Subhoranjan Dasgupta, a respected literary scholar, writes in 'Frontline-
An apostate’s articulation: What the grand show of the Ram mandir inauguration seeks to conceal
A religious ceremony has a soteriological purpose. It is pointless to 'seek to conceal' anything from God. Apostates may not understand this. But can they be articulate in any manner that successfully conceals their imbecility?
Not if the apostate is a buddhijivi-
Mythology and faith combine to deliver a spectacle in Ayodhya that excludes hundreds of other pressing problems faced by the country.
Any activity has an 'opportunity cost'. Dasgupta is ignoring the hundreds of other pressing problems facing Bengal- which is ruled by Mamta's thugs- when he writes this shite.
Today, January 22, 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, acclaimed as “Vishwaguru” by his innumerable acolytes, will preside over the consecration ceremony. He will infuse new life into the idol in a grand Pran Pratishtha Utsav attended by devotees like the RSS supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, and thousands of other complying celebrities.
If they were ordered to attend and did so under compulsion they could be said to be 'complying'. However, if they were Hindus and believed they gained religious merit by attending this marvellous event they were eager participants who considered themselves fortunate to have received an invitation.
The “sacred” task of installing the idol of Ram Lalla (five-year-old Lord Ram) in the garbhagriha (sanctum sanctorum) of the unfinished though resplendent temple in Ayodhya was accomplished on January 18. The four-hour-long ceremony reverberated with chants of “Jai Shri Ram”, reaching a crescendo in the last hour and merging with the utterance of Vedic mantras. Carved from krishnashila (black granite) by Karnataka’s renowned sculptor, Arun Yogiraj, the idol weighs more than 150 kg.
Sounds wonderful- at least for Hindus. What is Dasgupta's objection to it?
Yet a discordant—protesting or rebellious—note was raised on January 18 itself by a group of women who had come all the way from Birapani village near Kathmandu in Nepal. Sita, as we know, was the daughter of King Janak whose kingdom, Mithila, constitutes a part of present-day Nepal. The woman said, “We have come to pay homage to our persecuted mother, who hails from our land. No other woman in the world has had to suffer such dreadful persecution and deprivation.”
But she was actually a Goddess. These women were being silly. Still, maybe they gained something by performing this stunt. However, nobody paid them any attention save for this nutter.
They closed their lament by saying, “Persecution is rampant even now, even a hundred Ram temples cannot curb this crime.”
Nor can temples curb stupidity.
It is unlikely that Modi will think of what the women said he begins his reverential march on January 22, taking 500 measured steps from the temporary temple to the new grandiose structure. Hysterical cries of “Jai Shri Ram” will rent the air, conch shells will be blown, drums will be bashed to orchestrate the consecration. Every note will be wrenched out of this musical outburst to amass the political capital needed for the coming election.
It is unlikely that Modi- who is Hindu- will be thinking of anything else save the proper performance of his ceremonial duties and the great soteriological benefit this will bring.
However, it is heartening that some major leaders of the INDIA bloc alliance refused to take part in the show.
This was certainly heartening for the BJP. They feared that Sonia- who like Sita is a 'pativrata' foreigner- would steal some of the limelight and make the case that it was her husband who set the ball rolling for the construction of the Temple.
The reactions of the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, and CPI(M) were succinctly summed up by the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, who described the razzmattaz as “election gimmick”.
She had an election gimmick of her own- an interfaith march featuring lots of bearded Muslims.
The inauguration will be followed by spectacular celebrations, labelled “Mandolotsava”, for 45 days. I refuse to detail this extravaganza because it is so crushingly oppressive.
Dasgupta prefers the oppression meted out by Mamta's goons.
The opium of the masses
Dasgupta is a good little Marxist. But he is too frightened to speak against Mamta whose goons have beaten the Commies into whimpering submission.
will be produced and distributed in abundance to eclipse the death by suicide of debt-damned, desperate farmers in our country (2,366 farmers died by suicide between January and October 2023).
Dasgupta was crying like anything because all his pals in the countryside kept topping themselves. Then some evil BJP workers forced him to take opium so he would stop shrieking and shitting himself incessantly.
The rulers have nothing else to offer but this seductive narcotic.
The opium pellets, though meant to be taken orally, seduced Dasgupta and anally violated him.
