More than half of the world knows
what Christmas is (just a guess, I could be wrong), but very few knows what Shiva
Ratri is. To me it tells something about the “multi-culturism” and “secularism”
of western countries. It is a fact that the history, the ways of life and even
our festivities are often enforcements of the conquerors and the oppressors. We
all still remain the players of colonization, some as oppressors by declaring
their ways as being the right way and the civilized way, and some of us remain
oppressed. Pushed down, shamed and silenced only to speak when we praise the
oppressor. If you are already thinking how did I stray from Shiva Ratri to
colonization, trust me am not straying, there is no other character in the
Brahmanical culture than Shiva who understands colonization, appropriation and
assimilation.
Shiva, the man wearing tiger
hide, a garland of snakes, living in the
lofty Kailasha, meditating and smoking ganja and befriending the social outcastes,
the lowly animals (his another name is Pashupati which literally means that),
and the ghosts always was an attractive personality for me. As a kid I would
hear stories about Sati, Shiva’s wife, the daughter of King Daksha from my
great grandmother. How she went against her father’s will to marry Shiva as she
loved him, and how to punish her, Daksha organized a huge puja ceremony
inviting all other Hindu gods, but Shiva. Sati still came home alone, thinking
she did not need an invitation to come back home. What awaited her was her
father’s rude words for marrying the lord of the outcastes, she could not take
the insults and ended her life right there. Shiva hearing this came from
Kailasha, with his animals and ghosts and outcastes, and ran havoc on Daksha’s
palace killing him. Then took the lifeless body of Sati on his shoulder, and
danced, the dance of Kala, time, his Tandava dance started to crumble the whole
universe and Vishnu had to come to rescue as it was not yet time for complete annihilation.
As I sat next to my great grandmother
absorbing the whole story, my 3 year old self did not actually see the class
struggle and did not question was it just the class that made Daksha do
whatever he did? Back then to me the most important was the Tandava, the dance
of time.
As I grew up I heard more stories
about Shiva, when the gods and demons churned the seas to get the nectar of
life, first came the halahal, the poison that could kill everyone. Shiva did
not participate in this churning process, but to save all he drank the halahal,
the poison running down his throat, turned his throat blue, he tied a snake
around his neck to stop the halahal going further down. Thus he became the
Neelakantha, one who drinks the poison to save the rest. As I was fascinated by
this story, I did not see the effort of even gods to exploit the earth to get
the treasures hidden deep down, the first story of drilling the ocean perhaps? I
did not question why did Shiva not join the churning team? Was he protesting in
silence, was he left alone to protest?
The next story came when I was
grown up, and was doing everything possible to “change” my sexual identity. I read
the story of Shiva, in love with another god Vishnu in their Mohini form.
Vishnu, the gender fluid god could be anything, a man, a woman, everything in
between or nothing. I did not see hetero flexibility or a queer love story back
then, as those two characters were still gods to me, and not something that I could
be.
I guess I left the most important
story about Shiva, the destroyer. But not because that might hurt my
Brahmenical tradition, but because I wanted it to stand alone as an important testimony
of how colonization works. Shiva was not an imagination of a Hindu sage; he
existed long before the Vedas came. I remember the picture of the seal from Harappa
and Mohenjo Daro that I saw in school, Shiva sitting in the “lotus position”
with his Trishula, the trident, surrounded by animals. No one yet knows what
was the religion of that civilization, though the Right wing Hindus are trying
to push that it was a Hindu civilization. They are the triumphant majority now
in a land that I call home, and they will change the history very soon. They will
erase the existence of Shiva as someone who predated the Vedas, who persevered
from the nomadic, tribal, mountain dwelling traditions, who be friended the
outcastes in a religion where caste is the most important element. Maybe in another
couple of years no great grandmother will tell their impatient great grandkid
the story of Sati, as that might spark a question, was Daksha so cruel just
because Shiva was the lord of the outcastes? Was it because he still was
pushing the Brahmin status quo, to be accepted as a tradition in the
overwhelmingly puritan and agrarian Hindu civilization. Maybe no one will ever question why did Shiva
sit still when the greedy gods and demons plundered the oceans, was he on a Gandhian
hunger strike? Maybe not Gandhian as Gandhi too was a Hindu, maybe Gandhi stole
Shiva’s plan of hunger strikes and then erased that story from history so that
a Hindu can claim it. And I fear for
sure they will never tell the love story of Shiva with gender fluid Vishnu or
Mohini, as that is definitely not the story that they want the queers of the
land to hear. The Hindus have strangely joined the league of hate the gays with
the Christians and Muslims in India, already ignoring this queer love story. So
I write the story of Shiva, a man, not a god, who withstood the often passive
and more than often not so passive aggression of Hindus, telling us of people who lived in the mountains before
the caste dragged them down as unpaid laborers and divided them. I wish that
Shiva, the lord of the outcastes, the lowly animals and the ghosts, a happy
birth day.
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