Bharat Ganarajya needs Ganapati: myths, facts and gods

Om Ganesha Namah! This invocation must have slipped from the lips and hearts of many devotees of Lord Ganesha on the occasion of Ganesha Chaturthi these days. It was inspiring to read Claude Alvares on his FaceBook mural, recalling his earlier reflections and a write-up of 2008 about Lord Ganesha and the Mangala principle, placing the Lord Ganesha above St Francis of Assisi, a patron-saint of ecology in the Christian tradition.

Incidentally, the comparison seems somewhat far-fetched and even unjust: A frail human being like Francis of Assisi had to face real life challenges in Medieval Europe while a mythical construct of wishful ideals of pre-historic India can win any and all obstacles, be they ecological or otherwise, pre-historic or post-modern. Is it an effort to rebuild a myth of ecological foundations that is dear, and rightly so, for the Goa Foundation?

According to Claude Alvares, the Mangala principle which he associates with Lord Ganesha, implies wishes of prosperity but not at the cost of somebody else’s prosperity, something extremely difficult or near impossible to achieve for human beings. That is precisely why many religious scriptures and great spiritual leaders insist upon selfless actions, known as nishkamakarma to the followers of the Bhagvad Gita. However, Mangala sutta is also an important doctrine of Theravada Buddhism.

Before we proceed to reflect upon the comparison with Bentham’s utilitarianism, this mangala principle reminds me of Arun Shourie’s Introduction to his book entitled Worshipping False Gods (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1997): “Soon what started as the convenience of some politicians becomes myth, and myth becomes fact. And the country adopts as its deities the very ones who had striven for decades with its enemies to keep it in subjugation”. The book was a denunciation of Babasaheb Ambedkar, exposing the texts and contexts, that hardly sustain the political myths around the Indian Dalits.

Mangala sutra is better known in India as the Hindu ritual, an important sanskara that binds couples in marriage for mutual welfare and prosperity. It seeks to balance kama (sex) and dharma, the two purusharthas, and prevent the sex becoming a pleasure without responsibilities. To bring up Mangala principle in defence of ecology is a commendable exercise in updating a pseudo-historical myth into a convenient tool for curing a present malaise. The Fathers of the Indian nation tried something like this successfully in the Constituent Assembly, replacing the charka of the Indian National Congress with Ashoka’s dharma chakra in the national flag.

Obviously, since the dawn of the evolution of the Homo sapiens, our human species, religion and spiritual projections are the essence of all cultures. It was essential for the instinct of self-survival to project an eternity after life. The existential insecurity of the humans needed cultural constructs to take charge of the process of evolution and to check the natural tendency of the stronger to exploit and lord over the weaklings. 

Those born handicapped would hardly stand a chance to survive if cultural injunctions and institutions did not come to their rescue and protection. It was through culture and its linguistic component of transmission that human species took control of its evolution, unlike any other species that eventually died out or are doomed to die. Granting that cultures have thrown up counter-cultural checks from time to time, they will remain a tribute to “humanity”.

Let me come now to Utilitarianism introduced into India by the British thinkers and administrators cited by Claude Alvares. More about this ethical theory of governance may be read at https://stanford.io/2xhbeGS, but we have grown far beyond classical utilitarianism in our understanding of progress, happiness and development, though the outcome may be disheartening and the Mangala principle may still continue to be valid as ever in the past, even very distant past. Our Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen deserves credit for contributing to the new criteria for defining the human development index, leaving behind the national GDP as a basic component. 

Also Ganesha, Vinayak, Vignyaneshwar, Gajapati or Ganapati, will continue to be relevant in times to come, considering the fact that human progress has never been linear or fast-forward. We need to be thankful to our Indian ancestors from the times of the rock-carvings of Kerala for recording Ganesha as a helpful ally [http://bit.ly/2NJUYbM]. 

World cultures have thrown up since pre-historic times mythical heroes, gods and mother-goddesses to seek guidance, comfort and protection against the insecurities and threats to human survival. Many of those have been replaced and new ones invented as human skills developed to reduce those insecurities. 

Baruch Spinoza, a descendant of the Portuguese Jews who fled to the Netherlands, has left his understanding of this phenomenon, and summed it up by distinguishing two phases of nature, which he called natura naturata and natura naturans. The former represented the natural forces dominated by man, and the latter as the nature that remains uncontrolled by science and continues to instill fear and insecurity.

(The author is Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (Goa) 1979-1994; Retired Cathedratic Professor of the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Teconolgias (1996-2014)