3
Religion
of the Mound
Bumpy ride of the Indian nationhood
since independence on the constitutional path paved with its ‘sovereign,
socialist, secular character’ has had its own share of quibblings. Indian
secularists, anyone who can speak or write a line, have been putting up
stitches to sew up the fissiparous pot-holes so as to make the mobility of the
nation in accordance with the great constitutional provision. Unfortunately,
the unevenness ends up making it only bumpier, noisier. The Congress has been
paying a highly rewarding lip-service to secularism. (Save ’84, for it exposed
the grand party for a brief interlude.)
Earlier, the holes emerged due to
unavoidable wornoutness, but of late the bully-boys of Hinduism had started
digging up the incorporeal dirt, instigating every Jack and Gill to jump into
this religious game; sleazy politics of religion—jackpuddings of political
religion. Briskly it sent down a chain reaction activating all the joints in
Indian fabric; the politics of caste, creed, community, or any other
exclusivist social differential possible (given the amount of political
potential). So, during the ‘80s and ‘90s all flimsy points became big political
issues, making it the grandest game as well as occupation. Religion, entailing
its master as the most important weapon, went to legislatures and assemblies;
creating a huge vertigo in common man’s minds where the sniding tirade
strangulated the helpless fervent piety. A commoner’s God stood almost vandalised
and desecrated.
Spreading out from its mighty
political epicenter, scrimmaging waves shook the pious ground beneath many a
footsoles. Political squabbling about Godhood was splattered in its distinct
colours over the vast society. For the Congressite secularism it was as boonful
as a big draw in lottery. Various colours were flying jocosely: saffron for
Hindu redheads, a pale dull grey for secularists, Muslims got as many as the Koranic
injunctions could bestow. The explosion was really shaking. Even the mendicant
friars in deepest of renouncing caves came to realise and recognise the colour
of their Gods. True divinity meanwhile scraggily lost itself in its desolate
labyrinth. This new religiosity struck its rootage in almost all the psyches,
and at almost all possible places. Babri
Masjid was allowed to be vandalised. Congress government at the centre
stood a mute witness (was it deliberate?) while its foolish, communal
counterpart in U.P. zealously hob-knobbed with the vandals. And once it had
expectantly witnessed the killing of that medieval structure it cried murder to
become the shouty champion of the minority’s cause. Aah…how the political
parties provide a life sustaining breath to their opponents through their deeds
and misdeeds!
The village mound had its own little
elevated share of sacredness. Beneath the banyan tree there was a small conical
brick structure. This whitewashed two feet high empty reliquary stood
melancholically. It belonged to the bhangis, the scavenger community,
who’d built it in memory of their pitr, a young unmarried ancestor of
theirs who had drowned in the pond. Some of them claimed to have seen his
spirit in the banyan’s branches at one fearful night. To pacify the unliberated
soul they lit up earthen oil lamp inside the tiny interior along with some oblations
on certain nights.
Here on this mound, six or seven
metres high, untrimmed and pinchy shrubbery chanced across two more religious
strands. It stood, however, in infinitesimal ignorance of the prevailing
tension between the two plates---one static and the other one
moving, capable of creating social fold mountains; two religionists, one
knowing his faith through its profession, and the other one by just, chance or
mischance, being born in another set of belief system.
As the immortal mortality would’ve it,
the consequences of this tension wouldn’t lie hidden for ages. Even the tiny
gobbet had its future share of a shock arising due to an incumbent fold; the
latter in turn arising of a thrusting, thwacking, lively heavy plate crushing
upon a lifeless, passive block of earth, giving a tearing fold to the same heap
of earth; like a breaking twist to a same twig; like breaking a limb of the
same body; like harming the same humanity.
But who cares for such little sparks
of catapulting inhuman rage, especially in the new era of noisy spiritual markets.
