The passage to India

PANOS and THANOS KESSARIS PERIKLIS KESSARISâ€

INDIA

Panos Kessaris, was born in Athens of Greece, in 1968.

Trained at Baylor University Medical Center of Dallas, Texas to become a Maxillofacial Surgeon. Loves to travel, teach and write. Married to a wonderful wife, Jenny, with whom they raise three boys.

Thanos Kessaris, was born in Athens of Greece, in 2004. Currently, a studious member of the University of Nebraska High School and a certified PADI Rescue Diver. Loves the oceans and its creatures.

Design-Printing-Binding: CLOUDPRINT IKE Copyright 2020: Panagiotis Kessaris, Athanasios Kessaris ISBN: 978-618-00-1771-7 Printed on January 26th, 2020 Cover: The passage from death to life (by Jenny Athanasopoulou)

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he main author of this book, our Father, Periklis (or Pericles if you wish), born in Arcadia of Greece, graduated from Athens University School of Philosophy and after that he teached for almost 10 years History of Arts and Literature at the Tinos School of Fine Arts. He took a scholarship from the State Foundation (Idryma Kratikon Ypotrofion) back in mid-sixties for a whole year trip to India to study the philosophy of India and the Fine Arts of the East (University of New Delhi). His love for India was as great as his love for his own country. And through his writings he tried to make it known. As he loved to teach‌ The aim of his contemplation and through an arduous tour around the country (mostly by walking!) was not just to describe this Great Country and its treasures from its glorious past. After making all these his own living he tried to interpret them as much as he could and more than anything else, he tried to make them a human problem – way of thinking, meaning LIFE at its best.

A message to you all from a simple man: do not try to categorize this book to any of the known types of word. This is INDIA. And nothing else.

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Prologue The Mother of the Asian culture, India, never so far had in writings the luck of the other countries of the far East, even though it is the closest to us, the Greeks, compared to them, as a tribe and in creativity. So many good books were published lately about China and Japan, and very few about India. Is the latter less known to us? I don’t think so. Perhaps we contended ourselves with the handiest ideas for it, and we got reassured we didn’t need much more. And the written for this country are few as it is hard to walk it and tuck it. And it doesn’t offer too many exclamation marks like the other two mentioned countries, if you don’t seek to read the Indian himself, from his past glory till today’s misery; if you don’t arrest, through its amazing promotions, glares, delays, retreats and sinking, the universe to its evolutionary course, from the stone and the beast to the perfect and Oneness.

This missing part aspires this book to fill. In the first part you’ll find its legacy, from the Vedic texts and the caves to the years of marasmus. In the second part, the traveling, tastier for those who would like something juicier, I present the country and the people of India as it is today, up close and personal.

If my reader, by closing this book, feels like something new was transfused inside him, something that creates a new dimension which starts a dialogue with his old inner world, then, not in vain my bitterness and hardships and the dangers you watered me, distant Land! And I will tell everything, the way I lived them, without passion and prejudice, as I loved you too much, Damned Paradise of earth and of our soul!

I dedicate this book of mine to the Children of India, who helped me get into its Soul Note by the successors: after 55 years, today, the history, the architecture and the art of India remain unchanged. Some of the alleys in the suburbs of major cities, too. The ceremonies have domesticated, keeping the essence behind the actions. We narrate all of those the main author did, at his time, for historical purposes only and not to downgrade or to insult the country’s social mores.

After all, he saw himself the contradictory beauties of the soul of India, as a pure way of living. The face of India might be changing with the speed of light, but its soul keeps the divine spirit alive!

Let “Thoreau’s truth” prevail and enjoy!

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Dedicated to My Beloved Wife Jenny

Our journey: Mumbai, Ajanta, Ellora, Gujarat, Agra, Delhi, Kashmir, Srinagar, Benares, Bihar, Assam, Calcutta, Madras, Madurai, Durga, Comorin, Delhi

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PART ONE

Through the centuries Short Historical Flashback Roots and Seeding The Indians through their passage to nowadays created undoubtedly a great civilization. They never made history though because this was the nature of their civilization.

Why should they care of the birthdate of Buddha since he always existed, and he gets born every day among us? Although they were always looking at the sky, they couldn’t help it to mostly touch the Earth as they were always earthly creatures. And this is the reason why we can read their past through every spiritual edging of theirs although generally they stand to the “approx.”, since they don’t present the precision of the western epistemology.

The oldest human hoe over the Indian earth approach the early paleolithic period, meaning hundreds of thousands of years back. We find two spots back then, one up north and one down south. The former is related to the Sinanthropus (pekinensis) and the latter to the African world. Up to the Neolithic years, when technique and economy changed, and the humans are bonded to the earth, we find more marks of these cavemen.

All these Neolithic regions, north, east and south look alike their neighbors and affirm that the Indian sperm has deep roots.

In one of the deepest mattresses of this Neolithic period, since 2.500 BC, the chalcolithic civilization of the valley of the Indus river was developed. It was one of the most brilliant and oldest tributary civilizations on earth. We have modern cities from now on.

Not old village economy. Wealth, life, motion and art that although they keep in touch with those of Mesopotamia, they don’t stop giving growth to the sperms of the upcoming India. Two cities, two great centers, Harappa higher and Mohenjo-Daro lower, create around them the pre-Aryan culture for a thousand of years.

After that, (1.500 BC) its first cracks show up. The Aryans, who started earlier to spout as a herd from NW Asia, perceived this first. And they give these cities the final shot. The locals tend to move southern without being certain of their equation with the dark-skinned south Indians known as Dravidians.

A new culture rises now in the NW India. It keeps spreading and conquers the valley of the Ganges of the East. New deities, of the Nature and the Sky and not of the Fertility and Earth, like before, dynast the Indian soul. The Vedas are born, the first monuments of speech of the Indian race. The newcomers speak with contempt for the dark-skinned natives. The first sperms of caste are here.

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It was impossible to avoid fermentation of races and civilizations together. In the next 1.000 years that followed till we step on a historical ground, dark monuments and parallel documents occurred, that deeply influenced to our days the course of the Indian.

We can assume a move of the masses to the jungle of the south following the myth of the Ramayana along with the fermentations that take place up north emulating Mahabharata. Both epics, although today we deal with their most recent (final) form, configuring from their initial cores, we estimate that they cross the passage from the second to the first millennium BC. Through the centuries that follow, the Vedas of the Aryans subside to the background, and a local spirit, the one of the Upanishads gets on the front stage. Neither outflow, nor hymns to nature’s deities or sacrifices anymore, as with time they standardize, and they lose every contact with the human soul. An introversion is ignited from now on. The question where the human soul stands and which is its relationship with the eternal worldwide soul, meaning god, will lead for 2-3 centuries till the gigantic personality of Buddha absorbs all the fertile material from this current but also from all the others who ploughed India back in those days, to give a new expression and a new direction to this country. Simpler, more lay, more human this great Teacher entailed the crowds at the end of the 6th century BC till the beginning of the 5th.

The history itself Historically speaking, to step on India’s solid ground, we should go over to the period of Alexander the Great. Truly, it looks like India awaited for the magic stick of the Greek speech, so to start becoming starrier as it was emerged from its mythological nebula. It was a real pity that the Greek spirit didn’t saturate deeper and wider the Indian. After Alexander the Great reached the NW India, where the Indus river ramifies to five branches, he had uprooted the Persian empire and he had nothing else but to get back. One of his Diadochi, Nicator Seleukus I, collides with one of the founders of the Maurya’s Dynasty and afterwards he offers one of his daughters to become Chandragupta’s wife. He sends for this his ambassador Megasthenes, who gives us great reports regarding the Indians’ life at that time. Relative contacts continue to happen till they reach the zenith of the flourishing of the Greek Art in Gandhara.

Maurya The most brilliant of that Dynasty is Asoka the Great (273-236 BC). He founded the first pan-Indian Empire. After the 8th century BC the jurisdiction was gathered into the hands of a few Kings, meaning to the second higher class of Indians, who stand behind the Brahmins. Buddha was a prince too. But now with Asoka, the whole country is ruled under one scepter (except of the southern small part of India). He has been called the Constantine (the Great) of Buddhism. I think though he stands much higher, as he chosen religion to be a lesser pillar for him and was guided towards the worldwide humanity salvation. Asoka’s “in hoc signo vinces” (Latin: in this sign thou shalt conquer) never showed up in the sky to end up on earth and the earthly but started on earth and its hell to elevate the creation much higher. After his war at the SW of India he saw his win and defeat at the same time: blood and corpses. He contemplated that man is the worse 10

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monster of all. And that he is the one to tame. Said by Buddha first. It was then when he promised himself to preach Buddhism all around his country and outside of it. We saw his zealots in our country, the Epirus of NW Greece. We don’t only see his preach over the columns and the holy stones of India. We find it through his actions too. Repression of the castes, love to every leaving creature, justice and victory over the menaced beast that crouches inside us.

“Let the drums of war be silenced and let the Dharma drums be heard!”. And elsewhere: “on the ascent you find happiness, on the descent race…”.

Monuments of the Great Teacher are the stupa and schools of his project, the rocky-sculptured monasteries which they spring allover; the Sanskrit tends to take its form. The technicians can’t stay aside now even though they belong to the last class of the Shudras (laboring). There is a strong and educated middle class which makes the spinal cord of prosperity. Golden-chained merchants show up and great cities are built in unimaginable luxury. Music, dance, entertainment, perfumes… India makes its contradictory face.

Fully organized. Distinct administration, transportation, tax system and even surveillance of any suspicious move. Eremites, workers, nurses, whores, beggars, every kind of people conscripted to enter every single corner. There are some ludicrous policemen and “honest pharmacists” that can get rid of any kind of disbelievers. Holy scepter and lash together so to lead everyone to paradise.

This situation didn’t last too long though. After Asoka, the Maurya set, unity breaks and other Asian intruders come from the north and establish themselves for good. The Kausani arrive first at the valley of Ganges. The Huns hit the north side of India as well but they got refuted by the Gupta, so they turned their attention to the sickened Rome.

The Gupta For 300 years, till about the 6th to 7th century AD when the next enemies will intrude the country, the fame of the Maurya will shine again through the Gupta Empire.

These people never made it as south as the Maurya did. At times though they had a few monarchs subjugated at the south possessing this way the port of the Arabian Sea which brought them into commercial relationship with Rome and its subjects at the Middle East.

They found the organizational system of the Maurya and they perfectioned it. General promotion, composition and integration is observed among all levels, the happiest golden period of India has ripened. Science formulates daring for the times theories, reassuring for example that our planet turns around itself. The arts are supported a lot, and sculpture becomes the most sovereign reaching its zenith point. Philology is in its classic stage. Close to that time Ramayana and Mahabharata get their final publication form like our Epics by Homer (of Iliad and Odyssey) at the ages of Peisistratus. As a result of this general tactics of the Gupta to revitalize, side by side to Buddhism the so-called Hinduism, the latter outflanked the former within the next few centuries (after the 8th century AD). Nationalistic is the most appropriate name for the Gupta’s politics. Even though they assimilated Hellenistic components, overall, they closed the doors to their fertile internal springs along to every other foreign influence, which will cost a lot in the 11

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future to this country. They lost every chance to acquire a spinal cord into their spiritual world from a deeper contact with the ancient Greek spirit.

A dark age follows for centuries after the Huns intrude from the north and after the set of the Gupta. It seems though that some successors continued the actions of their fathers’ side by side with other tyrants till the beginning of the second millennium. During this period older centers fall or get destroyed and some new see the light. Perfect Schools and Colleges and Universities rise, Nalanda in the East is the first to cultivate science along with theology, something that was never done in the great monasteries of the Romanian Europe.

The mutual slaughter, of course, never stops, as the political unity doesn’t exist.

Though, even for a short time, the Indians manage to stop the first Arabic-Muslim hit at the mouthpiece of Indus river in 726 AD. And the country is undergoing happiness till the end of the 12th century AD since the external hits from the north have abated. And then the Turks – Muslims get in for good.

The rise of Medieval period The wealth is overflowing in the chests of the superior classes. Buddhism has been swallowed or exterminated and no foreign lead shakes the fertility of the Indian spirit, and Hinduism has been restored to its complete version. Closed to itself, India starts to get poorer internally, and no danger spurs its awakening. And the molding begins.

Drought come hand to hand with corruption.

Life and freedom of thinking are locked into suffocating and unbroken rules. Nothing can enter from outside to give birth to the doubt of their divinity. And the Indian, been afraid of the fluidity that his emotional life always shows, grabbed onto the commands of the brahmins with the precision of an algebraic equation. The theocratic Middle age spreads its crust upon every single manifestation and creation.

Though, the streaming blood of the Indian bodies, been in flames under the burning eternal sun of India, rushes for an escape. And since all doors were closed but one, it run relentless towards that way. Eroticism, this everlasting fertile element of the Indian adoration, born by this calcined earth, bursts now unstoppable, demolishing every barrier, making holy even the most inconceivable sense of promiscuity and distortion. Look at the monuments of Khajuraho. For which we will talk later, were it matches. What we can say in a situation like this though, is the fact that “when the vultures smell the stench of the carcasses…”.

The Turks From the NW again, the eternal open gate for the intruders since the times of the Aryans, the Turks step in at the beginning of the 11th century AD. Slowly to begin with, they keep moving, grabbing, depopulating, finishing their conquer at the end of the 12th century up north and close to Bengal at the east side. The Indians saw the disaster later, (like the Byzantines), as a divine menace. They, as well had their own way of loading their mistakes to the deities.

After a while, the Turks reach the south too, but as there is always a faction between 12

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them, some minor sultanates are created. The Indians take advantage of this and they enjoy lots of times their halfway or full freedom, like the Rajput at the west which easily could be called the Maniots (or Maniates) of India.

Either if they wanted this or not, the foreigners would cooperate with the locals and some new mixed forms of civilization will come forward. Even in the religion, some courageous will show up to demolish the Walls. But the most miraculous matter of this period is the fact that some cool breezes spring from the people’s soul. And the religious reformers are now these people’s children. Those who teach using their common language.

The Sanskrit loses its exclusiveness, but till today it keeps ravaging the Indian soul.

The South The Mongolians come up next. But let’s see what happens down to south India and how this part of the country shares its luck with the north.

Ramayana has in its core a move from the north to the south while the jungle still exists. We don’t know how old this mattress is. There are testimonies for commercial communication of theirs with Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine from the ages of David. Proportional relationships were present since always by the south with the western countries, so to increase them later with Rome.

Though it took some time for the southern to include themselves in the history and even more the prehistorian time of India. The prehistorical settlements of the south are attached to the river edges even here, and its megalithic monuments barely go back to the 5th - 6th century BC. And they never had the flourishing analogue of the Indus valley. Prominent tribal chiefs and the mountain range of Vindhya hold for a long time separated the south from the north. The short and dark-skinned habitats known by the name of Dravidians, have an unknown origin. Did they come from Iran, Arabia or Africa? Are they the same ones who created in the old times the civilization of the Indus and ended up going south after been persecuted by the Aryans? Very few documents exist to make certain conclusions.

Asoka never made it to the tip of the south. He just sent there the sperms of his civilization and more than anything else, the Buddhism. The Sanskrit starts to penetrate here too, but the area remains pure Indian and free of any influence by important foreign elements.

And the south was never united into one force although smaller from the northern country. Even after the 5th century AD many kingdoms keep the faction between them having only two or three of them to be more prominent in power and culture. Among the oldest dynasties that fight to keep the Indian tradition unspoiled till the late Muslim years, are the Cholas. The Pallava will stand till the 9th century AD and will complete the Aryanism of the south inserting the Sanskrit to philology. Works of art like the one of Mahabalipuram of the university of Kancheepuram, the Nalanda of the south are printed in their energetic. A little higher, at the level of Mumbai, were the miracle of Ellora and Ajanta took place, the Tchaloukia dynasty blossomed as a connection between the Indian-Aryan north and the Dravidian south. And down to the SW tip of India the Chere kingdom, today’s Kerala is the place where Christianity found the soil to become rooted.

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The Mongolians (or Mughals) The third in line Muslims that knock the gates of India are the Mongolians. And of course, through its eternally open NW door. They were coming from the generation of the Genghis Khan dynasty and after been living for many years in Iran, they were saturated by the Persian spirit. Turks and Indians resisted to the new intruder, but the latter, in 1526, steps over in Delhi and founds the Mongolian domination to the country.

These people gave 5-6 brilliant names to the history of India. Akbar the Great was the most capable and openminded of all. From his young ages he dominates in the north. He gets married to an Indian and this way he inaugurates the blend of the two countries and their civilizations. It’s a pity that none of his descendants followed him deservedly. Jahangir and Shah Jahan (son and grandson of Akbar) fought relatively successfully some remaining sultanates of the south. They were all passionate and skillful. All the branches of great thinking and economy flourished during their time like the cool breezed gardens they strew around their domain these heavenly happy lords. And it all went under, two centuries ahead of their lead’s end. Due to the narrow-minded bigotry of Aurangzeb. First he prisons his father. Then he kills his brothers. He starts tenacious expeditions against the Indian and Turkish kingdoms of the south. He loads the scarce body of the Indian with per person tax, he demolishes his temples, he makes him rouse. Exactly the opposite approach from the courageous, friendly and human tactic of the Indian’s grandfather, the one of Akbar. This malicious leader died in 1707 in the tornado he created trying to subjugate and not to unite India.

With the Europeans Meanwhile the buccaneer merchants of the West have started to ravage the coasts of the country. Portuguese, Hollands, English, French, fight each other here resulting proportionally to their European lands. And while this assertation was taking place between foreigners in a foreign stable, the southern Indians showed restricted resistance to their expansion. The Mongolians were powerless to the sea, although powerful on the ground.

So, the European merchants established themselves across the beaches and before starting their intrusion towards the mainland they were enjoying staring at a tasty spectacle from their towers. The same feeling of the hungry beast licking itself by the view of brothers killing each other. An inheritance of Aurangzeb that ruined the body of the empire. The south Indian force of the Maratha dynasty starts an unorganized campaign towards the north. The Persians fulfil a thieving walk down to Delhi. Muslim kingdoms arise. There’s no central ruler. Shuttering threatens the country.

The English diplomacy triumphs. It undermines the French, comes to an open rupture in 1765 with the Mongolians and dominates in Bengal. From now on England infiltrates the internal world and affairs of India using a claymore sword, diplomacy or canons, wherever the commercial “rights” of its companies don’t work effectively. In the middle of the 19th century, the English manage to create the greatest Indian empire since there’s not a single region excluded. The “white fear” squashed every spasmodic resistance. Some of the most shaming scenes of the west “Christian” civilization that can’t 14

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be washed off from the memory of the people that “haven’t yet found the real god”, were written here.

In the century that followed the European machine destroys the local crafting. The well-nourished lords keep sucking greedily the lean body of the Shudras. To milk better the country, they spread over its chaos a well-organized net, which left behind many positives for the Indians; like cables for communicating, transferring, organizing, and national unity.

And since Europe stepped over Asia with its goods, it was unavoidable to keep out its ugly side. The Indian studies were quaked by the conquers, awakening their feeling of pride, which was buried in the Indian soul for the last seven centuries. And Hinduism, elastic as always in his fresh form, doubles back, gets reborn, offers brilliant teachers. A new class, the urban, comes out to light, cool breezed children that don’t draw their titles by a barren inheritance. Few, comparing with the country’s population, but enough to start the fire. Great teachers like Tilak and Gandhi open a new dialogue with Gita, this great maker of the Indian action. The country now becomes a sacred issue – what more could the Europeans teach them? It was a good thing that the Indian Spirit, through the apostolic personality of Gandhi, made sure to keep a high standard, somewhere between the sky and the earth, with a passive resistance, full of energy, as it was the tactic of “no violence”.

Uprising and Tragedy More than all other nations after the English expansion to India, the Muslims felt they lost the most, as they were holding the reins for centuries. Since they were between the minorities, they got afraid and they thought of coming alongside the English. Nothing sweeter for the latter. They gave to the Muslims the general directorship, education like theirs in the language of Urdu resulting to a rekindle of their religious fanatism.

Widening this way significantly the Indian-Muslim gap.

The poor diplomates… can be cheated sometimes as when they light a fire to warm up, they can’t calculate which way and how strong the wind can blow. The comfortable oldies, Muslims and Indian maharajas were faithful to the side of the English dominance. The new generation, though, could see here, as well, differently, this situation.

And it was very sensitive to the way the English were treating the Islam inside and outside India. So, they follow the alliance with the Indian element till they manage to throw away the English. After that, the brother killing will start, Pakistan will arise, and the tough problem of Kashmir will dominate.

We reached today’s India. And we will discuss this matter in another chapter. Over the warp we spread so far, we will weave the next two chapters, over the blossoming of the past generations of India. After that, the modern India is coming along but always tightly bounded with its past. With this order, we will manage to take this country out of its chaos and give it a raised form.

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Writings and prophets The Vedas The pure Vedas are four. They include instructions for sacrifices and rituals or hymns to the deities and to the spirits of the Aryans of the Indian land, which personify, like in ancient Greece, the phenomena of nature. Those with the hymns have a lot to share, in poetry as well, for the arousal of the spirit of the oldest masses of this white race.

The most primitive, the most popular in the spirit is the Atharva Veda. Very few are the good hymns here, as most of them are spells for sicknesses, disasters and bad spi­rits: “We are addressed to the skies and the stars and the earth and the spirits of euphoria and to the mountains; to the seas, the rivers and the lakes: These will save us from the disaster…

Come you all from the south and the west; deities of the east come this way! From the east, to the north, the great and powerful deities are gathered. These will save us from the disaster…”

The first part with its paganism reminds us a known ancient Greek inscription, and at the second part we see, pure, the east spirit of magic.

The oldest and best Veda is the Rig Veda. Not certain if it is 5.000 years old. For sure though it is 3.000 years old. We stand in front of the oldest monument of speech of the Aryan tribe. A thousand of its hymns have been saved till today, given in different poetic meters. Divine thirst for sacrifices can be found in this collection: “These Maruts made the sky and the earth, these strong one savages are pleased with sacrifices.”

And here is a complete small hymn: “May the Vata bring us medicine, pleasant treatment for our heart.

You, oh Vata, are our father and brother and friend. Spare us life.

Vata, from this medicine of immortality, that grows over at your house, give us to live.”

And like this the praying keeps going, and the blessing from the gods-elements of nature, the storm and the lightning above all, since heavenly are the deities who rule in the Vedas.

Although all these sound common foundations for all religions, we can stand out some basic attributes. It is not like the Greek who will steal his gods’ actions and progressively will become one too. Neither the “jealous” god of the Jews: “there are no other gods other than Me”. Nor the blusterous Ahura Mazda of the Persians: “I am the guardian; I am the creator; I am the preserver; I am the insightful judge and I have the most charitable spirit”. Nor the bossy Allah: “There is only one god and he may do whatever he wishes”. A weak and devastated, in front of all the great and powerful natural elements of India, man who prays and offers, to find courage on earth and open the gates of the sky, is found in the Vedas.

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Already a philosophical gaze of life is warming up in one of the most promoted mattresses of the Rig-Veda. It reminds us the dawn of Genesis but with a more expressive explanatory interpretation: “There was never death neither anything immortal Without borderlines the day and the night.

This Oneness, breathless, breathed by itself. There was nothing beyond that till then.

Darkness was wandering, an insoluble chaos hidden in the dark.

Whatever existed, was with emptiness and amorphous; and with the power of warmth the Monad was born.

After that, the desire arose in the beginning, the fundamental sperm and bug of the spirit…”

Someone can see here the roots of the upcoming Hinduism. The later Indian thinking never stopped referring to these four cycles that a man should undergo: Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha. Meaning moral dept, earn commodities, enjoyment, and at the end renunciation and self-denial to unite someone, fully without needs, with the Highest Honor Reality.

Upanishads With time the Vedas got old. Those god-send words of theirs, full of awe in front of the mystery of creation, the brahmins where whispering mechanically around the altar.

They include, though, strong conceptions in their lyrics and that’s why they left behind good offspring: Brahma, Sutras and Upanishads. The first ones are nothing else but functional rules and the second ones condensed excommunications around Brahmanism.

The last are the most important texts.

With the Upanishads which continue the Vedic writings, the importance moves to the core. Nature is not that important. The internal world of ours, matters. Something that started with our Socrates too.

They were written around 800 BC. They make the oldest philosophical emergence of the world. They are about 100 saved today and its sizes and value varies. The most important ones are about 10 of them. Their dialogue is vivid and fresh, but you won’t find the logical buildup of the Platonic dialogues neither a skilled form of artistic work. More than anything, practice and intuition work together, and it looks like it was an exchange of improvised notes between teachers and students.

With the Upanishads, the children of the first two classes, the brahmin priests and princes, are gathered to the river edges and the forests around the eremites- teachers following the first of the four stages that are expected by the Indian law: education. These students offer their services to the community and in return the study for free. They learn the rituals, they learn byheart the Vedas and most important, they are initiated to the truth. Because this is the passion of the Upanishads, the reality, whatever stands behind the phenomena. Knowledge is the most wanted now. The knowledge of the Highest Substance that is found inside all things. This substance is the Oneness, the Brahman, God, they conclude. Here is the passage from the polytheistic Veda to the monotheistic 17

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Upanishads. And from the Aryan spirit to the local authentic spirit.

The Brahman (different from the brahmin priest or the Brahma addressee of the sacrifice) was self- dichotomized to matter and energy in the beginning and to the basic elements of the world later: wind, earth, water, fire, thought; so to finally get the unrestrained polymorphism of this world. This is the purest reality, the free of needs, the blissed one. And as we are its children, we keep some of this substance as well.

“–Bring me a fruit, my son.

–Here it is, Sir. –Break it.

–I did.

–What do you see?

–Small seeds, Sir. –Break one.

–I did.

–What do you see now?

–Nothing, Sir. –My son, said the father, what you cannot see is a fine thin substance: and in it, of this fruit, you will find the tree itself. Believe, my son, in this substance you will find the soul of the ALL. This is the truth; this is the soul. And you are that soul, my child.”

Like the salt, tossed in the water, which melts and spreads to all its points, the same way the Highest Truth, the Brahman, God himself infiltrates all of us and the whole creation. The Brahman is like a worldwide soul. The synchronous analytic psychology after the discovery of the common catholic subconscious, didn’t go any further than this.

The part of the Brahman that encourages the atomic part of us, the innermost essence, is called Atman. The Brahman and the Atman, the worldwide spirit and the real self, the Me and You are the same thing, is declared by the Upanishads. For the man to be saved and become blissed by overtaking the successive reincarnations, he needs to become one with It and achieve self-realization. This can happen only if he recedes life with its earthly, getting rid of any of his cravings from his mind and soul. Only then he gets the complete knowledge and the real redemption. There is some of this theory found in the base of the platonic dialogues and lots of it in the Hesychasts of the Byzantine years. The less someone is scattered in the everyday life and the less he gets upset from his passions, the greater he gets the chance to have divine beams enlightening his mind.

Gita, the song of God The text that gives us another turning point of the evolution of the Indian thinking and ethics, is Gita. It is a part of the epic Mahabharata. Before the fratricidal battle of Kurukshetra, Arjuna, one of the heroes from the one line-up, is afraid of hitting his beloved ones although he was treated unfairly by them. It was then, when Krishna, the divine incarnation and this hero’s charioteer, replies to him, and this is the content of Gita.

