A Tome of Marvel from a Giant Intellectual

SUJIT CHAKRABORTY

BOOK REVIEW

BOOK: A Brief Excursion Into The Sacred Feminine…

AUTHOR: Mandeep Lama

Published by Hamro Kitab, 2024

It is raining, and at 16 degrees C, I am feeling in desperate need to shed some much unwanted waste in the washroom. But I can’t.

You may term it a temporary urological inconvenience induced by a piece of literature. An anthology, is a better description about the nature of the book, and the ‘culprit’, who I happened to meet just this morning is Mandeep Lama.

It was the sheer brilliance of the book, A Brief Excursion into the Sacred Feminine, just out by Mandeep Lama that arrested me, and people who know me well enough, know that I have always preferred punishment for telling the truth than go for sugarcoating of lies.

For those seeking in me a personal affinity to Lama as the cause celebre of writing a salubrious critique, let me tell you, this morning was the first time I had ever met him. And that, after several rounds of disputes with him on various counts of intellectual intercourses, to make it sound a bit sexy!

The Gangtokian

But from the word go in his book, Lama has clearly redefined the dimensions of the term “unputdownable”. I started reading with the last of the essays in his anthology, because for me it is a topic of my choice: the ancient feminine and its subversion by patriarchy, across the world, over the ages.

But then, I deferred that and went to the first essay on Gangtok. And what a delight it was. You see, I got married to Gangtok in 2000, when I first rested my feet here. I had much later requested, beseeched literally, people to write on the Gangtok of yore, especially for our Sikkim Knowledge Group. None did.

And now, twenty-four years later, here is a rare intellectual working on a canvas of that Gangtok, of which I had known little. Lama has re-created that Gangtok where he’d grown up and found his own mettle.

The description of that Gangtok of the 1950s and 1960s is so vibrant that I found myself walking on its streets with neon-lights and the perpetual scare of a chudail jumping on to me in the middle of a forested road. The descriptions are lilting.

I could relate to the mules and horse caravans that once the late Motilal Lakhotia had told me about. That “M.A. Sir”, a Bihari teacher, and how letters to him would reach if one just wrote “M.A. Sir, Gangtok”. Everything came alive, especially the cinema shows.

I remember having read such a story about the first cinema hall of Kalembong, and I remember having requested many a writer to write similar memoirs about Denzong and Vajra cinema halls. None had. And now suddenly, Lama came out pouring all those stories.

I have a point, however, for Lama seemed to have wandered a bit while describing the 1960s, wherein he found it convenient to place Gangtok in the changing world order of Hippies and Beatles and feminism. For a reader lost in the mesmerising enchantment of old Gangtok, I felt perhaps that all those paragraphs could perhaps have been made more concise.

And though Lama took my breath away in such articles on Bhaichung Bhutia and Pawan Chamling, two seminal essays must be spoken of before I launch into my favourite topic, the title of the book: the sacred feminine.

GB Yakthumba: Valour Unlimited is an essay of monumental proportions. Indians in general and we Bengalis in particular have a very spicy habit of downplaying members of other origins. For us, all Nepalis as “bahadurs”… trusted, loved but small in dimensions as humans.

But this epic essay on Yakthumba was so enlightening that I had to seek Lama’s permission to use it first for Sikkim Knowledge Group, and then send it to the very prestigious Indian magazine The Mainstream, which did the honours.

The second article was titled Buddhism: The Original Teachings, and that too was an accomplishment all in its own league. Unparalleled. At least within my limited sphere of readings.

The Brahmanical Conspiracy

I must say that I regard Lama as a diminutive giant of an intellectual of a diminutive state, Sikkim. Polite to the core, unassuming, in his Introduction to this anthology, esteemed writer Manprasad Subba says just that: he (Mandeep Lama) makes much more than his diminutive physical stature by his grit as an intellectual whom none can afford to mistake as a midget.

Lama’s forte has been two big areas: one, a fight against Brahmanical hegemony; and two, the subjugation of the feminine religion. In fact, these both are the two faces of the same coin. And the masterfulness of his arguments is a class apart.

That does not mean I agree with whatever he has to say on these issues. And interestingly. I am also not challenging him on his tenets. But may be one lives and learns. For I have substantiation of his many views, and yet, there are a few things he may have missed out on.

For instance, the Brahman. Lama feels he is axiomatic in saying that there is a Brahmanical conspiracy in almost everything, which leads to distortions of history. I have read his articles on how Buddha’s entire life history, and even the name of the place he was born in has been changed by the conspiratorial Brahmans.

But Lama himself has said it in a sterling article in this anthology that according to Pravin Rai, on the occasion of a particular book’s “Lokarpan”, he (Rai) had said that once the writer has published a book, it comes into the public domain and “it becomes a public property over which the author has no control whatever”.

In fact, Lama says that Pravin Rai’s statement itself suggests that “there was no corresponding oriental terminology of the term “author”, which implies the author’s unconditional proprietary hegemony over the published work.

That provides the legitimacy behind my critique. And one of a few seminal points I wish to make is this. First, there is nothing wrong in being a Brahman, which I myself am. Unabashedly. But what went wrong, and is still going wrong, is the usurping of certain elements in history.

In this present context, for instance, the first point is, difference between the Brahman as an individual and the Brahmans as a class. The Brahmans as a class has sought to usurp every spiritual development in the Indian subcontinent as of “Hindu” origin. This is also the politics of the fundamentalist RSS.