Spiritual gurus with their cures for the spellbound masses; sheepwalk of
commoner flocks towards various remedying centres; hysterical religious mantras parroted by the hypocritical
professionals to exploit the commonness in laymen. In politics, bureaucracy,
private entreprises, institutionalised religiosity, and almost all walks of
life the so called specialised minority claiming to be the voice of conscience
of their respective flocks, uses the meek followship just for their own
professional interests. And who is the victim? The humanity at large or just a
common simple human being?
On the small elevation above ordinary
heads, two religions in strained silence imperceptibly jutted against each
other; most fragile Mohammedan figure and a prodigiously plump but lame Hindu
religioner. The former in his old battered body with a seemingly impossible
task at hand to watch over uncertain future of myriads of fish whom the
greatest danger possible was the watery grave perpetrated by any of the vested
interests by sprinkling poison in pond’s water in the dark of night so that the
sun could see the pond’s edges embroidered with upside down shiny dead fish,
with their mouths pouted in a fearful awe and eyes wide open, the scene of
watery deluge invisibly imprinted inside them. As far as his own body was concerned,
having born as a Muslim, the most fatal disease his weak rickety physical self
could get afflicted with was a virus which originates in some selfish minds,
but fatally preys upon innocent lives. Even the most pitifully hopeful angels
might’ve doubted his chance against these two peak risks to him and his fish.
Why the lessee kept such a hopeless
figure as the upkeeper? Oftentimes, it put a question mark even in the Sadhu’s
mind, who much to the satisfaction of his plans felt relieved for having this
almost inanimate figure sharing the mound with him. Anyone else in his place
would have been a nightmarish nuisance to the religioner. This sort of judgment
wasn’t a tricky proposition to any onlooker. The watchman seemed to be in the
job just for the mere assumption that his extreme abjectness and nearness to
death, which had made him almost invisible to any eager eye, might make the
very process of fishery and upkeeping invisibly trivial to the extent of
ignoring it to any potential wrong eye. Apart from this, other reasons could
only be clarified by the pond hirer, who was not so light minded as his easy
going ways and mannerisms suggested. Shrewd piscifarmer in him was aware of the
old man’s mastery and expertise unto the strokes of genius in any thing related
to the fish.
The watchman’s neighbour had arrived
in the village walking on his incorporeal path with his sagely baggage and
booty. He seemed a bit tired after such a long, long struggling journey over
the pious pathway escaping across the worldly muck and morass; earthly squalid
sluttery splashing around with its ungodly colour. Now his staff, or his
crutch, needed some rest. A bit of stabilisation on a small elevation, not far
from his chosen path, from where he’d keep an eye over the laymen loitering
around glowingly at a lower level; chidingly disillusioned level at which
people having the vaguest of faintest idea about Godhood, still talked of it
with the seriousness of life and death. Tediously rustic countryside, a world
of cattle drovers abuzz with bilious mooing and lowing; the obstinate, arrogant
work brutes leading a tough survival with a rude joviality seemed a waggish,
laboring ant swarm from the pastor’s resting pedestal.
In the depths of his soul, the
religioner exactly knew that his path of mendicancy circuited along this
glinting unsagely hoarseness barely escaping the suppurating worldly sloth on
both sides of his narrow but infinitesimally long path. Much to the chagrin of
Lord Shiva’s tattoo, His child’s smock was ever in danger of being
discoloured by trivial worldly colours of illusions. But, somehow by the grace
of God, he’d managed this tiresome walk and direly needed a rest.
At such elevated holy resting places,
ever on the move mendicants needed some religious refreshments to embalm their
aching limbs. A new strand in Hinduism’s ever evolving fabric was just the
aforesaid thing. The new thing arose from frowningly gloomy facts from medieval
history. Revivalists of Hindu pride, as they bulgingly called themselves,
caught the medieval mullah by his goatee forcing a witnessing tale of medieval
happenings, so as to drive away the confused laziness and tiresomeness of its
present practitioners; boasting, revengeful clarion-call of revivalism to
transfuse some belligerency into the legendary lethargic, calm and peaceful
Hindu blood. Scowling and squeaking blood thirsty cries of medieval Islamists
were being brought alive from the pages of history to write a new chapter in
the ever evolving book of Hinduism.
