Thinking along with JK

Thinking along with JK, mind is seen full of conditionings. Every act we do now, every thought which occurs, every view that the mind holds upon - all are, all have been deriving themselves recursively, layer upon layer of the past, my past, your past, our past. The pros is as much a part of this layering as the cons is. Nothing escapes, no theory, no school, no idea that has come down, however docile or daring, this matrix of conditioning. Even your spontaneity is sham-faced by the subtle prevarications of this chained lattice of conditioning. 'What survives?' is an extended link of this lattice.

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Generally with any book on spirituality, whatever may be the school or whoever may be the author, whether in any religious garb or not, I find one uniform feature. That is, all these books are brain-washing in the sense, that these make you feel that that way is the only way or the only efficacious way or the only superior way vouchsafed unto humanity as the final path. All other ways are either wrong or only preparations to this path. Why every mystic wants to do that for his way is queer if we choose to think on that. Perhaps this vehemence occupies the vacuum of the lack of any objectively verifiable ground. Science fares happier on that ground.

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Hall of Masks

We are in a hall of masks;
lost our heads long ago,
somewhere, hereabout,
in the midst of masks,
those should be lying,
lisping some unheard truths;
our masks deter our efforts
in finding out our heads
and shoot a thousand head-aches
of the heads unfound;
chinnamasta shies away
having tried and failed
to give us hints.

We are in a hall of masks
searching for a thousand reasons
instead of our one head that will count;
perhaps we are afraid we may find it
and postpone the chance of the unexpected;
the masks are in search of our heads,
to hide them and belie our eyes;
That one head, our beloved head
should reach us soon, in spite of us.

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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A Sangam poem

Eating plenty of plantain

of the rich swaying leaves,

along with the sweet shelves

of jack-fruits, resisting further intake,

changing gulps of honey-like water,

coursed with rich bouts of wine,

the monkeys find it impossible,

to scale the sandal trees,

and just doze off
on the beds of heaps of fallen blossoms;

effortless pleasures are aplenty

for all the living beings of thine hills,

easily got with no strain;

then forsooth, aimed pleasure,

is it so difficult for thee?

Bounteous beauty

and bamboo-smooth shoulders

branching off and entwining

as it were the heart,

ever pressing forth to thwart;

all for the sake of thee, if then,

she is tightly in guard by daytime

and you venture the night not sir;

the seasons fade fast away

and the wretched moon lingers long

down in the town.

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(Translation of one Sangam song, 'what is that?')

Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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'In the windy plains, O! Kannamma!'

In the windy plains, O! Kannamma

I rejoice in thy loveful thoughts

Lips of springs of nectar

Moonlight drips brimming eyes

Body shaped of pure golden hue

Till I last in this world vast

Make me forget everything else

Changing me into a celestial

You are my sweet soul O Kannamma!

I will adore thee for ever and ever

Sorrows gone and gone are the miseries

The moment you are held as gold

Pure nectar bristles in my mouth

When I utter your name Kannamma

In the fire of my soul you are the rising flame

You are my thought you are my mind aflame.

(Translation of Bharathi's song)

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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Poetry in a phrase !

Poetry in a phrase !

Poetry can happen even without words. If so, no wonder, poetry can happen even in only one word.

But nobody can doubt that poetry can happen in a phrase. Such phrasal poetic flashes are abundant in Sangam lore. One example we will see.

You are sitting in your garden house. It is calm, honeyed isolation. Surrounding trees chatter some age old jokes, which the wind recognizes.

The sheen of sprayed light, the skin of emergent twilight and the returning calls of the home-coming birds make the evening wine-dipped.

