Skip to main content

From Bhishma to Modi

 


“Do you really believe that you are a selfless person?” Draupadi asks Bhishma in my short story, The Autumn of the Patriarch. And the Patriarch of two kingdoms stands speechless before that question. What prevented Bhishma from seeing the adharma of what was done to Draupadi first by Yudhishthira and then by Duryodhana? What kind of dharma did this man, this great patriarch, practise? Draupadi contemplates. She recalled what he had done to Amba, Ambika and Ambalika. Just carried them off without even bothering to find out what their wishes were. And then gave them to another man as wives. As if women were commodities made for gratifying men’s varied pleasures some of which were as perverse as Bhishma’s when he carried them off like trophies. And when Amba faced problems one after another because of what Bhishma did, the great patriarch treated her as if she were a lump of cow dung. No, even cow dung gets more respect!

“Dharma is too subtle,” Bhishma tells Amba in my story. “Truth is simple,” Draupadi retorts.

This story which I wrote a few months after Modi became India’s Prime Minister in 2014 kicked my memory awake yesterday as I sat in a movie hall watching the Malayalam movie, Bhishmaparvam (Book of Bhishma). The movie has little to do with the mythological patriarch except that the protagonist, Michael (played by the inimitable Mammootty), shares certain characteristics like: he is the patriarch of a huge family with villainous characters (one of the villains being a Catholic priest who is treated rightly like scum from beginning to end), he is a bachelor pledged to look after dharma and won’t hesitate to kill for the sake of that dharma, he has been given the mandate as patriarch by his father, and he is good at heart even when he kills ruthlessly.

Draupadi in my story mentioned above accuses Bhishma of lovelessness. What is the meaning of selflessness devoid of love? Draupadi makes Bhishma think. But Michael in Bhishmaparvam has love in his heart. Maybe, Bhishma in the Mahabharata also had love in his heart. The problem with love is that it seldom walks hand in hand with truth. Love is blind. Truth has a 6/6 vision.

Is it possible to combine love and truth with one yoke? I often think people like Jesus died young because they realised the futility of trying to yoke those two things together.

Dharma leans more towards truth. But it cannot ignore love. The great patriarch has to walk the tightrope between truth and love. Tough. Bhishma managed it as best as he could, I should say though I never liked what he did to Amba. And Draupadi too. He did not exercise his heart enough, I think. Or was he a misogynist? Even Bhishma cannot be perfect, that’s all I know in the end. Even the incarnations of God had too many imperfections – irrespective of their religions.

 I mentioned Modi somewhere in the beginning of this post not without a reason. Not because I’m obsessed with Modi as some people allege. I found myself contrasting and comparing old Vyasa’s Bhishma with present India’s Modi. The latter is a ruthless bachelor with a single-minded dedication who kills love at every bend in the road for the sake of what he thinks is dharma.

What did Bhishma’s dharma achieve in the end? Even Krishna, an incarnation of God, shot murderous arrows through that dharma in the end. Treacherously too. Even God gives up dharma before love. Michael in Bhishmaparvam is more on the side of Krishna than Bhishma. Modi is on the side of Bhishma. But there is a big difference, a difference that snarls at me whenever Modi rises in my consciousness like he did this morning when my breakfast news reported that he has started a website, Modi Story, to advertise himself even more aggressively. Oh my God! How much should we endure in a lifetime! Amba would have found Bhishma too good in comparison. Forget Draupadi’s disrobing.


I did not like Bhishmaparvam. It’s just another cliched story of a benign patriarch adding to the entropy in our immoral universe.

Comments

  1. I am tired of how many things are invented just to praise him and barely any that question him

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are plenty of people who question him. But they're all silenced.

      Delete
  2. It's lovely to read your blog after such a long time. I agree, Modi stands out and I have a lot of respect for the gentleman.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Progressing from a nonexistent tea shop to the opulent Central Vista does call for attention.

      Delete
  3. Hari OM
    ...he may live as one, but Modi is most definitely NOT a bachelor. His wife, Jashodaben Chimanlal, is still very much alive and living on meager pension with her brother and sister-in-law. The analogy with Bhishma does Bhishma no favours! Modi sees himself more as some sort of mahatma, without having gone through any of the asceticism... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You said it. The man is personification of fraudulence. But people see a Messiah in him! I'm sure the hollowness will burst sooner than later with a terrifying boom... And India will be stunned by the emptiness of itself.

      Delete
  4. If self-serving can be called Dharma, then Modi is definitely following HIS Dharma with complete sincerity. Love (except for his chair) is something he does not appear to have come across in his life till date. As far as Bhishma is concerned, by combining his (so-called) Dharma and love (for the Paandavas), he allowed himself to be split into two with the heart being at one place while the body at some other one. Your article is an objective one. My one question for Draupadi - Is she sure that whatever she did in her life was righteous ? Did she never put any foot wrong ? Perhaps the thing that she could not understand that destiny repaid her in the same coin. We are too conscious about the wrongs done to us but become amnesiac when it comes to the wrongs done by us to others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Entering into the Mahabharata is tricky. You don't know which side to take. Even the god in it is deceptive. I am like an ice skater when I touch the epic. Just on the surface. I'm obliged to you for raising these questions. I have endless questions too on all the characters in the epic. All said, that's a sign of greatness in the epic.

      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

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...