“Go up front, take action, action, action!”, he said to him “because god exists in the move and only there, you will find the human salvation”. Though this action should be taken selflessly all the way, without ever getting attached to it, and be apathetic for the result. “And never care about the murders as they will resurrect one day.” The human 18

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transfer to the beyond, his faith to the immortality of the soul led here to the purification of the act of killing.

So, from the knowledge projected by the Upanishads for the ideal life and the redemption from its restraint, we are moving with Gita to the ideal action. Not that we are missing here the projection of knowledge or the ethics of an action. The action in Gita is promoted embossed. Some type of an action is found, of course, in the Vedas as well. This solemn action of this sacrifice is magic though and the rest of this complicated ritual has a symbolic, metaphysic and not ethical meaning. Here, the action is a race inside life itself.

And what an action! Dry, exempted from any passion, without any personal attachment to its fruition. You may viciously, yes, but you will come out of any action dry, like the duck’s feathers as it walks out of the lake. “The quiescence in action and the action in quiescence”, Gita says. You will grab the role that was assigned to you by your nature and by the society using your teeth and nails, without any thoughts, regarding your earnings.

Did you succeed? Keep going without been happy about it. Did you fall? Get up and keep going without any sorrow. Don’t become attached to anything, otherwise you will become upset, egotist, dirty. And you’ll never leave any space for the others and you’ll lose your aim which is the Eternal. “…facing with the same tranquility the success and the failure, whatever you do, you won’t fabricate your own restraint”.

Tame your senses and appetites in your mind, tame your mind, as we become our thoughts. Petrify even more in pain and happiness, without killing your body. Because the Yoga is not a gourmand a sleepyhead nor the one who stopped eating and sleeping.

The absolute peacefulness of the mind, this happiness that unites you with the Supreme Beingness, is achievable on earth. Just don’t get enslaved to anything.

“Yoga is the destroyer of pain, he is the one who has his feeding, work, sleep, awakening, everything in control and regulated”.

Get self-constructed. Rise vertically and build a new Ego, not a hostile You, but become one with It. Don’t be afraid and don’t have any hope but “welcoming peacefully joy and pain, win and loss, prepare for a battle. This way you won’t sin”.

Buddha Far enough from metaphysics and closer to the human, the “based upon experience”, was Buddha. From the Upanishads already has begun an anti-Vedic and anti-divine movement. The dispersed eternal spirit that runs through all creatures, gives to man the opportunity for becoming god; and at the same time it leaves in the margin the natural deities of the Aryans, as we find them in the Vedas. Towards this direction, Gita is moving, since it also leaves the possibility to the humans to become god-like through their actions.

Here, gods become the heroes’ charioteer and in other times the former hold the umbrella for them. A local, unorthodox, anti-Aryan spirit tends to blossom, having many faces.

This is a period with shocking fermentations; and not only for India. Our pro-Socratic philosophers, Zoroaster, Confucius and Lao-Tzu are about synchronous of Buddha and Mahavira.

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Prophets come and go in India and the most relative declarations are heard along with the most discrepant and contradictory. Close by the impulse for a fuller spiritualization the raw materialism stands. They say, whatever we cannot control promptly has the same possibility to be true or fake. We can be sure only for the material world. There is no other world, either in the sky or the underworld. The spirit has its roots in the body, it is the blossom of the combination of the material elements. Morality is of human construction too. “Live well for as long as you live. Live well even with borrowed, as once you get buried there is no way back”. And there’s a good hit for the brahmin priests: “Don’t listen to their religious offers and prays. Can the dead ever be fed? And if the food that is given to the brahmin priest can feed someone else, then why don’t you eat it at your home, so that the peripatetic brahmin can be satiated?” And the final shot to gods: someone praying to Indra, the deity of rain gets this answer: “steam are the clouds and they pour their water everywhere. What can Intra do?”

Inside this spiritual seethe, Buddha was born and spiritually nourished. We know with approximate precision his life’s borderlines, which is rare for the early stage of the Indian history. It is placed somewhere between 567-487 BC. Well-nourished as he was the young prince, the day he walked out from his glass-tower, the view of the real life hit him deep in his soul. He stared life’s pain and decline. The great question stuck in his mind: “Why do the humans suffer?” He left behind palaces, parents, wife and child, changed his fancy clothes with those of a beggar and hit the roads. He cogitated: “There should be a reason for the man’s pain”. He lived, he felt, he cerebrated. And his experience teached him, that the reason for thepain should be the human cravings and passions.

Next, he got naked from any bodily wish of his, after he tortured his own body making it like a skeleton. Still no result to this. It wasn’t the avoidance of pain then. An ascetism hides a passion inside. He decided to take the other way around. Started eating. His followers left him as they got aghast. Buddha continued to get deeper into every delight, rolling like a pig in slander. And he learned firsthand that passion to its hyperbole results to pain. Deprivation and enjoyment are the same: passions. And each one brings inside the seed of the other, the etiology of craving. Is there no salvation for the humans?

Of course, there is, but first craving must be destroyed as that’s the one that gives birth to pain! The Prince was certain for this now. The enlightenment was profound after all this thinking under the big tree. He was more than sure now. He was Buddha. And he knew how to uproot craving, by taking the Middle Way, the one that avoids atrocities. And he avoids them not because he denies them staying into Nothing, like a lot thought while improvising over Buddhism, but because behind them their unity lies.

Beyond the couples of the opposites, where the one connects with its contrary like the Beingness and the non-Beingness, we find the infinitude beauty of the world of variety which reaches individuality. The latter, Buddha says, which stands on the opposite of entirety, can make a brotherhood if they join each other. The atom must expand, get richer and deepen so much, till it holds the whole humanity inside it. This is morality, the base of Buddha’s ethics. The man gets destroyed by the passion with its atrocities as it pushes him from one Siren to another causing his disintegration. Only the middle pathway, where he tastes everything through a peaceful tension till he reaches plenitude, lets him free. The Gita’s teaching is crossed here with the Buddhism. And this afterglow is called Nirvana. So, Nirvana is not the Zero, but is Everything. It is not something empty 20

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but is that condition which vibrates by an equilibrated intensity. It is not deadness but is the dispassionate spiritual alertness. This is when the innermost lightning, a totalitarian éclat that gives an unconditional meaning to everything, the uncommunicable experience of Buddhism. You have finished your course, you became a Buddha too and you don’t need to reborn – reincarnate again, Buddha would have said, if he could admit metaphysical fairy tales, irrespective to the mind and the experience. You ‘ve got away from the world of change and degeneration, you uprooted from the ego every pressure of craving and destitution, you are eternalized. An equilibrated man who looks off the world over this peak, in peace, has become one with it. How much more human can the metaphysical belief of the Upanishads and the Vedic Moksha, be? In those texts it feels like you are following the way to god. In Buddhism you find god inside you. That’s why he is the only prophet who never mentioned the heavens.

Over this base, the morality of Buddhism stands. Stop doing harm, learn to be good, purify your heart. Good is anything that leads to unity, bad is whatever takes us down to the individual, the ego. The former purges us from egomathia and redeems us of the upcoming pain, since it is not only our pain, and, on the other hand it equips us with a sympathy for all creatures, without getting with this to hyperbole.

Going towards the practical definition of the Buddhism’s morality we met the commands: no hate, no violence, friendliness to everyone, unselfishness, temperance. Even abolishment of the caste. The Upanishads declared the general participation to the Ecumenical spirit, but its most important conclusion, the equity of the people, was never noticed. Even today, Hinduism, which, according to this belief divines the world of the animals and plants, follows the human class discriminations as a result of a non-entire treatment of situations, something that Buddha makes it really happen.

The spirit of Buddha was generally simple compared to the declaration of the Upanishads. He didn’t teach in Sanskrit but in the plain popular language with parables, like Christ. “Come”, he said, “there’s plenty of heaven on earth, for everyone”. A bunch of poor ones thickened his classes. Homeless, outcasted, whores and princes together, kings, brahmins and wealthy merchants, whoever was sick of the lies and were looking something simpler with tangibility, an atonement free of complicated theories and dead forms.

The first monasteries and universities were built with organized and democratic life.

Rules, staff gathering and voting to take decisions. Work and teaching for the pathway to salvation. They get some rest when it rains. The Master himself took the road to teach as well. He was 80 years old and he wouldn’t stop. The Middle pathway always spoken by his mouth. One day he faced a daunting. A young monk approached with his eyes restlessly and asked him: “Why, Master, don’t you as well, follow the Middle Way? You devoted your whole life to the salvation of the world. Isn’t this out of line?”

Buddha never replied. He thought, himself gave a rule of life to the people. The young monk and the other martyrs were outside the circle. And perhaps this was the antipode for life to keep going the acclivity, turbinated (like an upraised screw). This way we don’t revolve over the same channel…

After that the Master closed his eyes forever. His last words to those who stood by: “Everything goes to rottenness! Live with dignity and grimness. Save yourselves alone!”.

The Indian art bloomed over his relic. Asoka made Buddhism the official religion of the country. As it always happens, the new idea kept its clarity only for a short time.

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The people garnished it with lots of myths so to bring this idea closer to them. And every country of the far East which followed Buddha added its own sheathing over it. There was no other way. And the master’s mantle teared into two parts. Hinayana, the small vehicle stands closer to what he teached. Mahayana, the large vehicle, through its tumble to other Asian countries, underwent lots of additions with local divas resulting to become an unrecognizable scheme. Today, the Master is considered the 9th and last reincarnation of god Vishnu. This way Buddha became god, although he never spelled this word through his lips. Otherwise, he ended up in the country he was born with the same fate as Christ. He made it though, to blossom for more than a thousand years. Since the ages of Gupta, Hinduism begins little by little to swallow him naturally, either with propagandas or with pursuits that will be worsened later by the Muslims, giving to Buddhism the final shot.

Mahavira This colleague of Buddha who ruled Jainism had a better luck at this point than Buddhism although he never met the Master’s overall expansion. He was leaning towards ascetism and he prohibited fervently the killing of animals and even stepping over the grass as, according to his teaching, there is soul in there too! This way, the humans might starve to death so to save the other part of nature. Till today this theory is adopted by the richest merchants of India. Strange country…

The Epics Some folk texts which talk about old stories mixed with myths, are called Purans by the Indians. Their main subject does not deal with the theocracy of the brahmins like we see it through the Vedas or the Upanishads. Here we deal with the hymn of second class, the military one, known as Kshatriya. The Purans were initially this human-centered but as time was going by rolling down through the centuries mouth to mouth, they were engrafted with other theological or teaching material. Especially since after the professional writers got over it. With these texts we get closer to the Indian people, at last.

Two of those Purans descry due to their length, meaning and final form. We are talking about the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. And these lived and survived through the centuries by the mouth of the Indian people, till 5 centuries BC were composed for the first time into their epic form by intellectual writers. So they kept getting richer for another thousand of years until around the ages of the Gupta their form was finalized taking the personality they have nowadays. There are still many permutations of theirs around today though.

The analogues with the Greek Epics, the common motives over the scenery and even the form, are present, of course, since the more we go back to the roots of the two counties’ people the more we find them close to each other. Going a little further, the Indian Epics are much larger than the Greek ones, as Ramayana is 4 times larger than the Odyssey and Mahabharata about 12 times larger than the Iliad. The Greek ones are well built when the Indian ones are juicy without keeping their quality level consistent though. In the former we may get the highest spiritual arousals with amazing ethical samples, rare 22

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emotions and brilliant poetry. The latter become sometimes mundane with stagnate prolixity. Pure and clear words in the first but vibrated by passion, the Indian texts are unfolded through a myth much more magical. The condensation of the Iliad doesn’t exist here. The battle in Mahabharata though lasts 18 days and not 10 years. These Indian texts gave were inspirational for many poets and artists and they nourished and molded today’s Indian. Homer is not a part of our life today as much as Ramayana and Mahabharata are in the Indian’s life. Although Christianity didn’t destroy the ancient Greek spirit, it certainly made a deep engraving into our evolution. For India, the course is still unbroken. Rama, here, is still a deity with monuments and exceptional adoration, just like the westerns say: “Holly Mother!”. It is not a fact with Ulysses, at least in a conscious level.

The cross-fertilization between the two Indian Epics is present. Their basic myth and form are different though. Ramayana, even though it shows contradictions compared with its archetype through time, keeps a symmetry and a homogeneity that are not present in Mahabharata. Also, its character is better built. The handwriting of poet Valmiki is obvious through Ramayana. Mahabharata is characterized of the popular spirit, loaded always with intercalary episodes. The name of its poet: Vyasa, which means “compiler”.

Ramayana A walkabout in its core, this Epic, but on Earth and not above the sea like Odyssey.

Some move to the south when there was still jungle there, with apemen and, rarely, eremites around.

The protagonist is a prince named Rama married to his committed wife Sita. One of his father’s wives, takes advantage of a promise she was given and pushes him to banish Rama for 14 years to the jungle. The hero obeys his father’s wish blindly as he was dedicated to him and goes to say farewell to his beloved wife. But Sita won’t let him emigrate alone. There has never been more passionate text regarding a spouse’s faith. “My parents teached me so share the bad days as well with my husband”, she said. “My place is always by your side”. He replies: “My dear, these are 14 years in a dark jungle without any sunlight and without paths. Only snakes, tigers and wild birds that croak fearfully and bite deadly”. Sita insists: “Why should I fear the wild animals if I have you by my side? Why would I want the sun since I have your love warming me? Let me serve you in the jungle as your wife, my lord, let me share your pain”.

Rama buckles and the adventure begins. As many demons as he kills in the jungle the hero and although his brother protects his wife, Sita gets abducted by Ravan the king of island Lanka. The struggle for her freedom begins and Rama gets help from the habitats of southern India – apes by the Ramayana. The triumph and reclamation come after a hard battle. But Sita has one more challenge to go through: her husband’s doubt of her chasteness. Incomparable with the Helen of Troy…

Mahabharata The stories and myths that are braided around the central action of the Epics have no limits. Mahabharata is overloaded with such stories though. It became a real encyclo23

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pedia. There is a cord that penetrates it though. And that is Dharma, the highest ethical Law, like the will of Zeus in Iliad. I will try a short summary of Mahabharata, so to show and spread to the outside of India world, some of the ethical values that are projected through these Indian Epics. As I was ashamed facing the youth of India knowing so much from the Greek Epics and having so many diplomats here from foreign countries knowing so little or nothing at all about theirs, which are as precious and of brilliant meaning. I prefer this Epic than Ramayana as it has a lot of the freshness of the Indian people.

Its Myth Two brothers and two clans. The Pandavas are 5 brothers. The Kauravas are 100 brothers. Some beautiful stories are interlaced around these generations and their adventures. Magic and deceit hand to hand with wise ethical beliefs and diamond chivalric characters frame the narration. Religious-military atmosphere. Gods who get involved with the human happenings, lonely eremites, prince duels, yogi with supernatural abilities pass in front of our eyes. The father of the five Pandavas rules because the father of the Kauravas is blind. The latter are jealous and as soon as their uncle dies, they start their fight.

– What will happen now father? Duryodhana, the most vehement of his sons, asked.

Did you know they are preparing Yudhishtra to inherit his father? Why should the Pandavas always rule just because you happened to be blind?

– My son, your cousin is honest and skillful. Competent son of his father. We can’t do anything anyway. People adore them.

– Father, we can. We have friends too. And I paid to bride lots from their side.

– Beware old man, some mediators barged in, wake up before you end up seeing your sons becoming your nephews’ slaves.

The old man loved his nephews, but he adored his children. So, he abated to their plan to have killed the 5 brothers along with their mother in a close by bazaar, where a fake palace was set for them to sleep, a camouflaged roman candle.

Suspicious as the Pandavas were, they wouldn’t sleep. And while the connivers were trying to figure the time to present the fire as an accidental episode, they opened an underground getaway. And when they felt the time was getting close, they started the fire first in the wax palace burning its architect inside it who was a lapdog of the conspiracy.

As the beasty fire was purring the people were squealing. The Kauravas are faking their grieve and ignoring their failure they hide their smile. Their old father’s soul seems like a warm, on the surface, lake, being simultaneously ice-cold at its bottom.

Covered by the dark, the Pandavas leave in the fearful quietness that is penetrated by the creepy and strange screaming of the wild animals. After they got tired, the strongest of all, Bhima, gets over his back his mother and brothers, like an elephant. After catching their breath, they meet on the road the writer of Mahabharata who reassures them upon their sorrow: “Even the most righteous can’t be all the time in holiness. Even the most sinful doesn’t deserve to roll always in the mire. A weft is our life mixed of good and bad things together. And everyone carries his Carma, the load of this actions. So, don’t be sad”.

They ended up leaving in another town, in the house of a brahmin, presented as beg24

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gars, like the customary acquires. One day the mother is in front of a horrible scene: the family of the brahmin, tightly snuggled to each other, parents, daughter and son were crying mournfully. Each one was begging the fearful beast, the Indian Minotaur to take them as an aliment instead of the others. This creature was eating every week a carriage full of food along with its oxen and its charioteer.

– We will offer ourselves to the beast, they said, as we can’t leave with missing any of us.

– I will send my Bhima, the mother of the Pandavas said.

– What are you saying mother? The brothers replied. He is our backup. He saved us so far, and we are leaning on him to get back our stolen kingdom.

– What about our debt to our benefactor? The mother returned.

And like a gunnysack he rolled the Minotaur down, Bhima alone, after he devoured with humor in front of the beast’s eyes its amazing meal.

– Let’s leave my swains, one day, the mother said to her sons.

– Where to, mother? They asked.

– We sat enough here, she replied.

In a close by kingdom a princess was about to choose a groom. Lots of people, many days of celebrating, noise, music, dancing. Lots of contenders-Princes and between then the Kauravas. A steel bow heavy and strong there was. Whoever could find the center of a turning disk 5 times with his arrows, after bending this bow, being this disk far enough and at the same time having a swain look and coming from an aristocratic family, could be the one to marry the beautiful Draupadi.

The candidates were getting up for the contest but one after the other were sat down in shame. They couldn’t even bend it. At the end, a brahmin bends the bow and finds the target and he even threw the disk down after his final shot. He was one of the Pandavas, the sharpshooting archer Arjuna, disguised. The kshatriyas froze. Their father in law was more than happy. But he couldn’t agree to their request of getting all five brothers married to his daughter.

– My King, they replied. We have sworn to share happiness and sorrow. And the oath remains an oath.

And the beautiful Draupadi with no shame at all got married to all five brothers.

The news were spread and the Kauravas got pothered.

– Father now is the time to finish our plan, otherwise we are lost forever.

– And how is this possible Duryodhana?

– It is easy to wreak havoc between five men when there is a woman among them, since not all of them come from the same mother. And when Draupadi becomes suspicious for been cheated by one of them, we just invigorate her indications.

– Maybe this is time for conciliation, a few wise friends and relatives advised, and old grandfather of their family, the selflessly Bhishma. You should invite them too, to close people’s mouths about the rumor that you are enemies with them.

Under these circumstances the two families met halfway and the Pandavas returned to their father’s land and took back half of the kingdom. They crowned Yudhishtra king and they made Indraprastha their capitol. Just a little further, at the North Indian valley, the 100 brothers ruled their own kingdom, at the city of Hastinapur.

Close by the Pandavas’ kingdom, a powerful leader was living, and the former wanted to kill him. Except the righteous Yudhishtra denied this.

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– Ambition is the merit of the kshatriyas, Bhima replied. What good do they make, power and denomination, if we burry them? When we will get old enough, we can become monks. For now, we should act.

Finally, they agreed. Arjuna and Krishna then killed the king of Maghanap. The writer of Mahabharata who could see the future prognosticated fearful things: In the following 13 years there won’t be any Kshatriyas alive.

– I will make sure not to cause harm to anyone, Yudhishtra reassured.

The destiny of the chaos though penetrated the merit and the prosperity. Duryodhana was really angry of the Pandavas’ goodness.

– Worry not, one of his conniving uncles said to him. Not like this. We will manage them without a single drop of blood. Don’t you know your cousin’s passion? And that he is a blunder?

– What is wrong my eldest son? Why are you in a dark cloud? His father asked him.

What’s eating your guts? The whole world is on your feet. Widen your heart so you can embrace your cousin’s happiness and become cheerful too? You are a king yourself too and no inferior from others. Why are you so jealous my Duryodhana? Since your cousins are so immaculate. It is a shame to plan evil against them, since we can’t hurt them as they are so strong.

– I have no fear for anything, father. We can keep it simple too. Just invite the Pandavas for gambling with dices. They will listen to you only.

– But Vidura, the reincarnation of Dharma itself, calls this passion and we know that every passion demolishes our pillars.

– You can’t balance the merit of the kings, father, with any of the known values for the people. Moral or not, our law goes along with success and winning. I can’t go any more like this, father. It is all or nothing for me. I’d rather be dead if can’t make it work this way.

– I can’t continue like this either, my son. I am too old for this. Do as you want. I just wish I didn’t have such a great love for you, Duryodhana.

Gambling was customary in the military caste. Among those who loved gambling was the righteous Yudhishtra. With the passion we love everything that brings us to disaster.

He thought that his denial to this invitation could be the triggering event for the given divination. So, he went to play.

In Duryodhana’s place, a devilish uncle of his, asked to play. Yudhishtra didn’t accept this.

– You are trying to get away, coward, the uncle said. The game is a battle as well.

– Let’s do it, answered the leader of the Pandavas, throwing the dices.

Here go the diamonds and his horses along with his charioteers. And the elephants and the slaves along with the villages and the cities with their habitats. Because the insidious uncle knew the way…

– Anything else, king of the Pandavas?

– My precious brother Nakula.

– He is mine!

– My other brother too.

– Are you stopping here? Why don’t you play the great Arjuna and the lion Bhima?

Since you don’t share the same mother with them?

– Darn you, are you trying to divide us?

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– They are mine too! Anyone else?

– Myself. I will be your slave too, if you win again.

– I throw and look how I… win! Don’t forget you have left Draupadi behind.

– There you go, said Yudhishtra, in agony.

– She is… mine too.

– Kauravas winners, you go straight to the underworld, the voice of Vidura shouted.

You are all hanging from one string over a bottomless abyss.

– I want all my slaves to step here, Duryodhana said, and Draupadi should stand first.

– Draupadi doesn’t belong to us, a younger brother of his, said making an argument.

Our cousin didn’t have any right to place her in the game, since she didn’t belong to him only. And he gambled her after he lost his own freedom. And overall the game was a fraud.

We should all be ashamed.

– Thank god! The crowd cheered. Dharma is not dead. Humans will continue their path to salvation.

– Undress them! Another brother of Duryodhana cried, who started getting Draupadi naked first.

– One day I will drink their blood, Bhima thought.

– Gods, please! Draupadi shouted. No more shame!

And the miracle happens. Carnivorous birds, monkeys and jackals awfully screaming, they replace every cloth that is removed from Draupadi.

In front of this sight, the old man gives back to everyone their freedom and the kingdom to his nephews. And as Duryodhana starts to hit himself against the wall, he backed down to his son’s demand to gamble again with his cousin, saying: There is no mercy, our fate is pushing us to catastrophe.

And the two kings grab the dices again. The Pandavas loose again. The new agreement is for all to take a 13-year exile in the woods. And they all leave in somber. Their people cry, the skies get cloudy, the earth quakes. Another divination is heard: In 14 years the Kauravas will be lost! Duryodhana laughs sarcastically and the old man falls prone on earth.

Into their shelter, Krishna, the incarnation of the divine, was giving comfort to Draupadi.

– With five fabled husbands, here I am, dishonored, with Duryodhana standing still alive. Hold on, the god replied. They will all be lost one day in a horrible battle. To protect the righteous, to destroy the evil, to keep the Law alive, I get reborn again and again on earth.

– As we didn’t go through enough, after all this gambling, our big brother is following the brahmin texts, telling us to attack back no sooner than the 13 years pass. What are we here for, then? What good is our power if we don’t use it? Do we exist? Till when should we keep hiding? Can the grass ever cover the Himalayas? And since we were truly deceived?

Arjuna leaves for the Himalayas. Becoming an ascetic, he gets extreme powers. He gets weapons from Shiva himself. The rest of the Pandavas go for praying as eremites.

A painful tour that will last for years. We hear lots of stories regarding the forests of the Himalayas, like the ones we hear from the monks. The compiled atmosphere of Mahabharata is obvious here. It is written in bold that a human gets unbelievable powers after living in ascetic austerity. Reminds us of the Nazorean who reassured that a certain miracle couldn’t happen without pray and fasting. Knowledge is acquired. But not only 27

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that. Fury must be absent. More than that, merciless dedication to duty, where everyone belongs by nature and by social class for better or worse. Gita is getting prepared here.

Meanwhile, the old Kauravas is worried. What will happen with the ascetic power the Pandavas get in the deserts? On the contrary, his eldest son and his followers are getting bored in their fake happiness and they wouldn’t stop unless they get to the end of their schadenfreude: see their cousins unshod and exhausted getting blind by their blaze. So, they decided to build their palaces into the same woods. Accidentally, a third prince was camping there, who hated the demanding and gluttonous Kauravas. He fought them, he won the battle getting captivated Duryodhana and even dispersing the invincible Karna with them. The Pandavas cheer except for Yudhishtra.

– We should be ashamed. They are our relatives, he said.

– Are you forgetting so easily, brother? turned on fire, Bhima.

– Follow me, I order you to give back freedom to our cousins, their leader replied.

It is done. And Duryodhana, been full of shame, wants to die.

– Why are you so foolish? an uncle turns to him. If you regret it, why don’t you give them back half of the kingdom?

– What? I will destroy the Pandavas forever, he replied, getting back to himself.

The 12 years passed. And according to the oracle, the 13th had to pass incognito. If the Pandavas were found during that year, they had to stay for another 12 years in the forests. So, they found shelter in the court of a friendly king of theirs by getting disguised taking place in the service staff. Same goes for Draupadi. Things get a little complicated as the beauty with the five husbands becomes a temptation for the brother of the queen, who felled deeply in love with her. So, Bhima gets into her shoes in a date of theirs killing the annoying romancer.

The departed though was really a strong man and once his death became known, suspicions were raised. It can’t be anyone else, the Kauravas thought as they were looking everywhere for the hiding Pandavas, only Bhima could really kill him. We will steal the king’s cows and open a war. And if the Pandavas hide in his court, they will show up to help him. This way they will be brought to light.

They attacked under surprise. The Pandavas assist the king and always incognito and restrained. In a time of danger, Bhima was about to uproot a tree.

– Don’t! Yudhishtra cried to him. You’ll expose yourself. Don’t exhibit your p­ ower.

– If this accurate archer who comes against us is Arjuna, then we won, Duryodhana cried. There’s still one month before the 13th year passes.

– The astronomers say that it passed yesterday, Bhishma, the wise old man replied.

Leave the anger behind and come to your senses. Ask for peace.

– Arjuna’s arrows don’t sound like dices, a fair brother of his, said as well.

