Manu’s Shadow on Gita’s Path          

By BS Murthy

When I thought I am done with the study of interpolations in the Gita after my critique, Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation) I was tempted to turn my attention to the seldom read but much maligned Manu Smriti*. While I found that that testament is Incongruent and its motivated castigation is nothing but flogging a dead horse riding a blind donkey (an eponymous essay is due on this aspect), nevertheless, I could discern Manu’s shadow on the Gita’s path that is sought to be placed here for a public view.                     

It is worth noting that at the end of each of its eighteen chapters, it is asserted in the Gita that it is the quintessence of the Upanishads and the Brahmasutrās, and as argued in my critique supra, one-hundred and ten verses in it are latter-day interpolations bereft of the Upanishadic and Brahmasutric connotations. What is more, while some of those smear its inclusive philosophy with sectarian postulations, which echo Manusmritic caste discriminations that are inimical towards some sections of Hindus to their chagrin, the others are ceremonial exhortations that are irrelevant to the subject matter of Gita’s philosophical discourse and thus are seemingly out of place.

Moreover, in the ‘in vogue’ Bhagvad-Gita’s philosophical discourse are found some ritualistic postulations in chapter 3, titled karma yoga, which, are nothing but innovations of Manu’s stipulations in that regard.

It may be noted that it is postulated in the Manu Smriti that -

3.74. Ahuta (not offered in the fire) is the muttering (of Vedic texts), Huta the burnt oblation (offered to the gods), Prahuta (offered by scattering it on the ground) the Bali offering given to the Bhutas, Brahmya-huta (offered in the digestive fire of Brahmanas), the respectful reception of Brahmana (guests), and Prasita (eaten) the (daily oblation to the manes, called) Tarpana.

3.75. Let (every man) in this (second order, at least) daily apply himself to the private recitation of the Veda, and also to the performance of the offering to the gods; for he who is diligent in the performance of sacrifices, supports both the movable and the immovable creation.

3.76 An oblation duly thrown into the fire, reaches the sun; from the sun comes rain, from rain food, therefrom the living creatures (derive their subsistence)

3.117. Having honoured the gods, the sages, men, the manes, and the guardian deities of the house, the householder shall eat afterwards what remains.

3.118. He who prepares food for himself (alone), eats nothing but sin; for it is ordained that the food which remains after (the performance of) the sacrifices shall be the meal of virtuous men.

Now turning to the Bhagvad-Gita ‘As It Is’, it can be seen that the following verses are reflective innovations of the above that can be taken as inane interpolations.

3.9. Man is not attached to his actions performed in ritualistic sacrifices but all other actions bind him. 

3.10. The Creator wanted mankind to prosper through sacrifices, which shall be the milch cow of man’s desires.

3.11. Foster the gods through sacrifices 

3.12. Fostered by sacrifices, gods would bestow desired enjoyments, but they are thieves who do not return anything to them (gods).

3.13. Those that partake the remnants of sacrificial food are sinless.

3.14. Food that sustains mankind comes from rains, which are but the outcome of sacrificial ceremonies.

3.15. Brahma is seated in sacrifice.

3.16. Who follow the above regimen would attain moksha.

Besides, as can be seen hereunder, Gita’s Cycle of Creation, in chapter 8, akshara parabrahma yoga, follows Manu’s course.

Manu’s Creative process has it that –

1.52. When that divine one wakes, then this world stirs; when he slumbers tranquilly, then the universe sinks to sleep.

 1.57. Thus he, the imperishable one, by (alternately) waking and slumbering, incessantly revivifies and destroys this whole movable and immovable (creation).

1.67. A year is a day and a night of the gods; their division is (as follows): the half year during which the sun progresses to the north will be the day, that during which it goes southwards the night.

 1.68. But hear now the brief (description of) the duration of a night and a day of Brahman and of the several ages (of the world, yuga) according to their order.

1.69. They declare that the Krita age (consists of) four thousand years (of the gods); the twilight preceding it consists of as many hundreds, and the twilight following it of the same number.

1.70. In the other three ages (Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga) with their twilights preceding and following, the thousands and hundreds are diminished by one (in each).

1.71. These twelve thousand (years)* which thus have been just mentioned as the total of four (human) ages, are called one age of the gods. (*ten-thousand normal and two-thousand twilights)

1.72. But know that the sum of one thousand ages of the gods (makes) one day of Brahman, and that his night has the same length.

