Water, the elixir of life

Sukumaran C. V.

Man has through ages sought in vain for an imaginary elixir of life, the divine Amrita, a draught of which was thought to confer immortality. But the true elixir of life lies near to our hands. For it is the commonest of all liquids, plain water! —C. V. Raman.

In the past when there were hundreds of acres of paddy fields in my village, whenever I have been in the fields, I used to remember the title of an essay written by India’s greatest scientist C. V. Raman—Water, the  Elixir of Life—which was the first lesson in the English textbook of my Pre-Degree class. It is from that essay I learnt the meaning of the word elixir and whenever I watched the pure waters gurgling through the kazhaya from one field to the other, I used to tell myself— the elixir of life. 

In our mythology there is a word called amritu and I thought it was only a mythical imagination until I learnt the essay. Then I could see water is really the amritu and our paddy fields, the wetlands, were doing great service to the humans and other animals by preserving the elixir of life. There was a little creek alongside the paddy fields and even in the summer months pure water used to flow through it. Along the banks of the creek, screw-pines grew in abundance and water could be seen trickling down from their roots.  And summers have never been as scorching as they are now.

Today our district (Palakkad) is parching and scorching under the summer sun. As all the indigenous trees which absorb the UV rays are felled and uprooted, the level of UV rays are unprecedentedly high. The older people say that they have never experienced such scorching heat in their life. Rivers have dried up and the still remaining ponds are drying up. As we have deserted paddy cultivation and converted almost all the paddy fields to plots and estates and felled and uprooted every big tree, there are now no wetlands to preserve the rainwater; and no trees to absorb the scorching heat and protect the birds, humans and other animals. 

Everybody complaints about the heat and drinking water shortage, but nobody notices the dried up water bodies and ponder over the reason of their drying up. Along the banks of our village creek there is not even a single tree or screw-pine bush now and there is not a drop of water in the creek either. Water used to ooze into the creek from the wetlands, the paddy fields, and the water was preserved by the roots of the screw-pine bushes and indigenous trees. 

Now the wetlands were gone, the screw-pine bushes gone, the trees gone and is it possible for the water alone to remain? All of these are inter-related, and the humans, blinded by their selfish greed, forgot the interconnection. They converted the wet lands into dry-lands, destroyed the thickets and trees, and discovered that water also disappeared together with the ecosystem they have destroyed. 

Now the humans are suffering, but the brunt of the suffering is borne by the poor who are not part of the onslaught on the ecosystem. And the birds and animals also suffer.
Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, and other birds need water in summer not only to drink, but to bathe also. It is my wont to put a tub of water in front of our home for the birds to drink and bathe. And it is always a wonderful experience to watch birds drink and bathe. They never quarrel while sharing the water. I have seen even woodpeckers drink and bathe from the tub! Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, orioles and magpie-robins come regularly. 

When the jungle babblers drink and bathe, if a bulbul comes, it will wait patiently until the jungle babblers finished quenching their thirst and taking bath. I have not seen any bird attacking others on the matter of sharing the water!! There is no fight over the water either between two birds of the same feathers or between different kinds of birds. They behave themselves and show wonderful manners. No policing is need!
Jungle babblers are the birds who repeatedly bath and they always come in large numbers. It seems that they are highly social birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, orioles magpie-robins and other birds come in pairs. 

In our district, there are people who have to walk miles to fetch drinking water. While even the humans have no drinking water what will the birds do? (Of course ours is an anthropocentric world!). The stupid humans still think that everything was created for them. They are still unable to learn the truth behind the scathing satire of Jonathan swift.

In his Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes Man as the most dangerous of all animals. In the second book of the satire (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” (Italics added)

 
As C. V. Raman says, “there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of the countryside as water, be it just a little stream or a little pond by the wayside where the cattle quench their thirst…..The rainfed tanks that are so common in South India—alas often so sadly neglected in their maintenance—are a cheering sight….Water in a landscape may be compared to the eyes in a human face.”

In the name of ‘development’ we have blinded the eyes, and we are groping in the darkness of a drought-like situation. We are reaping what we have sown.

Imprisoned in the body

Sukumaran C. V.

I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silence, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.—Adrienne Rich

Karaikkal Ammaiyar was a staunch devotee of Lord Siva and one of the prominent Saivaite Saints (Nayanars) in the South Indian Bhakti Movement (circa 7th century to 11th century AC). The main thrust of the Movement was to help the agrarian development and the consolidation of Chola political power in South India. But if we look at the Movement  through a gender perspective, we can see that it also helped to consolidate the Patriarchal power over women. The story of Karaikkal Ammaiyar proves that even within the ideology of bhakti, the female is denied her agency and independent role.

