"The Ramayana in Global Perspective"

Yesterday, my Sanskrit class attended a wonderful (and by wonderful, I mean both educational and totally laughable) conference hosted by the "Aikyabharati Research Institute." The topic: The Ramayana in Global Perspective. Needless to say, all but three of the participants were Indian. My class got to witness the final speech, delivered by the revered "Swami-ji" to a gray-haired crowd of older and middle-aged Indian scholars sitting in plastic chairs.

So we showed up to this flourescently lit room, outfitted with a table and a podium raised on a platform. Below it were the plastic chairs, in which the scholars (most of them women, though the presenters were almost all men) chatted to each other and drank from tiny paper cups filled with sweet chai. Several swamis dotted the audience with their saffron robes, sacred threads, and foreheads (frankly) face-painted with exacting patterns of white, red, and yellow. Two swamis sat at the table on the platform; both wearing white and orange robes, one’s forehead and eyes completely covered in white with a streak of red up the middle, his head bald except for a long crop of matted black hair in the back; the other’s wrinkled face barely visible underneath gigantic bifocals and a white beared tinged gold with henna. A series of men stepped up to the podium, alternately delivering addresses and introductions in Hindi and Sanskrit. One swami announced that he had just published a book – “The Cosmic Energy of Vijnana” – in Marathi, and clarified (with a great amount of humor, for a swami of his stature) that if anyone was short on sleep, he or she should read it. Swamiji with the painted forehead blessed the first twenty copies of the book. Then he blessed several boxes of sweets, which – to everyone’s great pleasure – were passed around the audience, along with more mini-cups of chai.

Everyone’s sugar rush was just turning into a sugar crash when Swamiji began to speak. He delivered an address in extremely Sanskritized English – in fact, wouldn’t have been surprised if he had written his speech in Sanskrit and then translated it into English— involving hugely complicated sentences, words about the School of Justice and the School of Mercy and the Rule of Cosmic Discipline and how “Rama suffered for our sins” (sound familiar?), all ostensibly prescribing how the Ramayana should be read across the globe. Lots of Shree Ram this and that. Reading the Ramayana as literature is only useful if it ends in spiritual gain. (I might agree with him on that point, but with a different logic.) More of Rama suffering for our sins; we must repent so that his suffering his not in vain. Dharma, karma, samsara, chakra, dosha, guna: fire-and-brimstone Hinduism!

Swamiji yelled and spitted into the microphone, his consonants as harsh as if he were reciting Vedic Sanskrit – which was something he did often, judging from the grainy quality of his voice, the breakneck pace at which he spoke, and the fact that he had the entirity of his hour-long speech memorized.

It would make a hilarious counterpoint to your average American academic conference. The American Academy of Religion party favors—canvas bags—are great, but when all is said and done, wouldn’t everyone be happier with some sweets?

Mumbai

I woke up to "At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks," the headline of the New York Times online. It was 4 AM, and I was up early to get a headstart on coffee before driving the six hours to Nasik for a field trip.

There was so little news at that point -- the attacks had only happened several hours earlier -- that I assumed the best (it's funny when "the best"=a few small bombs going off in popular locations, less than ten dead and a couple more wounded) and groggily let my eyes skim over the article. Pune is three hours out of Mumbai, and there are rarely even bomb scares here, so there was no doubt I was safe. I did, however, notice that I had been to two of the attacked places that the article mentioned -- simply while traveling through Mumbai for a few hours. It gives some sense of the scale of the (what I then thought were relatively small) attacks.

And so we drove through the night, speeding through Pune's empty streets and watching the sun rise over the gentle red hills of the Maharashtrian countryside. Devotional Sanskrit songs streamed out of the sound system. Driving through this beautiful country -- roadside tea stalls filled with early morning crowds of men, makeshift huts on spare strips of land, wandering turbaned men clutching their walking sticks on the side of the highway -- I felt so far away from the morning's news. There was no question in my mind that India was the place for me to me.

I'm thankful to have had that drive this morning. A few hours later, when we had turned around and driven back to Pune (the school didn't want to risk its students traveling today), I read any reports I could find on the scene in Mumbai. The Taj in flames. Hostages. Seeking out American and British passport holders. Leopold's. Blood on the floor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria Terminus and Mumbai's largest railway station. Roads leading to the airport. The Chabad house. Hospitals, a movie theater. Machine guns, guns, guns, gunmen.

