Skip to main content

Onam of the Demon King

 

Image Source: India.com


Kerala is celebrating Onam, the grandest festival of the state. Onam is a festival of colours, flowers, music and abundance. In my childhood, Onam was projected as a harvest festival thus making it absolutely secular. The mythical legend of Mahabali (or Maveli as he was popularly and affectionately called by Malayalis) played relatively little role in the actual celebrations. The festive mood tended to supersede the legend though images of a pot-bellied Maveli made their presence felt ubiquitously.

Perhaps people aren’t too keen to scrutinise the Maveli legend because the legend doesn’t put the gods in any good light. Maveli is an Asura (demon) king who turns out to be far better than the gods. The gods, therefore, become jealous of him and an avatar of Vishnu descends to decimate the beloved king of the humans.

In her scholarly book, The Hindus – An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger says that the relationships between humans, gods, and asuras in the history of Hinduism can be grouped into three alliances. At first, in the Vedic period, the gods and asuras are opposed to each other and the gods prefer to unite with humans against the asuras.

The second alliance begins in the Mahabharata and continues through the Puranas. In this period, certain asuras and even humans become threats to the gods by virtue of their ascetic powers.

In the words of Doniger, “The balance of power changed again when, in the third alliance, devotion (bhakti) entered the field, repositioning the Vedic concept of human dependence on the gods so that the gods protected both devoted men and devoted antigods. This third alliance is in many ways the dominant structure of local temple myths even today.”

Maveli belonged to the second phase. He was a threat to the gods because of his goodness. To be too good is to tempt the gods. And the gods sent him to the netherworld but granted his wish to return once a year to visit his beloved subjects. Onam celebrates that annual return of his.

Personally, I find Maveli a charming figure merely because he is the quintessential rival of the gods. He shows that even the demons (asuras) can be better than the gods. He hurls a huge question mark on the very worth of the gods. He renders divinity ridiculously absurd. This is what makes Maveli a real hero. This is also why he should come every year to remind us of the absurdity of our gods and their religions.

 

Previous years’ posts on Onam

Dear Maveli [2018]

The abundance of Onam [2017]

Onam – celebration of human longing for utopia [2016 – most read]

 

PS. Floods subdued Onam celebrations in 2018 and 2019. Covid did something worse in 2020. Maveli would do better to stay in his Patalam. What we have done to our planet and its environment is far worse than what the gods ever did to anyone, even to Maveli. We are the Vamanas now, sending goodness down to the netherworld day in and day out.

Comments

  1. Indian SatireSeptember 1, 2020 at 12:17 PM

    Onam transcends all religious barriers

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 1, 2020 at 5:33 PM

      That's one of the best things about the festival. Unfortunately BJP is trying to destroy that secular nature.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
13 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more