SOME ASPECTS OF SOUTH ASIAN CULTURAL TRADITIONS

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "SOME ASPECTS OF SOUTH ASIAN CULTURAL TRADITIONS"

Roland Freeman
5 years ago
Views:

1 1

2 SOME ASPECTS OF SOUTH ASIAN CULTURAL TRADITIONS ANISUZZAMAN Professor Emeritus, University of Dhaka Paper presented at the SACEPS WORLD CONFERENCE ON SOUTH ASIA : DEMOCRACY, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND PEACE New Delhi, February

3 SOME ASPECTS OF SOUTH ASIAN CULTURAL TRADITIONS South Asia, home of a big chunk of humanity, may, in some way, be likened to the proverbial glass of water which is described as half empty or half full, depending on one's point of view. The facts are undisputed: the region contains a multitude of ethnic groups, innumerable languages belonging to at least four principal families, different faiths including five major religions of the world, varying social systems and ways of life and the like. Without ignoring these differences, many scholars view South Asia as a single area whose unity is seen, in terms, among others, of its being the seat of an ancient civilization, the predominance of her agricultural economy, and the rural, caste-oriented and religious character of her culture. Others stress on the differences in terms of the physical features of the land and the people, the variety of regional languages, the assorted political divisions, the divergence of religious persuasions, the disparate food habit and the like. David Ludden, a contemporary scholar, observes: We now see that rather than having one singular origin, South Asia has always included many peoples and cultures, which had different points of departure and followed distinctive historical trajectories. What once seemed like a single tree of Indic culture, rooted in the Vedas, with many branches spreading out over centuries, has come to look more like a vast forest of many cultures filled with countless trees of various sizes, ages and types, constantly cross-breeding to fertilize one another. The profusion of cultures blurs the boundaries of the forest. Cultural boundaries drawn by modern scholars in and around South Asia have come to be seen more as artefacts of modern national cultures than as an accurate reflection of pre-modern conditions. (India and South Asia, Oxford, 2002, p 7) It is, I daresay, appropriate that we speak of South Asian cultures rather than a South Asian culture. This is not to deny the threads of commonality that have run through them for ages or question the wisdom of applying the phrase 'unity in diversity' to characterise them. On this last issue, I am strongly reminded of the saying of Pascal, the seventeenth century French philosopher and writer: 'Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.' History tells us that when the Indo-European speakers settled in South Asia, they had met its earlier inhabitants with a different culture most probably one akin to that of Indus Valley civilization, which had a script and perhaps a literature of its own, but of which we know almost nothing. That they had met people who spoke languages of both Dravidian and Austric origin is almost certain. The Vedic literature that started growing around 1500 B.C. gave the first expressions to South Asian cultures. The Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata (which was compiled around 1000 B.C. and took the present form around 500 B.C.) and the Ramayana (compiled around 500 B.C.) provided South Asian cultures with the first sets of commonality. Renderings of the two epics are found in all the Neo Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali and Oriya and also in the Dravidian languages like Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telegu from the 10th century A.D. Versions of the 3

4 Mahabharata, cast in Jataka style, appeared in Sinhala. The influence of the two epics are also unmistakable in the development of music, dance and drama in the region. The second wave of commonality stemmed from the Bhakti movement that had spread all over the region from the 6th century A.D., but was specially popular between the 14th and 17th centuries. The movement was about devotional worship of a personal deity expressed in terms of the ecstatic love of the beloved for the lover that produced great literary compositions. The metaphor easily led to an amalgamation of the devotional and the erotic tendencies and the poetics of love poetry developed into a kind of theology for the devotee. The movement found early expressions in Tamil (9th and 10th centuries), caught on in Marathi (13th century), and spread over to Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Maithili, Oriya and Rajasthani (15th to 17th centuries) as well as to Kannada, Malayalam and Telegu (14th to 16th centuries). The Bhakti movement rejected both Brahmanical rituals and Jaina asceticism, broke the barriers of caste, creed and gender differences, and exclusively used regional languages instead of Sanskrit for their expression. It had a great deal of influence on music and dance, theatre, painting and sculpture. The remnants of this school are seen in the Bauls of West Bengal and Bangladesh today. Another phase of commonality appeared with the region's contact with the West which affected almost all cultural activities. Poetry underwent a great deal of change and new literary forms, such as fiction, drama and prose, appeared in all literatures. New waves came over in music and theatre as well as in painting, sculpture and architecture. Film appeared as a formidable art-form with an interesting history of its development. Ideas ranging from Romanticism to Realism, Feminism to Post-modernism, Marxism to Freudian thoughts made formidable impact on all forms of cultural expressions. The impact of the West on South Asian cultures has sometimes been exaggerated to reflect adversely on its indigenous heritage, westernization and modernization have often been equated, and the fact that seeds of many modern trends are found in many pre-modern cultures has been totally ignored. Another kind of commonality may be seen in the issues that are chosen by the writers and artists that also go beyond the relationship of man and woman. Given the nature of South Asian societies as a whole it is not surprising that the ground realities in the region have a great deal of similarity and so are the responses to them. In the earliest specimens of Bengali poetry, the Caryapadas, we find the poets regretfully pronouncing that 'the thief and its captor are the same person' or 'the jackal constantly fights the lion'. If this is a cry against the existing social order, this is also echoed in the poems of Nazrul Islam and the famine sketches of Zainul Abedin in the twentieth century Bengal. In Urdu, we have Josh Malihabadi giving voice to a spirit of revolt and Faiz Ahmed Faiz calling upon the people to speak the truth before the time exhausts or the body perishes. What Faiz exhorts his people to do is done by the parallel theatre in Pakistan in the eightes of the last century amidst all repressive measures adopted by the military administration. The Janajati movement in Nepal revived ethnic festivals and facilitated the broadcasting by the state-controlled media 4