But they both went to the side of war-angry Duryodhana. And the strongest troopers of his, Karna and Drona, joined him against Arjuna. Between rare episodes of self-sacrificing, the Pandavas exposed themselves. They leave the protective palace and get in between their friends. They make a Homerian market. People from the Kauravas arrive too, demanding the re-banishment of the Pandavas.

– You are all wrong. Ask your own astronomers too. If they really know something and if they are righteous, they will tell you the truth: “When Arjuna’s bow was heard, the 13-year period was full”.

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Lots of speakers were heard. Some peace lovers. Some others war hungry. Duryodhana couldn’t be persuaded. Lots of intercessors, brahmins, mortals and deities to arrive to a conciliation before the sharpened knives of the brothers show their beam under the light.

The common relatives deemed well, the figurative from the Kauravas softened and all the Pandavas abated, except Draupadi. They accepted to leave five villages to the Pandavas, so not to become beggars and live in dignity. But… – Not a single piece of earth for them, Duryodhana said.

The mother of the Pandavas is in a tragic position: Why does a mother give birth to Kshatriyas, if not to become famous on a battle? But then again: My children, my swains, yes but those three from the side of the Kauravas is that I am afraid of. They can kill you all. And perhaps Bhishma and Drona will feel sorry for you, logical as they are. But how about Karna, that wild beast? I can’t hide my secret anymore. I must tell him the truth.

– Do you know Karna, you are not coming from a low caste? You are my son. You come from... (and the reason is explained). And Dharma says that you shouldn’t go against your parents.

– Mother, oh mother… why are telling me all these now? Now that the heavy steps of war are getting closer. And how can I deny the Dharma that tells me to stand by the people who gave me shelter and food? Aren’t they going to call me coward and thief of their own food and traitor the Kauravas and the whole world? Mother of troopers, I cannot lie to you. I will fight with all my power your sons. And forgive me for this. But I can promise this to you: I will fight to death only your Arjuna. This way, either if he gets killed or if I get killed, you will still have 5 sons.

– Whatever is written to happen… said the mother. Just come close and let me kiss you.

Seven armies were gathered by the Pandavas and eleven by the Kauravas. Commander in chief was set the only brother of Draupadi and Bhishma for the others. With chariots and elephants, air horns and war cries belched in the flatland of Kurukshetra. Bhishma emboldens his own soldiers. Krishna inspirits the depressed (due to the upcoming brother killing) Arjuna. He reminds him of the teachings of Gita (the New Testament of the Indian): “lean and fight” guided only by the debt and without passion and without hoping for a reward…

The opponents are standing facing each other like two cloudy skies. Yudhishtra drops his weapons and to everyone’s surprise he walks towards the enemy side to get a blessing from the oldest relatives.

The first day of the battle the Pandavas bent. Over this brother killing, were nephews fight the uncles and sons with their fathers, gods observe and throw flowers to the young grandson who combats well against his grandfather, old Bhishma. And the latter was proud of his grandson too.

With these duels and general engagements, the second day of the battle flies. This time the Pandavas dominate. Draupadi’s brother fights against Drona and Arjuna; is breaking with his arrows whatever flies against him. And wherever Bhima moves to he looks like death himself.

– If you feel sorry for your opponent grandsons, grandfather, I want you to let me know, as I can’t bear this shame anymore, Duryodhana cried to Bhishma.

– I am getting old, my grandson, he replied smiling. And giving new samples of his abilities, he multiplies, and he gets everywhere like a catastrophic fire.

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– It is time to kill him and Drona, if you don’t want to lose the war, the charioteer Krishna orders Arjuna.

– Pull the reins, god, Arjuna replied.

– I salute you my grandson, Bhishma says while he struggles with Arjuna.

– You are not hitting with your heart, Arjuna, look at me how you get someone killed, Krishna says after coming to his attention.

– Lord of the world, the old man begs him, please kill me so I can become immortal, while a wreath of blood turns around his body.

But Arjuna holds Krishna promising him that soon enough he will fulfil his duty.

And at the same moments he vanishes thousands from the enemy. As his son was in danger, he protects him by killing the sons of the enemy’s troopers. Bhima kills eight of Duryodhana’s brothers standing still as a mountain. The old man is in sorrow and begs his eldest son, even now, to become logical, as the Pandavas cannot be taken having all the righteousness on their side.

The battle continues in pertinacity to the fifth day with dreadful massacre. Thousands of troopers lie down dead like burned trees while men, horses and elephants wait for the sunset to get some rest upon their frazzled bodies; just to get back in the next dawn till they become corpses. Bhima is trying to kill all his cousins and although they surround him to get him alive, he triumphs, although he is holding the reins himself (as his charioteer was lost). Bhima and Duryodhana are crossing their swords and their fight continues even after the sunset, against the rules.

On the seventh day, new schemes of battling are set, to get destroyed and leave more corpses at the valley of Kurukshetra. The spirit of the Kauravas is down. The five Pandavas fight the old-Bhishma who holds till the sunset. Having their bodies full of arrows and wounds, the troopers are moving back to rest getting soothed by some smooth music.

Currently no one is allowed to talk about the war or express the hate in his soul. Heaven blessing is spread everywhere.

Upon dawn, sixteen more brothers of Duryodhana are killed and Arjuna is crying for his son loss. The war is so awful! As Bhishma spreads fear to the Pandavas, Krishna is pushing again Arjuna against him.

– Don’t forget the soldier’s debt, he tells him.

And he falls in the field to kill him himself. Arjuna is holding him bursting: – I cannot execute him, I’d rather have myself exiled.

On the tenth day, the old man falls. His body wouldn’t touch the ground as too many arrows were in it. Duryodhana literally hexed him with his niggle: “Son of the Ganga, you feel sorry of your grandsons…”, he repeated to him. Around his corpse, the grandsons from both sides gathered.

– Duryodhana, find peace, the old man asked him before closing his eyes. The burning arrows of Arjuna, who was my worthy learner, show no mercy. Oh, how they hurt me!

Goodbye my swain grandson Arjuna.

The Kauravas find some courage when Karna joins the battle. For all these days he didn’t participate due to his stubbornness. Not for some Briseis, but because the leadership was given to Bhishma. And because the latter vituperated him for his arrogance.

But now Karna took his blessing in time, since he didn’t want to follow his advice for finding peace with the Pandavas, as a brother from the same mother.

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The leadership was given to Drona, now, who will keep it deservedly for five days.

– Now we will get to see what will happen as there in no more Bhishma around to feel sorry for the Pandavas.

The plan of Duryodhana to catch Yudhishtra alive doesn’t work, because Arjuna is ahead. Some try to challenge Arjuna sworn to kill him so to leave the Pandavas’ king exposed for Drona. The latter, like an armored beast he breaks the enemy’s lines killing lots of princes till he gets to Yudhishtra. He gets close enough but not too close. The 12th day closes with an elephant battle. The king of the Kauravas is fearful over his four feet battle cruiser. Even the elephant killer Bhima has a hard time with him, although to find him in the scene you must follow the line of the elephants’ corpses. The king of the Kauravas ravages people, horses and chariots like if he was the deity of catastrophe. Only the duet of Arjuna - Krishna can face him.

Sons of troopers from both sides act with bravery and fall in the field, their fathers acerbate. And the dance of war becomes frightful on the 14th day. The valley is full of bloody mud. Wild dances are set over and around the corpses. The contravention of the war rules are broken all the way. And mostly from the side of the Pandavas as Karna respects his promise to his mother, not to kill any other brother of his rxcept for Arjuna.

And the battle continues all night under the light of the torches. To break Drona’s impetus, the Pandavas cry that his son is killed. The lie is confirmed by the righteous gambler Yudhishtra. The father bents on his knees as if he was praying and Draupadi’s brother takes his head. His soul beams on its way to heaven. The war derailed completely all humans. Bhima gets his revenge for his son’s death by pouring more of his cousins’ blood.

More of Duryodhana’s brothers’ corpses are on the ground. His son’s too. Karna took over from Drona the leading of the Kauravas, but not for long. Arjuna takes him down cowardly while he was trying to free the wheel of his chariot from the bloody mud. And this was under the order of Krishna, the god of revenge, for unfairness and shamefulness.

– Ready for peace now, Duryodhana?

– Too late, too much blood separates us. And I don’t want to seem coward. I belong to the kshatriyas. We keep fighting! Another one takes the leading. And another one. All his brothers are dead. The rest of his troopers spread like birds that have been shot and Duryodhana alone dives into a lake to blow out his flaming anger. Oh, why does wisdom come so late? As he walks out the lake Bhima gets on him showing his menace for all those things that he suffered because of him. He steps on him with madness.

– Pay, Duryodhana now, Krishna sounds with irony. Where is your power now?

– I enjoyed, like a god myself, the powers I had. I fought, I hurt but I didn’t bend. And if you weren’t around Krishna, to help them…

– The Dharma, Duryodhana.

– In a while, I won’t feel the heavy steps of Bhima over my head. I am leaving for the heavens like so many other brave men, so many kshatriyas and so many of my brothers who are waiting for me.

The sky shined, divine music flew out and the gods were pouring flowers over the dying trooper. The living, from the side of the Kauravas, during the night, assault the Pandavas campus, killing all the sons of Draupadi and starting a fire. They returned on time to sweeten Duryodhana’s last moments: – We turned them to ashes! Only 7 left on their side and 3 from ours.

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– What a great joy and happiness! He murmured and his soul left him with a smile on his face.

The battle was over. This loss was unbelievable in only 18 days. On the front line stands an old man from the Kauravas and behind him the widows and the orphans crying. What a mess! Yudhishtra doesn’t want to wear the crown after all this bloodstream.

Childless uncles from one side and the five nephews with their mother from the other side, they are hugging each other over the corpses of their relatives.

– If only, you could leave me one child, Arjuna, his aunt was crying.

For 15 years Yudhishtra rules with the help of his uncle. After that they go for ascetism in the woods and from there they pass to the eternal peacefulness of the heavens.

Where the body doesn’t exist to agitate the thoughts bringing back to hate and pain, where everything is everlasting and unmarred. ONE. The six philosophies This is how the Indians call the basic systems of their thought, as they elaborated with time. In reality, there are more. Especially if you include their branches which influence each other borrowing its methods the one from the other. To be more specific the 6 systems can be grouped to 3 couples, which share the most obvious similarities between them.

This is not the philosophy like we know it from the West, neither about the personal synthetic validations although behind every system stands someone who coded his authentic aphorisms into sutras. Of course, the unproven hypotheses are not missing from any validation, but here something more blurs the crystal thought, an underlayer of old metaphysical creeds, that the Indian spirit never made it to leave it behind. The main aim that is laid through the above philosophies is not the truth, but the human salvation.

And salvation here means the redemption from the pains of life. And this is achieved completely when he gets out of the recycling of births. We see, this way, that theology never let from its calipers the Indian thought, although from all other points it moved from materialism to the groundless idealism and from the most finical rationalism to the cosmology. There are systems that consider the existence of a god important and others that evoke or deny him.

These systems dive their roots very deep, since they reach the Vedic texts, but their definite expression starts through the first pre-Christian centuries. Since then, they never stopped been commented through the medieval times till our years.

Nyaya The Word is a necessary instrument of every philosophy, and it finds its place here too. Though, more often, a greater space is given to intuition and the holy texts are respected. The most rationalistic system is the one with the name Nyaya. The analytic cogitation rules here, in a way that reminds of Aristotle, without been sure if there were any influences ever and where from. The sources of knowledge are four: perception, conclusion, analogue and reliable proof. The Indian peroration never reached the structure of the Greek, but here, the metaphysical faith was put aside, and the unproven validations limited. The Indian tried to move towards his salvation with criticism.

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Vaisesika The human composition and of reality’s generally are considered dual, material and spiritual. The system Vaisesika is using the logical construction of the human as well. It is cosmological and reminds us a lot the pre-Socratic philosophy. Going along with Democritus, it says that the world is consisted of atoms. And that there are 4 types of atoms: earth, water, fire and wind. The different combinations of the atoms create the objects.

But there are some spiritual elements which synthesize the humans: space, time, welkin, mind and soul. Soul, and the governor of Cosmos, make the moral law, the Dharma.

Samkhya The construction of Samkhya doesn’t look unacquainted to me regarding the previously mentioned pair. The initial elements of the world here are two, as well: Purusha and Prakriti. Prakriti is the altered matter with all its dynamic energy. Purusha is the always unchanged spiritual substance, the consciousness with which acts upon Prakriti and through a complicated process of subdivisions, the infinite forms of cosmos are created. This system is constructed upon logic but a metaphysical one, which is not based to any reality or reassurance. It has a strong belief to determinism, and it confirms that the result is always seeded in the cause. It is more or less the relationship between the cruse and the clay: they are not the same thing, but they are made of the same material.

To reach redemption from the body’s restraints, Samkhya says, you need to differentiate with your knowledge the Purusha from Prakriti. This is when you view the world in peace and apathetic. Then, after been released from reincarnations, death becomes the fundamental redemption. There’s something here from Buddha’s Nirvana. But Buddha, I think, gave prominence to Prakriti, the way it was raised as the supreme peacefulness of completion through the experience of life through the simple human.

Yoga Yoga aims towards the same finish line: the freedom of the soul from its material restraints. This aim has captivated the western world for its hypernatural powers that accouters man. According to Yoga, the redemption comes with body and spiritual discipline. Working a lot over your body and mind, you become master of the former by guiding with persuasion the latter. These exercises combined with long and controlled breathing are described in detail by the Yoga system till you reach the most difficult level, the perfect cessation of any activity. For example, if you try every morning “deep squat raising on your toes” and day by day you perform it slower till you make it last for 5 minutes. Then you’ll understand how much this exercise disciplines the mind, been a spiritual drill at the same time.

And if you practice more this psychosomatic exercise, you reach the point where you act bodily or spiritually with increasing relaxation, without effort at all, which is power, since you don’t become tired easily anymore. Skin and bones, as lean as Gandhi could be, his psychosomatic power was beyond comparison.

Furthermore, a moral exercise makes you stronger. No violence, no hate, truthfulness, abstinence. Controlling motions, emotions, passions, thoughts. Concentrating, 33

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contemplating, intensifying thought and the divine enlightenment comes. I don’t really know how this ecstasy works and up to which point can disclose something so inconceivable to humans, by any other way. Maybe this is a condition of self-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, known to us by the mystics of the byzantine years, as well. What’s left from Yoga, applied into our human bounds, is the indisputable somatic and spiritual health which can push self-culture to higher levels of despiritualism and more complete consciousness of our inner world. And this is redemption.

Mimamsa With this system we stand back again to the narrow minded brahmin teaching of the Vedic declension. A meticulous attempt for the exegesis of the Vedas stands here. It looks like they are trying to milk the tragus these hyper-conservative pundits while they are looking for hidden deep meanings in the words of those texts; which don’t include anything more than the lyric awe of the first Aryan nomads in front of the magnificence of nature along with a few primitive spiritual shivering. Mimamsa is leading towards the first polytheism and ends up to the complicated ceremony of sacrifice. This one, it is said, leads us to the right act and to salvation. Maybe this system is a life fallacy, a criminal offense, darkness that enforces till today the long-suffering Indian.

Vedanta Same conservative approach with its seal printed bold over the Indian soul has the Vedanta system. Despite its metaphysic nature, a more substantial philosophic idea we find here as it doesn’t try in vain over the early Vedas. It is inspired from the juicy seeds of the Upanishads.

In its early event, Vedanta seems strictly monistic and idealistic. There’s nothing else, the apologizer says, than the Brahman. The external world is all the way subjective, something like a dream, a deception; it’s Maya. Neither the change exists with its etiology, nor redemption. And we cannot capture the eternal Brahman with the finite equipment of our brain. It has vanished every value from the ethical action and condemned the humans to stagnation and fatalism.

Out of this dead end, Hinduism is trying to get, on the 8th century AD with a shortlived but inextinguishable philosopher named Shankara. The external world is not complete fraud, he says trying to prove it. It is neither real nor fake. There is a proportion that connects it with the worldwide and impersonalized essence of Brahman. It’s the proportion that connects a rope with a snake. We get fooled by considering the former for the latter. And this is Maya. And here, knowledge is guiding us to the practicable unity with the Brahman, so that the Atman – the atomic soul – can coincide with the worldwide. And the relationship between the Brahman and the Atman is the same that exists between the infinite space and the space inside a pot. Same thing, different limits.

The scope is to break the pot and diffuse the person into the universe. This is freedom and redemption. The absolute success happens after death. But it is possible in life too.

At that time, man finds out he is the same with the whole, stopping his egocentric tendencies and moves over the more stable base of morality.

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Shankara belongs to monism, but he opened the road for dualism which will follow, to ascertain that the essence of the world is dual, material and spiritual, indestructible and perishable. At the same time, he invented a third solution so that man can compromise the conscious of the perishable along with the craving of what he is not, the infinite, the absolute, the eternal. During the 9th century he personalized this eternal essence – Shaivism of Kashmir – and overlapped it with god Shiva. Since infinite has self-efficiency and immobility, it couldn’t by itself create the objective world. It needed for this a motional authority, not different, but at the same time, also something from itself. Close to the relation of the wave and the sea. And this would be the wife of Shiva, named Parvati. The union of the two gives the world. Parvati is so close to him that sometimes they are symbolized with one Shiva, a hermaphrodite. This was the pressure valve, the outlet for the Indian’s emotional release, of his innate sexuality, which was expressed unsparingly to the temples with the most daring couple poses.

The eternal essence has become now a person and reincarnates into infinite other beings, deities, humans and animals according to an old Indian admission and on the given grounds of the Christiane idea which accepted only one incarnation of the divine, the one of Christ. This way, the whole old Indian pantheon, from the animal worship to the human idolization and the adoration of the various wraiths – evolution of the primitive animism – coordinated with monotheism: they consist the expression of the divine, all these infinite faces of him; where their reincarnations aim, according to their Karma - meaning their bad or good actions – towards lower or superior forms of life. In the last case, it keeps going till they coincide with the eternal and crystal-clear source they originate from. This is when reincarnation stops, there is neither atom, nor pain but only an ineffable and interminable felicity, as the drop has returned to its Ocean.

Newer tendencies This admission of the divine, personalized we might call it, guided through the following centuries to a new belief, that the man can be exonerated only after devoting to deity. What’s missing, the newer movement of Bhakti says, is not the knowledge, neither the meticulous ceremonial incenses of the brahmins, but is the faith, the simple, honest and peaceful faith. With that, the holy Benares can rise inside your own heart.

This is a refreshing reaction to the hard-core Indian orthodoxy, for a race against castes, mystic and human together. Lots of its teachers were simple people who wrote and dispersed the new truth in the common language and not in the dead Sanskrit, which only the brahmins and the aristocrats used. “Burry the castes”, they said, like Buddha. Kill the fraud behind the words. Kabir, a mystic weaver, poet and saint of the 15th century, writes: “My god, either Allah or Rama…”. The difference stands only in the run of the rules. And elsewhere: “The Sanskrit is like the water in the well; the language of the people is like the running stream”. And this secretive tendency found its match in the Muslim Sufism, which is why we observe an inclination to their conflation. This fact will become the main scope of the Mongolian king Akbar. It is worth of mentioning, through the magnanimous stare of these wise outcasted, their human perception regarding the Great Truth: those who wanted only spiritual, they disgrace the external material world; those who say that the Truth is found only in the spiritual part, are not truthful, Kabir 35

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continuous. One of his follower’s compliments, that god didn’t make the senses to condemn them: “the eye enjoys the color, the ear enjoys the music, the palate enjoys the taste, all of them provided with grace.”

Later, the Christian ideas enter with the Europeans in India, but they influenced the Indian world very little. Of the three pathways towards salvation that are pointed from the above validations: • The knowledge, which is found from the rationalism of the Nyaya to the dissolution of the personality, for the secretive integration with the infinite of the Upanishads and of Vedanta • The action, which starts from the complicative, meticulous and groundless ceremony of the Vedas, to reach the unhuman creativity, with the unsensational attachment of Gita’s energy.

• The simple faith, free of any loaded knowledge and tradition of the medieval mysticism.

From all these, the Indian soul was deeply influenced by the lifeless scholasticism of the Mimamsa and the spooky spirit of the Vedanta. We end up mentioning the ethical problem of the Hinduism. Just mentioning as it concerns us wider in the second half of the book, where we gaze the modern Indian by following him closer to his events and demonstrations.

Their Morality It has been advocated that Hinduism is desiccated to the ethical problem when at the same time the Indians argue that their religion is the Dharma, meaning the right action.

It is true that more or less, open or covered, all the texts and their systems mention the ethical issue. Even Gita, no matter how much it theologizes, its core deals with the Indian morality, the most acquired impulse for his sloth and thyme easiness. Yoga counts specific virtues, which contribute to self-control (what the human is really interested in).

Even the Upanishads, with its alien world tendency, although it seems to discredit life from the ethical meaning, they set a fixed base upon the moral problem, that no other ethical philosophy in the world could stabilize. The fact that they never continued the construction over this base is another problem. It is a tag of war when you step on these problems. The more you go towards the roots, you miss the fruit; the validation keeps you away from the action, as it absorbs all your energy. The spiritual communalism of the Upanishads abolishes the “mine” and “yours” and “neither sorrow, nor torture exist for the one who has seen this unity”.

Today, it is a fact that the Indian’s morality stands low. The historical adventures of this tribe, the long-lasting slavery under foreign and local privileged contributed to his moral poverty. His educational wretchedness which goes along with his native conservatism made him place, close to his constructive virtues, (like truthfulness, hospitality, no hate, no violence etc.), some more, like, prohibition of meat eating and bathing only in the holy waters. He also gave the lead to the last ones.

The four stages of the atomic life of Hinduism: “educate yourself, live your life with intensity, recede when you get old and sanctify” rarely were applied in their sequence and their completeness. On the other hand, the Indians, dynasts and slaves, were attached 36

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with religious alacrity to their social castes. And this installed a trammel to their soul.

The brahmin, the warrior, the professional and the servant are born like this and they should die like this. And a divine trial decides for the caste according to their Karma, the ethical load of their previous lives – which is not conscious, so they can’t be responsible for their fate. It is easy to understand how easy it is for fatalism to make roots in the human soul. The only hope for reincarnation to a better caste is the faithful adherence to the debts of the caste someone belongs to. And life becomes suffocating with its subdivisions of castes and the dictation of unbent prescriptions and rules for most of the social aggregations.

We are closing with “Texts and Prophets”. We didn’t include here the main body, the core of the Indian thinking. Whatever blossomed over it, like a named or anonymous artwork cannot take its place in the abstract of this book. Not even names like Kalidasa’s, the dramatist of the Guptas’ acme. Or even the Tulsidas’ who stands in the dawn of the newest times, when the Sanskrit was finally abandoned and the live Indian languages took their place in the written texts; like the Hindi and other southern Indian dialects, less spread but today mostly processed and refined.

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The art of India View When you look for the first time at the Indian art, and try to compare it with the Greek one, it will seem hard to understand, simple, monstrous and barbarian. Though, some parallels exist in both cultures, owned or not to some exchange, and furthermore there is a random meeting to their historical pathway.

There is a prehistorical art of India and a historical one. A major gap exists between the two, as a result of emigration of new tribes. A period of heterogenous elements absorption follows and after that an infertile season with dryness. The survival through different arts is next, like the Muslim here (or the Byzantine in Greece). The European infiltration will speak its last word later.

Generally, the arts of the two cultures are different to their essences. The art of India never met the fast-ascending path of the Greek, which found its course within five centuries. Neither reached the latter’s consequence and unity. Lots of ups and downs here. We find mature art a little further up, primitive or nonexistent further down, jungle on the bottom. Neither the light-giving Athens nor the light-taking Greece. The blanks and the variety from Altamira to Knossos and Parthenon, and from the pre-roman barbaric ruins to the Aghia Sofia and Notre Dam, remind the early North Indian art and following, the two medieval rhythms which formed in the north and south of India.

Palaces and temples were built there but not grave monuments like the Mycenean.

Because the dead are burned till today, and the tendency of the Indian soul was to dissolve like a gold dust in the air, to unite peacefully with the infinite worldwide oneness as an after death condition of eternal happiness, instead of keeping its earthly form.

They are trying to move the earth to the heavens instead of bringing the heaven down to earth. Some change came later with the Muslim spirit.

The newer palaces, gloomy and irregular, remind the Minoan. The old ones were victims of their wooden material. The Indian temples have a plastic hypostasis, made mostly for show off as their architecture is tightly attached to sculpture. More than the ancient Greek temples. And as of painting, some ancient murals are saved, from the first post-Christian centuries, fewer relics of the medieval ages and some newer miniatures.

The equivalent of the Greek angiography and the byzantine paintings are not met here.

And Characters The scope of the Indian art is not the beauty, as the nice has no value here and it never overlapped with the real. On the contrary, for the Indian, the real is nice too. The real exists in its completeness, further than the temporary, earthly expressions of life which keep the man prisoned and hurt on earth. The redemption from these ties come, for the Indian, not through the fulfillment of action, art, science and religion; As there’s only one redemption: the unity with the Oneness.

It doesn’t mean that the natural world is uninvolved to this supreme spiritual substance. It is brought inside it. And the man may increase it by cultivating it till his ascetic equilibration, which doesn’t necessarily go along with a lean body, like in the Byzantium, since the body is the extension on the spirit. This way, the thinking Buddha, 38

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the dancing Shiva, the couples that make love over the walls of the temples, the apes, the living creatures, are all infiltrated by a mentality and have released their material weight and their animal nature.

The spirit didn’t come as a bloom of the matter. The former created and inhabits in everything, from the stone to the humans. That’s why all the sciences here are wrapped in the cloak of religion. The personality doesn’t exist. Object and subject are overlapped.

The artist is usually unanimous.

A complicated symbolism, birth of the brahmin intellectuality, and a childish innocence together, as a result of the religion’s popular spirit and of the attempt to express the absolute with temporary media, could be added to the character of the Indian art.

The Pre-historic years We are standing in front of the oldest tributary civilizations with the relics of the Indus river. The Mohenjo-Daro lower and the Harappa higher are the two centers of the chalcolithic art which cuspate from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. On this part of the Indian earth, the man of the caves and the small settlements developed to an urban civilization.

Wide designed avenues, which bifurcate to smaller lanes and alleys, granaries, samples of commercial motions, baths, palaces, a few mansions close by humble habitats and maybe some temples, judging from the scalable cisterns, a feature of the Indian temples till today.

Some more seeds of the later Indian art and way of thinking we detect here. Over the 2.000 soapstone seals and between other themes – of animals, deities, ceremonies – we find tree adoration, idolatry of male genitals, the Taurus, the yoga complexion of people and dancing ceremonies, all the religion emblems of today’s Indian. The pictograms of these seals are not read yet. From the artistic point, quite often they present masterpieces of embossment.

There is also a small quantity of little, clay figurines, cute in their childish character, sometimes very comic and other times humanized by an internal light. They represent women – maybe mother-Earth - men, priests and most of them belong to the animal’s kingdom, like horses, dogs, birds, pigs, rhinos, apes.

Very few are the clean plastic creations, also small, made of different kind of stones and of copper. A dozen of brahmin-kings, bearded, baldheaded, ornated, with eyes that – even today – look cunning, although empty, remind Sumerian works.

