The Ecstasy of Tradition: From Past as Tyranny to Present as Eternity

(A) “The Past”

I remember my childhood suddenly as one of confronting, well, not confronting but just cowing down unhappily, to what for lack of a better word I will call tyranny (and interestingly, when I typed “tyranny of” this morning on my phone, it auto-suggested “parents” among other things). This is not to say I felt powerless before anyone; elders, parents, teachers. I recall somehow having been filled with a sense that I had to only ask, (or beg, or cry, sometimes), and I got what I wanted (except bunking school, that even vomit-escalation tears could fail to pull off). I was I suppose lucky, fortunate, or as they say these days, privileged.

So the tyranny of which I speak now was less from a denial of things I wanted in the present and future from my parents than a perception I suppose I had of something that I came to believe existed outside of me, and yet loomed over me very profoundly like a big ghost or something.

That, I will now call the Past.

I do not know at what age one starts to develop a clear notion in one’s head that there is such a thing as the “Past.” When do we distinguish things from the narrative in our heads what we call “memory,” often our own, from that other narrative in our head which imagines a past to things outside of us; things we believe, know or imagine happened to our parents and their lives before we were ever born, things about our habitats and landscapes, and most of all, things about our “countries,” our traditions, our gods and goddesses, and most of all, things that make up that thing we call “history”?

I do not recall exactly now, though I try, how such a notion of “things that were there out there before me” formed in my mind as a child. Did old black and white movies evoke such a feeling? Or early days in schools, first encounters with strangeness and unfamiliarity, and a feeling that those big buildings were already there? Or was it the most beautiful, happy, uplifting things we saw even as children, our oil lamp and flower luminous Mother Goddess/Amma-vaarus and Boy-God Murugans in the temples under big Madras trees that were bigger than any concrete pretension back in those green and blue skies of the early 1970s?

“Where is God?” was an easily answered question enough; for the answer was everywhere, and yet also somehow more specific to certain places; God was in the temple, in the puja room, in every comic and calendar too (and yes, we old fashioned Hindus also strolled into Madras’s big churches sometimes, or dargahs, never quite having to think “God is not here though”).

“When is/was God?” was a more complex question.

The temple God and the ready to listen to my pleas God was of course now, forever, and also wherever I looked and whenever I thought. But all the other things by which and in which and as which we knew God, the tales of Krishna and Rama and Hanuman and Ganesha, these somehow always stuck to our minds I think that these were things that happened… in the past.

Maybe it was watching early color childhood Pandavas on the screen (the all-child-cast Telugu movie Bala Bharatam) or watching “Baby Devi” (Sridevi) and my mother as Krishna and Yashodha in the movie Yashodha Krishna. So this was the past. Krishna lived in a village with colorful children and cows and his mom at least in this movie looked like my mom; was my mom (ah, that made me feel special enough I suppose till reality wrecked it and I only recovered after writing a novel called The Mythologist decades later!). But Yashodha Krishna was a movie, and I knew the difference even as a child. I even watched it being made, after crossing a river near Mysore (or was it Udupi) in small coracles when I was four years old. I remember that “outdoor shooting” excursion. Long drives. A morning visit to a toy store in Mysore where a magnificent toy machine gun with tripod and all was available but my father said no. A night stop in a hotel where I turned on the shower by mistake and drenched myself. An anxious, expectant, exciting evening at a dark railway platform, where my father or uncle told me about that strange scepter-like thing that each train was supposed to pick up from the platform or something, a signaling system. Back then trains had steam, and big black gravitas. Was it 1973? Or 74? I remember that, even as I confidently remember now the way the “past” had formed in my mind by then around Krishna, around his mother, around Rama, around all the Gods. That was the past. Happened long before.

But the past was not only the gods, but it carried more things. I supposed I understood the earth existed before as part of that past too, and all its temples too. Krishna, Rama, all lived on this land, this “country,” somehow, that appeared too in my conception of the past somehow.

I knew by age six or so there was also such a thing as “Foreign.” Its people were around us a bit in Madras. They were also in the movies like Hatari and Guns of Navarone. They had powerful presence, and an incredibly cocksure funny way of talking (our driver Madhu could imitate every foreign movie we ever saw and impressed all the children profoundly till we learned English and realized he was just making up all his Hollywood tough guy drawls).

I also knew “Foreign” because my uncle, who looked like my father lived there, and he visited us, bringing toys, chocolates, smells. He played cricket with me too in the open land outside the house in Venus Colony (so named I think because there was a “Venus Studios” around there where my mother worked sometimes). Across that open land was a house where people from “Foreign” lived and had parties. All the children in my house would play “party” when we heard music from that house in the evenings. This involved dancing around when their songs played, and then, pretending to drink and smoke with air glasses and cigarettes when the music paused. We were scolded by the resident elders for doing that and never did it again.

