HVK Archives: Does faith need the crutch of wisdom?
Does faith need the crutch of wisdom? - The Pioneer
Anees Jung
()
14 October 1996
Title : Does faith need the crutch of wisdom?
Author : Anees Jung
Publication : The Pioneer
Date : October 14, 1996
These are days of Shradh, my servant said. He will take
a few hours off on Saturday, and go to the Jamuna river.
He will take a bath in its sacred waters, visit the
temple on its shores, feed the children who gather for
the occasion, distribute coins and return home. Only
then will he eat his afternoon meal. It is a ritual he
observes every year in memory of his dead mother.
A friend whose brother has chosen to split with the joint
family said, "My mother will not inaugurate his new rasoi
until shradh is over." What did the word mean and signi-
fy? "We call these days pitra-paksh, days set aside
after the full moon in memory of the dead. During these
15 days we remember the dead, feed the Brahmins and avoid
auspicious activities. Shradh days are not good for new
beginnings."
Feeding children, the way my servant did, seemed to me a
better way of remembering the dead. God is perhaps more
alive in them than in the temple pandas. To my friend I
quoted an Urdu couplet that points in the same direction:
Ghar se mandir hai bahut dur chalo yun kar lein. /Koi
rotey huwe bacche ko bansaya jaye.
I pondered over the ritual deep into the night. Timeless
in a way, it seemed to survive on many levels. On the
level of the unlettered man, who figured out the season
not by looking at a calendar but by watching the waxing
and the waning moon, it seemed to have greater purity and
poignancy. He would spend a quarter of his income in a
few hours in memory of his dead mother and grandmother.
He did not ' dread bathing in the raging Jamuna which,
the newspapers warned, had crossed the red level. He
preferred children to the chanting Brahmins. His belief
had no explanation. He even mis-pronounced the word as
'sharad'. He did not know that the word stemmed from the
root, shraddha meaning faith and devotion. He had shrad-
dha without knowing it.
People like my friend, who quoted from the Vedas, fed
Brahmins and could articulate explanations, would perhaps
look at my servant with amused cynicism. Does faith need
wisdom to survive, I wonder.
My servant's observance of the ritual was part of a
popular folk tradition that time had turned into lay and
low. It was an aspect of his locale and his dialect. He
was a Hindu who neither understood Sanskrit, a language
to know the gods, nor was he aware of the learned classi-
cal traditions that the Brahmins expounded. In his
scheme of things, Hardwar was not just a place but also a
river whose waters flowed over Laxman Jhoola.
My servant has travelled to the different sacred rivers
and widened his faith. Can his tradition be separated
from that of my friend, which is bigger, more classical?
Does the one not flow into the other, setting a magical
cycle in motion?
Introducing the vacanas, bhakti poems of personal devo-
tion to a single God, the poet AK Ramanujam analyses the
different components in the 'great' and 'little' tradi-
tions in Hinduism. The four elements in the 'great'
tradition are the caste hierarchy, the Vedas, the Vedic
rituals, the pan-Indian pantheon of Vishnu, Siva, Indra
and others. In the 'little' tradition instead of the
Vedic texts there are the Puranas, saints' legends, minor
mythologies, and systems of magic and superstition in the
various regional languages.
Parallel to the Vedic rituals, every village has its
local cultural observances, animal sacrifices, wakes,
vigils, fairs. Local sects and cults make the social
organisation while its mythology centres round regional
deities, worship of stones, trees, crossroads and rivers.
The vacana saints rejected both the traditions. They not
only rejected the Vedic scriptures but also legends of
the local gods and goddesses. They had contempt for all
ritual, for sacred space and sacred time.
Wrote Basavanna: The sacrificial lamb brought for the
festival ate up the green leaf brought for the decora-
tions. Not knowing a thing about the kill/it wants only
Toll its belly:/born that day, to die that day./But tell
me:Did the killers survive,/O Lord of the meeting rivers?
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