Between two small amputated trunks, the one is an athlete and the other is a dancer.

They used to have inserted limbs. Their burnish and motion with such a light contortion of the trunk remind the classic ancient Greek period and it is hard to place it back to 2.500 BC. An analogue promotion in sculpture is impossible to find so early either in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia, even though the latter are older and stand higher compared with the one of the Indus’ valley.

We are looking at two bronze dancers. The first with delicate, dark-color Asian characteristics, looks like today’s Indian, full of bangles in her arms, magnificent work of exotic primitivism. Regarding the pots and the small instruments, we can’t find something out of the ordinary.

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A lot have been said and written regarding the origin of these people’s tribe. Nothing is for sure since the key of their texts is still not found. The case of which the Aryans could be the ancestors is out of the question. If they are not the southern Dravidians, it could be a local tribe with undeniable Sumerian and other west Asian influences.

We are not aware of how this civilization was destroyed parallel to the Minoan, around 2.500 BC. The natural phenomena were advocated by lots as the cause of their vanishing. But looking at their fortification through their last period of acme, we easily see the aspect of some enemy intrusion standing, no matter if they were the Aryans or some other local war tribes. There are indications that the Bearded head people of the civilization of the Indian valley back down (Mohenjo-Daro museum) towards the south and east where they get engulfed and mixed with the waves of the immigrated white nomads that arrive from the NW. If the originals were Dravidians, they must have reached to the most southern tip, where they remain till today the less mixed, by Aryans, tribe and culture.

The gap For the next 1.000 years we lose the strings of the Indian art. This phenomenon reminds us the consequences of the Doric immigration in Greece, only larger the gap in time and in findings, here in India. Meanwhile, important fermentations happen here too. A mixture between the local and the foreign blood and deities. The heavenly male deities of the Aryans meet the earthly productive deities and the magic spirit of the natives to reach around the 6th century AD the rise of the local spirit through the Buddhism and Jainism. The small kingdoms are united under stronger scepters to end up later in the kingdom of the Maurya.

Although this was the poorest period in art works, the A to Z in the Indian philosophy is created. The Vedas and the following texts, even their great epics get the final form, an analogue of Homer’s epics which blossomed in times of artistic poverty. And all we know come mostly from traditional texts and from ikons over later artistic works than from synchronous to this period findings. The stone processing was still difficult then and its transfer even more, since the texts mention nothing but forests. Clay figurines, walls and beanpole cabins only, through this period. With time, while the Aryan waves smother the Ganges valley, every part of their civilization is promoted and temples, spacious houses and palaces are made. They are all gone now, since this muddy and petrified land had nothing else to offer than wood from the forests.

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The historic years An explanation We need to go to the years of Alexander the Great to meet in India an art well-nourished and continuous and with maintainable elements. Which has one character, all over India, for the first time as it is united under the Maurya. The manner we will attempt to outline its character might not be the ultimate for some “scientific” minds. But I think it will be the best for whoever wants to feel something from the Indian Art and not to get bored by daedalus subdivisions and dynasty catalogues that remind often to us telephone books. And I will give here, mostly what I saw, where I walked, and whatever I touched myself, instead of whatever I pumped out from worm-eaten mags of others, that are also based on others’ rags… The burning sun of India hurts, for sure, if you walk around a lot. And it is only for the locals and the brave ones. I will categorize them in a way which will make it easier for the reader to appreciate the important stuff, as the Indian monuments are endless in number and variety.

Architecture In general Even the architecture, such a practically artistic creation, was fully idealistic for India. The tradition and the symbolism overload it to the point where it loses its European meaning: construction and framing. Its borderlines get interlocked with those of sculpture, and they end up insoluble. Because the Indians through their whole spiritual fixation, never made it to “build”. Meaning, they couldn’t divide, fragment and synthesize from the beginning. They depicted the world in a natural way, where the architecture seems clearly artistic, like painting and sculpture. For this, we meet the Indian architecture very close to nature, made from its autonomous elements, dug in its intestines, hugged with its vegetation. Temple is not only the holy mountain, throne of their deities, but further than that, the whole world; and the holy tree is not only its curved ornament but also its native complement. The enclosure of the temple, the altar, the pillars and the columns have their own symbolism; even the brick is considered holly, as it is purified by the holy fire. An analogue of the byzantine temple, in symbolisms and in general, besides their general and specific differences, like the dome, which is never found in the Indian temple, as the group adoration doesn’t exist here.

The first monuments: columns In the Maurya dynasty we fall over the stable architectural monuments. The charming Asoka blared his humanitarian Buddhi policy with decrees, written over the rocks and the columns, spread all around the country. The latter are gigantic monolithic 41

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trunks with about 10 meters height. Round and well-polished, they narrow on the top and they get covered by an abacus loaded with animal statues: elephants, bulls, lions, making obvious their Persian influence. They are very imposing columns and I am not sure if they should be related with Egyptian obelisks. From now on the Indian column takes different forms: thin-high or wide-short, circular, quadrilateral, polygonal, or mixed, naked, fully or partially ribbed (Doric looking), adorned or loaded with dense carvings or totally dissolved in dozens of complexed statues which form it. The capitals follow the same variety, from the simple and naked to the decent with amazing statuary of human and animal figures.

Stupa Known from the old times, made of perishable material, they were spread during the time of Asoka. The myth says that it owes its form to Buddha’s inverted beggar’s tassel, hemispheric as they are, and less commonly round or angulated. It seems that they continue the design of the tradition of other tribes that didn’t use to cremate their dead.

The rock-built now, stupa is surrounded with a wooden enclosure showing its original derivation. You can enter from 4 different, overloaded of carvings, railing columns. The stupa, always solid, is crowned by figurative umbrellas, enclosed as well. The symbolisms of the uncountable decorations are so many that your mind boggles if you try to decode them.

These monuments were spread everywhere with the generalization of Buddhism.

Some of them were hiding in their bowels the relic of the Master, so they were built wherever he stepped, even in places of older Hindu temples. It is said that Asoka, himself, he made 84.000 of those. Very few are saved today as the Hinduism swallowed them along with Buddhism. In the history of Arts, only 4 emerge, all made after Asoka or during the

The great stupa of Sanchi 42

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first post-Christianic centuries: the great Sanchi stupa, the Sarnath stupa, Amaravati and Bharhut stupa. From the last two only the sculptures survived.

The caves The gifts of Buddhism don’t stop here. Parallel to the stupas, for a thousand years, we see the best of curving architecture in caves. The stupas are characterized as altars.

The caves become temples or monasteries. The temples are called Chaitya and they resemble a triple Christian temple, with cylindric roof and an arch in the background. A separate cell or niche stands as you enter, and it unites with the rest of the temple later; in it, you’ll find sacral symbols: a Buddha statue or a stupa. The monasteries are called Vihara. They resemble built monasteries. Basically, it is a quadrilateral hall surrounded by cells for the monks. They are mined in a single rock, like in the Chaitya. Few or lots of columns, they are one unit with the mine, either if they are necessary or not, as the tradition comes first. The frontages are curved, and they often show their wooden origin.

Generally, the Chaitya and the Vihara coexist side by side since the Buddhists – like the Christians – enjoy the adoration.

Counter to the stupas the most remarkable caves are found in the west India and mostly close to Mumbai. In the places Baja, Nashik, Karli we see the best and oldest caves. With time they get improved getting verandas and second floors and enriched with statues, paintings and other decorations to a point where the opinion that the Indian technicians started like giants and ended up like goldsmiths, seems to be true. This is mostly applied to the Hindu caves which are curved Ellora, internal view, Chaitya cave no10 outside to evolve in temple outlines. The ones of Buddhism and Jainism are kept simpler although they absorb the plentiful Indian pantheon. The basic decoration of the former are the colossal seated Buddhas. The Tirthankaras, the prophets of Jainism, are naked in the latter. The Hindu are overwhelmed by the tropical vegetation of the Indian soul, monstrous and lovable. Ajanta, Ellora, Bagh, Badami and the Elephanta island are some of the places where you meet Ajanta, face of cave no19 the most remarkable caves of either 43

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religion, exclusively or mixed together. We will complement their picture during our tour, so that you don’t get confused.

The built temples Since the Gupta acme, around the 6th century AD, the built temples make their appearance whose initial marks go further back. In the beginning they were flat roofed; a tower starts to stand up over the sanctuary. With time, different types will be created, depending with the place and the religious doctrine, and the dynasties. But basically, the areas of the temple are two, and they relate to the above-mentioned carved monuments.

The cell in the background of the latter, here becomes the sanctuary for the god’s statue as well or for the phallus in the Hindu temple, which now dominates in numbers. And the narthex becomes the entrance porch as congregation in Hinduism doesn’t exist since the adoration is a personal matter. Later, there will be added more chambers like for ballroom and donations.

In the variety of the built temples we discern two basic rhythms: the north and the south. The north rhythm: over the sanctuary a curved tower rises by the name of Shikara (meaning mountain peak) but over the narthex a pyramidal roof rises called Vimana.

The south rhythm: the curved tower doesn’t exist, and the inner sanctuary is covered by a pyramidal scalable roof called Vimana as well. You reach that after passing pre-galleries which multiply as you enter successive pillar supported lobbies loaded with forests of columns. Walls with great pylons surround the south rhythm temples and over them rise pyramidal multi-leveled towers, called Gopura. Great cisterns and residencies for brahmins and other stuff make this temple a whole state, contrary to the north rhythm which remain small and cute.

The North rhythm The impressive on this rhythm is the fact that the curved tower, round or quadrilateral, rises with boldness and plasticity. It attracts the eye to the sky with its scarping bundles that crawl over its ridge repeating in miniature, this same scheme. It is roofed by a round bread-looking cover which holds a pinnacle. Some horizontal crackings with statues or friezes break the monotony over the Vimana and the sides of the temple. Don’t look for an architectural skeleton inside the tower as it is solid to its base.

You’ll find temples like this in the whole north-central India. In Orissa, south of Bengal we check three of the oldest ones. Only about 80 are saved today from the hundreds they used to be. Their Shikara have a clearly curved scheme and they end up blind, without openings, simple without decoration internally, enclosed by a wall like in the south rhythm. Externally their amalgamation is plenty.

This tradition will be kept for centuries. On the 13th century we in Konark we stand in front of an amazingly massive temple dedicated to the god Sun. It represents the chariot of the sun and therefore it is equipped with wheels that would haul him to eternity. When its tower felled down you could feel the disproportion: the quality lost in the quantity. The wheels at its base, although huge, they resemble a reel destined to carry a monorail.

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On the contrary, the temples of Khajuraho in central India are not paddocked. Built around 1.000 AD, over a high base, they look like elegant pieces of art loaded with statue friezes outside and piles of lookalike love scenes inside-out.

Decoration with exceptional abstractedness surpluses here, but it never reaches the unmatched cavil of the west Indian temples, like in Gujarat or a little higher in Mount-Abu. The ones of Khajuraho have balconies around and present illuminated and happy with bolded vertical and horizontal contrasts, submissive to their photoshop. The production and variations of the north rhythm never stopped till nowadays, even though the Muslim style influences the country since the end of the Medieval times and forth.

North rhythm, temple of Khajuraho

The South rhythm Even through the pre-historic years, the south India moves slowly. Hardly after the 1st millennium BC finds itself in the chalcolithic period, to meet just a few centuries later some kind of society leaving in some advanced villages. Megalithic monuments, stone-fenced tombs, dug or roofed above the earth, weapons and instruments belong to the oldest findings. It remains controversial where these tribes came from. Were those who created the Indus river civilization? Were they Dravidians? Did they come from Iran, Arabia or Africa? Nothing is officially accepted and all we know is that they had a contact with the northern areas of India, and at the Ganges valley Aryans and locals fermented to get their final form. Only after using as a guide the later south Indian monuments, we can assume a Mediterranean relationship, since the scalable Gopura remind the Ziggurat of Babylon and the immense pillared halls bring to our mind the Egyptian temples. This by itself, cannot prove any tribal similarity though.

Of the built temples from the southern India, countless in number, the most important belong to the recent years and from the saved ones, none is older than 1.500 AD. Their design is engraved since the carved architecture of the 8th century BC which constitutes the completion of the cave structuring. We see it at the unfinished Rathas of Mahabalipuram. Close to Madras (or Chennai). The rock here is eaten inside out like a built gradient temple with a capping stone hooded or saddled, characteristic of the later Dravidian South rhythm. Cistern, gallery and towers (gopuras) architecture.

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To list the most important temples over the NE tip of the Indian peninsula, would be boring.

From their ancestors’ small Rathas which evolved through the first centuries of the second millennium to the built megatheria of the recent years, it seems that along with the taste, the elegancy and the acme of the country vanish.

The Gopura get higher over the pillars till they reach the 150 meters, making the view of the temple itself disappear. They get tight with successive and imposing walls that get increased up to the numRathas of Mahabalipuram ber 7, becoming great cities. The columns come in thousands and the sculptured world which grimaces over them monstrously transforms these god’s houses to a nightmare effigy of the tropical jungle. Kanchipuram, Tanjore, Vellore, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai are just some of their locations.

Other types Through the contacts of those two rhythms, from the north of Madras till the superior borderline of Mumbai, an intermediate type was created, wavered, which combines characteristics from both. The outline of these temples is formed progressively from polygonal to stellar; its Shikara rises like a cone and not curved. These are temples with reach and detailed decoration; we see some of their greatest samples at the area of Mysuru, the places of Halebbedu, Belur, Somnathpura.

In this part, we can mention a few things regarding the temples of Jainism, although, like their caves, they minded of complying with the outline of the close-by Buddhi or Hindu temples. They made hundreds. Not in memorable places like the Buddhists did.

Neither in residential areas like the Hindus. Very far, away from any society, only where a pilgrim can reach them, brahmins’ habitats, of god and wild birds’ shelters. The temples of Jainism are mostly found in the west India, where wealthy merchants leave, followers of Mahavira.

Northern, in Kashmir, we find another temple variation, Indian to its base. They have a rectangle yard surrounded by cells, predestined for statues. Walking up some stairs we pass to the pre-chamber and after that we walk down the yard; in the middle of it the main temple stands, over a base. The special and unique characteristic here are the overhead roofs, saddled and progressively smaller as they reach the sky. This is a general feature of the temples close to the Himalayas and further to China. Then a clover arch engraved in a pediment reminds the Greek-roman outline, but the columns are definitely Doric looking. In Martand and Awantipur you’ll see the most important samples of the Kashmiri acme from the 8th till the 9th century AD. 46

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The rest of the architecture Some tributary buildings, like walls, equipped with steps, close by the river sides, where sacral baths take place, tanks and cisterns built by lake edges, always by the Indian’s craving for water, and a few tombs surrounded by columns, topped by canopies, perpetuate the cremation of the maharaja and his beloved wives. These palaces spread around the country constitute a few more of the expressions of the Indian architecture.

The palaces, not that old, are found to all the cities that during the Muslim state were the chairs of the local dynasts and mostly in Rajputana (central and NW India). Often built in graphical locations, nailed on rocks, with castles around, are mirrored over natural or artificial lakes. There are no clear outlines or proportions, as their main purpose was practicality. A stack of public and private apartments may constitute one or more daedalus buildings, like The palace of Gwalior (part of it) in Gwalior and Amber (or Amer), usually multileveled. Lots of additional constructions later, with domes and balconies of east origin. Some present with a rectangle outline in a garden, resembling the Mongolians’. Between the oldest, and not before the 13th century, we find some in the central India. Inside them, inside the walls, the roofs, the objects you may read the type of culture the Indian court was following: an oriental beam of opulence, the one that makes the human soul sluggish. The recent, except for the Muslim ones, have some European influences, neither well digested nor of good taste.

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The muslim buildings Pre-Mongolian The Muslim architecture covers the area of the Indian, more or less, but as they are more familiar through the byzantine art, we will write less for it. It has so little from the Indian character, and it is less eternal, since the sand cement is used widely here.

The actual dome and the arch are the most obvious characteristics that manifest by the Muslim architecture at the end of the 12th century and brought to this country to replace its round or pyramidal towers. Even balconies, kiosks, minarets and railing windows. The bold plasticity of the Indian temple went away in front of the purely architectural and strictly iconoclastic spirit of the Muslims. And since the group adoration is a fact for the new religion, the temple opens its hug to accept its faithful, like it happened with the Christians after they took over the classics. The dead are buried now, and often in magnificent tombs, the palaces are well designed along with gardens and fortresses.

The Turkish art started from Delhi and got spread all around the country. Local styles developed like variations dictated by the mining materials found in the area, the contact with local or foreign traditions and the personal tastes of the sultans or the artists themselves. Simple and strict as they are these monuments, stand behind in fame and taste, from the upcoming Mongolian.

In the region of Delhi, where 5 dynasties succeed one another, we find a few octagonal covered tombs with a domus in the middle and kiosks around. The Qutub Minar, symbol of the prophet’s victory, is an imposing minaret which reaches the 70 meters in height. Surrounded by balconies and strips of repousse moto taken from the Koran, stands in between the ruins of the first Indian-Muslim art.

The Mongolian From the 16th century the Mongolians transfuse some new blood to the arts. Marble from red stone or mixed made, their monuments have another beam, they have color and the seal of eternity, regarding their elements but also through their sensitivity. Wealth, political union, relative peace and devoted emperors, nourished by a Persian taste. They seeded this taste all over India but mostly at the two main chairs, of Delhi and Agra. Gardens from paradise, temples, castles and palaces and tombs immeasurable.

In the beginning, with the wide-open policy of Akbar, a common architecture was about to be created, with the sincerity of Indian-Mongolian principles. This never made it to continue. This tendency can be read at the palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, a ghost town close to Agra. The bulbous architecture of the prophet is complexed in harmony with the Indian symbolism. Even through its decoration, where the animal looking Indian relief entangles with the abstracted arabesque, you can see the effort for marrying the two worlds.

Clearly, the Mongolian palaces are presented differently from the daedalus Indian ones. Inside spacious and shady gardens full of trees, flowers and running waters, surrounded by well joint walls, high and smooth, they unroll their outline regularly with great deal of ground floor apartments, private, common or public, for the king, the queen 48

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or the harem; justice hall, hearing lobby, building for the music band, baths, temple etc.

A great example make the two red-castles in Delhi and Agra.

The most intense creation, though, of the Mongolians are their tombs. Built in similar gardens, they play the role of a grave and a palace together, since they were settled by their masters before their death. Passing the walls through some imposing pillars, you will find, either in the middle or in the background of the garden, on an overhead base, the tomb standing, as a quadrilateral or eight-sided dome-roofed structure. The actual graves are located underneath the base of the construction. In the basement’s apartments, above the earth, you will find only cenotaphs, uniformed and placed in respect to the actual graves: centrally, in the large chamber lies the royal couple and in the adjacent ones the rest of the family. At the four corners of the tomb rise guardian minarets, either attached to the mail building or distanced from it, at the corners of the base. The latter is seen at the Taj Mahal of Agra, were the most important Mongolian graves are gathered.

The Taj Mahal is the most beautiful Mongolian monument of the country. It is a conjugal gift of love, built by the sentimentalist Shah Jahan (in Persian: King of the world) for his most beloved wife between all other spouses of his. The equilibrated proportions and the dream harmonize over this monument which combines simplicity to its totality with the most The Taj Mahal delicate spirit in the individual decoration. We may call it the Mongolian Parthenon, while these technical conquests of the Mongolians found here their synthesis and their culmination.

The rest of the graves of Agra vary, from the smallest and most elegant to the most immerse, like the tomb of Akbar which rises gradient like a pagoda having its four minarets at its wall-pylon. Generally, there isn’t any fairytale gold hiding in there, anymore. They keep though some very impressive colorations which wear with time, and they look like dense-colored modern configurations of abstracted painting. The phantasmagoric decoration of the flowered world made by kaleidoscopic stones remains intact. The sayings from the Koran overflow till the front of the tombs with more sketching.

The temples look poorer although magnificent. They knew very well the Mongolians how to take care of life and death, instead of just casting incense towards the heavens.

These are not sealed constructions. There are 3 or more niches that lead through a columned gallery, to a spacious yard, surrounded by other galleries as well. The climate here requests an open temple, like the Aghia Sofia without its western wall.

From the second half of the 16th century, and for a hundred years, three great Mongolian emperors left a respectable cultural heritage, each one according to his personal taste. Akbar left simple and sturdy buildings, Jahangir some beautiful romantic gardens, and Shah Jahan a mature and delicate architecture, which with its elegance reaches femininity. The narrow-minded intolerance that followed threw art and empire to a rogue, to make it easier for the European intrusion.

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Sculpture In general The prehistorical plasticity of the Indus valley, was expressed with all kind of materials, omens a brilliant future. After the dark millennium that follows, we face from the pre-Christianic centuries, a monumental sculpture, with few findings. It is an art with notable attainments which doesn’t, though, attribute the ideal of the Indian artist, the expression of the inexpressible. To make this become artistic reality, and have the foreign influences absorbed so that the artist reaches his inspiration, it will take centuries.

A primitivism will always be around as the inexpressible is still wanted.

Meanwhile, the symbolisms keep increasing. The god statues found in the cells of the temples are very few. Over the main body of the temple, where the people walk and pray, the fairytale of the world is blossoming and unrolls. Here, the Indian plasticity narrates, with scenes, motions, symbols like an endless book which unfolds in front of us and asks its decoding, so it won’t remain speechless after a good impression.

The seated Buddha, having his palms turned up, like his soles, meditates concentrated till enlightenment comes. When he touches the earth with his hand, it is when he gets power to win temptation. The latter was about to block him from seeing the light of truth and the salvation of the world. Having his hands upon his chest, he teaches, he gives motion to the wheel of Law. And with his right arm open, he stands like saying: Don’t be afraid, keep going with courage! The halo, ancestor of the one of Christian saints, later, talks about the enlightened Master. A knob over his head shows his connection with the next (the place where gods, angels and people live together in a perfect place after life).

The Hindu Pantheon has its own triad which often in sculpture presents by the name Trimurti: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer but also the recreator. The first one, after he created the world, caused his own vanishing as he was not needed anymore. Therefore, we rarely see him standing alone in art. Vishnu shows up with all his nine reincarnations, from fish to Buddha. Either he lies or he dances over a catastrophic demon, always guarding Dharma, with eight arms holding the world and with many more forms. Shiva follows the same patterns, but also, he presents as an eremite inspiring a tremendous force – by riding a bull – capable to burn up and built the universe again from zero. He hugs Parbati, like so many couples, on the Indian temple and becomes one with her; so one, that he becomes a hermaphrodite. He is light and flying holding the world at the same time in balance. His many hands rise, hold, lower or show, while narrating, his drum - vibrancy, shock! -, his torch – may he turn everything to ashes and remake them – his steps over the demon, to save the world, are just a small part of his load of symbolisms.

If we wish to go further, we will find so many monstrous or animal-looking deities.

Between them, in a separate spot, the elephant-head Ganesha, son of Shiva and representative of the human wisdom. There are more semi-gods and goddesses, flying and serpent spirits, the whole polymorphic animal kingdom which constitutes symbols and expressions of the divine. The squirms of the cobra symbolize the evolution of the world, they believe… while its poison reminds of death and the change of its skin resembles the reincarnation. How buried, becomes the Indian soul!

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From its technical standpoint, the Indian sculpture, generally, is presented exuberant. It seems like it is afraid of leaving the smallest gap, as you get anxious when you look at its scenes. The man overtops in every theme, overloaded though with symbolisms and ornaments, having them along with his clothes tightly attached to him. The animal kingdom follows and after that the vegetation, symbolically speaking, and then the geometric shapes. No sign of the spacious Greek art that gives you the feeling of freedom by just looking at it.

Its History – the beginning The first monuments of historical plasticity go back to the ages of Asoka. Kind of strange, as they stand in front of an art which doesn’t look organically like the precursor of the art that follows. This plasticity has matured in a way which crystallizes getting shapes. Later, we wonder why we stand in front of primitivism. This is a sign that this art is foreign, and although it doesn’t ignore the classic Greek one, it relates to the Persian.

The animals standing over the capitals, lions, cows, elephants and human figures are the few corpses left by the monumental plasticity of the Maurya’s. Everything is well polished, realistic and stylish but always with dynamism, like the one the lion heads show.

Asoka’s column and its lion heads

The preparation From the next two pre-Christianic centuries that follow, till the middle of the 4th century AD, the Indian sculpture rushes for the path of its classic accomplishment, which belongs to the Gupta’s acme. On the facades of the primordial caves and the balustrades that surround the stupas of Bharhut and Sanchi, we meet its first origin. Scenes regarding the life and the previous reincarnations of Buddha, and more scenes from wars, palaces, myths, animals and vegetation constitute its subjects. In the early stage of this period, the ikon of Buddha is not presented; only the subjects of the adoration to him, like his symbols, his footsteps, his stupa and more of his religion’s metaphysical symbolisms. The Jiaksis, like the Greek Hamadryades (spirits of the trees), combined traditionally with fertility, present like naked women caught by a tree branch, sacral of course, often constitute a common theme.

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The superior part of a pillar in Sanchi

Buddha from the art of Gupta

Initially, this art is simple and naĂŻve. Gradually, an internal power blows and creates the figures, the strict frontality is overwhelmed and becomes an effort to give some depth to the reliefs; something that never comes to its completeness in the Indian art. A vertical perspective, which will always be confound by the enlargement of the figures according to their values, will always exist and the space will never be organized scientifically as it was in the west during the Renaissance.

Sanchi presents a little more promoted, from a technical standpoint, compared with the Bharhut. The latter though dominates in genuine artistic sensation. The live popular feeling, from simplicity to a childish naivety and the dynamism we see, are missing here from the pompous repousse of Sanchi. In the ruins of the balustrades of Amaravati stupa, found in the Madras museum, we can watch the evolution of the above mentioned relief plasticity and determine up to which point they fertilized the Indian art some Greek-roman influences around the 3rd century AD (the ruins from Bharhut are found in Calcutta but those from Sanchi are standing at their original site). The life of Buddha here is illustrated on white marble, without missing his human nature, and unfolded with rocking figures full of passion and technical dexterity.

The school of Mathura, in central North India, is the most resistant to the foreign influences. It has a long tradition, from the pre-Christianic years, till the 6th century AD. It starts stiff and awkward in the beginning, but with time it gets to a more tractable stage, due to its growth during the Gupta’s acme ages. Still, contrary to its humanization through the Greek rules of standard and proportion, its weight never inclined towards the form and the rule; an internal light seems to discipline the materiality of its main body, overpowering its sensualism.

Gandhara, The Hellenic India To the higher left, towards Kashmir, around the branching of the rivers Indus and Kabul, and up to the point where their valleys on the north are blocked by high mountains, you ‘ll find Gandhara. Over its art you will meet a great part of Greece. Nowadays it belongs to North Pakistan, but a part of this city reaches the neighbor of Kabul, in Afghanistan. A crossroad of many civilizations, this area was. Once, it was a Persian es52

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tate. Later it was conquered by Alexander the Great. His successors, the Seleucids, after keeping it only for 20 years, they delivered it to Asoka’s father, who initiated it to Buddhism. During the 2nd century BC it is conquered again by the Greeks and after that it is surrendered to the Bactrians and after that to the Kushans. The latter’s greatest king Kanishka, supported Buddhism as well. From the second half of the 3rd century AD, it is delivered to the Sasanian (Persian) empire, who will hold it till the first half of the 5th century. After that, the Huns ravaged the area along with its civilization.

