Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  As mentioned, Mamallapuram was a good place to rest up a bit. It is today an important fishing village with a natural unspoilt beach. Its claim to fame throughout the world, however, is as a centre of stone carving and craftsmanship. Wandering around the town demonstrates the numerous stone carving activities still continued today. About 200 metres from my room on the second floor of this little, local homestay was the Shore Temple perched beside the sea. Built in the eighth century, the Temple is considered to be the earliest stone temple in southern India and the greatest construction of the Pallava Dynasty. The maritime activities of the Pallava rulers ensured that their influence spread throughout India and to neighbouring countries. Although not fully developed as recognisable Hindu temples, the stone-built sculptures around Mamallapuram constitute a kind of experimental laboratory centred on stone as a devotional art. The Hindu gods of Shiva and Vishnu are everywhere evident but the varied collection of boulder sculptures, temples, man-made caves and chariots (rathas) used in temple processions (and carved from single pieces of rock) suggest a spiritual rather than a strict religious focus. Rather than religious practices, the Pallava constructions suggested the centrality of religion in everyday life and observance. Massive rock bas-reliefs carved in enormous detail on the side of gigantic slabs of rock continue to provide debate and controversy over their significance. Irrespective of the debates about this storytelling, the influence of the Mamallapuram structures influenced subsequent devotional architecture throughout the south and eventually throughout India. Design and sculptures not only shaped subsequent Hindu temple developments but also temples culturally as places of feasts, festivals, dancing and devotion. Songs sung then are still recited and sung today, some thousand years later. Similarly, the inner sanctum of the temple – the sanctuary – was developed by later dynasties and came to be regarded as a sacred space. The Chola empire for example carried out the next architectural temple development at their capital Thanjavur, from the ninth century onwards. The Brihadishwara Temple for example is arguably the most breathtaking treasure of the Cholas and moved temple developments significantly along. Less grandiose than later temples, those at Thanjavur continued the architectural innovations with courtyards, extensive inscriptions on the temple walls, gopura (monumental towers at the entrance to the temple) tapering in a pyramid shape and carved figures. The carvings were bronze castings, with the figure of the dancing Shiva standing on one leg encircled by flames on a circular frame an image found around the world. These bronze castings were but one of the lasting artistic legacies from the Chola Empire and continue today in Thanjavur in a process almost unchanged from those times. Built 300 years after the Shore Temple and monumental in size, the Brihadishwara Temple through the inscriptions outlined for the first time detailed rules, finances, administrative arrangements and ritual activity. Shiva, Vishnu and their cohorts still dominated the iconograph but religion or more particularly Hinduism was becoming more structured and codified.

  In terms of fame and photography, though, it is the Meenakshi Temple in the ancient city of Madurai that grabs all the attention. Mentioned by visiting Greeks and Romans some thousands of years ago, Madurai has long been a city of commercial importance, trade, Tamil culture and worship. Today it is the state’s second city after Chennai and has a population of about a million people. It was the capital of the Pandyan Empire for over a thousand years. The Pandyans were the most southern of the three great historical cultures of Tamil Nadu. It was the wealth from this trade that provided the means for the Pandyan Empire’s greatest creation – the Meenakshi Temple. Here we have maybe the most outstanding example of Tamil architecture, as distinctive in the Tamil south as the Gothic cathedral is in Europe. My hotel was down by the market area in the city, quite close to the Temple. It was incidentally my first experience of ‘a business hotel’ – you book in at any time of day or night and have a period of 24 hours before leaving or extending your stay. It was all a little confusing at first. In this downtown area, everything is dominated by the Temple. It is huge. Covering an area equivalent to 25 football pitches and with some 14 towers, the Temple is a maze of courtyards, halls, and shrines. It is a city within a city. It is a Shiva temple but is dedicated to Shiva’s wife, Meenakshi, or Minakshi as she is sometimes called. It is she who is the patron deity of Madurai. Michael Wood in The Story of India states that the goddess of Madurai is mentioned in Tamil poetry dating back to Roman times but that her name and attributes may point to a more distant connection with the culture of the Bronze Age and earlier. Dominating the Temple profile – and much India tourist brochures and literature – are the magnificent gate towers, some 250 feet high and ornately decorated in garish and lurid coloured plaster characters and scenes from the Mahabharata, the national epic. It is a staggering building and from all the photographs I had seen had always been one of my ‘must visit’ sites in India. And here I was. I spent a day wandering around inside the Temple. It was both exhausting and wonderful. I was unable to do justice to the symbolism, sculptures and ritual activity surrounding me due to my own inadequacies. More importantly though I was able to witness how these most ancient of features still remain vital to people, worshipped as living deities and still a part of everyday life.

