Lessons from a family feud

For Tamil Hindus of my age, I would think that it is not uncommon for Rajaji to have been our interlocutor for the Mahabharata.  His retelling/summarizing of the epic into a manageable tome in the local vernacular, Tamil, was a fascinating read.  A gripping story involving a gazillion characters and complex inter-relationships between the characters.

Of course, it is not a mere story for the believers, of whom I was one.  I was a true believer when I read Rajaji's Mahabharata but even then it came across more as an awesome story than as a religious text.

As the polymath-polyglot-scholar-intellectual David Shulman noted in his review of a wonderful book: 

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war.

As Karthika Nair observed in the introduction to her book:

Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."

In this great epic, the war is between cousins; the sons of two brothers.  And one set of brothers has the counsel of god--Krishna. During a critical part of the war, when Arjuna loses his composure at the thought of killing his uncles and cousins, Krishna advises him that it is his dharma to fight.  Wendy Doniger wrote about the transformation of a war cry into something else that it is not:

How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

The Gita is a mere subplot in this massive epic.  The war does not end the epic though.  A confusing aspect of Rajaji's short versionof the epic were the pages well after the war, when the victorious brothers and their common wife are all dead.  This part of the Mahabharata is what Wendy Doniger is after this time in her latest work of translation, After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata.

In reviewing the book, Sunil Iyengar writes, "Why are the final books of the Mahabharata so unsettling, so gloomy about postwar prospects for what we now might call closure?"  Exactly.  That's how I have always felt about the post-war part of the story.  But, there was nobody that I could talk to about it, nor was I interested in religion and its stories for too long anyway.

Iyengar adds:

“The Mahabharata wants to have its karma and eat it too,” Doniger writes in her introduction. ... Doniger hails this ambiguity as an enduring charm of the text. It “is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics,” she writes, “that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion.”

I was in my pre-teens when I read Rajaji's version for kids.  I can understand now why the final chapters of the Mahabharata were so confusing to me.  I was looking for a tidying up of the story, all wrapped up with a bow on top, but the end was not cut and dried.  (Too many metaphors in one sentence? To heck with that rule!) 

I have placed an order for the book.  Perhaps you too should?

Postscript: Vyasa is credited as the author of the Mahabharata.  To give you an idea of the complex inter-relationships between the characters, here is one: Vyasa is the father of the brothers Pandu and Dhritarashtra, whose sons battle it out on the killing fields of Kurukshetra.  Karthika Nair sarcastically described Vyasa like this:

The pink tongue

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  The town did not exist prior to the mining and power generation enterprises.  There were a bunch of villages all around and, yes, many villagers were displaced--with compensation.  Whether that compensation was fair is a question to which I do not have an answer, nor is that the focus of this post.  

Many of the employees were from outside Tamil Nadu, which is why there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. And then there were quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi, Saurashtra!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home; perhaps there were more.

This motley crew in a classroom setting once gave us a hilarious moment.  During the elementary years, I wonder if it was the 5th or 6th grade, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  He asked because we all knew that not every kid was a Tamil.

Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said.

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things.  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

(I think Madhulika's family spoke Kannada at home.  Or was it Konkani?)

We did not know any better or worse.  Such linguistic diversity was normal. The way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

Many friends from school were not Tamils.  When we spent time together, we joked and conversed in English.  Rangayya, Manibaba, and Srinivas were Telugu-speakers.  Srikumar and his family conversed in Malayalam.  When Vijay and I fought, we did that too in English, leaving aside our respective backgrounds of Malayalam and Tamil.

While they all spoke their respective languages, not all of them learnt to read and write in Telugu or Malayalam.  After all, the school did not offer those languages as options.  It was then up to their parents or classes at their cultural associations.  In order to satisfy the language requirements, my friends studied Hindi, with the exception of Manibaba who dabbled in Sanskrit. 

All of them spoke Tamil, some more fluently than others.  If memory serves me well, none knew how to read and write in Tamil (unless they took Tamil for a couple of years in school.)  With stores and street names and bus routes and many more public services carrying signs in both English and Tamil,  they could easily navigate through the town and the state with the spoken language but were otherwise "illiterate" in Tamil. 