Under the spell of this rejuvenating
gust of wind the helplessly hunted down sadhus of medieval times were
now trying to belligerently fat themselves at countless mounds scattered around
Hindustan . Prophet Himself might’ve shed a
tear or two for this piteous Muslim, a frail human being born to Mohammedan parents,
and put out a protecting hand to save him a fatal fall from the evolving, shaking
mound into a watery grave. But the scrimmaging voice of some of his followers,
still surviving medieval species, who were imprisoned in a squeaking
communalised nationhood in the neighbouring country, was too noisy to leave any
effectivity from the voice of sanity. Utmost irony of all this was that the
watchman, despite all his negligible existence, looked a Muslim first and a
fragile, near death, human being later. After all religion count more than a
pathetic body. Physical debility had taken him nearest to death, but nearness
to death could never touch his being a Muslim. Isn’t it that even after death
our decomposed self gets a certain religion’s sovereign stamp?
History has this inevitable destiny of
constantly falling from smoke into smother. Pestilential strife ‘first as a
tragedy then as a farce’ goes on and on for humanity’s pangs in one form or
other; its mighty stream overpowering the mulch which we form in all our
discernment of historical wrongs. So, the medieval fire which burst out of misread
Quranic pages still flickers in its modern jehadi version of terrorism,
heating up Hinduism at small, small moundy elevations, to be at its utmost
guard and excitedly flex its 5000-year-old peaceful muscles and adopt a
counterfeit aggressive tone, at least at a politically institutionalised forum.
And all this in breach of its oldest and mightiest tenets on earth! The result?
Regarding a fellow faith with scorn!
Remnant Islamic embers still
smouldering with medieval fire, meanwhile, were trying to aggravate the
insinuating fire around India so as to burn the secular delicacy inside this
vast frying pan, in the fatal hope of destroying only the Hindu part of it; criminally
ignorant about the fate of inseparable Islamic crumbs inside the same pan on
the verge of being baked to death. This rabidly communal nationhood standing
over one million Hindu, Muslim and Sikh dead bodies, so immersed in this
slandering charm of immorality was constantly raising the temperature of this
decimating fire. As naturally, heated up reactionary pop corns were vengefully
fire-cracking inside the pan. Political strategists institutionalised it as an
issue of ‘war of religions’. And what about the fate of 15 crore Muslims in India India
Numerous Hindu religionists, worn-out,
who’d zigzagged up little resting elevations, did sense this new palpable
enthusiasm. Professional and careerist side of this political religion offered
new vistas for the starving and begging reclusory. So many discards were now
the religious recruits, people with a job at hand, in the institution of
Godship. Recruits’ only responsibility: Debasing a fellow religion already in
doldrums due to the misdeeds of some of its foolhardy and satanic followers; to
brand Islam as the rabble rousing blood thirsty monster.
Stuttering along the reclusive path
the Sadhu had reached this optimistic looking hut atop an excited
elevation, the mound. Swaying to the winds of the time he wanted to own it as
the holy land of his profession. A moderate occultism, sufficient witchcraft
skills, more than enough pious, preaching halo around his sagely visage and a
dexterous hold over the pulse of a commoner’s illusions and disillusions were
the skills and qualifications he possessed for the job.
One might’ve wondered, had the mussalman either pretended or got the
same qualities of throwing charms and muttering incantations, he too did
possess an equal chance of furthering his career. It was just like having an
equivalent degree from a different University. As simple as that! And people
simply don’t mind religion, as long as there’re good results from a
superstitious ritual. After all there are so many unjustified problems at hand:
Sufferings from the unknown, mysterious, demonic causes. If a solution
available, most welcome without caring a fig for the damned religion. Even in
this part of the country, Muslim professionals were numero uno in this
respect. When a Hindu practitioner failed to cure the negative brush with the
paranormal, the sufferer ran helter-skelter looking out for a Muslim of the
trade. Some were in the district city, others scattered distinctly over this
State with almost a negligible percentage of Muslim population, except in
remote south, where the aspiring MLAs in some constituencies had to woo them
for their effective chunk in the voter’s list.