You fix your gaze on a branch. It is odd, the curves and the bends and the swirling botanical gustos. One parrot is sweetly repetitive. You wonder why. Perhaps to relieve you of the mystery, a squirrel sits in a lower branch, being tutored by the parrot for some uncertain future symphony. It is not there, the reasons, in the creatures' minds. But the poetry links it so. The parrot and the squirrel make an ideal tutor and the taught. What the parrot says, the squirrel tries to repeat in many unsuccessful attempts. It looks so in the poet's eyes. He expresses it in a phrase, so beautifully, in akanAnURu. 12

kiLi viLi payiRRum veLil Adu perunchinai

a parrot teaching a squirrel

the sequence of calls

on a wide branch of tree

(veLil - squirrel)

The scholars who have translated this line so far, including my friend Prof A Dakshinamurthy, have overlooked this poetry, which is there in the natural sequence of words. Instead they have gone around to draw meaning more congenial to the common sense as - the parrots mistakenly thinking the calls of the girls in the ranches as the calls of their own kind and the squirrels dancing - which goes too way afar to make the Sangam poet look so prosaic, whereas the line in its natural order evoke a terrible sense of poetry in a serene mood.

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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'El' dorado of Tamil

A rich man adorns himself with very many apparels. An able artist knows how to use the same material in so many ways.

A language should be rich and at the same time highly artistic. Only then such language can use various words for every distinct occasion and the same word in very many senses in different occasions. It is rare to see such languages in the linguistic spectrum of the world. Tamil is one such language, which is at the same time very rich in words and highly artistic in the use of them.

To illustrate this point I will take the word 'el' in Tamil.

This simple word of mono syllable carries about ten meanings. Is it believable? But it is so. And not only that - this same word carries diametrically opposite meanings also.

First we will take the meaning of 'el' - as 'light'. Kuruntokai 216 uses this word 'el' in this sense. - 'thodu aar el vaLai'

Again the same word 'el' also carries the meaning which is opposite in signification to 'light'. el = night. NaRRiNai 2 uses the word in this sense - ellitai neengum iLaiyon.

Again another shade - neither light nor night but evening when the twilight sets in. el - evening. KuRuntokai 275 uses the word in the sense of evening. - el Urc cErtarum ERutai inatthu.

Again the same word 'el' is also used to denote daytime. In AkanAnURu 266 'el' is used in the sense of daytime. - kaLLutaip peruncORRu el imizh anna

Again the same word 'el' also signifies the Sun. PuRanAnURu 157 uses it as - mImisai el padu pozhudin

'el is not only the Sun but also the sunlight or sunheat veyil. Pingalandai nigandu lists it as a synonym for 'veyil'

'el' has not still exhausted its meanings. 'el' can also mean the full day. naaL, which the nigandu lists.

All these are in one way understandable as signifying inter related things like light, day, sun, sunlight etc. But what to say, when the same word 'el' is used to denote the qualities like greatness or abundance.?

AkanAnURu 77 uses 'el in the sense of big, great, majestic - el vaLi alaikkum iruL kUr maalai

And Perunkathai 33 uses it as abundance - el oLip paavai

What is so awesome is the range of meanings both opposite in signification and falling beyond the major registry of meanings.

Such was the original Tamil, voracious in vocabulary and yet again adept in using the words.

Is it the 'el' dorado of Tamil ?

(my thanks to the dictionaries and anthologies)

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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On Poetry vs Music

Some thoughts on poetry vs music, which I shared back and forth in dialogues in googleplus:

Singing poetry is strangling the delicacy of poetry by the arrogance of music.

Poetry has its own music inbuilt which manifests in progressive coming back to it and understanding the poetry layers after layers. But when you set the music from outside, the words are forced to play a different role than for which they are intended in poetry, a role of danseuse to an external code and rhythm. Whereas in poetry the words blossom out petals by petals of their meaning levels. This unnatural and forceful appropriation of poetry to serve the logic and codes of music is what I call 'the arrogance of music'. In chanting also the inner world of poetic sensibility is sacrificed to the social formulas and codes of chanting and choir.

Roman Jakobson sees progressive freedom of expression from the stage of phonemes into words to the stage of words set in sentences. But in prose and ordinary functions of language like reporting and narrating, the words are constrained by the denotative function, even though the connotative writes into the sentences more and more spaces of freedom. But in poetic function the language becomes almost self-referential and in one stroke it has become the stage, the player and the performance, all in one. The compulsion of denotation is reduced to the minimum. Roman Jakobson maps this progressive liberation of language in his book, 'Fundamentals of Language'. While discussing the two-fold character of language in the second part, his following words are significant, which play resonance with the Dhvani concepts of Kavya Sastras.:

"Thus in the combination of linguistic units there is an ascending scale of freedom. In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the freedom of the individual speaker is zero; the code has already established all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language. Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed, it is limited to the marginal situation of wordcoinage. In the forming of sentences out of words the speaker
is less constrained. And finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action of compulsory syntactical rules ceases
and the freedom of any individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially, although again the numerous stereotyped
utterances are not to be overlooked."

