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A Meme of Great Power |
Suniti |
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Biography |
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There are two sets of ideas really that make it easy for someone with a Hindu background to realise that the Internet is an excellent analogue for the cultural exchange that goes on anyway, whatever the technology, though I would argue that it doesn't need a Hindu to see certain things, any poet would do just as well.
The first set of ideas has to do with assumptions that are not necessarily made. The other set of ideas has to do with attitudes towards myth. (In this context, of course, Christian theology is also mythology.) Hinduism differs from the religions of the book in that it's permissible for a Hindu to invent stories and myths that try to explain, understand or simply express human experience. Indulging in such invention does not constitute heresy. Well, that's how it was until Hindu fundamentalism came along. Now, here's a fable with the title From the Panchatantra. though it soon becomes obvious that fable isn't from The Panchatantra, an old and well known book of fables in Sanskrit. In the holy city of Benares there lived a brahmin, who, as he walked by the riverbank, watching the crows floating downstream, feeding on the remains of half-burnt corpses, consoled himself thus: "It is true that I am poor, but I am a brahmin; it is true that I have no sons, but I, myself, an indisputably a male. I shall return to the temple and pray to Lord Vishnu to grant me a son." He went off to the temple and Lord Vishnu listened and Lord Vishnu complied, but whether through absent-mindedness or whether for some other more abstruse reason, he gave him a daughter. The brahmin was disappointed. When the child was old enough, he called her to him and delivered himself thus: "I am a brahmin. You are my daughter. I had hoped for a son. No matter. I will teach you what I know, and when you are able , we will both meditate and seek guidance." Though only a woman, she was a brahmin, so she learned very fast, and then, they both sat down and meditated hard. In a very short time Lord Vishnu appeared. "What do you want?" he said. The brahmin couldn't stop himself. He blurted out quickly, "I want a son." "Very well," said the god, "Next time around." In his next incarnation the brahmin was a woman and bore eight sons. "And what do you want?" he said to the girl. "I want human status." "Ah, that is much harder," and the god hedged and appointed a commission.
Suniti Namjoshi's latest book, Building Babel, published by Spinifex Press, is about the process of building culture under the aegis of Crone Kronos, i.e.time. Spinifex have put the last chapter on the Internet as a kind of building site to which others can contribute. |
She has published numerous poems, fables, articles and reviews in anthologies, collections and journals in India, Canada, the U.S., Australia and Britain. She has in the past published five books for poetry in India and three in Canada, including The Authentic Lie, 1982 and From the Bedside Book of Nightmares, 1984. Her first book of fiction, Feminist Fables, was published by Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1981; her second The Conversations of Cow, by The Women's Press in 1985; and her third, Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey, written for children, by Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1986. She has written with Gillian Hanscombe the sequence of poems, Flesh and Paper, published in 1986 by Ragweed in Canada and in both book and audio cassette form by Jezebel Tapes and Books in Britain. The Blue Donkey Fables (The Women's Press, London, 1988) was among the top twenty titles selected for Feminist Book Fortnight in 198. Because of India: Selected Poems, which covers a period of over twenty years, was published by Onlywomen Press in 1989, and The Mothers of Maya Diip, a satire set on an island off the west coast of India "where a matriarchy bloomed unashamedly" by The Women's Press, London in the same year. Saint Suniti and the Dragon and a new edition of Feminist Fables have been published by Spinifex Press, Melbourne (1993) and Virago Press, London (1994). |
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