Passion Week Reflections: Ecology and the good death

“The glory of God is a human being 'fully alive.' ” St. Irenaeus.

The ritual climax of the Holy Week is special. It is special not merely for the ritual drama following centuries old traditions that unfold at this time, but for the opportunities for personal reflection that open up through the emotion these rituals release. Every little action, and prop used in the course of the ritual drama offers the opportunity to change the course of our daily performances for the rest of the year or our lives. And at the end of the day, is this not one of the reasons why we repeat this sacred drama year after year?

Some time ago I had the opportunity to hear the plans an elderly friend was making for his final rites. Concerned with his ‘ecological footprint’ this friend decided that he did not want to be buried as per the norms observed by Goan Catholics. He wanted to go to his grave simply; without being dressed in a suit, without claiming for eternity a space in the soil of a cemetery, and without the wooden coffin that carries us to our final rest. He would rather be cremated he reasoned, going to his end in a shroud, a bamboo litter and then reduced to ashes that could be disposed off with greater ease than in the case of burial. As if in need of some sort of social sanction, he culminated these reflections with a nod towards his ‘Hindu heritage’, indicating that he would like to return to the elements in a way his ancestors had.

Our common ecological concerns had laid the foundations for our friendship, I was moved by his concerns for a good death, that seemed to echo the observation by St. Irenaeus. Concerned even in the contemplation of death with creating space for life, wasn’t this an example of a human being fully alive? I cannot say I agreed entirely with this friend however. But, there are times when one does not argue; one merely lets the moment pass. The issue has however stayed with me, motivating this week’s reflections.

For those who follow this column, the first part of my argument should be obvious; I took objection to a Catholic unproblematically assuming his (or her) ‘Hindu heritage’. The assumption that we had ‘Hindu’ ancestors can largely be made only by those groups who claim ‘upper caste’ ancestry. For the rest of the Goan Catholics, that is, the majority of us, we have the blood of many peoples within us. We come from groups that include Muslims, persons from Africa, China, and other groups that were less concerned with marrying into the ‘right background’. A ‘Hindu heritage’ is not something we can uncomplicatedly claim.

Further, given that ‘Hindu-ness’ as we know it today is the product of the nineteenth century efforts of upper-caste reformers, we cannot technically say we had ‘Hindu’ ancestors. Also, even if one would like to call our non-Muslim ancestors Hindu, we must remember that a total burning of the corpse was a practice followed largely by ‘upper’ or dominant castes. The money for, or the quantities of wood, used for a complete burning of a corpse was available only to a small part of society. Other castes groups either buried their dead, or only partially burned the corpse and then buried it. In any case, there is no reason to assume that burning of the dead in this manner is any more eco-friendly than burial of the dead. On the contrary, a burial, without the heavy coffin, that is an unpleasant class marker in the first place, may in fact be more ecologically friendly, since it allows nature to do her work at her own pace. It is when we demand exclusive use of the burial space for all eternity that the ecological costs start mounting.

Finally, in what may perhaps be the most Christian argument against recourse to ‘Hindu ancestry’, our belief, through baptism, in a man who transcended through His resurrection both time and space, makes it difficult to select just one group as our ancestors. Through Christ, who conquers all time, all groups in the past, and indeed in the future, are our own. They become especially our own, when they are found exemplary in a Christian lifestyle. This awareness adds critical dimensions to St. Ireneaeus’ observations.

One of the props in the Passion Play on Good Friday offers us an interesting option for Christians seeking an ecologically responsible burial. In a number of churches the bier that the figure of the dead Christ is carried on in procession is the kind that is still used by Muslim communities in India and other parts of the world. This bier holds the shroud wrapped corpse, and is not interred into the grave with the corpse. On the contrary, only the body wrapped in the shroud is deposited in the grave, the bier is reused. This practice is not very different from the image we get from the reading of the Gospel during Holy week.

The funerary practices of local Muslim communities it would appear offer us an option in the imitation of Christ. This option however offers us more than the opportunity to imitate the life of Christ. We are also allowed in this process to identify more actively with one of the more sinned against communities in contemporary India. It allows us to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our ancestry. In doing so, we are offered the opportunity to participate in laying the foundations for the just kingdom that we are committed to through our faith in Christ. Additionally it also gives us the opportunity to multiply the ways in which we can be fully committed to being alive. To stand for life, includes, creating the options for life subsequent to death, the expansion of our imagination of who is ‘our own’, and creating circumstances where people live in anticipation of life, not the fear of persecution.

Have a prayerful Holy Triduum and a Blessed Easter Season.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 20 April 2011)

No Carnaval in Paradise: The impossibilities of Carnaval in a post-Christian world

There is a certain familiarity that Lisbon brings to the Goan visitor. The place is full of familiar names, figures and remembrances. In this context, a friend suggested that rather than think that it was Portuguese names that Goans bore, it was in fact Goan names that the Portuguese carried with them. Goa, in other words, is where Portugal originated.