Chekkilar’s hagiography (Periyapuranam) speaks about 63 Nayanars.  Of the 63, Karaikkal Ammaiyar is the only (prominent) female Nayanar. 

Before she metamorphosed into a ghoul, Ammaiyar was a beautiful lady called Punitavati. Chekkilar says that Punitavati was a staunch Sivabhakta and once when an old man, a Saivaite mendicant, visited her home for bhiksha, as she had not cooked the mid-day meal, she gave one of the two mangoes her husband brought home to the mendicant.   

Later, her husband Paramadatan, having eaten the tasty mango served to him, asked for the second one. Punitavati couldn’t reveal the truth. She went inside as if to fetch the mango and prayed to Lord Siva and there appeared a ripe mango in her hand! She served the mango, but noticing the unique taste, the husband asked the reason. Punitavati could not but reveal the truth. Paramadatan could not believe it. He mocked her and asked to pray again. Then, to his surprise, he saw a ripe mango appearing in the hands of his wife. Terrified, he left Punitavati to find an ordinary wife!

                             Punitavati gives one of the mangoes to the mendicant

As she was deserted by her husband, Punitavati asked Lord Siva to take away her female beauty and make her one of his ghouls—the bhuthaganas—and in that terrible form (Pey) she wandered in the forests of Karaikkal praising the Lord, and came to be known as Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

In this regard, it will be interesting to examine the attitude of some prominent male Nayanars towards their wives. Iyarpagai Nayanar was so great a devotee of Siva that he gave his own wife to a mendicant, when the mendicant asked. Another one, Tiruneelakanda Nayanar, deserted his wife because she had committed, according to him, a sacrilege by blowing off a spider which fell on a Sivalinga.  Yet another one, Kaliyar Nayanar, tried to sell his wife in open market in order to buy oil lamps for a Siva temple. Siruttondar Nayanar, a temple supervisor, cut off a queen’s nose for smelling a flower from the garland which was meant for the deity—Lord Siva. When the king, Kalar Singer, knew this; he proceeded to cut of the hand of, not the culprit Siruttondar but, the queen for taking the flower to smell! 

As Vijaya Ramaswamy says, “In all these instances the devotional fervour of the male Nayanars has been highlighted at the expense of the women who have been depicted as objects rather than as persons.” (Walking Naked: Women, Spirituality, Society in South India)

While we see so many instances of men’s devotional fervour highlighted at the expense of women, it is difficult to point out even a single instance in which the role is reversed. Let’s come back to Punitavati. She was a beautiful woman and wife before she became the Pey of Karaikkal. The role of a wife and that of a staunch devotee were not allowed to go together. That was why Punitavati, the beautiful wife of Paramadatan, had been deserted by her husband. We see many an instance of men being devout Saivaites or Vaishnavaites and at the same time husbands also.

The famous example is Sundarar (Sundaramoorthy Nayanar). He even marries two women and his deity himself helps him to accomplish his desire of having both Paravai and Sangili as wives. But in the case of Punitavati, when her husband discovers that her devotion to Siva gives her divine power, he deserts her, because, he was ‘deeply perturbed by his wife’s supernatural powers and convinced that she was no ordinary woman’. But Sundarar, with his Siva bhakti, produces bricks of gold, a large quantity of paddy etc.; and yet his wives never thought he was too divine to be a husband.

In the legend of Karaikkal Ammaiyar, what we see is that even the ideology of bhakti is deftly used by patriarchy to constrain the female in her body. A female bhakta, however devout she may be, is not free to use the public space with her female beauty. But the males are allowed to do it. Sundaramoorthy is called so because he was so handsome. He never finds it cumbersome to wander through the world. But Punitavati has to uglify herself to wander through the world!  

It may be interesting to compare this act of Punitavati with the more or less identical act of Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess really makes her ugly for two reasons. As her husband deserted her, she no longer wants her beauty and she desperately wants to escape the lustful attack of the outer world—the public space.  

Karaikkal Ammaiyar lived nearly 1000 years ago and she realized that the public space was exclusively meant for the males.

Still public space is not meant for woman and girls. Still our culture is not ready to let woman grow beyond her body. We find manifold ways to make woman believe that she is only her body and that body is meant for man—to harass, to molest, to throw acid and to pass lewd comments at, to violate, to rape and to kill with virtual impunity.

It is high time we let woman grow out of and beyond the body. It is high time we made our private and public space gender egalitarian. It will be possible only if we get rid our culture of its deep rooted patriarchal, misogynistic traits.

