The Reality of the Kali Yuga

The transmigration of individual souls, long derided as the most fantastic of Hindu beliefs, has in the last century been made irrefutable by the scientific discoveries of the matter-energy continuum and the genetic code. When a person dies the indestructible energy pattern of the body floats free and transports the unique soul to a new material form, much as a radio wave carries a human voice to a rightly tuned antenna around the world.

That leaves only one fundamental belief of Hinduism without a publicly argued rational explanation: the long four-stage moral cycle from a Golden Age of virtue to the dank corruption of the Kali Yuga.

This lack of argument should be seen as part of our general cultural amnesia, for our ancients never postulated anything without reason. Indeed, it does not require much analysis to reveal the rationale for the four yuga cycle.

The first phase, when virtue is “firmly founded on four feet,” harks back to the time when humanity was part of Nature and cultural behavior closely reflected the instinctive. Ideas of the “Noble Savage” and “primitive communism” reflect somewhat similar thinking in the West. This was the time when the Saptarishis, seeking peace among the many tribes of India, assembled all their sacred lore into the Vedas, thereby underlining large commonalities among the groups and creating a common object of veneration.

The second phase of reduced but still excellent virtue was the time of the Upanishads, when rishis in their forest abodes agreed on the existence of a Paramatma universally immanent as the Eternal Law (Sanathana Dharma). The idea that a firm and unbreakable chain of karmic causality controlled individual destiny countered the tyranny of the tribe and gradually reduced groups to vague caste identities associated with specialized functions in an interdependent society. 

As hunter gatherer tribes settled into agricultural existence a protective monarch became necessary; the Ramayana captured and promoted the ideal of that new political reality. The change caused a drop in virtue from the previous era because the concentration of political power and land ownership inevitably introduced a considerable measure of negotiation and thus guile into social relations.

The third era, the time of the Mahabharata, saw the lust for power explode into great imperial conflict. Sri Krishna, acknowledged as the only “purnaswaroop” of Vishnu’s incarnations, set right the growing imbalance of the age and, in the Bhagavad Gita, instructed the virtuous how to endure the Kali Yuga to come.

That final age of overweening corruption can be seen rationally as the shadow of material progress in the preceding Yugas.

The specialized division of labor and the freedom of individuals to make moral and economic choices – a combination that Adam Smith in 18th Century England would describe as the essential attributes of a wealth-creating free market – had made India an immensely rich country. Its luxurious products, ranging from spices that preserved food to fine cotton cloth and diamond jewelry, attracted traders from the far ends of Eurasia and further added to the country's fabled wealth.

As imperial power had corrupted older ideals of governance, so wealth and luxury undermined the spiritual value system founded on the teachings of the Upanishads. 

The tamasic qualities of greed, jealousy and anger unmoored “practical” men and women from the fine concern with the truth founded in concern for karmic consequences. As that phenomenon grew it led to a larger closing of the Indian mind, preventing the society from perceiving and responding to internal and external threats. The ineffectiveness of leadership resulted in things falling apart at the slightest challenge; every invader found Indian allies and collaborators.

Interestingly, India did not attract invaders just with its wealth; its religious concepts -- or rather, incomprehension of them -- were key factors stirring them into action.

Within India, the concept of a Universal Spirit was firmly anchored in the concepts of Dharma and Karma, both preventing any individual or group from setting rules on behalf of the Almighty. Those anchors were lost as monotheism made its way from India to the philosophy of Plato. and then into the first Greek translation of the Jewish Bible three centuries before the advent of Jesus.

Within the Jewish fold the loss of constraints on the concept of God had little negative effect because of the belief in Israel’s exclusive covenant with YAHWEH; but as the messianic faiths of Christianity and Islam advanced exclusive claims on God that delegitimized each other and all other religions, the result was unending conflict.

The economic and political fallout was heavy. As Islamic conquests around the Mediterranean cut off Christian Europe’s access to the Indian spice trade it inspired an ongoing search for alternate routes to India. Marco Polo skirted north of Muslim lands to China, and his book describing a return to Europe via India, gave Christopher Columbus the idea that another path to the Orient might lie across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, an old Phoenician legend recounted by Herodotus that Africa was an island led the Portuguese to explore a southward sea route. 

