History as Karma

During the colonial era Europeans considered themselves unique in having a sense of history. All the rest of us, including the Chinese with their exact millennial court records, were deemed to have a sense of passing Time but not of history.

That assessment had two elements. One was a sense of racial superiority born of easy dominance over all other regions.

The other lay in the European belief that history was a fluid intellectual construct amenable to countless Orwellian revisions: those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.

In that perspective the Indian view of the past as an unalterable karmic progression seemed “fatalistic,” and it led the British to imagine that by creating their own narrative of Indian history they could control the country’s future.

The first effort at such rewriting, paid for and published by the East India Company, was by James Mill (1773-1836), a London journalist who wrote a six-volume history of India without ever visiting the country or knowing any of its languages. Mill trashed Indian history as a “monstrous and absurd” concoction of legends and myths. He thought Indian society “presented a very uniform appearance during the long interval from the visit of the Greeks [under Alexander] to that of the English,” and that their “annals … from that era until the period of the Mohomedan conquests, are a blank.”

Since that early 19th Century work, there has been a huge outpouring of British writing reinforcing those themes, almost all of it racist, much of it intellectually disreputable in terms of motive, and some blatantly dishonest.

An author who bundles all those elements is John Keay, whose books can be found in most bookshops and libraries in India. The following is my review of one of his books (done for the Amazon web site).

Propaganda as History

“Two hundred years ago India was seen as a place with little history and less culture,” says a blurb on the back cover of John Keay’s “India Discovered,” originally published in 1984. The book credits the British for transforming India into a country now “revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity.”

Keay makes his case with a massive amount of distortion.

For instance: “It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth Century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions.”

That is utter nonsense. India has never lost sight of its literary tradition dating back many thousands of years to the ordering of the Vedas. That tradition includes the philosophy of the Upanishads, the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the teachings of the Buddha. All of them constitute an understanding of the past that is incontrovertibly “history,” and much of it has remained common knowledge down to the village level.

The Buddhist tradition in particular is specifically historical, yet Keay asserts that the British were responsible for the “realization” that the Buddha was “not a god but a historical figure.” A Buddhist scholar is likely to laugh out loud at that.

Another laugh-out-loud assertion is that Warren Hastings promoted the study of Sanskrit because he “loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equaled.”

If Hasting loved Indians, Hitler loved Jews.

Edmund Burke’s blistering indictment in the British parliament when it moved to impeach Hastings for a variety of high crimes and corruptions made clear just how much the former East India Company honcho in Calcutta cared for Indians.

Of the tortures the Company’s tax collectors used in Bengal under Hastings, Burke said, “Virgins whose fathers kept them from the sight of the sun were dragged into the public Court [and there] vainly invoking its justice, while their shrieks were mingled with the cries and groans of an indignant people, those virgins were cruelly violated. …. The wives of the people of the country only differed in this; that they lost their honour in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons … they were dragged out naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women in the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.”

Hastings assembled the first group of “Orientalists” to study Sanskrit for only one reason: to comprehend the financial records of temples so he could tax their vast hidden wealth. In a few years his taxes drained the resources that had always before supported a great variety of social services, from village school teachers and vaids (doctors) to maintenance of roads, upkeep of water works and famine relief.

The East India Company’s fierce exactions destroyed not only that system but the entire agricultural economy of Bengal and pushed it into the first of the great “man-made famines” the British brought to India. In the first decade of its rule some 7 million people starved to death, fully a third of the population of what had been the richest province of the Mughal Empire. By the time colonial rule ended in 1947, the death toll from British “man-made famines” would be estimated at several hundred million.

Keay also engages in a great number of subtler distortions that are hardly unimportant.

For instance, in referring to Hastings as the “first Governor General of India” and adding parenthetically that “Clive had been Governor of Bengal only,” he creates the impression that British rule was far more extensive than it was. In fact, it remained virtually unchanged under Clive and Hastings; the main difference was that the latter had the title of “Governor General of India.”

