Introduction

The final autobiography in this volume is unusual in several ways. First, it was published as an oral history rather than a conventional autobiography. Fida Husain's Fifty Years in the Parsi Theatre, although told mainly in the first person, was published under the authorship of Pratibha Agraval, a theatre scholar who interviewed and recorded the actor. Second, its subject had an extraordinarily long life-span and outlasted all of his contemporaries who were active in the Parsi theatre. Indeed, Fida Husain lived for three decades beyond the last extant Parsi theatre company. He remained active at the helm of the Moonlight Theatre of Calcutta until his retirement in 1968. Late in his life, as a celebrated exponent of the “old Parsi theatre,” he created greater understanding of the form among the urban educated class. He taught seminars in acting, direction, and elocution at the National School of Drama throughout the 1990s. With his deep voice, artful enunciation, and commanding physical presence, Fida Husain gained respect for his personal talents and for the erstwhile tradition that fostered them.

These final accomplishments are outside the scope of his memoir, published in 1986. It focuses on his heyday between 1918, when he joined the New Alfred, and 1968 when he shut down the Moonlight. Fida Husain performed in hundreds of plays, first in female roles and then in male ones. His most famous part was that of the devotee Narsi.

The rich Indian culture spread to various cultural spheres of the Far East. Indian philosophy, literature, science and art left their distinct marks through Buddhism. Over the ages the profound impact of the multifaceted Indian culture enriched these countries by enkindling their creativity in various spheres of culture. However, the influence of Indian music remains hidden behind the history of the music of these countries.

Many civilised nations and races inhabiting Central Asia adopted Indian music and, due to cultural contacts, the prevalent music of Central Asia was incorporated into Indian treatises on music. From the various references to Indian ragas (principal modes of Indian classical music) in our treatise on music, there are indications of this unique absorption of foreign music. Todi and Khambaj, two North Indian ragas and principal modes of Indian classical music, could have some connection with Turkey and Kamboj (i.e., ancient Iran) as the names of these ragas suggest. In the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era, the Turkish people infiltrated into India. Similarly, an ethnic group of people from Central Asia called Kamboj also migrated to India and settled permanently on the northwestern frontiers of the country. It is quite likely that the infiltration of these foreigners had impact on the cultural life of people and music occupies an integral part of culture.

It goes without saying that any study of asceticism in Indian religion owes a great debt to the work of Patrick Olivelle. In addition to making many of the classic texts available in masterful translation, Olivelle has sharpened our reflection on the purposes of brahmanical renunciation and its inherent conflicts with the social, religious, and political landscape from which it emerged. The study of Buddhist renunciation is similarly enhanced by his work, and it is in the spirit of honoring my former teacher that I would like to make a small contribution here toward better understanding the motifs of sacrifice and asceticism in the early Mahāyāna tradition specifically.

Of course, Buddhism seldom calls to mind the notions of either sacrifice or severe asceticism. The historical Buddha's purported rejection of both is well known. For example, in the Küṭadanta-sutta, the Buddha counsels the brahmin Küṭadanta, who plans to offer a great sacrifice consisting of hundreds of bulls, rams, and goats. The Buddha describes for the brahmin his advice to a king for a bloodless sacrifice in a former life. Küṭadanta wants to know if there is an even more profitable sacrifice, and naturally the Buddha replies that there is. Gifts given to the saṅgha are more fruitful than other kinds of sacrifice, but even more profitable still is going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha, undertaking the moral precepts, and attaining direct insight into the nature and cessation of the manifold defilements.

Nietszche identified a general human propensity to find meaning in suffering. As he pointed out in The Genealogy of Morality, it is not the suffering itself that humans find so unbearable in life, but rather the fact that it is meaningless (1994, 127). Under conditions of poverty everybody suffers, but it is the women in the slums who are most creative in their attempts to glorify it. Men do not have the same notions of altruism and sacrifice – this is not how they define themselves as men. Nietzsche identifies Christianity as the most successful ideology to give meaning to suffering. The telenovelas give it a modern and glamorous gloss.

However, the telenovelas and the religious stories about the world are not ones that the women in the bairros have actively chosen, or ones over which they have any influence. Yet they are the most accessible form of sociability that the women have. This is reminiscent of their great grandparents' experiences of the dominant culture, as described by Gilberto Freyre:

Introduction

My Theatre Days is a classic autobiography from the Parsi theatre. Available since 2004 in a modern Hindi edition, it colorfully describes the life and times of Radheshyam Kathavachak, noted playwright and director. The book has enchanted readers with its portrait of commercial drama in North India in the days of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. Radheshyam straddled the great divide between older recitational practices that stressed personal devotion and more modern, public ways of marrying religious emotion and mythic stories to political agendas through theatre. He was by birth and training a reciter-singer in the Vaishnava sectarian tradition of the Hindi heartland. Bringing the poetic finesse and fervor of his background to the Parsi theatre, he created a series of powerful mythological plays. These dramas were performed by the New Alfred Theatrical Company at the very time that the nationalist movement was gaining momentum across North India. Radheshyam's use of Sanskritized Hindi and epic allegory were well matched to political and cultural trends of the 1920s, and he earned the respect of national leaders and literary giants like Premchand.

Radheshyam wore three or four hats, depending on how one counts. Firmly rooted in the world of oral performance, he gave devotional recitals all his life. He founded and operated a publishing house that printed devotional literature for the mass market. For several decades, he composed dramas while on contract with a large Parsi theatre company. And he worked in the film industry fitfully as well.

The destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid and the waves of violence that have followed it in India, coupled with the linked rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to political prominence, have led in recent years to a flourishing of studies on “Hindutva” or “Hindu nationalism.” Yet for all these works, very few have examined the relationship between the Indian National Congress (INC) and the rightwing religious politics of the Hindu nationalist movement. What work has examined this nexus has largely focused on its two varying poles. The first has dealt with the link between nineteenth-century reform movements and the post-1920 emergence of militant Hindu religious organizations, most notably the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Chetan Bhatt (2001), for instance, has carefully fleshed out the roles played by such mainstream nationalists and Congress stalwarts as Lala Lajpat Rai in developing the foundational ideological rationale bridging earlier ideas with the more rigidly communal ones that followed.

The second focus of scholarship has been on Congress activities of a more recent nature, post-Independence (primarily post-1980) when the party deployed “soft-Hindutva” for political gain. Generally, work in this group points to ways in which Congress-led governments succumbed to pressure from Hindu-right forces as early as the fifties, eventually opening the door for some party members themselves to advocate and practice weaker, more “moderate” versions of Hindu nationalist policy.

Jardim Cruzeiro (Crucifix Garden), January 1999

Francisca knocks on the door of Senhor Higino dos Santos. According to her sister-in-law, Livia, he ‘receives’ spirits, although only when he is suffering from his nerves. But Francisca does not want to talk to him in his spiritual capacity as a Candomblé priest – she has come to discuss a delicate subject. ‘Come in, my daughter’, he says, motioning her with his fleshy black hand into the dark room. It has brick walls, a concrete floor and no windows; once he shuts the street door the only light is from a candle on the table. He motions her small frame towards a chair on one side of the table. His huge form laps over the seat of the chair on the other. Francisca does not know how to start. She stares at the divining shells on the table. He stares at her voluptuous lightbrown cleavage and divines the cause of her embarrassment. ‘If you don't want to bring another child into the world, then I can prepare something for you. Cravo tea. Have you heard of it?’ Francisca nods her head and answers, ‘Yes, my sister-in-law told me to come to you.’ He lifts his great frame up and goes through a curtain just behind her. Francisca makes a plan: ‘I will prepare it early tomorrow morning, and then, if Livia is right, I should be rid of it by the afternoon novela’.

The Hindu law of adoption provides an exemplary case of the interaction of religion and law in traditional Indic discourse. According to classical Hindu jurisprudence, there are two reasons behind an adoption. The first, a religious reason, ensures that a man will receive the ancestral offering called śrāddha after his death. The adoptee offers the śrāddha which sustains a man in the afterlife and, without which, his soul may potentially be lost forever (Derrett 1977: 40-1). The second motive for an adoption, a legal one, is to provide an heir for a family's property.

These two motives are by no means unique to the Hindu tradition as both form part of a common pattern in many parts of the Eurasian world up to the modern period (Goody 1976). Evidence from Rome, Greece, and China suggests that issues surrounding both inheritance and ancestral rites were at the heart of adoption. Neither Jewish law nor Islamic law, by contrast, accept adoption in a fully legal sense and both thus serve as useful contrasts. In both the latter systems, however, fosterage or guardianship was permitted without any change in the legal status of the child. The comparative approach to adoption reveals the important, though often elided, difference between adoption and fosterage, the latter being a more precise term for the charitable acceptance of orphans, whether or not they be also legally adopted.

The Problem of So-Called “Folk” Etymologies

The study of etymologizing—of the techniques and theories of word-derivations in different cultures—as distinct from the study of etymologies themselves, might appear, to an outsider, a dull if necessary aspect of linguistics and critical philology. However, closer examination of some of the varying uses of etymologies and related forms of wordplay in different cultures, and of the divergent views of language that these uses encode, reveals that the topic is far from trivial. On the contrary, such linguistic forms tell us much about the ways in which language, the physical world, and especially the relation between the two have been conceived. The present essay compares and contrasts etymologizing and some related forms of language in the classical Hindu and modern British traditions as a preliminary effort toward understanding the differences between the “linguistic ideologies” of those traditions.

Scholars of ancient Indian languages have paid greater attention recently to the function of etymologizing and para-etymological word manipulations within the traditions they study, in part because these represent such prominent and distinctive features of these traditions, and in part to correct earlier dismissals of such verbal forms by Western scholars. Friedrich Max Müller's (1823-1900) statement that “a sound etymology has nothing to do with sound” (Müller 1877: 59), although directed at unscientific linguists in Europe, also captured an attitude common among earlier European scholars, including Müller himself, toward some of the etymological speculations within the Hindu tradition.

The 2,000 years history of interaction between India and China has been an outcome of the immense contributions made by a number of prominent personalities. Among them, from the Chinese side, we know the names of Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing. From the Indian side, the names of Kumārajīva, Buddhabhadra, Pāramārtha should be mentioned. Of these renowned monks, Kumārajīva was perhaps the most remarkable. Kumārajīva's father was an Indian and his mother was a princess from the ancient kingdom of Kucha. Since Kucha is now within the territory of China, we may say Kumārajīva was half-Chinese or a Chinese Indian. The various accounts of the life and work of these great historical figures have left deep impressions on our minds.

In modern times, the name that requires special mention in the development of Sino-Indian rapport is Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. His visit to China in 1924 was an important event in the interface between modern China and India. It rekindled the mutual exchanges between these two nations and propelled the development of a new genre of literary writing in China.

It is noteworthy, at this point, that all these personalities, who tried to bring the two countries closer, were extraordinary scholars with great knowledge and wisdom. Their intellectual acumen and academic achievements played a crucial role in shaping Chinese and Indian cultures and their subsequent intermingling.