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| Raja Ravi Varma's depiction of Maa Saraswati (from Wikimedia) |
Today my heart tugged me to write about Saraswati.
My parents tell me that my first connection with the Goddess
began with Maa Saraswati at the age of three. It appears I had picked up on the
festival preparations in my city and insisted on my idol of the Goddess. And they
got me a beautiful clay image of Mother, sitting on a swan and playing her
veena, with that benevolent look.
They also provided me with puja samagri and it seems I had
taken it up earnestly. I had done the puja as I had seen family elders and priests
do. And that this puja changed the pattern in my family. My mother, she says,
took up celebrating festivals around Devi with as much traditional rigour as
she could muster. And that I toddled around her.
My growing years were filled with pujas of devi, inside home
and outside home. I have great fondness of the Goddesses of different forms
anywhere. My very first research paper was a media analysis of the movie “Daman”.
In this movie, the protagonist is named Durga and climax is centred around
Durga Puja. The movie reflects on the disconnect between the perception of
human women as against goddess women. While Maa Durga is worshipped, the young
wife Durga is subjected to severe abuse.
Some of my efforts in writing about Goddesses stems from
this disconnect. How can I return Goddess to Earth?
In all this, there are groups of people who have given their
entire lives for the academic study of Goddess myths. I do not come into this as
a traditional academic even though I have read academic papers and taught at
University in this area. I come in as a lover, dearly wanting to introduce She
who tugs me even when I forget her. I come in as someone who believes that some
of the continuing traditions of older cultures hold patterns that sustain a
sense of ecology, of enmeshment and interdependence, and a wisdom that maybe
sorely needed.
Maybe I am wrong in my assumptions and if so, may I discover
them when it is time. For the moment, I find the existing theoretical lens that
dominate both academia and public intellectual space as reductive and often
divisive (in spite of desiring otherwise). The analysis tends to be through a
narrow boundary lens.
My sense is we need to expand how we perceive our world.
Challenge existing concepts, or shake them up with other perspectives, open out
new possibilities of seeing and being.
I also find some challenges in the South Asian ecology. We
underestimate the extent to which we have adopted and adapted colonisation
patterns (both the old and new forms) and how our thought breathes through the
colonial lens. The enemy is not an outsider. It is us as we gather and
communicate.
To call something Western or Hindu and some forms
intrinsically superior to others is actually playing into the same kind of
categorical illusions that hurt us in the first place.
I hope through this series and through all of my writings I
can reinvoke the smell of earth, generosity of clouds, the expanse of roots of
trees in how we hold each other.
Devi Saraswati
I have known Maa through Raja Ravi Verma paintings. A
particular figure of a woman that the painter thought fit to project onto the
Goddess. And versions of it have creeped into the many sculptures. I recognise
that.
I am also aware there are older forms of Saraswati like Vāc and myths are way more entangled
and complex than what I present here.
Today I choose to step back from the usual media forms and
reflect on the Goddess as symbol of learning. My readings about Saraswati are
not exactly in-depth. I maybe wrong in how I present her. Nevertheless, the
lover’s eyes senses Mother wholly.
In common practice, Maa is known as the Goddess of Learning,
Speech and Arts. I once taught at an Indian University where the central sculpture
was a huge image of Maa Saraswati, moon-white, sitting in a fountain of lotuses.
And in her backdrop were the blue mountains. I passed by her every morning on
my way to teach.
The question for me is why the Goddess is associated so
closely with Bramha, the Creator. The popular myth goes that Bramha created Saraswati.
She was the Shakti for the creative action and also some one he fell in love
with. There first child was Manu, the first Man.
What has learning and speech have to do with the evolution
of life? Thanks to studying Bateson and cybernetics, I can say—Everything. The
trouble is, as Ivan Ilich points out clearly in his book Deschooling Society,
we have come to understand Learning as instructional communication that happens
in a designated spatial area called school/college/university during designated
hours. And we prove we have “learnt” through the process of exams and other
assessment tools.
Learning, as both Gregory and Nora Bateson point out, is
something more liminal and an alive process. It is how an organism comes to
live, thrive and evolve in its environment. As Nora often says, if you are
alive, you are learning.
It is how unicellular organisms gathered and fused to become
multi-celled entities, creating more complex structures as they evolved. It is
how they learnt to continue life through splitting, duplicating and
reproduction. It is how they incubated babies of more complex creatures like
mammals in Mummy’s belly for extended period. It is how they created hormonal
complexes that kept the mother attached to her offspring, and a community of
mothers attached to all of children. Remember how many of us burst into instant
smiles when we see a toddler.