Under both, the East India Company continued to collect taxes on behalf of the Mughal Emperor in Bengal and to extort revenues in lieu of debt repayment from the indigent Nawab of Arcot in Madras.

Over the next century the Company would continue to collect taxes in the name of the Mughal as it slowly added to its territories. The British Crown would assert sovereignty only after the national uprising of 1857. After that, it would rule some 3/5ths of undivided India for just 90 years, a third of that in steady retreat before the strengthening nationalist movement under Mahatma Gandhi.

Given that reality, how do we explain the undeniable zeal that fired so many Englishmen, most of them with other day jobs, to search out the Indian past?

The explanation is rich in karmic ironies.

Warren Hastings initiated the work of the “Orientalists” to get more taxes. They brought to light not only a great mass of public wealth but the riches of the Indian past. That had the effect of reconnecting modernizing Indians to their national roots: Gandhi, for instance, first read the Gita in London, in Edwin Arnold’s English translation.

What sustained the zeal for discovery into the 19th Century?

It was the theory of an Indo-Aryan language family proposed by William Jones, the most brilliant of the first Orientalists. It was misinterpreted to mean there was an actual flesh and blood “Aryan race,” a possibility the British seized on eagerly because they could be the “original Aryans” and thus legitimate rulers of India. Thereafter, everything they did to uncover Indian history was driven by the hope of finding concrete evidence of that link.

Meanwhile, the karmic current of the “Aryan race” gained enormous energy in Germany and France, where it was seen as justifying White supremacist racism. Hitler epitomized that view, and his reach for Aryan supremacy precipitated World War II.

As if to underline this whole string of karmic ironies, the armies that devastated Britain’s capacity to hold on to India marched under the ancient Indian symbol of good luck, the Swastika.

Keay’s flat self-serving presentation of the British Indian relationship is typical of almost everything that has been written on the matter since colonial times. It reflects at one level a basic incomprehension of the multi-layered subtleties that have been in play, and at another, a determined refusal to see India for what it is.

What can break that pattern as accelerating changes in international relations force once powerful countries to turn in small corners will be a pressing issue in the years ahead.

************ end of review ************

The British seem to have learned nothing about karmic consequences from their experience of ruling India. They are undoubtedly behind such initiatives as the EPIC Channel and the attempt by the Hindu Mahasabha to glorify Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. They will inevitably spur Indians to a reawakening of their spiritual and political history that would have taken much longer otherwise.

Britain and Hinduism 5: The Path of Karma

The story goes that Shiva and Parvati were watching from Kailas one day as a poor old man trudged along a desert road hungry, thirsty and miserable.

“Why don’t you help him?” Parvati asked.

“I can’t” said Shiva. “It is his karma.”

“You are all-mighty God,” said Parvati. “You can change his karma.”

“I can’t” said Shiva. “The Law of Karma is unbreakable and unbendable.”

“Surely, you can change little things” Parvati argued. “What’s to stop you from giving that wretch some food and drink and making him rich?”

“Watch this,” said Shiva. He waved his hand and on the road in front of the man there appeared a table laden with a rich feast and a pot of gold.

Just at that moment the old man thought to himself, “All my life I’ve walked around with my eyes open. Now here’s a straight road with nothing to see. Let me walk with my eyes closed for a change.” So he closed his eyes and walked past the table.

The story has two lessons. One is that our individual karma determines how the world affects us. The second is that to appreciate God’s gifts we must keep the eyes open, and not just to see but to understand.

Individual Karma

Once, when the Buddha was preaching, he noticed that a leper on the side of the audience had quietly, instantly, understood his whole aim and purpose. The Enlightened One pointed out to the audience what had happened and explained that it was the man’s meritorious karma that allowed such comprehension. We normally never think of our karma in such a direct way, but if we do, it is clear that for good and ill, the past is a profound presence in every moment of every life.

