Truth, perception and elusive empathy

Just when you think that maybe the world is improving, news does a great job of jolting you back to reality. Take the dowry harassment cases in the country – you would think we might have moved beyond the practice, and yet, just the month of May brought with it the news about Deepika Nagar and Twisha Sharma. Giribala Singh, Twisha’s mother-in-law and a former judge, has been giving numerous interviews to the media, and her callous remarks about her dead daughter-in-law are only less shocking than the hordes of people defending these remarks on social media.

What these comments show us is the difficulty of stepping outside one’s personal experiences to see the world as it is. But that brings us to the bigger question – is there even truth independent of our seeing of it? This, precisely, was the topic of discussion between two unlikely interlocutors: Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, who met in 1930. Where Einstein argued for a conception of truth independent of human perception of it, Tagore maintained that there was no truth unmediated by human experience.

While I’m always talking about the Sanskrit epics, the puranas, and related narratives, sometimes, the folktales and vernacular adaptations are even more interesting than the text itself, and show all the different ways in which people have read the same tales. For instance, a popular folktale attaches itself to the figures of both Tulsidas and Samartha Ramdas. Let us assume it is Ramdas for this story.

The tale goes that while Ramdas narrated the story of the Ramayana to his disciples, he was divinely inspired by Valmiki to get everything right – to see the events of the Ramayana unfold as Valmiki had seen them.

Ramdas got to the emotional part of the story where Hanuman looks for Sita in the Ashoka grove in Lanka, and began to describe all that Hanuman saw in the grove: the lush trees, the white flowers, etc. At this point, there was a sharp interjection from someone in the audience who had been listening to the story with eyes welling up.

It was Hanuman, who, legend goes, always rushes to where the story of Rama is recited and listens to it with folded hands and tear-filled eyes.

But here, Hanuman strongly objected to Ramdas’s narration of the events. Why? He insisted that the flowers in the Ashoka grove were not white, but red. Ramdas gently answered by saying that Valmiki had described the flowers as white. But Hanuman was far from convinced. After all, he had been an eyewitness to the whole episode – who could know better than him what the colour of the flowers was? They were crimson red, he insisted.

Who was to resolve the dispute between one devotee with divine vision and another who witnessed the event? Ramdas and Hanuman went straight to Rama, the hero of the story, to ask which of them was correct. But Rama only pointed out that he had never seen the Ashoka grove. So the two set off to meet the only other eyewitness who could verify the veracity of the story – Sita.

She affirmed that Ramdas was, indeed, correct. The flowers in the Ashoka grove were a pristine white. But, she smiled. Hanuman was not lying. He was so angry at Ravana for abducting Sita and at the rakshasis for keeping her imprisoned that, in today’s idiom, he saw red. His eyes, reddened in wrath, caused all the white flowers to look crimson to him.

Now, if you object that red eyes don’t cause us to see the world in red, sure, you are right. But if only we could change our worldviews to empathise with the suffering of others, would the world not be a better place for it?

The writer is the author of How to Love in Sanskrit and likes writing new things about very old things.

Anusha S Rao is the author of How to Love in Sanskrit and likes writing new things about very old things  @AnushaSRao2

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.