Salman Rushdie mentions somewhere (perhaps in Imaginary Homelands (1992)) that India does not exist in reality except in the minds of its people. It is a collective fiction, he says, which has to be maintained by riots and ritual outpouring of blood.
It is true that the invasion of India by the British has led to a massive complex among Indians. Many accept that India became united only under British rule. Before that it was a collection of motley kingdoms warring with each other.
Diana L Eck’s book India: A Sacred Geography (2012) comes as an antidote to such thinking. Eck’s central thesis is that the entire nation was unified for centuries through the bonds of religion and spiritual pilgrimage. As Eck says: “[India’s landscape] has been constituted not by priests and their literature … but by countless millions of pilgrims who had generated a powerful sense of land, location, and belonging through journeys to their hearts’ destinations.”
Eck calls her book a book about the “pilgrim’s India”. Pilgrims have traversed India throughout the ages right from the Vedic times and, perhaps, even earlier. The Mahabharata has mention of the Pandavas going on a pilgrimage throughout the length and breadth of India. The Mahabharata has a passage that states that the holy practice of pilgrimage [tirthyatra] is better even than many sacrifices to the Gods. “For example,” says Eck, “the famous Dasashvamedha tirtha in Banaras is the place where ritual bathing bestows the fruits of “ten ashvamedha” sacrifices.”
Eck covers many pilgrimages from the Ayyappa pilgrimage in South India to the pilgrimage to Pandarpur in Maharashtra. She says that India’s pilgrimage spots do not stand apart but are interconnected to each other in an inseparable whole.
One wonders why there is no mention of the holy places of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs etc in the book. Christians are said to live in India since the time of St. Thomas. But Eck cannot be faulted for only focusing on “Hindu geography”. That alone has resulted in a huge tome and more inclusions will have rendered it unpalatable like a dry encyclopaedia.
It is true that the invasion of India by the British has led to a massive complex among Indians. Many accept that India became united only under British rule. Before that it was a collection of motley kingdoms warring with each other.
Diana L Eck’s book India: A Sacred Geography (2012) comes as an antidote to such thinking. Eck’s central thesis is that the entire nation was unified for centuries through the bonds of religion and spiritual pilgrimage. As Eck says: “[India’s landscape] has been constituted not by priests and their literature … but by countless millions of pilgrims who had generated a powerful sense of land, location, and belonging through journeys to their hearts’ destinations.”
Eck calls her book a book about the “pilgrim’s India”. Pilgrims have traversed India throughout the ages right from the Vedic times and, perhaps, even earlier. The Mahabharata has mention of the Pandavas going on a pilgrimage throughout the length and breadth of India. The Mahabharata has a passage that states that the holy practice of pilgrimage [tirthyatra] is better even than many sacrifices to the Gods. “For example,” says Eck, “the famous Dasashvamedha tirtha in Banaras is the place where ritual bathing bestows the fruits of “ten ashvamedha” sacrifices.”
Eck covers many pilgrimages from the Ayyappa pilgrimage in South India to the pilgrimage to Pandarpur in Maharashtra. She says that India’s pilgrimage spots do not stand apart but are interconnected to each other in an inseparable whole.
One wonders why there is no mention of the holy places of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs etc in the book. Christians are said to live in India since the time of St. Thomas. But Eck cannot be faulted for only focusing on “Hindu geography”. That alone has resulted in a huge tome and more inclusions will have rendered it unpalatable like a dry encyclopaedia.
No comments:
Post a Comment