse. Queues of hopeful women, wistful to be pregnant wait their turn to adore and anoint the sacred lingam/yoni.
Even Sundareswar her spouse had a mother. Every chav has come from a womb and let none of us ever forget it. The queue’s great hope of course is that pregnancy will follow.
Add that to the services offered by the NHS to women who long for a baby?
I’ve recently re-read Kevin Rushby’s Children of Kali, a fascinating investigation of a bizarre episode of Indian social history – the murder of more than a million people with nothing more than a rumal – a handkerchief, but also sometimes a cover for dishes used in sacred or cultic activities. But also, too, and fearfully a weapon that the Kali-driven thuggee cult used to murder randomly and supposedly as a sacred offering to Kali. Don’t idealise the mystic east, I was warned by Dinah when talking about India. Well, there can be few things less idealistic than thuggee murder, even though the reality was probably more to do with poverty and petty crime, than some glorified ritual sacrifice to provide blood to feed the unquenchable Earth Mother Kali.
Add that to the debate about serial killers? ‘But first the possessed person must be in a state of trance. She must be seized by Parashakti, and then she will feel nothing. For the goddess to do that she needs to be fed twelve basins full of blood.’ Her names are as many as her devotees, though sometimes she is called simply Mahadevi – the Great Goddess – for the world was created when she opened her eyes, and it is destroyed whenever she blinks. Some call her Jagatikanda, the Root of the World. Others know her as Supreme Ruler, She who supports the Galaxy, She who is Ruler of All the Worlds, Mother of All. Her most sacred title is the Root of the Tree of the Universe.
Yet if Parashakti is Life itself, she is also Death.
Kali Durga Sati Parvati Ken Smith introduces the Indian Great Goddess with her many names.
She’s called, among other things, Kali. She’s the primeval energy that keeps everything going.
She can destroy all she creates, and for this reason many of her devotees choose to worship her as Pancapretasanasina, She who is seated on a Throne of Five Corpses. She is also known by the names ‘She who is Wrathful, She who has Flaming Tusks, She who Causes Madness, She whose Eyes Roll about from Drinking Wine, the Terrible One, The Night of Death’.
Though she is fierce, terrifying and destructive, the goddess is said to be quick to come to the aid of her devotees. In times of drought she appears in a form having many eyes. When she sees the condition of her creatures she begins to weep, and her woe has the force of a hundred monsoons. Soon the rivers begin to flow, the ponds and the lakes fill to overflowing, and verdure covers the earth. Through Parashakti the world is reborn.
Add that to the debate about religious experience?
One of the most memorable visits I’ve ever made to a place of worship was in Old Delhi, worlds away from India’s centres of government and western style shopping malls. The Kali Temple is nothing much to look at from the outside – nor from the inside either!
But be in there when the crowds press in – something indefinable happens and you become part of it – devotee and observer alike. Even now after my first visit some 14 years ago, I can hear the noise, smell the smell, taste the smoke and the sweat, be reminded that my separateness as an individual is a myth.
Just down the road the modern Lotus Temple constructed by the international Bahai community has a clinical artificial feel to it. You feel you should be properly dressed, the collecting boxes shout their insistence that money is the most worthy offering you have to make. Further down the road, the gaudy Krishna Temple with its riveting pantheon of images, its orderly queues, its urgent clusters of shaven devotees, remind one of a hit West End popular show.
Here at home we are in the Christian season of Advent – a time that will resonate in different ways for, at one extreme those ‘end-timers’ who think we are living in the very last days and for, at the other, those who think that preparation for celebrating the birthday of one of the world’s great moral teachers is no bad thing. Maybe for Sofists a more suitable Advent discipline might be, however briefly, to try and think outside the box of our own language, our own cultural or religious persuasion.
It’s an Indian cliché that if you ask a Hindu holy man ‘how many gods are there?’ he will initially reply – ‘millions’. If you persist he will eventually say – ‘One’. And millions of Indians, from the most ignorant to the most profound will agree with both answers. More than that, many of them will also persist in stressing that she is female. For them all, a sexless deity is almost inconceivable. What did, here in the west ‘without body, parts or passions’ ever really mean? And she’s called, among other things, Kali. She’s the primeval energy that keeps everything going. As Parashakti, she is that without which the testosterone driven male is nothing.
With all due respect to the Christian church’s Virgin Mother, we have nothing resembling the fearsome and ferocious Hindu mother goddess Kali. She assumed the form of a powerful goddess and began to be popular from the 6th century AD.
Images of her depict her as having been born from the brow of the earlier goddess Durga during one of her battles with the evil forces. As the legend goes, in the battle, Kali was so much involved in the killing spree that she got carried away and began destroying everything in sight. To stop her, Lord Shiva threw himself under her feet. Shocked at this sight, Kali stuck out her tongue in astonishment, and put an end to her homicidal rampage. Hence the common image of Kali shows her, standing with one foot on Shiva’s chest, with her enormous tongue stuck out.
