Suttee: Wagner's Götterdämmerung & Kirtane's Elder Madhavrao's Death...थोरले माधवराव यांचा मृत्यु

Today March 8 2014 is International Women's Day (IWD)

(Warning: In this post, I have quoted from Wendy Doniger’s book 'The Hindus: An Alternative History'...The book has been withdrawn from the Indian market by its publisher Penguin India in February 2014)

J L Nehru, 'The Discovery of India', 1946:

"This suttee, or the immolation of women on the funeral pyre of their husbands, was never widespread. But rare instances continued to occur among the upper classes. Probably the practice was brought to India originally by the Scytho-Tartars, among whom the custom prevailed of vassals and liegemen killing themselves on the death of their lord. In early Sanskrit literature the suttee custom is denounced. Akbar tried hard to stop it, and the Marathas also were opposed to it."

Wendy Doniger, 'The Hindus / An Alternative History', 2009:

"To return to my central metaphor, once you’ve seen the rabbit (or hare) in the moon, it’s hard to see the man anymore, but the double vision is what we should strive for. This means that when we consider, for instance, the burning of living women on the pyres of their dead husbands (which we call suttee, to distinguish it from the woman who commits the act, a woman whom the Hindus call a sati), we must try to see their rabbit, to see the reasons why some Hindus thought (and some continue to think) that it is a good idea for some women to burn themselves to death on their husbands’ funeral pyres, while other Hindus strongly disagree. On the other hand, we cannot, and need not, stop seeing our American man (or, perhaps, woman) in the moon: the reasons why many Americans think that suttee is not a good idea at all. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that the image of a duck-rabbit (also, actually, a duck-hare) was either a rather smug rabbit or a rather droopy duck but could not be both at once. But this is precisely the goal that a non-Hindu should have in studying Hinduism: to see in the moon both our man and their rabbit."

Philip Mason, 'The Men Who Ruled India', 1953:

 “…particularly in Bengal, suttee was sordid and cruel…in nine cases out of ten, the woman in Bengal went to the flames in fear and horror…she was usually tied to the corpse, often already putrid; men stood by with poles to push her back in case the bonds should burn through and victim, scorched and maimed, should struggle free…”


Piers Brendon, 'The Decline and Fall of The British Empire 1781-1997':

"Lord William Bentinck...led this drive to westernise. He banned suttee, the burning of Hindu widows —which Europeans sometimes attended as a spectacle, like the animal fights which rajahs staged for them."

Every kid in India (and England) once was taught that Lord William Bentinck, with the help of  Raja Ram Mohan Roy, was responsible for abolishing the tradition of suttee in India.

Historian John Keay has an interesting take on the subject:

"...With Lord William Bentinck, an Evangelical sympathiser, as governor-general (1828–35) a start was made on India’s ‘reformation’ with legislation to outlaw practices like widow-burning (sati, suttee) and ritualised highway killing (thagi, thuggee). Neither was particularly common, nor were they in any sense central or peculiar to Hindu orthodoxy. The effect of legislating against them, whilst it probably saved some lives, was principally to stigmatise Hinduism as indeed abominable to Christian consciences. Although Indian converts to Christianity were few and although Indians were shielded from the worst tirades of Evangelicalism, its assertive new ideology gained a degree of acceptance amongst the British in India. Their rule itself became increasingly imbued with a sense of divine mission, their earlier toleration and even support of Indian religions evaporated, their conviction of Christianity’s moral superiority grew, and their solicitude for the taboos of their subjects was eroded by carelessness and ignorance. When an ambitious army chaplain or a well-meaning subaltern favoured the sepoys under his command with a homily on ‘Christian values’, they might once have indulged him. Now, apprised of a rumoured conversion or smarting under a caste affront, they fidgeted with apprehension..."

