Stories

I I am not sure what the discussions are about. Here are some of the problems that have surfaced. Do (did) people in India believe that Ramayana is (was) a narration of ‘what really happened’? Even without specifying the ‘when’ and the ‘where’, the answer is obvious: some (did) do; some (did) do not; some are agnostic. The question, however, is: What is the question about? What problem is it meant …

There are multiple kinds of interpretation. For instance, there is interpretation of symbols in a domain like Physics: μ (in elementary optics) is “interpreted” as the refraction index of a substance. We use a more or less analogous notion of “interpretation” in Chemistry, Mathematics and so on. In logic, we speak of “interpretation of variables” like p, q, etc. Here, it means that the letters …

The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the past. This is partly the result of how Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three Semitic religions) look at themselves and their own past: everything they claim about their past (the Flood, …

Let me begin with the following dialogue between a Swiss-German and a young Balinese (from Bichsel, Peter, Der Leser, Das Erzählen: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, 1982, Darmstadt und Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. Pp. 13-14, my translation and italics): When I discovered, or when it was explained to me, that Hinduism is a pedagogical religion, namely, that in so far as the best “good deed” …

Today, both in India and abroad, we see the emergence of a new intellectual trend: based on painstaking research, to write an accurate history of India. What is new about this approach? In one sense, as I shall explain in this article, this attempt is not novel; in another sense, which too shall be explained, there is something very new in it. I shall talk about both in the course of answering the …

Of course there are any number of stories in other cultures, ‘Hinduism’ included, about the creation of the world and what happened ever since. However, not every story about the creation of the world (let us stick to these kind of stories) has the quality of making the world ’the Cosmos, that is’ into an explanatorily intelligible entity. The Big-Bang theory is also a story about the creation of …

(I) In a Greek story, Persephone spends part of the year in the underworld and part of the year on earth, and winter is caused by her mother Demeter’s sorrow at parting, and spring by her mother’s joy at reuniting. When taken at face value, this story makes the change of seasons be because of someone’s emotions, and hence intelligible. Two points with respect to this. (a) I do not think that the …

Vyasa’s argument (to the extent we can speak of an argument in this context) is quite subtle: When Urvasi comes to Arjuna at the behest of his father, and when she is possessed by desire, and when the Apsaras choose freely and unconfined, then (a) one cannot reject her; (b) and with the argument that she is a superior to him. If you split this conjunction and cast in normative terms, it says …

Let us begin with the assumption that our stories about Indra and the Gandharvas are just that: stories, authored by human beings, without truth-content. (That is to say, they are neither true nor false.) When human beings write stories, their imagination is (partially) constrained by their societies, cultures and the times they live in. None quite knows how exactly the latter constrain human …

1. Here is one way of looking at what stories are. They are symbols. What are they symbols of? Well, they could symbolize acts; they could also be symbolically interpreted as justifications of such acts. Under this construal, a story requires an interpretation: one has to interpret the story as a symbol of either an act or as its symbolic justification. (The same applies to looking at stories as …

In many cultures, especially in the Indian case, it is important to understand that stories are not explanations. They are neither true nor false because they do not describe ‘factual’ events; they do not claim that they do either. Unlike the Bible, the Puranas do not have to be true or known to be true for them to play the role they do in the Indian culture. The Indian myths neither allegorize …

[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107] Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, the …

What is history? In the first place, it is the subject matter of historiography, which is what historians write. What does historiography talk about? The human past. In other words, there is a distinction to be made between ’the past’ and ways of talking about this past. If this distinction (between ’the past’ and ‘ways of talking about it’) is accepted, then we can answer the question about what …

Symbolic interpretation of lingam from a netizen: “In ancient India, there was a fertility cult; our ancestors knew that it was a fertility cult; Lingam was a symbol for the phallus then; it continues to be one even when many millions are ignorant of this now; and that the Modern Indians’ attitude to sex is inhibiting because of which they do not see the symbolism.” To keep the contrast between us …

Some consider it to be a “superstitious practice”, the implication being that it is irrational to believe that dancing causes the rain to fall: no reasonable people on earth can buy the story that dancing actually causes rain to fall. I am not willing to buy it. However, it is a fact that in some cultures people do perform ‘rain dances’. However, to explain the ‘rain dance’ by attributing a …