My “past” bag did not quite have space those days to fill up with ideas about a past for “foreign” though. It was rich enough with past-imaginings for our own land. Maybe going to Tirumala and figuring this God came up here and stood like a statue a long time ago. Or Mantralayam, where the elders talked with even more confidence about Pujyaya who sat down one day inside his special room and now protected everyone from there (and he could still walk outside every night and go bathe in the Tunga). I imagined all of this matter of factly, even as my conception of the past before me also filled itself out with what we might now call modern historical figures; Gandhi most of all, and Nehru. They were represented as statues (respectable, but not quite same as “statues” in temples, for those were only God), they were in books, and they were in black and white, quick motion documentaries. This, and tales of the “foreign” that ruled our land from elders constituted the part of the “past” which constituted a picture of what we could also call “History,” and a big, immediate, slightly ominous part of that was a sense that there had been a problem for our parents and grandparents, a big one.

It was well after our gods came, but not too long before me or my cousins did, but there had been a problem for my country of tyranny. The British ruled us and bullied simple, kind, and ever peaceful people like my grandaunt who were terrified of them and walked away whenever they were around. But then the problem was solved. There were great people like Gandhi and Bose and Nehru and Alluri Seetarama Raju (also available in color via actor Krishna surrounded by pink-powdered foreign villains) who had sent them away.

That was the notion, more or less, of the past with which I remember starting school. Now I will speak of the tyranny.

(Aa) “Tyranny”

I did not obviously have a word like tyranny, or even tradition, let alone orthodoxy, patriarchy, fundamentalism, or any such thing to stick to my sullen resentment with certain things that seemed to come over me over the years at that time. In fact, I would say it took a very long time for such a feeling, much less a vocabulary for it, to even build up.

In the beginning, it was less about resenting the past as it was about craving the “Future,” and it was the impediments to that imagined future that I began to label somewhat as the tyranny of the past.

I suppose just like how we fleshed out a sense of something called the past before us and bigger than us, we also worked slowly on a sense of something called the future. It was in some ways small and immediate at first, I would imagine, like thinking of the future as say, when the bell rang and classes ended and I could go home. Once I was home there was no “future,” only the red soil and rocks in the garden, and random meaningless play all the while ignoring grannies’ calls to come inside, denying the darkness and the great scarlet sunsets over Golconda leading to it as they were all forever.

Then there was a future in terms of a what was in store a few days ahead; like looking forward to summer holidays and going to Madras (by this time I was in school in Hyderabad) to play with my cousin. But beyond this there was also the less clearly understood larger future; sometimes of my own, like thinking about the popular class-essay question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and sometimes of the country, like “When will my India ever become like ‘Foreign’?”

That last notion of the future, I think, was the one thing by which every other conception of the past came to be fleshed out for me through my school years.

The word I learned much later for that notion that had lodged itself in my mind as a child in a modern school, uprooting with an equal counterforce much that was in my mind as affection for not the past but actually the present, a present of festivals and ceremonies I was still living in as a child in a traditional, devout household, was “telos.” I of course did not know the word “telos” then (I learned this in the 1990s during my PhD) nor of course something connected to that like “apocalyptic” (in the sense of how I said it when I started noticing how obsessively Hollywood kept blowing up our beloved Golden Gate Bridge like the world really had to end cos the Lord said so or something).

As I went through school, through the years 1975–1987, I did two things simultaneously with that past/future thing in my head. I decided, much like my literary alter ego Parashuram in The Mythologist, that both India and me were somehow tied deeply into what might happen in the future together. India would have to become more “modern” in the future, and so would I. This “modern” vaguely involved mostly stuff; cars, clothes, gadgets, not oiling hair, hanging out with friends who would look and act and talk a certain way (English with American slang), and somehow, now that I think of it, a very sterile social and natural landscape indeed.

Somehow, all this seemed inevitable for India. Indira Gandhi seemed all set to make it that way, though her local underlings who seemed like feudal landlord villains from our movies never did. Then, when her suave Archie’s Riverdale-contemporary sort of son Rajiv became Prime Minister and began talking of computers, it seemed the future was imminent, at least for India. As far as my catching up with it went, it would only take my mastering Brilliant Tutorial and Agrawal classes to get into IIT and then, I suppose, get a job or something (all this, for reference, was now 1980s).

This deal with the future was of course soon to fail by the time I left school and went to try and study engineering, but well before that, it was doing something to my concept of the past (and then another, new notion of past, more visceral, memory rather than thought, would appear, which I will explain shortly). The future we all had set up for us by the 1980s actually was very useful in doing something I realize was quite mercenary now; one by one, day by day, year by year, it became the pretext for one to banish things that had been happening routinely in the present, into the kingdom of the no-longer-useful past. You want me to take grannies to temple? Sorry, busy, studying for IIT. You want me to come on a pilgrimage to Mantralayam or Puttaparthi? Sorry, busy, studying for IIT. Thursday bhajan? Maybe will just come at the end for arathi? Don’t have time to sit through the whole thing now.