Six years after Columbus made landfall at Hispaniola, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern cape of Africa and a Gujarati pilot took him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. A later Portuguese expedition to India was blown far off course by a storm off the western coast of Africa and landed up in Brazil. Within a matter of decades Europeans moved from belief in a flat earth to circumnavigating the globe.

I have described in an earlier post the horrendous consequences of European expansion for the people of the newly discovered regions. In India the European intrusions were preceded by those of Arabs, Turks and Afghans occurring as it were, in slow motion over the period of a millennium. There was no concerted response even though Guru Nanak went throughout the country seeking to spark a renaissance. It took the mass murder and dire poverty inflicted by the British to bring his efforts to fruition four centuries later.

As the country now looks to a period of sustained economic growth it is well to remember that the path out of the Kali Yuga must be essentially spiritual and that enormous challenges face us. Our political elite is sodden with corruption, our policing authorities are wolves, the intellectual leaders who should be helping India recover its true self are in the pay of our most bitter enemies, and even some of the leaders of our fighting forces, men who should value honor above life itself, have sold their integrity for that most pitiable of rewards, money.

I firmly believe that our exit from the Kali Yuga is unstoppable. The power of the bhakti of the great mass of Indians – certainly the only thing that has kept the country on an even keel through the worst disasters – will ultimately cleanse the elite. However, there is no predicting the pace of change. It will depend entirely on the moral conduct of younger generations. If they are committed above all else to personal integrity and sacrifice in the service of the country India can recover itself swiftly. If not, we could linger for generations in the current bewildered and weakened state at the mercy of brutal foreign forces.

There are many signs those forces are strengthening. The latest is the announcement of an Indian chapter of Al Qaeda, which has from its inception been under British control. I take it as an indication that the British incubus is readying like some real life Voldemort to return from the realm of the undead.

As with the evil Lord of the Harry Potter stories, Britain has a range of allies awaiting the return, from corporate leaders, media houses and poisonous advertising agencies to openly anti national A-list film stars and of course, the corrupt in every field with black money under British management.

Also, a slow coup d'etat seems to be gathering strength from within the civil service that runs everything from elections to our unconstitutional and out of control Intelligence Bureau. The death of a popular BJP politician in a car accident in Delhi, the fall that put another outspoken leader into a coma in Rajasthan, the attempt to tar the most active environmental activists in the country, and now the bid to bring the judiciary under bureaucratic control, are not incidental straws in the wind. .

They should put everyone on alert. In fact, everyone should be prepared for a 9/11 type attack that will justify declaration of an Emergency and suspension of civil rights and procedures.

Remembering Guru Nanak

Two saint-poets stand at the beginning of the Indian renaissance that is still gathering force. One was Kabir, a Muslim foundling raised by a Hindu, the other was Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion.

Both of them revived the distilled excellence of Indian tradition, freeing it from centuries of meaningless ritualism.

They were born (Kabir 1440 and Nanak 1469) before Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola and Vasco da Gama came ashore in Kerala; but their legacy is very much part of the modern Indian mainstream.

Both were “Bhakti” (devotional) poets, part of a movement rooted in the Gita that was revived in Tamil Nadu during the long, slow decline of Buddhism, first by the Saiva Nayanars (5th-10th Century) and then the Vaisnava Alwars (6 to 9 Century).

Spreading to North India as Islam made inroads into Indian society the vibrant faith of the Bhakti poets sustained Hinduism as it came under foreign assault and, especially in Kabir and Nanak, sought to enfold the invading religion.

Kabir’s impact on India was spiritual and literary; that of Nanak was more: like the ancient Rishis, the Buddha and Sankara; he set the wheel of Dharma moving anew. The rise of the Sikhs as a warrior community sparked that of the Marathas under Chatrapati Shivaji, and together they doomed the Mughal Empire. To say that is not to slight the Mughals, who were by then thoroughly Indian by blood and vision; but they were, barring Akbar, firmly of the country’s past as Nanak and Shivaji betokened its future.

On 10 November, Nanak's  542nd birth anniversary, all Indians owe it to themselves to consider the significance of his life, for he set India as a whole on the path to rediscovering its own lost self.

He preached a rigorously sensible faith scorning caste and Hindu-Muslim divisions, and asserting without philosophical complexity an intense devotion to the loving, universal and indivisible reality of God.

