MY TAKE ON SABARIMALA

NEITHER JYOTI NOR WALL; A BIT OF COMMON SENSE

Valson Thampu

The Ayyappa Jyoti show of strength, sprung with surprising ease and efficiency on the 27th, and the women’s wall to be held on the New Year day, are two sides of the same coin. Both pretend to be other than political, precisely because they are nothing if not political. In respect of both, the emphasis is exclusively on size and scale; not on the spirit, meaning or purpose.

Of the two, Ayyappa Jyoti is more overtly religious, timed to perfection to synchronize with the finale of the prolonged Sabarimala pilgrimage. Conceived in an ambience of hyped up religious fervour, it was sure to evoke massive popular response. Women’s wall, conceived in the historical ambience of navodhanam, or the historical ensemble of diverse reform movements in Kerala, is less specific in its evocations and symbolism. If anything, it is burdened by an immanent self-contradiction. Reform movements in Kerala were aimed at breaking walls, not making them. Going by the arguments of the ideological architects of the wall, the proposed wall is envisaged to visually embody in the public space the idea of strength; especially the strength of the Kerala women forces that threaten their equality, dignity and freedom of choice.

If so, a significant irony confronts us in this ambiguous antagonism, unprecedented in the history of our social formation, between ‘light’ and ‘wall’. The antagonism between the two is all too obvious. Light is in the hands of those who believe that those who are about to constitute the wall are embodiments of darkness. The latter, on their part, are equally persuaded that the Jyoti-bearers represent regressive forces that are out to keep women ‘walled out’ from sacred spaces. Ambiguity inheres in this face-off, in the sense that Jyoti and wall are conceived and unfurled as antagonistic symbols of resistance. In terms of their intentions, the wall and the light are identical, which is, in itself, significant.

A significant feature of the present age is that symbols are reduced to their physical dimensions. A symbol is, as the word suggests in its literal meaning, compacted of two dimensions. In a symbol the physical points to a spiritual meaning. The ultimate reach of the atomizing power of modernity is that it drives a wedge right down the middle of a symbol and tears apart the physical and the spiritual. Modernity is distinguished for its irreverence towards what is traditional and its nonchalant assimilation of everything -including the sacred- into its profit-maximizing agenda. Even the sacred is valued only as grist to the mill of political book-keeping, the reckoning of profit and loss. So, expect no qualms in degrading religion into a political accessory. Traditionally, the sacred has been associated more with mountain-tops and forests, with ashrams and enclaves of meditative serenity, than with streets and sites of confrontation.

It mocks the sagacity of Keralites to suggest that any political party, or any conglomerate of political parties, has a monopoly over the navodhanam heritage. The fact is that, first, religious establishments and, thereafter political parties, disowned the spiritual discipline and heritage of navodhanam in the past. Sree Narayana Guru, for instance, is a shining light of undying significance in the saga of navodhanam. Not only that. Every religion, in its origin, has had a navodhanam genius. Christianity in respect of Judaism, Protestantism in relation to Catholicism, Buddhism vis-à-vis Vedic Hinduism, were all essentially navodhanam effervescences. Marxism was, historically, a gurgling of the navodhanam spirit in respect of the de-humanizing and self-alienating genius of monopolistic capitalism. But, without exception, religion and politics, have disowned the navodhanam heritage as inconvenient to the dynamics of perpetuating the status quo and enlarging its iniquitous and inegalitarian advantages.  Navodhanam should not be a mere crisis-response strategy, but an on-going spiritual struggle to keep life illumined continually by the jyoti, the light, of godliness.

Light, as a symbol, is a reminder that the core purpose of religion is to effect people’s enlightenment. This was clear to our ancient seers who taught us to pray, “From darkness, lead us to light”. The function of ‘light’ is to unveil diverse orders of connectedness that would, for want of it, remain hidden. Darkness, correspondingly, is an alienating, fragmenting, and disabling force. Light as a spiritual symbol -the most universal symbolic link between religion and the Divine- is a reminder of the need for humankind to wake up and emerge from its prolonged spiritual slumber of dis-connectedness. In the Indian context this awakening was envisaged to result in the emergence of humankind from religious ghettos to spiritual universality, as in the vision of vasudhaiva kutumbakam. The desideratum in the spiritual core of all religions is that God is universal and, therefore, the fragmentation of humankind and their incarceration in various mutually antagonistic camps is tantamount to practical atheism. The fact that a religious outfit may use ‘light’ for fortifying these walls of exclusion does not make it any less atheistic.

What the people of Kerala need is not a choice between this symbol loaded communally or that symbol slanted politically. What we need is the freedom, and good sense, to stay steadfast on the foundation of social amity and cultural vitality which have played no small role in helping this tiny and beautiful state to be a national showpiece of people’s empowerment. The newly inaugurated industry of public antagonism, in which the people of Kerala are lined up like de-individualized workers on assembly lines for mass-producing alienation to their own detriment, spells gloom and doom. Keralites need to wake up to the peril confronting them.

The comparative length of the Jyoti chain and women’s wall has no bearing on our day-to-day life or collective destiny. The Jyoti and the wall are meant to subserve interests indifferent to the character and culture of Kerala. This forebodes an irresponsible and cynical willingness to ignore pressing real-life issues, especially in the wake of the worst natural calamity the state has seen in recent history, for the sake of petty and partisan gains. For the people of the state to lend legitimacy to this aggressive deployment of vested interest is to make a public display of their gullibility.

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