In the Thicket of Things
Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik have collaborated to make Hinduism’s oldest ideas contemporary
Aranyaka brings together two contemporary interpreters of Hindu mythology, the enormously popular Devdutt Pattanaik and the rather more esoteric Amruta Patil. Together, they explore some of the most complex ideas of Hinduism as articulated in the Vedas and the Upanishads, locating these meditations in and around human beings and their relationship to nature. Their intensely symbiotic process of collaboration is explained at the back of the book but, simply put, the story and pictures came primarily from Patil while Patmeets tanaik functioned as a stimulus and sympathetic interlocutor. The volume, therefore, equally represents the ideologies and concerns of both creators.
The book opens with a reference to the Rig Vedic hymn, ‘Nasadiya’ (10.129), which speculates on the origins of the world and the impulse for creation itself. It stands out among all creation hymns because it is layered with uncertainty, ending on a note of quiet doubt about whether anyone will ever know how the world came into being. The authors place secular, modern knowledge about the emergence of cellular organisms in these primal Rig Vedic waters and segue into one of the best known stories of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (The Great Forest Teaching): that of the sage Yagnavalkya, his wives Katyayani and Maitreyi and the fiercely independent Gargi, perhaps the first recognised woman intellectual in our philosophical tradition.
Patil chooses the quiet Katyayani as the focus of Aranyaka, telling her story as the woman who opts to live the life of the body than that of the mind. She leaves her family and community to live in and off the forest, where she the ascetic Y. With their hard-learned botanical knowledge, they build an agrarian life and their home grows into a peaceful, pastoral community. Katyayani nurtures Y’s students and the woman seeker who comes to him for knowledge (a weaver, brilliantly spun off from Gargi’s metaphors in her arguments with Yagnavalkya about the ultimate reality). Katyayani becomes the female principle of plenitude and with her generous body and visceral instincts, she is the vital challenge to the austerity of her cerebral male partner. Patil and Pattanaik play with the Samkhya principles of Prakriti and Purusha in their narrative of the dynamic between Katyayani and Y, showing us that oppositional can also be complementary.
Gender, sexuality, power, hierarchy, the city versus the forest, the human being vs the natural world—all these markers of our troubled times jostle with each other in Aranyaka. While I prefer the destabilising angst and the micro-layered images of Patil’s earlier works (Adi Parva and Sauptik), there is no doubt that with Aranyaka, she and Pattanaik have brought Hinduism’s oldest ideas into our current yuga, the Anthropocene, with passion and beauty.