The place has not been explored well. The archeologists stumbled at the hostility of the tribes; it is said. Eccentric stupas, complicated buddhi caves, were beautified by sculptures with bold Greek character. Their dating is not certain, but generally it seems that very few are pre-Christianic, few were made after 400 AD and none created after 600 AD. Their acme is assumed between 50-200 AD. The older they are, the more they have a Greek character. The newer are suffocating by Persian-Indian influences.

In architecture, the Greek influence is obvious only over some columns. The Greekness of the sculptures though can be found through the technique, the themes and the names of the artists, since it is very easy to read the name Agesilaus under the writing “Agisala”. The Greek rule has humanized this plasticity, it gave proportions and organized its synthesis. The effort for pleating is persistent, resulting to reaching the laws physics, sometimes becoming talkative or monotonous. The anatomy is meek, the temper is so familiar to us, the equilibration between the figure and the spirit, the posture and some more individual principles, like the headdress and the nose speak the language of the Greek art.

A Buddha of Gandhara The themes to their summation are buddhi, but we also obwith Greek spirit serve some Greek ones; centaurs, newts, Dionysian scenes, garlands and one Athena. Buddha often reminds of Athena.

Through the buddhi scenery, the prehistoric and historic life of the great Master passes in front of us, repousse in different syntheses or in lonely statues, small or half in size, sometimes in the natural size, standing or cross-feet seated; his reincarnations, his mother’s dream, his birth, his childhood and school age, his marriage. Then comes the great question and the give up of the family and the luxuries of the palace, the wandering and the contemplation to solve the enigma of life, his enlightenment, finally. He teaches people, brahmins and deities, adored even in life, goes through eternal Nirvana. His body is cremated, he gets a funeral, his corpses are shared, the adoration of his tomb (stupa) begins. And many bodhisattvas, his apostles, who continued his teaching.

Countless works of art, found in the museums of India, in Asia generally, in Europe and America show the productivity of Gandhara. Close to the statues and the bass reliefs, made over colored green stone, a line of creations by clay follow, terracotta and colored stucco, which get reproduced by die cast molding. The flexion is more than obvious now.

After a thousand years of blossoming, this Greek source of light in the heart of Asia, is extinguished.

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Acme Through this general blossoming of the Gupta’s prosperity, art finds its zenith and although its rules will give it a form, later they will suffocate it. Brahmanism rises now but the Buddhism doesn’t stay behind in the production quality. On the contrary, in these three centuries of the Gupta’s acme, we meet the spiritual figures of Buddha. The chisel finally manages to attribute the aspiration of Nirvana. With schematic greeklish folding, the Master, standing or seated or just as a bust, doesn’t seem untouched by the air of the classic Greek art. The plasticity doesn’t go any further and its character in general is Indian, following the local Mathurin The middle part of the rock-relief in Mahabalipuram art, to its mature phase. The full of spirit, body of Buddha, here, has digested the sense of all the abstracted symbols of the older sculpture. Self-restricted now, has the sight of blissfulness and is ablaze by an internal light, full of compassion for the humans.

Proportional virtues are found in the Hindu production, which, by using its own pantheon, deluges the fastening of the Indian art. The simplicity here subsides, giving its place to something more passive, the sensuousness becomes more obvious but not so coarse. This art is praiseworthy and free; it knows well, and it can do whatever it wants.

But is in danger, as it may crystalize, losing its primitive vein that helps it blossom.

The radiance of the Gupta’s art continues till after the sunset of its empire on the 7th century. It is spread beyond its borderlines. The statues of the great cave of the Elephanta, of the Ellora, and of the Ajanta carry its seal. Up north till Kashmir, and above the Indian earth, it showed its domesticating force. Down southern, it gave its simple form, as we see it on the rock-curving of Mahabalipuram, even though it was the Pandavas’ land and not of the Gupta.

Vishnu, in his creative part, laying on the serpent which symbolizes eternity, or while holding the world with his eight arms, and the scene of the minotaur goddess who kills the evil spirits, are some of the magnificent intaglio of the Mahabalipuram caves. The greatest sense though comes from the great carved synthesis, outdoor, over the face of the rock, close to the street. The researchers haven’t given a name to this yet. Either if it is the cathode of the Ganges from the heaven or the ascetism of Arjuna to get supernatural powers, or something similar. Either way, Ganges is depicted in the middle of the scene and descents like a cataract; Arjuna from the left side, gets self-tormented standing on one foot, bony by ascetism, and many other figures, deities, human, serpents, elephants and other animals, over the ridge of the rock the constitute a synthesis full of motion with a mystic anxiety. These thin-curved figures of the 7th century, bring our memory back to the rhythm of Amaravati and fill our soul with some other happiness, as you look at the rock blossoming with a spirit of authentic creativity.

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The descent Through the last centuries of the first millennium and the first centuries of the second millennium, the Middle Ages enter slowly. The classic India with its naked creations has seen the sunset. Simplicity, freshness, spirit, they all start to retreat in front of the cruel rule and the lifeless conservatism. Some, attributed the fact to the prevail of the rules of the Gita, which declares: I love the man Who accepts the enemy and friend the same way, The shame and the glory.

Same, peacefully, he encounters Warmth and chill, happiness and pain …without desires, impassive, unmoved From anything.

Behind this spirit of Gita, no death is hiding; just the intense drama of life. The etiology of dryness in art is elsewhere. Its roots in life, must break first.

Truly, after the Gupta, the Indian unity broke. Through the small kingdoms that grew up, strictly theocratic societies developed; meaning, death for every acme of life. Palace and priesthood became one, kings and brahmins were divined and they both started the people’s bleeding.

The great built temples multiply, the caste hardens. The statues, the idols of gods coincide with gods. The brahmins looked up their old texts and found “documents” which they adjusted properly to fortify their new status. They found more and more symbolisms, unbelievably meticulous and imposed them to art, with special texts, to make it capable to guide the humans to a definite unity with the divine. Every inspirational source of creativity dried up.

A dancing Shiva. Bronze Not too dry though, through the next centuof the 10th century ries, as the overloaded scenery over the temples, are not always the ones the unbent theocratic clique wants, maybe because the new dynasties, primitive at that time, had their blood boiling too much to cool it down by the brahmins’ insipidity.

This death mask of the Middle Ages never made it to kill the soul of the Indian, although it buried him, very deep. The superior classes found the way out and the contract to run riot behind the mask. Just look at the erotic scenery of the temples. That was the time for salacity, placed side A couple from the Khajuraho temple 55

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by side with the skeletonized ideal of ascetism.

The figures become stylish, dressed, loaded with ornaments, drowned by an elsewhere décor, like if the abstracted arabesque-mania is driven to twinning with the Indian idolatry. You’ll find paradigms in the temples of Halebbedu, and Gujarat. With more freedom and gallant are presented the erotic scenes of the Orissa (or Odisha) temples, although the décor-mania tends to cover the rest of the temple’s surface. A dynamism is preserved under this mantle, easily spectacle over the horses of the great temple of Konark.

In year 1.000 AD the freezes of the KhajuraAnd this way the art died, in Madurai ho temple project. The ridges of the temples are loaded with restraint, in style, zones of decoration. The zones are three in number and surround the temple against its vertical concaveness. We see other scenes over the base of the temple which subscribe the preparation or the action of love making. Long, liger figures, half sized, with angulated face, large breasts, – the women – show a passiveness, with a miraged happiness in their eyes, an internal psychosomatic breakdown that doesn’t let anything to stoop to raw vulgarity.

Around this season, the bronze plastics found great development in south India, which follows the evolution of the marble. The work of arts that are free from the decorating load are as distinct between the 8th -12th century. An integer pantheon stands priestly, gesturing and having to the center, ruling, the dancer Shiva.

The Muslims couldn’t add anything to the plasticity, since the Koran forbids every performance of human figure. They showed their dexterity only through the balustrading windows.

The barbarization Through the following centuries the Indian sculpture’s quality sinks between the two rhythms which differ as much as they look alike: the baroque and rococo. Colossal figures are created, alone or loading the temples. The meticulous works are overdone. Ending up in a lifeless conservatism, nothing artistic is left. Fantastic and monstrous figures are thrown up, stacked, like if an emptiness needs to be filled, the one of a chaotic soul, that totters behind a cruel crust. Meanwhile, the European fashion intruded with its odd plasticity and the barbarization is complete in shame. Just look at the great temple of Madurai.

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The paininting Its facet The manifested artistic production of China and Japan in quantity and quality, is painting and the above – architecture and sculpture - come second. Contrary to these countries, in India, painting comes third. This is not due to Gita’s spirit, which motivates the labor, as painting doesn’t premise less labor than the other two arts. On the contrary, painting needs something more, spiritual, inherent with the nature of the Gita and the Indian and with greater effort since it is obliged to attribute three dimensional themes over the two dimensions. The cause of its few corpses are elsewhere. Time favors less the maintenance of this art, especially under the climate of India. The latter allied with intolerance to wear down its older production. In the recent years though, we see a rich representation of painting through the miniatures. By any means, the Indians never became maestros of the brush touch, never were so delicate and airy, never inspired such a poetry over their creations, like the Chinese and Japanese did. They created an art beyond any place and time, strongly attached to their local conditions, even during their good times.

Pre-historical painting corpses have been found in the land of India, in caves of paleolithic primitivism with hunting scenery, resembling the ones of Spain, but not with the same quality and not as old. To meet the historical painting of the country, we must go to the first Christianic centuries. It seems that the tradition was never disrupted judging from some old pitchers and from the Sanskrit texts which never stop talking about palaces. Some books which belong to pre-Christianic years, define the skills of the painter and the sensual rules of his art.

Ajanta The oldest, saved to our days, painting, is found in Ajanta and belong to the Gupta’s ages. It is about mural paintings in the internal surfaces of the caves, created after coating the rock with a special absorbing paste. Similar traces are found in northern India’s caves till Middle Ages and in the southern India: but only traces and an art not so meritorious to bridge or restore the gap to the recent years; so we stand in front of the great Indo-Mongolian miniature production.

Through the Ajanta caves, we form a complete ikon about what the Indian palette achieved in the acme of its creation. From all the caves that maintain to some extend its traces, we can stand on the 1st and the 17th. The latter’s Painting from cave no17, Ajanta mural paintings are older, as they belong to the 5th - 6th century, in the heart of the Gupta’s blossoming. Fully mature, the buddhi painter overwhelms the conventionalism of the previous and present (Ajanta’s) 57

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tradition: the frontality and the layout of the shapes in zones have broken. Clear technique, equilibrated design, ruthless outline, peaceful expression. The classic to its zenith.

Walking into the first cave, we move a century later and stand in front of a romantic style. Thin figures, sweet colors, a baroque, since everything becomes vociferous. The eyes become emphatically fissionable, like open wounds, on purpose stretched, to have the soul exposed. After that, marasmus comes. The linearization of the design and the decorating overload presage this.

The themes constitute scenes from the palaces or from Buddha’s life, matters which are connected and come out of the walls with a plethora like the Amalthea’s horn. The ceilings, the columns, the verandas show that painting décor deluged every surface and hugged human figures, plants, flowers, animals and geometrical outlines. Even deities of the Hinduism and loving couples present in this ox bolt hole; this is a sign that Buddhism has lost his initial purity.

Plasticity and depth are present too, but not with their strict meanings. These concepts never became scientific, as they remained inside the borderlines of experience and conventionalism. If you stare enough this great bodhisattva in the first cave, he overtops with his size, proportionally inappropriate compared to the rest of the synthesis. But his inertial, ethical stature enforces this. He stands in front of the great decision: renounce the world, to save it.

Parallel in time with the mural paintings of Ajanta are some badly preserved corpses from Bagh, much inferior in art and poorer in colorations. This is a different style, with stiff outline and cosmic themes. Even more cosmic present about 20 female figures in Shri Lanka. They are close to the Ajanta’s style and they make obvious how great stood Ajanta, teaching Asia how to paint.

Miniatures Almost a thousand years later, till the 16th century, painting returns meritorious.

Mainly, we deal with miniatures and not with mural paintings, since the paper has been invented. In between the 11th -14th centuries we spot some samples from Buddhism and Jainism which are illustrated handwritings. The implementation follows the Indian tradition, which is conventional and not naturalistic; it has a symbolism and a mystic atmosphere.

The Mongolians Contrary to this, with the Mongolian miniature, in the 16th century, we stand in front of a different climate. These devotee rulers found a way to slide over the Muslim prohibition of human imprint, at least in their own court. And they gave us an illustrated drunk of life and colors. Celebrations, hunting, battles, portraits, animals, a life all the way in happiness overflows and unfolds in front of our eyes. Now we have names, of many artists, Indian, Muslim and even Persian, as the Persian painters worked first in the Mongolian courts. The early Mongolian miniatures brought many conventional figures from the Persians, the stylish, thin background full of trees, flowers, clouds and rocks with strict outline. But with time, through a gradual coloration change, they get closer to the real58

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istic molding although they keep their peculiar type of air-perspective, as they are seen sidelong from above.

Even the most important illustrated handwritings are countless. The fact is that a perceptible evolution and change is notable between the most brilliant dilettante emperors. Akbar assigned to illustrate historical handwritten texts of his actions and of his ancestors. Brawny as he was, he asked to translate the Mahabharata to the Persian language. For its illustration, many Indian and non-Indian painters worked. Jahangir guides the painting towards the Persian models, and at the same time to realism. It tends to become more sensitive but also it is Local Indian tradition, losing its initial impulse. The paintings multiply and beJain manuscript tween them you can see some genuine portraitures with spiritual infiltration and conferment, and not just a photography of the face. During Shah Jahan’s empire, the Mongolian miniature becomes so delicate that turns to exfoliation according to the period’s tendencies.

For a century, the Mongolian creations will beam and spread from the northern to the rest of India, where it will rationalize the local coarse and conventional tradition, to just die later in the short-hearted Aurangzeb, through its factorization. Before dying out though, it left its marks over the Indian production. Something from its inner temper and from the psychism that infiltrates it, was given to the Mongolian art by the Indian; and in return, it takes from the former the themes and the technical plasticity.

The Indian For 2-3 centuries, till the 19th, when the descent started, two great parts of the Indian earth, the Rajputana to the west and the Himalayas on the north, became centers of painting blossoming. Several schools, characterized by their syntheses and their colors, took the analogue form of one of the two courts, also depending on the influence they had from the Mongolian politics and art. To differentiate the one school from the other you need familiarity and sometimes advanced sensitivity. It is not rare to face difficulties and confuse them even with the Mongolians.

The differences we note, along with the themes of the scenery, will help to distinguish them. The Indians, despite the panegyric character they took in the past, wrapped with graphical environment, keep their mystic mood. A religious symbolism sneaks to their cosmic appearance. Passive ladies waiting with endurance their beloved husbands and more often the nondescript god Krishna between the cows and female shepherds consist its inspirations along with other mythologic scenes taken from the brahmin texts and the great Indian epics.

It is worth of mentioning this god, here, since Krishna constitutes the wider circle in the Indian micrography. Adored by many, polymorphic between the Indian Pantheon, as it incarnates the supreme divine essence, the painters want him mostly as a shepherd-god and extremely human. From his childhood they present him as a milk thief. Later they have him grabbing in secret the clothes of the bathing milk-women. Next, he perches on 59

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top of a tree playing his flute to scare the bathing ladies and make them come out of the water with tremor trying to hide their nudity with their hands. Lots of outlaw crushes and cupids with Radha, analogue with the Greek goddess Hera, jealous and stubborn, either she resists to his necking or she is about to slap him for his disloyalty. The unity with her, it is said, symbolizes the mystic unity of the soul with god, and Kangras school, Krishna and Radha (through Mongolian realism) if you get deeper to this, there’s no ending.

The central-west India, today’s Rajasthan, is the province where the recent Indian miniature was born. The Rajput, either hostile or conciliatory with the Mongolians, they had a relative independence. The different schools, Mewar, Bundi, Bikaner, Tanjore and others, offer a variety to the art work; either they are older and closer to flatness and to the other conventionality of the Indian tradition, or they are approaching the Mongolian realism, as the time passes; and you can see that in the school of Bikaner.

The miniature flushes from Rajasthan to the Himalayas transferring its weight mostly to Panjab than to Kashmir. Some Indian kingdoms made roots in these slopes and with relative peace and freedom they reached prosperity to create during the 18th and 19th centuries. The blossoming Basohli school, loses its warmth in the 18th century. The big eyes on the faces and the conventional elements maintain the authenticity in the Indian art. The contrary happens with the rest of the schools, of which the one of Kangras stands distinctive with tis phantasmagoric face.

The two samples of the paintings we adduce show the primitive and popular character of the recent Indian painting and the other focuses to its realistic attribution through the Mongolian influences.

New proclivities The Indo-Islamic synthesis in painting offered the most recent blossoms to the Indian art when the time for the rest of its artistic creations was withering. Its circle though closed as well in the 19th century. It is flooded by the “European loans”. And its new form hasn’t matured yet. Either it is like a despair imitation or it moves over a modern level, which, although qualitative, cannot be assorted if it belongs to a museum of Paris, of Athens or of Delhi; still far away from the battering reality of the country.

A reaction started from Bengal, connected wider with the rejuvenation of the Indian nationalism which brought back to its roots the Indian art; often with superficial approach though and not in depth. Still, there are brilliant exceptions of those who eavesdropped deeper the pulse of the Indian soul. Among the important recent painters, the gigantic personality of Rabindranath Tagore dominates. This amazing creator transcended the borderlines of his country, because he stood up as an Indian in his entity, never been narrow-minded. With an impulsive overflow of genius he gave fresh cosmogonic rhythms to the human fetal state which tends to evolve and complete gradually emerging from his dark abyss.

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PART TWO

The face and soul of India, today The tour The West Arriving Before you step on its mythical earth, from mud and dream fermented, India welcomes you. In the middle of February, 4 am and some short-panted custom officers welcome you at the airport of Mumbai under a host of funs which whir demonically.

You get dyspnea while you start walking for downtown through the stinking muddy water. Dampness splashes you and everything you touch glues on you. As you get closer, India welcomes you again, shocking. Careless shacks, but eternally messy, low and badly constructed, made by canes, grass, tits and rags, adrift of the monsoon, filled by dark skeletonized legs that wander in the surrounding muddy waters.

Mumbai Walking towards the seaside you reach the city center. Its great buildings, public and private, remind you of the freshly rejuvenated Europe, when the latter was “discovering” India. The canes which offer their shadow, the hanging –with no shame– white clothes spread out in the balconies, bring us back to the east.

If you walk around the town, you’ll meet all the gods of the world. Buddha, Christ, Ahura-Mazda, Allah, all in their own corral and flock, are here. The Hindu pantheon dominates with its countless deities. Half-naked brahmins in open temples, are overflowed by the flowers and their fragrances, get incensed with clattering by drums and horns which sound like the mumble of the beasts and the foaming rivers of their land.

Climbing higher, you dawdle the gardens, as the night wraps the crowded city, in humidity as well. Thank goodness these small oases exist in India… Cloud watching down the bowing seaside, you taste the day’s firestorm of Mumbai. Over that way you find its display window, the most synchronous face of the city; which is spread across the length of the busy coast avenue, surrounding a great part of the Mumbai bay while at its feet breaks the wave of the Arabic sea, blurred and stench. But look at its exotic burning-colored flowers that made roots in this mud! Mud and sun, the main elements of India, with which you get familiar with, since you dropped the fake load, the one you used to bring along into your soul. You empty, you fill in, you empty again and you keep adding after you remove again, working like the sculptor, the clay, till you ideate inside 61

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you the statue of this polymorphic and erratic country. You might discover here the universe, through its whole evolutionary course, from the creation to the fire and brimstone, and read on its spine the human, from the beast till the saint’s stage. But you have a long way to go and you shouldn’t rush, or else the fetus to be born may come atrophic and deformed, like a 6-month premature.

After my anchorage, I got stubborn with the Greek vice consul, as although he was around for quite long, he was rushing to simplify every situation. His opinion was that it was better during the English occupation. “What am I going to see from now on?”, he was saying. “Except for barbaric things, there is nothing for me here to see”. I felt pity for him. Three days later, I revisited him crushed. My curiosity to get into the inmost of the Indian, threw me, from my first steps, to a robbery. A local “doctor” took me from my hotel to accommodate me at his house. Although I don’t drink alcohol or coffee, he managed to have me drink a local “tea”. All the sudden I felt sleepy and as I was trying to put my 900 USD (from my scholarship) to my pockets, I fell on the floor. In the dawn, I found out that my pockets were accommodated as well, halfway. The consul got on fire hearing this. “Did you think you are in Florence? You came to study in Florence, hah? You are lucky you didn’t find your guts on the floor”, he said with choler.

It was a strong buffet. Although I was still in the beginning of my journey, this wasn’t enough to make me chicken out. I went on with stubbornness, against hunger and thirst, against the scorcher and the danger this land may offer to you copiously; as my desire to discover India became inextinguishable.

The places around Close or far from Mumbai, in this waterside of India, are located the most legendary caverns and caves of the world. Although Buddhism made its first steps in the east coast, it blossomed in the west. In history, the west seems more earthly than the east. These brusque rocky ridges of the Ghats got the attention of the brahmins’ preserving chisels as it worked as a challenge.

Close to Mumbai is the famous cave of the Elephanta island. In the morning I took the boat from the Gate of India, a huge building with local rhythm, which insists to mention the English occupation along with the Indian tolerance. Millions of boats in the puddled open sea and an hour later we arrive. Riders are waiting to carry you with stretchers, like a maharaja, up to the top where the legendary cave stands. As I overtake them walking up the path, I see the bitterness (oh, what a bitterness) on the skeletonized face of the riders. Children and monkeys surround you and it’s kind of hard to distinguish them.

The way takes you straight to the great cave, a brahmin temple of the 8th century, at the time when Shiva was digesting Buddha for good. The cave carved to its wholeness, forms a kind of a cross whose lateral galleries lead to glades. Lines of columns hold the ceiling and on the sides some reliefs narrate the endless fairy tale of Hinduism. After you get used to the submissive half-darkness you distinguish the brahmin pantheon in action.

Its triad speaks on its own: Brahma creates the world, Vishnu maintains it, and Shiva destroys it. All three of them are one god: Shiva, with his three expressions… Therefore, the artist represents them together as a three-faced wholeness by the name Trimurti.

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This is a rare piece of art which shows amazing dynamism, in the background of the cave; the Gupta’s beam at its best is here.

More deities, coming from the far Vedic pantheon, like the cloud-attractor Indra and Mother-Earth, have their place in here, as well. And angels and demons and animals and serpents, and deities, all of which obey Shiva who overtops gigantic and polymorphic. Passively sweet-looking, he holds a lotus in his hand becoming then the creator. Fearfully decorated with skulls and serpents he becomes a destroyer, to restart the construction Trimurti, Elephanta island of the world in new casts. And to keep him balanced he dances whirling and cradling his 8-10 arms, becoming a preserver. He is the beginning and the end of the world. His permanent symbol is the lingam, a kind of a phallus as the ancient Greeks would have said, which is in a different cell inside a cave.

In Ellora and Ajanta are located, in groups, most of the caves of India. Mountains have been delved under the great patience of the brahmins. Nothing else. Mud, water, wood, tiles, engines, all replenished by one chisel hold for centuries by the hands of one faith.

Ajanta Both the cave locations can be accessed from Aurangabad, which is only a day by t rain, and another hundred kilometers village road ride to get to Ajanta. Thirty caves are hiding here close to each other, in the sharp shore of a concave dale; around its bed, a heavenly blossoming oasis is found. They were buried for more than a thousand years to the human memory, since the yellow robes of the buddhi priests stopped agitating inside them. Till when in 1817, the English soldiers stumbled on them.

Rich or poor, small or large, finished or not, very few have the outline of a temple.

The rest are monasteries. After you pass the first half of them, you meet the oldest ones which go back to the pre-Christianic centuries. Simple and iconoclastic as they are these caves, do not accommodate their god’s picture. But as you keep going, you find more recent ones, built in the 7th century, when the Buddhi Nirvana reigned over here too.

Everything, chisels, prays, breaths got silent. The Master thrones in a cell of the background, or even to the sides; the rest of the dĂŠcor, with its tropical inflation, over the facet, the columns, everywhere, tends to drown the nakedness and the simplicity the Master asked for.

The fame of Ajanta though came from its paintings. All the important works the Indian land could preserve from this perishable art, is found here.

Overview of Ajanta caves Just 5 or 6 caves make the Pompei of 63

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India. Either from the old ones –teared to pieces– or through the freshest ones, you have in front of your eyes and soul the fairy tale of Buddha’s life in its complete colored apparel. Hazy earthly colors are teared by passionate yellow-burning ones, and at the same time they get enriched by breezy white, blue and green tones.

Ellora Closer to the starting post is Ellora. You will pester quite a lot if you want to reach it.

Caravel busses take you there, with sparse timetables, potted with local villagers accompanied with a vomitous odor. They move slowly and they stand for long at the endless feasts and the religious street celebrations. Sometimes you arrive, and you get a payback for all these. You’ll find another 30 caves here, but not continuous like in Ajanta. They unroll along a chained hill line. As they are more recent, they are not just buddhi. You see the great Master seated in the dark belly of the first ones only; simplicity along with nudity. Only the flaming valley from the opposite sends its light reflectively, just enough to glimmer his redemptive smile.

You reach the brahmin caves. Temple and monastery coexist here, as the former is surrounded by the cells of the latter. Buddha is fully evicted! Replaced by the demon-pantheon of Hinduism. You mystify in front of the cave called Kailasa. A hundred years of labor. Tripled and in two levels, the monolithic temple stands in the middle, having face to face, on the sides, the carved cells, like cut bread slices with a hundred feet height.

Elephants hold the temple on their back. And all the rest of the statuary of gods, semigods, scenery from the Epics, and many more unimaginable figures, overflow constantly from each and every surface, like a blossom of the temple, of the rock, of the mountain, of India, of the world.

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Heading up Gujarat Up to the left, as you are mounting, you reach Gujarat, the western protuberance of India. Homeland of Mahatma Gandhi and a place of multiple temples of Jainism, as here you’ll meet most of the Mahavira’s followers, often wealthy merchants, like a bitter irony against his preaching, which seeks to exterminate the human needs, after he threw away his last rugs and reached the endless ascetism. “It’s a sin, he was saying, to kill every leaving creature to eat; it is a sin even to step on the grass as there is soul there as well”. His followers, even when they adopt the mortgage of their prophet, they tend to forget that they take advantage of the human flesh becoming richer. And for atonement, voluntarily or not, they become brave donors for a phantasmagoric temple erection.

We won’t go through the paths and streets of the whole country though, as our mission is not to write a tour guide, but to discover India to its core.

The Rajput’s land We are taking the acclivity to Rajasthan. The greatest state of newest India. If you keep NW, you enter deeper into its desert. Sandy all the way, nothing but cactuses grow around, resembling the Greek Mani, only there are no mountains here. Regarding the rest, they resemble as a tribe to the inhabitants of Mani, as they didn’t bend over their head to the intruding Muslim, and since then, insist to their cruel and bloody customs.