Now, the other Brahman, singular, is not a class but an individual, such as me, who insists on being impartial and seeking advancement in their own knowledge. Thus it is that the Brahmanical class has usurped Buddhism, and the Buddha has over the centuries been bracketed as an avatar of Vishnu. Which is patently wrong, and not just a mistake, but a wilful distortion.

But Lama must also remember that mostly all the thoughts existing in the subcontinent have their origin from this system of thought that is correctly to be termed Sanatan Dharm, and Dharm means a righteous path and not the typical Abrahamic “religion”.

In that sense, Bouddha Vihars have been mentioned in the Mahabharat. Bouddha Stupas have been found in the Saraswati-Sindhu Civilisation in Mohenjo Daro. And hence, Bodhi as a concept of agnosticism has always existed as one stream of thought within Sanatan Dharm. This cannot be contested.

There are said to have been 121 Buddhas before Gautam Siddharth. It is a moot point that Gautam did not call himself Buddha, a term given by his followers, just as Jesus Christ did not found Christianity, which evolved as a Church-controlled vested interest almost 300 years after the death of Jesus in 48 AD.

Why Gautam Siddharth is so vital, and why he does not belong to the so-called Hindu pantheon, is that he was the first among all his previous Buddhas to found a categorical system, a path and codified certain aspects of it. It was a very pronounced and bold philosophy on the face of the Brahmanical tyranny of his time.

And because he was agnostic, saying nothing on the existence of a God, so he cannot be usurped as a part of the pantheon as an avatar of Vishnu.

The Feminine

My other moot point is that Lama sees another Brahmanical conspiracy in reducing ancient Indian feminism to the status of a mere ‘cult’. Much of what Mandeep Lama has said in terms of the feminine being the power of giving rebirth again and again is very correct, so there is no point in me rewriting what he has brilliantly written.

But the facts he could have mentioned is that this feminism is at the core of all books of the Sanatan Dharm. One very concrete example of this is the Kamakshya Temple in Assam.

It is said to be that spot where Sati’s yoni fell when Shiva was dancing the tandav and Vishnu had to calm him down by chopping Sati’s dead body into 52 pieces.

Now, yoni means, literally, vagina. But the spiritual essence is that of the absolute and inalienable symbolism of the power to procreate.

Akshay Tritiya is a sacred day in Sanatan Dharm, and it is believed that Mother Earth has her annual menstruation on those three days and any kind of ploughing of fields is forbidden then.

There itself lies the debunking of any attempt by Brahmanical tyranny to treat menstruation as unclean, unholy, and “grimy” the correct appellation used by Lama.

Mandeep Lama might have also mentioned that the feminine is not dead, and in parts of this vast lands, such as Bengal, Odisha and Assam, she is the presiding deity. This is one reason that the political attempt by the Bhartiya Janata Party in the polls in West Bengal the last time bounced so heavily.

The BJP’s singular ideological mistake in Bengal poll strategy was to foist a Male, that too, a prince and not a Bhagvan, as the counter to Durga, Saraswati, Laxmi, Manasha, Chandi, Jagaddhatri and so forth. Bengal always believed in the feminine as the supreme. There is hardly any space for Ram in West Bengal!

True Feminism

Sanatan Dharm also celebrates the feminine in many other forms. One needs to read the story of Shakuntala (and for god’s sake, not Kalidasa’s Abhigyan Shakuntalam but the one in Mahabharat) to read about the glory of the feminine.

Shakuntala was the illegitimate child of Sage Vishwamitra and the heavenly nymph Menaka, and she was brought up by Kanva Rishi. One day while hunting, King Dushyant arrived at the hermitage of Kanva, and there, to cut a long story short, he copulated with Shakuntala.

Later, he left, saying that he was giving her a ring and when she comes to his palace, she should show that ring to Dushyant to help him recognise her.

But when Shakuntala did arrive there with her 11 year old son Bharat, Dushyant not only denied that Bharat was his son but even called Shakuntala a stray woman, a harlot, no less.

And this is the point when Shakuntala, an unwed mother, gave herself to a tirade against Dushyant which ought to be a lesson for feminists anywhere in the world. She blasted the daylights from Dushyant’s eyes. She even taught him what is true Raj Dharm or the king’s duty. That speech can be a signature piece of any kind of true feminism.

It is then that the gods intervened and rebuked Dushyant for refusing to recognise his own wife and son. Then King Dushyant made Bharat sit beside him on his throne, and it is after the son of Shakuntala – the epitome of the feminine ? that what we call India got its first real name: Bharatvarsh! That is how patriarchy has been sent for a six in true Sanatan Dharm but unfortunately, Mandeep Lama’s tome has no mention of this.

Gayatri: Mother of Universe!

Where do you find such feminism? Where do you find the feminine if not in Bharatvarsh, and in the highest mantra of Sanatan Dharm, the Gayatri Mantra?

Sanatan Dharma feminism starts with Gayatri, which is called the Chhanda Mataa. This signifies the ultimate essence of feminism, because Gayatri is the mother that has given birth to all the seven cosmic rhythms (Anustup, Trishtup…etc) from which every single entity we see (and those that we don’t see) in the universe has been born.

She is the Prasavita, the Birth Giver of the universe. So I cannot agree with the thesis that Brahmans have usurped the sacred feminine. Only the Brahmanical class, which does not itself know the meaning of Brahman, has distorted all this.

Suffice it to say that any intellectual worth her or his salt must read this fantabulous book by Mandeep Lama, who I consider one of the intellectual giants, diminutive only in height and in his extreme politeness.

(Sujit Chakraborty is Founder-Editor & Admin of Sikkim Knowledge Group: www.facebook.com/groups/1016930669122164.

Email: sikkimknowledge@gmail.com)