RITUALS AND THE REPUBLIC

Light of Truth

A couple of decades ago, I was to be in the Madras Club. My host was aghast when I turned up in a pair of kurta and pyjama, my feet terminating in a pair of chappals. So clad, I was ineligible to enter the hallowed space. A similar predicament awaited me in Tollygung Club, Kolkata. I was booted on that occasion, but not ‘tied’, and unsecured at my neck. An uncollared neck was anathema to the ritualistic augustness of that club.

A few years later, during my tenure as the Principal of St Stephen’s College, I was deluged with a spate of court cases as part of a multi-pronged, strategy to ‘smoke the oldie out,’ I felt like, out of sheer curiosity, attending one of the court sessions, just to see how it all happened. My lawyer coached me before he took me there. “Don’t smile while in court. You may look at the judge, but never nod at him, instinctively or otherwise, when you feel you are in agreement with him, or you think the argument is turning in your favour.” In one word, be a frozen specimen of humanity. As the proceedings got underway, I could not help wondering why a lawyer, especially the one who was arguing on the weaker side of the case, had to garnish every sentence with “My Lord”! On second thoughts I shuddered at what the court would be, sans this arabesque of ceremonies and seeming charades.

Shaking hands with each other, or gracefully ‘namastey-ing,’ is a social ceremony. Leave it out? And walk past each other, like two two ships sailing past each other at night?
In respect of rituals, there are at least three categories of people. First, the cynics; who, however, fall back on rituals when the going gets tough for them. Second, the mindless adherents to rituals and customs. Third, the enthusiasts for rituals whose zeal is exceeded only by their ignorance of what the rituals mean. While I was the principal of St Stephen’s, the Students’ Union Society, decided to pull off a coup against the ‘Christian character’ of the college by having SaraswatiVandana recited at the inaugural of the Union, which is, otherwise, kept as a religion-neutral ceremony. After the prayer was rendered with aplomb and felicity, when my turn to deliver the inaugural address came, I asked the organizers if any one of them could give a brief exposition of the meaning of Saraswati Vandana to the audience. None could! To them, the recital was an exercise in contumacy. I used my address, then, to explain what Saraswati Vandana meant, putting the spotlight on the symbolism of the swan, the vehicle of Saraswati.

I have asked, likewise, the organizers of innumerable public functions why they needed to start with ‘lighting of the lamp’? To this day, I haven’t had an answer, other clumsily vague beatings about the bush. The same goes for almost every ritual and ceremony on which much time and money are expended. Consider now our zealots of aggressive patriotism, who roughed up a physically disabled person in a cinema hall because he could not stand up when the national anthem was played. What do they know of the spirit of the anthem? What do they care for the burdens and disabilities that ordinary humanity is heir to? For them the ritual of playing the anthem is an occasion for inflicting their will on a helpless human being. Their prowling in search of defaulters is all, the playing of the anthem is nothing.

Given all of the above, it is quite tempting to damn rituals. To do so would be as irrational as judging anything by its abusers and not by its proper use. Spoiled brats, drunk on their parents’ ill-gotten money, zip through streets in their swanky BMWs and maw down pedestrians. So, outlaw BMWs? The problem is not with particular cars. The problem is with particular drivers.

Thomas Mann, in his classic novel The Magic Mountain (1924), wonders how crude life would be, if it is shorn of rituals and ceremonies. This was in reference to just within the chivalric tradition. Public life, he says, will sink into crudity. Rituals and ceremonies pertain to the reverence with which how a thing is done. Surely, a society can only gain from being mindful of the ceremonious propriety with which everything needs to be done. That is so even at the family dining table.

We need to make a distinction between religious rituals and secular rituals. Whether my costume is offensive for want of a neck-tie, or whether I am uncouth because my feet are not shod in shoes, are all wholly superficial issues. Religious rituals and ceremonies are mostly indifferent to such issues, except in the case of those who mediate them, deeming them to be -erroneously, I believe- integral to the solemnity of their observance. As a rule, when a people get alienated from the meaning of a ritual or ceremony and are obsessed, correspondingly, with its externals, they become aggressively intolerant of deviations from customary details. For them, it is conformity that matters; the meaning of the ritual doesn’t. Conformity is itself the ritual.

Religious rituals hinge on symbols. They pertain to the irreducible elements and realities of the human condition; symbols that capture the poetry of the human predicament. Symbols are used -and have to be used- in religious rituals because the insights these rituals embody are too expansive to be captured in prosaic language. Poetry and rituals are spiritual twins. The brutal imposition of a ritual -religious or secular- is murderously prosaic. It a boorish insult to the ritual in question, in comparison to which its non-observance is a courtesy, howsoever sterile. Terrorizing people into showing respect to the national anthem when played in cinema halls, or into mouthing jingoistic slogans, are rituals of terrorism, not of patriotism. They mock the Republic blue-printed in the Constitution of India.

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