Temple Run

Past & Present

Note: I must begin by apologising for the short hiatus in this newsletter’s publication. It is nearly a month since I last released an issue. To be honest, the year has not gotten off to the best start, writing-wise. The all too familiar doubts I have written about before, seem to hold the upper hand right now.

What Do You Do?

On Books & Words

Writing this piece, too, was a challenge. People who are far more knowledgeable than me have spoken about recent events with far better eloquence. What could I add to this discourse? What is the worth of a voice that does not add value? I was troubled by these questions as I struggled through this essay. In the end, I suppose I wrote it if only to have something to write about. Our stories are unique to us and sometimes, writing them can mean more to us than to those who read them.

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I have never had a good head for poetry. In school, I encountered the works of Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost, and others, which lent their weight to the slim paperback collection prescribed in our syllabus. At the time, we treated poems as tools that served the purpose of recitation. The brightest students would memorise pages of them, stride onto the stage and rattle them off with élan, to win glory in elocution contests. For me, things were not quite as simple. No matter how many times I read these verses, I could never remember them for more than a few days. But there was one unlikely hymn that managed to leave a mark on my porous mind: the Hanuman Chalisa.

As an adolescent, I would accompany my mother to the local Hanuman temple at least twice a week; sometimes, more. Hanuman Chalisa booklets would lie stacked on a corner table. I would pick one up and flip through the pages, chanting the verses under my breath. After a few months, I no longer needed the booklet but I liked the feel of the paper on my fingertips. I had an inchoate understanding of the words, guessing at their meaning and pronunciation. This did not bother me. School had taught me that recital trumped comprehension. And so, my incantation of the Hanuman Chalisa was, to me, a glorious achievement.

The predictable rebellion of young adulthood – and later, an espousal of atheism – brought an end to the temple visits. The Hanuman Chalisa, too, faded from my mind, leaving only a few stray lines as residue. Years later, I would suddenly remember these lines after seeing the ‘Angry Hanuman’ image glaring at me from the back of a car. The precise sense of the words still eluded me but they were now endowed with my memories of that temple. To a naïve tweenager, it had been a place of hope; a place that offered refuge and succour to all who crossed its threshold. Regular visitors would develop a feeling of kinship, exchanging stories and sharing in each other’s prayers. There was an element of religiosity, of course, but it was not quite as belligerent. Over time, the erosion of my faith had made me cynical about all things religious. Yet, my memory of that particular Hanuman temple remained preserved in amber, a relic of a more wholesome past.

I had found it difficult to hold on to that memory when confronted by the visage of the Angry Hanuman. Karan Acharya, the graphic designer who created the poster, has said he never intended it to convey aggression. It was an attempt to depict Hanuman with attitude. Whatever his motivations, his vector art gained national notoriety. It was praised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an election rally. It was co-opted by the Bajrang Dal in the lead-up to the Karnataka assembly elections, last year. While some have described it as the iconography of a hypermasculine, combative Hindutva that has been on the rise in the past decade, others have brushed such claims aside as ‘alarmism’ and ‘cultural naivete’.

I did not, of course, know any of this when I first saw Angry Hanuman glowering at me. All I knew was that the ‘attitude’ on Hanuman’s face had an unsettling effect, forcing me to avert his gaze. It was convenient to look away and ignore the complexities of what it meant and what it stood for, in an increasingly polarised society. In the years that followed, I would continue to look away every time I encountered a poster, flag or banner emblazoned with that image. Now, there is nowhere left to look away.

Image Source

For most of this month, the city has been garlanded with saffron flags. They flutter from rooftops and balconies. They streak through the streets, perched atop cars, auto-rickshaws and motorbikes. The Angry Hanuman makes an appearance on some of the flags. On others, the words ‘Hindu Rashtra’ stare back at you. On January 22, the Prime Minister – the head of the most populous secular democracy in the world – led the rituals for the consecration of the idol at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. Later, he declared the event as a ‘moment of celebration’ and the ‘origin of a new time cycle’.

Within a few days, this ‘new time cycle’ ushered in another moment of celebration: the seventy-fifth anniversary of the adoption of our Constitution. The occasion was marked by the Indian tricolour popping up in a few places – like flotsam in a sea of saffron - but it all felt muted. We are at a moment in time when the aspirational plurality of the Constitution appears to be at odds with the current zeitgeist. Majoritarian views and values seem to possess the ability to bulldoze – quite literally – everything that stands in their way, and shape the world in their image.

I often wonder what the devotees at the Hanuman temple of my childhood – everyday folk who always had warm smiles and kind words to spare – would make of it all. The Angry Hanuman, the othering of minorities, the religious propaganda. But I fear, I already know the answer.