Ms. Doniger is more severe on the British than this:

"...The British law probably facilitated more women’s deaths than it saved, and its main effect was to stigmatize Hinduism as an abomination in Christian eyes. Suttee is a pornographic image, the torture of a woman by fire, hot in every sense of the word. Relatively few women died that way, in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands who died every day of starvation and malnutrition, but suttee had PR value. Thus the Raj had it both ways, boasting both that it did not interfere with other people’s religions and that it defended human rights. The debate, in both India and Britain, turned what had been an exceptional practice into a symbol of the oppression of all Indian women and the moral bankruptcy of Hinduism. Nor did the 1829 law, or, for that matter, the new legislation enacted by India after its Independence put an end to it; at least forty widows have burned since 1947, most of them largely ignored until the suttee of Rup Kanwar in 1987 became a cause célèbre, and some even now attested only in obscure local archives."
 
Vinayak Janardan Kirtane (विनायक जनार्दन कीर्तने) wrote a Marathi play called  “Elder Madhavrao’s Death" ( थोरले माधवराव यांचा मृत्यु)  in 1861.  It was supposedly the first independent, literary and published play in Marathi.

It was staged in 1862 and had a scene of Madhavrao’s (1745-1772) wife Ramabai (रमाबाई) going suttee on his funeral pyre.

A woman going suttee was considered almost a goddess. To create publicity stunt, theatre company who was staging the play started bringing a few ladies from the audience on to the stage to worship Ramabai !

Soon the scene became so popular that it alone would last for a couple of hours! People used to forget that the actor playing Ramabai was a male – Vishnu Vatave (विष्णु वाटवे) ! People took home suttee’s 'prashad' (like flowers, wheat/rice grains, vermillion/ turmeric etc.) from the stage the way the people must have taken it in real life in November 1772!


[based on D G Godse (द ग गोडसे), 'Butterfly Possessing Stinger' ('नांगी असलेले फुलपाखरू ') 1989]

Was this glorification- now perhaps sounding creepy to urban middle class- unique to India?

Hardly.

None other than Richard Wagner,  one of the greatest Western classical music composers, did it in his opera Götterdämmerung, 1876 !

"...Richard Wagner staged suttee in his opera Götterdämmerung by having his heroine, Brünnhilde, ride her horse onto the flaming pyre of her beloved Siegfried.  In an early draft of the opera (summer of 1856), Brünnhilde spouts a kind of garbled Vedanta (via the philosopher Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy in German): “I leave the Land of Desire, I flee the Land of Illusion forever; I close behind me the open door of eternal Becoming. . . . Freed from rebirth, everything eternal . . . I saw the world end.”  Thus some Europeans glorified the custom of suttee."

 (Wendy Doniger, 'The Hindus / An Alternative History', 2009)

This is just one example. One can learn about more such from Doniger's book. 

'The Sati of Ramabai, Wife of Madhavrao Peshwa (reigned 1761-1772)'

Courtesy:  Dorothy and Richard Sherwood and Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lenart

watercolors

Artist: Unknown

After the picture above was posted on FB page of Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, Pune in October 2013 by Pratish Khedekar,  there was this comment:

"the position of Ramabai is very interesting, traditionally the sati immolates herself seated with husbands body draped over her lap"

In the picture above Ramabai is shown lying next to her dead husband's body and not carrying his head in his lap. 

Why?

"the Atharva Veda regards the practice of the wife’s lying down beside her dead husband (but perhaps then getting up again) as an ancient custom. On the other hand, women in the Vedic period may have performed a purely symbolic suicide on their husbands’ graves, which was later (hindsight alert!) cited as scriptural support for the actual self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres called suttee." ('The Hindus / An Alternative History', 2009)

Was the artist perhaps depicting the scene of suttee as was perceived in the Atharva Veda? Just a symbolic suicide?

 

Kim Novak- Now and Then...धम्मपद

The Dhammapada (धम्मपद):

"Look at your body—

A painted puppet, a poor toy

Of jointed parts ready to collapse,

A diseased and suffering thing

With a head full of false imaginings." 

