Refined treat for thinking souls
FThe Hindu belief system has always encouraged deliberations, debates and questioning of not only one’s beliefs but also, of all the ancient Indian texts, religious or otherwise. So, the book, Beyond Dharma by Wendy Doniger gives a wonderful opportunity to deliberate on the Shastras in the present day. The book with its exemplary research is insightful and also somewhat controversial as it attempts to define the elusive word Dharma and its overall place in human life. However, Doniger’s book is not just about the philosophical aspect of Dharma, rather it draws parallel between
Kautilya’s
Arthashastra and Vatsyayana’s Kama
Sutra and how both oppose what is mentioned in the Dharmashastras.
The book picks up popular terminologies from Hinduism, such as moksha and provides different views of or quite some time, it has been raining novels of all hues. So, when a book of short stories landed in my hands, I picked it up for among other reasons ‘novelty’ value. The stories penned by Geetashree Chatterjee, tilt to the Chekovian — piquant slices of life, open-ended, subtle, nudging our imaginations and provoking musings on life’s many ironies and puzzles.
Gathered under the intriguing title A basketful of lies, the 15 stories softly reveal how human lives are delicately supported by different lies or rather concealments of various truths — venial ones to potent, razor-edged truths, which if outed could tear apart relationships. So, while in the first story, ‘The Paint Brush’, the lie is innocuous — the protagonist is delighted to have acquired a magical brush that paints all she wants to, but cannot do deftly enough to win accolades, in ‘Operation Dead
Rat’, the truth that is hidden is grave. The central figure Geetika is unaware that her husband whom she loves is the very man who had pushed her into her present partially brain-damaged state.
In ‘Maamone’, an impressionistic painting of a lady of another era, the reason why she separated from her husband remains a secret till her death. The last story in this collection ‘The Interlude’, beautifully structured and unravelled, shows how significant untold truths merge into the woodwork of our lives with time and Book: A Basketful of Lies: A collection of short stories Author: Geetashree Chatterjee
Publisher: Pages:
Creative Crows 121; we learn to live with these, some easily and some uneasily, depending on who benefits from the deception. Does hiding amount to lying? Life does not bear too much true-speak — is that so? The book keys you into these thought-spaces and leaves you pondering.
It is evident this writer has a deep feel for the language from the way she uses it, with care, love and dexterity, reveling in feel of words, in no hurry to narrate her tales and sign off. Though in a few places, the language seems too heavy and verbose, by and large it flows limpidly, yielding some precious turns of phrase and sentences like these: “The emptiness was in its own place and her mundane happiness had a place of its own. As long as her sorrows and smiles were in their definite compartments, she was free of worries. She cherished them both equally.”
Indeed, the collection enfolds an interesting story called ‘The Linguist’ about a woman’s experience of marriage with a linguist. While Nalini is initially fascinated by her husband’s linguistic skills, with time, this very factor gnashes their relationship as she is unable to fit into his circle. The story sparkles with quaint foreign terms like ‘schadenfreude’ (German) referring to pleasure derived from another’s misfortune and ‘saudade’ (Portuguese) meaning longing for someone you loved and lost. Alltogether, A Basketful of Lies makes for an interesting read. A refined treat for thinking souls! Price: Rs 199 the word when mentioned in Arthashastra and Kama Sutra. The author states, “...Kama Sutra speaks of it only twice, once when it simply assimilates moksha to dharma and once when it describes the courtesan’s success in achieving the release (moksha) of an unwanted lover (6.3.44), a strikingly profane use of the word. The Arthashastra, too, never mentions moksha in a religious context, but uses it only to designate the release from marriage – divorce (3.4.27,30). The unusual use of this highly religious word to designate sexual separations in both texts is surely a bit of blasphemy that the Kama Sutra picked up from the Arthashastra. In any case, moksha is not part of the worldly realm of the shastras.” While talking about Hinduism and Dharma, it is impossible to not talk about Manu. The book says, “There are many other dharma texts, with significantly different ideas on many of the subjects that concern us here; some are older, some later than Manu... But Manu’s texts remains the gold standard that most later texts either accepted or rebelled against, and it provides a base against which we may measure the other two texts that are our main concern.”
Doniger makes interesting observations that exists in these ancient texts, for instance, in the section Spying and Seducing, the author brings out riveting facts pertaining to the two texts, “…The paranoid psychology of the political text casts its shadow over the erotic text. Eternal vigilance is the price of tyranny—but also the price of adultery.”
In the epilogue, Doniger brings forth the colonial impact on these texts. So, after the British colonised India in the eighteenth century a sanitised version of the Kama shastras arrived. The book boldly mentions, “...As not only Protestants but Victorian Protestants, the British rejected as filthy paganism the sensuous strain of Hinduism, both the world of kama and much of Hindu theological dharma, with what they saw as kitschy images of gods with far too many arms. It reminded them of Catholicism.”
Overall, Doniger’s book must be read with an open mind and its content should be taken as a well-researched document that could help us to look at the ancient texts with a fresh pair of eyes.
Book: Beyond Dharma: Dissent in the ancient Indian sciences of sex and politics
Author: Publisher: Pages:
Wendy Doniger Speaking Tiger 248; Price: Rs 599