A Western theologian writes that the problem with Hinduism is that it does not separate good from evil. The fallacy with such argumentation is that the writer wants to distinguish two phenomena which cannot be separated. Where does the good end and evil begin is a matter of impossible behavioral analysis. Woman or man is not distinct in terms of good and evil. No one is; neither humans nor their representations in mythologies and literatures. Pre-Christian religious cults had deities of ambiguous attributes in terms of good and evil. The deities of Hindu pantheon are not categorically binary opposites. Before I elaborate more, I have a story from ancient Iraq. The story comes from the Sumerian folk tradition.
We have responsibilities to comprehend the nuances of religions and cultural practices beyond clichéd interpretations.
One day God felt intensely creative and made a beautiful creature. He named it Human. With extreme gratification over the beauty of the object, he almost praised his own range of creativity. He looked at it for some time and wanted to blow life into it. He paused for a moment and summoned the brightest angel. The deity appeared within a flash. He was second to god in every aspect. “Look at my make,” God was filled with hubris. “It looks dignified,” praised the angel. “The best!” God continued looking at his creation. “It is a charisma!” The angel was awestruck by its beauty. Then something happened which changed the course of heavenly order.
God suddenly asked the angel, “Bow to it.” The angel looked at God with a shock. He thought for a moment and said, “I cannot.” “Bow to it.” “I cannot.” God commanded him for the third time and the angel still refused amidst disbelief. Then God commanded something unthinkable: Go to Hell! The angel was instantly hurled into hell from the kingdom of god. He pondered amidst tears, “I was the second to Him and the first lover of God. How could I bow to something which comes after me.” The villagers still say that out of extreme love Satan learned to hate God. Eternal hate evolved out of divine love.
The idea of binary opposites looks feeble in such circumstances. Good and evil, love and hate and many such seeming contradictions complement one another. Let me now elaborate my proposition made earlier. There is a common cultural reason for bringing in such interpretation of the goddess story. One may notice the traditional image of Durga killing the demon; the semiotics is not merely of the god killing the bad. It is more a matter of divinity assimilating the evil into herself. Mahasuri (the great Demoness, one of her names) embodies both; as she possesses good in her, she contains evil within. The binaries are subsumed into one divine symbol.
Think of another example. Look at the Chol Nataraja image of dancing Shiva. There is a flame of knowledge that encircles not only the god but also the demon under his feet. Knowledge possesses both the god and the demon. The flame does not separate the god and the devil. There are many such examples in religious narratives and iconographies where binaries collapse into one.
My point here is less to philosophize the idea of opposites than to say that we have responsibilities to comprehend the nuances of religions and cultural practices beyond clichéd interpretations. There is no harm in such stereotyping but there is more joy in understanding our cultures beyond the age old readings of “victory of good over evil.” The separatist analysis of some of the most significant cultural practices is reductionist complacency.
The interpretive practices at times sound very readymade. I like to object to such modes of understandings where multiple perspectives do not come into play. Such interpretations lead us to say that Hinduism is clumsy and Islam is fundamental in beliefs. Once a European academician asked me if we were not overly superstitious since we have so many gods and goddesses. My perspective was very simple: Think about the cultures which can name millions of gods and goddesses and think about their immense power of identifying millions of forces and energies of nature. We like to name ourselves, our places, our objects, and if those wise ancestors named the features and attributes of nature one after another, what is superstitious about it. They identified nature in their aesthetic modes, which science does in rational modes. Both the purposes are to know the world around us. Other things are just details of knowing. Happy Dashami!
pallabi@pallabi.wlink.com.np
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