What I find really interesting about this is that, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter at all. It is entirely possible to take the categories we are presented with unquestioningly, and use them to structure our appreciation of Carnatic music — indeed, that is precisely what pretty much everybody in the audience had done until today. Of what use, then, is such historical investigation?

This question is of immense importance, not just for the relatively obscure field of South Indian classical melodic structures, but for the entirety of the South Asian (and hence South Asian American) effort to make sense of our heritage. For a variety of reasons (largely attributable, in my opinion, to the epistemic rupture caused by colonialism), we have been cut off from older ways of thinking and living, and are hence struggling to make sense of our past as we march towards the future. The question we need to ask ourselves, as TMK has done in this field, is very simple: does history matter? Do our past customs and traditions mean something to us? Are they worth preserving and investigating?

I should clarify that there are two things that can be meant by “disregarding” history.

1. The first is to actually believe that all the categories we use to understand the world, all the texts we have, everything we call “culture” or “tradition”, are eternal and unchanging. This view is deeply problematic and leads to severe, crippling misunderstandings of our past and therefore our present. This is not what I’m talking about here.
2. I’m more interested in the second possibility: that we acknowledge our past, accept that things were different and things have changed and things will change, but then consciously decide that there is no present relevance to studying the past. This is more like saying, “sure, R.D. Burman’s music came before A.R. Rahman’s and may have influenced it, but I’d much rather listen just to ARR, or for that matter, to that new DJ in that new up-and-coming club down the street.”

The second choice is a historically conscious choice to choose to disregard the effects of our past on our present and our future. And it will have moral, ethical, political, even aesthetic consequences. (Well, most things do, but you’d need history to tell you that!) What are those consequences, and are we okay with them?

I’m curious to know what y’all think about this matter. I’ve been thinking about other formulations of this question off and on for a while now, and those of you who know me probably know where I stand on the matter I’d love to hear from you all.

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More importantly, are the answers to these questions even relevant spiritually? Sonali wrote an excellent post about different ways to interpret these epic texts. The three categories she posits are: history, literature, and scripture. There are certain aspects of these epics that may seem unrealistic, and cause us to doubt their historical veracity. But does that matter, if we primarily view these epics as scripture, or even solely as literature?

While there is plenty to discuss just considering the Ramayana & Mahabharata as literary works, I want to focus on the spiritual interpretation of these texts – this is, after all, Swadharma. To consider these texts as scriptures is to draw, or attempt to draw, moral lessons from them. Did Yudhisthira act appropriately when gambling with Shakuni and putting Draupadi’s honor at stake? Was Bharata’s decision to try to disobey his mother and put Rama on Ayodhya’s throne the right one? By answering these questions, one is creating, or perhaps simply applying, certain rules about the proper way to act. So if we consider that the true value of these scriptures is that they provide a source for a moral code, does it even matter whether these events are hypothetical or actual?

I don’t think so. Fables & exaggerations are used all the time for teaching moral lessons. So clearly, the historical inaccuracy of a set of events doesn’t preclude them from being used as a source of morality. What is essential is posing a question about what is “right”, and then answering it, or at least prompting the reader to answer it. For example, the events of the Mahabharata set the context for the discourse of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most well-known sources of moral guidance in Hinduism. To connect this back to Sonali’s original post (and to disagree with my own comment on that article eight months ago!), I think that you can indeed consider the Ramayana & Mahabharata as scripture without considering them as history.

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The fact that these interchanges between Greece and India have been recorded and passed down through history is incredible — even more incredible that the Greek writings show deference to the wisdom of a foreign culture! Just read this:

The fifth [sage], being asked [by Alexander] which, in his opinion, was older, day or night, replied: “Day, by one day”; and he added, upon the king expressing amazement, that hard questions must have hard answers.

Alexander’s experiences in India always strike me as a vivid portrayal of the balance between external power and internal power. Though we may never be able to know exactly how these specific discussions went, the same balance of external and internal power has lived on — to relive that feeling, just take a look at the pictures of the man blocking tanks during the Tiananmen square protests.

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Historicity aside, the point is insightful, and provides an interpretation of some mythological stories. For example, he says that the story of Kaliya, where Krishna defeats and dances upon a troublesome snake, was meant to subtly discourage snake-worship, and that the demise of Daksha, a sacrificer of both animals and humans, represents the fading of live sacrifice. He calls this the absorption of various creeds, specifically the reconciliation of Vedic and non-Vedic beliefs. Radhakrishnan tells a story of the advancing front of Vedic thought — in his own words:

“The Hindu took up the gods of even the savage and uncivilized and set them on equal thrones to his own” (p.32, Unwin Paperback edition).

He provides the example of Kali to support this point, citing Kali’s initial status as the object of demonic sacrifice, and her evolution into a divinity on par, in the Hindu pantheon, with any of the other gods. (For a more eloquent description of Kali as a divine goddess, see this well-written post on The Hunt for Paradise.)

Though Radhakrishnan does not explicitly use him as an example, Gautama Buddha is an interesting instance of absorbing another creed. By including the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, Hinduism was acknowledging his divinity and the worthiness of his beliefs.

The objection here is that absorbing all neighboring faiths would result in a mass of deities, with no uniting force. That is, simply collecting objects of faith in one place does not unite the faithful. To address this objection, Radhakrishnan defines a goal of Hinduism with careful eloquence –

“[Hinduism] seeks the unity of religion not in a common creed but in a common quest” (42).

The reason this point is salient is that this common quest — the quest for truth, the good life — is what unites all Hindus, even today. We are as varied in our beliefs as we are in the languages we speak, the clothes we wear, but we are united by our common quest. Realizing this, early Hindu theologians undertook the absorption of nearby faiths, uniting the disparate beliefs of the South Asian subcontinent into one pantheon of Hinduism, and merging them over millennia into a consistent body of thought.

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