Purushottama: The Rebirth
There is, within the process of solitary circumspection, beatitude of immeasurable profusion. Contemplative, the philosopher of the corporeal is aware of his essential resonance with all creation. “I am not overawed by the cosmos, for I know that it is my origin, and I am composed of the self-same particles that constitute it”, or to that effect says the renowned science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson. Such is the stage of Dhārmic Equilibrium; the ultimate Being, which we may regard as a metaphor for the cosmos as a whole, is, as Aldous Huxley notes in his The Perennial Philosophy, both immanent and transcendent; it is both innate to us and yet independent of us.
This Perennial Philosophy, the Dhārmic Equilibrium, of which I may be said to have discerned only the adumbrations, is highly esoteric. For all its superior analytical abilities, the human species is most curiously yet to imbibe it in thorough measure. Nebulously, the seemingly inanimate objects which have no such consciousness as mankind may boast of, appear to have connaturally mastered that art, for do not the stars and planets of our very own Akashganga in their billions traverse an exquisite spiral with the most consummate precision? They may be said to have attained their stage of Dharma; the ultimate equilibrium.
The notion of Dhārmic Equilibrium transcends the simplistic notion of good versus evil, and is enshrined as the ultimate precept in the innumerable parables that grace the Hindu tradition. We would be apt to think of the Kauravas and Pandavas, for instance, not as historical beings but as our innate assortment of qualities, and our very existence as a perennial Kurukshetra amongst them, so as to achieve the Dhārmic apotheosis of existence.
Perhaps the most potent of them all is the parable of the Maryādā Purushottama Rāma; the embodiment of Supreme Nobility. He is regarded as the seventh avatāra of Vishnu, the sempiternal Preserver, and thus an epoch-maker. It is in virtue of the veneration of an extraordinarily epoch-defining person that numerous succeeding generations recall his or her exploits. The veneration finds expression in cultural celebration — festivals, as well as in infrastructure such as temples. Those moments of the divine song thrilling the assembled devotees at its crescendo makes one transcend all fissures and just be children of that god, ever desirous of emulating him or her.
In the present age, therefore, the reconstruction of the Rāma Mandir is of profound psychological significance. Momentarily, we would well disregard the minutiae of the values which were manifest in Rāma, and heed that which spans a vaster expanse of time; the Indian civilization.
What has the chronicle of the Indian civilization been but one of being home to such eminent wisdom as to be the envy of the world, and subsequent degeneration to a largely spiritless civilization that was but a shadow of its former self? On their part, the Hindus themselves have, at least after the centuries of the Mauryans and the Guptas, proven with rare exception to be so incorrigibly gormless as to lend credence to the contention by Pakistani trolls on social media that the Hindus scarce possess the fiery zeal to govern themselves, and are so contemptible a people as to deserve foreign enslavement. Not evanescently, needless to say, would a reasonable being in fact endorse the enslavement of India, nay any entity.
Yet, it is evident, looking down memory lane, that enslavement has been a fractious part of Indian history. We are cognizant of centuries of chronicled literal abuse against the Hindus; plunder, massacre, destruction of temples and libraries and so forth. That the Holocaust against the Jews is lent an ear to by all conscionable and civilized nations of the world and rightly so, but an elaboration of that against the Hindus almost always invites hostility from the academia, has always been incomprehensible to me. Does there yet persist that antediluvian anti-Pagan mindset amongst the nobility that are the Western academics as well as their Indian gentry that is ever prepared to emulate its Western superiors? What is it that the Hindus desire? To chronicle their story so as to not be objects of such abuse again. Why is so innocuous an endeavour unpalatable to the powers-that-be?
It is amidst this unalloyed hostility that the Rāma Mandir has emerged as a symbol, for Rāma was the most consummate manifestation of that broad net of Dharma that may be said to be the substratum of this civilization. Why was it destroyed in the past? Because someone told us that we were not entitled to our beliefs and were condemned to an apocryphal Avernus for the same. Because someone sought to forcefully establish the superiority of his essentially foreign ideology upon a people who were content to be left alone. By no means were these people epitomes of perfection, but does that warrant what was meted out to them? People are apt to react strongly with their belief systems challenged. Post-1947, India was legally independent. Was it not but logical for the Hindus to have deemed it an opportunity to rectify past injustices? Yet, all it met with was consistent apathy and periodic antipathy from the government.
I have said this earlier and I say this again: the demolition of the Babri Masjid was criminal, and the perpetrators deserve prosecution. But as human are others, so are the Hindus, and so it follows that as others have patience limits, so do the Hindus. They lost temples, libraries, millions of lives to the sword of the barbarian; their education system to British sophistication of armament; much of their land in a calamitous event called the Partition; and yet more temples to state avarice in what was supposedly independent India! You would but be subsumed in a sea of idealistic inanity to expect the Hindus to have maintained absolute equanimity. Only someone in whose vessels flowed opioid rivers as opposed to blood would have maintained perennial acquiescence to abuse after abuse. The indignance was to have manifested sooner or later, and Babri Masjid merely happened to be its unfortunate object. They needed a symbol of tyranny, and perceived the Babri Masjid, built atop the birthplace of the god they revered, as an appropriate candidate.
But that anarchist incident did not in legal terms pave the way for the November 2019 order by the Supreme Court. It is worth our memory that the case was not one of Hindus versus Muslims. The Court treated it as a property dispute. It did not specifically say that a temple must be built; it handed over the land, after due consideration of evidence, to a trust that aimed to build the temple. The Court did not deem it its business to adjudicate on what the trust did with the land.
Synoptically, it boiled down to this: the Hindus had to go through a judicial system that was essentially the product of the colonial era, to merely build a temple in a land that has civilizationally been theirs for millennia. Yet, they agreed; they recognized that their civilization-state had taken over the form of a nation-state as a matter of exigency and would have to go through the ‘system.’ And they waited nearly 500 years for this.
The Rāma temple, in a modern India, is the commencement of a healing process. We must not be sanctimonious. If we accept transgenerational trauma in regard to the Jews, we must necessarily do the same in regard to the Hindus. Much more needs to be done, not necessarily by way of religious infrastructure but certainly by way of narratives. This is the first step, perhaps towards a civilizational revivification.