Devoid even of this aforesaid
respectable faculty, piteousness of the watchman’s existence knew no bounds.
Clinging on to this job with a caterpillar’s grasp was the only missing link
between the morsels his tiny hunger required and the death to starvation. He
was doing just the same; obeying the ageless cosmic urge of mortality to
stutter towards immortality. However, he looked just prolonging the death’s
waiting time. Too old and worn out as he was. Nothing seemed to take notice of
him as the cosmic hours effortlessly lumbered away. At least the newcomer had
taken the trouble of casting a squirming cursory look as if to check out the
life inside.
Away from this tale of religions on
the mound with its small elevation from a common man’s head, there to the
southern side of the pond amidst the lush paddy greenery foraying to sunbeams
and humid wind of four directions; sparrow flocks flew across the sky in
perfect harmony and positioning in space and time, mocking at its mystery, as
if its secret ended in this ecstatic group with a will to survive, which took them
gallopingly from field to field, like the universal will expanding from the
time of Big-Bang.
All this agility and tensionless
nature, away from the mound seemed to say, “I’m beyond religion’s scale.” This
whisper of the ultimate truth hitting against the blindfolded and handcuffed
soul inside the human body as well as the institutionalised belief systems; man’s
insinuating diatribe against divinity; false facets of reality blinding the
faithful eyes. But where does this infinitely gigantic epicentre of the unseen
lies? So many disillusioned pathseekers perished on the supposed right paths,
reaching no-where, only death calmed down their futile search. Imperiously
obsessive march of the renounciators of ‘pleasure seeking passions’ ending in a
cataclysmic mud in which both worlds—spiritual and material—are almost mucking.
Some mystics claim to have witnessed the unsubstantiated glimpses of reality.
But this slight dithering tussle with reality at an unknown plain is beyond the
wavering rationale of the scientific-philosopher.
Then what’s the essence of the ‘beyond
normal’? Is it the innocent, to the extent of being foolishly blind, faith of
divinity-ebriated people like Bhagat Ram? Is it in the vast ritualistic
repertoire of the practitioners like our very own Sadhu? Is it the
totally unmasking delicate equipoise at the margin of death and life as in the
case of our own watchman, a mere religioner by birth? Is it just the practical
utility coming down to help us out of the dire straits from its chamber of
secrets? These are many pin-pricking, squirming questions and more questions;
mere links in the chain of the greatest question. And our religiondom a mere
brittle structure made of brick and mortar of these questions, buzzing with
contradictory, comparative and relative voices---an ever increasing confusing
noise, while the patience wearing thin among the mortals all around. In this puzzlement
the fire-breathing hate-teachings as well as the most genteel piety get crushed
under a huge cosmic crushing-millstone.
Who, then is at ease with this
paranormal scaffolding? Perhaps he or she is a commonly sensitive common human
being, fulfilling his/her little humane role on earth, going in harmony with
the huge cycle of cosmic evolution, without groping around for the unknown, and
finally falling at the hierarchy of mortality.
Mortality’s hierarchy? Yes, it seems
so to our limited senses. Hierarchy of the mortality starting from the most transient
lives amongst flora and fauna to the planet itself, then the solar system, the
galaxy, the cosmos... reaching unto the infinite longevity, the cosmic immorality;
similarly, the hierarchies of space and time losing out in the infinite zone of
the unknown. What’s the way out? Just simple faith or faith with reason? The
former personified by a simple common human being bowing before this cosmic awe
in abandoned reverence. The latter by a scientist juggling with induction and
deduction to arrive at substantiated facts; which though in all their practical
transcience serve us materially, but never ending limitations glare in our face
as the scientific age progresses further. Perhaps, it’s in the scheme of divinity
to allow reason an evolutionary hierarchy of its own for the materialist usage
by the human society. How long and how far this logical evolution of ours will
go is known only to the utmost and ultimate logic. Even scientific-philosophers
realise this limitation of science. As harbingers of advancing science they put
forth a torch-light ahead: the light of cosmic theory based on numerous cosmically
ordained assumptions. Whether we’d be able to survive for that much time as
would take the civilizational advancement to the brink of highest cosmic
hierarchy? Answer is a big, definite No! Because the life of our planet or even
the solar system is just a short life hierarchy linking the chain towards the
ageless, immortal primal matter and spirit. Till then, we’d have our share of
theologists searching for cosmic cues about the cosmic mirage in the cosmic
desert.