Economic realities
A staggering sum of Rs.1,800 crore
about 1.5 billion dollars or a little over one dollar per head of the population.
has already been spent to erect this monumental shrine in a poor nation (i) where
poor people keep having babies who are bound to be very fucking poor. An extra dollar won't make any difference to them.
the number of children suffering from chronic malnutrition is the highest in the world;
don't have kids if you can't feed them
(ii) where 27 per cent of the population is surviving below the poverty line
because India followed the Socialist path. It should have settled for a better type of opium- viz. Religion.
and another 15 per cent is perched perilously just above the cursed border,
which is a little more than two dollars a day
that is, close to half of the entire populace is engaged day in day out in the grim business of survival; (iii) where 60 per cent of the country’s total wealth has been cornered
created, not 'cornered'
by just a handful of industrial houses and corporate families who do not constitute more than 5 per cent of the population;
0.005 percent maybe
(iv) that ranks 111 out of 125 nations on the World Hunger Index, faring even worse than Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan;
which were less Socialist than India
and (v) where its rank is a miserable 132 among 191 countries on the Human Development Index.
because, for the longest time, India listened to buddhijivi mathematical economists. Then people noticed that West Bengal kept sinking lower and lower on every economic index. Clearly, buddhijivis have shit for brains.
The claim of emerging as the world’s third largest economy sounds vapid and vacuous when one confronts this devastating socioeconomic reality.
What devastated West Bengal was Marxism.
Eminent economists from Joseph Stiglitz to Amartya Sen, from Pranab Bardhan to Prabhat Patnaik, have repeatedly
shat themselves in public by making crazy predictions or policy prescriptions. Stiglitz praised Chavez's Venezuela. Sen said Rahul was smart!
underlined the blatant anomaly, but to no effect. The most populous country in the world, by merely aggregating its citizens’ earnings, would be the third or fourth largest economy in the world.
Not if they are subsistence farmers or pastoralists. They don't produce any monetary surplus.
Even the much-flaunted increases in per capita income and Gross Domestic Product are treacherously misleading because they merge, unpardonably, the sky-high income of the minuscule rich and the measly earnings of the millions of poor.
Get rid of the rich and let the poor starve. That's what Stalin and Mao did- right?
In other words, the stark inequality inherent in these mechanical metrics remains craftily concealed.
No. Governments need to know who can pay tax and on what. Accountancy is about making an enterprise or a Government more efficient or effective.
What matters is the precious absence of “real freedoms” emphasised by Amartya Sen in his 1999 book, Development as Freedom, a text that changed development economics.
Nope. That subject had died thirty years previously when people noticed that listening to development economists caused countries to turn into shitholes.
It is the horrendous inequality in the distribution of wealth and resources that hurts.
Nope. Poor people having babies who are bound to be very poor hurt both their progeny and themselves. But this is also true of incestuous alcoholics or drug addled prostitutes. One good thing about Religion is that lots of girls can become nuns.
In this context, I am reminded of a dialogue that took place 40 years ago. In 1985, when I interviewed Günter Grass for the first time, I asked him, “What perturbed you most in my country?” The radical Social Democrat replied, “A sea of raging poverty pockmarked by a few islands of unforgivable, vulgar luxury.
Without those islands, there would have been greater poverty.
Moreover, these islanders were so criminally smug and callous.”
Rajiv had said 'India needs more 5 star hotels'. Actually, India needed something like the Chinese 'houkou' or internal passport system so that quality of life in highly productive cities could improve. The alternative is capital flight and brain drain.
Nothing has changed since.
Much has changed. Cambridge educated Brahmins or Baidyas can no longer fuck up the economy. A 'chai-wallah' can displace the Dynasty. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. India's economy has probably overtaken Germany or will definitely overtake it by the end of this year.
The new mantra
Let us leave the economy aside because a virulent form of religious bigotry is the new mantra.
Jai Sri Ram is a very old mantra.
The first question to ask here is how the particular site in Ayodhya was selected for the temple.
Only if you are as stupid as shit. The answer is obvious. This is the widely accepted 'janmabhoomi' of the Lord.
Of course, the Sangh Parivar had said all along that the mandir would be built on the rubble of the mosque, but that assertion was given the crucial legal sanction by the Supreme Court on November 9, 2019. In a scandalous example of a “doublespeak” judgment, the Supreme Court bench first announced that the demolition of the mosque was an “unlawful” act
attracting a small penalty for criminal trespass
and then apportioned that very demolished area as the site of the new temple.
because the Bench accepted that the Temple deity had continuous possession
Those who were overly censorious whispered that the judge had been promised a petty goody after retirement.
Why did the whisper this? Overly censorious people are not afraid to speak their minds.
Lo and behold, it was indeed given at the proper moment.
What is this nutter talking about?
After all, obeisance had been paid to the “Maryada Purushottam”.
No. The deity in question is the child Rama- like the baby Jesus.
The very expression Maryada Purushottam rings a disturbing bell.
