The God next door

Vishnu: Hinduism’s
Blue-skinned
Savior
Editor: Joan Cummins
Mapin
Rs 3,500; Pp 296

A little-known fact about Hindu religious practices is that no priest can possibly start any ritual worship of any deity without invoking Vishnu or his hallowed memory. Even when the priest, irrespective of the school to which he belongs, worships the other two members of the Hindu Trinity of Gods — Brahma, the Creator, and Shiva, the Destroyer — he has to start the process by paying obeisance to Vishnu. There seems to be no getting away from Vishnu, the Preserver, or the one who maintains order and balance in the cosmos by means that are both violent and peaceful. Such is the primordial importance conferred on Vishnu by those who wrote the Hindu religious scriptures.

The importance of Vishnu in the Hindu way of life arises for another reason. Of the three members of the Trinity, Vishnu appears to be the most real, infinitely more human, more balanced, present in many more forms and incarnations than the other two, and certainly better understood by most practitioners of the Hindu religion over the ages.

Brahma is the most remote of them all. You can count the number of temples at which you can worship Brahma. Shiva is more popular, but his bohemian way of life and mercurial behaviour inspire awe and fear, and do not make him easily acceptable. Therefore, Shiva remains a distant God. In sharp contrast, Vishnu is the God next door, manifesting all the qualities including the virtues and the minor foibles that a Hindu householder has no qualms in identifying with. He is like the Shakespearean tragic hero — who does not hold an ordinary position in life, but whose hubris helps ordinary folk empathise with him. For Shiva, there is reverence and fear. For Vishnu, there is reverence, but hardly any fear. In addition, there is affection and empathy.

Full report here Business Standard 

A tome on Vishnu

Here is a book that traces the growth of Vishnu within the Hindu pantheon.

The book bears the title of an exhibition that was opened in North America and coordinated by the First Center for the Visual Arts drawing from at least 45 collections in the U.S. Going by the book, this seems to have been a superb exhibition and the text and the photos of the exhibits do full justice to what seems to be a mammoth and ambitious undertaking.

The various images of the exhibits are intermingled across three important and well-written themes that governed the layout of the objects.

Part 1: The image of Vishnu, his attributes, his consorts, his female form, Garuda and legends associated with him.

Part 2: Deals with his avatars and the various images of Vishnu.

Part 3: Deals with the worship of Vishnu.

In all parts the text is lucid, yet packed with information. Joan Cummins, in her introduction, offers an excellent analysis of the Hindu religion and presents the uniqueness of the religion with a variety of choice for the spiritually inclined and the plethora of sub cultures the religion contains. She believes this is because of its age and because, it is a religion that has no single prophet/founder and has therefore grown in a cumulative process so that, “two people might find themselves praying next to each other in a Vishnu temple, repeating the same words and looking at the same sculpted icon, while holding radically different visions of the god and completely divergent spiritual objectives.”

Full report here Hindu

The flaw in the crystal

In today’s literature of the Subcontinent, there is no escaping mythology – nor should there be.

Hindu mythologies and epic characters have become cultural metaphors in India. Many speak with ease of a lakshman rekha that constrains the behaviour of a woman, call scheming older men shakunis, identify sati savitris in women we see around us. No wonder then, that mythological themes, characters and events are found widely recurring in the country’s popular cultures and literatures. To speak of Hindu mythologies permeating contemporary literature in India, therefore, is to state a truism – but a compelling truism, nonetheless. In one sense, there is nothing more traditional than repeating the stories from the past: throughout the region we have been doing so for centuries, each retelling becoming another layer in the vibrant, living palimpsest of the myths and epics. So it is unsurprising when we find contemporary writers doing what writers from the Subcontinent have been doing for what seems like forever – using themes, characters, events and emotions from a literary past to add nuance to their work.

For these reasons (and perhaps others as well), there is almost never a single version of any Hindu myth. We commonly know Hanuman to be the son of Vayu, but the Siva Purana tells us that this extraordinary monkey was the son of Siva (via a complex impregnation process that involved shed semen and hawks and leaves and open-mouthed women). By telling ancient stories in our own way, we are asserting a claim to these stories, making them our own, just as the story of Hanuman’s birth passed through many hands and minds and mouths and became a Saivite myth. Similarly, we, any and all of us, are invited by the Hindu tradition itself to tell stories again and again. By doing so, our contemporary tellings and variations and interpretations enthusiastically add to the inherent diversity and dynamism of our reservoir of tales.

Full report here Himal

Caste & the labour market

Review
BLOCKED BY CASTE, ECONOMIC DISCRIMINATION IN MODERN INDIA
Edited by Sukhadeo Thorat, Katherine S. Newman;
Oxford University Press,
Rs. 750

This is an excellent volume — carefully-researched and eye-opening — on caste-based injustice in our society and economy. Now, while there is a literature that documents discrimination and the denial of civil liberties, there is very little understanding and research on the practice of caste discrimination in markets, notably in modern, urban and metropolitan settings, and in public institutions. This book takes up the challenge of understanding the latter by means of systematic research on the question.

A useful four-fold classification of the types of discrimination is proposed by Thorat and Newman: complete exclusion, selective inclusion, unfavourable inclusion, and selective exclusion. Complete exclusion would occur, for example, if Dalits were totally excluded from purchase of land in certain residential areas. Selective inclusion refers to differential treatment or inclusion in markets, such as disparity in payment of wages to Dalit workers and other workers. Unfavourable inclusion or forced inclusion refers to tasks in which Dalits are incorporated based on traditional caste practices, such as bonded labour. Lastly, selective exclusion refers to exclusion of those involved in “polluting occupations” (such as leather tanning or sanitary work) from certain jobs and services.

Study in rural areas
There is a body of research on discrimination in rural areas and on the continuation of caste barriers to economic and social mobility in village India. There is a myth, however, that caste does not matter in the urban milieu and that, with the anonymity of the big city and with education and associated job and occupational mobility (assisted by affirmative action), traditional caste-based discriminatory practices disappear. This book explodes that myth in a set of chapters that focus on the formal labour market. These chapters use methodologies developed in the United States to study racial discrimination, and are written in collaboration with scholars from the U.S.

Thorat and Attewell ran an experiment to test caste discrimination in the urban labour market. For one year, researchers collected advertisements from leading English language newspapers for jobs in the private sector that required a university degree but no specialised skills. The researchers then submitted three false applications for each job. The applicants, all male, had the same or similar education qualification and experience. One of them had a recognisable upper caste Hindu name, another a Muslim name and the third a distinctly Dalit name. The expected outcome was a call for interview or further screening.

An analysis of the outcomes, using regression methods, showed that, although there were an equal number of false applicants from three social groups, for every 10 upper caste Hindu applicants selected for interview, only six Dalits and three Muslims were chosen. Thus, in modern private enterprises (including IT), applicants with a typical Muslim or Dalit name had a lower chance of success than those with the same qualification and an upper caste Hindu name.

Full report here The Hindu