  After returning home from Tamil Nadu I watched a three-part television series on the BBC entitled Treasures of the Indus presented by Sona Datta, a curator from the British Museum. They were wonderful programmes on first the Harappa discoveries, then the Mughals and, finally, the temple cultures of Tamil Nadu. I wished I had seen the series before my visit to Tamil Nadu. One of the dominant themes linking across the programmes was the complexity of spirituality and the evolving religiosity in Southeast Asia as exemplified in these three instances at three different times. What emerges is the evolution of Hinduism from a cultural experience to a more organised, ritualised and codified religion. Always complicated with the multitude of deities and narratives – often competing and contradictory – Hinduism emerged as one of the world’s great religions replacing Buddhism in the process. Adaptive to changed circumstances, absorbing influences and different beliefs and interrelating the profane with the divine, emerging Hinduism not only was defined by its tolerance and respect for others but also by its peaceful progression over the millennium. Above all it is a story of the blurring of the illusionary with reality in everyday life and observance. And at the centre of these devotional practices was the temple that has provided a focus for over thousands of years. It’s not surprising that this flowering of temple building and architecture ushered in an explosion of artistic expression, and best seen in the Tamil Nadu temple trail.

  In trying to fathom the complexities and intricacies of southern India, I got talking while in Madurai to this Indian young woman from Chennai. She was a student and was down in Madurai on a sightseeing visit. She knew her Indian history. For most of its history, India was a weak state, she pointed out. The numerous empires and dynasties that were swirling around my head and that provided some rough timeline and storyline for me were, she continued, symptomatic of its weaknesses. I felt a little deflated after all my efforts to make sense of my visits to this or that part of India. Yes, she argued, there were glorious periods, ‘golden ages’, enlightened rulers and dynasties, stunning cultural endeavours and achievements, substantial economic successes and global respect from other trading powers at different times in the country’s history. She was really in her stride by now. But the fundamental weakness that bedevilled historic India then and today, she argued, was the absence of any empire or ruler capable of unifying all its peoples and territories. There was as a consequence an absence of institutions, political legitimacy and bureaucracy necessary to establish a viable functioning state. The very diversity that we foreign tourists find remarkable and welcoming has been India’s Achilles heel. When compared to say China or European countries, India failed historically to create the political infrastructure that managed to incorporate this huge diversity – linguistically
and religiously. This fragmentation was exacerbated by the proliferation of local rulers who were happy to go about their business provided there was no interference.

  Phew, I thought and ordered another beer – my reflex action when I need time to think. However, and notwithstanding these insightful comments by my student friend from Chennai, for most overseas visitors to India, the country’s history and culture is grasped imperfectly through a number of dates and episodes that shaped world history not in the third or eleventh century but in the twentieth century. This more recent history of India – dramatic, brutal and momentous – will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. Most obviously for example is the Independence of India itself in August 1947, the withdrawal of the British and the terrible human costs of the Partition in the creation of Pakistan. The one to two million deaths and eleven million people leaving their ancestral homes to flee to safer venues in the ensuing Hindu-Muslim bloodbath constitute one of the defining global historical episodes of the last hundred years.

  History in the crossfire

  As mentioned earlier, the notion of ‘civilisation’ is a difficult one to grasp or understand even though it is used extensively when discussing India. It seems to be one of those elastic terms which means whatever the authors want it to mean. You have for example ‘Indu civilisation’, ‘Indian civilisation’, ‘Western civilisation’ or ‘Eastern civilisation’, all suggesting many different understandings. Most people probably will associate ‘civilisation’ as something to do with history, language, culture and institutions. Our tourist books confidently talk about the Mughal or Chola civilisations. ‘Civilisations’, or ‘dynasties’ or ‘empires’ seem to be a convenient shorthand for separating great clumps of history into manageable chunks. For serious historians, however, such crude periodisation must be infuriating (but, whisper it, very useful for us tourists). The nature of history, ‘what it is’ and its methodologies have always been subject to lively discussions and debates in India and elsewhere. In recent years, however, and as hinted above, being clearer on what is meant by ‘civilisation’ has moved out of narrow academic concerns into more mainstream media agendas. The heated and occasionally violent discussions around aspects of Indian history have been fuelled by a wider global debate. For example, Samuel P. Huntington, an influential American academic, published in 1993 his seminal article entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” which he later followed with his book, The Clash of Civilizations: And the Remaking of World Order. Focussing on an understanding of the post-Cold War period, Huntington argued that attention to ‘civilisations’ was a better way of understanding the world rather the previous attention given to ‘ideologies’. Given the ‘end of history’ as an American colleague of Huntington described the fall of the Soviet Union, Huntington outlined his argument precisely and clearly. “The twentieth-century conflicts between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism,” he wrote, “is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomena compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.” Religion he argues is the key primary element in “civilizational identity”. Given the “War on Terror” from the world’s superpowers and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the mess that is Libya today, anti-Islamic sentiment, and brutal dictatorship in Egypt and the tragedy that characterises contemporary Syria, Huntington’s arguments provided ready and easy answers that appeared to legitimate the dangerous world turmoil and the actions of the West. ‘Islamophobia’ was a new term that entered the media’s lexicon.

