DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE GREAT MOTHER

DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE GREAT MOTHER PROF. I. ISTHAK

Abstract. Philosophical reflections of Late Prof Isthak, published in Negations, a journal of culture and creative praxis, ed. Sebastian Kappen, Vol.3, 1982.

Modern human, in the capitalist environment, is an orphan. Very often he is depicted as a child, irrecoverably lost in a big crowd. Literature is the field, where such harsh metaphors flash into the very core of the living being. What happened to man, for all these euphemisms in literature?

The Mother Archetype If we look outwardly, we see that the ‘universal sun’ has set in his world and he is turned to a moth, seeking the lamp-light of privacy.1 Inwardly, capitalism really brought for him the death of his Great Mother. That is how he became an orphan.

If, to Marx, the ‘universal sun’ was the individual’s commitment to a common goal, the symbol of the Great Mother is the racial inheritance of the primeval life-force in every living individual.

It symbolizes the manifold structural qualities of the human mind, imbibed through the ages. The Mother-archetype is associated with the qualities of maternal solicitude and sympathy, with the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason, with any helpful instinct or impulse: all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility.2 Mother is the primordium of all human relations, whether familial, social or cosmic. She is the symbol of love and kinship, and the image of security and of the fulfillment of the need to belong, to avoid moral and physical aloneness.

A number of myths and legends have been fancifully formulated by the primitive mind in relation to this Great Mother, in all places. In many of them, nature or earth is the Mother. The tribal structure, caste, church and other religious groupings, nationality - all these could perform the function of the Mother, down the ages. Human beings were then like chicken under the wings of the mother-hen, as we see in the poem, “The Hen”, of the Malayalam poet, Sri. Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan.

From the bosom of this Mother, when we came to the abode of the real human beings of our times as seen in contemporary literature, the universal sun has set in the horizon and the Great Mother is dead in man’s inmost soul. The setting of the universal sun and the death of the Great Mother signify, in infinite dimensions, the social and psychic alienation of man in modern capitalist environment.

The deadening consequence of this deplorable human predicament is suggested in all modern literature in Malayalam. In a way it is a criticism of capitalism - the emerging structure of society - in its threatening effects on the total development 1

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of the “Whole Man” the long-cherished dream of Karl Marx and of many other prophets of humanity.

But, beyond doubt, this is not a literature of the proletariate in the sense of the Progressive Literature of the 1940-s and after. Capitalism means alienation, both psychic and social. And alienation is not a problem of the proletariate alone.

It swallows the entire humanity. This is the remarkable change in perspective in the new Malayalam literature. Here are the words of Sri M. Govindan, one of the pioneers of the new sensibility in art and thought. “Proletariate is not the only enemy capitalism confronts. Man against capitacapitalismthat is the fighting lines today.“3 Man orphaned One fine illustration of the spiritual agony and suffocation of human beings, entangled in the dehumanizing consequences of developing capitalism, is the Malayalam novel, ‘The crowd’, written by Anand in 1970. The background of the novel is the towering inferno of the city of Bombay. The title itself suggests the core of the novel. The dwellers of the city are the ‘Crowd’. A crowd is devoid of all inter-personal relations. It is not a family, tribe, nation, caste, or community. It consists of mere individuals, stripped of all maternal bonds of time, place, and consciousness; alone, isolated, and with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness; having nothing to search for and long for, in the dark fire of the city-inferno.

Like a child strayed from its mother and lost in a big crowd, each individual is under the grip of the ‘Yakshi’ - the charmingly deceitful city - as told in this novel, or under the arms of the ‘Rekshus’ as in the poems of Sri. N. N. Kakkad. The sun has set and the Mother is dead in man’s infertile soul.

Sri. M. Mukundan, in his short story, ‘Morning to Morning’, presents a young man, dropped by a train just minutes back, finding himself alone in the railway station. Here the writer successfully uses the metaphor of a child cut off from its umbilical bond with the mother. That young man, who never gets the answer to ‘Who am I?’, poses the problem of the loss of identity in modern times. This is the counterpart of the Marxian concept of the ‘self-estranged man’ in an ‘alienated world’.