Almost uniquely for his time, serving the poor was always a special concern to Nanak. At 12, when his father tried to initiate him in business and gave him some money to invest, he fed a number of poor people, declaring that “true business.” The gurudwara of Sacha Sauda now stands where he fed the poor.  

He accepted followers from all backgrounds, declining only those who lived ascetic, isolated lives outside society, a rejection that emphatically located spiritual life within the household. His teachings were an antidote to the weaknesses of India’s fractured, caste-ridden society that had made it possible for Arab, Persian and Afghan invaders to make slow inroads into the country, bringing with them the missionary religion of Islam.

Nanak addressed frontally the new split those invasions had caused, beginning his career as a religious leader in 1496 with the dramatic proclamation: "There is no Hindu there is no Mussulman. I follow the path of God who is neither Hindu nor Mussulman."

His own relations with Muslims were always close: at 16, he went to work as storekeeper for the Muslim ruler of Sultanpur, where he befriended the much older Sufi minstrel, Mardana, later his boon companion as he preached across the length and breadth of India. Nanak went as far as Assam in the east, Kabul in the north, Tamil Nadu in the south and beyond Sind to Mecca in the West.

The scope of his travels underlined his desire to reform the whole body of Hinduism rather than to create a new sect. Islam was as much his object of reform as Hinduism: the story is told that in Mecca, when upbraided for sleeping with his feet towards the Kabba, he asked his inquisitor to point them in the direction that God did not exist.

Did Nanak fail in his wider aim of reforming Hinduism and Islam? Does the existence of the Sikhs as a minority religious community mean that the rest of India has remained and will remain unaffected by his distillation of all that is best in our traditions, Hindu and Muslim?

The answer must be categorically in the negative. If there is one overwhelming lesson from the Indian past, it is that history does not move in a straight line. It has subtle detours and byways, triumphs that turn into long term defeat, weaknesses that evolve into strengths, contradictions that resolve themselves in magical new unities.

Nothing exemplifies that as much as the transformation of Nanak’s legacy. When he died in 1518, the Portuguese were the only Europeans in the Indian Ocean and Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was still a youth in Afghanistan. In the time the Mughal Empire rose to its intolerant peak Nanak’s peaceable community changed under nine successive Gurus into a cohesive society of warriors, and that had a direct influence on the upbringing of Shivaji in Maharashtra.

The rise of the Sikhs and Marathas doomed the Mughal Empire, laying India open to the stealthy invasion of the British, who sought to strengthen their tenuous control of the country by setting its people against each other on the basis of religion and caste.

In the aftermath of that era the Granth Sahib, containing the hymns of the ten Gurus and of 22 Hindu and Muslim sages, offers the nonsectarian vision that is at once the best of Indian tradition and the hope of our future. For an India committed to the physical welfare of its people yet sustained by its spiritual core it is an invaluable guide. In moving towards that goal, the following extract from one of Guru Nanak’s hymns should serve as an essential adjunct to Satyameva Jayate:

 “Though man perform lip-devotion, penance, and austerities,
   Dwell at places of pilgrimage, bestow alms and perform acts of devotion,
   What are these without the True One?
   As he sows so shall he reap; human life is lost without virtue.
   O silly one, happiness lies in being a slave to virtue.”

Dim Outlook

Outlook magazine has just celebrated its 16th anniversary with an issue devoted to “Generation Awesome;” it tells how “India’s young are driving the change in politics, business, sport, music, news – and beyond.”

I hate to rain on a birthday party, but the issue seems a last-minute effort, with a disparate guest-list babbling rather incoherently about their presumed areas of expertise.

The piece that caught my eye as particularly requiring comment was “Past Forward” by novelist Amish Tripathi (The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas). Headlined “Mom, Give Me Shakti!”(an Indianization, he tells us, of "the Force be with You"), it was written in response to a request from Outlook for a “message to youth."

Tripathi's “message” is a dump on older Indians who complain that youngsters are losing touch with the country’s ancient culture. He sees the complainers as the real problem. They fall into two categories, he says, “India-glorifiers” and the “India-rejecters,” both equally close-minded, and thus fundamentally unlike Indians in their days of ancient greatness. The greatness of ancient India was, “at the core, all about confident open-mindedness.”

