Circle of reason

Head and heart are traditionally pitted as natural adversaries in the dynamics of the human condition. The need for faith is often posited a...

Head and heart are traditionally pitted as natural adversaries in the dynamics of the human condition. The need for faith is often posited as the need of the ‘‘heart’’; an emotional, messy and somehow ‘‘immature’’ need, scorned by atheists and ‘‘rationalists’’. The pure, cold light of ‘‘reason’’ is upheld as the better way to be and reason, the twentieth century had us believe, precluded ‘‘God’’. Curiously, those philosophers who used ‘‘reason’’ as a tool to establish the Divine were brushed under the carpet: Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire (selectively), Emmanuel Kant. And of course, Adi Shankara and a galaxy of brilliant minds from India and the East.

The effect of this Western intervention on post-Independence minds and digestions is still to be calculated. Its best result was the technical liberation of women and caste from the stranglehold of orthodoxy. Its most frightening consequence, though some of us will reject this as “reductivist”, is the politicisation of religion. This seems to have come about because nature does abhor a vacuum and the vacuum is nothing less than the void that Sartre — heavenly irony! — immortalised as ‘‘the God-sized hole in us’’. See painter Anish Kapoor’s canvases for one view of its terror. Kapoor told me in an interview past that he chose to depict the Void in rejection of its opposite, the thrusting aggression that characterised 20th century icons: guns, planes, submarines, warheads, skyscrapers, that tore through the elements, ripping apart land, sea and sky.

Inevitably, the Void suggests Woman: the enfolding, accepting, nurturing, putting-forth dimension, expelled from star billing in all major religious systems and able to keep a place of semi-honour only if vivisectioned as Virgin and Mother. In India, too, despite the Devi. Else, would there be Sena morality, rapes and societal pressure on women to always explain themselves, always be found guilty until proved innocent? This is of course said with affectionate apology to the many good men in our midst. But how wearisome the battle seems sometimes, to reverse centuries of inappropriate behaviour and achieve a respectable measure of gender democracy.

Curiously, one view of this situation came from of all people, His Holiness Srisri Jayendra Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram. In another interview past, he explained why my generation of working women had to pay such a terrible socio-emotional price for not submitting to the control freaks. “Society takes three generations to adjust. You are the middle generation, making the most changes, so you are hit the hardest. Your marriages collapse or many of you cannot find a worthy partner. But the younger ones should find it easier.” And when I asked if this came from the head or the heart, he reminded me sharply that in the Hindu view, both are one ‘‘manas’’.