Of course all of this was taking place within a major process of readjustment within my own mind about what was useful and wasn’t, but also what was truth and wasn’t. I never became “atheist” in the sense of feeling the need to assert whether Rama/Krishna were/are there or not there. God was there. That is all. But all this other stuff, temples, pujas, traditions, it just seemed, unnecessary. Maybe, even “superstition.”

After all, this was how “foreign” (which of course I knew by many names of countries now) had become the future for which we aspired too as well, Chacha-Indiramma-Rajiv-Me. The West had got rid of its superstitions first and fast, and had progressed to planes, rockets, computers, everything great in the world. Now this did not mean we (India) did not have progress in us; after all, we had that iron pillar in Delhi, and some other stuff we could see in our historic sites. But somehow our progress had been held back by superstition. Vemana, Kabir, a whole bunch of people were always striving (yes, I used the word “striving” back by 1982 for anything to do with India and progress, it seemed apt, and “endeavor” too though I spelled it “endeavour” those days) to get us out of our superstitions, out of our past.

In daily life, by this point, said superstitions and past were now clearly felt as a tyranny. No escaping some token pujas and temple visits now and then. No escaping rules about hygiene and entering the puja room. No escaping silly restrictions on going out most of all just because it was rahu kalam or something.

By the late 1980s, I was ready for the future. Actually, I wasn’t, in the sense that I had no clue or preparation for the challenge of leaving home and living in a hostel, nor for passing engineering. But Hyderabad, and India were getting to it in some ways. We had fast food ice cream places to hang out in. We had instant noodles. And color TV and VCRs. We had put a man in space and I even had his autograph.

I wonder if children today, in 2019, are feeling the same way about the future as they watch India’s moon mission’s progress. I am sure they do. Some stories don’t really change over time, do they? Maybe that’s the tyranny, really. Or something else? I do not know. Depends on the story I guess.

(E) The Present, or The Past in the Present ?

Before I attempt to explain eternity, tradition, or ecstasy, I must seek first to represent something of a memory, a feeling, a place in time and in place, that I thought then as “past”, a very vivid, intense sensation of being in the past, and yet, that intensity now only tells me that somehow maybe I was in the present. Very deeply in that present.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, even as I was working out life-plans about national and personal past and future in and around distant political figures, I began to experience something like nostalgia, or actually the word for the feeling as I learned eventually from a “Dictionary of Obscure Words” was “hesternopothia.” This, I understand, meant “unbearable longing for an unattainable past” or something like that. Or at least what I began to feel.

I recall feeling this one afternoon when my father drove us down from Banjara Hills and back around through Mehdipatnam towards Golconda fort to go pick up my cousin who was then studying in a boarding school. We very rarely went in that direction, maybe a couple of times in all my whole life when we went to Golconda (and one time even to Chilkur Balaji temple before it was famous though I have only my father’s word for it as I do not recall).

On that particular day, October 1984, Dussehra holiday perhaps, I remember seeing the tall grey herculean pillars sort of boulders of Jubilee Hills from far below and feeling very transported by the sight. For a moment, it seemed like I was witnessing it all not “in 1984” at all. There was a world here; no this, all this, it was here from so, so, long ago. This world. This earth. This… Hyderabad.

For the next few years, in between my hasty and desperate plans to escape into what I thought was going to be a better future, a modern future, I began to crave moments, long moments and hours actually, of just doing nothing, but feeling that all over again. It was not too hard to do so. Each evening, all I had to do was to go sit on some boulder in my home gazing over the city or a little way up the road where all the houses ended. Then, by the time I reached high school, I also began to find that same sense of longing, place, far-away-ness, in music, in The Beatles, Dylan, Moody Blues, Floyd. And some obscure band killed Country Joe and the Fish, which somehow made me feel the same way about a place in a time I had not even been in; San Francisco in the 60s. All that music somehow made my longing all about a very different imagined time and space.

Then, by the time my engineering experiment came crashing down, and I felt like I had fallen out of favor with all the glorious future that India and my smarter engineering friends were better equipped to handle, I was in some strange place where neither past, present, nor future seemed to really make any sense. All I remember about that time is that sometime after reading Catch 22 and before completing Castaneda, I decided, for a while, I would stop referring to myself in the first person when speaking with my friends about the past or future. So I used to say “I am fine, thank you.” But not “I’ll see you tomorrow” but “He will see you again tomorrow.”

