East and West: Why we are what we are

Are Europeans by nature individualistic and adventurous, and Indians close-knit and contented? Haunted by civilisational questions, Suchethana Swaroop turned to the great epics for answers. Sujay B M met him to discuss his hypothesis

Why does Indian education focus on rote learning while foreign institutions prioritise critical thinking? How does the West, though stereotyped as an individualistic society, manage its public life with greater responsibility than the East? We talk of community first, but our classical music is focused on individual improvisation, while the ‘individualistic’ West has developed forms such as the symphony, involving complex individual parts harmonised for hundreds of musicians playing simultaneously?

These are some questions I ask myself when I think of how we differ from the West. It wasn’t until I read ‘Beyond East and West’ that I got a sense of where our civilisational impulses might originate from. The book seeks to understand the Eastern and Western civilisations through a study of their epics. Understanding our present through the past, as reflected in literature, is not unusual, but in this extended essay, we see an ambitious attempt to compare two civilisations and their epic impulses.

‘Beyond East and West’ is an English translation of Suchethana Swaroop’s Kannada work ‘Aa Purva Ee Paschima’. The original was published in 2003 by Prasaranga and Hampi Kannada University. The English translation, by N S Raghavan in 2019, was published by the prestigious London publisher Routledge.

It took Swaroop four painstaking years to turn his ideas into a book. He got down to studying the Greek poet Homer, the Roman poet Virgil, and Dante, the philosopher-mediator from Italy, to trace ideas that have fired the imagination of the West. On the Indian side, he devoured the writings of Vyasa,Valmiki and Kalidasa, and returned to his favourite Kannada poets Pampa, Ranna, Kumaravyasa and Basavanna.

How it all began

Swaroop was working as a journalist with Prajavani in the 1980s. Besides news, he wrote on nature and the environment. But when he started writing on literature, he realised that Indian languages like Kannada had a wealth of writing but were not read as widely as works in English. He asked himself: How did English come to dominate the world? What led the Europeans to embark on long journeys and colonise so many parts of the world? Was their literature inspiring them to set sail?

Swaroop turned to the epics for answers. The more he read, the more he began to see a pattern in how the East and the West had evolved. He learnt Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit to be able to read the original epics. His book ‘Aa Purva Ee Paschima’ began taking shape.

Trip to Mysuru

I began thinking about Swaroop’s academic persistence as I sat in a KSRTC bus speeding on the Bengaluru-Mysuru expressway. My thoughts went back to my middle school days, when I had devoured Amar Chitra Katha’s three-volume English version of the ‘Mahabharata’. Later, I read Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari’s English translation of this Sanskrit epic. My father’s love for literature ensured I was well-acquainted with the Greek epics ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ written by Homer. The former describes the siege of the ancient city of Troy, while the latter, its sequel, is about a king’s struggle to return home after the Trojan War. These poems were written in the late 8th or early 7th century BC.

One day in 2012, my school in Bengaluru closed no sooner than it had opened because someone had called a Karnataka bandh. I had to get back home. I started reciting dialogues from Brad Pitt’s epic war film ‘Troy’ to make my 6 km-walk easier. I knew the major dialogues by heart!

As a child, I was fascinated by the grand plots, heroic characters and poetic imagination in these epics. At 25, I am intrigued by the nuanced understanding of human nature that the poets bring to bear on their writing.

Swaroop’s tryst with literature began in the early 1970s. A few days before he was to start his BA course at Maharaja’s College in Mysuru, he went to the college library and borrowed Leo Tolstoy’s novel ‘Anna Karenina’. It was an intriguing story of love and jealousy. Days later, he picked up Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, followed by Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’, a book on God, free will, and morality. His passion for reading prepared him for his magnum opus, which he conceived in 1995.

When cultures meet

Vyasa’s ‘Mahabharata’ and Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ are set in different eras and different societies. Yet, Swaroop contends, there is more in common between them than we imagine. A king’s blind paternal love, for instance. Dhritarashtra is similar in this respect to Priam in the ‘Iliad’. Aren’t Achilles heel and Duryodhana’s thigh manifestations of the same inexorable destiny? Aren’t Odysseus and Krishna shrewdness personified? They come across as tactical geniuses who must deploy their wisdom in the middle of strife. Their actions decide what happens to entire armies, clans and empires.