130 years after Marx, is Marxism still relevant?

Sukumaran C. V.

March 14^th, 2013 is the 130^th death anniversary day of Karl Marx. As the unabated greed of corporate capitalism destroys all the sustainable ways of living and ruins Mother Earth by making climate change fiercer and fiercer, we have to seek alternate ways to stop the further degradation in order to sustain life on Planet earth. To save the Earth and the flora and fauna including the humans from eternal doom, the corporate greed for the natural resources is to be strictly stopped. We have to stem the devastation of the Environment and the subaltern people. Can Marxism provide the theoretical framework to usher in the much needed paradigm shift? 

Marx shaped his theory and methodology at a time when science and its laws were seen as the only proper means to understand all phenomena—natural or social. Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy (1830) reflected the first strong influence of the laws of natural sciences in the study of society. Like Comte, Marx was strongly influenced by science and throughout his writings, especially after the epistemological break which is said to have happened in 1845, we can see his stress on scientific socialism. Just like the bourgeois social and economic theories, Marxism too established universal laws on social relations and tried to predict the future course of the human ‘progress’.
But in the pre-1845 Marx, especially in the 1844 Manuscripts, strong Romantic components are discernible. The pre-1845 Marx is called ‘the immature Marx, the philosophical anthropologist who is still an ideologist rather than a true scientist’ by the scientific Marxist school. 

The lack of a certain kind of methodology of its own is one of the salient features of Romanticism. In literature it can be seen as a revolt against methods—the rules and laws of classicism. As a social movement it expressed the disillusionment of a class whose dominance and privileges were being eroded by the emerging bourgeois ethics. In this sense Romanticism is a reactionary tendency which looked backwards. But by focusing its attention on the elements which were sidelined or marginalized by the homogenizing structural methodologies of the post-Enlightenment era, Romanticism gave birth to democratic pluralism and helped the people to see beyond the structural methods like classicism, positivism, empiricism and even Marxism.

Marxist methodology was and is predominantly structural and therefore, like positivism, Marxism also neglected the heterodox nature of human life and societies. Marx was trying to change the bourgeois society which was a creation of the Enlightenment, not by negating the Enlightenment, but by using the emancipatory potentials of the Enlightenment itself. The Romantics were on the contrary rejecting the Enlightenment by preferring the pre-Enlightenment communitarian ethos. Marx criticized the bourgeois social order because the bourgeoisie, which had played a ‘progressive role’ in history, became a hindrance to the further progress of humankind towards an egalitarian and 'class-less' social system. Marx’s quarrel was not with the Enlightenment, but with the bourgeois class which exclusively appropriated the fruits of the Enlightenment.

Both the bourgeois social order and Marxism which opposed it drew their strength from the same source—the positivism of Enlightenment. This grievous fault led to the sidelining of the subaltern communities, the females and the Environment by both the liberal democracy and Marxism. Sustainable development was not a concern of the Enlightenment ethics of ‘progress’ and such progress (of both capitalism and 'Communism') ultimately led us to climate change. 

In the age of the reification and alienation of human beings, which happened as a result of the bourgeois appropriation of the Enlightenment possibilities of human welfare to entrench its own hegemony over nature and society, Romanticism provided leverage for a break-through into a subject-sensitive modernism as distinct from the objective modernity of the bourgeoisie.  

Marxism inherited much of the positivist-objective tendency of bourgeois modernity by rejecting romanticism as feminine and ineffectual. It is the Frankfort School of thought—the Critical Theory—which tried to infuse the romantic urge into Marxism for having a subject-sensitive modernity as distinct from that of the objective modernity of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie and classical Marxism. Even if Romanticism originated as a (reactionary) revolt against the universalizing objective methodologies of post-Enlightenment era, it stressed the need to give attention to the heterodox nature of human life which can’t be fully explained and grasped only through objective structural methodologies. 

But Marxism, just like the bourgeois democracy, refused to enrich itself by its inability to be receptive towards the issues of gender, environment and the subalterns; and therefore, 130 years after Marx, when the world faces the imminent collapse of industrial civilization due to its byproduct called climate change, Marxism fails to offer an alternate methodology to save the world. Marxism can only do it by creatively negotiating the issues of sustainable development and gender. 

The Moon will certainly rise

                                          Sukumaran C. V.