I'm scared -- everybody's scared. I know that I have no real right to be, since I'm sitting eons away from where fear rightfully lies. Perhaps my particular brand of fear comes from love of this country, and according disbelief (or naivete) that anything of this scale could happen here, now, today. India's past is full of violence; in smaller pockets, its present is, too. Bombs in Delhi have punctuated the last few months. Jaipur in May. Ongoing crimes -- violent or systematic -- against women, the poor, the socially exiled. I wonder if current events will provoke a violent backlash against India's large and peaceful Muslim population. But my India has never experienced something like what happened last night; the images painted by the words of the New York Times seem to me a new and bewildering modern art form.

I know it's all over the world, these beautiful countries speckled with (or drowned in) violence. For me, it only makes me want to stay on, so that I can ride through that countryside many, many more times and remember how perfect it is here. Hey, it's Thanksgiving, after all.

The stars

I found this article gracing the cover of the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section (yes, I read the Styles section first) just in time for my all-day meetings with not one, but two, astrologers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/fashion/23psychic.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

Looks like I'm not the only one turning to the stars for advice. I do get the sense, however, that none of the psychics, Tarot readers, and spiritual mediums in the article have studied the massive, exacting, almost impenetrable science of Vedic astrology. (According to many, it's the sheer difficulty of Vedic astrology, and not any bogus-ness, that makes for so many bad astrologers these days.) My roommate M says that one of today's experts has been studying Vedic astrology for more than 30 years; he teaches it, now, in the States and here. The other has only been studying for 9 years, having turned to astrology after becoming a successful CPA. Way to foresee the economic recession -- and where all everyone would be turning for help.

I've had a few interesting brushes with astrology and the like. Twice, astrologers have approached me out of crowds on the street and told me that something very important is about to happen to me. Neither of them asked me to sit with them for a reading, or to pay them. The first time, I was in the middle of applying to Harvard. The second time, I was in the middle of packing my bags for this trip.

Anyone ever been to an astrologer, psychic, palm reader, Tarot seer, medium?

Friday adventures

I had the ride of a lifetime today -- on the back of my Sanskrit teacher's motorbike.

Professor M rides a bike like she teaches grammar: slowly, safely, quietly assured of her prowess. As I struggled to kick down the foot-rest, she chuckled and scolded me, "Don't move!" Calmly rolling her eyes at my awkwardness, she added, "I can't balance if you do that." And, just as she does with grammar, M innocently underestimates the task at hand. Surrounded by at least fifty other honking motorbikes, rickshaws, trucks, buses, bicyles, and oxen at a traffic light, she remarked--and this was not a deadpan--"Traffic is less today."

What a ride it was. We rolled through the slums and the army encampments in our school's neighborhood; we zoomed over bridges and through winding side streets. The city never looked more beautiful.

Our destination was the Pune office of Samskrita Bharati, which (we discovered) is actually just the apartment of the man who runs the Pune branch. He spoke to us in very slow and easy Sanskrit, with a lot of English words thrown in, about how Sanskrit was no longer just a language for Brahmins and Hindus. He then showed us an array of books published by Samskrita Bharati, all highly Hindu in subject matter. The first-year Sanskrit primer's first chapter read, "This is Shiva. That is Saraswati." "The Brahmin goes to the temple." But -- length and quiet Hindutva aside -- his lecture was hardly fire and brimstone. At the end of the afternoon, his wife served us delicious homemade ginger sweets.

Breaking news: it looks like our class is going to go on an overnight field trip next week to witness part of a five-day Vedic animal sacrifice, supposedly the only rite of its kind done in India today. Twenty-four animals. Too exciting.

And now off to prepare for a dinner party my flatmates and I are throwing tonight. Feels great to be done with the week, though I'll admit that one thing I'm *not* done with is today's exam -- three hours spent working on it in school this morning, and two essay questions to go. The thought of the animal sacrifice keeps me going.