Now this suggestion seems facile, ridiculous even. We would do well to remember though, that history is always an artifice, a construction of ideas, emphasizing some aspects rather than others, the direction of some flows, rather than others. Much writing and thinking, especially within Portugal, begins from the assertion of Portugal’s gift of culture to the world. Where there is talk of counterflows, the influence of the colonized is seen as only ornamental, superficial. The colonized has not really impacted on the famed continental Portuguese soul.

I am led to these ruminations by my thoughts this last Carnaval. Through the entire festival, I was possessed by a strange irritation; an irritation I just could not figure out. I was sure it had to do with my conviction that Carnaval is a tropical feast, and my being out of Goa and missing the passion with which Carnaval is celebrated in Goa. I argued in my last column that the Goan Carnval is now a brief and gaudy lament for a lost citizenship which is why we Goans are still so passionately celebrate it. It was after seeing my thoughts on paper, that it all came together, and I could place a finger on an alternate source of my irritation.

‘These silly Portuguese are not doing it right’ I kept thinking, holding Goan practice to be the model-type. And indeed why not, since as I will go on to argue, the Goan Carnaval continues to approximate the ideal of what Carnaval is supposed to be. The Portuguese Carnaval simply has ‘to suck’ as a Lisboeta friend put it, because it has largely lost any context that a Carnaval ought to have.

The hierarchy of the Goan Catholic Church may disapprove of it; and our last gasp of fun, before Lent may not quite be the spirit in which we ought to approach Lent. However, we must recognize that the fact that Lent is still taken fairly seriously provides a significant context for the Goan Carnaval. Even if we do not abstain during Lent, the Goan Catholic enters into a social context, not different from that experienced by the errant Muslim during Ramzaan. In not abstaining we recognize deep down, that it is we, the non-abstainers, who are the aberration. In the post-Christian society that Portugal has become, the absence of the tension of restraint that Lent provides to the periods of moral laxity and consumptive excess through the rest of the year, results in a Carnaval without an edge.

The Catholic faith in Portugal has been largely replaced by a more secular faith, that of the ceaseless worship of Mammon, through constant consumption and sensorial gratification. Ghalib perhaps captured it best in his couplet; ‘Hazaron qwahishein aisi ki har qwahish pe dum niklen; bahuth nikle merey armaan, phir bhi kum niklen’ (Thousands of desires, each worth dying for...many of them I have realized...yet I yearn for more...). My perspective is to be sure partial and biased. I am but a few months a Lisboeta, and live in close proximity to Bairro Alto, the veritable temple courtyard of Mammon in Lisbon. In this location, and to quote the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan in his poem Madhushala, ‘Every day is Holi, and every night Diwali’.

Carnaval is necessarily a period of abandon, when we create a fleeting material paradise of plenty, to contrast with the daily deprivations we may suffer. As such, it is also a festival with stresses our relationship to the corporeal. When in this consumeristic world, every day is a Carnaval, and want is almost unknown, what sense in having a half week of Carnaval just once a year?

Portugal may be poor, its standards of living lower than in the rest of Europe, and yet, this is not the poverty of its not-so-distant past. It has, despite its grumbling, and it has to be said that the Portuguese lo-ove to grumble, settled comfortably into the Pax Europeana. This Pax is what Foucault has would have called governmentality. A situation where by and large our every material need is taken care off, or at least entertainment and distractions provided if it is not. Portugal’s needs may not be taken care of, but it definitely lives within a bureaucratic and consumeristic net where the edge of frustrated desires are blunted. The Goan Carnaval, as I laboured to indicate last week, is powered by the desire to incarnate a radically different citizenship from the one we currently inhere in. At Carnaval, we dance on the edge of that desire.

Goa, and indeed much of the world, lives outside of such a Pax. We may all be made of the same flesh and blood, but thanks to this Pax, this net of distraction, we realize our bodies (our corpus) in radically different ways from those in the European continent. It is perhaps a realization of this radical difference in corporeality, and the ensuing impossibility of Carnaval in Lisbon, that was at the basis of my irritation through Carnaval this year.

The time of Carnaval, and its relationship to the world, is an ideal. Once we are admitted into this reality, there is no new or old, authentic or pretender. When Portugal (or the colonizer) falls away from this ideal, it is indeed, Goa (or the colony) that becomes the model. The colony then, is where the metropole, can now originate from.

