Devlok With Devdutt Pattanaik: 3 Read online

  When we talk of the Western tradition, there are two main streams—the Greek and the Abrahamic—which formed the tradition of the Jews, Muslims and Christians. The Greek influence is very strong. Alexander too must have heard these stories and thus wanted to conquer the world. The most famous Greek stories are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. There’s another called Argonautica. All these are stories of heroes. A hero has ambition and wants to achieve something. He goes on a journey during which he has many adventures. He battles demons, saves young damsels, meets learned ascetics and, by the end of the journey, achieves something big. He undergoes a transformation through his journey, but on his return home finds that his family has not changed, so a gap appears in his relationship with them.

  There are many such stories. There’s one famous story of Helen of Troy. A prince comes to Greece and meets the extraordinarily beautiful Helen and they fall in love. As Helen is married they decide to elope on a ship to Troy. All the Greek kings decide to attack Troy to bring Helen back. Such was Helen’s beauty that she’s known as ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’. There are many dramatic stories within this epic story, one of which is of Achilles and the Trojan War. This story is told in the Iliad. Achilles fights on the Greek side but has an altercation with a general Agamemnon, after which he refuses to take part in the battle. The Greek army faces defeat. They plead with him to fight, but he refuses. His brother, or some say his lover, Petrolocus (homosexual relationships are common in Greek stories), believes he ought to fight. He wears Achilles’s helmet and goes into the field. The Greek soldiers think it is Achilles and they are inspired to put up a great fight against the Trojans. During the battle Petrolocus gets killed. Achilles is furious and returns to the field to seek vengeance. He defeats Hector, a Trojan hero, and ties the body to the wheel of his chariot and drags it through the city. Basically, he humiliates a dead warrior, which nobody did.

  The Iliad is a story about a selfish hero who leaves and comes back to the battlefield because of personal anger. Achilles was Alexander’s favourite character. He wanted people to consider him as great a hero as Achilles. He wanted everyone to be afraid of him like they were of Achilles. He wanted to conquer all of Asia the way Achilles defeated Troy.

  The story of Odysseus is famous in Greek mythology. Tell us about it.

  Odysseus is one of the great warriors in the Trojan War, and it is his cunningness that leads to Troy’s defeat. He builds a huge wooden horse for the Greek soldiers to hide. The Trojans think the Greeks have retreated as they cannot see them or their ships. They are fascinated by the wooden horse and take it inside their fort, which no Greek has managed to breach for ten years. At night, Odysseus leads the men out of the horse and they unlock the main gate of the fort, leading to the downfall of Troy.

  But the story of the epic Odyssey is of him returning home after ten years of war. It took him another ten to return home to Ithaca. For twenty years, he was away from his family. In the interim, he has numerous adventures: his ship gets wrecked; he gets into a fight with the Sea God; he battles demons like Cyclops (one-eyed demons); he escapes from the beautiful women at sea known as Sirens who can charm you with their melodious singing but are in fact demons who can swallow you up; he is lured by witches who try to make him forget his home but fail; his fellow travellers die, and so on.

  Through all this time, his wife, Penelope, resolutely waits for him and refuses to remarry, despite many offers. Her son too is of marriageable age and her well-wishers worry that she’ll be left alone. Penelope tells her suitors that she’s weaving a cloth for her father-in-law and the day she completes it, she’ll remarry. But the cloth she weaves during the day she undoes at night after everyone is asleep so that her task is never completed.

  At a dramatic moment in the story, Penelope finally agrees to remarry—on the condition that the suitor proves himself worthy of being the king of Ithaca and her husband. The challenge is to shoot a single arrow through the handles of twelve swords that have been lined up. Man after man fails. One of them succeeds. Penelope asks who it is as she does not recognize him. It is Odysseus. It is ironical that at last when he returns home, nobody recognizes him because he has grown old.

  This sounds like a swayamvara from one of our stories.

  There may have been some common thread between Greek and Indian cultures 2000–3000 years ago. They say that part of the Aryan tradition is in India and part in Europe. In the Aryan tradition there used to be a competition for the hand of the girl, similar to the concept of swayamvara. There are many similarities like this between the mythologies of the two lands. But these are superficial. When the British spoke about our culture, they compared the kidnapping of Sita to Helen’s elopement in the Iliad. But it’s not the same because Helen left of her own accord while Sita was kidnapped forcibly.

  The most important difference is the concept of rebirth and karma. In India, we talk of karma, that this particular life is one among many births. In Greek culture, there is only one birth, one life. You live only once. So there is a lot of drive and passion—there is only one life and so we have to achieve something. The Greek heroes are ferocious. Their gods and goddesses sometimes support them and at other times oppose them. This makes the heroes very angry. They feel they’re being toyed with, used like pawns.

  According to their beliefs, they have three possible destinations after death. Those who have done great work in life and pleased the gods go to Elysium, a special kind of heaven. Those who’ve upset the gods go to Tartarus where they will have to do the same task over and over again, thousands of times, until eternity. Usually this task is one where you can only fail, like trying to fill a broken pot with water. Those who have lived average lives, done neither too well nor upset the gods, go to Asphodel. There is no return from any of these places.

  Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that if you obey God and His commandments, He will be pleased and on the day of reckoning you will go to heaven. If not, to hell. In Hinduism, the concept is very different. If you’ve been good, you’ll go to heaven but it will be temporary. If you’ve been bad, you’ll go to hell but that too is temporary. You’ll keep getting reborn in different bodies and will be trapped in the cycle of life and death (ritu chakra). One day, when you attain knowledge and wisdom, after you’ve done tapa and yoga (forms of meditation and self-reflection), you’ll be released (mukti) from this ritu chakra. And you will find moksha (liberation).

  So Greek mythology does not have the concept of moksha?

  No. It’s always about achievement. The desire for revolution, for changing the world, comes from this belief system—that nothing in the world will change until the hero does something. Indians traditionally believe that the world is always changing, whether you want it to or not, so what will you achieve by revolting? That’s why in India, we don’t even have the concept of a hero.

  But Rama is the hero of Ramayana.

  In common understanding, he is seen as a hero. But this is wrong. Rama, Krishna and Shiva are all gods. They have the knowledge of all time (adi-ananta kaal) and are doing leela (simply participating in the illusion). A hero is one who undergoes an emotional transformation through his journey of victory or defeat. Our gods are stithpragnya, unaffected and stoical. They are the same in victory and defeat, in the forest and in the palace. The Greek statues show tension, style, attitude and musculature. Indian gods have no tension on their faces. They are peaceful (shanta rasa), their bodies are soft, etc. There is no concept of mad energy (junoon). A Greek hero has passion, a destination. People believe the Gita says that gods will appear on earth and defeat the wrongdoers (adharmi). What this really means is that these gods will reveal knowledge to the ignorant. The word ‘buddha’ means to awaken the sleeping one: ‘You are blind so I will reveal myself to you, give you darshan and open your eyes.’ There is no straightforward concept of good and bad or victory and defeat. In the Mahabharata, the Pandavas win but can it be called a victory when they lose their children? Rama �