Land of Lime

Madhumalati has three suitors, and she likes them all. The nature of her feelings towards each of them isn’t clear to her but she has to choose one of them before she turns sixteen; otherwise, according to her astrological charts, she would die. Remember this is a pre-modern story and don’t shake your head in surprise and say: no sixteen year old ought to be making that decision. Let us simply assume that in times past, before we became modern, folks were wiser and more mature at an earlier age. Madhumalati’s dilemma is real and speaks to our own times and dilemmas in interesting ways.

Madhumalati is an atypical Dr. Rajkumar film. He is simply one of the suitors and isn’t the bearer of moral dilemma. Nor does he offer the solution to Madhumalati’s dilemma. Rather, he is one of the agents responsbile for her moral confusion. In fact, the movie too isn’t particularly good or enjoyable. The story line is thin and stretched out. Dialogues are trite and there are very few memorable lines. Songs too don’t linger in our mind, long after the viewing of the film. The story itself is taken from the well known Betala Paccisi series of stories in which king Vikramaditya of Ujjayini solves questions posed by the ghost. But the king isn’t part of the framing of the film itself and merely comes at the end, to resolve Madhumalati’s dilemma.

The film opens with the birth of Madhumalati, who is the daughter of a merchant called Keshavachandra Gupta of Ujjayini. A Sorcerer predicts that she will live for only sixteen years; however, if she is married before she turns sixteen then, she will escape from her destined death. It is not easy to find her a groom though, since he should be proficient in astrology, Atharvaveda and sorcery and finally, marital arts.
In the meanwhile, the Sorcerer needs sixteen 16-year old young virgins to complete his tribhuvana vashikarana sacrifice, which would enable him to hypnotize and control all beings. He already has fifteen and then having identified Madhumalati, that flawless beauty who is perfect for his sacrifice, he sends his disciple to kidnap her, when she is about to turn sixteen. Our three young heroes - Madhusudana Sharma, the astrologer, Trivikrama Sena, the warrior and Vamanadatta, an expert in magic and sorcery - rescue her on three different occasions, fall in love with her and plan to seek her hand in marriage. Since they still hadn’t completed their education, they continue their journey, study with the same teacher and become very good friends. Yet they do not know their lives are intertwined through their love towards Madhumalati.

Then having failed in his quest to obtain her, the Sorcerer arrives at Keshavchandra’s house, with a plan to trick her parents and take her away. The three suitors too arrive at the same time, are surprised to find each other seeking Madhumalati’s hand; they are prepared to sacrifice their lives but not their love for Madhumalati. When Madhumalati in unable to choose, they compete for love but then all three successfully pass the test, leading to an impasse.

A confused and uncertain Madhumalati seeks advice from the Sorcerer ironically, who tricks her and takes her away to his cave, after hypnotizing her. Now, all three suitors had to work together, use all their skills of sorcery, marital arts and astrology to rescure her and bring her back to her parents home. Whose contribution was critical and who deserves her? She, however, couldn’t decide even now since all three of them contributed to her rescue and couldn’t have accomplished it alone. Before she could choose, she is bit by the snake that the Sorcerer had sent to kill Vamanadatta.

Would it surprise us now if all three suitors fight over the right to cremate her? When her parents refuse to entertain any such request, Vamanadatta magically takes the body away and cremates her. Trivikrama keeps her ashes, whereas Madhusudhana wanders all over the world, seeking the knowledge of Sanjivini mantra, which will bring her back to life. Now when is brought back to life, here is the final question: who should she marry and what should be the criteria for making that decision? If Madhusudana learnt sanjivini to bring her back to life, Trivikrama had preserved her ashes, which was only possible since Vamana had stolen her body and cremated her.

While all the courtiers fail to offer an acceptable solution, Vikramaditya, the Indian Solomon, offers his judgment. She does indeed love all three of them, since they are related for many lives but the nature of her love (which isn’t evident to her too) and her relationship to these three men clearly manifests itself in the role they played in her life so far. Vamana having performed her cremation, has shown he is her son, whereas Madhusudana being responsible for her rebirth, is her father; Trivikrama, on the other hand, had been her husband in past lives and hence he kept her ashes. So he should marry her.

I realize it is hard to ignore the (ontological) roots and the framing ideas of this story in the Karma theory, but what made me sit up and think is simply Madhumalati’s moral dilemma. While the story and the film are somewhat absurd, Madhumalati’s confusion at having to choose from among three suitors is something that we could relate to. Who do we like and why? What ought to determine our conduct and duty? Yet, when we don’t have access to Vikramaditya’s wisdom and judgment, whagt do we rely on? Modernity offers us the freedom to choose selves and make life style choices, without necessarily providing the moral anchors outside of ourselves and our bodies, some prior truths, some ontological certainties, whether we believe in them or not. What are the apriori values that constitute and/or determine the basis of our conduct?

These are the questions that linger in our minds, long after we watch this uninteresting and forgetful film.

Postscript: At the core of such moral dilemmas are our desires and sometimes, conflicting need to act responsbily and ethically. Speaking of desire, I read Mohan Rakesh’s classic play Ashadh ka ek din (One day in Ashadha) yesterday. The play is on Kalidasa, his muse, Mallika, and unrealized possibilities. Invited by the king of Ujjayini to be his court poet, Kalidasa leaves his village and Mallika behind, somewhat reluctantly. He knew of the seductions of power and recognition but he also sought them actively. But his creative spirit remains tied to the village, and Mallika, for (and to) whom he continued to write all his works. One day he finally returns, seeking to make a new beginning but Mallika is married and has a young daughter. She waited for him a long time, even had merchants bring his kavyas and read them all. But it is too late. Kalidasa says:

I said that i wanted to make a new beginning. Possibly it was the struggle between desire and time. I see that time is more powerful because …. Because it doesn’t wait.

