India an Indologist imagines

I dropped archaeology to enroll for Indology at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. Gradually, I began to reinvent India for myself. Whenever I began to think I knew something, my German teachers cleared away that illusion quickly. Only later did I realise, not through my teachers, but through general academia, that this was part of the subtle game that cultures and cultural scientists play with each other. The "I know better than you do" syndrome found in all walks of life that gets institutionalised in the great edifices of universities.

My first experience of Indological fieldwork was in Pushkar, Brahma’s holy city. Fiftytwo white ghats surrounding a blue lake. Three to four hundred places of worship: temples, household shrines, sati memorials… Brahmaji at the western end of the town on a raise, walled in by a fortress-like temple. Brahmaji with four faces, the fourth looking tenderly at Gayatri, his second wife. Savitri, his first wife, sits angrily upon a hill far away, outside the limits of the town. Why did he have two wives? To find out I pored over ha-ndwritten manusc-ripts of the Push-kara-Mahatmya, the Glory of Pushkar, composed in Sanskrit. Long ago, in the golden age, Brahma had performed a Vedic ritual in praise of fire here. But interruption upon interruption threaten-ed to dismantle the yagna.

A snake was thrown into the gathering of priests, a naked skull-bearing yogi was angry that he wasn’t invited, a wild, ecstatic ascetic did a pr-alaya-dance, Brahma’s wife Savitri was absent at the auspicious beginning (so he married Gayatri, a young cowherd girl)… Intrusions and breakdowns were the order of the five-day-long ceremo-ny. But breakdowns were declared as opportunities for growth. Equivalences were laid down. The exact science of ritual got woven into the undulating ph-ysical, religious and social landscape. The praise of fire became the crossing, the tirtha.

But still the question remains: why Indology? Why not IT or CA or MD or MBA? Well, given the multifarious nature of Brahma’s universe, not everybody is slotted to do the same thing as everybody else. For me, Indology is an exercise in appreciation. Appreciation doesn’t mean saying how wonderful and how good a thing is. Appreciation begins with a simple acknowledgment of how things are, the suchness and the thusness. Not how things should be or ought to be. But while I appreciate, I also create and construct. Like the title of a well known scholarly work says, I "imagine" India. I imagine India both from outside, in the scholarly discourses of universities in Germany, England, the US and India, and from within, from the community, the family, the place I live in. Not through fantasy, but imagination, a creative and cognitive faculty.

The question is, what kind of world does my imagination comprehend and construct? Is it a world of fragmentation and fissure or of richness and wholeness? In a universe where Brahma transforms rather than destroys, everything has its place, both worlds are equally good or equally bad. Who knows really? The fact of the matter is, that choosing to create one or the other world affects the quality of our own lives. I, for one, choose to imagine India as drenched with creative, human potential, exploding in full blown self-expression right now!

The writer is Professor of Religion, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg and New Delhi