The row over artist Asanthan’s body reignites a fundamental question – is Shiva a brahmin or a dalit? Or, does he transcend all such temporal identities?
If we deconstruct our myths, Shiva appears to us as a rebellious, subversive and subaltern God incessantly in clash with the dominant forces of Vedic Brahmanic Hinduism. He was the god of the underdog, the deity of the original tribes, the chandalas and the mlecchas till the brahmins appropriated him. He dwells in graveyards, he is the spirit of forest and mountains, a nomad who overpowers the culture of the settled sedentary culture of the vedic brahmins.
Shiva remained a motif of the unvanquished human consciousness, struggling and meditating in deep penance on snow-clad mountains, perhaps smoking pot and why not.
Shiva is a symbol, an emotion, not something that can be bound inside the four walls designed by brahmins, so that they can reign supreme over the original inhabitants of the land.
This power struggle still seems unsettled and the Asanthan issue – where the body of the artist was denied access for public homage at Durbar Hall ground adjacent to Ernakulam Shiva temple – is just another symbol of this centuries-long power struggle to usurp the wild, dalit god.
Many rituals in temples and notions of impurity are specifically designed to keep lower castes outside the bounds of broad Hindu culture, which was always a self-evolving, organic culture and has been correcting itself through various reformist movements. Savants and seers, be it Adi Shankara, Buddha, Sri Ramakrishna, Gandhi or Sree Narayana Guru, tried to delve into their own struggles and personal experiences and then come out enlightened and partake that wisdom to the masses.
The Bhagavatham tells us the story of Daksha Prajapati, where the first denial of caste hierarchy takes place. Prajapati objects to his daughter Sati’s desire to marry Shiva, who lives in the forest and graveyards and is dirty and wild. But she marries Shiva in spite of the objection of her father. When Daksha organized a huge yaga and Sati went there uninvited, she was insulted in front of the guests. This story even today echoes the modern-day predicament of inter-caste marriages.
Sati, unable to bear further insult, ran into the sacrificial fire and immolated herself. Shiva, upon learning about the terrible incident, in his wrath invoked his bhoothaganas to destroy the yagasala. Sati subsequently reunites with Shiva, incarnated as Parvati.
We can see similar kind of unrest even in contemporary times, when one community tries to appropriate gods and symbols that have universal appeal. The Ardhanareeshwara avatar of Shiva again reveals how he has a transgender quality that goes beyond the concept of traditional male-female divisions. Shiva is ascetic and erotic at the same time. He is in full control over his physical and spiritual being. The spirit behind the myth of Shiva was much ahead of the times. But there has been always a case of objectifying abstract truths into mere symbols and idolatry worship so that it benefits people who are in charge of the places of worship.
They can then have control over the mainstream cultural consciousness. Rituals have a huge positioning in the power game and it can turn very oppressive. Shiva stands for a different sort of power, which is always in opposition to the power of aggression and domination, the power with capital P, as differentiated by Spinoza’s ‘power’, which represents creation or puissance that can be translated as Veeryam.
In the Spinozian concept, it is this immanent creativity latent in all of us, a possibility that Shiva tries to expound through his avatar. This is the power of emancipation and true involution, or metamorphosis of human being or the anticipation of the ‘Over Man’ in the Nietzschean sense. Shiva epitomizes the supreme existential state of Satchidananda – sat is the truth; chid, the expression of truth; and the resulting bliss is ananda.
It is ironical that brahmins want to reduce the symbol of Shiva to the four walls of their temple and bring in religious dogmas like pure-impure. They are doing it perhaps knowing the sheer power this god can wield to transform individuals.
Caste is used to put people in place and it has immense impact on the lives of people. The popular notion that the caste came on its own is wrong as there was conscious attempt over thousands of years to divide people in order to retain social and economic dominance. If one looks from above, one will understand that caste originates from a personal madness which at times transforms into a social madness, a paranoia produced by the forces of Power. This madness is cunningly exploited by parties like BJP, who will pit one against the other for their benefit.
The caste equation is a necessary evil for all political parties in India so that they can prosper at the cost of this hatred for each other which will translate into votes.
Dalits, on the other hand, should not fall into these devious motives as every time when their god was usurped by upper castes, reformers had come up within the community to make them more secure and understand the real meaning of their own existence.
We had reformer saints like Nandanar and Pakkanar who revived the Bhakti movement even during the height of oppressive brahmanical hegemony. It is a natural process that whenever there is inequality there will be corrective forces that will come up to fight against it, in spite of political, fascist forces trying to exploit the situation.
What dalits should do is to chart a path that their god Shiva had conceived in the first place, instead of just becoming rebels for the sake of becoming rebels. At one level there is an immense possibility of liberation from traditional caste hierarchy, and at a deeper level there is a self-purification process occurring through inner discipline and meditation of self. Dalits should not take recourse to the negative or reactive use of the saivic principle but appropriate the affirmative and transformative thrust of the saivic event. Becoming Shiva of the dalit would mean a politics of becoming and metamorphosis instead of an identitarian politics of negation and reaction.
The writer did his doctorate at JNU and is a former professor of history at Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur
- Times of India
