Many intellectuals in India, including the famous painter M.F. Hussain, struggle to come to terms with the modern Hindutva brigade who claim that the first moghul king, Babar, destroyed the Ram temple and built a mosque there. Babar a king reknown for compromises did no such thing; in fact, like all kings he wrote in detail to his son how one must be extra careful in dealing with local hindu sentiments, a thing or two that could have come useful to the East India company before the Indian mutiny.
Reinventing the past has been a glorious past time for all nationalists. Many tribal totems and clans have mutated into a biosphere of gods and demigods broadly termed as Hinduism. Dynamics of these societies have been studied in detail by D.D.Kosambi many decades back. Older half-human half-beast horned gods were thrown into underworld and the modern human heros like Ram and Krishna have evolved over-throwing matrlinear and maternal-uncle societies and eventually migrating to cattle raising grass lands and creating farmlands. King Ram, Krishna, Cattle rancher Jesus Christ and Mohammed started hoarding the people as if they are cattle to the modern era.
As big joint families break down into modern nuclear families these gods try to evolve into montheistic modern male chauvinistic gods. Sisters and women evolve to wives. cattle, servents and even into prostitutes in the case of Mary Magdalene. In Indian mythology godesses Kali, Kannagi and Neeli evolve into ghosts of the past along with their disappeared matrilinear societies, with their modern docile female forms evolving into Lakshmi, the back side of the holy cow (I am not joking!!).
Indian rituals and mythologies have mutated into a plastic historical flux with nothing as illustrative as their marriage ritual. The marriage ritual started intially as a ritual celebration of the coming of age of girl, later evolved into a marraige ritual with layers and layers of additions. The bridegrrom now arrives in a slow moving car, but he used to arrive some centuries back in a horse and carry the bride away with that now being incorporated as part of the ritual. The central piece of the ritual being the grinding wheel, an ancient symbol of sexual intercourse.
The ancient Vishnavite mythology proposes an evolution theory based great sexual orgy of the milk being churned using snakes to create newer and newer forms from ghosts to gods; with Vishnu the god evolving from Fish to Totoise to Pig to Lion to Man. Male chauvinistic societies associate human evolution with Lions – hollywood's movie Lion-King being the great example but we know that we have evolved from Monkeys, with a matrilinear origins.
Neocolonialists like George Orwell and selfish-gene theorists like Richard Dawkins propose that modern human condition is programmed at a hardware level to evolve into an Hegelian He-man and the masters of the universe. These are ficticious hollywood modern mythologies that have to be clearly opposed as being reactionary idealogies that alienate men from other men through caste, class, religion and sex. These idiots talk of the differences between men as if they are some kind of sub-species, you should have been there when George Bush was instigating citizens of United States against Iraq and Afghanistan. I travelled on an empty plane a few days after September 11th. I was not alive when Hitler carried his agenda in Germany, but I can feel it now, how it would have been to be a Jew.
India is no different, Ram with his great followers like Modi, Advani (it is by no accident he has a mush that is similar to Mussolini) and our own Cho Ramaswamy intend to create greater pogroms against non-hindus like they did in Gujarat. The socialist Congress has its own pogroms like the New Delhi Sikh massacre to boast about in the great race to get more Hindu votes. As plastic historical flux called Hinduism evolves into moderm Ram-ism greater tragedies are in store for non-Hindus with their own montheistic male chauvinistic gods and non-conforming ghosts of the past.
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