Then, eventually, I stopped seeking the meaning of life in my head I suppose, and went back slowly to what my parents had been saying all along. Study. Work. Family. Twenty plus years of that. And now, Shanti.

(Ee) Here and Now, Now.

Shanti, now, flows from much farewells to past (the real thing, as in the material, the place), much “acceptance” as it were.

I missed Hyderabad at first because it had changed, the boulders had all gone. Then, I accepted that. My home and parents were there. Then, that went. I accepted that. It was the first irrevocably harsh example I had of something my father once said to me: “Baba, nothing is permanent.”

So, now, a bit of thinking about the future, about “setting lands in order” or some such over coming years and hopefully decades, a bit of optimism about doing the right thing; moments, dharma, ashramas, generations, Ceremonies One, Two and Three as I called them in my novel Saraswati’s Intelligence (annaprasana, upanayanam, vivaaham). And there is no fourth ceremony in Kishkindha as you know because, well, as Anjana tells Hanuman, after Third Ceremony it’s First Ceremony (for the next generation) all over again!

Time.

Tradition.

A word I never really used all that much, for good or for bad. A word I stuck too much in my mind’s conceptual mush bag along with “past.” A word I got all academic on once I read about how it was all “invented,” that things we assume have been around forever were actually invented, often with all sorts of political implications and all that. A word I therefore avoided, especially as far as using it as a simple unquestioning excuse for pushing arguments about culture would go. Whatever I wrote about Hinduism, I would not do the story parents had done to us, which was to say “that’s the way it is,” and all that. I would not do “do it, or else,” either, for my parents, and my Guru too, never really did it that way. My temples, my festivals, my gods did not need threats.

So I avoided “tradition,” or talking about it at least, even as slowly I returned to it.

Of course, I could call it as my Western Buddhist friends would, “practice,” for that sounds much cooler, of course.

Yet, tradition is what it is; it is not unchanging, it is not tyrannical, it is not what I had thought it to be at all.

It is, for me at least, just the way it is.

Nature. A particular adoration of nature.

Dharma?

I know so little of it. All I do is to jump sincerely into it, every word and gesture of it when sitting with our Sastry garu at this or that puja. And I feel happy for days after. Sometimes I barter that happy state for some silly cosmic-mundane reward (did my publisher reply? Should I check my email? Maybe now that I am post-puja…)

But mostly, it is just the way it is. I do not actively think about this as about the past, or about preserving it for the future (maybe a bit, now and then). Mostly, it is, only that. In the doing of it.

Today I thought of tradition not in the sense of just the pujas or festivals we do, as best as we can in new lands and circumstances. I thought of it in terms of everything this body learns to do, so quickly, so small, when compared to the objective context of it all. The wrapping of a fabric in a particular manner; the asanas; the breaths, the syllables uttered with the conviction of an artist, a musician, a dancer gone into the ecstasies of the soul.

And then the mundane too, the secular. The things we learn to do and not do as children. What hand to use for what. What foot to use for what. What gesture to present before elders and saints and not. What words to use for them and not.

For a moment, I think, my modern mind balancing its act between its conceptions of past, present, and future, of the injustices and hurt too that all this ceremony and code may have done to others too; women, the poor, sometimes animals. Then I also think about the injustice and hurt done to this all too by those who have not stopped to ponder this profound question, of what is sacred and inviolable, and what is sacred and therefore must change. I think about the violence of time as we inhabit it today; my Bhagyanagar boulders that once stood long up into the sky to tell me “Look, look up, here we are, your great ancestors watching you from before you were born, waiting for you to come back here with your grandchildren to show them to us.” They are gone. Even the temple-ransackers of a thousand years ago did not eviscerate the landscape of our memory and our promised future as much as one generation of “developers” and beneficiaries did.

I wish to believe in you again, stone ancestors, maybe call you a ghost, a great planetary ghost, so I can show you my grandchildren.

Ah, there I went longing again. Now I travel in this medium, called Medium. Real world is over. Almost.

But this screen is not reality either. I know. Reality begins when I stop, which is almost now.

I will remember tradition again, what little I know of it, and chant my invocation to Agni at mealtime. Sometimes, my mind races, and I imagine it all, every bit of it, Agni’s travel from Sun to sun-spit planet to water to life to dinosaur to primate to piped gas and khichdi in California and to me. Sometimes, I just forget about all that, but concentrate whatever it is I want to feel into a drop of ghee in each plate. I think now when I do that of Sri Aurobindo and the idea of the “Ghee-pouring mind.”

It’s a tradition, see. I just made one up now.

It’s nice. But when I think of that word now, I also think of so much more. I think of Vyasa Tirtha. I remember Hampi. I remember all these days. Violence, recovery, restoration, hope.

And when the sun rises, I await my morning Gayatri mantrams, each day, every day.

This is the ecstasy of tradition.

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