Anand Neelakantan's Blog - Posts Tagged "legend-of-onam"
My artcile about Onam in Deccan Chronicle
Maybe Onam is a remembrance. Or maybe it is a lament. Or perhaps, it is just a dream that withered away.
Onam is the only festival in India that is celebrated in honour of an Asura. All other festivals like Deepavali or Navarathri belong to the gods.
They celebrate the victory of one god or another over the evil forces of darkness. Whose evil and whose darkness is another moot point.
Festivals are all about victory. Rarely are they about lost dreams. It is not often that ideas get celebrated.
But Onam is an idea that is worth celebrating. In a society that was tied up in convoluted knots of caste hierarchy for centuries, such a thought of equality sprouted in it, is indeed a miracle. Does the hazy legend of Mahabali hide the shame of a subverted race?
Is there something more to be read about the Vamana avatar and Parasurama avatar of Lord Vishnu? What the little dwarf, Vamana asked was for three feet of soil. What was granted was three feet of soil. What got taken away was the entire earth and the sky.
Asuras had nowhere to go, other than under the feet of the dwarf who had by now grown into a giant. The legend of Parasurama, who is the next avatar of Vishnu, also has to be read along with this.
It is said that after his many rounds of regicide that exterminated innumerable rulers, he decided to find a land for Brahmins.
He threw his axe and the god of the sea, Varuna, retreated from Gokarna to Kanyakumari. This is the land that the fifth avatar of Vishnu found for the Brahmins.
If we read both these legends together, some vague pictures of history emerge from the misty folds of myths.
Perhaps, Vamana is a symbolic representation of the first wave of migration of Brahmins to the kingdom of Asuras.
A small group of migrants arrive at the kingdom of a powerful king and asks for asylum. The migrants get a foothold and then they grow so powerful to subvert the king and the entire culture.
The kingdom is weakened within. It is in this weakened kingdom that the Rama with an axe to grind comes to establish his social order.
History is always written by the victor. These legends when stripped of all the contrived dogmas tell a simple tale - a tale of the people who got run over by another culture.
When we think about it in this manner, Onam becomes more than just a harvest festival. It becomes a cry of agony. It becomes a trip of nostalgia to a vague memory, a flight of fantasy to what could have been.
It is a collective sigh of a people who dream about a past that has got coloured and glorified in the hands of time. Not many cultures of antiquity had cherished the ideals of equality of all men.
More than anything, Onam is a tribute to such a culture that had dared to think about all humans being equal when the ideas of conquest, war, caste, slavery etc ruled the world.
In that way, Onam is more about yearning for a future that may never be than the remembrance of a past that never was.
(The writer is the author of the novel ‘Asura- Tale of the Vanquished’)
Onam is the only festival in India that is celebrated in honour of an Asura. All other festivals like Deepavali or Navarathri belong to the gods.
They celebrate the victory of one god or another over the evil forces of darkness. Whose evil and whose darkness is another moot point.
Festivals are all about victory. Rarely are they about lost dreams. It is not often that ideas get celebrated.
But Onam is an idea that is worth celebrating. In a society that was tied up in convoluted knots of caste hierarchy for centuries, such a thought of equality sprouted in it, is indeed a miracle. Does the hazy legend of Mahabali hide the shame of a subverted race?
Is there something more to be read about the Vamana avatar and Parasurama avatar of Lord Vishnu? What the little dwarf, Vamana asked was for three feet of soil. What was granted was three feet of soil. What got taken away was the entire earth and the sky.
Asuras had nowhere to go, other than under the feet of the dwarf who had by now grown into a giant. The legend of Parasurama, who is the next avatar of Vishnu, also has to be read along with this.
It is said that after his many rounds of regicide that exterminated innumerable rulers, he decided to find a land for Brahmins.
He threw his axe and the god of the sea, Varuna, retreated from Gokarna to Kanyakumari. This is the land that the fifth avatar of Vishnu found for the Brahmins.
If we read both these legends together, some vague pictures of history emerge from the misty folds of myths.
Perhaps, Vamana is a symbolic representation of the first wave of migration of Brahmins to the kingdom of Asuras.
A small group of migrants arrive at the kingdom of a powerful king and asks for asylum. The migrants get a foothold and then they grow so powerful to subvert the king and the entire culture.
The kingdom is weakened within. It is in this weakened kingdom that the Rama with an axe to grind comes to establish his social order.
History is always written by the victor. These legends when stripped of all the contrived dogmas tell a simple tale - a tale of the people who got run over by another culture.
When we think about it in this manner, Onam becomes more than just a harvest festival. It becomes a cry of agony. It becomes a trip of nostalgia to a vague memory, a flight of fantasy to what could have been.
It is a collective sigh of a people who dream about a past that has got coloured and glorified in the hands of time. Not many cultures of antiquity had cherished the ideals of equality of all men.
More than anything, Onam is a tribute to such a culture that had dared to think about all humans being equal when the ideas of conquest, war, caste, slavery etc ruled the world.
In that way, Onam is more about yearning for a future that may never be than the remembrance of a past that never was.
(The writer is the author of the novel ‘Asura- Tale of the Vanquished’)