In my mind, both these stories spoke to each other and the link wasn’t merely the city of Ujjayini or king Vikramaditya, in whose court Kalidasa served. Mohan Rakesh’s play is profoundly modern, especially in its conception of the characters of Mallika and Kalidasa. And thus very different from the spirit and world view of Madhumalati. More on these difference, sometime soon.

Cast of Madhumalati: Rajkumar, Udaykumar, Arunkumar, Bharati, Ashwath, M P Shankar.
Dialogue: Sitaramashastri
Background Singing: S Janaki, P B Srinivas,
Music: G K Venkatesh
Script and Direction: S K A Chari.

OK, strictly for University geeks, here is an essay in the Chronincle for Higher Education by Lindsay Waters, who makes fun of an essay (appropriately entitled ‘The History and Future of the Footnote in Critical Inquiry’) Critical Inquiry published recently ranking the greatest literary theorists cited in its pages. Here is the relevant quote:

But even granting CI its conceit, the second surprise (I’m lapsing into the ranking mode myself) was the relatively huge gap between the four most frequently cited theorists and the rest: Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147). Then we drop down below 100 citations: Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell ranks at No. 12, tied with Friedrich Nietzsche with 57 citations. The majority of the rest of our most-cited theorists huddle together with more modest numbers to their names. Harvard lit crit Homi K. Bhabha (an editor of CI) ties with Aristotle at No. 27, each with 38 cites; Harvard’s Greenblatt ties with MIT’s Noam Chomsky at No. 80, with 17 cites; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (again Harvard) ties with Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist from Germany, for 57, with 24 cites. Barbara E. Johnson (Harvard) is named but unranked with 12 cites. Once you get past the Europeans, the list is heavily East Coast, heavily establishment, and hardly does justice to what was once the fun of reading CI (although it may indicate what the journal has become in recent years).

But then what is the nature of scholarly engagement with these much quoted thinkers? Waters points out one example that the authors themselves cite:

The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry’s managing editor, note that “Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumentatively,” which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer’s sign of the cross.

But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise.

Here is Waters’ sobering conclusion:

More tragic is the harm such lists do, especially (as Merton speculated) in the humanities, where thinkers tend to mature much more slowly than in the sciences. Such lists harm because they freeze things; they tend to favor those who were precocious young; and they positively discourage the slow-to-mature, causing the system to lose whatever the last people might have contributed. The human cost of such list making is wastage. The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all.

Now I should get back to serious matters, liking quoting significant theorists and agreeing with them.

In less than two weeks, the biggest sporting spectacle, World Cup begins. Mike Marqusee writes in the Guardian on the economic enterprise that the World Cup is and its winners and losers. Read on.

A recent report from Oxfam - Offside! Labour Rights and Sportswear Production in Asia - reminds us that while Nike pays $16m a year to the Brazilian team, the mostly female Asian workers who make the gear are paid as little as £2.50 a day. Those who seek to unionise face dismissal. An Adidas supplier in Indonesia, where workers receive 60 cents an hour, recently sacked 30 union members who took part in a legal pay strike.

The economics and demographics of the World Cup suggest that globalisation is less a uniform wave than an irregular maelstrom. Capital and labour flow at different rates in different directions, as do images and ideas. Paradoxically, globalisation turns national identity into a prize commodity. Corporate and media interests in this country will seek to channel emotion (and spending) into support for the England team. Great numbers will follow the event not because they love football but because they have been persuaded that England’s World Cup run is important to them. Inevitably, political forces will seek to exploit that heavily hyped attachment.

One of the things that makes the World Cup compelling, sometimes disturbing, is the way the fundamentally trivial, harmless realm of sport (where accident and idiosyncrasy reign) acquires an aura of immense consequence. The pointlessly beautiful (beautifully pointless) game seems burdened with a vast weight of financial, cultural, political import. The amazing thing is that it somehow survives.

I see none at all
Who can build a tank
With the body as bank,
Buttress it with mind,
With virtue for steps,
And fill it all full
With water of Bliss.

Before you I declare,
Guhesvara,
Forever shall stand
The tank I have built.

Here is Allama’s response to Siddharama, who in spite of being an ascetic, is immersed in the world and is content building tanks and temples in Sonnalige (modern Sholapur in Maharashtra). Allama questions the purpose of Siddharama’s activities and offers another path. The vacana is a nice illustration of what it means to build an inner tank that shall stand.

Also seea related vacana by Allama: What do we cultivate?

Writer and commentator, Richard Rodriguez has a nice essay in the WAPO on the illegal immigrant as the ‘great prophetic figure’ within the Americas. As people have moved in search of livelihood or pleasure, legally or illegally, the inevitable Mexicanization of America and the Americanization of Mexico does create anxieties everywhere. Bush gets this perhaps more than any other politician but he too has to commit that folly of trying to ‘brick up the sky’ as Rodriguez says so eloquently.

Even as we buy this inevitability, what is the price we pay? Rodriguez suggests that Mexico as a ‘vision and economic reality’ distinct from America is dying.

A nation that cannot feed its young with dreams but cuts its milk with memory and sand is going to starve the future; it is going to die. The only place where people will continue to hold on to Mexico will be in the United States.

Was he speaking of India too?

Also read Borderline by Mois    s Na    M (okay, that’s how the name is represented in print) on absent, porous borders and hollowness of national sovereignty.

Hariva nadige maiyella kalu
Urivagnige maiyella nalige
Bisuva galige maiyella kai
Guhesvara, nimma saranange sarvanga linga [Allama, v. 775]

For the flowing river, legs are the entire body
For the burning fire, tongue is the entire body
For the gusty wind, hands are the entire body
Guhesvara, for your sarana, all the limbs are linga.