How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.
I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.
But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simple, gentle vision, the quiet aspiration of someone whose life and being was a million miles distant from the transmuted figure of the warrior prince of current majoritarian imagination. He chose to think of Rama, in the manner that T M Krishna wrote so evocatively, as the epitome of kindness and justice, a seeker of human truth who dreamed of a habitus that would allow for peaceful coexistence of diverse peoples. It was this vision, which grew after successive readings of the Sundarakanda, that led my father to call his home Ayodhya, a place where, he imagined, he would live out his retired life, reading, listening to music, doing his yoga, and playing chess. Where his family would gather round and listen to each other’s stories, laugh together, and feel comforted and cared for.
My father, if he had lived, would have turned 93 today. He grew up studying English, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu, and loving the culture and poetry of all these languages, but for the first six decades of his life, his idiom of choice was couched in the symbology of mathematics. Upon retirement, when he moved into the house called Ayodhya, he gave up the numbers and symbols of functional analysis to immerse himself in his parallel passions—music, the Sanskrit classics, and chess.
His—our—Ayodhya was built and named in the late 1970s, before the name acquired the charge it holds today. Like many others of his generation, born before independence, without family wealth, to own a home was an achievement that came after years of saving, and for him, almost at retirement. The naming thus was an indulgence he allowed himself, a way of claiming a personal vision after long years of subsuming his own material desires in service of a large extended family. It was, after all this time, a space that he had created for himself and those he loved, and all of that hope was carved into those letters on the compound wall.
Yet the single story of Ayodhya that is threatening to dominate popular consciousness today is that of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the politics of hate that it has engendered, and so when Google Maps throws up my location with the name of the house, I feel like I need to explain, to distance myself from that story and all that it stands for. I know for sure that is not the story my father would have wanted associated with this house, with his home. His Ayodhya is the abode of a meditative Rama, one who agonized over decisions as he sought to execute what he saw as his dharma. My father’s reading of the Sundarakanda, or indeed the larger Ramayana, was a personal journey, and even as he immersed himself in the beauty of Valmiki’s writing he was willing to debate the nuances of the narrative.
Translator Arshia Sattar, in an interview, has remarked, “people don’t want to develop a relationship with the Ramayana because they don’t want to be associated with the prejudice and politics of hate that have surrounded the text since the 1980s.” It’s a similar sense of unease I have when I think about the name on my gate post. Perhaps that is why I have let the letters fade?
But to give up the name, to give in to the unease, would be a victory for the other side, for those who seek to impose a hegemonic, unidimensional narrative upon our consciousness. I find myself, as I am sure do many others, conflicted about traditions that we have grown up with, recognizing as we do now the exclusions and hierarchies embedded in many practices and belief systems. We make decisions to disavow some while feeling the need to cling on to others, possibly cultural and aesthetic strands whose meanings hold enough ambiguity to allow reshaping. The polarization of our current social and political discourse however allows no room for such ambiguities, for fuzzy in-betweens that might accommodate the pleasure of some traditions while recognizing the toxicity of others.
My father’s Rama, and his Ayodhya, are ideas (possibly ideals) that are deeply personal, offering for him (I like to think) pathways to an inner sanctum where reflection and dialogue can occur, where one can seek one’s own dharma. A dharma that has nothing to do with the political drama unfolding in the city called Ayodhya.
Comments