The Hindus (117 page)

The impermanence of the paintings in Mithila came up against another way of valuing art when, in the aftermath of a major earthquake in 1934, William Archer, the local collector, inspecting the damage in Mithila’s villages, saw the wall and floor paintings for the first time and subsequently photographed a number of them. He and his wife, Mildred, brought them to wider attention in several publications. In the 1950s and early 1960s, several Indian scholars and artists visited the region and were equally captivated by the paintings. But it was not until 1966, in the midst of a major drought, that the All India Handicrafts Board sent an artist, Baskar Kulkarni, to Mithila to encourage the women to make paintings on paper that they could sell as a new source of family income. They became known popularly as Madhubani paintings.
⁹⁴

Although, traditionally, women of several castes painted, Kulkarni was able to convince only a small group of Mahapatra Brahmin and Kayastha (scribe caste) women to paint on paper. By the late 1960s and early 1970s two of these women, Sita Devi and Ganga Devi, were recognized as artists both in India, where they received numerous commissions, and in Europe, Japan, and the United States, where they represented India in cultural fairs and expositions. Their success and active encouragement inspired many other women to paint.

From the mid-1970s women of several other castes, most especially the Dusadhs, a Dalit community, and the Chamars, also began to paint on paper, along with small numbers of men. It is quite likely that they were already painting at the time of the Archers, who, for some reason, wrote only about the higher-caste women. But instead of painting themes from the
Ramayana
and the Puranas, the Dusadh women painted their own folklore, and their high god, Rahu (who causes eclipses of the sun and moon), and their culture hero, Raja Salhesh. Later they also created new techniques and new subject matter and eventually began to depict some of the gods of the upper castes (Krishna, Shiva). Gradually artists of different castes and genders began to borrow themes and styles from one another. Although the images were similar, women of different castes usually developed distinctive styles of painting.
⁹⁵
Over time, in part because of the greater diversity of people painting, the subject matter of the paintings expanded to include ancient epics, local legends and tales, domestic, rural, and community life, ritual, local, national, and international politics, as well as the painters’ own life histories.

Women of the upper castes eventually added to their repertoire various subjects of social critique, including dowry, female abortion, bride burning, suttee, terrorist attacks (such as a painting of the planes about to hit the Twin Towers), and even caste discrimination: A young Brahmin painter, Roma Jha, depicts upper-caste women refusing access to a well to a Dalit woman.
⁹⁶
The lower-caste women, who depend upon the paintings for their livelihood, generally stick to more traditional themes, but one woman, Dulari Devi, who is of the impoverished Mallah (fisherman) caste, has painted poor women being denied medical treatment, village headmen chasing away women who have come to complain of maltreatment, and rich families locking their houses and escaping from a flood, leaving the poor to weep over their dead.
⁹⁷

The paintings are still ephemeral in the lives of the painters, for like all successful art, they leave the atelier and go out into the world. But the paintings are now preserved in books, catalogs, and frames on the walls of houses throughout India and beyond; like the Marwari horses, they now belong to the world. There are troubling aspects about this transaction: Euro-American people have intervened in the lives and art of the people of Mithila, not only reversing the most basic understanding of what it means to them to make art—its impermanence—but changing the medium (encouraging them to use more permanent dyes, less fragile paper, and so forth) and influencing its subject matter. For capitalism inevitably raises its ugly head: The knowledge of what will sell in New York and San Francisco influences the subjects that the women in Mithila choose to paint, just as European standards of equine breeding influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris. This should give us pause, even before we acknowledge that many people besides the painters make money on these transactions. On the other hand, the painters have also made money, money that has freed them from degrading poverty. We may or may not judge that this gain justifies the possible loss of artistic integrity, but in any case it is what has happened and what is happening. At the end of the day the lives of the painters have been enriched by the income from the paintings, and the lives of everyone who has seen the paintings have been enriched by the women of Mithila.

The princess Renuka (also known as the goddess Mariamma), whose decapitated head took on the body of a decapitated Dalit (Pariah) woman, continues to survive as a goddess in the village of Chandragutti, 240 miles northwest of Bangalore, where a week-long festival dedicated to the Hindu goddess Renukamba (“Mother Renuka”) has taken place every year for centuries. The Chandragutti version of the story is that Renukamba’s clothes (instead of her head) dropped off as she fled for her life from her murderous husband, and she took refuge in a nearby cave, where she merged with a deity. Each year, thousands of Dalits have taken off their clothes to immerse themselves in the Varada River, then climbed two and a half miles with their clothes off to offer prayers to the goddess at the hilltop cave temple.

But police banned the nude pilgrimage in 1986 after devotees clashed with members of the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS), a group advocating the uplifting of lower castes. DSS volunteers, claiming that the ritual was degrading for Dalits, were beaten when they tried to prevent pilgrims from undressing. The worshipers then attacked police and paraded ten police officials, including two women constables, naked along the banks of the river.
⁹⁸
Complex issues of sexual propriety intersect here with the rights of Dalits, as non-Dalits attempt to prevent Dalits, ostensibly for their own good, from indulging in their own rituals. No longer a question of heads versus bodies, the worship of Renukamba now expresses an ambivalence toward the human body itself, as well as the enduring tension within the social body of caste Hinduism.