Haps and mishaps

Haps: Tomorrow brings a field trip to the local office of the Samskrita Bharati organization, a group that promotes spoken Sanskrit and Sanskrit education -- often, I hear, with a serious Hindu nationalist agenda. It should be an interesting trip. Thankfully I don't know enough Sanskrit to throw political insults at our gracious hosts, and our teachers assured us that they really would be gracious, too.

Mishaps: Project de-Perfectionize is well under way! In this morning's reading class, I innocently paraphrased a sentence about a princess planning to returning to the house of her father, the king. My teacher, fed up of the word I always use for "house", asked me to throw out a few synonyms. I said the following: "grham, sadanam, sadman, saranam, nivasah, vesya."

"House, house, house, house, house, prostitute."

Laughter and blushing ensued.

In other news, on Sunday I have back-to-back appointments with two Vedic astrologers. Suggestions for questions I should ask them?

Tulsi Vivaha

Sometimes it seems like all I do these days is go to weddings.

On Thursday afternoon, I attended the annual marriage of the Hindu god Krishna with the sacred Tulsi plant. “What,” a friend asked me, “is Krishna doing marrying a plant? What would that be called – floraphilia?”

Good question. Luckily for us, there are a whole bunch of stories that point toward the answer (to the question of Krishna’s marrying a plant, not to the question of the technical term for such unions – though, come to think of it, perhaps that’s what the American right is thinking when they disavow gay marriage: “first people marry someone of the same sex, next they’ll be marrying plants like those idol-worshippers; even a civil union with someone of the same sex is bad enough, but a civil union with a *plant*?”).

According to a Google search, Tulasi Vivahah originates with Vishnu, the god of whom Krishna is an avatar. Vishnu was being seriously bothered by a demon named Jalandhara. Because Hinduism is so wonderful, however, even demons can perform religious penance and obtain favors from the gods in return. This Jalandhara had been particularly austere, and had been granted immunity to death – as long as his wife, the goddess Vrinda, was faithful to him. Try as he might, then, Vishnu couldn’t kill Jalandhara.

Clearly there was only one option. One night, Vishnu assumed the form of Jalandhara, and led Vrinda to stray from the path, so to speak.

Killing the demon wasn’t the problem – it was his wife that proved to be trouble. Vrinda went berserk when she found out the trick that Vishnu had played on her. She cursed him into the form of the black Shaligram stone. Impressed with her fidelity, Vishnu decided to make their relationship legitimate: he transformed her into a Tulsi plant and promised to marry her every single year.



Other stories about Tulsi Vivahah likewise preach wifely fidelity. (Notice a pattern in my Sanskrit education? My teachers *just might* be eager for us all to get married, auspiciously and soon.)

In any case, on Thursday afternoon we set up a marriage ceremony for Krishna and Tulsi on the gravel outside the Sanskrit classrooms, under the huge banyan trees. We had a cooking lesson (in Sanskrit), and then the pandit came to deliver a lecture about Tulsi Vivahah (also in Sanskrit). Once everything for the marriage had been set up, my classmate R stepped up to the plate to perform the puja. The pandit told him everything that he had to do (in Sanskrit, of course), chanting Veda all the while. Lots of water-dripping, sandalwood–spreading, flower-giving, light-offering ensued. The whole thing was just beautiful, a tiny little golden Krishna murti being married off to a tulsi plant twenty times his size.



When it came time for the actual marriage, we all stood and our teachers joined in for the traditional marriage hymns. We walked around the perimeter of the blanket on the ground, circumambulating the newlyweds. Then we all ate sweets that had been blessed by Krishna and Tulsi.

The best part: smack in the middle of some Vedic stotra or other, the pandit’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and conducted a lengthy conversation with the person on the other end of the line – in classical Sanskrit.

Panini

...and I don't mean the sandwich.

Today was a great day in my Sanskrit education. In grammar class we started to learn (and by started, I mean *inched* out the *very* beginning of) Paninian grammar, which I like to think of as the world's first computer program, a key to the Sanskrit language. So exciting! To start, fourteen sutras that provide the tools for understanding Paninian code: short strings of letter-syllables, brilliantly arranged by...well, I haven't learned what they're arranged by, but it must be genius, whatever it is. Thus, am completely regretting the fact that I've not studied a particle of computer science.

