Author: S. Aravindan Neelakandan
Publication: UPI Asia Online
Date: November 9, 2007
URL: http://www.upiasiaonline.com/Society_Culture/2007/11/09/commentary_deepavali_is_more_than_a_festival/2789/
Deepavali is the Festival of Light celebrated
by Indian religious traditions -- Vedic, Jain and Sikh. Multi-level mythologies
and history have made the festival cherished in the memories and lives of
the billion-strong Indian communities. It is the Festival of Light, and light
symbolizes many things positive, including primarily freedom.
Swami Vivekananda, the great Hindu savant,
said that freedom is the first condition of life. And the light of Deepavali
is also the light of freedom -- freedom from control, freedom from tyranny
and freedom from all that artificially divides humanity.
Hindu nationalists, after all, were proclaiming
the unity of the human race from Himalayan peaks while Europe was besieged
with racial theories and conflicts. As early as 1910 Sri Aurobindo pointed
out that race is a pseudo-scientific category. Veer Savarkar declared in the
1920s that humanity is one from pole to pole and all other divisions are manmade
and artificial. Why talk about race during Deepavali?
During the expansion of European colonialism,
colonial "scholars" -- who were often missionaries or administrators
-- tried to present the history of the people of continents like Asia, Africa
and the Americas. They derived the lineage of these people from Ham, a son
of the Biblical figure Noah. Why Ham? Because Noah cursed him and his descendents
with servitude to the descendants of Noah's other two sons.
This mythology of Genesis was transformed
into the history of the people whose continents the Europeans colonized. The
curse of Noah justified slavery. Even after the abolition of slavery, it made
Europeans feel good about the civilizing mission they were to take up among
the dark-skinned races of the world.
In India a variant of this Hamitic myth set
the dark-skinned Dravidians beneath the fair- skinned Aryan invaders (who
were descendants of Shem or Japheth as per the guesses of the researcher concerned).
Soon the demons of Hindu mythologies became Dravidians and the Gods Aryans.
Political movements which applied racial categories to social inequalities
sprouted.
For the colonial administrators these movements
were blessings in disguise, and they encouraged these social divides to counter
the rising tide of the anti-colonial freedom movement in India. In the process
the beautiful cultural traditions of India became victims of racial interpretations.
Deepavali is one such.
In South India the Dravidian supremacist movement
was run by E. V. Ramasami, a disgruntled Congressman. He declared that Narakasura
-- a demon whose death we celebrate in Deepavali -- was Dravidian and that
he was killed by deceit by Aryan invaders. So he declared that Deepavali should
be a day of mourning for Tamils.
It is interesting to note that even though
his followers today form the ruling party and Dravidian ideology -- which
is racism camouflaged as social justice -- is the ideology of the ruling party
in Tamil Nadu, people have rejected this racial interpretation of the Deepavali
mythology. Tamil Nadu is full of children bursting crackers and people exchanging
sweets on the day of Deepavali -- virtually indistinguishable from the rest
of India.
Deepavali thus symbolizes in Tamil Nadu the
victory of Tamil culture, which is part of Indian culture, against racist
propaganda. To feel the significance of this cultural victory over racist
narrative one has only to look at Rwanda, where a parallel racist divide of
the people by Hamitic myth-turned-history resulted in genocide and massacres
and wars among people of the same stock and culture who were made to believe
that they were alien races.
The mythology of Deepavali that is very prevalent
in the South is the killing of Narakasura, a demon born when Vishnu rescued
Earth from chaos. Narakasura, though born of divine parents, had an uncontrollable
urge to conquer the entire universe. He imprisoned women. In the end he was
met in battle by Vishnu, who was aided by an incarnation of Mother Earth.
Ultimately he was killed not by Vishnu but by Mother Earth. As he was dying
he realized his wrongs and requested that his death be celebrated as the Festival
of Light.
Are not we too children of Earth carrying
the divinity within and yet an uncontrollable urge to control all nature?
And have not our technologies, born out of an urge to control nature, created
a serious imbalance between yin and yang and relegated the feminine into dungeons
of our unconscious? Then will not Gaia -- Mother Earth -- remove our species
on her onward march if we do not make our presiding paradigms sustainable?
The mythology of Deepavali has layers and layers of meaning and we humans
as a species would do well to ponder over it.
Then as we celebrate Deepavali we cannot forget
the kind of sacrifices associated with it. One such is that of Bhai Mani Singh
of the Sikh tradition who in 1737 sacrificed his life for the right to celebrate
Deepavali in the Golden Temple (Harmandir) of Punjab. He was cut limb by limb
and tortured for his "offense" in organizing the Festival of Light.
To this day Sikhs remember his sacrifice as they light the lamps in Gurudwaras.
Less well known is the sacrifice indentured
laborers of Indian origin underwent in Africa for their right to celebrate
Deepavali. Two historians, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, in their book titled
"Inside Indenture" revealed how indentured Indian laborers who went
to Africa in the 1860s to work in the sugarcane fields relentlessly fought
for their right to celebrate Deepavali -- which the colonial authorities refused.
At last they won their right to celebrate the festival in 1907.
Says Desai: "Being the 100th year of
celebrations, we need to recognize and pay homage to those indentured laborers
and many other Hindus who sacrificed a great deal to convince the white colonial
authorities that Hinduism was a religion and that they had a right to celebrate
Deepavali."
Thus in South Africa Deepavali became a symbolic
clarion call for freedom and end to discrimination that anticipated the arrival
of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Note that it also gives the lie to the
recent claims of Western Indologists -- high priests of a subject that has
undeniable colonial roots -- that Hinduism itself is an artificial creation
of colonialism. As this fight for the Festival of Light by indentured Indian
laborers shows, Hinduism is not a colonial construction, but a natural and
spontaneous manifestation of a collective expression of the Indian religious
heritage.
Deepavali is thus more than just a festival.
It is an expression in light divine of a great civilization that emphasizes
the oneness and divinity of not just humanity but of all existence, in this
age of strife and terror.
(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological
NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in
Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language
"God and 40 Hz.")