Perhaps, it’d be far better for us
mortals just to concentrate on the search for our true selves; the earthly
mirage of humanity teeming with its own mind-blowing contradictions and
paradoxes. One such earthly mirage searcher, Cyril Connolly, might’ve come
across a satisfying oasis seeing which he exaltingly said—
“In my religion there would be no
exclusive doctrine, all would be love, poetry and doubt.”
Undoubtedly, love is the spirit and
skeleton of any religion. It is easiest of the idealisms to be talked and
preached about. All our relationships starting from a mere environmental
consciousness up to the sexuality for the partner are underpinned by this God’s
only emotion, idea or motivation. Hence, talk about it is as cheap, normal and
easy as we breathe and live. It, too is the compassionate core of each and
every religion in the world; the Godly remedy for the maladious passions,
prejudices and disparate trials and tribulations of humanity.
It’s however to be scrutinised whether
love lies at the heartcores of the religioners imitating the cosmic compassion
under the mollycoddling pious injunctions of their belief systems. It’s rather
ironically mysterious, how this first sermon of all religions vanishes in thin
air whenever attacked by hate-worms.
As for the poetry, in its uninhibited
gay abundance and unfathomable creativity it certainly can convey message of
the beyond. Just like Bhakti saints who at least realised the essence of the
ultimate spirit. Meera boozed in love and devotion to Lord Krishna. The blind saint poet Surdas seeing the glimpses of
reality with the clearest of eyesight, when he sang in his poetics—
“Lord,
while I walk, sleep, work or weep,
What
else can reside in my soul’s deep?
Soul’s
every sinew immersed in a prayer,
Where
even blindness can’t dare
To
make thou invisible to my eyes,—
Just
to see you this soul vies,
Through
thy eyes; I can see
What
the mortal eye denies.”
Such is the power of poetry. A
completely blind devotee could see Him with the help of his remaining four
senses. Such is the channel of devotional verse that it can break all
scaffoldings which disillusion and imprison our material or physical selves.
Like religion which enables us to survive on frugalities of matter by bestowing
spiritual wealth, poetry with the rhyme and rhythm of its few words is ever in
consonance with the self-perpetuating, meditating cosmic silence. Alas, it
loses ground when religion in a hard economic sense is made a vehicle, a
profession, a means of power and pelf. For then it requires a huge amount of
hollow words and spiritless prosaic preachings, creating a huge web of ungodly
trap.
Doubt, the third constituent of Cyril
Connolly’s faith, on the surface of it may seem to be an irreligious worm with
its futile faculty of bugging a human being with either atheism or agnosticism.
But the presence of a doubt about the validity of our illusionary and/or
disillusionary reflections and/or refractions on the true plain of reality with
our limited, perishable and abuseable senses does in fact indicate the undoubtedness
about the infallible fundamentalism of the ultimate reality. Thus ‘the extent
of the absence of doubt about the existence and grace of God’ determines the
degree of the religiosity in a human being.
Firm conviction about the human
dizzardry perhaps has inkling about the ultimate wiseness and witticism. Only
this feeling can make one understand and realise the ‘purpose of creation’ at
least, if not the ‘creation’ itself; at least an ounce of inkling about the
tiniest of most simple fact about Him. That is all we can reach up to in our futile
climb to the infinitely high summit where in the highest and undefined echelons
somewhere, sometime the pleasantly cosmic Epicurean revels in mystical fun and
happiness. That’s all we can achieve with our collective, common existential
selves summing up all our acts, intentions and potentialities. When this
altruistic will of ours is institutionalised to get a defined ‘ism’ it is
perhaps the Humanism---the religion of mankind, yet so Godly with its selfless
love to fellow human beings. This perhaps is the true purpose of religion as
well as the creation.
