Skip to main content

Vamana versus Mahabali


Kerala celebrates its state festival, Onam, today. The spirit of Onam is the sheer antithesis of contemporary politics which is governed by post-truth strategies. This morning’s national dailies brought us the news that the Income Tax raiders laid siege to more than 110 offices which were not kowtowing to the ruling party at the Centre. Raids and other forms of oppression have become the most common way of dealing with critics of the union government today. Every Indian today is expected to dumbly accept whatever the union government dishes out. This is just the opposite of what Onam teaches.

Onam is about self-sacrifice and integrity. Fundamentally a harvest festival, it is sustained by the legend of King Mahabali during whose reign Kerala was a sort of utopia where the people were highly virtuous. Honesty, equality, justice and other principles guided the nation unfailingly. The king was the paragon of all such virtues. But he was an Asura king. Hence the gods in the heavens were not quite chuffed with his popularity. None less than God Vishnu himself took an avatar in the shape of Vamana in order to sent Mahabali to the netherworld (Patala) using fraudulence.

Onam does not celebrate that fraudulence, however. Amit Shah wanted Keralites to do that. A few years back he wished “Happy Vamana Jayanti” to the people of Kerala on the occasion of Onan and tasted the hellish fury of Malayalis. No, Onam is not about the victory of the gods. Not the victory of fraudulence which is not uncommon in Indian legends including the epic Mahabharata. Onam celebrates the return of Mahabali to visit his people with the due permission of his vanquisher. An annual visit of his people by a loving king. The loving and virtuous king happens to be a demon and his nemesis happens to be the mightiest of the gods! Is it irony or catastrophe? You decide.

When I saw the names of certain publications which were raided yesterday – The Print, The Wire, The Caravan – I was reminded of the dwarf Vamana and the great Mahabali.

I think India is now governed by the spirit of Vamana and all Mahabalis are being sent to the netherworld through raids of all sorts.

The latest edition of Mathrubhumi weekly [Malayalam] carries a story by celebrated Malayalam writer Zachariah. Ammalu is a prostitute whose father was a Communist who loved Mahatma Gandhi. Seeing her father paying obeisance before a picture of Gandhi’s every morning, Ammalu too venerated Gandhi but without knowing who he really was. Ammalu asks the narrator-protagonist of the story, “Who shot Gandhi?” She wants to know the details of the Gandhi assassination. But the narrator doesn’t tell her. Instead he sings a song, the prostitute’s song: “Every night belongs to her.”

It starts raining outside. A spatter of raindrops falls on the narrator and Ammalu through the window. The narrator doesn’t see his room anymore. Instead he sees many skies. There are rainbows and stars and planets and international vessels floating in those skies. He hears the humming of eternity.

He hears Ammalu’s sobs.

I stifle my sob when I look at The New Indian Express headline in front of me: Tax raids on top policy thinktank, NGO, Trust.


I will celebrate Onam, however. Let there be light at least in my rare celebrations.

PS. My previous posts on Onam: Here

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanSeptember 8, 2022 at 2:17 PM

    Hari OM
    May this auspicious festival and New Year bring happiness and prosperity to you. And at least a day of respite from the ravages of news items... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. R Niranjan DasSeptember 9, 2022 at 11:15 AM

    Hope you had a wonderful Onam.

    ReplyDelete

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

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...
22 comments
Read more

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...
10 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

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...
16 comments
Read more