In the ears of a very disturbed person- sure.
Apostates ask, is Ram really the supreme human example of godly qualities?
No they don't. They ask things like 'could I suck you off in return for the price of a pint of beer?'
I do not want to hurt the sentiments of the acolytes.
Yes you do. You are simply too stupid to achieve any such thing.
So, I will not repeat the harsh verdicts of Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya and Professor Sukumari Bhattacharji on Ram.
But I will repeat everybody's harsh verdict on those two shitheads- viz. their shitty Marxist heads were filled with Marxist shit. Bhattacharji, it must be said, was born a Christian and thus had an ancestral obligation to shit on Hinduism.
The former, a brilliant exponent of Indian materialist philosophy, authored the classic Lokayata Darshan, and the latter, a formidable authority on Hindu religion (both philosophers were Marxists and Sanskrit scholars), wrote an unsurpassed treatise on the Hindu pantheon.
They were ignorant shitheads. Still, they were smarter than this nutter- but that's not saying very much.
No, with an eye on the fervid adulation of Ram, I shall depend on the mild expression used by the much less abrasive Bimal Krishna Motilal
Matilal, not Motilal
(he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford),
he was a very flatulent man as Spivak appreciatively records. Sadly, nobody told him that Navya Nyaya is category theoretical. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
who, according to Amartya Sen, was the greatest Indian philosopher after Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.
Sen is as stupid as shit.
I was fortunate enough to have him as a friend.
Yet he can't even get his name right.
Motilal scoured the epics more diligently than anyone else and in their original languages.
Nonsense! He was a specialist in Nyaya not Mimamsa.
When I requested him to comment on the adulatory expression, Maryada Purushottam, he gave a wry smile and observed deprecatingly, “He [Ram] is a controversial character rooted in legend.”
Because he knew he was addressing a Marxist nutter.
Thereafter, we both attempted to list the failings of this mythic and ahistorical figure. Our revealing list is as follows:
First, Ram summarily beheaded the lower-caste Sambuk because he dared to indulge in tapasya (divine worship) to attain moksha or salvation.
So what? The Ramayana has an occasionalist metaphysics. God is the only efficient cause. Sambuk gained Heaven immediately- which is why he was doing tapasya in the first place.
Sambuk crossed the preordained caste-directed prescription of karma, so had to be decapitated. Many varying versions of this occur in the many Ramayanas, but the actual act remains unchallenged.
But that was in 'Treta Yuga' which ended long ago. Sambuk wanted to go to Heaven and Ram fulfilled his wish.
Second, Ram killed Bali, the valiant monarch of the monkeys, by shooting a deadly arrow at him from behind a bush. Bali had done him no harm. When the dying Bali asked Ram why he had committed this act, Ram could offer no cogent answer.
But we can. Essentially, it is that a warrior must anticipate all possible ploys and take counter-measures. Don't trust to the other side keeping to 'the rules of the game' unless there is a pre-compact or a reputational penalty.
Third, unable to vanquish the valorous Indrajit or Meghnad, Ravan’s son, who had defeated Ram and Lakshman twice in straight and fair battles, Ram sanctioned a crafty and cowardly assassination at the behest of the gods and his friend, Vibhishan, Ravan’s brother. The latter told him that Meghnad became invincible after his worship of Siva (Nikumbhila Yagna) each morning, and hence had to be killed before he could perform the ritual. Accordingly, Vibhishan guided Lakshman secretly to the prayer ground where Indrajit was readying himself for the yagna, and there Lakshman killed his unprepared and defenceless foe.
This is an 'upay'- or expedient. Once again, it is the responsibility of the warrior to take precautions against any vulnerability he might have. Suppose you are advising a King who says- 'I scorn to take such and such precaution because no honourable warrior would attack me under such circumstances.' The Minister then gives this example and says 'look, even the pious Laxman used this 'upay'. It is up to you to protect yourself. Not to do so is hubris.'
Meghnad’s frantic appeal to be allowed to bring his weapons was brushed away. In despair, Indrajit hurled his implements of worship at Lakshman, the bells and conch shells. One recalls the moving depiction of Meghnad’s helpless valour in his last hours by the Bengali poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in his epic Meghnadbadhkavya.
A boring shithead. What is poetic about Indrajit is that, child that he was, he thought that by slaying an image of Sita, the bone of contention would disappear and thus the grown-ups would make peace.
Fourth, even more questionable than all the acts above, Ram decreed the agnipariksha of Sita, the epitome of conjugal devotion, after his victory in the war.
As a result of which all the virtuous dead were brought back to life. In Valmiki, Sita enters the fire by herself.
