A journey to Sri Lanka, the state of Tamil Nadu 1980, and other travels in India

We travel with seven: the oldest child eighteen, the youngest six months. Travelling by public transport with seven people is an event, especially in crowded situations. So it happens in a bus, loaded with Buddhist pilgrims and some monks on their way to Kateragama, that there is no place to sit. I ask one of the monks whether mother and child might sit on his chair. “No”, that wasn’t possible because “the other monk wasn’t supposed to sit next to a woman.” I said: “I don’t think that the rule is an appropriate interpretation of the intention of the Buddha in this situation”, but my remark was of no avail. As usual, rules prove to be stronger than the voice of right intention. But I insisted, and said: “Her name is Tara, the tear of the Buddha, the goddess of compassion”. The monk smiled, stretched out his arms to receive the baby and let her sit on his lab. Everybody happy.

Before exploring the island, we wanted to visit Tamil Nadu, a state in the South of India with 52 million inhabitants, and a language close to Sanskrit. The ferry goes from Talaimannar to Rameshwaram. In Talaimannar we saw crying Tamil men and women, saying goodbye to each other. A lot of police. It didn’t look good. These were the first signs of a bloody civil war to come. More signs would follow. The story of Sri Lanka as God’s Paradise on Earth showed its first cracks, a reminder of the remark by Nasr Abu Zayd that all religions are what men make of it.

During the journey southward to visit friends in their house near the Indian Ocean, we were struck by the shivalingams in temples and along roads, representing female and male principles such as vagina and penis. Here we found a religion that goes straight to the essence of human life by putting sexuality and Eros, the creative force of the cosmos and the beginning of human life, in the center of their rituals and piety. Not only in temples, also in the backroom of a shop one can see how men and women venerate the lingam by placing fresh flowers and burning incense in front of it. At the same time, there were signs pointing in a different direction, such as the Ayodhya incidents or the manifestations of the political party BHP. Also the crude repression of women and the caste system with its marriage rules that may ruin a family with only daughters. It took me many years before I began to understand how many ‘contradictions’ were present in this huge country where millions dream in their vernacular language but speak English in the Indian parliament, to bridge the gap between their indigenous languages.

The journey to the south, the heartland of the Dravidian culture, harboring the traces of an ancient matriarchal culture, stimulated me to visit India many times, hoping to find some answers to the complex question of the transition of a matriarchal culture to a patriarchal one. Intuitively, I felt that the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures could be of a similar importance as the discovery in my dream of nomadic and sedentary experiences of life. Perhaps there were links between both. Could it be that the repression and gradual disappearance of tribal cultures were part of the transformation of matriarchal societies into primarily patriarchal ones? The question is of importance, not only for Indian or other Asian cultures, but also for other continents and Europe. The Greek Olympus with Zeus and his women; the stories about the ancient Goddesses; the Eleusinian mystery cults; Athena with her helmet: this ‘Olympic carnival’ of gods and goddesses shows all the signs of a transition of prehistoric matriarchal systems toward patriarchal ones.

It is a striking example of the Indian Constitution after India’s Independence in 1947 that in 1997 K.R. Narayan was elected as the first Dalit President of India. The Indian Constitution rejects the caste system but it hasn’t the power to alter its age-old beliefs and customs, especially when these are linked to power and control mechanisms. Also the Constitution’s acceptance of secular humanism as foundation for the freedom of its many religions and life-stances, is of great importance. But that doesn’t end the struggle between religious aspirations with fundamentalist overtones. Ayodhya is such an example.

Travelling through India, our train halted in Ayodhya. There weren’t many people at the station. The weather was rainy, nothing remarkable except the fact that Ayodhya was world news. Hindu and Muslims were clashing about the question whose temple or mosque was there earlier. The outcome of serious archaeological research that there had never been a temple of Ram on the spot of the mosque, wasn’t enough evidence. A Hindu leader responded: when millions of Hindu believe that there was a temple in former times, then it stood there in former times. With other words: truth follows power; facts don’t count. Nazism and fascism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism uphold a similar approach to the past. It is also the belief of every nation that rewrites its history, or realizes its aims and rights by establishing facts on the ground. It is the story of Mars, not hindered by anything else than another Mars. It is the message of Sartre’s existentialism that the essence follows the actions. It is the motto of an unbridled capitalism that preaches creative destruction. All modern ideologies share the belief in this kind of activism.

Aryans, to this day, continue to seek ways to dominate India. Under the heading Aryan patriarchal society Ray Harris mentions how the process began with the Muslims – the Mughal Empire from 1526 till 1857, “but the British pushed it with force. The Arya complied happily because it gave them more power. The reality is that the process of Aryanization of India went slowly…strongest in the North West; weak in the South and East. The British adopted the Laws of Manu as guide for all the Hindu, thus legitimizing Brahmin authority…The Aryan caste system resembled the British class system. Many Aryans became Anglophiles, even when they supported independence. Adopting a Victorian moral code, the Aryan conservative is extremely prudish.”
The film Raja Hindustani, released July 13, 2010, caused an uproar because their lips kissed for a too long time. A number of mayors have imposed strict codes on public affection reminiscent of fundamentalist Islam.
Harris concludes that the condition of women under the Arya is brutal and dehumanizing.
“I would have no hesitation in saying that of all the religions the Arya treat women the worst,” adding that “the Arya have been involved in the systematic and sinister attempt to rewrite Indian history” and that “The Indian media is firmly controlled in the name of public morality, but it is really in the name of Aryan patriarchal control.”