In the famous novel, ‘Khasakinte Ithihasam’, Sri. 0. V. Vijayan has set his hero in a similar situation. The hero’s mother died in his childhood, though at times she shines in his memory. His father is old and bed-ridden. This is the situation in which he commits sin against his father, with his stepmother. This sinfulness is the root of his alienation, like the alienation of man from God and Paradise: the absence of a ‘Virgin Mother’. In Vijayan’s novel the dead mother is significantly at work behind the veil.

In these and many other stories and novels of today, we see the suffering human soul, fallen off from the grasp of the guardian angel or the protecting goddess, robbed of all its intrinsic power to liberate itself from the burning fire, faced only with dejection and death. There is not even a glimmer of freedom or hope in the horizon.

The Mother Em-powering Art against capitalism need not always end up with the delineation of the prospects of revolution or liberation. It may sometimes project only ‘setting and

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death’ - setting of the universal sun and death of the Great Mother. This the adamant Marxist critics in Malayalam could not tolerate. They could not conduct a positive search into the deeper human realms or show even a semblance of dialectical imagination. They failed to grasp that every ‘setting and death’ suggests a new ‘rise and resurrection’. It is painful for them to admit a progress in literature, out of line with their own outworn Progressive Literature. This is how they came to brand the entire modern literature as anti-human and reactionary.

Side by side with this literature of ‘setting and death’, there is in Malayalam another poetic line, which apparently invokes the power to overcome alienation.

The great archetypal Mother comes alive in these poems, especially in those of the poet, Sri. Kadmmanitta. These poets are invariably sensitive to the ‘mytho-poetic substratum of being’ the alienation of which meant for modern man, according to Dr. Jung, the loss of meaning and the feeling of insignificance.

Why does this trend remain poetic alone ? May be, because poetry is more primeval, racial, and maternal. It is interesting to note that the poems ‘Kattalan’ and ‘Kirathavritham’ of Kadammanitta appeared simultaneously with ‘The Crowd’ and ‘Khasakinte Ithihasam’.

The symbol of power for those poets is the racial Mother, Kali, the loving and terrible mother. Idasseri Govindan Nair, a pioneer of the new Mother-cult in Malayalam poetry, in a penetrating search, in one of his poems, into the core of the Malayali, finds there this Great Mother of dual nature.

Originally, Kali was worshipped in family groves (Kavu). She had then no form or temple; her name too might not have been Kali. Since caste system had not yet divided society into various levels of status, everybody could come to the abode of Kali. Only later, with Aryanization, did alienation creep into this society. The original Dravidian Mother was thus cut off from her people, enshrined within the four walls of temples, and surrounded with complex rituals; and her people too were alienated from one another by caste system and its consequences.

The original Mother and the cultural model of the un-alienated society around her is the source of vital power and vigour in the new type of poetry which strives to fight alienation today. The attempt to confront human alienation gives it a revolutionary dimension.

As in the parallel prose literature, in poetry also we see the inner agony of contemporary human. But the difference is, at the height of his/her suffering, the ‘third eye’ of his/her consciousness flashes and from the deep dungeon of his/her existence a wild and ‘irresistible mother-force dashes forth to fight the dark, alien forces that have tortured him/her from the beginning and to regain freedom. While, in prose, there was only the setting of the universal sun and the death of the Great Mother, in poetry also we see the inner agony of contemporary man. But the difference is at the height of his suffering, the third eye of his consciousness flashes and from the deep dugeon of his existence a wild and irresistible mother-force dashes forth to fight the dark alien forces that have tortured him from the beginning and to regain freedom. While in process there was only the setting of the univerasal sun and the death of the great mother, in poetry there is both setting and rising, death and resurrection.

In this context it is interesting to note that Maxim Gorky was though in a different way, a worshipper of the Mother.“He has created a series of Mothertypes each of which is a symbol of the vital life giving alpha.4 For him, Mother is

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the perennial source of life and the only one force before which death is humble and numb. This should make us enquire into the primeval relations between the archetypal Mother and the revolutionary art.

(1) Ernst Fischer, Marx in His own Words, Penguin Books, 1968, p.17 (2) Violet Staub De Laszlo(1959), The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, p.333 (3) Violet Staub De Laszlo, The Beginning of a Search, 1951, p.162 (4) Prof. Boric Byalik, Preface to Mother, p.10