1.73. Those (only, who) know that the holy day of Brahman, indeed, ends after (the completion of) one thousand ages (of the gods) and that his night lasts as long, (are really) men acquainted with (the length of) days and nights.

Here’s the Gita’s Cycle of Creation in Manu’s track supra-

8. 17

Wise all realize days Brahman 
Ages thousands make with nights.

8.18

By day as He brings beings
Un-manifests He all by night.

8.19 

It’s all rebirths through His day
But with nightfall cease they all 
As He wakes up puts He back.

(Above verses are excerpts from the author’s Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of Self-help)

 *The Laws of Manu by G. Buhler, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1886, available at Internet Archive 

My ‘Novel’ Account of Human Possibility 

Whenever I look at my body of work of ten books, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not. I was born into a land-owning family in a remote village of Andhra Pradesh in India that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from there, but much before the rural education mechanism was geared up. It was thus the circumstances of my birth enabled me to escape from the tiresome chores of the primary schooling till I had a nine-year fill of an unbridled childhood, embellished by village plays and grandma’s tales, made all the more interesting by her uncanny ability for storytelling. As my maternal grandfather’s grandfather happened to be a poet laureate at the court of a princeling of yore, maybe their genes together strived to infuse the muses in me their progeny. 

However, as the English plants that Lord Macaulay planted in the Indian soil hadn’t taken roots in its hinterland till then, it’s the native tongues that ruled the roost in the best part of the vast land, and in Andhra it was Telugu, the Italian of the East that held the sway.  No wonder then, leave alone constructing a sentence on my own in English, whenever I had to read one, I used to be afflicted by stammer. Maybe, it was at the behest of the unseen hand of human possibility or owing to his own foresight that my father in time had shifted our family base to the cosmopolitan town of Kakinada to put me into the missionary McLaren High School in Class X. With that began my tryst with English, which, courtesy one of my maternal uncles, eventually led me to the continental fiction in translation that engaged me more, far more than the technical subjects I had to pursue for a career as a mechanical engineer.

While the Penguin classics inculcated in me a love for English language that is besides broadening my outlook of life, my nature enabled me to explore the possibilities of youth, and given that letter-writing was still in vogue then, I was wont to embellish my letters to friends and loved-ones with insights the former induced and emotions the latter infused. Clearly, all those letters that my novels carry owe more to my impulse to write them than to my muse’s need to express itself through them. Even as the fiction enabled me to handle the facts of life with fortitude, as life, for its part, chose to subject me to more of its vicissitudes, I continued tending my family and attending my job.

Fortuitously, when I was thirty-three, my mind and matter combined to explore the effect of the led on the leader, and when the resultant “Organizational ethos and good Leadership” was published in The Hindu, I experienced the thrill of, what is called, seeing one’s name in print. Encouraged, I continued to apply my mind on varied topics such as general management, materials management, general insurance, politics, and, not to speak of, life and literature resulting in some thirty published articles. But fiction was nowhere in the sight, nor I had any idea to turn into a novelist for Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Emily Zola, Gustav Flaubert et al are literary deities (I hadn’t read Marcel Proust and Robert Musil by then), and where was the question of a devotee envisioning himself as a deity.

But when I was forty-four, having been fascinated by the manuscript of satirical novel penned by one Bhibhas Sen, an Adman, with whom I had been on the same intellectual page for the past four years then, it occurred to me, ‘when he could, I can for sure’. It was as if Bhibhas had driven away the ghosts of the masters that came to shadow my muse but as life would have it, it was another matter that as he didn’t want to foul his novel by dragging it to ‘publishable length’, it remained in the limbo.

With my muse thus unshackled, I set to work on the skeletal idea of Benign Flame with the conviction that for fiction to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil, not the hotchpotch of local and foreign caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, the then norm of the Indian writing in English. Yet it took me a fortnight to get the inspiring opening sentence - “That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train.”  