My first experiences in the South of India were different from those I describe above. Staying in the house of friends near the coast in Tamil Nadu, we were invited to the house of the president of the Congress Party of Tamil Nadu. He and his wife lived conform the old traditions. Early afternoon, our host invited me to go for a walk. It proved to be his walking meditation. Standing in front of a huge tree, he spoke the words: all the leaves of this tree are different. I was struck by his utterance. Only then I understood why he had asked me for a walk. If a politician sees the differences between thousands of leaves on the ‘same’ tree, he also sees the differences among people. This happened during the summer of 1980.

New Delhi. The villa was well guarded. Heavily armed guards let us in. People were waiting, sitting on a bench along the corridor to his room. Common people, all wanting to talk to the minister, the one with responsibility for the safety of a billion people. A scene unimaginable in Holland.
He showed us his latest New Year card that presented all the religions of this immense country within a circle. He said that each of them manifests a special view that adds to the richness of life.
David, who recently founded a special funeral centre in Amsterdam, asked him whether it was allowed to transport a dead person from The Netherlands to Varanassi for a cremation. ‘Yes, except in case of a criminal past or aids’. From time to time, a guard opened and closed the door. We talked for at least thirty minutes: from an ethical point of view, the means are more important than the aims; from an aesthetic perspective, form is more important than content or meaning. It was a privilege to talk with this great man, a Sikh whose belief, i.e. Sikhism, has its sources in Hinduism and Islam.

From New Delhi we travelled to Varanassi, the holiest place for Hindu. After the cremation of their loved ones, people throw the ashes in the Ganges. The first born son has the ritual task to light the wood for the cremation of his parents, and to push the arms or legs back into the fire when necessary. To see all these burning piles of wood with the bodies amidst of flames, while men are throwing their nets in the Ganges hoping to find some gold or gems, surpasses any theatrical performance, especially when it gets dark. This is, in fact, India’s secret: night and day, sometimes more at night than at day-time because of the heat, lots of people in the streets and the squares, doing what they are doing. Like the man sleeping, his head on an oil barrel, the feet on another one, stiff as a plank.

We return to Madurai after we have spend some time in the south. Before we leave, I decide to shave my hair and beard in India, wanting a radical change in my appearance. I know the change will be for a long time, probably until my death. I don’t know that Adam, my son, has a similar plan. When the local barber visits the house to do his job, we both leave for the garden, amazed and amused to discover that we took a similar decision.
Walking in Madurai, people approach us, asking whether we are converts or pilgrims. We discover how important the distinction between a tourist and a pilgrim is, for both Hindu and Buddhists. Bald Tara, six months old, on the back of Job is greeted with the highest respect, people touching her head.

On the ferry from Rameshwaram to Talaimannar, an ex-secretary of president Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike approached me to say that his wife was impressed to see a white woman breastfeeding her child. She had never seen this before. The child was Tara; the mother Judith.

The couple returned from a pilgrimage after reaching the retirement age of 60. He invited me to visit the Buddhist Center in Kandy. So I did. Thanks to his mediation, I could visit Maha Thera Nyanaponika (1901-1994), a Buddhist monk, born in Germany.

I think, it is only enlarging the problem

During the visit, one is supposed to ask questions. My question was about identity, saying: ‘Thera, let’s not talk about individual identity so well known in the West. But what do you think about Atman, the greater Self’?

His answer: ‘I think, it is only enlarging the problem’.

I was astonished, not knowing whether he was joking, playing a trick on me or that he was serious. After three days, I realized that his answer referred to Atman as Brahma or World Soul. His Theravada Buddhism approaches Illumination or Enlightenment as the negation and absence of any form or substance.

Returning from China in 1292, Marco Polo arrives at the Coromandel Coast of India. He writes that according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on earth’. Marco Polo asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made of the earth and to the earth we must return.’
The Travels also reports: ‘The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king – except his is stubbed with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night.’ He calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon (Sri Lanka) produces most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.

Polo’s story reminds me of images of naked men we saw along a road travelling by car on a secondary road in the direction of Bombay/Mumbai. The men were only wearing a string. Seeing our car, they disappeared into the forest nearby the road. The same happened in Sri Lanka, when we were looking at a location to the south of Colombo. Entering a large domain, we saw naked people with paint on their body. Asking our guide, he talked about them as locals still living according their old habits.

I ask myself the question whether the difference between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures could be of a similar importance as the discovery in my dream about nomadic and sedentary experiences of life. The answer is ‘yes’, even more so than between nomadic and sedentary cultures. Marco Polo writes about a sedentary culture, where the rule of law applies to everyone, including the king. It also exemplifies the equality between people in their nudity and their common bind with the earth, when the king answers Polo’s question why they sit on the earth.
We see here all the elements of a world view that is both democratic and earth-bound; with equality between women and men, being safe while travelling at night with their goods, and being rich. The contrast with the Aryan caste system and the British class system as their ally couldn’t be more outspoken. The gradual dominance of the patriarchal system, not only in India, but practically worldwide, has been a transformation that poses the question whether there can be an evolution in the opposite direction.

Part of the answer is that the transition of earth-bound religions toward sky-bound religions runs parallel to the transition of matriarchal toward patriarchal societies. To study what happened in the context of India’s ancient and recent paradigms, might be helpful to get the issues of sex and religion, nature and modernity, and the effects of capitalism’s law of unequal development, into focus.