Reconciling tradition

By : Aditya Adhikari

The Last Brahmin: Life and reflections of a modern-day Sanskrit pandit by Rani Siva Sankara Sarma translated by D Venkat Rao Permanent Black, 2007

Written in Telugu in 2002 by a schoolteacher of Sanskrit, and recently translated into English, The Last Brahmin is a sustained reflection on the lives and worldview of the Sanskrit pandits – the social class that once enjoyed unparalleled spiritual and social authority across the Subcontinent, but has for the past few centuries been in steep decline. The writer, Rani Siva Sankara Sarma, is a longtime insider to the tradition, and the overarching form of the narrative is that of a personal and familial memoir, with recurring excursions into sustained historical and philosophical themes.

The Last Brahmin hinges on a dramatic crisis. On his deathbed, the Vedanta Pandit Rani Narasimha Sastry announces that neither of his two sons is fit to officiate over his death rites, for they have abandoned the norms and values of the ancient order. The younger son has become a non-believer. The elder son, a double PhD in Chemistry and Sanskrit, has converted to Hinduism, and is now a religious teacher with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The father does not recognise the Hindu religion, but instead believes in only the dharmas of particular castes. Modern-day Hinduism, he believes, has become corrupt by imitating the Christianity of India’s colonial rulers. Both sons, then, having fallen prey to modern ideologies, he believes them to have lost their right to perform their ancestral traditions.

Rani Siva Sankara Sarma, the younger son and author of this memoir, has spent his life moving away from his father’s orthodox Brahminism. He despises his father’s way of life; he regards his father as “a complete fool, a blind man who wants to stop the rising tide [of modernity] with his knee”. But faced with his father’s rejection, made doubly painful by the fact of the father’s imminent demise, Sarma is forced to a sympathetic reconsideration of his family’s traditions: of its beliefs and rituals, the social and inner lives of its members, its rejection of and inability to come to terms with the modern world, and the strict adherence to ancient caste norms in a world increasingly hostile towards them.

Sarma’s eventual reconciliation with his father’s traditions, however, remains ambiguous. It is a partial reconciliation, never free from ambivalence, even during the author’s most sympathetic moments. The ambiguity is largely due to the complex position from which he reaches out to his father’s orthodoxy. On one level, it is the position of someone whose vehement rejection of his tradition is derived through his exposure to modernity. Sarma believes in the
values of liberty and equality, after all: he is an occasional communist and member of the Revolutionary Writer’s Association, who has co-authored poetry with Dalit writers with a view towards their liberation from the oppression of caste order.

On a deeper and more interesting level, Sarma’s opposition to his father’s traditions derives from his identification with the women in his family. Unlike his highly educated brother, Sarma completed less than a year of formal education. He spent his childhood and adolescence at home learning Sanskrit from his father; having no friends, he also ended up spending most of his time with his mother, sisters and other female members of the family. His intimacy with these women, unusual for a male child in an orthodox Brahmin family, exposed him to the sufferings inflicted upon women by a patriarchal regime – illiteracy, child-marriage, complete disregard by the family’s male members, isolation from the wider world. All of the women in Sarma’s family, he writes, were mentally unstable and prone to paranoid anxieties and hallucinations. As an impressionable child among these women, Sarma himself shared in these torments. “Ghosts, demons and the most frightening spirits of evil have hovered about our house for a very long time,” he writes. “They are our ancient relatives.”

Liberal-rational winds
More than any abstract belief in universal equality, it is Sarma’s childhood desire to alleviate his mother’s (and his own) suffering that later draws him towards communism. He was first attracted to the idea of a classless society because it evoked in him the same feelings of liberation he had felt in childhood when his mother told him stories of vaikuntha, the realm of eternal joy. “I used to think that psychic illnesses, superstitions and inequities inherited by the Brahmin tradition,” he writes, “would be blown away like puffed rice flour by the wind of liberal-rational formulae.”

However, Sarma is only selectively and ambivalently allegiant to modern values. While recognising that the women in his family suffer under an iniquitous system, Sarma is reluctant to put forth any prescription for their liberation. Modern approaches to the liberation of women, he says, such as through education and assertion of their individuality, will only succeed in burying feminine “gregariousness, extroversion and spontaneous creativity”, and will give rise to “wicked and cruel motives such as competition and success”.