He took this outrageous step to clear any doubts his subjects could raise against Sita because she had spent months as a captive in Ravan’s palace, in Ashokvan, to be specific.
This silly man doesn't get that divine incarnations have supernatural powers.
Fifth, even after returning to Ayodhya, Ram’s disquiet concerning Sita persisted. And again, to quash the uncomfortable whisperings of his subjects, he directed Sita, by then pregnant, to leave Ayodhya. Sita’s steadfast devotee, Lakshman, took her to the forest, where she found refuge in Valmiki’s ashram.
This episode is absent in Valmiki and Tulsidas. Still, it is aesthetically pleasing and fits with the notion that the Viyogini is higher than the Yogi.
Sixth, after the birth of Lava and Kush, Sita returned to Ram’s court in Ayodhya with the twins, who chanted paeans to Ram, but the latter vacillated even then. Unable to tolerate this last insult, Sita invoked Mother Earth to take her back to her breast. The soil cracked and Sita entered her last refuge. As Motilal commented: “Sita’s spirited exit was her last act of defiance.”
That is Babu English at its most bathetic. A wife may make a 'spirited exit' by telling her hubby that he's got a tiny todger and she's going home to her wealthy family where even the most menial servant earns more than the whole of his family.
Motilal’s iconic predecessor, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, ended his masterly literary text, Sitar Banabas (Sita’s Exile), with the following lines: “A repository of all virtues, Sita was an exemplary woman… but no other woman experienced such sorrow, such deprivation.”
But she wasn't really a woman. She was God incarnate.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt was thoroughly irreligious
he converted to Christianity
and Vidyasagar was a confirmed rationalist and agnostic.
He was a casteist who opposed the British Government's plan to extend education to 'the lower orders'.
I fear that if the Sangh Parivar wrests power in West Bengal, it will remove Meghnadbvadkavya from the syllabus.
It already has been from the UPSC Bengali paper. Even future bureaucrats should be spared boring bombast as much as possible.
It was selected as one of the three deathless texts of Bengali literature by Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the late poet and scholar Sankha Ghosh. Dutt had no love to lose for, in his words, “Ram and his rabble”.
We have none for Spivak, Sen and other such cretins.
In a letter to his dear friend, Rajnarayan Basu, Dutt declared, “People grumble and say that the heart of the poet is with Meghnad and the rakshasas. And that is the real truth. I despise Ram and his rabble; but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination; he was a grand fellow.”
Dutt would have been very happy to hear of the great General Niazi whose gallant soldiers raped and killed so many Bengali women. Sadly, Dasgupta has refused to give me a little money so I can build a grand temple to Ravana where Pakistanis can rape Bengali Sitas to their heart's content. No doubt, Mamta will make a suitable provision of this sort for the Hindu women of West Bengal.
Highlights
A staggering sum of more than Rs.1,800 crore has been spent to erect the Ram Mandir in a poor nation where poverty is rampant.
A paltry sum compared to the 23,000 crores the TMC is known to have grabbed through various scams.
As a virulent form of religious bigotry becomes the rule of the day, it is good to examine whether Ram was really the paragon of virtues that he is made out to be.
Ravan was a grand fellow because he kidnapped other people's wives. Ram was faithful to his one and only wife. What a bastard!
Since the 1940s, the Sangh Parivar has devoted its might and resources to sanctify this “controversial” Maryada Purushottam.
Who is considered an incarnation of the Lord by Hindus. Dasgupta is an apostate. He is welcome to worship Ravan and idolize Niazi for raping and killing so many Bengalis.
The icon of Hindutva, Veer Savarkar, for instance, claimed that the real history of India began with Ram’s coronation in Ayodhya.
No he didn't. Savarkar wasn't ignorant.
The Parivar converted a mythical figure into a historical figure, picked out the dilapidated Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Ram, and at the dead of night, surreptitiously placed an idol of Ram inside the mosque. Thereafter, they claimed that this human act was an example of divine intervention.
In which case, the Parivar deserve to rule. They are clearly the smartest bunch of guys the world has ever seen. Getting a billion people to believe that their ancestors worshipped Lord Ram when actually that whole narrative was only concocted in 1948 or '49 is an extraordinary achievement.
Thousands of pages have already been written on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and I would not like to recall them needlessly. But this I know: When the then West Bengal Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, made an impassioned appeal to L.K. Advani to cancel his perilous rath yatra destined for Ayodhya, Advani rejected his proposal and began the march. As he progressed in his luxury-bus-turned-chariot through the States of north India, followed by hundreds of high-strung karsevaks wearing the masks of monkeys, vicious communal riots erupted. Around 2,000 people, mostly members of the minority community, were killed in the course of a few months in 1990.
