Precursors of culture

But all these are instances of superstition, not taboo. I think superstition is based on ignorance while taboo springs from experience and environmental conditioning. Superstition is traditional, taboo is cultural. Superstition divides, taboo disciplines. Mauryan society, as depicted by the Greek travellers, was tabooistic while the society portrayed by Alberuni is superstitious. Superstition is blind faith, taboo is a commandment.

The term `taboo’ originated in Polynesia, where Captain Cook found a society where things, persons and institutions were held to be either sacred or accursed. In Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, you couldn’t get anyone to work on Sundays. It was a taboo day on which no fish was caught or fowl roasted. Nor were flowers plucked. No dancing, no music or liquor it was a dry day. Nearer home, only a few decades ago on the Malabar coast, all work stopped for three days at the end of January for the Ucharal festival.

A taboo is a self-denying ordinance, not something imposed by a ruler. Most taboos in the Northeastern States of India are based on two basic principles of Indian culture: that a wrong done to one is a wrong done to all; and that the might of all is greater than the might of one. A taboo is a cultural capsule. Scores of taboos in the Andaman and Nicobar islands revolve around their beautiful coconut trees, their palmyra leaves and rare plants, revealing a cultural panorama that is very compelling.

In the Lushai Hills, the sight of an Atlas moth, a very rare insect in our eastern ranges, recalls ancient tales of military history a brilliant victory or a more glorious defeat. In Bastar, tree felling was first stopped because of a tribal taboo.

Today, it is a cognisable offence in Indian law a glorification and reassertion of an ancient taboo. One tribe in the Andamans prescribes an elaborate penance for a man who kills a stranger. The four tribes of the Nilgiris, the Korumba, Badaga, Kota and Toda, have an elaborate taboo system with a culture many centuries old at its heart.

The cultural systems inherent in taboos are so entrenched that it would seem to be historically wrong and psychologically impossible to demolish them by mere reform. You cannot bring the tribal into the mainstream simply by distributing sarees, something they tried in Madhya Pradesh during the Emergency.Prehistoric man walked this earth warily, and he imposed on himself a set of self-restricting, self-denying, self-enforcing and to some extent even self-effacing rules (not rituals) to preserve his culture.

Slowly, the number of proscriptions increased to such an extent that he created a sort of taboo cult. Awed by the unknown, he strengthened the coercions of the system and fortified its incursions into the mystic and the occult.

And the process continued on into medieval times. In Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Punjab, it was forbidden to shoot a swan on the water, or a nightingale in song. The Maharaja was honouring the sentiments of his Dogra wife Guddon, a native of the Kangra hills, where it is still a taboo to harm the bird. Finally, culture does not consist of man added to nature, but a complex of man, nature, art and taboo. But today, we need something beyond mere proscriptions. We have to go beyond nihilism to a culture of defiance.