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With the fall of pagan Rome began the process of the extirpation of the gods and goddesses of Europe. For centuries, their memory was kept alive by a few brave souls and by old censored texts banished to the church libraries where access was limited. When these old memories stirred, they begat the Renaissance which, in turn, set in motion a wide-ranging search to recover the lost heritage of the ancient world. One goal of this search is to recover the grammar of ancient myths. Old legends were first read as straight stories about gods and goddesses. With time, the psychological dimension of the myths became apparent. Most recently, the physical and spiritual layers of this knowledge have been uncovered. Gods are sometimes stars and planets, sometimes they are cognitive centers. The play of gods weaves patters that resonate with our deepest emotions. The ongoing decoding of ancient myths has been facilitated most by the study of Indian mythology, because India remains one region where the old has continued to live and prosper. The past two thousand years have been the golden age of Indic myths. Old stories were expanded and enlarged in massive volumes called the Puranas. We all know the enchanting stories of Krishna and Radha, or Parvati's fierce austerities to obtain Shiva; there are others, equally fascinating tales about a host of other gods and goddesses. This brings us to Ka a narrative on Indian mythology by Roberto Calasso. A famous hymn of the Rigveda (10.121) speaks of sacrifice to ``Ka'', literally ``who,'' and this hymn has been taken as representative of the openness of the Indian mind at that time. The explanation in another text is that ``Ka'' is really Prajapati, the lord of the creatures, and it is to Prajapati that the frame of stories keeps on returning. Calasso binds the stories together loosely. He begins with Garuda's study of the Vedas and puzzlement with Ka. Successive episodes cover the destruction of the sacrifice of Daksha by his son-in-law, Shiva; the wedding of Shiva and Parvati; the battle between the Devas and the Asuras; Chyavana and Sukanya; the horse sacrifice; Krishna and the gopis; the Mahabharata; and the Buddha. In brief, the book is an anthology of some of the best-known stories from Indian mythology. Calasso is like a kathakara spinning old material into new narrative. This is an old genre, and this is how the medieval Puranas were created. In our times, we have great kathakaras like Murari Bapu and Asha Ram holding audiences spellbound with their renderings of episodes from the Ramayana or the Bhagavata Purana. Calasso writes with verve and intelligence but does he capture the ``deep structure'' of the Indian myths like Murari Bapu does? Can Calasso be counted upon to create new stories similar to the ones that he has taken from the old texts? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions is a resounding``no.'' Calasso uses the interpretive apparatus of the 19th century Indologists to guide him. This apparatus depended primarily on a straight-forward linguistic analysis of the narrative. But recent scholarship has shown that this approach is largely wrong. Consider the name of any god, say Vishnu. In the same hymn it can stand for the abstract God, the personal deity, a star, a psychological center, a part of the human body, or a specific implement of ritual. The 19th century translations often conflated these categories with ridiculous results. It is as if future linguists were to insist that quantum mechanics must be read literally and to see an electron as being a wave sometimes and a particle atother times merely reflects a pathology of thought. Another trouble with the scholarship of the19th century was that it dismissed traditional meanings or was simply ignorant of them. For example, we were told that Rigveda 10.86 is a dialog between Indra, his wife, Vrishakapi (``a monkey bursting with seed''), and the monkey's wife! The Orientalists did not consider the possibility that while ``kapi'' may mean monkey, ``Vrishakapi'' could be something else. Horseradish and horseweed need not be connected to horse, or in future a mouse might as much mean a computer accessory as a little mammal. In case of ambiguity, it is best to take the aid of early texts. And what do they say? The Nirukta, the earliest extant book on Sanskrit etymology, explains Vrishakapi as the sun. In the Mahabharata, Vrishakapi is described as the unicorn, which symbolizes the sun.The hymn 10.86 turns out to have a perfectly reasonable astronomical meaning. It also provides an important link to the iconography of the Harappan period. We don't know if the rituals described in Indian books ever actually took place. Calasso speaks of the agnichayana ritual in the second part of his book. In this ritual 10,800 bricks of various kinds--and of precise dimensions-- were piled in five layers to represent Time (Prajapati) in the shape of a falcon. The structurewas rebuilt in successively larger dimensions 95 times, so that a total of more than a million bricks were needed! There is no evidence that such structures were ever built, because a million bricks piled at one place should have left a trace. A lot of the ritual described in the Vedic texts is notional and metaphorical. Calasso devotes several pages to the horse-sacrifice. But one of the earliest texts, Taittiriya Samhita 5.4.12.3, says that``it is a disused sacrifice, for, say they, who knows if the whole of it is performed or not?''Ashva of the horse sacrifice, we are told, is really the sun! There are other texts which tell us that the Vedic sages and animals inhabit the internal cosmos of man. According to the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad the Seven Sages are our two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and the mouth! Paradox lies at the heart of all mythology, especially Indian mythology. Myths are riddles that reflect the mystery of our existence, and they deepen this mystery to help us transcend (sacrifice) our normal ways of seeing. Calasso's retelling captures a few of the riddles; more often he is literal, losing the essential meaningand spoiling the fun. No wonder, his stories can confuse as much as they illumine. A lot of good expository writing on Indian mythology is still confined either to recent scholarly books, journal articles, or is available only in non-English languages.For someone needing a reliable introduction to this writing in English, I would recommend books by Aurobindo, Heesterman, and Zimmer. |