Unfortunately, there’s enough
hollowness and vacuous loopholes inside humanity’s common secretive chambers
where the overpowering nihilism strikes deep roots blindfolding the greater
chunk of the humanity; creating the veil of shadowy ego whose jingoism boasts
about its futile vortex ‘I’. And the deterministic chaos created by this scion
of worldly mirage emerges in such a material formation that the formless God is
left lost in its fathomless nycto. Love becomes the most theoretical
word just to be trampled upon by our tongues as many times as possible.
Beserking and fore-imaginating genteel piety of poetry is found to be
unmeaningfully too abstract and doubts about God and Godhood abound and
perpetuate themselves with a monstrous ferocity; the infinite doubt about the
infinity itself; doubt about other paths, the utter bathophobia of other’s
religion; and a total absence of doubt about one’s own professionally
institutionalised faith.
Our religioner in the tale had
ascended this new religious elevation thinking beforehand the professional
potentiality of his worn-out mendicancy at this new destination. During this
age of kaliyuga, the Dark Age, according to the Hindu mythology, everything’s
essence has to be assessed through a prism of shrewdly trite utility; meaning
in both letter and spirit, the purposefulness of every idea, action or thing
obsessively derived through its materialistic essence. Thus, materialism in all
its smugness is riding triumphantly at the down-trodden back of
spirituality. So the new religion of
this new age, standing at new scaffoldings with new hopes and aspirations
provided an ample opportunity for at least economic and social survival of its
followers.
Sharply declining spiritual content
inside the religionists’ hearts, is, under the spell of cosmic cycle of
badness, leaving behind badlands and bogs where the absolute truth is
beratingly bemired by the evil feigning consumerism of heart and soul;
carnality driving morality to the last end of the parapet. Chaotic weirdness of
the Dark Age! Religiondom has been divided into numerous holy sectarian clubs,
where the God’s Personal Assistants on earth hypnotize the perplexed masses
with their smatterings about the modern virtue and new-age faith. The followers
meekly follow the new mantra according to their degree of ease with
ill-smelling wealth, lust driven loveless sex, lame morals and blindness to the
crimes against humanity. Aah, the frowzy, bugging politics of the cheats! To
tap it all eagerly waits the big business of modern spiritualism, teeming with gurus
and mentors (ever ready to play into the hands of the unknown forces working on
behalf of the dark age of the present). Very easily it reaps the harvest of
blind faith. Close on its heels follow the politicians and the business class (the
muleteers) entailed by a lost, benumbed mass of ordinary people groping around
for the big question of survival.
The village at which the Sadhu arrived
had its own jettisoning layer of this new dharma, the way of life.
Illiterate and semi-literate womenfolk were the soft targets of this fresh,
impressive religious poignancy. Unfamiliar dilemma brought about by the
contradictly conflicting realities of a hard life had left them in a sort of
strangling lurch. Across the haze veiling around them they could hear and see
the feeble pictures of women upliftment and empowerment: the western women conquering
space; enjoying sexuality to the fullest of their instincts; beating the scholars,
the politicians, the co-workers. Bleary eyed they ogled at its own knee-jerking
and jiggling version in the form of Indian urban women. For the women of this
village, right from the school and odd college going girls to the illiterate
hollow-cheeked elders, this period had been of awe and inspiration. Awe for the
waiting liberty whose patience was wearing thin as traditionalism was still
comfortable on its conservative stool. Not a single love marriage or an
inter-caste or an inter-religious one had a single instance of success in the
village history. Most beautiful of girls were tagged to anyone picked up almost
randomly like the chancy throw of a dice by the family from among the eligible
bachelors of the same community excluding the three gotras, the surnames,
of father, mother and grand-mother.