The popular perception that the ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Iliad’ are similar in thought and intent is flawed, he observes. While they talk of wars waged to rescue women, he points to a basic difference: Helen eloped with the man of her choice while Seeta was forcibly taken away by Ravana. The ‘Ramayana’ and the ‘Odyssey’, however, are similar. They can be interpreted as stories of valorous kings (Rama and Odysseus) and their extensive adventures. Rama is banished to the forest for 14 years where he meets sages and demons. He enlists an army of Vanaras (monkeys) to build a bridge across the ocean to bring abducted Seeta back. Similarly, after defeating the Trojans, Odysseus fights battles for years to get back to Ithaca, his home, to reunite with his wife Penelope.

In Swaroop’s view, the ‘Iliad’ is more like the ‘Mahabharata’. Fundamentally, they convey the age-old wisdom that blind love for one’s children can have disastrous consequences for a kingdom. They provide a full-scale account of devastating wars, not seen in other epics. Though Virgil’s Aeneas was preceded by Valmiki’s Rama by a few centuries, they share attributes such as a single-minded devotion to their goals. The two characters are regarded as ‘ideal men’ in their respective societies.

Between the lines

For Swaroop, epics serve as blueprints for civilisational values. More importantly, it is the way they were received and interpreted that determined their role in subsequent centuries. He argues that while Odysseus is mostly alone on his mission, Rama depends on Hanuman to cross over to Lanka, and then to get the Sanjeevani herb to save his brother Lakshmana’s life.

Odysseus’s sense of adventure, Swaroop says, is a characteristic we see in Europeans. “They are truth-seeking with an unmistakable individuality,” he says. This characteristic, he posits, drove them to explore the world and make scientific discoveries. On the other hand, Arjuna seeks Krishna’s help, and Rama ropes in Hanuman, reflecting the Indian trait of working collectively. Swaroop doesn’t discount the adventurous streak in Indians but the instances were few and far between. In the medieval times, the Cholas captured parts of south-east Asia like Thailand and Cambodia. “However, these conquests were more on cultural and religious lines than political in nature,” Swaroop says.

While the Greeks celebrated the destruction of the city of Troy, the Pandavas felt repentant after the Kurukshetra war. A nuanced depiction of the futility of war is seen in the concluding chapters of the ‘Mahabharata’. He believes, like other scholars, that they could be a later addition to the ‘Mahabharata’ by anonymous authors.

Evolution

While studying the two civilisations, Swaroop observed how they approach their epics differently. While the West has always revered Homer and accorded him a sacred status, they have adapted Homeric characters to changing times, and created heroes reflecting realities other than those depicted in the originals. Sophocles, master of Greek tragedy, named one of his plays after the Homeric hero Ajax, “a warrior unequalled in valour and sanity”, but his treatment was different. “In the hands of Sophocles, Ajax becomes a man deluded and distracted, heading towards a tragic end,” says Swaroop.

Virgil’s epic ‘Aeneid’ was also inspired by Aeneas, a second-rank Trojan hero from the ‘Iliad’. But this Aeneas has little in common with other Homeric characters like Odysseus. “In fact, Odysseus is cunning. He is ready to use every trick in the book to reach his goal. Aeneas, on the other hand, is an ideal man bent on providing a new home to his Trojan people, rendered homeless after the horrific Iliad war. However, Aeneas never resorts to deceitful tricks,” says Swaroop. In a literary first, Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ introduces his predecessor, poet Virgil, as a character. The 1321 CE poem talks of heaven and the
afterlife but also reflects on the anxieties of the time,
marked by crusades and instability in Europe.

Indian approach

The medieval Indian writers, however, were content to rewrite the Sanskrit epics without major digressions from the original, he argues. They did little to adapt plots and characters to the realities of their time. A sense of contentment, even smugness, had settled, perhaps?