 (as quoted in 'The Conspiracy Against The Human Race / A Contrivance of Horror' , 2010 by Thomas Ligotti)

Carol Tavris, review of  'Lip Service' by Marianne LaFrance, WSJ, August 6 2011:

"...This is why, as Ms. LaFrance shows, Botox treatments smooth out feelings as well as wrinkles. When Botox is injected into the muscle that encircles the eyes to eliminate what Ms. LaFrance unfortunately calls "those awful crow's-feet wrinkles" (she of all people should refer to them as laugh lines!), it inhibits the muscles that convey delight, curiosity or irritation. Appropriately enough, it does not affect the fake smile..."

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, March 5 2014:

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make beautiful. Just look what they did to Kim Novak. Until Sunday night, most of the world thought of Novak primarily as the siren of Hitchcock’s iconic “Vertigo,” a famously stunning actress whose career peak happened nearly 60 years ago. Then she showed up at the Oscars, presenting the award for best animated feature with an admiring Matthew McConaughey. Her hair was a shoulder length tumble of blond, but it was her face that was the most surprising for a woman of her 81 years. Her eyes seemed pulled back, her lips seemed strangely inflated and her skin seemed at once unnaturally taut and puffy. If you were on Twitter on the time, you could almost hear the collective gasp...."

Now:

courtesy: AP and The Atlantic

Apparently, Ms. Novak,  the 81-year-old actor, struggled to speak at the Oscars on the morning (in India) of March 3 2014.

Even her smile, fake or genuine,  seems to be affected in the picture above.

Spencer Kornhaber wrote in The Atlantic:

 "...The talk seems to be a bunch of people arriving at the same joke about the 81-year-old Vertigo star thinking she'd arrived to present an award for "Frozen," because of the way her face looked. Donald Trump, speaking as he does for civilization's baser instincts, tweeted that "Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!’"..."

Then:

courtesy: The Golden Age of Hollywood

I am Forlorn and Destitute, and Misery is My Ultimate Lot

Today March 3 2014 is 307th Death Anniversary of Emperor Aurangzeb who ruled most of India/ South Asia from 1658-1707, a record that may never be broken.

World's leading historian John Darwin says:

"...Aurangzeb’s reign came to be seen by later historians as the climax of the Mughal era, and his death as the signal for a new dark age of imperial collapse, from which India was rescued by British intervention after 1765..."

('After Tamerlane / The Global History of Empire since 1405', 2007)

Emperor Aurangzeb in front of soldiers and an elephant, 1672 


By:  Olfert Dapper (c 1635-1689), A Dutchman who never travelled outside the Netherlands!

Courtesy: Wellcome Library, London  (Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

 John Keay, 'India A History', 2000/2010

"...In 1705 Aurangzeb fell seriously ill. A frail and shrouded spectre dressed ‘all over white’, as a visitor put it, with turban and beard of the same ghostly pallor, he was installed in a palanquin and carefully carried back to Ahmadnagar. Even then he was a long time dying. Embittered and isolated, he prayed hard, bemoaned the state of affairs, and found fault with his officials; he had already despaired of most of his progeny. As for himself, ‘I am,’ he wrote, ‘forlorn and destitute, and misery is my ultimate lot.’ The misery ended in 1707, his ninetieth year. His funeral expenses were supposedly met from the sale of the Qurans he had copied and the caps he had stitched. True to his wishes, he was buried not beneath a stylish mountain of marble and sandstone at the heart of the empire but in a simple grave beside a village shrine dear to the Muslims of the Deccan. At Khuldabad, not far from Aurangabad, a neat little mosque now flanks the small courtyard in which stands the least pretentious of all the Mughal tombs. There is barely room for a vanload of pilgrims. And instead of a great white dome, a dainty but determined tree provides the only canopy..."

Painted seal of Mughal Emperor Awrangzib ibn Shah Djahan I, Abul Muzzaffar Muhammad Alamgir surrounded by the names of his predecessors,  c. 1669

Courtesy: Wellcome Library, London  (Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ )

 

Science Demands Heroic Minds, But Not Heroic Morals

Today February 28 2014 is National Science Day in India

J. Robert Oppenheimer:

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That's the way it was with the atomic bomb."

Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, 'Outlook', July 2002:

"Vedic astrology is one of the six limbs of the Vedic knowledge-system. Jyotish-shastra—that combines astronomy and astrology—is a coherent, consistent and comprehensive body of knowledge with theory, practice and underlying mathematical models, and is certainly a science."

Czesław Miłosz:

" If I had to tell what the world is for me 
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theatre seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance"

 
John Horgan, Scientific American, June 2013:

"There are lots of other irrational beliefs out there that science should try to cure people of. Some examples: Belief that string theory and multiverses are legitimate scientific propositions and not just science fiction with equations. Belief that snazzy new mathematical models running on ever more powerful computers will help the social sciences become as rigorous as nuclear physics. Belief that evolutionary psychology represents psychology’s final, triumphant paradigm instead of just another fad. Belief that behavioral genetics will soon transcend its embarrassing record of bogus claims—the gay gene, God gene, warrior gene, high-IQ gene, and so on–and become a credible field. Belief that drugs like SSRIs represent a huge advance over psychoanalysis and other “talking cures” for mental illness. Belief that humanity is headed toward a Singularity, when we all turn into software and live happily ever after in cyberspace."

Jeanette Winterson:

"As explanations of the world, fairy stories tell us what science and philosophy cannot and need not. There are different ways of knowing. "Bring me the two most precious things in the city," said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird."

John Gray:

"An old fairy tale has it that science began with the rejection of superstition. In fact it was the rejection of rationalism that gave birth to scientific inquiry. Ancient and medieval thinkers believed the world could be understood by applying first principles. Modern science begins when observation and experiment come first, and the results are accepted even when what they show seems to be impossible. In what might seem a paradox, scientific empiricism – reliance on actual experience rather than supposedly rational principles – has very often gone with an interest in magic.
Science and the occult have interacted at many points. They came together in two revolts against death, each claiming that science could give humanity what religion and magic had promised – immortal life."

'Science, Mystery and Magic II (superman)', 2011 (Oil on Canvas)

Artist: Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra

Courtesy: THUKRAL & TAGRA

 For most middle-class Maharashtrians and their media,  scientists- likes of Jayant Narlikar (जयंत नारळीकर), A P J Abdul Kalam,  Stephen Hawking,  Albert Einstein, Vijay Bhatkar (विजय भाटकर), Raghunath Mashelkar (रघुनाथ माशेलकर), Anil Kakodkar (अनिल काकोडकर) -  are like gods.

They can do almost no wrong. 

  

A few of them are best-selling authors in Maharashtra. They also are often sought after for 'sound bite' on most issues that attract media. All Indians among them have been given 'Padma' awards.

I have hardly read- if any- a critical assessment of their scientific work or general writings in a Marathi newspaper or TV.

They are as much celebrated for their morals as their intellect.


Adam Gopnik writes of Galileo:

"...In 1592, Galileo made his way to Padua, right outside Venice, to teach at the university. He promised to help the Venetian Navy, at the Arsenale, regain its primacy, by using physics to improve the placement of oars on the convict-rowed galleys. Once there, he earned money designing and selling new gadgets. He made a kind of military compass and fought bitterly in support of his claim to have invented it. Oddly, he also made money by casting horoscopes for his students and wealthy patrons. (Did he believe in astrology? Maybe so. He cast them for himself and his daughters, without being paid.)..."

(The New Yorker, February 11 2013)

Mr. Gopnik further writes:

"...Contemporary historians of science have a tendency to deprecate the originality of the so called scientific revolution, and to stress, instead, its continuities with medieval astrology and alchemy. And they have a point. It wasn’t that one day people were doing astrology in Europe and then there was this revolution and everyone started doing astronomy. Newton practiced alchemy; Galileo drew up all those horoscopes. But if you can’t tell the difference in tone and temperament between Galileo’s sound and that of what went before, then you can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese. The difference is apparent if you compare what astrologers actually did and what the new astronomers were doing..."

I agree. You must appreciate "the difference in tone and temperament between Galileo’s sound and that of what went before,"

But Mr. Gopnik's conclusion of the essay is very disturbing:

"...It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals..."