Kamandalu Katha

It used to be an article of deepest faith, the kamandalu or waterpot made from a dry pumpkin. The process of making one was itself reportedly of great spiritual significance. A ripe pumpkin, perfect in every particular, was plucked tenderly from the plant. Its succulent inner flesh was removed and the shell cleaned and dried until it hardened to portable firmness. A handle was affixed and a spout. So exactly did a human being have to break away from attachment to the physical world and clean his inner self of egotistical desires, otherwise described as a detox of the ‘I’ quotient. This enabled the said individual to experience the “bliss of the Realised Self” (Sat-chid-anand), or nectar, which the kamandalu was meant to hold.

The deities themselves were proud to hold a kamandalu. The iconography of Brahma the Creator shows his four hands holding the Vedas, a sruva or sacrificial tool, a japmala and a kamandalu. Knowledge, yagna and meditation (symbolised by the first three) allowed one finally to experience the greatest of the Creator’s gifts, the nectar of God-attainment contained in the kamandalu. The four faces of Brahma held more clues to what life was meant to be about: They represented the functioning of the antahkarna or inner personality in its four elements — mind, intellect, ego and “conditioned consciousness” (manas-budhi-ahamkara and chitta).

A person who figured out these components of his nature could then expand it to a macro-awareness of himself as part of a larger creation and of the One-ness of God that united all the outside stuff. So Brahma’s iconography is actually the first articulation of modern India’s political and cultural basis: Unity in diversity. Most interesting is the reconciliation of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ in this concept. Because all this high talk of ‘mano-buddhi’ hankara-chittaani-naaham’ embodied by the Creator, is rooted in manifest reality — the lotus on which Brahma sits springs from the belly of Vishnu! But here on earth we can only imagine the grief and terror of the wives or mothers when some man, fed up of grahastashram, took diksha from a dikshitar and picked up a kamandalu, raring to hit the tapovan to get on to Higher Things. Buddhism and Hinduism are bursting with such men. (Like many Sufis: somebody married them off to some hapless girl and one fine day, they dumped their wives and rushed off to Find God). The idea of self-realisation through defusing one’s meaner, pettier instincts is obviously lovely. But what terror resided in that wretched pumpkin for those cast aside for it. In today’s world, the faithlessness of the kamandalu is rooted in the manifest reality of our politics. Kaddu curry, anyone?