If we imagine that our eyes do not see in space but in time, it is possible to envision that reality: each person would appear as the end of a very convoluted flagellum stretching back to Creation/Big Bang. That scene is easier to picture as a single enormous body containing all life – the Purusha of our Creation Myth. Far from being fanciful imagination, that is the exact scientific truth: each of us is a long and complex causal chain with mind-boggling millions of tangles in the backward stretch.

The karmic energy that drives each individual life is thus not entirely a distinctive factor; it is closely connected to everything around it and operates in synchrony.

So how do we “understand” our individual karma?

Jesus summed it up beautifully in “Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not. Neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

To “understand” it is necessary to drop all shows and affectations and be your-self.

That takes the utmost seriousness of spirit without being heavy. It requires quiet time in which to shed your various roles and stresses and breathe free. People often call this meditation, and there is a lot of mumbo jumbo about watching candle flames, breathing incense and so on, but essentially all it involves is relaxing and gently sidelining any stressful thoughts that well up in your mind. The mind achieves first a state of calm and then of joy. That joyful feeling indicates you are in touch with your karmic self – a term that is a synonym for God here, for the one is the face of the other.

In such a state you can ask any question, express whatever aim you have in life, and there will be a creative response. To quote Jesus again, “Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find.”

What you get will be direction. Gandhi in moments of crisis would consult his “still small voice” and be guided fully by it.

Experience at a humbler level, my own, allows me to say that once you find the inner voice you have to hang on no matter how difficult the guidance. If it takes you over rough terrain, consider it necessary. In my case, it involved quitting a career contract at the top level of the United Nations professional cadre and striking out as the editor/publisher of an independent newsletter on the UN, an occupation comparable in status and security to the itinerant vending of vegetables. What made it especially difficult in my case was that the formidable American national security Establishment found the venture suspicious and ensured that it would not be a commercial success. I stuck it out by doing a number of odd jobs, including stringing for The Times of India (under Dileep Padgaonkar), and undertaking a wide variety of freelance assignments. As the difficult years went by, I developed an altogether new perceptual and critical quality in my writing, had an altogether more nuanced appreciation of the United Nations, and began to see shape and structure in the chaotic progression of international affairs. I doubt that if I had remained with the Secretariat any of that would have happened. Things have not got any easier now that I am back in India, for the fuzz here have taken up where the Americans left off, and there is nothing a writer can do in self defence; but I have no doubt about my path even though it could dip me into new miseries at any moment.

That brief personal aside is to underline that what I write about is not all theory. It is also to highlight the significance of the message the ancients telegraphed by putting the hymn to Agni at the opening of the Rig Veda and making the sacred fire Witness to every Hindu ceremonial of sacrifice, marriage, death and remembrance. Agni leaps the cusp of matter and energy. It symbolizes our material and spiritual being. It is God with us and within us, the life force, the karmic energy.

Agni signals also the magical nature of the universe, its unfathomable size, brilliance and energy, every aspect miraculous in our mundane sight.

The fortunate among us learn early that the sense of the magical is the basis of all faith, that it leads the truly blessed to Bhakti, a prayerful devotion that is at one extreme the last resource of the powerless, and at the other, the common secret of the successful, of grace under pressure, of champions in every field.

The mute unexplained strength of Bhakti is karmic energy, and it is the primary driver not only of individual lives but of all human affairs. We can trace its flow from the beginning in India.

The Saptarishis who put the Vedas in order, the anonymous authors of the Upanishads, Valmiki the lowborn brigand who became a poet to celebrate Ramrajya, and Vyasa the grandsire of the Bharata clan, all mustered an awesome karmic force. So did the Buddha in replacing Hinduism when it grew decrepit, and Adi Sankara in reviving the old faith when Buddhism flagged.