Here’s what Jawaharlal Nehru had to say on this in ‘Glimpses of World History’ (1934): “Any civilisation falls, for that matter, not so much because of the strength of the enemy but because of the weakness and decay within... The people of India, instead of creating new ideas and things, were busy with repetition and imitation. Their minds were keen and intelligent enough, but they were more concerned in interpreting and explaining what had been said and written long ago... All these are the signs of the evening of a civilisation. When this takes place you may be sure that the life of that civilisation is vanishing.”

Multiple Indian languages retold the Sanskrit epics. Kannada literature reinterpreted them but in a limited manner. Pampa modelled the ‘Mahabharata’, making king Arikesari, his patron, the hero. He called it ‘Vikramarjuna Vijaya’. Ranna’s ‘Gadayuddha’ and ‘Kumaravyasa Bharata’ (aka ‘Gadugina Bharata’) are other examples. These poets, particularly Kumaravyasa, had flair and panache. All the same, they went back to the epics for inspiration — they adapted the ‘Mahabharata’ to the socio-cultural ethos of Karnataka.

Reform movements have worked better in the West than in the East, Swaroop says. A case in point is the vachana movement in the 12th century in Karnataka. It was spearheaded by the poet and reformer Basavanna. He challenged the caste system and inspired alternative literature. Akkamahadevi and Allama Prabhu were among the great poets he inspired, and the vachanakaras envisaged a new, less hierarchically divided society. Yet, the movement wasn’t as successful as the Renaissance or the Reformation in the West. Was the movement ahead of its time? Or did we feel the existing order was good enough and all the answers lay in the past?

Swaroop says this is not to suggest that the lessons inherent in the ‘Mahabharata’ and the ‘Ramayana’ are not timeless — greed leads to bloodshed and ruin, causes an entire empire to collapse, and truth eventually prevails over falsehood. However, bolder reinterpretations always take a society forward, Swaroop says.

Impact of the British

Swaroop says Indian society was marked by a harking back to past glory until it came face to face with the challenges posed by colonial rule. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Jyothiba Phule were among those who espoused new ideas. Their modernity was inspired by the ideals of the West. They sought
education for all, and propagated gender equality.

This new Renaissance in Indian society provided a fresh perspective in several fields, particularly literature. Michael Madhusudan Dutta wrote ‘Meghnad Badh Kavya’. A Bengali ballad, it retells the ‘Ramayana’ from the perspective of Ravana’s son Meghanad. Such efforts can also be seen in Iravati Karve’s Marathi work ‘Yuganta: The End of an Epoch,’ and Kannada playwright T P Kailasam’s English works ‘Purpose’, about Ekalavya, and ‘The Brahmin’s Curse’, about Karna. Malayali author M T Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Randamoozham’ narrates the ‘Mahabharata’ through the lens of Bhima, one of the Pandavas.

The Renaissance educated the masses, and provided the socio-cultural basis for our national movement, he argues. Swaroop fears we are regressing again. He says the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s, which culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, brought back the emphasis on the past.

Life’s project

Swaroop’s epic explorations had brought to him enough insights for a book in 1999 but he wasn’t sure if it would work as a book or a series of newspaper articles.

“Prof D A Shankar of Mysore University said it could easily fetch me a Doctor of Literature (D Lit) degree if I wrote it in the right format. I wrote it as a book. And it got me a D Lit from Karnatak University!” Swaroop says. He then got it translated into English. During the publishing process, realising the importance of the biggest project of his life, an emotional Swaroop told Shankar, “It’s fine if I die now. My life’s project is complete now.”

Historian Rajan Gurukkal commented that ‘Beyond East and West’ was the best manuscript he had read in two decades. Swaroop was overwhelmed. He also fondly recollects the contribution of his “exceptional translator” Raghavan. Swaroop had set out with the aim to find out if epics shape and guide civilisations. They do, he says, but has now come round to the opinion that, more than the epics, it is how we interpret them that impacts the way we lead our lives, and how we envisage our future.

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