Rajputana has a personality. A lot of color decorates it, from the buildings to their apparel. A lot of times the Indians talk with pride about this fashion of theirs.

As you keep climbing the country, you can’t miss the Mount Abu. At the height of 1.200 meters, you are staring a magical valley seeded with rocks and vegetation close by a heaven-made lake, where monasteries of Jainism stand. Spooky as they look, they remind the prophet whom they honor. The groom runaway from the marriage, leaving the guests and the princess bride, renouncing this evil world, as great affliction overwhelmed him when he saw the animal they were about to sacrifice to celebrate.

Famous temples, built and not in caves, surrounded by a court and cells, with seats for standing or seated Tirthankaras fully naked, exactly the way the prophets of Jainism want it. Inside these temples you will find a flowering-spuming desert, with an amazingly phantasmagoric décor. The sponsor, it is said, to make the technicians expedite the meticulous artwork, promised to weigh the removed rocky chips and pay them with equal weight in silver. When he saw that it wouldn’t go any faster, he challenged them to surpass their limits by paying them in gold.

We keep going north. The trees become a rare thing. The white sand is spread all over.

The earth, the people, the animals become slenderer. Plenty of earpieces, even to men.

Pierced ears all the way with grommets; skinny arms and legs but overloaded with heavy steel rings and bracelets, that they carry all day and night, while at work or asleep, like convicts. As the sun breaks down by heating, you chew the sand that sticks over your body when it gets windy. Cows and people get into the dirty-muddy water up to the neck, like amphibians, trying to go back in evolution’s chain and become aquatic again, you would think.

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You keep going. Rivers on the way, fricking out from their thirst, they are permanently buried under the sand. Burning ridges, dried up and after that, the desert. You may not be able to continue if the sandy winds find you, as you will have to camp for days. Long camel caravans come lower to bring fresh water. A little higher, they constructed recently some channels to irrigate the white sand; and it gets so fertile when it burns out its thirst…

As it is hard to get there, you may try to turn right and towards the center, directed to Delhi. Udaipur, Ajmer, Jaipur, Amber (or Amer) and the town-chain with monuments that narrate the Rajput’s glory are many.

Endless walls surround the ridges. Tall daedalus palaces built over craggy rocks, well-fortified, are mirrored in the lakes and cooled by the surrounding gardens. Dark labyrinths to keep the ladies of the harem hidden, and somehow you could see the basement’s round chamber, where the fire was kept alive, to swallow them, when the news of their master’s death would be heard.

Some of them today are museums and you can see in there, precious handwritten texts with miniatures of unknown meaning. Other times you see collections of western works of art, cold replicas, understanding this way the bad taste of the maharajas’ xenomania. When in good condition, you see wall paintings, furniture and gold, and the whole crystal polyhedral decoration of the ceiling, which, through the darkness, gives you the impression of a sky with restless, shiny, million-colored stars. In its vast scope, under the endless galleries, the population of the poor is housed, idles, pisses, getting back in a way, some of their –for centuries– trampled rights.

Agra Getting close to Delhi. Before that, you must check Agra. The two together, make the greatest bases of the Mongolians. Their glory shines mostly in Agra tough. Your mind gets bemused in front of the bulkiness and the beauty of their tomb monuments. They cannot be compared with the humble, scowling Turkish tombs of Delhi. Here, they show an unexpected peacefulness, not only because they were the home of their masters’ but also because they were touched by real art.

Between them, dominates the Taj Mahal, the construction of Shah Jahan, for housing his most beloved wife, his most precious love flower. Now he rests there too, by her side.

Your soul rests too, there, as you wander around admiring. You cannot get this freshness and rejoicing by the modern media, while the plain of Agra is in flames under the sun. Fully marbled, attached and harmonic, with enriched decoration inside delicate branches and colorful flowers made of dozens of colored stones each, close to the Jamuna temple, looks like an intangible dream-fantasy which found its expression in the most solid matter.

You don’t feel like leaving this place. At some point, this mystagog finishes. And as you leave, your attention is attracted by the heavy, bronze-binding gates, at the entrance of the precinct. And then you find out that those were necessary, along with the watches over the minarets, since these tombs were hiding lots of gold and diamonds. Many thoughts were crossing my mind as I was leaving. I took a conductor with a three-wheel bicycle, to run me by the city’s Jamuna river edge.

The sun was down. The road was ascending, and the boy was pulling together his sunburned body spasmodically, standing over the saddle and stretching his lean legs to get 66

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me higher. I was staring at the Taj. The last sunrays were wrapping it in a rose glory. And as I was absorbing it for the last time, with eyes and soul, while it was breathing purple, I felt that it was nourished by the blood of the scrawny conductor.

– Stop, I said to him, stop!

The poor boy got frightened, thinking I was mad for slowing down. He lost his temper, went down the saddle and started pushing with all his remaining strength, eagerly.

He was about to cry. And as I was filling his palms with coins leaving him in a rush, like an accomplice, myself, for his eaten –by the civilization– flesh, to leave some piece of work-art behind, I read through his sadly smiling face, a query, and an unanswered bewilderment for the improbable majority of the Indians…

Delhi High in the Ganges valley, close by the Jamuna is built and rebuilt many times till today the Delhi. The roots of its history go way back, till the battle of Mahabharata. Here was Indraprastha, the chair of the Pandavas, one of the two opponent families of the Epic. Though, the old corpses are unimportant, as whatever overtops today is the Muslim monuments, Turkish and Mongolian.

You look as a nonentity, when you stare at the Qutub Minar (meaning: The Tower of Victory) a little outside the city. It marks straight to the sky by an amazing height, symbol, you would think, of the Prophet’s sword which spread in the East and the West.

Around it, trees and flowers and ruins of temples and tombs stolen from the wrecks of Shiva’s sanctuaries. Closer to the city, by the shore of Jamuna river, you can see more Turkish graves which roofed the corpses of sanguinary sultans from the end of the 12th century. They stand faded, rigorous and silent, purely funereal and outlandish monuments, as they are distant spread in the lowlands, drowned by orgasmic vegetation.

Nothing reminds you the Mongolian open-hearted creation, here.

The Mongolians knew how to live first, not only how to get buried. They didn’t resemble to the Pharaohs who lived only to die, so they left behind nothing but graves.

The former built strong and beautiful castles, in Delhi, Agra and elsewhere, and brilliant palaces which combine the practical comfort with the spiritual delight. The building of the royal band is not missing, where the melodic waves of scarce Anatolian music effuse to the whole acreage of the castle, while hundreds of harem women cradle lightly waving hedonically their serpentine limbs for the pleasure and erection of their master.

Therefore, I insist that they knew well how to live these fun lovers. They knew extremely well. An inscription inside the Delhi’s red castle reassures in the Persian language: “If there is one paradise in this world, it’s here, it’s here, it’s here!” That clearly means, that the paradise is located here, on earth! You may give to the word “here” any wider or narrowminded meaning you wish to give.

Bold and smashing is the antithesis between the old and new Delhi, which is not rare in India, when something new tends to break abruptly from its dark past. As much as fuggy might be the old city, that much commodious is the new one. Could this be symbolic for the country’s future? That’s a tough answer. For now, the old part is squeezing with its rasping huskiness every effort for rejuvenation. So much, that the word “rise”, which comes again and again, unstoppable, by the pen of Tagore, resembles to an agonizing invocation in the middle of the desert.

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I was about to leave Delhi, and I still didn’t have digested well inside me, one more of the old faces of India. One day, I take an Indian friend asking him to escort me there.

He freezes to my urge.

– Please, don’t refuse, Mohan, I said to him, I want it, very much! I want to see this famous street of Delhi, the ladies’ hotspot street.

– Ok, but we should leave all our money, and even our watches at home, and maybe take a stalwart with us.

– But we will just walk through it.

– Watch out I they pull you aside.

We had a hard time to find this street which has the initials of Great Britain. It is wide and it has only on its one side the large balcony-faced houses, dark and spiderwebbed. Lazy guys laying down on the pavement, get up when they see a white man getting close, and they get closer. Dark faces, smallpox scars and stab wound lacs. Their “merchandise” is exhibited shamelessly, and they bargain the price of a …syphilis. We are surrounded by 5 or 6 of them.

– Keep going and don’t answer to them, my friend is scolding me. Can’t you see they are thieves?

– And what is the police doing about it?

– They share the money with them. Do you want to know how many have been unrobed or killed here? They might be selling their “stuff” but we, as Indians, as much as we might bare, we won’t accept any foreigners to put their hands on our women. It becomes a family thing.

– But I want to get closer, to see them in the eyes, Mohan. The Indian women are so unapproachable, and I am very curious to face them.

– Are you nutty?

He really got angry with me and pulled me from my sleeve narrating short and curt to persuade me, stories of murder, robbery and “color revenge” against white men.

It couldn’t be any other way. The 25 years old boys are complaining that they haven’t touched a single woman’s hand. Even the recommendations proceed without handshakes. I was at risk myself later, in Kashmir, as I became obviously talkative with some female students. And, on the other hand, I remember how much they begged me the male students to introduce them to some American girls there, as those were not afraid to shake their hands (the shameless…).

We turned to the right and snuggled into some atrocious narrow streets. The old Delhi to its greatest glory. Dirty, labyrinthic, full smell of burning meat, a stuck of woodworm walls, ready to collapse. Gaggles of children in the alleys, you would think the houses overflowed and eructed them. Merchandisers sitting on benches, they fry cheap spicy delicacies. Others get bathed having one cloth surrounding their waist and others are turned towards the wall, pissing seated at the edge of the street. Some others seat flaccid, speechless, barmy, like praying in silence and endlessly. You sweat, you drown, dyspnea and nausea get on you till you get on a glade, to feed your lungs with lighter air.

In New Delhi you breath again completely. Spacious villas with trees, wider roads and vegetation, adjusted to the nature and rules of India, where everything has true dimensions, trees, rivers, rains, population, mountains.

The royal avenue, which leads to the governmental shops, is a piece of art, as it opens 68

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along with the huge gate of India. There’s something left from the English, wanted or not. All these buildings with the circular parliament in the middle, remind you classical Greek architecture combined with local Indian tradition. In the rest of the city, till where the embassies are located, you may admire the peculiarity of the modern construction to save the internal parts from the sunburn. Not rarely, close by this European nobility, deplorable cabins coexist – of workers who built the mansions – tatterdemalions, beggars, lepers. And the most sinful: school children seated on the pave, if there are any, as they are usually housed in tents or under the tree shadows.

One day, I was asked by an Indian professor if I believe in India’s resurrection.

– Of course, I said to him, as soon as you’ll transform the temples into schools.

– But, what about our traditions? He looked at me, surprised.

– This is the only way to make good use of them. Otherwise they will become a heavy load, like the turtle’s carapace, which will drown every attempt of yours to reclaim.

– Not even Gandhi dared to do this; although he was so radical in many ways. He even believed to the holy cow, for which we have so many sophistries to cover our shame for its adoration.

– You are so attached to nature, you Indians, that you undressed the man, for its favor, from every value of his. And you have conceived so little from the fertile side of Gandhi…

It was a good chance while talking about this, to walk towards the Museum of Gandhi. Many memoirs of the great Teacher, bound with the meaning of his life, are found there. Photos from his childhood; a boy with shadowed eyes, the same with his mother’s ready-to-cry ones. Later, a student in London, wearing bow ties; an Asian, who, for one moment, looks like he envied Europe. After that, he finds himself in Africa, where –through his self-sacrifice– he nourished his idea for the liberation of his country, becoming himself a symbol for the freedom of all the oppressed-on earth. He said once: “They know nothing about religion those who wish to separate it from politics. We are against to any tyranny, without using violence or menace”. The spirit of Gita, reborn and adjusted to this occasion.

Later, his resistance to the English, his marching through the whole country, to persuade his people to follow him to this difficult rebellion without violence, to prevent any brother-killing with the Muslims. His prisoning, his fasting, and the shack where he isolated and lived weaving and spiritually working, tireless skeleton, fed –you would think– only by his divine visions.

All these become live by just looking at his picture, but also through the real articles he used to use, bound tightly with the life and the universe of this synchronous Christ.

Handmade pens, wooden forks and spoons, a book send by his adored Tolstoy, a present sent by his loved ones, the untouchables (a glass); and looms, lots of looms around, permanently included in the museums along with his “no violence”, running with the impetus the modern humanity has taken.

In the end, one of the bloodthirsty bullets which took down his tormented body, victim of the extreme nationalism, which didn’t think of keeping love between the children of India. The ampule of his ashes and the white blood-dyed pieces of fabric which were covering the weak body with the great soul. Further back, an ikon of cheap art displays him hugging Christ and the other great martyrs of the universe.

We left in silence. Further down, by the shore of Jamuna, you ‘ll find a cenotaph, sign 69

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of the location where his corpse was buried. An area in ashes, colorless, inhabited only by a few Untouchables (or Dalit), the oppressed Indians of the fourth caste, those called Harijan, by Mahatma Gandhi, which means “god’s beloved ones”. He walked, he ate, he lived with them and reassured them that if he could ever be reborn, he preferred his soul to dress up a Harijan’s body. Countless Indians visit this place everyday barefoot, get closer around the monument, having their palms united in front of their chest, they kiss the dark marbles and they live silent, placing flowers that remain amaranth.

– Well? Was the play barren? Asked the professor.

I contemplated for long, before answering.

– You kicked out the English, alright. But I’d like to see how you deal with Chinese upon “no violence”, I replied.

– Gandhi said, that, “the strongest nature melts in front of the fire of love. And if it doesn’t, it means this love was not meant to be”. As he wasn’t looking only at India’s temporary specific requests. Behind his country was standing a pure population, fair, honest and voluntary free.

– When you are given a smack and you shrivel, I said, you are weak. If you answer with five smacks, you are strong. If you turn your other side to the opponent, you are stronger.

But if you let them kill you, what good is this for the people?

– “Nothing is lost, neither the killer’s knife”, Buddha said, the professor replied.

– But now the fairy tales for an after-life reciprocation are finished. Only whatever you offer over the cortex of the earth till your 60 or 70 years of age matters. And whichever from your offer becomes useful for the next generations, can become your passport to immortality, I answered widening our discussion.

– I am talking about this world too. What are we in front of the world? The world doesn’t consist of ourselves only.

I was about to come to the end of my contemplation. The Asian is lost in the group but in Europe the team is buried by the over-nourished Me. Two different worlds which should come to some communication, so to equilibrate.

To their supreme education, the Indians seem presentable. Modern buildings, boarding schools, borrowing libraries, many spiritual foundations. Not all departments exist to every university, and therefore the students must move from one part of the country to the other; but this ferments the unity of the Country. The only bad thing is that the lower classes are still away from considering University studies.

– Only three from my caste of the Shudras follow this university, a student was telling me.

– What prevents you from this?

– Poverty, nothing else.

– But there are cheap boarding schools and I’ve heard of scholarships.

– Listen, he said, taking me out of the way. Our society has many imperfections. I don’t believe we will get rid of them, not even in 50 years. The boarding school might be cheap, but 100 rupee a month are needed. I have 50 from a scholarship and to get the rest, my parents had to sell our land; my mother had to sell her jewelry too. Please, don’t let anyone know about my family’s undressing.

– Is poverty something to be ashamed of?

– It’s a disgrace. You can see that the students from the high society have a hard time to 70

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include me in their group. I am desperate, as I still have one more year of studies.

– Any part time job while you study?

– Impossible. Even the heaviest job, the mines, pays 2 rupee a day. Do you get it now?

– I understand my friend.

– I am scared to the idea of the western capitalism, if what we have, according to the constitution is called socialism.

– Don’t be afraid, I said, words have no meaning nowadays.

In the high society, the origin of the students has a great deal with their arithmetic sharing, between boys and girls, although the girls are not emancipated in India. The department of Philosophy of the university of Delhi is constituted exclusively by girls which generally surplus in the theoretical sciences.

This a very modern and spacious university. A whole city, outside the old Delhi, full of trees like a paradise. Scholars from all around the world, mostly from the eastern countries study here Indian literature and those from the “communist” countries learn exclusively Indian languages. The Indian students are tolerant, friendly, willing and in some, the Asian churlishness is not missing. They hold Marx in one hand, and they reassure you the 70% of their population is vegetarian through their life for religious purposes.

Lots of wild birds around the forest of the boarding house. In the dawn, they rush into our cells, making noise, waking us up early and filling the place around with dry herbs.

They are a great trouble, for us, the strangers. Some of them close the windows to kill a few wild doves and eat them, with great precaution always, as to their perception, the soul of one’s ancestor might dwell in these birds.

Going Northern We are in May. Fire is throwed up by the sky, the university closes. The student population leaves for home and the Jubilee Hall takes a mournful sight as it gets desolated from its inmates. Hard to stay away from the blower fun. My friend Antonio is writhing in pain. Day and night, back and forth walks in his room worried. He wets fabrics continuously, and he blasts them over his naked body, which popped like a thirsty land.

– What’s going on Antonio? I asked him.

– Leper, leper, leper! He cried.

We ‘ve got really worried, as Antonio was visiting every week to help a group of Christians who distributed food and medications to some lepers who lived in the heart of Delhi. The doctor though reassured him that the grooves over his body were due to dehydration and they would heal around June. Maybe faster if he could move closer to the Himalayas.

– Let’s go, I said, Delhi is too small for us. We leave for the Himalayas or we return home.

About thirty Europeans we arranged as a group to leave for Kashmir. Only, at the time we were getting ready to leave, bad news came from there: the government prisoned Abdullah, the leader of the Muslim majority in Kashmir. They were all stunned, looking at me with sympathy, leaving alone.

A Yugoslavian said: – Now I know why Byron died in Mesologgi.

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As I was getting further away, I’ve heard a Spanish guy saying: – There is a continuity since the times of Ulysses.

In reality, I just preferred to leave under the fire of the war instead of bearing the sun’s. The former seemed to me less frightening.

On the way up The plain is burning. Only the narrow streets can hide you from the sun rays. We enter Panjab (which means Mesopotamia) as the Indus river branches to five. This is where Alexander the Great stopped. There is no distinctive sign of his, only his legend lives ageless. A little higher, I was told, is located a fount, one of his monumental. I reached the spot. Nothing there. Only a memory. Perhaps this is the only eternal monument. And they told me, that only a few years back, they were selling authentic portraits of this great soldier!

Now, Panjab is divided in two pieces, having its west part in Pakistan. After the population exchange was complete (reminds of the Asia Minor population of the Greeks), and since the Indians lost Lahore, they made a new capital, Chandigarh. A perfectly modern city, based on a project of a French engineer, spread close by a lake, with dental sweet-looking hills to its background. Every part of this city has its own uniformity and shop autarky. Brick wall residencies with lime framings, huge, delirious modern public buildings, a bold inorthography of the traditional India.

People here are tall, less brown, residues of countless intruders who knocked the gates of India starting from here. Most of them are Sikh, a religious dogma that has only a few centuries of history on its back. It is a creation of ten gurus, who preached simple, practical ideas in a Christian spirit, throwing away the pantheon of the Hinduism. They dominate in morality and energy, but as they are Indians as well, they couldn’t stay far from the general idea of the country. No matter the effort these Sikh gurus made to reach the essence, they ended up considering fatal sins the habit of smoking, cutting your hair and not wearing the turban.

Going forward and to the right, you see some summer shelters with exceptional beauty climbing the Himalayas: Mysore, Shimla, Kullu. It was strange though, the way from here to Srinagar was uncertain, and I couldn’t positively find out if there is way for the capital of Kashmir or not; and the maps were even more confusing.

So, I found a shortcut to the left arriving to Amritsar, an old city, all the way Anatolian, with dirty alleys and shops where hungry, cars, cows, dust, mud and dung live together. A little further, a wall where the English killed hundreds of defenseless women and children with heavy shotguns, during the passive resistance times of Gandhi.

I moored high, close to the “Golden Temple”. Lots of barefoot swordsmen, carrying cane poles, others laying down, outdoors, in the court, in the corridors, reading or crying, day and night, gospels, an endless praying to heavens. You mystify, thinking you are dreaming, till you find out that you are in the Mecca of the Sikhs.

We are entering the “golden temple”. Before that, you are obliged to wash hands and feet in a puddle. Thank god there were no algae inside. The Indians were washing their faces as well, but they didn’t insist that I should follow on that too. I felt like cholera was lurking. You reach the temple by a bridge, since it is surrounded by an artificial lake.

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Inside out galvanized golden – how else would it attract the people? – overloaded with decorating ornaments.

– Our religion is simple, the guide insists. What do you think about our architecture?

– Excellent, I replied, only simplicity is missing.

Sundown. Not even the night could cool down the atmosphere. The fun was just mixing the hot air. As I walked to my cell, I lighted a candle. If all these bugs are louses, I thought… The dawn came. They were louses…

Kashmir Going a little higher, you enter Kashmir. The landscape changes. The first swellings on my feet are obvious. The earth becomes tender, the rivers clear and foaming, at last.

On the other side, you see snow, but you still burn inside, although you get so close to the eternal fridges.

Jammu. This city is so familiar, the winter capital of Kashmir. A Christian church in its center domesticates you and resembles the Kalamata of Greece. But as you keep on going, you might stop while staring the temple of Rama. There is one deity for every pyramid-roofed cell. Having a monkey’s head, a tiger’s head, a fish-tale, a turtle’s feet, multi limbed (arms or heads), it becomes hard for the word-nourished European to be persuaded for their supernatural powers, naturally dressed as they are, these statues.

The byzantine art attributed the hypernatural with a much more spiritual manner. Not that the fine Indian art is missing the despiritualizing picture. But in this world, the way things travel in the mystery of the beyond, there is no hierarchy; in the darkness of the “epekeina” (where god, angels and the souls of good people live together), everything looks the same. From the beast till the saint, the world is one and inextricable, since the monster is considered god and the saint lives as an eremite, beastly. In the dimension of infinity, you know, all things are equalized, as the whole and the half, the tenth and the mill are equal, meaning infinite.

Between these deities, stands the most adored one, a gigantic phallus, made by dark black marble, crowned with flowers. His worshipers sprinkle it with oil and flower leaves, they feel it with awe, and sometimes lick it. Amazing that in this place was born the most unhuman ascetism. This is one more reason which makes the study of India harder. You don’t find in this country the crystal-clear face of China and Japan, and you can’t just rest easily upon your exclamation marks.

For 15 hours, the bus goes up and down till it gets you to Srinagar. The trip is dangerous but also beautiful. The road is narrow and irregular, the bottomless chasms gawp low, and lots of military trucks come and go. Towering pines climb like nails against the slope, and foaming waters surge from the mountain’s belly. There is more inside that belly, eating up this mountain, till it goes down, closing your road, making you stay up all night to figure out how you open it, to continue your journey. The mountain commits a crime…repeatedly.

We keep climbing. It gets steamy. A Muslim lady’s yashmak goes up. I knew that the mountain’s crime just doubled up. Her face was oozing jellied sweetness. The snows branch the summits like frozen cataracts. Flashing, clouds, downpour. Throw Intra, throw! I won’t put my coat on. Burning Delhi, I get revenge!

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Srinagar Just before getting dark, you pass the great canal of Nehru, which drills the ridge and you exit to the long valley of Srinagar. Flowering trees and then waters, many waters that shine in the dark. In the morning, I will see the town. For now, I was just thinking of Jahangir, when he was asked for his last wish: – Kashmir, he said, Kashmir and nothing else. And he closed his eyes smiling inside his sweetest vision.

It is dawn! I can’t express this Beauty! And how familiar these faces are, figurative with almond-shaped Mongolian eyes. Young ladies with dozens of bracelets hanging from their ears, heavy and large, like horseshoes. And as they can’t hold them, the poor girls, no matter how low they are hanging, they help it by passing through them a cord tightened over their head.

The Mongolian lakes and gardens, with gigantic plane trees, and jumping waters, are crawling and fall rattling, mirroring through their translucence a drunkenness of flower-colors. “If there is a paradise in this world…”. They new very well these “Elysian Fields”, those charmers, who were bringing their elephants from Delhi, to spear their summer up here. Fiery, crocus, flaming-red sundown and snowed peaks, reflected in the liquid lens –the lakes spread over the mountain’s feet– peace everywhere, a breathing nature. “…this paradise is here, is here, is here!”.

And houses in the lakes, and mobile home-yachts with all the comforts for the wealthy visitors. More home-boats over the rivers, with deplorable, rotten planks, over which many were born and many more died, as they didn’t own a single piece of land to make a cabin to live under. Quite often, they take out the muddy seaweeds from the bottom of the lake and they let it curdle transforming them to a floating, movable garden.

They plant lettuce and tomatoes and other gardening. From those lakes they get most of their food and to these everything returns. A complete cycle.

The surrounding You can walk to the mountains, where the rice rises, but it takes another 2-3 kilometers higher. The gardens climb terraced over the slopes, bold-colored flowered spots, head-steps and pine-hills. And their names: “garden of pleasure”, “morning breeze”, “love’s residence”.

And as the summer arrives, the streets get opened, and you may climb higher. You plow the gorges back and forth; you absorb the beauty of the highest mountains of the world. Tender, wild, nude over here, domestic and light-rustling elsewhere.

You catch your breath and aim higher. There’s a point where your feet won’t find a straight path. It is time to climb. When the snow starts crying and becomes mud, you hear it lower transforming to a thunder clapping torrent and a blurry river, at the end.

Further down, dozens of locals die of hyperthermia. How can you not wonder about India’s different stages? You meet other faces, small tribes, shepherds and villagers having their legs submerged up to their knees in the rice mud. Their only food in their ball comes from this harvest.

In this heaven’s formation you will find several monuments with Indian tint, but 74

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Cylindrical stupa of Sarnath

Ruins of Awantipur. Doric form of the column

with a different face. Awantipur, Martand and more can be found here. My pride as a Greek is indestructible, reading over them the marks of the of the ancient Greek art.

Traces over the freezes, striped columns like the Doric, domesticated sculpture faces, closer to nature. From here, passed the ancient Greek spirit, to find its way to China.

The holy hair This beauty sometimes turns to a nightmare as you forget where you are and all the dangers that lurk. At the end of Srinagar, you reach the buildings of the newly constructed university. Close by, surrounded by apple trees, the Aghia Lavra of Kashmir’s Muslims (Mongolian mosque): the Hazratbal, which means “the prophet’s hair”. In here is kept one of Mohamed’s holy hair, for which, recently, after been “stolen”, human heads were taken and sent from one side to the other as a “present”, up to a point where a massive manslaughter was in the air, between Hinduists and Muslims. Suddenly, the evil retreated, as the holy corpse of Mohamed was found back to its place, and the specialists reassured, after extensive exam, that it was the authentic hair of the prophet.

The mosque, though, never stopped to put fire in the Muslims’ chests. Every Friday, the barmy worshippers of the hair become an overfloating river here. Not to mention the period of celebrating its memorialization. For 15 days the place is undergoing an earthquake from the long-drawn out songs of the Hodges and the countless millions of faithful coming from the fields. At that time, you will be able to see that precious hair. It was then, when I saw the soul of the Asian and became fearful.