From South India, the modern Bhakti movement passed across India in several generations of saint poets during the first third of the last Millennium to help sustain Hinduism against invasion in the north. At a time when Babur was still a youth in Ferghana, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated what became, after the interruption of two empires, the current Indian Renaissance. Raja Rammohun Roy gave it firmer structure in opposing the British in Bengal, and after him, it became countrywide. With Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, the struggles for human rights and national liberation spilled into the rest of the world and led to the great transformations of the 20th Century.

What is remarkable about this entire sequence is that soldiers, bureaucrats and kings had nothing to do with primary initiatives; they came wholly from individuals who saw what had to be done and did it.

All this should jar readers, especially the young inured to the post-colonial expectation that government is the solution to all our problems.

Government played little part in the life of traditional India; it rose in importance because of its colonial role as Chief Thief and Exploiter. Since independence, there is an expectation that government should solve all problems and provide compensation for misfortunes. That attitude, promoted by a pandering, sensationalist Press, is deeply unhealthy. Government intervenes in the life of society at the cost of liberty. The monetary compensation it provides is not care and comfort; it is a cold bureaucratic gesture and index of control.

The result of expecting the government to be a nanny is a learned helplessness in society. Young people today should consider that the quality of daring is the clearest difference between Indians today and those held out as exemplars of nobility and achievement in our sacred literature. The two outstanding examples Hindu children learn of are Prahlada and Eklavya, one a prince, the other a teenager from the low Nishada caste.

Prahlada is a bhakt who resists tyranny so steadfastly that his karmic energy calls up Narasimha, the half-man half-lion incarnation of Vishnu; the Universe itself bends to the power of his faith.

Eklavya’s story is among the most painful and disturbing in the Mahabharata, and it is to the great credit of the epic's numerous editors down the centuries that the story remains in all its unvarnished brutality, an unmistakable indictment. He comes to Drona, teacher of war to the Pandavas, asking to study archery; but the high-caste warrior will not consider it. Undeterred, Eklavya goes off into the forest, builds a clay figure of Drona and practices before it until he is better than Arjuna. Drona, who has promised to make Arjuna the best in the world, deals with the situation by demanding that Eklavya give him the thumb of his right hand as the gift due to a guru. The boy cuts it off without a plea.

The lesson to draw from the story of India as a whole, and those of Prahlada and Eklavya in particular, is that in a world of many inequities the aroused karmic force cannot rest. If Maya does not hide from our eyes what needs to be done, it is imperative to do it. If something is incomprehensible, it is necessary to struggle until it is clear. Every victory contributes to the next one. Failure does not matter, only the effort does: it makes your karma more powerful.

How humanity will fare in the 21st Century now hangs in the balance. We are now at a critical period in the evolution of world order, when the momentum of the European industrial era has weakened almost to a standstill. What will come in its place is going to depend very largely on what we in India do.

Part 6 of this essay will look at the emerging world scene and India's potential role.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Intimations of Immortality

One of my classmates at Columbia Journalism School died recently after a long illness. He was the second to go in the space of a few weeks.

Although we are still in our sixties (“the new 40s”), our cohort is at a stage when it must begin to face the fact that death has become a personal rather than a philosophical interest.

Shored up as I am by the Indian expectation that the soul will go from one discarded body to another, this issue is somewhat easier for me than for most Westerners who, if they believe in the reality set out by their religions, face Judgment Day. If they do not believe, death can only be a final extinction, an equally imponderable end.

But how real is my expectation of many more lives to come (my spiritual status being far from the dispassionate stillness required for moksha)?

It’s very real, and not because I have blind faith in what the Bhagavad Gita says: Science has crept in all around the concept of an eternal soul and now makes it impossible to believe in anything else.

Two scientific advances in particular have validated the concept of the soul. One is the recognition of the matter-energy continuum set out in Einstein’s E=MC2. Matter and Energy are indestructible; they can only be converted into each other.