How many did Jyoti Basu kill? In 1997, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in a reply to an Assembly question, stated that between 1977 (when they came to power) and 1996, 28,000 political murders were committed. The true figure was at least ten times that.
After the destruction of the mosque that inevitably followed, Advani, replete with remorse, lamented that the day of the demolition was the most tragic in his life. If this is not an example of flagrant doublespeak, I do not know what is.
This isn't 'doublespeak'- which means the use of ambiguous or obscure or euphemistic language. Advani, being a politician, was merely indulging in hypocrisy.
Did he not know from the very first moment that the most cherished programme of the Parivar was to turn the mosque into rubble? Other stalwarts such as Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti rejected such manicured ambivalence. They leapt in ecstasy when the domes collapsed, as photographs testify.
They gained politically by it. However, at the end of the day, only good governance matters. That's something Mamta can't supply.
What is noteworthy is that this movement of epic proportions, spread over the decades and ordained to recapture the spirit of “pure and pristine Bharat” from the insidious hands of the “infidels”, has not yet led to a single creative statement worth its salt.
Its purpose was political and religious. It succeeded well enough on both scores.
Not a single poem, story, novel, or drama that fulfils the preconditions of creativity has been penned on this, the most soul-lifting programme of the Sangh Parivar.
Whereas Bengalis have written plenty of boring shite about the Great Bengal Famine. Sadly, they have shown less enthusiasm for praising the noble Niazi and his Ravan like rapist horde.
One wonders why. The answer is found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “What is Literature?”
written before he turned into a Marxist nutter
where Sartre emphasised that genuine creativity cannot ever flourish on the bedrock of hatred and malevolent violence.
and yet Celine was a better novelist than Sartre though crazier than a bedbug. In the end, Sartre was a pedagogue- or wrote like one- whereas Celine wielded not the scalpel of wit but, being a French Doctor, a suppository soaking in shit.
No imperishable novel, for example, has been written as yet that extols racism or fascism.
Auden and his ilk thought Kipling a racist and proto-fascist. But Kim is imperishable.
But as Modi consecrates a new chapter in new India on January 22, I have decided to withdraw all of my aspersions listed above.
He will continue to eat his own shit.
I will smother the critique I have fashioned until now.
He thinks his shit is a 'critique'. How sweet!
I have also decided to regard “Jai Shri Ram” as a blessed slogan
or pious greeting used by Hindus.
and not a fascist war cry thundered by fanatics as they vandalise churches and mosques and lynch hapless Muslim cattle traders.
Why not say it is a Hindu war cry like 'Har Har Mahadev!' ?
I will even discover pervasive affluence, flowing milk, and honey, in my wretchedly poor country
TMC has plenty of gold and diamonds.
by accepting the delirium of Anurag Thakur: “India is as developed as the welfarist countries of advanced West Europe.”
Thakur didn't say that. He said the BJP wants to make India as developed as Europe by 2047.
More than anything else, I rubbish the censorious list of Bimal Krishna Motilal
Matilal, you fucking cretin
and revere Ram as Maryada Purushottam, the most resplendent example of divinity in human form, brimming with love and compassion.
The cunt is being sarcastic.
Rabindranath Tagore used the word karunaghana or “dense with mercy”
compassion, not mercy.
to describe the Ram of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas—a Ram very different from the militant-vengeful Ram of the Sangh Parivar.
A Ram who said 'Ravan, you are a grand fellow. Kindly sodomize my wife. I too am available for this purpose.'
But even after this about-turn, a searing question remains. How did Maryada Purushottam, the receptacle of all human virtues, of love and compassion, react when the mosque was reduced to rubble and at the bloody carnage that preceded it?
God would not have been pleased that 'Mullah' Yadav had killed Ram-bakht kar-sevaks.
I found the grief-stricken answer in the first line of a poem by Kaifi Azmi.
A Muslim. Muslims worship various Hindu gods- right?
Torn by anguish, he wrote: “And on that day, Ram left Ayodhya forever.”
Azmi checked out in 2002- when Sonia said she'd build the temple if the Bench gave permission. As for Lord Ram, he is receiving worship not just in Ayodhya but all over the world.
So, I ask, “Vishwaguru, when the essence of divinity departed from Ayodhya on December 6, 1992,
because a Muslim dude said so
the day of the Babri Masjid demolition, what and whom are you trying to install today?”
The answer is 'the temple deity- Ram Lalla Virajman's 'pran prathistha is being done on January 22, 2024. You are welcome to watch it on TV. Jai Hind. Jai Sri Ram.
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