Publisher : Penguin Random House, Rs 499
The rediscovery of Greek philosophy in Europe was not accompanied by a resurgence of Greek mythology, except with a sense of nostalgia. People preferred the story of one God to many. This mixing of Greek philosophy and Christian theology created a new wave of thinking — secularism, Devdutt Pattanaik writes in his new book
From imperialism to Nation States
Science focusses on facts and with more facts and more ways to make sense of them, scientific truth expands. Religious truth, however, remains static. Naturally, with scientific facts challenging fundamental assumptions about the material world, religious truth failed to satisfy. So scientists turned to Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle for answers.
The rediscovery of Greek philosophy in Europe, however, was not accompanied by a resurgence of Greek mythology, except with a sense of nostalgia. People preferred the story of one God to the stories of many gods. This curious mixing of Greek philosophy and Christian theology resulted in a new wave of thinking that gave rise to what we now called secularism.
Secular philosophers, like the ancient Greeks, valued individual thinking, but unlike ancient Greeks, they insisted on equality and liberty of man, which were Christian values. Humanists like Kant, Rousseau and Hegel believed in the power of reason that enabled humans to break free from nature. But antihumanists like Nietzsche, Marx and Freud questioned the very rationality of humanity, and attributed all actions to unconscious motives. If humanists defined cosmos, anti-humanists saw chaos in cosmos. Everything in life became ‘problematic’, a shadow, intensifying the yearning for sunlight.
In modern India, the educated elite views itself as a champion of logos and so rejects all things religious in the quest to be scientific and secular. They see the masses much as the Greeks viewed the barbarians: feudal, anti-democratic, favouring the mythos of either Hinduism or Islam. This has resulted in the infamous divide between ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’. Bharat accuses India of being westernised, while India hopes that Bharat will be eventually modernised.
From Nation States to Globalisation
Today, the West sees itself in a post-mythic, post-religious, post-structural modern world. But the mythic eye does not agree. Modernity firmly clings to the finite linear structure. In journalism as well as Hollywood movies, the hero myth dominates. The political discourse presents authority figures as overbearing Titans who need to be overthrown by young Olympians. Doctors look at disease as pathologies (monsters) to be overcome by medical and surgical intervention. Reaching a target in the world of business is considered an Olympian triumph. Technology is the new ambrosia, meant for all. The clash between humanists and anti-humanists, structuralists and poststructuralists mirrors the conflict between Apollonian clarity and Dionysian mysteries, over whom Zeus has to prevail.
This modern/secular/Greek worldview force-fits Hindu mythology into Greek or Christianity templates. Thus Hindu devas become ‘phallic’ like Hermes, and ‘rapists’ like Zeus, and asuras are explained as Christian demons, or Greek Titans. So the worldview establishes that India is in the shadows and in need of sunlight. It dismisses all talk of rebirth as mere superstition, failing to see the impact of this idea on the Indie mind.
Indie mythologies-Hindu, Buddhist and Jain-do not follow the linear structure that Greek storytellers (from chaos to cosmos) or Greek philosophers (from faith to reason) or Christian missionaries (from many gods to one God) or scientists and activists (from unjust feudal faith to fair egalitarian development) prefer. It has its own structure: a cyclical oneIJ
Western mythology propagates the idea that the world is in need of changing, either by Greek heroes, or by Abrahamic prophets and kings, or by scientists, activists and capitalists. Indie mythology presents the idea that the world is constantly changing, human intervention notwithstanding. There are no heroes or villains, no oppressor or oppressed, no saviour or martyr, just different ways of looking at reality. That is why the West sees itself as masculine, active, decisive, violent and straightforward, and qualifies Indie ideas as feminine, passive, ambiguous, non-violent yet cunning.
In terms of the ‘allegory of the cave’, Indian sages valued the sunlight outside as well as the shadows inside. What is sunlight for some people will be shadows for others. If one is in sunlight in one context, one is in the shadows in another. The seeker is therefore encouraged to observe with empathy-rather than argue with-contrary points of view. Here, subjectivity is given as much value as objectivity, and the journey is towards plurality, not singularity. The point is not to replace false knowledge with true knowledge; the point is to expand the mind to accommodate all kinds of knowledge.
The West dismisses the Indie worldview as chaos, thus closing its mind to any new possibility but its own. Not surprisingly, there are many books by Western scholars that ‘explain’ Hindu mythology, but very few by Indian scholars that bother to ‘observe’ Western mythology.
This book is an attempt to bridge that gap. Excerpted from Olympus by Devdutt Pattanaik and published by Penguin Random House