The discovery of the genetic code is the other major step Science took towards the soul. Its importance lies in the recognition that each of us is a piece of code: complex and only dimly understood as yet, but essentially, each individual is a piece of software that takes material form at the moment of conception.

Put the two concepts together, and we have an individualized code destructible in its material manifestation as DNA but not in its Energy persona. When the material body dies, our individual wave pattern survives, and as with the human voice carried by radio waves, it can vibrate another receptor: a new body at the moment of conception.

As with the radio wave, our individualized genetic pattern will only vibrate a receptor tuned to the right frequency. That’s where the concept of karma comes in. Every action, every thought we have affects our DNA, which contains information coded at the molecular level. At death, the code that floats free of the body is a permanent record of the sum total of our actions. It can only take a new material form consonant with that code.

So, those with good karma find bodies that resonate with virtue, others degenerate into lower forms of life.

QED.

Understanding History: 3. An Indian View of the Past

This is the third part of a series on Understanding History. Part 1 was on the colonial construct of history, and Part 2 on India's brainwashed historians. 

To see clearly the need for a uniquely Indian historiography we have to keep in mind the evolution of European concepts of history. From the time of the ancient Greeks to the middle of the 19th Century, it was a literary pursuit, of interest mainly to the elite interested in governance. In ancient Rome, it became moralistic in Plutarch’s Lives, overtly polemical under the impetus of missionary Christianity, nationalist in the 18th Century, and racist during the colonial period.

Until about 1850, history was the occupation of amateurs; then, under the influence of German scholars, it took on the pretensions of a science, with a methodology that aimed “not to please, nor to give practical maxims of conduct, nor to arouse the emotions, but knowledge pure and simple” (Langlois & Seignobos: Introduction to the Study of History, 1904). In practice, European historians have come nowhere near that ideal, but our professional historians have accepted their propaganda as fact and belittled India’s own understanding of history. To see what that is we have to look at how Indian tradition has shaped our view of the past over the millennia.

Ramayana & Mahabharata
Far from being poor historical material, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are key markers of the evolution of Indian society. The Ramayana, as noted in an earlier post, records and justifies the evolution of kingship, not as an imposition of force accepted in trembling and fear as in Hobbesian Europe but founded in the love of a virtuous and beloved king. Rama is not an all-powerful dictator but a ruler solicitous of popular opinion in all things.

The story of the Mahabharata is completely different in moral content. The personality of Krishna is suited for a time when the State is well established and dominated by power-hungry, immoral people. He is the primary strategist and tactician for the dispossessed and politically weak but virtuous Pandavas, their spiritual mentor even in the rush and press of battle. As the only purna swarup among the incarnations of Vishnu, Krishna is fully conscious of his divinity from the moment of birth, acutely aware of the need to confront and check the growth of evil as the baneful Kali Yuga approaches.

The revelation of his Universal form to Arjuna is to drive home the teaching that the workings of the Universe lie beyond human knowledge, that even if we do not like the hard choices before us, we must make them according to our best lights; in the worst of times we cannot despair and should not abandon our duty.

To be able to do that in an age dominated by ignorant passions of every kind, he advises detachment. “You have the right to action, not to the fruit thereof” he tells Arjuna. “True yoga is to be unmoved by defeat and loss, or wealth and victory.” He did not say (as Western commentators so often misinterpret), that we should deaden ourselves to feeling; only that our actions should be dispassionate.

All this is meaningful history. The rich content of our ancient literature, declared largely irrelevant in the frame of European historiography, is central to the Indian national narrative. That is so not because we assert that the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are literally true but because we define historical truth differently. It matters little whether Rama and Krishna were “historical figures.” They have lived in Indian hearts for thousands of years, and their stories illuminate who we are as a people; that gives them a reality far beyond that of any tinny chronology.

Their significance is not in the miraculous stories of the epics, but in the values they incarnate, and the moral guidance they offer. It says more about India than any library of Western “histories” that without benefit of church or clergy its people have made national treasures of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is their moral weight, more than anything else that has allowed India to endure the massive corruptions of the culturally amnesiac class brought to power by colonial rule.