One of the reasons why some people feel uncomfortable about visiting India is that by western standards, it is such a messy place. Things are never tidied up, never truly disposed of, thrown away.
Hygiene is problematic; jobs remain – sometimes for years, sometimes forever, unfinished, heaps of stuff everywhere, waiting to be recycled, to provide work and income for the destitute, or be eaten by sacred cows and vultures. To a certain extent this is the result of climate, or just human laziness. But philosophically the reason for it is rooted in a different understanding of both time and matter. No straight line here; endless circles where each moment encapsulates, absorbs, depends on, stems from all previous moments.
Kali and Holy Man What goes around comes around. In a mythology where the gods traverse in a twinkling of eyes, myriads of universes on eagles and vehicles of every description, there is so much to exercise and occupy the imagination, distract the mind from the mundane. There’s a memorable passage in Ka by Roberto Calasso – described by one critic as the very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written -where, almost incidentally he draws attention to a discarded piece of pottery and says: ‘that’s Prajapati’ – the name of one of the precursors of the current Trinitarian orthodoxy of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu – still there albeit in an abandoned and often unacknowledged way.
So here we are again, nearly Christmas. In our reckoning – the year is 2008. The terrestrial ball hangs in a human-made sky. Globalism is the buzz word as though it were something new. As I write these words the business world is in tumult, even torment as Mammon once again fails to deliver all that it appears to promise. In six weeks time, when I imagine you might be reading these words, I hazard a guess that – in a world in the grip of a crisis brought about by its inability/unwillingness to truly order its house (oikonomia – whence economics) – many of us will find it a source of considerable disappointment that monetary dialogue still largely consists of the rich talking to one another.
Whatever the politically correct scientific theory about our geological origins may be, the reality is that we’ve always been a globe and the surface of the planet has always been inter-connected and intracausal. Seas and mountains, forests and deserts, ice fields and the sheer fear of the unknown and the different, to say nothing of the curse Semitic man thought God put on the earth as a punishment for those who built a tower to become gods themselves, has kept and still keeps human tribes apart from each other. But the piecemeal attempts to make cosmic sense have continued unabated, and both fools and the wise have done their bit.
In my recent visit to Africa I had the opportunity to look round an ultra-modern funeral business in Ghana’s capital Accra. The firm’s shop window had an extensive display of coffins. As I gazed in wonder at the satin-lined mahogany beds for the dead, wondering how, in such a poor country, the money might be raised for such luxury, my mind flashed back to the holy city of Puri in the Indian state of Orissa where earlier this year, smoke from a burning corpse stung my nostrils as my auto rickshaw drove me along the sea front. A few hours previously the corpse would have been breathing. When combustion was (more or less?) complete, the dead person’s ashes would have been lovingly collected, and maybe scattered in the sea. Equally possible is that the ashes would eventually be taken to the River Ganges with an elaborate ceremony as old as time, led by a priest learned in the Vedas and chanted in Sanskrit. Mother Ganga – she too is Kali, the irritating woman in Lord Shiva’s hair, has claimed her own for the billion, billionth time.
Let’s leave aside for a moment, the practical pros and cons – burial versus cremation – as ways of human rubbish disposal. We know that the future has to lie with burning rather than burial. Instead let’s contemplate the more philosophic, symbolic differences. Those expensive caskets, those state-ofthe-art deep-freeze cabinets (if you’re really important it can take up to three years for preparations to be put in place for your funeral!) – while not quite cryogenic, are a symbol, a statement about a god-intended individuality, scripturally linked with the burial of Jesus and the hope of resurrection for all those dead in Christ. On the Indian sub-continent, by contrast, mostly within 24 hours, those cloth wrapped corpses with greater or less ritual from scriptures older than anything here in the west, offered, (preferably but not necessarily on the banks of the River Ganges), to Agni (Kali too) the deity who, for Hindus, burns at the heart of the atomic structure of the physical world.
The illusion of separateness stripped away, the maya of permanence exposed in its rawness, its folly and its finality.
Maybe tomorrow (and this is far from certain, given the modern twist to the idea of globalism and our self-interest driven and as yet totally inadequate response to so called Green Issues) we may eventually see a public debate with Pagans and Hindus, both of whom have a much stronger and clearer understanding of the feminine, a far more honest appreciation of the earthiness of earth, and who, lacking a classical western metaphysic – the sort that makes Richard Dawkins and his ilk rub their hands with smug glee – have a much better chance of rescuing the cosmos from bankers and tribalists.
In an age of reason and with the rise of science, the otherness of the western god has been his downfall and is why rightly the Atheists will have none of it.
Ken Smith is the Editor of Portholes and Sofia Letters Editor. her woe has the force of a hundred monsoons For the first section of my talk – looking at the subject from a historical perspective – I’m indebted to the theologian, Don Cupitt’s book, Sea of Faith (first published in 1984, following the broadcast of the TV series of that name).