The pray was flying monotonous, but after each stanza it was going a pitch higher and higher, every time followed by the crowd’s intensive participation; till the priest from his minaret, takes out and shows a glass tube, like a thermometer, which had inside the seldom-seen hair. The sea of faces starts moving like one trunk, with their hands turned to its direction, growling, roaring, tears, paroxysm to sacrifice, Asia!

– We are the majority and we want our freedom, the Muslims cry.

– They are traitors, they want to take over Pakistan, the Indians reply.

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– Why don’t you take this to elections?

– We do, but they are always falsified. We want a referendum with international supervision.

– Why don’t you want India?

– They are chauvinists, they killed Gandhi.

Sometimes they come close, to unburden themselves. For the militarism and the heel, the big businesses and the land owned by the Hinduists. And behind all these you can easily guess the narrow-souled bigotry. The religion, more than anything else, is the pusher and the divider causing bloodstreams.

Bridges explode every once and then. Schools, banks, busses, every governmental service is turned to ashes. Youngsters that come out of the crowd crying “freedom, freedom”, and police officers discern them using thick beanpoles, to get them in the paddy wagon.

Blood on the pavement, imprisoning. Telegraphy wires on the street along with coop wire, tightened together against unsuspecting soldiers and innocent civilians.

With the President We got together a few international students from around the world and appointed the local prime minister of Kashmir for an interview. In the garden of his house, under the gigantic, wide-shadowing planes, we had tea and we asked him questions, always related to the situation.

– There are a few, he said, the sold agitators who don’t want the peace and the progress of this land. We won the elections three times in row. They ask for a referendum. Why don’t they do one in China as well for Tibet? What if every constituency of India asks for one? Won’t India become then, five hundred pieces again, like before the liberation? India is like a condominium with a hundred apartments. If the tenants of one of them want to take it and leave, it isn’t just a case of their own, it is a matter of all the apartments’ tenants. The religion cannot control the borderlines of the countries. Also, there is a common civilization that we share with India, from the dawn of our history.

– I’ve heard the Muslims of the periphery constitute the 90%. Contrary to the fact that their children in the University make only the 10% of the students’ population. Is this true, and if so, why is that happening?

– Yes, he replied without any menace. It is true and that’s because the Muslims were always farmers, so they never had the chance to learn the basics. But today we offer free education, and, in a few years, they will take their share in the supreme education. I am a Muslim myself and it hurts me a lot.

We all agreed to the above. Only, the last part, seem to hide a craft. The President never explained why the Muslims remained farmers as a whole.

Many of the students reassured him that on the way back to their country, they would mention him and the “rights” of his country. I didn’t say a thing. I was thinking of Cyprus. And the great forces. And their personal interest. So, we learnt to say: “Did you expect any morality from the politicians?” And if Shastri would have said: “I give independence to Kashmir”, thinking it would be for the benefit of his country, to avoid wars and expenses that would decimate the already low economy… wouldn’t this take down his prestige and the self-assertion of his people?

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Don’t we see where all these weaknesses lead our world to? Oh, Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi… You could see so far and so broader than all the others. “If Kashmir wants to go with Pakistan, let it go” you were saying. “Whoever wishes, can follow me…” was said by Christ, but you must have the guts to ascend with your own cross and get crucified, telling the whole truth to the people.

Same all We were in July and the flames of the started to hit Kashmir too. The monsoon was about Delhi and the heat was cutting down there a bit. The businesses, the schools, life itself and the capitol’s people would get back in motion again soon. Followed the footsteps for the way back then.

Like a huge and black cape, you could see the monsoon going high, spreading to shadow the sun, coming closer and blowing dust. It uprooted the trees grabbing them from their green hairy branches and burst cold and shiny drops. These rains are another beauty of India, another sublime in the country that has no standards.

The cracking earth was drinking, drinking, drinking with no ending. For a while the rain stopped, the sun came out, and the earth whitened again showing its dryness. The drinking will continue for about two months. The steamy atmosphere will shorten your breath. The sun goes down like a black-red jar, immersed in gold dust. Thick humidity paralyzes you worse than the heat; hard for the strangers to walk out at night. And if you do, you are looking forward to going back to your room and insert your nose in the fun to get some life back.

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Descending East You must wait a while after the monsoon cuts down, before you start moving southern. Maybe to feel a little less heat, if it ever breaks down, as down below the middle, India lives under an eternal summer.

Temples of pleasure One more holy place, of the sacral depravity, you could say, is located here. It is worth to stay, to get to know better one more of the basic faces of India.

Inside a hilled valley, close to a red-roofed village, are saved till today, about 20 temples, of which most belong to Hinduism and less to Jainism.

There is something exceptional to their architecture. The towers over the galleria, the hall and the sanctuary of the temples, do not curve outwards as much as it happens with the northern rhythm, neither become pyramidal as the southern rhythm.

They stand upon this, between the two rhythms, although their outline, grouped, belongs to the north. The temples of Khajuraho dominate for their open belvederes, which surround them, and bring light to the internal part, while, at the same time, they break the external monotony, giving them the ikon of a frigate heading for The most decent love scenes of the Khajuraho temple eternity.

What really attracts our interest in the Khajuraho temples is their sculptured decoration. From the artistic point of view, we are in front of a period around 1.000 AD, where the coolness and simplicity of classic plasticity starts to back off to give space to styling, decorative load, and medieval dryness. There’s a lot of juice here dictated, to a point, by the thematic of the sculpture, concerning its wholeness, with the sexual activity. And this is what we will try to explain here.

No Indian temple is missing the hugged couples of deities and mortals. The action though is overwhelming in extend and daring. Around the bases and over the freezes which surround the sides of the temples, scenes unroll, so inconceivable and shameless that make you bite your lips, no matter how well prepared you are. Come to think of it, these temples are not considered museums for the Indians; they are still active and functional.

In half the actual size, and quite bold to become carved, you can find here stacked love scenes where the inventiveness of every recent degeneration would go ballistic.

Couples which get prepared for intercourse with effusion and inimitable knowledge and others which are already in action with postures and scenes unavowed. Complexed couples and multifaced groups, either with mostly men or with mostly women, holding each other, swooping or emerging and attach with combinations uncaught by the craziest fantasy. Examples of homosexuals from both sides, bestiality, sadism and humor, lots of 78

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humor I think exists in these syntheses, contrary to those who expect to find some moral teaching. For example, the animal-lover who looks so dedicated to his action; a girl close by is covering her eyes with her palms while at the same time is looking through a small opening between her fingers.

Amazing what the young Indian puritan might thing of to cover his shame upon all these. There are several explanations from their side. The daring scenes, they say, are limited in the exterior part of the temple and as you get to the interior, they lessen, as a symbol of a soul’s course from the material to the spiritual, since the temple is the world.

The autopsy disproves this, as the scenes continue to be as egregious climbing over the ridge of the temple and they are not afraid to intrude deeper to the interior, till the holiest sanctums.

Some, saw the seduction, which needs to be overmastered by the faithful, others explained the phenomenon as a bait, for the devoted to crawl all the way to the temple, and others take it as an incantation for the evil eye.

All these include a lot of naivety and we need to look elsewhere to find the actual exegesis. The deeper etiology is hiding under the misty and flaccid climate of India which panders a lot the sexual life. Where else, from, could the Indian spirit start from, to explain the impetus and creation of the universe and of life, or take its symbols from, if not from the most primitive unrestrained innate urges? What do you see inside all Hindu temples, instead of the Christian Holy Table? The phallus. Over here, to be more accurate, you can see a huge one, made of granite, hard to be surrounded by three people together. They say it is miraculous, because when the fanatic Mongolian king was trying to break it down after serious hits by a sledgehammer, for three days, it remained undamaged. After that, the bigot king felled on his knees and groveled.

The deity for fertility goes way back in time here; from the period of blossoming at the Indus valley. It presents with fluctuations but until now it doesn’t retreat. One of the Indian philosophies accredits the creation of the of the universe to the union of the male and female energy, which make a tightly connected (one) body, the hermaphrodite Shiva.

There are hearsays of ceremonial adoration with orgies. From his inmost freshly vibration the Indian would start, to find the spasm of pleasure-seeking into a sense of unity with the divine; as here, the human and the cosmos are not separated into two camps, the damned material and the divine spirit.

In many older temples, a special dancing hall has survived time, were you may see the dance, even today, like a sacral action; but, personally, I never met it there, except for the courtyard of the temple with dressed female dancers. An Indian mechanic, though, a grievous man, but not a Hinduist, reassured me that a few years ago, he saw, with his own eyes, in a far-flung temple high in the Himalayas, a dozen of naked young dancers surrounding the goddess frantically thrilled. And the goddess, of course, as a wooden statue, as it was, couldn’t see a thing. Some old brahmins though seated close by, god knows what they were thinking of under their fat beavers.

Because the phenomenon is not just an expression of a theoretical thought but also a reflection of reality: the harems of the maharajas were counting hundreds of inmates.

And we know very well the distance between the palace and the temple. The insatiable studs of the court found a way to sanctify their bulimia in making love with the above cosmogonic idea. And they systemized this burning issue of theirs to a scientific fact, in full.

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One of the holy texts of the Indians, the Kamasutra, discourses at length this matter.

It is written by a monk and its seeds are found in the Vedas. According to this book, you have to know a lot to enjoy the bliss of love. And it keeps going by giving its advises to a daughter, a wife, a courtesan, and a prostitute. Sixty-four techniques should be known by the ideal wife upon making love. Among them, you find music, dance, decorative arts, crafts, hand engraving, sports and…strategy. The man, on the other hand, should know how the art of embellishment and learn the qualifications that will make him a great conqueror. First, it is written, he has to win the woman’s consent, then comes the rest of the preparation, the kiss and the enjoyment which has to be complete, and in mutual participation. And way more hilarious, regarding stands, categories of limbs etc.

This way, someone can see the position that takes in the life and tradition of the Indian, the love making. This is the creator, the most fetal condition of god and of universe which become identical, in India. They are all embraced by the religion and sanctified under its mantle, art, pleasure, politics, science, life in its unity. That’s why it is obvious that, no matter how far they get these scenes upon dare and inversion, generally they don’t present in abrupt explicit, since a diffuse spirituality fights to remove the brutality form the bodies, although they remain earthly.

And someone might wonder: how come, in this country of extreme pleasure hunting, the ascetism was born? It is not strange, since from the age of Plato, we know that “the contraries come from their contraries”. When a situation gets out of line, all you have to do, to save it, is to look at the other end”.

While I am leaving the temples of Khajuraho, I read over a wall a recent phrase: “the most wrong idea about god, lays here”. And I said: – How strange! What is blessed by the religion here, is cursed in their lives. In Europe, the opposite happens. The church exorcises it but the society tastes it without reservations. Does this make any sense?

Benares Close to the slopes of the Ganges, is squeezed in quick-fire the Mecca of the Hinduists.

They say, the first creation of the gods, and those who abide it, go straight to heaven without the reincarnation torture. About 1.500 temples are packed in here and push each other, to the right and left into frowsty alleys, full of flowers, fragrant, manic pilgrims, brahmins, merchants, cows and dung mixed together.

Thousands of cheap wares, for soul-saving souvenirs, and delicate crafts, perhaps too cheap if you think of the time and toil they spent to make them; elsewhere, astrologists seated on their crossed feet, telling you your future with the certainty of an oracle, while staring grooved skulls. A little further, naked Sadhus, meaning saint humans, sprinkled with dust, long hair and painted forehead, remain seated for The most decent love scenes of the Khajuraho temple hours, praying frozen, still, submerged 80

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in another world. Endless lines of beggars, wounded, swollen, lepers, with exophthalmos, skinny, beg mourning. Some surround you demanding, they pull you, you feel closer the danger of hunger.

You reach the steps which take you down to the big, wide river. Hard to make out the opposite shore. At this period, its bed is low, and it can only freshen the heated pilgrims.

After the monsoons, it gets surged wildly, overflowing the steps and sometimes drowning the close by houses. It fertilizes the fields in all directions. You may understand now, why it caused awe in the past as its usefulness established it as a god. Till today, the conservative soul of the Indian adores this river.

The people themselves make another river, coming from very far, unstoppable, getting into its blurry bed, to take its blessing and leave their smallpox in it; as, close by, has its temple the dreadful goddess of Variola. If this damn disease gets you, she does not allow you to visit the doctor for treatment. You have to bathe in Ganges, it is said, only (to add some cholera to it).

The brahmins stand in lines at the edge of the river, to supply the people with all the necessary for the great worship. They shave their heads, they salve their bodies with paints and oil, throwing some of that into the river, and holding the tail of the holy cow they walk deeper into the grimy waters of the Ganges. They wiggle the water they have placed into their palms and they burble, after putting their hands in front of their chests: “Give light to the world and to our hearts…”

Further down, the crematoriums smoke and the burned corpses are thrown into the river, ceaseless. Others half burned and others barely burned, as there are really poor ones out there who can’t afford the cost of cremation.

A corpse is floating, some ravens escort it. A skinny old lady has been brought in a rush, by four young men, who bathe her to make sure she gets the blessing before she leaves our world. She growls fearfully with the water in her mouth and lets her last breath fly; she didn’t look so happy for the heaven she gained.

After they leave the river, they dash their foreheads with different colors and shapes paintings, depending on their religious castes. They then ascend to the city carrying in their vases some of the muddy water of Ganges.

They pass from the temples, sprinkling with it the phalluses of Shiva and take the rest at home, where mixed with the holy cow’s piss, they commune it sip by sip; a definite soul energizer as it will absolve them from the heavy loads of life, sending them earlier to the heavens.

Which cataclysm will ever wash off India?

Bihar The place smells lots of Buddha, as you descent for Calcutta. Most of the tracks of his memory are cornered here. A little further up, in Nepal, are located his father’s palaces; those which he abandoned one day along with all the goodies and lovable, the rebel son, when the crazy idea of saving the man from his pain hit him in the head. For years, the great question tortured him, he followed many roads, had tasted plenty of experiences and ideas he thought before getting in Gaia, under the ancestor of this wide-shadowed tree. Here he got enlightened for a moment, by a glaring beam and the whole rosary of 81

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life got untied in a second; the truth, simple and naked, as always. That was it. The middle pathway, which doesn’t get poorer when it declines, neither gets muddy by been adhesive, but tasting the controlled keeps moving ahead for the integration.

The oldest built Buddha’s temple is located on the side of this tree with the wide thick leaves. And straight further up, some more recent monasteries of the Enlightened: a Chinese, a Tibetan, of Thailand, with distinctive architecture each, depending on the country Under this tree Buddha enlightened it represents. You stop before the Tibetan.

You start tremoring. What a betrayal under the name of the Master… A stack of monsters and serpents dressed in their most dapple colors, they grimace like repulsive necklaces around his ikons. A heavy cylinder orders you with a sign: “turn me one-two times, it is for the goodness of the humanity and it heals the sins”. Under this stress and in such a wizard-mania it is submerged, here, his pure, preaching. That’s why China swallowed them in no time.

The cylindric stupa of Sarnath has perpetuated the place where Buddha started the wheel of Law: where he made the first preaching after his enlightenment. In front of five only listeners, between those who abandoned him terrified, after he denied the path of strict ascetism, the master who reached the truth by making contemplation the experience of life, started: “the middle path, my children, the simple road of our heart…”, to conquer in no time the whole Asia. Close by a deer forest, dwelled only by wild birds and a few fawns, silent, untrodden by humans, a sacral place. Further up there are more temples and in between them the most famous institute of Buddhism, the University – monastery of Nalanda, the Cluny of India, which, like in the roman monasteries of the West, thousands of trainees wrapped in yellow robes, learn, chat, contemplate for centuries.

Deeper, in the center of the Indian peninsula, stands on a vegetated hill and between other ruins, the great stupa. There is no exceptional event from Buddha’s life marking this spot. It looks like India delivered after a long painful pregnancy, this stupa, bringing it to light. So, it stands for 18 centuries narrating through the engraving, over its pillars, whatever the master did, or even better, whatever they believed he did, the people who lived few hundreds of years after his terminal Nirvana.

Isolation, Nirvana. Only the birds go frenzied over the trees, like if they want to exorcise the atmosphere. The noise from the village below, never makes it here. People go by, they ascend, they see, they feel the hemispheric monument, which stands silent through the talkative gates, like saying: there it is, the human heart, speechless to its great secret which never gets announced. Whatever goes inside in words is already written at the periphery. The Master talked through the need to help the man discover his heart; but in…

Man’s name, don’t overload it, let it breath, let it absorb under control, fill in and empty out, get finished and finish.

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Assam On your left you see Assam, separated from the main trunk of India by the wedge of East Pakistan, but there is one passage. It resembles a desperately laid out hand towards the mother or a recede for getting lost between the other chicks of Indochina.

Wild earth with virgin forests and animals, the most primordial heart of India beats here. Tribes with distinctive conscious and customs of the stone ages, decorate their nudity with feathers and horns, living in their own world. Still animists, those who never embraced Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianism, they still adore trees and stones.

Around 50 dialects are spoken here and their muscular legs along with their half-opened eyes make China roar at them at times.

The Assamese have also stirred up, but India insists on keeping them under its territory. There is oil underneath, but it is also a matter of prestige.

– I don’t have a house anymore, said to me one day, a student from Naga.

– Was it burned?

– Five times. And they killed three of my brothers and one sister of mine. Every home has two or three victims from the “no violence” followers.

– So, what’s going now in Naga?

– We fight. For 14 years through the mountains and from Burma, we hit the colonialists, who forgot what they were, just till yesterday.

My friend burst into tears. I was thinking what’s the meaning of the pandemic adoration of Gandhi, in India, when his work is brutally trampled, no matter how deep the foreign hand was hiding behind such redemptive mutinies. The earth though, remains very earthly.

Calcutta A few mountains and countless rice fields, never enough though to fill up these millions of empty stomachs. At the end you can see its first cabins. You walk for half an hour in its station and there’s no place to seat. It is drizzling and as the pavements are on fire, it feels like your feet will be burned. People, lots of people in the streets, come and go, shouting. Endless lines of cars over the great pendular steel –made bridge, boats up and down the river, trams, two story busses, barefoot disabled reek pulling their two– wheeled barrows, crowd, horns, whistling, fuss.

Five million souls are stacked here, dozens might be squashed in one only room, exuding in the streets and sleeping down over the pave. All the tribes of earth, black, white, yellow, patchy, others, wild straight form the jungle, naïve Europeans, sharp pickpockets, rippers, quacks, wise and saints, they all boil here, mixed. Ecumenical city, western type life and buildings aside of the purest Eastern, expanse lives with misery, together.

The temple of Ramakrishna covers and formulates, from the architectural point, his vision and his work. It goes height, gets concaved, with plasticity, it gets crossed, it embraces, it wishes to be Hinduist, Christian and Muslim together. Multi-headed deities, Nazarene, arabesque, all three types of adoration under its roof.

Further out you will find the Santiniketan University, dream and deed of Rabindranath Tagore. Simple and humble, roofs all the branches of the human mind and 83

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heart in the hug of nature and peacefulness. “The world is one” he used to say the bard of Bengal. While you read him, the inside of you wakes up, as there’s in everyone a sleeping counterpart.

“The wayfarer has to knock every door before he comes to his own, each one of us will waft through all the worlds before we reach our inner sanctum, in the end”.

And from this, starts his conflict with Gandhi, who wrote a smaller circle inside the ecumenical circle, the one of India, which he burst on, as the most crucial inquiry of the time.

– The universal balance is endangered, Tagore said.

– I open my windows to get inside the light and the breeze of the world, I won’t let its tornados to uproot my house, Gandhi replied.

Lots of monuments, museums, gardens, temples can be seen in Calcutta. Too bad, its best sight, the house of Tagore wasn’t open for the visitors, for a week, due to a public holiday! It makes someone angry to see all these people stacked in front of brahmins and deities, formed the way their ancestors wanted it, and keep closed the most synchronous temple, inside which, one of the most concrete spirits of our centuries acted.

I was lucky though, meeting S. Tagore, a grandson of the famous poet, unbelievably duplicate in the looks. Magnificent, hardworking, with rich hair combed in the back, talking with confidence without any sign of the usual inferiority complex of the Indians.

– The most genuine Tagore is his work itself, he said to me. We, his own relatives, who lived with him closely, cannot weigh him right. He is a very common deity to us.

He showed me some of the poet’s paintings, with great interest. Then he turned the discussion elsewhere, as he was a candidate of the radical revolutionary party in his country.

– What are they doing in Delhi, those sleeping beauties? Inside- out the embassies, drooling and eternal blessedness. Even though we own a rich land, people starve, and they don’t give a darn about it. This is life, the good and the bad stand here together, five million souls boil here. Stay, stay for two weeks in Calcutta to see the motion, to feel the emotion, to check the theatres, to verify that the heart of India beats here; you can’t acculturate Bengal in 5 days.

– You see, India is so great, Mr. Tagore.

The way to Madras Days and nights in the train, standing a lot, without sleep, squashed, especially if you run through one of those endless Indian celebrations, for which they might be travelling for three days and nights, not to miss them. You might even go unfed, as although there is some food, it is served without fork or spoon. Hard to get it eaten by your palm only, if you are not used like this. We get well baked by the train containers under the sun.

Hell. You head for the famous Puri (or Pauri), to freshen up from the Bengal bay, by the seaside. The wave breaks on the sand hills seething, as steamy comes the wind from Indochina by the opposite side.

We got thirsty. We saw the boy breaking the ice over a dirty step before serving it to our glasses.

– Drink it, said a German to me. Or else we will die from thirst.

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I took it down. The water was crunchy, although the ice disappeared in seconds…

The next day, Eike’s foot got swollen from an infection. Took the size of an elephant’s.

I was sleeping exhausted the night before they rushed to take him to the capitol. In the dawn I found a note over my pillow, saying: “Goodbye our friend. Very early we have to abandon our … comfortable bed. We wish you good luck, for the time being in this enchanting country.”

Best of luck to them. We shared some coconuts like brothers, as we couldn’t find anything else to mollify our hunger.

I kept going. Alone again. I took the way for Orissa (or Odisha), famous for its temples, which are of the oldest built monuments of India. Sacral this place is too, hundreds they were long ago. But today most of them have been knocked down and the rest dominate with their circular towers surrounded by tree lines.

Simple, without décor internally, but you would love to see more since you made it so far. Too bad you don’t get this chance often. They call you profane, these Hinduists, if you enter, as they are trying to protect their deities from any foreign “infection”. In some of the sanctuaries, they live beggars, cheese makers, and loafers or incurable bigots who rush out angry threatening you with canes because you entered their holy place.

You walk a little further down. The vegetation becomes more tropical, people wear less clothes, their bodies become darker, the caste gets rougher, you see colorful foreheads. You read: “hotels for brahmins”. The service staff stands closer to the wall when you pass through, not to contaminate you with their shadow, as this myth runs in their blood.

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The South Madras and the surrounding A domesticated and spacious city with European odor. It gets windy, you feel relieved. Strangely good and strangely bad sensations in the air. Thinking how fast this climate changes, you imagine how the body is affected by it. The people are different here. Short, with big eyes, bronze. Hard to find a beautiful woman, different languages, other monuments, only the common deities chisel their common soul.

The Santa Marina, a scarce sandy beach; you walk it forever, like an ant, in vastness.

Seated crowd and the cabins of some fishermen who struggle over a couple of logs, to make a living. In the local museum you’ll find plenty of small bronze statues, unique products of the south, all in funny and dancing poses.

The temples are way too many and large here, like if they are trying to cover every inch and drown the land, as they have done with the Indian soul. Easy to reach from here: Kanchipuram and Mahabalipuram. The first one is famous for its temples; we will pass that as they are never enough here in the south. The second location has its own face. It conquers your soul with its magic; the natural and the one given by the man, who never reached its end. Crystal river waters, sea and sand and densely branched trees coming out of engraved rocks forming large umbrellas, a divine gift for the sunburned visitor.

These rocks were always a challenge for the monk-technician. They blossomed over their ridge and inside their guts, the great fairy tale of India, often scratched by the sun and the rain, but still a solid crystal inside the Indian soul. Nude and rough, strangely simple for the south these forms as they are, you would say they were touched by the stick of the ancient Greek art. Possible, if you think that these monolithic temples, the Rathas, have been carved from the outside, in a way to outline a peristyle. All five of them, gathered in the same court, are identified as the five Pandavas of the Mahabharata. These were, they say, their chariots. All these carves remain finished, halfway finished of just started with their scratches all of the sudden abandoned; like a human or a divine cataclysm killed one day the simple, nude song which started to be weaved with such a mirth over the rocks of Mahabalipuram. Though, this is not the face of the south.

There’s plenty of onus here in the Dravidian soul. Contrary to this, up north, the wind brought many times the western spirit and blew up a few of the redundant ornaments.

The last sunrays make the drowned by vegetation Madras seem very sweet looking.

Children play in their rooms and others dive by the river edge into the muddy waters, like little pigs do. Eagles, ravens and purple clouds travel through the sky, the sun dips into a thick golden-purple dream, a perfect piece of art.

– Goodbye Madras. There is still some more in the south for me.

Madurai and Durga It is beyond any dream to make possible to see all the castles, all the palaces, all the temples of the south. The temples are heavily wrapped by walls – seven in Thiruchee (or Trichy) – to guard, they say, the deity’s idol and its treasures, which are way too great; so many that you would need half an Indian’s month salary to get a visiting ticket.

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– No way, I said. If the only way to see them, is for increasing these treasures, I don’t need to see them.

You go through the imposing pillars over which rise mountains of multi-leveled pyramidal gopuras, overloaded with all the heinous figures a human soul could ever throw up. You lose your mind inside a forest of supportive halls and you lose your temper by the countless black statues which deluge the columns, the ceilings, the walls and the inaccessible dark sanctuaries.

We stop in Madurai. If you want to see up to which point of brutality the art can slide and which form the “human underground” can get, get closer to this temple. You enter, you keep walking, leaving behind you vociferous merchants of deities, bargaining ikons and souvenirs, to get yourself into a rocky jungle of statues and columns. One gallery only reaches the number of a thousand of those. Multi-limbed, multi-headed, serpent-looking, flying, dressed in dapple colors, grimace the monstrous deities, terror and daze for the naïve, a bewilderment for those who think naturally. The beasty soul of Europe becomes peaceful as soon as it enters the church. The innocent and peaceful heart of the Asian comes here to be rugged by awe. Dialectic plane? Or are we looking in the Beyond whatever we miss on earth?

These sprites become alive, at some point, as alive cows and elephants complement the pantheon to the internal part of the temple. At least, the elephants become useful by doing something practical, as they collect the coins with their proboscis. And a child close by, dressed in a colorful uniform, incarnates the deity, sprinkled with rose leaves by his ecstatic adorers. This is how the creation is spiritualized by the Indian.

They were celebrating the fearful goddess Durga, of power and harvest, destroyer of evil. This deity, seated on a tiger and having by her sides the deities of wealth and wisdom, raises her 10 arms equipped with all kinds of weapons. She fights for 4 days with the bad demon, (reminds of the Christian St. George) to crash it on the fifth day. After they satiate her with fruits, flowers, milk, colors and glorifications, they escort the statue to a festivity procession singing with drums, to set it over the blurry waters of the Ganges.