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I will like to take one example from Victor Hugo,  a line which I like very much - 'L'homme respire, mais l'artiste aspire'. L'homme is man. 'respire' belongs to biology. L'artiste again the name of man in one function. 'aspire' belongs to the field of values - aspiration. Here what function the biology word 'respire' is doing? Man respires. Is it reporting? What use? Yea man respires. What of that? But V Hugo uses the whole first part as a preamble and foregrounding for what he is going to say next, as 'pakaippulam' - contrast background. The whole unit Man respires serves to focus our attention on 'but the artist aspires'. Aspiration is as essential and sine qua non to the artist as respiration is to the man, biological. Where will you point the occurrence of poetry here? In which word? That is why we have to consider that poetry is maximum freedom context of language, which Dhvani says in its own way - Poetry happens after the words are exhausted.

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Srirangam V Mohanarangan

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On the idea of Pierre Bourdieu..

Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, very aptly expresses one concept of field research experience, in his book 'Outline of a Theory of Practice'. When in 1989 or so, when I was conducting a group of my friends in a cultural understanding practice employing phenomenological constructs, through a couple of years, to temples like Srirangam, Thirupathi, Kancheepuram and Melkote, the idea I was beginning to have then, was very near to what is expressed here in this book by Pierre Bourdieu.

"The anthropologist's particular relation to the object of his study contains the makings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, leading him to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations."

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The author speaks of the necessity of the theory developed to be at variance in some aspects from the object studied. The accountability question does not arise. The research has to fulfill the accountability criteria. The point is even if participatory exercises are incorporated into the module, still the faith commitments or the lack of them, make a large difference in the presentation. And in the research methodology, it fails at the start if you uphold the faith positions.

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Existence of bias - regarding a thought of Mr Alex Watson

Existence of bias in research may not be totally eradicable. But awareness of such bias and that too self-awareness by the scholar himself is an efficacious corrective and check to that bias. Real research rests on such self-disciplines. Here is an example, which when read emboldens one's reliance on true research and its functioning towards knowledge. Mr Alex Watson is one such scholar, whose opinions make one think and rethink about the matter. In his remarkable book translating with a commentary Bhatta Ramakantha' work 'naresvaraparikshaprakasa', which is again an elaboration on the work 'naresvarapariksha' of Sadyojyoti, Mr Alex Watson writes the following words. (Bhatta Ramakantha, an early Saiva Siddhantist belongs to the later part of 10th century CE): "The fact that, in western scholars' encounter with Buddhism over the last two centuries, Buddhist authors have been interpreted as Hegelian, Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian, Platonic, Stoic, transcendental idealist, phenomenologist, and as akin to Husserl, Russell or Whitehead, indicates that, instead of letting the texts speak for themselves, we have a tendency to superimpose on them perspectives with which we are more familiar. This raises worrying questions about our ability to recognize what is unfamiliar as unfamiliar."

To my mind it looks but natural and creative also to read authors across times and cultures in parallel lights and in inter-textual interpretative understanding. But sometimes the comparison may become a noise rather than an enhancing music of mutual meditations. Perhaps to avoid such noisy mishaps Mr Alex Watson intends his note of caution.

Then what is the way out ? How to do remedial research which avoids such quagmires? He himself suggests a valid approach of sticking to the words intelligently.

"If we want the classical Indian traditions to reveal themselves, not our own preconceptions, and the voices of their thinkers to come across louder than our voices, our most powerful tool is philology. While we can never completely eliminate our own subjectivity, we can, as philologists, attempt to set it aside to some extent by sticking closely to an observation of the texts themselves, and, when interpreting, allowing our analysis to be guided by concepts and ideas derived from the text itself or other texts of the same general period and tradition."

Persons, who aim to be better and more better scholars cannot afford to pass over these words in haste.

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