  Adding fuel to this fire was the British historian Niall Ferguson. Describing himself as a “fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang”, his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) and later in 2013, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, made the British Empire respectable once again. As a flattering review in the British Daily Mail newspaper put it, Britain’s Empire stood out “as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law.” Colonised people such as those in India, Ferguson argued in his later text, would not have had their most valuable ideas and institutions – parliamentary democracy, individual freedom and the English language – without the ‘humanitarian’ rule of the British. As might be expected the arguments of ‘how Britain made the world great’ provoked heated and extensive debate not only in the West but in India too. Some of the best of these debates are between Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra that run across many years and are to be found in a number of journals.

  However, it wasn’t the writings of Ferguson and many other Western defenders of Britain’s military and ideological adventures in various parts of the world that were the main stimuli behind the re-emergence of ‘civilisation’ as a focus of interest in the popular press, and especially in India. Instead it was the election of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, that has generated excitement and, also, a deep foreboding within the country. The BJP’s sweeping victory was not totally unexpected given the torpor, stagnation and inactivity of the last years of the Congress government under Manmohan Singh, but the complete collapse of the Congress Party was nevertheless dramatic. Bereft of any significant grassroot organisation unlike the BJP, the Congress party was already faced with formidable obstacles in the overwhelming corporate and small business support for Modi, the sycophantic media support for Modi and a grumbling middle class who felt that Congress had concentrated far too much on the country’s poor. It appeared that most of the country yearned for a new champion in the march towards neoliberal solutions in the country’s stalled economic progress and they seem to have found it in the BJP.

  Later chapters look more closely at the rise of the BJP. Here, the focus is more directed to the purposeful, hateful and divisive atmosphere that has enveloped ‘history’ as its focus. Worries had been expressed by an increasing number of Indian intellectuals of the religious and ideological baggage that is, and has been, associated with the BJP and its more hidden allies. In an article in the Times of India entitled “Journey towards soft fascism”, and written a week before the 2014 election for example, Kanti Bajpai warns of the dangers of a majority-led government under Modi. He describes this as “soft fascism”, which is, he argues, “simply a society marked by less authoritarianism, intimidation, chauvinism, submission and social Darwinism” than “hard fascism”. More ominously, he suggests that soft fascism: “rises, establishes itself and consolidates its hold through the structures and systems of democracy.” ‘Soft fascism’ maybe a little over the top to put it mildly but it illustrates some of the fears that have been aroused by the rise of the BJP.

  Established just over thirty years ago, the BJP is generally seen as reactionary party (rather than a progressive right-wing Party), chauvinist and with an ugly communal outlook (i.e. anti-Muslim). If BJP’s nationalist ‘masculine’ Hindu outlook was not enough of a worry, there is the larger issue of the influence within the BJP of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded as a direct imitation of European fascist organisations. The RSS is, argues Amit Chaudhuri, a “disciplinarian, quasi-militant, extreme right wing outfit.” The promotion of a fundamentalist, literal brand of Hinduism is resulting, he suggests, in leading to “the political, instrumental use of Hinduism to defend and assert identity while assailing other identities.” Given that India at the time of Independence opted for ‘secularism’ to prevent religious strife, the implications of a move towards Hinduism rather than secularism as the dominant paradigm in the near future has grave and dangerous implications. Hinduism with its incredibly rich, creative and fluid legacy as a non-organised religion is to be replaced as a narrow, literal, dogmatic, monitored and puritanical collection of ‘truths’. For most scholars and believers, Hinduism is far from being a monolithic belief system. It has no founder, no single canonical text and no ecclesiastical structure. Based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, the evolution of Hinduism traditionally has been seen as a complex pattern of groups, cults, ideas and s
ects interacting with other religions such as Muslims at different times, in different contexts and in different ways. Instead we have today an attempt to replace this complex, rich myriad history with a simple historical narrative of India defined by two antagonistic religious communities with a glorious Hindu ‘golden age’ followed by the ‘dark ages’ with the arrival of the brutal Mughals. Today it is the focus on a single god – the warrior god Ram – that is promoted and used as the mobiliser of true Hindus against the outsiders and invaders, the Muslims. India has become the land of Ram. Myth and fiction is asserted as historical fact – a ‘post-truth’ in today’s political lexicon.