In seeking a new historiography relevant not just to modern India but to a globalizing world it would be useful to look at how differently Europe and India have approached and achieved the primary goals of remembering the past and being guided by it. Perhaps the simplest way to do that would be to compare the hopes expressed in the introductory passages of the Histories of Herodotus and of the Mahabharata.

Herodotus was impelled to write by “the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds.” His gossipy stories are still read today, but mainly by scholars and history students, and few would attribute much “glory” to the people in his narrative.

The hopes expressed at the opening of the Mahabharata as the visiting Ugrasrava begins telling the hermits of the Naimisha forest of Vyasa’s great work, are markedly different from those of Herodotus: “As the sun dispels the darkness, so does the Bharata by its discourses on religion, profit, pleasure and final release, dispel the ignorance of men. As the full-moon by its mild light expands the buds of the water-lily, so this Purana has expanded the human intellect. By the lamp of history, which destroys the darkness of ignorance, the whole mansion of nature is properly and completely illuminated.”

The illuminating power of history is in line with that of the sun and moon. The Mahabharata is not just about a particular war but about “religion, profit, pleasure and final release” – that is to say, all of life. While the histories of Herodotus gather dust on bookshelves, Vyasa’s story is known in every village in India and far afield; its heroes are remembered fondly in the names of children throughout the land, and its teachings taken to heart by unschooled peasants, scholars and saints.

The Mahabharata has kept a nation of great diversity in touch with its essential cultural unity and instructed countless generations on what is to be valued in life, and what is without worth. This is what history is supposed to do. As a remembrance of the past that puts the present in proper perspective the Mahabharata is unmatched by any other work. Western historiography with its malleable truths and tribal loyalties has produced nothing remotely comparable.

That the Mahabharata is a sophisticated work of national, moral and philosophical guidance is evident at many places in the narrative. Consider, for example, the origin and nature of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Although always referred to as “cousins,” the two sets of siblings, ostensibly the sons of the blind Dhrithirashtra and his younger brother Pandu “the pale,” are unrelated by blood.

The sons of Pandu, who is cursed to die instantly if he should give way to carnal desire, are actually fathered by different gods invoked by his two wives. Dharma, the personification of universal law fathers the first-born Yudhisthira. Maruti the Wind begets Bhima of immense strength. Indra the warrior god of thunder and storm is the father of Arjuna, the perfect warrior. The twin Aswins, skilled in the arts and husbandry that support life, are the parents of Nakula and Sahadeva.

Together, they represent the essential strengths of any civilization: Law, Power, the capacity for war and the skills for peace. India is united not by its bloodlines but by the indissoluble bonds of a brotherhood of very mixed parentage; that theme is further emphasized in the love of the Pandavas of one shared wife who can be seen without taxing the imagination as the beautiful land to which all are wedded.

The Kauravas are also not the natural sons of the blind Dhritrashtra. His wife Gandhari (from Gandhara, modern Afghanistan), is childless and becomes pregnant only through the magical intercession of Vyasa (a literary device he uses throughout the Mahabharata to signal didactic intent). Her pregnancy is abnormally prolonged, and as it draws past the second year she hears of the birth of Pandu’s first son and, losing patience, induces birth. What emerges from her womb is not a baby but a horrible ball of flesh, hard as iron. Vyasa returns to remonstrate with her. If she had not lost patience her offspring would have been of unrivaled splendour.

However, all is not lost: he cuts up the ball of flesh into a hundred and one pieces, putting each in a separate jar. After two years of incubation the Kauravas emerge from the jars, all boys except for the youngest; they seem normal, even splendid, but are demonic by nature. As the Pandavas exemplify the attributes of a healthy society, the Kauravas illustrate the monstrous consequences of human over-reaching and incontinence.

