In Hindu mythology, Lord Vishnu is associated with economic activities

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Devdutt Pattanaik, ET CONTRIBUTORS|Updated: May 04, 2018, 11.16 PM IST

In contrast, Shiva is about letting go and accepting what is while Vishnu is about making efforts to enjoy a good life.

In the Vedas, Vishnu is the name of a minor god, who is younger brother of Indra, and is known for the three steps he took to span the world. But later, in the Puranas, we see a shift in Hindu mythology  and he becomes the preserver of the world. What preserves the world? Goodgovernance, or dhrama? What is good governance? Adequate wealth generation and adequate wealth distribution.

And so, Vishnu has always been associated with economic activities: just as Krishna as cowherd, is linked to animal husbandry, while his elder brother, Balarama, holds a plough and is linked to agriculture. As Ram, he is considered fair and just, alluding to proper distribution of wealth. In fact, Vishnu is called down to earth every time the earth is plundered and the earth appeals to him in the form of the earthgoddess, Bhu-devi, who takes the form of a cow.

In fact, cow is a metaphor for earth making all kings Gopala, or cowherds, those who ensure the earth is being ‘milked’ correctly. What is interesting is that the form of Vishnu connects him with economic activity. And this is best understood when we compare and contrast him with Shiva,  who became equally powerful god in Puranic times, as compared to his less popular Vedic form, Rudra.

Shiva is imagined as a hermit, linked to desolate mountains, caves, and crematoriums. He is smeared with ash. He wears animal hide. He can be seen wandering alone in the forest, trident and rattle-drum in hand. In contrast, Vishnu is linked to an ocean of milk, to butter, to rivers, to woods, to farmlands and pasturelands. He wears silk fabric, assuming the existence of farmers, spinners, weavers, dyers and washers.

He wears gold ornaments, assuming the existence of miners, smelters, smiths and jewellers. Shiva’s ash is made effortlessly by burning wood, dung and corpses. Vishnu’s sandalpaste demands effort. The aromatic stick has to be rubbed on a wet rock for a long period of time.

The more effort, the more sandalpaste. Just comparing and contrasting ash and sandalpaste makes one realise the difference in the philosophy of Shiva and Vishnu, seen through an economic lens. Shiva is about letting go and accepting what is. Vishnu is about making efforts to enjoy the good things in life.

This thought recurs when we see how they associate with milk. Shiva is linked to raw unboiled unprocessed milk. Vishnu loves butter and ghee, creation of which demands effort.

Shiva does not seek milk; Vishnu demands to be served, and even enjoys stealing butter and distributing it to all. Shiva is the bull, who cannot be domesticated, but still is vital to the economy as bulls make the cows pregnant. Castrated bulls, or bullocks, can be beasts of burden but they cannot make cows pregnant. Vishnu is linked to cows, which is vital for rural economy.

Shiva sits still on top of the mountain, withdrawing from the world, outgrowing hunger.

And if there is no hunger, there is no demand, or supply, or market. In other words, destruction of the economy. Is that good? The goddess tells Shiva that while outgrowing one’s own hunger is good, surely taking care of other people’s hunger, feeding others is also good. Thus a counter-point is added to Shiva’s hermit ways. Shiva’s hermit ways challenges the hunger of man, but so does the idea of generosity that the Goddess speaks of and Vishnu embodies.

Yes, hunger sustains the market. But whose hunger? Our hunger or other people’s hunger. What hunger sustains the world? The shareholder’s or the consumer’s or the employee’s. Capitalism is obsessed with shareholder’s wealth. Communism with employee’s wealth.

Capitalism celebrates consumerism. Communism mocks it. Yet a perfect ecosystem is one where everyone’s hunger is satisfied, and more importantly satiated. A satiated Vishnu feeds the world, thus creating Vaikuntha.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)

Source: economictimes

Commanding heights: A discovery of Nehru through his books

popular indian books

He may be reviled on Facebook and Twitter, but Nehru’s books have lost none of their value and appeal.

by  Keshava Guha

Published Nov 14, 2016 · 05:30 pm Updated Jan 03, 2017 · 02:59 pm.