Beautiful girls grew up aspiring for a
husband, lover, life partner and friend all in a cosmic unison, not like the
western women who had the promiscuous pleasantry of enjoying the above said
things in different men; men of their choices. These doodle damsels of the
village put all of their trust in Lord Shiva for finding an adarshpurusha, an
ideal man having all the qualities which a western women in all her empowered liberty
tries to find herself in different men. They kept a fast on Monday to appease
the Lord and worshipped Shivalingam, the cosmic penis, a symbol of
procreation, fertility and divine origination. On the day of Mahashivaratri,
the night of Lord Shiva, young unmarried girls and brides kept a common
fast. Attired in best of their rural apparels, salwaar-kameez and saris
they visited the temple to perform puja and offer oblations. Abandonly
putting up their future at the God’s stake, they looked like the God’s own
daughters, whose idol seemed filially obliged to find out a good match for the
reverentially surrendering daughters.
The omniscient father, as a matter of
fact, did listen to their prayers. Most of them got married as they reached
matriculation level in the village
High school
In rarest of rare cases, two suffering
bodies unable to cope with the heart’s tortuous beats decided to end their
lives. In still rare cases, just before their confirmed parting away, they took
the most dreaded and tabooed decision. That was of becoming one, though for a
little time, at the risk of their lives. To the triumphant rejoicing of heart
the shy rural girl in such a case offered to her lover the most precious thing
she had with her, her virginity. It required a seminally schemed out tricky
plan, for if caught options were so few, at least for the girl: a suicide, or
dropping out of the studies and hastily married to whomever her family could
lay hands upon after the stigmatising incident, and in between the demonic
wrath of the whole society. These invisible, jiffy moments of sorrowful local
love-tales were thus unarguably unwelcome transgressors into the
rural-rusticity steeped in its prideful traditionalism. Seminary, indirect and feeble
support to liberal love was still too fragile to bear a heavy jab from the
crude parish fist; the latter invariably had its final jibing say when it came
to the question of:
“Was it a day, for young lovers’ hay?”
“Definitely not!” it scoffed in a
thundering taunting voice.
Though hackneyed from years of usage,
the worn-out triteness was, thus, still tautly holding ground somehow.
As for the women, farmers’ wives, life
was shorn of anything naughtily flirtatious. It was just plain hard work from
wee hours to late night. Rough and rumble of barn, cattle, farms, abusive
husbands, howlariously rude children and what not. Anything except the
aforesaid things sounded capriciously scandalous and cocky. Arrogantly hard
working male villagers abided by a supposedly scriptural injunction buried somewhere
in the tomes of dharma shastras, books guiding a proper way of life,
written at the time when the first millennium was still in its infancy. Its
rustic version in local parlance went like this:
“Woman, student or cattle at hand,
All of them are only but a stick’s
friend.”
Treat them in any other way, the local
tradition surmised further, and they will spiral out of control. So the bull-whipping
tongues flowingly throwing obscenities and occasional fist-work were the
ordinary things in the village life. They were damn sure that the womenfolk
needed to be yoked onto a straightforward line connecting a few hardworking
spots, hence tired utmost to stave off anything astraying. It was somewhat changing
with the young married men of the day. Their intensity of devotion to the ‘controlling
injunction’ was far, far milder. They just couldn’t flare up the smouldering
tumult inside their softer hearts to prey upon the young, somewhat delicate damsel.
Gone was the era of day and night-long
brutal farming work in a totally unmechanised manner, here in an era of fastly
mechanising agriculture there was some
time for the softer things of life for the new generation. They could be seen
sometimes stealing some appeasing and mollycoddling hearty moments somewhere in
a hole in their small houses, much to the accursing dismay of the fussy,
nagging septuagenarians.
“You people are cowards. Don’t know
the proper way of controlling a woman. Your foolish lullabies will spoil them
to the core and then there won’t be left anything except repentance,” was the
common refrain of old farmers, whose hard lives during youth gave them almost
no leeway to understand a woman outside a narrow circle which had so few things
like exacting as hard work from her as possible to the limits of her biological
make-up, kicks, grubbily bellowed rude words and to cap it all a most formal,
almost emotionless love making which involved zero foreplay and nil glow of
after-thoughts; just a plain fucking, coming like a nature’s call or farting.