CHAPTER 25

The spirit of broad catholicism, generosity, toleration, truth, sacrifice
and love for all life, which characterizes the average Hindu mind not
wholly vitiated by Western influence, bears eloquent testimony to the
greatness of Hindu culture. . . . The non-Hindu peoples in Hindustan
. . . must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness
towards this land . . . but must . . . stay in the country
wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving
no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s
rights.
¹

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973)

If I know Hinduism at all, it is essentially inclusive and evergrowing,
ever-responsive. It gives the freest scope to imagination,
speculation and reason.
²
. . . It is impossible to wait and weigh in
golden scales the sentiments of prejudice and superstition that have
gathered round the priests who are considered to be the custodians of
Hinduism.
³

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

 

The statement by Golwalkar, a leader of the chauvinist Hindu organization known as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), in 1939, reflects a different sort of cultural schizophrenia from the creative dichotomies that have typified so much of Hinduism. The first half of his statement seems to me to express largely valid historical claims, while the political agenda of the second half contradicts those claims, paradoxically using the justifiable Hindu pride in religious tolerance to justify intolerance. Gandhi, the bane of the RSS, also makes two points that are, if not contradictory, in considerable tension: He takes the inclusiveness and imagination of Hinduism for granted, but he contrasts that inclusiveness with the attitudes not (like Golwalkar) of the non-Hindus of India but of the Brahmins, whose “prejudices” against both Dalits and Muslims Gandhi protested throughout his life. The boast that Hinduism is tolerant and inclusive has become not only a part of Hindu law but a truism repeated by many Hindus today, yet this does not mean that it is false; it is a true truism, however contradicted it may be by recurrent epidemics of intolerance and exclusion. How are we to understand the balance of these conflicting currents in the history of the Hindus?

Agni, the name of the Vedic god of fire, is also the name of one of India’s most powerful nuclear missiles. Pakistan named its missile Ghorid,
⁴
after Muhammad of Ghor. Why should the two warring South Asian nations reach back into Vedic and eleventh-century history to name their nuclear warheads? What is the relevance of history to religious intolerance?

India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable.
^lq
If you have read this far, dear reader, and have plowed through these many pages, and have paid any attention at all, you will have learned at least one important thing. You could easily use history to argue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and that they have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well together, and that they have not; that Hindus have objected to suttee, and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced the material world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lower castes, and that they have fought for their equality. Throughout history, right up to the contemporary political scene, the tensions between the various Hinduisms, and the different sorts of Hindus, have simultaneously enhanced the tradition and led to incalculable suffering.

The great mystery about the abuse of history is not the abuse itself but the question of why, in such a future-intoxicated age, we still reach for the past (or a past, however confected) to justify the present. “That’s history,” after all, is an American way of saying, “So what?” But even such American amnesiacs practice a cult of the past with regard to the Constitution and the often unintelligible intentions of the founding fathers, and they have just a few hundred years of history. Hindus have thousands, and their concern for history is correspondingly more intense.

We (and by “we” I mean all of us, Hindus and non-Hindus) can of course learn from the errors of the past, though we are often condemned (pace Santayana) to relive it even when we remember it—indeed, sometimes precisely because we (mis)remember it.
^lr
And we must be on guard “lest we forget,” as Kipling prayed. Often the future is shaped not by what we remember but by what we forget. But we have lost our naive faith in our ability to know our past in any objective way. And memory may not be on our side here; given the tragic power of revenge, sometimes it pays to have a good forgettery.
^ls
At the end of the day, individuals and groups will have to make their decisions in the present, as they did in the past, on some basis other than history, such as, given present conditions, what seems most humane, most compassionate, most liberating for the most people
now.

In the Epilogue to George Bernard Shaw’s play
Saint Joan
(1923), Joan cries out: “Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those who have no imagination?” Surely history is one of the most important things for us to imagine and to realize that we are imagining. What an utter waste it would be not to keep using our knowledge of a tradition, such as the Hindu tradition, that is so rich, so brilliantly adaptive. The profuse varieties of historical survivals and transformations are a tribute to the infinite inventiveness of this great civilization, which has never had a pope to rule certain narratives unacceptable. The great pity is that now there are some who would set up such a papacy in India, smuggling into Hinduism a Christian idea of orthodoxy; the great hope lies in the many voices that have already been raised to keep this from happening.

We can learn from India’s long and complex history of pluralism not just some of the pitfalls to avoid but the successes to emulate. We can follow, within the myths, the paths of individuals like King Janashruti or Yudhishthira or Chudala or, in recorded history, Ashoka or Harsha or Akbar or Mahadevyyakka or Kabir or Gandhi, or indeed most rank-and-file Hindus, who embodied a truly tolerant individual pluralism. We can also take heart from movements within Hinduism that rejected both hierarchy and violence, such as the bhakti movements that included women and Dalits within their ranks and advocated a theology of love, though here too we must curb our optimism by recalling the violence embedded in many forms of bhakti, and by noting that it was in the name of bhakti to Ram that the militant Hindu nationalists tore down the Babri Mosque. We must look before we leap into history, look at the present, and imagine a better future.