From there on, it was as though a ‘novel’ chemistry had developed between my muse and my characters’ psyche that shaped its fictional course, and soon, I came to believe that I had something unique to offer to the world; so, not wanting to die till I gave it to it, I used to go to lengths to safeguard my life till I finished it with a ‘top of the world’ feeling. What one Spencer Critchley, an American critic, thought about my contribution – “It’s a refreshing surprise to discover that the story will not trace a fall into disaster for Roopa, given that many writers might have habitually followed that course with a wife who strays into extramarital affairs” - made me feel vindicated, though there were no takers to it among the Indian publishers and the Western agents.

So, I had no heart to bring my pen to any more paper (those were the pre-keyboard days) though my head was swirling with novel ideas, triggered by an examined life lived in an eventful manner.  Sometime later, that was after I read a book of short stories presented to me; I had resumed writing due to a holistic reason.  While it was the quality of Bhibhas’ satire that set me on a fictional track from which I was derailed by the publishers’ indifference, strangely, it was the lack of it in that book that once again spurred me onto the novel track to pursue the joy of writing for its own sake, and that led me to the literary stations of Crossing the Mirage and Jewel-less Crown. But in the wake of the hotly debated but poorly analyzed Godhra-Gujarat communal rioting in 2002, as I was impelled to examine the role religions play in social disharmony, my fictional course had taken a non-fiction turn with Puppets of Faith.

Then it was as if my muse, wanting me to lend my hand to other literary genres led me into the arena of translation, pushed me onto the ‘unknown’ stage, put me on a stream of consciousness, took me to crime scenes, and dragged me into the by-lanes of short stories. However, it was Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who lent his e-hand to my books in search of readers. Who would have thought that life held such literary possibilities in English language for a rustic Telugu lad in rural Andhra even in post-colonial India? The possibilities of life are indeed novel, and seemingly my life has crystallized itself in my body of work before death could dissipate it.

 

 

 

 

 

An ode to the Muse (Cināre)

 

This is BS Murthy’s English rendition of Dwana Sastry’s nānēs tribute in Telugu to the Jnānpēth ascendant, Dr. C. Narayana Reddy (Cināre), on his 75^th birthday   

 

1                                              

So to savour                                           

Cināre’s verse,

Goes Jnānpēth

To Hanumānjipet.

 

2.

Hi, Sastryji

Cināre greets,

Brings that warmth

To Dwana’s heart.

 

3

Beckons as Dwana

Ever he grants,  

Cināre’s love

It’s Dwana’s pride.

 

4

Takes he mike

It sings his tune,

Glued to seats

All sit spellbound.

 

5

‘Rise as thou    

Cavils if world

‘Grow sky-high’,

Is Cināre quote.

 

6

Instant scale 

As gives printout

So his reply

Comes post-haste.

 

7

Grace Golconda

So Tank-bund,

Made Cināre the city his own

Hath which charms of Charminar.

 

8

As it shapes

He spots talent,

Pats he backs

Of rising stars.

 

9

Sees he far ‘n

Wide as well,

Nurses he all

Regions three.

 

10.

Burn in envy

At his back,

Face to face

They show their teeth.

 

11

Where leads envy,

Cināre, those?

Stay they put

At alphabets best.

 

12

Find in Cināre

Small-timers,

Mother-like love

That sooths them all.

 

13

Hold on old

Eye for new,

Holds he ever

Young ‘n old.  

 

14

Break its back

As score gathered,

Stage sans Cināre

Seems empty.

 

15

Wraps he ghazal

In Telugu garb,

Lends that charm

To both of them.

 

16

Speaks as he

In sonorous tone,

Out of tune seem

Speaks who next.

 

17

Count on Cināre

Doth he have

Dig at false airs

Thou put on. 

 

18

Oratory is but

State of the art,

Log into Cināre

Dot com quick.

 

19

With his muse

Of all seasons,

Makes he tango

With mod verse.

 

20

Ever he reaches 

One and all,

Share thee dais

And seem so small.

 

21

Words in rhyme 

With rhythmic force,

Horse-like trots

His flow of verse.

 

22

On the seat

Of power he sits,

Cascade like he

Holds his sway.

 

23

Sees he moon

In broad daylight,

Takes his muse 

All worlds in stride.

 

24

Sung to tune

In soulful tone,

Lyrics his grace 

Well silver screen

 

25

It’s with buds of sannajaji

Pōlamala he came to weave,

Blossoms that for times to come

Fragrance of it never to wane.

 

26

Discourse his

On modern verse,

Treatise it makes

On rules of muse.