More than literacy in their native languages--the mother tongues--I would imagine that these raised questions about identity.   At least, they spoke their respective languages in their homes, unlike many children of immigrants who do not speak the languages spoken by their parents and grandparents.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes in that wonderfully autoethnographic essay:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Another child of immigrants has an entirely different story to tell about her mother tongue.  In this intense essay packed with emotions, "over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life," she writes.  What led to the memory erasure?

I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

In immigrant families in which "successful" assimilation leads to children not learning the language of the old country, grandchildren often don't have the linguistic ability to converse with grandparents.  As Aziz Ansari joked in one of his bits, the chats with his grandmother were ultra-short because he didn't know Tamil that his grandmother spoke, and she did not speak English either.

These are modern problems because many of us simply do not stay put where we are born.  But then staying put is really not an exciting choice either.  Something has to give.  Sometimes it is the pink mother tongue that we sacrifice :(

She never apologized!

She died. Aged 96. 

"Now that she is gone, the imperial monarchy must end too. ... That would be an end to celebrate"https://t.co/ebYBESvarf

— Sriram K (@congoboy) September 9, 2022

The following is a re-post from March 2022:

*****************

In the post-WWII Anglo-American world, two events happened in 1952.  On the eastern side of the Atlantic, Princess Elizabeth ascended to the throne after the death of her father.  Later in the year, General Eisenhower won the presidency in a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson.

The former had a "divine right" to the throne.  In what was once a colony of the British monarch, Eisenhower campaigned and convinced the electorate that he was the best man for the job.

After serving the maximum eight years, Eisenhower returned to life as a regular citizen of the United States.  Elizabeth has been holding on to the throne at a ripe old age of 95.

The Queen continues to be the titular head of many of her former colonies.  So, she sent her grandson and his wife on a goodwill tour to a couple of them in the Caribbean.

The royal grandson made some waves even before reaching the blue Caribbean waters.  When commenting on the situation in Ukraine, he forgot that we do not live in a world in which the king is always correct.  We are only too happy to remind the royalty if they are walking around in the nude.

He said that it was “alien” to see war in Europe.

Those of us who did not sleep through the history classes in high school know well that if anything Europe has been a battlefield for ever.  And the bloodletting was so massive across Europe that even though there are conflicts in Africa that involve a few countries, the phrase "World War" refers only to the horrible wars in Europe.

Alien to see war in Europe?

This gifted royal grandson and his wife headed to the warm Caribbean, where the reception was not always pleasantly warm.

In Belize, for example, the royal couple had to cancel their first engagement after Indigenous Q’eqchi Maya villagers protested plans for the royal helicopter to land on a local football field. ...

Protesters in Kingston carried or wore signs telling the British to SehYuhSorry, and, in honor of 60 years of Jamaican independence, groups posted 60 reasons the British should formally apologize for slavery and more than 400 years of exploitation.

The Queen's representative 'expressed “profound sorrow" and said that “slavery was abhorrent, and it should never have happened.”

You see how he distanced himself from all that?  Like a Nixonian "mistakes were made."  It is not without reason that English teachers stress using the active voice.  Tell us who did it!

Of course, the royal grandson did not personally enslave humans.  He did not colonize alien lands.  But, his royal status is intimately tied to all that and more.

So,what should be done to move forward?

What we now need is for the west, especially the United Kingdom, to seriously engage with us on this matter. And, it’s not just lip service that we require. Flowery words and artful symbols not only do not placate us, but words without action will also offend us. We need leaders in civil society, in politics and in the monarchy to not only acknowledge historic exploitation and the consequences thereof but to begin to make concrete steps to rectify it. 

Work has already been done. The Caricom Reparations Commission has outlined a clear 10-point action plan with a tangible plan forward for creating justice.

Here in America, to seriously engage on such matter is what the inheritors of Eisenhower's political party do not want to do.  In fact, Republicans have actively passed laws, in the states where they are in power, that ban any sincere discussion of the past and how that past has brought about the present.  Further, they believe that this ban on history will be a critical part of their campaign to win back the Congress and the White House!

These two countries on either side of the Atlantic are supposedly the beacons of democracy!