And that all of this is held together through the process of
communication. Not just words, not just gestures, but the whole-body throbbing
with messages for the other. The dog sniffs the bark of the tree, bees smell
chemical in the air, birds fall unusually silent, beetle freezes. The child
gurgles, the puppy nips to play, the kitten practices climbing over. A lover
gazes at her love, the flower blooms, leaves shed. And something is comprehended,
something is communicated. Saraswati, Goddess of Sound and Speech.
The very essence of life is learning. The very energy of
evolution is adaption through learning.
It is only apt that Bramha and Saraswati are together in the
mythic stories. And perhaps we need to pay attention not only to “learning” but
also the process of creating. That Creativity as some quality in a person does
not exist. Rather, given the right conditions, any being/group/context/geography
may create something new through learning.
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| Devi Matangi: A Calcutta Lithograph (Wikimedia) |
Devi Matangi
Just as I was getting comfortable with the mythic stories of
Saraswati, I learn about Devi Matangi. This Goddess is a tantric Goddess of
Learning. She is said to be a sixteen-year-old sensuous gal, with emerald-coloured
skin, crescent moon on her forehead. She is the Goddess of the dark arts and
the dark learning.
What that means is she is the goddess who presides over “influencing”
and “attracting” art forms. How to control someone or influence their desires,
how to attract a mate easily and so on.
One of her versions is Uchchhishta Matangi. The “Outcaste
Matangi” who emerged from leftovers of Trimurti, and who is worshipped through
pollution—unwashed hands and leftover offerings. She is also offered cloth with
menstrual blood.
Frankly, when I first encountered her, I was discomforted. She
was the Goddess of everything I disliked. I know of influencing communication
as marketing and advertisement. I know of it as propaganda. I know of hypnosis
and how some claim to place suggestions in others. I know of the misuse of
these patterns for power, dehumanisation, abuse of various forms, and sending
people into an economic spiral.
And yet in the stories, Matangi is said to be a Mahavidya
Goddess closely associated to Mahadevi Tripura Sundari. She is a Goddess of
arts and path to attain Enlightenment. It is said that devotees learn to confront
forbidden practices and transcend notions of purity and pollution and thereby attain
bliss.
Insight came through two different paths. One is the study of Jung’s understanding of Psyche. In his exploration, Carl Jung, found “shadow” as significant and urged its integration into the conscious being. He said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” He also said, “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
For me, reading Jung knocked on my own shadow self – how do
I own up to both the desire to control and my dislike of the same?
As I explored, I realised the issue is deeper. Jung writes about collective shadow. A collective shadow are the values, ways of being, images and so on that is repressed culturally. It also includes “collective guilt, responsibility and reparation.”
I wondered about women who have experienced sexual abuse and
unable to own the erotic aspects of their being. Or those who weaponised the
erotic as an expression of anger. This is an ongoing exploration, and I do not
have any aha moments to share. But there is something here.
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| Ophiocordyceps unilateralis PC: A Community for Naturalists · iNaturalist |
The other pathway for insight came from Merlin Sheldrake’s
study of fungi. In his chapter on “Mycelial Minds” in the book “Entangled Life”
he writes about ‘zombie fungi’. These fungi species are able to control and
modify their host behaviour. One of them that he describes is Ophiocordyceps
unilateralis. This fungus species infects carpenter ants who lose their fear of
heights. They climb the nearest plant and soon the fungus forces the ant to
clamp its jaws around the plant in what he calls as the “death grip.” Mycelium
then grows from the feet of the ant and embroiders over the plant surface. Later
they spore. This work is done with extraordinary precision—just the right
temperature and height that is suitable for their fruiting activities. (Please
read Sheldrake’s book, if you have not.)
Our gut microbiome also influences the Gut-Brain axis and influences
our emotions. It is said that serotonin, the happy-making hormone is produced
in the gut. Changes in the composition of the microbiota species in the gut
influences moods.
Umm. Devi Matangi could be the Goddess of Microbes and Shakti of the Psychedelics :-)
This pathway made me wonder – when we are talking about attraction
and control in the modern times, we often consider it as an individual mastery
for needs that end with the individual or group. My pleasure or building up my
power/status with no awareness of the consequence to the ecology.
Devi Matangi is embedded in a cultural process that is found
on the notion of whole and preserving ways that keep this awareness alive. These
traditions, although massively demeaned and reduced in modern times for psychedelic
and sexual adventures, were never about hedonistic activities. They are
grounded in the transcendent whole and held with great rigour. It is extremely difficult to follow this path and very few tread on them and that too, with great care and
secrecy.
One does not end up writing bestsellers on this :-)
This is an area of continuing exploration for me. I trust the awareness will emerge with the Grace of the Goddess when the time is auspicious. I hope it is has also intrigued you.
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