(A version of this column was first published in the Gomantak Times, 24 Feb 2010)

Credits

Image No.1 - Campo das Cebolas - Lisbon
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo1087357.htm

Image No. 2 - Carnaval in Lisbon - 1907
http://xafarica.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/158121.html

Image No. 3 - The Fight Between Carnival and Lent - artwork by Pieter Bruegel
http://apor.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/%C2%ABdominica-ad-carne-levandas%C2%BB/

Image No.4 - Roman Triumph
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-roman-empire.html

Lenten Reflections: Or why Inter-religious dialogues are a bad idea

Secularism has not meant in India the same thing that it did to countries in Western Europe. In those spaces, notably France, secularism meant restricting the direct say of the Catholic hierarchy over what was constituted as the space of the State. In India secularism has largely meant equal treatment to all religions, or the irrelevance of the individual’s religion to the State in public matters. The Indian State however, also inaugurated a social dimension to accompany this ‘political’ dimension of secularism. This dimension was to promote what we have come to understand as ‘communal harmony’, where Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isai, can all live as bhai-bhai. Taking stock of the situation around us, we can safely say that this project has by and large not been a success. To sit in for this failure, we refer to those common gustatory experiences at Christmas, Eid or Diwali, where we eat food together, as evidence of communal amity and harmony.

This common gustation probably made sense in the context of the Indian freedom struggle, where to create the Indian, one needed to overcome the barriers of caste and get people to think of themselves, at least in the ‘public sphere’ as Indians. Caste distinctions were (and are) enforced through two methods; restricting the options regarding who one can marry, and secondly by restricting who one could eat and drink with. The first method was largely ignored since it fell within the so-called ‘private sphere’. The second method however most definitely fell within the public sphere, since eating together could bring people together in public, without unduly impacting on the axis on which the whole caste system turns, i.e. the control of access to women’s bodies. Eating together helped mobilize people to fight the British and in that context made sense. Beyond that, our eating together at festivals is now only a token reminder of the caste rules we are breaking when we entertain. In any case this sense of doing the guest a favour by feeding her is also a strong part of Indian hospitality. Why else do we have the famous come-eat-and-go norm at our wedding celebrations?

There is perhaps no clear-cut administrative method to ensure the social grounding of this Indian notion of secularism. However, as citizens of a secular republic we could encourage an ethic of inter-faith dialogue among ourselves to ensure this social grounding. I use faith as a conscious alternative to the phrase religious, since they mean two different things, at least in the context I seek to use them. Religion would refer to the more standard ritual practices of a sect or community, the communal practice of which grants them a definite identity as opposed to others. Faith would be the spirit that animates the individual to engage in these rituals for reasons beyond identifying with the group. Faith would be the spirit that makes the individual desire to transcend the immediate and the material in search of, and in support of, the underlying unity in the world.

It is when we make this distinction that we can engineer changes in the way we understand the inter-religious/faith initiatives that mark our times. The inter-faith dialogue is not a dialogue between two discrete monolithic social groups, say Hindu and Muslim, Muslim and Catholic, but between individuals, and more crucially between the individual and herself, i.e. an intra-personal dialogue. The inter-faith dialogue does not seek to capture practices and outward symbols, but seeks to capture an essence and then bring that essence into the practice of one’s daily life, whether religious or secular.

Allow me to elaborate. As a child growing up in a Catholic community that by and large had not realized the momentous changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, Lent was a time for the outward manifestation of sorrow and mourning. Don’t drink, don’t eat meat, don’t play Holi and don’t watch TV on Good Friday. Lent would have continued for me as a nuisance rather than a spiritually renewing season were it not for my encountering the spirit with which I saw Muslims embrace the month of Ramzan. Ramzan is not the time for long faces and despondency, but a time to joyously embrace. Fasting and the breaking of the fast, the prayers that are actively attended, all these are acts that brings the community together, in what one Catholic theologian has compared to the ‘communion of saints’ that we formally acknowledge in the course of the Creed.

Internalizing this attitude to Lent has subsequently radicalized the manner in which I view Lent. Lent is now a joyous period that allows me the opportunity to reflect, reconcile and spiritually renew myself. It is not as if this aspect of Lent is not emphasized by Catholic teaching. What I seek to emphasize is that my observation of Islamic practice has helped me to come one step closer to ideals within my maternal faith-tradition. Thus I am not required to imitate or replicate Islamic, Hindu or other rituals. I am not even required to participate in them. Inter-faith dialogue requires me only to respect other traditions enough to observe them and see what spirit I can take away from their traditions to enrich my own encounter with life, while not necessarily changing my identity.

Such an approach to dialogue is necessarily individual and cannot be boxed into the bureaucratic requirements of State projects. Despite the accepted common-sense that the State and society are two different entities, all too often, we actively imitate the State. We imitate the structures of the State, the manner in which the State goes about achieving its goals. We make committees and rules and constitutions and formal meetings and in the course of this process the spirit falls by the way side. Thinking of grounding secularism through inter-faith dialogues therefore could possibly be a way forward for us, in these troubled times.

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 27 Feb 2009)