Last week, India celebrated Diwali, the festivals of lights. And the modern Indians flooded the social networking sites with posts related to the same festival. It’s a good way to make people across the world familiar with our festivals. This prompted an American friend to inquire about the significance of this festival. Hardest are the questions whose answers are sort of obvious. After a long pause, I explained to him that there are various beliefs behind celebrating this festival, depending on what part of the country one comes from. I knew the various beliefs simply because the state I grew up has different reason behind celebrating Diwali compared to the state I currently reside in. Probably the state where my ancestors came from has its own explanation as well. That’s when he asked me this question, to find an answer for it; I had to do a small research. The question was, “Most of you have the same religious background, similar culture yet varying definition of the same festival. Why?”
Had I known the right phrase to “google” I would have been able to answer this question quickly. So I started looking up for reasons why each part of our country has this subtle difference in culture. I was astonished by some of the findings. The best explanation I found was from an article by Justice Markandey Katju. Justice Katju is a person who immensely inspires me through his blunt talks and logical views. In fact his style often reminds me of my own father’s style.
A lot of us are familiar with the fact that the USA is called the land of immigrants with more than 60% of its population being descendents of Europeans immigrants. However this immigration was about 500 to 600 years back, which is fairly recent, compared to the immigration to India from north-west and to some extent from north-east, which began about 10,000 years ago. So this gives rise to the question, who are the true Indians? Many would be tempted to jump to the conclusion that it would be Dravidians. It would surprise many if I wrote that even Dravidians immigrated to the present day India from north-west part. The evidence of this is very interesting. Even today, there are more than two million speakers of a language called Brahui, in regions of Afghanistan. What makes it further interesting is that Brahui is a Dravidian language, which has a high degree of similarity with Tamil. Immigration from south to north-west seems counter-intuitive as north-west fits nowhere near south, in terms of human habitability index. Justice Katju further concludes that the true Indians in that case would be about 5% of today’s population, making India a country with 95% ‘old immigrants’.
This leaves little room to be surprised about the fact that even our religious scriptures have multiple versions. Take for example, the Ramayana, which has so many versions and no single of which could be claimed as the authentic version. Each is as authentic as the other is. I suppose this would be the only logical explanation behind such a diversified culture that we have in India today, in spite of similar religious beliefs. Probably, all immigrants adopted a common platform, with their own interpretation and spirit depending on the geography, which makes our country as multifaceted as it is today.
6 comments:
thats true ..our religious scriptures do have multiple versions!!
Mansee, thanks for you comments. And the thing is, almost all parts of India celebrate festivals on the same day, yet give different explanation for the same. This is really interesting. I wrote article as an attempt to investigate the reason behind this 'strange' logic. Getting back to your originial comment, yes our religious scriptures have many versions. But in stating that we should be careful, not to offend anyone. Recently, Delhi Univ dropped an essay by the classic writer A. K. Ramanujan, dealing with this same topic (300 Ramayanas), which sorta motivated me to write this article!
All credit should go to modernization, where Vedic culture/literature are no longer part of school studies but we learn various languages and other subjects.
Multiple versions and translation are again because we no longer know SANSKRIT from which other languages are born.
Bring back SANSKRIT and Vedic literature !
Mandy, I agree with you to a large extent. We should rediscover our culture, before the generations to come forget about it, in the midst of emulating some other cultures. It would be really interesting to understand how things have occured and evolved in our own country and have more uniform thoughts around.
Hmmmmmmm i guess i should admire ur friend's thoughtfulness. But i felt to answer this question - "Most of you have the same religious background, similar culture yet varying definition of the same festival. Why?", we could have drawn something similar to his religious background and draw a parallel picture with ours. Because like India,USA is also a land of immigrants albeit a newly created one :P....But overall the post as usual reflects the sagely style ;)
@Sutapa: Having said that US is the land of immigrants, the festivals here are celebrated on the same day and have same beliefs behind celebrations.
But back in India, Diwali is celebrated by some as symbol of "Return of Lord Rama" and by some others as "Killing of Narkasura" etc. That's something beyond understandable to someone who has never been to India and probably hard to explain, even as an Indian.
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