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One hundred and twenty seven years after his birth, the reputation of India’s first and longest-serving prime minister would seem to be at an all-time low. As he is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the founder of a dynasty, a share of any discredit that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi or the Congress acquire attaches itself to Jawaharlal Nehru’s name.

Nowhere is Nehru more abused and reviled than on “social media”, as it is conventionally understood: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. In his life, Nehru may have been the most beloved of all Indian politicians: 50 years after his death, virtually every failing of the modern Indian state is in some form attributed to Nehru, often accompanied by the hashtags #BecauseOfNehru or (sarcastically) #ThankYouNehru.

The backlash comprises legitimate criticism of his economic and foreign policies or failure to address health and primary education as well as rumours and theories that range from deeply misleading (that Nehru rejected a Security Council seat for India) to fraudulent (that he died of syphilis, or wrote a letter describing Subhas Chandra Bose as a “war criminal”).

But if one looks past Facebook and Twitter, and beyond his career as prime minister, a much more expansive view of Nehru emerges: both of the man, and of how he is regarded today. While many of India’s Founding Fathers wrote, perhaps only Nehru, whose books enjoyed immediate domestic and international success, could claim to have had a second career as a writer. If, to play on the title of his most famous work, one wants to discover Nehru – to see past both official Congress hagiography and its backlash – there is no better place than his books. And as their reception on a very different social network, Goodreads, shows, they have lost none of their value or appeal.

Three classics

Nehru’s three principal books – Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography (sometimes published as Towards Freedom) and The Discovery of India – were each written during Nehru’s periodic spells in jail. While imprisonment took him away from his work for the Congress and his family, Nehru relished the time spent in learning – both from books and from compatriots such as Maulana Azad – and from reflection. According to the historian Sunil Khilnani, “Years later, feeling keenly the lack of time to read or write, Nehru would regret – only half-jokingly – the fact that he was no longer regularly dispatched to jail.”

Glimpses came first, a series of letters written to his daughter Indira from various prisons between 1930 and 1933. While not as widely-read as the Discovery, it is in many ways an equally remarkable work. No reader of Glimpses can fail to be impressed by its sweep, or the fact of its being written without access to a library, but Nehru’s greatest achievement in Glimpses is his recentring of world history away from the West.

Glimpses was written by and for an Indian reader, and Indian history consequently finds the space denied to it in Western surveys, as well as serving as a reference point throughout the narrative. But it is in his explorations of Asian history beyond India – above all of China – that we see Nehru’s faith, truly radical at the time, in the possibility of a global view of world history, written from a non-Western perspective. It is a proudly idiosyncratic work, more impressionistic than comprehensive: “It is not my aim in these letters to provide full and detailed pictures of anything.” Glimpses is a book best dipped into rather than read cover to cover.

Nehru’s Autobiography is, today, the least read of his major books (it has 309 ratings on Goodreads, to the Discovery’s 4,430 and 1,257 for Glimpses). This is because it is not a conventional or intimate autobiography – it is, surprisingly, the least personal of his books. It is dedicated to his wife “Kamala, who is no more” – but there is very little in it of his family or private life. The one exception, his relationship with his father Motilal, is covered as part of the book’s broader narrative, which is that of the Indian freedom movement in the years 1919-’34. It remains as fluent and engaging an account of that period as any written since, but its real interest, for a discovery of Nehru, is the relationship between the writer and Gandhi – intense filial love in the face of often profound intellectual disagreement.

Defying categorisation

The Discovery of India stands alongside Gandhi’s own autobiography as one of the two enduringly popular books from the Indian national movement. The common shorthand description – that it surveys India’s history just as Glimpses did the world’s – does little justice to this unique book, whose form defies categorisation. Part reflection on contemporary politics, part memoir, it reaches into political theory, aesthetics, economics and sociology in an attempt to craft a narrative of continuity amidst continual change, of intellectual freedom and the assimilation of foreign cultural influences in a rigid society. The Discovery is really Nehru’s own intellectual autobiography.