A college professor wrote the sentence—A woman without her man is nothing—on the blackboard and asked the students to punctuate it. Almost all the students, males and females, punctuated the sentence as: A woman, without her man, is nothing. Only one of the students, a female one, punctuated it as: A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Most of the students depended on the accepted wisdom of the patriarchal society to punctuate the sentence, but the girl revolted against the accepted and traditional male chauvinistic wisdom of the society and made the very sentence which is misogynistic in nature into an empowered one for the female. Using the same words in their given order, she altered the sentence into an altogether different one which is beyond the reach of the conventional wisdom by which every one of us is constructed.
It seems that the general conscience of the highly literate Keralite society is punctuated with the traditional misogynistic notions. Three recent incidents show the terrible rot within.
Sixteen years ago, a minor girl from Suryanelli in the Idukki district was seduced by a man and was trafficked throughout the state offering her to more than forty people. The case is known as the Suryanelli case. The special court convicted 36 persons to rigorous imprisonment in the case. But a division bench of the Kerala High court acquitted all the 35 accused and mitigated the punishment of the remaining one.
Recently, one of the two judges who acquitted the culprits was caught on video as saying that the Suryanelli girl had been deviant, immoral and it was a case of child prostitution, not abuse.

It means that the misogynistic punctuation of his mind played a prominent part on delivering the judgment. It means that the judgment was a biased one. It means that the judge wrote the judgment with a bias against the victim—gender bias! It means that we have still ‘a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view’.
(As the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who wrote the epoch-making play A Doll's House, which came as a thunderbolt to the male-centric social and moral ethos of Europe, says:  "A woman cannot be herself in the society of present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view." It should be remembered that Ibsen wrote the above quoted sentence in the notes he made for the play in 1878. How contemporaneous the sentence seems in the present day Indian socio-cultural background!)
Immediately after the judge was caught on expressing his gender bias, we heard an aged doctor, who was the captain of a state wide govt. sponsored value awareness trip (Moolyabodhana Jaadha) speaking to the girls of the Govt. Women’s College in the state capital that “only ten minutes is needed for men (including him) to make women pregnant.  If the girls become active as the boys, their uterus will be damaged. Therefore, they should not try to be as active as the boys are. They should be calm and quiet. They should not run and jump as the boys do."
The retrogressive sermon continued: "Boys can easily seduce girls. Most of the girls (90%) lie to their parents to wander around with their lovers. In hell you can see more women than men. Of all the good people, 80% are men. There are only 20% good women. Therefore women should always allow men to stand in front of them. Women have to live in the protection of men.”
While nearly one thousand girls sat silently hearing this highly misogynistic and male chauvinistic speech, one courageous girl, a final year B. A. English Literature student stood up, booed at him and walked out of the venue in protest. She saved the dignity of the girls with her booing, with her bold protest. Her booing has virtually become a thunderbolt to the deep rooted male chauvinist mindset of the most literate state in the country.
The persons like this ‘awareness’ trip captain are dangerously illiterate as far as gender sensitivity is concerned. And they are in dire need of awareness on the topic. If our society is comprised of 80% ‘good’ men who think women should only stand behind the males, can we change it into such a one in which the female is considered as an individual just like the male is? It may be easier to make harsher laws to deal with sexual harassment, but such laws are not going to stop the crime as long as our society is filled with ‘good’ people who believe women should not be as active as men. Sexual harassment germinates from the mindset that sees the female as a given thing for the amusement of the male, from the mindset which believes that the female is created for the pleasure of the male.
If there are more 'literate' people in our society like the awareness trip captain who thinks that gender equality is against the will of God, it means that our society is terribly illiterate. We have to make it literate. And I think that the bold action of the final year Literature student of the Govt. Women’s College against the patriarchal sermon is a crude way of making the ‘good’ men literate in gender equality.
And then we heard that Amrita Mohan, an undergraduate student at All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuarm was verbally abused by some men and she being a martial art expert, handled them physically. The culprits filed private petition in the First Class Judicial Magistrate Court and the magistrate ordered the police to register case against Amrita. And the police registered a case against her under Sections 341, 323, 325, 332, and 334 for wrongful restraint and voluntarily causing grievous hurt!! The magistrate ordered the police to register one more case against her!
“I was out after 10.30 p.m., but why should that prompt these men to talk to me that way? Moreover, I was with my family and a friend’s family. This is the city that I was born and raised in, and it is sad how I cannot be outside my home at night,” says Amrita. (The Hindu, Feb. 20. 2013)
When the female asserts herself, our male chauvinistic mindset is upset and is not ready to accept it. We are not ready to punctuate our conscience in a way that enables us to see the female as an individual just like the male is, with equal rights, equal space, and equal dignity.
We desperately try to intimidate the female in order to dissuade her from asserting herself. It means that male chauvinism acts like the stray dogs that bark at the rising moon. Let the dogs bark, the moon will certainly rise.