Sa Ham- I am She (2024 series): Child Goddess

Sri Bala Tripura Sundari from Pinterest

 

(This is the second post the 2024 Sa Ham series. To read first post, please click here.)

In her book, “Whispers of the Unseen: the Quest for 64 Yoginis”, author Beena Unnikrishnan has a chapter on Bala Tripura Sundari. The nine-year-old daughter of Goddess Lalitha. It is said that in great battle between Demon Bhandasura and the Goddess, the young Bala insisted on joining the war. The mother finally relented and gave her some of her armour and weapons. Sri Bala fought valiantly and defeated several sons of the Demon. (You can read my review of this book in the Frontline magazine here).

I was quite taken aback with this story. The story of child Krishna doing many divine acts are well-known. However, I had not heard of Bala. Once I researched, I discovered many songs and hymns dedicated to Bala including a thousand-names chant, Sri Bala Sahasranama.

This research made me reflect on how children are portrayed in mythology and ancient scriptures. For example, the entire Katha Upanishad is a conversation between 5-year-old Nachiketa with the God of Death Yama. And I couldn’t help noticing the contrast with how we perceive children now.

Parenting

I am thinking of Dr Benjamin Spock and his famous book “Baby and Child Care” which revolutionised parenting in the 20^th century. What it also did was to insert the idea globally that one needed a book or an expert to help with parenting, that there was ideal parenting “what-to-do” and “how-to-do” tips.

Combined with the rise of psychology influenced mostly by Freud and his later students, the engineering orientation to the world as problems to be solved, increased number of nuclear families, parenting became a process of moulding children and ensuring socially appropriate behaviours. To this was the addition of innumerable books, toys and games, giving rise to an industry whose workers depend on this process to continue as is.

The consequences of this shift in parent-child narratives are many. The most important aspect being loss of respect for the child as an aware and legitimately responsive human being. The “child” becomes lesser in hierarchy and treated as this adorable vulnerable waiting-to-receive-right-inputs creature. “Woh toh bachcha hai.”

One social media ad assured parents that they were the one who “hold the key to unlock the potential of their child” and the business would help parents “find the lock for the key.”

The directed sculpting and shaping through books, toys, and activities also meant the children are not discovering their own modes of entertainment and play. Instead, they are boxed in. Play this game to improve brain functions, and this one for motor functions and that one to learn alphabets quickly. The notion of unlimited growth is inserted right in the early years.

Veteran educationist K.B. Jinan often comments on this state. That children can figure out what they need to play with and how. That it increases curiosity when they are free to move around and discover. That parents can learn from observing children. He worries about the loss of natural cognitive processes in our world and states, existing “cognitive sciences are better for machines, not children.” You can follow hisInstagram page titled “Do_nothing_parenting”. 

The guided parenting activities also cut off children’s multipronged connection with environment. What we have is an activity with pre-decided one or two purposes. Instead of discovering an environment, they learn to relate to others from a utilitarian point of view. Park is for X, playground for Y, supermarket for Z and so on. Or how categories are formed and continue in our world.

Thankfully many are challenging the usual discourse of parenting and writing complex unparenting narratives of parent-child relationships. It is also wonderful to read rich layered memoirs of parents like this one that was published this week or the one I had written a decade back.

"Childhood"

There is another significant consequence of the events of the last century. It is the way in which “childhood” has become a distinct category of experience and part of the cause-effect analysis. The content and experience of this category is imagined having huge effects on the rest of life. Personal narratives often dip into this experience to make sense of their “behaviours” in the world. There is also a sense of loss and yearning if that category was not the imagined ideal.

What this excessive focus does is to deny other aspects of our life. That cultures and our worlds change. What was true of our parents’ time is not true in our times is not true of our children’s times. Which means actions are informed and influenced by the worlds they come into being so that the meaning of “childhood” is a shifting dynamic. What it also denies are intergenerational patterns that we find ourselves in – patterns that continue and some that are disrupted and some that are sadly discontinued. We are unable to zoom out and observe the swirl of everything.

Including the increasing pollution of water, soil and air. Of changing climate. Of intense divide of hearts and what that means to our nervous system. Of changing communication patterns.

Finding the cause of pain in a specific childhood is ignoring the larger broken-breaking, healing-healed world we were born into.

Through all of this, I remember the people who treat young persons differently. A dear one had shared an observation of her son. This young man is a mathematician of distinction and in a particular event, he collaborated with his very young cousin and received her inputs with great respect and seriousness. Bayo Akomolafe often refers to learning from hischildren, especially his son Kyah. In one speaking event, I saw him include his young daughter as a co-speaker-thinker.

And me thinks Bala Tripura Sundari probably smiles through such moments.