Reading Nehru’s books upends a number of the popular stereotypes that surround him, most notably that he was the “last Englishman to rule India”, culturally and intellectually Western. Nehru believed that Asia in general and India in particular needed to develop the intellectual self-confidence not to see themselves from a Western perspective, decades before the rise of post-colonial theory – many readers will be surprised to see that he believed that Hindustani, not English, ought to be the principal link language of India. Also evident throughout is his understanding of India’s diversity and his belief in the positive value of that diversity.

The closest the three books have to an intellectual common thread is Nehru’s vision of history as a narrative of the expansion of freedom and social and economic justice. “Nehruvian socialism” is a pejorative phrase that isolates his policies as prime minister from the moral commitment to progress and equality that underpinned them. As he writes in Glimpses, “No sound and stable society can be built up on the basis of inequality and injustice, or on the exploitation of one class or group by another.” Nehru was far from an uncritical or dogmatic Marxist, but we see in his books how Marx and socialism appealed to his worldview and his understanding of the particular problems of Indian society.

As Khilnani writes, Nehru, unlike Gandhi, was no saint, but, rather, “like any one of us – teeming with human appetites, often bewildered by life’s choices, self-doubting, indecisive, short-tempered, needy, sometimes downcast.” More than anything, what we get from Nehru’s books is a sense of his humanity – of his contradictory impulses, his immense ego and self-assurance and yet his acute consciousness of his own failings. He writes of his marriage to Kamala in the Discovery: “I had been and was a most unsatisfactory person to marry…we did not complement each other.” It is in Nehru’s “human appetites” and his frank portrayal of them that the contrast to today’s politicians is most stark.

On Goodreads, owned by Amazon and the world’s most popular literary social network, each of Nehru’s books enjoys broad acclaim. Five- and four-star reviews dominate, ranging from over 80% of the ratings for Glimpses to 65% for the Autobiography. Only 2% of ratings for the Discovery and 1% for Glimpses are one-star. Reviewers, most of them Indian, are frequently dazzled by the range of Nehru’s erudition, and by his prose style.

This says something about Nehru’s books, but also about the nature of different social networks. Contrast Goodreads to its parent, Amazon. On Amazon.in, recent books by Barkha Dutt and Rana Ayyub have been subject to organised trolling by Hindu nationalists: a majority of the reviews for Ayyub’s Gujarat Files, and over 90% for Dutt’s This Unquiet Land, are one star. On Goodreads fewer than 20% are one star for either book, and four star reviews are the most common.

Honest assessment

Some might put this down to politics – that Goodreads, unlike Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, is a “left-liberal” haven. But the real reason for the divergence is that the vast majority of Goodreads users, unlike many on other social networks, act in good faith. They review only books that they have truly read, and offer an honest assessment of the book.

Intellectual good faith requires a willingness to change one’s mind, rather than blind adherence to an inflexible set of conclusions. And the reviews of Nehru’s books reveal just how often this takes place. As one Goodreads user says of Glimpses: “Anyone who has not read this book has not seen this side of Pt. Nehru. Most people I know do not have respect for him for the things he did as politician. However, the letters that he wrote to his daughter are amazing to say the least.”

Another writes: “My negative impression about Mr Nehru has vanished after reading this book.” Discovering Nehru through his books, some readers no longer feel inclined to blame him for all the ills of contemporary India. A reviewer of the Discovery says: “Reading this book made me blame Indira Gandhi more for the problems of India prior to 1991.”

That’s not to say that a course of Nehru’s books will win over every hater. For some, it may only harden their antipathy: even so, they may find they enjoy the experience. The last word belongs to one Makarand Hazarika: “Jawaharlal Nehru was a power hungry person with dastardly acts and meretricious character, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t write good books.”

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Source: scrollin