As evidence of such open-mindedness, he points to all kinds of things, ranging from Vedic Sanskrit (very different from the classical language we know today), to the “art of making idli ... probably learnt from Indonesia.” The point is a bit fuzzy, but in the interests of moving on, let us pretend it makes sense.

As evidence that the young today have regained “the syncretic strength” of their ancient forbears Tripathi makes another set of confused observations. He includes feedback from readers of his novels: “a Muslim youth conveyed to me he is a proud Muslim but he is inspired by the concept of Har Har Mahadev; a Hindu youngster wrote in to appreciate the fact that I keep saying inshah’Allah despite being a devout Hindu.”

In the past, India’s “open-minded and accepting society” enjoyed “mind-numbing” success. One sign of that success: “Despite not having massive gold mines, India has amongst the largest gold hordes (sic) in the world. Some historians believe this is the legacy of centuries of surpluses from gold-bullion-driven trade.” Tripathi thinks it is only in the last 300 years that Indians forgot “the true essence” of their ancient culture, and as a consequence, “lost their mojo.”

That was not because of British rule but “because we forgot who we were. We forgot our core culture. We forgot our confident open-mindedness. … The self-assured mixture of religions for centuries gave way to insecure exclusivist thoughts. Scientific temper declined … Unlike Japan, we did not capitalize on the great industrial advancements of the Western world. And then began our decline.” Mercifully, the analysis of that failure is not extensive, but it is enough to make clear Tripathi is almost wholly ignorant about the Indian past.

In that, of course, he is not alone. In my experience, most Indians have only the foggiest notion of history. (As a test, ask the next few people you meet when Indian nationalists first declared the aim of "purna swaraj.") As this state of postcolonial confusion has been off the radar of our politicians and intelligentsia, I will devote the next few posts to perceptions of history, Western and Indian.

The Indian Press - 1: the colonial era

Readers today will have a hard time imagining the lengths to which the British went to keep Indians unaware of their political situation.
At a time when the only journalists at work in India were a handful of Englishmen putting out weekly 8-pagers read by a few hundred people, Warren Hastings issued regulations banning the publication of any news of India-related discussions in Britain. That included discussions in the Court of Directors of the East India Company and the British parliament.

Editors were not to carry “alarmist” reports likely to arouse “suspicion” in the local population, comment on the local administration, or print anything about "private scandals" and public conduct of Company officials that would cause dissension in society. (British journalists in India then were generally disreputable figures, as interested as they are now in the sexual excesses of others.) Nor could they carry extracts from the Press in Europe that broke these rules. An official censor reviewed all material before publication. The situation eased somewhat after a British court ruled that the censor rather than the editor should be held responsible for libel, but Company officials continued to review all material. The punishment for offending them was deportation.

The first Indian to venture into this highly sensitive area was Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, a teacher in Calcutta who in 1816 began publishing the weekly Bengal Gazette. He was associated with Ram Mohun Roy’s Atmiya Sabha and the publication lasted only a year.

During this period, Christian missionaries from the nearby Dutch territory of Serampore were increasingly active journalists, putting out Samachar Darpan in Bengali and Friend of India in English from 1818. 

In response, Bhowani Charan Banerji began publication in December 1821 of Sambaud Kaumudi, a weekly in Bengali; it was taken over the next year by Raja Ram Mohun Roy, who also began to issue the weekly Mirat ul Ukhbar in Persian and the less frequent Brahmunical Magazine intended to counter missionary propaganda. Meanwhile Banerji, who was a more orthodox Hindu than Roy, came out with Chandrika Samachar.

In 1822, the Bombay Samachar began publication in Gujarati. All these publications had small circulations of between 100 and 200, but it worried the officials of the regime enough to try and encourage the European-controlled Press: the East India Company subscribed to 100 copies of Friend of India and allowed it cut-rate mailing privileges.

A hawkish faction of Company officials was not satisfied with such indirect means to air their views, and in 1822, eight of them joined in launching John Bull in the East. Even that was considered inadequate, and when one of the eight assumed the top slot in the Company’s local hierarchy he required that all publishers should be licensed by the regime, a move aimed especially at Indian editors and publishers who could not be deported.

