Adityanath ruled Gorakhpur, like a robber baron, being voted
into Parliament several times by his unruly mob of RSS platoons, recreating
with ardor his sense of male chauvinism.
Gorakhpur is the site of a pristine temple, its white neat structure, nestling
in a grove of trees. People come from all over UP to worship, and taxi drivers
describe the kanphatta (a sect of yogis)
monk as having a large diamond in his ear.
The excessively large glittering diamond in his pierced ear says it all.
The rural lumpen proletariat is in awe
of him. They describe him as having authority over scriptures, holding classes
for them every day, and generally providing samosas and tea as part of their
everyday sustenance as they work hard to fulfill the criteria of being foot
soldiers for him. Gorakhpur represents Saivite splendor, martial Hinduism, in
which the Gita printing press and the town itself become the manner in which a
millennial old renunciant tradition of
gathering itself into continual
martiality is represented.
Gorakhpur has fields
which are rich with rice and sugarcane, the markets brim over with
vegetables, and the people are representative of Indian villages, where
subsistence farming allows them to survive. However, education and health
benefits are what the State provides, and
given a routine lack of attention
to them, the hospital tragedy where infants died of encephalitis is seen as a
“normal” aspect of life in the monsoon. BEMARU states represent that borders
are infact osmotic, and the people catch overcrowded trains to various parts or
Bihar, Maharashta, Rajasthan and Uttara Pradesh, to become a floating population
of labourers who provide India with it’s resilient work force. Nepal lies very
close, and the king of Nepal often visited Gorakhpur in the past. Cows and
bulls eating plastic in filthy garbage
dumps is a very typical scene in Gorakhpur.
Kushinagar, fifty three kms from Gorakhpur, is in the
excellent hands of the Patna Archaeological Circle. The immense statue of the
Buddha in eternal sleep (parinirvana)is
the site that pilgrims from Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand visit. Guest houses
have been built for them, as they are well paying tourists, who have come to
see the gilded Buddha who sleeps in the company of mourners, most of whom are
Dalits from the town, simple people, without mobiles or movie cameras. The
Gupta rulers left us a monumental legacy in this small hinterland town,
companion to the larger untidy, crowded, eternally noisy Gorakhpur. Here, there
is a silence, large empty roads, and beautiful lawns aound the memorial to
Buddha’s cremation. Kushinagar is emblazoned by Maurya stone and brick work,
the austere compounds and relics sufficient to remind us of the Buddha’s
constant presence in architecture that commemorates his life and teaching. The
anguish of the Dalits as they mourn his death is so palpable in Kushinagar,
because local legend has it that he
shared their food, and died because what they ate was habitually rotten stale
food. If there is an intensity of suffering it is there, in the room, where
the immense image of the dying Buddha lies in deep sleep, coated in
gold metal.
Mediating these two towns, Gorakhpur and Kushinagar, are
woods, where Buddhiyama holds sway over
pilgrims. They believe in her ability to save them from drowning by water. She
is as integral to our understanding of small towns as the legends which inform
them are matters of everyday practice. In these towns with agrarian hinterlands,
and many stagnant pools, children often drown to death. Buddhiyama is not a footnote to Saivite authority, she
is the divinity that protects the householder. In the woods, in a temple built
to her, she is visited and beseeched to. She provides the fulfillment that
householders seek in the virtue of their ordinary lives. She does drown some,
though, according to legends and fear compounds pilgrimage. The Gods do as they
will, and human beings respond, sometimes by fearing them, and sometimes
forgetting them.
The poor who visit Buddhi Ma bring their families to this
site so that they may eat and drink festival foods, buy clothes and toys, have
their hands henna patterned, balloons and amulets purchased. Since Indians
believe in karma, it’s a little frightening, when we see politicians behave as
they do, uncaring of the poor and the
disabled. It’s essential that we return to the secular frame of our
constitution and demand human rights as the basic platform for our negotiations
across party lines, or religious faiths. We must invest in our children the
right to freedom of expression, and the possibilities of religious variation.
Masculinist theologies, whether secular or religious tend to see power and
domination as the curricula of post modernity. But it is the hidden away, the
unspoken, the secreted, that appears as a contrast.
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