We started with where and how the sound "a" is pronounced in the mouth, and began to learn two sutras about the strengthening of vowels.

In listening class, we came across the aorist imperative -- another great moment. Starting to think all this Sanskrit has finally begun to permeate my skull!

YES, WE CAN!

This morning's election bash brought many a tear and many a gulab jamun.

Aam, vayam saknomah! Yes, yes we can!

Pratidinam

Or, "Every day".

I realize I haven't yet written much about school, even though it takes up most of my time (and *definitely* most of my energy) on most of my days. So because it's early in the week and I have yet to realize the vast amount of grammar and vocabulary (not to mention sung verses) which I must memorize by nine o' clock on Friday morning for the weekly exam -- and because I'm too excited about the election to buckle down on my homework quite yet -- I'm going to share what it was like to go to school today:

After pushing the snooze button a few times, I got out of bed at 7:15am and padded to the kitchen, where I grabbed the big cappuccino mug before either of my roommates could get to it. Filled it with illustrious Nescafe, and inhaled. I took my second mug back to my room, where I worked on understanding the short story that we had been assigned for our "Modern Literature" class coming up today. Often -- too often, perhaps -- one comes across words and sentences in Sanskrit literature that make one think "surely this doesn't actually MEAN what the dictionary says it does" or "there must be some contextual definition that I'm missing" or "I'm definitely breaking up the sandhi [what ties Sanskrit words together] incorrectly." And all too often, those words or sentences mean *exactly* what you thought they did.

Exhibit A: Last year's selection from the Mahabharata featured one character calling his enemy an "impotent sesame seed."

Exhibit B: Today's short story contained a paragraph about how the narrator's father would go to the temple every day after lunch and sit in the middle of the floor surrounded by villagers, singing songs while smoking a hookah.

Exhibit C: We're currently reading a Puranic story in which an old Brahmin man, afflicted by leprosy because of some serious evils committed in a past life, insists on visiting a local prostitute. His wife -- whose saintly devotion the story is supposed to encourage -- carries him there on her shoulders. On the way, however, he kicks a sage who, having been falsely accused of robbery, is sitting in the gallows. What's more, the "dvijottamah" ("the best of the twice-born," an epithet my teacher claims is used without a trace of irony) kicks the sage with his left foot. Obviously the sage curses him. The devoted wife protects him. The gods-- powerless compared to the faithful wife -- get involved. Stay tuned.

At eight, I walked down to the corner where my friend J, who is taking Marathi at the same institute, picked me up in a rickshaw. We drove out, first through the city, then through the slums, to Deccan College campus. My two teachers and my two classmates arrived with many a "suprabhatam, katham asi?" (good morning, how are you?) exchanged. We started our first class: reading the Puranic story cited above. No English is spoken in class; instead of each student translating a few lines into English, each student is expected to give a Sanskrit "anvaya" (a rearrangement of the words in the sentence into their proper syntactic order) and then a Sanskrit paraphrase that shows he or she knows the meaning of the lines at hand.

Two hours later, we break for tea. Often teatime is held completely in Sanskrit; today we talked in English about corrupt landlords and the older ages at which Indians are getting married these days.

Then it's time for grammar class. Often we spend grammar class drilling Sanskrit's infinite noun declension paradigms. This week, however, we've started studying numbers -- something most foreign language students learn a few weeks into their first years. It's one of the things I've always loved about Sanskrit, actually: the fact that I could say "Upon hearing the words of his beloved son Rama, King Dasaratha, whose soul was great, collapsed from his affliction upon the surface of the earth as if he were a tree that had been cut down" before I could count to ten.

But after completing a worksheet on numbers, we spent the rest of class time talking about astrology. It's no small thing, here.

Then we settled into "Modern Literature," the words of which--being written without sandhi and usually with good syntax--we only had to paraphrase.

We finish every school day reciting the shlokas (verses) and stotra (devotional verses) we're required to memorize each week. This week brings a super-long stotra written by Shankaracharya in praise of Bhairava, Shiva in his wrathful form. It's composed in iambic Something. On a wild guess, I wonder if it's called an "astakam" ("making eight") because there are eight triplets in each "paada" ("quarter of a verse", or literally, "foot"). [**Correction: this is NOT why it is called "astakam." Bad, bad Nell.**]

Then we walk over to the Marathi classrooms, where J and A are finishing classes with their two teachers. We all sit on the ground and eat delicious homemade Indian food with our hands from a tiffin. After lazing around for a bit, laughing and washing our dishes together, we split up into autorickshaws and head into our afternoons.