5 of programmes in the indigenous languages which were otherwise neglected and thus paved the path of multiculturalism. Kabir, the sixteenth century Bhakti poet, writing in Hindi, turns against communal and caste discriminations: A Brahman wears a sacred thread that he himself has made. If you are a Brahman, born of a Brahman mother, why haven't you come into the world in some special way? If you are a Turk, born of a Turk, why weren't you circumcised in the womb of your mother? If you milk a black cow and a white cow, can you distinguish the milk that they give? Sheikh Madan, a Bengali Baul of the nineteenth century, complains against the priestly classes for their wrongdoings: The path to God is blocked by the temple and the mosque, and though I hear your call, O Lord, I cannot find the way. Against me stand both guru and mursid... on the gate are many locks: Puranas, Qur'an, tasbi, mala, such outward show makes Madan weep in sorrow. Rabindranath Tagore, who admired the songs of Kabir and of the Bauls of Bengal, loomed large in the twentieth century with his humanism and universalism and his influence extended to the whole of South Asia. The ugly communal riots at the time of the partition of India has been a subject of fiction in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English on both sides of the border. Khawaja Ahmad Abbas, Krishan Chandar, Saadat Hasan Manto and Khushwant Sing's stories and novels have moved people to their core. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala- Tamil relations had started to deteriorate shortly after the country won independence but in the eighties it became much worse. A group of Sinhala and Tamil writers, such as Parakrama Kodituwakku, K G Amaradasa, Gunasena Witana and Dominic Jeeva, as well as the literary organization, Janatha Lekhaka Peramura, attempted to create harmony and ease tension by publishing their original works as well as coming up with anthologies of Sinhala and Tamil writings translated into the other language. In a similar way, the condition of women portrayed in the creative works of writers, painters and filmmakers in South Asia demonstrate both traditional values nurtured and changing attitudes developed both by the male and female of the species. A whole list of female authors, from Svarnakumari Devi to Asapurna Devi and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain to Taslima Nasreen may be mentioned in this context. In his lecture on Man delivered at the Andhra University in 1937, Tagore said : The human body is a universe inhabited by millions of cells. Each of them is instinct with its own individual life and yet with a deep direction towards a mystery of unity. If they had self-consciousness they would have been conscious of their separateness and at the same time of their identity with the whole body. The later fact could only have been possible through an 5

6 unaccountable indication of relationship, though the complete knowledge of the whole body would surely be beyond the power of those cells. For, this body exists not only here and now, but its past persists in it, its future awaits it. There is also a common element of general felicity pervading the whole system which cannot be analysed and which is what we mean by health. Besides this each cell embodies a spirit of self-dedication to the purpose of the maintenance of life's wholeness. If we try to grasp the mystery of this career, we can understand that the truest nature of these minute bodies centre round something which we can call their universal aspect. It is the same with Man. He has observed the deeper endeavour of his own heart and felt that he is not exclusively an individual : he is also one in spirit with the Universal man, under whose inspiration the individual engages in expressing his ultimate truth through crossing nature's limitations. To these expressions he gives the name of the true, the good, the beautiful, not only from the point of view of the preservation and enrichment of society, but from the completeness of his own self. The seeker after the truth, good and beautiful cannot but be conscious of his identity as an individual and the fact of his belonging to a particular place and time as well as to the humanity that does not admit of the trappings of any particular time and space. There are elements in South Asian cultural traditions such as respect for the fellow human being that is conducive to sustaining democracy, tolerance and liberalism that reject bigotry and militant extremism, and love of Nature that contributes to the protection of environment. One realizes, however, that things can't be wished into reality. In the struggle for the protection of the planet, the creation of a better world to live in, and the building of democratic institutions and secular society, the writers and artists of South Asia will surely join hands with the others having the same goal. 6

CULTURAL HERITAGE OF INDIAN EPIC RAMAYANA

CULTURAL HERITAGE OF INDIAN EPIC RAMAYANA Prof. Dr. Jyotsna Chattopadhyay Rabindra Bharati University West Bengal, India Abstract:- The Indian Epic Ramayana and its study in our country since time immemorial