Blasphemy in Brahma Muhurta

Dr T S Shyam Kumar: courtesy Pachakuthira

At Brahma muhurta this morning, I was reading something profane if not blasphemous. Well, I didn’t even know until I was reading it that Brahma muhurta was the most auspicious time of the day and that it lay in the fourth yama of the night – that is, from 3 am to 6 am approx.

Sleep eludes me these days in this period of the night. I wake up in the Brahma muhurta and then I am unable to go to sleep, for some reason beyond me. So I pick up my mobile phone and go to Magzter App. The magazine I chose to read this morning happened to be a Malayalam literary periodical, Pachakuthira. An interview with Dr T S Syamkumar, Sanskrit scholar and teacher as well as author of many books and recipient of some notable awards, caught my attention. This interview was something unique for me and one of the many things I learnt from it is that Brahma muhurta is the auspicious period that begins roughly 1 hour 36 minutes before sunrise and lasts for about 48 minutes.

Dr Syamkumar questions the very paternity of Lord Rama in the interview, among a lot of other blasphemous things he speaks without any fear of the reigning right wing of today’s India. King Dasaratha had no children though he had three wives. So he organised a religious ritual known as Putrakameshti, meant to beget children, sons of course.

When a great person’s genesis is not quite socially acceptable, says Dr Syamkumar, we ascribe some divine intervention to it. Dasaratha’s royal priest Vasishta got Sage Rishyasringa to perform the Putrakameshti. Vasishta must have been too old to do the ‘special’ sagely service that would actually help the queens to conceive, though the myth gives the honour of the conceptions to a sweet pudding given by Agni the fire-god who emerged from Rishyasringa’s sacrificial fire. Fire and sweetness can be powerful aesthetic metaphors, if you look at the story as a work of fiction. Rishyasringa’s sweet fire led to the conception of Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna, the four sons of Dasaratha.

What a story to read in Brahma muhurta?

Moreover, the story of the birth of Rama and his step-brothers is just a faint glimmer of a sun that has yet to rise. Or a lone drop hinting at an unseen ocean. The interview has so much to offer us: from D D Kosambi to Max Meuller.

Syamkumar went on to question almost everything that sustains what today’s Sangh Parivar upholds as sacred. He questions the sanctity of Sanskrit which, according to him, has always been a language of oppression. The rituals like the lower caste people cleansing themselves ritually with the dust on the feet of the Brahmins become a horror for him. And the Sangh’s Rama is a Brahmin Rama, asserts Shyam Kumar.

When Madan Mohan Malviya asked the people of Kerala to chant the name of Rama during his speech in Kottayam in the 1920s, certain Hindu reformers of Kerala chanted ‘Ravana ki Jai’, says Syamkumar before going on to quote Sri Narayana Guru who claimed that the fate of the low-caste Shambuka at the hands of Rama would have been our fate too had the British not ruled us. Well, I resolved to study the history of Kerala in detail.

Who was Rama really? Was he anything like what today’s Sangh Parivar claims to be? This is the major theme that underlies the interview that kept me engrossed in the Brahma muhurta this morning. The first thing I did after I closed the Magzter App was to place an order for Syamkumar’s book in Malayalam, titled Arute Raman? [Whose Rama?]. Soon you will find me in the local library where I have noticed a few good books on Kerala’s history.