That led Ram Mohun Roy to stop publication of his Persian weekly, the one most often criticized by officials. He explained that presenting an affidavit in open court as required by the new regulations was “very mean and censurable.” Further, “after incurring the disrepute of soliciting and suffering the dishonour of making the affidavit, the constant apprehension of the license being recalled” would “disgrace the person in the eyes of the world … and create such anxiety as entirely to destroy one’s peace of mind.”

Thomas Munro, a leading figure in Calcutta presented the British view of the matter: “A free Press and the domination of strangers are things which are quite incompatible. … If we, for the sole benefit of a few European editors of newspapers, permit a licentious Press to undermine among the natives all respect for the European character and authority, we shall scatter the seeds of discontent among our native troops and never be secure from insurrection.”

After Roy’s exit from the editorial scene Dwaraknath Tagore came on stage, launching the Bengal Herald in English and the Banga Dhoot in Bengali. Another Tagore – Prassana Kumar – published the Reformer.

In Bombay, Bal Shastri Jambhekar began issuing a group of publications between 1832 and 1944 ranging from a weekly to a monthly, the most prominent of which were the weekly Prabhakar and monthly Upadesha Chandrika (the latter a response to the missionary publication Dyanodaya). In Madras, the Company funded several small publications, but the most successful ones continued to be issued by missionaries.

All these licensed Indian publications were mute about the racially charged uprising of 1857, but  "manuscript newspapers" proliferated. One estimate at the time said that that the “king of Awadh” was paying 3,194 rupees to 65 news writers.

British owned newspapers were openly racist and intemperately anti-Indian during the uprising. In promulgating the Control of the Press Act of 1857 Charles Canning (whose tenure as the Company’s chief honcho in India straddled the war years) complimented the English Press for its loyalty and support; the constraints in the new law, he assured its editors, were meant for their Indian counterparts (including the manuscript Press).

Indian-owned papers were generally ill financed and made do with the cheapest of everything: the machinery used to found The Amrita Bazaar Patrika was bought for 32 rupees, and it was operated by the editor himself.

The 1878 Vernacular Press Act (modeled on the Irish Coercion Act) sought to exploit the financial weakness of Indian media by requiring publishers to post bonds that would be forfeit if they should be judged seditious. The Act also provided for the confiscation of printing machinery, paper and other materials, allowed the search of any media establishment, and other summary action, all without going to court. In Ireland publications subjected to such high-handed treatment had the right to sue for damages; in India that right was reduced to the right to appeal to the Viceroy’s Council – in other words, to the same officials responsible for the Act.

The first result of the new law was to silence one of the most strident Bengali voices, Motilal Ghose’s Amrita Bazaar Patrika, but not the way the British expected. Convinced that he was a particular target of the Act and would not long survive under it, Ghose switched his paper overnight from Bengali to English, avoiding its jurisdiction altogether. Other Bengali papers were unable to avoid the law, which was implemented on the basis of material they had published in the past. The most prominent victim was Shome Prakash which closed after it was served with a notice.

The Vernacular Press Act must have seemed to the emerging Indian intelligentsia to mark the depth of their defeat and helplessness under foreign rule. However, in retrospect that was when they lit the nationalist fuse. The effort to muzzle the expression of Indian opinion occurred under the viceroyalty of Robert Edward Lytton, one of the two most hated British regents in India (the other was George Curzon at the turn of the century).

Lytton affected an air of distant hauteur towards all Indians and with studied inhumanity organized amidst the worst famine of his time an obscenely gluttonous Durbar at Delhi to celebrate Victoria declaring herself “Empress of India.” He also spent a great deal of money on what he grandiloquently called his “forward policy” on Afghanistan, a foolish and futile bid to bribe and intimidate its Emir into becoming a British vassal – after a war had failed to do it. The enormous cost of these follies he passed on to Indians by raising the Salt Tax, the most painfully regressive of all British imposts, for it lay most heavily on the poorest people.

It was in that context that Indian editors took the momentous decision to form the Native Press Association. It shaped a new sense of solidarity among Indian editors, publishers and readers opposing the Vernacular Press Act, and laid the foundation for a pan-Indian political awareness. These developments were unplanned, but not altogether fortuitous; the need to promote a common Indian consciousness and counter British propaganda had become clear to a growing number of people. In Lahore, Dayal Singh Majithia founded The Tribune to balance the The Civil and Military Gazette, where Rudyard Kipling cut his teeth as imperial propagandist.

More to come