The sturdy female companions of these
work brutes, who bore their husbands’ dicktats callously cool headed in stunned
silence, had their own recalcitrant grudges against their softer
daughter-in-laws or grand daughter-in-laws.
“You neither work nor bear a delivery.
We used to deliver babies while working in the fields and your life is at
greatest danger when it comes to giving us a male heir. You are fit for only
one thing. Fleece your coward husbands by your scandalous overtures and leave
them fit for nothing,” was the staunchly supportive refrain from the female
partners of old farmers.
From across this gawky traditional
smokescreen, with its oath of celibacy till marriage (a single life-long
partner and utter, utmost faithfulness to each other by the husband and wife
till the day of reckoning) there was hazily visible a small, secretive,
promiscuous world of extra-marital relationships. In fact everyone had a small,
sweetie inkling about what was happening, yet nobody cared a rap about it.
Adventuristic air over such affairs seemed to whisper slowly:
“Go on... go on! But take care not to
let it become an open secret.”
Middle aged semi-literate or
semi-illiterate women, clumsily moving to the wrong side of enjoyable years had
of late rammed into a new, naughty adventurism to tick off the boredom caused
by their dull, monotonous lives. Fearful of the start of the dark night of age,
they almost convinced themselves that even a night starts with a raylet of evening
star. So, why not make hay while there was still some sunshine left in the
dusking horizon. This fawningly bright raylet required no acid test at morality
or character’s front. It was after all a sacred flummery beyond the unholy grim
and grey of ordinary mortals. It jabbered mystic syllables to calm down the
agitated middle aged female souls. The reverential raylet stood them in good
stead in this respect.
This saviour was the new age religious
carousel. Variegated sects, creeds and ashrams were fastly coming on the
scene to illume the suffering laity. Numerous adroit preachers, gurus,
reverends, priests and mendicants were audaciously establishing themselves with
their practical spiritual shops claiming to know the path to the ultimate,
inextricable reality. Unfortunately, as business does oftentimes, the alluding
flummery enmeshed with the holy pastil fragrance got involved many duplicitous
characters whose only purpose was to increase their flocks through the
pauperising vengeance against the people of their own creed. Witchcraft,
fanaticism, exclusivism and disparaging doctrines were the important parameters
of this new religious economy waiting in the wings.
For the dumpish rural women at the fag
end of their middle age this new propulsion brought a new chance to make for
the lost time in the form of preaching sessions, satsangs, keertans, and
a stay lasting some liberal days at the ashrams in the holy company of religionists
and fellow devotees of both sexes and all ages. As natural, many of them got
the divine opportunity to down their pantalets for the first time to a man
other than the boring husband. We shouldn’t stretch it too far to the extent of
God’s invalidation. All we should say is that the religionists were having a
good time. Maybe God in his pleasant spirits was giving something to make up
for the pauperising infecundity of the mendicancy of yore. More the boom came,
more loudly His panegyrists sang. Myriads of dunderheads got duped; maybe to
pay up for their past misdeeds.
Though it had been a bit late for our
lame religioner, but he seemed ready to jump into the fray with an invigorating
mettle. At last he wanted to construct a paying pedestal in commemoration of
the wasted mendicancy of so many years. And become a part of the prevailing
religious fervour which seemed to mock at Kant who’d unfortunately philosophized:
“The moral basis of religion must be
absolute, not derived from sense experience. And this moral sense is innate,
not derived from experience.”
Much to the chagrin of the philosopher’s soul the
modern, real, trend was in an opposite direction, to derive the basis from
purely material experience feted by the senses; from being over-awed by ritualistic
charms; from the religioners in the role of mystic physicists to cure the mysterious
diseases. And all this, of course, was creating a baleful of piousness for the
new religion which was devouring the unbuckling hindrances of yore.
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