 

27

Wit his sparkles 

Telugu phrase,

Gives its cutting

Edge his pun.

 

28

Nook ‘n corner 

Of mother earth,

Travelogues of his

Spread his word.

 

29

Of the parishad

That he built,

Suravaram et al

But make pillars.

 

30

Helps his verse

Peripheral press

Rub its shoulders

Mainstream with. 

 

31

Land-line his

In Hyderabad  

Brings to ear

His hallowed tone.

 

32

Podium high

Of art itself,

Cināre sans

Seems artless.

 

33

It’s no joke

To ever compile

Works of writers

He unveiled.

 

34

Brings he Midas

Touch to verse

Gave his village

House to books.

 

35

To aver that one

Never espied him,

Akin to saying

Saw none clouds.

 

36

Runs as stream

Of verse in him,

Makes his muse

Flood world of word.

 

37

Sweet is Vennelavāda verse

Savours one but to the end,

Words that sculp in Ramappa 

Ajanta as well move no end.

 

38

Surname his

Well, Chaitanyam,

Hath it traits

Of high wisdom.

 

39

Verse his metre

Desi true,

Shows the way

To rhyme itself.

 

40

Apart fragrance of his love 

Acquaintance with Cināre

Accrues to one benefits of

Aspects life of uprightness. 

                        

41

Not for him

Ever nit-picking,

Makes him that 

The revered One.

 

42

Withers not age

Nor stales custom,

Shakespeare could’ve

Said of him.

 

43

Turns he deity

On the stage,

Casts he spell

On one and all.

 

44

Roots with his 

In Telangana.

Rose he high   

In poetic world.

 

45

In the school

Of Hindustan,

Stands he tall

As Headmaster.

 

46

On the plots

Of time he owns,

Builds he blocks

Of disciplined life.

 

47

Curly hair that

Crowned his head,

Passed since reign

To bald eminence.

 

48

Takes he note

Of all to note,

Prone not to miss

Pros and cons.

 

49

Saintly though 

He’s worldly too,

As it comes

He takes his life.

 

50

Stumps he all

Who leave the crease,

Irks all those 

Who bear witness.

 

51

Muse as rooted

In grassroots,

Verse his covers 

Worlds all there.

 

52

Shapes he life

To suit his needs,

Tread occult his

Science footprints.

 

53

It’s in poetry

Lays he store,

Well, if mimicry

God save thee.

 

54

For the soul

Of common man,

What a feel doth

Hath this man!

 

55

Warmth of his

For tinsel world,

Gummadi’s demeanour

Shows the world.

 

56.

How I wish

It’s I, who owned,

Gopi’s slot

In Cināre heart.

 

57

Hard to please

Was N.T.R,

But won Cināre

The former’s heart.

 

58

Cināre’s lyrics

Or celluloid reels,

Bestowed which

To which glamour?

 

59

It’s by folk touch

Which he gave

Got such verve 

The Telugu song.

 

60.

Alien though are

Bhajans Mērā’s,   

Imparts pen his

Telugu touch.

 

61

Of the innate

Child in him,

Power ’n position

Couldn’t rob him.

 

62

Taught in Telugu

Schooled in Urdu,

Feathers he adds

To both their caps.

 

63

Forewords his

To books of theirs,

Help all authors

Make their mark.

 

64

No great deal to

Guess it right

Makes who face

Of Andhra arts.

 

65

End eras

To bring new ones,

Ends not time

His poetic hold.

 

66

Pelt ’n see

Stones at him,

Turn they pearls all

As he smiles. 

 

67

Fatherly love

That he bears,

Fills the heart

Of Ms. Ganga.

 

68

Won he laurels 

Others he lauds,

Get bluestockings 

Share their due.

 

69

Takes the cake

Late better-half his,

It’s in her name

He hands out.

 

70

Ever he values 

Fair sex more,

Proved he siring

Girls all four.

 

71

Looks his belie

Passed he through,

Years all those

Full seventy-four.

 

72

Not for him

Is writer’s block,

Ever he pens 

The verse he breathes.  

 

73

Why not Cināre

Take fresh guard,

And get going

For thy ton.

 

74

When that happens

Won’t Gibbon

Come down to note how Telugu

Muse so rose high in years all those.

 

75

Look ye forward

For that day,

But for now have

Dwana’s nānēs.