Veenu Sandhu, a bright scribe from the house of Business Standard chose to enunciate her weekend moorings in the column View Finder by the title “Bring it On” dedicating it to The Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley Civilization Fame.
Veenu recollects as to how the lesson on the Dancing Girl left an indelible mark on her which she has not forgotten so far. Whether it was out of her deeper penchant for the historical and civilizational explorations of India or whether it was owing to the enactment of The Dancing Girl by Sister Linda- chin thrust out, eyes closed, right hand on the hip, left hand resting on the leg- who in her own admission used to be a terrifying nun who made everybody around freeze at once.
The transmogrification of the frightening Sister Linda into The Dancing Girl which filled Veenu’s heart for admiration towards her principal, seem to have cast a halo of constricted derision towards a more indigenous worldview of The Dancing Girl which tend to ascribe a connected connotation to the same in consonance with the Civilizational currency of India.
Veenu is thereby forced to think and claim that today, attempts are being made to trap this masterpiece from a lost civilization in restrictive labels. She further goes onto invoke the oft-repeated and discredited design of settling contemporary political scores by cleverly inducing civilizational narratives. She thereby says, the fate of the dancing girl is as though being steered in the direction that politics in the country is taking, which is allowing religion to creep into everything.
I tend to empathize with Veenu who got her early cerebral nurturing from within the confines of a restrictive regime ran by a religious order for whom the genesis of this world happened some 4000 years before the arrival of the Christ.
The definitive direction of contemporary politics of the country is yet to be ascertained but having been chiseled in an educational setup ruled by a religious order which posits an absolute blind faith in the gospels and miracles more than the scientific reasoning of the nature of things, makes Veenu a bit compromised in carrying further her fetish for a free fall argumentation.
It’s none of Veenu’s fault. Her principal might have been in a perpetual fix as to how come a prosperous civilization could have taken shape producing a bronze figurine of just double the size of Veenu’s thumb in the Indus-Saraswati belt of India when God was yet to create the cosmos.
Interestingly, many of us including myself have had the onerous burden of going to a missionary school for want of our parental aspiration to get their wards English Educated. But the teaching and training back at home did salvage our conscience from becoming utterly anglicized and alienated from our roots. My lawyer mother used to say it amidst the family gathering that her purpose to send us to English Medium Missionary School was just to make us learn the Global Language and the connected motifs. Sanskaras of the traditional Vaishnavite fold, I shall induce in them back at home. Her efforts probably paid off well.
It’s during these homemade tutoring, I got to know amidst many other things that complimentary values are quite integral to the Indic worldview. And that’s why as a Computer Science & Engineering Graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur I don’t find any objection to the scientific enough rationale extended by a retired professor of the Banaras Hindu University who claimed that the Dancing Girl is, in fact Parvati, the wife of Shiva.
It would certainly be hard for Veenu to deduce and comprehend this simple mathematical abstraction of complimentary truths owing to her Biblical over-dosages at Sophia Convent. She might be having a tougher personal space as well or else her Mommy would have made up for her frightening principal and helped her expand her constricted worldview emanating out of her classrooms.
It’s but very natural to a native Indian that Shiva & Shakti happen to be a conjugal pair. It’s an axiom of the Indian pantheon, howsoever diversified it might be from Kailash to Kanyakumari.
Constructing a wild and weird referential framework by introducing terms and introductions with heavy ideological overtones remain the trick of the trade for the libertarian cabal when merit of the argument falls short. This is probably scholarship by deception.
I could not find any relevance of political volatile terms like Right Leaning thinkers have for long maintained that Shiva was worshiped by the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization.
She misses the law of complimentary truths all over again. If she chose to invoke the term Right Leaning thinkers, she is by default qualifying herself to be a left leaning one. But she cleverly misses this objective insertion for want of monopolizing the mind space of the reader.
Her sinister contempt for scholarship & corresponding reasoning in the Hindi language comes out emphatically when she says that the professor, while making this assertion in a research paper published in the Hindi journal of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) argued that the statuette had to be of Parvati because ‘where there is Shiva, there should be Shakti.