And now I'm here.

Go Obama!

Limerick

My friend D, whom I've known since seventh grade, composed this limerick for me out of nowhere:

nelly is secretly asian
with freckled skin, unlike a raisin
she struts down the street
in her pink flip-flopped feet
and her firey good looks are just blazin'

Readers: if D has written a limerick for you, too, do share!

Barack, I did puja for you today...

Love marriage

I heard an incredible story yesterday.

I was at the last Diwali party of the week, held at the home of the sweet lady who helped me find my flat. Mrs. K and her family host foreign students who are studying in Pune; my friend A stayed with her over the summer, and my German roommate-to-be, F, has stayed with her for the past few months. In any case, she, her husband, and her son are incredibly warm, and invited the lot of us over for a little Diwali bash. We ate sweets , watched CNN, and spoke in lots of languages at once. There was a lot of laughter.

When one family at the party -- a young husband and wife, and their baby son -- had left, Mrs. K told us the story of their marriage.

A few years ago, the young lady had been staying with Mrs K as a paying guest while she worked for an Indian cosmetics company in Pune. While she was in Pune, she met a young man from Kerala. They fell in love, and wanted to get married. Eager to show off her boyfriend to Mrs. K, she had him (and a group of his friends) come by the street where Mrs. K lives, so that Mrs. K could spot him from the balcony. Mrs. K, suspecting he would be a "dark little man with a beard, like all those Keralans", was surprised to see a fair (and shaved) man below her balcony. She called him up, he met the family, and everyone became friends.

There was just one problem. The young lady was Hindu; she came from a very strictly Rajput family based in Varanasi. The young man was Christian; he came from a very strictly Catholic family in Cochin. Everyone knew their parents would never agree to let them be married.

So the K's took matters into their own hands. They took the couple, and a few friends as witnesses, down the local court in Pune. They got married there.

But everyone knows you're not really married in India until you've had a religious wedding -- and, let's face it, a PARTY. Plus, they still hadn't told their parents.

Everyone thought for weeks about what to do. Finally, the girl went back home and told her family. They reacted badly (to say the least) and locked her in the house for days. Finally, her younger brother intervened on her behalf, and convinced her parents to let her return to Pune and to her job. Her parents called the K family, saying that if their relations found out about the marriage, the family would be cast out from society and shamed for generations to come. The young lady's sister and brother would never be able to find spouses.

Many tears and negotiations later, her family finally consented to the marriage -- as long as it was held under firm Hindu guidelines, and as long as no one found out the boy had been brought up (and indeed still was) Catholic.

The boy was fine with this. The girl was ecstatic. A few more hurdles remained, though, the first of which was convincing the boy's Catholic family to consent to a Hindu wedding. After putting their heads together, the K's figured out how to jump this one: Mr. and Mrs. K (two very fair Brahmins) would pose as the young man's parents; assorted members of their family would pose as the young man's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The man's family would never have to know.

They rehearsed for weeks leading up to the wedding. Everybody knew everybody else's character. The wedding passed without a hitch -- until, that is, the bride and bridegroom went to a Hanuman-ji mandir to pay their respects. While they were there, dutifully praying to Hanuman with all their relatives (and fake relatives), they heard a voice cry out, "Hey, Shenji Joseph! What are YOU doing here?!" It was one of the young man's friends from school, who by a strange twist of fate had ended up in that city, at that temple, at that moment. Before the innocent friend knew what had happened to him, four of the men from Mrs. K's family had pounced on him, muffled his voice, and forcibly dragged him out of the temple.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The second wedding ended well, and the couple flew to Kerala to be married as Catholics. (For, the young man's parents had said, it would be just FINE if the two were married -- as long as the ceremony were absolutely Catholic as could be.) The young woman's parents, satisfied that they had convinced their entire family and neighborhood of the groom's pure Brahmin roots, even attended the wedding.

They are now living happily ever after as a practicing Hindu-Catholic family.