Da Vinci’s Devi

Everybody loves a conspiracy. And Dan Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, is creatively brilliant, a banquet of a book, except the end is a bit tame, don’t you think: Let the patriarchal status quo continue, keep Magdalene and the sacred feminine alive merely in song and story without official restitution, despite five million women being killed in the names of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? The plot is drawn from the politics of religion and the re-writing of history books, except that the ‘history book’ in question is the world’s number one best-seller: the Bible. Nowhere does Brown mock Christ or speak of him with anything but love and respect, but — and this is what we envy the West for — he critiques, without fear of fatwas, riots and vandals, the expulsion of the sacred feminine from official Christianity and the political makeover enforced on Jesus four centuries after his death when Constantine the Roman emperor hijacked his legacy for his own political benefit.

I won’t spoil the story for you in case you haven’t read it yet. However, Express readers are no strangers to the issue of the sacred feminine that keeps appearing in Faithline, whether it is a Devi story or Leah, the Californian rabbi whom you met in Cochin last September, who’s a votary of Shekinah the Jewish goddess. Or Faithline’s theory that Europeans slid into the Dark Ages when they threw out the Old Gods for sexless church dogma, seeing light only in the Renaissance when they let the Old Gods out to romp unofficially but openly in their lives through art, literature and architecture. Yet, your columnist is accused by the patriarchal Hindu right of being “an honorary lady Jesuit” on the payroll of Opus Dei! So it was with that extra edge of interest that I finally got around to reading the wholly unputdownable Da Vinci Code.

The strangest part, for an Eastern reader, as I’m sure many of you found, was that reading the book became an interactive game. Many points it raised may be revelatory and shocking to the Western reader but are so internalised by Indians that we start second-guessing the author on what argument or evidence he’ll produce next. And we’re usually right! We guess the identity of the Holy Grail well ahead, recognise the tantrik rites of the secret society that guards this knowledge and a lot more. And when Brown begins on the symbolic structure of the cathedral, the Indian knows what’s coming a mile away: it’s the female bod, because in our temples the sanctum sanctorum is called garbha-griha (the womb). The nice thing is that the book is all about riddles, so you’re going to have lots of fun, with plenty of serious stuff to chew over, too.