Dhrithrashtra’s blindness and Gandhari’s decision on her wedding day to blindfold herself for life establish a theme Vyasa returns to repeatedly in his long narrative: Evil is rooted in the incapacity or willful refusal to see reality. Every fateful choice the Kauravas make as they spiral down to doom illustrates the delusive power of egotism, greed, anger, hate and envy. No Satan plots their downfall, for Hinduism has no such entity; their fate is sealed by the failure to see the kinship of all things underlying the world’s vast differentiation; without spiritual cognition, they lack compassion, and thus understanding.

These value judgments indicate a factor of central importance in Vyasa’s story: the course of human affairs is not accidental. The immutable laws that govern the universe extend into human conduct and our actions propel destiny. In telling of the origins and development of the conflicts that culminate in the killing field of Kurukshetra, Vyasa shows repeatedly how bad karma has insidious and long-term effects.

Pandu brings on his curse because he shoots a deer in the act of coupling. Karna is resplendent like his father the Sun god and a greater warrior than Arjuna; but he accidentally kills a poor man’s only sustenance, a cow, and invites the curse that disables him at a critical point in battle and causes his death. The matchless warrior Bhisma inadvertently ruins the life of a princess he kidnaps according to the Kshatriya code, and her revenge comes after her death and rebirth as the effeminate Sikhandin, against whom he will not defend himself.

The repercussions that flow from ill-considered actions are clothed as curses, but they are manifestly the ineluctable working out of karma. The Bharata war itself is a karmic landmark, for it occurred just before the world entered the Kali Yuga, the most benighted of the four-phase cycle of the moral universe.

The lesson of the whole of Vyasa's work is that when bad times come, there is nothing to do but accept it, knowing that it is karma at work. The best response is to create good karma, oppose evil with good, understand hatred, fight it with love.

In part 4: constructing a karmic history for the globalized world.

Living by "Indian Tradiion"

Arun Shourie told an audience in Coimbatore last Friday that Indians must “know, understand and live according to” Indian tradition. Speaking at a seminar on scientific and cultural perspectives on India, he expanded on the theme as if it were a purely academic matter: knowing Aryabhatta’s work, understanding the mantras of pundits, and studying Hinduism at the university level.

 I’m afraid he missed the point.

 We’ve been so colonially brainwashed, even a scholar like Shourie seems to have lost sight of the fact that the essence of our tradition does not lie in understanding the Word of the Shastras but in our resonance to their Spirit. Hundreds of millions of Indians, most of them uneducated, do know, understand and live by that Spirit. Those who do not, as Shourie unwittingly exemplified, are our urban sophisticates.

 How can I make such an assertion without benefit of survey or study? Because it is a truth that can be deduced from the fact that despite a burden of elite corruption that has no parallel outside China, India continues to be a stable and largely honest country, with its fundamental instincts and affections still guided by the best in our traditions.

And what are the “best” of our traditions?

The philosophical essence lies in the first verse of the Ishopanishad: “God the Ruler pervades all there is in this Universe. Therefore renounce and dedicate all to Him, enjoying or using the portion that may fall to your lot, without coveting what belongs to others.”

Conceptually, the best of our traditions lie in the great idea of Universal Law, Dharma, applied to human life in terms of the moral causality of action, Karma.

Most uneducated Indians live by these fundamentals of our tradition, evincing their faith in personal gods and goddesses, but as the Gita says, bowing ultimately to the Universal Self.

In contrast, the educated classes, especially those who people the realms of power and commerce, have been completely unmoored from the sheet anchor of tradition. The wealthy curled darlings of our nation who now disgrace Tihar jail with their presence, obviously do not believe in Dharma or Karma. Two generations after independence, they seem to be blind even to the large lesson hammered in so mercilessly during colonial rule: that the well-being and safety of our country depend on the integrity of its leaders.

It would be instructive to have them face an inquisitorial television camera on these large issues.