Veenu might not have been told by Sister Linda that civilizational discourse and corresponding commentary does need a profound mastery over the indigenous precepts which are best suited to be comprehended and expressed in the native language per se. Civilizations across the Globe have had their own evolution and enriched life experiences. A 26 literal language which is incomplete to express the possible spectrum of phonetics just can’t claim to have its suzerainty in perpetuity.
What is so unsurprising for Veenu that this issue of the journal was published under ICHR Chairman Y S Rao, a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana. A cogent historiography anchored into the civilizational narrative of India shall come out from a native formulation alone after having weathered aberrations from Missionary Scholars.
After inducing the doctrine of deception, Veenu goes on to invoke the doctrine of fixation, whereby you peddle all your logic towards a known result for which you have been erected as a proxy. Objective Scholarship warrants for due reasoning and a systemic deduction of a result from a series of coherent steps. Short circuiting a logical argument by tending to discredit a substantial line of reasoning is akin to establish an opposing view. This subtle tactic has eventually got demonetized.
It astonishes Veenu that demands are being raised to rename the Indus Valley Civilization as Sarasvati River Civilization as she remains ignorant of the elaborate GIS mapping of the archaeological sites excavated all across the region and interestingly majority of the habitations have been found dotting the course of now extinct but then roaring Saraswati.
The objective realities of Science do have a precedence over theological beliefs and propaganda of faiths which nurture the cardinal principle of exercising dominion over the fish of water and fowl of air.
When the focus of Governance in India shifted from enjoying & exploiting power to slogging for the welfare of people at large, Race Course Road got renamed as Lok Kalyan Marg. Every Civilization does have its Magna Carta moment and India is probably witnessing the same whereby her subdued conscience is resurrecting layer by layer. Like the British imperialists, the ruling dynasty post 1947 took it to be its privilege to rule and enjoy the fruits of power rather than making it a means to serve the needs and aspirations of people at large.
On the emergence of definitive evidence, Jagdish Chandra Bose was accorded the credit of being an independent inventor of wireless along with Marconi. The more we tread in future, the more we start knowing about our past.
Veenu now invokes her third tactic from her arsenal – deflection – at once. She deflects the narrative by invoking Pakistan that the Islamic nation as also been staking claim on The Dancing Girl. What argument is she trying to bring into the discourse by introducing a reference to an enemy state. Pakistan has been staking claim for a whole lot of things which are essentially India.
She then goes onto creating a dubious comparison by asserting that Pakistan’s demands we can simply ignore. It’s the forces within that are the worry.
Reclaiming the lost heritage is a cause of worry for this libertarian scribe who as a child fell in love with the 4 inch figurine. Nobody is contesting her personal preference to ascribe whatsoever abstract meanings of strength, which Veenu exhorts so beautifully as “This little girl had survived the ravages of time – thousands of years. No wonder she still stood with such impudence, as though mocking the world. My admiration for her multiplied”. Her romance with the audacity and resilience with The Dancing Girl is a matter of great elation as it somehow represents the intrinsic spirit of womanhood, which Veenu might probably be experiencing.
But denying and challenging the right of a duly placed scholarly pursuit to associate The Dancing Girl with Parvati doesn’t augur well on her part. This association in no way restricts the abstracted view of The Dancing Girl. On the contrary it catapults the figurine to a differential order of feminine audacity, courage, conviction et al. The values and virtues which Parvati reverberated with.
Extending a political diatribe in the veil of a civilizational feature column is no sign of mature journalism. It simply establishes the advent of wilderness into which the left liberal thought process has strayed itself into. How long would a sheer materialistic dialectics could have served the cause of human emancipation. Imperialistic religious orders intolerant to diversity and oblivious to a reasoned re-creation of the philosophical framework would find difficult to match up to an utterly iconoclastic tradition of objective scholarship based on personal experience.
The mask has actually got off the face of left-liberal intellectualism which has failed to produce an integrated view of human life and the due fulfillment of its vivid aspirations. India has never been more inclusive and more embracing than today. How many streams of faith she has assimilated in her vast bosom with fortitude. Just that it has got its spirit liberated from the sword and sophistry of its invaders like the little figurine which has faced the vicissitudes of centuries, unfettered and undeterred and using the phraseology of Veenu but from a different perspective, she says to the world of intolerance “Bring it On”.
