The Literature of the Gayatri Mantra

The Gayatri Mantra is a highly revered prayer in the Rig Veda. It has the potential to inspire one profoundly. But it can also acquire sinister meanings or connotations depending on how and where it is used. That is true of most religious symbols.

The Gayatri Mantra appears like a motif in Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, three times. Anjum, the protagonist who is a hijra as well as a Muslim (doubly unwanted), finds the child Zainab orphaned during the 2002 Gujarat riots and takes her to a barber, gets her hair cut off like a boy’s, dresses her like a boy, and teaches her the Gayatri Mantra as a talisman against future communal assault “in case Gujarat comes to Delhi”. Delhi is where Anjum takes Zainab to. Anjum has made her home in a cemetery in Delhi. After all, cemetery is where the Muslims in Modi’s India are supposed to belong. Pakistan ya kabristan is a slogan shouted again and again in the novel in which Gujarat does come to Delhi.

The next time we hear the Gayatri Mantra in The Ministry is as a promotional material in a British Airways commercial. The burgeoning Indian middle class is very religion-conscious. After all, they elected as Prime Minister the same man, “Gujarat ka Lalla”, who wished to send all Muslims to Pakistan ya kabristan. The Gayatri Mantra must have an eerie charm for people who love to send other people to kabristan.

Zainab has to grow up in a kabristan in Delhi with Anjum. It is Zainab who recites the Gayatri Mantra later in the novel. She doesn’t know the meaning. She doesn’t even know which language it is written in. But she knows that it is a Hindu prayer. She recites it for her fiancé who was a Hindu once upon a time. She recites it, in fact, as a funeral song in memory of the dead father of her fiancé. Zainab recites it standing in a fast-food stall in a shopping mall that was built over the place where that man for whose soul she recites it was killed. “I know a Hindu prayer!” She says, “Shall I recite it here in memory of Abbajaan?”

The Gayatri Mantra acquires a prismatic spectrum of meanings in Roy’s novel. This capacity to produce meanings is the ultimate power of literature. This meaning created by literature is not morality. This meaning can lead one to morality. It should.

The Gayatri Mantra as a prayer may not do that at all. On the contrary, it can kill. Religion can be a deadly weapon in wrong hands as it has happened in contemporary India. Roy’s novel shows how cemeteries become the habitats of certain people because of religions. Such revelations can be made only by literature, I think.

This is a continuation of my last post which argued that literature is not moral science. I conclude this discussion here. The purpose of this post is to repeat what I said in the last post that literature can be more effective in transforming people into better creatures than religions. I just brought in the example of a contemporary novel. I am happy that the last post aroused some debate. I would be happy to continue that debate.