If Sarma’s antagonism towards his father’s traditions has its roots in his identification with the women in his family, so too does his eventual reconciliation with and appreciation for these customs. Indeed, his later reconciliation is made possible only through the literary sensibility that he has cultivated over the years, and this sensibility owes a deep dept to his mother and other women in his family. His mother’s mythical and religious imagination is of a different universe than that of his father’s. Unschooled in Sanskrit (in fact, unschooled in any kind of writing), with no access to the reflections of high Brahminism as encompassed in the Upanishads and Vedas, her system of beliefs is rooted instead in the myths of popular subcontinental religion. For instance, she worships the local Sudra god Mutyalamma. Meanwhile, the Puranic and Kashi Majili stories that she tells her son, the radio plays that he hears with her, the Sudra puppet shows that she introduces him to – these together instil in Sarma the desire to write.

Sarma’s father, the orthodox pandit, has no problems with his wife’s belief system or her worship of Sudra gods. After all, Brahmin women, unlike Brahmin men, do not go through the thread ceremony that makes them ‘twice-born’ and thus eligible for the study of the Vedas and its associated esoteric reflective disciplines. On the other hand, the son’s attraction to the Sudra god, to puppet shows based on Sudra popular myths, is met by stern disapproval by the male members of the family. But this does not stop the young Sarma from writing a play based on popular myth in the vernacular Sudra dialect. In The Last Brahmin, too, the author’s style is somewhat like that of the myths and tales that first inspired him to write: open-ended and digressive, heedless of authority, with little attention paid to logic or internal consistency. “Both in language and life,” he writes, “I have never liked formulaic norms.”

The old style
Sarma’s powers of imaginative empathy, and the ease with which he is able to hold conflicting opinions simultaneously, eventually allows him to reach a highly sympathetic interpretation of his father’s belief system without being forced to give up his life-long aversion and antagonism to orthodox Brahminism. Without quite overcoming the belief that his father’s rejection of modernity is futile and absurd, Sarma comes to see heroism in the continued efforts, of the Brahmins of the ancient order, to withstand the onslaught of pernicious temptations brought about by modernity: the desire for fame and success, the drive towards domination over others.

By refusing to provide interpretations of scripture in any language other than Sanskrit, to any caste other than Brahmin and in any form other than speech, the father demonstrates that he has no desire to publicly display his superior reflective grasp. As such, his life is pared down to the barest essentials, a purely private life centred on the home, devoted solely to the study of the Upanishads and Vedanta and the performance of Vedic rituals. His rejection of public life is extreme. He has no interest in politics, nor in attracting disciples. He rejects most formal religious institutions. He does not visit temples, even regarding temple worship as non-Vedic and vulgar.

Sarma contrasts his father’s rigid Brahminism with his brother’s modern-day Hinduism. The latter, he suggests, has made severe compromises to the temptations of modernity, and has internalised the principles underlying the belief system of India’s colonial rulers. The core disagreement between the father and his elder son is over the institution of caste. The orthodox father maintains that caste has been divinely ordained and that each caste should follow its particular divinely given dharma. His elder son thinks his father too rigidly obstinate, and emphasises that rigid adherence to caste norms and a refusal to propagate Brahminical culture outside a rapidly diminishing subculture will only lead to the extinction of this culture. Brahminism has to adapt to the times, the elder son warns, and to do this it has to expand across castes and become the hegemonic worldview of a casteless, homogenous Hinduism. For most of his adult life, Sarma sided with his brother, perceiving the eradication of caste to be a desirable step towards an egalitarian social order. But forced to seriously confront his father’s worldview as he lies on his deathbed, he comes to understand the father’s aversion to Hinduism, to how it has internalised the vices of modernity. Behind caste eradication, he feels, lies the modern-day Brahmin’s drive for power. And the modern-day Brahmin desires political domination. As with the ideology of India’s Christian colonial rulers, modern-day Hinduism is expansionist and imperialist. Both Christianity and Hinduism make followers of the Subcontinent’s popular traditions feel that their native customs are inferior. Both also impose a tyrannical, homogenising regime onto diverse societies.

To the author, the father’s Brahminism, on the other hand, seems to desire neither the elimination of other cultures, nor its own expansion. It has no notion of territoriality, of nation, of patriotism, of religion. It “desires that the culture of castes, the conventions of castes, the goddesses of castes – everyone, as per their own dharma, must flourish”. In this way, feels Sarma, it stands as an antidote to the homogenising, tyrannising impulses of modernity.

These are Sarma’s conclusions, but the reader senses that they are only temporary, only provisional. Sarma’s sensibilities, after all, do not allow for rigid certainties. And despite his newfound appreciation, he cannot re-enter his father’s world. After his father’s death, the family pandit (“the custodian of our clan genealogy”) asks him to wear the sacred thread and perform the funeral rites. Sarma understands that this would signify total acceptance of his father’s worldview, and so he declines.