The prays have something formidable. Painted girls dance waving to the sound of the organs in front of the temple. Their motions, their expressions and their masks show that a story of the goddess is narrated. Everything is embraced by the religion: theater, celebrations, arts, excitement and stimulation and even enjoyment. Then the dance is slowed down and a brahmin from his sanctum hits his drum. More drums and flutes are gathered up front and they start a barbarian sound and a cosmogonic mumble, making you think that a world is sinking and another one fights to emerge. Another brahmin sprinkles the incense and a third one is pushing air to the statue using a fun. The sound goes higher and higher and the pilgrims gather carried away and grotesque. As the only white man around, I step aside scared. What if, I thought, the goddess turns negative to fulfil a wish? Looking for the flagitious, between them… Isn’t this how the sacrifices for the world’s catharsis started, to consternate the deities?

The smoke vanished and the smiley face of Durga was now obvious, with all arms raised against the evil. Then I knew, that every passion and dynamism of the Indian, palls easily.

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Comorin Plain, rocky-mountains, palm trees, nude, beautiful red-place. Going for the point, to explore the whole Indian peninsula. Stones, temples and foaming waves unite there coming from three seas, and down below the equator. Only three steps away from the ait, the southern tip. There’s a warning sign not to dare, as the current is strong. But you brave it, you dip in the boiling water and walk over the opposite side’s isle, over where there is no more. What a wild cheer is this!

There is no more southern beyond this point. The poverty follows the rule of the unimaginable. The barefoot is the king of the street, the school, the office. The dish of the (every-) day: peppered rice spread over a palm tree leaf. Even the northern Indians have a difficulty tasting it so spicy. The meat is out of the question. The vegetarian is the rule here.

I found some fish. It was so stinky that I couldn’t eat it. I get back to my room and I find four mice fighting over my biscuits. I gave those away to them. I called the hosteler.

He looked at me like a fool, and said: Shouldn’t they eat?

I still had two Kerala bananas, red and mature in my bag. I went outside to eat them but before I started taking the peel off, five or six children surrounded me. I turned the other way and a monkey jumps in front of me. I threw one peel to it. The second one went over a low roof from where a dozen baby monkeys were staring me. One of them grabs it and started jumping from branch to branch having the rest chasing it. The next moment the adult monkey grabs both of my bananas right in front of my mouth and vanishes.

Time to return from the other side of the country, to absorb its sight and soul.

Flaming rocky-mountains, wide sandy beaches, shadowed rivers by palm and coconut trees. Kerala spreads like a sickle west to the tip. The people here, are solemn, scarce, naïve, made of good stuff. Progressive and hard-working they have eaten the jungle looking for an additional piece of earth. Christians from the old times to their greatest percent, since the ages of Apostle Thomas, as they are, you can see how differently their souls have been fermented by the word of the Nazarene.

– In this place they have heard about equality, a Russian told me. This is why the communist party took the 45% of the voters. The Hinduist though, cannot understand that he is in the same level with his maharaja. He just expects that his next reincarnation will bring him to a better fate.

– Hmmmm, I said. The next thing you will assert is that Christ was the prophet of Lenin…

Middle planed The car snagged over the forested mountains. Some graphic resorts rise over the ridges. The winter hits suddenly this place, the people are dressed well, cataclysms, other deities live here. Then you get in the jungle. Dense and wild vegetation, glades further down and a deer here and there running with fear, buffalos and elephants walk in lines and if you lucky enough, a tiger may get in your way. Mysuru is a very beautiful new city, dressed like a celebrity, full of festivals, bright palaces and of course, elephant processions.

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Although we stand low, if we keep the mid plane to get back to Mumbai, we go through Belur and Halebbedu. More temples drowning in statues. The latter are drowned by an amazing decorative load. The north against the south rhythm over them. Mounty planes, rare the rains, no such a thing like a steamy earth. You get out of your sopor, you feel like you are flying. A little higher, Badami is another typical village of India. Gigantic red rocks stand aside, like the Greek Meteora, dug to become caves. Bijapur stands between ruins of palaces, walls and temples. The bulbous domes of the mosques dominate here.

And as you are heading quickly for Delhi again, more endless tribes, more castles, palaces, temples, museums either with rare works of art, or with cheap collections of pretentious maharajas, which, over their value, their light variations, or bold contrasts, even over their monotonous repetition, you can read the motions of the Indian’s eternal soul; the one we will try to describe by getting closer to it, next.

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The Indian We were already getting talkative with a few young Indian pupils, while waiting for the buss.

– How do you imagine Greece? I asked them.

– Like a country full of statues, they replied.

How much truth there is in this naivety… no question about it.

– How do you imagine India? You may ask the mature European.

– Like a country with stink, sicknesses, and self-tortured ascetics, they will answer without thinking of all the rest. Neither they get suspicious of how widely they can study the human being through all these, to end up becoming aware of themselves. Just thinking of Greece, you get disappointed of the complete darkness which goes up our great university professors. I am not sure of how many they have heard the name of Ramayana; the Indian high school pupils though, are very much aware of the Iliad epic.

How come this country is still undergoing draw backs? This is as true as its brilliant creativity in the past. So, we need to find out why the Indian was buried in the recent years.

The climate must be playing a serious role here, for sure.

– In my country, now, the temperature is below 0 degrees Celsius, a guy from Sweden told me. But I can get well dressed and work properly. Here, in India, I can’t take off my skin.

The roots of badness But the climate was always the same, and in the past, it never blocked the blossoming of the civilization. Up to a point, of course, someone can adjust himself. No matter how much the stranger suffers here, take a look at the locals how easily he walks barefoot over the burning asphalt, and without a hat under the flaming sky. And you can’t call the southern more indolent than the northern Indians, even though the climate is more flaccid in the south. The etiology of this descent, which got enlarged through the past years is found closer to the person; how well he is fed and in his spiritual reconstruction.

Exhausted from hunger as he is out of his unacceptable diet, the Indian, doesn’t get it, neither himself nor those who handle his luck, that no engine starts working without gasoline. The misunderstood spirit of ascetism maybe leads to the widely accepted role of deprivation; this way, hunger becomes a natural condition, and none is complaining about having an empty stomach. And if in one of their folks songs shows a complaint, this never becomes a protest: “For this stomach, For this stomach I left Bengal, For this stomach I worked hard, For this stomach I clobbered rice, For this stomach I cropped rice, For this stomach I worked in a shop, For this stomach I took canes over my back, For this stomach I took part, 90

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For this stomach I followed streets and roads, For this stomach I tortures my lips, For this stomach I met Yam raj (the lord of death) For this stomach”.

The war with Pakistan made the economy of the country much more critical. The leaders imposed from the people to pay by offering a meal every week and … not eat it. Meaning, those who couldn’t pay any longer, shouldn’t eat it, outside the boarding houses. The result was to sink the production to worse. They should have said: have one additional meal and work to produce two.

Even the democratic spirit, seeded in the eternal Indian tolerance, collaborated for this slip. Nehru himself, a modern and open-minded leader, failed at this.

– We will proceed with respect to the personality of our people, we wrote.

Which personality though? The majority of the Indians are thinking out of the ordinary. They look after the everyday leaving, and when it comes to find a third job, they won’t take it if their rice ball is full. Do they really need someone to make them work harder? As soon as the personality rises out of their mind, then you gradually start to respect him.

Old ideas and values. But when they were fresh, they had a meaning. With time they eroded, they became pests and instead of supporting him, they brought the Indian into this apathy for the material world. Whatever was its initial meaning, or whichever was given to it by some recent contemplators, the word “Maya” as a characterization of the earthly, in its simplest form, is translated as a “fraud” of “untrue”, by the Indians. For him, the truth stands behind the grave, and only when the reincarnation cycle stops.

Either from pursuance, or by misconception, or even from deception, the Indians were guided to the perfect erosion of life from any value.

Karma How can someone come through the reincarnation? It is an ethical matter. The bravest answer was given by the song of Gita: “Go forward, work, without memory attachments, without aim or benefit, use the energy for the energy, and everything will go well”; with limited influence towards the Indian soul… Whatever reached the people, after an eight-century period of misery, and successive slavery, was nothing but endless sacral ceremonies, meaningless and torturing, which start before their birth and continue after their death; the 24 hours of the day are not enough to apply these protocols. Even the following content of Dharma is not less harrowing for making his Karma lighter, to get rid of the previous lives’ sins.

Nature’s connection The Indian has roots, for sure. Cities, skyscrapers, factories, engines haven’t severed him from nature’s embracement. For centuries, he gets his feeding from it and rests over its rampant vegetation, leaving and breathing from its exhalation. The Indian adored the nature, not as a European outdoorsy, but through an attachment that would scare even the spirit of Gita. All the religious stages he has passed and surpassed till today, the human kind, tree adoration, animal adoration, human adoration, spirit adoration live 91

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together in India; you can find it by reading the Jainism, which insists upon not hurting the green herbs; also, you see it from the religious awe with which they bend in front of their maharaja till the stage which perceives the divine as the diffused spiritual element of the Brahma.

The animal kingdom seems to infest the greatest part of the Indian soul. The case of the sacral cow is the most known. Two hundred million oxen cumber the country, about 4-5 cows for every family. You can’t a house poor with as many animals owned. There wouldn’t exist an economic problem for the country if they would maintain them at least fertile. Very few of them can be milked or pull the plow while the rest keep wandering around ownerless in the central parts of the cities, obstructing the traffic, consuming food, sick and infectious for the people. “We cannot kill a mother”, the Indians say. As if only the cows had mothers… And if you insist with your logic, you are considered to be illogical and irreverent.

The animal adoration in India is not restricted to the cow. It goes further. The animal-head deities are countless. The cobra is sacral too, no matter if it may kill a whole family after entering their cabins. You read in some local newspaper that a frog marriage was performed to cause rain, and at the same time you are watching the mice running unhindered on the floor and over the buffets of the touristic resorts.

I remember one day in Kashmir, I was getting dry by eating everyday rice with beans, so I asked to include in the menu some lake-fish which was sold very cheap by the Muslims. They never replied, so I repeated myself, and as I was insisting, one of them took me aside to tell me: – Please don’t mention it again. Don’t you know that we adore the fish here?

– How could I believe this coming from tomorrow’s scientists? I got on fire. And how are you so sure, you are not man eaters?

– How? – Do you have servants at home?

– Three of four.

– And how much do you pay them?

– Oh, today the servants cost a lot. They used to be cheap in the past.

– Where is the line of expensiveness?

– Half or one rupee a day.

– What do you mean by saying cheap?

– They would eat our leftovers.

– Well, is this man eating or not?

Other times, I happened to see something less believable. I was up in the desert of Rajasthan, close by Bikaner. There was a peculiar temple dedicated to the mice. The décor was full of their statues. The live ones were outflowing from the sanctum to the courtyard and outside the main borderlines. The Indians were offering them cheese and sweets, thinking they were really cute, as they jumping to grab the food. The five of the Europeans we were around, were holding our noses and our sleeves.

One more calculation lights better the situation: six millions tons of wheat, the whole American aid, is wasted to the mice. The Parliament discussed the matter of importing cats, seriously. How would the people react though?

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The caste The deification of nature absorbed the acme from the Indian trunk and filled him with ticks. As the nature rises, the Indian gets undressed from any value. This becomes more obvious through the castes. Which constitute a great part of the Indian morality.

This history begins since the years of the contact between the Aryans and the locals.

The color and the prevalence of the former automatically made the indigenous become inferior, like it happened through other times and locations. The social needs of that period formed 4 classes: the Brahmins (the priest-teachers), the Kshatriyas (princes and warriors), the Vaishya (merchants and professionals), the Shudras (servants and workers). This soon became a strict law. Manu, a mythical wiseman and a lawmaker, writes that it is more preferable to pay your castes’ duties badly, than perform those of another caste perfectly.

The greatest gap is created between the first three castes and the last one. A branch of the latter is called “Untouchables”. Their shadow should never cross the one of a brahmin, not ever touch another caste’s man, never get water from the same well, or even enter in the same temple. A Shudra should never murmur the holy texts, as he could infect them.

The texts give all the privileges to the higher castes and close the doors of the heavens to the low ones. When a brahmin kills a Shudra, he gets punished like if he killed a dog. It is also forbidden to work the land as he could harm the worms. Contrary to this, the Shudras should serve the other castes, working like a dog, should they have the luck to die defending brahmins, cows, women and children, then there might be a place for them in heaven.

After the liberation, all Indians are considered equal in front of the law. The man inside hasn’t change, and the redemption has come only for a few. This way, the walls they build between them, the children of India, drown every chance for prosperity. You cannot do a different job from the one your caste permits you to do, no matter of your capabilities. If you marry a girl from a lower caste, you lower yourself too. Cordiality and cooperation between the castes is unacceptable. The Shudras are mostly tortured by an inferiority complex, no matter if the world, typically at least, doesn’t favor this old custom.

A rift has been created in the souls too. I am not talking about those who swear that they consider all the children of India brothers of theirs. The fact that generally, the Indians avoid talking about this matter shows a shame, maybe a consciousness crisis, which is very consoling.

I remember upon my arrival in Delhi, right after my installation at the boarding house, the door of my cell is knocked and a young Indian in tears begs me: – Sir, I am a cook, and I need your help to write an application to get a job in the boarding school’s kitchen.

A well-dressed Indian was in my room at that time who got angry at him.

– Get out immediately, he told him.

As I couldn’t make something out of this, I looked at him puzzled.

– Listen Greek, he said, don’t forget you are in India. I am a Brahmin and he is a Shudra. If I let him breath my air, he will run over my back.

After I got his point, I pulled back the boy in a provocative way. I completed his application and I let him walk out. Then I turned to my roommate whose face was red and steaming, and said: 93

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– If this your India, I am leaving right this moment. I am asking you: are you not ashamed? Is this how you will resurrect your country? By throwing in the garbage the greatest part of your population? And you, the well-educated man, do you believe that a person can be born privileged even in virtuousness? How can you then try to conquer it?

We exchanged a lot. He got very happy after I told him that I believe in India. And he was one of those who mimicked my behavior for the Shudras, taking it to his village, never caring of the oldies’ opinion that the pillars of India are demolished nowadays. If you find the Indian’s pulse, you can help him adjust.

The woman Captive to India remains the woman’s creativity. Generally, the family bonds are powerful, since under the same roof, when it exists, live all the relatives, parents, children, grooms, brides, grandchildren with the grandfather been the leader. The females remain submissive before and after their marriage. This didn’t come after the Muslim intrusion. It is written through the Indian history too.

The unbeatable dedication of Sita to Rama and the existence of harems stand on the opposite side of Draupadi’s example, having her handling five husbands. All as important to the history of the country. When the reputable Indians invite you at home, they make sure their wives are busy in the kitchen. The poets recommend to the women to adore their husbands like gods. Some texts want her in the Shudra caste and others they place her by the man’s side, for his completeness, like an eternal earth where the soul blossoms.

The contradictory roots of the Indian soul, owed to the bold contrasts of a great country, the stagnancy here and the evolution elsewhere, and the adventures of a race through the centuries present a situation strictly patriarchic and sometimes matriarchic.

The most bashing for the woman is the wild sati, whose roots are found in many ancient tribes. According to the custom, the widow of the deceased should be burned alive, along with the corpse of the husband. Plenty of signs of those who were sacrificed like this. In cases like these, other times, the texts donate to her, 35 million years of bliss with her husband in heaven, and other times for that same immolation, they send her straight to hell. The English rifle and the Indian heralds had a hard time to strangle this custom in the first half of the 19th century.

Today, the Indian ladies, Muslim and not, are still restricted, although the non-Muslim don’t carry the yashmak. The cases of emancipation are few and exist mostly in the Christian societies. I found myself in many sprees of Delhi. Public, private or in schools.

Only about twenty girls, and always the same with their traditional uniform, the Salwar Kami or their lordly Saree which reminds of an ancient Greek lady.

The woman is so pretty under this flaming sky, in a steamy atmosphere. The Indian lyrics find many perfections on her. The divine artist who run out of elements making the man, he took (not the man’s rib): “The roundness of the moon The carving of the serpent, The rustling of the grass And the blossom of the flowers, The eye of the deer 94

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And the tears of the cloud, The vanity of the peacock And the softness from the parrot’s chest, The hardness of a diamond, the sweetest of honey And the bloodthirst of a tiger, The hypocrisy of the crane And the faith of Chakrawata (planetary systems)”.

With all these, he made the woman.

And … delivered her to the man.

Elsewhere, the Indian, outlines the ideal characteristics of the woman with the hungry man’s bulimia: breasts like pouches, thin waste, pelvis like chariots’ wheels. Then the woman came from the man’s mirroring. She started crying: “Woe, I do, and I don’t exist!”

And the Maker: “You fool, you are nothing by yourself. But united with the man you stop been a shadow and the mirror’s idol, as you perceive from his essence”.

As we had tea with some Indian professors in a coffee shop at the university of Delhi, we talked about this matter. They seemed ashamed for the situation, so they started joking. The Indian hangs the gold from her ears, but the European places it to her teeth, one said. The European covers herself high and low but the Indian only in the middle. Then, they all got serious and some other said: – More than anything else, our women have to take out of their mind the inferiority complex. Then, they will stop feeling like doggies.

They all turned to me, asking for my opinion. I though t a lot. Then I replied: – Wake them up, but gradually, as they have to get used to the idea. Or else the “doggies” become lions.

The facts didn’t take too long: a woman becomes Prime minister in the country!

More problems As if these problems were not enough, we see more skids and divisions cutting the Indian horizontally or vertically, threatening to turn him to pieces at a time where he is trying to coil. After the creation of two Pakistan, 10% of the population are Muslim.

When a gunshot is heard, fear, suspicions and imprisoning follow. The Christians are a minority, and the Sikh are even less along with the Jewish. In these countries, the religions keep their ancient role intact, by dividing the population and cause bloodstreams.

Adding the above to the Indian hive we get the present miscommunication through their social relationships.

The language in another problem. More than 800 dialects exist. Only the English unites the country as a language of the central Government and the supreme education.

They thought of imposing the Hindi, as a daughter of the Sanskrit, as half of the people use it. But the south replied with hara-kiri and self-burning. We cannot accept, they said, an inferior language, without culture and mixed with the Indian-Persian Urdu. It is true, that the Hindi doesn’t have in its asset the literature of the Tamil and the Bengal.

After that, comes the tribe panspermia. When god made the world, a myth of theirs says, took a few of each clan and placed them in India. White, yellow, black, creole, and all of their branches you can imagine.

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This would have been a real blessing, for the structure of the strongest race of the world, if there would have been a convergence towards the inside.

Though, the old masters worked upon their division, and the Madras Indian never felt sorry for the pain of Kashmir’s people.

Only One strong bond exists, which holds all the roots and faces together: the undivided culture of the Indian peninsula, the spirit of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Even those who don’t belong to Hinduism, more or less they follow the dance of the Indian tradition. Maybe this is one more reason why the Indian grabbed, voluntarily or not, his past. Only, he got hooked to it, absorbed by it, and dried up over it instead of milking power from it. The rich volition and will of the Indian, ended up here. Impenetrable, unshaped, became a screech and a simple attachment to a (once) important past.

Today, the Indian sinks under the load of centuries. An unbearable carapace has wrapped the sensitive Indian soul, unimpregnated by the juices of that soul, impenetrable by the modern light. It resembles the man who was well nourished, studied, educated himself and when he decided to travel to eternity, he never got rid of the worthless luggage, those which escorted him since he was a kid: pencils, crayons, plasticine, boards, old shoes, toys, kitchen implements, notes. They are all sacral to him and they drown him.

The future What will happen with India? China already cut the ropes with its past and rebuilds everything from the beginning. Japan assimilated Europe and keeps going forward by showing the power of the rose leaves. India is out of the Middle Ages but the European drink she absorbed make the country trample a little, as it’s not used to it yet. Arts, education and economy are westernized. Is there a Renaissance going to blossom here?

Which new face is our planet going to feel in the upcoming future?

The country’s economy might be promising but for the most is desperate. The births are resistless, about 10 million people per year (one whole Greece annually!), which means as many souls to be fed. The economy doesn’t follow this rhythm. The hungry surplus every year. The legacy plays its role too, as sometimes the tractors are not allowed to plow the land where Shiva is sleeping. Once, the government tried to take over the exploitation of the temples from the maharajas, but as soon as the latter stopped visiting them, the crowd mimicked them.

The country which gave birth to Buddha cannot stay buried forever. After the last step before degradation, the salvation comes. Tagore cries with anger: “Forget the psalms, songs, prays.

Whom do you look for to adore in the dark corner of the sealed temple?

Open your eyes to see: there’s no god in front of you!

It is where the villager works the tough land, Where the road opener blows the hard flints.”

And the spirit lives in the people. Listen to the Bauls for a moment, one of the religious sects combined with musical tradition: “There’s no mosque, temple or sacral day, In every step of mine I have my Mecca, Holy is every moment.”

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It is obvious that there is a motion inside the Indian souls. They are all proud of their country and they love it. Only, most of them stay close to the harrowing traditions. Others prefer the dialogue with the science, getting off their back, gradually, everything barren. Some others are abrupt: “only the communism will solve our drama.”

Hard and dangerous to guess, but if you look through its good centuries of creativity, you cannot be disappointed. Only about seventy years of freedom is in the air after eight centuries of slavery and even more of brahmin-state. How long did it take to Greece after the 1821 revolution to make up the lost time?

You can see clearly now that a nationalism is rising in India, which becomes chauvinistic as with all neophytes happens. China and Pakistan hits make the country stronger.

An India, the way Gandhi want it: to love itself as it is a part of the world.

I remember, it happened in the Jubilee hall in the University’s boarding of Delhi. After lunch, we got lazy around the sofas of the waiting area, under the incessantly whirled funs, many Indians and a rich sample book of scholars from around the world. Suddenly, a German newcomer enters, fugitive from East Germany. The Indians gathered around him as he was narrating with a short of breath his adventure from getting away of the soldiers’ firing. He was telling the whole truth been misty-eyed, and at the end the Indians clapped vigorously. Some Russians stopped playing chess, obviously angry. One of them comes closer and asks reserved: – Can you all gentlemen tell me one thing please: who builds around his house tall walls, a thief surrounded by domestics or a tidy surrounded by cads?

– Are you calling us cads and thieves? I asked him.

– No, not you, He said. You might be nothing. But the capital, this soulless machine, which keeps going in cold blood, grinding human flesh and bone in its gear, is the problem.

It will blow up all these years of laboring.

I couldn’t care less about these opinions. But the Indians clapped him with the same strength. For me, this was a rare moment. As I found the at last the unenslaved, non-dogmatic human who is missed in our times.

– Bravo India! I shouted. Bravo India! They turned to me. Don’t be surprised, I said.

Do you know what’s going on back to the West? There two shares of us. The one believes half of the world is inhabited by angels and the other half by evil. The other share believes of the opposite. As we decline, you start ascending my friends. Your fathers said: Many pathways lead to heaven. You are the ones who synchronized this eye-opening against the universe. The truth lays under none’s hands. Listen, judge, assimilate and it will spout inside you. This is how the spirit of Gandhi and the song of Tagore reached you.

Help them go further and you will see. Let us, the poor civilized ones, live like chained slaves of the fist, but also of the paleolithic magic mixed with a medieval narrow mind.

We keep straight forward irrepressibly, holding our breath –where to?– building high towers outside, getting poorer inside, getting unbalanced dreary. If we don’t find the counterweight to our hydrocephaly, if don’t awake the tightened crumples of our soul, digesting Christ and Buddha and Confucius and Marx and Freud and Einstein, every conquest will become a problem to our survival.

You need to get your own conquests, but those will come naturally, don’t worry. The wealth of the soul is much more valid for the humans and yours is an ocean. You own a virtue that we are missing: get in the variety of human-sea of your country and find the 97

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hidden power, as this is not a weakness. No rush to fall in the cliff. The people are eternal.

Milk from the spirit of Gita, get it in your blood, as such song has never been heard.

This is your song, your pride –ours too if we wish–, blossomed blood of your fathers’, not from Krishna or Shiva or from any other of the millions of deities you carry along. These fairy tales are dried and dead. Get rid of them. The mud and the flaming sun of your country promotes the seeding, the growing and the blossoming.

You carry the excessive load of your dead past glory, your stigma, you grind your teeth at times, but they all constitute the positive element of the Oneness, as long as inside you is hiding the most consoling dough; the dough for changing this hypocritic, oppressive, ravenous universe which has no shame for transforming its atrocity to morality, and preaching that there is no other way, only because its leaders love their comfort couch, a little less its people and not at all the person. Even if this “no violence” of the tiger remains an utopia, it is the only solace for the human being: only from the home country of Gandhi we will see the Honest Powerful, holding the porphyria and the sacral stick. All the great creations which got away from the eternal overstepped course, arose from the chaos. Keep going forward, into the people now, not towards the heaven, you, grandchildren of the Gita. It a great deal that you make the one fifth of the world.

I never saw before so many people crying together out of pride.

The educated Indian keeps something provincial in his character, for sure. But many times, I envied him for his comfort, cool, and pithy way he talks, peals and appeals.

I was losing little things from my cell. In the beginning I was getting angry in the beginning, but then I was just playing silly. One day, after I received my scholarship, I left three hundred rupees over my table leaving the door halfway open, watching from outside. For a moment the Shudra who was steeling from me, knocks and gets into my room.

He sees the money; he gets out looking for me restless. He calls me and he is rushing me into my cell locking behind us.

– You are unbelievable, he said to me looking at the money. Why do you want to humiliate me like this?

He runs to his room bringing over and throwing to my face whatever he took from my room, soaps, maps, statues, glasses. In front of the greatest crime, the anesthetized crust broke and his pure soul spoke. Every time I remember Jaglisch, I feel worse than an awful surgeon who experimented over a live body.

Take their villages. They look awful. But just smile at the poor pure Shudra and you’ll see how the creation shines in his eyes. Give him your hand and you endow him the heaven.

A throng with roots, pagan at his base, without deep incisions through his course, like it happened in Europe with Christianism.

“Goddess earth, you are our mother, Smile to us mother, As it is time to harvest the rice.

Our heart is full And we have to pass the day singing.”

Its core is not at all out of this world, like the main trunk. Listen to him again: 98

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“This broken bunch Oh! We smoke it only once.

Our life is priceless – we live it only once.

And its joys as well, only once we have them And then, Never More.”

A continuous affirmation to Being, from the soil to the soul, qualifies the Indian. The saint finds his roots inside the beast. Tight bonds that will have to be thrown away from the time’s strings and expose them to the sun to blossom.

The time passed. India was writhing inside me. The airplane took a turn humming.

As it was leaving, the great country seemed smaller every time I looked back. It turned to a view and a dream. I saw the gigantic karma of India wounded, shrunken, bleeding, full of calluses, ticks, with wild ravens flying around it. But also tender, kind, with primitive acme in its cancellous bone, absorbing well the vibrations, rising without rushing, a promise for the synchronous humanity which wants to stand on its feet by taking pills; this humanity, finally, shouldn’t look for kindness while at the same time reproves those who don’t show exclusively their teeth.

I couldn’t help myself.

– Someone hand me a pen and a piece of paper, I murmured.

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